At Cal’s insistence, they took another bus to Le Port on the grounds that a taxi was potentially traceable, buying their own billets and sitting apart, with both keeping an eye out for anyone official seeking to board and examine papers.
Once in the port and seeing no sign of anything that posed a threat, they walked up the canal towpath, thankfully with the sun going down and the heat of the day dissipating. His fear of not finding the barge proved to be an unnecessary worry; the men crewing it had stopped outside the basin on the edge of the industrial zone where it joined the canal coming in from the south, before a branch that went through to the commercial port.
His two Basques and the French owner were sitting on the deck, quietly smoking and looking innocent. After a quick look to ensure no one was watching, they approached the barge, jumped aboard and immediately disappeared below into the cramped and stuffy cabin.
‘And now what happens?’ Peter enquired.
‘We wait until the right people have come on shift.’
‘Are you not a little light on muscle for what you have to do?’
‘I am, but thankfully we have you along.’
‘It’s at times like these,’ Peter sighed, pulling out his packet of French cigarettes, ‘that I wish I’d paid more attention at school.’
With nothing much to do till the sun went down, and neither willing to indulge in much more useless speculation as to how the Jeunesses Patriotes had got on to Cal’s cargo, they turned to talking about old times, which tended to sound rosy in retrospect and had been bloody awful in fact.
As subalterns, they had first met in the dying weeks of the Great War at a time when everyone thought the retreating Hun were beaten, but they were not; their retreat was orderly and designed to inflict maximum casualties when, as they often did, they made a stand. Jerry was always forced to fall back but no position or trench was surrendered without a hard and costly fight.
When those times were reprised there was no mention of any deep friendship between the two, more a degree of natural mutual respect, given that first quality had been absent. It was more than just an inability to connect, it being a bad idea to get close to anyone at such a time.
No two men who had lived through those days could discuss them without recalling, even if they avoided mention of it, the losses they had witnessed, both in fellow officers and the men they led; anyone being killed was bad, but a close friend dying could break those who survived, men who lived on the very edge of what could be tolerated by the human spirit.
Both had stayed in the army, Cal for personal reasons, Peter for the lack of a real alternative and, meeting again in the part of Mesopotamia destined to become Iraq, there had been no flowering of friendship at all — Captains Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester had been on two sides of an argument about the tactics being employed to contain the Arab insurgency.
Peter, like most of his contemporaries, saw nothing untoward in bombing villages or pounding the insurgents and their families with artillery — the end justified the means. Cal disagreed so vehemently he had eventually resigned his commission, though, unable to settle, he had become, almost by accident, a gunrunner and advisor to various freedom movements on guerrilla warfare, much of the art of which he had learnt from his Arab opponents.
The Peter Lanchester he had known before Hamburg, as an acquaintance not a friend, seemed typical of a type that saw England as the centre of the universe, though they would nod to the useful contributions of the Celtic fringe in the making of Great Britain and the Empire. But they saw the unemployed as work-shy, Jews as devious Yids, Arabs were wogs and not to be trusted, while anyone Latin, especially South Americans, could be dismissed as a slimy dago.
In that, Peter had seemed typical of his class and the company he kept, the denizens of ex-military officers’ clubs and the golf course bores who saw anyone not Anglo-Saxon as somehow incomplete. Yet he had proved to have another side; he hated Fascism as much as did Cal and had the brains to also, like him, see leaving it to grow unchecked as a threat to everything he valued.
It was Hamburg and after that had got them closer, though both, if asked, would probably have plumped for being semi-chums rather than deep pals. Yet Cal, who knew he was the one who harboured the resentments, had come to respect Peter more.
The shared experience of acquiring and illegally shipping guns had created a sort of bond, which he would have struggled to define, given the disparity of many of their views; the only thing of which he was sure was that in a crisis, Peter was utterly reliable.
CHAPTER SIX
When the time came to start the donkey engine and move it was dark, the only light the faint glow coming from the city spill, until they were in the well-illuminated dock area. Peter was not allowed to see but only to hear the exchange between Cal and the douaniers, noting that it lacked for nothing in the sound of formality, down to the thud of stamps being banged on the false cargo manifests; if money changed hands, that was carried out in silence.
He was allowed out of the stuffy cabin only when the barge was out in the harbour, with Cal pointing to the set of lights — three horizontal white and one red — that identified his freighter, which they edged alongside, throwing up heavy cables so they could be lashed, metal to metal.
The ship had a derrick which did the actual lifting aboard and a crew to do the stowing; it was getting the boxes out of the barge hold that constituted the toil, which was carried out stripped to the waist, took all night and left the two Brits and their companions with sweat-soaked bodies and aching muscles.
When it was finally empty they and the Basques went aboard the ship, the latter disappearing to the crew quarters while Cal went to talk to the captain, returning to say that he had arranged that they should be taken into land down the coast by the ship’s motor boat the following day. He could then allow the barge to cast off and return to the canal system and its home berth, not a problem now that it was empty.
As the engines of the freighter began to throb through the ship and the anchor chain rattled aboard, Peter had first dibs at getting properly washed and shaved, Cal doing likewise using kit he had borrowed. By the time they cleared the outer roads they were tucking into what Peter called a proper breakfast in the master’s cabin: eggs, bacon and sausages and toast, with a mug of strong tea.
‘None of that French muck,’ he insisted. ‘No wonder they get so fractious with each other when they start the day on nothing but bread and bloody jam. You can’t think straight on a rumbling stomach, old boy.’
That consumed and it being the beginning of another hot day, it was two deck loungers on the shaded side of the main housing and some very welcome sleep.
They were still on deck and awake, sipping gin and tonics and with the sun now dipping into the western horizon, when they turned to the subject closest to Peter’s heart: the recruitment of Cal to work in Czechoslovakia, a request to which he was sure he had more than qualified for an answer, while the man in question still had doubts about that, as well as other matters.
‘It might be best to tell me what it is you want and it would also be helpful to know what it is you are trying to achieve.’
The response from someone normally so unruffled bordered on the impatient. ‘I take it that is a yes, old boy?’
‘No, Peter, it’s a bloody question. Who is running this and why? Next question, what is wrong with using your own people?’
Peter stood up and went to the deck rail to look out over the sparkling waters of the Bay of Biscay, which reflected in the depth of their blue the colour of the sky, taking out another gasper and lighting up, drawing slowly several times and exhaling clouds of spent smoke. Cal wondered if he was really thinking or play-acting, increasing the tension in order to make more dramatic what he was going to say.
‘If you repeat what I am about to say to you, I will probably be chucked out on my ear or slung into Brixton for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.’
