Rake picked up the bottle and looked questioningly at Tobiasson-Svartman, who shook his head and then regretted it immediately. Rake filled his own glass, but not to the brim this time.
‘Does this affect my mission?’
‘Only in that from now on, everything has to proceed at great speed. In wartime you can never assume that there will be plenty of time available. And that’s the situation we’re in now.’
The conversation with Rake was at an end. The captain seemed uneasy. He scratched at his forehead, which showed traces of red spots.
Tobiasson-Svartman left the captain’s quarters. The October evening was chilly. He paused on the compan-ionway and listened. The sea was booming away in the distance. He could hear somebody laughing in the gun room. He thought he recognised Anders Höckert’s voice.
He closed the door of his cabin and thought about his wife. She always used to go to bed early when he was away, she’d told him that in a letter the same year they were married.
He closed his eyes. After a few minutes of trying, he managed to conjure up her smell. It was soon so strong that it filled the whole cabin.
Chapter 26
It rained during the night.
He slept with his lead clutched tightly to his chest. When he got up, shortly before six, he had a nagging headache.
He wanted to run away, escape. But it was only that he was impatient at still not having embarked on his mission.
Chapter 27
At dawn on 22 October, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman transferred to the gunboat Blenda.
The waiting was over.
He was welcomed at the end of the gangway by the commanding officer, Lieutenant Jakobsson, who had a squint in his left eye and a deformed hand. He spoke with a pronounced Gothenburg accent, and despite his squint his expression seemed friendly and sincere. Tobiasson-Svartman could not help thinking that Jakobsson reminded him of some character he had seen in one of those newfangled films, or whatever they were called. One of the police officers, perhaps, who were forever chasing the star but never managed to catch him?
Lieutenant Jakobsson inspired him with confidence. To his surprise, he was allocated the captain’s cabin.
‘This isn’t necessary,’ he insisted.
‘I’ll bunk with my second in command,’ said Lieutenant Jakobsson. ‘It’s a bit cramped and crappy on these gunboats, the more so as we’ve had to take on extra crew because of the particular nature of the mission. And my orders include that you have the best possible conditions in which to carry out your task. As I see it, a good night’s sleep is one of the cornerstones of human existence. And so I’m prepared to put up with my cabin-mate grinding his teeth in his sleep. It’s like sharing a cabin with a walrus. Assuming walruses grind their teeth, that is.’
He asked Jakobsson to tell him the history of the ship.
‘Parliament voted for it in 1873. She was the first of a series of gunboats, and none of the farmers who dominated parliament in those days had any idea about how many there should be. We have room for eighty tonnes of coal in the bunkers, and that’s enough to see us through 1,500 nautical miles. The engines are horizontal compounders, in accordance with the Wolf system. I’m not at all sure what’s special about the Wolf system, but it seems to work. She’s a good ship, but getting on in years. I suspect they’ll soon retire her.’
Tobiasson-Svartman went to his cabin. It was bigger than the one he’d had on the Svea. But it had a different smell to it. Like an anthill, he thought. As if there had been an anthill in the cabin, but it had been removed during the night.
He smiled at the thought. He imagined explaining to his wife about his first impressions of his cabin, and the smell of formic acid.
He went up on deck and asked Lieutenant Jakobsson to assemble the crew. It was a fine day, with a southerly breeze.
The crew consisted of seventy-one men. Eight of the ratings and a naval engineer had joined the ship to help with the expedition. What they knew about the work in store was little enough.
The crew assembled following a whistle from the second in command, whose name was Fredén.
Tobiasson-Svartman was always nervous when required to address a crew. To conceal his unease, he came across as strict and liable to lose his temper.
‘I will not stand for any slapdash work,’ he began. ‘Our mission is important. These are unsettled times and battle fleets are sailing round our coasts. We shall be remeasuring the depths of parts of the shipping route used by the navy, to the north and south of where we are now. There is no margin for error. A sounding that is out by even one metre could result in disaster for a ship. Shallows that are overlooked or wrongly positioned on a chart could wreak devastation.’
He paused and surveyed the crew, standing in a semicircle before him. Many of them were young, barely twenty. They eyed him expectantly.
‘We’ll be looking for what cannot be seen,’ he went on. ‘But because it cannot be seen, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There could be sandbanks just below the surface that have not previously been discovered or charted. There might also be unexpected depths. We shall be looking for both of these features. We’ll be mapping out a route along which our warships can proceed in safety. Any questions?’
Nobody had a question. The gunboat rocked up and down in the swell.
The rest of the day was spent establishing the necessary routines and organising reliable procedures. Lieutenant Jakobsson plainly had the confidence of his crew. Tobiasson-Svartman could see that he had been lucky. A naval officer forced to hand over his cabin to a colleague on a temporary, confidential mission could easily have reacted sourly, but Lieutenant Jakobsson did not seem put out. He gave the impression of being one of those rare people who do not conceal their true character behind a false front. In that respect Lieutenant Jakobsson was the opposite of himself.
The routines were duly established. Every fourth day he would report to Captain Rake. It was estimated that in ideal weather conditions the destroyer would pass their position every ninety-sixth hour. Rake had at his disposal cryptographers who would encode Tobiasson-Svartman’s reports and transmit them to Naval Headquarters. Within a few days the changes that needed to be made to the charts would be with the cartographers in Stockholm. The work would proceed at tremendous speed.
Late that afternoon Lieutenant Jakobsson fixed an exact bearing. They were three degrees north-north-east of the Sandsänkan lighthouse. According to the latest charts the depths around the Juliabåden buoy were twelve, twenty-three and fourteen metres.
Tobiasson-Svartman gave the order that the Blenda should stay where it was until the following day. This was where the measuring work would begin.
He studied the sea through his telescope, scrutinising the distant horizon, and the lighthouses within view. Then he closed his eyes, but without taking away the telescope.
He dreamed of the day when only in exceptional circumstances would he need the help of various instruments. He dreamed of the day when he himself had become the only instrument he needed.
Chapter 28
The following day. Three minutes past seven. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman was on deck. The sun was hidden behind low clouds. He was dressed in uniform. It was plus four degrees, and almost dead calm. A musty smell of seaweed was coming from the sea. He was tense, nervous about the work that was about to begin, afraid of all the mistakes waiting in store for him, mistakes he hoped not to make.
A submerged sandbank long used by herring fishermen, marked on the charts as Olsklabben, was 150 metres to the west of the ship. He had in one of his suitcases an archive that he always carried around with him. He had read in an old tax roll that this sandbank had been ‘used by fishermen and seal hunters since the sixteenth century and belonged to the Crown’.