Dark Voyage (3 page)

“So now, in London, we are left to simmer in the exile stew—de Gaulle demands this, the Belgians want that, the Dutch navy turns the heat down and wears sweaters, because gas is expensive. Thank God, is all I can say, for our tugboat rescue service and for the ships of our merchant fleet, which sail, and are too often lost, in the Atlantic convoys. But Britain needs more—she needs America is what she really needs but they’re not ready to fight—and now she has decided, and we may have given her a little help in seeing it, that she needs
us,
D’Arblay Street, thus we need our friend Terhouven here, and we need you. Special missions, Lieutenant Commander DeHaan, at which you shall succeed. Thereby casting some very timely glory on Holland, the Royal Navy, and its beloved Section IIIA. So then, will it be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? ‘Maybe,’ unfortunately, is at present not available.”

DeHaan took a moment to answer. “Is the
Noordendam
to be armed?”

This was not a bad guess. Germany had armed merchant freighters and they’d been more than efficient. Sailing under false flags, with guns cleverly concealed, they approached unsuspecting ships, then showed their true colors, took the crews prisoner, and sank the ships or sent them off to Germany. One such raider had recently captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet, which mattered because whale oil was converted to glycerine, used for explosives.

But Leiden smiled and shook his head. “Not that we wouldn’t like to, but no.”

“Well, of course I’ll do it, whatever it is,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”

“What about them? They serve on the
Noordendam,
under your command.”

DeHaan nodded, as though that were the answer. In fact, such business as Leiden had in mind was first of all secret, but sailors went ashore, got drunk, and told whores, or anybody in a bar, their life story.

Leiden leaned forward and lowered his voice—
now the truth
. “Look,” he said, “the fact is that all Dutch merchant ships that survived the invasion are to come under the control of what’s called the Netherlands Ministry of Shipping, and most will then be under the management of British companies, which would put the
Noordendam
in convoy on the Halifax run, or down around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Suez Canal to the British naval base at Alexandria. But that won’t happen because the Royal Dutch Navy has chartered her from the Hyperion Line, at a rate of one guilder a year, with a Dutch naval officer in command.”

DeHaan saw that Leiden and Terhouven were looking at him, waiting for a reaction. “Well, it seems we’ve been honored,” he said, meaning no irony at all. They truly had been, to be chosen in this way, though he suspected it would be honor bought at a high price.

“You have,” Terhouven said.
Now live up to it.

“It’s not final,” Leiden said, “but there’s a good possibility that your sister ships will be run by British companies.”

“Lot of nerve, they have,” Terhouven said. “What’s the old saying—‘nation of pirates’?”

“Yes,” DeHaan said. “Like us.”

They all had a laugh out of that. “Well, it’s just for the duration,” Leiden said.

“No doubt,” Terhouven said sourly. The Netherlands Hyperion Line had come into existence in 1918, with Terhouven and his brother first chartering, then buying, at a very good price, a German freighter awarded as part of war reparations to France. Governments and shipowners, over the centuries, forever had their noses in each other’s business—bloody noses often the result.

“You’ve been at this a long time,” DeHaan said to Leiden.

“Since 1916, as a young ensign. I tried to get out, once or twice, but they wouldn’t let me go.”

This was not necessarily good news to DeHaan, who’d taken some comfort in Leiden’s being, from the look of him, an old seadog. But now Leiden went on to describe himself as “an old deskdog,” waiting a beat for a chuckle that never came.

“Haven’t been to sea all that much. Not at all, really,” Leiden said. Then smiled in recollection and added, “We never got out of Holland—six of us from the section—until August. Snuck down into Belgium one hot night and stole a little fishing smack, in Knokke-le-Zoute. Hardly any fuel in the damn thing—that’s how the Germans keep them on the leash—but there was a sail aboard and we managed to get it rigged. All of us were in uniform, mind you, because we didn’t want to get shot as spies if they caught us. We drifted around in the dark for a time—there was a good, heavy sea running that night—while our two amateur sailing enthusiasts had a,
spirited
discussion about which way to go. Then we realized what we looked like, ‘bathtub full of admirals’ somebody said, and we had to laugh. Office navy, that’s us.”

DeHaan glanced at Terhouven and saw that they’d both managed polite smiles—Leiden may have been “office navy” but they were not. Terhouven said, “Might as well kill this,” and shared out the last of the gin, while DeHaan fired up one of his cigars.

“All right,” Leiden said, acknowledging a comment that had not actually been spoken, “maybe we better get down to business.”

It was after two in the morning when they left the little room and walked back down the rue Raisuli, which had grown steeper during dinner. Terhouven and Leiden were staying at a private home near the Mendoubia gardens, while DeHaan was headed for the waterfront. It was a warm night, a spring night, with a breeze off the water and a certain lilt to the air, well known to the town’s poets but never named. Anyhow, the cats were out, and the radios turned down—likely out of consideration for the neighbors.

A man in a doorway, the hood of his djellaba up so that it shadowed his face, cleared his throat as they passed by and, when he had their attention, said,
“Bonsoir, messieurs,”
his voice cheerful and inviting. He hesitated a moment, as though they knew who he was and what he was there for, then said,
“Messieurs? Le got franais, ou le got anglais?”

It took DeHaan a moment to think that through, while a puzzled Terhouven said,
“Pardon?”

“Le got,”
DeHaan said, “means taste, preference, and
franais
means that it is a woman you have a taste for.”

“Oh,” Terhouven said. “I see. Well, gentlemen, it’s on the Hyperion Line, if you care to make a night of it.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Leiden said.

They came, a few minutes later, to the rue es Seghin, where they would part company. Terhouven said goodby, adding that they might be able to meet the following day. Leiden shook hands with DeHaan and said, “Good luck, then.” He held DeHaan’s hand a moment longer, said, “We . . .” but did not go on. Finally he said, “Well, good luck,” and turned away. He was, as he’d been all night, bluff and brisk, professional, yet just for an instant there’d been an edge of emotion to him, as though he knew he would never see DeHaan again, and Terhouven’s glance, over the shoulder as he walked off, confirmed it.

DeHaan headed for the Bab el Marsa and the port.
Le got hollandais,
he thought.
Drunk and lonely and sent off to die at sea.
But he found that thought offensive and made himself take it back. In the North Atlantic, and everywhere in Europe, all sorts of people had their lives in their hands that night but there was always room for one more, and as to who would see the end of war and who wouldn’t, that was up to the stars. When DeHaan was fifteen, his father, captain of the schooner
Helma J.,
had gone copra trading in the Celebes Sea, taking rafts up the jungle rivers, buying at native villages, bringing the copra out in burlap sacks. Then one day he went up the wrong river and was never seen again and, for a horribly awkward half hour, the head of the
Helma J.
syndicate had sat in their parlor in Rotterdam, staring at the floor, mumbling “poor man, poor man, his luck ran out,” and leaving an envelope on the hall table. One year later, through floods of his mother’s tears, DeHaan had gone to sea.

It was almost three in the morning by the time DeHaan reached the dock. The port launch was long ago tied up for the night but his chief mate had sent the
Noordendam
’s cutter for him, crewed by two ABs, who wished him good evening and started the engine. DeHaan sat silent in the bow as they chugged off through the harbor swell, past dead fish and oil slicks lit by moonlight.

0800 Hrs. 4 May 1941. 3512
′
N/610
′
W, course SSW. Low cloud, light NE swell, w/wves 4/6 feet. No vessels sighted. All well on board. J. Ratter, First Officer.

For the time being, he thought, reading the first officer’s entry as he began the forenoon watch, which ran from eight to twelve in the morning. A traditional captain’s watch, like the four-to-eight, and the dreaded midwatch. Midnight to four, which called for endless mugs of coffee, as one stared into the night and waited for dawn, but he’d never sailed on a ship where it was any other way. At “the hour of the wolf,” when life flickered, and sometimes went out, a captain had to be on his bridge.

He said good morning to the new helmsman—always an AB, able-bodied seaman—at the wheel, and saw that Ratter, his first officer, hadn’t gone down to his cabin at the end of his watch but was out on the starboard wing of the bridge, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars. U-boats might well be out hunting, even this close to the British air cover from Gibraltar, and from the open deck of the bridge wing you could see much better than on the enclosed bridge. Not that it mattered, DeHaan thought, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight. They could break radio silence, a hard-and-fast rule for merchant ships since the beginning of the war, but that wouldn’t save the
Noordendam
.

Still, despite the war, despite anything, really, it eased his heart to be back at sea.

The Atlantic on a spring morning, six miles off the coast of Africa. Low cloud bank on the horizon, gray, shifting sky, sea the color of polished lead, stiff breeze from the northeast trades, gulls swooping and crying at the stern as they waited for the breakfast garbage. The real world, to DeHaan, and reassuring after the strange dinner four nights earlier. The blazer was back in his locker, and DeHaan was himself again—faded denim shirt rolled up above the elbows, gray canvas trousers, tie-up leather ankle boots with rubber soles. And a single badge of authority: a captain’s hat, a very old and hardworn friend—the gold stitching of the Hyperion Line insignia, twisted rope in the shape of an
H,
faintly green from years of salt air—which he wore with peak tilted slightly over his right eye. A good Swiss watch on a leather strap, and that was that.

Done with his survey of the horizon, Ratter came in off the wing deck and said, “Morning, Cap’n.”

“Johannes.”

Ratter was in his thirties, with a long, handsome, serious face and dark hair. Three years earlier, he’d lost an eye in a wheat-dust explosion on the
Altmaar,
one of the
Noordendam
’s sister ships. There’d been no glass eye for him at the hospital in Rangoon, so he’d worn a black eye patch on a black band ever since. He was a good officer, conscientious and bright, who had long had his master’s papers and should have had his own ship by now, but the financial contractions of the 1930s had made that impossible.

“Service at oh nine hundred?” he said.

“Yes,” DeHaan said. It was Sunday morning, and an inviolable shipping tradition called for him to conduct a Divine Service, followed by captain’s inspection. He didn’t mind the latter so much, though he saw through all the tricks, but the former was a burden. “Compulsory today,” DeHaan added. “That means everybody. You already have the bridge, and you can keep the helmsman. Kovacz will take the engine room”—Kovacz, a Pole, was his chief engineer—“and I want everybody else on the foredeck.”

“All right,” Ratter said. “Full crew.”

DeHaan turned to the helmsman. “Come a point to starboard, and signal half speed.”

“Aye, sir. Point to starboard, half speed.” He turned the wheel—highly polished teak, an elegant survivor of the East India trade—and shifted the lever on the engine-room telegraph to
Half Speed Ahead
. From the engine room, two bells, which confirmed the order.

“I’m going to have to make a speech,” DeHaan said, clearly not happy about it.

Ratter looked at him. This never happened.

“We’re not going to Safi for phosphates.”

“No?”

“We’re going to Rio de Oro,” DeHaan said, using the official name for the strip of coastal sand known commonly as the Spanish Sahara. “Anchoring off Villa Cisneros—and I don’t want to get there much before nightfall, so, save the oil.” After a moment he added, “We’re changing identities, you might as well know it now.”

Ratter nodded.
Very well, whatever you say.
“Liberty for the crew?”

“No, they stay aboard. They all got ashore in Tangier, so they won’t take it too hard.”

“They won’t, and, even if they grumble, it’s Mauritania, whatever the Spaniards call it, and you know what they think about that.”

DeHaan knew. Sailors’ mythology had it that seamen on liberty in the more remote ports of northwestern Africa had been known to disappear. Kidnapped, the stories went, and chained to stepped wooden wheels, treadmills, in the lost villages of the desert interior, where they were worked to death pumping water from deep wells.

“We’ll have the local bumboats,” DeHaan said. “Crew will have to make do with that. And put the word out that we’re due for a long cruise, so, if they need anything . . .”

The mess boy came tramping up the ladderway—metal steps, too steep for a stairway but not quite a ladder—that led to the bridge. Known as Cornelius, he thought he was fifteen years old. He was, if that was true, small for his age, pale and scrawny. He’d grown up, he said, on the island of Texel and had first gone to sea on the herring boats at the age of nine. And running away to sea, according to Cornelius, had greatly improved his lot in life.

“Breakfast, Cap’n,” he said, offering a tray.

“Why thank you, Cornelius,” DeHaan said. Ratter had to turn away to keep from laughing. DeHaan’s breakfast was a mug of strong coffee and a slab of mealy gray bread spread thickly with margarine, which bore, at its edge, the deep imprint of a small thumb.