“How would I know? But they’re strong signals, so it could be Germany.”
What is this? Something sudden, was all he knew. Invasion? Political upheaval? The war is over. “Have you listened to the BBC?” he asked.
“At midnight. But nothing new-fighting in the Lebanon, Mr. Roosevelt speaks. Then music for dancing.”
DeHaan thanked him and hung the tube back on its hook. In the faint light of the binnacle lamp, 2:58.
“Any idea why?” Ratter said.
“No.”
2:59. 3:00. “What do you make it, Johannes?”
“Oh three hundred.”
“Scheldt?”
“Cap’n?”
“Show two, three-second signals.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n.”
A count of ten, no more, and the answer. DeHaan turned the engine telegraph to Full — Stop and told Ratter to drop anchor. As the chain began to run out, a familiar sound, echoing over the water from the east. Tonk. Tonk. Tonk. A sound he’d heard all his life-a fishing boat with a one-cylinder engine, the voice of its single stroke amplified by a long exhaust pipe run up through the roof of the wheelhouse, very resonant and loud, a Steamboat Willie cartoon honk. “Here she comes, sir,” Scheldt called out from the wing.
“Have Mr. Kees get a line on her, and lower the gangway.”
Ulla, she was called, maybe the captain’s wife or daughter, and when DeHaan climbed down to her deck he saw that she was a classic of the breed-fishy and smelly, nets hung everywhere, her scuppers, the vents that let water run out when she was hosed down, thickly crusted with a generation of dried scales. He counted eight in the crew, fishermen by the look of them, in overalls and boots and heavy beards. The captain, a hefty viking in a home- knitted blue-and-yellow watch cap, stood by the door of the wheelhouse, aloof from all these strange goings-on aboard his boat.
Two of the others were armed fishermen-one with a Sten hung on a leather strap, the other with a big pistol in a shoulder holster. This was the leader, a young British naval officer, a Scot by his accent, who identified himself as the ARCHER of the NID orders, then stood back, obviously very relieved when DeHaan offered to have the Noordendam officers manage the cargo handling. DeHaan wasted no time-Van Dyck and a few ABs boarded the Ulla, then, with Kees running the cargo crew on the ship, they soon had the first truck lowered to the deck of the fishing boat.
DeHaan and his crew stayed on for the one-mile trip to shore, where the Ulla was tied off to a piling and, after a lot of shouting and a few mashed fingers, the truck was pushed onto a ramp, then rolled down into the water sloshing at the tide line, where its engine was started and it was driven a few feet up the sand. “Well I’ll be damned,” one of the fishermen said to DeHaan. “This begins to look like it might actually work.” A rather donnish fisherman, this one, by the tone of his voice, arch, and faintly amused. He was tall and spindly, with thin red hair and beard, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses.
DeHaan looked up into the night sky. “It will take some time,” he said. “We won’t get it finished by dawn.”
“Our patrol comes a little after eight,” the man said, following DeHaan’s eyes. “He’s very regular-eight and ten-thirty and four-thirty. A Blohm and Voss spotter plane, a flying boat.”
“Is he ever, ah, early?”
“Never. Very punctual fellow, our German.”
“That’s useful.”
“It is, isn’t it. So we can work at night.”
“And what do you do?”
“Me? I’m the local boffin.”
“Boffin?”
“You know, the science chap.”
“Oh, a professor.”
“Used to be, but I’m in the navy now. It was the RAF came calling, originally, but they didn’t quite know what to do with me, so I was sent off to the navy, where they gave me a wee little rank and said, ‘Now you go to Sweden.’”
The captain reversed his engine, came about, and the Ulla tonked back out toward the freighter. “Quite a noise, that,” said the professor. “If I had a drill with a metal bit, I could turn it into a calliope, but I don’t think Sven would care for it.”
“No, I doubt he would. Is that your specialty?”
“Sound, yes. Waves and UHF and whatnot. I spent twenty years in a basement laboratory-I’m not sure the university actually knew I was there. Then the war came, and no more pings and toots for me.”
As they neared the Noordendam, Kees already had the second truck suspended from a crane. “I should tell you there’s a third truck,” DeHaan said, “but it burned up in the hold.”
“However did that happen?”
“We don’t know. Can you manage with two?”
“Oh yes, I should think, it only has to haul the towers up. We’ve got a sort of ramp to climb-you’ll see.”
“Use the burnt one for parts, maybe.”
“We shall. If we last long enough to wear something out.”
Along with the second truck, the Ulla was loaded with three of the long crates. It was well after four, by then, with summer dawn just getting started. Looking up at the sky, DeHaan saw fading stars and wisps of distant cloud to the west, with darkish, troubled sky beyond. Rain by midday. He’d know for certain as soon as he could check the barometer. Not good news, Baltic weather was famously treacherous-bad storms came suddenly, in all seasons.
DeHaan sat in the back of the lead truck, with the professor, Van Dyck, and the front ends of the crates. Behind them, the second truck drove in reverse, the same system they’d used on the Lisbon dock. Their progress over the sand, then through low scrub, was, with the geared-down engines, very slow but very steady. Finally, some two miles inland, the driver signaled back to the second truck, they rolled to a halt, and the engines were turned off.
They’d stopped at the front yard of what looked like an abandoned farmstead. DeHaan got down from the truck, took his hat off, ran his fingers back through his hair. Somebody’s dream, he thought, once upon a time. A burned-out cottage, the sagging remains of an old fence. There was nothing else, only the wind, sighing across empty fields and rustling the weeds of the dead garden.
The British officer and one of the fishermen walked some way beyond the cottage, then rolled back a large camouflage net. DeHaan was impressed, he hadn’t seen it at all. “For the spotter planes,” the professor said. “What do you think of it?”
“Well done.”
“The best film company in England made that.”
As they walked toward a squared-off entry to a tunnel, maybe twenty by thirty feet, the professor said, “Had your breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
“Good.”
DeHaan soon enough understood why. As he entered the tunnel, the smell very nearly made him retch. “Damn, what is it?”
“Never smelled a mushroom cellar, have you.”
“No.”
“We think this may have been a mine, a long time ago, though what they were mining remains a mystery. Then old somebody came along, built himself a little house, and decided to use the chamber for growing mushrooms. It’s the growing medium that smells-mushrooms feed on rot. Now, as to what the medium may have been, that’s a topic for discussion, and here we split into three camps: there’s the pig-manure faction, the rotten- potatoes crowd, and a compromise party-pig manure and rotten potatoes. What are your views?”
“I’ll never eat another mushroom.”
