Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [124]
She had no plans.
But she had left the barn door open.
32
THAT’S THE PLACE, NUMBER ONE,” THE CAPTAIN SAID, and lowered his telescope.
The first mate peered out through the rain and the spray. “Not quite the ideal holiday resort, what, sir? Jolly stark, I should say.”
“Indeed.” The captain was an old-fashioned naval officer with a grizzled beard who had been at sea during the first war with Germany. However, he had learned to overlook his first mate’s foppish conversational style, for the boy had turned out—against all expectations—to be a perfectly good sailor.
The “boy,” who was past thirty and an old salt by this war’s standards, had no idea of the magnanimity he benefited from. He held on to a rail and braced himself as the corvette mounted the steep side of a wave, righted itself at the crest and dived into the trough. “Now that we’re here, sir, what do we do?”
“Circle the island.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And keep our eyes open for a U-boat.”
“We’re not likely to get one anywhere near the surface in this weather—and if we did, we couldn’t see it unless it came within spitting distance.”
“The storm will blow itself out tonight—tomorrow at the latest.” The captain began stuffing tobacco into a pipe.
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure.”
“Nautical instinct, I suppose?”
“The weather forecast.”
The corvette rounded a headland, and they saw a small bay with a jetty. Above it, on the cliff top, was a little cottage standing small and square, hunched against the wind.
The captain pointed. “We’ll land a party there as soon as we can.”
The first mate nodded. “All the same…”
“Well?”
“Each circuit of the island will take us about an hour, I should say.”
“So?”
“So, unless we’re jolly lucky and happen to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time…”
“The U-boat will surface, take on its passenger, and submerge again without us even seeing the ripples,” the captain finished.
“Yes.”
The captain lit his pipe with an expertise that spoke of long experience in lighting pipes in heavy seas. He puffed a few times, then inhaled a lungful of smoke. “Ours not to reason why,” he said, and blew smoke through his nostrils.
“A rather unfortunate quotation, sir.”
“Why?”
“It refers to the notorious charge of the Light Brigade.”
“I never knew that.” The captain puffed away. “One advantage of being uneducated, I suppose.”
There was another small cottage at the eastern end of the island. The captain scrutinized it through his telescope and observed that it had a large, professional-looking radio aerial. “Sparks!” he called. “See if you can raise that cottage. Try the Royal Observer Corps frequency.”
When the cottage had passed out of sight, the radio operator called: “No response, sir.”
“All right, Sparks,” the captain said. “It wasn’t important.”
THE CREW of the Coastguard cutter sat below decks in Aberdeen Harbor playing blackjack for halfpennies and musing on the feeblemindedness that seemed invariably to accompany high rank.
“Twist,” said Jack Smith, who was more Scots than his name.
Albert “Slim” Parish, a fat Londoner far from home, dealt him a jack.
“Bust,” Smith said.
Slim raked in his stake. “A penny-ha’penny,” he said in mock wonder. “I only hope I live to spend it.”
Smith rubbed condensation off the inside of a porthole and peered out at the boats bobbing up and down in the harbor. “The way the skipper’s panicking, you’d think we were going to bloody Berlin, not Storm Island.”
“Didn’t you know? We’re the spearhead of the Allied invasion.” Slim turned over a ten, dealt himself a king and said, “Pay twenty-ones.”
Smith said, “What is this guy, anyway—a deserter? If you ask me, it’s a job for the military police, not us.”
Slim shuffled the pack. “I’ll tell you what he is—an escaped prisoner of war.”
Jeers.
“All right, don’t listen to me. But when we pick him up, just take note of his accent.” He put the cards down. “Listen, what boats go to Storm Island?”
“Only the grocer,” someone said.
“So the only way he can get back to the mainland is on the grocer’s boat. The military police just