A Bridge Of Magpies (31 page)

'Excellent!' Denny replied. The strange unseeing look went. from his eyes. 'Excellent! That's it! That's what we'll do!

Where's the bomb?'

'Still in the dinghy.'

'Struan - listen I' exclaimed Jutta, who had flinched at my suggestion. 'It won't work! A small bomb like that won't accomplish what a salvo of depth charges failed to do!

That hatch is fast. If you use the bomb anywhere else on the hull shell come apart at the seams and go down like a stone.'

`Jutta's right-' said Kaptein Denny unexpectedly. 'That doesn't mean to say the idea's basically unsound.' He indicated the mine. 'That could go up in sympathy with the bomb if we detonated it on the conning-tower. The torpedoes, likewise.'

For the second time a word gave me the clue to a solution. This time it was torpedo.

'I see a way!' I said quickly. 'We'll draw that half-fired torpedo out of
its
tube -we we can manage it in shaJlower water with a dragline attached to one of the cutters! All that will then stand between us and the interior of the sub will be the torpedo-tube door. The salvage bomb will take care of that!'

Ànd send her to the bottom in the process,' objected Jutta. '

It won't work ...'

'It
wi!l,'
retorted Denny. 'We'll make it work. We'll beach her, that's what we'll do. Well put her ashore on her side at the Bridge of Magpies - it's the only place hereabouts. We'll dump the mine in the channel. We can do that once she's ashore by using
Gaok's
mainboom as a derrick ...'

It sounded good to me-not to Jutta.

`You both talk as if you expect the night is never going to end!' she exclaimed. 'What about
Sang A
while you're busy beaching her and blowing her open? What about . . .?'

But Denny went on, as if he hadn't heard her, 'We've time! We'll tow her! We'll use the up-channel current in our favour!'

`How far is the Bridge of Magpies, do you reckon?' I asked. 208

Jutta stood back, resentful and mistrustful.

'Seven-eight miles,' he replied.

We've come less than two in the past three hours. We've got to do better than that.

We will. We must?

It was a desperate last-chance throw; and we both knew it. We both knew, too, that we were discounting the signs in the sea and the wind. The writing was on the wall that the salinity lift had dropped–and
U-160's
buoyancy with it: the casing aft the conning-tower, which had been a good foot above the water when we'd first come aboard, was now occasionally awash. For'ard, it was almost continuously so. Our race against the sea and
Sang A
was likely to turn out a very close-run thing.

'I'd like to have Julia with me in
Ichabo
now,' J said. '

Right,' he replied. 'We'll work up speed gradually. We can manage six knots if we try?

Maybe we could have done so if it hadn't been for that misfired torpedo, which we couldn't draw until the water shallowed. We safely crashed the two-and three-knot barrier on a north-easterly
course
towards the channel mouth and the Bridge of Magpies, when suddenly
U-MO
yawed, and wheeled at right angles. We fought her with both cutters'

engines until we brought her to a halt. Lights. Engines. Shouts. Time. Time. Time.

Where was
Sang A?

'She's sinking slowly by the head,' I called across to Kaptein Denny in
Gaok,
on the opposite side of the U-boat. 'We've got to do something to stabilize her and offset the torpedo's drag.'

When I looked at the sodden hulk I began to have secret doubts: the odds were mounting against us. The U-boat was riding–if her dead action could so be described–so low that most of the time now the deck was flooded. Attached to the dead-weight by the hawser cradle, the cutters, too, were beginning to wallow.

'No time I' answered Denny. 'It's still too deep here. Try again!'

We got going and worked up a little speed-crabbing through the water, then with a sudden swirl we swung broadside on and the U-boat and cutters became unmanageable again. It takes twenty minutes and two-and-a-half miles 209

for a supertanker to come to a halt. It didn't take us two-anda-half miles, but it did take twenty minutes. It also needed another ten to bring the U-boal on to a rough course again towards the Bridge of Magpies,

For the next few hours we threw the book at
U-160–
short and long bursts ahead and astern-jointly and independently, full and half rudder or simply no rudder at all. Nothing helped, really. We may have gained half-a-mile-a distance the current would have carried us, anyway. The only difference in the later stages was that the acute swinging gave way to a long sweeping eddy-like molion as we cavorted up the coast into the mouth of the channel at its southern entrance. Jutta stood with me in
Ichabo's
wheelhouse and watched the first light of dawn tarnish the eastern edge of the sky.
Ichabo
was to port (the seaward side) and
Gaok
to starboard (

landwards). Sperrgebiet dawns are something all of their own. They're not
grey
but sand-coloured and you first see a long shape loom out of the blackness; and it takes on the form of the top of a dune while night still hangs around the base. The light comes quickly, too: the fact that we began to make out the long lines of the dunes ashore was ominous. They should have been hidden in dense fog at that hour, but the disintegrating upwell cell had thrown everything out of kilter.

Jutta asked in a small, thin voice, 'How far to go still, Struan?'

'It depends on how much mileage is left in the sub.'

There didn't seem to be much. It was a marvel, really, that she was still with us. The sea, which had moderated to a swell, swept clean across the casing now, though the stack of torpedoes was still above water. The deeper she sank the more the current took hold of her–and of us. We were in one of the relatively quiet phases, when
U-160
was heading the way we wanted and the cutters were just nudging her along. The wind was only a fresh breeze now, but it had changed direction completely and settled in the south-west, its true quarter.

There was a kind of basic despair about Jutta when she surveyed the scene-as if she couldn't break out of a trap of inner darkness.

She asked suddenly, Struan–what if he's mad? Really mad?'

210

I glanced across at
Gaok.
Kaptein Denny stood like a statue at the wheel.

It was both a question and a call for reassurance. She added, 'Master of the Equinoxes, Lord of the Solstice –

it sounds like something out of a phoney old-time operetta.'

'He isn't a phoney. Nothing could have sounded more way-out before than his story of
U-160
returning. Yet she did.' I gestured. 'You couldn't have more concrele proof –

we're not lashed fast to a dream-Jutta.'

'I know-I know. But I can't go along with the rest of it, Struan. Maybe he suffers from some kind of delusion –

paranoia, schizophrenia, or whatever they call his particular brand of mania.'

'We'll prove his genuineness, one way or another, pretty soon, when we blow the sub open and see what's inside her.'

'What happens then?' Her attitude implied, 'if'-not 'when'.

'After we've got the Book of Tsu, I'll take it from there.'

She looked so cast down that I put one arm round her and drew her close to me.

'Look, there's our target.'

Ahead, wisps of fog clung to the Bridge of Magpies. It appeared more brown than black in the muted light.

'It's not far–only about a mile to go. Fog lifting. Clear day. Empty horizon. Moderate sea. Not a thing in sight.'

'I want you to
know that-
whatever happens in the next few hours, I love you more than any words of mine can say.'

'And
I
you, Jutta.'

But her body against mine was hard and unresponsive and tension-shot. She went on. Her voice was higher pitched-vibrated with nerves.

'Where
is Sang A,
Struan? Where? What if she's tracking us at this very moment with her radar, now that the sandstorm's over; just waiting to pounce when it suits her-watching us . .

'Steady,' I said. 'Steady. There's not a sign of her. We'll win out yet.'

'It's all too quiet! Everything's cooking up underneath! J

feel it, Struan I Isn't there anything you can do? The waiting's sending me crazy!'

'Ahoy there!'

It was Kaptein Denny from the sub's conning-tower.
I
211

was surprised to see him there. J reckoned he must have left
Gaok's
bridge, unnoticed; while we'd been occupied.

'Come up here, will you? Both of you. And bring the bomb along too.'

'Right,' I called. 'I'll fetch it from the dinghy.' To Jutta I said quietly, wonder what he's got in mind–we shouldn't need the bomb until we beach her.'

She didn't answer, but cast an anxious glance round the widening horizon.

I collected the bomb and we sloshed across the wet deck and up the rusty ladder to the U-boat's bridge-stepping over the rubber cables which led to the cutting torch. After that long effort previously, we'd changed cylinders and connected up to full ones in
Ichabo.
We'd switched them from one boat to the other, to obtain a better weight distribution. Kaptein Denny was seated on the Captain's jump-stool, to which I'd secured the emergency wire which held the mine. The brass nozzle of the blowpipe cutter was hooked on to the coaming which encircled the bridge at chest-level. I was surprised to see
Sang A's
sub-machine-gun on the floor. I looked up to question Denny about it – I was more curious than apprehensive–and immediately I was aware of
a
great change in him. What had previously disquieted me about his eyes, when we'd been deadlocked over the problem of opening up
U-160,
had now become a reality: they were slightly hooded with tiredness but clear and intense, with a kind of exultation. He had a smile of welcome for Jutta. He might already have found the Book of Tsu rather than be facing a day of peril and difficulties.

What do you want the bomb for at this stage?' I asked. He replied with a question. 'How secure is that mine?'

'If it lasted last night it'll last today. The sawing effect of the sea's gone, as you can observe for yourself.'

What I mean is-if your emergency cable broke suddenly, would the original cable still hold?'

Probably. It took
my
weight for a short while when I fixed it.'

I noticed then that he had his Taisho pistol in his belt-along with an odd-shaped knife with a flat handle I hadn't seen before.

'Put the bomb down,' he went on.

I did so.

212

'Would you agree with me that we're heading north?' `

North - sure. But why .

J didn't complete my question because something crossed his face which sent an adrenalin-charge of fear and doubt racing through me.

'Good,' he said. `Good. In Japan the dead always face north, both ships and men.'

He got to his feet and pointed ahead, changing the subject rapidly before our apprehension had time to crystallize. Took!'

The top of the Bridge of Magpies was catching the first sun. The soaring arch wasn't composed of rock but of feathers

- hundreds of thousands of dun-coloured little birds that had been blown out of the desert by the gale and had found shelter on the arch's seaward side.

'They aren't real magpies, of course, but little desert birds they give that name to.' He
was
speaking rapidly, as if time were running out on him and he had something important to say before it did.
'It
was like that the day you were born, Miss Jutta. There's an old Hottentot superstition. Once a year, they believe, on the day after the great gale,
the
Girl walks across the Bridge of Magpies and joins the Lover . . I glanced at Jutta, who stood taut and poised, a mixture of pity and growing horror in her eyes. Outwardly she was composed but I knew she was very close to the edge. She'd
been
right about his sanity. The unconnected prattle and mercurial leaps from subject to subject meant only one thing. His next words to me confirmed it.

'I'd like you to cut the old mine cable with the blowpipe. Leave the new one you used for the repair. Here, where I can reach it.'

He restated himself on the jump-stool and plucked al the wire. I noticed that he put his foot on the sub-machine-gum

'Kaptein Denny . . There was a rising note in Jutta's voice.

The dead always face north, both ships-and men, Miss Jutta. We're now facing north.' The final clincher on the fact that he was out of his mind came when he added, 'I'm going to drop that mine on the stack of torpedoes and blow up
U-160.'

Kamikaze.
That's a good word for what's happening, J

thought, my eyes fixed on Kaptein Denny's seamed, exalted 213

face. That's the way the
kamikaze,
or divine wind spirit, worked in the Jap fliers who plunged their bomb-laden planes to self-destruction through the Yanks' withering ack-ack fire and on to their carriers' decks.
Kamikaze
–Sperrgebietstyle. Divine wind spirit gone bad. The thing's eaten into his mind all the years and now he's at the end of the line. I wonder what the C-in-C will say when he gets to hear of it? He won't know what happened-of course, because there won't be any survivors. Kaptein Denny wasn't reacting to my scrutiny. His face was remote. In his last moments he was remembering things and places we'd had no part of. The external world–our world–meant nothing to him.

`You can't . . .1' exclaimed Jutta.

'Why?' I demanded peremptorily. I had
to
get past that mental state of his. 'Why?'

I did get past: 'There!' he pointed.

There was no mistaking
Sang A's
whalebacked snout and low hull. She was rounding the southern end of Possession, past the tiny horseshoe-shaped curve called Black Prince Cove, and heading into the channel. At yus. He must have spotted her out to sea before he crossed to U-160 from
Gaok.
Jutta and I stood rooted. Then from behind us there was
a
smothered noise from Kaptein Denny. We swung round. He'd pulled up his jersey and jabbed that odd knife into himself. He covered up the wound right away but we'd seen the rush of blood. Jutta's face screwed up.