Dark Voyage (35 page)

The lead bomber came speeding through the lights, head on to the
Burya,
then flew over it. In the light, they could see a round ball, suspended from a parachute, as it floated down toward the destroyer. “Dorniers,” Ratter said. “Parachute mines.”

Behind the first, seven or eight more, flying abreast. As the explosions began at the front of the convoy, a silhouette flashed over the
Tsiklon
and a string of mines chained together plummeted to its deck. One breath, then a hot blast of air hit the bridge, as a second plane, wings tilted, roared over the
Noordendam
.

There were screams from the deck, tiny balls of yellow fire flashed through the bridge house, and a flight of chained mines spun through the air as the plane roared away. Then a hatch cover blew up, boards soaring into the sky, and a great peal of thunder rang deep inside the
Noordendam,
which made her heel over and shudder. It knocked DeHaan backward and, when he scrambled to his knees, Ratter was sitting next to him, looking puzzled. “Can’t hear,” he said. Then he reached for DeHaan’s forehead and pulled out a triangle of broken glass. “Don’t want this there, do you?”

DeHaan felt the blood running down his face. “I can do without it.”

Ratter’s face sparkled in the light and he began to brush at it with his fingertips. Scheldt used the binnacle to haul himself upright, then took hold of the wheel. “Ahh the hell,” he said. DeHaan stood up, wobbled, steadied himself, saw that Scheldt was staring at the compass. “Two eight two?” he said.

“Back to zero nine five, south of east,” DeHaan said.

Scheldt shook his head, pulled down on one spoke of the wheel, which spun free until he stopped it. “Gone,” he said.

DeHaan looked out through the shattered windows. The
Tsiklon
had vanished, and in the light of the burning trawler he could see smoke pouring from the forward hold, an orange shadow flickering at its center. “Johannes, are we making way?”

Ratter went out to the bridge wing and looked over the side. “Barely.” From the radio room: “Are you alive, up there?”

“Yes.”

“We are on fire.”

“We are.”

From their port beam, the blast of a foghorn, then another. It was an icebreaker, its searchlight playing over the deck of the
Noordendam,
then a voice shouted Russian over a loud-hailer. DeHaan went out on the bridge wing, where the AB was staring open-mouthed at the approaching bow of the icebreaker. Which now began to move right as the captain figured out that the
Noordendam
’s steering was gone. Some of the passengers were signaling with their hands,
go around us
. With a final angry blast on the horn, the icebreaker’s bow passed the freighter’s stern with ten feet to spare.

DeHaan turned to go back to the bridge, then saw Kovacz, staggering up the ladderway. “Damage report,” he said. “The engine-room people are done for. That thing blew in the bulkhead, two of the boilers exploded, the third is still working. We have dead and wounded, one of the lifeboats is gone, and I can’t find Kees.”

“And we’ve lost our steering,” DeHaan said. Up toward number three hold, he saw that Van Dyck had the fire crews working, which meant that steam from the remaining boiler was giving them pressure on the hoses.

What was left of the convoy was moving east. Searchlights on, antiaircraft firing as the Dorniers returned for a second attack. DeHaan looked down at his feet, money, bills he didn’t recognize, was blowing all over the place.
The mustached men with the machine guns.
Who had built a small fortress of stacked trunks on the hatch cover of the forward hold.

Kovacz said, “I’m going back to the engine room, Eric. I’ll get some help and do whatever I can. Is the rudder broken free?”

“Gear frozen in the steering tunnel,” DeHaan said. “I’d bet that’s what it is.”

“Can’t be fixed.”

“No.”

“So, we’re going wherever we’re pointed.”

“Yes, a point or two west of north.”

“Finland.”

The battle moved east, slowly, ships and planes fighting hard, until there were only sudden flares of fire on the horizon, distant explosions, a few last searchlights in the sky, then darkness, and the
Noordendam
sailed alone. Opinion on the bridge had it that the small fleet was finished off, sunk, but they were not to know that. And there was a lot to be done. They were getting maybe two knots from the poor broken
Noordendam
but the one boiler, with Kovacz coaxing it along, kept them under way, helped by a following sea. Shtern worked hard, the passengers and crew helped—the dead were moved up to the afterdeck and decently covered, the wounded wrapped in blankets and sheltered from the wind. They searched everywhere for Kees, two missing ABs, and two passengers, but they’d apparently gone overboard during the Dornier attack and nobody had seen them after that.

Then it was quiet on the ship, and dark, because they were running with lights off. DeHaan ordered the scramble nets and gangway lowered and the lifeboats readied, then assigned crews to help the passengers—wounded first, then women and children. When that was done, the officers and crew began to gather their possessions.

0300 hours. At sea.

At DeHaan’s direction, Mr. Ali made contact with some Finnish authority—at the port of Helsinki or a naval base, they never really discovered who it was. DeHaan got on the radio and told them they had dead and wounded aboard, and were headed for the islands west of Helsinki, on the south coast. There would be no question of resistance, the passengers and crew of the
Noordendam
would surrender peacefully.

And under what flag did they sail?

Under Dutch flag, as an allied merchant vessel of Britain.

Well then, he was told, the word wasn’t precisely
surrender
. True, Finland was at war with Russia, despite their treaty, and true, that made her an ally of Germany. Technically. But, the fact was, Finland was not at war with Britain, and those who set foot on Finnish soil would have to be considered as survivors of maritime incident.

Was Finland, DeHaan wanted to know, at war with Holland?

This produced a longish silence, then the authority cleared its throat and confessed that it didn’t know, it would have to look that up, but it didn’t think so.

0520 hours. Off the coast of Finland.

In the watery light of the northern dawn, an island.

A dark shape that rose from the sea, low and flat, mostly forest, with quiet surf breaking white on the rocks. It was not unlike the other islands, some close, some distant, but this one lay dead ahead, a mile or so away, this was their island.

DeHaan moved the telegraph to
Done — With — Engines,
the bells acknowledged, and, a moment later, the slow, labored beat stopped, and left only silence. He picked up the speaker tube and said, “Come up to the bridge, Stas. We’re going to beach on the rocks, so clear the engine room.”

On the bridge, Scheldt was still on watch, standing before the dead helm. “Go and get your things together,” DeHaan told him. That left Ratter, and Maria Bromen, who stood close by his side. DeHaan took the
Noordendam
’s log and made a final entry: date, time, and course. “Any idea what it’s called?” he asked Ratter.

“Maybe Orslandet,” Ratter said, looking at the chart. “But who knows.”

“We’ll call it that, then,” DeHaan said. He wrote it in, added the phrase
Ran aground,
signed the entry, closed the log, and put it in his valise. With the engine off, the
Noordendam
was barely making way. Out on deck, the passengers and crew had gathered in the dawn light, standing amid their baggage, waiting. The
Noordendam,
very close now, caught on a sandbar, but, with the incoming tide, slid off it and headed for the island.

Maria Bromen’s hand took his arm as they hit. The bow lifted, the hull scraped up over the rocks and then, with one long grinding note, iron on stone, the NV
Noordendam
canted over and came to rest, and all that remained was the sound of waves, lapping at the shore.

They searched for her, some time later, once the war in that part of the world had quieted down. She was, after all, worth something, there was always money to be made in rights of salvage, and all it would take was the filing of a claim. By that time it was full autumn, when the ice fog hung in the birch forests. There were two Swiss businessmen, a man of uncertain nationality who said he was a Russian migr, several others, nobody knew who they were. They asked the people who lived along that rockbound coast, fishermen mostly, if they’d seen her, and some said they had, while others just shook their heads or shrugged. But, in the end, they found nothing, and she was never seen again.

READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
MISSION TO PARIS
BY
ALAN FURST
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE

I
N
P
ARIS, THE EVENINGS OF
S
EPTEMBER ARE SOMETIMES WARM
, Excessively gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistably seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafés, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war—that too had its moment. Almost anything, really, except money. Or, rather,
German
money. A curious silence, for hundreds of millions of francs—tens of millions of dollars—had been paid to some of the most distinguished citizens of France since Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. But maybe not so curious, because those who had taken the money were aware of a certain shadow in these transactions and, in that shadow, the people who require darkness for the kind of work they do.

The distinguished citizens, had they been willing to talk about it, would have admitted that the Germans, the political operatives who offered the bounty, were surprisingly adept. They knew how to soften a conscience, presented bribery as little more than a form of sophisticated commerce, of the sort that evolves in
salons
and offices and the private rooms of banks—a gentleman’s treason. And the operatives could depend on one hard-edged principle: that those who style themselves as
men of the world
know there is an iron fist in every velvet glove, understand what might await them in the shadows and so, having decided to play the game, they will obey its rules.

Still, human nature being what it is, there will forever be
somebody
, won’t there, who will not.

One such, on the fourteenth of September, was a rising political star called Prideaux. Had he been in Paris that evening, he would have been having drinks at Fouquet with a Spanish marquis, a diplomat, after which he could have chosen between two good dinner parties: one in the quarter clustered around the Palais Bourbon, the other in a lovely old mansion up in Passy. It was destiny, Prideaux believed, that he spend his evenings in such exalted places. And, he thought, if fucking destiny had a shred of mercy left in its cold heart he would just now be hailing a taxi. Fucking destiny, however, had other things in mind for the future and didn’t care a bit what became of Prideaux.

Who felt, in his heart, terribly wronged. This shouldn’t be happening to him, not to
him
, the famously clever Louis Prideaux,
chef de cabinet
—technically chief of staff but far more powerful than that—to an important senator in Paris. Well, it had happened. As
tout Paris
left for the August migration to the countryside, Prideaux had been forced to admit that his elegant world was doomed to collapse (expensive mistress, borrowed money, vengeful wife) and so he’d fled, desperate for a new life, finding himself on the night of the fourteenth in Varna, the Black Sea port of Bulgaria.
Bulgaria!
Prideaux fell back on his lumpy bed at a waterfront hotel, crushed by loss: the row of beautiful suits in his armoire, the apartment windows that looked out at the Seine, the slim, white hands of his aristocratic—by birth, not behavior—mistress. All gone, all gone. For a moment he actually contemplated weeping but then his fingers, dangling over the side of the bed, touched the supple leather of his valise. For Prideaux, the life preserver in a stormy sea: a million francs. A soothing, restorative, million, francs.

This money, German money, had been meant for the senator, so that he might influence the recommendation of a defense committee, which had for some time been considering a large outlay for construction on the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Up into Belgium, the Ardennes forest, where the Germans had attacked in 1914. A decision of such magnitude, he would tell the committee, should not be made precipitously, it needed more time, it should be
studied
, pros and cons worked through by technicians who understood the whole complicated business.
Later
, the committee would decide. Was it not wise to delay a little? That’s what the people of France demanded of them: not rash expenditure, wisdom.

All that August, Prideaux had temporized: what to do? The suitcase of money for the senator had reached Prideaux by way of a prominent hostess, a German baroness named von Reschke, who’d settled in Paris a few years earlier and, using wealth and connection, had become the ruling despot of one of the loftiest
salons
in the city. The baroness spent the summer at her château near Versailles and there, in the drawing room, had handed Prideaux an envelope. Inside, a claim ticket for the baggage office at the Gare de Lyon railway station. “This is for you-know-who,” she’d said, ever the coquette, flirting with the handsome Prideaux. He’d collected the suitcase and hidden it under a couch, where it gave off a magnetic energy—he could
feel
its presence. Its potential.

The senator was in Cap Ferrat, wouldn’t return until the third of September, and Prideaux sweated through hot August nights of temptation. Sometimes he thought he might resist, but the forces of catastrophe were waiting and they wouldn’t wait long: his wife’s ferocious lawyer, the shady individuals who’d loaned him money when the banks no longer would, and his cruel mistress, whose passion was kindled by expensive wines with expensive dinners and expensive jewelry to wear at the table. When unappeased she was cold, no bed. And while what happened in that bed was the best thing that had ever happened to Prideaux, it would soon be only a memory.