Read Online Gold From Crete by C.S. Forester - Free Book Online Page B

nerves?’
    ‘Marion?’ suggested Nickleby, and as Crowe looked round at the others they nodded an agreement.
    ‘Right!’ said Crowe. ‘Get the orders out for him now.’
     
    That was how HMS Cheyenne , Lieutenant-Commander Edward Marion, DSC, came to detach herself from the Twentieth Flotilla at the end of that day to undertake an independent operation while the rest of the flotilla shepherded the wounded Apache back to port. It explains how an Italian submarine happened to rise to the surface close alongside her to find herself, much to her astonishment, swept by a torrent of fire from the waiting guns. The official British communique, issued sometime later, describing the capture, whole, of an Italian submarine, puzzled most of the people who read it. And yet the explanation is not a very complex one.
     

Intelligence
     
    Captain George Crowe, CB, DSO, RN, walked down three short steps into the blinding sunshine that made the big aeroplane’s wings seem to waver in reflected light. The heat of the Potomac Valley hit him in the face, a sweltering contrast to the air-cooled comfort of the plane. He was wearing a blue uniform more suitable for the bridge of a destroyer than for the damp heat of Washington, and that was not very surprising, because not a great many hours earlier he had been on the bridge of a destroyer, and most of the intervening hours he had spent in aeroplanes, sitting in miserable discomfort at first, breathing through his oxygen mask in the plane that had brought him across the Atlantic, and then reclining in cushioned ease in the passenger plane that had brought him from his point of landing here.
    The United States naval officer who had been sent to meet him had no difficulty in picking him out - the four gold stripes on his sleeves and the ribbons on his chest marked him out, even if his bulk and his purposeful carriage had not done so.
    ‘Captain Crowe?’ asked the naval lieutenant.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Glad to see you, sir. My name’s Harley.’
    The two shook hands.
    ‘I have a car waiting, sir,’ Harley went on. ‘They’re expecting you at the Navy Department, if you wouldn’t mind coming at once.’
    The car swung out of the airport and headed for the bridge while Crowe blinked round him. It was a good deal of a contrast - two days before he had been with his flotilla, refuelling in a home port; then had come the summons to the Admiralty, a fleeting glimpse of wartime London, and now here he was in the District of Columbia, United States of America, with the chances of sudden death infinitely removed, shops plentifully stocked, motorcars still swarming, and the city of Washington spread out before him.
    Crowe stirred a little uneasily. He hoped he had not been brought to this land of plenty unnecessarily; he regretted already having left his flotilla and the eternal hunt after U-boats.
    The car stopped and Harley sprang out and held the door open for him. There were guards in naval uniform round the door, revolvers sagging at their thighs; a desk at which they paused for a space.
    ‘No exceptions,’ smiled Harley, apologizing for the fact that not even the uniform of a British naval captain would let them into the holy of holies for which they were headed. There were two men in the room to which Harley led him.
    ‘Good morning,’ said the admiral.
    ‘Good morning, sir,’ said Crowe.
    ‘Sorry to hurry you like this,’ the admiral said gruffly. ‘But it’s urgent. Meet Lieutenant Brand.’
    Brand was in plain clothes - seedy plainclothes. Crowe puzzled over them. Those clothes were the sort of suit that a middle-class Frenchman, not too well off, and the father of a family, would wear. And Brand’s face was marked with weariness and anxiety.
    ‘Brand left Lisbon about the same time you left London,’ said the admiral. His eyes twinkled - no, ‘twinkled’ was too gentle a word - they glittered under thick black eyebrows. No man who looked into those eyes even for a moment