The Lost Naval Papers Part 15

"Ha!" said the First Lord, "as you would not come to us, we have unbent our dignity and come to you. This is Chief Inspector Dawson."

"So I supposed," growled the grizzled old man, who sat at a big desk upon which was piled many flimsies. It was the great Lord Jacquetot, who for all his French name was English of the English.

"Will you explain to Mr. Dawson what we want of him or shall I?"

inquired the First Lord. Lord Jacquetot rose from his chair, showing nothing of the infirmities of age. He approached Dawson, looked over him keenly, and said, "You don't look like a civilian policeman. Where have you served?"

Dawson explained that he had in former days been a Red Marine.

"I thought as much," said Jacquetot. "There is no mistaking the back and shoulders of them. Once a Pongo, always a Pongo." He held out his hand, which Dawson shook diffidently. An ex-private of Marines does not often shake the hand of a First Sea Lord.

Lord Jacquetot walked over to one of the maps and beckoned to Dawson to follow. The First Lord hovered in the background, ready to put in a word at the first opportunity.

"There has been a serious naval disaster in the South Seas," said Jacquetot, "and we must clean up the mess, pretty d.a.m.n quick. The news came yesterday. Orders were wired at once that two battle-cruisers, the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_, should be sent at full speed from Scotland to Devonport to dock, coal, and complete with stores. To keep them outside the enemy's observation, and to avoid any risk of mines or submarines in the Irish Channel, they have been sent far out round the west coast of Ireland. Here they are; we get messages from them every hour." He indicated two pins. Just then a messenger entered and handed to the First Sea Lord a wireless flimsy. Jacquetot read it, slipped a scale along the map, took out the two pins, and shifted them further south. "They are going well," said he; "doing twenty-five knots. They should be off Plymouth Sound by to-morrow evening."

"It is a long way," put in Dawson, deeply interested. "Fifteen hundred miles."

"There or thereabouts. The coast lights are all out, so that they will steer a bit wide. They should do it in sixty hours."

"I gave the order within thirty minutes of getting the news of the disaster," remarked the First Lord, smacking his lips.

Jacquetot made no reply, though his eyes hardened and his mouth drew into a stiff line. It was his province to give Orders to the Fleet.

"Those battle-cruisers," went on Lord Jacquetot, addressing Dawson, "will go into dock at Devonport as soon as they arrive. They will be there forty-eight hours at least. They must be clean ships before they go through the hot tropical water if their speed is to be kept up.

They have gun power, but power without speed is useless for the work which they have to do. After leaving England it will be a month before the Squadron, of which they are to form the chief part, will be concentrated in the South Seas. For two days at Devonport, and for four weeks while at sea, there must be the completest secrecy if our plans are to succeed. Without absolute secrecy we shall fail. The Board of Admiralty is responsible for the sea, but not for the land.

We can make certain that no news of the despatch of these two cruisers gets out at sea; can you, Mr. Chief Inspector Dawson, undertake that no news gets out on land--that no whisper of their sailing reaches the enemy by means of his spies on land?"

"It is a large order," said Dawson thoughtfully.

"It is a very large order," a.s.serted Lord Jacquetot, frowning.

"But large or small, the thing must be done," broke in the First Lord.

"If this news gets out, and we fail to come up with the German Squadron down south, the effect upon the public will be horrible. The English people may even lose their perfect, their sublime, faith in ME."

"They may lose their faith in the Navy," muttered Jacquetot.

"It is the same thing," said the First Lord.

"Can you let me know more details, my lord?" asked Dawson. "What is the programme? I don't see at present how the arrival, docking, and sailing of the battle-cruisers can possibly be kept secret, but there may be a way if one could only think of it."

"If the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_ arrive according to programme," said Jacquetot, "they will not come up the Sound till after dark. Then in the small hours they will slip into dock, and no one but the regular dockyard hands will know that they are there. We will haul them out also in the middle of the night, and they will be clear away by daybreak, forty-eight hours after arrival. Coal and other stores are on the spot in plenty, and the sh.e.l.ls and cordite for the twelve-inch guns can soon be got down from the Plymouth magazines. The secrecy of the operation seems to me to turn on whether we can trust the dockyard hands."

Dawson shook his head. "I wouldn't plump on that, my lord. There have been enemy agents working in every dockyard in the kingdom for years past, and we haven't spotted all of them. Still, we have our own men working alongside of them--Scotland Yard men engaged from among the shipbuilding trades unions--accounting for every one, so that no man can be away from his post without our knowing and shadowing him. It is not easy to get any information out of the country nowadays. The secret wireless stories are all humbug. Wireless gives itself away at once. If one wants to get news to the enemy, one has to carry it oneself, or hire some one else to carry it. Most of that which goes we allow to go for our own purposes. I am pretty sure that no dockyard hand could get anything away to Holland without our knowledge, so that it doesn't matter whether they are trustworthy or not so long as we're not fools enough to trust them. You may not know it, but I have my own Yard men among your messengers here in this building, and among your clerks too."

"What!" cried the First Lord. "You don't even trust the Admiralty!"

"Least of all," said Dawson grimly. "If I was head of the German Secret Service, I would have my own man as your private secretary."

The First Lord sat down gasping. Jacquetot nodded kindly to Dawson, and laughed in his grim old way. "You are the man we want," said he.

"I am not thinking much of the dockyard hands," went on Dawson; "I can look after them. They're all provided for. The danger is in the gossip of a seaport town. I have lived in Portsmouth for years, and Plymouth is just like it. You may take my word for it that the arrival of the _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_ in dock at Devonport will be known all over the Three Towns half an hour after they get there. Their mission will be discussed in every bar, and it won't be difficult to make a pretty useful guess. Here is a disaster in the South Seas--which will be published all over the country by to-morrow morning--and here are two of our fastest battle-cruisers summoned in hot haste from Scotland to be cleaned and loaded for a long voyage. Any child, let alone a longsh.o.r.eman, could put the two things together. 'So the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_ are off to the South Seas to biff old Fritz in the eye.' That is what they will say in the Three Towns where there must be hundreds of men--British subjects, too, the swine, and many of them natural born--who would take risks to shove the news through to Holland if they could get enough dirty money for it. Our worst spies are not German, you bet; they are Irish and Scotch and Welsh and English. That's where our difficulties come in. I am not afraid of the dockyards, but the gossip of the Three Towns gives me the creeps."

"Then what can we possibly do?" wailed the First Lord, who saw his prospect of a brilliant coup wilt away like a fair mirage. "The secret will get out, our plans will fail, and MY Administration, my beautiful Administration, will have to stand the racket. How shall I defend myself in the House?"

"That won't matter much to the country," put in Jacquetot bluntly.

"What matters, is that we should do everything possible to keep the secret in spite of all the inherent difficulties. Sit down, Mr.

Dawson, and do some hard thinking."

"I prefer to stand, my lord. When I want to think I do a bit of sentry-go."

"So do I!" exclaimed the First Lord. "All my most famous speeches were composed while I walked up and down my dressing-room before my--" He broke off hastily, but as neither Jacquetot nor Dawson were listening, he might have completed the sentence without revealing the secrets of his looking-gla.s.s.

"May I speak my mind, my lords?" asked Dawson.

"It is what you are here for," replied Jacquetot.

"I always work on certain general principles. They apply here. People will talk; that is certain. If one doesn't want them to talk about something really important, one puts up something else conspicuous, harmless, and exciting to occupy their minds. In your politics"

--turning to the First Lord with an air of simplicity--"when you've made a thorough mess of governing England, and don't want to be found out, you set the people fighting about Home Rule for Ireland. I don't mean you, sir, but politicians generally."

"Quite so," said the First Lord, blinking.

"Well, see here. We don't want any talk about the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_. So, before they arrive, we must give the people of the Three Towns a real t.i.tbit of excitement. Battle-cruisers come to dock in Devonport quite often when they are damaged. Two battle-cruisers which had been mined or submarined, one towing the other, would be a pretty picture in the Sound. It would set all the folk talking for days, and no one would think that two damaged cruisers had anything to do with the South Seas. Everybody would say, 'What cruel luck. If the _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_ hadn't got blown up they would be just right and handy to send down south. As it is--' And then the German agents would somehow get the news to Holland--we would help them all we could in a quiet way--that the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_, two fast battle-cruisers, had been nearly lost, and were being patched up at Devonport. The Germans, hearing the glorious news, would hug themselves and say that now was the time for the High Seas Fleet to come out and smash Jellicoe. The last thing in their minds would be any concentration in the south against their own Pacific Squadron.

That's how I apply my general principles to this case. Meanwhile, of course, the _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_, well and sound, would be racing away down to the South Seas and no one in the Three Towns--except the dockyard hands, whom we would look after--and no one at all in Germany, would have a glimmer of the real truth."

While Dawson was thinking aloud in this rather halting, stumbling way, the First Lord and his chief naval colleague were looking hard at one another. The politician, with his quick House-of-Commons wits, jumped to the idea before his slower thinking expert colleague could sort out the two battle-cruisers who were to be mined or submarined from the two which were to speed away south to avenge the recent disaster.

"If the two battle-cruisers are mined or submarined--which G.o.d forbid," said Jacquetot, "how can they sail for the south?"

"Need they be the same ships?" inquired Dawson, whose eyes had begun to flash with excitement. "Need they be the same?"

"Don't you see?" interposed the First Lord. "The idea is quite good. I was just about to suggest something of the kind myself when Mr. Dawson antic.i.p.ated me. That is where the mind with a wide universal training has a great advantage over the narrow intensive intelligence of the professional expert. Even in war. What I propose, what Mr. Dawson here proposes with my full concurrence, is that two severely damaged battle-cruisers, known temporarily as the _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_, should be brought into the Sound in broad day and displayed before the eyes of the curious in the Three Towns. The real ships will slip in, be docked and coaled, and slip out again. The two others, upon whom public attention has been concentrated, shall be put aground somewhere in the Sound to be salved with great and leisurely ostentation. We will keep them well away from the Hoe, and allow no one whatever to approach them. We will, unofficially, allow the news of their sorry state to get out of country and into the Dutch papers. Meanwhile, as Mr. Dawson says, the real _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_ will be speeding towards the south, and the saving for the nation's service of my invaluable public reputation for accurate judgment and quick decision.

Mr. Dawson's suggestion--I should, perhaps, rather say my own suggestion--shall be laid before the Board at once."

Though the stiff mind of Lord Jacquetot was not very quick to take in a new idea, no man alive was better equipped for practically working out a naval scheme. While the First Lord was a.s.suming that sorely damaged battle-cruisers, or vessels which could be pa.s.sed off in place of them, needed but his summons to spring from the deeps, Jacquetot had pressed a bell and ordered a messenger to request the immediate presence of the Fourth Sea Lord, within whose province was the whole art and mystery of ship construction. Upon the appearance of this officer the plan was gone over anew, and he was asked whence and within what time he could produce two presentable dummies to do duty in the Sound for the entertainment of the population of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse. There were, said he, two if not three at Portsmouth, constructed out of old cargo tramp hulls for the mystification of the enemy. They had already done duty as newly completed battleships, but with a little alteration to the canvas of their funnels, the lath and plaster of their turrets and conning towers, and the wood of their guns, they might be made into perfect likenesses--at a distance--of the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_. The ships' carpenters, he explained, could make the changes while the dummies were coming round to Plymouth. Seated at the desk of Lord Jacquetot he wrote the necessary orders in code, his Chief signed them, and they were put at once on the wires for Portsmouth. The sea-c.o.c.ks, said the Fourth Lord, would be opened twenty miles from land so that the "_Intrepid"_ might come in sadly down by the bows, and the "_Terrific"_ with a list of twenty degrees, pluckily towing her sorely crippled sister. With a chart of Plymouth Sound before them, the two officers settled the precise spot, sufficiently remote, yet well within sight of the Hoe, at which the two unhappy battle-cruisers should come to rest upon the mud. "It will be a most pathetic spectacle," said the Fourth Lord laughing, "and I will bet a month's pay and allowances that at the distance not a man in the Three Towns will have the smallest suspicion that the genuine copper-bottomed _Terrific_ and _Intrepid_ are not ditched before his blooming eyes." He rose from the table, upon which the chart had been laid, walked over to Dawson and shook him warmly by the hand. "You won't get any credit for the idea," he whispered. "One never does. But it was a d.a.m.ned good notion. What are you going to do now?"

"I am going to Plymouth this afternoon to make sure that the German truth gets over the water to Holland, and that the English truth stays safely behind. If you will all do your part, I will do mine."

CHAPTER XIII

THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN

"Every man to his trade," said Dawson. "I didn't go into the difficulties of our job to those high folks at the Admiralty, but they are not at all small. You have a head on you, Froissart, though it has the misfortune to be French; set it going on double shifts."

The two men were sitting in a specially reserved first-cla.s.s compartment in the Paddington-Plymouth express; as companions they were hopelessly uncongenial, yet as colleagues formed a strong combination in which the qualities of the one served to neutralise the defects of the other. Dawson, in spite of his love for the Defence of the Realm Regulations, was still sometimes unconsciously hampered by an ingrained respect for the ordinary law and the rights of civilians; Froissart, like all French detective officers, held the law in contempt, and was by nature and training utterly lawless. The more reputable a suspect, the more remorseless was his pursuit. They were, professionally, a terrible pair who could have been pa.s.sed through a hair sieve without leaving behind a grain of moral scruple.

Froissart, when he would be at the trouble, understood and spoke English quite well, though with me he used nothing but the raciest of boulevard French. "My friend," said he, "your promise to those Ministers of Marines was rash; for, unless there is the most perfect execution of your scheme and the most sleepless watching of those whom you call dockyard hands--_ceux qui travaillent dans les chantiers, ne c'est pas_?--the sailing of these _grands croiseurs_ will be told to Germany. There are too many who will know. We are upon _une folle enterprise_--a chase of the wild goose."