At a dead slow crawl, the Thorneycrofts purring softly, the torpedo boats had approached the shallows at Kronstadt in a V formation. To their right the inky sky had been lit up time and time again by scarlet flashes as the Bolshevik gunners had fired at the Navy biplanes which were carrying out the feint. Smith had told himself the fly-boys were really giving the Russkis some stick.
Then suddenly, startlingly, there was a huge flash of light which had revealed the whole of the Red Fleet, silhouetted against the lights of Petrograd. ‘Get a butchers o’ that, sir!’ Ginger Kerrigan had cried excitedly. ‘There they are!’ He’d been right. There had been their targets.
‘Ahead both… full speed ahead!’ he had cried joyously, carried away by the excitement of the kill to come.
The Swordfish had surged forwards. A huge white wake erupted behind her. Her prow rose in the air. Each wave they hit felt as if it were a brick wall.
Searchlights clicked on in the enemy fleet. Red flares had sailed into the night sky. From port a machine gun had begun firing. Angry white tracer had come hurrying towards the attackers. It had been followed a moment later by the throaty bark of a quick-firer. Water had started to erupt in wild crazy fountains all about them. But they had stuck to their course, hurtling forwards across the surface of the water at forty knots.
Then Dickie Bird had spotted her, their target. ‘The Spartak!’ he had yelled frantically above the ear-splitting racket made by the Thorneycroft engine. ‘To port there!’
Smith had recognised her immediately. There had been no mistaking the three funnels of the old Tsarist battleship. Now he had pressed every last bit of speed out of the Swordfish, which was groaning at every seam, as if she might fall apart at any moment. ‘Stand by the tubes!’ he had yelled.
Ginger and Billy Bennett had run to their posts, staggering all over the racing deck.
Six hundred yards! It was now or never, he had told himself. To his front there had been scarlet flashes everywhere as the Red Fleet took up the challenge. ‘Fire!’ he had yelled. ‘One… two…!’
The Swordfish had shuddered as the first one-ton torpedo had hit the water. A moment later it was hissing through the harbour towards its target. Number two followed with a splash and a ripple of bubbles and then it, too, was on its way towards the trapped Spartak. Smith had swung the boat round in a great racing curve and then they had been belting out of the harbour, with shells exploding all around them, the air singing with great shards of bright silver metal. The Swordfish’s mast had come tumbling down. Billy Bennett had groaned and had slumped to the deck, blood jetting from his wounded arm. Wildly Smith had swung the boat from left to right in crazy zigzags, trying to put the Russian gunners off.
Then it had happened. A great hollow boom, followed an instant later by a blinding scarlet flash which had coloured the racing sea in its blood-red hue. Smith had flung a hasty glance over his shoulder, his heart beating furiously with excitement.
He cried with sheer joy at what he saw. The Spartak had been struck amidships. Already, panic-stricken sailors were diving over the side into the boiling sea. A sailor dived from the top mast where he had been the lookout, missed the water, hit the side of the listing battleship and then crumpled into the sea like a sack of wet cement.
Suddenly there was a great, tearing, ear-splitting rending of tortured plates. Slowly but definitely the crippled battleship had begun to turn like some enormous whale in its death throes. Loud gurgling sounds came from it like water running down a drain, followed by obscene belches as trapped pockets of air broke the surface.
An underwater explosion had ripped the keel off the Spartak. Blazing oil had poured out of her in a frightening scarlet stream, engulfing the frantic, screaming men in the water in a flash. Slowly, majestically, the Soviet battleship completed a full circle, her propellors dripping and gleaming in the blood-red glare. For a few seconds the Spartak had poised thus, her insides being torn apart by the inrushing water and repeated explosions as her ammunition locker had gone up, the metal hull glowing a dull angry red. Another explosion. With a great lingering, sad sigh, what had been left of the Spartak had slid slowly beneath the surface of the water, leaving the oily water behind her frothing and fuming. The pride of the new Soviet Fleet had been destroyed…
Now as the old freighter came to a stop in the harbour and Smith gazed out at the stretch of water which led to Petrograd, where he had earned his VC for sinking the Spartak, he thought how he had changed since 1918. Then, although he had been a veteran of the naval battles in the Straits of Dover, he had been a relative innocent. Now, after six years of working together with C and his Secret Service, he was anything but innocent.
He looked up to where Mrs Reilly, as he still called her even though they were lovers, was dealing with the Finnish skipper, and told himself that now he even took and seduced other men’s wives. He sighed and wondered idly if there was any way of turning the clock back. What if he hadn’t tackled the Spartak? Perhaps if the admiral then in command had given him another target, a lesser ship, he might have remained an obscure lieutenant, destined to serve his thirty years and retire to the Home Counties as a lieutenant commander, instead of becoming ‘Common Smith VC’ whose name and medal were familiar to every newspaper reader in the country.
‘A penny for them?’ Dickie Bird asked, coming up from below, muffled up in a thick civilian greatcoat, with a scarf tied around his neck against the biting cold. He looked at his old shipmate curiously as if he already suspected something had gone on between him and the beautiful Mrs Reilly. But before Smith could answer, the woman called down from the bridge, ‘Mr Smith, could you get your crew ashore as soon as possible? The captain here will supervise the unloading of the two crates. We expect the locomotive to be here at any minute.’ She made a counting gesture in the continental fashion with her thumb and forefinger.
‘Cripes!’ Dickie Bird exclaimed. ‘The old Horsemen of St George do work, don’t they! Now we’re going to have a private train…’
‘Gentlemens and lady, the locomotive,’ the fat little Finnish train driver with the Bronx accent announced in his fractured English, sweeping off his battered leather cap and bowing, as if he expected a round of applause.
The little party stared in awe at the ancient engine, its sides covered with rust, the tender piled with logs, with, beyond, two flat cars laden with the crates and behind them a small passenger coach, its sides still marked by bullet holes from Finland’s civil war of six years before.
‘Gawd ferk a duck!’ Billy Bennett exclaimed, breaking their awed silence. ‘What is it – Stephenson’s frigging Rocket?’
The fat little Finn, who Ginger had already christened ‘Finnegan’ because he could not pronounce the driver’s long and complicated name, rubbed the side of the great old locomotive with his greasy rag and said proudly, ‘Best English make. Look!’ He pointed to a plate set in the side of the cab.
Dickie Bird peered at it and read out the legend, ‘Manufactured… York Carriage Works… 1882… Oh, my sainted aunt, it is old! Do you think it’ll manage to get us there?’
‘Gentleman’s sainted aunt need no fear… She’ll get gentlemens – and lady – there.’ He patted the side of the locomotive, as if it were a pedigree horse.
Smith smiled and said, ‘All right, chaps, let’s get aboard. Can’t hang about here all day.’ He shot a look over his shoulder at the still green waters of the Gulf of Finland, remembering the last time he had been here before the attack on the Spartak. Suddenly he shuddered, and it wasn’t with the cold. A lot of good men, both British and Russian, had died that time. Was history going to repeat itself?
Half an hour later they were on their way, chugging eastwards through the empty wastes of Finland at a steady ten miles an hour, the locomotive trailing thick clouds of black smoke behind it. For the most part, the men mostly dozed, though a few played cards; for like sailors all over the world, they were not interested in the scenery. They had seen enough of it in their past travels.
Smith and Dickie Bird were seated up front with Mrs Reilly in that part of the carriage which had been curtained off to give her some privacy from the men. Now she told them what she knew and gave them their instructions for the journey till they reached the port where Swordfish would be reassembled, ready for action. ‘The captain of the Finnish ship translated the local Finnish paper for me,’ she explained, as they rattled through the empty countryside weighed down with snow, with the firs marching in silent ranks to the horizon as far as the eye could see. ‘The headline was that Lenin is dead and that there has been another attempt on Trotsky’s life, which was naturally the work of my husband.’
‘Oh, I say!’ Dickie Bird gasped.
‘It failed,’ she said laconically. ‘At all events, things are obviously coming to a head at Petrograd now. We must be ready to play our part. The crisis, I am sure, will come soon. For my husband, it is his last chance to achieve greatness. He is getting old.’
She looked at Smith, who blushed when he thought of what they had done the night before and said, her face revealing nothing, ‘You can see how lonely this dreary country is, nothing but snow and trees. We could be attacked anywhere along the route until we get to the port. Your men will have to be on guard, Mr Smith.’
‘The Chief Petty Officer has already broken out weapons. They are all armed, Mrs Reilly. And that fellow with the golf bag you saw earlier on, Ginger Kerrigan? Well, it contains our Lewis gun. I think we can manage.’
‘Good,’ she said in a brisk, businesslike manner. ‘Then I shall let you get on with your duties.’ They were dismissed.
The morning passed slowly. Outside, the wilderness remained empty, save for wild snow hares who stared at the metal monster crawling by, long ears quivering, and an occasional stag, muzzling at the snow, trying to find vegetation below, his nostrils steaming greyly. But even in this snowy waste there were a few villages, a huddle of white clapboard houses around the station, where the train would be halted so that the stationmaster could come aboard and ask the passengers if their ‘Honours’ would give permission for the train to proceed. According to Mrs Reilly the custom dated back to the days when Finland had been ruled by the Tsar and only high Tsarist officials travelled in a private first-class coach. Hence their privileged treatment. ‘Crikey!’ Ginger Kerrigan exclaimed when he heard that. ‘We ain’t half a lot of Lord Mucks now!’
Ferguson shot him a hard look but he had no effect on the ginger-haired Liverpudlian. Now, when he fetched a mug of steaming tea from the samovar which was kept boiling on its stand at the end of the coach, he’d say in what he thought was an upper-class accent to Billy Bennett, ‘I say, William, will you pass me the sugar, old thing?’ and drink his tea with his little finger sticking out in a refined manner. So he imagined at least.
But not all the Finnish stationmasters in their frock coats and leather cross-straps were so polite. Some fifty kilometres west of Lahti, just as the sun was beginning to set, colouring the white steppe with a blood-red hue, the little fat driver, his face as black as any negro’s from the flying soot, stopped at a tiny village to load the tender up with fresh logs. As in the other villages the stationmaster entered the carriage, cap in hand. But this village stationmaster was scruffy and unshaven in contrast to the others. He hung his head to one side as if he didn’t want them to see the shifty look in his dark eyes.
Mrs Reilly spoke to him in Russian and translated his answer. ‘He says he has orders from further up the line not to let any train through till tomorrow morning. An urgent repair is being carried out, it seems.’
Dickie looked out at the darkening snowfield and said, ‘It’s going to be pretty parkey inside here tonight without the heat from the engine.’
Smith looked at the little Finnish engineer. ‘Haven’t we got enough wood to keep on going a bit? I don’t trust this fellow.’ He nodded at the stationmaster with his hangdog face.
‘Me neither,’ he answered in that thick Bronx accent of his. ‘But not possible, gentlemens. Not enough wood.’
Smith turned to Mrs Reilly again. ‘Would you ask him if he could find us some warm accommodation for the night?’
She did so and translated that the stationmaster was offering them two huts next to the rusty branch line which ran behind the station.
‘Then that will have to do,’ Smith said reluctantly, taking out a sovereign and giving it to Mrs Reilly. ‘Give him this and ask if he can’t rustle up some warm food for us.’
The stationmaster’s dark eyes lit up when he saw the gold coin. His face was transformed. He gave them a fake smile and then he was backing his way down the aisle, bowing and scraping mightily, while Dickie Bird moaned, ‘I ’spect we’ll get fleas…’