Audacity (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  The coffee came and he sipped at it while they ploughed on, at twelve knots. There was no point in changing course, trying to run. The Zeppelin would have seen their smoke long before they saw it and could overhaul them at four or five times Audacity’s top speed of fifteen or sixteen knots. He watched it slide slowly across the bow then fly on towards the south. It did not turn aside for a closer look at the ship so it was not seeking her, just flying a routine patrol like a sentry patrolling his beat. Smith told Ross so, but stayed on the bridge.

  In less than an hour they saw it return, coming up from the south and following the same line so that this time it passed astern of them. It still did not alter course to investigate one solitary tramp plugging on into the Baltic. It had no reason. Any ship here had to be neutral or German. But if a ship were headed outwards, for the Sound…? Smith shifted uneasily then glanced at Ross, saw his tiredness, and told him that he would stand the rest of the watch. Smith would not sleep now.

  He paced the bridge on weary legs. Blackledge had not warned him of this Zeppelin. Did it patrol every day or was this an isolated flight? He worried at the problem until McLeod came to relieve him.

  They sighted distant smoke several times that day but no ship showed above the horizon. Next morning they steamed through fog again that cleared in the forenoon. Smith was standing some watches so Ross and McLeod were not working watch and watch about, and he had the forenoon. He saw Elizabeth Ramsay come on deck to stand by the lee rail. She nodded when he put a hand to his cap in salute but then turned and walked away.

  McLeod came to the bridge, worked on his chart for a few minutes then stretched his huge hands above his head, easing the muscles in his back. He glanced sideways at Smith and ventured, ‘This…reconnaissance, sir.’

  Smith smiled inwardly at the inflection on the word ‘reconnaissance’. As he’d expected, McLeod was taking that story with a pinch of salt. ‘Yes?’

  McLeod asked innocently, ‘D’you think it might be to see if we could get some ships into the Baltic?’

  Smith let his grin show. ‘It could be, couldn’t it?’

  McLeod said, ‘Oh, aye.’ He gave that suggestion up, tried another tack: ‘What about after Kirkko, sir?’

  Smith cocked an eye at him. ‘What about it?’

  McLeod grinned openly, knowing that another captain might have snubbed him for his probing. ‘Sorry, sir. I’ll mind my own business.’

  Smith understood his curiosity. Admittedly a Q-ship’s job was a long way from routine patrolling, but this! He spoke easily, ‘One step at a time. Let’s get our business done at Kirkko, first. I’ll tell you one thing, though.’

  McLeod’s head turned quickly and he snapped at the bait, ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘We could do with some coffee up here.’

  *

  The lookouts reported smoke at intervals during that day, too, but it was late afternoon when McLeod called Smith to the bridge. ‘A ship, sir, and it looks like she’ll pass us close.’

  She was off the starboard bow and some four miles distant, about the size of Audacity and looking flush-decked, like the German raider, though it was difficult to be sure, bows on as she was. Then as the two vessels steadily closed Smith saw she was not flush-decked, but only looked that way because there was a deck cargo of stacked timber filling the wells forward and aft of her bridge.

  McLeod muttered, ‘Her colours are flying away from us so it’s hard to tell—but they could be German: black, red, white…’

  Smith used his glasses and read the name on her bow: Anna Schmidt. She was black and rust-streaked, deep-laden and low in the water. Now she was turning, marginally altering course towards Audacity. Her siren blared, two short blasts. A man stood outside her wheelhouse, waving his cap above his head and McLeod said, ‘Oh, hell! He wants to talk to us, sir.’

  The way came off the German ship, her screw was still and she was almost stopped now. Smith said, ‘All right.’ He was thinking of what he might learn from this meeting. ‘You say your German isn’t much good but that doesn’t matter. You’re a Swede, remember.’ And: ‘Stop her.’

  The telegraphs rang and the pulse of Audacity’s engines ceased. She slowed and stopped almost abeam of the Anna Schmidt with less than fifty yards of sea between them. Her master was bawling through a tin megaphone now and McLeod stood out on the bridge with another. He lifted it as the bawling stopped and answered, ‘Nein!’ Then he murmured an aside to Smith, lounging at the wheelhouse door: ‘He asked if I spoke German and I told him I didn’t.’ But the skipper of the Anna Schmidt bellowed again and McLeod growled, ‘The bloody man speaks good Swedish! He’s asking if we’ve come from the North Sea.’

  ‘Tell him.’

  Smith watched the Anna Schmidt as McLeod made his reply, not understanding a word but knowing it would be that the Lulea was out of Bergen and bound for Helsinki. The German master started again and McLeod translated: ‘He’s warning us about the Russian minefields still in the Gulf of Finland, says some of them have been swept and we can get into Helsinki all right…He says they’ve been swept all along that coast but there are still big fields out in the middle of the Gulf between Finland and Riga.’

  Smith knew about them; McLeod had marked them on his chart. The pilot was going on: ‘He wants to know if we saw any U-boats in the North Sea and was there any British shipping?’

  ‘Tell him we saw no U-boats but there were a few British ships waiting for a convoy from Bergen.’ That was nothing the U-boats did not know already, except that in fact there were more than a few British ships.

  McLeod’s tone dropped and became harder: ‘He says the U-boats have sunk many. His son is in a U-boat.’ There was the reason for the interest in the North Sea, that and a natural hunger for news. McLeod said, ‘He’s out of Kotka’—Smith stirred; that was not far from Kirkko, McLeod had been there—‘with timber for Kiel.’ The deck cargo of sawn lumber was self-evident, stacked so it showed two to three feet above the bulwarks of the Anna Schmidt. The German was laughing, a big laugh that came up from his belly, and McLeod explained: ‘His ship’s due for an engine overhaul in the dockyard as soon as she’s discharged her timber so he’ll have nearly two weeks at home with his wife.’

  ‘Say you hope his son joins him.’

  McLeod looked oddly at Smith, but obeyed.

  ‘Now tell him we saw a Zeppelin earlier on and we didn’t know they flew this side of the Sound.’ Smith waited, wondering if the man’s thoughts of his wife and Smith’s good wishes concerning his son would soften the German skipper and remove his suspicions at such a question. Why should the master of a Swedish tramp be curious about a Zeppelin?

  McLeod translated as the German boomed away cheerfully, unsuspectingly: ‘The Zeppelin just keeps watch. The ships that used to patrol these waters while Russia was in the war have gone to the North Sea. Most of the naval forces in the Baltic have now been concentrated at Danzig and Riga.’

  Blackledge had said that troops and ships were gathering there—for an attempt to grab the Russian Fleet? Was Audacity in a race, to help sink that Fleet before the enemy took it?

  McLeod went on: ‘Now the Zeppelin only flies when the weather is good enough.’ That meant when it was fit to fly. ‘Almost every day now. There’s only one destroyer at the Sound and you must have seen her. She did not stop you?’

  He ceased his muttering interpretation and bellowed a negative.

  They could see the German nodding: ‘Only the Swedes stop and board before leading the way through the minefield. The Zeppelin and the destroyer do nothing. They are a precaution, like a policeman, you understand?’

  McLeod glanced at Smith, who said, ‘Wish him a safe voyage and wave goodbye.’ They had learned enough, more than Smith had hoped for, and further questioning might make the German skipper wonder at their curiosity.

  The bellowed exchanges sounded across the sea for the last time. Churned foam showed at Audacity’s stern and then that of the Anna Schmidt as the screws of bot
h ships turned and they got under way. The German master waved his cap and McLeod flapped a big hand. ‘Damned if I’m taking my hat off to him!’

  Smith decided the Zeppelin made no difference to Audacity and her mission. On her way home she would pass through the Zeppelin’s patrol area in the light of day and, inevitably, be seen. But she would be regarded as just one more merchantman approaching the Sound and, with a lot of luck, would evade the sole destroyer in the night by running in the shallows.

  He went to his cabin, to read his orders again—Audacity would reach Kirkko the next day—and to sleep, because he would be on the bridge for most of the night as they passed the minefields at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. He scanned the typed sheets again, arid sentences, flat statements: Germany held all the southern shore of the Baltic to and including Estonia; Russia, Denmark and Sweden were neutral, the last two as sympathetic to the German cause as to the British; Finland was neutral but a friend of Germany; the Bolshevik Russians were aiding and supplying the Red Guards trying to take over Finland while General Mannerheim and the White Finns fought them.

  The agent at Kirkko, by name Robertson, would make himself known to Smith there, and would be informed by telegram to expect Audacity, as Lulea, on the fifteenth.

  Smith did not need to read the orders, he knew them by heart now. He locked them away in his desk and sprawled on his bunk. In twenty-four hours he would be at Kirkko and in forty-eight hours his task might be completed. Though this would depend on the Russians, he was prepared to bet they would get their hands on the gold as soon as they could. And with it, Elizabeth Ramsay. He pushed her out of his mind and instead summoned up a picture of the chart, going over again the course he had plotted past the minefields. After a time he slept, but uneasily; his dreams full of Red Russians and White Russians, Red Guards and White Finns. Gold. And Elizabeth Ramsay.

  *

  They passed the minefields at the mouth of the Gulf in the night, running in the swept waters close to the Finnish coast, as the Anna Schmidt would have done. The morning was windless and they steamed through fog yet again. In the forenoon it thinned and visibility lifted to about two miles but the air still held a damp cold that chilled the men out on the open bridge. The lookouts stamped their feet and every now and again lowered their glasses to beat their gloved hands together. Smith strode steadily back and forth from one wing past the front of the wheelhouse to the other, twelve paces each way.

  McLeod left his chart and came out of the wheelhouse to tell Smith, ‘We make the turn into the channel to Kirkko in two hours, sir.’

  Smith nodded. ‘Thank you.’ They were almost there and a day early. That extra day might be useful. The agent in Kirkko should know of Audacity’s coming but plans could always go wrong. They weren’t home yet by a long—

  ‘Ship starboard beam two miles! A destroyer!’ That was a yell from the starboard lookout, grabbing his glasses and lifting them to his eyes.

  Smith turned quickly, snapped, ‘Revolutions for eight knots!’ Because this ‘tramp’ should only be making that speed, not the twelve knots at which she’d been cruising.

  ‘Eight knots, sir!’

  The other ship had appeared suddenly out of the mist on a course parallel to their own but now was leaning over under helm as she turned to close Audacity. McLeod said, ‘She’s flying German colours.’

  Smith could see that for himself. He lowered his glasses and slipped quickly into the wheelhouse, the lookout’s voice following him: ‘She’s German, sir!’

  Smith pressed the button under the screen that set alarm buzzers whirring throughout the ship. There came a trample of feet as the crew of the four-inch ran through the passages from their mess just forward of the funnel to the housing, just aft of it, where the gun was hidden. Ahead, and below him, the door of the fo’c’sle was hooked back and the crew of the twelve-pounder waited inside. He could see their faces, ready to pile out and up the ladder to the gun when it swung up out of its concealment below the deck of the fo’c’sle.

  He stepped out of the wheelhouse on the port side where he would not be seen from the destroyer, looked aft and saw the door in the poop similarly open. Ross sauntered aft along the deck without apparent haste and passed in through the open door. His station in action was with the twelve-pounder on the poop.

  Smith went back to the wheelhouse and the voice-pipes, heard and acknowledged the ‘ready’ reports as they came in but his head was turned to watch the destroyer closing them.

  Two hours from Kirkko. They had passed the mines in the Kattegat, all the perils of the Sound and then the five hundred miles of the Baltic, only to run into this destroyer at the last. McLeod was out on the bridge-wing, ready to do his act as the Swedish master of Lulea but Smith could hear him swearing softly, savagely.

  It was an old destroyer with a turtle-back fo’c’sle but she mounted as many guns as Audacity and had an extra ten knots of speed. Audacity was still some miles outside Finnish waters so there was no chance of claiming the haven of a neutral shore. Not that the Germans were likely to take much notice of the ‘neutrality’ of these waters; they were friends of the Finns and could expect their help. Five thousand young Finns, the Jägers, had been trained in Germany by the Kaiser’s Army and were now back in Finland, serving under Mannerheim.

  The destroyer was turning again now, and slowing to run abeam of Audacity and within hailing distance. Her guns were manned, the loading numbers standing by the open breeches, each cradling a shell ready to load when ordered. There was no doubt who would fire the first rounds if there was a fight. Either way, Audacity was unlikely to win. And there was the gold in Smith’s cabin, Elizabeth Ramsay in hers.

  There were two officers on the bridge of the German destroyer. No gold lace showed on the heavy coats they wore but their caps and their stances marked them. One of the Germans held a megaphone now and his voice came over to Audacity, hollow and harsh from the metal.

  McLeod said, ‘He’s asking where we’re from, where we’re bound and what cargo. He can read our name; he’s close enough to count the rivets!’ He lifted his own trumpet and bawled his answer in Swedish, that Lulea was out of Bergen and bound for Kirkko with American canned goods.

  The German reply cracked quick and brief: ‘Kirkko?’ McLeod repeated it: ‘Ja! Kirkko.’

  The German lowered the megaphone and consulted with his fellow officer. Smith could see them studying Audacity as they talked. McLeod muttered, ‘I don’t like this, sir. Seems as if something might be up. I hope to God he isn’t going to try to board us.’ He and Smith could be killed in the next few minutes. One of those guns was trained on Audacity’s bridge.

  The German lifted his megaphone again and McLeod translated: ‘How long are we staying at Kirkko?’

  The plain truth might be the best policy—or some of the truth, for it was a cardinal rule never to let the enemy know more of your movements than you could help. Smith spoke for the first time: ‘Tell him, only long enough to discharge the consignment due there and to take instructions from our agent. We sail tonight for Helsinki.’

  McLeod did not know what the truth was, knew nothing of the agent Robertson or why they were in fact going to Kirkko. Possibly that gave his voice a ring of sincerity as he bawled across to the destroyer. Smith saw one of the officers nod and then the other was using the trumpet again. McLeod took a breath. ‘I think it’s all right. He’s warning us there’s civil war in Finland, Mannerheim’s fighting the damned Bolsheviks and there are Red Guards all along this coast. He says we’re wise not to linger in Kirkko.’

  The German lowered the megaphone and lifted his free hand while McLeod waved in reply. The destroyer was cracking on speed, pulling ahead of Audacity and turning away. Her men were securing their guns fore and aft. McLeod stepped into the wheelhouse and let out a whistling sigh: ‘That was a bowel-opener.’

  Ross showed behind him. ‘I thought we were for it. I’m sweating.’

  Smith made no reply. He was cold.

>   The destroyer disappeared into the fog and Audacity’s gunners stood down in an atmosphere of relief and excited chatter. The tension had built in them as the destroyer ran close alongside, and for minutes they had been on edge, waiting for the order to load and fire. But now the ship settled back into her normal routine and Smith wondered at the Germans’ reaction to the mention of Kirkko. They warned him not to delay there but he would have to, Red Guards or no, because he had come ‘with all despatch’ and arrived a day early. He would not have a rendezvous with the Russian officers before the following night. Kirkko could be a trap but he had no choice. He had to talk to Robertson.

  5—The Russians

  Audacity entered the Finnish port of Kirkko in the afternoon of the fourteenth of April. The fog and the damp, bitter cold of the morning had cleared and they closed the land in pale sunshine so they could see the densely wooded shore. Ice floated in patches that groaned and squeaked as they rubbed along the ship’s hull. Smith and McLeod took Audacity in slowly, still disguised but with her crew closed up at action stations. They did not know what they would find in Kirkko, but hostile Red Guards who might try to board were a possibility. Smith was ready to fight his way out if need be, though that would mean the end of his mission.

  All along that coast was a litter of offshore islands and shoals. The channel through them was buoyed, narrow, tortuous and it led to an opening between steep cliffs that hid the port. As they passed through the gap the channel curved sharply to the right and now they opened the anchorage with the little town a half-mile away at the head of it.

  ‘Not much of an anchorage,’ muttered McLeod. ‘Room for two or three ships by the town but the sailing directions and the chart show shoals either side of the channel. There’s enough water there for us, but—’

  He did not need to finish: Audacity must not be seen to be of far shallower draught than any normal ship of her size. Smith, glasses to his eyes, gave his order. ‘We’ll anchor here.’ He did not want to be close to the town. On the fo’c’sle the blacksmith knocked off the clip and the anchor roared out. Audacity lay close inside the entrance and to one side of the channel, leaving room for another ship to pass her if need be.