“That is not the only place, not with the lead we seem to have. But it will require a new plan. Signal the squadron and the destroyers: we will heave to while I decide what to do.”
“Yes, sir.” Wray left for the bridge; Cradock leaned over the charts.
“Is it cleverness, or some difficulty?” Cradock said to himself. Souchon had the reputation of a bold man. He had thrust all the way to Bone and Phillipeville, and made it safely back to Messina. Clever of him to leave Messina in daylight, clever to attempt that feint to the north. If he anticipated trouble in navigation waters, it was clever of him to slow, to arrive when he had the best visibility, when he could see a waiting collier, or British warships.
He felt Defence shiver successively, like a horse shaking a fly from its skin, as the revolutions slowed and her speed dropped. Deliberately, he did not go on deck to see how the following cruisers obeyed the signals. Defence shuddered through her secondary period of vibration and steadied again.
How many hours ahead were they? If they pressed on as quickly as possible and Goeben did not speed up, they would be a clear eight hours ahead… she could not possibly spot them. What then? His fingers traced the familiar contours of the Morean coast. If Goeben held on the shortest course for the east, she would pass between Cythera and Elafonisi. But that provided the obvious place for a trap, and if she chose to go south of Cythera—or worse, south of Cerigotto—his ships could not catch her. He must not head his fox; he trusted that Gloucester’s pressure would keep Souchon running a straight course.
Behind the rocky coast of the Peloponnese, the rosy-fingered dawn broadened in classical design over a wine-dark sea. Westward, day’s arch ran to a distant horizon unblemished by German smoke. They had passed Navarino, where almost ninety years before the British had—with grudging help from their French and Russian allies—scotched a Turkish fleet. Under the cliffs to the east, little villages hugged narrow beaches. Spears of sunlight probed between the rough summits, alive with swallows’ wings.
As they cleared the point of Sapienza, the squadron came out of the shadows of the heights, and into a sea spangled with early sun. To port, the Gulf of Messenia opened, long golden beaches between rocky headlands; the old Venetian fort at Korona pushed into the water like a beached ship. Ahead, the longer finger of Cape Matapan reached even farther south. Water more green than blue planed aside from the bows; Cradock felt his heart lift to the change in the air, the light, the old magic of the Aegean reaching even this far west.
He glanced aloft at the lookout searching for the smoke of German ships. One of the destroyers had already peeled off to investigate the gulf for a German collier in concealment; another had gone ahead to investigate the Gulf of Kolokythia. Here he could have ambushed Goeben in the dark, but in daylight these gulfs were traps for slower ships.
“You must signal Admiral Milne,” Wray said.
“And let the Goeben hear how close we are? I think not,” Cradock said. “Admiral Milne is… cruising somewhere around Sicily. He will follow when he thinks it convenient, when he feels certain of events.” Cradock smiled, that wry smile which had won other captains’ loyalties. “We are the events. We will sink Goeben—or, failing that, we will turn her back toward him, and the 12-inch guns of the battle cruisers.”
“But if we don’t—” Wray was clearly prepared to argue the whole thing again.
“I had a hunter once,” Cradock said, meditatively. He gazed at the cliffs rising out of the sea as if he had no interest in anything but his story. “A decent enough horse, plenty of scope. But—he didn’t like big fences. Every time out, the same thing… you know the feeling, I suppose, the way a reluctant hunter backs off before a jump.”
“I don’t hunt,” Wray said, repressively.
“Ah. I thought perhaps you didn’t.” Cradock smiled to himself. “Well, there was only one thing to do, you see, if I didn’t want to spend all day searching for gaps and gates.”
“And what was that, sir?” asked Wray, in the tone of one clearly humoring a superior.
Cradock turned and looked at him full face. “Put the spurs to him,” he said. “Convince him he had more to fear from me than any fence.” Wray reddened. “I thought you’d understand,” Cradock said, and turned away. He hoped that would be enough.
By 0730, they were clearing Cape Matapan; Cythera lay clear on the starboard bow. Cradock peered up at the cliffs of the Mani, at the narrow white stone towers like fangs… still full of brigands and fleas, he supposed. Some of the brigands might even be spying for the Germans. They would do anything for gold, except, possibly, spy for the Turks.
The German ships were likely to pass Matapan fairly close, if they wanted to take the passage north of Cythera… plenty of places along that coast to hide his cruisers. But none of them were close enough, especially if the Germans went south. He dared not enter those gulfs, to be trapped by the longer reach of the German guns.
No. The simplest plan was the best, and he had time for it. Ahead now was the meeting of the Aegean, the white sea with its wind-whipped waters, and the deeper blue Ionian. This early on a fair summer’s day, the passage went smoothly; the treacherous currents hardly affected the warships on their steady progress past Elafonisi’s beaches, the fishing village of Neapolis, and the steep coast of Cythera, that the Venetians had called Cerigo.
Around the tip of Cape Malea, he found the first proof that Souchon intended to use that northern passage. Off the port bow, a smallish steamer rocked uneasily in the Aegean chop.
“Greek flag, sir,” the lookout reported. “The Polymytis.”
“If I were Souchon,” Cradock said, “this is where I would want to find a collier. I would want one very badly.”
“But it’s Greek.”
“Souchon flew a Russian flag at Phillipeville,” Cradock said. “And our destroyers could use more coal.” He sipped his tea. “I think we will have a word with this collier. An honest Greek collier—if that is not a contradiction in terms—should be willing to sell the Royal Navy coal, in consideration of all the English did to free Greece…” He peered at the ship. Something tickled his memory… something about the way her derrick was rigged, her lines. The German ship General had appeared in Messina tarted up like a Rotterdam-Lloyd mail steamer, though she belonged to the German East Africa Line.
“From where, and where bound?” he asked; Wray passed on his questions.
The dark-haired man answered in some foreign gibberish that sounded vaguely Turkish or Arabic, not Greek.
“He says he doesn’t understand,” he heard bawled up from below.
“He understands,” Cradock said quietly. His eye roved over the steamer again. Ignore the paint (too new for such a ship), the unseamanlike jumble of gear on the deck, the derrick… and she looked very much like a ship he had seen less than a year before putting out from Alexandria, when she had flown the German ensign. He even thought he could put a name to her.
“We’ll have a look at her,” he said to Wray.
Wray swallowed. “Yes, sir, but—if I may—she is flying a neutral flag.”
“She’s a German Levant Line ship—imagine her in the right colors. She’s no more neutral than Goeben. She is most likely old Bogadir with her face made up. If, as I suspect, she’s carrying coal, then—one of our problems is solved. Possibly two.”