“I go to wait at the rendezvous for Marshall Marmont and inform her captain that the force is to return to Dunkerque.”
Two hours was enough. “And if the enemy sights you?”
“I run like hell, sir.” Sanders sounded doleful.
“Correct.” Smith was quietly emphatic. It was not an order in the tradition of Nelson, but Sanders was not a Nelson and it was odds-on that any enemy boat would be twice Sparrow’s size. Smith flinched at the thought of Sanders becoming involved in any such night action.
He looked at his watch just as Lorimer called, “Time, sir.”
“Stop both!”
The engines slowed, stopped, but an instant later the engine of the CMB roared into life then throttled back to a throaty mutter. She cast off her tow and sidled alongside Sparrow. A grimy stoker passed a bucket down to the CMB. Smith climbed down the ladder into the cockpit beside Curtis who stood at the wheel. “Carry on.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The CMB swung away from Sparrow and the mutter of the engines became a growl as she worked up speed. Smith, looking back caught a last glimpse of Sparrow and thought he saw her already moving ahead. Sanders was on his own now.
Curtis took the CMB up to only twelve knots and held her there, hardly cruising, but keeping the speed down kept down her bow-wave also and the wash that would otherwise mark her in the night. She slipped on through the sea, lifting and falling, bow smacking from wave to wave, so even at that speed and in that calm the spray came inboard.
To the south-east a flare hung in the sky, faded, died. A searchlight’s beam wandered, was still, went out. There were gun flashes. Those were the lines of the trenches at Nieuport. The British would be licking their wounds and re-grouping, the Germans consolidating the ground won and preparing themselves against the inevitable counter-attack. The same old stalemate, the armies wrestling back and forth across the lines of trenches, gaining a few yards here, losing them there. Losing men all the time. Smith was certain the attack on the lines at Nieuport, successful though it had been, was not Schwertträger. It was nothing new, just another attack.
But they were closing the shore now, though it was still unseen. He thought they could damn near run aground before they saw the dunes on a night like this. Then the engines slowed to a mutter and Curtis said huskily, “Lights, dead ahead.” Smith stared over the bow as it sank into the sea with the way coming off the boat. He saw the lights that blinked and were lost in the rain, come again so that they seemed to twinkle like distant stars or to move like fireflies but they were neither. They were lights on the shore or in the woods by De Haan.
He swallowed his excitement and kept his voice steady as he asked, “Are we on station?”
Curtis answered, “Almost, sir. I reckon we’re less than a mile from the beach.”
“Carry on.”
The CMB puttered on softly; all of them, Curtis in the cockpit and Smith and Midshipman Johnson alongside it, the two men manning the Vickers guns forward and aft, all watched the lights.
Until the seaman forward at the Vickers called hoarsely, urgently, “Ship fine on the starboard bow!”
Curtis spun the CMB to port. They saw the black lift of the ship but only because she stood against the lights on the shore. She was making only a thread of smoke and was anchored, showing no lights at all. As they swung away the rain hid her completely but she had seemed so close that Smith’s order was almost whispered. “Good enough. Stop her.”
The way fell off the CMB and she lay hardly moving on that dead calm sea under the beat and hiss of the rain with the engines grumbling below. Had the lookouts on the enemy ship seen them? The CMB had seemed right on top of her but then Smith thought how the rain was falling and the CMB had made hardly any bow-wave or wash and had been throttled right back. No challenge came. No gun blazed at them out of the night and he said softly, “Let’s get on with it.”
Curtis turned over the wheel to Johnson. “You’ve got her, Mid.” His two seamen set to work forward, casting off the lashings that held the tarpaulined hump on the fore-deck. It was Curtis’s Red Indian canoe that he had made out of canvas and ply and paddled around Dunkerque harbour.
Smith and Curtis threw aside their oilskins and dragged off their boots. One of the seamen handling the canoe slipped and staggered as the CMB rolled gently under their shifting weight. Curtis called softly, pained, “Christ! Be careful! That’s not a whaler you’re banging about there!”
Smith dipped his hands into the bucket by his feet. It was a present from Sparrow’s stoke-hold and it held grease and soot. He smeared the blackness over his face and hands and Curtis did the same. It was a rough expedient but it served. All of them kept one eye and both ears cocked towards the unseen ship that yet was so close. Smith told Johnson, “When we’ve gone, haul clear of that ship, anchor and wait for us with the engines running, ready to slip if you have to make a bolt for it. Got that?”
The midshipman nodded, swallowed.
The canoe dropped into the sea and one seaman held it alongside while Curtis lowered himself gingerly into the stern and Smith cautiously followed in stockinged feet and sat down ahead of him. To Smith, used to dinghy and whaler, the canoe sat lightly on top of the water, seemed ready to dance on the surface of the sea. He took the compass and the paddle a seaman passed him but Curtis said, “Better if you just hang on to that paddle in case, sir, and let me do the work. There’s a knack to this.”
Smith nodded. Curtis said, “Shove off.”
The seaman pushed the canoe out from the CMB and it bobbed there alarmingly until Curtis dug in his paddle and it slid forward. The CMB was lost in the darkness and they were alone on the dark sea though it was a minute or so before the mutter of the engines finally faded behind them. The canoe was a new experience for Smith, so light and so low in the water that it was as if he were swimming. She rode the quiet sea well enough but inevitably water slopped in. Curtis used the paddle with an experienced economy of movement, steadily and without a deal of splashing that would have made a white blaze in the dark, pointing the bow of the canoe at the pin-pricks of lights on the shore. He was heading to the north of them so as not to lose ground to the tide that was streaming south-west now. They were not alone for long. The enemy ship was first a shadow that blotted out some of the lights and then a silhouette, taking shape against them. She was still seen only fuzzily through the rain but she was so close! Smith gestured with his left hand and Curtis wheeled the canoe to port to take them past the stern of the ship. Smith could make out a gun forward, two funnels, another gun amidships and a third right aft. She was a big boat, even allowing for the tricks played by darkness and his position right down on the sea. He thought she might be one of the S class boats and those guns would be four-inch. As the canoe slipped on she came abeam. She was anchored fore and aft to hold her against the tide.
“Sir!” Curtis’s hiss snapped Smith’s head around and he saw a second ship to port. Her stem lifted tall out of the sea where she too was anchored and that stem was little more than a cable’s length from the first destroyer in line ahead. The canoe was slipping between them but was only a shadow on a sea filled with shadows. He could see the barrel of the gun on the destroyer’s foredeck, behind it the lift of the bridge and the tracery of mast and rigging.
Two of them. At anchor. If they had been at sea and met Sparrow! Were there others ahead or astern of them?
Why were they anchored here?
The canoe slipped on as Curtis thrust steadily with the paddle. There was water slapping around Smith’s thighs now and he used his cupped hands to bail but only for a few moments. The destroyers were barely lost behind them when Curtis swung the bow of the canoe to port again. Another ship grew out of the night ahead of them, lower in the water this one and smaller, with one tall funnel amidships and a box of a wheelhouse before it. A tug. They swung around her stern and she, too, was anchored fore and aft and as they swept almost under her counter, light spilled across her deck and the sea as a hatch was opened. They heard the wheeze of a concertina and a man singing slowly, sadly, then the hatch closed and chopped off the light and the voice. For long seconds their night vision was destroyed, then slowly the lights grew out of the darkness again as Curtis drove the canoe on towards the shore. Smith watched the lights come up, thinking. Two big destroyers anchored close inshore, so close inshore as to have precious little water under them at low tide though the tide was flowing now. Were there more? A tug anchored a cable’s length inshore of the destroyers. Was she alone or was there another?