Читать книгу Cold Harbour - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 7

There were bodies all around, clear in the moonlight, some in lifejackets, some not. Way beyond, the sea was on fire with burning oil and as Martin Hare lifted on the crest of a wave, he saw what was left of the destroyer, her prow already under the water. There was a dull explosion, her stern lifted and she started to go. He skidded down the other side of the wave, buoyant in his lifejacket, and then another washed over him and he choked, half-fainting as he struggled for breath, aware of the intense pain from the shrapnel in his chest.

The sea was running very fast in the slot between the islands, six or seven knots at least. It seemed to take hold of him, carrying him along at an incredible rate, the cries of the dying faded into the night behind. Again he was lifted higher on a wave, paused for a moment, half blind from the salt, then swept down very fast and cannoned into a liferaft.

He grabbed at one of the rope handles and looked up. A man crouched there, a Japanese officer in uniform. His feet were bare; Hare noticed that. They stared at each other for a long moment and then Hare tried to pull himself up. But he had no strength left.

The Japanese crawled forward without a word, reached down, caught him by the lifejacket and hauled him on to the raft. At the same moment the raft spun like a top, caught by an eddy, and the Japanese pitched headfirst into the sea.

Within seconds he was ten yards away, his face clear in the moonlight. He started to swim back towards the raft and then behind him, cutting through the white froth between the waves, Hare saw a shark’s fin. The Japanese didn’t even cry out, simply threw up his arms and disappeared. And it was Hare who screamed, as he always did, coming bolt upright in the bed, his body soaked in sweat.

The duty nurse was McPherson, a tough, no-nonsense lady of fifty, a widow with two sons in the Marines fighting their way through the islands. She came in now and stood looking at him, hands on hips.

‘The dream again?’

Hare swung his legs to the floor and reached for his robe. ‘That’s it. Who’s the doctor tonight?’

‘Commander Lawrence, but he won’t do you any good. Another couple of pills so you’ll sleep some more like you’ve slept all afternoon already.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Seven o’clock. Why don’t you have a shower and I’ll lay out that nice new uniform for you. You can come down to dinner. It’ll do you good.’

‘I don’t think so.’

He looked in the mirror and ran his fingers through the unruly black hair that was streaked with grey, although at forty-six you had to expect that. The face was handsome enough, pale from months of hospitalisation. But it was in the eyes that the lack of hope showed, no expression there at all.

He opened a drawer in the bedside locker, found his lighter and a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He was already coughing as he walked to the open window and looked out over the balcony to the garden.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘One good lung left, so now you’re trying to finish what the Japs started.’ There was a Thermos flask filled with coffee by the bed. She poured some into a cup and brought it over. ‘Time to start living again, Commander. As they say in those Hollywood movies, for you the war is over. You should never have started in the first place. It’s a young man’s game.’

He sipped his coffee. ‘So what do I do?’

‘Back to Harvard, Professor.’ She smiled. ‘The students will love you. All those medals. Don’t forget to wear your uniform the first day.’

He smiled in spite of himself, but only briefly. ‘God help me, Maddie, but I don’t think I could go back. I’ve had the war, I know that.’

‘And it’s had you, angel.’

‘I know. The butcher’s shop at Tulugu finished me off. It also seems to have finished me for anything else.’

‘Well, you’re a grown man. You want to sit around this room and quietly decay that’s your business.’ She walked to the door, opened it and turned. ‘Only I would suggest you comb your hair and make yourself respectable. You’ve got a visitor.’

He frowned. ‘A visitor?’

‘Yes, he’s with Commander Lawrence now. I didn’t know you had any British connection.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Hare asked, bewildered.

‘Your visitor. Very top brass. A Brigadier Munro of the British Army, though you’d never think so. Doesn’t even wear a uniform.’

She went out, closing the door. Hare stood there for a moment, frowning, then hurried into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Brigadier Dougal Munro was sixty-five and white-haired, an engagingly ugly man in an ill-fitting suit of Donegal tweed. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles of the type issued to other ranks in the British Army.

‘But is he fit, that’s what I need to know, Doctor?’ Munro was saying.

Lawrence wore a white surgical coat over his uniform. ‘You mean physically?’ He opened the file in front of him. ‘He’s forty-six years of age, Brigadier. He took three pieces of shrapnel in his left lung and spent six days on a liferaft. It’s a miracle he’s still around.’

‘Yes, I take your point,’ Munro said.

‘Here’s a man who was a professor at Harvard. A naval reserve officer, admittedly, because he was a famous yachtsman with connections in all the right places who gets himself in PT boats at the age of forty-three when the war starts.’ He leafed through the pages. ‘Every damned battle area in the Pacific. Lieutenant Commander, and medals.’ He shrugged. ‘Everything there is, including two Navy Crosses and then that final business at Tulugu. That Japanese destroyer blew him half out of the water so he rammed her and set off an explosive charge. He should have died.’

‘As I heard it, nearly everyone else did,’ Munro observed.

Lawrence closed the file. ‘You know why he didn’t get the Medal of Honor? Because it was General MacArthur who recommended him and the Navy doesn’t like the Army interfering.’

‘You’re not regular Navy, I take it?’ Munro said.

‘Am I hell.’

‘Good. I’m not regular Army, so plain speaking. Is he fit?’

‘Physically – yes. Mind you, I should think it’s taken ten years off the other end of his life. The medical board has indicated no further seagoing duty. In view of his age, he has the option of taking a medical discharge now.’

‘I see.’ Munro tapped his forehead. ‘And what about up here?’

‘In the head?’ Lawrence shrugged. ‘Who knows? He’s certainly suffered from depression of the reactive kind, but that passes. He sleeps badly, seldom leaves his room and gives the distinct impression of not knowing what the hell to do with himself.’

‘So he’s fit to leave?’

‘Oh, sure. He’s been fit enough for weeks. With the proper authorisation, of course.’

‘I’ve got that.’

Munro took a letter from his inside pocket, opened it and passed it across. Lawrence read it and whistled softly. ‘Jesus, it’s that important?’

‘Yes.’ Munro put the letter back in his pocket, picked up his Burberry raincoat and umbrella.

Lawrence said, ‘My God, you want to send him back in.’

Munro smiled gently and opened the door. ‘I’ll see him now, Commander, if you please.’

Munro looked out on to the balcony across the garden to the lights of the city in the falling dusk. ‘Very pleasant, Washington, at this time of year.’ He turned and held out his hand. ‘Munro – Dougal Munro.’

‘Brigadier?’ Hare said.

‘That’s right.’

Hare was wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt, his face still damp from the shower. ‘You’ll forgive me for saying so, Brigadier, but you are the most unmilitary man I ever saw.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Munro said. ‘Until 1939, I was an Egyptologist by profession, a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. My rank was to give me, shall we say, authority in certain quarters.’

Hare frowned. ‘Wait a minute. Do I smell intelligence here?’

‘You certainly do. Have you heard of SOE, Commander?’

‘Special Operations Executive,’ Hare said. ‘Don’t you handle agents into occupied France and so on?’

‘Exactly. We were the forerunners of your own OSS who, I’m happy to say, are now working closely with us. I’m in charge of Section D at SOE, more commonly known as the dirty tricks department.’

‘And what in the hell would you want with me?’ Hare demanded.

‘You were a Professor of German Literature at Harvard, am I right?’

‘So what?’

‘Your mother was German. You spent a great deal of time with her parents in that country as a boy. Even did a degree at Dresden University.’

‘So?’

‘You speak the language fluently, I understand, or so your Naval intelligence service tells me and your French is quite reasonable.’

Hare frowned. ‘What are you trying to say? Are you trying to recruit me as a spy or something?’

‘Not at all,’ Munro told him. ‘You see, you’re really quite unique, Commander. It’s not just that you speak fluent German. It’s the fact that you’re a naval officer with a vast experience in torpedo boats who also speaks fluent German that makes you interesting.’

‘I think you’d better explain.’

‘All right.’ Munro sat down. ‘You served on PT boats with Squadron Two in the Solomons, am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, this is classified, but I can tell you that at the urgent request of the Office of Strategic Services your men are to be transferred to the English Channel to land and pick up agents on the French coast.’

‘And you want me for that?’ Hare said in amazement. ‘You’re crazy. I’m all washed up. Christ, they want me to take a medical discharge.’

‘Hear me out,’ Munro said. ‘In the English Channel, British MTB’s have had a very rough time with their German counterparts.’

‘What the Germans call a Schnellboot,’ Hare said. ‘A fast boat. An apt title.’

‘Yes. Well, for some contrary reason we call them E-boats. As you say, they’re fast, too damn fast. We’ve been trying to get hold of one ever since the war started and I’m happy to say we finally succeeded last month.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Hare said in astonishment.

‘I think you’ll find I never do, Commander,’ Munro told him. ‘One of the S.80 series. Had some engine problem on a night patrol off the Devon coast. When one of our destroyers turned up at dawn, the crew abandoned ship. Naturally, her captain primed a charge before leaving to blow the bottom out of her. Unfortunately for him, it failed to explode. Interrogation of his radio operator indicated that their final message to their base at Cherbourg was that they were sinking her, which means we have their boat and the Kriegsmarine don’t know.’ He smiled. ‘You see the point?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Commander Hare, there is in Cornwall a tiny fishing port called Cold Harbour. No more than two or three dozen cottages and a manor house. It’s in a defence area so the inhabitants have long since moved out. My department uses it for, shall we say, special purposes. I operate a couple of planes from there, German planes. A Stork and a Ju88S night fighter. They still carry Luftwaffe insignia and the man who flies them, gallant RAF pilot though he is, wears Luftwaffe uniform.’

‘And you want to do the same thing with this E-boat?’ Hare said.

‘Exactly, which is where you come in. After all, a Kriegsmarine boat needs a Kriegsmarine crew.’

‘Which is contrary to the rules of war enough to put the same crew in front of a firing squad if caught,’ Hare pointed out.

‘I know. War, as your General Sherman once said, is hell.’ Munro stood up, rubbing his hands. ‘God, the possibilities are limitless. I should tell you, and this again is classified, that all German military and naval intelligence traffic is encoded on Enigma machines, a gadget the Germans are convinced is absolutely foolproof. Unfortunately for them we have a project called Ultra which has succeeded in penetrating the system. Think of the information that would give you from the Kriegsmarine. Recognition signals, codes of the day for entry into ports.’

‘Crazy,’ Hare said. ‘You’d need a crew.’

‘The S.80 usually carries a complement of sixteen. My friends at the Admiralty think you could manage with ten, including yourself. As it’s a joint venture, both our people and yours are searching out the right personnel. I’ve already got you the perfect engineer. A Jewish German refugee who worked at the Daimler-Benz factory. They manufacture the engines for all E-boats.’

There was a long pause. Hare turned and looked out across the garden to the city. It was quite dark now and he shivered, for no accountable reason remembering Tulugu. When he reached for a cigarette, his hand shook and he turned and extended it to Munro.

‘Look at that and you know why? Because I’m scared.’

‘So was I in the belly of that damned bomber flying over,’ Munro said. ‘I’ll be just as bad when we fly back tonight though this time it’s a Flying Fortress. I understand they have a little more room.’

‘No,’ Hare said hoarsely. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘Oh, but you will, Commander,’ Munro said. ‘And shall I tell you why? Because there’s nothing else you can do. You certainly can’t go back to Harvard. Back to the classroom after all you’ve been through? I’ll tell you something about yourself because we’re both in the same boat. We’re men who’ve spent most of our lives living in the head. Other men’s stories. All in the book and then the war came and do you know what, my friend? You’ve enjoyed every golden moment.’

‘You go to hell,’ Martin Hare told him.

‘Very probably.’

‘What if I say no?’

‘Oh, dear.’ Munro extracted the letter from his inside pocket. ‘I think you’ll recognise the signature at the bottom there as being that of the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces.’

Hare looked at it in stupefaction. ‘Good God!’

‘Yes, well he’d like a word before we go. What you might call a command performance so be a good lad and get into your uniform. We haven’t got much time.’

At the White House, the limousine stopped at the West Basement entrance where Munro showed his pass to the Secret Service agents on the night shift. There was a pause while an aide was sent for. He appeared after a few moments, a young naval lieutenant in impeccable uniform.

‘Brigadier,’ he said to Munro, turned to Hare and saluted him as only an Annapolis man could. ‘It’s a great honour to meet you, sir.’

Hare acknowledged the salute, faintly embarrassed.

The boy said, ‘Follow me, gentlemen. The President’s waiting.’

The Oval Office was shadowed, the lamp on the desk which was littered with papers the only light. President Roosevelt was in his wheelchair at the window staring out, a cigarette in his usual long holder glowing in the darkness.

He swivelled round in the chair. ‘There you are, Brigadier.’

‘Mr President.’

‘And this is Lieutenant Commander Hare?’ He held out his hand. ‘You’re a credit to your country, sir. As your President, I thank you. That Tulugu business was quite something.’

‘Better men than me died sinking that destroyer, Mr President.’

‘I know, son.’ Roosevelt held Hare’s hand in both of his. ‘Better men than you or me are dying every day, but we just have to press on and do our best.’ He reached for a fresh cigarette and put it in his holder. ‘The Brigadier’s filled you in on this Cold Harbour business? You like the sound of it?’

Hare glanced at Munro, hesitated, then said, ‘An interesting proposition, Mr President.’

Roosevelt tilted back his head and laughed. ‘A neat way of putting it.’ He wheeled himself to the desk and turned. ‘To wear the enemy uniform is totally against the terms of the Geneva Convention, you understand that?’

‘Yes, Mr President.’

Roosevelt stared up at the ceiling. ‘Correct me if I get my history wrong, Brigadier, but isn’t it a fact that during the Napoleonic Wars, ships of the British Navy occasionally attacked under the French flag?’

‘Indeed it is, Mr President, and usually when sailing French ships taken as prizes of war and recommissioned into the British Navy.’

‘So, there is precedence for this type of action as a legitimate ruse de guerre?’ Roosevelt observed.

‘Certainly, Mr President.’

Hare said, ‘It’s a point worth making that in all such actions, it was customary for the British to hoist their own flag just before battle commenced.’

‘I like that.’ Roosevelt nodded. ‘That, I understand. If a man must die, it should be under his own flag.’ He looked up at Hare. ‘A direct order from your Commander-in-Chief. You will at all times carry the Stars and Stripes on this E-boat of yours and if the day ever dawns that you find yourself sailing into battle, you will hoist it in place of the Kriegsmarine ensign. Understood?’

‘Perfectly, Mr President.’

Roosevelt held out his hand again. ‘Good. I can only wish you Godspeed.’

They both shook hands with him and, as if by magic, the young lieutenant appeared from the shadows and ushered them out.

As the limousine turned down Constitutional Avenue, Hare said, ‘A remarkable man.’

‘The understatement of the year,’ Munro said. ‘What he and Churchill have achieved between them is amazing.’ He sighed. ‘I wonder how long it will be before the books are written proving how unimportant they really were.’

‘Second-rate academics out to make a reputation?’ Hare said. ‘Just like us?’

‘Exactly.’ Munro looked out at the lighted streets. ‘I’m going to miss this town. You’re in for a culture shock when we reach London. Not only the blackout, but the Luftwaffe is trying night bombing again.’

Hare leaned back against the seat, closed his eyes, not tired but aware of a sudden fierce exhilaration. It was as if he’d been asleep for a long time and was awake again.

The Flying Fortress was brand new and on its way to join the American 8th Air Force in Britain. The crew made Munro and Hare as comfortable as possible with Army blankets and pillows and a couple of Thermos flasks. Hare opened one as they crossed the New England coast and moved out to sea.

‘Coffee?’

‘No thanks.’ Munro positioned a pillow behind his head and pulled up a blanket. ‘I’m a tea man myself.’

‘Well, it takes all kinds,’ Hare said.

He sipped some of the scalding coffee and Munro grunted. ‘I knew there was something. I forgot to tell you that in view of the peculiar circumstances, your Navy has decided to promote you.’

‘To full Commander?’ Hare said in astonishment.

‘No, to Fregattenkapitän actually,’ Munro told him, hitched the blanket over his shoulders and went to sleep.