Free Rogue Raider by Nigel Barley Page B

to their pointless deaths by a proper gentleman. But he knew this exploit meant not glory but trouble. They had singed the British lion’s beard, shown it to be toothless and stupid, roused native contempt against it. Now it would stop at nothing to get them with its great grasping claws.
    They gathered in a few more ships, gleaned just off Ceylon. Most were in ballast or uninteresting. With so much documentation imperfect or destroyed, it was often difficult for a prize officer to reach a rapid decision about the neutrality or contraband status of a vessel and its contents. Lauterbach always hoped for some moment of wordless understanding with fellow seamen but mostly the captains could not, or would not, understand that their vessels might just be favourably viewed by a well-disposed and adequately lubricated assessor. He lived a metaphorical being in a painfully literalist world where everything had to made laboriously explicit. One waxed insulting, shouting of dishonesty and peculation and Lauterbach had him arrested for fomenting military indiscipline, slapped in chains and his vessel sent to the bottom without compunction. This might have made him more cautious but did not. Peculation was his art. It possessed him and he could no more forsake it than any other artist could his particular muse.
    Their supply of coal was running low. If a British warship happened across them, they would not even be able to lift their skirts and run. And then they took the Buresk with 7,000 tons – a whole month’s supply – of hard Cardiff coal aboard her, the best in the world. An hour or so’s wheedling and headshaking and a little well-placed money produced an excellent result. The British captain, officers and steward would stay aboard, with a crew hired from amongst the Arab prisoners of the junkman, and follow German orders. The remaining crews of the latest six victims were shipped off to freedom – or at least India. Von Muecke would insist on making the distinction. There was a final coaling from the Markomannia in the Maldives and she too was sent off to rendezvous with the Pontoporos. The men were finally permitted to send mail to their loved ones at home, that would be posted by her in the East Indies. By the time it arrived, many of them would be dead.
    Von Mueller knew that troopships were being sent from Australia and New Zealand via Aden, hauling more fodder for the insatiable land war to chomp on. On the outward voyage they would have a heavy escort but on the way back, as empty vessels, would more than likely be unaccompanied. By sinking them, he could break the circle and cause widespread havoc like a man who refuses to send back his empty beer bottles. What he needed first was a quiet place for rest and repairs for, from radio traffic in code and in clear, it seemed that no less than sixteen enemy vessels were now scouring the seas for the Emden. Von Mueller scanned the charts. And his eyes lit up. Diego Garcia, that little dot of coral and sand in the most remote part of the Pacific, would do nicely.
    The expat population of Diego Garcia was not large. In fact its total was two, an Englishman and a resolutely francophone Malagasy. Twice a year a small sailing schooner put in and brought supplies of tobacco, bully beef and strong drink and bore off the copra – delivered by the pretty and philoprogenitive inhabitants – that justified the imperial presence. It was not an eventful life. They ate fish, drank coconut milk and coconut sap and their many derivatives, alcoholic and not, and read and re-read the same few books beneath a benevolently distant British rule.
    The Emden hauled itself on four clogged boilers into the coral bay and dropped its greased and fouled anchor into the limpid water as the sailors looked around at the waving palms and the gently pulsing waves and sighed. The Buresk slipped in and anchored coyly alongside the Emden , tucked behind its apron. Peace. Calm.
    Then