commander. He was a young man, only four years my senior. I had also
known him from my Spanish days.
'To those at sea!' was the second toast. Glasses clinked. The sailors
drank, standing, to their comrades who were braving the perils of the
Arctic night in the watery wastes. To good luck in battle and a steady
heart in the hour of danger and decision.
Now the admiral was looking at me across the table—1 was sitting on
his right, among the journalist guests, to whom F. was demonstrating
with the aid of knife and fork how the torpedo boat was sunk. His eyes
on me all the time, the admiral said something to his neighbour, and the
latter, the flotilla commander, got up to propose a third toast. 'Here's to
Captain Grigoriev, who skilfully vectored the submarine onto the
German convoy.' And the admiral made a gesture to show that he was
drinking to me.
I shall not list all the toasts that were proposed, especially as the
journalists I have mentioned told the story of the 'three roast-pigs' in
the press. I shall merely mention that the admiral disappeared quite
unexpectedly—he suddenly got up and went out. In passing my chair he
leaned over, and without letting me get up, said quietly: 'Please come
and see me today, Captain.'
CHAPTER FOUR
RANGING WIDE
The machine took off, and within a few minutes that hash of rain and
mist, which we thought nothing of on the ground, became an important
part of the flight, which, like all flights, consisted of (a) the mission, and
(b) everything that hindered the execution of the mission.
We made a flat turn, banking slightly, and swung round onto our
course.
Our mission, then, or, as the admiral called it, 'special assignment'
was this: A German raider (evidently an auxiliary cruiser) had passed
into the Kara Sea and shelled the port of T. and was now lurking
somewhere far in the East. I was to hunt her down and sink her, the
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sooner the better, as a convoy of ours with a cargo of war materials was
on its way through the Northern Sea Route and was now fairly close to
this port. It was not difficult to imagine what havoc a big warship could
cause in these peaceful waters.
I pulled up to five and a half thousand metres. But here, too, there
was nothing but the same dreary cloud hash, which the Almighty
himself seemed to be stirring up thick with a gigantic spoon.
So I had to find her and sink her. Doing the first was far and away the
more difficult of the two. How astonished the admiral had been when I
corrected almost all the islands of the eastern part of the Nordenskjold
Archipelago on his chart. 'Have you been there?' 'No.'
He did not know that I had been there yet not been there. The map of
the Nordenskjold Archipelago had been corrected shortly before the war
by the Nord expedition. I had not been there. But Captain Tatarinov
had, and mentally I had followed in his wake a thousand times.
Indeed, nothing in life is done in vain. Life turns this way and that,
plunges down, forcing its way like an underground river in the darkness
and silence of eternal night, and suddenly emerges into the open, into
the sunshine and light of day, just as my machine now has emerged
from the welter of clouds. Aye, nothing in life is done in vain.
Always uppermost in my mind was the thought of what my life would
have been in the North if I had found Katya and we had been living
together at N.
She would wake up when, at three in the morning, I came home
before setting out on a flight. She would be rosy, warm and sleepy.
Perhaps, on coming in, I would kiss her in a way that would somehow be
different, and she would understand at once how important and
interesting was the task which the admiral had entrusted me with.
I had seen this a thousand times, but would it ever be like that again?
'Navigator, bearings!'
The pilot's course and the navigator's were three degrees out, but
coincided to a T when cigarette-cases, pocket torches and lighters were
turned out of pockets,
What had I been thinking about? About Katya. About the fact that I was
flying to places where we had once planned to go together and from
which I had been kept away for so long. Had I not known for certain,
beyond doubt, that the time would come when I should be flying in
these parts? Had I not charted to within half a degree the route which,
as in a child's dazzling dream, the men from the St. Maria had trudged,
breathing heavily, with eyes shut against the blinding glare? And in the
lead, a big man, a giant in fur boots.
But this was romancing. I drove the thought away. Novaya Zemlya
was close at hand.
You would be bored if I started telling in detail how we hunted that
surface raider. To detect a camouflaged warship, a barely visible streak
amid the boundless wastes of the Arctic seas, was no easy task. We flew
from base to base for over a fortnight. One of the flights lasted seven
hours. After scouring the Kara Sea in both directions we returned to
Novaya Zemlya, but could not find it. It was as though these great
islands had up till now been marked on the map by mistake. While the
fuel lasted we flew around over the place in the black fog, and if the
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wind had not, to our good fortune, torn a small bright hole in the fog, I
should probably not have been able to finish this book. We made for this
gap, and landed safely with the engine cut off.
Altogether it was a hard fortnight we spent on Novaya Zemlya. Every
time we started out in the hope of finding the raider, though it had been
plain to me for some time that we ought to be seeking it much farther
East. We scoured the sea until fuel gave out and the navigator inquired
phlegmatically: 'Home?'
And 'home' would unfold to our gaze-rugged, tumbling mountains,
