Dark Voyage by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page B

through the Strait?”
    “After dusk, on Saturday.”
    Sims said “Hm,” in a way that meant he was pleased. “Better after dark, off Gibraltar, with the German coast watch.”
    DeHaan agreed.
    “When will you become the
Santa Rosa
?”
    “We’ll start rigging at oh-three-thirty, an hour before dawn, then anchor off a stretch of coast called Angra de los Ruivos, paint with the rising sun, and be on our way by ten hundred hours.”
    “What’s there?”
    “There is, Major, truly nothing there. A dry riverbed, Wadi Assaq, and that’s it.”
    They stood silent for a time, the throb of the engine hypnotic. “Five and a half hours, did you say, for painting?”
    “We think so. We’re painting directly over Hyperion Line colors, so no chipping or sanding. We’re using scaffolds and bosun’s chairs, hung over the side, and all our best hands—the whole crew will be involved in this—and we’ve got plenty of rope, cans, brushes, everything.”
    DeHaan had made a point of that, planning logistics, with the bosun before they left the chandlers in Tangier. He had once, in some forgotten port, watched sailors in the Soviet navy as they smeared paint on with their hands.
    “We have only an hour for drying,” DeHaan went on, “and we’ll have to spray water on the stack to cool it down, and thin the paint so it seems faded. It will look awful, but, that’s no bad thing.”
    Sims’s silence implied satisfaction. The helmsman kept steady on 320 degrees, slightly west of north, and the quarter moon was fully risen, its light broken on the rough surface of the sea.
    “Our ETA,” Sims said, back again to what was really on his mind. “How close do you think we can come?”
    DeHaan’s voice was tolerant. “Seventeen hundred nautical miles to Cap Bon, Major, past Morocco and Algeria and much of Tunisia. We’re rated at eleven knots an hour, and we’re actually doing about that, so, by simple mathematics, it’s six and a half days. The weather forecast is fair, for the Atlantic, but once we enter the Strait of Gibraltar, we’re in the Mediterranean, where storms, you know, ‘come up out of nowhere.’ Well, they do, and there’s tons of Greek bones on that seafloor to prove it. But, the way we think in the trampship business, if not Monday, then Tuesday. All we can ever promise is not to be early.”
    “We have three nights,” Sims said. “For our little man to show a little light. Still, one is, understandably, concerned.”
    One is, terrified.
Not of dying, DeHaan thought. Of being late.
Rule Britannia.
             
    0420. Off Rio de Oro.
    Refuge.
This hour in his cabin as the sun came up was DeHaan’s night, but he rarely used it for sleep. That came beyond dawn, for three hours, before he went back to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve. He was used to it—sleeping again in the afternoon—and he’d somehow found a way to like it, which, according to the way he’d been raised anyhow, was pretty much the secret of life. He shifted for new comfort on the narrow bunk and stared at the dark porthole at the other end of the cabin.
    Not far. The refuge, in steel painted gray, was ten by twelve: a bunk with drawers beneath it, a wardrobe with small desk attached, chair bolted to the floor, sink and toilet in a small alcove behind a curtain. There was a two-shelf bookcase fixed to the bulkhead, the wall, above the desk, which held his forty-book library, his wind-up Victrola, and an album of records in thick paper envelopes. Beyond that, the
Noordendam:
the ceaseless hum and rattle of the ventilator fans, the creak of the ship as it rose from a trough, the pacing of the watch officer on the bridge above his cabin, bells on the half hour, and the engine, drumming away beneath him—let it catch its breath for one heartbeat and his blood raced before he even knew what he’d heard. And, beyond the
Noordendam,
the sound of the wind and the sea.
    This presence, this perpetual music, in all its moods, was not