‘The bombers’ll find us, though, sir,’ said Rowles. ‘Just listen to that one going over!’
‘Quite likely,’ said Crowe. He had already weighed the possible loss of the Apache and her company against the chances of saving the gold, and he had no intention of working through the pros and cons again.
‘Here he comes now,’ said Hammett suddenly; his quick ear had caught the splash of oars before anyone else.
Nickleby swung himself aboard and groped his way through the utter darkness to the bridge to make his report.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘The gold’s there. It’s in lorries hidden in a gully half a mile away and they’ve sent for it. The jetty here’s usable, thank God. Twelve feet of water at the end - took the soundings myself.’
‘Right,’ said Crowe. ‘Stand by to help Commander Hammett con the ship up to the jetty.’
Merka Bay is a tiny crack in the difficult southern shore of Crete. It is an exposed anchorage giving no more than fifteen feet of water, but it serves a small fleet of fishing craft in peacetime, which explains the existence of the jetty, and from the village there runs an obscure mountain track, winding its way through the mountains of the interior, over which, apparently, the lorries with the gold had been brought when the fighting in the island began to take a serious turn. Crowe blessed the forethought of the Greeks while Hammett, with infinite care in the utter blackness, edged the Apache up the bay to the little pier, the propellers turning ever so gently and the lead going constantly.
They caught the loom of the pier and brought the Apache alongside. Two seamen jumped with warps, and as they dropped clove hitches over the bollards, Crowe suddenly realized that they had not had to fumble for the bollards. The utter pitchy blackness had changed into something substantially less; when he looked up, the stars were not so vividly distinct. It was the first faint beginning of dawn.
There was a chattering group on the pierhead - four women and a couple of soldiers in ragged khaki uniforms. They exchanged voluble conversation with the interpreter on the main deck.
‘The gold’s coming, sir,’ reported that individual to Crowe.
‘How much of it?’
‘Forty-two tons, they say, sir.’
‘Metric tons, that’ll be,’ said Holby to Nickleby. ‘How much d’you make that to be?’
‘Metric tons are as near as dammit to our ton,’ said Nickleby irritably.
‘The difference in terms of gold ought to amount to something, though,’ persisted Holby, drawing Nickleby deftly with the ease of long practice. ‘Let’s have a rough estimate, anyway.’
‘Millions and millions,’ said Nickleby crossly. ‘Ten million pounds - twenty million pounds - thirty million - don’t ask me.’
‘The knight of the slide rule doesn’t bother himself about trifles like an odd ten million pounds,’ said Holby.
‘Shut up!’ broke in Rowles. ‘Here it comes.’
In the grey dawn they could see a long procession of shabby old trucks bumping and lurching over the stony lane down to the jetty. All except one halted at the far end; the first one came creeping towards them along the pier.
An elderly officer scrambled down from the cab and saluted in the direction of the bridge.
‘We got the bar gold in the first eight trucks, sir,’ he called in the accent of Chicago. ‘Coins in the other ones.’
‘He sounds just like an American,’ said Rowles.
‘Returned immigrant, probably,’ said Holby. ‘Lots of ‘em here. Made their little pile and retired to their native island to live like dukes on twopence a week, until this schemozzle started.’
‘Poor devils,’ said Rowles.
Sub-lieutenant Lord Edward Mortimer was supervising a working party engaged in bringing the gold on board the Apache.
‘Where do you propose to put the stuff?’ said Crowe to Hammett.
‘It’s heavy enough, God knows,’ was the reply. ‘It’s got to be low and in the centre line. Do you mind if I put it in your day cabin?’
‘Not at all. I think that’s the best place at the moment.’
Certainly it was heavy; gold is about ten times as heavy as the same bulk of coal.
The seamen who were receiving the naked bars from the Greeks in the lorry were deceived by their smallness, and more than once let them drop as the weight came upon them. A couple of the bars, each a mere foot long and three inches wide and high, made a load a man could only just stagger under. It gave the hurrying seamen a ludicrous appearance, as if they were soldiering on the job, to see them labouring with so much difficulty under such absurdly small loads. The men were grinning and excited at carrying these enormous fortunes.
‘Hardly decent to see that gold all naked,’ said Rowles.
‘Don’t see any sign of receipts or bookkeeping,’ said Nickleby. ‘Old Scroggs’ll break a blood vessel.’
‘No time for that,’ said Holby, glancing up to the sky. The action recalled to them all the danger in which they lay; each of them wondered how long it would be before the Stukas found them out
The first lorry was unloaded by now, and driven away, its place being taken by the second. An unending stream of gold bars was being carried into the Apache. The second lorry was replaced by the third, and the third by the fourth. And then they heard the sound of dread - the high incisive note of a fighting plane. It came from the direction of the sea, but it was not a British plane. Swiftly it came, with the monstrous unnatural speed of its kind, not more than five hundred feet above the water. They could see plainly enough the swastika marking on the tail and the crosses on the wings.
‘Open fire,’ said Hammett into the voice tube.
Crowe was glad to see that there was no trace of hurry or excitement in his voice.
All through the night the gun crews had been ready for instant action. The long noses of the 4-7s rose with their usual appearance of uncanny intelligence under the direction of Garland at the central control. Then they bellowed out, and along with their bellowing came the raving clamour of the pom-poms and the heavy machine guns. The plane swerved and circled. The -50-calibre gun under the end of the bridge beside Crowe followed it round, its din deafening Crowe. He looked down and noticed the grim concentration on the face of the red-haired seaman at the handles.
But that plane was moving at three hundred and more miles an hour; it had come and gone in the same breath, apparently unhit. It seemed to skim the steep hills that fringed the bay and vanished beyond them.
‘It’s calling the bombers this very minutes,’ said Holby, savagely glaring after it. ‘How much longer have we got to stay here?’
Crowe heard the remark; naval thought had not changed in this respect at least, that the first idea of a naval officer should be now, as it had been in Nelson’s day, to get his precious ship away from the dangerous and inhospitable shore and out to sea, where he could find freedom of manoeuvre, whether it was battle or storm that threatened him.
‘That’s the last of the bars, sir,’ called the English-speaking Greek officer. ‘Here’s the coin acoming.’
Coins in sacks, coins in leather bags, coins in wooden boxes - sovereigns, louis d’or, double eagles, napoleons, Turkish pounds, twenty-mark pieces, dinars - the gold of every country in the world, drained out of every country in the Balkans, got away by a miracle before the fall of Athens and now being got out of Crete. The bags and sacks were just as deceptively heavy as the bars had been, and the naval ratings grinned and joked as they heaved them into the ship.
The first lorry full of coin had been emptied, and the second was driving onto the jetty when the first bombers arrived. They came from inland, over the hills, and were almost upon the ship, in consequence, before they were sighted. The guns blazed out furiously while each silver shape in turn swept into position, like the figures in some three-dimensional country dance, and then put down their noses and came racing down the air, engines screaming. Crowe had been through this before, and he did not like it. It called
for nerve to stand and look death in the eye as it came tearing down at him. He had seen men dive for shelter, instinctively and futilely, behind the compass or even the canvas dodger, and he did not blame them in the least. He would do the same himself if he were not so determined that the mind of George Crowe should be as well exercised as his body. To watch like this called for as much effort as to put in a strong finish after a twenty-mile run, and he leaned back against the rail and kept his eyes on the swooping death.
At the last possible second the hurtling plane levelled off and let go its bomb. Crowe saw the ugly black blob detach itself from the silver fabric at the same second as the note of the plane’s engine changed from a scream to a snarl. The bomb fell and burst in the shallows a few yards from the Apache’s bows and an equal distance from the pier. A colossal geyser of black mud followed along with the terrific roar of the explosion. Mud and water rained down on the Apache, drenching everyone on deck, while the little ship leaped frantically in the wave. Crowe heard and felt the forward warp that held her to the jetty snap with the jerk. He could never be quite sure afterwards whether he had seen, or merely imagined, the sea bottom revealed in a wide ring where the force of the explosion swept the water momentarily away. But he certainly noted, as a matter of importance, that bombs dropped in shallows of a few feet did not have nearly the damaging effect of a near miss in deeper water.
The second plane’s nose was already down and pointing at them as the Apache swung to her single warp - Mortimer was busy replacing the broken one. Crowe forced himself again to look up, and he saw the thing that followed. A shell from one of the forward guns hit the plane straight on the nose; Crowe, almost directly behind the gun, saw - or afterwards thought he had seen - the tiny black streak of not a hundredth of a second’s duration, that marked the passage of the shell up to the target. One moment the plane was there, sharp and clear against the pale blue of sky; the next moment there was nothing at all. The huge bomb had exploded in its rack - at a height of two thousand feet the sound of the explosion was negligible, or else Crowe missed it in his excitement. The plane disappeared, and after that the eye became conscious of a wide circular smudge widening against the blue sky, fringed with tiny black fragments making a seemingly leisurely descent downward to the sea. And more than that; the third bomber had been affected by the explosion - the pilot must have been killed or the controls jammed. Crowe saw it wheel across his line of vision, skating through the air like a flipped playing card, the black crosses clearly visible. Nose first, it hit the sea close into the shore, vanished into a smother of foam, and then the tail reappeared, protruding above the surface while the nose remained fixed in the bottom.
It was a moment or two before Crowe was able to realize that the Apache was temporarily safe; one bomber had missed and the other two were destroyed. He became conscious that he was leaning back against the rail with a rigidity that was positively painful - his shoulder joints were hurting him. A little sheepishly he made himself relax; he grinned at his staff and took a turn or two along the bridge.
Down on the main deck Mortimer had made fast again. But somehow one of the containers of gold coins had broken in the excitement. The deck was running with gold; the scuppers were awash with sovereigns.
‘Leave that as it is for now!’ bellowed Hammett, standing shoulder to shoulder with Crowe as he leaned over the rail of the Apache. ‘Get the rest of the stuff on board!’
Crowe turned and met Hammett’s eye. ‘It looks to me,’ said Crowe, with a jerk of his thumb at the heaped gold on the Apache’s deck, ‘as if this would be the best time in the world to. ask the Admiralty for a rise in pay.’
‘Yes,’ said Hammett shortly, with so little appreciation of the neatness of the jest that Crowe made a mental note that money was apparently a sacred subject to Hammett and had better not in future be made a target for levity - presumably Hammett had an expensive family at home, or something. But Hammett was looking at him with a stranger expression than even that assumption warranted. Crowe raised his eyebrows questioningly.
‘There’s mud on your face, sir,’ said Hammett. ‘Lots of it.’ Crowe suddenly remembered the black torrent that had drenched him when the bomb burst in the shallows. He looked down; his coat and his white trousers were thinly coated with grey mud, and it dawned upon him that his skin was wet inside his clothes. He put his hand to his face and felt the mud upon it; the damp handkerchief that he brought from his pocket came away smeared with the stuff; he must be a comic-looking sight. He tried to wipe his face clean, and found that his day- old beard hindered the process decidedly.
‘That’s the lot, sir!’ called the Greek officer.
‘Thank you,’ replied Hammett. ‘Cast off, Mortimer, if you please.’
Hammett strode hastily back to the engine-room voice tube, and Crowe was left still wiping vainly at the mud. He guessed it had probably got streaky by now. He must be a sight for the gods.
Those idiots on his staff had let him grin at them and walk up and down the bridge without telling him how he looked.
The Apache vibrated sharply with one propeller going astern and another forward, and she swung away from the pier.
‘Good luck, sir!’ called the Greek officer.
‘Same to you, and thank you, sir!’ shouted Crowe in return.
‘The poor devils’ll need all the luck that’s going if Jerry lays his hands on them,’ commented Nickleby. ‘Wish you could take ‘em with us.’
‘No orders for evacuation yet,’ said Holby.
The Apache had got up speed by now and was heading briskly out to sea, the long V of her wash breaking white upon the beaches. Hammett was as anxious as anyone to get where he had sea room to manoeuvre before the next inevitable attack should come. Soon she was trembling to her full thirty-six knots, and the green steep hills of Crete were beginning to lose their clarity.
‘Here they come!’ exclaimed Nickleby.
Out of the mountains of Crete they came, three of them once more, tearing after the Apache with nearly ten times her speed.
Hammett turned and watched them as the guns began to speak, and Crowe watched Hammett, ready to take over the command the instant he should feel it necessary. But Hammett was steady enough, looking up with puckered eyes, the grey stubble on his cheeks catching the light.
The bombers wasted no time in reconnoitring. Straight through the shell bursts they came, steadied on the Apache’s course, and then the leader put down its nose and screamed down in its dive.
‘Hard-a-starboard!’ said Hammett to the quartermaster.
The Apache heeled and groaned under extreme helm applied at full speed, and she swung sharply round. Once a dive bomber commits itself to its dive, it is hard for it to change its course along with its target’s. Crowe’s mathematical brain plunged into lightning calculations. The bomber started at about fifteen thousand feet or more - call it three miles; three hundred miles an hour. The hundredth of an hour; thirty-six seconds, but that’s not allowing for acceleration. Twenty-five seconds would be more like it - say twenty before the ship began to answer her helm. The Apache was doing thirty-six knots. In twenty seconds that would be - let’s see - almost exactly one-fifth of a mile, but that did not mean to say that she would be one-fifth of a mile off her course, because she would be following a curved path. A hundred and fifty yards, say, and the bomber would be able to compensate for some of that. A likely miss would be between fifty and a hundred yards.
Crowe’s quick brain did its job just in time. The bomber levelled off as it let go its bomb, the thing clearly silhouetted against the sky.
‘Midships!’ ordered Hammett to the quartermaster. The bomb hit the water and exploded seventy-five yards from the Apache’s port quarter, raising a vast fountain of grey water, far higher than the Apache’s stumpy mainmast.
‘Well done, Hammett!’ called Crowe, but softly, so as not to distract the man as he stood gauging the direction of the second bomber’s attack.
The Apache w
as coming out of her heel as she steadied on her new course.
‘Hard-a-port!’ said Hammett, and she began to snake round in the other direction.
The crescendo scream was repeated, but this time the pilot had tried to out-think the captain of the destroyer. The bomb fell directly in the Apache’s wake and not more than forty yards astern. She leaped madly at the blow, flinging everyone on the bridge against the rail. And the pilot, as he tore over the ship, turned loose his machine guns; Crowe heard the bullets flick past him, through all the din of the gunfire.
The Apache was coming round so fast that soon she would be crossing her own wake. The third bomber was evidently so confused that he lost his head, and the bomb fell farther away than the first one did. Now all three were heading northward again, pursued vainly for a second or two by the Apache’s fire.
So they were safe now. They had taken the gold and had paid nothing for it.
Crowe looked aft to where a sailor began to sweep the remaining gold coins into a little heap with a squeegee, and he wondered whether any destroyer’s scuppers had ever before run with gold.
Then he looked forward, and then down at the crew of the .50-calibre gun. It was with a shock that he saw that the red- haired sailor was dead; the limp corpse, capless, lay neglected, face in arms, on the steel plating, while the other two hands were still at work inserting a new belt He had been thinking that the Apache had escaped scot-free, and now he saw that she had paid in blood for that gold. A wave of reaction overtook him. Not all the gold in the world was worth a life. He felt a little sick.
The first-aid detachment had come up now, and were turning the body over. A heavy hand fell to the deck with a thump; Crowe saw the reddish hair on the wrist that he had noticed earlier. And then his sickness passed. Forty-two tons of gold; millions and millions sterling. Hitler was starving for gold. Gold would buy the allegiance of Arab tribesmen or neutral statesmen, might buy from Turkey the chrome that he needed so desperately, or from Spain the alliance for which he thirsted. That gold might have cost England a million other lives. Through his decision England had given one life for the gold. It was a bargain well worth it.