The Challenging Heights Read Online Free PDF

medicine. How do we get Ulmanis’ name on the damn thing?’
    Hatto beamed. ‘Leave it to me, sir. He’s here in the city keeping his head well down because von der Goltz and the Baltic Barons are trying to capture him.’
    ‘Think you can find him?’
    ‘Shouldn’t wonder, sir. I hear his Minister of Commerce and a couple of other ministers are aboard the destroyer, Seafire. They’ll know where he is and I happen to have made my number with Seafire’ scaptain. Chap called Andrew Cunningham. Rather hot stuff for a sailor.’
     
    Seafire lay alongside the breakwater in the inner harbour, just ahead of her a merchant ship laden with arms.
    ‘Her engines have broken down,’ the officer on the gangplank told them. ‘And the Old Man’s scared stiff someone will decide to board her, seize the weapons and start a revolution.’
    Beyond the merchant ship was a large barracks containing German soldiers and behind it a tract of pine forest. As they went aboard, Cunningham, a tall round-faced man bursting with self-confidence and salty language, was conducting a ferocious argument with a wild-looking man with a bushy black beard, partly in Latvian, partly in halting German and partly in English.
    ‘The bloody man’s claiming the Germans have captured the Latvian GHQ,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m going along to see what’s happened. Fancy joining me?’
    As they headed into the forest, they met German soldiers staggering back with beds, pots, pans, chickens, ducks, blankets and various other forms of loot. A house in a clearing was burning fiercely, alongside it a battalion of German soldiers forming up ready to march off. Seeing the British uniforms, Latvian officers, their faces bruised, their uniforms torn, rushed up, waving their arms, to explain that the Germans had arrested all their senior officers, seized their records and started the fire . As they finished, a German band at the head of the column blared out and the column began to march off. Cunningham frowned.
    ‘It’s obviously no time for a ship full of arms to be alongside the jetty,’ he said. ‘We’d better shift her.’
    Returning to the ship, the tow was made fast and they began to head down the narrow canal that led to the commercial harbour.
    ‘The swing bridge’s supposed to open to my siren,’ Cunningham growled, staring ahead. ‘If it doesn’t, we’ll have to ram it and put a landing party ashore to shoot anybody who objects.’
    As they reached the outer harbour and made fast again, German troops were visible on both sides of the canal and in a lot of neighbouring buildings, and they could see the black snouts of machine guns near the lock gates.
    ‘This is bloody ticklish,’ Cunningham admitted. ‘One destroyer against the whole of von der Goltz’s army. We’ll go in stern-first, Number One, in case we have to come out in a hurry.’
    Backing and filling in the narrow waterway, the ship turned round. The Germans began shouting insults but, as the destroyer’s guns were lowered and trained round, ready to fire at point-blank range, the shouting died. In a deathly silence, they waited for what would happen, but as Cunningham rapped out a series of crisp orders, all of them quite audible to the Germans on shore, the machine gun parties at the ends of the wharves quietly picked up their weapons and disappeared. Almost immediately a couple of Latvians, who claimed to be ministers of the deposed government, climbed aboard and claimed asylum. They said Ulmanis and other ministers had taken refuge with the British Mission.
    When they found him, Ulmanis looked tired and ill but he was more than ready to append his signature to anything that might bring help, and two hours later the request for a linguist and for Cecil Arthur Diplock in particular was in the safe of the captain of a naval trawler heading towards England.

 
     
Three
    Stuck away at the north-eastern end of the Baltic, there was a depressing feeling of being out of the world