Decoy (21 page)

Ned shook him by the hand and started off down the rope ladder. At each step down, the ladder swung in against the ship’s side. Going down was always more difficult than climbing up, and the rough paint of the ship’s side scraped his knuckles as the ladder kept banging against the hull.

Suddenly hands were grasping him and he was in the boat sitting on a thwart. It did not seem so dark down here, and he realized that the water sluicing between the lifeboat and the ship was slightly phosphorescent.

He scrambled aft and found that Jemmy had already shipped the rudder. ‘Is the bung in?’ he demanded.

‘Put it in myself,’ Jemmy said.

Ned shouted preliminary orders and men grasped oars, holding them vertically on the port side, ready to use them to shove the boat clear of the ship.

‘Right, cast off the sternfast… Fend us off there…’ Then, as the gap opened up between the lifeboat and the ship, enough for the oars to get to work, ‘Cast off the painter…’

Five minutes later, the men rowing briskly yet appearing to make no progress in the darkness, among waves much larger than Ned had expected and passing under the boat with a hiss as though a giant was exhaling, the dark blob of the
City of Norwich
finally disappeared ahead, and for a few moments a whiff of her funnel smoke caught the back of his throat and made him cough.

He saw that the men were settling into the rhythm of rowing, thanks to the practice they had had back in England, but they were not used to the high waves: every now and then a man who had not dipped the blade deep enough cursed as the loom jerked back and hit him across the chest.

But Ned could not throw off the air of unreality that was wrapped round him, as though he was an inert chrysalis in a cocoon. A chrysalis, he thought, making a wry joke, waiting to turn into something.

It would be hard to tell someone on land that having just been left in a lifeboat in the middle of the night in the middle of winter in the middle of the Atlantic one felt cocooned, as though the wind and seas, the grey lifeboat, the cursing men, the oars more like twitching frogs’ legs than the Boat Race, were disconnected memories. Yet this was the beginning of their weird gamble. It was quite impossible to connect this pitching and rolling boat and the men at the oars with the bespectacled boffins at Bletchley Park, to whom a cipher was simply a mathematical problem – one that might take months to solve. Nor was there any apparent link between this boat (water was already swilling around his feet) and the plump and pink yet bulldog face in Number Ten Downing Street, who had told him to collect men of diabolical cunning. Well, full of diabolical cunning they might be inside, but at the moment they were just dark lumps of misery, already sodden with spray and rapidly chilling with the wind which, as it evaporated the water from the clothes, acted as an efficient refrigerator.

Then the absurdity of it all hit him simultaneously as the wind sliced off a breaking crest and flung it in his face, the cold water soaking down round the neck of his duffel coat, cold tentacles gradually becoming clammy as they went lower. ‘Keep your stomach warm and you’ll survive…’ How many times had he heard that in lectures on survival at sea: how many times had he told his own men the same thing? But like the lecturers and instructors, he had skated lightly over the ‘how’. Keep your stomach warm and the rest of your body won’t worry about the cold. But
how
to stop the stomach gradually chilling as all one’s clothing became sodden and cold, the doeskin material of a uniform jacket turning into fine sandpaper to chafe skin, where every move exposed to another cold compress a tender part of the body that still retained a tiny, previously unrecognized area of warmth?

A standard ship’s lifeboat containing twenty-three shivering, cursing and sodden men thought to be possessed of diabolical cunning (it must have been a sunny day) yet already wishing they had never heard of the sea, a few Sten guns greased and wrapped in oiled canvas, a few metal boxes with ‘black bangers’ sitting in them like emu eggs – this miserable bunch were Britain’s champions in the contest against Germany. Hitler had pitted Commodore – no, Admiral, he had recently been promoted – Dönitz and all his U-boats, about five hundred by now, and all his Enigma makers and cipher experts, and electric torpedoes with magnetic pistols which exploded the torpedo when triggered off by a ship’s magnetic field, against them. Laughable. Had history juggled the time so that, instead of the Armada, Spain sent Don Quixote astride his spavined Rosinante, to be met by the Black Prince on the playing fields of Eton, the whole affair to be reported by Beachcomber? What a one-sided tourney that would have been. Yet as the British crowd prefers supporting the underdog, they’d probably have cheered the Don and hooted so loud against the Black Prince that his charger would have bolted, although his wife Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, would certainly have then gone on to the field and put the crowd to flight.

There was some comfort in thinking about jousting, because the heavy armour must have kept the wind out, and presumably one had armourers ready to clean the armour and polish it after the battle – and grease it, too: a squeaky visor or one which stuck open, exposing one’s cowardly grin to swift dentistry from an opponent’s sword, could be troublesome.

Knightly combat – now all that was left of it was proof of some of Newton’s laws, and phrases used mostly in heraldry. A coat of arms – how many realized that it was originally a way of identifying yourself? A dozen knights in a dozen suits of shining armour sitting on a dozen heavy horses also clad in armour looked as alike as a dozen wine glasses. So each wore a sleeveless silk coat, like the colours a modern jockey wears to distinguish his horse’s owner, and on the silk his lady embroidered the arms of his family. Some Yorke forebears five hundred years ago must have pulled on their silken coats of arms, been hoisted up on to their horses (a knight in full armour was done for if he fell: some wretched fellow could creep up, flip open the visor and cut his throat!), raised their lances to their wives or mistresses, and galloped off to find glory or a clangorous end. They certainly never thought that one of their descendants would be pulling down the hood of his duffel coat as he sat in a lifeboat, the tiller tucked under his arm as a vastly foreshortened lance. Gentlemen of England now abed shall think themselves accurs’d… Well, perhaps, but he was prepared to swear that the twenty-three gentlemen of England (and Scotland, Wales and Ireland) now in this boat wished they were abed at this moment – as no doubt was Hitler’s champion,
B der U
himself. Ned visualized the hard-faced little man Dönitz, with his large ears and close-cropped hair (several photographs of him were pinned up on the wall of ASIU, on the ‘Know Your Enemy’ principle), tucked up in a warm bed near Kernével. No doubt a comfortable French chateau had been requisitioned, and German Navy cooks probably sliced leberwurst where previously a gourmet cook juggled truffles which pigs had rooted up in the chateau’s own grounds…

Jemmy was shaking his arm insistently. ‘Two hours, Ned: time to change the watch!’

So two hours had passed while he had been riding with Rosinante, picturing Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent – who was by chance one of his forebears – along with the Black Prince, whose tomb in Canterbury Catherdral was a reproach to all the Cromwells, Harry Pollitts and James Maxtons of this world – and the Major Gateses, too, the pro-Germans now interned on the Isle of Man because of their opinions before the war.

Changing the watch involved only physical contortions: as soon as Ned passed the word, the man at the inboard end of each oar changed places with the man sitting outboard. The inboard man had been doing the work, from the position of most leverage. The man outboard had tried to doze, holding on to the oar as instructed, so that it should not be lost overboard if the inboard man let go.

Jemmy slid across the short aftermost thwart and took the tiller. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he said. ‘Now you see why I’m a submariner.’

Dawn came with the dreary slowness of departing toothache. The Croupier commented sourly: ‘You can now
see
what’s making you miserable. I prefer the dark.’

Daylight revealed a desolate scene: wave heaping upon grey wave, white crest after white crest ripping off its top and scattering to leeward in cold spray which made eyes raw. But was it so cold? Ned felt warmer, until he considered it, pulling the hood of his duffel over his face to keep out the spray. No, it was no warmer because obviously it could not be; quite simply he was getting used to it. He knew from bitter experience when the
Aztec
sank that after a while one did not really feel the cold. One could see the effect of it – pinching flesh did not produce pain – but not feel it. One just grew weaker, and the onset of hunger produced that stage in the process of surviving where the strong came through and the weak gave up; where the real leaders still made the decisions and gave the rest the will to live, and the hearty blusterers who in less stringent times passed for leaders, kept quiet, only too glad to leave decisions to others.

Strange how if you covered your head and face it seemed less harsh. The man who invented duffel coats should die a millionaire. Yet it was somehow symptomatic of – well, the British Isles – that the duffels issued to the Royal Navy were thin compared with the Royal Canadian Navy type. Yes, here in the tiny tent formed by the duffel’s hood you did not hear the hiss of the wind. It did not whine because there was no wire rigging or anything else to cause a whine. What did wind sound like in a desert, with no buildings to buffet and no trees? Presumably just a hiss; a roar if it was very strong. The sea was not comparable to the desert because the wind tossed up the waves and there was always the sound and feel of waves and spray. Oh to be a Bedouin safely in his tent in a sandstorm. Yet no doubt the stifling Bedouin, breathing in sand, dreamed of being in a boat at sea, where there was no sand and no heat. No satisfying the customers, Ned thought, and dozed off.

He woke momentarily lost – the hospital after the operation on his hand, with Clare at the Palace Street house, on board the
Marynal
while chasing the U-boat in the convoy, in a desert somewhere… He pulled back the duffel hood and saw a grey and white desert of waves that moved eastwards with an awe-inspiring relentlessness. Perhaps not so high as when he had dozed off, though pushing back the hood brought back the drumming and buffeting in his ears.

‘Want a spell?’ he asked Jemmy.

‘No, I’m all right. Wind is easing. Sea flattening a bit, too.’

‘Still not gentlemen’s yachting weather, though.’

‘But we’re not gentlemen,’ Jemmy said.

Ned pulled back the sleeve of his duffel to see his watch. ‘Seven o’clock. Time for breakfast.’ He leaned forward. ‘Sergeant Keeler, are you awake?’

A burly figure in kapok lifejacket and duffel swivelled round to face aft, thin strands of blond hair plastered over his brow, blue eyes red-rimmed from salt spray. He looked like the amiable village baker; in fact he was a Royal Marine commando and was more skilled in killing men than anyone else Ned had ever seen. A quick flip with a cheese wire from behind and a knee in the back killed a sentry silently; an edge-of-the-hand blow across the windpipe from the front was as effective. Dagger, cosh, rifle butt, length of gas pipe, Bunsen burner hose filled with lead shot, an old sock containing beach-worn pebbles, Sten gun, Bren, Lewis, revolvers, automatics… Sergeant Keeler handled them with such familiarity as if they were childhood toys.

Yet he was softly spoken, with a Midland country accent, perhaps Herefordshire, and his round face and ruddy complexion seemed to belong on a farm. Keeler was a kindly man; the sort of person that made a good father. The only thing was that at the earliest age possible he had entered the Royal Marines – this before Hitler’s attack on Poland – and as soon as the special Marine commando units were formed, had volunteered. From what Ned could make out, being a Royal Marine commando made Keeler flourish like a well-manured and expertly pruned rose tree: corporal, sergeant instructor, and then a reputation for being the best man with a cheese wire, able to lob a grenade into a bucket at twenty paces, the best all-rounder with a Sten, the best with what Keeler always referred to as ‘the small stuff’, revolver and automatic… When Ned had called on the Marines with a letter from Captain Watts and said he wanted the loan of some Marines and their best sergeant for a month, the Marine colonel had nodded and said at once: ‘Keeler’s your man, from what Captain Watts says,’ – what
had
Watts written? Ned wondered – ‘I’d be inclined to let Keeler pick his own team. Sounds a bit “death or glory”, so you want the best.’

Well, the colonel had been right: Keeler had kept his team on their toes and also trained the seamen in the finer points of close-range fighting. An innocent cheese wire, normally seen on a cheese board with a wooden toggle at the end, became a murderous garrotte; the place in the human body to insert a dagger for maximum effect… Keeler had turned a blasé Jemmy and a bored Croupier into keen students of silent killing and, with Ned, they had been fascinated by Keeler’s descriptions of the three commando raids on the French coast in which he had taken part. None had ever been made public. None had involved more than thirty men, and each had a specific task. One had been to take a couple of scientists (put into uniform in case they were captured, and so that they would not be shot as spies) to attack a radar station on the cliffs close to a French village.

Jemmy had added a few words to the story: putting the two boffins into uniform would not help: since Hitler had announced his notorious ‘Commando Order’, all captured commandos were executed anyway. Keeler had laughed and admitted that the boffins had worn uniform for another reason: it was important, if they had been captured, that the Germans did not guess the real reason for the raid. Two men who obviously were not commandos might give the game away, so the boffins had to be beefy men who, like the rest of the party, were well equipped with vicious weapons.