The Hunter from the Woods

Sea

Chase

One

At Work By Midnight

He was a gentleman in search of a good piece of meat.

He was out for enjoyment this evening, strolling casually through the charming streets of Danzig, a busy harbor city on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It had once been known as Gdansk and was originally part of Poland, had a complicated political history between the rulership of Poland and Germany and was now, in this month of April in the year 1938, known as a “free city” with its own national anthem, constitution, government and even its own stamps and currency apart from the Polish standard. The population was ninety-eight percent German, and this was also reflected in its language.

As he walked along what was locally known as the Royal Road—so named because it was the procession path of visiting kings—he passed sights like Neptune’s Fountain at the center of the Long Market and the Golden Gate with its statues symbolizing Peace, Freedom, Wealth and Fame.

He enjoyed peace, he relished freedom, he didn’t really need wealth nor did he desire fame. But tonight he had to find the perfect chateaubriand.

The clerk at the very expensive Hotel Goldene Eiche had given him the name of the Restaurant Maximillian. Too far to walk? Not at all. Three miles was a nice stroll and the evening was cool, the city was lighting itself up for the night and there was a certain excitation de la vie in the air. So he’d set out, dressed in a dark blue Saville Row suit with a crisp white shirt and a plain-spoken black tie, neither walking too slowly nor striding too fast, for he always took pleasure in every moment.

He was twenty-eight years old and as fit, probably, as he would ever be. He was a large man, standing six-feet-two with a broad chest, narrow hips and long, lean legs. He had the look and smooth motion of a track-and-field athlete. He wore his thick black hair closely-trimmed, and from his darkly-handsome and rugged face his intense green eyes inspected the street-scenes he passed with genuine interest, consideration for the cast of characters involved, and not a little flash of humor at the chaos of what was called ‘civilization’.

His eyes also did not fail to note the bright red posters on some of the street corners proclaiming the future of the Nazi Party as the future of Germany.

But this was an evening for a good steak, a glass of wine and possibly some music later on. He did have a schedule, though. He had to be at work by midnight.

In the oak-walled quiet of the Restaurant Maximillian, he spoke German in ordering his chateaubriand rare and was informed by the waiter that it served two persons. The diner’s response was that he wouldn’t be eating quality steak for awhile, so please bring it on along with a bottle of Cabernet, waiter’s choice.

Sehr gut, sir.

The coat-check girl, a very willowy redhead with bee-stung lips, wandered over as he was drinking his initial glass of wine and engaged him in light conversation about was this his first time at the restaurant, where was he from, and so forth. It got to the point where she said she was free this evening after ten o’clock, and if he wished to come back for her she could show him a hot music club that would make him, as she put it, “itchy”.

He smiled and said thank you, but he had to be at work by midnight. What kind of work? she asked, a little dark of disappointment in her eyes.

He told her he was in the nautical trade, and then he wished her a pleasant evening and she went away.

After a leisurely dinner, he continued his stroll. Around the corner he discovered a tavern of orange-painted bricks that had been in operation, more or less, since 1788. In the dark-timbered, slightly-musty but quite pleasant confines he ordered from the barmaid a Tyskie pale lager. She was a personable and angelic-looking young woman with curly blond hair and eyes nearly the color of the lager. Her globes were absolutely huge north of her equator, and she didn’t mind making sure he got many good looks at the way they threatened to burst from her ribboned bodice. Then she leaned in close, smelling of peppermint and peaches, and confided in him that she thought all men were babies at heart, and that what all men truly—truly—desired was a nice pacifier to put into their mouths and suck on to their heart’s content. And what did he think about that? she asked with her red lips twisted to one side.

He said he didn’t really have an opinion on that subject, because he had to be at work by midnight.

What was his job? she asked, as she toyed with one of her ribbons.

The nautical trade, he told her, and then he finished his Tyskie and left.

The night was moving on. So was he. Two streets over, he entered a dimly-lit but well-attended music club and sat at a table to listen to a trio playing piano, muted trumpet and drums. He ordered a glass of ginger ale. He took the music in while staring at the twinkling multicolored lights that clung to the ceiling. After the third song he noted a man in a gray suit get up from a nearby table he shared with a woman and head toward an alcove on the far side of the bandstand. When the man had gone from the room, the woman got up from her seat and came directly and purposefully to his own table.

She was sleek and black-haired and wore a black dress that she’d been poured into. She wore a fashionable hat with a little fluff of lace descending over her forehead and left eye. She stared at him with her sea-green eyes as if she’d been searching for a good piece of meat, and here it was.

She asked him if he would be gentleman enough to save her from a very poor specimen of mankind, and while her escort was gone to the restroom she would be pleased and happy to leave this club and show him another place where one might get to know one much better than here.

He gave her a faint smile, sipped at his ginger ale, and told her he was flattered she’d chosen him as her potential savior, but he had to be at work by midnight and in fact he would be leaving in a few minutes. Also, he said, he wanted her to know her escort must have either come upon an occupied bathroom or suffered a false alarm because the man was even now returning to their table.

Therefore he did not get to tell her he was in the nautical trade.

He checked his wristwatch. It was time. He paid for his drink, left the club and began walking back to the Hotel Goldene Eiche. Again, his pace was neither hurried nor languid. In his room at the hotel, he thought of taking a shower and shaving but decided against both. Then he removed his necktie, his Saville Row suit and white shirt and took from the closet a stained and dirty brown canvas duffel bag. From the contents of the duffel bag he put on faded gray underwear and white worksocks. He put on a red plaid shirt with patches at both elbows. He put on a pair of baggy brown trousers that made a mockery of his fitness and was furthermore stained with the shadows of old grease. He laced up cracked and battered workboots. He pulled a brown woolen cap down on his head, and then shrugged into a canvas jacket that was missing three buttons and bore enough stitches to make Frankenstein jealous. His fine English wallet was replaced with a Polish travesty of cardboard and rubber bands. His equally fine Rolex wristwatch, last year’s model, went away in favor of a tarnished pocketwatch that was possibly new when the British charged from their trenches at the first battle of the Marne. His shaving razor was flecked with rust, his boar bristle toothbrush worn to a nub, his personal bar of soap made from pig’s fat. And smelled it.

He was nearly ready to go.

He left his suit and other belongings on the bed. Everything would be collected later, by someone else. There was no need to study himself in the mirror; he appeared no longer to be a gentleman, but was a scruffy-looking roughneck. Just as planned.

He tied up his duffel bag with his other sour-smelling work clothes in it and left the room. Crossing the Goldene Eiche’s famous lobby with its indoor oak tree and cream-colored sofas that had never hosted an uncreased trouser was interesting, because suddenly he no longer belonged in this rare air. A squat man wearing a bowtie—a house detective?—began striding after him, calling for him to please stop.

He didn’t.

Outside on the street, he asked the doorman to hail a cab for the harbor. He received a haughty glare until the Danzig currency in his fist spoke. Then there was the skittish cab driver to deal with, and again money changed owners. The cab pulled away, with the roughneck and his duffel bag on the back seat.

An instruction was given to stop well before the harbor entrance was reached. That instruction was explicitly followed. The roughneck swung his duffel bag over his shoulder and walked toward the harbor with the smell of Baltic salt, oil, dead fish and the metallic friction of cables and machinery in his nostrils.

Beyond the gate, worklights glowed aboard the dark shapes of moored freighters.

Figures moved about, walking through the beams of illumination. Hammers swung and sparks jumped. A crane engine growled, pulling up crates in a netting. Orders were shouted and re-shouted. Someone flicked a burning cigarette butt into the water like a shooting star. Ropes creaked as the sea moved beneath rust-streaked hulls, and trucks barked black fumes as they hauled flat trailers piled with more crates and stacks of burlap bags.

He stopped at the security hut to sign the detail sheet that was offered to him.

With the bleeding fountain pen he wrote Michael Gallatin, Ordinary Seaman.

Then he swung the duffel bag up over his shoulder again and he walked on in his battered boots toward Slip Number Four and the Norwegian diesel ship Sofia.

Two

Sailor’s Hands

When the last cargo of farm fertilizer in three hundred black oildrums and sixty crates of ball bearings had been loaded in the Sofia’s hold, red dawn was beginning to break. The huge double diesel engines throbbed and knocked, making the old ship vibrate like a tuning-fork and moan like a busted fiddle. Orders were shouted along the deck. Lines were cast off. Brown water stirred up from the muddy bottom by the twin props boiled at the stern. The ship, born in 1921, gave a small lurch as it left the pierside like an elderly dame startled from her nap. The one-hundred-and-fourteen-meter length of Sofia swayed back and forth as she searched for her balance. Her central wheelhouse sat atop an ugly stack of port-holed steel. Two masts spider-webbed with cables and nettings stood fore and aft. Ventilation funnels had been riveted to the deck in no apparent rhyme nor reason; it was the triumph of some Nordic ship designer’s descent into a bottle of aquavit. Everything topside was painted a vaguely-spoiled yellow, mottled with patches of orange rust. The hull was smoke-gray, except for more rust streaks that streamed down from the anchors at the pier-dented bow and clung just above the waterline like a strange species of ivy. The Sofia, an undignified and much-abused mistress of the sea, was rocked by the most innocent of waves and caused to cry out at her joints and rivets and bulkheads and deckboards as if she dreaded any touch of the man she had once loved.

The ship left the harbor in quiet shame.

In the mess hall belowdeck, Michael Gallatin was looking askance at a plate of fried potatoes swimming in oil. His scrambled eggs, likewise, were about to slide off the plate in a greasy foam and what passed for bacon appeared to be made from fat and brown rubber.

Thank God, he thought, for the memory of the chateaubriand.

At least the ship’s coffee was palatable. Not necessarily good, but strong enough to make the teeth ache and the gut clench. Colonel Vivian had warned him that the food might not be up to the standards of a sidewalk kidney pie in Soho, but it was for the best during the first few days of the voyage until Michael got his sea-legs and sea-stomach. Those tramp freighters roll like a whore with bedbugs, Vivian had told him in undelicate terms. Best to do your puking from an empty bag.

But breakfast was served, and Michael was hungry. He had to eat. The mess hall, even just past dawn, was full of cigarette smoke and men with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. Michael figured almost all of the forty-two crew were here, except for the first and second mates and a few other specialists on engine duty. The clatter and scrape of eating utensils on plates was a diabolic symphony. But the work had been hard and constant since midnight, and now that Sofia was underway—at about five knots per hour, it felt to him—and breakfast was piled up on the gray tables, the mood among the rough-hewn, rough-fleshed and rough-eyed men was definitely lighter.

He hadn’t really met anyone yet. He’d been assigned to a loading detail, but everyone was a stranger. He was sitting at a table with a wiry, wrinkled man of about fifty who could eat around his cigarette by shifting the stick from side to side in his mouth. The second occupant of his table was a stout fellow with sandy-brown hair who wore a sweat-stained blue workshirt and giggled to himself at every opportunity, and the third was a lean black man around thirty or so who had a shaved head and was missing the right half of his nose. It had been carved away to the rippled pink flesh. A very sharp razor at work, Michael thought as he tried one of the bacon strips. The black man wore a necklace of cowrie shells, another necklace of ebony beads and a third with some kind of hexagonal blue stone hanging from it. He had deeply-sunken eyes that looked at no one directly but seemed to be seeing a lot.

“Ah, ya!” boomed a voice behind Michael. “Here’s da sumabitch I wanna find!”

Michael turned around in his chair. Over him stood the monstrous, huge-shouldered, lantern-jawed man he’d heard called ‘Olaf’. They’d been on the same loading detail. Michael had already apologized for some infraction that had involved the passing back and forth of heavy crates, though he wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to make Olaf holler a curse and spit on the deck. Michael had been briefed and trained on all this, but the briefing book and the landlubber’s lessons went out the window when the hard, fast work began.

“I’m talkin’ to you!” Olaf said, as if Michael didn’t already know. The mess hall went silent. “You gonna sit there or I’m gonna pull you up?”

The man’s protruding brow was dappled with red. His dark brown eyes were also red-rimmed and as fiercely hot as volcanic stones. He had a dirty matting of brown hair with an untameable cowlick sticking up in back. He stood with his meathooks on his wide hips awaiting Michael’s decision.

Michael was tempted to return to his breakfast, but he reasoned he should stand.

“Now you listen!” A finger with a filthy nail jabbed his chest. “You don’t get in Olaf’s way! You don’t push Olaf! Eh? You don’t make Olaf look slow in front of nobody! Eh?”

“I already said I was—”

“You shuddup!” Olaf growled, with another painful finger jab. He looked Michael over from boots to cap. “You ain’t no sailor!” Michael said nothing. This was getting serious; who would have thought the dummy could see through him so easily?

“No sailor!” Olaf repeated. “I seen how you don’t know what you’re doin’! And them hands! They ain’t no sailor’s hands! These,” he said, thrusting his work-scarred and rope-burned palms into Michael’s face, “are sailor’s hands! So you gonna be tellin’ me, what real sailor you put out of a job by signin’ on here! Eh? What friend a’mine you put out on da pier, him with maybe a wife and three, four kids?” He gave a scowl that caused even the black man with the shaved-off nose to wince. “You ain’t no good! I take a breath a’ you, and you stink!”

Michael had no reply for this. He’d already gone one sorry too many.

Olaf smacked his left palm with his right fist. His mouth wore a wild grin. “Ah, I’m gonna teach you! Olaf’s gonna drop you, pretty fella. Olaf’s gonna fix that nose and close up them eyes. Olaf’s gonna stretch that neck and give you a new set a’ teeth! Olaf’s gonna—”

But what Olaf was going to do was interrupted by Michael hitting him in the jaw with his right fist as hard as he could let one fly.

Olaf went back on his heels and crashed over the next table and fell over two men who tried to get away but were caught under the toppling bulk. Then Olaf slid down their backs and fell to the sickly-green floor tiles, where he lay with blood on his mouth, his eyes twitching in their sockets and his fist still balled up but unthrown. He made a bubbling noise over his bitten lower lip, gave a thunderous fart from his massive ass, and then went to sleep like mother’s best baby.

Michael sat down to finish his breakfast. He’d nearly broken his knuckles on that slab of a jaw, but at least he was on his way to having sailor’s hands.

Somebody laughed and somebody hollered. Somebody gave a whistle of respect and somebody shouted out in a singsong language Michael had never heard before. Then the clatter of utensils on plates continued, cigarette smoke puffed into the air, and the black-bearded second mate burst into the mess hall with one of the cooks and wanted to know who the fuck was fighting in here.

No one said anything. The second mate, a Spaniard named Medina, stood staring down at the sleeping Olaf. He repeated: who the fuck was fighting in here?

“Hey, mon!” said the black man with the carved nose. He grinned wickedly, showing white teeth sharpened by chewing Jamaican sugarcane. “That big fool, he fall down and bust hisself open! Doan be no fightin’ goin’ on!”

Medina looked around the room for a second opinion, but suddenly everyone was very much enjoying their oily potatoes, greasy eggs and rubbery bacon. He reached out, grabbed a mug of coffee from another table and threw the liquid into Olaf’s face. The sleeping giant began to come around with a hitch and sputter. “You! And you! Get him into a shower! And don’t waste the water!” The two men Medina had pointed out, the very same two who’d nearly had their spines rearranged, grumbled around their cigarettes but they dragged Olaf out of the mess hall through the swinging door. Medina backed away as if retreating from a roomful of wild animals. “Nobody better fight!” he warned, just before he got out.

The ritual of face-feeding continued. Soon some of the crew would hit their bunks while the others had work detail. Michael was scheduled for six hours of sacktime. He looked across the table at the black man. “Thanks. I’m Michael Gallatin.” He offered his hand.

“Didn’t ask,” the man said. He stared coldly at the hand. “Doan want.”

He scraped his chair back, stood up and sauntered out of the mess hall with as near a rooster’s strut as Michael had ever seen.

Michael finished his coffee. Across the table, the grinning idiot giggled into empty space.

A navigator’s degree at a time, the Sofia was turning across the sunlit waves toward the Denmark passage to the North Sea.

Three

The Best Man

On the third morning at sea, as Sofia’s bow pushed through blue waves under the glare of the Baltic sun and gulls swooped the length of the ship, Michael got a look at the girl.

As his rank of Ordinary Seaman dictated, his was the most mundane and mind-numbing of jobs. His work had much to do with scrubbing away rust and refinishing the affected areas with sealant, primer and paint; there was a lot of rust, and there was a lot of paint. His work also involved a mop, a bucket, and a deck that seemed to go on forever. Therefore as he labored at these concerns he let himself mentally drift, yet not so much as to lose the necessary rhythm that got the job done.

His count of the crew’s nationalities: fifteen Norwegians, nine Swedes, five Poles, three Spaniards, three French, two Dutch, one Brit besides himself, one Russian, one African and one Jamaican. He’d known this before setting foot aboard Sofia the first night. He also had known their names and what histories could be discovered about them, no simple feat even for the British Secret Service.

The Jamaican’s name was Dylan Custis. Had been arrested in Kingston for having three wives at the same time. Later the authorities had found out about the counterfeit money he was creating in his cousin’s basement. Custis evidently had an artistic talent suitable to mimic a very reasonable five-pound banknote.

Olaf Thorgrimsen, from Trondheim, had been at sea since he was a thirteen-year-old engine boy on a steam freighter that probably made Sofia appear a beauty queen. His only brushes with the law had been several public brawls. Since the incident in the mess hall, Olaf had been in an infirmary bed and the scuttlebutt was that he was feigning double vision.

The other Brit was an eighteen-year-old Ordinary Seaman named Billy Bowers.

Michael had seen him at work and bunked near him, but the young man was quiet and kept to himself. Bowers had no criminal history, the only exceptional fact being that the young man had at fifteen evidently left his home in Colchester after the death of his mother.

Michael knew that the first mate was a twenty-six-year-old African named Enam Kpanga. No criminal record, but a sterling educational history and graduation with degrees in business and maritime law at the University of London.

The Sofia’s captain was an interesting case. A Frenchman named Gustave Beauchene, fifty-one years old, from Paris. Beauchene had gone to sea in his late twenties, for a French freighter line, and had drifted from company to company until at last he made captain for the Norwegian Blue Star line at age forty-nine. There was intimation in the report of a fondness for strong drink and a reputation for outbursts of vitriolic anger. Michael had not yet laid eyes on Captain Beauchene, nor had the good captain deigned to speak or otherwise meet with any member of the new sign-ons.

Michael had not wanted this assignment, and had tried to dodge it with as much fervor as he could summon. He didn’t care to be cooped up on a ship for so long, he’d told Colonel Vivian. It was against his nature. It did not require his specific talents, anyway. And besides, shouldn’t it be better handled by someone with actual nautical experience?

We send the best man we have at the moment, the colonel had told him in that infuriatingly calm, cool and collected way Vivian possessed. You’ve been trained to do what is needed. When it is needed. You are needed now. Please take those reports with you. I am to remind you that your briefing and training session begins promptly at eight o’clock in the morning aboard the freighter John Willis Scott, moored at drydock at Battersea.

You’ve got to be joking, Michael had said. You’ve secured a freighter for me?

I used to joke, Vivian had answered, already turning his attention to another document on his desk. But that was when I was a major and a hale and hearty boy.

Now, I fear, I’m all grown up. Good day, Michael, and good hunting.

And Michael Gallatin had answered, Let’s hope there’s no need for any hunting on this one.

Quite, said the colonel with one of his quick, tight smiles. He rarely showed his teeth anymore. Do enjoy your night in Danzig, the Hotel Goldene Eiche is very charming.

Michael’s paint brush moved back and forth, masking with dull yellow an area that had been scraped of rust and reprimed. But he knew, as everyone did, that rust was an enemy that never slept.

He was on his knees on the starboard deck, working on one of the series of ventilation funnels, when he noted the girl come through a doorway at the base of the amidship superstructure. He knew exactly who she was, though she was dressed against both the chill in the air and any eye that might turn in her direction. She was wearing a shapeless gray overcoat, buttoned to the throat, the collar turned up as well. She was wearing large circular-lensed sunglasses and a dark brown silk scarf over her hair and tied under her chin, rendering herself nearly faceless. Michael could tell her body was slim and she was young, but then again he already knew that Marielle Wesshauser had turned sixteen in the second week of March. He heard the hard clump of her left shoe against the deckboards, and quickly he glanced there though he already knew about her left leg being three inches shorter than the right. The clunky black left shoe, as ugly as the right one since orthopedic shoes are rarely lovely, had a built-up sole to compensate for the problem of balance. Did she catch the movement of his head and did her own eyes behind the sunglasses very quickly mark his notice? Possibly. But she walked away from him with her face downcast, the air slightly ruffling the mouse-colored scarf and the thick-soled shoe beating a halting rhythm on the deck.

She disappeared aft, possibly intending to make as many circuits of the ship as she could before either the impoverished strength of her leg gave out or the hammerblow noise of her condition beat down her willpower.

Michael saw a shadow fall over him.

He realized he should have smelled the medicinal odor of the infirmary in the air a few seconds before he did. He twisted around and there indeed stood Olaf Thorgrimsen, cleaner now than before, his hair combed back and damp from a fresh shower. The cowlick would not be controlled.

“There you,” said Olaf.

“Yes,” Michael answered, still on his knees. “Here I am.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, neither one moving on their own but the ship moving them with its slow roll against the sea.

Olaf reached into a pocket of his trousers and retrieved something wrapped in a piece of old Norwegian newspaper.

“Give you this,” Olaf grunted, and he held it out.

Michael put aside the paintbrush and took it. When he opened the piece of newsprint, he saw it contained an oatmeal-and-raisin cookie still warm from a platter in the mess hall. Like rust, the cooks never slept. “Thank you,” Michael said.

“No sailor,” Olaf told him. “Yet. But maybe you fighter. Eh?”

Michael didn’t know how he should respond. He simply nodded.

“Olaf likes fighter,” said Olaf. Then he turned away. His thick bulk shambled away from the hard sunlight into the shadow beneath a blue awning roped against the superstructure. Michael heard a door open and close.

He returned to his painting, ate the cookie, and in a few minutes heard the sound of Marielle Wesshauser coming back. Her pace had slowed. It appeared the left shoe was heavier than before, and it dragged at her leg like an anchor. She made her way around a lifeboat, negotiated passage between two ventilation funnels, may or may not have glanced quickly at him as she clumped past, avoided the gaze of a couple more ordinary seamen doing the same work as Michael, and then she went through the exact door by which she’d left the interior of the ship. She was going back to her cabin, the one she shared with her twelve-year-old brother Emil. Her father and mother were in the cabin across the hallway. There were two more passenger cabins on the hall. Michael knew that a V. Vivian had paid for them, but V. Vivian had not shown up for the voyage and so those cabins remained empty. Michael knew that Paul and Annaleisa Wesshauser had made arrangements for their food to be delivered to their cabins. Their names on the Sofia’s passenger list, a very short document, were Klaus and Lili Hendriks.

Michael finished his job. But there was always another one to do, and the advice he’d been given by the ex-master of the freighter John Willis Scott was to always find it and apply himself before he could be spotted dawdling and be assigned to something far worse. Therefore he went directly to another funnel and started the process of scraping away streamers of orange rust.

He knew his real job aboard this freighter. It was to carefully watch the crew, to listen to their conversations and gauge their movements, to fit in if at all possible, but to be very vigilant. To be as observant as a wolf on the hunt, so to speak. Much depended on it. Maybe many thousands of lives, as well.

Certainly four lives.

He thought he had things well under control so far. It would be a long voyage. They’d travelled about four hundred nautical miles already, but there were eight hundred and sixty-odd more yet to go. From Danzig to Dover, it was a journey of roughly ten to twelve days to two weeks, depending on the weather.

Michael suddenly had the desire to stand up from his kneeling position and gaze back across the sea they’d just crossed. It was untroubled but for the white foam of the freighter’s wake.

He recalled Colonel Vivian telling him that sometimes loose ends could come flying apart with remarkable and dangerous consequences. He recalled the colonel telling him to always be prepared for the unexpected.

Good advice, he thought.

“Hey, you! Get to work there!” It was the Spanish second mate, throwing his weight around. His voice was loud enough so that everyone could hear how a real man gave orders. Without comment or a change of expression, the lycanthrope from Russia knelt down and continued his labor.

Four

Vulcan At His Forge

Sofia entered the North Sea on the fifth night, having stopped at Copenhagen to take on another load of machine parts in crates and a couple of hundred hardwood logs.

Michael lay on his bunk in the semi-dark of the crew’s sleeping quarters and thought this must be a little preview of Hell. The smells of men who worked so hard for a living could never be completely eradicated by the paltry streams of water from the reluctant showerheads. A toilet had backed up and added its odiferous fumes. The pungent, nose-wrinkling stinks of oil and diesel fuel were always floating about; Michael imagined he could see them, like currents of green and yellow smoke moving in the sodden air. If some of these men snored like this at home, they would be smothered in their uneasy sleep by half-deaf wives. And there was also the problem, to him, of the closeness of people. He was unable to find a private space, unable to breathe a private breath. He longed for a run through the woods. He longed to be away from the odors of cigarette smoke and human foulness. But here he was and here he had to stay until this voyage was done. He cursed Colonel Valentine Vivian, and he lay on his back feeling the ship roll against the rougher North Sea waves and hearing her groan deep in her guts where the engines knocked and clattered every second of every day.

Everyone was growing a beard by now. Shaving was too much trouble. It seemed almost too much trouble to change clothes. Michael put an arm up over his eyes to block out the dirty lightbulb that always burned at the entrance to the showers and head. Occasionally someone belched, struggled up and went off to relieve themselves. He couldn’t help but hear their further struggles and blasts of escaping gas, thanks to the fried and oily food. The cooks knew a dozen ways to prepare kippers, but none of them worth eating. Michael wondered if the Sofia’s passengers had gone on a starvation diet, but then again they were probably getting better food for their money.

He thought that he could so easily let the wolf out in this miserable chamber, and it wanted to get out. It always wanted to get out. The change was not so much a matter of willing it to happen, but letting it happen. Opening the soul cage, is what he considered it.

A little less vigilance, and it would be there. Sometimes at night, when he could sleep, he awakened with a start to feel the wolf coming out. Just sliding out of him, first the rippling bands of hair and then the searing pain of bones reforming. The smell of his own animal in his nostrils. His mouth in agony, his gums starting to be ripped apart, the taste of blood from new fangs. He always slammed the soul cage and locked it before he went too far…but the wolf was always there, and it always yearned to break free.

Life aboard a freighter was not suitable for lycanthropes.

He had enough of the noise and the smells. He had to get out and find some fresh air and a quiet place. He eased out of the bunk and from his duffel bag put on his red plaid shirt, his paint-dappled trousers and his cracked boots. He shrugged into his dirty canvas jacket and went through the door that led to the stairway up.

The Sofia was illuminated by small lights atop the masts and running lights at bow and stern. The windows of the wheelhouse, atop the central superstructure, showed dim yellow light, as was suited for nighttime eyes. Waves drummed against the hull. The ship shivered, as if it felt the chill wind. Michael put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and breathed deeply and gratefully of clean salt air. He walked along the portside deck, trailing a shadow. The night was very dark beyond the wash of Sofia’s lamps. Michael had seen clouds closing in before sunset. Now there were no stars. But a fitful flare of lightning occasionally jumped within the clouds, and very distantly there was the sound of thunder.

He heard a clumping noise coming toward him, getting louder, and he realized at once that she too was having trouble sleeping. He kept his head down until they were almost together. Then he looked up into her face, and he smiled and said in German, “Hello.”

She shivered like the ship. Her head had also been lowered. She had her arms around herself. She was wearing the ugly mouse-colored overcoat and a gray head-scarf, which allowed just a glimpse of her blonde hair. Tonight, of course, there was no need for sunglasses. Her eyes were a cool shade of aquamarine under unplucked blonde brows. Her nose was small and sharp-tipped and her chin was adorned with a small dimple. She looked at him with something like horror in her face, and then she put her head down again and tried to get past as quickly as her weight of a left shoe would allow.

“May I walk with you?” Michael asked, before she could escape him.

“No,” she said, more of a whispered breath than a voice. “Please. Leave me alone.” She was trying to move faster, but she suddenly stumbled and had to catch her balance against one of the funnels.

“Don’t you want to see Vulcan at his forge?” Michael asked. She was still trying to get away, not daring to meet his gaze. He gently spoke her false name: “Kristen?”

The teenaged girl took two more staggering steps before she looked back over her shoulder.

“Come watch Vulcan at work,” he told her, standing against the gunwale. “Just for a moment.”

“I have to go,” Marielle said, but she wasn’t moving. Her eyes darted here and there; anywhere but to his own eyes. And then: “How do you know my name?”

“I suppose I heard someone mention it. From the passenger list.” He smiled again. “I think it’s a very pretty name.”

“I have to go,” she said again.

The right foot moved, but the heavy left foot remained where it was.

Lightning flared amid the clouds.

“There!” Michael said. “Vulcan at his forge. Did you see it?”

“No.”

“Keep watch, then. It’ll just be…there! Did you see it then?”

“It’s lightning,” she said, with a trace of irritation.

“It’s Vulcan,” he corrected. “Working at his forge. He’s the god of blacksmiths, you know. Ah, listen…hear the sound of his hammer on the anvil?”

“Thunder,” she muttered.

“Vulcan has an interesting history.” Michael made a half-turn so he could watch the display in the clouds but she could also still hear him. “He was the son of Jupiter and Juno. But Juno thought he was ugly. She cast the baby off the top of Mount Olympus into the sea. When he fell all that way, he was injured.”

There was no response for a little while. Then her quiet voice asked, “Injured? How?”

“He broke one of his legs,” said Michael. “It never developed properly. After that, he was always crippled. There he is again! Listen to that hammer!”

Marielle Wesshauser, the daughter of Paul and Annaleisa and sister to Emil, was silent.

At last she said, “I shouldn’t be talking to you. Father said not to talk to anyone.”

“He’s right. There are some men on this ship who are not very nice.”

She frowned at the deck. Michael saw her glance quickly up at him and then away again. “Are you nice?” she asked cautiously.

“If I said I was, would you believe I was telling you the truth?”

She had to think about that one for a moment.

Michael watched the lightning. The sound of thunder was nearer now; a storm was on the move. North Sea weather, particularly at the change of seasons, was never predictable. “You don’t have to talk, Kristen. I’ll talk. Can I tell you some more about Vulcan?” He turned to face her.

She kept her eyes averted. She shrugged beneath her overcoat.

“Vulcan,” said Michael, “sank down to the bottom of the sea. The sea-nymph Thetis found him and took him to her grotto, and she raised him as her son.” He paused, firming up the memory of this story from his mythology studies. “Vulcan had dolphins for playmates. He had all the sea as his world. Then one day he found what was left of a fisherman’s fire on the beach. Do you know what it was?”

She shook her head. Again, her eyes slid to his, lingered for just a few seconds, and then darted away.

“A single coal,” Michael continued. “Glowing red-hot. Well, he became fascinated with it. He became fascinated with fire, and with creating things from fire. He made rare and beautiful necklaces and bracelets out of sea stones and metals for his mother. He could make anything out of fire. It was his element to be used and adored. There!” That particular flash had been tinged with vivid electric-blue. “He’s working extra hard tonight.”

“But,” said Marielle. She hesitated, as if thinking she’d already said too much. “But,” she went on, “how did Vulcan get back up to the clouds? You said he was in the sea. How did he get back to the sky?”

“His real mother invited Thetis to a party on Mount Olympus. Those old Greek gods were always having parties. Then Juno saw the magnificent necklaces and bracelets of rare sea-metals and wanted to know who forged them, because she wanted some too. So she invited the son of Thetis to come up and make some for her. That’s how he got back to Mount Olympus, and after that Juno realized who he was.”

“And then he lived there with his real mother?” Her frown deepened. “Even though she didn’t like him?”

“He tricked her,” Michael said. “He built a fantastic metal chair for her that trapped her with its arms and wouldn’t let her go. Jupiter couldn’t even free her. Jupiter begged Vulcan to let Juno free. Finally Vulcan, because he had such a kind heart, let his mother go. And because of that, Jupiter told Juno to leave the boy alone, and then do you know what happened?”

“No. What?”

“Venus fell in love with Vulcan. The most beautiful of the goddesses, in love with him. And him only a crippled blacksmith. But Venus saw his heart, and that was what she loved. It was enough. After that, Vulcan went to work making arms and armor for all the heroes of Olympus, and he made thunderbolts for Jupiter. Look there! See? He just made a new one.”

She cocked her head to one side and studied him. A little shy smile came up and, like the quicksilver lightning, flashed away. “I think you’ve been on this ship too long.”

“True, very true,” he agreed. “My name is Michael Gallatin.” He offered his hand to her.

Now her heavy left shoe did move, scraping across the boards. She stepped back, as if she’d been presented not with a human hand but with the claw of an animal.

“I’m tame,” he told her. When I need to be, he thought.

But she was having none of it. Without looking at him again she turned away and struggled onward across the moving deck. Michael decided to let her go. It was a long voyage yet; there would be plenty of time.

Time for what? he asked himself. A shipboard romance with a sixteen-year-old girl? Certainly not! But watching her pulling herself along that first day, making herself faceless to hide from the world…

He knew what hiding from the world was all about, and he didn’t wish that on anyone. Particularly not on a girl with such beautiful eyes and a shy smile. Perhaps there had been sadness in that smile, too. He sighed. In any case, it was time for him to move along. The smell of advancing rain thickened the air.

He walked briskly toward the stern. And just past another lifeboat he came upon two figures standing together, peering through binoculars at ship’s lights off in the distance. Michael judged the second vessel to be possibly three or so miles away.

His sudden approach and footfalls, clumsy rather than careful, caused the two men to lower their glasses and turn toward him. One of the men was Medina, who screwed up his black-bearded face in a rictus of anger. “What do you think you’re doing, man? You’re not on duty! Why are you out of your bunk?”

“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.”

“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

Two seconds after the searchlight’s death, a rifle was fired from Javelin. A bullet whacked the gunwale in front of Beauchene. Someone else on Sofia pulled the trigger. A bullet sang off Javelin’s superstructure. Then the shooting started overlapping each other, echoing between the ships. A porthole on Sofia was smashed. Everyone crouched down behind whatever cover they could find. A bullet zipped past Michael’s left shoulder as he knelt behind the gunwale. Beauchene’s Thompson chattered and bullets beat against steel.

Several shots rang out fast upon each other, and there came a cry of pain from one of Sofia’s crew. Michael got off two bullets at a man in a black rainslicker and cap who scurried up a stairway. He saw the man clutch at his left thigh. Bullets slammed into the gunwale before Michael, causing him to duck his head.

Suddenly from amidships on Javelin there was the noise of a bolt going back.

A belt-fed machine gun began to speak, its tone deadly. Bullets bit into Sofia’s deck, ricocheted off a capstan and pocked holes through a lifeboat. Michael lifted his head and saw the machine gun and its team up on a metal-shielded platform that a few moments before had been camouflaged with a gray canvas tarp. The gunner swivelled his weapon back and forth, spraying bullets across Sofia. Michael got off two more shots and saw sparks fly off the metal shield. Then the machine gun came hunting for him and nearly chewed through the gunwale in its enthusiasm.

More of Sofia’s bullets banged into the metal shield. The gunners shifted targets and fired at the annoying hornet’s nest. Michael squeezed the rest of his bullets off and quickly reloaded. A high-pitched klaxon alarm suddenly began, ear-cracking in intensity.

It was coming from an electric whistle atop the superstructure. Javelin picked up speed and began to move away, changing course to port. The firing kept on, even as the two ships widened their distance.

At last, there was no use in shooting because the range was too far.

Michael stood up. Gunsmoke still whirled in the air. He watched Javelin hurry across the gray waves. “Who’s hit?” he called, and Olaf shouted back that it was the Dutchman, shot through the right wrist. “We held them off!” Gustave Beauchane was on his feet but he was staggering with shock. “We held them off! Mon Dieu, nous l’avons fait!” Then he looked to one side and his giddy grin faded. He saw the Spaniard lying a few feet away with the top of his head blown away and glistening bits of brain laid out upon the deckboards.

His eyes narrowed, Michael was watching Javelin continue to move away at about ten knots. He saw activity at the stern. A dark shape was rising from the deck. Something covered with another tarpaulin. He wondered if an electric winch was at work.

There was similar activity toward the bow. Something rose up on a platform to a height just above the gunwale. Men moved about in trained and deliberate order. The tarps were removed. Michael realized with a start that he was looking at the steel gun shields and the barrels of two five-inch cannons that had been artfully hidden below the deck.

Javelin was not a freighter. It was a warship.

A wolf, he thought. Dressed in sheep’s clothing.

As he stared across the waves in what for him was nearly shock, Michael saw Javelin swing into a broadside position.

“Christ!” Billy Bowers said, standing a few feet away. He shouted the next: “They’ve got big guns!”

The forward cannon fired with a gout of smoke. There was a thunderclap and a waterspout rose up directly in front of Sofia’s bow. The freighter trembled in a sharp turn to starboard. There was the noise of everything loose crashing together and men lost their footing on the rainslick deck.

The cannon toward the stern fired. Hanging onto the gunwale, Michael felt the shell’s impact like a blow to the belly. Sofia gave a wounded cry. She’d been hit up near the bow. The forward cannon fired a second time. Michael heard the air sizzle as the shell passed just over the ship, and a waterspout shot up to starboard. Once more the stern gun spoke, and again Sofia was shaken by a hit. The ship was zigzagging violently; either the Swede or Medina was putting his back to the wheel.

A shell from the forward cannon punched through the superstructure. Portholes exploded and steel crumpled. “Get down! Get down!” someone was shouting, though it was hardly necessary; men were trying to fold themselves into smaller and smaller targets.

Except for three. Michael remained standing, so did Billy, and Gustave Beauchene aimed his Thompson at the now-distant Javelin and opened fire as he shouted blue curses into the rain. The warship’s guns fired almost in unison. Sofia lurched, struck in two places. A blaze had broken out toward the bow, the flames leaping up from the deck. Another shell crashed into the superstructure, dangerously close to the wheelhouse. The freighter veered again to starboard, trying desperately to escape the punishment.

“Put out that fire!” Beauchene shouted to his crew, and then he staggered forward across the pitching deck to do it himself.

A shell hit the side of Sofia just aft of where Michael was standing. The impact lifted him up and threw him to the boards. The sound of distressed steel screeched in his ears. He lay dazed for a few seconds, feeling the wolf wanting to burst from its soul cage.

When he reached up for the hand that reached for him, he thought his own fingers might already be hooking into claws. But he was wrong.

Billy pulled him up. “You all right?”

Michael nodded. Were his ears bleeding? No.

Another shell struck toward the stern and Sofia shivered in agony. Then the rain began falling in sheets. Visibility was drastically cut; Michael could no longer see the Javelin through the gray curtains. Whether the lack of visibility affected the range-finders or not, he didn’t know, but the guns had ceased firing.

“Damn,” Billy said. Michael saw that his eyes were wide and his face bleached. Rain dripped from his chin. He was a kid trying to play a man’s part. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say, and then he lurched forward and threw up over the side.

A group of men were fighting the blaze and beating it down as Beauchene hollered and raged. Extinguishers sprayed. The flames sank away, and in a moment only black smoke curled up into the rain.

Michael stood over the body of the dead Spaniard. Several other crewmen, including Olaf Thorgrimsen and Dylan Custis, were silently staring down at the carnage. The presence of violent death among a member of any tribe, Michael knew, had the effect of piercing the hardest heart. Rain slashed across the dead man’s face and open eyes. “Would someone find a canvas?” Michael asked, and Olaf immediately trudged off to secure one.

The captain appeared on the scene, his hair plastered down and face smudged with smoke. He pushed at the brains with the toe of his shoe. “Somebody get that up!” he ordered. No one moved.

Then someone did come forward.

He bent down. A pair of black hands scooped up the essence of a man, and then Enam Kpanga walked to the gunwale and dropped his burden into the sea. When he turned again toward the ship, his face was devoid of all emotion and his eyes were unknowable beyond the rain-wet glasses. He wiped his gory hands along the sides of his black trousers, and then he passed on by Michael and through the gathering of men like a silent spirit.

“Wrap him up,” Beauchene said when Olaf returned with the canvas. “Anybody who wants to say something, say it now. I didn’t know him. When you’re done, put him over. Somebody pick up his rifle and shells. Comprenez?” He swung his gaze upon Michael. “I need you,” he said, “to get up to the wheelhouse. Tell Medina I said to keep the engines at full speed. Tell him I said to come back to course two-four-zero. Go!” He may well have been urging himself onward, for he hurried off with a heavy-set gray-bearded man, one of the two engineers.

Michael climbed the stairs to the wheelhouse. The repugnant but obviously capable Swede was still at the helm. Rain whipped against the windshield. Though dawn had broken, visibility was limited only to the foam-streaked gray waves twenty meters beyond Sofia’s bow. Medina sprawled in a brown leather chair with his hands to his face. “Get on duty!” Michael snapped at him, and he relayed Beauchene’s commands.

Medina’s eyes had sunken. He’d aged ten years in the last thirty minutes. “We’re all going to die,” he said.

Michael put his hand on the revolver’s grip in his waistband. “Give those orders or you’ll go first.”

The orders were given and carried out. Sofia, a tougher lady than she appeared, slowly swung back on her course for England.

“Mr. Medina!” It was the Russian radio operator, calling from his station. “Message for the captain!”

Michael didn’t wait for the second mate to respond. He walked back to the radio room. The bizarre noise of static, bagpipe drone and cat squall was pulsing from the speaker.

Michael asked in Russian, “Still jamming?”

The radioman looked at him in surprise. He was smoking a cigarette, and now he blew smoke through both nostrils. He gave a faint smile and said, also in Russian, “Jamming, yes. They drop the interference a little to send messages and receive from us, then they power it up again. A noise generator. Very wicked device, this one.” He stared at Michael with new respect. “What’s your home?”

“I was born in St. Petersburg.”

“Ah!” He tapped his heart. “Stalingrad. Well, it was Tsaritsyn when I was born. Hey, you speak good English!”

“You also.”

“Yes, we don’t waste our Russian on those with inferior ears, huh?” He grinned and reached over to a shelf that held tubes, wires, other radio parts and various tools of his trade. He flipped open a small leather case and offered Michael a hand-rolled cigarette.

Michael said, “Thank you,” as he accepted it. Not because he planned to smoke it, but because it was a comrade’s gift.

The jamming noise quietened, if only enough for that clipped voice to come through: “From the German vessel Javelin to the Norwegian freighter Sofia. Repeating our message. Captain Manson Konnig requests a meeting between brothers of the sea. He regrets your escalation of violence. Captain Konnig requests that you allow him to board your fine ship at your earliest invitation. Captain Konnig will arrive in an unarmed motor launch, with only the necessary crew. He will bravely and resolutely board your ship alone and unarmed. Is this agreeable to the captain of the Sofia?”

Michael tapped a finger against his chin.

The jamming was still at a lower volume. They were waiting.

Michael was about to do something that would get him hanged in a naval trial a hundred times over. But as far as he was concerned, and with the lives of the Wesshausers in the balance, at this moment he was in charge.

“Tell them to come ahead,” Michael directed.

“I can’t do that,” the radioman said, still in Russian. “I know you’re a big man here, but you don’t have the authority.” He let his gaze pass over the revolver. “Unless you force the issue.”

“All right.” Michael drew the weapon and held it between himself and the radioman. “Tell them to come ahead. I presume they’re still off our portside. Tell them we’ll treat Captain Konnig fairly. But tell them we’ve set up our own machine guns and if there’s any hint of trouble we’ll blow that launch to splinters. And tell them we’re not cutting our speed. Go on.”

The radioman sent the message. His German was not excellent, but it was very good.

There was a pause of maybe two minutes, during which the jamming noise increased. Then the clipped voice came back through the aural onslaught: “Agreed.”

The static and pulsing noises swelled louder. The radioman again had to dial down the volume.

“On their way,” he said, with the ironic fatalism of a true-born Russian.

Eight

The Mellow Moment

“You did what?”

Michael faced Captain Beauchene in the hallway outside the radio room and told him again. It was about twenty minutes after the meeting had been accepted, and Beauchene had just come to the bridge from a variety of tasks designed to keep Sofia afloat and the men from casting their lives to the lifeboats.

After the second telling, the captain stared at the floor. Rain dripped steadily from his yellow slicker. “We’re not reducing our speed,” he said.

“I told them that.”

“You had no right.”

“I want to see what we’re dealing with.”

“Oui, and what do they get to see?” Beauchene glared into Michael’s eyes. “That we have a few rifles and pistols to use against their fucking cannons? Well, they already know that, don’t they? Merde, what a mess!”

“We might get some idea how to clean it up by meeting Konnig.”

“You say.”

“Yes,” Michael answered calmly. “I do say.”

Beauchene held Michael’s gaze a few seconds longer. Then he shook his head and ran a hand through his rain-soaked hair. With a weary sigh, he said, “Come in and get a drink.”

Michael followed him through a door on the other side of the hallway. Beauchene’s cabin had a porthole and would have a nice view of the sea when the weather wasn’t so closed-in. That was the best that could be said for it. There was a bunk, a desk, two chairs in need of reupholstering, a tatty green throwrug, a floorlamp with a crooked shade that had a cartoon of marching tin soldiers upon it like something taken from a child’s playroom, and another lamp on the desk. Newspapers and magazines were piled around. There was a shelf of a few sad-looking books. It was obvious the captain ate alone and sometimes didn’t finish his meals, because the plates and leftovers were in plain sight. The cabin had the musty dirty-socks smell of a cheap hotel room, uncleaned for many a night. There were no pictures on the pine-panelled walls. No excuse was made. Beauchene closed the door and rested his Thompson gun in a corner. He sat behind the desk, opened a lower drawer and brought out a half-full bottle of brandy and a single glass. The glass, Michael noted, had a brown crust of dried brandy sticking to its bottom and was mottled with greasy fingerprints. Beauchene poured liquor into the nasty glass and offered it to Michael, who took it without hesitation because it was not the worst thing he’d ever drunk from.

Beauchene swigged from the bottle. “Five men wounded and two dead,” he said as the fire descended. “We were lucky there. Next time not so much. Some electrical cable damage aft. The engineers are working on it. No hull damage, thank God. No rudder or engine damage.” He drank again. “A shell caused some havoc in one of the staterooms. Not theirs or the children’s. My worst problem is figuring out how to feed my crew. Most of the crockery in the galley broke when we started slinging ourself all around like a maniac with an ass-itch. Got a cook with a broken arm, too. The doctor doesn’t need his heroin today, he’ll patch everyone up. Aren’t you drinking?”

Michael took a sip and managed his initial reaction. It was not exactly France’s finest.

“Sit while you can,” Beauchene suggested, and Michael took the better of the two bad chairs. “There you go.” Beauchene was speaking not to Michael but to the bottle. It was a croon of appreciation, or perhaps dependency. Michael thought that one man’s heroin was another man’s brandy. “Ah, oui!” Beauchene took another drink and closed his eyes. He leaned back in his chair. “Le moment mûr,” he said.

Michael knew what that meant: The mellow moment.

“Haven’t had many of those?” Michael asked. “Except from a bottle?”

“Not many, thank you for asking.” The captain’s eyes remained shut. Then they suddenly opened and the red glare had returned. “Who the fuck are you? Or, rather…who the fuck do you think you are? Receiving my radio messages and giving orders? I could shoot you for either one of those!”

“And then,” Michael said easily, as he sipped the mixture of pinesap and hot glue, “you’d have one less gunman.”

“One less pain in my ass, you mean. I ought to forget about the shooting and knock your brains out.” That statement caused him to frown and stare again into the bottle. His swig this time was a long swallow of needful thirst. “Damn, what a day,” he said.

Michael had to ask the question. “Why do you hate him?”

“Him? Him who?”

“You know.”

Beauchene grunted. “I told you. He’s a black nigger and he’s a college boy. They put him here to ride my back. Imagine that! After all these years, a nigger on my back! And not just any one, but a college boy! Oh, they’ve got big plans for him, you can count on that.” He leaned forward and planted his elbows on the desktop. “They put him on me to get experience. That’s what they said. To get the actual experience of seamanship. But you know…you know…that’s not all of it. Non! They want him watching me. Taking notes. Judging me, for any error. Because of my past mistakes, you see. A few errors. A few scraped hulls and mishandled cargo. Always the captain’s fault, oui? And now look what you’ve gotten me into! If we get out of this, how will I have a job?” Another swig of deadly brandy went down his pipe. “Two men are never going home. Do you get that? And how many more will never be going home? Eh? So how will Captain Gustave Beauchene ever have a job after this?” He abruptly slammed the bottom of the bottle down on the desk. “Answer me!” he shouted, his face contorted with pure rage.

Michael was very careful in his reply. “When we get out of this, the British Secret Service will arrange a job for you with any British merchant line you please to approach. I can promise that.”

“Oh, can you? Promise me a job sailing a desk through a sea of papers? Or perhaps you can get me a job in a bakery? Making crumpets and little tea-cakes for fags with umbrellas?”

It struck Michael then. Gustave Beauchene bore a hatred not only for Eman Kpanga, but for the entire world.

Beauchene was very intelligent. Michael knew the man must have seen some realization in his face, because the captain smiled grimly and said, “You think you know me, is that it? From your little histories and spy papers? Did you know, then, that I was the third generation of my family’s bakery in Paris? That this was to be my continuation of the very profitable Beauchene family business? Oh, yes! When I wasn’t sailing on the Seine, I was busy doing my part to carry forth the tradition. The great Beauchene tradition!” He said it as if it were something dangerous.

He picked up his bottle and stood up and peered out the porthole at the gray banners of rain. The sea had flattened, the waves beaten down by falling water.

“Then,” he said, “I met a woman.” Something in his voice changed; it deepened, and went dry. “A very beautiful and gracious woman. A woman far above my league. Yet she called to me. And I answered, yes I did. This woman…what can I say?” He put the bottle to his lips but did not drink, and so lowered it again. A sigh came out of him that might have been a whirlwind made small and private. “We were married,” he went on. “And she wanted things. Needed things. Those beautiful and expensive things a beautiful woman needs. Well… I had to make more money for her, didn’t I? I had to give her those things. To keep her, you see? Because a woman like that…if you lose her…you will hate yourself every day as long as you shall live. So I began gambling. More and more. It became a need of my own. I won some, oui, but in the end…you know, the house always wins.”

Beauchene was quiet for awhile. Quiet also was Michael Gallatin.

“The house,” Beauchene said, “took my family’s business. And then… I learned about all the other men. Just by accident, the first one. Then… I began watching, and following her. There were so many others. It must have been a thrilling thing for her.

“And I thought…of course a beautiful woman such as she would never be satisfied just with one man. Certainly not just with me. Well, look at me! And I was better then, but I was on the downward slide. Without money…how could you keep a woman like that?

“And then…and then… I followed her to a hotel. I followed her upstairs. To a room. I let her go in. She walked as a woman does to meet a favored lover. As she used to walk toward me. And then I waited for awhile, and I kicked the door in.”

Again the bottle went to his lips. Again it was lowered. Strong drink was not strong enough.

“There she was,” said Beauchene, as he peered out the porthole at the rainy gray world. “In the bed. Held in those black arms. And both of them looked at me, as if I was nothing. She had no shame. I think she must have known I was following her, because she’d been expecting me. Maybe that was part of the thrill, too. She smiled, just a little bit. Have you ever realized, Monsieur Gallatin, how deadly a smile can be?”

The question cut like a terrible blade.

“Oh,” Beauchene said softly, “I loved her more than life.”

Michael couldn’t see the man’s face. He didn’t want to see it.

“And furthermore,” Beauchene said in a voice strained with old agony still raw, “what would the fates decree, but to someday make me the master of a ship that bears her name?”

He turned toward Michael. Something of the rainy gray world was in his eyes. “You’re thinking now how much hate is in me. Yes, you’re right. I hate Caucasians, Orientals, Africans, Brits, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Russians and all the rest of them. I hate Frenchmen and I hate French women. I hate the tall, the short, the plain and the beautiful. I hate those who frown and those who smile. I hate the lucky in love and the unlucky in life. And most of all, Monsieur Gallatin, most of all… I hate—”

There was a knock at the door. “Captain?” It was the young African.

“Most of all, I hate men with green eyes,” Beauchene said, finishing his litany. He aimed his mouth at the door. “What do you want?”

“Sir…a motor launch is approaching on the port beam. Its signal lamp is asking us to hold our fire.”

Beauchene tilted the bottle to his lips and killed it. “Lower the ladder. One man should come aboard, and one man only. When he gets on deck, frisk him for weapons and blindfold him. Take him to the mess hall. And tell everyone my order is: no firing upon the launch or the man. Understand that?”

“Yes sir.” Kpanga went away.

“All right, then.” Beauchene came around the desk and picked up his Thompson.

He reloaded it with a fresh clip. “Don’t worry,” he told Michael, who had begun to worry. “I’ll be as sweet as cream cheese. You ready?”

Michael was.

They left the cabin to go meet their visitor.

Nine

The Javelin’s Master

The man standing in the mess hall had been blindfolded with a piece of black cloth. Enam Kpanga, Olaf Thorgrimsen and Billy Bowers were with him when Michael and Beauchene arrived. Olaf, brandishing his pistol, was walking around and around the Javelin’s captain, as if to examine him from all angles. Billy stood at the door, his eyes dark from lack of sleep.

“May I remove my blindfold?” Manson Konnig asked in English with a crisp German accent. His voice betrayed no emotion, and not a half-quaver of fear.

“Oui,” said Beauchene.

Konnig reached up long-fingered hands, removed his perfectly-white captain’s cap with its high top and spread-winged eagle insignia above the Nazi symbol, and then took off the blindfold. He had reddish-blonde hair, trimmed short on the sides but thick on top, and a neat mustache and goatee more on the red side. He was wearing a long black raincoat over his uniform. His boots looked to have been recently painted with glossy ebony. He put the blindfold in a pocket of his coat and returned the cap to his head. Then he adjusted it at a slight, jaunty angle.

The man’s cautious dark brown eyes regarded first Beauchene and then Michael.

“Captain?” he asked, and offered his hand to the lycanthrope.

“I’m the master of this ship,” said Beauchene, his eyelids at half-mast.

“Ah! Yes!” Konnig moved his hand toward Beauchene, but it was not accepted.

“Well,” said the Javelin’s master, as he closed his hand and dropped it to his side, “pardon me. I was expecting a captain, not a garbageman.”

Beauchene smiled thinly. He kept his eyes on the Nazi. “You two men can leave. Wait outside. Kpanga, you stay.”

“Oh, dear,” said Konnig. “Must we have that in the room?”

“He stays.”

Billy and Olaf left. Michael pulled a chair over and sat down, interested to watch this encounter play out and also to examine Konnig. The man was tall and slender, very fit-looking, and about thirty-five years old. He had a long aristocratic nose with the required pinched nostrils. His chin was square, his teeth well-polished, his demeanor that of German royalty slumming with the fieldhands. His smile was a little oily.

“Would you please not wave that weapon around?” Konnig was referring to the Thompson. “I believe you’ve already committed an act of war with it, by destroying my searchlight.”

“Your searchlight hurt my eyes.”

Konnig grunted softly. He put his hands behind his back and locked the fingers. “I’m detecting here a certain level of animosity.”

“That may be because you killed two of my crew.”

“Really? And how many of your crew are left?”

“Enough to count.”

“Count for what? More coffins?”

“You worry about coffins for your own crew.”

“Oh, I surely will!” Konnig began to stroll around the room, looking here and there. “You did kill one of ours, by the way. A young sailor from Hamburg with a wife and two daughters. Shot right through the lungs. Died just before I left the ship. Does that make you proud?”

“It makes me wish more of my men had aimed better.”

“You’re harsh!” Konnig said with a small wicked grin. “A Frenchman from…where?”

“France.”

“And what about you?” Konnig turned his attention to Michael. “Who and what are you?”

“I’m a man in a chair,” said Michael.

“No, you’re a man in a chair who will be dead before this day is done,” Konnig answered. He was no longer grinning. “As all of you will be dead, if you refuse to turn your passengers over.” He showed his palms. “Now listen! What is to be gained by a show of resistance? Nothing, in the long run. We all know that.” He motioned toward Kpanga. “Even that one knows it. Captain, why do you wish your crew to be killed? And for a few people you really have no interest in? What should it matter to you and to your crew what becomes of those people?”

“Captain Beauchene,” said Michael, “knows you’ll kill everyone on board and sink this ship as soon as you get them. That’s why it matters.”

“Wrong!” Konnig stabbed a finger at him. “I am offering this: we receive the Wesshausers, and then we remove your crew. Yes, we do sink this freighter, but… My God, isn’t she already half-sunk? Continuing on…we transport you, Captain Beauchene, your officers and your crew to Germany, where we will offer you lodging, food and all possible care. We’re not monsters, sir! We just want what is ours.”

“Lodging?” Beauchene’s eyebrows had gone up. “For how fucking long?”

“Until,” said Konnig, with a shrug, “we say it is in our interest to send you home. Now…that might be weeks, months, or years. We don’t know the future. Who does?”

“Your big-mouthed Nazi boss seems to.”

“Well, he’s special,” Konnig admitted. “One of a kind.”

“We’re not giving you the Wesshausers,” said Michael.

“Pardon me!” Konnig frowned. “Who’s the captain here? The dead man in the chair or the French garbageman?”

Beauchene laughed. It was an evil sound.

He walked purposefully toward Michael. With the remnant of that twisted laugh on his face, he wrenched the revolver from Michael’s waistband. He cocked it, and then he turned and walked straight toward Manson Konnig, who blinked furiously and took a backward step.

Beauchene was faster. He put the revolver’s barrel against the peak of Konnig’s white cap. One shot blasted the cap from Konnig’s head and made the eardrums sing.

Konnig staggered back and nearly fell before he righted himself. His mouth was open, his eyes furious at this crass indignity. But he was smart enough not to protest against a madman with a revolver in one hand and a Tommy gun in the other.

Beauchene stood over the smoke-stained cap. “I’ve always wanted to put a hole in one of those,” he said, with a huge satisfied smile.

Konnig released the breath he’d been holding. A lock of reddish-blonde hair had fallen over his forehead, which appeared to be sparkling with sudden sweat. His smile was less satisfaction and more stupefaction. “With my compliments,” he managed to say.

“He’s speaking for me, but I can speak for myself,” said the Frenchman. “You can go back to your ship. We’re sailing on, with our passengers.”

“Not sailing very far, I’m afraid.” Konnig was inspecting his scalp with the fingers of his right hand. “We’ll have to stop you, of course. I will tell you that my mission involves two choices. I was told the first choice was to remove the Wesshausers and take them back alive. The second choice, if the first proved difficult, was to make sure no one on this poor, sad vessel ever passes across the North Sea. It’s really up to you, sir.”

“It may really be up to me to put this gun against your head and give your cap a twin.”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” Konnig said. “And why not? Because if I am not back on my motor launch within another ten minutes, Javelin will start to miss me. And when she misses me, she gets very angry. She begins to shoot incendiary shells, which will burn this ship to a crisp and causes such agonies to human flesh. And my death does nothing for you, because I have three very experienced and capable officers all more than willing to take charge. Now…we are going to destroy this ship, if you refuse our demands. Yes. But we will not use the incendiaries and we will gladly accept any crewmen we rescue. If I am dead, however, Javelin will run the survivors over until there is nothing left but a red smear in all this gray sea. So, you pompous little idiot, what is your choice?”

The African suddenly advanced on him. “Here!” he said angrily. “You can’t speak to my captain like—”

Konnig’s right arm straightened. There was a click of metal. In his hand appeared a small derringer, guided along a metal track laced from elbow to wrist. Michael realized it had been overlooked when Konnig was frisked, probably because the concentration was usually on armpits, sides and groin. Michael reached frantically for his pistol, which wasn’t there.

There was a single loud crack! and Enam Kpanga’s head was rocked backward.

His glasses flew off. A small round wound, deadly enough, had appeared at the center of his forehead. Kpanga’s knees buckled and he slithered to the floor and twitched as he died.

Konnig stood over the body. “I’ve always wanted to put a hole in one of those,” he said. With a snap of his wrist the derringer was retracted back along his forearm to the inner elbow.

Beauchene gave a shuddering breath and swung both guns up, pistol and Tommy. Michael was on his feet, advancing to pin Konnig’s arms.

“Gentlemen?” Konnig said. “I am leaving now.”

The absolute, chilling disinterest in his voice caused Beauchene’s fingers to freeze on the triggers and Michael’s shoes to stick to the floor.

“Honestly, what good would it do to even hold me here, much less kill me?” Konnig stepped over the dying or dead African on his path to the door. “I don’t think I’ll wear the blindfold out, if you don’t mind.” He narrowed his eyes at the expression of horror on Beauchene’s face. “Surely…that thing wasn’t worth the price of a funeral pyre, was he? Now, you have my word I won’t use the incendiaries. Those are very nasty. Remember, sir, that we will rescue any crewman we find in the sea. You might spread that little bit of information around, to help matters. Oh…and I do have another cap.” He paused at the door. “Do the two men outside know our agreement?”

When he received no reply from either Beauchene or Michael, Manson Konnig turned away and left the mess hall as nonchalantly as if he had just eaten a four-course meal and was on his way to take a nap.

They went after him.

Up on the deck, the crewmen who had guns were training their weapons on him. He strode to the port gunwale, where the rope ladder was still hanging over the side. The rain had lessened, the sea flat except for broad-backed rollers, visibility still closed-in. Konnig waved to the motor launch, which had kept pace with Sofia. It nosed in at the bottom of the ladder.

The captain of the Javelin started over the gunwale. He looked up as Beauchene approached, the pistol and Tommy gun ready to blow him to pieces. Rain streamed from the Frenchman’s face and hair and his mouth was a grim gray line.

Konnig hesitated. “Sir!” he called to Michael, who was just behind Beauchene. “Restrain your captain, if you will. There is yet time for a peaceful conclusion to this. And your freighter would make such a lovely fire.”

Beauchene didn’t stop. He came across the deck like a juggernaut. He reached Konnig and put the Thompson’s barrel under the man’s chin.

“Surely,” Konnig said, with a half-smile, “you wouldn’t sacrifice your entire crew for a single nigger?”

Michael saw Beauchene’s trigger finger twitch.

But the Thompson remained silent.

Konnig stared into the Frenchman’s eyes for a few seconds, and then—satisfied with what he saw there—he pulled his throat away from the submachine gun and began his climb down the rungs.

The motor launch received him and he stepped under the shelter of its canopy. The boat turned to port and moved off through the shifting curtains of gloom.

Beauchene stood alone, as Sofia rocked him.

He abruptly turned away and walked quickly past Michael, who followed him because he knew where the captain was going.

In the mess hall, Beauchene approached the African’s body. Blood had trickled like a pattern of scarlet lace from the bullet hole. Kpanga’s eyes were open, his forehead misshapen. Beauchene set the revolver and submachine gun on a table and bent down to pick up Kpanga’s glasses. As he stood over the body, he wiped the lenses on his dirty once-white shirt.

Michael picked up the pistol and slid it back into his waistband. He said nothing; words were no good in this room.

Beauchene knelt, opened the African’s coat and put the glasses in the inside pocket. He remained kneeling for a moment, with his head bent forward. His eyes didn’t know where to rest. He made a noise like a gasp, and that was all.

He stood up.

“I’ll have to find somebody to say something,” he told Michael. “I didn’t know him.” He went to the door and paused. “We’ve got to get ready. You coming?”

Michael nodded. “I am.”

They left the mess hall and the dead African on the floor and went back to the deck where the crew was waiting to be told.

Ten

Bucket Of Blood

By late afternoon the Wesshausers had been placed in a single stateroom with mattresses padding the walls. They tried to make a joke of it, something to do with a padded cell, but they knew exactly what was coming.

The crew had been fed steaks as tough as boot leather and energized with hot black coffee. Those who wanted or needed Benzedrine tablets got them from the doctor. The rest of the mattresses from the crews’ bunks were roped to the gunwales and allowed to hang down nearly to the waterline; it was thin insurance against the five-inch shells, but might prevent a hull breach. Crewmen stood watch along the deck and from the crow’s nests atop both masts. The rain fell intermittently, the sea foamed and swirled, and Sofia kept on her full-speed course to the land of Shakespeare. The Javelin made no appearance from the North Sea mists.

Michael Gallatin was standing near the bow, searching those mists with a pair of binoculars, when he heard her approaching. She stopped on the other side of a lifeboat that had unfortunately been punctured by fifteen slugs from Javelin’s machine gun.

“You shouldn’t be on deck,” he said, lowering his glasses.

“I needed to walk.”

“Keep walking, then. And get below as soon as you’re done.”

“You sound like you think you’re my father.”

“I’m amazed your father would let you out here. Don’t you know what’s likely to be happening any minute now?”

Marielle peered warily around the splintered lifeboat. She was wearing her buttoned-up overcoat with the collar upraised. Her blonde hair spilled out below a wine-red beret. She had her hands thrust into her pockets; though Sofia was rolling, Marielle had found her sea-legs.

“I know,” she said, and she let her eyes graze past him. “My father knows, too. He appreciates the effort, but he thinks we’ll be on our way to Germany before nightfall.”

“Not if I can help it.” He brought the binoculars back up and kept searching.

“My father doesn’t think anyone can help it,” she replied. “They’ve found us and they’re going to take us, and that’s that.”

Michael grunted. “I wouldn’t have thought your father was a quitter. Or you either, for that matter.”

“It’s not quitting. It’s being accepting of reality. That’s what my father says.”

“Whose reality? Hitler’s?” Michael let the question hang. He lowered the glasses again and turned his head so he could look directly into her aquamarine eyes. She pulled back just a little, but not by much. “Your father’s been very brave so far. He must be a brave man, to have risked his family. To have risked everything, really. Well, I’m not giving up and neither is the captain and crew of this ship. So why should he?”

“He doesn’t want anyone else to be hurt.”

“Someone’s going to be hurt, whether they take you off this ship or not. It’s the Nazi way.” He gave her a brief tight smile.

She studied him for a moment with a number of sidelong glances. “There’s something strange about you,” she decided. And amended the word: “Different, I mean.”

“Possibly so.” He wondered if she could sense the animal in his soul cage.

She stared out upon the sea. “I think,” she said, “you’re a gentleman pretending to be a roughneck.”

“That’s interesting.” Again he scanned the mists with his glasses. “I’ve always thought of myself as a roughneck pretending to be a gentleman.”

“You’re hiding something,” she said.

“Who isn’t?”

“What you’re hiding…isn’t like anyone else. It’s…” Marielle frowned. “Very deep,” she finished.

“Not so very deep,” Michael said, but he didn’t wish to say anything more.

She was silent for awhile. Michael suddenly wished she would go away, because he thought she could see more than she realized.

“Do you think I’m crippled?” she suddenly asked. “Is that why you told me the story about Vulcan? Because he was crippled, too?”

“I told you the story about Vulcan because I could see him working at his forge in the sky.”

“No,” she said, and abruptly she took a lurching step forward on her high shoe and the sixteen-year-old girl regarded him with the calm and knowing composure of a woman. “Herr Gallatin, I don’t ask anyone to feel sorry for me. I don’t want that, and I never have. I don’t really like being as I am. I don’t like the sound I make as I walk. I don’t like the attention it draws, because it’s always people feeling sorry for me. Either that, or laughing at me behind my back. But I can abide that, better than the other. I can’t stand looking into the faces of people and seeing what they’re thinking of me, that I’m a poor pitiful child who wears a heavy shoe and can never walk right and can never dance. But I never ask anyone to feel sorry for me, Herr Gallatin. And I saw that in your face the first time I looked at you. I see that in many faces aboard this ship. So, yes, I may be crippled and I may not wish to be around people very much, for just the reasons I’ve said, but…”

And here she hesitated, as if to draw up from her depths what she really had to say.

“Please,” she said, and in her eyes there gleamed the bright shine of tears, “do not cripple my dignity.”

He faced her directly. “I would never dream of such a thing,” he said. “I told you about Vulcan not because he was crippled, but because he knew pain. I think you know pain, Marielle. I think that’s what you hide, very deep. And I think you have to find a way to let it go, so you can forge a life.”

Her eyes were glassy. Her mouth twisted a bit. “What do you know of it?” she asked, in a bitter whisper.

How to answer such a question? he wondered. He realized she couldn’t see herself. She couldn’t see her potential for beauty, or for joy. She couldn’t see how lovely her eyes were, or how soft was her hair. She couldn’t see the German roses in her cheeks, or her own svelte slim body beneath the shapeless overcoat. She could only see the malformed leg and the heavy shoe that weighted her like an anchor to the earth. And of all the faces that held pity for her, no one held more pity than the face in the mirror.

A lookout shouted from the aft crow’s nest. Another shout replied, over on the starboard side.

The Javelin was coming. Michael had expected it from the port side. Even though he couldn’t see the warship, he realized from the crew’s warning shouts that it had crossed their stern and was probably even now swinging its guns toward the target.

Billy Bowers stood within calling distance. Michael said, “Billy! Come here! Get the girl below!”

Billy hurried over and, though Marielle recoiled in abject fear, he took her hand. “I won’t bite you!” he said. She resisted him and jerked free. She tried to stagger away, but she lost her balance and fell against the gunwale. “Damn it, girl! Hold still!” Billy told her, and then he scooped her up in his arms and nearly ran with her across the deck.

Michael strode to the starboard side. And there through the glistening mist, just barely visible, was the deadly silhouette of Manson Konnig’s Javelin.

It was too distant for any bullet from Sofia to reach. Michael saw flame gout from the forward cannon and heard the blast, and he realized with a sinking heart that in a few moments Sofia might well be reduced to a bucket of blood.

Water shot up just short of the hull. The crewmen with rifles were firing, as if it would do any good. The next shell from Javelin sizzled over the deck and spewed up water on the port side. Getting the range, Michael thought. Where the hell was Beauchene? As if he could do any good, either!

Michael cursed Valentine Vivian. One thing was certain: a wolf could drown as easily as a man.

The third shell hit Sofia amidships, just above the waterline. The shock may have been cushioned by a mattress, but who could say? A vibration rippled across the deck. Another shell cut a gash across the forward mast. And then both of Javelin’s guns began firing in rapid succession, and in a matter of seconds the shrieking projectiles slammed one after the other into Sofia’s hull, her deck and her superstructure.

The freighter heeled to port. Michael lost his footing and was thrown back against a capstan. He went down to his knees, and there felt what must have been another shell rush past him with a high-pitched whine and a smell of burned matches. Behind him, a lifeboat exploded into kindling. Something crashed against metal and screamed off into the air. He heard shells hitting like punches being thrown against human flesh. A figure stumbled past him, holding the bleeding stump of a right arm. Sofia pitched back and forth under the barrage, and when Michael looked toward the wheelhouse he saw holes being torn in the superstructure as if it were made of flimsy cardboard. More portholes exploded. The ship shuddered along her length, and still the shells continued to strike.

A lycanthrope could know horror. He knew it, when he saw the glass windshield of the wheelhouse blow inward from a direct hit.

Over the ear-blasting noise of shellfire and the rending of steel he heard a man screaming and did not know if it was his own voice or the voice of a comrade.

He knew only that the ship’s wheel was most likely unmanned, or in the best case helmed by a Swede whose eyes had been cut to pieces by flying glass.

He got up off his knees and ran across the deck, which shivered like the spine of a kicked dog. He reached the staircase and climbed up, and as he climbed he saw the red flames spouting from Javelin’s guns and Sofia being torn apart below him.

On the bridge, the Russian radioman was fighting for control of the wheel. The Swede lay with a blood mask for a face and his throat sliced open. Medina had collapsed in his own pool of gore next to the engine order telegraph. Overhead, cables dangled down and electric sparks jumped. A fresh insult of rain swept through the opening where the windshield had been. Sofia, gone mad with pain, was turning herself starboard toward Javelin as if to end her agonies.

“I’ve got it!” Michael shouted, and he grasped the spokes of the glass-slashed wheel and wrenched it to port. How long did it take for the rudder to respond? Sofia went on, heedless of human hands. He thought the rudder must have been blasted away. Under his feet, the bloody planks jumped from the percussion of more shell hits. A hot sizzling thing, smoking like a comet, burst up from Sofia’s deck into the air.

Michael felt the rudder bite hold and the freighter begin to turn. He put his back into the wheel. The Russian radioman retreated to give him space. Fire suddenly rippled along the torn electrical cables above Michael’s head. Still the ship was turning, responding by slow inches. Waterspouts shot up on either side of Sofia and then through the rain that flew into his eyes Michael saw ahead of them a white mass that hid the sea.

A fogbank, he realized. He glanced at the engine telegraph. The pointer was set to All Ahead Flank, the fastest possible speed order. Medina must have rung it before the wheelhouse was hit. The bow was headed right into the fog. So be it, Michael thought.

And then: Go, you bitch!

Someone shoved him aside.

Gustave Beauchene, blood streaming from a wound on his forehead and his shirt and yellow rainslicker streaked with it, took charge of the wheel. He, too, had seen the fogbank. Shells crashed into Sofia’s stern. The thunder of cannonfire echoed across the sea. Michael smelled blood and gunpowder and the sweat of fear. “Get to the stern!” Beauchene shouted to the Russian. “Find whoever you can and start throwing the ropes and nets in our wake! Go, now!”

The Russian ran out and down the stairway. Michael realized Beauchene was desperately hoping something might foul Javelin’s props, because the warship was going to be right behind them.

Trembling, Sofia entered the fog.

It closed around the freighter like a huge cloud. In a matter of seconds, tendrils of fog drifted across the deck and visibility was cut to maybe twenty meters. The sound of the diesels pulsed against the white thickness. “Allez, allez!” Beauchene whispered, as blood ran down through the seams of his face to his chin.

In another moment he turned the wheel a few degrees to port. Then again to starboard. White fog swirled into the wheelhouse, the breath of ghosts. Michael went into Beauchene’s cabin and found a nasty oil-stained rag; he brought it out and gave it to the captain, who silently pressed it against the wound on his forehead.

Beauchene turned the wheel to port once more. He said, “Hold her steady,” and Michael took the helm. Beauchene rang up a change on the telegraph: All Stop.

The voices of the big diesels faded to a low rumble.

Then…there was only the hiss of the fog and the sea, the pained creaks of Sofia’s injured flesh and bones, and the noise of men calling to each other in the gloom.

Sofia drifted.

Beauchene fetched a fire extinguisher from the radio room and sprayed out the overhead flames. His bloody face stared impassively at Michael Gallatin.

His voice was a dry croak. “I’m going to go find out the damage. If we’re sinking or not. I’m going to go find out how many men have just died. And your people may be dead, too. That may be for the best, for them. We can’t take another beating like that, do you understand?”

Michael answered, “I understand.”

“She’s been hurt,” said Beauchene, as if that explained everything.

Then the Sofia’s master, suddenly a very small and weary man, turned away and stumbled down the stairs where his bloody handprints stained the rail.

Eleven

The Specialist

Twelve men wounded, four severely. Five men dead, including the doctor when the infirmary was hit by two shells one nearly after the other. The pumps working at full capacity to fight the gushing leak near the stern until a patch could be welded in. Some electrical damage forward. Many new hull, deck and superstructure scars, though nothing critical. Damage to one of the engines due to running at flank speed, but thankfully the engineers vowed to repair it within six hours.

Darkness fell. The fog remained. All of Sofia’s lights were cut except for a few bulbs belowdecks. Shadows began to claim the ship.

“Not very fucking good,” was Beauchene’s report to the remainder of the crew in the mess hall. A bandage was plastered to his forehead, his eyes puffed with pain. “We’re alive and afloat, but when this fog clears we’re dead, plain and simple. We’ve got three lifeboats left. I’m telling you that anyone who wants to strike out on their own can go. You can take some food and water. If you’re going, dress warm and get out now. Maybe you’ll be picked up by another freighter and you’ll live to tell the tale. All right, then. God be with you.”

The three lifeboats stayed where they were.

The night moved on.

Crewmen stood watch in their fields of fog. They listened for the throb of engine noise, but if Javelin was out there she was gliding.

They had no doubt Javelin was out there.

Beauchene did have a plan, of sorts. Every so often he ordered the engine room to provide enough power to creep forward a few hundred meters, then Sofia was allowed to drift again. The intent was to keep the noise down, keep the bow aimed toward England, and maybe—maybe—get out on the other side of this fogbank before Javelin could find them. In the meantime, the radio jamming continued and no messages could get through.

Around midnight, as some of the crew came to fill their cups from the bottomless coffee pot, Michael sat at a table with Olaf Thorgrimsen and Billy Bowers. The cook had supplied some raspberry pie which actually tasted of raspberries, showing that pressure was good for the kitchen. Currents of cigarette smoke moved slowly in the air, and all conversation was hushed.

A gaunt, pallid man who entered the mess hall immediately became the center of attention.

Paul Wesshauser, in his black trousers and gray sweater, poured himself a cup of coffee. His eyes were dark-hollowed beneath his glasses. He looked like a man bearing a heavy burden. He sat down at a table by himself, spooned a half-cup of sugar into his joe, lit a cigarette and inhaled to the roots of his lungs.

Michael left his own table and walked the few paces to Wesshauser’s. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

Wesshauser shrugged, and Michael sat down.

“You holding up?” Michael asked; it was a stupid question, from the look of the man.

“I’m all right.” Wesshauser drew the smoke in again and let it slowly seep from his mouth. “How many died for me today?”

“Five.”

“Five,” Wesshauser repeated. He examined the burning end of his cigarette. “My God. I never meant for this to happen.”

“Of course not. And you’re not to blame for the deaths.”

“Yes, I am.” Wesshauser’s eyes flashed. “If I hadn’t taken it in mind to leave Germany, then…everything would be as it was.”

“That’s right,” Michael agreed. He took a sip of his own black coffee. “You’d still be in Germany, and you’d be working for the Nazis. A fine future that would be. Making weapons for them? You do make weapons, correct?” Michael hadn’t been told exactly what Wesshauser’s area of expertise was.

“I’m a designer,” said the man.

“You make that sound very elegant.” Michael watched the smoke drift from Wesshauser’s mouth. “I think you did the right thing. The only thing. If you feel the Nazis would misuse what you design then you had no choice but to get out. And it took a lot of courage to get this far.”

“Yes, I should be proud of myself for killing so many men, and for ultimately killing my wife, daughter and son.” Wesshauser smiled without humor. “Because that’s what I’ve done.” He bit down on the cigarette. “I went to see Captain Beauchene. To ask him to give us up. Do you know what he told me?”

“No, what?”

“He said he would not allow his crew to be killed like sheep. He said they would die as men, and that those who had already sacrificed their lives would not be dishonored. So, he said…no, he would not give us up. I stood before him and begged. And he told me to get out while I could still walk.”

“Good advice,” Michael said. He knew what part of it was: Gustave Beauchene the garbageman versus Manson Konnig the aristocrat. Michael found himself staring at the place on the floor where Enam Kpanga had died. A mop had soaked up the blood and the canvas-shrouded body had been consigned to the sea. “My daughter told me you’ve spoken with her.” Wesshauser adjusted his glasses as if to view Michael from a different angle. “That story about Vulcan. She found that very interesting. You know, she keeps to herself quite a bit.”

“Does she?”

“Oh, yes. It’s the leg, of course. And the shoe. She’s terribly shy about it. She doesn’t wish to stand out in that way. Her mother and I…we do our best to keep her from feeling so bad about herself, but…you know…she is crippled.”

“Hm,” Michael said.

“It’s difficult,” Wesshauser went on, “to hold such standards of perfection and have a daughter who…is afflicted. My own father was a perfectionist. He was the great shining example of the German engineer. Everything should fit together just so. And I have led my life the same way. So…it’s difficult…when—”

“Everything doesn’t fit together just so?” Michael interrupted.

“Yes. Difficult,” said Wesshauser. “And difficult for Marielle also.”

“I’m sure.” Michael finished off his coffee. He was ready to rejoin Olaf and Billy.

“But my high standards have suited me well,” Wesshauser told him. He drew deeply again from his cigarette. “That’s why they want to stop me from getting to England. I know what’s coming, very soon. They don’t want the British Navy to have access to my knowledge of torpedoes.”

“Hm,” Michael said once more, for want of a better comment. He thought this man was probably a self-important prick. He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Thank you for your time,” he said, with a chill in it. He took his empty coffee cup back to the big stainless steel dispenser to fill it up again.

But before he got there the words my knowledge of torpedoes hit him. He stopped abruptly, with an idea lodged in his mind. A man behind him—one of the engineers—bumped into him and went around.

“Wesshauser,” Michael said when he returned to the man’s table. The eyeglasses peered up at him from behind the pall of smoke. “Could you…make a torpedo?”

“Make a torpedo,” Wesshauser repeated, without inflection.

“That’s right. You’re the specialist. Could you make one? Put it together from…well…whatever’s on this ship.”

“I have no idea what’s on this ship. It goes without saying that I’d need high explosives. There would have to be a steel casing and a detonator.” He frowned and dropped the cigarette butt into his cup. “What are you carrying?”

“Machine parts, ball bearings, hardwood logs and fertilizer.”

“Fertilizer,” Wesshauser said.

“That’s right. About three hundred oil drums full. Just common stuff, I understand.”

“Made with ammonium nitrate?”

“I don’t know.”

“And of course you have diesel fuel?”

“Yes.”

Wesshauser nodded. His eyes looked shiny. “Do you realize that amount of ammonium nitrate could detonate and blow this ship into outer space? And that combined with diesel fuel, the explosive compound is made certain to blow?”

Michael swallowed. “I…suppose…you’re saying—”

“I’m saying if the fertilizer is made with ammonium nitrate, you are carrying many hundreds of high explosive devices on this freighter. My God! Are you people insane? What are your conditions to prevent oxidation in the hold?”

“There are fans,” Michael said lamely. “When they’re turned on.”

Wesshauser stood up. “Listen to me!” His voice was urgent, because he’d realized that here might be—might be—a way out. “Do you have a machine shop? A welding station?”

“Yes. Both.”

“No shortage of steel.” Wesshauser was talking to himself. Then, to Michael: “Machine parts, did you say? Of what nature?”

“You’d have to ask the captain. Even he might not know.”

“All right, all right.” Wesshauser ran his fingers across his mouth. “Let’s say a watertight casing can be made and the machine parts would be suitable to form a detonator. Wait…wait!” He shook his head. “No. Ridiculous! There’s no possible way to deliver the weapon. No torpedo tube, no way of aiming the thing.” His hand crept up and his forefinger beat against a vein at his right temple as if to wake up a sleeping part of his brain. “Mathematics,” he said. “There’s so much mathematics involved in aiming and delivering a torpedo. And even so…the odds are that the weapon will not hit its target. This ship…there’s no possible way to send a torpedo from this ship to strike the Javelin. I could make a dozen torpedoes, if I had the time and materials, but without a delivery device—”

Wesshauser stopped speaking. He blinked suddenly, as if startled by a flash.

“You’re carrying logs,” he said. “What length are they?”

“Varied lengths. Five to ten meters. Why?”

“Herr Gallatin,” said the German, “we need to see Captain Beauchene. Now.” They climbed the stairs into the wounded bridge, where fog swirled in through the opening where the glass had been. A single low lantern illuminated Sofia’s master, who clung to the wheel of the drifting vessel with one hand and held in the other a fresh—or nearly, since it was again half-empty—bottle of brandy.

“What the fuck do you two want?” he growled.

In Beauchene’s cabin, revealed by the lantern’s candle, Wesshauser leaned over the desk and on a piece of fly-specked paper drew a diagram with a fountain pen.

“Very well, I understand the torpedo part,” Beauchene said as he and Michael watched the diagram take shape. “I understand about the fertilizer.” The document signed by the cargo master indicated the presence of ammonium nitrate in the black oildrums. “I understand about making a casing and a detonator and all that…but what are you scribbling?”

“A design,” Wesshauser explained, with the candle’s glow in his glasses, “to make this ship the aiming and delivery device. Look here,” he said, and tapped with the pen’s point. “The bow. We need a steel socket attached to the bow at the waterline. Something with clamps that can hold a ten-meter-long hardwood log. If you have saws, the log itself should be squared off from end to end and reinforced with steel on all sides to keep it rigid. Then…here…you see?”

“I’m looking, but I’m not seeing. Yet,” Beauchene added.

“Here, at the far end of the log, another steel socket should be inserted. That should also have clamps to hold the torpedo steady. The torpedo will be underwater, at a depth of possibly a meter or so. You see what I’ve drawn?”

“A ramming device,” Michael said.

“An aiming device,” Wesshauser corrected. “A torpedo on the end of a steel-reinforced beam, secured to the ship’s bow. With any luck, the detonator makes contact with Javelin under the waterline, and sends an electrical spark into the explosive packing. Add to the packing a payload of ball bearings, and the potential for damage to Javelin is further increased. It’s going to be at best an uncertain proposition, because of the imperfect working conditions…but if I can find the right elements on board, I believe I can make this torpedo.”

Beauchene frowned. “There is one small problem here, sir,” he said dryly. “Un peu de pas. We would have to be, as I calculate with my great brain, less than ten meters from Javelin to make this work. As you gentlemen may recall, Javelin has large fucking guns. So how, sir, do we get within ten meters of Javelin without being blown to pieces?” He finished his question with an eye-watering swig of brandy.

“We have to become the hunters,” Michael spoke up, seeing the plan. “We have to seek out Javelin and go on the attack. It’s the only way.”

“In this fog?” Beauchene asked. “How do we find a ship in this? And if it clears as we’re charging for her, won’t she just speed out of danger?”

“We have to hope the fog holds, then,” said the German. “No one on Javelin will be expecting our surprise. Herr Gallatin is correct; it’s the only way.”

“If they can’t find us—and God, I hope they can’t—then we can’t find them.”

“That may not be entirely true,” Michael said. “The continuous jamming signal. Can the radioman determine the direction that’s coming from?”

“I have no idea.” The radioman had been released from duty for the night, and the radio shut down even as the jamming cacophony shrieked on. “Maybe he could twiddle his dials and his thumbs and make an educated guess, I don’t know.”

He’s a Russian, Michael thought. He remembered a saying from his life in the circus: Russians know from which way the wind blows and from which way the shit flows.

“An educated guess might do,” he said.

Beauchene looked from Michael to Wesshauser and back again, searching for either sanity or hope. He took another long drink. “It’ll be dawn in five hours,” he told the German. “What do you need to get started?”

Twelve

Dead Ahead

Lamps hung from Sofia’s bow. By their fog-dimmed glow, men worked from three lifeboats in the swells. A cable snaked down to an air-powered rivet gun, which made a tremendous racket in use. The work was charged with tension, because if a watch on Javelin heard that noise and the ship followed it, for most men dawn might never come.

A steel cage-like apparatus with a pair of claw-shaped clamps had been riveted in position just at the waterline. Now, moving ponderously and slowly, the men in the boats guided what appeared to be a ten-meter-long gray steel beam into the cage. The clamps were shut down upon it and fastened tight with wrenches. A smaller version of the cage-like device was already bolted to the far end of the squared-off log that masqueraded as a steel beam. There was a groove within the cage for a cylindrical object to be inserted and seized by the second pair of clamps.

A wooden seat descended between a pair of ropes. Dylan Custis came down with a bucket of yellow paint and a brush. He began to paint upon the bow a pair of female eyes complete with eyelashes, as below him the other men watched and waited.

Custis had approached Captain Beauchene in Michael Gallatin’s presence.

You know, cap’n, Custis had said, this ship, she doan got much sense. Doan got what she needs to live, cap’n. Now if she’s gone be taking a big fish in her teeth and she ain’t got but the one chance, doan you think she better have some eyes to see with? Beauchene had agreed that, yes, Sofia did need a pair of eyes to see with.

I’ll make ’em so pretty, Custis had promised, you’ll fall in love with her all over some more.

They waited on deck for the torpedo that was being put together in a bulb-lit room where the welding torch burned bright blue and a grinding machine thinned small metal parts to nearly perfect specifications. But perfect enough? No one could say.

Michael stood on deck, watching the work at the bow with a group of other men.

Beauchene leaned over the side. There was no need to bark orders because the men knew they were fighting for their lives; perfection in this case might be an impossibility, but the work was going to be damned good enough.

Dawn was about an hour away.

Beauchene went below to find out if the shark had teeth yet.

Michael heard the girl coming. No one even looked in her direction; she was one of them by now. Marielle stood beside him, peering over the dented gunwale. When he glanced at her, she gave him a quick nervous smile and he answered with a nod. Then he noted Billy Bowers come up on her other side, and Billy also leaned over the gunwale to watch.

Michael thought that three was a crowd. He stepped back, and when he did he saw Billy silently slide his hand into hers, and she just as silently accepted it, and Michael wondered at how shipboard romances could even happen on a freighter in a sea chase. Maybe a spark had been thrown from Vulcan’s forge, he thought. Falling all that way to earth it had flared with uncanny light, and drifting down upon the Sofia it illuminated a boy carrying a girl in his arms to safety. Perhaps, he thought, a future for two people could be sealed with the touch of a crippled god’s fire. He hoped it was so.

As dawn began to lighten the fog, the torpedo was brought up on a handcart.

Following behind the men who pushed it forward were Captain Beauchene, Paul Wesshauser, the two engineers, the mechanics, the electrician, the pump operators, the able seamen and the ordinary seamen. The torpedo was a little over three meters in length and possibly half a meter around at its midsection. From its bullet-shaped tip protruded a trio of metal prongs. Its steel skin was mottled yellow and black, but words were written in white upon the evil-looking hide. Not just words, Michael realized in another moment, but names. Everyone who’d worked on the torpedo had written his name on it in white paint, probably waterproof, and it appeared that all the men who followed behind the handcart had added their names as well.

“Come on!” Beauchene told the crew on deck. “Come sign your names!” He was holding a can of white paint with a small brush resting in it, and this he set down on the handcart beside the weapon.

They came. The brush scrawled name after name, until at last Beauchene offered it to Michael.

“Sign it,” he said.

It was an order.

Michael dipped the brush into the paint and found a clean place to sign. He noted the names of the wounded and dead written along the torpedo’s length. He noted also a particular name: Enam Kpanga.

He wrote Michael Gallatin, and then he gave the paint can and the brush to the captain, who added the final name up near the detonator.

A portable hoist on lock-down wheels was set at the bow. Heavy cables supported the torpedo, which Michael figured probably weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds. If anything went wrong lowering the torpedo over the side to the men in the boats, the dangerous fish would slide directly to the North Sea’s bottom. It was going to be a tricky operation, because if that thing got out of balance and started swinging on the cables its weight could break bones and shatter the lifeboats. Also, nobody wanted the detonator to hit Sofia, though Wesshauser had already told Beauchene and Michael that it would be calculated to explode from an impact at a speed of five knots or above.

“Easy, easy!” Beauchene cautioned as a winch turned and the torpedo went down to meet the upraised arms. “Play out the cables!” he said to the hoist’s operator. Then, louder: “Christ! Not so fast!”

The torpedo, still cabled to the ship, was placed across two boats and ferried over the swells to the business end of the steel-reinforced beam. Some of the men from the third boat slipped into the cold sea. Two of them wore frogmen’s masks and fins, used for clearing the props and working beneath the hull. The insertion of the torpedo into its groove and the closing of the clamps to grip it would have to be done a meter underwater.

The hoist operator kept letting the cables play out to give the workers enough slack.

Then the two boats were in position. Working slowly and methodically, the crewmen manhandled the weapon into the water, where its natural inclination was to sink to the mud seven hundred meters below. The winding in of slack in the attached cables by the hoist operator prevented that disaster.

The frogmen guided the torpedo into its steel socket. Tools were passed down from the boats to tighten the clamps. When that was done and a ‘success’ signal shown by an upraised fist, the cables were unhooked. The torpedo stayed fixed in place in its cage and clamps, its detonator almost precisely a meter underwater.

The frogmen and the other helpers climbed back aboard the third boat. The lifeboats came back alongside and the crew, abandoning their craft to the whim of the sea, ascended on rope ladders. The cold and wet were given blankets and hot coffee.

It was a job well done, Michael thought.

Sofia was ready to be a huntress.

Paltry streams of gray light were beginning to pierce the fog. Beauchene told the crew to take their stations and be ready for action. He asked Michael to come with him to the bridge. In the wheelhouse, he rang up All Ahead Standard on the engine telegraph. The ship began to move through the waves, gradually gaining speed. In the radio room, the Russian was listening to the jamming signal and according to the slight changes in volume trying to triangulate a position of origin.

Michael saw nothing ahead but fog and sea.

“Port, thirty degrees,” the radioman called. Beauchene repeated the call and made the course correction. Then, after a few minutes: “Starboard, twelve degrees.”

“Starboard, twelve degrees,” Beauchene called back. The wheel was turned to the right, and Michael watched the needle of the ship’s binnacle-mounted compass move.

The fog remained unbroken.

Twenty minutes passed by on Michael’s ancient pocketwatch. The Russian called out, “Starboard, eight degrees.”

The call was repeated, the wheel turned the rudder and the compass needle moved once more.

Sofia went on, over rolling waves into a realm of softly-floating sea clouds.

Michael felt the tension throb in the pit of his stomach. He took the revolver from his waistband, just to hold something sturdy. If the Russian miscalculated, Javelin could sight Sofia first and bring those guns to bear at pointblank range.

“Hold steady,” called the Russian.

“Steady,” said Beauchene. His knuckles were white on the wheel.

Salt wind blew into Michael’s face through the rectangular hole where the windshield had been. In it he smelled the ship: oil, timbers, old grease-stained canvas, the burnt odor of shell damage, the rank unwashed flesh of working men and the higher, more raw scent of their fear.

He thought he was sweating under his red plaid shirt, but then he realized the wolf hairs were coming up across his back and chest. Rising up in arcs and swirls and strange patterns like primeval symbols unknown to any modern man, and then falling back again beneath the itchy human skin. He had a compelling urge to either run or pee, and he was reminded after all this time that he’d felt the exact same way after he’d killed Octavius Zloy. In that instance, he’d left a puddle of piss as he was caught between worlds and squatting on the floor.

There was nowhere to run, and he didn’t think the captain would enjoy watching him stain the boards.

“Yuri!” Beauchene called. “Do you have a distance?”

“Impossible to be exact, sir.”

“Then don’t be exact, just give me your best estimate.”

A silence followed, during which the Russian must have been either listening or calculating. “I’d say…six hundred, seven hundred meters. That’s my best.”

“Straight ahead?”

“Yes, sir.”

Beauchene said to Michael, “Take the wheel.” When Michael had it, Beauchene rang up the command to the engine room: All Ahead Flank.

Sofia drove forward, her torpedo thrust out like an iron fist.

“Move aside,” the captain told Michael as he returned to the helm.

But before the transfer could be made there was a shout toward the stern. Another voice rose up, unintelligible but urgent. Beauchene peered into the fog along the torpedo’s path, his eyes narrowed. Michael kept the wheel steady. The thrum of laboring engines pulsed along Sofia’s length. Down on the portside deck, someone shouted: “Ship! Dead ahead!”

They were upon it before Michael could pull in another breath.

It was not there and then suddenly it was. Beauchene gave a strangled cry of alarm. Javelin was crossing their bow at a slight angle toward them. Michael saw some of the enemy crewmen at a rail amidships, pointing at Sofia. The deck guns, which must have been constantly manned, began to swivel toward the freighter.

But it was going to be too late.

One of the guns got off a shot that blistered paint along the port side of the wheelhouse. And then Beauchene was standing beside Michael and wrenching the wheel to starboard before Javelin could slide past. Michael saw the torpedo strike Javelin just forward of amidships on the starboard side.

A deadly pair of seconds passed.

Then came the blast.

The forge of Vulcan blazed along Javelin’s hull. A huge geyser of white water rose up and spread out, and with it the ear-splitting noise of rending steel, multiple thunders and runaway locomotives smashing together. The shockwave came back upon Sofia and hit her against her prow like Neptune’s gigantic shoulder. The entire ship was shoved backward, waves smacking against the hull with the hollow booms of heavy artillery. Beauchene went to the floorboards as Michael clung to the wheel. Sofia rose up and pitched downward. Part of the geyser fell upon her deck with enough power to knock men senseless but make them think they were drowning first. Water slammed down on the wheelhouse’s roof. The whipsaw motion of the wheel nearly broke Michael’s wrists as he hung tight, but Sofia’s next rise and fall and pitch to starboard jarred him loose and he staggered back and fell as the wheel spun to its own direction.

There was a secondary explosion from Javelin. A hot wind shredded the fog. Burning things flew through the air and landed on Sofia’s deck. Michael struggled up in time to see Javelin’s length crash against Sofia, starboard to port, in what might have been a dance of death.

For then all Hell opened.

A white-hot fireball exploded seemingly from beneath Javelin’s forward deck. Funnels, flaming rope, parts of bodies and a cannon barrel were blown into the sky. The planking blazed with a violet glow as if from a gas flame. Suddenly the entire forward part of the ship convulsed with a shriek of steel. Bright red and purple objects trailing wakes of sizzling fire began to burst upward through the deck, throwing flame to all sides. They hissed upward into the red-lit fog.

Michael knew. “A spark’s hit the ammo! The incendiary shells are cooking off!”

Beauchene leaped to the engine telegraph and frantically rang for Back Emergency.

As the fireballs shot upward from the doomed Javelin and spread voracious flames over the wheelhouse and deck, a massive wall of gray smoke erupted from the warship and rolled across Sofia. In it, burning men desperately scrambled over the gunwales from one ship to the other. Some of them had guns, were firing and were quickly shot by Sofia’s armed crewmen, but others vanished into the murk. Huge flames were shooting up from Javelin. There were screams and pleas for mercy. As Sofia’s engines began to back the ship off from the conflagration, the gap between the vessels widened and more burning men threw themselves into the sea.

Michael watched, his face drawn and tired. The reflection of flame writhed in his eyes.

He thought, grimly, that the sharks today would not have to search very long for good pieces of meat.

Javelin was leaning over on the starboard side. She was afire from stem to stern.

Almost out of sheer damned spite, she shot three more incendiaries at Sofia that sizzled over the ship and hit the choppy sea, and then the freighter backed off into the fog.

Thirteen

A Good Day’s Work

Nearing nightfall, Sofia was a hospital ship without a doctor.

Beauchene had guided his girl back into the smoke and fire to rescue survivors. They’d pulled from the sea fourteen badly burned men and six more who could at least walk. The sharks were indeed already returning to the sea what had walked on land. There was no sign of Manson Konnig’s body. It was going to be a long trip, the rest of the way to England, and there would surely be more canvas shrouds lowered over the side. For some of those burned scarecrows, it would be the merciful thing.

Eight Javelin crewmen were found hiding aboard Sofia, one of them in the closet of the second of V. Vivian’s unused staterooms. Another was hiding down a ventilation funnel. A third had to be shot because he attacked Olaf Thorgrimsen with a pocketknife.

Sofia was a mess. With the crumpled bow that had crossed her eyes, she could barely make four knots. Multiple leaks forward had been contained and the pumps were at work, but she was badly injured. Rough weather, Beauchene told Michael at a meeting in the mess hall, could bring the sea rushing in through the patches and now they had not a single lifeboat. Javelin’s heat had scorched the portside of Sofia’s superstructure and blackened her gunwales. The torpedo’s detonation had burst the eardrums and the resultant shockwave had broken the bones of more than one man. Every porthole on the ship had been either blown inward or cracked.

One thing could be said for Paul Wesshauser, in Beauchene’s opinion. The skinny bastard knew how to pack a long dick.

Michael suggested the fans ought to be turned on in the fertilizer hold.

Beauchene and Michael took a walk around the singed deck near seven o’clock. The captain carried his Thompson and Michael his revolver, because two hours ago another Javelin crewman had been found curled up under a tarpaulin. Most of Sofia’s lamps that still worked had been turned on. The crew was being fed and food was being prepared for the wounded prisoners, who’d been put into one of the forward holds. A dependable Pole had been named first mate and was manning the helm. A radio SOS had gone out and received a reply, and Sofia was meeting with the British freighter Arthurian for medical help and supplies around ten. Then the Russian, a good day’s work done, went to eat his dinner and get some sleep.

Sofia’s smashed nose headed west. Above the sea, stars filled the sky.

“She’s not pretty but she’s tough,” Beauchene told Michael as they walked. “I think we’ll make it all the way. If we have a calm sea. And if those patches hold. Ah, maybe we can get better equipment from your British friends, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Come on, mon ami,” he said, and he reached up to clap Michael on the shoulder. “I’ve got another bottle.”

They climbed the scorched stairs to the wheelhouse, Michael following the captain. A few low lamps burned on the bridge. The first thing the two men saw was that the wheel was unmanned and Sofia was just beginning to drift off-course. The second thing was that the dependable Pole lay on the boards on his face with blood on the back of his sandy-haired head.

The third thing they saw was a ragged and burned figure standing in the corridor.

It still had a red goatee. The ebony boots were not now so glossy.

It also held a Luger, and it fired that weapon twice.

Gustave Beauchene cried out and clutched at his left side. He fell to his knees as the Luger trained upon Michael Gallatin.

Michael had no time to draw his own weapon. He propelled himself forward as the Luger barked and a bullet whistled past his left ear.

He hit the ruins of Manson Konnig in the midsection with his shoulder and drove the man back even as he grasped and held the gun hand. The Luger fired again, the bullet thunking into the ceiling. Konnig suddenly showed his strength and tremendous power of will by striking Michael a hard blow between the eyes with his free fist and then swinging him bodily around as his knees buckled. Michael crashed through the door onto the dirty carpet of Beauchene’s cabin.

Dazed, Michael saw the gun rise up again and flung himself aside as a bullet dug splinters from Beauchene’s desk. He got his own weapon out and fired a shot, which went wild over Konnig’s right shoulder. Konnig stood in the doorway, his teeth bared in the dark and melted face, and fired once more as Michael crawled under the protection of the desk. Then Michael lifted the entire desk up and heaved it at Konnig, who retreated into the corridor as papers flew about him and dirty plates clattered against the opposite wall.

A bolt was pulled back.

Konnig’s head swivelled to the right.

Gustave Beauchene, blood blotching his shirt at left side and left shoulder, was aiming his submachine gun. He had a crooked grin on his gray face.

“I’ve come,” he gasped, “to remove the garbage.”

He opened fire.

Michael saw the bullets start at Konnig’s belly and stitch upward along the chest and into the face. Konnig danced a dead man’s jig. A chunk of his head vanished in a red spray. The Luger fired once more from the nerveless fingers, the slug going into the floor.

Beauchene kept firing to the end of the clip, and then Konnig crumpled like a rag doll that had been held over a campfire by a bad little boy.

Konnig’s body twitched and twisted, but without much of a head there was not much of a brain therefore he was strictly yesterday’s news.

He was red all over.

The body was still. Beauchene lowered his Thompson, clutched at his wounded side again and then he too dropped. Michael emerged from the cabin and went directly to the captain’s aid. He tore the shirt open to look at the wounds. Three crewmen alerted by the noise of gunfire, among them Dylan Custis, came rushing into the wheelhouse and gathered around Michael and the captain.

“For Christ’s sake,” Beauchene asked them, “what’s the fucking fuss?” He blinked heavily, struggling to focus. “Haven’t you ever seen a man who needs a drink?”

It was a sunny morning when Sofia made harbor in Dover. The lines were thrown and secured, the anchor was dropped, and the ugliest ship that had ever crossed under the view of Dover Castle was safe. The gangplank went down, and the journey was done.

Several black trucks and ambulances were waiting, as well as two polished black sedans. Another crew came on to unload the cargo. The cranes moved and the hoists rattled. Blinking in the English sun, the men walked off Sofia carrying their duffel bags and strode off along the pier either alone or in groups: Olaf Thorgrimsen, soon to be bound back to Norway on another ship, and Dylan Custis, eager to visit his wife in Croydon; the engineers, electricians, mechanics, carpenter and welder; the able seamen and the ordinary seamen; the men of many nations but now the rather proud owners of one citizenship.

The freighter trash.

Marielle Wesshauser and her family had been met by some men she knew must be important. One of them was very tall and boyish-looking, though he was probably in his late forties. He had silvery-blonde hair and pale blue eyes. He had a high forehead, so he must be smart. Freckles were scattered across his cheeks and the bridge of his crooked nose. He talked quietly to her father and kept eye-contact. He seemed very cool and collected. She’d seen that same man speaking to Captain Beauchene on deck not long ago, and he’d spoken that very same way. Afterward, he and Captain Beauchene had shaken hands and then Marielle had watched the Frenchman wander around the ship. It seemed he was touching everything he could, as if saying goodbye to someone he’d once loved.

But she understood now that one had to look ahead. Always ahead. And that one had to keep working at life. Working at it, all the time. Working and working, like Vulcan at his forge.

For how else would anything beautiful be created?

They were leaving now, she and her family. The important men wanted to put them in one of the black sedans and take them to a hotel in London. That would be very much fun, Marielle thought. It would be very exciting, to walk around in London.

But first…

She searched and searched. Then she searched some more.

She looked everywhere.

But the gentleman was gone.

“Come on, Marielle! It’s time!” said her father, who offered her his hand as usual to negotiate any precarious path, such as the gangplank.

But she decided she didn’t need his hand today. Today she felt the sun on her face, and today she felt so light.

Because Billy was standing at the bottom, waiting for her, and when he saw her he smiled and came up to meet her halfway.