A Bridge Of Magpies (26 page)

I said,
'Kamikazes are
suicide killers, avengers, nothing to 175

do with naval officers or naval strategy!

'You're right. Revenge. Russian revenge for their navy's humiliation at Tsushima. The Reds have long memories. It's eaten into them for nearly three-quarters of a century. It runs through all Soviet naval thinking in Far Eastern waters –

ships, bases, tactics, dispositions. Russia didn't have the opportunity to take her revenge against Japan in World War II, because she came in right at the end when the Americans had done the job. She still longs to take a crack at us. What better target could a
kamikaze
squad set for itself than to lay its bands on the almost sacred weapon which broke their fleet once, and use it against Japan herself when the chance offered? Mild gave them their opportunity and Soviet money paid for all that expensive salvage gear of
Sang A's.'

'And their hardware,' I said, indicating the sub-machine
gun.
'There's
a
lot more of these around on
Sang A.
Plus other, heavier metal. But how do you know all this background?'

'I was given a lead by something I overheard that first day we went aboard her–they weren't to know I understood Japanese, of course. My suspicions were confirmed when I searched her. We had the pleasure of meeting that night of the party, you and I, Captain Weddell.'

'The guard in the mask!'

'Aye. Miss Jutta knew I was around!

'You signalled him with the torch.' Jt was a rhetorical accusation.

Jutta had sat aside while I'd cross-questioned Denny. I considered that the whole thing had become too big for her. Now her voice was remote and slightly mistrustful.

'Yes, I did. I was afraid for you, being alone. We'd made a plan beforehand. Kaptein Denny never left the vicinity of Possession.'

'That puts paid to expecting help from the frigate, then? '

It's better this way,' said Kaptein Denny.

I went on rowing mechanically, just as a concussed Rugby player goes on playing-my mind in a daze. Then J jerked into the present again. From downwind came the sound of a boat's engine starting up. If half of what Kaptein Denny said was correct, the sooner we made tracks for the high seas the betler. 'Where's
Gaok?'

176

'We're almost there
now:
only a couple of cables' lengths to go, to starboard . . . easy as she goes.'

We pulled alongside the cutter and streamed the dinghy astern at the end of a painter.

'They're practically breathing up our exhaust pipe,' I said. '

Start the diesel. Perhaps they won't hear it, the way the wind's blowing. Find your way out to sea?'

'I'll start the diesel all right but I mean them to hear it. I want them to think we're heading seawards.'

'Think?'

We're
on our way inshore. Bridge of Magpies. After that, Albatross Rock.'

'Do you want to hand them
Gaok–and
us–on a plate?'

'Listen to me. We start the engine-rev it up and hope the sound does reach them. Then we cut it, We sail. After we've picked up
Ichabo.'

'Sail!
Two boats! You're out of your mind!'

say two boats. And we sail.'

That settled it. As far
as
another reef-grazing ride was concerned, I didn't need faith
to
trust him after our breakout from Alabama Cove. His next words-though, drove my patience to the
limit.
'

Wet tow
Ichabo.'

'God's truth! What next! Tow! Halve our chances! Halve our speed! HaJve our manoeuvrability!'

We tow.'

The only
bright
spot was
that he
appeared
to have more to lose than we did. We had only our lives. What the rest of his stake was I intended to find out.

'Okay-' I capitulated.

At that he became more relaxed and easy again. 'Let's go, then.'

We gunned
Gaok's engine as
hard as we dared and then set off under a scrap of sail towards a spot where,
Denny
maintained,
Ichabo was at
anchor. Except for the direction of the wind, I had completely lost my bearings. Most of the fog had gone now but the dust made
a
more tangible darkness which hid the sun and filled our eyes and noses and crunched between our teeth.

We located
Ichabo,
lashed her helm, and made
Gaok's
towing cable secure. Then we set off-in a series of tight tacks, into the teeth of the wind and across the channel towards 177

the mainland. The air was very hot-and dust blew like a rasp. Desert debris
was
everywhere. The wind was nudging gale force and had a dry rolling rattle to it–like shaking a giant version of one of the Sperrgebiet's own rattle bushes which clatter like castanets.

There
was a
steely precision about the way Kaptein Denny tacked and tacked again. He himself had the wheel and I tended the sail. But my mind was only half on the tricky operation: at every turn I expected to run
into a Sang A
search party. Jutta-too, was on constant watch from the bridge.

There was no time to think about the fantastic story Denny had told us. I was continually on the move because at every change of course
Ichabo
would stream away lumpishly downwind and drag round
Gaok's
stern. As an example of giving your enemy every chance to cut off your retreat Denny's strategy seemed hard to beat.

But we went on undetected and finally made a ninety degree turn-so close to Doodenstadt's rocks that spray from the breakers was added to the little which carded on to the deck. Now
Gaok
pointed southwards, hugging the shore, with
Ichabo
cavorting out to lee at the end of her cable. A thought struck me and I made for
the
bridge. 'Radar!

Sang A has
radar! She'll pick us up for sure!'

'In these conditions? Never!' Denny replied. 'Her radar screen will look like a bead curtain across a bar, with all this stuff flying around. There are enough mica particles in it to thake radar about
as effective as
a cross-eyed drunk.'

We drove south.

It wasn't more than ten miles to Albatross Rock-but a couple of crabs under sail would have followed a straighter course than
Gaok
and
Ichabo.
The Bridge of Magpies showed up. Visibility
was
so low that its legs appeared to have been amputated. When it disappeared astern I gave up trying to calculate where we were-from the amount of forward movement, sideways drift and
wind
thrust. It is impossible for me to say, therefore, at what point off the fractured, fissured coast I saw, dead ahead on the sea's surface-the grey thing with rounded sides which looked like an igloo tent, or a hangar–one of those plastic structures which are inflated to give them shape. Only this one was dirty and shiny and wet and there were lighter patches here 178

and there on its bulging sides.

Gaok
couldn't miss it the way she was heading.
What in he!! was Kaptein Denny doing?

I threw myself off the bridge and roof where I'd been attending the sail and into the wheelhouse below. Jutta was there, staring transfixed at the object in our track. Tut your helm down!' I yelled. 'Down!'

Denny didn't seem to hear and went on gazing forward without turning his head.

I snatched at the wheel–and I looked into the blue barrel of the Taisho.

Tack! Keep away!'

'The rock, man – you'll sink us!'

'Leave it to me . it isn't a rock .

He never got any further because at that moment
Gaok's
bowsprit pierced the grey bulk. The result was like putting your head inside Big Ben's biggest bell when the hour strikes. The boom stunned the ears and kicked the diaphragm. My resulting nausea wasn't only sound induced. The plasticlooking bubble threw off a flatus which was as sickening as it was unique.

The stench-patch
Gaok
had to cross wasn't bigger than
a
cricket field, and it couldn't have taken more than a couple of minutes but it seemed like hours. I was shouting things which I couldn't hear because my eardrums were paralysed, and I was holding Jutta, gagging and retching against me. I lip-read the explanation of the thing-on Kaptein Denny's mouth-'The sound of guns!'

The sea round about was thlck enough to have matched
Walewska's
oil spill, but once we had lurched clear of the patch and gone far enough to give our ears time to recover, Denny told us what the 'sound of guns'-really was. He'd heard it a score of times before, of course-but to
us
it made
Gousblom's
end sound more poignant.

'Jt wasn't guns
Gousblom
heard but the explosion of gas pockets which are caused by the upwell cell building up. What you saw back there was a small section of the mud floor of the channel which the
gas
lifts bodily to the surface. Gas is quickly generated by the action of the upwell cell's warm water on billions of minute, decomposing sea creatures on the ocean bed. Pockets form and push the mud upwards into giant balloons. When they reach the surface, where the
pressure
of the air is less, they explode.'

'If there'd been no "sound of guns" there'd have been no
U-160
action,' observed Jutta thoughtfully.

'True. It was luck, fate, call it what you like. It doesn't last for long, Miss Jutta.
Gousblom
was unlucky enough to be around at the wrong moment. Once cold water starts flowing it kills the process.'

'No lost Book of Tsu. No Kaptein Denny,' she added.

'Sometimes even I think of myself as a
gamat
fisherman. Denny-Denzo.' That triggered off something inside him and he spoke and steered and never looked anywhere but ahead while
Gaok
spooked her way through the sandstorm towards Albatross Rock.

'The first Admiral Denzo lived about 800 years ago,'

Denny began. 'He fought for a Japanese emperor named Minamoto. Denzo won a great sea battle against the Taira clan and his victory gave Minamoto control over the whole of Japan. It is the first occasion on which there is a record of the Book of Tsu. Denzo is known to have based his successful strategy on its precepts. In recognition of his victory Minamoto appointed Demo to be Keeper of the Book of Tsu. He also conferred a hereditary title on him. It's been in our family ever since:

Then he said quietly, and not at all theatrically, and with no pose, 'Master of the Equinoxes, Lord of the Solstice.'

He raised the gun-hand which had gone out at such high stretch at Mild. 'I am the Master. I have my duty. The Book of Tsu must never faJl into the hands of Emmermann and Kenryo and Mild.'

'Pearl Harbour – Tsushima,. The story's full of gaps.' The hoarseness in my own voice surprised me.

'Yes, it is. I'm not telling you that the Book of Tsu which won Demo his victory was the same as the one used at Pearl Harbour and Tsushima. It wasn't. Over the centuries after Minamoto the Book of Tsu became debased until it was regarded as a lot of mumbo-jumbo, simply a collection of incomprehensible medieval magic spells. An elaborate ritual – over which the Master presided – was built up and it became more important than the Book itself. Its meaning was almost totally obscured by the beginning of the twentieth century.

'Then my grandfather, who lived at the time of the Meiji 180

Revolution which made Japan into a modern state, revised and rewrote the Book of Tsu in terms of modern naval concepts. That-was about twenty years before the Battle of Tsushima. Admiral Togo based his victorious strategy on this revamped, dynamic version of the Book of Tsu. So did Yamamoto at Pearl Harbour. He and the Japanese Naval
Staff
were already planning and playing war gathes five years before the Pacific War broke out. Yamamoto himself tasted victory at Tsushima. He was there; he lost a couple of fingers from a shellburst.'

'J feel like a spacecraft starting
to
come back to the everyday things on earth-' I said.

'I haven't got past the shock of re-entry yet.' Jutta looked it, too.

Kaptein Denny went on: 'Jt's probably easier for the Oriental than the Western mind to accept that one can receive valid guidance from extra-sensory forces. Maybe it's something to do with the ritual or the symbols of the Book of Tsu, which amuse and project the unconscious. Who knows? It might prove a rewarding modern study in ESP. All I can say is that it worked for Togo and Yamamoto.'

The more you tell us the more unlikely it seems that the Master of the Equinoxes should find himself
as
tar away from his hereditary shrines and what-have-you as the Sperr gebiet,' I said.

'Not when you reaJize that Luderitz has a direct associat ion with the Battle of Tsushima. It was at Luderitz that Admiral Rozhdesvensky coaled the Russian fleet for the last time before it sailed to destruction by Togo's guns at Tsushima. You'll find his signature in an old visilors' book at the port.'

'Nothing of this makes it any clearer why you were at the Bridge of Magpies with the Book of Tsu, that night, waiting
for U-160
to pick you up. And it wasn't even a Japanese sub,
as
you'd expect, but a German one?

'Jn 1936 there was an army
coup in
Japan –a palace revolution. Young Turks grabbed the government. They set aboul eradicating all the traditionaJ things–except the Emperor, of course. He's sacred. The rest went into the fire. That included the hereditary office-bearers. The Master, my father, was a front ranker for liquidation.

'We lived
a
little way out of Tokyo at the shrine where
281

the Book of Tau was kept. I was an ensign serving in the Navy. My father was tipped off by phone that a killer squad was on its way to eliminate him. He vowed they'd never lay hands on the Book of Tsu. So he swore me in as the new Master, after arranging with friends to smuggle me–and it–out of Japan. He also fixed with someone at the Imperial PaJace for me to see the Emperor in order to ratify the title. He shot me off with the Book of Tsu, and calmly awaited his executioners.