Dark Voyage

UNDER SPANISH FLAG

In the port of Tangier, on the last day of April, 1941, the fall of the Mediterranean evening was, as always, subtle and slow. Broken cloud, the color of dark fire in the last of the sunset, drifted over the hills above the port, and streetlamps lit the quay that lined the waterfront. A white city, and steep; alleys, souks, and cafs, their patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away. Out in the harbor, a Spanish destroyer, the Almirante Cruz, stood at anchor among the merchant steamers, hulls streaked with rust, angular deck cranes hard silhouettes in the dusk.

On board the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion Line, the radio room was like an oven and the Egyptian radio officer, known as Mr. Ali, wore only a sleeveless undershirt and baggy silk underdrawers. He sat tilted back in his swivel chair, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder and reading a slim, filthy novel in beautifully marbled covers. From time to time, he would remove his gold spectacles and wipe his face with a cloth, but he hardly noticed. He was used to the heat, the effect of a full day’s sun on the ship’s steel plate, and, come to that, used to these ports, hellholes always, Aden or Batavia, Shanghai or Tangier, and he was much absorbed in the noisy pleasures of the people in his novel. On the wireless telegraph before him, a gray wall of switches and dials, the ether crackled with static, his duty watch had less than an hour to run, and he was at peace with the world.

Then, from the static, a signal. On the BAMS frequency-Broadcasting for Allied Merchant Ships-and, he thought, far out at sea. He set the book face down on the work shelf below the radio, put on the headphones, and, with delicate thumb and forefinger, adjusted the dial for the strongest reception.

Q, Q, Q, Q.

For this message he didn’t need the BAMS codebook-not since May of 1940 he didn’t. It meant I am being attacked by an enemy ship and he’d heard it all too often. Here it came again, the operator fast and heavy on the key. And again, and again. Poor man, he thought. His fellow radio operator on some battered old merchantman, tapping out his final message, his ship confronted by a surfaced submarine or an E-boat raider, the shot already across her bows or her engine room torn apart by a torpedo.

What Mr. Ali could do, he did. Opened the radio logbook, noted the date and the time, and recorded the anonymous cry for help. DeHaan, captain of the Noordendam, would see it when he put the ship to bed for the night-he never failed to check the logbook before going to his cabin. If they had been at sea, Mr. Ali would have notified the captain immediately but now, in port, there was no point. Nothing they could do, nothing anyone could do. It was a big ocean, British sea power concentrated on the convoy routes, there was nobody to challenge the enemy or pick up survivors. The ship would die alone.

The signal went on for a time, fifty seconds by the clock on the radio array, and likely went on longer still, perhaps sending the name of the ship and its coordinates, but the transmission disappeared, lost in the rising and falling howl of a jammed frequency. Bastards. Mr. Ali watched the clock; five minutes, six, until the jamming stopped, replaced by empty air. He was taking the headphones off when the signal returned. Once only, and weaker now, the ship’s electrical system was almost gone. Q, Q, Q, Q, then silence.

DeHaan, at that moment, was ashore-had just left the gangway of the harbor launch and approached a battle-scarred Citron parked on the pier, TAXI TARZAN painted on its door, its Moorish driver stretched out in the back, hands clasped beneath his head, for his evening nap. DeHaan looked at his watch and decided to walk. The rue Raisuli was supposedly just beyond the Bab el Marsa, Gate of the Port, which he could see in the distance. He had been invited- ordered, he thought, that was the honest word-to a dinner given by a man called Hoek. Other than the fact that such things never happened, a perfectly normal request, so, one better go. Put on the shore uniform-double-breasted navy blazer over a soft gray shirt and dark wool trousers, and the tie, blue with a silver spaniel-and go.

He walked purposefully along the quay, thanking his stars as he passed a Norwegian tanker berthed at the pier and caught the rich aroma of aviation fuel. Of all the ways he didn’t want to die. DeHaan was tall, seemed tall, and lean, with strength in the arms and shoulders. Regular features: a North Sea face, gray eyes, sometimes cold, sometimes warm, with seafarer’s lines webbed at the corners, and rough, fair hair, almost brown, its first gray-he’d just turned forty-one-visible in sunlight. A certain lift to this face; pride, maybe, of profession not position-good as any man, better than none. Thin lips, not far from a smile, that Dutch set of the mouth which found the world a far more eccentric, and finally amusing, place than its German versions to the east. He had big hands, appreciated by women, who’d told him about it. Surprise to DeHaan, that idea, but not unwelcome.

Should he have worn his uniform? The Hyperion Line had one, plain and blue, for their captains, traditional on the first day of a voyage and never seen again, but DeHaan disliked the thing. It wasn’t, to him, a real uniform, and a real uniform was what he’d wanted. In May of 1940, when the conquering Germans had stripped out the filing cabinets of the Royal Dutch Navy administration building in The Hague, they’d surely found, and just as surely refiled for their own purposes, the 1938 application of one DeHaan, Eric Mathias, virtually begging for a commission, and service on a destroyer, or a torpedo boat, or anything, really, that shot.

He walked past the railway station and, a few minutes later, entered the narrow streets behind the Bab el Marsa gate-another world. Fragrant, the Maghreb. Stronger than he remembered; twenty-five years at sea, he thought, and too many ports. Fresh orange peel on the cobbled street, burning charcoal and-grilled kidney? He rather thought it was, nothing else quite smelled like that. Ancient drains, cumin, incense. And hashish, nothing else quite smelled like that. A scent encountered now and again aboard the Noordendam, but one mostly ignored it, as long as the men weren’t on watch. He was himself, as it happened, not entirely innocent of such things, the stuff had been one of what Arlette called her vile little pleasures. One of many. They’d used it one night in her room in the rue Lamartine, balancing tiny morsels on a burning cigarette end in an ashtray and sucking up the smoke through a tightly rolled hundred-drachma note he’d found in his pocket. Then they’d made ferocious and wildly chaotic- Ah, this! No, this! But what about this? — love, after which he’d fallen dead asleep for ten hours then woke to make Arlette a colossal Dutch pancake swimming in butter.

In the rue Raisuli, Arab music from a dozen radios, and two Spanish Guardia, in their Napoleonic leather hats, strolling along in a way that told the world they owned the street. Which, officially, they did. Tangier had been since 1906 an International Zone, a free port trading in currency, boys, and espionage. Now Spain had taken control of the city, incorporated into Spanish Morocco, which meant that Casablanca was French, ruled from Vichy, and Tangier Spanish, and neutral, and governed by Madrid. But DeHaan and everybody else knew better. It was, like Paris, one of those cities emphatically owned by the people who lived in it. And how, DeHaan wondered, did Mijnheer Hoek fit into all this? Trader? Emigr? Decadent? All three? Number 18 in the rue Raisuli turned out to be a restaurant, Al Mounia, but not the sort of restaurant where important people gave private dinners.

DeHaan parted the bead curtain, stepped inside, and stood there for a moment, looking lost. This can’t be right, he thought. Tile floor, bare wooden tables, a few customers, more than one reading a newspaper with dinner. Then a man he took to be the proprietor came gliding up to him, DeHaan said, “Monsieur Hoek?” and that turned out to be the magic phrase. The man clapped his hands twice and a waiter took DeHaan through the restaurant and out the back, into a courtyard bounded by tenements where life went on at full pitch; six stories of white laundry hung on lines strung across the sky, six stories of families eating dinner by open windows. From there, DeHaan was led through a damp tunnel into a second courtyard, an unlit, silent courtyard, then down an alley to a heavy, elaborately carved door. The waiter knocked and went on his way as a voice from within called out, “Entrez.”

Inside, a small, square room with no windows and, except for a ceiling painted as the night sky-blue background, gold dots for stars, a silver sickle moon on the horizon-there was only fabric. Carpets covered the walls and the floor, a circle of hassocks was gathered around a low table with a brass tray that occupied most of its surface. As DeHaan entered, a man seated in a wheelchair-made entirely of wood except for rubber tires on the spoked wheels-extended his hand and said, “Captain DeHaan, welcome, thank you for coming, I am Marius Hoek.” Hoek had a powerful grip. In his fifties, he was pale as a ghost, with sheared fair hair and eyeglasses that went opaque, catching the light of a lamp in the corner, as he looked up at DeHaan.

Rising from their hassocks to greet him, the other dinner guests: a woman in a chalk-stripe suit and a dark shirt, a man in the uniform of a Dutch naval officer, and Wim Terhouven, owner of the Netherlands Hyperion Line-his employer. DeHaan turned to Terhouven, as though for explanation, and found him much amused, all sly grin, at the prospect of the famously composed Captain DeHaan, who couldn’t imagine what the hell was going on and showed it. “Hello, Eric,” Terhouven said, taking DeHaan’s hand in his. “The bad penny always turns up, eh?” He patted DeHaan on the shoulder, don’t worry, m’boy, and said, “May I present Juffrouw, ah, Wilhelm?”

Formally, DeHaan shook her hand. “Just Wilhelm will do,” she said. “Everybody calls me that.” She wore no makeup, had fine, delicate features, was about thirty-five years old, he guessed, with thick, honey-gold hair cut very short and parted on the side.

“And,” Terhouven said, “this is Commander Hendryk Leiden.”

Leiden was broad and bulky, bald halfway back, with a drinker’s purplish nose, a sailor’s wind-chapped complexion, and a full beard. “Good to meet you, Captain,” he said.

“Come sit down,” Terhouven said. “Enjoy the walk over here?”

DeHaan nodded. “It’s the same restaurant?”

“The private room-who says it has to be upstairs?” He laughed. “And, on the way, a taste of the real Tangier, assassins behind every door.”

“Well, that or couscous.”

Wilhelm liked the joke. “It’s good, Al Mounia, a local favorite.”

DeHaan lowered himself onto a hassock as Terhouven poured him a glass of gin from an old-fashioned ceramic jug. “Classic stuff,” he said.

“They sell this in Tangier?”

Terhouven snorted. He had a devil’s beard and the eyes to go with it. “Not this they don’t. This came across on a trawler in May of ’40 and flew with me all the way from London, just for your party. Real Geneva, made in Schiedam.” He tapped the label, hand-lettered and fired into the glazed surface.

“My friends,” Leiden said, “with your permission.” He stood, glass held high, and the others, except for Hoek, followed his example. Leiden paused for a long moment, then said, “De Nederland.” In one voice, they echoed his words, and DeHaan saw that Hoek, knuckles white where his hand gripped the arm of the chair, had raised himself off the seat to honor the toast. They drank next to victory, Hoek’s offering, and, from Wilhelm, success in new ventures, as Terhouven caught DeHaan’s eye and gave him a conspiratorial flick of the eyebrows. Then it was up to DeHaan, who’d been desperate for the right words from the moment Leiden lifted his glass. Finally, as the others turned to him in expectation, he said, quietly, “Well then, to absent friends.” This was conventional and wellworn but, on that night, with those friends in a Europe held by barbed wire and searchlights, it came back to life.

Terhouven said, “Amen to that,” and began to refill the glasses. When he was done he said, “I propose we drink to Captain Eric DeHaan, our guest of honor, who I know you will come to appreciate as I have.” DeHaan lowered his eyes, and was more than grateful when the toast had been drunk and the group returned to conversation.

Terhouven told the story of his flight from London, on a Sunderland flying boat, his fellow passengers mostly men with briefcases who were rather pointedly disinclined to make conversation. A nighttime journey, hours of it, “just waiting for the Luftwaffe.” But then, “the most beautiful dawn sky, somewhere off the coast of Spain, the sea turning blue beneath us.”

Hoek glanced at his watch. “Dinner should appear any moment now,” he said. “I took the liberty of ordering-I hope you don’t mind, it’s better if you give them time.” A good idea, it seemed, they were happy enough to wait, the table talk wandering here and there. You had to be Dutch, DeHaan thought, to know that the gin was at work. Not much to be seen on the exterior, everyone calm and thoughtful, attentive, in no hurry to take the floor. They were, after all, strangers, for the most part, together for an evening in a foreign city, who shared little more than citizenship in a conquered nation, and its corollary, a certain quiet anger common to those who cannot go home.

“Years since I’ve been back,” Hoek said to Terhouven. “Came out here in, oh, 1927. Looking for opportunity.” An unvoiced naturally lingered at the end of his sentence-Holland was a trading nation which had, for centuries, used the whole world as its office, so commerce in foreign climes was something of a national commonplace. “And I found a way to buy a small brokerage, in ores and minerals, then built it up over the years. They mine lead and iron, in the south, and there’s graphite, cobalt, antimony, asbestos. That’s in addition to the phosphates, of course. That pays the rent.”

DeHaan knew about the phosphates, Morocco’s main export. The Noordendam, as it happened, was scheduled to call at Safi, the port serving Marrakesh on the Atlantic coast, to take on a bulk cargo from the Khourigba mines. So, DeHaan thought, it all made sense, didn’t it-his boss flying down from exile in London, taking his life in his hands, to bring a jug of Dutch gin to celebrate the loading of one of his freighters. Well, all will, in time, be explained. In fact, he had a pretty good idea what was going on, he was simply anxious to hear the details.

“So, your family’s here, with you,” Terhouven said.

“Oh yes,” Hoek said. “Good-size family.”

DeHaan thought he saw a flicker of amusement in Wilhelm’s eyes, an expression on her face he could only describe as not smiling.

Terhouven, making conversation, asked her how long she’d been in Tangier.

“Mmm, not so long, a few years maybe, if you add it all up. I was in Paris, after the war, Juan-les-Pins in the summers, then here, then back to Paris, Istanbul for a while, then back here.”

“A restless soul.” Terhouven knew her type.

She shrugged. “A change of light. And people, I suppose.”

“You’re an artist,” Terhouven said, it wasn’t exactly an accusation.

“After a fashion.”

“After nothing,” Hoek said firmly. “And nobody. She’s shown in Paris and New York, though she won’t tell you that.”

“In oils?” DeHaan said, meaning not oils, of course.

“No. Gouache, principally, though lately I’m back to charcoal pencil.” She took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case with Bacchus and girlfriend on the lid, tapped it twice, and lit it with a steel lighter. “Back to life drawing.” She shook her head and smiled ruefully that such an odd thing should be so.

At the door, a firm knock, and three waiters with trays.

The dinner was served in traditional dishes set out on the low table. Bowls of aromatic yellow soup, soft bread still hot from the oven, a grandiose pastilla — minced pigeon breast and almonds in pastry leaves, a platter of stewed lamb and vegetables. Once the dishes were set down, glasses packed with crushed mint leaves were filled with boiling water, poured ritually by the chief waiter, who raised and lowered the spout of a silver flagon as the stream curved into the glass. When he was done, the waiter said, “Shall we remain to serve you?”

“Thank you,” Hoek said, “but I think we’ll manage by ourselves.”

This was in French, which DeHaan understood, some of the time, and also spoke, some of the time, and in his own particular way-“the French of a beast,” according to Arlette. He had good German and English, like almost everyone in Holland, and, a year earlier, after the invasion, he had added to his forty-book library a Russian grammar. He had no professional, or political, reason for this, it was more akin to chess, or crossword puzzles, a way to occupy the mind in the long hours off-watch, when he needed to distract himself from the captain’s eternal obsession: every beat of the engine, every tremor and creak of the ship, his ship, at sea. Thus he found an absorbing if difficult pastime, though in addition to studying the grammar he’d more than once fallen asleep on it, and showered it with ashes, seawater, coffee, and cocoa, but, a Russian book, it endured, and survived.

Terhouven, seated next to him, said, “How was Paramaribo?” He tore himself a length of bread, took a piece of lamb from the platter, studied it, then swished it through the sauce and put it on the bread.

“It’s the rainy season-a steambath when it stops.” They’d taken a cargo of greenheart and mora wood, used for wharves and docks, from Dutch Guiana up to the Spanish port of La Corua, then sailed in ballast-mostly water but some scrap iron-for Tangier.

“Lose anybody?”

“Only one, an oiler. A Finn, or so his book said. Good oiler, but a terrible drunk. Hit people-he was pretty good at that too. I tried to buy him out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it.”

“In Paramaribo? They wouldn’t take a bribe?”

“He hit a pimp, a barman, a bouncer, a cop, and a jailer.”

“Christ!” A moment later, Terhouven smiled. “In that order?”

DeHaan nodded.

Terhouven finished his lamb and bread, wiped his mouth, then made a face. “Too dumb to live, some people. You replace him?”

“Couldn’t be done. So, as of this evening, we’re at forty-two.”

“You can sail with forty-two.”

“We can.” But we need more and you know it.

“It’s the war,” Terhouven said.

“Pretty bad, lately, everybody’s undermanned, especially in the engine room. On a lot of ships, when they reach port, they have the crew on deck after midnight, waiting for the drunks to come out of the bars. ‘Climb aboard, mate, we get bacon twice a day.’”

“Or somebody gets hit on the head, and wakes up at sea.”

“Yes, that too.”

Terhouven looked over the tray to see if there was anything else worth eating. “Tell me, Eric, how come no uniform?”

“All I knew was ‘a dinner,’ so…”

“Is it wrecked?”

“No, it lives.”

“You can have another made here, you know.”

Across the table, Wilhelm said to Hoek, “Well, I went to the flower market but he wasn’t there.”

DeHaan was done with dinner, had had all he wanted and liked it well enough. He’d been everywhere in the world and eaten bravely, but he could never quite forget his last plate of fried potatoes and mayonnaise in a waterfront caf in Rotterdam. He took out a packet of small cigars-a Dutch brand called North State, cigarette-shaped but longer, the color of dark chocolate, and offered it to Terhouven, who declined, then lit one for himself, inhaled the brutal smoke, and coughed with pleasure. “Wim,” he said, “what is this dinner about?”

Terhouven hesitated, was about to tell all, then didn’t. “The Hyperion Line is going to war, Eric, and the first step is taken here, tonight. As for the details, why not wait and see-don’t spoil the surprise.”

The waiters returned, the first holding the door, the second bearing a tray piled high with mounds of little pastries that glistened with honey, the third carrying two bottles of champagne in buckets of ice. He raised the buckets proudly and grinned at the dinner guests. “Celebration!” he said. “Open both bottles?”

“Please,” Hoek said.

When the waiters left, Hoek opened the briefcase by his feet and unfolded a Dutch flag, red, white, and blue in horizontal bars, took it by the corners, and held it above his head. Commander Leiden rose and drew from an inner pocket a sheet of good paper with several typed paragraphs, cleared his throat, and stood at attention. “Captain DeHaan,” he said, “would you stand facing me, please?” From somewhere in the neighborhood, the sound of whining Arabic music was faintly audible.

Leiden, in a formal voice, began to read. This was admiralty language, stern and flowery and impressively antique- hereby s and whereas es and shall not fail s, a high wall of words. But plain enough to DeHaan, who blinked once but that was all: Leiden was administering the oath of enlistment in the Royal Dutch Navy. DeHaan raised his right hand, repeated the phrases as directed, and swore his life away. That done, the conclusion was not long in coming. “Therefore, in the name of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Wilhelmina, and by order of the Commissioners of the Admiralty of the Royal Naval Forces of the Netherlands, it is our pleasure to appoint to commission the present Eric, Mathias, DeHaan, to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, in the sure and certain knowledge that he shall perform with full honor and endeavor…”

It went on for a time, then Leiden shook his hand and said, “You may salute, now,” which DeHaan did, and Leiden returned the salute as Terhouven and Wilhelm applauded.

Looking at Terhouven, DeHaan saw a joker’s delight, thought, why no uniform indeed, you sly bastard, but saw also eyes that shone brighter than they should.

They ate the pastries and drank the champagne and talked about the war. Then, at midnight, the man who worked as Hoek’s attendant and chauffeur, a pink-cheeked migr called Herbert, arrived and Wilhelm and Hoek left them. They could hear the chair bumping along the cobbled alley toward a car parked in a nearby square.

“Quite a character,” Leiden said. “Our Mijnheer Hoek.”

“A big heart in him,” Terhouven said.

“Surely that.” Leiden paused to finish the last of his champagne. “He has never married, officially, but it’s said that two of his servants are actually his wives, and that the children in the house are his. It’s not unknown here. In fact, if he were Mohammedan, he could have four wives.”

“Four wives.” From his tone of voice, Terhouven was considering the domestic, not the erotic, implications.

“Only two, for Hoek, and it’s no more than gossip,” Leiden said. “But he does maintain a large household, which he can easily afford.”

“Well,” DeHaan said, “why not.”

“We agree. Whatever their peculiarities, you soon discover, as part of a government in exile, the importance of patriots who have their wealth abroad.”

“And want to spend it,” Terhouven said.

“Yes, but not only that. What you saw here tonight was the North African station of the Royal Dutch Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence.”

Terhouven and DeHaan were silent, then Terhouven said, “May one ask how you found them?”

One may not — but Leiden never said it. Terhouven was himself a patriot of this category and that, by the slimmest of margins, bought him an answer. “They volunteered-at the consul’s office in Casablanca. There were others, of course, more than you’d expect, but these two we decided we could trust. If not to be good at it, at least to be quiet. This sort of connection excites people, in the beginning, and they simply must tell, you know, ‘just one friend.’” He spoke the last words in the voice of the indiscreet, then turned to DeHaan and said, “You can depend on them, of course, but one of the axioms of this work is that you don’t abandon your, ah, best instincts.”

DeHaan began to understand the dinner. For a time, he’d thought he might be asked to serve on one of the Dutch warships that had escaped capture in 1940 and gone on to fight alongside the British navy. Now he knew better. Yes, he was newly a Luitenant ter Zee 1ste Klasse, but-and Terhouven’s presence confirmed his suspicion-it was the Noordendam that was going to war.

“And Wilhelm?” Terhouven said.

“Our wireless/telegraph operator. And, just as important, she knows people-migrs and Moroccans, plain folk and otherwise. An artist, you see, can turn up anywhere and talk to anyone and nobody cares. Very useful, if you’re us. She was among the first to apply, I should add, and her father was a senior officer in the army. So, maybe it’s true, blood will tell and all that.”

“Are they to give me orders?” DeHaan said, not sounding as neutral as he thought.

“No. They will help you-you will need their help-and they may serve as a retransmission station for our instructions to you.”

“Which are?”

“What we want you to do, and this is the broad answer, is to carry on the war. We, which is to say Section IIIA of the Admiralty General Staff, currently find ourselves crammed into two small rooms in D’Arblay Street, in Soho. Some of us have to share desks, but, frankly, we never had all that much space in The Hague, and we’d learned, over the years, to accept a certain, insignificance. With Holland a neutral state, as she’d been in the Great War, the government had better things to do with its money than to buy intelligence. We had the naval attachs in the embassies, ran a small operation now and again, watched a few ports. Then the roof fell in and we lost the war in four days-the army hadn’t fought since 1830, nobody anticipated attacks by parachute and glider, the queen sailed away, and we surrendered. We were humiliated, and, if we didn’t believe that, the British found ways to let us know it was true. In their eyes, we stood with the French, the Belgians, and the Danes-not the ‘brave but outmanned Greeks.’

“So now, in London, we are left to simmer in the exile stew-de Gaulle demands this, the Belgians want that, the Dutch navy turns the heat down and wears sweaters, because gas is expensive. Thank God, is all I can say, for our tugboat rescue service and for the ships of our merchant fleet, which sail, and are too often lost, in the Atlantic convoys. But Britain needs more-she needs America is what she really needs but they’re not ready to fight-and now she has decided, and we may have given her a little help in seeing it, that she needs us, D’Arblay Street, thus we need our friend Terhouven here, and we need you. Special missions, Lieutenant Commander DeHaan, at which you shall succeed. Thereby casting some very timely glory on Holland, the Royal Navy, and its beloved Section IIIA. So then, will it be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? ‘Maybe,’ unfortunately, is at present not available.”

DeHaan took a moment to answer. “Is the Noordendam to be armed?”

This was not a bad guess. Germany had armed merchant freighters and they’d been more than efficient. Sailing under false flags, with guns cleverly concealed, they approached unsuspecting ships, then showed their true colors, took the crews prisoner, and sank the ships or sent them off to Germany. One such raider had recently captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet, which mattered because whale oil was converted to glycerine, used for explosives.

But Leiden smiled and shook his head. “Not that we wouldn’t like to, but no.”

“Well, of course I’ll do it, whatever it is,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”

“What about them? They serve on the Noordendam, under your command.”

DeHaan nodded, as though that were the answer. In fact, such business as Leiden had in mind was first of all secret, but sailors went ashore, got drunk, and told whores, or anybody in a bar, their life story.

Leiden leaned forward and lowered his voice- now the truth. “Look,” he said, “the fact is that all Dutch merchant ships that survived the invasion are to come under the control of what’s called the Netherlands Ministry of Shipping, and most will then be under the management of British companies, which would put the Noordendam in convoy on the Halifax run, or down around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Suez Canal to the British naval base at Alexandria. But that won’t happen because the Royal Dutch Navy has chartered her from the Hyperion Line, at a rate of one guilder a year, with a Dutch naval officer in command.”

DeHaan saw that Leiden and Terhouven were looking at him, waiting for a reaction. “Well, it seems we’ve been honored,” he said, meaning no irony at all. They truly had been, to be chosen in this way, though he suspected it would be honor bought at a high price.

“You have,” Terhouven said. Now live up to it.

“It’s not final,” Leiden said, “but there’s a good possibility that your sister ships will be run by British companies.”

“Lot of nerve, they have,” Terhouven said. “What’s the old saying-‘nation of pirates’?”

“Yes,” DeHaan said. “Like us.”

They all had a laugh out of that. “Well, it’s just for the duration,” Leiden said.

“No doubt,” Terhouven said sourly. The Netherlands Hyperion Line had come into existence in 1918, with Terhouven and his brother first chartering, then buying, at a very good price, a German freighter awarded as part of war reparations to France. Governments and shipowners, over the centuries, forever had their noses in each other’s business-bloody noses often the result.

“You’ve been at this a long time,” DeHaan said to Leiden.

“Since 1916, as a young ensign. I tried to get out, once or twice, but they wouldn’t let me go.”

This was not necessarily good news to DeHaan, who’d taken some comfort in Leiden’s being, from the look of him, an old seadog. But now Leiden went on to describe himself as “an old deskdog,” waiting a beat for a chuckle that never came.

“Haven’t been to sea all that much. Not at all, really,” Leiden said. Then smiled in recollection and added, “We never got out of Holland-six of us from the section-until August. Snuck down into Belgium one hot night and stole a little fishing smack, in Knokke-le-Zoute. Hardly any fuel in the damn thing-that’s how the Germans keep them on the leash-but there was a sail aboard and we managed to get it rigged. All of us were in uniform, mind you, because we didn’t want to get shot as spies if they caught us. We drifted around in the dark for a time-there was a good, heavy sea running that night-while our two amateur sailing enthusiasts had a, spirited discussion about which way to go. Then we realized what we looked like, ‘bathtub full of admirals’ somebody said, and we had to laugh. Office navy, that’s us.”

DeHaan glanced at Terhouven and saw that they’d both managed polite smiles-Leiden may have been “office navy” but they were not. Terhouven said, “Might as well kill this,” and shared out the last of the gin, while DeHaan fired up one of his cigars.

“All right,” Leiden said, acknowledging a comment that had not actually been spoken, “maybe we better get down to business.”

It was after two in the morning when they left the little room and walked back down the rue Raisuli, which had grown steeper during dinner. Terhouven and Leiden were staying at a private home near the Mendoubia gardens, while DeHaan was headed for the waterfront. It was a warm night, a spring night, with a breeze off the water and a certain lilt to the air, well known to the town’s poets but never named. Anyhow, the cats were out, and the radios turned down-likely out of consideration for the neighbors.

A man in a doorway, the hood of his djellaba up so that it shadowed his face, cleared his throat as they passed by and, when he had their attention, said, “Bonsoir, messieurs,” his voice cheerful and inviting. He hesitated a moment, as though they knew who he was and what he was there for, then said, “Messieurs? Le got franais, ou le got anglais?”

It took DeHaan a moment to think that through, while a puzzled Terhouven said, “Pardon?”

“Le got,” DeHaan said, “means taste, preference, and franais means that it is a woman you have a taste for.”

“Oh,” Terhouven said. “I see. Well, gentlemen, it’s on the Hyperion Line, if you care to make a night of it.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Leiden said.

They came, a few minutes later, to the rue es Seghin, where they would part company. Terhouven said goodby, adding that they might be able to meet the following day. Leiden shook hands with DeHaan and said, “Good luck, then.” He held DeHaan’s hand a moment longer, said, “We…” but did not go on. Finally he said, “Well, good luck,” and turned away. He was, as he’d been all night, bluff and brisk, professional, yet just for an instant there’d been an edge of emotion to him, as though he knew he would never see DeHaan again, and Terhouven’s glance, over the shoulder as he walked off, confirmed it.

DeHaan headed for the Bab el Marsa and the port. Le got hollandais, he thought. Drunk and lonely and sent off to die at sea. But he found that thought offensive and made himself take it back. In the North Atlantic, and everywhere in Europe, all sorts of people had their lives in their hands that night but there was always room for one more, and as to who would see the end of war and who wouldn’t, that was up to the stars. When DeHaan was fifteen, his father, captain of the schooner Helma J., had gone copra trading in the Celebes Sea, taking rafts up the jungle rivers, buying at native villages, bringing the copra out in burlap sacks. Then one day he went up the wrong river and was never seen again and, for a horribly awkward half hour, the head of the Helma J. syndicate had sat in their parlor in Rotterdam, staring at the floor, mumbling “poor man, poor man, his luck ran out,” and leaving an envelope on the hall table. One year later, through floods of his mother’s tears, DeHaan had gone to sea.

It was almost three in the morning by the time DeHaan reached the dock. The port launch was long ago tied up for the night but his chief mate had sent the Noordendam ’s cutter for him, crewed by two ABs, who wished him good evening and started the engine. DeHaan sat silent in the bow as they chugged off through the harbor swell, past dead fish and oil slicks lit by moonlight.

0800 Hrs. 4 May 1941. 3512? N/610? W, course SSW. Low cloud, light NE swell, w/wves 4/6 feet. No vessels sighted. All well on board. J. Ratter, First Officer.

For the time being, he thought, reading the first officer’s entry as he began the forenoon watch, which ran from eight to twelve in the morning. A traditional captain’s watch, like the four-to-eight, and the dreaded midwatch. Midnight to four, which called for endless mugs of coffee, as one stared into the night and waited for dawn, but he’d never sailed on a ship where it was any other way. At “the hour of the wolf,” when life flickered, and sometimes went out, a captain had to be on his bridge.

He said good morning to the new helmsman-always an AB, able-bodied seaman-at the wheel, and saw that Ratter, his first officer, hadn’t gone down to his cabin at the end of his watch but was out on the starboard wing of the bridge, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars. U-boats might well be out hunting, even this close to the British air cover from Gibraltar, and from the open deck of the bridge wing you could see much better than on the enclosed bridge. Not that it mattered, DeHaan thought, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight. They could break radio silence, a hard-and-fast rule for merchant ships since the beginning of the war, but that wouldn’t save the Noordendam.

Still, despite the war, despite anything, really, it eased his heart to be back at sea.

The Atlantic on a spring morning, six miles off the coast of Africa. Low cloud bank on the horizon, gray, shifting sky, sea the color of polished lead, stiff breeze from the northeast trades, gulls swooping and crying at the stern as they waited for the breakfast garbage. The real world, to DeHaan, and reassuring after the strange dinner four nights earlier. The blazer was back in his locker, and DeHaan was himself again-faded denim shirt rolled up above the elbows, gray canvas trousers, tie-up leather ankle boots with rubber soles. And a single badge of authority: a captain’s hat, a very old and hardworn friend-the gold stitching of the Hyperion Line insignia, twisted rope in the shape of an H, faintly green from years of salt air-which he wore with peak tilted slightly over his right eye. A good Swiss watch on a leather strap, and that was that.

Done with his survey of the horizon, Ratter came in off the wing deck and said, “Morning, Cap’n.”

“Johannes.”

Ratter was in his thirties, with a long, handsome, serious face and dark hair. Three years earlier, he’d lost an eye in a wheat-dust explosion on the Altmaar, one of the Noordendam ’s sister ships. There’d been no glass eye for him at the hospital in Rangoon, so he’d worn a black eye patch on a black band ever since. He was a good officer, conscientious and bright, who had long had his master’s papers and should have had his own ship by now, but the financial contractions of the 1930s had made that impossible.

“Service at oh nine hundred?” he said.

“Yes,” DeHaan said. It was Sunday morning, and an inviolable shipping tradition called for him to conduct a Divine Service, followed by captain’s inspection. He didn’t mind the latter so much, though he saw through all the tricks, but the former was a burden. “Compulsory today,” DeHaan added. “That means everybody. You already have the bridge, and you can keep the helmsman. Kovacz will take the engine room”-Kovacz, a Pole, was his chief engineer-“and I want everybody else on the foredeck.”

“All right,” Ratter said. “Full crew.”

DeHaan turned to the helmsman. “Come a point to starboard, and signal half speed.”

“Aye, sir. Point to starboard, half speed.” He turned the wheel-highly polished teak, an elegant survivor of the East India trade-and shifted the lever on the engine-room telegraph to Half Speed Ahead. From the engine room, two bells, which confirmed the order.

“I’m going to have to make a speech,” DeHaan said, clearly not happy about it.

Ratter looked at him. This never happened.

“We’re not going to Safi for phosphates.”

“No?”

“We’re going to Rio de Oro,” DeHaan said, using the official name for the strip of coastal sand known commonly as the Spanish Sahara. “Anchoring off Villa Cisneros-and I don’t want to get there much before nightfall, so, save the oil.” After a moment he added, “We’re changing identities, you might as well know it now.”

Ratter nodded. Very well, whatever you say. “Liberty for the crew?”

“No, they stay aboard. They all got ashore in Tangier, so they won’t take it too hard.”

“They won’t, and, even if they grumble, it’s Mauritania, whatever the Spaniards call it, and you know what they think about that.”

DeHaan knew. Sailors’ mythology had it that seamen on liberty in the more remote ports of northwestern Africa had been known to disappear. Kidnapped, the stories went, and chained to stepped wooden wheels, treadmills, in the lost villages of the desert interior, where they were worked to death pumping water from deep wells.

“We’ll have the local bumboats,” DeHaan said. “Crew will have to make do with that. And put the word out that we’re due for a long cruise, so, if they need anything…”

The mess boy came tramping up the ladderway-metal steps, too steep for a stairway but not quite a ladder-that led to the bridge. Known as Cornelius, he thought he was fifteen years old. He was, if that was true, small for his age, pale and scrawny. He’d grown up, he said, on the island of Texel and had first gone to sea on the herring boats at the age of nine. And running away to sea, according to Cornelius, had greatly improved his lot in life.

“Breakfast, Cap’n,” he said, offering a tray.

“Why thank you, Cornelius,” DeHaan said. Ratter had to turn away to keep from laughing. DeHaan’s breakfast was a mug of strong coffee and a slab of mealy gray bread spread thickly with margarine, which bore, at its edge, the deep imprint of a small thumb.

DeHaan chewed away at the bread and sipped the coffee and stared out at the low cloud on the horizon. In a moment, he’d go back to his cabin, read through the Divine Service-from a stapled booklet, dated Sunday to Sunday, provided by the Hyperion Line-and jot down what to say to the assembled crew. But, for the time being, with bread and coffee, Ratter’s silent presence, and fair weather, it was a pleasure to do nothing. The bridge was his true home on the ship-or, really, anywhere in the world. A sacred space, no clutter allowed. Only the helm, engine-room telegraph, brass speaking tube to the engine room with a tin whistle on a chain around its neck, compass mounted in a brass binnacle-a waist-high stand, signal flags in wooden compartments that climbed the port bulkhead, and an arc of grand, square windows in mahogany frames. Access was by doorways that led to the bridge wings, and a ladderway to the deck below-to the chartroom, captain’s and officers’ quarters, wardroom, and officers’ mess.

DeHaan permitted himself time for half his coffee, then said, “Well, I guess I have to go to work. Just keep it nice and slow, south-southwest at one-ninety degrees, and stay six-off-the-coast.” The phrase meant beyond the five-mile limit, international waters. “We’re running west of Morocco for the next few hours but, technically anyhow, that’s Vichy France.”

Ratter confirmed the order.

DeHaan took one last sip of coffee, then another, but he couldn’t leave. “I just want you to know,” he said, “that we’re really in it now, and it’s me who put us there. Maybe something had to happen, sooner or later, but it’s going to be sooner, and somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Ratter shrugged. “That’s the war, Eric, you can’t get away from it.” He was silent for a time, the only sound on the bridge the distant beat of the engine. “Anyhow, whatever it is,” he said, “we’ll come through.”

The wind blew hard on the forward deck, waves breaking at the bow, sun in and out of a troubled sky. The crew stood in ranks for the Divine Service, their heads uncovered, hats held in both hands. Kees, the Noordendam ’s second mate, a stolid, pipe-smoking classic of the merchant service, counted heads, counted again, and went off to retrieve a couple of convinced atheists skulking in the crew’s quarters.

Divine Service was meant to be vague and ecumenical: for Lascar and Malay crews from the East Indies, Moslems-as Mr. Ali was thought to be though in fact he was a Coptic Christian-for Catholics, for everybody; a few simple words addressed to an understanding and comprehensive God. But DeHaan knew the services to have been written by the Terhouven family pastor, a Dutch Reformed minister in Rotterdam with a pronounced taste for Protestant gloom. Thus that day’s service was based on the words of Martin Luther: “Everyone must do his own believing, as he will have to do his own dying.” Given the speech that DeHaan would be making after the service, the worst possible choice, but this was not the moment to improvise.

Belief mattered, went the homily, one had to have faith in the ways of the Lord, one had to be compassionate, to express this faith by charity toward one’s fellow man. A reading of Psalms 93 and 96 came next, followed by a recitation of the reverend’s chief work, The Seaman’s Prayer — a stormy, nightbound opus that made at least some of the men flinch. The word storm was not to be said at sea, lest there be one about, which, on hearing the mention of its name, came to see who was calling. After a minute of silent prayer, as most of the men bowed their heads, the service was over.

“Men,” DeHaan said, “before you are dismissed for captain’s inspection, I must say a few words to you.” DeHaan cleared his throat, consulted his notes, then held them behind his back. “We all know that half the world is at war, that we face a powerful and determined enemy. Over the next few weeks, the Noordendam and its crew will take part in this struggle by participating in a secret mission. Secret — I emphasize the word. It may be dangerous, you may be called on to take up duties which are not usual to you, but I know you will do what has to be done. I know you are capable, I know you are brave, and now you may be called on to prove it. During this time, you will remain aboard ship. Your officers and I will do everything we can to make life easier for you, but you are to expect the unexpected, and meet whatever happens with all your experience and skill.

“We will be anchoring off Rio de Oro later today, and the bumboat men will be coming to the ship, as usual. For those who may need a little extra money to buy the necessaries, you may call on Mr. Ratter, for the deckhands, or Mr. Kovacz, for the engine-room crew. I would like to end this talk by saying ‘if you have questions, ask me,’ but I would not be able to answer. I have always been proud of Noordendam and her crew, and I know you won’t disappoint me. What we do, we do for those at home, in Holland, in Europe, wherever they are.” He let them think it over for a moment, then said, “Those of you on watch can return to duty, the captain’s inspection will begin at ten hundred hours.”

Thank God that’s over. He wondered what they’d thought about it. Some of the men had met his eyes- you can count on me. Perhaps they’d lost friends or family in the Rotterdam bombing-when Holland had virtually lost the war-an object lesson from stern Papa Germany. Some of the men had stared at their shoes, while one or two seemed angry: at the enemy, at their captain, at life; there was no way to know.

Maybe a third of them had no idea what he’d said, because they didn’t speak Dutch, but their mates would find a way to explain it to them. The language of the merchant service was pidgin English, some three hundred words that got seamen through their daily duties and life below deck. A number of them couldn’t read or write, particularly the oilers and firemen in the engine-room crew. Former stokers, most of them, from the days before steamships had converted to oil, their hands seamed with black lines where cuts and blisters had healed over coal dust. There were a few communists, some secret, some not, supposedly on Hitler’s side since the pact of 1939, and a few who didn’t think the Nazi doctrines were all that wrong. But, in the end, they were all sailors, who couldn’t leave the life of the ships because they were-and they would say it just this way-married to the sea. A hard life, seen from the shore, brutal and dangerous and, often enough, mortal. Even so, it was in their blood, and it was the only life they wanted to live.

Kees stood by DeHaan’s side as the men broke ranks and headed for their inspection stations. Taciturn and reflective by nature, he made no comment, but for a single interrogatory puff of pipe smoke whipped away by the wind.

“There’ll be an officers’ meeting in the wardroom, before lunch,” DeHaan said, answering the puff.

Kees nodded. Just not enough trouble for some people in this world, they have to go looking for more. He didn’t say it out loud but he didn’t need to-DeHaan understood him perfectly.

1830 hours, Villa Cisneros.

DeHaan had anchored Noordendam well out in the bay. She could have tied up at the deepwater pier but her master chose, perhaps, not to pay the dockage fee-penny-pinching always a credible motive in the world of tramp steamers.

“Ever been here?” DeHaan asked the AB steering the ship’s cutter. There was a chill in the desert air as night came on, and he pulled his leather jacket, sheepskin-lined, around him and held it closed.

“Can’t say as I have, sir.”

“Seems quiet,” the other AB offered.

Benighted, maybe, or, better, godforsaken. But seamen tended toward diplomacy with officers present. A thousand souls in the town, according to one of DeHaan’s almanacs. Well, maybe there were, hidden away in a maze of bleached walls and shadows, but, from just off the pier, the place was deserted. Not much of anything, in Rio de Oro. Four hundred coastal miles of sand and low hills, and abundant salt, which they sometimes exported-a last tattered shred of the Spanish Empire. But, a neutral shred, and that made it useful.

They tied up to a bollard on the pier and, as DeHaan climbed the stone stairway to the street, a desert wind, smelling of ancient dust, blew in his face. Eight months earlier, on a street in Liverpool, he’d discovered the same smell, had puzzled over it until he realized that it rose from the foundations of old buildings, newly excavated and blown into the air by Luftwaffe bombs.

It was only a minute’s walk to the Grand Hotel Cisneros-Leiden had told him where to find it-which turned out to be three stories high and two windows wide, a stucco building that had been white at the turn of the century. The lobby seemed vast-a high ceiling with a fan, black-and-white tile floor, dead palm tree in a yellow planter. The clerk, an elderly Spaniard with the face of a mole and a wing collar, stared at him hopefully as he came through the door. In one corner, Wilhelm, in Barbour field jacket and whipcord trousers, was reading a book.

He greeted her, his words echoing in the empty lobby. From Wilhelm, a crooked grin-clearly they couldn’t talk here. She rose and said, “My car’s just out the back.”

DeHaan didn’t envy much in this world but he envied Wilhelm her car. It was parked in a small square behind the hotel, between a 1920s moving-company truck and a Renault sedan, a flock guarded by a mustached shepherd in a sheepskin vest and hat, with a rifle slung diagonally across his back. Wilhelm handed him a few dirhams, which he tucked away as he inclined his head by way of saying thank you.

“It’s wonderful,” DeHaan said. A low, open sports car, weathered by sand and wind to the color of chromatic dust-probably green if you thought about it, with a tiny windscreen, a leather strap across the hood, bug-eyed headlights, and the steering wheel on the right. In British movies, the hero vaulted into cars like this but DeHaan took the traditional approach, snaking his way inside and settling into the leather seat.

“Yes,” Wilhelm said. “Mostly.” The shepherd stared thoughtfully as Wilhelm tried the ignition, which coughed and died. “Now, now,” she said. On the fourth try there was an ill-tempered snort, then, on the fifth, a string of explosions-full power. The shepherd broke into a huge smile, and Wilhelm laughed and waved to him as they went bumping off down the street.

“What is it?” DeHaan said.

“What?”

“What is it?”

“Oh, it’s a Morgan. There’s more to it, I think, letters or numbers, something.”

They were out of town and on a dirt road almost immediately. Past a field of green shoots and a blindfolded ox, harnessed to a wooden bar and walking in a circle around the stone rim of a well.

“It used to belong to a friend of mine,” Wilhelm said. “An American. He liked to say that back in the States he’d had all the Morgans-the horse, the car, and the girl.”

The dirt track began to narrow and it was almost dark. Then, suddenly, they climbed to the crest of a hill and the ocean appeared on the left. Wilhelm braked to a stop. “There you are,” she said.

Down below, the Noordendam at anchor, lights shimmering in the haze, a thin stream of smoke from the funnel as one boiler was kept running to serve the electrical system.

“Did you see that old truck? In the square?” Wilhelm said.

“Yes.”

“That’s your paint,” she said. “In metal drums.”

“Is somebody watching it?”

“The guard, of course, as you saw. And the driver isn’t far away.”

“How much do you have?”

“Two hundred gallons. They said at the ship chandler you need gamboge and indigo, and burnt sienna-they wrote the proportions on the drums-to make dark green. And white, for the striping. Of course it needs to be thinned, thinned way down, so there’s white spirit.”

Wilhelm handed him a sheet of paper with a description printed out in pencil, DeHaan could just barely read it in the failing light. “ Funnel: black with green band. Hull: Black with broad green band between narrow white bands.”

“Is that correct?” Wilhelm said.

“That’s the description in Lloyd’s Register. No boot-topping, thank God.” Merchant-company colors were often used for the latter-the space that showed when the ship was high in the water, without cargo.

“Then Santa Rosa, on the side,” Wilhelm said.

“On the bow, yes. And at the stern.”

The Noordendam was to become the Santa Rosa, of the Compaa Naviera Cardenas Sociedad Annima, with offices on the Gran Via in Valencia. As a ship steaming under a Spanish, a neutral, flag, she could go anywhere. In theory. According to Leiden, the real Santa Rosa was in drydock, with a serious engine problem that would require a new casting, in the Mexican port of Campeche.

Leiden, and Section IIIA, presumed that with the wartime suspension of the “Movements and Casualties” page of the maritime journal Lloyd’s List — daily intelligence on the world of six thousand merchant ships-hostile personnel, at sea or in port, would have at hand only the annual Lloyd’s Register, and the false Santa Rosa would conform to the description found in the section on Spain. That is, if they even bothered to look. It was further presumed that the newly confidential — limited-distribution-version of the shipping pages would not be available to enemy observers. On these presumptions, Section IIIA was betting forty-two lives and a ship.

Still, not such a wild bet. The Noordendam and the Santa Rosa were, if not twins, at least sisters. They were typical tramp freighters, picking up cargo anywhere and taking it to designated ports, as opposed to liners, which made scheduled trips between two cities. They’d both been built around 1920, five thousand gross tons, some four hundred feet long and fifty-eight wide, draft of twenty-five feet, single funnel, derricks fore and aft, blunt in the bow, round in the stern, carrying nine thousand tons of cargo-enough to fill three hundred boxcars-with a top speed of eleven knots. On a fair day with a decent sea. They were similar to the eye, and not unlike a thousand others.

“Are there ship’s papers-for the Santa Rosa?” DeHaan said.

“No point. You could only use them if you’re boarded and, if you are, the game is over. A merchant crew wouldn’t survive interrogation, and there’s too much on the ship that would give it away, under close inspection. However”-she reached behind the driver’s seat and retrieved a soft package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string-“here is my contribution.”

She untied the string, turned the paper back, and handed DeHaan a ship’s flag-the heavy cotton fabric softened and faded by service in ocean weather. A Spanish flag, the monarchist version reintroduced by Franco in 1939. Two horizontal red bars-blood-red, and not subtle about it-held a wide band of yellow with a coat of arms: between columns, beneath a flowing pennant with motto, an eagle in profile is protected by a checkered shield. DeHaan, from northern Europe, the land of forthright stripes, had always thought it looked like a medieval war banner.

“Seems well used,” he said.

“It is.”

“Did you buy it?”

“Tried. But, in the end, we stole it. There was a message from Leiden, back in April, ‘Obtain a used Spanish maritime flag.’ Well, it wasn’t to be found in the local souks so we-me and a friend, a trusted friend-took the ferry over to Algeciras for a day. Not much you can’t find there, since the war ended-a single boot, sacred paintings marked with a hammer and sickle, old pistols-but they were fresh out of used flags. So we came back to Tangier, went to the chandler, and bought one. New and crisp, sharp, bright, and wrong.

“I tried everything I could think of-washed it in lye, soaked it in seawater, left it in the sun for days-but this flag had its pride and it wouldn’t age. Finally my friend said to soak it in bath salts and bake it dry, which led to an amusing fire in the oven and a visit with the firemen. By the time they left, the flag was a little too used-which is to say, black.

“Now Leiden had used the word obtain, which left us a certain, latitude, so my friend had a bright idea: yachts. Plenty of them stranded in Tangier and Casablanca, at the yacht clubs, and of course the people who own them, some of them anyhow, give parties. Well, we found the flag we wanted-on a huge motor yacht that belonged to the count of Zamora, known in Tangier as ‘Cookie,’ and pure Groucho Marx. Likely raised some hell in his day but it was probably nineteenth-century hell, because Count Cookie is an extremely old man and doesn’t give parties. But we did get ourselves invited to a cocktail Amricain, at a nearby slip, on a yacht called the Nride, owned by some Italian aristocrat. This grew into a real party, by the way; caviar in the piano, ice cubes down the cleavage, fan dancing with the drapes-a very sporty crowd and they didn’t miss a trick.

“So, after midnight, I went up on deck for a breath of air, walked back to the pier, went three docks over, and out to the last slip. Only problem was, I had this idiot who’d followed me around all night and now he follows me out to the motor yacht. Definitely a Mitteleuropa type, but nave, or maybe just stubborn, because I’m the girl of his dreams. ‘Mademoiselle Wilhelm,’ he says, ‘you are lovely in moonlight.’

“We’re standing at the foot of the gangway, at this point, and I flirt with him and tell him I want that flag. Must have it. Crazy Dutch artist, he thinks, drunk, sexy, has to have a Spanish flag. Well, why not. So we tiptoe across the gangplank and onto the deck, and lower the flag. And, lo and behold, it’s an antique-the old bastard must have had it from before the civil war. And, of course, he hears us, or someone in the crew does, because just about the time we get it unclipped, somebody yells in Spanish and we run like hell, laughing all the way.

“Now this is a big flag, and, even folded, it can’t go back to the party, so we run to his car, a Lagonda, of course, put it in the trunk and he drives me back to my studio, an old garage, where I have a headache and get rid of him. An hour later my friend shows up, worried sick, thought I was in jail, but we drove right past the guard at the gate of the club.”

It was dark on the hilltop and very quiet, a lean slice of waning moon had risen just above the horizon. New moon on the twelfth, DeHaan thought. Which was why the operation was planned for that night, and, if it didn’t go, would have to wait for June. “We shouldn’t stay here too long,” he said.

“No, you’re right.” She set about starting the car.

“I’ll send a boat for the paint,” he said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“I’m in Room Eight.”

DeHaan folded the paper back over the flag and retied the string as the engine started. “Thank you for this,” he said.

“My pleasure,” she said. “Fly it, ah, proudly?”

“I suppose,” DeHaan said. “Might as well.”

0920 hours. Rio de Oro Bay, off Villa Cisneros.

DeHaan used the chartroom as his office. A bank of teak cabinets filled one wall, with wide drawers that held charts for the seas of the world. Such seas might fold, in the right storm, but not the charts. There was desk space atop the cabinetry, with calipers, pencils, chronometer-all the paraphernalia of navigation. One door led to DeHaan’s cabin, the other to the deck.

The AB Amado, prompt to the minute, knocked politely, two diffident taps on the door. “Yes?” DeHaan said.

“Able Seaman Amado, sir.” This in English.

“Come in.”

He was a shaggy man in his late thirties, with a mustache and a slight limp. There were three Spaniards aboard the Noordendam — one was a fireman, and barely verbal, a second, eighteen years old, served as cook’s assistant and messroom boy. The third was Amado, formerly a ship’s carpenter on a Spanish tramp, who’d signed on as an AB in Hamburg in 1937. Which meant less status, and less pay, but this was a rescue and Amado was happy to be alive.

“Please sit down, Amado,” DeHaan said, indicating the other high stool pulled up to the cabinets. “A cigarette?”

“Please, sir.” Amado was sitting at attention.

DeHaan gave him a Caporal and lit it, then lit one of his little brown North State cigars. DeHaan had boxes of them, but he could only hope they would outlast the war.

“The speech yesterday,” DeHaan said. “It’s been explained to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that’s all right?”

Amado nodded. He took a deep drag of the Caporal and let the smoke out slowly, turning one hand to an angle that meant he wanted to say much more than his English would allow. “Yes,” he said. “Very much.” DeHaan saw that he was one of those men whose fire had been banked to an ember, but that ember was carefully tended.

Amado now told his story. DeHaan already knew most of it-from the bosun, who served as petty officer and father confessor to the deck crew-which was just as well, because the conversation was hard work for both of them, though the story was simple enough. When civil war came to Spain, it also, in time, came to Amado’s ship, a Spanish ore-carrier hauling chromite, from Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, to Hamburg. As they neared the German coast, somebody called somebody a name and a fistfight started, which grew quickly into a brawl between Republican and Falangist crewmen-red and black neckerchiefs appearing like magic-then spread to the officers, except for the captain, who locked himself in his cabin with a loaded shotgun and a demijohn of rum.

In a matter of minutes, the weapons came out. “First knifes, later, ah, fusiles.”

“Guns.”

“Yes. So this.” Amado pulled up his pant leg and revealed the pucker scar.

The Falangists held the radio room, the wardroom, and the officers’ mess, the Republicans had the bridge, the engine room, and the crew’s quarters, there were wounded on both sides, two seamen fatally stabbed, an officer shot dead. As night fell, the fighting subsided to a standoff-shouted insults answered by wild gunfire, then, at dawn, the Falangists sent out a distress call, which produced, a few hours later, two Kriegsmarine patrol boats. When Amado, who fought on the Republican side, saw the swastika flags, he knew he was finished.

But he wasn’t. Not quite.

Officers and crew were taken under guard, the wounded patched up, the ship herded into Hamburg harbor. The Falangists, as fellow fascists, were released immediately, while the Republicans-“Bolsheviks, they call us”-were held at the port. German officials then wired the owner of the ship, who wired back an hour later and objected to the arrests: where, he asked, was he to find a replacement crew? Thus, after a day of questioning and a couple of broken noses, they let most of the Republicans go. “But three,” Amado said, “not come back.”

What the Germans wanted, in fact, was not a few new inmates for their prisons, what they really wanted was the chromite ore, used to harden steel in various war machines-the cargo in the hold of the Spanish ship, and more in the future, all they could get.

But Amado-maybe a ringleader and maybe not, DeHaan wasn’t sure-was not going to board that ship ever again. Which sailed without him, while Amado stayed at a seamen’s hostel in the Altstadt district, where, two months later, DeHaan found him. “Very bad, Hamburg,” Amado said, his face hardening at the memory of it.

From DeHaan, a sympathetic nod, then, “Amado, our ship will be a Spanish ship, for a time.”

Amado looked lost.

DeHaan went to his cabin and returned with the paper parcel. He opened it, and when he showed Amado what it held, the man stared for a time, then his eyes lit up with understanding. “Ah!” he said. “I know this…”

Amado didn’t have much English, DeHaan thought, but he certainly knew deception when he saw it. “That’s right,” DeHaan said. “And you”-he pointed for emphasis-“the captain.” He took off his cap and placed it on Amado’s head. “On the radio, yes? Or, or, when we need you.”

Amado returned the cap with a rueful smile. Not for the likes of me.

“Can you do it?”

“Yes, sir,” Amado said. “Con gusto.” With pleasure.

The bumboat men arrived at dusk, pulling up to the ship’s side in an assortment of feluccas with striped awnings, and announcing their wares as they climbed up the steep gangway along the hull. Waiting for them on deck, Van Dyck, the bosun, and AB Scheldt, with folded arms and policeman’s clubs carried in loops on web belts.

The bumboat men carried suitcases full of tobacco, matches, cigarette papers, French postcards, fruit, chocolate, chewing gum, buttons, thread, needles, writing paper, and stamps, which they spread out on blankets, everything just so. Then they squatted on their haunches and called out the great virtues, and demeaning prices, of their merchandise-these were not, and God was their witness, merely stamps. Business was brisk, DeHaan’s offer of money for small necessities had been enthusiastically taken up, and DeHaan himself, standing with Ratter and watching the show, felt compelled to buy a few things he didn’t need. He’d always liked Levantine bazaars-there was one in Alexandria where the stone corner at the base of a fountain had been worn to perfect roundness, over the centuries, by the brush of robes.

When a young man with three women appeared on deck, Ratter said, “Never fails, does it.” One of the women was young, the other two ageless, all were unveiled, eyes dramatized with kohl, mouths painted carmine. “Tell him no, right? Back to the boat.”

DeHaan shook his head. “Might as well get them laid.”

“You,” Ratter said in his brutal French. “Come over here.”

The pimp wore a sharp green suit. He hurried over to Ratter and DeHaan and said, “Sirs?”

“Are the girls clean?” Ratter said. “Not sick?”

“They are perfect, sir. They have seen the doctor on Monday. Dr. Stein. ”

Ratter stared at him with a cold blue eye. “God help you if you’re lying.”

“I swear it, sir. Sir?”

“Yes?”

“May one beg permission for use of your lifeboats? Under the tarpaulins?”

“Go ahead,” DeHaan said.

A crowd gathered, the girls smiled, blew kisses, fluttered their eyelashes.

The twilight was long gone by the time the last two bumboats arrived. The early merchants had returned to shore, and most of the crew was on the mess deck, eating dinner, with oranges, the Hyperion Line’s contribution from the bumboat market, for dessert.

The bosun and AB Scheldt had gone below, and DeHaan and Ratter waited as the men in djellabas struggled up the gangway. Twenty of them, at least, some carrying wooden crates with rope handles, and breathing hard by the time they reached the deck. One of them laid his crate down, then unbent, coming slowly upright with a shake of the head and a why me? grimace on his dark face.

“Quite a long way, up here,” DeHaan said, sympathetically.

The bumboat man stared for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “Like to broke me fookin’ balls,” he said.

Commandos everywhere.

Five in the first officer’s cabin, Ratter and Kees crammed in with the chief engineer on three-high bunk beds, a few more in the wardroom, sleeping on the floor and on the L-shaped banquette where the officers ate, the rest stashed here and there, with Mr. Ali moving to the radio room to free up the cabin he shared with his assistant. Once upon a time, in that prosperous and hopeful year 1919, at the Van Sluyt shipyards in Dordrecht, the Noordendam had been designed to carry four first-class passengers-wandering souls or colonial administrators-which was common for merchant ships of the day. She had, it was rumored, actually carried one, but nobody could say who it was or where he went, and in the end all it came to was mahogany trim and a bit more space for the ship’s officers who occupied the cabins.

Major Sims, the unit commander, stood the midwatch, midnight-to-four, with DeHaan. Short and trim and, DeHaan sensed, taut with suppressed excitement, he was one of those men with skin too tight for his face and slightly protruding eyes, so that he seemed either irritated or astonished by life, an effect heightened, at that moment, by a deep-brown coat of camouflage cream. “It will wash off,” he said. “With soap and water.” By nature not particularly forthcoming, he did tell DeHaan, in the confidential darkness of the bridge, that he and his men were from “a good regiment, one you’d know,” and that he’d “been asking for a special operation for a long time.” Well, DeHaan thought, now you have it.

A heavy sea, as they headed north, Noordendam rolling and pitching her way through the swells. DeHaan stood at ease by the helmsman, hands clasped behind his back in instinctive mariner’s balance, a posture that Sims soon enough discovered for himself. Some of the commandos would surely be feeling queasy by now, DeHaan thought, with worse to come, but Major Sims seemed, anyhow, to be a good sailor. The mess boy appeared on the bridge and DeHaan ordered two mugs of coffee brought up.

“No change in the ETA, is there?” Sims asked.

“Monday a week, the twelfth, off Tunisia-Cap Bon, just after dark. The estimate has us passing the French airbase, at Bizerta, an hour earlier. Of course, that is an estimate.”

“Quite. When do we go through the Strait?”

“After dusk, on Saturday.”

Sims said “Hm,” in a way that meant he was pleased. “Better after dark, off Gibraltar, with the German coast watch.”

DeHaan agreed.

“When will you become the Santa Rosa?”

“We’ll start rigging at oh-three-thirty, an hour before dawn, then anchor off a stretch of coast called Angra de los Ruivos, paint with the rising sun, and be on our way by ten hundred hours.”

“What’s there?”

“There is, Major, truly nothing there. A dry riverbed, Wadi Assaq, and that’s it.”

They stood silent for a time, the throb of the engine hypnotic. “Five and a half hours, did you say, for painting?”

“We think so. We’re painting directly over Hyperion Line colors, so no chipping or sanding. We’re using scaffolds and bosun’s chairs, hung over the side, and all our best hands-the whole crew will be involved in this-and we’ve got plenty of rope, cans, brushes, everything.”

DeHaan had made a point of that, planning logistics, with the bosun before they left the chandlers in Tangier. He had once, in some forgotten port, watched sailors in the Soviet navy as they smeared paint on with their hands.

“We have only an hour for drying,” DeHaan went on, “and we’ll have to spray water on the stack to cool it down, and thin the paint so it seems faded. It will look awful, but, that’s no bad thing.”

Sims’s silence implied satisfaction. The helmsman kept steady on 320 degrees, slightly west of north, and the quarter moon was fully risen, its light broken on the rough surface of the sea.

“Our ETA,” Sims said, back again to what was really on his mind. “How close do you think we can come?”

DeHaan’s voice was tolerant. “Seventeen hundred nautical miles to Cap Bon, Major, past Morocco and Algeria and much of Tunisia. We’re rated at eleven knots an hour, and we’re actually doing about that, so, by simple mathematics, it’s six and a half days. The weather forecast is fair, for the Atlantic, but once we enter the Strait of Gibraltar, we’re in the Mediterranean, where storms, you know, ‘come up out of nowhere.’ Well, they do, and there’s tons of Greek bones on that seafloor to prove it. But, the way we think in the trampship business, if not Monday, then Tuesday. All we can ever promise is not to be early.”

“We have three nights,” Sims said. “For our little man to show a little light. Still, one is, understandably, concerned.”

One is, terrified. Not of dying, DeHaan thought. Of being late. Rule Britannia.

0420. Off Rio de Oro.

Refuge. This hour in his cabin as the sun came up was DeHaan’s night, but he rarely used it for sleep. That came beyond dawn, for three hours, before he went back to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve. He was used to it-sleeping again in the afternoon-and he’d somehow found a way to like it, which, according to the way he’d been raised anyhow, was pretty much the secret of life. He shifted for new comfort on the narrow bunk and stared at the dark porthole at the other end of the cabin.

Not far. The refuge, in steel painted gray, was ten by twelve: a bunk with drawers beneath it, a wardrobe with small desk attached, chair bolted to the floor, sink and toilet in a small alcove behind a curtain. There was a two-shelf bookcase fixed to the bulkhead, the wall, above the desk, which held his forty-book library, his wind-up Victrola, and an album of records in thick paper envelopes. Beyond that, the Noordendam: the ceaseless hum and rattle of the ventilator fans, the creak of the ship as it rose from a trough, the pacing of the watch officer on the bridge above his cabin, bells on the half hour, and the engine, drumming away beneath him-let it catch its breath for one heartbeat and his blood raced before he even knew what he’d heard. And, beyond the Noordendam, the sound of the wind and the sea.

This presence, this perpetual music, in all its moods, was not to be resisted, and sent him wandering through his own life, or those in the forty-book library. The read, the unread, and the oft read. A few Dutch classics-Multatuli’s Max Havelaar and Louis Couperus-and some not so classic-a trio of military biographies and a flock of fat historical novels, which were good friends when he was too tired for anything but his native language. A Dutch translation of Shakespeare’s plays was better to look at on the shelf than to read, though he had worked through Henry V more than once, because it felt like fiction.

Conrad, of course. In whom a Polish sea captain fought a losing battle with a London literary migr. He had The Mirror of the Sea, bought in expectation of philosophy but soon abandoned, guiltily, with a promise to return and do better. The ghastly Nostromo, magnificently written but so evil and miserable in its story that it was not to be read, Heart of Darkness, which he liked, also The Secret Sharer — could that actually happen, a cabin shared? — and Lord Jim, a real sea story and a good one. One of his mother’s brothers had virtually lived the same life, except that, threatened by fire in a cargo of jute in the Malacca Straits, he hadn’t jumped, and his ship did sink, taking Uncle Theo with it.

Conrad shaded off, as DeHaan saw it, to what he really liked, adventure stories with intellectual heroes. These were not so common, but what there was he returned to again and again. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the story of a military intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, sent to stir up Arab rebellion against the Turks during the Great War, when Turkey fought alongside Germany. In the same way, Malraux, Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, in English, and even Stendhal, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, by “the Hussar of Romanticism,” who’d fought, an officer under Napoleon, in all the desperate battles of the Russian campaign and lived to write novels. Those he had in Dutch, along with War and Peace, which could be read at the bleakest moments of life at sea and still provide, somehow, almost magically, consolation, a world away from the world.

DeHaan looked at his watch, it was almost four-thirty in the morning. He lit a cigar, and watched the drifting smoke as it rose in the air. They were running at Dead Slow now, had been for an hour, as Ratter and the bosun supervised the preparation for painting. He heard the squeak of block and tackle, shouted commands, a curse, a laugh-work under way sounded like nothing else. The porthole remained black but the edge of dawn was out there somewhere, and soon the engines would stop and he would hear the steam winches on deck and the slow, grating slide of the anchor chain as it was run out.

DeHaan ran his eye across the shelves, along the row of faded covers-books did not fare well in sea air-past the nautical almanacs, his Bowditch, The American Practical Navigator, Nicholl’s Deviation Questions and Law of Storms, past his dictionaries, to the end of the middle shelf, to the Baedeker for France, and a few novels in French. My Mother’s House, The Vagabond, Claudine in Paris, and Claudine at School.

Colette.

He was a slow reader in French, very slow, but there was a simplicity in these books, a joyous shimmer, in the words and beyond, that coaxed him along. And more. It wasn’t just the schoolgirls, kissing and petting and scheming against the headmistress-erotic in a hundred ways but nothing wrong with that-it was also the garden. The rue. The cat and the sky. It was, as DeHaan put it to himself, the perfect compass south to his north-to the cruelly practical life he had to live outside this cabin. A dream world, the winding road and its plane trees, the auberge with its rusty garden chairs on the gravel beyond the French doors.

These were not illusions. He had been there. And at the end of that road, in a lumpy bed in that auberge, Arlette had wondered why he chose to leave it. To make his money, she supposed, one had to do that. And, she said, with a melancholy twitch and wriggle to make her point, so went the sorry world. Not two years ago, he realized, the last spring before the war. He’d met her in a caf in Amsterdam-she was there with a girlfriend who knew a fellow captain-and, Noordendam in drydock in Rotterdam, they’d gone off to Paris, and then to the countryside.

His life with women had always been a victim of his life at sea-brief affairs recollected at length. Occasionally close to mercenary-gifts, whatnot-and sometimes passionate, but typically on the great plain that lay between. The last time, after parting with Arlette that spring-forever, she’d said-had been the previous October, in Liverpool, with a woman he’d met at a rather refined club for naval officers. She was an ambulance driver, a WREN, young and pink and immaculate and talkative, and so fiercely intent on pleasing him he suspected she never felt a thing. A sad evening, for him, after Arlette.

A flaming redheaded Breton, fire goddess, with a floating walk and a hot temper, a hot everything. At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. “It’s my skin,” she said later, during a brief repose, a Gauloise hanging from her heavy lips. Very white, and thin, she said, so the touch of a hand set her alight. Always? No, not always. But now. “I knew it would be like this,” she pouted, accusing him of exciting her. Of course she was flattering him, enticing him, making him her own-he knew it, and was flattered, and enticed. Still, she wasn’t lying, her skin was pale, and delicate, her grandiose behind, after lovemaking, flushed and mottled in the light of the night-table lamp.

She was, he thought, a couple of years older than he was. She worked in the shops, she said, first this job, then that, it was all the same. And she had come to Amsterdam, she more or less told him, for an adventure, bored with those men she could have met in Paris. What, he wondered, would become of her, now that the Germans occupied the city? This vision worried him; she was not a woman who would avert her eyes, was not someone who could disappear into the scenery.

The light in his porthole had turned to dawn, and when DeHaan felt the ship lose way and the anchor was let down he rose from his bed and went to take a look. They were a mile off the coast; low hills, gray sand, a light surf that broke against a cliff. He took off his shoes and sighed with pleasure, shed his shirt and trousers, and slid beneath the blanket on his bunk. He finished the cigar, tapped it out in a metal ashtray, and closed his eyes.

They’d spent two days in Paris, after the countryside, then he had to take the early train back to Holland and went alone to the station, past a market, a church, streetsweepers with a water truck. Very soft, the light in Paris, at that time of day.

As DeHaan went up to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve, the painting was fully under way, scaffolds slung over the side, ABs handling the tackle that operated the bosun’s chairs. Back at the stern, a loud splash was followed by sarcastic hoots of “Man overboard!” followed by some ripe curses from Ratter and the order to “haul that sonofabitch back on board, goddamnit!” Beneath a bright sky, his funnel now wore half a stripe of Spanish green-so he’d named the color-and he could see the bosun dangling up there, peering nearsightedly at the blistered iron, each stroke of the brush applied with concentrated finesse. “Fucking Rembrandt himself,” Ratter said, when DeHaan joined him.

“Not so bad.” It had been one thing to scheme about the deception, something else to actually do it. Ratter felt the same way, he guessed, but neither of them would say it. Yet. “Looks like we’re on schedule,” DeHaan added, determinedly cheerful.

He took a turn around the ship, then went down to the lower deck, where Sims had his men caring for their weapons-stripping and oiling Sten guns and two lethal-looking Brens, machine guns with small tripods on the barrel, whetstoning knives with rubber handles, loading ammunition belts. Most of the men had their shirts off, and chatted amiably as they worked. They would likely have preferred to be on the top deck, in the sunlight, but a German air patrol was always a possibility and Sims well knew it. DeHaan wished them all a good morning, then returned to the bridge, where Cornelius was waiting with his breakfast. Thickly cut bacon, almost warm, between two slabs of bread, and strong coffee. Fresh bread was produced daily on all merchant ships, and the conventional wisdom said that one got either good cooking or good baking, but the Noordendam ’s cook had clearly been left out of that equation. DeHaan chewed away at his sandwich, dense and rubbery, and stared out at the empty sea.

When he was done, he strolled onto the bridge wing, coffee in one hand, and swept his binoculars along the shore. Ratter was below him, at the foot of the ladderway, and DeHaan called out, “Anything stirring, this morning?”

“One of the lookouts saw a truck, about oh-six-thirty.”

“There’s a road, up there?”

“Not on any map we have-maybe a goat track. The road goes inland.”

“What sort of truck?”

“All I saw was a dust cloud, moving north.”

DeHaan looked again, slow and careful, but there was nothing.

They were under steam by 1020. There was a cloud bank on the far horizon, but a long way west, and rain rarely came to this coast, so DeHaan felt reasonably safe. The Noordendam was no more, her name chipped and sanded off; she was now the Santa Rosa, on the bow and stern, with Valencia, her home port, added beneath the latter. It was Van Dyck’s job to change the name on the ship’s life preservers, and he would repaint them later that morning.

As they moved north, into the open sea, DeHaan had Ratter take the bridge. One final job remained-he could have ordered it done, normal practice, but, for whatever reason, he felt he had to do it himself. He went to the stern, unfolded the Spanish flag, and ran it up the low-angled mast. He’d had a look at the ship’s copy of Lloyd’s Register and he knew her checkered history. She was the ex- Kavakos-Piraeus — built at the Athenides yards in 1921- ex-Maria Vlasos-Larnaca, ex-Huittinen-Helsinki, then, at last, in 1937, Santa Rosa-Valencia, now owned by the Cardenas Steamship Company SA.

A new life, DeHaan thought, as the flag snapped and fluttered in the breeze. Ghost Ship, Section IIIA — London. Making, according to her faked manifest, for the Turkish port of Izmir, to take on a cargo of hides, baled tobacco, and hazelnuts.

9 May. Hamburg.

S. Kolb.

So he was called, on his latest passport-Mr. Nobody from the state of Nowhere. He was bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache-a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit. He lay on a bed on the top floor of a rooming house in the Zeilerstrasse, not far from the docks, a narrow room with a window at one end. It was a warmish night, and still, and the curtains hung limp in the dead air. Outside, the city was silent, with only the intermittent call of a foghorn from the sea beyond the harbor.

S. Kolb had been in this room for ten days, most of his time spent lying on the bed, reading newspapers. This was, in general, the way he spent his life, except when he had to work, and that was only now and then, for an hour, sometimes, or twenty minutes. But he hadn’t worked at all in Hamburg, this was simply the place from which he was to go to another place. He’d worked in Dsseldorf, where he’d committed murder, and in Karlsruhe, where he’d collected a sheet of paper.

The paper, specifications for a machine, was hidden in plain sight, in a file with similar papers, in his briefcase. Nothing unusual, for a salesman of industrial machinery, supposedly working for a company in Zurich. No border guard, not even an SS officer on a Monday morning, would know that it mattered. And it actually might, he thought, though he was one of those men who had always suspected that, in the end, nothing mattered, and he’d more or less built his life on that principle.

What certainly did matter, at that moment, was a message from an Englishman called Brown. A decent, dog-and-garden sort of a name, he thought, euphonious, that implied a euphonious sort of a life-the odd revolver and lockpick aside. Of course Brown was no more his real name than S. Kolb was his, and if there was any distinction to be made, it lay in certain filing cabinets, where Brown was designated a workname, and S. Kolb an alias. Mr. Brown, a fattish, placid fellow, who hid from the world behind pipe and sweater, was just then responsible for getting S. Kolb out of Hamburg, and S. Kolb found himself wondering, for the hundredth time, just how the hell he was going to manage it.

Six days earlier, the steamship Von Scherzen had not appeared in Hamburg harbor, and while the men at the port office wouldn’t exactly say what had become of her, their faces hardened a certain way when he inquired, which suggested that she was at the bottom of the sea. But she would not, at any rate, be part of the escorted convoy of German ships which had been scheduled to sail to Lisbon. He would, they told him, have to wait for a berth on a different ship, and they deeply regretted the inconvenience.

So did he. This was difficult work, equal parts danger, discretion, and waiting, a mixture that was, to say the least, hard on the nerves. Its traditional palliatives were alcohol and sex-yet more danger and discretion required here, but one had to do something. One could go mad reading newspapers. But newspapers were, at least, safe; women were not. Of course he knew that the port of Hamburg virtually swarmed with prostitutes, one could have anything one could pay for, but many of the men who sought them out were known to be traveling alone, far from home, and such men were, especially under the present regime, of interest to the police. It was caution and discipline that had kept S. Kolb alive all these years but now he sighed miserably as he felt their chains tighten around his chest. No, he told himself, this is not for you.

Or was he, perhaps, being too hard on himself? He was, as it happened, waiting for a woman-this was the third night he had waited-and there was a bottle of apricot brandy hidden, from himself as much as anyone else, at the back of the top shelf of the room’s armoire. This woman, known only as Frulein Lena, was his single contact in Hamburg and he had gotten in touch with her when the Von Scherzen didn’t appear. She had somehow, and one could meditate at length on that somehow, signaled his predicament to Mr. Brown, and it was now her job to bring him news of a revised set of travel plans, which would reach Hamburg by means of a clandestine W/T set.

No secret radio could transmit from Germany-the Gestapo listened to all frequencies and would have a position fix on it soon enough-but coded messages could be received. This situation echoed that of ships at sea, naval and civilian, which could listen to transmissions but had, otherwise, to maintain radio silence. Some irony in this, Kolb thought, the governments of the warring nations had thereby attained a certain ideal level of supervision: one could only be instructed, one could not ask questions, one could not talk back.

So, by necessity a good soldier, he waited for orders. But he did allow himself some measure of speculation, to wit: if Frulein Lena were to come to his room with instructions for his exfiltration from this wretched city, could she not also, perchance, provide an hour of tender oblivion? Kolb closed his eyes and set his newspaper on the floor. All hail to caution, yes, but with Lena he shared a secret life-would she perhaps be amenable to a secret tryst? Did he dare to ask? She was colorless and plain, somewhere in the middle of her life, quite heavy, and thoroughly bound in corsets, her iron bulk, in his imagination, tumbling free, prodigiously sweet and plentiful, as they were-only God knew how-dismantled.

No, he did not dare. Life had taught him one lesson: trust nobody. If only he had learned that in time, he would not be in this city, in this woeful room with curtains where green knights rode across a yellow field. In the Austrian city of Lenz, his father had worked as a clerk in a bank, and the young S. Kolb, on finishing secondary school, had been installed as a junior clerk in that same bank. Where he was, a year later, found to be embezzling money, moving a small portion of the funds into an account in his own name. He was confronted, humiliated, discharged, and threatened with prosecution. His family, with terrible effort, had managed to make good on the missing money, and the police were never notified.

He had, however, not stolen the money. Someone else-he suspected a senior officer of the bank-had done it, and left a trail that led to him. This he told his parents, and they wanted to believe him, but, in their hearts, they couldn’t. Thus he learned the brutal lesson: life was governed by deceit, and by power. Not the Golden Rule, the Iron Rule. Kolb had to leave his hometown but managed, by persistence, to find a job as a clerk in one of the government ministries in Vienna. The armaments ministry, it so happened. And soon enough, in a caf on the elegant Krntner Strasse, he met a genial young woman who, in time, introduced him to a rather less genial foreign gentleman, who taught him a clever method by which he could supplement his meager salary.

That was many foreign gentlemen ago, he thought, nostalgic for his youth, those long-gone days of Mr. Hall and Mr. Harris and Mr. Hicks-tubby old Brown was a recent incumbent, having materialized, the way they did, only last January. Pleasant and mean, all of them really, explaining nothing but what was required.

In the long hallway that led past his room, Kolb heard footsteps, a heavy tread, but they passed by his door and receded down the corridor. Kolb looked at his watch and saw that it was after midnight. Not that it mattered-women came to men’s rooms in these places, at any time of the day or night. Frulein Lena, meine Schatze, meine kleine Edelweiss, where are you? Perhaps he’d been abandoned, simply left to fend for himself. For a time, he dozed, then woke, startled, to three discreet taps at the door.

9 May. Off Kenitra, French Morocco.

The dog watch, four to eight in the evening, was traditionally split in two, so everybody could eat dinner. DeHaan stood the first half, on the ninth, and, in fine rain and mist, squinted through droplets on the windows as Noordendam butted north, beam on to a short, steep sea, with the northern trade blowing spray over the bow. Out on the wings, the lookouts’ oilskins ran streams of water. Major Sims came up to the bridge and said, “Filthy weather, out there.”

DeHaan looked for a tactful answer-Sims had obviously not been at sea in filthy weather, because this was far from it. “Well, tomorrow we’ll be going east,” he said. “In the Mediterranean.”

Sims was clearly pleased with the answer, and nodded emphatically. “One tries, of course, to keep one’s people occupied,” he said. “But, you know how it is, the way they feel now, the sooner the better.”

They stood in silence for a time, then DeHaan said, “There’s one thing about this, mission, Major, that I really don’t understand.”

“Only one?”

“Isn’t a commando operation usually done with a submarine?”

“Ideally, it is. And it started out that way, I believe, but we only have so many, and they’re mostly up north. In fact, we were damned close to canceling the thing, then somebody came up with the idea of a merchant ship. A neutral.”

Noordendam was laboring too hard, DeHaan thought, and had the helmsman come a few points west.

“Truth is,” Sims said, “where we’re going, it’s not healthy for submarines. Our side has the east and west ends of the Med, with Gibraltar, and the fleet at Alexandria, but, in the middle, that’s another story. There are French airbases at Algiers and Bizerta, Italian planes across the Sicilian Channel at Cagliari, and they have a naval base at Trapani, and, since January, the Luftwaffe is operating from an airfield in Taormina, in Sicily. Submarines don’t like airplanes, Captain, as I’m sure you know, and add the destroyers, which fly seaplanes from their decks, and you stand a rather good chance of losing your submarine.”

“And a commando unit.”

“That’s not really the thinking, I’m afraid. It’s the Andrew, the Royal Navy, wanting to keep what it has. You can replace commandos.”

And tramp freighters. “I suppose you can,” DeHaan said. “Anyhow, we’re proud to do our part.”

“Your crew? I’m sure your officers are.”

“Hard to tell, with the crew. They always do what needs to be done, that’s just life in the merchant marine. I think the men with families in Holland like the idea of a raid. As for the rest, it’s probably different for each of them. We had six German crewmen in August of ’39, then, in September, after war was declared, four of them asked to sign off, including our second engineer, and we put them ashore in Valparaiso. But the other two stayed on. There was a time when we didn’t think about these things-nation of the sea and all that-but then the politics started, in 1933, and everything changed. Our chief engineer, Kovacz, was an officer in the Polish navy. He came aboard in January of 1940, in Marseilles. He’d been in port, up in Gdansk, when the Germans attacked. His ship blew up in the harbor.”

“Bombed?”

“Sabotage, he says.”

“Bloody war.”

“We had to sign him on as a fireman, but we lost our chief engineer a few months later and Kovacz was right there in the engine room. We’re lucky to have him.”

“And your two Germans? Still aboard?” He meant the question to sound like ordinary conversation, but there was an edge in his voice.

“Yes, and they’re good seamen. One’s an anarchist, the other didn’t want to die for Hitler. He’s young, nineteen maybe. They’ve had a few bad moments, fights in the crew quarters. Officially, I don’t know about it, and the men sorted it out among themselves.”

“It’s no different with us,” Sims said. “An officer can only do so much.”

Sympathy, DeHaan thought, as commanders we all face the same problems, and decided to take advantage of it. “What are you after, Major, on Cap Bon? I know I shouldn’t ask but I’m responsible for this ship, and for the lives of my crew, and on that basis maybe I have a right to know.”

Sims didn’t like it. Went silent as a stone, and, for a long minute, it was very quiet on the bridge. Then he walked over to the bulkhead, away from the helmsman. DeHaan let him stand there for a while before he followed.

“For you only, Captain DeHaan. May I have your word on that?”

“You have it.”

“Commando operations are meant to do many things: they upset the enemy, they help public morale-if they’re reported, they destroy strategic facilities. Communications networks, power stations, drydocks.”

Sims was just talking so DeHaan waited, and was rewarded.

“Also,” Sims said, “coastal observation points.”

“Like Cap Bon.”

“Yes, like Cap Bon. They seem to be able to watch our ships, even at night, in dense fog. We must get convoys through, Captain, to our bases on Malta and Crete, because the Germans are going to attack them. Must. Without these bases, as points of interception, our forces in Libya, all our operations in North Africa, are in peril.”

“At night? In fog?”

“Yes.”

“Can that actually be done?”

“Apparently it can. We suspect they’re using infrared searchlights, which can ‘see’ the heat of ship engines.”

DeHaan knew the span of nautical technology-there was hardly any aboard the Noordendam but it was still his job to know what there was. Even so, he had never heard the expression infrared. “What kind of searchlights, did you say?”

“Infrared. An invisible barrier, like a curtain, projected from both shores. Bolometers, Captain.” Sims almost smiled. “Sorry you asked?”

“I know about radio waves, radars, but, after that…”

“Goes back to the Great War, in Germany, they’ve been playing with it for a long time. But, now that I’ve told you, here’s my end of the bargain. If we manage to get technical equipment back to your ship, and something happens, to me, and my lieutenant, be a good fellow and make damn sure the thing finds its way to a British base. Will you do that?”

DeHaan said he would.

“There,” Sims said. “You see? All you needed was something more to think about.”

On the tenth of May, in the early evening, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. The mist and rain continued, but they steamed with running lights on, as a devil-may-care neutral ship would, and DeHaan could feel the telescopes and binoculars of the shore watch, British and German, French and Spanish, as they entered the Mediterranean.

DeHaan did not remain on the bridge for his midnight watch, instead, after a look at the charts, he left the helmsman to work alone and met with Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz in the wardroom. Ratter had the assistant cook produce coffee and a can of condensed milk, which he poured liberally into his mug while repeating the time-honored quatrain “No shit to pitch / No tits to twitch / Just punch a hole / In the sonofabitch,” then stirred it in with the end of a pencil.

“It looks like we’re going to be on time,” DeHaan said. “The twelfth, just before midnight. Sometime after that, the commandos go ashore. We’ll run them in as close as we dare, then drop anchor about two miles out, ship dark, and there we wait. The signal for return is two flashes of a green light, so we’ll have deckhands standing by to lower scramble nets.”

“And the gangway?”

“Might as well.”

“What if they don’t show up?” Kees said.

“We wait. For three days.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Ratter said, “Three days? Anchored off Tunisia?”

“We’ll be boarded,” Kees said.

DeHaan nodded.

Finally Kees said, “What about the weather?”

“Last report from Mr. Ali, the meteorological forecast for allied shipping, says that this system has settled in all over southern Europe, and is likely to continue.” The forecast came in code-the weather-report war one more small war within the big war.

“We want that, right?” Ratter said.

“I suppose we do. Anyhow, we’ll need to rework the watch list, so we have the best people at the helm, and on deck.”

“Vandermeer at the helm?” Kees said.

“No, on watch. Young eyes are better.”

“Schoener, then,” Ratter said.

“A German, for this?” Kees said.

“He’s right,” DeHaan said. “Use Ruysdal. He’s older, and steady.”

“Mr. Ali in the radio room?”

“As usual. But I want a good signalman, maybe Froemming, on deck with the Aldis lamp.” He meant the hand-operated, shuttered light that flashed messages.

DeHaan turned to Kovacz. As with many Poles, Kovacz’s second language was German, sufficiently fluent so that Dutch, the nautical part of the language at any rate, came easily to him. He was a little older than DeHaan, stooped and bearlike, with thinning curly hair and sunken, red-rimmed eyes. His speech, always deliberate, came in a deep, gravelly bass thickened by a heavy accent.

“Stas,” DeHaan said. “You take the engine room, with your best oiler and fireman.”

Kovacz nodded. “Boilers up full?”

“Yes, ready to run for it.”

“Run like hell,” Kovacz said with a grin. “Screw down the safety valve.”

“Well, be ready to do it if you have to. Everything working?”

From Kovacz, an eloquent shrug. “It works.”

“Lifeboats in good shape?” DeHaan asked Ratter.

“I’ll make sure of the water tanks. The chocolate ration’s missing, of course.”

“Replace it. Davits, lines, blocks?”

“I replaced a rotten line. Otherwise, all good.”

The assistant cook knocked at the wardroom door, then entered. He was an Alsatian, short and plump, with a classic mustache, who looked, to DeHaan, like the dining-car steward he’d once been. “Patapouf,” DeHaan said, the word was French slang for fatty. “More coffee, please. Any dessert left from dinner?”

“Some pudding, Captain.” A thick, potato-starch concoction with dried dates.

“Anybody joining me?”

There were no takers. “Just for me, then, Patapouf.”

“Aye, Captain,” he said, and waddled off.

The meeting lasted another twenty minutes, then DeHaan went back up to the bridge for a quiet watch. At 0400, when he returned to his cabin, he cranked the handle of his Victrola and put on his record of Mozart string quartets. He opened one of the drawers built into his bunk and, from beneath a sweater, withdrew a belt and holster, well spotted with mildew, which held a Browning GP35 automatic, made in Belgium. Firing a 9-millimeter Parabellum round, it was the standard-issue sidearm for the Dutch military, and served as the captain’s weapon, always to be found on a merchant ship. Three years earlier, when it had replaced an ancient revolver, DeHaan had thrown an empty tomato-sauce can off the stern and banged away at it until, evidently unharmed, it disappeared beneath the waves.

He took a box of ammunition from the drawer, disengaged the magazine, and began pressing the oily bullets into the clip. Ratter had the other weapon on board-that he knew of, at any rate-a. 303 Enfield rifle, which was kept in a locker in his cabin. When attacked by an enemy vessel, a freighter had only one tactic-to turn stern to, where it could accept the most damage without sinking, and try to run away. That, and the pistol and the rifle, completed the ship’s defensive array. Some British merchantmen were being outfitted with antiaircraft guns and small cannon but such martial measures were not for the likes of the Noordendam, and most certainly not for Santa Rosa. The Mozart, however, was scratchy but pleasant against the sound of the sea, and DeHaan found himself calm and contemplative as he armed for war.

11 May, 2300 hours. Off Mostaganem, Algeria.

DeHaan was sound asleep when somebody pounded on his door.

“Yes? What?”

A lookout opened the door and said, “Mr. Kees says for you to come to the bridge, sir. Right away, sir.”

DeHaan managed to get his shirt and pants on, and went barefoot up to the bridge, the ladderway cold and wet as he climbed. Kees was waiting for him on the wing.

“There’s some damn thing out there,” Kees said.

DeHaan stared out into the rain and darkness, saw nothing. But, somewhere out to port, just astern, was the low rumble of an engine.

“Smell it?” Kees said. “Diesel fumes, and no outline I can see.”

A ship low to the water, with big engines that ran on diesel. DeHaan swore to himself-that could only be a submarine. Which could hide and fight beneath the sea but by preference attacked at night, at speed, on the surface, where it could run at sixteen knots instead of the underwater five. Kees and DeHaan walked to the stern and peered out into the gloom.

“He’s stalking us,” Kees said.

“We’re a neutral ship.”

“He may not care, DeHaan, or maybe he knows better.”

“Then he’ll demand surrender, and, if we try to run, he won’t waste a torpedo, he’ll sink us with his gun.”

“What can we do?” Kees’s voice was unsteady, and querulous.

“We can refuse,” DeHaan said. “And do our best with what comes next.” He’d played this moment out in his mind a thousand times but now he realized he would not surrender. The presence of a British commando unit gave him an excuse, but that’s all it was. Final orders, he thought. Firefighting crew, distress call, lower boats, abandon ship.

It was a fine rain, almost a mist, but he was soaked, water running down his face. A minute went by, and another, long minutes, then Kees said, “My God,” as a dim shape, gray and low, emerged from the darkness beyond the Noordendam ’s lights. A moment later, a hatch opened at the top of the conning tower and a man’s upper body, in silhouette, appeared above it. A searchlight came on, the beam swept back and forth across the deck. Then, amplified by a loud- hailer, a challenge, an Italian version of the standard “What ship?” An Italian submarine, then. Perhaps, DeHaan thought, the Leonardo da Vinci — fine job of naming there-infamous for attacks on British convoys. The challenge was repeated, the officer, likely the captain himself, clearly growing impatient.

DeHaan held his open hands on either side of his mouth and shouted, “Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa!” He was blinded by the light shining in his face. It moved to Kees, who shielded his eyes with his hand, then it shifted forward to the bridge. Turning to Kees, he said, “Go get Amado. Do it yourself.” He saw that several crewmen had come aft, and were milling about in small groups. “And get those people below, ” he said. Then he called out, “Momentito, per piacere, capitn vene, capitn vene!” Which was pretty much the extent of his Spanish, or Italian, or whatever he’d said. Maybe some Latin in there, in case they were monks. The captain’s hat he’d always imagined Amado wearing was in his cabin, on a peg behind the door.

The figure with the loud-hailer climbed down the conning tower and walked up to the bow. DeHaan was suddenly conscious of his bare feet-but maybe that wasn’t so bad. Here on this rusty old whore of a Spanish tramp. DeHaan tried for an ingratiating smile, said “Momentito,” and raised helpless hands. The figure, in full naval uniform, stared at him as though he were a bug.

Now both of them stood there, watching each other, until DeHaan heard footsteps on the deck and Kees appeared, with his arm around Amado’s waist. In an undertone, Kees said, “Oh Christ,” and half-carried Amado to the edge of the deck where, DeHaan could see, he dared not let him go. Amado, roused from his bunk in the crew’s quarters, was shirtless and, a loopy half smile on his face, drunk as a lord. “You’re the captain of the Santa Rosa, remember?”

Amado nodded fervently, ah yes, of course. He closed one conspiratorial eye.

The officer shouted in Italian, angrier by the minute, and Amado shouted back in Spanish, the words Santa Rosa repeated several times.

Another question.

From Amado, “Cmo?”

Tried again.

Kees said something to Amado, who yelled, his words well slurred, some sentence that included the words Izmir and tobacco.

Another figure appeared next to the officer, a big, burly fellow with full beard and black turtleneck, a submachine gun carried carelessly at his side. The officer asked another question, Amado tilted his head-what’s he saying?

“Tell him ‘Valencia,’” DeHaan said. Better, he thought, to answer some question.

Amado did it, then stumbled and, but for Kees, would have pitched into the water. Kees, out of the side of his mouth, said, “I think he’s going to be sick.”

The man with the beard began to laugh, and, a moment later, the officer joined in. And the captain was dead drunk!

The officer shook his head, then dismissed the whole stupid business with a cavalier wave of his hand. The two returned to the conning tower and disappeared, the engine rose in pitch, and, with its exhaust vents pumping clouds of black smoke, the submarine rumbled away into the night.

DeHaan wanted a drink, he had a personal bottle of cognac in his cabin. He left Kees to deal with Amado, who’d fallen to his knees, and headed back toward the bridge. There was, on the way, a ventilating fan built into a louvered housing, some four feet high. As DeHaan went past, he saw that Sims and one of his men were kneeling in its shadow. The soldier held a rifle with a sniper scope, the weapon’s strap circled tight on his upper arm to keep the gun steady, a practice common to the target shooter, and the sniper.

DeHaan raised his eyebrows as he went past, and Sims gave him a smile in return, and a brisk little salute.

12 May, 1830 hours. Off Bizerta.

Twice that day they’d been looked over. First by a reconnaissance flying boat, flat-bottomed cabin suspended below wings with pontoons, French roundels on wings and fuselage. Sims guessed it might be a Breguet 730, but admitted he’d only seen photographs. He was sure, however, of the one that showed up in the late afternoon, an Italian Savoia-Marchetti in desert camouflage with a white cross on its tail, called the Gobbo, “the Hunchback,” Sims said, for the bulbous shape of its cabin.

Both planes came down to five hundred feet and circled for a good look. Behavior anticipated by DeHaan who had his full cast on deck-the cook and his assistant, in their usual dirty aprons, peeling vats of potatoes, and three deckhands sitting in a circle on the hatch cover of the forward hold, playing cards. He’d had a laundry line strung between two cargo booms, with shirts and drawers flapping in the wind, and, according to instructions, all the men on deck looked up at the planes and waved. The French pilot waved back. Toward dusk, a column of smoke was sighted on the horizon but the ship, whoever she was, showed no interest in the Noordendam.

As night came on, DeHaan called for Dead Slow from the engine room. They were not far, he thought, from Cap Bon. Finding it would not have been a problem, in better days, when every point and cape, harbor and river delta on the merchant shipping routes showed identification lights, described in the almanacs, but war had turned the coasts to low, dark shapes at the edge of the sea-once again the sea of Homer. Ratter had taken bright-star sights the night before, and shot the sun at midday. He had the navigator’s gift, a mathematician by birth, and was formidably better than DeHaan, or anyone on board, at celestial dead reckoning. And, when a soft glow lit the landward sky, he said it was Bizerta.

On this night, the ship’s lights were never turned on, and they steamed along slowly, on calm waters, edging toward the coastal desert. At 2010, a flight of aircraft was heard above, headed due east. “Could be ours,” Sims said. They flew high above the Noordendam, a distant, steady drone, and their passage lasted thirty seconds. The ship was now at the geographical center of the Mediterranean war: Sardinia and Sicily to the north, British bases at Malta less than two hundred miles to the east, Wavell’s desert divisions, fighting in the Italian colony of Libya, another few hundred miles south, German-occupied Greece and British forces on Crete maybe eight hundred miles due east. Just after nine in the evening, DeHaan went down to the radio room to join Mr. Ali for the BBC news.

DeHaan enjoyed his visits with Ali, a sophisticated Cairene-cigarette in ivory holder and gold spectacles-highly educated and proud of it, who spoke British English, learned in colonial schools, and had been heard, more than once, to use the expression old boy. A good wireless operator, he spoke parts of many languages, and, by tuning in hourly to BBC broadcasts, had become the ship’s newspaper.

DeHaan had missed the first part of the broadcast, so Mr. Ali brought him up-to-date. The lead story reported fighting in Iraq, where British troops had occupied Basra and the southern oilfields. The Rashid Ali government was allied with the Axis powers, and sought German intervention, but, the broadcast said, nothing could stop the British advance on Baghdad.

“And then,” Mr. Ali said, “there has been the most terrible bombing of poor London. The British Museum, which I have visited, and Westminster Abbey.” This over the announcer’s voice reporting the flight of Rudolf Hess, third-highest official in the Reich, to Scotland, where he’d parachuted to earth and was “presently being questioned by government officials.” The announcer left the story rather abruptly, suggesting that neither the BBC nor anyone else knew what was really going on, and proceeded to the “Personal Messages,” coded communications to clandestine operatives all over Europe and North Africa:

“Mr. Johnson’s class, at the Preston School, is visiting the zoo. Mr. Johnson’s class, at the Preston School, is visiting the zoo.

“Gabriel, cousin Amelia has a bouquet. Gabriel, cousin Amelia has a bouquet.”

And on, and on, as DeHaan and Mr. Ali sat transfixed by words that had, to them, no meaning at all, except as poetry.

12 May, 2030 hours. Off Cap Bon.

“We’re turning around,” DeHaan told the helmsman. “Come hard left rudder to two seventy degrees.”

Ruysdal, at the helm, repeated the order, and they began the wide sweep that would send them back the way they’d come-the equivalent, for this five-thousand-ton monster, of pacing back and forth. They’d been cruising at slow speed since dusk, the atmosphere on the ship tight as a drum, with half the crew on deck, squinting out toward land, in search of Sims’s “little man with a little green light.” But life sometimes went wrong for such little men, and DeHaan wondered what Sims would do if he never turned up.

He wondered also about the possibility that the ship was “visible,” as Sims put it, to an observation point on shore. Thus their reappearance, after a twelve-mile run to the east, coming back the other way, would hopefully register as a second vessel, the two ships passing in the night, as it were, though for all DeHaan knew the people on Cap Bon with the demonic apparatus could figure out exactly what was going on and a largish artillery round was just now on its way to the bridge.

Waiting.

The commandos were assembled on deck amid their gear, faces blackened, their cigarettes red dots in the darkness. The bosun, with a crew standing by, ready to assist, paced the deck where the scramble nets had been slung over the side. DeHaan occupied himself by watching the sea, which stayed calm, only a light chop, fortuitous for men who had to paddle more than a mile in rubber boats. The northeast winds, for the time being, were off doing something else, but that, DeHaan knew, wouldn’t last.

Ratter was up in the bow, where an AB was casting a lead line-the Noordendam was in as close as DeHaan dared take her, with visibility, light rain, new moon, down to a mile or less. As for Sims, he was everywhere, sometimes on the bridge, the privilege of command allowing him the luxury of not sitting still.

2130. 2230. Maybe it wasn’t Cap Bon. On the bridge, Sims muttered under his breath, peered at the coastline, took five steps this way, five steps back. DeHaan wanted to help, to provide some distraction, but there was nothing to be done. Been in London lately? What did you do before the war? No, that was worse than silence. He looked at his watch, again, and saw that it was still 10:45, then thought about noting the change of course in the log, but clearly he couldn’t. He would falsify the day’s entry, though logs were sacred books and it went against deep instinct to write lies in them. His mind wandered here and there, Arlette, the girl in Liverpool. And what became, these days, of captains who lost their ships and survived? Join somebody’s navy, at best. Or take another merchant ship, to lead another lamb to another slaughter.

Then, hurried footsteps up the ladder to the bridge-one of Sims’s men, breathing hard with excitement. “Major Sims, sir, Smythe says he seen a light, and one of the sailors too.”

Sims cleared his throat and, perfectly calm for all the world to see, said, “Very well.”

“Good luck, Major,” DeHaan said. “See you in a while.”

Sims looked at him for a moment, then said, “Thank you,” turned, and followed the commando out the door.

Forward of the bridge, there was muted commotion, shadows moving about, something clattered to the deck, then the boats were lowered to the water and the commandos climbed down the nets and paddled away into the night. “Come right to three fifty, Ruysdal,” DeHaan said. Then, to the lookout on the wing, “Have Van Dyck prepare to drop anchor. In ten minutes or so.”

DeHaan went out to the wing facing the shore. Shapes in the darkness, almost the entire crew was ranged along the edge of the deck, watching the boats as they pulled away.

0115 hours. Off Cap Bon.

Noordendam swung slowly at the end of her anchor chain, DeHaan and Ratter had stationed themselves on the bridge wing and, sleep being out of the question, most of the crew remained on deck. From anchor, a mile or so out, Cap Bon was a span of gray beach that climbed to an empty horizon. Lifeless, it seemed to DeHaan, dead still. With the engines shut down, there was only the lap of the sea against the hull, rain dripping on iron, and the slow creak of the cargo booms. In the distance, a faint rattle, muffled by the weather, which stopped, then, an afterthought, reappeared for a brief encore. “They’re fighting,” Ratter said. Instinctively, they both raised their binoculars and focused on the horizon.

“See anything?”

“No.” Then, “I see that.”

A flare burst red against the sky, sputtered as it floated toward the earth on its parachute. A second followed, both well east of where DeHaan thought they’d be. On deck, the crewmen called out to one another in low voices. The second flare was almost gone when there was an orange flash, with a low crump that came rolling out over the water seconds later. Then another. Ratter counted out loud, as though calculating the distance of a storm by the interval between lightning and thunder.

“They’re really at it, now,” DeHaan said, listening hard. He heard the fight as a series of brief stutters, whispery and dry, the volume climbing and falling. Joined by a louder version, deeper, not so fast, which went on for a long time, then ended with another flash. So much for silent assault. DeHaan had seen the knives, and assumed their use would lead to a quiet conclusion, but it hadn’t. The heavy machine gun returned, and this time it continued, and, through the binoculars, he could see what looked like lines of flying sparks. DeHaan glanced at his watch, where seconds turned into minutes. And, at eleven minutes, more or less, the battle ended.

0305. Kees had joined them, they were all in oilskins now, with hoods up, as much against the wind as the rain. No whitecaps yet, but the waves were slapping hard against the hull and the rain blew sideways.

“Back any time now,” DeHaan said. The planning said three hours, then they would return to the shore and show a signal light.

“An hour overdue,” Kees said. “And soon enough it’ll be dawn, and we’ll be sitting out here. For no particular reason.”

“If somebody shows up,” DeHaan said, “we’re repairing a valve.”

“Or the J-40,” Ratter said. This was meant as a joke. The J-40 Adaptor was an old navy story: a small steel box with a handle, nobody knew what it was for, eventually a cook put a carrot in it and cranked the handle and it came out the other end shaped like a tulip.

“You think they know what’s going on, at Bizerta?” Kees said.

“They’d be here if they did,” Ratter said.

“They could’ve seen the flares, or maybe had word on a telephone, or a radio.”

“So, where are they?”

“Well, with the French, you never know.”

It was 0335 before they saw the light. DeHaan breathed a sigh of relief. “Finally,” he said.

After a moment, Ratter said, “What’s he doing?”

They stared through their binoculars. The light was yellow, with a powerful beam blurred by the haze, on and off, on and off. Ratter said, “That’s no recognition signal, that’s Morse.”

“Three short, three long, three short,” Kees said. “Where I come from that’s an S, an O, and another S, and, the way I learned it, it means save our souls. ”

“I’ll want the rifle,” DeHaan said to Ratter. And, to Kees, “Boat Four-get the crew up here and prepare to launch.”

“You shouldn’t be the one to go,” Ratter said.

DeHaan knew he was right, and pretended to think it over. “No, it’s for me, Johannes. And right away. Get the signalman to make back Confirmed. Help coming. ”

DeHaan went quickly to his cabin, snatched the Browning in its holster and worked on buckling the belt, beneath his oilskin, as he ran back up the ladderway. On deck, organized confusion. The number four lifeboat- Santa Rosa painted on its bow, for which he silently thanked Van Dyck-was swung out on its davits, ready to lower. Of the three-man crew, the AB Scheldt was already aboard, settling the oars in the oarlocks, and AB Vandermeer was trotting from the forecastle. The signalman was standing by the boat, working the shutter on the Aldis lamp, and Ratter was just emerging from below, Enfield in hand. “It’s loaded,” he told DeHaan. “Eight rounds on the clip.” He handed DeHaan extra clips, which he stuffed in the pocket of his oilskin. Meanwhile, Patapouf, the assistant cook, was running toward the boat. What now? Cocoa?

DeHaan grabbed Ratter by the sleeve, pulled him close and said, voice low and tense, “What the hell is he doing here?”

Kees, standing by the winch a few feet away, saw what was going on. “Braun’s got a sprained ankle,” he said in an undertone. “Patapouf’s the listed replacement.” DeHaan grimaced, nothing to be done about it, and climbed into the boat.

The boat swayed as Patapouf struggled over the gunwale, then settled himself on the bench, chin held high with bruised French dignity. He’d seen the officers squabbling and knew that it was about him. Turning to DeHaan he said, “I served in the army, Captain.”

Rifle in hand, heading for God only knew what on the beach, DeHaan was embarrassed, and nodded that he understood. Ratter put a flashlight on the seat next to DeHaan. “If you need help, two short, one long.”

“Lower away,” Kees said, as the winch engine produced a squirt of steam and began to grind.

At the oars, Scheldt and Vandermeer worked against the heavy sea as the boat rode up the waves and smacked down in the trough, and, even with DeHaan and Patapouf bailing away, the water rose to their ankles. When they were halfway to shore, the man on the beach started signaling again, which gave them a position fix, a few hundred yards east of where the tide was driving them.

“Signal back, Cap’n?” Vandermeer said. He was a tough kid, short and skinny, with fighting scars on his face, who’d been hired off the dock in Shanghai.

“No,” DeHaan said. “We don’t know who else is out there.”

A fast ride in, once they hit the shoreline, and they vaulted over the side and ran the boat up the gravel shingle, then dragged it higher, into the dune grass, safe from the tide. It was raining harder now, and their oilskins snapped in the wind. DeHaan took the flashlight, and handed the Enfield to Patapouf. “Know how to use it?”

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“What’d you do, in the army?”

“Cook, sir, during the war, but they taught us how to shoot.”

DeHaan handed him the extra clips.

They headed east, footsteps crunching on the shell litter. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Then, an English voice, somewhere above them, almost lost in the rumble and crash of the surf. “Who are you, then?”

“From the boat,” DeHaan said. “Captain DeHaan.”

They saw him as he rose, silhouetted against the sky, Sten gun pointed at them, then swung aside. “Glad you came. It’s a fucking horror up there.”

“Where?”

“Few hundred yards inland.” He joined them, looping the Sten’s strap over his shoulder. “I’ll take you,” he said. “If I can find it-should’ve left fucking breadcrumbs.” Was it Sims’s sergeant major? DeHaan wasn’t sure, the man’s watch cap was pulled down over his forehead, and he was limping. “Stepped in a hole,” he said.

“Who are you?” DeHaan said.

“Aldrich. Sergeant Aldrich.”

They set off along the beach. After a few minutes, DeHaan said, “What happened?”

“Christ-what didn’t!” They crunched along for a time. “We left one guard and our Arab with the boats-ahh, skyline here, gents.” He bent low to the ground, scurried up the dune, over the top, and down the other side, to a twisting, stony path flanked by broken boulders. “Bloody fucking thieving bastard, turned out. He ran off with them. Or someone did. Or who fucking knows. Anyway, we couldn’t find Wilkins and we couldn’t find him.”

“And Major Sims?”

“Couldn’t find him either.”

They trudged on in silence, the path turned to dreamscape-low canyons of splintered rock shining wet in the rain, scrub trees and brush, terrain that forced a tack every few yards, over ground which rose and fell so that, with a blank horizon, it seemed as though the land had closed behind them. “He took two men,” the sergeant said, “and they went to circle round the flank, and that was that. When we finally got those bastards to give up, we went looking for him, but..” DeHaan felt his foot slide, tried to catch himself, then fell flat on his back. “Careful, there,” the sergeant said-a comic line, now that it was too late to be careful. “The whole bloody mess was more than we bargained for,” he went on, as DeHaan got to his feet. “You’ll see.” When they were again on their way he said, “We called out to them, whistled, flashed a light, but they were just, well, gone. It ain’t all that rare y’know, I was with the expeditionary force, May of ’40, up by the Dyle River in Belgium, and it happened all the time.”

A rock wall appeared from the darkness, the sergeant stopped and said, “Ahh, this bugger.” He stood still, looked to one side and the other, then said, “It goes to the right here, doesn’t it. Yes, right.” Down a narrow defile into a valley of rocks, then up a steep slope, some kind of flint, where DeHaan tried to use his hands but it was like broken glass. Lost in this place, he thought, you would give up. A few minutes later they came to a wadi with a foot of fast water rushing through it-so fast they had to fight to keep balance as they crossed. The sergeant worked at climbing the bank on the far side, sand crumbling away as he tried to get a foothold, then hauled himself up on the third try and extended a hand to help the rest, saying, “Come on now, Mabel.”

“Do you think they were taken?” DeHaan said.

“Taken,” the sergeant said. “Something took ’em, yes, that’s about it, isn’t it.”

At last, a gulley, where mounds of gray rags lay amid tangled wire in a few inches of water. The survivors of the whole bloody mess, DeHaan realized, soaked and exhausted, with a manned Bren at either end. At the middle of it, the lieutenant struggled to sit upright. “Well, damned glad to see you, ” he said, a smile on his dead-white face. One pant leg had been sheared off and his hand was pressed against a bandage wrapped around his thigh. “We will need a lift,” he said, apologizing for the inconvenience. Silently, DeHaan counted the men in the gulley-eleven-and realized they could manage with one boat. The lieutenant saw what he was doing and said, “Four dead, five missing, including the major, I’m afraid, and two so badly wounded we had to leave them.”

DeHaan knew there’d been twenty, plus Sims, and thought he’d miscounted, until he discovered a German officer in with the rest, lying on his side with his hands tied behind his back. Sitting next to him, his guard, one of those teenaged soldiers who looked thirteen-a pinched face, out of some Victorian slum, spattered with blood. On the floor of the gulley, broken aerials, steel boxes with dials and gauges, each of them trailing snarls of copper wire, and two concave disks-one a parabolic mirror with a cracked face-about three feet wide. Some or all of it bolometers, DeHaan thought.

“Looks like you got what you came for,” he said.

The lieutenant nodded. “And a Jerry. Technician, from the insignia on him.” DeHaan could just make out the pinion wheel of an engineering officer on the man’s sleeve. “So a good raid, if we make it back. Could’ve been cleaner, of course, but they had a little protective force, French officers and Tunisian troops, and they just had to make a fight of it. Didn’t last long, but…” In the sky, a distant whine, and all the men looked up as it grew louder, then faded into the distance.

“Fucker’s back,” one of the men said.

“He knows we’re down here,” the lieutenant said. “We cut their telephone lines but we didn’t get the radio, not right away. And one of the officers shot off a couple of flares.”

“Last thing he did,” the sergeant said.

“We don’t know who he was signaling,” the lieutenant said, “but we took fire from a second unit as we left. So, they’re out there, somewhere.”

DeHaan looked at his watch. Maybe an hour until daybreak, he thought. Using his Sten as a cane, the lieutenant got to his feet. DeHaan and his crew took a share of the captured apparatus, DeHaan carrying two of the metal boxes. One of them had been smashed in the middle, as though someone had tried to disable it with a rifle butt, and the glass in the gauges was shattered. On top of the control panel was a

brass plate with a trademark, Zeiss, and, below that, WRMEPEILGERT 60.

The trek back to the beach was slow, hard work; the lieutenant, and one of his men, needed help in order to walk and DeHaan, near the head of the column, looked at his watch more than once. The magic boxes were light at first but grew heavier over time, while the wind strengthened with the approach of dawn and the chill left his hands and feet numb and settled deep inside him. When they heard the plane they stopped, the sergeant, moving ahead of the column as scout, holding up a hand until it passed. Would the pilot see the darkened Noordendam, anchored off the coast? DeHaan couldn’t find a way to believe he wouldn’t. But, so far, no explosions from that direction. Surely, he thought, that would happen at daybreak, when the real fighter planes would be up and hunting.

A silent march, except for the men who swore as they fell, and it took forever to cross the wadi, where the water was now well above their knees. At one point, after circling the cliff, they found themselves in a strange corridor between narrowing sandstone walls, and the sergeant had them turn around and go back.

DeHaan was watching him, about fifty feet ahead, when one of the men, who must have gone the wrong way when they doubled back, stepped between them. A man he didn’t recall seeing, all those days on the ship, which was very odd, because he certainly had his own, rather flamboyant, style. But, after all, commandos, a special breed. This one wore a heavy beard, had a cloth attached to the back of a kepi and a long rifle slung on his shoulder. The man looked up, saw DeHaan, and, for a moment, they both stared.

Suddenly, from behind, a loud whisper, “Get down you fucking cheesehead.” What? A name stuck to Dutchmen, so it must be him. He started to turn around, then flinched as a Sten fired off and something whizzed past his ear. Now he went down, fumbling beneath the oilskin for the Browning. Somebody else fired as DeHaan turned back to look for the bearded man but he’d vanished. Kepi, French Foreign Legion. He managed to get the pistol free and worked the slide to arm it as men ran past him and somebody yelled, “Get him, Jimmy.” Another burst, where he couldn’t see, and another, which produced an indignant roar, as though somebody’d had his foot stepped on. Indignation ended abruptly by a third, very short, burst.

“They’re over there.”

They were. Stuttering flashes and French shouts and a thousand bees. DeHaan pointed the Browning toward the gunfire and pulled the trigger, shells ejecting past his cheek until they stopped. A few seconds later, silence. Then the metallic snap of magazines being replaced and the voice of the sergeant. “Right, then. Hop it.” One of those wizards with a mystical sense of direction, DeHaan thought, hoped, he now led them off down some new path.

A bizarre procession. The lieutenant hobbling along with his Sten-gun cane, his helper pulling him by the elbow, the German prisoner-a balding clerk, squinting as though he’d lost his glasses-hurried along by a commando at his side, behind them a man with a Bren in one hand while the other dragged the parabolic mirror, which bounced along the slippery rock as he ran low to the ground. DeHaan followed, trying to free the empty clip from the Browning with one hand as he trotted past Patapouf, who lay on his back, arms flung wide, staring up at the rain. DeHaan knelt by his side, reached for the pulse in his neck with two fingers. The commando behind him took a handful of DeHaan’s oilskin and hauled him to his feet. “Gone to God, sir. Leave him be.”

“Patapouf,” DeHaan said. Fatso. The immense stupidity of it clouded his vision.

“I know, sir. Can’t be helped.” A thick accent, high-pitched voice, the teenager with the pinched face. “He stood up to fire, see, and you oughtn’t to do that.”

DeHaan picked up the Enfield and the boxes.

Then, reluctantly, he began to run.