Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307405500
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Stowaway Spy

CAPTAIN REGINALD SANDERSON Kearon, master of the merchant ship MV City of Lancaster, had spent his war being shot at by German torpedoes. He had taken command of the MV Assyrian in 1940, only to have it sunk under him by a U-boat. Then he took the helm of the MV Belgravian, until that was also torpedoed. On both occasions, he had been the last man to leave his sinking ship.

Kearon was one of thousands of unsung heroes of the Merchant Navy who continued to ply the oceans throughout the war transporting vital supplies. The merchant ships traveled in convoys, often undergunned and ill-defended. This was not like other forms of warfare: It was dirty, often boring, and enormously dangerous. The enemy was usually invisible.

The three-thousand-ton City of Lancaster had been built by Palmers of Jarrow in 1924 as a coal ship; now she carried food, building supplies, munitions, and anything else needed to sustain the war effort, wherever the empire required it. Her thirty-man crew were mostly Liverpudlian Irishmen, hard men who worked their hearts out at sea and drank themselves insensible on shore. The Lancaster was as battle-scarred as her captain. She had evacuated twenty-five hundred people from Saint-Nazaire in 1940, and seen the ship alongside her bombed and sunk with all hands. She had been stalked by German U-boats and attacked by Heinkel bombers, and she had fought back with her 10-and 12-pounders, two antiaircraft guns, and a pair of machine guns, fore and aft. No one pretended it was a fair fight.

A big, bluff Irishman born in Arklow on the coast of County Wicklow in 1905, Kearon looked like Neptune in uniform. His hair had gone gray, but the edges of his wide beard were still rust-red, as if corroded by salt spray. A strong mixture of seawater, rum, and rage ran in his veins. He was entirely fearless, beloved and feared by his crew in equal measure, and blessed by an almost mystical capacity for survival against the odds. Having spent three years as a floating target, and having had two ships sunk under him, this sea dog was longing to bite back.

The City of Lancaster, bound for Freetown, Sierra Leone, via Lisbon, was at Liverpool docks taking on a cargo of pipes, mail, and parcels for British POWs when Captain Kearon was summoned to the shipping office on the quay. Waiting for him was a thin, slight man in civilian clothes with an inadequate mustache. He introduced himself as Major Ronald Reed (he had been promoted). Politely, but authoritatively, the little man explained that he worked for British intelligence. Captain Kearon, he said, would soon be taking on a new crew member, one Hugh Anson, as an assistant steward. This man was a double agent, performing a vital secret mission for the British government, and Kearon would be responsible for his well-being on board. In Lisbon, he would jump ship. The desertion would leave the City of Lancaster shorthanded, Reed said, but this was unavoidable.

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