‘I thought that the air might have made her well again. You said that she had left us because she was very ill.’
Her father sighed. ‘There’s no air on this earth that could have made your mother well, Marina. She was very sick.’
‘Which was why she had to leave us. Ivy said Mama couldn’t breathe in the dirty London air.’
‘For once, Ivy is right.’
‘But where did Mama go?’
Her father’s face looked drawn and pale. ‘She went home,’ he whispered. ‘Where she thought she would be safe.’
‘But where is ho—’
‘Sir?’ Jones stood in the doorway.
‘Yes?’
‘Just got a message from Room 40, sir.’
‘And?’
‘There’s been another British fishing vessel . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Disappeared, sir. She’s . . . She’s . . . missing.’
‘Details?’
‘The Maggie – a trawler out of Dundee – was last heard from at 0800 hours, GMT.’
‘Where was she?’
‘Latitude 72 degrees north, and longitude 33 degrees east.’
‘The Sea of Murmansk,’ the Commander said, quietly. ‘What was she doing that far north?’
‘She had tried to turn back, sir. But she was being pursued, sir, by a Mordavian battleship.’
‘Like all the others,’ the Commander muttered.
‘Thing is, once the Maggie entered the Sea of Murmansk, the Mordavians didn’t follow her. She disappeared an hour later.’
‘We’re sure of that?’
‘No one can get any signal from the boat.’
‘No signal at all?’
‘She didn’t even send an SOS, sir. She just sent . . . well, it wasn’t even much of a message, sir. Room 40 sounded quite agitated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The skipper of the Maggie said that he was taking his men to . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘The place didn’t make any sense, sir. All Room 40 said was that it wasn’t marked on any map.’
Finchin now appeared. ‘Commander. We might have a bit of trouble, sir.’
‘I know. Another British boat has gone missing.’
‘I think this might be a different sort of trouble, sir.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It would seem, sir, that we are being chased.’
21
Marina counted three battleships on the horizon. There was no mistaking the pointed prows, gun turrets and powerful engines of the Mordavian Annihilator Class dreadnought.
Her father had given the Chief Engineer instructions to push the engines to their limit and take the Sea Witch’s speed up to twenty-five knots. This should mean that they could outrun the heavier boats, which would not be able to travel at much more than twenty-one knots, but it would take a few hours.
But the battleships were not left behind. Over the next hour, they gained on the Sea Witch.
Brown and Perkins stood on the stern of the boat to get a good look at their pursuers. Marina sidled up to them to listen.
‘They’re coming for us,’ Perkins said. ‘Though what they want with us is anyone’s guess. We’re not doing anything wrong. What’s got into them, chasing a fishing boat?’
‘Beats me,’ Brown replied. ‘But they don’t need to have any reason, with gun turrets that size.’ Neither man seemed particularly bothered by the prospect of being chased down by enemy boats. ‘Look at them, though, Perkins. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beauties. That’s the new Annihilator Class, every one of them built in the last year.’
‘What you reckon about them guns?’ Perkins asked him. ‘They don’t look as big as what’s on our warships.’
‘Aye, they don’t look as useful as ours, but they can fire ’em quicker,’ Brown said, thoughtfully. ‘The boats are lighter, too. The steel hull is not as thick. It makes them faster in the water and easier to turn.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’ Marina asked.
‘Not much point being scared,’ Brown said, shrugging. ‘Either we’ll get away from them or we won’t. There’s not much an Able Seaman can do about it. It’s up to the Chief Engineer and that engine of his.’ He pulled out a small pipe and started packing it with tobacco. ‘We might as well go the mess, Perkins. Play cards. I’ll get Trenchard to keep a look out. He likes being on deck. You need to get inside as well,’ he said to Marina.
‘But isn’t there anything else we can do?’ It seemed cowardly, somehow, to go inside and play cards.
‘We’re being pursued by Mordavian dreadnoughts, Perkins. The Boy, here, wants to know if there’s anything else we can do.’
Perkins frowned for a second. ‘No.’
The warships kept the Sea Witch just within firing distance. The day after their appearance, a freezing sea fog fell. But the boats could still be identified by the soft glow of their red fog lights – like monsters’ eyes, Marina thought.
Marina asked Jones why he did not signal for help.
‘Any British warship coming to our aid would make it seem the British are up for a fight,’ he explained. ‘The Admiralty won’t take the risk. We’re on our own.’
The fog lifted. The Sea Witch continued north. She had no choice; there was no turning back. The mood of the crew was subdued, but they went about their tasks and tried to keep the ominous presence of the powerful dreadnoughts out of their thoughts.
Marina felt that she couldn’t breathe. ‘It’s like we’re in a net,’ she told Paddy. He put his head back and told her he agreed. She thought about that strange creature she had put back in the sea; to her, being trapped was the worst sort of unhappiness, a living death.
‘They think they’re so invincible,’ Marina said to herself as she looked at the narrow grey prows slicing through the water like knives. But what were those high-sided grey hulls in comparison to the sea? Guns wouldn’t help them if the sea rose up. Those boats would be helpless, because the power of a rising wave was unstoppable. How would those dreadnoughts cope with waves the size of mountains?
These thoughts gave Marina an odd feeling. She no longer felt she was on a boat in the middle of a cold, northern sea. Nor was she part of the sea that moved around her. If she closed her eyes and took a breath, she felt that she was the sea. There was no telling where she ended and the sea began.
