The man seemed interested. He’d been sent to drop off a body, but he was getting involved in the story. Wanted to solve it.
‘What about that girl kept hanging around the bar?’ he asked the giant. ‘She wasn’t one of ours, was she?’
The giant shook his head, thinking. Then he remembered.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘Was that her?’
The other man nodded. They both looked at Cook, proud of themselves.
84
The SSAddington Lasshad sailed from Baltimore six days earlier, carrying three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate pellets to be used as fertiliser on Britain’s fields. Captain James Steingard was anxious to get the ship into dock. It had been a quiet crossing, a mercifully short six days with no sightings of U-boats. As the men stood on deck, waiting for the signal they’d been given permission to enter the Albert Dock, he checked his watch. If everything went according to plan, he could be handing the ship over to the pilot for unloading in less than an hour. If the trains played ball, he could be at home in Suffolk with his wife before nightfall, a glass of last year’s elderberry wine in his hand, and his dogs at his feet.
The wave of bombers had given Steingard a fright. Not what he’d been expecting once he’d made the safety of the Thames. His cargo was designed to be spread on fields depleted of nutrients by two years of intensive farming. But he’d been given the full briefing on accepting the job. The Yank who’d signed over the cargo couldn’t wait to get off the ship. Said it felt like standing on top of a bomb the size of a city block. Ammonium nitrate was an excellent fertiliser, but an even better explosive.
‘Sir . . .’
One of the German fighters above was trailing smoke, high up in the cloud. A Stuka. One of the RAF boys must have clipped it.
‘Get the gun up,’ Steingard ordered. Almost definitely overkill, but better safe than sorry. The Admiralty had given him a large-calibre, high-angle machine-gun, along with two crew members seconded from the Royal Navy. Much better than their old Vickers, which had always felt like a pea shooter against the fighters coming at them out at sea.
Was he being over-cautious? The men looked to him to set the tone. If he showed his nerves now, they’d all go to pieces. But why not? They’d lugged the gun and its crew across the Atlantic and back. Might as well put it through its paces.
The trail of smoke from the Stuka described a graceful arc, a curving trajectory as it slowly fell out of formation. Slowly, at first, then faster. Now it was falling towards them with its distinctive scream, the horn designed purely to inflict terror on those who heard it.
Men ran to their stations, the navy gunners to the bow where the gun had been bolted to the deck. Everyone watched, eager to see the big gun firing. Steingard was glad he’d given the order. It gave the men something to rally around, and a sense they were defending themselves.
The Stuka was getting lower, and Steingard could see smoke pouring from its engines. If the pilot was still alive, he’d be blinded by the smoke. At least he wouldn’t be able to aim at the ship.
Steingard lit his cigarette and tossed the match overboard. It was a long way down to the brown water, which was rushing past as the tide ran out. There was a small craft down there, and for a second he thought it was pulling alongside. Perhaps the pilot coming aboard. But the boat made its way along the shadow cast by theAddington Lass. Three men. A large man at the stern looked up, and he nodded accordingly.
A splash of wet hit Steingard, and he wiped his face. His hand came away red, as his mate, standing next to him, suddenlysunk to the deck, like his legs had been taken out from under him. The next thing he knew, the world had slowed down. Loud metallic pings sounded out, as sparks flew from a line across the deck. Bullets, he realised, fired from the plane still bearing down on them. His mate had caught an unlucky ricochet and blood was pumping from a hole in his neck. Steingard dropped to his knees and held his handkerchief to the wound. He didn’t know much about doctoring, but he knew enough about stemming leaks, and this was a bad one.
TheAddington Lasswas a sitting duck. Out on the high seas it was a nimble craft, under Steingard’s expert touch. Give him a fair fight, and a good crew, and he’d take his chances. But here, idling at the river’s edge, waiting for the illusion of safety being in dock would provide ... this was hell on earth. The anti-aircraft gun was firing lower and lower as the Stuka plummeted. If they weren’t careful, those navy boys were going to end up firing straight across the length of the cargo hold, into the bridge. The fighter was impossibly big now, filling the sky, then gone, as it disappeared below him. He returned his attention to his mate, who was clutching his arm. Steingard forced an easy smile onto his face.
‘Hold on there, Mick, we’ll have you on land before you know it.’
Mick opened his mouth to reply but, instead, a bubble of thick blood burst out, splattering Steingard’s face. So Steingard missed what happened to the German plane, not that he worried. It had evidently missed his ship, and that was all he needed to know.
There was an explosion from close by, sounded like the river bank. The plane must have hit the concrete road alongside the quay. A fireball rose up with a woof as the plane’s fuel tanks went. Steingard winced, the heat singeing his face. Burningdebris fluttered down, out of the sky, some of it landing on the thick planks covering the cargo hold.
One of his men stepped across the planks and kicked a piece of flaming debris. Some kind of fabric. It caught on the crewman’s foot, prompting good-natured laughter from the other men.
The crewman was shouting, his trousers catching fire. Something sticky and flammable on the burning debris, perhaps. The crewman panicked, jumped backwards, trying to escape the flames from his own leg. He tripped on a timber and went down, into the hold.
Steingard listened for a shout from down in the hold. Some kind of sign the crewman was all right. There wouldn’t have been too much of a fall – the cargo was piled high.
85
Cook watched as the Stuka came out of the sky. He prayed a bullet would hit one of his captors, evening the odds, but no such luck.
The plane missed the freighter, hitting the ground at hundreds of miles an hour on the far side of the ship. There was an explosion from the wreckage of the plane.
Soon after the explosion Cook heard shouting, and laughing. The sounds of men who work together, blowing off steam.
The small boat was dwarfed by the freighter. At the tiller, the giant had taken them in close to shelter from the fighter, a tactic that had almost backfired. Cook could sense both men getting ready. They were nearing the point where they’d been told to dump him, he could see it on their faces, the way they looked out at the water, avoiding him.
Cook thought of one of Blakeney’s favourite aphorisms. God helps those who help themselves. He didn’t think God had much of an opinion about whether he lived or died, but he felt the principle was sound. Take control. Make things happen.
