Vengeance 10

Balancing on the heaving deck, he tried to recall details from the map he had studied so carefully over the past weeks. The Greifswalder Boden was free of most navigational hazards except for the scattered sandbanks that edged this tideless inland sea. They would be the greatest problem, as all channel markers would have been removed at the start of the war. There was, however, no other choice. Accordingly, he slipped the bow mooring, ran back and lifted the stern-line off the cleat, and, as the boat swung about under the battering of the waves, raced for the wheelhouse. There was a grinding crash as the boat collided with the one to starboard, then a second, and he had the engine full astern and the wheel spinning over.

The boat responded sluggishly to the helm at first, its bluff coaster hull wallowing heavily, and as they cleared the point the gale-force winds laid her right over. Memling fought the wheel, pulling the throttle further and further open until the engine screamed in protest. The boat came reluctantly under control, and he reduced the rpm. He had no idea how much diesel oil there was in the tanks, but knew it would be damned little. There was a sail furled professionally about the boom, and he suspected it saw a great deal of use given the shortage of fuel in Germany.

By accident Memling found the switch that started the circle of glass set in the windscreen spinning to provide a semblance of visibility. Huge seas, only half-hidden by the darkness, reared about the boat, and spume snatched from the wave crests was flung away by the violent wind like shotgun pellets. Summer gales in the Baltic were doubly dangerous because of its shallowness, and Memling wondered if they would survive.

The sky began to lighten near dawn, revealing heaving white- flecked mountains of water towering in all directions. Irrationally Memling had expected the storm to moderate, but instead it seemed to increase in fury. The compass showed a north-easterly course. The fuel indicator was broken so there was no way of judging the distance covered or the magnetic correction factor to be applied to the compass; yet he felt they must have come far enough to have cleared the island of Rugen, which formed the northern rim of the Greifswalder Boden, and to have left the dangerous sandbanks behind. Memling was forced to guess at the magnetic correction as he altered course due north, turning the wheel a bit at a time until the compass needle was oscillating north, north-west. He was hazy about the exact directions and distances involved but recalled that the island of Bornholm also lay to the north of Usedom and was less than sixty kilometres from the Swedish coast. But Bornholm was occupied Danish territory, and he had no idea how to distinguish between it and neutral Sweden without actually landing. With the fatalism that his present predicament encouraged, he decided to worry about that if and when the time came.

The gale slackened a bit towards noon, and he was able to lash the wheel and hurry below. Francine was still in the bunk, but the blankets had been churned into knots. He found and lit a lantern and swore the souls of the four SD men to damnation. Any regrets over their killing disappeared at the sight of her breasts — where they had concentrated the cigarette torture. Bruises on her thighs suggested she might have been raped. When he eased her over, he discovered large crisscross weals on her back where they had used their belts.

Memling rummaged through the lockers but found nothing with which he could treat her burns and the cuts from the belting. He made her as comfortable as possible in the narrow bunk and retied the restraints. Her pulse was slow and weak, and her breathing noisy.