Audacity (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  ‘The other one’s Norwegian.’ McLeod again. ‘And she’s a big ‘un.’

  That was the ship that appeared to be on course from Kristiansand. Not a three-island tramp this one but flush-decked, only the superstructure and masts standing up from the line of the bulwarks that swept from bow to stern of her. She was twice the size of the tramp, showed no sign of rust and she was faster, gradually overtaking the British ship and a half-mile inshore of her. There was something odd about the set of the derricks on her masts…

  Movement caught at the corner of Smith’s eye and he turned and saw the woman, Mrs. Ramsay. Early though it was, she stood at the rail just below the bridge, looking out at the British tramp and waving. Smith realised that as her cabin opened from the wardroom on the port side she must have seen the other ship from the scuttle and now she had hurried out for a better look. She had wrapped a thin dressing-gown over her nightdress—if she was wearing a nightdress. She was worse than naked. Then she looked up at him and he saw that her face, even at this hour, was made-up, her lips painted, smiling. Then her dark eyes met his, and she turned quickly. He watched her walk away, her body sliding under the thin cotton. When she had gone he stood still for a while, eyes now on the tramp receding astern. Then he went back to his pacing.

  *

  Elizabeth Ramsay stood in her cabin, her back against the closed door, and shivered. It had been cold out on the deck but that was not why she shivered. That first night in the wardroom he had been formal, distant, shabbily dressed, nondescript except for the palest blue eyes in his thin face. Outside just now, standing wide-legged on the bridge to balance against the motion of the ship, he had looked at her again—and differently.

  She thought she read that look. She also knew what she wanted and was determined to get it. She must go her own way. He was captain of the ship that would take her part of that way. Nothing more.

  She took a deep breath, relaxing against the cabin door.

  Then she snapped upright and away from it, a hand to her mouth, as the rumble of gunfire rolled across the sea.

  *

  The noise spun Smith round on his heel and brought McLeod leaping out from the wheelhouse door. They stared aft. ‘It’s that bloody raider!’ McLeod grated. ‘It was her, all the time!’

  The British tramp was a mile astern with the raider inshore of her. The ship that had seemed flush-decked was not. The bulwarks had now been struck down to show the teeth their high sides had hidden. There were four guns mounted in the well forward of the bridge, two on either side, and they were all big pieces. There was another in the well aft, able to train to port or starboard. Now Smith saw why the set of the derricks had looked odd: while the false bulwarks were up those derricks had seemed to be seated below the apparent flush-deck. The real deck was visible now and it was ten feet lower than the false one.

  Smoke wisped from the muzzles of the two guns on the raider’s port side. The shells burst on the tramp’s fo’c’sle and forward of her bridge. From Audacity they saw the flash and smoke, wreckage leaping into the sky then falling to splash into the sea. The tramp stopped.

  Smith ordered, ‘Slow ahead!’ The way came off Audacity. From her bridge they watched as the tramp’s boats were lowered, her crew climbed down into them and began to pull away from the ship. They were hardly clear of her when the raider opened fire again. She had stopped abeam of the tramp and only a quarter-mile away. The old ship shuddered as each big shell exploded inside her.

  McLeod ground out, ‘Target practice!’

  Ross was on the bridge now and a harshness in his voice betrayed his anger. ‘A sledge-hammer to crack a nut! Need they make such a meal of it?’

  Smith saw the tramp list slowly to starboard and her head went down. He swung his glasses away, sought and found the two boats filled with men. They were resting on their oars. Watching the end of their ship? He thought he saw faces turned towards Audacity, apparently the Lulea, a neutral ship. Waiting for her to assist?

  The port side lookout said, ‘I think some o’ them fellers in the boats are just in singlets, sir. They’re prob’ly firemen come up from the stokehold in a hurry.’

  Smith had seen them. But, ‘Keep a lookout on your full arc of search!’ he rasped.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ But there was resentment, anger in the man’s reply.

  ‘Well, do something!’ The woman’s voice skirled the length of the ship. Smith lowered his glasses and saw Elizabeth Ramsay back on the deck below, glaring up at him. ‘You can’t leave them! You can’t let those swine treat them like that!’

  Smith threw over his shoulder, ‘Half ahead!’

  ‘Half ahead, sir.’

  ‘Revolutions for ten knots.’

  ‘Ten knots, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’ She had stepped closer, so that she was almost beneath his feet, head thrown back to shout at him, ‘This is the Navy, is it? Where’s your humanity? Have you forgotten what you’re really supposed to be?’

  Smith replied harshly, ‘I told you I had my orders, Mrs. Ramsay, and I would carry them out. Now I have one for you: Get below to your cabin or I’ll have you forcibly taken there and locked in.’

  She stepped back as if he’d lifted a hand to strike her and paused for a moment. Wondering if he was bluffing? He was not, watched her steadily and she saw he meant it. There were tears on her cheeks; she shook her head in anger and frustration then turned and hurried away, clutching her dressing-gown around her.

  Smith lifted his eyes again to the ships and the boats. The tramp was awash as far aft as her superstructure, her stern lifting out of the sea. It would not be long before she sank. That was clear to the raider, too. She was under way again and making a lot of smoke, obviously working up to her full speed, hastening away from the scene.

  Smith said, ‘Find out if Sparks picked up any transmissions.’

  Ross answered, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  McLeod muttered, ‘I don’t remember if she had any wireless aerials rigged.’ He was speaking of the British tramp.

  Smith did not remember either, but doubted if she had because wireless was unusual in a ship of that size and type. Audacity’s own aerial was a discreet single wire strung between her two masts, difficult to see except from a ship passing close to her and then only with glasses. It was strung now because only supposedly neutral merchantmen had been in sight and at some distance. It would be quickly hauled down if a warship appeared.

  Audacity’s operator was keeping a listening watch in the wireless office below the bridge, his orders to maintain wireless silence unless capture was inevitable. Privately Smith thought this laughable: it was unlikely they could get a signal off in the chaos and carnage of the last stages of a lost battle, and unlikelier still that it would be heard if they were in the Baltic—the range would be far too great.

  Ross reappeared. ‘Not a cheep, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It was no more than Smith had expected. If the tramp or the raider had sent off a signal, Audacity’s Sparks would only have heard it if he had happened to be tuned to the same frequency they were using.

  The tramp’s boats were moving now, the oars working, and they were headed for the Norwegian coast. McLeod said, ‘They should be ashore before sunset.’

  ‘Good.’ Ross scowled out at the boats. ‘The barometer’s falling. Not dropping like a stone so there won’t be a storm, but falling.’ He glanced up at the low cloud ceiling. ‘It’ll be a dirty night.’

  Smith could do nothing for the men in the boats. His orders were clear. Audacity’s mission was to deliver the gold ‘with all despatch’; no delays nor diversions, no involvement in a fight that was not her own. But he watched the boats intently until they were lost to sight between grey sea and grey sky.

  He resumed his pacing, aware of the atmosphere of battened-down rage on the bridge and throughout the ship; he could read it in the hunched shoulders of the group of seamen gathered on the poop and still peering astern.

  McLeod voiced
it: ‘I would have liked to have a go at that bastard!’

  Ross was silent a moment, then said sardonically, ‘So would I—then. But thinking about it now, it’s a good job we didn’t. She’d have blown the hell out of us with those six-inch guns.’

  That was true and McLeod was obliged to nod gloomy agreement.

  Leading-Seaman Buckley stood at the back of the bridge and watched Smith striding rapidly, jerkily back and forth, saw the set face and hard eyes. His captain was in a hell of a temper, he thought.

  But an hour later when the Zeppelin cruised overhead at an estimated five thousand feet Smith paused for only a minute to eye the silver cigar shape calmly. Then he turned again. The pacing was still rapid but with a relaxed rhythm to it now. He scowled but the pale blue eyes were abstracted, and behind them a plan was shaping.

  Blackledge had said before he went ashore at Rosyth, ‘You didn’t ask why we picked you for the job.’

  ‘Audacity was chosen and I’m her captain.’

  ‘We could have got another captain but we decided on you because of your record. It’s far from unblemished but you have a way of pulling things off.’

  Now Smith wondered if he had. If he could. It was easier said than done. Ahead lay the Sound, patrolling destroyers and mines, but first there were the minefields at the mouth of the Kattegat…

  3—Night Passage

  The mines were laid across the mouth of the Kattegat between the Danish Skaw and Marstrand to the north of Göteborg in Sweden. Audacity passed them in that black night of low cloud with drizzling rain driving on the wind and flecked white with snow. Smith took her creeping through the shallow waters close to the Swedish coast, unmined because no ordinary ship could pass there and any minelayer would have taken the ground. Audacity drew just over five feet. There was a man in her bow casting the lead and calling the soundings. They had to change the man at that job every fifteen minutes when his hands became too frozen to feel the markers on the line. He had to rely on his sense of touch: Audacity showed not a wink of light.

  With Goteborg a blurred radiance off the port bow she turned south away from the coast and out into the deeper water of the Kattegat. When the first pale light hardened the horizon she was out of sight of land and she steamed through that day at a lazy five knots. The Sound was less than a hundred miles away and they dared not approach it until the sun was down.

  Smith slept through the forenoon then ate lunch alone in his cabin. Rain and snow swirled past the scuttle and the barometer promised no change for the better. If it turned to fog, and McLeod thought that likely, then the passage of the Sound would change from hazardous to downright foolhardy. Smith knew that if he had to wait in the Kattegat for the fog to clear he would lose at least a day. Blackledge had warned of that probability and had allowed for it, giving Smith twenty-four hours in hand. But he could lose no more than that because he had to be at Kirkko on the fifteenth.

  He firmly told himself there was no point in worrying about a disaster that might not strike. Then he pushed away his plate and went out to the wheelhouse. Ross and McLeod waited for him there—with Elizabeth Ramsay. She was dressed for the weather in fur boots that came to her knees and a cape with a hood attached to it. In the comparative warmth of the wheelhouse the hood was pushed back. She stared ahead at the oily sea splitting white at Audacity’s bow.

  Ross said, ‘Mrs. Ramsay asked if she could have a word with you, sir.’

  Smith, on the other hand, wanted a word for her. Disturbing? Not strong enough. He answered politely, on his guard, ‘Of course. Mrs. Ramsay?’

  Her head turned and she spoke quietly but clearly. ‘I was angry and upset yesterday but you had your orders and there was nothing you could do. I understand that now. I’m sorry.’

  She understood it because McLeod had spoken his mind when he met her at breakfast in the wardroom that morning. ‘He had no choice! And you had the gall to accuse him of cowardice! It’s only a year ago, when he was in an old cruiser scraped off the dockyard wall, that he took on two big, new German cruisers. If there was ever a time for running away, that was it, but did he hell! The things that man’s done…’ And then he went on to tell her.

  Smith appreciated the apology and that it was made in front of his officers and bridge-staff. He realised this was deliberate; Elizabeth Ramsay had accused him in public and that was how she would apologise. He was also aware that while the bold dark eyes held his gaze, their message was clear: This is just an apology. No more than that. Accept it, don’t seek to extract advantage. He answered, ‘Thank you. I think I know how you felt at the time, standing by and watching a ship sink, unable to do anything to help.’

  The woman nodded, moved to the wheelhouse door then paused there a moment. He watched her and she knew it. She stared out at the cold sea, the weeping sky, and shivered. ‘Will the Navy catch that raider?’

  ‘I hope so.’ But privately Smith doubted it. The German had played this game successfully before, the ocean was big and escorts stretched thin. Any ship sailing out of convoy, like the tramp the previous day, was easy game.

  Elizabeth Ramsay left and Smith tried to put her out of his mind. He told Ross and McLeod to fetch the chart and led the way back to his cabin. The navigator spread the chart on the polished table and Smith dug his hands in his pockets, scowled down at it. He said, ‘Tonight’s course.’

  Ross and McLeod stood by the table, eyes on the chart, and waited. There were three ways out of the Kattegat and into the Baltic. The first, the Great Belt, had been mined by the Danes, and besides, any passage of it took a ship past the doorstep of the German naval base at Kiel. The second, the Little Belt, was the route used by German U-boats and warships out of Kiel, partly mined and infested by destroyers. Any ship attempting to pass through the Little Belt would be boarded and searched.

  Smith’s finger went to the third option: the Sound, the stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. He tapped the northern end of it. ‘There are no mines at this end and it’s about ten miles from Kullen, on the Swedish side, to the Danish shore. But this is the main control point for German patrols, destroyers from Kiel that come out through the Little Belt. They stop and board every ship. From Kullen in the north to Skanor at the southern end of the Sound is about fifty miles as the crow flies but we’re not aboard a crow, more of an ugly duckling.’

  Ross grinned and McLeod chuckled. Smith’s finger traced down the Sound and paused: ‘There’s a Danish minefield outside Copenhagen.’ He traced further south still: ‘Danish, German and Swedish mines close the southern exit between Skanor in Sweden and the Danish coast. There’s a swept lane through the Swedish field, the Kogrund Passage, but ships only go through in daylight, escorted by the Swedes and, obviously, examined by them. So we can’t use it.’ He tapped the chart again, south of the minefields that McLeod had earlier marked in pencil.

  ‘More German patrols at the southern end of the Sound. They don’t stop and search as a rule because they know any ship coming out of the Sound into the Baltic must be bound for a German or neutral port, while ships going in are either bound for ports in the Sound or they’ll be checked at its far end.’

  McLeod asked, ‘So we don’t need to worry about the southern end?’

  ‘Yes, we do. Those destroyers patrolling south of the Sound know that ships only come out through the Kogrund Passage in daylight. We can’t use the Passage, as I said, so we have to take advantage of our shallow draught and get round the minefields at night. And if those destroyers see a ship coming out of the Sound at night, or if the sun comes up and shows a ship steaming away that must have made the passage in the dark, then they’ll smell a rat, chase and board her.’

  Suddenly their heads cocked, looking up at the deckhead, listening. There was the drone of an engine, heard faintly, like the buzzing of a fly, over the steady beat of Audacity’s engines. Smith went out through the wheelhouse to the bridge-wing and watched the seaplane fly overhead.

  Ross spoke from the wheelhouse,
‘Danish markings, sir.’

  Smith nodded. The seaplane circled back, swooped low and he saw the heads of pilot and observer poked over the side of the biplane, peering down at the ship. He lifted a hand over his head. They waved in return and then the seaplane climbed and droned away on its patrol.

  McLeod was looking over Ross’s shoulder and said, ‘He was just having a looksee.’

  Smith said, ‘That’s right. Clearly we passed muster.’

  It was comforting to know Audacity’s cover worked, but no amount of disguise would get her through the Sound. That was up to him. They returned to his cabin and he said, ‘So: we can’t approach this northern end until after dark because if the patrols see us they’ll stop us, and we have to be out of sight of the destroyers at the southern end by the time it gets light. We can’t go in at the top one night, out at the bottom the next because we can’t hang around in the Sound all through the day as we did in the Kattegat.’ For one thing, his orders—which Ross and McLeod hadn’t seen—demanded haste. And for another: ‘We’d be in sight from either shore the whole time and there’ll be Swedish patrols out of Halsingborg or Malmo, Danish out of Copenhagen. If we steamed up and down they’d become suspicious. If we anchored they’d want to know why. Either way they might board us and blow the gaff. They don’t have to tell the Germans about a British Q-ship in the Sound, but they don’t have to keep quiet about it either. And we can’t take that risk.’