13 June, 1920 hours. Off Brest.
The dinner conversation was in English, mostly, but sometimes German, for Kovacz and Poulsen. They managed-everybody helped their neighbor, it was better than silence, and better, come to that, than the smoked fish and beans.
“Where are we tonight, Captain?” Kolb said.
“Off Brest, approximately. Well off, about two hundred miles.”
“The minefields,” Ratter explained.
“Yes,” Kovacz said. “Big naval base at Brest.”
“And submarines,” Mr. Ali said.
“They come out of La Rochelle, I think,” Ratter said. “Not that it makes any difference, they’re all watching us.”
“Easy prey,” Kolb said. “But why bother?”
“They’ve sunk neutral ships, both sides have,” Ratter said. “Maybe somebody just wants to put another mark on their score, so they push a button.”
“Or, a bad mood,” Mr. Ali said.
“Yes,” Ratter said. “Why not?”
Nobody had a reason why not-such things did happen, and always would.
“It is vile, this war,” Maria Bromen said. “All of them.”
“It will end,” DeHaan said. “Some day.”
“War?” Kolb said.
“This war.”
“Have you heard the one about Hitler and the end of the war?” Kolb said. “He’s in his office and he’s looking at his portrait, and he says to it, ‘Well, they’re trying to get rid of me, but you’re still hanging there. What will become of us, when the war is over?’ And the portrait says, ‘That’s easy, Adolf-they’ll get rid of me and hang you.’”
A translation followed, with a few laughs. Mr. Ali gave a BBC report, and comment on that held out until dessert. More oranges, gratefully received, then Ratter went to the bridge to relieve Kees and the rest returned to their cabins. DeHaan and Maria Bromen were the last ones in the passageway, standing in front of their doors.
“So then, good night,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Sleep well.”
Claudine in Paris? DeHaan stood musing in front of his library and tried a paragraph. Long Atlantic rollers now, below him, the ship taking her time on the way up, engine at work, then down into the trough.
14 June, 0645 hours.
RAF skies, today. They’d crossed 50N latitude at dawn, if they were on schedule. The ship log seemed to think so, though he wouldn’t feel certain until Ratter shot the noon sunsights. Something of a border, fifty-north, France falling away to the south, the English Channel off the starboard beam as Noordendam swung away from the minefields that guarded the Western Approaches. Swung away, as well, from the lights of neutral Ireland, a safe haven. Better that they couldn’t see them, he thought-he’d certainly considered putting Bromen ashore there, before they curved over Britain into enemy waters, but they had no time to make port, couldn’t abandon her alone in the cutter, and, come to that, couldn’t afford to abandon the cutter either.
So she had to stay aboard. His passenger. Of course he’d hoped for more, but that hope had climbed some interior hill, then tumbled down the other side-the midnight knock at the midnight door to remain locked away in his imagination. Because she would say no. Say it tenderly, no doubt, but he very much didn’t want to hear her say it. And having her so near him made it much worse. Proximity. One of Desire’s great inventions, wasn’t it. Office partition, apartment wall, bulkhead-one would not, in fact, become a spirit and float through to the other side, but the thought was there.
A turn around the deck. He told the helmsman to stay on course and left the bridge. The sea had grown stronger overnight, Noordendam ’s prow nosing through heavy swells as spray flew high above the bow and sent up little puffs of steam as it hit the deck. DeHaan stood dead still. This couldn’t be what he knew it was. He trotted forward and knelt down, the salt spray stinging his eyes, and pressed a hand against the iron surface. Then he ran for the bridge.
The siren’s wail produced both fire crews, sprinting for their hoses, and Ratter and Kees. Shouting over the siren, he told them where it was. Ratter got there first, wrapped his hand in his shirttail and spun the wheel that opened the hatch to the number one hold. When he threw the hatch cover back, gray smoke poured up from below. “Get a hose over here!” Kees yelled. An AB poked a nozzle into the opening and DeHaan had to grab him as he pulled the lever back and the high-pressure stream whipped the hose and almost sent him into the hold. “Give me that,” DeHaan said and Kees handed him a flashlight. But, lying on his stomach and peering down into the darkness, he could see only a shifting cloud of smoke.
“What the hell is it?” Ratter said.
No answer. Hold fires were caused by spontaneous explosions, from dust, or slow combustion in damp fibers. “There’s ammunition in those crates,” Kees said. “Or worse. It’ll blow us open.”
Ratter put a foot on the first of the perilous steps, iron rungs, that descended into the hold. It was thirty feet, three stories, to the keel, sailors died when they fell down there, and the rungs extended only six inches-the shipyards didn’t sacrifice space needed for cargo. Ratter coughed as he climbed down and, as DeHaan followed, said, “I’ll thank you not to step on my fucking hands, Eric.”
“Sorry.”
Kees slithered backward off the deck and DeHaan watched his foot turn sideways, probing for purchase on a slippery rung. Above them, the AB adjusted the hose so that the white stream of water hissed past their heads-one slip of the hand and all three of them were finished. Someone on deck, maybe Kovacz, growled, “You’re too close.”
Some intelligent soul now turned on the lights-which meant the electrical system hadn’t burned, and revealed one of the trucks, with its hood and cab in flames. “Turn off the hose and hand it down,” Kees yelled.
“Don’t try it,” DeHaan shouted.
“Don’t worry about that,” Kees shouted back.
The light helped them go faster. Too fast, DeHaan’s foot skidded off a rung and he grabbed the one above him with both hands, the flashlight clattering as it landed below.
By the time they reached the bottom, all three were breathing through handfuls of shirt. Kees turned the hose on and played the stream over the burning truck. The fire in the cab went out immediately, but burning gasoline in the engine kept coming back to life. They moved forward, sloshing through an inch of brown water, finally lying down in it and sending the stream up into the engine from below. That did it. “Should I hit the crates?” Kees said.
“No, better not,” DeHaan said.
Standing in front of the charred, smoking hood, Ratter said, “Trucks catch fire by themselves. Happens all the time.”
“You didn’t drain the tank?” DeHaan said to Kees.
“I thought they’d need to drive it right away.”
DeHaan walked over to the crate nearest the truck, one of the eight-by-eights, and felt for heat. The wood was smoke-blackened and warm to the touch, but no more than that. “Would’ve caught, in time,” he said.
“Sabotage,” Ratter said.
“Maybe.”
“That little German.”
Like a graceful bear, Kovacz clambered quickly down the rungs, a rag tied bandit-style over his nose and mouth, then stood with them and stared at the burnt truck. “It catches fire? All by itself?” he said, taking a pair of fireman’s gloves from his back pocket and putting them on. He walked over to the truck, waving the smoke away from his face, and yanked the door open. “Ignition switch is on,” he called out. “Maybe the wires heated up.”
“Too much time since we loaded,” Ratter said. “Battery wouldn’t last that long.”
“Ever hear of it?” DeHaan said.
After a moment, Kees said, “Once. On the Karen Marie, some kind of big touring car.”
“So it can happen,” DeHaan said. Then called out to Kovacz, “Anything in there that doesn’t belong?”
