The Hansa Protocol (23 page)

They reached the end of the path, which had brought them to the summit of the cliff. There they stopped, and looked down into the vast protected haven of Dunnock Sound. It was an awesome sight that met their eyes.

Stretching away far to the western shore of the Sound a mighty fleet lay at anchor. It seemed impossible that so many great ships could have been built, let alone brought together in such a colossal show of strength. Grey and menacing, the superstructures of the vessels towered upwards through the blur of cold rain. Line after line of great
battleships
could be seen, and around them a whole navy of cruisers, lightly armoured and with smaller guns, the scouts of the fleet.

Admiral Holland pointed down towards a magnificent ship in the centre of the flotilla, a ship to which all the others appeared to be doing homage. It rose awesomely above the forest of masts, turrets and smoke-stacks, the jewel in the Royal Navy's crown.

‘HMS
Fearnought,'
said Holland ‘Twenty thousand tons displacement, a speed of twenty knots, ten twelve-inch guns in those five turrets. No
ship of any navy on earth could withstand a salvo from her.'

Kershaw looked down at the fleet. He could see innumerable sailors at work on the decks, dwarfed by the size of the vessels and the height of the cliff where they stood. Clouds of seagulls swooped and cried around the forest of masts.

‘What ship is that lying near her to the right, Holland?'

‘The ship off her starboard bow? That's the cruiser HMS
Leicester
, in which His Royal Highness will sail through the fleet'

Admiral Holland let his gaze drift across the lines of ships as far as the western shore and its huddles of buildings, almost lost to view in the dullness of the fine rain. Years in a warm Admiralty office had not diminished his immunity to bad weather, and he stood quite unmoved by the wet and cold of the cliff.

‘I don't see what these hot-heads can do,' he said. ‘The whole
shoreline
is guarded by soldiers of the Scottish regiments. The entire area is virtually sealed off until the thirtieth, when they lift anchors.'

Colonel Kershaw did not reply. He stood wrapped in his cloak, looking fixedly out and away from the fleet towards the dull, fermenting waters of the North Sea. He was very still. Holland stole a glance at him. What was he thinking about? There was nothing of interest there, though far out to sea the winking lights of some kind of vessel could be seen, either at anchor, or proceeding very slowly north.

Admiral Holland stirred restlessly. He was chafing at Kershaw's absorbed silence.

‘What are you looking at?' he asked testily. ‘There's nothing to see.'

‘Heligoland.'

‘Heligoland? Well, you can't see that from here. It's an island about forty miles off the German coast. There's no one there but a few herders and fisherfolk. But I appreciate your mentioning it. We ceded it to Germany in '90, as you know, and it's obvious that they'll establish a naval base there. Really, you'd have thought the Great Powers— but there, the Germans have done nothing in Heligoland yet.'

‘No, they've done nothing there yet, Holland. But they will.'

Kershaw stopped for a moment, and looked down the path towards the grim, rain-soaked tower below them. There seemed to be no life about the place, just rain, and a quiet breeze. It was too quiet! He recalled the previous day's interminable railway journey from London. A man had got on the train with them in London, changed whenever
they changed, and was with them when they had transferred from the main line on to the Highland Railway.

It wouldn't do, at this juncture, to mention that man to Holland. He had almost certainly not seen the man, as he had been careful to keep out of their sight as much as was possible. He'd been a soldier once, but the proud mien had deserted him. It had been replaced by a seedy, furtive ugliness ….

They reached the rough track that ran in front of Craigarvon Tower.

‘Come, Kershaw' said Admiral Holland, ‘it's time for us to think and re-think, and that can best be done in the shelter of the Tower. Things are too quiet here. Suspiciously quiet. Nothing's happening, so there's nothing we can do. What on earth can these madmen be
contemplating
?'

‘Whatever it is,' said Kershaw, ‘it will be to do with explosives. Something terrible is contemplated – “a victory beyond your wildest dreams”, as Baron von Dessau told his dangerous rabble in Berlin. Why hedge the matter about with ifs and buts? That victory can only be an act of destruction by explosives associated with the great fleet down there in Dunnock Sound.'

He thought for a moment of the telegraph message that he had received earlier that day from Inspector Box in London. It had suggested very sinister possibilities. Well, he had the secret means of making investigations of his own. Holland could be told whatever was necessary when the time was ripe.

Holland made no effort to refute what Kershaw had said. The two men walked soberly across the wet grass to the ancient tower of Craigarvon. The single narrow door was opened to them by a uniformed marine with a fixed bayonet on his rifle. They passed inside, and the door was firmly slammed and bolted. Craigarvon Tower had become what it had often been in the past, an impregnable fortress.

‘Inspector Box! My pleasure, I'm sure! We don't often see you over here. Come in, and see if you can find a chair somewhere. And you, Sergeant Knollys.'

Mr Mack's spacious domain at the Home Office looked to Box rather like a roofed scrapyard. As they stepped over the threshold from a tall, narrow corridor, the two detectives almost collided with the burnt and detached door of a free-standing safe, which had clearly been
blown off its hinges in some kind of explosion. It was twisted out of shape, and its green paint had been scorched by fire. There were similar pieces of wreckage arrayed around the room, and leaning against the walls.

Box and Knollys picked their way across the bare boards between piles of yellowing documents and manuals, and sat down in two Windsor chairs drawn up in front of Mr Mack's massive desk. There was not an inch of space visible. Most of the desk was covered in small boxes and pieces of iron pipe. Everything seemed to have a
brown-paper
label attached. The air was thick with pipe smoke, and the ceiling stained yellow with the tobacco-smoke of decades.

‘What can I do for you, Inspector Box?' asked Mr Mack. He seemed genuinely delighted to see them, and his old face managed a wintry smile. He was wearing his usual rusty black suit, to which he had added a blue woollen muffler.

‘I'd like a little chat with you about shells,' said Box. ‘Just a little
introduction
, if you see what I mean. I expect you know all there is to know about shells.'

Mr Mack joined his fingers together, and looked critically at his
visitors
.

‘Well, Mr Box, it's very kind of you to say so. But I'd like to get clear in my mind what you mean by shells. I take it you don't mean seashells? No, well I thought you didn't. Just my little joke. But there are shells and shells, Mr Box. First, there's your common-or-garden shells. Then there's your armour-piercing shells. And your high explosive shells – beautiful, they are. Then there's your shrapnel shell, your thin-walled, your artillery shell, your naval shell—'

‘Pause there, Mr Mack, I beg of you,' said Box, holding up his hand to stem the flow of words. ‘The naval shell, I think, is what I'd like a little chat about. A few informal words, if I may put it that way.'

Mr Mack rummaged around among the detritus on his desk until he found a short clay pipe, which he proceeded to light. There followed a period of snuffling, interspersed with a number of throaty coughs. Mr Mack's mild, pale eyes began to water.

‘The naval shell, Mr Box, and you, Mr Knollys, comes in two kinds, the armour-piercing and the high-explosive. They have a sharp point at the front, and a fuse in the base. The point sometimes has a soft steel cap, which absorbs the shock of first impact, so that the shell can
penetrate 
the armour before it bursts. They burst, you know. That's the theory, anyway.'

‘It's amazing, Mr Mack, the things you know. And these naval shells – they go into the ship's guns—'

‘They go into the ship's
magazines
, Mr Box. You've heard of a
magazine
, haven't you? You've got to be careful about sparks and naked lights in magazines. More often than not they'll have a copper floor. Tread carefully, if ever you find yourself in a warship's magazine.'

‘They're in racks—' Box ventured.

Mr Mack hauled himself up with a sigh, and pulled open one or two drawers in a tallboy. With a little bleat of triumph he pulled out a
backless
book, which he flopped down on his desk. For a few moments he began worrying at the pages until he had found what he wanted.

‘There you are. There's a diagram of a battleship. It'll save you making wild guesses about racks, and so on. That's HMS
Hazard.
A lovely ship, that, of eighteen thousand tons. There's your magazine, you see.'

Mr Mack pointed to part of the diagram with a heavy index finger pitted with tiny blue points of embedded gunpowder, one of the minor disadvantages of spending his life with dangerous explosives.

‘Moving away from the stern, we pass over four compartments of the ship, and then, below where you see that twelve-inch gun in its barbette – its turret, you know – you'll see the magazine.'

Mr Mack, warming to his subject, seized a magnifying glass from his desk, polished it quickly on his muffler, and handed it to Box.

‘See? Notice that it's below the water-line, for safety's sake. And below the magazine, there's a separate shell room, and the revolving hoist, that takes the shells up to the barbette.'

Inspector Box ran the magnifying glass across the diagram, noting the vast engine rooms, the coal bunkers, and the boiler rooms. He silently marvelled at the sheer size of the great warship.

‘There are four more magazines here,' he said, ‘sited beyond the boiler-rooms towards the prow.'

‘That's right,' said Mr Mack, sitting down again in his chair, and puffing away at his clay pipe. ‘They're to service the two forward gun turrets. So now you see where all the shells are kept on a big warship. Is there anything else you'd like me to tell you?' He added, very shrewdly, ‘I suppose all this is the other end of The Belvedere business?' Box nodded his assent.

Sergeant Knollys had said nothing since he and Box had entered Mr Mack's smoky Home Office kingdom. But he had been eyeing the old explosives expert speculatively while Box had been examining the diagram. There was a hint of mischief in his eyes when he asked a question.

‘I was wondering, Mr Mack, why you have these plans of warships here in your office. Is there a purpose in that, or do you just like warships?'

‘Sergeant!'

Box's tone held mild reproof, but Mr Mack only chuckled.

‘Seen through me, haven't you, Sergeant Knollys? Well, everyone to his trade. That goes for me, as well as you. I have these plans of warships so that I can contrive ways of blowing them up! Devise tricks and traps to send these great vessels to the bottom of the ocean! It's all part of the business of knowing your enemies. Try to think what they'd do, and see if it's possible. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.'

Arnold Box thought once more of the over-confident admiral, and his pride in the great battleship HMS
Fearnought
, which had apparently arrived in Caithness on the previous Thursday, after its journey up from Portsmouth.

‘If ever you felt like turning your skills in the direction of HMS
Fearnought
,
sir,' asked Box, ‘what particular explosives would you use to send her to the bottom of the ocean?'

Mr Mack did not reply for a moment. He glanced shrewdly at Box, and then once again hauled himself to his feet.

‘Explosives? I'd use whatever came to hand, Mr Box. Trinitrophenol, nitrocellulose – to put it more simply, I'd use the contents of the
magazine
themselves as my fiendish device! There's no point in taking a bomb into a warship when it's carrying enough high explosives in its magazines to lift the decks!'

Mr Mack beckoned them into an adjoining room, which proved to be a very untidy workshop. There was a metal-topped bench, a lathe, a small furnace, and a jumbled collection of pieces of broken machinery. A grimy slit of a window looked out on to the rain-soaked expanse of St James's Park.

‘This is what I'd use, gentlemen,' said Mr Mack, dragging a kind of oil-covered drum from beneath the bench. He made a half-hearted attempt to wipe it clean with a grimy cloth.

‘This is what you'd call a detonator. Ridgeway's Limpet Igniter. A nifty piece of work, just eight inches in diameter. See those magnets? And the timing mechanism? This one's broken, but you can see the idea. The magnets clamp the device to the fuse in the base of a shell. You set the clock, and when the time that you've set comes round, that steel rod in the centre there activates the fuse plate, and the shell explodes.'

Mr Mack turned some exposed clockwork mechanism with his hand, and the steel rod shot out with an alarming thud of metal. He threw the device back into the gloomy recess under the bench, and wiped his hands on the grimy rag.

‘And then, of course, Mr Box, the other shells in the magazine explode in sympathy. What we call the “brisant” effect. And the
magazine's
a confined space, with armoured steel walls, so the force of the magazine going up blows the ship to pieces. And that sympathy …. that “brisant” effect, can spread to neighbouring ships, and then – well, then, Mr Box, you could lose the whole fleet.'