room and chatted with the oilers and firemen. He grew prouder of his crew as the evening wore on-there was none of the usual griping and bitching, no tales of thievery or fistfights. Nothing quite like danger, he thought, to cure the bullshit of daily life.
He took Amado aside and told him he might be on stage once more, in the coming days. He asked Van Dyck if he could rig a communication line from the bridge to the radio room, and Van Dyck said he could, using spares kept on hand for the bridge/engine-room system. “It’ll look like hell,” the bosun said. “Tube running down the helm and across the deck.”
“Do it anyhow,” DeHaan told him.
He visited with Shtern, in a former storage locker, heavily whitewashed and made over into an infirmary, a red cross painted on the door, and finally with S. Kolb, found reading in the wardroom.
“Good book, Herr Kolb?”
Kolb held the spine up for DeHaan to see. H. Kretschmayr, Geschichte von Venedig. “A history of Venice,” he said. “I found it at my hotel in Lisbon.”
“Wars and trading fleets?”
“Doges.”
In those hats.
“It goes only to 1895,” Kolb said. “But maybe that’s not so bad.”
“We will be entering German waters, tonight,” DeHaan said. “I thought I’d let you know.”
“Am I to be assigned-an action station?”
DeHaan was diplomatic. “We don’t expect to be doing very much fighting, Herr Kolb, but, if something happens, we know where to find you.”
“I can work a radio, sir.”
I bet you can. “Oh? Well, we’ll keep that in mind.”
Ratter shot starsights at 2100 hours, and calculated they would cross a line parallel to Stavanger, Norway-six degrees east longitude-not long after midnight. “Their front door,” he said.
“Yes, if we’re going to be stopped, it will happen there.”
“Ship dark? In midstream?”
“No, all lit up, and six off the Norwegian coast.”
At 0018 hours, on 20 June, 1941, the NV Noordendam entered German-occupied Europe, curving around a welcoming minefield that served, on this sea border, as barbed wire. DeHaan noted it in the log with particular care, because he sensed they would not be coming out. A dark shore, to the north. Blacked out. No lighthouses, no lightships, no bells or horns or signal buoys-none of the navigational apparatus that had helped mariners find their way for centuries. Still, with nothing more than a sickle moon, it should have been like any night sea voyage-ship’s bells on the half hour, engine full ahead, wake churning behind them-but it wasn’t, because whatever was watching and waiting out there could be felt. Calm down, DeHaan told himself, but it didn’t help, and Ruysdal, beside him at the helm, wasn’t doing much better. “Bearing zero nine five, Cap’n,” he said, for absolutely no reason.
“Steady as she goes,” DeHaan answered. Like dogs, he thought, barking at the night.
Then all hell broke loose.
From the coast, huge searchlight beams went stabbing into the sky and DeHaan grabbed his binoculars, followed the beams, saw nothing. But a distant hum to the west deepened, as he searched, to a low rumble, then swelled to the full roar of a bomber formation. In answer, antiaircraft cannon: dozens of them drumming together, with pinprick flashes from the shore and flak burst high above-slow, silent puffs turned ash-gray by the searchlights. The first bombs were like sharp thunder, single explosions that broke over the rhythm of the cannon and rolled across the water, then more, and louder, all run together as the main body of the formation came over target. With, clearly, at least some incendiaries, which, whatever they hit, produced great pillars of orange fire as smoke poured up into the sky.
A shadow sliced through the lower edge of a beam and Ruysdal said, “Dive-bomber.” Its engine screamed as it fled away, lights chasing it until it banked hard and came howling out over the sea, toward the Noordendam, where a crowd of sailors on deck cheered wildly and waved as though the pilot could see them. “Brave sonofabitch.” This from Ratter, standing over the green binnacle light, which lit up his face from below as though he were a kid with a flashlight.
DeHaan turned back toward the shore in time to see a second dive-bomber-or the first, back for more-a black flash against the firelight, followed by a beautiful white starburst, with smoke trails that arched high in the air, and one blurred snapshot of what might have been a superstructure. “Ship?” he said.
“Looks like it, sir,” Ruysdal said.
“They’re after the naval base at Kristiansand,” Ratter said.
It continued. Stuttering antiaircraft, the night lit by fire. “I think there’s a possibility,” Ratter said, “that this is for us.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” DeHaan said.
“Are you sure?”
After a moment he said, “No.”
One of the searchlight beams had found a bomber, a thin line of smoke streaming from the fuselage beneath its wing. A second searchlight joined in, then a third. They were very good at it now-they’d pin this bastard against the clouds as long as they liked. Not so long. The plane rolled over, very slowly, then tumbled like a falling leaf, this way and that, until it plunged into the sea and left no more than steam.
BALTIC HARBORS
They left the Skagerrak minefields on a perfect summer morning.
Coming around the Skaw at 0730, with Ratter and DeHaan working together on the bridge, where they’d been all night, draining mug after mug of coffee and poring over the British maps until they were sure they had it right and only then ordering the course changes. They had also, since midnight, stationed two ABs at the bow, watching the water ahead of the ship, because it never got all that dark up here this time of year-almost Midsummer’s Eve, the Scandinavian sky pale and silvery long before the sun rose. Otherwise, it seemed to DeHaan like normal commercial life in the Kattegat-two Norwegian coasters up ahead of them, a coal-burning freighter in the distance, and, the only sign of occupation, a converted trawler, flying the naval swastika, patrolling the Danish shoreline.
For the first time in fourteen hours, DeHaan relaxed, and began to think about his aching feet and the bunk in his cabin. He’d just slipped the maps back in their envelope when one of the lookouts came charging up the ladder and shouted, “Loose mine, Cap’n, off the port bow.”
“Come to full stop,” he told Ratter, then trotted after the AB, who could really run. They got up to the bow in a hurry but, he realized, he might just as well have taken his time, because the minute he saw it he knew there wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about it.
It bobbed thirty feet off the bow, a rusty iron ball, long ago painted orange, with detonator horns sticking out all over and a broken chain trailing down into the water. Not especially warlike or sinister, from the look of it, simply practical; six hundred pounds of amatol, enough to blow up a village.
Transfixed, DeHaan and the ABs stood still for a moment and watched as the thing slid past them. The engine was stopped but that didn’t matter, momentum would carry them along for quite a while, as it would despite a hard-rudder change of course. They might have used the rifle on it, DeHaan thought, but it was much too close. No, all he could do was walk back along the deck, keeping it company, waiting to see if fate would send a small wave or a little cat’s paw of wind, finally standing at the stern, by happenstance still alive, and watching as it floated away on the sun-dappled water.
The master of the Noordendam and one of his passengers were absent from dinner on the night of the twentieth. Some time early the next morning they would be off the southern coast of Sweden, no doubt a busy time for all, so he’d perhaps chosen that evening to rest, sending the mess boy to the kitchen for onion and margarine sandwiches and relieving his personal, chartroom store of two bottles of lambic beer. Rich stuff, thick and deep, brewed by merry friars-one would suppose-in the cellars of the Saint Gerlac abbey in Belgium, the saint’s emblem, a
