submarine. Which could hide and fight beneath the sea but by preference attacked at night, at speed, on the surface, where it could run at sixteen knots instead of the underwater five. Kees and DeHaan walked to the stern and peered out into the gloom.
“He’s stalking us,” Kees said.
“We’re a neutral ship.”
“He may not care, DeHaan, or maybe he knows better.”
“Then he’ll demand surrender, and, if we try to run, he won’t waste a torpedo, he’ll sink us with his gun.”
“What can we do?” Kees’s voice was unsteady, and querulous.
“We can refuse,” DeHaan said. “And do our best with what comes next.” He’d played this moment out in his mind a thousand times but now he realized he would not surrender. The presence of a British commando unit gave him an excuse, but that’s all it was. Final orders, he thought. Firefighting crew, distress call, lower boats, abandon ship.
It was a fine rain, almost a mist, but he was soaked, water running down his face. A minute went by, and another, long minutes, then Kees said, “My God,” as a dim shape, gray and low, emerged from the darkness beyond the Noordendam ’s lights. A moment later, a hatch opened at the top of the conning tower and a man’s upper body, in silhouette, appeared above it. A searchlight came on, the beam swept back and forth across the deck. Then, amplified by a loud- hailer, a challenge, an Italian version of the standard “What ship?” An Italian submarine, then. Perhaps, DeHaan thought, the Leonardo da Vinci — fine job of naming there-infamous for attacks on British convoys. The challenge was repeated, the officer, likely the captain himself, clearly growing impatient.
DeHaan held his open hands on either side of his mouth and shouted, “Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa!” He was blinded by the light shining in his face. It moved to Kees, who shielded his eyes with his hand, then it shifted forward to the bridge. Turning to Kees, he said, “Go get Amado. Do it yourself.” He saw that several crewmen had come aft, and were milling about in small groups. “And get those people below, ” he said. Then he called out, “Momentito, per piacere, capitn vene, capitn vene!” Which was pretty much the extent of his Spanish, or Italian, or whatever he’d said. Maybe some Latin in there, in case they were monks. The captain’s hat he’d always imagined Amado wearing was in his cabin, on a peg behind the door.
The figure with the loud-hailer climbed down the conning tower and walked up to the bow. DeHaan was suddenly conscious of his bare feet-but maybe that wasn’t so bad. Here on this rusty old whore of a Spanish tramp. DeHaan tried for an ingratiating smile, said “Momentito,” and raised helpless hands. The figure, in full naval uniform, stared at him as though he were a bug.
Now both of them stood there, watching each other, until DeHaan heard footsteps on the deck and Kees appeared, with his arm around Amado’s waist. In an undertone, Kees said, “Oh Christ,” and half-carried Amado to the edge of the deck where, DeHaan could see, he dared not let him go. Amado, roused from his bunk in the crew’s quarters, was shirtless and, a loopy half smile on his face, drunk as a lord. “You’re the captain of the Santa Rosa, remember?”
Amado nodded fervently, ah yes, of course. He closed one conspiratorial eye.
The officer shouted in Italian, angrier by the minute, and Amado shouted back in Spanish, the words Santa Rosa repeated several times.
Another question.
From Amado, “Cmo?”
Tried again.
Kees said something to Amado, who yelled, his words well slurred, some sentence that included the words Izmir and tobacco.
Another figure appeared next to the officer, a big, burly fellow with full beard and black turtleneck, a submachine gun carried carelessly at his side. The officer asked another question, Amado tilted his head-what’s he saying?
“Tell him ‘Valencia,’” DeHaan said. Better, he thought, to answer some question.
Amado did it, then stumbled and, but for Kees, would have pitched into the water. Kees, out of the side of his mouth, said, “I think he’s going to be sick.”
The man with the beard began to laugh, and, a moment later, the officer joined in. And the captain was dead drunk!
The officer shook his head, then dismissed the whole stupid business with a cavalier wave of his hand. The two returned to the conning tower and disappeared, the engine rose in pitch, and, with its exhaust vents pumping clouds of black smoke, the submarine rumbled away into the night.
DeHaan wanted a drink, he had a personal bottle of cognac in his cabin. He left Kees to deal with Amado, who’d fallen to his knees, and headed back toward the bridge. There was, on the way, a ventilating fan built into a louvered housing, some four feet high. As DeHaan went past, he saw that Sims and one of his men were kneeling in its shadow. The soldier held a rifle with a sniper scope, the weapon’s strap circled tight on his upper arm to keep the gun steady, a practice common to the target shooter, and the sniper.
DeHaan raised his eyebrows as he went past, and Sims gave him a smile in return, and a brisk little salute.
12 May, 1830 hours. Off Bizerta.
Twice that day they’d been looked over. First by a reconnaissance flying boat, flat-bottomed cabin suspended below wings with pontoons, French roundels on wings and fuselage. Sims guessed it might be a Breguet 730, but admitted he’d only seen photographs. He was sure, however, of the one that showed up in the late afternoon, an Italian Savoia-Marchetti in desert camouflage with a white cross on its tail, called the Gobbo, “the Hunchback,” Sims said, for the bulbous shape of its cabin.
Both planes came down to five hundred feet and circled for a good look. Behavior anticipated by DeHaan who had his full cast on deck-the cook and his assistant, in their usual dirty aprons, peeling vats of potatoes, and three deckhands sitting in a circle on the hatch cover of the forward hold, playing cards. He’d had a laundry line strung between two cargo booms, with shirts and drawers flapping in the wind, and, according to instructions, all the men on deck looked up at the planes and waved. The French pilot waved back. Toward dusk, a column of smoke was sighted on the horizon but the ship, whoever she was, showed no interest in the Noordendam.
As night came on, DeHaan called for Dead Slow from the engine room. They were not far, he thought, from Cap Bon. Finding it would not have been a problem, in better days, when every point and cape, harbor and river delta on the merchant shipping routes showed identification lights, described in the almanacs, but war had turned the coasts to low, dark shapes at the edge of the sea-once again the sea of Homer. Ratter had taken bright-star sights the night before, and shot the sun at midday. He had the navigator’s gift, a mathematician by birth, and was formidably better than DeHaan, or anyone on board, at celestial dead reckoning. And, when a soft glow lit the landward sky, he said it was Bizerta.
On this night, the ship’s lights were never turned on, and they steamed along slowly, on calm waters, edging toward the coastal desert. At 2010, a flight of aircraft was heard above, headed due east. “Could be ours,” Sims said. They flew high above the Noordendam, a distant, steady drone, and their passage lasted thirty seconds. The ship was now at the geographical center of the Mediterranean war: Sardinia and Sicily to the north, British bases at Malta less than two hundred miles to the east, Wavell’s desert divisions, fighting in the Italian colony of Libya, another few hundred miles south, German-occupied Greece and British forces on Crete maybe eight hundred miles due east. Just after nine in the evening, DeHaan went down to the radio room to join Mr. Ali for the BBC news.
DeHaan enjoyed his visits with Ali, a sophisticated Cairene-cigarette in ivory holder and gold spectacles- highly educated and proud of it, who spoke British English, learned in colonial schools, and had been heard, more than once, to use the expression old boy. A good wireless operator, he spoke parts of many languages, and, by tuning in hourly to BBC broadcasts, had become the ship’s newspaper.
DeHaan had missed the first part of the broadcast, so Mr. Ali brought him up-to-date. The lead story reported fighting in Iraq, where British troops had occupied Basra and the southern oilfields. The Rashid Ali government was allied with the Axis powers, and sought German intervention, but, the broadcast said, nothing could stop the British advance on Baghdad.
“And then,” Mr. Ali said, “there has been the most terrible bombing of poor London. The British Museum, which I have visited, and Westminster Abbey.” This over the announcer’s voice reporting the flight of Rudolf Hess, third-highest official in the Reich, to Scotland, where he’d parachuted to earth and was “presently being questioned
