The Hunter From the Woods (9 page)

“I’m walking,” was the calm reply.

“
Walking
?” Medina pressed forward, his chest pushed out and his chin pulled in. “This isn’t a stadium! It isn’t a road! Tell him what this is, Mr. Kpanga!”

“It’s a
ship
,” said Enam Kpanga, but his attention had already returned to focusing the lights on the horizon in his binoculars. Michael thought Kpanga was awfully unconcerned about the fact a first mate had just taken an order from a second mate. The African wore a black suit and an open-collared indigo shirt. Kpanga’s flesh was the hue of purest ebony from the heart of the dark continent. He was thin and tall, about the same height as Michael. He had a cap of close-cropped hair with a widow’s peak. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles with round lenses, and Michael thought he looked more like a first-year law student than the first mate of a rust-gnawed freighter.

“Where were you walking to?” Medina inquired acidly. He grinned, which was almost his undoing. “Home to your momma?”

Michael Gallatin increased the intensity of his green eyes. He said nothing, his face placid. Medina’s grin vanished.

“Careful the way you look at me, man!” the second mate warned, which was nearly his second brush with disembowelment.

“Very strange, this is,” said Kpanga, lowering the binoculars. He had a melodic British accent tinged with the smooth rhythm of his tribal tongue. He cast a gaze at the wayward crewman. The
Sofia
’s lights sparked off his eyeglasses. “Return belowdecks, if you please.”

“We ought to make an example of him.” Medina didn’t quite know when to stop edging toward a fast and brutal reckoning.

“Return belowdecks, if you please,” Kpanga repeated, as if the second mate had not only never spoken but wasn’t even standing there.

Michael nodded. The African once more peered through the binoculars. Medina waited for a further provocation. Michael thought he could tear the Spaniard’s beard off in about three seconds. He looked toward the distant lights. Another freighter, most likely. Also headed for England? Before Medina could speak again, Michael turned away and went forward to the stairs he’d ascended from his little bunk in Hell.

Five

The Captain

It was a small movement. A small sound. A change in the thudding of waves against the hull. A quietening of the labored diesels.

Michael Gallatin sat up on his bunk.

Had he been asleep at all? Maybe for two hours. Everything was still semi-dark. A few other crewmen had felt the change in their sleep as well, and were groggily stirring. Someone spoke out in Polish, as if from a dream. A question that had no answer.

Michael’s heartbeat had quickened. He swung himself off the bunk and because he was still mostly dressed all he had to do was pull on his boots, his jacket and his woolen cap. Then he was up the stairway into the night.

A cold, stinging drizzle hit him in the face. He saw, first of all, that the lights of a ship were about five hundred meters off the port beam. The ship’s bow was aimed toward
Sofia
. Michael judged it was making maybe ten knots. A shrill alarm went off in him.
Sofia
was slowing nearly to a glide. He saw a signal lamp blinking up at the second ship’s wheelhouse. Sending morse code to
Sofia
. He took a moment to decipher it.

Stop your engines. We are overtaking.

“Damn it,” he breathed, and then he went to the stairs leading up along the side of the superstructure and raced to the wheelhouse at the top. At the locked door, he balled up his fist and started hammering.

The door opened and a startled-looking Enam Kpanga peered out. Raindrops flecked his glasses. He said, “What are you—”

Then he stopped speaking, because Michael shoved him back and walked into the low-lamped wheelhouse, where a Swede with a face like the business end of an axe was manning the helm. Before him, the wide rectangular windowglass was streaked with rain.

Medina was standing at the engine order telegraph, the brass instrument by which the bridge communicated speed changes to the engine room. Michael saw that the pointer was set to the
Ahead Two-Thirds
position instead of what would normally be
All-Ahead Standard
. Medina’s hand was on the pointer and was about to ring the next lowest engine speed,
Ahead One-Third
.

“Keep your speed up!” Michael commanded.

The moment was frozen. Rain pattered against the window’s glass.
Sofia
moved over a wave and down, then began to rise again. She moaned somewhere amidships.

“Seaman!” Kpanga had not shouted it, but nevertheless his voice carried absolute authority. “Get off the bridge!”

Michael turned to face him. “I want to see the captain.”

“Are you
insane
?”

“I said, I want to see the—”

A pistol’s barrel was placed against the back of his skull.

“Get out of here
now
,” said the Spaniard, “or I will blow your fucking head off.”

“My name is Michael Gallatin,” he said to Kpanga. “I’m an agent with the British Secret Service. Special Operations. Your German passenger is a weapons expert named Paul Wesshauser. He’s trying to get himself and his family to England and away from the Nazis. Obviously the Nazis don’t want that to happen. We believed a freighter was the safest way over. Their secret police were watching all the airports, civilian ship lines and train stations.” Loose ends, he thought grimly. Someone in the network had either been paid to talk or had his mouth loosened by the ugly end of a pair of pliers. “That ship is coming to take him, and I can tell you he doesn’t want to go. Neither do we want him to
be
taken.” He turned his head a fraction. “If you don’t put that gun down in three seconds, I’ll kill you.”

The pistol wavered.

“I’m counting,” Michael vowed, smelling fear.

“Put it down, Monsieur Medina,” said another voice, heavy with a French accent.

The pressure of the pistol against the back of Michael’s head went away.

Michael turned to the left, toward the voice. A figure emerged from a shadowed corridor at the back of the wheelhouse. It was a man of stocky, broadchested build and Napoleonic height, standing five-feet-six at most. He came forward into the dim glow of the yellow-shaded lamps. He was dressed not as the captain of the
Sofia
, but as her lowliest and most decrepit ordinary seaman. The front of his grimy once-white shirt was a nasty mural of coffee stains, grease smears, food spatters and other less definable artwork. His belly bulged over his canvas trousers, which in turn bagged around his stubby legs and were held up by a pair of vomit-green suspenders. His shoes were so scuffed it was nearly impossible to tell if they’d been brown or black; they were the washed-out hue of careless despair.

Captain Gustave Beauchene approached Michael and peered up into the other man’s face. Beauchene had a grizzled gray beard and heavy jowls, his cheeks pitted with the small round scars of smallpox. His eyes, sunken in wrinkles that made Michael think of cargo netting, were nearly the same gray as his beard. His hair, too, was gray and unkempt, ratty in front and hanging down over his ears and the back of his neck. Michael had already caught the noxious fumes of very strong body odor, and also…whiskey, of course. No, that was wrong. Brandy. After all, the captain was a Frenchman.

Beauchene reached out and took the pistol from Medina’s hand. Without hesitation he put the barrel against the center of Michael Gallatin’s forehead.

“I will give
you
three seconds,” he said, as a small red glow of fury burned deep in his eyes, “to convince me you’re not either a liar or a madman.”

Michael saw no need to waste time. “I was placed here to protect the Wesshausers if necessary. But mostly to watch the crew, just in case a member of the secret police got aboard. I know the histories of everyone here. You, Mr. Kpanga, are a very intelligent and ambitious man who did extremely well with his studies at the University of London. Medina, you broke your wife’s right arm in a fight two years ago and your brother-in-law swore to kill you. You wound up putting him in the hospital in Seville with a knife to the belly. And
you
, captain…well, I know you also. Want me to tell you about the Swede?”

“No,” said Beauchene.

Michael nodded. The less said about that child-molester at the helm, the better.

Beauchene handed the pistol back to Medina. Then, moving surprisingly fast for a man his size, he slapped Michael across the mouth with his right hand so hard the blood bloomed from Michael’s lower lip and for a few seconds tears of pain fogged his vision.

“How
dare
you,” said the captain, in a voice made of sharp-edged gravel. “How
dare
you bring this on my crew and on my ship. You
British
! You self-centered prigs! Playing your spy games! Fuck you and fuck all of you!” The spittle flew from his mouth. “I hope you will be very happy with the outcome of this! Monsieur Medina!”

“Sir!” said the Spaniard.

“All Stop.”

Medina moved toward the engine order telegraph.

“Don’t touch that,” Michael said.

“Oh, how he threatens!” Beauchene’s ugly mug twisted in an uglier grin. “And him without a gun! Go on, give the order!”

“You stop those engines,” Michael said, “and every man on this ship is dead.”

“Christ, this one
believes
in himself, doesn’t he? All right, my fine fucking fellow, how do you propose to kill every member of my crew?”

“I won’t.
You
will. By stopping those engines. You let that ship take the Wesshausers, and you’ll think that’s the end of it. But then the men on that ship will bring their machine guns and grenades and whatever else they have aboard, and they will begin murdering everyone here. Why? Because the Nazis want no international incident. They don’t want the British press or the press of any other country on earth to get wind that they’ve kidnapped a weapons expert who was trying to get
away
from them.
And
taken his family, as well.” Michael paused to wipe his lip with the back of his hand. The smell of his own blood, to him, filled up the wheelhouse.

“You know what they’ll do,” Michael continued, and now he cast his gaze around at Medina and Kpanga to draw them in. “They’ll kill everyone and then sink the
Sofia
. And I’m sure they didn’t come unprepared for that. The
Sofia
becomes another statistic. A freighter, lost in the North Sea. Who can say what happened? But I can promise you, there will be no one left alive to tell the tale. So, Captain Beauchene, you stop the engines and give the Wesshausers over, and you and I and every man on this ship are dead.”

No one spoke.

No one moved, but for the
Sofia
herself.

The rain had strengthened, and thrashed against the glass.

“
Madre de Dios
,” Medina whispered, his eyes huge above the black beard.

“Captain, sir!” It was a voice from a room along the shadowed corridor. Michael recognized a Russian accent. “We’re receiving a radio message!”

No one stopped Michael when he followed the captain, Kpanga and Medina back to the small radio room. The Russian-born radioman, a sallow long-jawed drink of brine, had his earphones resting around his neck and was tuning the dials on a slab of a radio with louvers in it that displayed the red heartbeat of its tubes.

Over a noise of static and tones that sounded like a half-drunk Scotsman playing a bagpipe as a scorched cat howled along, a firm and clipped voice from the radio’s speaker said, “Repeat: this is the German vessel
Javelin
, to the Norwegian freighter
Sofia
. Captain Manson Konnig requests you to follow his instruction. Stop engines and prepare to be boarded. Repeat: stop engines and prepare to be boarded.”

Then the static and tones increased in tumultuous noise and the radioman had to dial down the volume.

“Still jamming us,” he told Beauchene. “We can’t get anything out, sir.”

“
Merde
!” The captain smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand. “
Merde
!
Merde
! You can’t break it?”

“No, sir.”

Beauchene shot a glance of disgust at Michael. “You see what you’ve done? We can’t even send an SOS! We’re helpless out here!”

“Tell me about their ship.” Michael was addressing Enam Kpanga. “When did you first spot it?”

“Just after sundown. Through the binoculars it looks only like another merchant. Maybe one hundred and thirty meters in length. Wheelhouse toward the bow. Normal running lights. Two masts strung with cargo netting. The ship is riding high, so it’s not loaded down. It’s even been flying a Norwegian flag. We tried to hail it by radio and got no reply. Very strange, that was. It held its position for awhile off the portside stern, and then it picked up speed. We saw it drop the flag of Norway and raise a German banner. Right after that the jamming started.”