When Gus Agar opened his eyes after the explosion, the first thing that struck him was the almost complete silence. No guns were firing, no engine was roaring: there was just the gentle sound of waves washing against the shore. Something also seemed to have gone wrong with the laws of physics because instead of being blinded by the beam of a searchlight he was staring straight up at one as it swung to and fro above him against the night sky.
But wherever he was it wasn’t heaven – he was in too much pain for that. It gradually dawned on him that he was lying in a crumpled heap in the footwell of the cockpit. From where he lay he could see into the engine room. Beeley was there, apparently dead, his body slumped lifelessly across the silent engine. Gus tried slowly to disentangle himself from the various pipes and cables at the bottom of the cockpit, trying to work out how badly he was hurt. He had certainly taken a tremendous blow across the forehead because he had a thumping headache. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. As he started to sit up, Beeley too began to move. He looked up, saw Gus and at the same moment seemed to realise that the engines had stopped.
‘I’ll try to get her going again, sir,’ he mumbled weakly and started to haul himself upright.
Gus sat up properly and looked around. It seemed as if the entire crew had been knocked unconscious in some kind of collision. Marshall must have come to his senses first because he was trying to tend to Gefter and Veroline who were both sprawled across the rear of the boat, still out cold.
As he checked himself for cuts and broken bones, it dawned on Gus that CMB7 was immobile – not just not moving forwards, but as motionless as a rock, as though the boat were held in some gigantic vice. He stood up gingerly and looked over the side. In the darkness he could see that they were resting on some sort of underwater obstruction. Looking upwards, he realised that they were almost directly below one of the sea forts. Not far away to starboard was the rocky shore of Kotlin Island. They had run aground on the breakwater that connected the two.
Beeley clambered out of the engine room and sat down gingerly next to his captain.
‘No good, sir,’ he said. ‘The propeller shaft is smashed, the watertight seams have gone and we’ve got two massive holes in the hull. Even if we could get her off this breakwater the only place she’d go is straight to the bottom.’
Marshall had roused Gefter and Veroline. The five men gathered in the cockpit and shared a hip flask of rum. Above them the searchlight still swung back and forth. Apart from cuts and bruises, they were all miraculously in one piece. Gus explained their situation. The searchlights must have lost them in the explosions and the confusion when they ran aground. The fact that no patrol boat had arrived to investigate probably meant that the Russians thought they had been sunk. But in the morning it would be a different story. There were right underneath the fort and it was certain that they would be seen. There was a chance that the British sailors and Veroline as a neutral Finn would simply be imprisoned – although there was also a good chance that they would be shot out of hand. But for Gefter, a Russian spy, it would be a different matter. For him a bullet would be a kindness, for if they were arrested and the Cheka got him he would certainly be tortured so that they could find Paul Dukes. Gus asked Gefter what he was going to do. He pointed out that it would only take a few moments for him to swim to shore and that from there he could walk into Kronstadt town, mingle with the locals and probably escape to the mainland. Gefter considered this. He asked what Gus intended to do.
Gus looked around the wreck of CMB7. He did not relish the prospect of waiting to be discovered by the Bolsheviks. He knew that the Cheka had put a price on his head, dead or alive. After the Kronstadt Raid, he suspected that a lot of Bolshevik troops would be quite happy to collect that bounty for ‘capturing’ him dead.
‘I guess we’ll try to get her into the water again. See if we can float out on the current. Maybe make it to the Finnish or Estonian coasts.’
But both men knew that was a forlorn hope. Even if CMB7 did float and did not just fall to pieces in the water, there was no way they could get out of range of the sea forts by dawn. As soon as it was daylight they would be spotted and simply blown out of the water. Gus could see from Gefter’s bitter smile that he knew this. He had never had much time for Gefter, considering him both arrogant and untrustworthy. But Gefter’s next words changed his opinion for good:
Gefter’s courage gave Gus renewed hope. He slapped his knee and winced.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘Richard, get below and start plugging those holes with anything we’ve got. Use the sea jackets if you have to. The rest of you come with me and we’ll see if we can’t lever her off this breakwater.’
Veroline, who did not speak much English, realised now what Gus was planning to do. As he had done before he started to panic – noisily. He gabbled in Finnish, but it was clear that he thought they must surrender and throw themselves on the mercy of the occupants of the fortress. Since they were right below the Russians this was a disturbance that was likely to bring the guards right down on them. Gefter, the former prizefighter, ended the argument with a right cross to Veroline’s jaw which knocked him onto his back for the second time that evening. Gus, who was about to argue with Veroline, was left open-mouthed. Gefter simply shrugged and clambered out of the boat behind Beeley.
It is no easy thing to move a boat weighing four tons when it is firmly wedged onto a breakwater, but by using sheer physical strength and the boat-hooks as levers Gus and his team persuaded CMB7 to give up her resting place and slide into the water. Marshall had done his best to stuff the holes with clothing and the canvas covers, but the boat immediately began to ship a great deal of water. The only answer was to bail furiously with anything that came to hand.
Gradually they began to drift with the current into the open waters of the Gulf, but it was agonisingly slow going. At this rate they had no hope of being beyond the range of the Russian guns by dawn. Then Beeley had an idea. He took the boat-hooks and from them made a crosspiece which he wedged alongside the firing chamber of the torpedo ram. From the crosspiece he then hung pieces of canvas torn from the deck covering. It made a very small sail, but there was a substantial easterly breeze. Together with the current, Gus estimated that they were now making about two knots. It might just be enough – if they could keep CMB7 facing in the right direction.
The problem was that the rudder assembly had been torn off in the crash. If they held their current direction they would simply sail far out into the Gulf and without a radio or any way of signalling it was very likely that they would die of thirst before they were rescued. Even Beeley was stumped to come up with an answer to the problem, but it was the frantically bailing Gefter who came to their aid. He attached a couple of empty petrol cans to a rope and flung this over the bows. When one of the crew hauled on the rope the petrol cans provided just enough resistance to give a little steerage to the boat. The problem was that they now had fewer items to bail with and CMB7 began to settle increasingly swiftly into the water. Worse still, the faster she settled, the slower she travelled. In desperation, Marshall pulled off his seaboots and began bailing with those. For some reason, the sight of him standing there in his socks and throwing water over the side was so ridiculous that the whole crew forgot their plight and broke out into laughter.
But the moment passed and they all began anxiously watching the eastern horizon beyond the looming bulk of Kronstadt, looking for the first signs of dawn. The dark shapes of the sea forts lay strung out in the water behind them – still far too close for safety.
Yard by yard they drew further away, bailing hard all the time. But the sky was growing steadily lighter and by about three o’clock it was clear to all of them that the sun was going to beat them. They were still within sight of the forts and it was now just a matter of waiting until one of the sentries spotted them and sounded the alarm. Unable to get away, they would then simply be picked off by the eight-inch naval guns on one of the larger fortresses.
One by one they stopped bailing. There really seemed little point now. In fact, the lower they were in the water, the less chance there was of them being spotted. Together they sat in the torpedo trough, sharing a cigarette and waiting for he moment when the disc of the sun would break through the clouds. Gefter solemnly shook hands with each of them and told them what a good try it had been and what an honour it had been to sail with them.
For Gus Agar it was galling to have travelled so far and done so much, only to fail at the very last attempt. He wondered what would happen to Paul Dukes now?
It was then, as Gus was staring out over the sea, that a strange thing happened. Slowly but surely a sea mist began to rise from the water around them. At first he watched it incredulously: it was a phenomenon that he had not seen in these waters before. But then he stood and shouted to the others to start bailing again. He had no idea if the mist would be thick enough to hide them from the binoculars of those in the forts, but he was damned well going to give it a try.
Slowly the mist thickened. It was touch-and-go. At any moment the men expected to hear a boom as one or other of the fortresses opened fire, but the sound never came. The sun rose, the early-morning mist continued to thicken and CMB7 gradually crept to safety. When they were sure that they were far enough away, the five men whooped and cheered and slapped each other on the back. They were safe – if only they could keep the boat afloat a little longer.
The water had risen to the level of CMB7’s deck when they heard a small motor chugging away somewhere in the mist. It sounded too slow to be a Soviet patrol boat and anyway the Russians were unlikely to venture this far out beyond the safety of the minefields.
Gefter and Veroline hailed the boat in Russian and Finnish and before long a small Finnish fishing boat slipped through the mist and came to a stop about fifty metres away, just on the edge of visibility in the murk.
Not surprisingly, they were very suspicious and demanded to know what this strange vessel was. Gus ordered Veroline to tell them that they were a Royal Naval vessel from the flotilla at Biorko and that they required a tow to shore. The men would be well rewarded for their help. However, the prospect of a reward was clearly not enough to tempt the fishermen because they immediately started up their engine and began to pull away. Seeing this, Gus nodded to Marshall on the Lewis guns who sent a burst across their bows just to remind them where their duty lay. The fishing boat immediately altered course and pulled alongside. Within minutes CMB7 was being towed back to Terrioki. ‘The boat they couldn’t sink’ had held out to the end.
The mist began to lift as the sun rose and the sea warmed. As they sat there watching the pine forests of the Finnish coast draw nearer, Gus remarked to Gefter that it was strange to think that they had come all that way just to be saved by a change in the weather conditions.
But Gefter shook his head. Like all Russians he was deeply superstitious. As far as he was concerned, they had not been saved by the weather. They had been saved by God.