The Secret Pilgrim Part 6

Hamburg had always been a good place to be English, now it was an even better place to spy. After the lakeside gentility of Zurich, Hamburg crackled with energy and sparkled with sea air. The old Hanseatic ties to Poland, northern Russia and the Baltic states were still very much alive. We had commerce, we had banking - well, so had Zurich. But we had s.h.i.+pping too, and immigrants and adventurers. We had brashness and vulgarity galore. We were the German capital of wh.o.r.edom and the press. And on our doorstep we had the secretive lowlands of Schleswig Holstein, with their horizontal rainstorms, red farms, green fields and cloud stacked skies. Every man has his price. To this day, my soul can be bought for a jar of Liibeck beer, a pickled herring and a gla.s.s of schnapps after a trudge along the d.y.k.es.

Everything else about the job was equally pleasing. I was Ned the a.s.sistant s.h.i.+pping Consul; my humble office was a pretty brick cottage with a bra.s.s plate, handy enough for the Consulate General, yet prudently apart from it. Two clerks on secondment from the Admiralty performed my cover work for me, and kept their mouths shut. I had a radio and a Circus cypher clerk. And if Mabel and I were not yet engaged to be married, our relations.h.i.+p had reached a stage when she was ready to clear her decks for me whenever I popped back to London for a consultation with Bill or one of his lieutenants.

To meet my joes, I had a safe flat in Wellingsbiittel overlooking the cemetery, on the upper floor of a flower shop managed by a retired German couple who had belonged to us in the war. Their busiest days were Sundays, and on Monday mornings a queue of kids from the housing estate sold them back the flowers they had sold the day before. I never saw a safer spot. Hea.r.s.es, covered vans and funeral corteges rolled past us all day long. But at night the place was literally as quiet as the grave. Even the exotic figure of my sea captain became unremarkable when he donned his black hat and dark suit and swung into the brick archway of our shop and, with his commercial traveller's briefcase bouncing at his side, stomped up the stairs to our innocent front door marked "Buro."

I shall go on calling him Brandt. Some people, however much they change their names, have only one.

But the jewel in my crown was the Margerite - or, as we called her in English, -the Daisy. She was a fifty-foot clinkerbuilt, double ended fis.h.i.+ng boat converted to a cabin cruiser, with a wheelhouse, a main saloon and four berths in the foc'sle. She had a mizzen mast and sail to steady her from rolling. She had a dark-green hull with light-green gunnels and a white cabin roof. She was built for stealth, not speed. In poor light and choppy water, she was invisible to the naked eye. She had spa.r.s.e top-hamper, and lay close to the water, which gave her a harmless image on the radar screens, particularly in heavy weather. The Baltic is a vengeful sea, shallow and tideless. Even in a mild wind, the waves come steep and nasty. At ten knots and full throttle, the Daisy pitched and rolled like a pig. The only speedy thing about her was the fourteen-foot Zodiac dinghy hoisted as the s.h.i.+p's lifeboat and lashed to the cabin roof, with a Johnson 50 horsepower to whisk our agents in and out.

For her berth she had the old fis.h.i.+ng village of Blankenese on the river Elbe, just a few short miles out of Hamburg. And there she lay contentedly among her equals, as humble an example of her kind as you could wish. From Blankenese, when she was needed, she could slip upriver to the Kiel Ca.n.a.l, and crawl its sixty miles at five knots before hitting open sea.

She had a Decca navigator that took readings from slave stations on the sh.o.r.e, but so did everyone. She had nothing inside or out that was not consistent with her modesty. Each of her three-man crew could turn his hand to everything. There were no specialists, though each had his particular love. When we needed expert despatchers or fitters, the Royal Navy was on hand to help us.

So you can see that, what with a new dynamic team to back me up at London Station, and a full hand of sources to test my versatility, and the Daisy and her crew to manage, I had everything that a Head of Station with salt water in his blood could decently inherit.

And of course I had Brandt.

Brandt's two years before the Circus mast had altered him in ways I at first found hard to define. It was not so much an aging or a hardening I observed in him, as that wearying alertness, that over wakefulness, which the secret world with time imprints upon even the most relaxed of its inhabitants. We met at the safe flat. He entered. He stopped dead and stared at me. His jaw fell open and he let out a great shout of recognition. He seized my arms in a sultan's greeting and nearly broke them. He laughed till the tears came, he held me away to look at, then hauled me back to hug against his black overcoat. But his spontaneity was strained by watchfulness. I knew the signs. I had seen them in other joes.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n, why they don't tell me nothing, Herr Konsul?" he cried as he embraced me yet again. "What d.a.m.n game they playing? Listen, we do some good things over there, hear me? We got good people, we beat those d.a.m.n Russians to death, okay?"

"I know," I said, laughing back at him. "I heard."

And when night fell he insisted on seating me among the coils of rope in the back of his van and driving me at breakneck speed to the remote farmhouse that London had acquired for him. He was determined to introduce me to his crew and I looked forward to it. And I looked forward even more to getting a sight of his girlfriend Bella, because London Station was feeling a little queasy about her recent arrival in his life. She was twenty-two years old and had been with him three months. Brandt was looking hard at fifty. It was midsummer, I remember, and the inside of the van smelt of freesias, for he had bought her a bunch at the market.

"She's a number one girl," he told me proudly as we entered the house. "Cooks good, makes good love, learns English, everything. Hey, Bella, I brought you new boyfriend!"

Painters and sailors make the same kind of houses, and Brandt's was no exception. It was scant but homely, with brick floors and low, white-raftered ceilings. Even in the darkness it seemed to usher in the outside light. From the front door we stepped straight down into the drawing room. A wood fire smouldered in the hearth and a s.h.i.+p's lamp shone on the naked flank of a girl as she lay reading on a heap of cus.h.i.+ons. Hearing us enter, she sprang excitedly to her feet. Twenty-two and going on eighteen, I thought as she grabbed my hand and gaily pumped it up and down. She was wearing a man's s.h.i.+rt and very short shorts. A gold amulet glinted at her throat, declaring Brandt's possession of her: this is my woman, wearing my badge of owners.h.i.+p. Her face was peasant and Slav and naturally happy, with clear, wide eyes, high cheeks and a tipped-up smile even when her lips were in repose. Her bare legs were long and tanned to the same gold colour as her hair. She had a small waist, high b.r.e.a.s.t.s and full hips. It was a very beautiful, very young body, and whatever Brandt was thinking, it belonged to no one of his age, or even mine.

She set his freesias in a vase and fetched black bread and pickles and a bottle of schnapps. She was carelessly provocative in her movements. Either she knew exactly, or not at all, the power of each slight gesture she made. She sat beside him at the table, smiled at me and threw her arm around him, letting her s.h.i.+rt gape. She took possession of his hand and showed me by comparison the slenderness of her own, while Brandt talked recklessly about the network, mentioning joes and places by name, and Bella measured me with her frank eyes.

"Listen," Brandt said, "we got to get Aleks another radio, hear me, Ned? They take it apart, they put new spares, batteries, that radio's lousy. That's a bad-luck radio."

When the phone rang, he answered it imperiously: "Listen, I'm busy, okay? . . . Leave the package with Stefan, I said. Listen, have you heard from Leonids?"

The room gradually filled up. First to enter was a darting, bandy-legged man with a drooping moustache. He kissed Bella rapturously but chastely on the lips, punched Brandt's forearm and helped himself to a plateful of food.

"That's Kazimirs," Brandt explained, with a jab of his thumb. "He's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and I love him. Okay?"

"Very okay," I said heartily.

Kazimirs had escaped three years ago across the Finnish border, I remembered. He had killed two Soviet frontier guards along his way, and he was crazy about engines - never happier than when he was up to his elbows in oil. He was also the respected s.h.i.+p's cook.

After Kazimirs came the Durba brothers, Antons and Alfreds, stocky and pert like Welshmen, and blue-eyed like Brandt. The Durbas had sworn to their mother that they would never go to sea together, so they took it in turns, for the Daisy handled best with three, and we liked to leave s.p.a.ce for cargo and unexpected pa.s.sengers. Soon everyone was talking at once, shooting questions at me, not waiting for the answers, laughing, proposing toasts, smoking, reminiscing, conspiring. Their last run had been bad, really bad, said Kazimirs. That was three weeks ago. Daisy had hit a freak storm off the Gulf of Danzig and lost her mizzen. At Ujava on the Latvian coast, they had missed the light signal in the fog, said Antons Durba. They had fired a rocket and G.o.d help them, there was this whole d.a.m.ned reception party of crazy Latvians standing on the beach like a delegation of city fathers! Wild laughter, toasts, then a deep Nordic silence while everyone but myself was struck by the same solemn memory.

"To Valdemars," said Kazimirs, and we drank a toast to Valdemars, a member of their group who had died five years ago. Then Bella took Brandt's gla.s.s and drank too, a separate ceremony while she watched me over the brim. "Valdemars," she repeated softly, and her solemnity was as beguiling as her smile. Had she known Valdemars? Had he been one of her lovers? Or was she simply drinking to a brave fellow countryman who had died for the Cause? But I have to tell you a little more about Valdemars - not whether he had slept with Bella or even how he had died, for no one knew for sure. All that was known was that he had been put ash.o.r.e and never heard of again. One story said he had managed to swallow his pill, another that he had given orders to his bodyguard to shoot him if he walked into a trap. But the bodyguard had disappeared too. And Valdemars was not the only one who had disappeared during what was now remembered by the group as "the autumn of betrayal."

In the next few months, as the anniversaries of their deaths came round, we drank to four other Latvian heroes who had perished unaccountably in the same ill-starred period-delivered, it was now believed, not to partisans in the forest, nor loyal reception parties on the beach, but straight into the hands of Moscow Centre's chief of Latvian operations. And if new networks had been cautiously rebuilt meanwhile, five years later the stigma of these betrayals still clung to the survivors, as Haydon had been at pains to warn me.

"They're a careless bunch of sods," he had said with his usual irreverence, "and when they're not being careless, they're duplicitous. Don't be fooled by all that Nordic phlegm and backslapping."

I was remembering his words as I continued my mental reconnaissance of Bella. Sometimes she listened resting her head on her clenched fist, sometimes she laid her head on Brandt's forearm, dreaming his thoughts for him while he plotted and drank. But her big, light eyes never ceased visiting me, working me out, this Englishman sent to rule our lives. And occasionally, like a warm cat, she shook herself free of Brandt and took time to groom herself, recrossing her legs and primly correcting the fit of her shorts, or twisting a hank of hair into a plait, or drawing her gold amulet from between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and examining it front and back. I waited for a spark of complicity between herself and other members of the crew, but it was clear to me that Brandt's girl was holy ground. Even the ebullient Kazimirs deadened his face to talk to her. She fetched another bottle, and when she returned she sat down beside me and took hold of my hand and opened my palm on the table, examining it while she spoke in Latvian to Brandt, who broke into a gust of laughter which the rest of them took up.

"You know what she say?"

"I'm afraid I don't."

"She says English make d.a.m.n good husband. If I die, she going to have you instead!"

She clambered back to him and, laughing, wriggled into his embrace. She didn't look at me after that. It was as if she didn't need to. So I avoided her eyes in return, and thought dutifully about her history as told to London Station by Sea Captain Brandt.

She was the daughter of a farmer from a village near Jelgava, who had been shot dead when security police raided a secret meeting of Latvian patriots, Brandt had said. The farmer was a founder member of the group. The police wanted to shoot the girl as well, but she escaped into the forest and joined up with a band of partisans and outlaws who pa.s.sed her round among them for a summer, which did not seem to have upset her. By stages she had made her way to the coast and, by a route that was still mysterious to us, got word to Brandt, who, without troubling to mention her to London in advance, picked her off a beach while he was landing a new radio operator to replace another who had had a nervous breakdown. Radio operators are the opera stars of every network. If they don't have breakdowns, they have s.h.i.+ngles.

"Great guys," said Brandt enthusiastically as he drove me back to town. "You like them?"

"They're terrific," I said, and meant it, for there is no better company anywhere than men who love the sea.

"Bella want to work with us. She want to kill the guys who shoot her father. I say no. She's too young. I love her."

A fierce white moon shone on the flat meadows, and by its light I saw his craggy face in profile, as if set against the storm to come.

"And you knew him," I suggested, affecting to recapitulate something I vaguely remembered. "Her father. Feliks. He was a friend of yours."

"Sure I knew Feliks! I love him! He was a great guy! The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds shot him dead."

"Did he die immediately?"

"They shoot him to pieces. Kalashnikovs. They shoot everybody. Seven guys. All shot."

"Did anyone see it happen?"

"One guy. He see it, run away."

"What became of the bodies?"

"Secret police take them. They're scared, those police guys. Don't want no trouble from the people. Shoot the partisans, throw them in a truck, drive away to h.e.l.l."

"How well did you know him - her father?"

Brandt made his sweeping gesture with his forearm. "Feliks? He was my friend. Fought at Leningrad. Prisoner of war in Germany. Stalin didn't like those guys. When they came home from Germany, he sent them to Siberia, shot them, gave them a bad time. What the h.e.l.l?"

But London Station had picked up a different story, even if at this stage it was only a whisper. The father had been the informant, said the whisper. Recruited in Siberian captivity and sent back to Latvia to penetrate the groups. He had called the meeting, tipped off his masters, then climbed out of the back window while the partisans were being slaughtered. As a reward, he was now managing a collective farm near Kiev, living under a different name. Somebody had recognised him and told somebody else who had told somebody else. The source was delicate, checking would be a lengthy process.

So I was warned. Watch out for Bella.

I was more than warned. I was disturbed. In the next weeks I saw Bella several times, and each time I was obliged to record my impressions on the encounter sheet which London Station now insisted must be completed each time she was sighted. I made a rendezvous with Brandt at the safe flat, and to my alarm he brought her with him. She had spent the day in town, he said. They were on their way back to the farmhouse, why not? "Relax. She don't speak no English," he reminded me with a laugh, noticing my discomfort.

So I kept our business short, while she lounged on the sofa and smiled and listened to us with her eyes, but mostly she listened to me.

"My girl's studying," Brandt told me proudly, patting her on the backside as we prepared to separate. "One day she be a big professor. Nicbt wabr, Bella? Du wirst ein ganz grosser Professor, du!"

A week later, when I took a discreet look at the Daisy at her berth in Blankenese; Bella was there again, wearing her shorts and scampering over the deck in her bare feet as if we were planning a Mediterranean cruise.

"For heaven's sake. We can't have girls aboard. London will go mad," I told Brandt that night. "So will the crew. You know how superst.i.tious they are about having women on the s.h.i.+p. You're the same yourself."

He brushed me aside. My predecessor had raised no objection, he said. Why should I? "Bella makes the boys happy," he insisted. "She's from home, Ned, she's a kid. She's a family for them, come on!"

When I checked the file, I discovered he was half right. My predecessor, a seconded naval officer, had reported that Bella was "conscious to" the Daisy, even adding that she seemed to "exert a benign influence as s.h.i.+p's mascot."

And when I read between the lines of his report of the Daisy's most recent operational mission, I realised that Bella had been there on the dockside to wave them off - and no doubt to wave them safely back as well.

Now of course operational security is always relative. I had never imagined that everything in the Brandt organisation was going to be played by Sarratt rules. I was aware that in the cloistered atmosphere of Head Office it was too easy to mistake our tortuous structures of codenames, symbols and cut-outs for life on the ground. Cambridge Circus was one thing. A bunch of volatile Baltic patriots risking their necks was another.

Nevertheless the presence of an uncleared, unrecruited camp follower at the heart of our operation, privy to our plans and conversations, went beyond anything I had imagined-and all this in the wake of the betrayals five years earlier. And the more I worried over it, the more proprietorial, it seemed to me, did Brandt's devotion to the girl become. His endearments grew increasingly lavish in my presence, his caresses more demonstrative. "A typical older man's infatuation for a young girl," I told London, as if I had seen dozens of such cases.

Meanwhile a new mission was being planned for the Daisy, the purpose to be revealed to us later. Twice, three times a week, I found myself of necessity driving out to the farmhouse, arriving after dark, then sitting for hours at the table while we studied charts and weather maps and the latest sh.o.r.e observation bulletins. Sometimes the full crew came, sometimes it was just the three of us. To Brandt it made no difference. He clasped Bella to him as if the two of them were in the throes of constant ecstasy, fondling her hair and neck, and once forgetting himself so far as to slip his hand inside her s.h.i.+rt and cup her naked breast while he gave her a prolonged kiss. Yet as I discreetly looked away from these disturbing scenes, what remained longest in my sight was Bella's gaze on me, as if she were telling me she wished that it was I, not Brandt, who was caressing her.

"Explicit embraces appear to be the norm," I wrote drily on the encounter sheet, Hamburg to London Station, late that night in my office. And in my nightly log: "Route, weather and sea conditions acceptable. We await firm orders from Head Office. Morale of crew high."

But my own morale was fighting for survival as one calamity followed upon another.

There was first the unfortunate business of my predecessor, full name Lieutenant Commander Perry de Mornay Lipton, D.S.O., R.N., retd., sometime hero of Jack Arthur Lumley's wartime irregulars. For ten years until my arrival, Lipton had cultivated the role of Hamburg character, by day acting the English b.l.o.o.d.y fool, sporting a monocle and hanging around the expatriate clubs ostensibly to pick up free advice on his investments. But come nightfall, he put on his secret hat and went to work briefing and debriefing his formidable army of secret agents. Or so the legend, as I had heard it from Head Office.

The only thing that had puzzled me was that there had been no formal handover between us, but Personnel had told me tersely Lipton was on a mission elsewhere. I was now admitted to the truth. Lipton had departed, not on some life-and-death adventure in darkest Russia, but to southern Spain, where he had set up house with a former Corporal of Horse named Kenneth, and two hundred thousand pounds of Circus funds, mainly in gold bars and Swiss francs, which he had paid out over several years to brave agents who did not exist.

The mistrust shed by this sad discovery now spilled into every operation Lipton had touched, including inevitably Brandt's. Was Brandt too a Lipton fiction, living high on our secret funds in exchange for ingeniously fabricated intelligence? Were his networks, were his vaunted collaborators and friends, many of whom were drawing liberal salaries? And Bella-was Bella part of the deception? Had Bella softened his head and weakened his will? Was Brandt too feathering his nest before retiring with his loved one to the south of Spain? A procession of Circus experts pa.s.sed through the doors of my little s.h.i.+pping office. First came an improbable man called Captain Plum. Crouched in the privacy of my safe room, Plum and I pored over the Daisy's old fuel dockets and mileage records and compared them with the perilous routes that Brandt and the crew claimed to have steered on their missions along the Baltic coast. The s.h.i.+p's logs were sketchy at best, as most logs are, but we read them all, alongside Plum's records of signals intercepts, radar stations, navigational buoys and sightings of Soviet patrol boats.

A week later Plum was back, this time accompanied by a foulmouthed Mancunian called Rose, a former Malayan policeman who had made himself a name as a Circus sniffer dog. Rose questioned me as roughly as if I were myself a part of the deception. But when I was about to lose my temper he disarmed me by declaring that, on the evidence available, the Brandt organisation was innocent of misdoing.

Yet in the minds of such people as this, suspicions of one kind only fired suspicions of another, and the question mark hanging over Bella's father, Feliks, had not gone away. If the father was bad, then the daughter must know it, went the reasoning. And if she knew and had not said it, then she was bad as well. Moscow Centre, like the Circus, was well known for recruiting entire families. A father-and-daughter team was eminently plausible. Soon, without any solid evidence I was aware of, London Station began to peddle the notion that Feliks had been responsible for the betrayals five years ago.

Inevitably, this placed Bella in an even more sinister light. There was talk of ordering her to London and grilling her, but here my authority as Brandt's case officer held sway. Impossible, I advised London Station. Brandt would never stand for it. Very well, came the answer - typical of Haydon's cavalier approach - bring them both over and Brandt can sit in while we interrogate the girl. This time I was sufficiently moved to fly back to London myself, where I insisted on stating my case personally to Bill. I entered his room to find him stretched out on a chaise longue, for he affected the eccentricity of never sitting at his desk. A joss stick was burning from an old ginger jar.

"Maybe Brother Brandt isn't as p.r.i.c.kly as you think, Master Ned," he said accusingly, peering at me over his half-framed spectacles. "Maybe you're the p.r.i.c.kly one?"

"He's besotted with her," I said.

"Are you?"

"If we start accusing his girl in front of him, he'll go crazy. He lives for her. He'd tell us to go to h.e.l.l and dismantle the network, and I doubt whether anyone else could run it."

Haydon pondered this: "The Garibaldi of the Baltic. Well, well. Still, Garibaldi wasn't much b.l.o.o.d.y good, was he?"

He waited for me to answer but I preferred to take his question as rhetorical. "Those jokers she shacked up in the forest with," he drawled finally. "Does she talk about them?"

"She doesn't talk about any of it. Brandt does, she doesn't."

"So what does she talk about?"

"Nothing much. If she says anything of significance, it's usually in Latvian and Brandt translates or not as he thinks fit. Otherwise she just smiles and looks."

"At you?"

"At him."

"And she's quite a looker, I gather."

"She's attractive, I suppose. Yes."

Once more he took his time to consider this. "Sounds to me like the ideal woman," he p.r.o.nounced. "Smiles and looks, keeps quiet, f.u.c.ks - what more can you ask?"

He again examined me quizzically over his spectacles. "Do you mean she doesn't even speak German? She must do, coming from up there. Don't be daft."

"She speaks German reluctantly when she's got no choice. Speaking Latvian's a patriotic act. German isn't."

"Good t.i.ts?"

"Not bad."

"Couldn't you get alongside her a bit more? Without rocking the lovers' boat, obviously. Just the answers to a few basic questions would be a help. Nothing dramatic. Just whether she's the real thing, or whether Brother Brandt smuggled her into the nest in a warming pan-or whether Moscow Centre did, of course. See what you can get out of her. He's not her natural father, you realise that, I suppose. He can't be."

"Who isn't?"

For a confused moment I had thought he was still talking about Brandt.

"Her daddy. Feliks. The one who got shot or didn't. The farmer. According to the record, she was born January '45, wasn't she?"

"Yes."

"Ergo, conceived around April '44. At which time - if Brother Brandt's to be believed - her supposed daddy was languis.h.i.+ng in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Mind you, we shouldn't be too strait laced about it. No great feat of skill, I suppose, to get yourself knocked up while your old man's in the pen. Still every little helps when we're trying to decide whether to abort a network which may have run its course."

I was grateful for Mabel's company that night, even if we had not yet found our form as the great lovers we were so anxious to become. But of course I didn't tell her anything of my business, least of all about Bella. As a Vetting girl, Mabel was on the routine side of the Circus. It would have been quite improper for me to share my problems with her. If we had already been married - well, that might have been a different thing. Meanwhile, Bella must remain my secret.

And she did. Back in my solitary bed in Hamburg I thought of Bella and little else. The double mystery of her-as a woman and as a potential traitor-elevated her to an object of almost unlimited danger to me. I saw her no longer as a fringe figure of our organisation but its destiny. Her virtue was ours. If Bella was pure, so was the network. But if she was the plaything of another service - a deceiver planted on us to tempt and weaken and ultimately betray us - then the integrity of those round her was soiled with her own, and the network would indeed, as Haydon put it, have run its course.

I closed my eyes and saw her gaze upon me, sunny and beckoning. I felt again the softness of her kisses each time we greeted one another - always, as it seemed to me, held for a fraction longer than formality required. I pictured her liquid body in its different poses, and turned it over and over in my imagination in the same way that I contemplated the possibilities of her treason. I remembered Haydon's suggestion that I should try to "get alongside her," and discovered I was incapable of separating my sense of duty from my desires.

I retold myself the story of her escape, questioning it at every stage. Had she got away before the shooting or during it? And how? Had some lover among the security troops tipped her off? Had there been a shooting at all? And why did she not grieve more for her dead father, instead of making love to Brandt? Even her happiness seemed to speak against her. I imagined her in the forest, with the cutthroats and outlaws. Did each man take her at his will, or did she live now with this one, now with that? I dreamed of her, naked in the forest, and myself naked with her. I awoke ashamed of myself and put through an early-morning call to Mabel.

Did I understand myself? I doubt it. I knew little about women, beautiful women least of all. I am sure it never occurred to me that finding fault with Bella might be my way of weakening her s.e.xual hold on me. Determined on the straight path, I wrote to Mabel daily.

Meanwhile I fixed on the Daisy's forthcoming mission as the perfect opportunity to undertake a hostile questioning of Bella. The weather was turning foul, which was what suited the Daisy best. It was autumn and the nights were lengthening. The Daisy liked the dark too.

"Crew stand by to sail Monday," said London Station's first signal. The second, which did not arrive till Friday evening, gave their destination as the Narva Bay in northern Estonia, not a hundred miles west of Leningrad. Never before had the Daisy ventured so far along the Russian seaboard; only rarely had she been used in support of non-Latvian patriots.

"I would give my eyes," I told Brandt.

"You're too d.a.m.n dangerous, Ned," he replied, clapping me on the shoulder. "Be seasick four days, lie in your bunk, get in the way, what the h.e.l.l?"