A thin grey mist hung over the Baltic. It clung to the rocks along the coast so that they looked like bearded giants. A mysterious stillness brooded over the sea as the little Swedish steamer chugged eastwards at a steady ten knots an hour. Standing on the rusting deck, muffled up to the eyes, Billy Bennett was chewing at a piece of cold fried bread in between snatches of the old wartime ditty, ‘Don’t cryee… don’t sighee… there’s a silver lining in the skyee… Cheerio, chin-chin, napoo… tootle-oo… Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eyee… Goodbyee…’
‘Put a sock in it, Billy,’ his shipmate Ginger Kerrigan said. ‘You and yer bloody goodbyee!’ He shivered and slapped his arms about his skinny body. ‘Ruddy brass monkey weather today.’
‘Only trying to cheer meself up,’ Billy Bennett said, taking a last bite at the cold fried bread. ‘With the kind o’ bleeding grub them Swedes serve – all that raw fish rubbish – a bloke needs cheering up, don’t ’e?’
Ginger Kerrigan pulled the dewdrop off the end of his long red nose and slung it expertly over the side. They were a day and a half out of Hull now and passing through the straits that led into the Baltic proper. As far as he could see, the inland sea was empty. Indeed, they hadn’t sighted a vessel since the day before. But then, Ginger told himself, it was a Sunday, and a freezing January Sunday to boot. Merchant seamen hated to be sailing at a weekend. That was the time when they were snug in some pub or knocking-shop, making up for a long boring week at sea. He sighed. At this particular moment on a freezing morning like this, he wouldn’t have said no to a pint of wallop and a warm tart.
Up on the bridge, taking their morning exercise, Bird and Smith were pretty much of the same mood. Their breakfast had been served them by a pretty blonde Swedish stewardess but she was as bland and as boring as the food. Now Dickie Bird sighed and said, ‘When we get to port, old bean, I’m going to go the whole totus porcus – the whole hog.’
Now it was Smith’s turn to sigh and say, ‘Dickie, I wish you wouldn’t go in for that awful public-schoolboy slang. Should have left that behind you when we departed Harrow-on-the-Hill.’
Dickie didn’t seem to hear Smith’s objection. ‘I’m going to get myself some decent scoff, a pint of champers and a nice keen young filly—’ He broke off suddenly.
‘What is it?’ Smith asked hastily.
‘To port,’ Dickie answered. ‘Visitors.’
Smith acted immediately. ‘All right you lot,’ he called to Ginger Kerrigan and Bennett, ‘get out of sight.’ He nodded to the grizzled Swedish captain with a cigar clenched in the side of his mouth and the bottle of aquavit in the pocket of his shabby jacket. ‘You see to them, skipper?’
The Swede shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and growled, ‘Ja, I do.’
Now, sheltering in the lee of the bridge, the two Englishmen watched as the small craft, painted a light blue, came slowly out of the fog, a man mounting the searchlight on the superstructure while another couple waited next to the quick-firer. ‘Looks like one of those damned Hun sub-chasers that the Huns used to run out of Zeebrugge during the last show,’ Dickie Bird said.
Smith nodded his agreement. ‘Yes, very definitely, and she’s coming our way.’ He strained his eyes and read the white-painted legend on the other craft’s side. ‘Wasser… schutz… polizei…’ he said slowly. ‘That’s the Hun water police.’
‘So it is,’ Dickie retorted, ‘but aren’t they a bit out of German territorial waters?’ he added.
‘You’re right. They definitely are.’ Smith pressed himself closer into the shadows, as the fast patrol boat started to slow down and draw alongside the ancient coal-burning Swedish freighter. A German in police uniform came out of the bridge with a loud-hailer. In German he asked, ‘What’s your cargo? Where are you bound?’
The Swedish skipper told him in broken, heavily accented German as the two young British officers waited tensely. They knew that the Germans had no right to stop another vessel outside German territorial waters. But they could hardly object, especially with those two tough-looking policemen standing next to the quick-firer. Both of them knew their Germans of old. As Dickie Bird was often wont to say, ‘Wouldn’t trust a deuced Hun as far as I could throw him. Beastly race!’
The man on the bridge of the German vessel stared hard at the little freighter with its rusting superstructure and its unpainted plates. ‘What’s in those crates?’ he asked after a few moments.
The Swedish skipper knew well enough what was in them – the Swordfish. But he feigned innocence with all the authority of a professional actor. He pushed his battered cap to the back of his head, scratched his hair, pulled his nose and said finally, ‘Well, I don’t rightly know. The agent said machinery. And that’s what it reads on the manifest. So that’s what they’ll be, eh?’
The German stared up at him in disgust, as if he were dealing with an idiot. ‘A captain should know every item of his cargo intimately,’ he warned.
The old skipper chuckled. ‘The only thing I know intimately, German, is my old woman… and I don’t know her that intimately these days.’ He chuckled again and fumbled with his flies to make his meaning quite clear.
The German shook his head and then he said, catching the skipper by surprise, ‘And where are you from?’
Without thinking the Swede answered, ‘Hull’ in the very same instant that Billy Bennett slipped on the icy deck as he tried to get below and cried out at the top of his voice, ‘Bloody hell!’
Smith knew at once that the German had heard. He could see it in the policeman’s hard face. He knew, too, that the cop would already be asking himself, what was an Englishman doing aboard a rundown old Swedish freighter?
But the German did not react. Instead he touched his hand to his cap in salute and called to the Swede, ‘Schon gut, Herr Kapitan. Gute Fahrt,’ before returning inside the bridge. Moments later the vessel was under way once more, disappearing into the thin mist, her engines roaring as the craft put on speed.
Bird and Smith came out of their hiding place and stared in the direction the German craft had taken. But already she had disappeared.
‘The Hun spotted us,’ Smith said pensively. ‘The crates, that Hull and that damned fool Bennett shouting in English were a dead giveaway.’
‘I’m afraid so, old chap,’ Dickie agreed. ‘Still, he said ta-ta politely enough and tootled off nicely, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Smith answered, face suddenly worried, ‘but is he going to stay away? Will his friends soon make an appearance?’
‘In the lap of the gods, old thing,’ Dickie said airily. ‘Kismet and all that, what?’
But Smith wasn’t leaving it to chance. He strode over to the elderly skipper, who was again ‘refreshing’ himself, as he called it, from his flat bottle of spirits and asked him to alter course immediately. They would sail close to the Swedish coast now till they reached a point below Sundsvall where they would steer directly eastwards for Finland. And they would keep within Swedish territorial waters. It would be safer that way. ‘The Germans wouldn’t dare enter Swedish waters, skipper.’
The old Swede, faded old eyes glowing again with the effect of the strong spirit, chuckled thickly and said, ‘You don’t know the German gentlemen, Mr Smith. In my time I have seen a lot of them. The German, he do what he likes.’ He chuckled again and then concentrated on bringing the ship about.
Time passed leadenly. In their tiny and dirty little cabin, Smith and Bird read, while in the fo’c’sle the crew of the Swordfish did the same or played cards, while CPO Ferguson watched the players, that old stern Calvinist look on his withered face, murmuring at periodical intervals, ‘Yon’s a mug’s game. Ye’ll allus find there’s one o’ you card sharpers in every game.’ A comment frowned upon by Ginger Kerrigan, who happened to have an extra ace concealed in the sleeve of his jersey. ‘What’s it matter, Chiefie?’ he retorted, ‘we’re only playing for tabs.’ He indicated the heap of cigarette ends resting in his cap in the middle of the players.
But the old chief petty officer wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s the way o’ the dee-vil,’ he announced. ‘Not a farthing o’ good can come of it.’ Then he lapsed into a moody silence.
Outside the light was going early, as it always did in these northern regions, and on the bridge, the old captain, already half drunk on the aquavit, was slow to see the two biplanes emerging from the darkening sky. Routinely he raised his glasses, as he had always done during the war when he had heard the sound of aircraft engines. Neutral Swedish as his ship had been, he had always found it safer to turn on all the vessel’s lights so that the pilots recognised her for what she was.
Two Fokker biplanes slid into the circles of calibrated glass. The one was painted bright red, as if it might belong to some flying circus, of which there were many touring the Baltic countries during the summer. The other was painted blue, a sky-blue which would merge with the sky on a normal day. But neither seemed to bear any badges of identification.
He frowned. ‘They’re probably Swedish,’ he said to himself in the manner of all lonely men. ‘After all, they are coming from the Swedish mainland.’ Still he couldn’t overcome the feeling that there was something strange about the two Fokkers. Where were they going at this time of the day with the light already going? Normally pilots didn’t fly in the hours of darkness, especially civilian ones. They didn’t have the instruments to do so.
Suddenly the pilot of the red plane waggled his wings. It was a signal to the other one. Its pilot, too, waggled his wings, as if in answer. The planes started to come down lower. Now he could just make out the dark shapes of the pilots’ heads in their leather helmets in the open cockpits. Abruptly he gasped. Both planes, although they didn’t bear the markings of the Swedish Royal Air Force, were armed with machine guns. He could see the two machine guns fastened to the engine cowling quite clearly now. He grabbed for the speaking tube, pulled out the plug and whistled sharply.
Down below, Smith reached for his end. He pulled out the plug. ‘What is it, skipper?’ he asked casually.
‘There’s something strange here, mister,’ the Swede answered. ‘Aeroplanes bearing down on us. Better come up topside and have a look.’
Smith sprang out of his bunk and peered through the dirty porthole. He caught a glimpse of a Fokker biplane coming in very low. Then another, painted a bright shining red.
‘Two planes!’ he cried. ‘One of them red.’
‘Red!’ Dickie shouted above the roar of the engines. ‘Lemme have a dekko!’
He pushed Smith to one side. The latter hurriedly put on his boots while Dickie Bird peered out of the porthole. Suddenly he gave out a low whistle. ‘You know, Smithie, who always painted his plane red during the last show so that our chaps would know exactly who they were tangling with?’
Smith, busy with his bootlaces, shook his head.
‘I’ll tell you then – the Red Baron!’
‘Who?’
‘You know, you soft-headed mutt, Baron von Richthofen.’
‘Oh crikey. Let’s get up topside PDQ.’
‘Pretty Damned Quick it is!’ Dickie Bird echoed and then they were running up the companionway as fast as their legs could carry them.