Authors: John Drake
Agent of Death (19 page)
‘I must take off the frock,’ she said, ‘it gets creased if you don’t hang it.’ Then the door closed behind her, leaving me confused and wondering, but undaunted in hope as young men ever are, even if she did have a sour look on her face.
She was soon back, wearing some sort of slacks and a pullover. She was barefoot, her toenails were scarlet, and her hair was brushed out over her shoulders. But she was fully dressed, buttoned up, belted in, and she saw the disappointment on my face and sneered.
‘What did you expect?’ she said. ‘Just stockings and a smile? David, I’m giving you a bed for the night. As a friend. And that’s it.’ She pointed to various doors. ‘That’s my room. That’s your room. That’s the bathroom.’ I just nodded. I was seriously, head-swimmingly tired by then, so I finished the drink, said goodnight, went to my room, and undressed and went to bed.
I would have slept well except that she woke me up in the night.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, move over,’ she said, exasperated, pulled back the covers, and got in beside me. She was naked, she felt gloriously wonderful, and she put her arms round me and kissed me. Then she punched my shoulder quite hard. ‘Just don’t get yourself stupidly killed when you’re with those stupid commandos,’ she said. ‘Because they’re all mad. All of them. Especially Lord Leonard.’
The
Führerboat,
The
North
Atlantic
.
Saturday 3 June
,
05
.
40
hours.
Sohler ran to the control room, pressing through hatchways, pushing past the slave workers that cluttered everything with their tools and wires, and squeezing past the crewmen manning their stations and the extra men making repairs. The control room was crammed and jammed with men, and nothing was working properly; Sohler was tired, tired, tired, and his burns still hurt, and the bright light of the control room pierced his eyes after the dark of his cabin. But it was Sohler’s vocation to put up with this, so he did.
‘Here, sir! Look, sir!’ cried Kuhnke, and three men standing over the torpedo firing board all stood back, leaving just the operator sitting in front of it.
‘What have we got?’ said Sohler, as he buttoned up his Tommy blouse and then straightened his cap.
‘Look, sir,’ said Kuhnke, and pointed at the piece of SSA witchcraft that was supposed to control the torpedoes. It was alive with lights. It was working. Sohler stared. This was the board that had gone crazy and shoved one fish against another, and blown the front out of the boat. And now it was behaving itself again. It was the first piece of SSA gear that was back in operation after the explosion. It was the first piece of SSA electronic gear that was working properly at all. It was very good news.
‘Who fixed it?’ said Sohler.
‘He did, sir,’ said Kuhnke, pointing to a slave worker. Sohler looked at the wizened creature in his wretched stripes, with only a number to identify him instead of a name. Sohler looked at the man, and something flickered in his exhausted mind but couldn’t be grasped, so he grasped something else: the number on the man’s tunic.
‘Number 245,’ he said, ‘isn’t that the one we gave the wiring diagrams to?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Kuhnke, ‘him and 416. They were supposed to be fixing the navigating board.’
‘So where’s 416?’
‘He’s cracked up, sir,’ Kuhnke explained. ‘He’s the one the blackshirts wanted to shoot. The second one. They shot the first one but you saved 416. But he’s no use now.’
Sohler nodded. He’d never noticed the number at the time. All the slavies looked the same. ‘So where is he now?’ he said.
‘He’s in the galley. He’s secured. There’s nowhere else to put him, where we can keep an eye on him. Do you want to see him?’
‘No,’ said Sohler, and looked round the control room. Everyone was looking at him. He frowned. ‘All hands, carry on!’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ they said, and turned back to their duties, most of them with hardly room to move their elbows, let alone use their tools. The control room reeked of sweat and foul air, because there were too many men and the air conditioning was off and on all the time. The place stank. It was sweltering and foul even to a veteran like Sohler, and the boat itself seemed to be sweating, as condensation dripped off the metalwork in a steady patter. Sohler sighed. It was a wonder that anything electrical worked at all, let alone half-worked.
Sohler fought to make his mind work. He looked at the slave workers and wondered if he’d done right? He hated the black SSA. They were fighting a war that was already lost, such that sensible men should keep their heads down and keep clear of the enemy, not antagonize him. The blackshirts were an insult to his authority aboard the boat, and, more than anything else, he despised them for their punishment executions. So he was glad that he’d stopped them doing that, and very glad that he’d shot Zapp.
But, but, but … it was obvious that the blackshirts had been right in blaming the slave workers. Torpedoes didn’t arm and fuse themselves. No. Someone had been playing with the boat’s electrics, and who else could have done it? Or wanted to do it? It had to be the slavies. But the boat had been sent out before it was ready, and now it was falling apart because it’d been damaged, and because it was a nightmare of untried, novel equipment, and only the slave workers really understood it. So Sohler’s solution had been to let them carry on at their work, but under the close supervision of his crew, insofar as anyone understood their work.
It was either that or admit to Svart – who was supposed to have designed all this clever stuff – that he, Sohler, could not run his own boat. However, Svart was on the sick list, and anyway Sohler was tired. And then Sohler’s mind flickered again and this time he grabbed the thought, and spoke directly to 245.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘Feldman, sir,’ said the slave worker, and with those words Sohler knew what had flickered and prickled in his mind. There it was! He’d got it. Now he was sure. Feldman wasn’t standing like a slave worker and he didn’t speak like one. Feldman was standing to attention.
‘You’ve served at sea, haven’t you?’ said Sohler.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Feldman, ‘
Kaiserliche
Marine
in the last war.’
‘What branch?’
‘U-boats, sir. I was an
Inginieur
Oberleutnant
. I served in U139, U151, U164, and U157.’
‘U157?’ said Sohler. ‘Did you serve under Max Valentiner?’
Feldman stood to even stiffer attention. ‘Yes, sir. I was his chief engineer.’
Sohler gasped. Valentiner was his boyhood hero: the
twelve
dozen
man
who sank one hundred and forty-four ships. ‘Valentiner!’ said Sohler. ‘I met him once. He spoke to my class at Mürvick, at the Naval Academy. I had the honour to take him to lunch.’ Sohler looked at the miserable slave worker who suddenly was something else. ‘Right!’ he said. He looked round the control room and raised his voice. ‘Attention! All of you. This man is one of us. He’s a U-boatsman. From now on he will be addressed as Herr Feldman.’ Sohler turned to Kuhnke. ‘Get him something decent to wear. Not those stripes.’
Feldman felt sick. There was too much in his head. Too many strong things. Far too many. It was beyond bearing. He concentrated on the practical and the immediate.
‘With respect, sir,’ he said, ‘look at the firing board.’ He leaned past the man in the operator’s chair, and pointed. ‘These lights here, sir? They show that of the five torpedoes left in the tubes, three are still active: the ones in the red tubes.’ Feldman tapped a finger on the lights. ‘Top green blew up. Middle green and bottom green are dead. But the red-side fish are alive.’ He looked at Sohler. ‘As you know, Captain, they’re Type G7 stroke c electric motor homing torpedoes with SSA warheads. Those are detonated by impact, or by the target ship’s magnetic field, or by over-pressure, or propeller noise.’ Sohler nodded, and Feldman continued. ‘They’re supposed to become fully armed only when fired clear of the boat. But they’re fully armed right now, which means they might think we’re a target.’ Feldman paused. ‘Which means they could go off at any minute, sir. All of them.’
The
North
Sea.
Monday 5 June
,
08
.
15
hours.
I used to think that the world’s most charismatic speed machine was a Griffon-engined Spitfire. But that was before I was aboard His Majesty’s destroyer
Nantwich
, closing on her sister ship
Nailsworth
at a combined speed of eighty miles per hour. The thrill of the moment has stayed with me all my life, and still sends a shiver down my spine even now.
Any man o’ war, under way with colours streaming, is a sight that stirs the blood, but the grey, racehorse elegance of these N-class destroyers, with their swept-back, streamlined forms was piercingly beautiful, while their jutting guns, and the enormous white wakes under the bows was the most wonderful expression of power. And by God they were fast! They were designed for thirty-six knots but doing more, each with a pair of Admiralty three-drum boilers driving Parsons turbines sending forty-thousand horsepower down twin shafts to two propellers.
And all because the ships were showing off.
Nantwich
was outbound with Lord Leonard’s commandos on board, and
Nailsworth
was returning from some unknown duty; each was trying to swagger more than the other because, as with Lancasters, the crews were mainly young men in their teens and twenties, determined to make a show. Aboard
Nantwich
the wind shrieked past our ears, carrying soaking spray that hit like buck-shot, giving an impression of speed so tremendous that it felt like flying. So the matelots lined the rails beside the commandos, and everyone cheered as
Nailsworth
shot past like a bullet and each ship wallowed in the other’s wake.
But there was time for a little piece of navy humour, English humour. A signal-light on
Nailsworth
blinked at
Nantwitch
, and one of ours blinked back. I read the Morse quickly, having learned it at Wellington because such things come easily to me. So I was grinning before everyone but the two captains and their signallers.
The messages were abbreviated by common usage:
‘NSWTH TO NTWCH. BTR FIN HAUL ICLNDIC COD…’ and so on. Which translated as:
‘
Nailsworth
to
Nantwich
. Beg to report a fine haul of Icelandic cod came aboard during our commission. Have you any chips?’
‘
Nantwich
to
Nailsworth
. Regret no chips but plenty of splinters came aboard during action against enemy while you were fishing.’
Hours later, near midnight rounding the Skagen peninsula into the Kattegat, the joke wasn’t so funny. Lord Leonard and I were up on the bridge, the ship’s command centre, where a small group of officers and ratings performed their duties in a cramped, angular space containing a binnacle, voice pipes, Lewis-gun mountings, signal lights, and a pig’s-ear urinal. It was a steel tray, high up over the water, and boxed in at chest height. There was a glazed windshield for’ard, a chart room astern, the Main Battery Director Control above, the wheelhouse and helmsman below, and very little room overall. So Leonard I were privileged to be there, invited by
Nantwich
’s commander, Captain Draper.
He was a career seaman in his late thirties who reminded me of Noel Coward, playing a destroyer captain in his famous film
In
Which
We
Serve
. Thus Draper said
rind
, not round,
acrawss
, not across, and carried himself with a tremendous, English dignity. Lots of naval officers behaved like that, and I often wondered if Coward imitated them or they imitated him. For whatever reason, Draper sounded exactly like Coward as he spoke to us.
‘We should come under fire very soon now, gentlemen,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘We are in range of the Punno Island battery, which has radar fire control and will spot us even at night.’ He looked at us straight faced. ‘But please do not entertain the least fear of injury, because the battery has four eleven-inch guns. So should we be hit, we shall all be killed instantly, which is entirely painless.’ He turned to the officer beside him. ‘Isn’t that so, Number One?’
‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said his first lieutenant, as he stared through his binoculars at the black land, ten miles off to the east. ‘Everyone says so.’
I looked at them both. It was the English at play. I was Polish-Russian enough to notice. There is no other people so obsessed with humour, jokes, and red-nosed comedians. The English bathe in humour, especially ironic humour. I was in a meeting once with Englishmen and Americans, who share a language and ought to understand one another, yet at lunchtime the Americans got together and asked:
‘Will you guys please stop the jokes among yourselves, because we don’t know when you’re serious and when you’re not.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the English, ‘how terribly rude of us, we’ll stop at once.’ They were genuinely sorry, mortified even, but kept right on doing it and it didn’t help the meeting one bit.
Then we all saw the four silent flashes in the night as the battery fired. One! Two! Three! Four!
‘Ah!’ said the first lieutenant. ‘
Mark
!’ and a rating next to him clicked a stopwatch. ‘A bit late, tonight. Nonetheless: for what we are about to receive …’
‘… may the Lord make us truly thankful,’ said the rest, ‘Amen!’
‘Shells are faster than sound, gentlemen,’ said Captain Draper, ‘so they will arrive before we hear the bangs.’ He paused. ‘Except when they burst among us of course.’ We looked at one another and waited, myself and Lord Leonard. The rest of his men were below, and I couldn’t help thinking of them as the real players, while I was merely dressed in commando gear and given a Colt automatic as my last hope, but not a commando knife because those weren’t for spectators. We waited about half a minute, then came most appalling sound I ever heard in my life. It was infinitely worse than flack, and shockingly loud.
SHOO
-
SHOO
-
SHOO
-
SHOO
-
SHOO
-
SHOO
!
The salvo of huge shells screeched over our heads and, just possibly, Captain Draper didn’t cringe, but everyone else did. It was a ghastly, dreadful noise that struck terror from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. Then, miles away in our wake, there were four huge explosions, as enormous columns of water threw themselves a couple of hundred feet into the air, drumming the message into our heads that we were totally unprotected from shot and splinters because the bridge was wide, unprotected, open.
We were static targets in the dark, shiny steel helmets and clenched teeth, and I was wondering why in God’s name the naval architects hadn’t put armour over this vital place, as any aero-designer would have. I was told later that it had to do with keeping a good lookout, though I suspect it was naval tradition, stemming from the fact that Nelson’s quarterdeck had been open and what was good enough for
him
was good enough for anyone else.
Meanwhile, the battery fired again. Four bright flashes. Another salvo.
‘
Mark
!’ said the first lieutenant.
‘Mark, sir,’ said the rating, and looked at his stopwatch. ‘Forty-eight seconds between salvoes, sir.’
‘I say,’ said the first lieutenant, ‘they’re getting better, aren’t they?’
‘Good old them,’ said Captain Draper, and he leaned forward and spoke down a voice pipe. ‘Bring her round, pilot. Steady as she comes, and proceed as ordered.’ A voice came back up the pipe.
‘Aye-aye, sir! Proceeding as ordered.’
Draper explained the manoeuvre to Leonard and me.
‘We shall zig-zag for a while to confuse the battery still further,’ he said, ‘though they are not terribly good in the dark, since they cannot observe the fall of shot. Which of course reflects no discredit upon them. It would be the same for anyone, would it not, Number One?’
‘Indeed, sir. Not their fault at all, sir. Radar might pick up the splashes and again it might not. I’m sure they’re doing their best, sir.’
‘Quite,’ said Draper. He turned back to Leonard and me. ‘We have a pretty good idea what our Swedish friends are capable of,’ he said, ‘because we’ve been out here a couple of times on your behalf so they shan’t think tonight is anything special. Not them, nor our German friends, who cannot fail to hear the Swedish battery as it comes into action.’
‘Much appreciated, Captain,’ said Leonard.
‘My pleasure,’ said Draper, and spoke again to his first lieutenant. ‘It was quite fun when we came here in daylight, was it not, Number One? Teasing them to see what they could do?’
‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said the first lieutenant. ‘Great fun. Especially when we really did have splinters come aboard from near misses.’
‘
Fortunes
de
la
guerre
, Number One,’ said Draper, and expanded on the subject for the benefit of Leonard and me. ‘The guns are old Krupp pieces, d’you see? Installed in the 1890s and designed to engage capital ships going fifteen to twenty knots, which was good for those days. But we’re going twice that speed, so they can’t quite train fast enough to keep up with us.’
‘But they are getting better, sir,’ protested the first officer.
‘Don’t worry, Captain,’ said Leonard, ‘we’re going to have a word with the gunners when we get ashore, and we’ll ask them very nicely not to shoot at us on the way home, because that will be in daylight.’
Draper smiled as if someone had politely opened a door for him. ‘Oh how kind!’ he said. ‘That really would be terribly nice of you. Though do take care not to upset them, because we would not want to interfere with Swedish neutrality, would we, Number One?’
‘Good Lord, sir, no sir! Wouldn’t want to upset the bloody Swedes.’
‘Quite,’ said Draper, and continued. ‘Meanwhile, in fifteen minutes we shall enter the channel between Punno Island and the Orust and Tjörn peninsulas,’ he said. ‘Once there – and in position off your chosen landing site – you may make your way ashore.’ As he spoke
Nantwich
completed another zig-zag, heeled over hideously, and we found ourselves looking down at the rushing black waves as if they were vertically alongside us and only inches away from our noses.
‘Just one thing, Captain,’ said Leonard, hanging on hard as she righted. ‘When we do get into the boats, it would be appreciated by my chaps if you could slow down a bit, because otherwise we’ll have to paddle quite hard.’
There was laughter and Draper nodded. ‘Certainly, brigadier. I might even heave to, in the cause of inter-service cooperation.’ Draper looked down at his watch, then frowned as he was interrupted by another salvo that shrieked overhead shoving skewers into our ears. He waited the few seconds until the shells came down, with just a slightly irritated look on his face as if he were waiting for a late bus.
‘Ah!’ he said, when they’d finished their bursting. He looked at Leonard. ‘Brigadier, I do not expect dawn before zero four fifteen tomorrow.’ He spoke as if he personally would not
allow
an earlier sunrise. ‘So I shall disembark you at twenty-four hundred. And now would be a good time to get your chaps to their stations.’ He glanced at the sky, and smiled. ‘The weather is calm. You have a clear night. You should have plenty of time to reach your objectives before sunrise.’
Then his manner changed completely, all jokes set aside. ‘So I wish you Godspeed,’ he said, ‘and I give you my solemn word that this ship will be waiting when you need her.’ He shook our hands and spoke to us each individually. ‘Good luck, old chap!’ he said. ‘Good luck!’ It was deeply sincere, it was from the heart, and was a considerable lesson in Britishness for an Englisher-Polski yid.
Nantwich
was crammed with commandos. Four assault troupes: Able, Baker, Charley, and Dog, bearing mainly small arms, and a heavy-weapons troupe armed with Bren guns and three-inch mortars. Each troupe was commanded by a captain, with two lieutenants and four sergeants, and was self-sufficient in signals, supplies, ammunition and first aid. Finally there was a small supply troupe with extra Bren magazines and bombs for the mortars, while Leonard himself led a ten-man command team of mainly signallers and runners. I was supernumerary, though even I was loaded with still more Bren magazines, as was every other man in the expedition, because Leonard particularly favoured his Bren guns and wanted unrestricted fire from them.
Most of these men were berthed on the seamen’s mess deck, and those that weren’t were brought in to hear Leonard’s final words before we got into the boats. It was an uncomfortable, uneasy space, with tiers of bunks and fold-away mess tables, and it heaved with the ship’s powerful motion, so the commandos were packed shoulder to shoulder, with their officers around Leonard, a map of Punno Island on a mess table, and the ship’s first lieutenant standing by to give advice if needed.
