Codeword Golden Fleece (58 page)

Rex was first out on deck; Simon went into Richard’s cabin to help him get a coat on. As they started up the companionway they met Rex coming down again.

‘It’s nothing serious,’ he said at once. ‘We collided with a poor little fishing-boat, and she got the raw end of the deal. She bumped us on our port bow and scraped along our beam. Her mast got caught in one of our steel boat davits and snapped clean
off; but we weren’t doing more than six knots, and I wouldn’t think we’ve even sprung a plate.’

The silence was now uncanny, and Richard suddenly asked:

‘Why have our engines stopped, then?’

‘I couldn’t say.’ Rex turned, and they followed him up to the bridge.

The Captain was apparently having a heated argument down the voice-pipe with his Chief Engineer. They could not understand a word he said, but when he had finished he turned to them and spoke in French.

‘Some of the gear from the broken mast of that filthy fishing-boat has fouled our propeller. It may mean a slight delay, but there is nothing to worry about; so if you are wise you will go back to your beds.’

In view of the urgency of their journey they all felt a little uneasy, but the Captain having said a ‘slight’ delay was reassuring. After all, the consequences of a collision at sea might have been so much worse, and, as Rex pointed out on their return to the saloon, it was the first accident which had caused them any delay at all during the many hundreds of miles that they had travelled on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Disquieted but not seriously alarmed, they returned to their bunks and soon dropped off to sleep.

When they awoke the engines were still silent, and Simon, who was up first, went out to make anxious enquiries of the Captain. On his return he found Rex helping Richard to dress, and they both saw from his face that he had bad news for them.

‘We’re in a muddle,’ he announced. ‘Apparently the propeller was still going when that gear got tangled up in it. Something got twisted and a new propeller will have to be fitted. We can’t do anything but lie here until we sight something big enough to tow us in to Varna.’

‘Shucks!’ snapped Rex. ‘What’s the matter with radioing for a tug to come out and tow us in?’

‘Small coasters like this are not fitted with wireless yet.’

Richard glanced at the porthole. ‘But the fog!’ he cried in quick alarm. ‘Look! It’s as thick as ever. It may be hours before anything comes near enough to spot us in this murk.’

‘There’s our siren,’ Simon murmured, not very happily. ‘Anything that gets near enough to hear it will head for us to find out what’s wrong.’

Even as he spoke the short wailing blasts of the hooter, that
had been sounding at intervals of a few moments all night, came again.

In gloomy silence they ate their breakfasts, then went up on deck. The sea was still calm, there was not a breath of wind, and the fog showed no signs of lifting. It was now the 18th, so they had only three days and two nights to go, and even when they reached Istanbul they would have to communicate with London, and London would have to issue instructions in time for Sir Reginald Kent to complete the deal before midnight on the 20th. Now terribly conscious of every wasted moment, they sat up on the afterdeck straining their eyes into the murk for the first sight of any rescuing ship and their ears for a reply to their wailing hooter.

At the first opportunity they spoke to the Captain, and asked him to have them transferred to any ship that appeared in order that they might be landed at Varna at the earliest possible moment, to which he readily agreed; but it was two o’clock in the afternoon before a sudden stir announced that a vessel had at last been sighted.

The vessel proved to be only another fishing-smack, and the friends were faced with the awful question as to whether they should go aboard her or wait until something more speedy and reliable appeared on the scene.

By means of megaphones their Captain and the Master of the fishing-smack held a staccato conversation, after which the Captain reported that the Master said that if the fog lifted he should be able to reach Varna that night, but if it did not it was unlikely that there would be enough wind to enable him to make port until next day.

All suffering the most chronic anxiety and indecision, the friends discussed the matter, and finally, swayed by an intense craving to end their enforced inactivity rather than from any judgment that the soundest brain could have made, they decided to chance a transfer to the smack. A boat was accordingly lowered, they were put aboard, and ten minutes later as the two vessels drifted apart they watched the steamer disappear in the chill grey mist.

The hours that followed were positive torture, and the misery they felt was aggravated by the fact that neither the Master of the smack nor his crew of two spoke a word of any language Simon, Rex or Richard could understand. In consequence they could not enquire how far from Varna they were or what prospects
there were of the fog lifting. They could only sit in cramped discomfort weighed down by the appalling responsibility to the Allied Cause which had been placed upon them.

After what seemed an eternity the fog appeared to grow gradually denser, then they realised that this was not actually the case but that darkness was falling; and with breaking hearts they knew that they were condemned to another night at sea.

The fact that their evening meal consisted of steaks cut from a freshly caught white dolphin would normally have provoked their interest; but this passed unnoticed until Rex afterwards examined the fin of the great fish and, having counted its rings, astonished them by remarking that it had been well over two hundred years old, and that some giants of the species were credibly reported to have disported themselves in the Black Sea for eight hundred years before being caught.

When morning came they felt like death from having spent the night huddled together in the one narrow cabin, but the fog had lifted somewhat. Grey wisps of it still obscured the horizon, but there was enough breeze for the fishermen to run up the mainsail.

By eight o’clock the last remnants of the accursed fog had been swept away, and under a blue sky they were lapping along through a slightly choppy sea. But they had been the best part of sixty miles from Varna when the fishing-smack had picked them up and the efforts of the Master had not reduced the distance by as much as half, so it was getting on for two o’clock when they landed at the Bulgarian port.

Another hour went in interviewing the immigration authorities and securing transit visas permitting them to go on as soon as possible to Turkey. They then hurried to the Harbour Hotel and made enquiries as to the quickest means of continuing their journey. When they had learned them it seemed that they were already faced with defeat.

It was Thursday the 19th, and the only passenger-carrying coaster plying between Varna and Istanbul left the former on Wednesdays and Saturdays. To have gone by train would have been equally futile, as the journey was, by comparison, even more roundabout than that from Constanta, necessitating a run inland of nearly one hundred and fifty miles to Tirnovo, then a corkscrew passage south through the Balkan Mountains and a further four hundred and fifty miles as the railway meandered through the south-eastern tip of Europe. It was in fact nearly seven hundred
miles by rail as compared with only one hundred and forty-six by sea.

Rex begged the manager and desk clerk, to whom they were talking, to find them a plane, but they clearly thought he was joking, and when persuaded of his seriousness assured him that aircraft rarely came to a little town like Varna.

Simon wanted to hire a car and attempt the three-hundred-mile run round the vast bay, but they were told that most of the coastal roads were little better than tracks and that such a trip would take at least three days.

Richard insisted that some ship or other must be leaving Varna for Istanbul before Saturday, and demanded that the manager should ring up the port authorities to find out. He proved correct. A Soviet cargo vessel was sailing at midnight that night.

It took them three hours to trace the ship’s Captain to a little waterside café. They had drinks with him, and after some haggling, through an interpreter, a sum was agreed for which he should take them with him.

The ship did not sail at midnight. It was a filthy tub in which the Captain was far from being the Master and the crew an ill-disciplined set of toughs.

Nearly mad with frustration, the three friends stayed up all night, hardly speaking and alternately tramping the deck or staring over the side as they waited for errant members of the crew. It was five o’clock in the morning before the last drunken Russian seaman was carried aboard and six-thirty before they were clear of the port. When at last the ship was at sea her passengers flopped, despairing and exhausted, onto the filthy bunks that they had been given.

They woke in the early afternoon and, having eaten an unappetising snack, held a grim council of war. It was the 20th of October, and at midnight the option would become merely a piece of waste paper. The ship was ploughing along at a steady fourteen knots an hour. It had been due to dock at Istanbul at eleven o’clock that morning, but the drunken Russian crew had cost them a good six hours. They could not hope to be in now before five in the afternoon. That left seven hours to explain their mission at the British Embassy, then get a decision taken in London and the requisite instructions telegraphed to Sir Reginald Kent.

Richard was still optimistic, but the other two, who knew much
more about cable delays, were of the opinion that the great coup would now misfire by a matter of hours.

Soon after they sighted Fort Kilia they anxiously watched the pilot come aboard. Then they passed Rumeli and entered the narrows of the Bosphorus. Impatiently they walked the deck, their eyes unseeing as they glided by the charming vistas of terraced gardens on either shore and the domed splendour of the old Dolmabatchi Palace, their minds concentrated solely on the flying moments, each one of which now brought them nearer to defeat.

They were at the gangway with their bags waiting for the ship to dock when, to their surprise, she dropped anchor in mid-channel. They then saw a large motor-boat full of uniformed men put off. A few minutes later the usual Customs Officials came on board accompanied by a squad of soldiers. The reason for this soon emerged. Turkey was not at war, but, owing to the war, in a state of advanced preparedness which was causing her to take maximum precautions; particularly with regard to Russia, whose designs she had ample reason to regard with apprehension. The military guard was for the purpose of making certain that no one left the ship unless they had been issued with special permits to do so.

Richard, Rex and Simon argued with the Turkish officials in vain. In no circumstances could the travellers be allowed to land until they had been fully vetted by the immigration authorities, and, as it was now after five o’clock, these would not be visiting the ship until the following morning.

‘Well, I guess this is the end,’ said Rex, as he at last turned miserably away, and they walked to the forward part of the deck.

‘Oh, God!’ muttered Richard. ‘Just to think of all those hundreds of Nazi aircraft we could have grounded if only we could get ashore!’

‘ ’Fraid we’d have missed the boat anyway.’ Simon endeavoured to soften the blow. ‘As I said earlier today, getting cipher cables through isn’t like pressing a button.’

Rex was staring at the shore. It was only two hundred yards away.

‘I could swim that in no time,’ he said suddenly. ‘Give me that option, Simon.’

‘Ner.’ Simon shook his head. ‘If I thought you had a dog’s chance, I would. But in broad daylight it would be flat, deliberate suicide; and I saw the Duke shot before my eyes. I’m not going
through that again to no purpose. If it was after dark it would be different.’

‘Come on, ante up,’ urged Rex. ‘After dark it’ll be too late for certain. We’d never get our message to London in three hours.’

‘No.’ Richard joined the opposition. ‘Simon’s right. You can see by the looks of these Turks that they hate the very guts of the Russians. I’ve no doubt they think we’re Russians too, and they would riddle you with bullets before you could swim a dozen yards. The Golden Fleece would be no good to anybody at the bottom of the Bosphorus.’

‘Okay,’ said Rex. ‘We’re sunk then! Jezz, it’s tough, though, when you think what we might have done to Hitler. If only we’d had just one more day!’

‘If only we’d been crossing the Pacific,’ Richard sighed, with an attempt at lightness, ‘we’d have made that extra day without knowing anything about it.’

‘What on earth d’you mean?’ Simon gave him a puzzled state.

‘Why, surely you remember the Jules Verne story
Round the World in Eighty Days?
The hero did it for a bet, and when he got back to London he thought he’d lost his money by a bare twelve hours; but he’d forgotten that when you cross the Pacific from West to East, once you’re over the Date Line you have made a day.’

‘What a grand dénouement,’ commented Rex. ‘The only snag is that we haven’t crossed the Pacific’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Simon, quickly fumbling in his inner pocket and producing the Golden Fleece. ‘We haven’t crossed the Pacific, but that’s given me an idea. Did any of you ever bother to look at the actual date of this option?’

‘You’re nuts,’ Rex shrugged. ‘It was completed by the Rumanian Prime Minister’s signature and handed to old von G. on the 21st September, so it must be up today, 20th of October.’

‘Wait!’ gasped Simon. ‘Wait! It wasn’t handed to von Geisenheim until half past ten at night, so if it is dated the 21st he would have lost nearly a whole day. My God! I’m right! I’m right! We’re going to win out after all! It is for thirty days as from
midnight
of 21st September. That means the option does not expire until midnight tomorrow.’

For a moment they were almost stunned at the thought of this last-minute reprieve from failure, then Rex drew his hand
across his brow and muttered: ‘Holy Jehosaphat! This beats all. Just lead me to a magnum!’