Sink or Capture! (Commander Cochrane Smith series) by Alan Evans

Author:Alan Evans [Evans, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

10

A dark night and now snow was falling, but lightly, tossed on the wind. The inlet should lie ahead, over the nodding bow of the fishing boat, but darkness and the whirling white flakes hid it. Smith looked at his watch using a torch, held in his cupped hands so there would be no leakage of light. There was always the possibility of an enemy patrol on the dark shore. It was time. He said quietly, “Look out for their light. They should show it now if they are there.” If. And if this boat was in the right place and he and Harry Vincent, standing beside him now, had not made a balls-up of their navigation so that the inlet was a mile away. He licked his lips.

He was using Per Kosskull’s boat again because he was ready to try to bluff if he found a German patrol waiting for him at the inlet. There was silence in the fishing boat except for the low putter of its engine as it crept in towards the unseen shore. They all tried to pierce the darkness and the blinding snow. The same team was in the boat as earlier in the day but with the addition of Harry Vincent and the other soldier rescued from Hornet with Ellis.

He sat in the sternsheets of the boat now, wrapped in a borrowed oilskin, a young second-lieutenant attached to the battalion as interpreter. Tall, gangling, relaxed, he had explained: “My father was in the timber business in Bergen from before I was born.” He had grinned at Smith, “The old man had the right name for it — Woodman. I lived in Norway until I was nine years old and then I went to school in England. But I still came back for vacations up to 1938. Father was promoted and moved back to the London office then.”

When he climbed into the boat Smith had asked him, “Are you being looked after all right, Mr Woodman?”

“Yes, sir, thank you. Mr Kelso lent me this oilskin and really made me welcome.”

“I’ll bet he has.”

Dry humour there because Ben Kelso would greet an interpreter with heartfelt relief, and Harry Vincent had laughed. But they were all serious now: Phillips and Lugg were missing from the team, the two men they had put ashore and had come for now, the men Smith worried over. But —

“There it is! Port bow!” The low call came from one of the two seamen acting as lookouts, standing in the bow with one arm outstretched, pointing.

Smith had seen the three short flashes, yellow sparks in the night. They had gone now but he told Buckley at the helm, “Port ten … steady…now steer that.” The boat crept on in and now Smith saw the looming shadow of the shore, the black lift of the hillside on either side of the inlet. The boat rode more easily as they slid into the sheltered water, the way came off her as the clutch was thrown out and then the bow grounded gently on the southern shore.

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