the commissars quiet.” She yawned, then stretched.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “You have to work soon, no?”
“Not until midnight.”
“Must make you tired, to sleep in two parts.”
“You get used to it.”
“Still, I should let you sleep.”
“I have my whole life to sleep.”
When they were quiet, they could hear the wind sighing at the porthole and the rain beating down on the deck. “It’s a storm outside,” she said.
“Not too bad, just ocean weather.”
She yawned again, then moved around until she was comfortable. “Would you like to touch me a little?”
“Yes.”
15 June, 1810 hours. Off Glasgow.
DeHaan was in the chartroom when he heard the plane, the whine of a small engine passing above them, which faded away, then returned. He hurried up to the bridge wing, where a small biplane was circling back toward them in a cloudy sky. A two-seater, some kind of reconnaissance aircraft he didn’t recognize, with British insignia on the fuselage. Kees opened the bridge door and said, “He’s been signaling to us.”
“How?”
“Waving out the window, pointing to the foredeck.”
The plane passed over the bridge, flying so slowly that DeHaan wondered it didn’t stall. The pilot held something out the window, swooped low over the foredeck, dropped it on the hatch cover, then waved again as he flew away.
DeHaan and the watch AB went forward and recovered a zippered canvas bag. Inside, a chunk of kapok, that would have kept the bag afloat had it landed in the sea, and a sheaf of papers in a plastic envelope.
DeHaan took it back to the bridge. “What is it?” Kees said.
He wasn’t sure. Typed instructions, with courses and positions underlined, and routes between fields of tiny crosses marked out in red pencil. Finally he said, “Minefields. In the Skagerrak. It’s very precise.”
“Up-to-date,” Kees said.
“Looks like it.”
“So top secret-not even for the radio.”
“No, I don’t imagine they’d want anybody to know they have this.”
Kees studied the maps, then, with a tight smile, said, “You know, I just might lose my bet.”
“I think you might,” DeHaan said. “This gets us well beyond six-east.”
“Well, I won’t pay off just yet.”
“No, I wouldn’t, just yet.”
DeHaan called a senior officers’ meeting at eight, and Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz joined him in the wardroom. He chased Cornelius, cleaning up after dinner in the mess area, then laid out the minefield maps and routes on the table.
“What I wonder,” Ratter said, “is how we would do this if we were a real Spanish freighter.”
“By radio, once we were in the North Sea. That’s a guess, but I don’t think the Kriegsmarine gives out maps-not to neutrals.”
“Not many of them,” Kees said. “Only a few blockade runners. They aren’t led through, are they?”
“I don’t think so. There’s quite a lot of traffic up there, once you get past the Norwegian coast-Swedes down to Germany with iron ore, Norwegians and Danes, hauling all sorts of cargo. And however they do it, we’ll be in among them, just one more freighter.”
“Recognition signals?” Kovacz said.
“God I hope not. The British would’ve warned us, if there were. Could they do that? Every Argentine and Portuguese tramp going into the Baltic?”
Kovacz shrugged. “Hardly any go, like Kees said. British blockade maybe works better against Germany-they have to depend on Sweden, Russia, the Balkans.”
“That’s what Adolf always carried on about,” Ratter said. “Geography.”
“Nazi lies, Johannes,” Kovacz said. “It was always about Wehrwille and it still is.” It meant the will, the desire, to make war.
Leaning on his elbows and looking down at the maps, Ratter said, “They need this cargo, don’t they. Really need it.”
“I hope so,” DeHaan said.
“They need it all right,” Kovacz said. “For U-boats. For, ah, what’s the word, signatures. The British have direction-finding antennas everywhere-Iceland, Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Cape Town, other places, just look at a map and think it through. So they get all the signals, and plot positions on charts, and maybe make a kill, but this station, in Sweden, is for U-boats. Built in Kiel and Rostock, then tested, worked up, in the Baltic. Each radio operator is different, has his own signature, the way he uses the transmission key, so, once you recognize him, you can figure out which U-boat is where. What the NID wants to do is write the life story of each submarine, find out its number, maybe even the name of its commander. They want to watch it from its birth, at the Baltic yards, to its death. Because if U-123 is in the Indian Ocean, it isn’t on the Atlantic convoy routes.”
Ratter lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “Stas, how do you know all this?”
“When I was in the navy, in Poland, we had people at work on these things. The earth is four-fifths water, that’s a lot of room to hide, so the great trick of naval warfare has always been to find the enemy before he finds you. You’re finished, if you can’t do that, and all the courage and sacrifice in the world simply adds up to a lost war.”
North, and north. Into the heart of the storm on the evening of the sixteenth, where the wind shrieked and thirty-foot waves came crashing over the deck and sheets of driven rain sluiced down the bridge-house windows. It was DeHaan who took the storm watch, but Ratter and Kees were on and off the bridge all night long, everybody in oilskins, including the helmsman, hands white on the wheel, who stood a two-hour shift before DeHaan sent him below and had a fresh one take over. The force of the storm blew out of the west, and DeHaan kept giving up a grudging point at a time, fighting for his course, because Noordendam couldn’t take it full on the beam. Finally Kees said, “Turn into the goddamn thing for Christ’s sake,” and DeHaan gave the order, swinging due west and heading up into the wind. Mr. Ali came up, now and again, blinking as he wiped his glasses with a handkerchief, to report distress calls coming in on the radio-the North Atlantic taking hold of the war that night and trying to break it in half. Then a savage gust of wind snapped the aerial and Ali appeared no more.
It backed off, the morning of the seventeenth, with a violent red-streaked dawn, and DeHaan staggered down to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, and crawled into bed. He woke, some time later, to find something soft and warm in there with him, and spent a few seconds being exceptionally happy about that before he fell back asleep. Woke again, alone this time, he thought, until he came up from under the blanket and saw her standing at the porthole and gazing out. He watched her till she felt it and turned around, wiping her eyes. “You are looking at me,” she said.
“I am.”
“Well then,” she said. And came back to join him.
They were a day and a half late, steaming up past the Hebrides and swinging around the Orkney Islands into the North Sea, but there was still time to reach the Smygehuk by the twenty-first, as long as the weather held fair. Which it did, but for a series of line squalls in the wake of the storm that neither DeHaan nor the Noordendam took very seriously. These had been busy sea-lanes before the war, but no longer-only a few fishing boats, a British destroyer in the distance, a corvette that came up on their starboard beam and stayed with them for twenty minutes, then found something better to do. They were alone after that, in choppy gray waters, cold and grim, running south-southeast between Britain and Norway, with the Skagerrak, portal to the German Empire, lying some twelve hours to the east.
At dusk, DeHaan took a commander’s tour around the ship-a campfire-to-campfire, night-before-the-battle tour. Slow and easy, with all the time in the world, he stopped to smoke a North State with some off-watch ABs, had a salt-beef sandwich and cold tea in the crew’s mess, sat on a bench in the workshop that adjoined the engine
