Free Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

operations in North Africa, are in peril.”
    “At night? In fog?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can that actually be done?”
    “Apparently it can. We suspect they’re using infrared searchlights, which can ‘see’ the heat of ship engines.”
    DeHaan knew the span of nautical technology—there was hardly any aboard the
Noordendam
but it was still his job to know what there was. Even so, he had never heard the expression
infrared
. “What kind of searchlights, did you say?”
    “Infrared. An invisible barrier, like a curtain, projected from both shores. Bolometers, Captain.” Sims almost smiled. “Sorry you asked?”
    “I know about radio waves, radars, but, after that . . .”
    “Goes back to the Great War, in Germany, they’ve been playing with it for a long time. But, now that I’ve told you, here’s my end of the bargain. If we manage to get technical equipment back to your ship, and something happens, to me, and my lieutenant, be a good fellow and make damn sure the thing finds its way to a British base. Will you do that?”
    DeHaan said he would.
    “There,” Sims said. “You see? All you needed was something more to think about.”
             
    On the tenth of May, in the early evening, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. The mist and rain continued, but they steamed with running lights on, as a devil-may-care neutral ship would, and DeHaan could feel the telescopes and binoculars of the shore watch, British and German, French and Spanish, as they entered the Mediterranean.
    DeHaan did not remain on the bridge for his midnight watch, instead, after a look at the charts, he left the helmsman to work alone and met with Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz in the wardroom. Ratter had the assistant cook produce coffee and a can of condensed milk, which he poured liberally into his mug while repeating the time-honored quatrain “No shit to pitch / No tits to twitch / Just punch a hole / In the sonofabitch,” then stirred it in with the end of a pencil.
    “It looks like we’re going to be on time,” DeHaan said. “The twelfth, just before midnight. Sometime after that, the commandos go ashore. We’ll run them in as close as we dare, then drop anchor about two miles out, ship dark, and there we wait. The signal for return is two flashes of a green light, so we’ll have deckhands standing by to lower scramble nets.”
    “And the gangway?”
    “Might as well.”
    “What if they don’t show up?” Kees said.
    “We wait. For three days.”
    For a moment, no one spoke. Then Ratter said, “Three days? Anchored off Tunisia?”
    “We’ll be boarded,” Kees said.
    DeHaan nodded.
    Finally Kees said, “What about the weather?”
    “Last report from Mr. Ali, the meteorological forecast for allied shipping, says that this system has settled in all over southern Europe, and is likely to continue.” The forecast came in code—the weather-report war one more small war within the big war.
    “We want that, right?” Ratter said.
    “I suppose we do. Anyhow, we’ll need to rework the watch list, so we have the best people at the helm, and on deck.”
    “Vandermeer at the helm?” Kees said.
    “No, on watch. Young eyes are better.”
    “Schoener, then,” Ratter said.
    “A German, for this?” Kees said.
    “He’s right,” DeHaan said. “Use Ruysdal. He’s older, and steady.”
    “Mr. Ali in the radio room?”
    “As usual. But I want a good signalman, maybe Froemming, on deck with the Aldis lamp.” He meant the hand-operated, shuttered light that flashed messages.
    DeHaan turned to Kovacz. As with many Poles, Kovacz’s second language was German, sufficiently fluent so that Dutch, the nautical part of the language at any rate, came easily to him. He was a little older than DeHaan, stooped and bearlike, with thinning curly hair and sunken, red-rimmed eyes. His speech, always deliberate, came in a deep, gravelly bass thickened by a heavy accent.
    “Stas,” DeHaan said. “You take the engine room,