The Hunter From the Woods (10 page)

“Can you determine its speed?”

Kpanga adjusted his glasses. Was his hand trembling just a little bit? It was hard to tell. “If you’re asking if
Javelin
is faster than
Sofia
, I would say definitely yes. It caught up very quickly. We can make top speed of seven knots—”

“
Eight
,” the captain interrupted with a sneer. “Shows how little
you
know!”

“I’d say
Javelin
can make sixteen,” Kpanga said to Michael, his face as impassive as stone.

In layman’s terms, Michael thought, the German ship could run rings around this piece of wallowing wreckage.

The static and droning tones on the radio ebbed though they did not go away. The Russian dialed up the volume. A clipped voice said, “German vessel
Javelin
to Norwegian freighter
Sofia
. Captain Konnig has generously given you thirty minutes to comply with our request. Repeat: you have thirty minutes to comply with our request or severe action shall be taken.”

The jamming increased in volume once more, and again the Russian turned down the racket to spare everyone’s ears.

“Do you have guns aboard?” Michael asked anyone who could answer.

“Some in the storeroom,” Medina said. He looked pale and stunned. “Four or five rifles. A pistol or two. Mutiny insurance. Ammunition for everything.” He shook his head, defeated. “I don’t know.”

“Any machine guns?”

“I’ve got a Thompson in my quarters.” Beauchene motioned toward another closed door across the way. “I like to have my mutiny insurance under my bunk.”

“Good. You’re going to need it, I think.”

Beauchene’s eyes narrowed. “What’s your name? Gallatin, you said? Well, Monsieur Gallatin, you’re going to pay for this when we get out of it. Believe me. Monsieur Medina, order engines full ahead. And change course, thirty degrees to starboard. After ten minutes, change course…oh….make it eight degrees to port. Set up a zigzag every ten minutes afterward, but keep that damned ship in our wake.” The Spaniard was slow in responding. “Move
today
!” the captain growled.

Medina stumbled toward the helm and the engine order telegraph.

“Captain?” Kpanga asked. “Do you want me to—”

“I want you to shut your black hole,” came the reply. “Gallatin, let me get my Tommy and then you’re coming with me. We’re going to find some men who can handle firearms. Then I want to be introduced to this good German shit who’s put all our necks on the fucking guillotine.”

Six

Freighter Trash

For all his sourness and bluster, Gustave Beauchene was masterful at managing his crew. Michael stood at the back of the mess hall as the captain addressed his men in no-nonsense terms. Beauchene spelled it all out.
German weapons expert and family on board. Trying to get to England. A German ship with probably a Nazi captain now just a few hundred meters away, and the threat of violence to come. And not just the threat of violence, but the probability that the
Sofia
and her crew would be destroyed even if they bowed down and handed Herr Wesshauser over to the swastika swine.

“No one asked for this,” Beauchene told them as he walked back and forth, a little Napoleon in a dirty shirt and a yellow rainslicker with his hands on his hips. “You’re not being paid any more for it.” Michael watched him cast his hard-eyed gaze across his audience: the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Poles, the Spaniards, the French, the Dutch, the young Brit Billy Bowers and Dylan Custis the necklace-festooned Jamaican. Even the dull-witted Olaf Thorgrimsen was paying rapt attention like an Oxford student on exams day.

“You’re working men, not fighting men,” said the captain. “Well,
some
of you are.
Working
men, I mean. We’re here and there’s not much we can do about it.”

“We can get on the lifeboats and get away!” one of the Norwegians said. “Get off the ship! Can’t we?”

“And leave this beautiful bitch?” asked Beauchene, which brought a few harsh barks and bells of nervous laughter. “Oh, you could do that, very well.
Certainement
! But did you ever see the lifeboat that could stop a
bullet
? At least here you’ve got some steel to hide behind.
Rotten
steel, but there you have it.” He paced back and forth again. “Did you men know I used to be a baker? That’s right. A fucking honest-to-God
baker
. In the City of Light. My family business. Yes, laugh if you want to and I’ll cut your nuts off. I’m talking to
you
. In the blue shirt. What’s your job? Cock stretcher?” He turned his attention away from the giggling fool. “A
baker
,” he went on. “Throw everything into the mix, knead it, beat it, do whatever you want to do.
Pray
over the fucking thing. But nothing is ready until it passes through the fire.” He nodded, scanning their faces. “Gentlemen, whether we like it or not…we’re going to pass through some fire, very soon. I
hope
we won’t. But I know we will. Those Nazis…they don’t quit, they don’t give up. They’re not going to let a shipful of freighter trash stop them. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen, but when it starts…no one will blame the man who goes to his bunk. Hear that?
I
said it.” He swelled his chest out a little. Then he motioned toward the five bolt-action rifles and the two revolvers that lay on the table before him, along with boxes of ammunition. His Thompson submachine gun—the ‘Tommy gun’—was propped up in a corner. “We may have some univited guests. I need seven men who
won’t
go to their bunks. Seven men who can handle a weapon. And not just their own, with five-fingered Mary. Any takers?”

Michael watched. He had Medina’s revolver tucked in his waistband.

No one moved for a moment. Then a tall Norwegian with a tattoo on the back of his neck stood up and took one of the rifles. “Stand over there,” the captain told him.

Two more men, one Dutch and the other a Swede, took rifles. Billy Bowers stood up and chose one of the pistols. Olaf Thorgrimsen took the second pistol. A Spaniard picked up a rifle. Then the last rifle went to another Norwegian, a squat burly man with thick black eyebrows.

“Load up,” Beauchene told them. “Get out on the deck. Choose your positions and keep watch. Don’t shoot yourselves.”

As the men left the mess hall, the brown-haired and gray-eyed Billy Bowers glanced at Michael, his fellow Brit, and acknowledged him with a lift of the chin.

“That’s all. If you’ve got work to do, get to it. Breakfast is up in two hours.” Beauchene retrieved his Thompson and motioned Michael to follow.

They went to Wesshauser’s door. Beauchene slammed on it with the butt of his submachine gun. A noise to rouse the dead.

“My God! My God! What is it?” asked the gaunt, pallid man who peered out the door and fumbled with his eyeglasses.

“Your cruise is over, pussy,” said the captain.

Beauchene pushed in and Michael followed, feeling very ungentlemanly. He averted his gaze from Annaleisa Wesshauser, a striking-looking woman in her early forties with curly blonde hair and the aquamarine eyes of her daughter, as she sat in bed and tied her lavender-colored gown up to the throat.

“What’s this about?” Red swirls had surfaced on Paul Wesshauser’s cheeks. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of gray pajama bottoms. Behind his glasses his eyes were very dark and very angry. He had a thatch of brown hair that stuck up in spikes from its encounter with the pillow. If he was any thinner he would have fit through one of the cracks in the walls. But Michael was sure that a man desperately hiding himself and his family from the Nazis for several weeks before this trip could be arranged did lose some of his appetite for strudel.

“This is your Jesus,” Beauchane told the couple, motioning with a thumb toward Michael. “Praise him.”

Paul and Annaleisa looked at each other as if they’d been awakened to a nautical nuthouse.

“My name is Michael Gallatin,” said the man from London. “British Secret Service. I was sent to make sure your trip was…”

“Unexciting,” Beauchane supplied, as he sat down on a floral-printed chair with his submachine gun across his knees.

“Unopposed,” Michael corrected. “And unfortunately, that no longer is the case.”

“Momma?” It was Emil, coming in sleepy-eyed and with touselled brown hair nearly like his father’s. Behind him limped Marielle, wearing a long enveloping blue robe. When she saw Michael she jerked herself back out of the room as if the floor under her uneven feet was redhot.

“It’s all right,” Annaleisa said quietly, though Emil had by now seen the submachine gun. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”

Marielle’s face, her blonde hair falling about her shoulders, peered carefully around the doorjamb.

“The German ship
Javelin
has come to take you,” Michael said, standing in the center of the room. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

Paul regained his composure. A muscle worked in his jaw. “How did they find out?”

“Loose lips,” said the captain, “sink ships. True a thousand years ago, true today.”

“Torture probably had something to do with it,” Michael answered. “Or money. There were several people who knew. One may have been a double-agent. In any case, speculation about that will have to wait for the experts to backtrack the trail. Right now, there’s the
Jave
—”

“Captain! Excuse me, please!” Enam Kpanga had come into the room. He nodded at the Wesshausers before he focused his full attention on Beauchene. “Sir, the ship’s pulled up on the port side. They’re hailing you with a bullhorn.”

Beauchene simply stared at the African.

“Sir? Did you—”

“Get out of this room,” Beauchene said, standing up from his chair. “This is a
private
room. A
nice
room. Do you think people in this room want to
smell
you in here?”

Michael winced. He saw Kpanga swallow hard.

“Sir?” the African said, with a note of pleading in his voice. “I only wanted to—”

“Smell up this room,
oui
. You’ve done your job. Get out.”

Kpanga gave a look to Michael of forlorn indignation. His mouth opened as if he wished to say something, perhaps to make some explanation of the captain’s remarks. But no explanation could be made. Kpanga closed his mouth, straightened his back which had begun to hunch as if readying for the strike of a bullwhip, and strode quickly out of the room.

“You and me,” Beauchene told Michael. “Up on deck.” He braced the Thompson against his shoulder and without another word to the Wesshausers or their children he went into the hall.

“Wasn’t that a little harsh?” Michael asked as they walked.

“He’s a black nigger,” came the flat response. “Worse than that, he’s a college boy.”

The rain had again tapered to a nasty drizzle. A smear of faint gray light had begun to show to the east.
Javelin
was so close to the port side of
Sofia
the two ships were almost trading paint. Michael took the revolver from his waistband. The other crewmen with weapons were lined along the portside gunwale. They were facing a dozen black-garbed men, also wielding rifles and pistols, who were lined along
Javelin
’s starboard gunwale. A
Javelin
searchlight swung back and forth across the scene, stabbing the eyes.
Sofia
, still at full speed, shuddered over a wave and shards of white foam was flung up between the hulls. The sound of diesels was the muffled beat of wardrums.

“Captain of the
Sofia
!” called a voice over a bullhorn. “Show yourself!” There was a few seconds’ pause. “Captain of the
Sofia
! Show yourself!” That same request and pause was repeated over and over.

Michael had a good view of
Javelin
. It did, indeed, look like any ordinary freighter. Its mast and running lights illuminated coils of ropes, lifeboats, ventilation funnels, capstans, nettings, various machines and cables used in hoisting cargo and the like. Michael saw a figure in a black raincoat and a white captain’s cap standing at the railing up at the blue-lit wheelhouse. Just watching, casually examining the scene. Captain Manson Konnig, in the flesh?

“Captain of the
Sofia
! Show—”

Gustave Beauchene stepped forward and fired off a short burst from his Tommy that shattered the arrogant searchlight and instantly killed it.

Seven

In Sheep’s Clothing