Lifeboat! Read Online Free PDF Page A

tug.’
    Andersen laughed softly in the darkness. ‘ She is yours, my friend. Tomorrow I begin three days’ leave. No one will touch her whilst I am away. There is no need now. Scarcely any ships coming or going, eh?’ He shrugged hopelessly and then, even amidst all the trouble, he managed to raise a chuckle as he added, ‘Except yours, my brave Captain.’
    â€˜Will the soldiers suspect anything?’
    Andersen raised his shoulders. ‘They have not interfered with me since they came. We will hope not.’
    They shook hands once more. ‘Good luck, my friend, good luck,’ Andersen murmured and moved away through the rain.
    That was the last time Captain Sinclair ever saw his Danish friend.
    Captain Sinclair watched and waited his chance. Close to the harbour was a tavern frequented by sailors and now by the Nazi soldiers too. The British sailors, frustrated by the confines of their ship when such pleasures lay only yards away, embarked upon a campaign to visit the establishment. Their Captain actively encouraged the scheme and told them of his own plan.
    They chose a dark, wet night when no moonlight penetrated the thick cloud, when the sea was a black, concealing, moving being and the dockside was a cold, rain-drenched inhospitable place. The Nazi sentry was huddled in a doorway when the sailors crept down the gangway in ones and twos and slipped through the shadows towards the fuzzy lights of the tavern. Once inside they mingled freely with the off-duty enemy soldiers, pretending to drink vast quantities of alcohol and giving oscar-winning performances of aimiability towards their captors.
    â€˜Ach, you’re a grand laddie, Frishzie, to tek all we’ve been giving ye these last days.’
    The Germans smiled and raised their mugs and nodded expansively toward their captives for the war was going well for Germany. They were sure of victory and could afford to be generous to the vanquished, to these poor Britishers who in a few days would be transported to camps in Germany. If they ever returned to their Britain, it would be to a very different place, Fritzie believed, under the rule of the Third Reich. The Germans watched their British prisoners enjoying their last moments of comparative freedom and apparently growing steadily drunker by the hour.
    Eventually the sailors bade an excessively fond farewell to the German soldiers with much back-slapping and camaraderie. They staggered from the tavern and lurched along the dockside shouting and singing raucously, ‘… On the Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lo-o-omond.’ They gathered in an unsteady semi-circle around the lone sentry in his sheltered doorway.
    From behind them came the soft ‘phut-phut-phut’ of the tug chugging up and down the harbour. Only the British sailors knew that instead of Captain Niels Andersen, their own First Mate was operating the tug.
    On board their ship, Captain Sinclair strained to see through the rain and the darkness and then whispered to young Macready at his side, ‘Right, laddie, away now.’
    The boy, who had stayed on board with his Captain, slipped down the gangway, obscured from the German sentry by his rollicking shipmates. He ran, soft-footed, towards the forward mooring-post and unhooked the two hawsers. Lying flat on his stomach at the edge of the quay and feeling his arms almost pulled from their sockets by the heavy ropes, he hung over the black water. Waiting his moment until the roistering sailors’ voices rose higher and higher he let slip the hawsers into the water. Then he scrambled up and, half-crouching, scurried to do the same with the aft mooring ropes, then back to the gangway and up it on to the deck where he crouched down, panting heavily.
    â€˜Well done, laddie, well done!’ were his Captain’s whispered words of praise.
    Captain Sinclair stood up and gave a shrill whistle. At once the drunken sailors closed in upon the German. A knife