What on earth could the Moehne be doing down here in her solitary station, beyond all civilization and well off the modern shipping-routes? Nothing came round the Horn these days, unless you counted a handful of meat ships out of New Zealand, and they normally kept well to the southward of the Horn itself, down almost to the edge of the pack-ice and well out of contact. The Moehne would be right out on a limb if anything should go wrong with her engines or her radio… and presumably she wouldn’t want to break radio silence anyway and reveal her presence. No wonder they’d wanted that floating dock as a repair base.…
Shaw turned away moodily from the port, hands thrust into his pockets. Then, struck by a sudden idea, he turned back again. He waited until the footsteps overhead had moved away and then he opened the glass of the port. A cold wind blew in. Scrambling up on to his bunk, he pushed his head out into the biting air; he found that if he expelled all his breath he could wriggle his body through a little way, for the port was a biggish one… which, no doubt, explained that sentry-like tread above. Anyway, if he reversed his stance, he could take a look at the ship, and that might give him some ideas or be a help when the time came to make some attempt at escape. His port was only just below the after deck so he should be able to see a fair amount of the vessel. Withdrawing his head, he turned round so that his back was to the ship’s side, and then he thrust his head through again and looked upward with interest. He saw an armed sentry walking aft… and then, looking for’ard, he saw something else.
And that was when he began to understand.
He couldn’t in fact see very much from his awkward angle but he could see that the Moehne’s masts were a mass, a clutter, of radio and radar antennae and ancillary equipment. The enormous aerials, which covered both the vessel’s own masts and a special radar mast stepped amidships — all exceptionally tall masts — were of all shapes and sizes, like some petrified forest in a witches’ sabbath… except that some of the trees in this particular forest were turning, very slowly and implacably.
Why in heaven’s name hadn’t he tumbled to it long before?
That floating dock had been fitted out as a radio and radar maintenance unit… how could he have been so dumb? Certainly he had been misled by the reports that the Angolans were fitting out ships with radar at Luanda — but at least he should have ticked over when those microdots of Fleck’s had told him that the dock’s route to Luanda was only a blind anyway!
Before the sentry spotted him he pulled his head back into the cabin, cursing savagely.
It was all too clear now. Radio… radar… a test. A test, and the Moehne right down here in secrecy. The three things could add up to one big question-mark: Was the ‘Moehne’ on station for the purpose of making some sort of radio interference with the Warmaster test? Could these people have gained detailed knowledge of the new missile, could the equipment be used in some way to mess up that test, to ball-up the orders passed to the missile’s controls — to wreck the launching, turn the whole thing into a damp squib that never even left the ground and so make the Americans look supremely foolish in Russian eyes, in the world’s eyes? Or could Warmaster even be blown up on the launching-pad, with terrible results to the whole area around Canaveral? But — if all this was fact — why? Fleck of all people wouldn’t want the Russians to get ahead… or would he? Would he perhaps want to help along the up-and-down mechanics of Russia-versus-America, give the whole process a push from behind, redress the balance of power in Russia’s favour so that, feeling able to exploit her own Warmaster-type missile unopposed in its field, she would attack — and then the Nazis, sitting back under cover throughout the world until the two big shots had smashed each other up irrevocably, would come into the open and strike? Strike, and win?
It could be…
Shaw sat down on the bunk, his head held in his hands, thinking and thinking and making circles of his thoughts.
He was left alone all that day except for the regular arrival of well-cooked, properly served meals. He chain-smoked the time away, tried to read one of the books he had found on the desk. Tried and failed and then just moved restlessly about the small cabin. His dinner came at 7 p.m and afterwards the steward-who was accompanied on each visit by the armed guard — came back with a glass of neat whisky. He said stolidly, ‘With the compliments of the Captain.’
Shaw showed surprise. ‘Oh? Please give your Captain my thanks.’ He looked at that whisky with genuine and heartfelt desire; it would do him a power of good and he felt pretty certain that old-timer wouldn’t have shoved anything in it, but even so he wasn’t risking it. After the steward had gone he tipped the lot down his wash-basin and swilled it away with water from the tap — and with many, many regrets.
That night he lay awake listening once again to the deck sentry and to the distant wind-sounds and the surge of the sea outside. At around 5.30 a.m, when he had dropped into an uneasy slumber, he came awake with a start as he heard what sounded like the lowering of the landing platform, and then he heard footsteps on the deck overhead. It sounded as if the helicopter either had been, or was going, out on another trip. A few minutes later he heard someone shutting the door of the cabin next to his, and then a man’s voice, and a fainter voice replying; but nothing else happened.
It was when he had had his breakfast that things started happening. Nosey came into the cabin and said, ‘Get moving, Mac. Mister Fleck’s here and he wants to see you. He wants to see you very, very badly indeed.’ There was a gloating look on his chubby face as he jerked up his gun and added, ‘There’s someone else come along with Fleck. The girl. She’s in the next cabin.’
Chapter Eighteen
Nosey and the armed sailor marched Shaw along to the Moehne’s dining-saloon. The sentry stationed himself outside the door and Nosey went off on some business of his own. The saloon, a large athwartships compartment, covered almost the full beam of the vessel — and, again, had a familiar feel about it, the feel of a British warship’s wardroom. A long table stood beneath a row of ports running along the fore-and-aft line to starboard and looking out on to a narrow strip of deck and, beyond, the grim, barren line of the shore. A leather-upholstered settee was fixed to the bulkhead on the outboard side of the table, and on this settee a tall, well-built man sat, smiling coldly.
Rudolf Fleck.
Captain Lindrath, his white hair awry and a frown driving down between his thick eyebrows, was walking up and down with his hands clasped behind his back. Every now and then he appeared to be muttering to himself. Something had plainly happened to worry the old man. He was looking extremely upset. At the moment, however, Shaw was much more concerned with Rudolf Fleck, who looked somewhat too happy and confident considering there had been a leakage concerning events at his northern base.
It was Fleck who broke the silence. He said, ‘Well, Commander. You perhaps imagined you’d knocked us out, with what you did to our centre in Brooklyn.’ He smiled, but there was a glint of anger momentarily visible in his eyes. ‘I can well understand your disappointment, my dear fellow!’