naval and civilian, which could listen to transmissions but had, otherwise, to maintain radio silence. Some irony in this, Kolb thought, the governments of the warring nations had thereby attained a certain ideal level of supervision: one could only be instructed, one could not ask questions, one could not talk back.
So, by necessity a good soldier, he waited for orders. But he did allow himself some measure of speculation, to wit: if Frulein Lena were to come to his room with instructions for his exfiltration from this wretched city, could she not also, perchance, provide an hour of tender oblivion? Kolb closed his eyes and set his newspaper on the floor. All hail to caution, yes, but with Lena he shared a secret life-would she perhaps be amenable to a secret tryst? Did he dare to ask? She was colorless and plain, somewhere in the middle of her life, quite heavy, and thoroughly bound in corsets, her iron bulk, in his imagination, tumbling free, prodigiously sweet and plentiful, as they were-only God knew how-dismantled.
No, he did not dare. Life had taught him one lesson: trust nobody. If only he had learned that in time, he would not be in this city, in this woeful room with curtains where green knights rode across a yellow field. In the Austrian city of Lenz, his father had worked as a clerk in a bank, and the young S. Kolb, on finishing secondary school, had been installed as a junior clerk in that same bank. Where he was, a year later, found to be embezzling money, moving a small portion of the funds into an account in his own name. He was confronted, humiliated, discharged, and threatened with prosecution. His family, with terrible effort, had managed to make good on the missing money, and the police were never notified.
He had, however, not stolen the money. Someone else-he suspected a senior officer of the bank-had done it, and left a trail that led to him. This he told his parents, and they wanted to believe him, but, in their hearts, they couldn’t. Thus he learned the brutal lesson: life was governed by deceit, and by power. Not the Golden Rule, the Iron Rule. Kolb had to leave his hometown but managed, by persistence, to find a job as a clerk in one of the government ministries in Vienna. The armaments ministry, it so happened. And soon enough, in a caf on the elegant Krntner Strasse, he met a genial young woman who, in time, introduced him to a rather less genial foreign gentleman, who taught him a clever method by which he could supplement his meager salary.
That was many foreign gentlemen ago, he thought, nostalgic for his youth, those long-gone days of Mr. Hall and Mr. Harris and Mr. Hicks-tubby old Brown was a recent incumbent, having materialized, the way they did, only last January. Pleasant and mean, all of them really, explaining nothing but what was required.
In the long hallway that led past his room, Kolb heard footsteps, a heavy tread, but they passed by his door and receded down the corridor. Kolb looked at his watch and saw that it was after midnight. Not that it mattered- women came to men’s rooms in these places, at any time of the day or night. Frulein Lena, meine Schatze, meine kleine Edelweiss, where are you? Perhaps he’d been abandoned, simply left to fend for himself. For a time, he dozed, then woke, startled, to three discreet taps at the door.
9 May. Off Kenitra, French Morocco.
The dog watch, four to eight in the evening, was traditionally split in two, so everybody could eat dinner. DeHaan stood the first half, on the ninth, and, in fine rain and mist, squinted through droplets on the windows as Noordendam butted north, beam on to a short, steep sea, with the northern trade blowing spray over the bow. Out on the wings, the lookouts’ oilskins ran streams of water. Major Sims came up to the bridge and said, “Filthy weather, out there.”
DeHaan looked for a tactful answer-Sims had obviously not been at sea in filthy weather, because this was far from it. “Well, tomorrow we’ll be going east,” he said. “In the Mediterranean.”
Sims was clearly pleased with the answer, and nodded emphatically. “One tries, of course, to keep one’s people occupied,” he said. “But, you know how it is, the way they feel now, the sooner the better.”
They stood in silence for a time, then DeHaan said, “There’s one thing about this, mission, Major, that I really don’t understand.”
“Only one?”
“Isn’t a commando operation usually done with a submarine?”
“Ideally, it is. And it started out that way, I believe, but we only have so many, and they’re mostly up north. In fact, we were damned close to canceling the thing, then somebody came up with the idea of a merchant ship. A neutral.”
Noordendam was laboring too hard, DeHaan thought, and had the helmsman come a few points west.
“Truth is,” Sims said, “where we’re going, it’s not healthy for submarines. Our side has the east and west ends of the Med, with Gibraltar, and the fleet at Alexandria, but, in the middle, that’s another story. There are French airbases at Algiers and Bizerta, Italian planes across the Sicilian Channel at Cagliari, and they have a naval base at Trapani, and, since January, the Luftwaffe is operating from an airfield in Taormina, in Sicily. Submarines don’t like airplanes, Captain, as I’m sure you know, and add the destroyers, which fly seaplanes from their decks, and you stand a rather good chance of losing your submarine.”
“And a commando unit.”
“That’s not really the thinking, I’m afraid. It’s the Andrew, the Royal Navy, wanting to keep what it has. You can replace commandos.”
And tramp freighters. “I suppose you can,” DeHaan said. “Anyhow, we’re proud to do our part.”
“Your crew? I’m sure your officers are.”
“Hard to tell, with the crew. They always do what needs to be done, that’s just life in the merchant marine. I think the men with families in Holland like the idea of a raid. As for the rest, it’s probably different for each of them. We had six German crewmen in August of ’39, then, in September, after war was declared, four of them asked to sign off, including our second engineer, and we put them ashore in Valparaiso. But the other two stayed on. There was a time when we didn’t think about these things-nation of the sea and all that-but then the politics started, in 1933, and everything changed. Our chief engineer, Kovacz, was an officer in the Polish navy. He came aboard in January of 1940, in Marseilles. He’d been in port, up in Gdansk, when the Germans attacked. His ship blew up in the harbor.”
“Bombed?”
“Sabotage, he says.”
“Bloody war.”
“We had to sign him on as a fireman, but we lost our chief engineer a few months later and Kovacz was right there in the engine room. We’re lucky to have him.”
“And your two Germans? Still aboard?” He meant the question to sound like ordinary conversation, but there was an edge in his voice.
“Yes, and they’re good seamen. One’s an anarchist, the other didn’t want to die for Hitler. He’s young, nineteen maybe. They’ve had a few bad moments, fights in the crew quarters. Officially, I don’t know about it, and the men sorted it out among themselves.”
“It’s no different with us,” Sims said. “An officer can only do so much.”
Sympathy, DeHaan thought, as commanders we all face the same problems, and decided to take advantage of it. “What are you after, Major, on Cap Bon? I know I shouldn’t ask but I’m responsible for this ship, and for the lives of my crew, and on that basis maybe I have a right to know.”
Sims didn’t like it. Went silent as a stone, and, for a long minute, it was very quiet on the bridge. Then he walked over to the bulkhead, away from the helmsman. DeHaan let him stand there for a while before he followed.
“For you only, Captain DeHaan. May I have your word on that?”
“You have it.”
“Commando operations are meant to do many things: they upset the enemy, they help public morale-if they’re reported, they destroy strategic facilities. Communications networks, power stations, drydocks.”
Sims was just talking so DeHaan waited, and was rewarded.
“Also,” Sims said, “coastal observation points.”
“Like Cap Bon.”
“Yes, like Cap Bon. They seem to be able to watch our ships, even at night, in dense fog. We must get convoys through, Captain, to our bases on Malta and Crete, because the Germans are going to attack them. Must. Without these bases, as points of interception, our forces in Libya, all our operations in North Africa, are in peril.”
“At night? In fog?”
“Yes.”
