Angels in the Gloom (35 page)

And of course he would also have to inform Germany of it, so they could send a U-boat to intercept the Cormorant, which would take skill and some planning. If the device was as brilliant as Morven had said, it was the ultimate weapon!

There was only one answer: Patrick Hannassey. He was perfect. If there was any man in Europe who could get himself onto the Cormorant as a member of the crew, and be unremarkable, competent, a man whose face or mannerisms no one would remember, and yet have the intelligence, the imagination, and the cold, brutal instincts to kill if necessary, it was he.

He would get the prototype into the hands of the Germans. And in so doing, he would have to go with it himself. The Germans would probably have to employ more than one U-boat, and in all likelihood end in sinking the Cormorant, which was a loss the Peacemaker regretted. Still, bitter as that sacrifice would be, it was small as a price for ending the war now in May of 1916, instead of God knew when!

And it had the added, and now quite urgent, beauty that a word from the Peacemaker to his cousin in Berlin, and the Germans would keep Hannassey, get rid of him if necessary. He must not be allowed to return. A mention of his aims, a free and peaceful Ireland, demanding money, an even larger share of power and total independence, would be sufficient to see that Berlin removed him from the scene.

Yes. It was excellent! A better outcome than he would have dreamed possible, even this morning. He picked up the telephone.

Matthew reported for duty on board the HMS Cormorant. He was familiar with the sea from having spent holidays on the coast in small boats, but this would be very different. It was a relief to be able at last to do something personally to strike against the enemy who had, until this point, outwitted and outplayed him at every stroke. Somewhere on this ship, unless both he and Shearing had misjudged, there would be another man placed as late and as artificially as he was. That other newcomer would be here to steal the prototype for Germany, just as Matthew was here to catch him, and through him the murderer of Theo Blaine.

He had never been on a warship before, only seen them from the shore, low and sleek, gray castles of steel on the gray water, decks dominated by bridge and gun turrets. There was very little rigging, just one relatively small mast and two cross-spars, enough for signaling and radio. Funnels proclaimed the power of mighty engines. There was no grace and beauty of sails as at Trafalgar, or sound of the wind in canvas. They were more like wolves than swans in flight.

Once on board the differences were perhaps less great. He was welcomed without ceremony, merely one of eight new men replacing those killed or injured. As an officer, albeit junior, he had a cabin to himself. Perhaps that was Archie’s doing. As he unpacked his few belongings and stowed them in the space under the high, hard bunk and in the chest of drawers, he concluded that if shared, such cramped quarters would have made his task infinitely more difficult.

The only other furniture was a washstand, a chair, and a hinged table that let down as a desk. The whole space was about five paces by three, with a port over the bunk. But then the entire ship was less than two hundred feet long.

He must familiarize himself with it as soon as possible, learn every passage, stairway, every fitting and its use, every room, and at least something of every one of the hundred and twenty-seven men, and what his job was. One of them was his enemy.

He must go up and report to the signal room, and he could not afford to get lost. All the passages were narrow; one could barely pass anyone without touching him. On the floor was a curious substance, rough to the feel, a mixture of cork and India rubber known as corticine. Everything else was metal, with the occasional glass lightbulbs.

When he came above into the air, he found the deck itself was wood, but there was still the steel of gun turrets, and the mass of the bridge and signal house above, the only place from which almost everything could be seen.

He felt the thrum of engines and the surge of power. They were already under way; the safe, familiar outline of Portsmouth harbor was slipping astern. Soon there would be nothing around them but the gray water, and whoever else was on it, or under its concealing surface.

He thrust the thought from his mind and clambered up to the signal house to report for duty, not to Archie, but to the chief signals officer.

Ragland was a quiet man of about thirty-five, with a plain, intelligent face and sandy red hair. But when he spoke there was a sincerity in his voice and an authority of manner that earned almost instant respect. There was no dissembling in him and no bravado. He made it known he required the same of others.

He did not betray by any flicker of expression that he knew Matthew was any different from the ordinary replacement: raw, uncertain of himself, but adequately trained.

“Matthews? Settled in?”

Matthew stood to attention. He had no seniority here, he was a new recruit, given rank only because of his knowledge of signals. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. My name is Ragland. You’ll report to me. I don’t know what you did ashore, but here obedience is exact and immediate, or you’ll end up at best in the brig, at worst at the bottom of the sea. There is no room for hesitation, individual will, or taste, and certainly not for any man who doesn’t fit in. We rely on each other, and a man who can’t be trusted is worse than useless, he’s a danger to the rest of us. Understood, Matthews?”

“Yes, sir.” He thought bitterly of how companionable that sounded, that perfect fellowship, the sort of thing people described in the trenches, and it did not apply to him at all. He could trust no one, except Archie, and Archie was remote from him in the hierarchy. He was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He knew the rudiments of his job, little more. He did not know the sea. To none of the men he would see day by day could he tell anything of the truth, nor dare he trust them. Somewhere on this ship there was a German agent who would think nothing of killing him if he blocked his path to the prototype. It was Matthew’s job to find him, before he found Matthew.

He had to do his job in signals without relying on anyone else. He could confide in no one and at all times must guard his tongue, the way he responded to anything, even the silent betrayal by his ignorance of duties, perhaps most of all the physical fear he had never had to face before.

“Then you had better familiarize yourself with your station, and the ship in general, and get about it,” Ragland told him. “You can start now.”

Matthew spent the rest of the day doing exactly as he was told, and trying to look as if it were natural to him. By the end of the evening he was becoming more used to the smells of salt, oil, and smoke, the sound of ship’s bells, and on deck the constant hiss and whine of wind and water. He was glad that at least the movement of the sea was something he was acquainted with.

Below he had eaten in the officers mess, listening a great deal more than talking. The food was good enough, but they were newly provisioned and he expected it to get worse. At least there was enough of it, and they were not under fire. He was a lot better off than Joseph had been most of the time.

He wondered about Joseph, aware that his conscience had driven him to go to Flanders in the first place, and perhaps it was all that made him consider returning now. His physical injuries were healing, but the wound to his mind and his emotions appeared to be deeper. Something in him had changed, and here in this close, crowded room with other men who also faced the enemy every day, and the possibility of mutilation or death, Matthew found that the change grieved him. Joseph was not a soldier in fact, but he was in spirit. He was as much part of the regiment and of its battle to survive and win as any other man.

Matthew ate silently, answering only if he was spoken to, and he watched the others. He had no idea if the man here to steal the prototype was an officer or a seaman. He must learn everything he could of each man, because his life might depend on seeing the tiniest element that did not fit in. He may not be given more than one chance before it was too late.

The crew was complete without him. They had a bond he would never be part of. They were not unkind, but they knew his inexperience and mistrusted it. He would have to earn his place. The jokes passed over his head. He did not understand the teasing, the laughter, the references to one man’s boots, another’s compulsive tidiness, a third’s lapse of memory. They were based on terror and violence shared and endured together, tolerance of moments of weakness easily understood, the loss of friends, and above all, the knowledge of horror yet to come, and that they might not survive it. They knew each other’s values, and that tomorrow or the next day their own survival might hang on that courage and willingness to sacrifice even life for the good of the many.

Matthew slept badly, aware all night of the shifting and turning of the ship, the sound of footsteps along the narrow passage on the other side of the door, and of course every half hour the ship’s bell ringing the time. About three in the morning he heard running, and a brief burst of gunfire, but there was no alarm. He lay rigid in his bed, gulping air.

With jarring reality he became aware of physical war, shells tearing apart the metal of the ship, men injured. He was not afraid of pain; he never had been. But since the murder of his parents, violent death horrified him in a new way. The reality of it reached inside him and touched his innermost being. Now the knowledge that he was on a warship that might become involved in the slaughter and injury of battle made him nauseated and a little cold. But at least it would not be personal, face to face, as it was for Joseph. He might see the injured or the dead, but they would be people he barely knew, and above all, he would not have to inflict injury himself. The enemy would be distant, a ship, not men. Except, of course, for the one man on the ship that he had come here in order to find.

It was more than an hour before he went to sleep again. His rest was uneasy and full of violent dreams.

The next two days were difficult and exhausting. It took all his concentration simply to learn his job and he was embarrassed at the mistakes he made. Ragland was patient with him, but he made no allowances. He could not afford to. At home in St. Giles, Archie was a friend. They had known each other for over fifteen years, but mostly at family occasions, bound by a love for Hannah, taken much for granted. Here on the ship his word was law, his decisions governed the life of every man on board—and very possibly the death also.

On the one occasion Matthew passed him in the narrow passage up toward the signals room, he remembered to salute only just in time, and received a brief acknowledgment in reply, an instant meeting of the eyes. Then Archie was past him and on the steps up to the bridge, and the isolation of command.

It was a strange, artificial situation, and yet unbreakable. Here the sea and the enemy were the only realities. Friendship and duty were the core of survival, but neither must ever trespass upon the other. In his own way, Archie was every bit as alone as Matthew could ever be, and with a burden of trust enough to break the mind, if you allowed yourself to think about it. Better not to. Just act, each moment for itself. Do your best.

At the end of the third day, Matthew lay on his bunk staring up at the ceiling and realized he ached in every muscle and his head throbbed from the tension of concentrating on getting each decision right, and drawing no attention to himself. He hadn’t had any chance at all to try to find the man sent here to steal the prototype.

Presumably they would be ambushed by a U-boat. There would be no point in torpedoing them. The last place the Germans wanted the prototype was on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Time was short. What would he do, in their place? Have a U-boat shadowing them, stalking, and keep in touch with them somehow. Radio signals. A sharp burst, too quick for anyone on the Cormorant to detect. Just sufficient to keep in touch and mark their position. A destroyer was not an easy target to disable adequately enough to be certain of getting the prototype off before sinking it. They carried four four-point-seven-inch guns, two pairs of pom-pom guns, and four torpedo tubes, and they could move through the water at twenty-five knots. They were the wolves of the sea—swift, maneuverable, and often running in packs. But even alone, they would fight hard for their lives. It would take two U-boats at least to be sure.

Whoever was on the Cormorant had to be one of the new men on this voyage. It was a matter of elimination. He must begin immediately in the morning, even if he had to get Archie’s permission to delegate some of his signaling watch duties to somebody else.

But he did not get the chance. He woke in the dark to the urgent sound of alarms. All hands on deck. He scrambled into his jacket and boots and, heart pounding, he made his way up to the bridge, feet slipping on the steps.

The ship seemed to be alive with movement, men running, shouting orders, manning the gun turrets. The wind was rising, sharp and startlingly cold for the end of May. The ship bucked and slithered on the long Atlantic swell. Over in the southeast there was a gray blur across the horizon. It would be dawn in half an hour.

Matthew scanned the surface of the sea for any sign of the black presence of a U-boat, but he saw nothing except the glimmer of waves as the half-light caught their backs, and the occasional paler tips of spume.

“You won’t see them,” Ragland said from beside him.

“What do we do?” Matthew asked.