Rogue Raider (3 page)

They called His Imperial Majesty's ship
Emden
“the swan of the East.” Lauterbach shouted and gesticulated to a stall for hot dumplings and looked her over. He danced the hot food on his tongue, swallowed and grunted, unimpressed. He had visited too many “Pearls of the Orient” and “Venices of the East”, that lay choking in their own garbage, and paid court to too many “oriental beauties”, who turned out to have pyrrhoea and scabies, to pay heed to any of that. Swans, anyway, he had always found to be unpleasant and pointless creatures – like aristocrats. He had looked her up in the naval records, rattled the skeletons in her closet, seen her with no clothes on. She was nothing to write home about.

He knew that, technically at least, the
Emden
was less a swan than a white elephant. Her keel had been laid a good eight years back in 1906 in Danzig as part of the Kaiser's first petulant arms race against his British cousins. A policy had sought to cultivate local enthusiasm by naming each vessel after a particular German city. That of Emden was informed, in suitably inflated language, that it had now a ship of its very own and had tried to rise to the occasion with a rash of civic receptions and declarations of patriotism that fatigued both givers and receivers but allegedly pleased the Kaiser. In those days of peace and posturing, the navy's main duty was to please the Kaiser and numbers were everything as nations fought with reviews of the fleet like little boys showing off their collections of marbles.

She was obsolete when built. The old stove-pipe funnels had a quaint air of tipped top-hats and her torpedoes were of outmoded design and sorely limited range. The prognathous bow echoed a time when ramming was a standard naval manoeuvre while the old piston-driven engines were cumbersome and unresponsive. Ships were split into categories – battleship, destroyer and so on – so that they could be matched between the various nations but then a sort of cheating blurred the distinctions so that a cruiser could be heavy, light or medium. The
Emden
was a decidedly ‘light‘cruiser. Those of foreign navies already had smooth-running turbines and were faster, better armoured and more heavily gunned than this white-painted swan. They had more watertight compartments and were less easy to sink. Never mind. She had one great charm for Lauterbach. She was not intended to stand and fight other armed vessels but prey on helpless merchantmen. She was designed to be the school bully that kicked little kids and took their sweets off them. If anyone her own size or a teacher turned up, she was to run away.

“You givee one piece dollar I takee travel box inside ship-ship.” The rickshawman was there, interrupting his thoughts, grinning through broken teeth and holding out his hand confidently. Lauterbach paused and sighed. Those young puppies had spoiled the market. He roused himself, deliberately stood against the sun so the great shadow of his bulk fell in the driver's eyes and pointed to the stack of old, well-used luggage, generously embossed with supplementary straps and reinforcements, raised his fist and gobbed a stream of pidjin in the expectant face.

“I reckon you one piece fella him savvy box velly bloke. Chop-chop you takee bloody travel box. You no takee I givee bloody bamboo chow-chow, damn right.”

The scrawny driver quailed, seized a suitcase, clapped it on his head and jogged off up the gangplank at the exaggerated pace they called “the imperial trot.”

Lauterbach watched him with a satisfied smirk and moved gently up the plank himself, clamping the rail with huge, serial, slow hands. Gangplanks could be slippery and dangerous. This one bent under his weight but that was just a comforting proof of his own solidity. Later, he resolved – point made – the Chinese should have his tip. He was, after all, far from being a harsh man. He just liked things to be clear.

His cabin was tailored for one of those slim boys, a thing of louvred lockers and stick furniture, a doll's house. Back on the
Kraetke
, his own command, he had a double bed screwed to the floor and chairs of leather and brass. Here, there was a slim monastic bench of leatherette that, he could foresee, would be too short, too narrow and preclude all hospitality. He sat down on it with a groan – that it returned – lit up a cigarette and stared at the pile of luggage, like a new schoolboy waiting for his feeling of blank emptiness to turn into the inevitable homesickness. Only now he was not moving forward to some new stage in his life, with new experiences and privileges but backwards towards adolescence and loss of power. Already the leatherette was sticking wetly to his buttocks. There was a smart tap at the door and young von Guerard was there, grinning through flawless teeth, beckoning in another rickshaw driver with more luggage.

Lauterbach sat his ground, puffed smoke aggressively. “I think you must have made a mistake, Lieutenant von Guerard. They told me this was my cabin.”

Von Guerard laughed with confident charm – threw a fencing foil twirling into the corner, seized and piled boxes and tennis raquets, gave too large a tip. He sprawled back, legs apart, on his boxes and grinned up at Lauterbach. He had been perfectly and expensively finished in all the best schools of the Reich and acquired gentlemanly accomplishments. Great wealth brought with ir great irresponsibility. He had the ability to drink a bottle of champagne standing on his head whereas Lauterbach, more pedestrian, merely prided himself on drinking one while still standing on his feet.

“Surely you don't think you're having this huge cabin and all this space to yourself, Juli-bumm. We're lucky there are just the two of us. Will you take the bench or the hammock?”

“The hammock.” He could get one of the men to stitch two of them together lengthwise. The mere thought of trying to sleep through rough weather, swinging there like a bat sent a stab of dyspepsia through his stomach and stuffed suffocation up his nostrils.

“This is going to be such fun.” The boy quivered with excitement. “We'll give the Brits a pasting.”

“Yes. Such fun.”

Wherever he went, von Guerard expected to be loved and to feel himself immediately and effortlessly at home. He was like some big-footed puppy that had been petted and cosseted all its life. Lauterbach lacked such certainty. He had never found it easy to simply belong or even be accepted. Feeling old and depressed, he rose on shaky feet to stagger to the heads across the way and slam the clanging door shut and sat, fat, mottled knees crammed up hard against the warm metal and held his head. There were the usual pathetic pencilings, “Long live the Kaiser” and “Up the Boys in Blue.” Along the top was a line from a von Eichendorf poem, “Whom God truly favours he sends out into the wide world.” They did you a good class of poems in the navy. Down in one corner, was a further text in a small crabbed hand. He bent to decipher it as von Guerard's clear happy laughter rang out again in the cabin across the corridor, accompanied by the sound of tennis balls thudding against the bulkhead. It was the optimism and cheerfulness of the young that made them insufferable. “Turpitz fucks pigs,” it read. In support, was offered a sketch of the admiral, hat rakishly askew, engaged in one of the less common forms of congress. It was clear that the artist had studied at no formal school of anatomical drawing and impressed by verve rather than draughtsmanship. Lauterbach sat back and breathed with relief. He was not totally alone in a conformist world, then. To settle and reassure himself further, he reached into the special, waterproof pocket a cunning tailor had sewn into his waistband and pulled out a fat wad of currency and started counting his money out onto his knees. “Ten, twenty, thirty …” There were slick dollars and curlicued marks and arrogant pounds but somehow most reassuring were the fat Chinese notes – soft, thick and friendly as bedsheets. “Forty, fifty, sixty.” A comfort blanket against the world. As he counted, his breathing steadied and his heart slowed back to its accustomed pace. He would survive.

“The situation is as follows …” Von Muecke, the First Officer, was enjoying the chance to perform in public. He raised his pointer with trim authority and rapped firmly on the map pinned to the wall. Early thirties, focussed, a mind devoid of doubt and humour, he reeked of hard beds and cold showers. In his presence, Lauterbach was oddly aware of the dandruff on his own collar. Dandruff was a sort of unpardonable inefficiency. There was no need, he thought with irritation, for von Muecke to rap. Did everything have to be a military parody? At the messroom table, he had noticed him attacking the dumplings in their serving dishes with the sequenced motions of a bayonet charge. He shifted fat buttocks uncomfortably on the hard wooden chair. Von Muecke had made them heroically fling all cushions overboard as part of the change from peace to war footing. The curtains over the portholes had gone too and they had been blacked out with paint. A good nautical fug of armpits, fags and fish supper was building behind them. When on war watch, men slung their hammocks by their stations, slept in their clothes for days and had no time to wash. The stink of a warship was like that of a prison – all balls and boredom. Lauterbach hated it.

“The war is nearly won. Berlin reports that our forces have already scored significant victories in France and Belgium …” Von Muecke's pointer coolly moved whole divisions effortlessly across borders through barbed wire and machine guns. War was then not a thing of rotting green corpses and foul decay but of crisp lines etched on a map. “It was feared that the British, unable to confront Germany as an equal, would take the coward's route yet again and fight its battles through others. Luckily that has not occurred and Britain has let slip the mask and we see, at last, the naked face of our enemy's jealous hatred. English greed for wealth and power has deceived and humbled France and Russia, now also enemies, and reveals the sole purpose of that perfidious nation to be nothing less than the total annihilation of peaceful Germany.” His beaky little nose pecked the air with satisfaction. Its silhouette fell across the map of Europe seizing Paris in an ambitious pincer movement between nostrils and upper lip. The eyes gleamed fervently. “Our glorious victory is certain. The land war will be over in a matter of months. Our mighty fleet has gained the open sea. Tsingtao is an impregnable citadel, a secure part of the fatherland, that will vigorously defend the honour of German arms. If we are to deck our beloved vessel with a champion's laurels we must all lend ourselves swiftly to that great purpose, before our foes bend on trembling knee to sign their unconditional surrender” The pointer became a sword for the flourishing. “Three cheers for the Kaiser!”

The ratings leapt to their feet, crying out lustily, fisting the air, cheers ricocheting around the steel walls like shrapnel. Lauterbach flourished his pipe silently in token participation, mimed cheers slack-mouthed, being irrelevantly distracted by the irritating image of foes trying to sign while on bended knee. He had no hatred for the British. He had met lots of decent British seamen and the world for him was divided along a simpler line – that between sailors and landlubbers. The sea belonged to no state, neither did sailors so that a seaman's vocation was its own nationality and brotherhood. One of the turning points in his early life had come with the realisation that his father's mind was irrevocably decayed when he developed a sudden rabid interest in national politics.

“Three cheers for Admiral Graf Spee!”

The situation was bad then, much worse than he had thought. The rest of the Pacific squadron had got out of port fast and sailed for German Samoa to avoid being bottled up by the British. Tsingtao was undefended and would fall if the Japanese came in on the other side. In a few short months Germany would have no coaling stations left in the East and the entire fleet would be immobilised for lack of fuel, whereas the whole British empire could be reduced in naval terms to a series of heaps of Cardiff coal, dumped arrogantly all over the face of the planet. Earlier that day they had passed through the lingering wakes of a big flotilla of ships and there was noisy wireless in code. It could only be the British foolishly chattering and giving their position away. Germany had eight cruisers, Britain alone had thirty-four, not counting their French, Russian and Japanese allies. A less skilled card-player than Lauterbach could see that those were not great odds. But he would not mention Japan. These happy boys would not want to hear it and would hold it against him as a mark of his negative thought and lack of team spirit.

“What about Japan?” he asked. The words fell into a deep, deep silence, like a depth charge tumbling in still blue water after the initial splash. Von Muecke wheeled round, sneered briefly and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could do so he was flung to one side and his pointer sent clattering as the
Emden
veered hard over to starboard. Lauterbach hardly had time to feel the pleasure of Number One's discomfort before the rising revolutions and an abrupt thrumming through the steel deck gave sign that the ship was running at full speed. “Action stations” rang out and the audience disappeared in a thunder of feet that reminded him of boys stampeding at the sound of the bell that marked the end of the school day. Lauterbach – Lieutenant Lauterbach – rose to follow at a more measured pace. This was the navy so there were rules of course. Everyone's precise status was defined by the rings on his sleeve and precedence and rights of way up and down ladders and corridors were clearly marked in the handbook. Lauterbach's bulk made such rules redundant for he filled every stairway and gangway and moved like a whale through the ocean, leaving smaller fish to avoid him as best they could. Younger men hitched their elbows into the rails and coolly slid down ladders, leaning back and without touching the treads with their feet. Lauterbach plodded down step by step. Ladders were dangerous. You could hurt yourself. He had seen it happen loads of times.

As acting navigation officer his place was on the bridge and he moved solidly along the passageways and upwards to glowworm illumination. The nighttime waves were rough and heavy and the decks were awash. Rain squalls lashed his eyes, reducing vision still further. An eerie phosphorescence glowed from the sea and the prow was rhythmically dipped in running gold sending long dark shadows ghosting through the water. The men would be up, panicking, spotting non-existent submarines all night. As he struggled along the open deck and up the ladder, the wind plucked nastily at his tunic so that he gathered it around him. Important not to catch a chill. He knew they were in the Straits of Tsushima, between Korea and Japan. Japanese ships they could not yet touch. Russian they could and would seize. He passed through the door and saluted.