As Mortimer translated the typewritten material Crowe looked back at the dead man lying in the puddle on the deck. He thought of the hunted submarine struggling desperately to throw off pursuit, and the final refuge taken at the bottom of the sea, of the rain of depth charges that had brought her up again, shattered and helpless; there would be the rush to destroy the secret documents, and before that could be effected came the shells from the Apache, blowing the shattered hull above and giving the captain his death-blow, even while the invading water whirled him to the surface.
‘It’s authentic all right,’ commented Nickleby, peering over Mortimer’s shoulder.
‘Yes,’ said Crowe; ‘let’s hear it over again ... Go on, Mortimer.’
The sunken submarine had an appointment with another, in two days’ time, so that the one newly come from port could exchange information with the one returning - there was a day, a time and a position. Above all, there was the underwater recognition signal, the sequence of dots and dashes which, sent out in sound waves through the water, would be picked up by the other vessel as a signal for them both to rise to the surface at dawn to effect the exchange.
‘I think somebody ought to keep that appointment,’ said Crowe, looking quizzically at his assistants.
‘There’s a bit of difference in pitch between the sound of our underwater signal and theirs,’ demurred Holby.
‘Not enough to matter,’ said Crowe. ‘If they get the signal they’re expecting, the right signal, at the right time and place, they won’t stop to think about a trifling difference in pitch. Put yourself in their place, man.’
The staff nodded. There was something fascinating and magnetic about their captain’s determination to do the enemy all possible harm. But it was their duty to look at all sides of a question.
‘What about surface propeller noises?’ said Rowles, but Crowe shook his head.
‘There won’t be any,’ he explained. ‘We’ll send one ship - there’s no sense in taking the whole flotilla - and she’ll get there early in the dark, so she can drift. Who’s got the steadiest nerves?’
‘Marion?’ suggested Nickleby, and as Crowe looked round at the others they nodded an agreement.
‘Right!’ said Crowe. ‘Get the orders out for him now.’
That was how HMS Cheyenne, Lieutenant-Commander Edward Marion, DSC, came to detach herself from the Twentieth Flotilla at the end of that day to undertake an independent operation while the rest of the flotilla shepherded the wounded Apache back to port. It explains how an Italian submarine happened to rise to the surface close alongside her to find herself, much to her astonishment, swept by a torrent of fire from the waiting guns. The official British communique, issued sometime later, describing the capture, whole, of an Italian submarine, puzzled most of the people who read it. And yet the explanation is not a very complex one.
Intelligence
Captain George Crowe, CB, DSO, RN, walked down three short steps into the blinding sunshine that made the big aeroplane’s wings seem to waver in reflected light. The heat of the Potomac Valley hit him in the face, a sweltering contrast to the air-cooled comfort of the plane. He was wearing a blue uniform more suitable for the bridge of a destroyer than for the damp heat of Washington, and that was not very surprising, because not a great many hours earlier he had been on the bridge of a destroyer, and most of the intervening hours he had spent in aeroplanes, sitting in miserable discomfort at first, breathing through his oxygen mask in the plane that had brought him across the Atlantic, and then reclining in cushioned ease in the passenger plane that had brought him from his point of landing here.
The United States naval officer who had been sent to meet him had no difficulty in picking him out - the four gold stripes on his sleeves and the ribbons on his chest marked him out, even if his bulk and his purposeful carriage had not done so.
‘Captain Crowe?’ asked the naval lieutenant.
‘Yes.’
‘Glad to see you, sir. My name’s Harley.’
The two shook hands.
‘I have a car waiting, sir,’ Harley went on. ‘They’re expecting you at the Navy Department, if you wouldn’t mind coming at once.’
The car swung out of the airport and headed for the bridge while Crowe blinked round him. It was a good deal of a contrast - two days before he had been with his flotilla, refuelling in a home port; then had come the summons to the Admiralty, a fleeting glimpse of wartime London, and now here he was in the District of Columbia, United States of America, with the chances of sudden death infinitely removed, shops plentifully stocked, motorcars still swarming, and the city of Washington spread out before him.
Crowe stirred a little uneasily. He hoped he had not been brought to this land of plenty unnecessarily; he regretted already having left his flotilla and the eternal hunt after U-boats.
The car stopped and Harley sprang out and held the door open for him. There were guards in naval uniform round the door, revolvers sagging at their thighs; a desk at which they paused for a space.
‘No exceptions,’ smiled Harley, apologizing for the fact that not even the uniform of a British naval captain would let them into the holy of holies for which they were headed. There were two men in the room to which Harley led him.
‘Good morning,’ said the admiral.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said Crowe.
‘Sorry to hurry you like this,’ the admiral said gruffly. ‘But it’s urgent. Meet Lieutenant Brand.’
Brand was in plain clothes - seedy plainclothes. Crowe puzzled over them. Those clothes were the sort of suit that a middle-class Frenchman, not too well off, and the father of a family, would wear. And Brand’s face was marked with weariness and anxiety.
‘Brand left Lisbon about the same time you left London,’ said the admiral. His eyes twinkled - no, ‘twinkled’ was too gentle a word - they glittered under thick black eyebrows. No man who looked into those eyes even for a moment would want to be the admiral’s enemy. Now he shot a direct glance at Crowe, twisted his thin lips and shot a question.
‘Supposing,’ he asked, ‘you had the chance to give orders to a U-boat captain, what orders would you give?’
Crowe kept his face expressionless. ‘That would depend,’ he said cautiously, ‘on who the U-boat captain was.’
‘In this case it is Korvettenkapitan Lothar Wolfgang von und zu Loewenstein.’
Captain Crowe repressed a start. ‘I know him,’ he said.
‘That’s why you’re here.’ The admiral grinned. ‘Didn’t they tell you in London? You’re here because few people on our side of the ocean know Loewenstein better than you.’
Crowe considered. Yes, he decided, the admiral’s statement was right. He knew Loewenstein. In the years before 1939, the German had made quite a reputation for himself by his bold handling of his yacht in English regattas - Loewenstein and his helmsman. Burke? Of course not. Bruch - Burch - something like that. Good man, that helmsman.
Crowe had met Loewenstein repeatedly on several formal occasions when the British navy had met detachments of the German navy while visiting. And since 1939 their paths had crossed more than once - Crowe on the surface in his destroyer, and Loewenstein two hundred feet below in his submarine.
‘Loewenstein,’ the admiral was saying, ‘left Bordeaux on the thirteenth - that’s four days ago - with orders to operate on the Atlantic Coast. We know he has four other U-boats with him. Five in all.’
The shaggy-browed admiral leaned over the desk. ‘And Loewenstein,’ he added, ‘is out to get the Queen Anne.’
Captain Crowe blinked again.
‘The Queen Anne,’ pursued the American admiral ruthlessly, ‘that is due to clear very shortly with men for the Middle East and India. Men we can’t afford to lose. Not to mention the ship herself.’
‘What’s the source of your information, sir?’ Captain Crowe asked.
‘Brand here,’ said the admiral, ‘also left Bordeaux on the thirteenth.’
That piec
e of news stiffened Crowe in his chair and he stared more closely at the lieutenant in plain clothes. The news explained a lot - the seedy French suit, the hollow cheeks and the haggard expression. A man who had been acting as a spy in Bordeaux for the last six months would naturally look haggard.
Brand spoke for the first time and his pleasant Texan drawl carried even more than the hint that he had not only been speaking French but thinking in French for a long time.
‘This is what I brought from Bordeaux,’ he said, taking an untidy bundle of papers from the admiral’s desk. ‘It’s the code the German agents in this country use for communications with the U-boats.’
Crowe took the bundle from his hand and gave it a cursory glance. This was not the time to give it prolonged study, complicated as it was, and half the columns were in German, which he did not understand. The other half were in English, and were composed of a curiously arbitrary sequence of words. Crowe caught sight of ‘galvanized iron buckets’ and ‘canned lobster’ and ‘ripe avocados’. Farther down the column there were figures instead of words - apparently every value in American money from a cent to five dollars had a German equivalent, and the words ‘pounds’ and ‘dozens’ and even the hours of the day could convey certain meanings when put in their proper context.
‘With that code,’ explained Brand, ‘you can give time, courses, latitude and longitude - anything you want.’
Crowe braved a question he half suspected he should not have asked. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘It’s not the original,’ interposed the admiral. ‘The Nazis don’t know we’ve got this. There’s no missing original to give them the tip to change their code.’
‘A French girl got it for me,’ Brand explained.
There was a silence and then the admiral said, ‘Well, Captain, there’s the setup. What have you got to suggest?’
Captain Crowe looked down at the floor and then up at the admiral.
‘Of course the Queen Anne will be secured by convoy,’ he said. ‘I know you’re not thinking of letting her make her regular transport runs without escort. If Loewenstein is waiting for her with five submarines, her speed won’t do her any good. And if the Germans know the course and time out of your ports now, there’s no guaranteeing they won’t know any change in course or time you might give the Queen Anne’
The admiral made a sudden gesture. ‘We can send the Queen out with half the fleet,’ he said. ‘But once we’re at - map, please, Lieutenant!’
Young Harley spread a map in front of the admiral. Captain Crowe hunched over it, following the line pointed by the top- striper’s finger.
‘Once there,’ said the admiral, ‘we’ll have to let the Queen go on her own. We can’t go past that point without neglecting our coastal duties. And Loewenstein is bound to trail along until the escort leaves. Then he’ll hit. Unless he can be drawn off.’
‘Yes,’ echoed Crowe absently. ‘Unless we can draw him off.’
‘Can we?’ the admiral demanded. ‘Or - I’m sorry - that’s an unfair question, thrown at you all at once, Captain. Think it over and tomorrow morning at’ - he glanced at his wristwatch - ‘ten we’ll talk it over.’
‘It wouldn’t break my heart,’ said the naval-intelligence agent, Brand, suddenly, ‘if something drastic happened to Loewenstein. I’ve seen some of the pictures he’s taken with his little camera from conning towers. Close-ups of drowning men - and one that’s the pride of his collection, a woman and a kid off the Athenia.’
‘Something drastic is going to happen to Loewenstein,’ said the admiral. He looked at Crowe, and the captain blinked.
‘Right-o,’ said Captain Crowe.
He found himself outside the office without clearly realizing how he got there. He wanted to walk; he was urgently anxious to walk, partly because long hours in planes had cramped his legs - legs accustomed to miles of deck marching - and partly because he wanted to think - had to think - and he thought best on his feet.
He had to draw Loewenstein off. But what could draw a sub commander off a prize like the Queen Anne ? To sink the Queen would give any U-boat skipper the Pour le Mérite with oak leaves or whatever brand of decoration Hitler was giving out now. A man would have to be mad to forsake a prize like that. Mad or - but Loewenstein had been half mad that day he had seized the wheel from his helmsman at that Copenhagen regatta and had tried to ram the boat that had overhauled him and blanketed him, stealing the race at the last moment. That Danish club had disbarred Loewenstein for that. But the helmsman had been exonerated. Good man, that helmsman, Crowe thought. Braucht - it was something that started with a B. Broening. Yes, that was it - Broening.
Crowe looked around him, squinted at the sun, tucked his chin in his limp white collar and set off boldly in the direction of the British Embassy. He was remembering all he could about Korvettenkapitan von und zu Loewenstein. He called up the slightly pug nose, the cold blue eyes, the colourless hair slicked back from the forehead - he remembered all these. Then there was the ruthless boldness with which he would jockey for position at the start of a yacht race. He would bear down on another boat, keeping his course while the helmsman - Broening - yelled a warning until the other boat fell off. The protest flags fluttered on many occasions when Loewenstein sailed. And after the races, it always was Loewenstein and some beautiful harpy at their table, alone, except for the miserable helmsman, Broening. Now, Loewenstein was the boldest of all U-boat captains.
Crowe knew his lips were not moving, but his mind was speaking. Draw Loewenstein off, it said. But how? Loewenstein is a believer in the guns, as shown by his record. He conserves his torpedoes to the last. The ideal method of attack, according to Loewenstein, is to rise to the surface at night, preferably when there is just enough moon, or shore-light glare, to give a good silhouette of the target. He times his rise so that the convoy is almost upon him. Then he uses his guns furiously, pumping shells into every hull he can see; his whole pack of U-boats firing together. Then, before the escort comes up, even before the deck guns of the freighters can go into action, his sub flotilla submerges and scatters on divergent courses that confuse surface listening posts so that the escort destroyers don’t know the exact spot over which to make their run. Damned clever - except he thinks the Americans don’t know how he works. And I - God help me - have been brought over here to show Loewenstein he guessed wrong. But what is it about Broening that’s so important? Why do I keep thinking about him?
It would be eight or nine days before Loewenstein and his pack could be expected off the American coast. In that time the moon would be past its full. Three-quarters, rising about eleven. So that it might be best to--
Crowe forgot the sweat that dripped down his face - everything except the problem at hand. It was something that even in his wide experience he had not encountered before, this opportunity of sending orders to an enemy in the sure and certain knowledge that they would be received and acted upon.
Broening, he told himself. Last I heard of him was that he’d become a Johnny come lately in the Nazi Party and Von Ribbentrop had sent him to some little Latin American country as a consul. Loewenstein must have loved that. Always hated the man, Loewenstein did, even though he won races for him. Now, despite all Loewenstein s Junker background, it seems that Broening is outstripping him in the race for prestige. I’ll wager Loewenstein would like nothing better than to-I believe I have it.
The shower bath offered him by a friend in need at the Embassy was something for which he would have given a month’s pay. He stepped under the cold rain and pranced about solemnly while the healing water washed away the heat and his irritation. A plan to deal with Loewenstein was forming in his mind, and as he cooled down, his spirits rose and he nearly began to sing, until he remembered that he was on the dignified premises of the British Embassy. But he still grew happier and happier until he was struck by a fresh realization. Then his spirits fell abruptly. He had not written either to Susan or Dorothy this week, thanks to the hours spen
t travelling from England. And today was nearly over, and tomorrow he would have to write to Miriam - three letters pressing on him, to say nothing of the official report he would have to write. Crowe groaned and stayed under the shower a minute longer than he need have done in order to postpone the evil moment when he would have to come out and face a world in which letters had to be written, and when he did he was cursing himself for a soft-hearted fool for not cutting off the correspondence and saving himself a great deal of trouble.
But outside, the assistant naval attaché welcomed him with a smile.
‘Here’s Miss Haycraft,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like her assistance in writing your report. You needn’t worry about her - she knows more secrets than the Admiralty itself.’
Miss Haycraft was a pleasant little fair-haired thing with an unobtrusive air of complete efficiency. She sat down with her notebook in just the right way to start Crowe off pouring out his report of his interview with the admiral and Lieutenant Brand.
Halfway through his discourse, Captain Crowe stopped. ‘I wonder if the Embassy has any records on a man named Broening?’ he asked. ‘Nazi fellow. Believe he was consul or minister or something in a Central American state. I--’
‘Yes, Captain,’ said Miss Haycraft crisply. ‘Herr Broening is in New York, waiting to take passage on the diplomatic-exchange ship, Frottingholm’
‘Ah?’ asked Crowe. ‘And when does the Frottingholm sail?’
‘It’s not definite,’ the girl answered. ‘There’s some trouble getting Berlin to assure safe passage.’
‘Umm,’ said Captain Crowe.
In another ten minutes the report was done. Crowe looked at Miss Haycraft and felt temptation - not temptation with regard to Miss Haycraft, however; she was not the girl to offer it.
‘Was the ANA really speaking the truth when he said you could be trusted with a secret?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Haycraft, and her manner implied that there was no need at all to enlarge on the subject.