Alistair MacLean Sea Thrillers 4-Book Collection: San Andreas, The Golden Rendezvous, Seawitch, Santorini. Alistair MacLean
you happen to know the nature of their injuries?’
McKinnon regarded the Lieutenant speculatively. ‘I have a fair idea.’
‘All seriously wounded?’
‘There are no seriously wounded, far less critically injured patients aboard. If they were, they wouldn’t be here. Poorly, you might call them, I suppose.’
‘But bedridden? Immobile?’
‘The wounded are.’
‘They are not all wounded?’
‘Only eight.’
‘Good God! Eight! You mean to tell me that there are nine who are not injured?’
‘It all depends upon what you mean by injured. Three are suffering from advanced cases of exposure – frostbite, if you like. Then there are three with tuberculosis and the remaining three have suffered mental breakdowns. Those Russian convoys take a pretty vicious toll, Lieutenant, in more ways than one.’
‘You have no cause to love our U-boats, our Luftwaffe, Mr McKinnon.’
The Bo’sun shrugged. ‘We do send the occasional thousand bombers over Hamburg.’
Ulbricht sighed. ‘I suppose this is no time for philosophizing about how two wrongs can never make a right. So we have nine unwounded. All of them mobile?’
‘The three exposure cases are virtually immobile. You’ve never seen so many bandages. The other six – well, they can get around as well as you and I. Well, that’s not quite accurate – as well as I can and a damned sight better than you can.’
‘So. Six mobiles. I know little enough of medicine but I do know just how difficult it is to gauge how severe a case of TB is. I also know that a man in a pretty advanced stage can get around well enough. As for mental breakdowns, those are easy enough to simulate. One of those three may be as rational as we are – or think we are. Come to that, all three of them may be. I don’t have to tell you, Mr McKinnon, that there are those who are so sick of the mindlessness, the hellishness, of war that they will resort to any means to escape from it. Malingerers, as they are commonly and quite often unfairly called. Many of them have quite simply had enough and can take no more. During the First World War quite a number of British soldiers were affected by an incurable disease that was a sure-fire guarantee for a one-way ticket to Blighty. DAH it was called – Disorder Affecting the Heart. The more unfeeling of the British doctors commonly referred to it as Desperate Affection for Home.’
‘I’ve heard of it. Lieutenant, I’m not by nature an inquisitive person, but may I ask you a personal question?’
‘Of course.’
‘Your English. So much better than mine. Thing is, you don’t sound like a foreigner talking English. You sound like an Englishman talking English, an Englishman who’s been at an English public school. Funny.’
‘Not really. You don’t miss much, Mr McKinnon, and that’s a fact. I was educated in an English public school. My mother is English. My father was for many years an attaché in the German Embassy in London.’
‘Well, well.’ McKinnon shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s too much. It’s really too much. Two shocks like this inside twenty minutes.’
‘If you were to tell me what you are talking about –’
‘Sister Morrison. You and she should get together. I’ve just learnt that she’s half-German.’
‘Good God! Goodness gracious me.’ Ulbricht could hardly be said to be dumbfounded but he was taken aback. ‘German mother, of course. How extraordinary! I tell you, Bo’sun, this could be a serious matter. Her being my nurse, I mean. Wartime. International complications, you know.’
‘I don’t know and I don’t see it. You’re both just doing your job. Anyway, she’s coming up to see you shortly.’
‘Coming to see me? That ruthless Nazi killer?’
‘Maybe she’s had a change of heart.’
‘Under duress, of course.’
‘It’s her idea and she insists on it.’
‘It’ll be a hypodermic syringe. Lethal dose of morphine or some such. To get back to our six walking unwounded. Widens the field a bit, doesn’t it? A suborned malingerer or ditto TB patient. How do you like it?’
‘I don’t like it at all. How many suborned men, spies, saboteurs, do you think we’ve picked up among the survivors from the Argos? Another daft thought, I know, but as you’ve more or less said yourself, we’re looking for daft answers to daft questions. And speaking of daft questions, here’s another one. How do we know the Argos really was mined? We know that tankers are extremely tough, heavily compartmented and that this one was returning with empty tanks. Tankers don’t die easily and even laden tankers have been torpedoed and survived. We don’t even know the Argos was mined. How do we know it wasn’t sabotaged so as to provide the opportunity to introduce a saboteur or saboteurs aboard the San Andreas? How do you like that?’
‘Like yourself, I don’t like it at all. But you’re not seriously suggesting that Captain Andropolous would deliberately –’
‘I’m not suggesting anything about Captain Andropolous. For all I know, he may be as double-dyed a villain as is sailing the seas these days. Although I’m willing to consider almost any crazy solution to our questions, I can’t go along with the idea that any captain would sacrifice his ship for any imaginable purpose. But a person or persons to whom the Argos meant nothing might quite happily do just that. It would be interesting to know whether Andropolous had taken on any extra crew members in Murmansk, such as fellow nationals who had survived a previous sinking. Unfortunately, Andropolous and his crew speak nothing but Greek and nobody else aboard speaks Greek.’
‘I speak a little Greek, very little, schoolboy stuff – English public schools are high on Greek – and I’ve forgotten most of that. Not that I can see that it would do much good anyway even if we were to find out that a person or x number of persons joined the Argos at Murmansk. They would only assume expressions of injured innocence, say they don’t know what we are talking about and what could we do then?’ Ulbricht was silent for almost a minute, then suddenly said: ‘The Russian shipwrights.’
‘What Russian shipwrights?’
‘The ones that fixed the damage to the hull of your ship and finished off your sick-bay. But especially the hull repairers.’
‘What about them?’
‘Moment.’ Ulbricht thought some more. ‘I don’t know just how many niggers in the woodpile there may be aboard the San Andreas, but I’m all at once certain that the original one was a member of your own crew.’
‘How on earth do you figure that out? Not, mind you, that anything would surprise me.’
‘You sustained this hull damage to the San Andreas while you were alongside the sinking corvette, before you sunk her by gunfire. That is correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘I told you. We don’t know. No torpedoes, no mines, nothing of that nature. A destroyer was along one side of the corvette, taking off her crew, while we were on the other taking off the survivors of the sunken Russian submarine. There was a series of explosions inside the corvette before we could get clear. One was a boiler going off, the others could have been gun-cotton, two-pounders, anything – there was some sort of fire inside. It was at that time that the damage must have happened.’
‘I suggest it didn’t happen that way at all. I suggest, instead, that it was then that a trusty member of your crew detonated a charge in the port ballast room. I suggest that it was someone who knew precisely how much explosive to use to ensure that it didn’t sink the ship but enough