The Spy in Black

By J. Storer Clouston.

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Part I

The Narrative of Lieutenant von Belke (Of the German Navy)

I

The Landing

If anyone had been watching the bay that August night (which, fortunately for us, there was not), they would have seen up till an hour after midnight as lonely and peaceful a scene as if it had been some inlet in Greenland. The war might have been waging on another planet. The segment of a waning moon was just rising, but the sky was covered with clouds, except right overhead where a bevy of stars twinkled, and it was a dim though not a dark night. The sea was as flat and calm as you can ever get on an Atlantic coast—a glassy surface, but always a gentle regular bursting of foam upon the beach. In a semicircle the shore rose black, towering at either horn (and especially on the south) into high dark cliffs.

I suppose a bird or two may have been crying then as they were a little later, but there was not a light nor a sign of anything human being within a hundred miles. If one of the Vikings who used to live in those islands had revisited that particular glimpse of the moon, he could never have guessed that his old haunts had altered a tittle. But if he had waited a while he would have rubbed his eyes and wondered. Right between the headlands he would have seen it dimly:—a great thing that was not a fish rising out of the calm water, and then very stealthily creeping in and in towards the southern shore.

When we were fairly on the surface I came on deck and gazed over the dark waters to the darker shore, with—I don’t mind confessing it now—a rather curious sensation. To tell the truth, I was a little nervous, but I think I showed no sign of it to Wiedermann.

“You have thought of everything you can possibly need?” he asked in a low voice.

“Everything, sir, I think,” I answered confidently.

“No need to give you tips!” he said with a laugh.

I felt flattered—but still my heart was beating just a little faster than usual!

In we crept closer and closer, with the gentlest pulsation of our engines that could not have been heard above the lapping of the waves on the pebbles. An invisible gull or two wheeled and cried above us, but otherwise there was an almost too perfect stillness. I could not help an uncomfortable suspicion that someone was watching. Someone would soon be giving the alarm, someone would presently be playing the devil with my schemes. It was sheer nonsense, but then I had never played the spy before—at least, not in wartime.

Along the middle of the bay ran a beach of sand and pebbles, with dunes and grass links above, but at the southern end the water was deep close inshore, and there were several convenient ledges of rock between the end of this beach and the beginning of the cliffs. The submarine came in as close as she dared, and then, without an instant’s delay, the boat was launched. Wiedermann, myself, two sailors, and the motor-bicycle just managed to squeeze in, and we cautiously pulled for the ledges.

The tide was just right (we had thought of everything, I must say that), and after a minute or two’s groping along the rocks, we found a capital landing. Wiedermann and I jumped ashore as easily as if it had been a quay, and my bicycle should have been landed without a hitch. How it happened I know not, but just as the sailors were lifting it out, the boat swayed a little and one of the clumsy fellows let his end of it slip. A splash of spray broke over it; a mere nothing, it seemed at the time, and then I had hold of it and we lifted it on to the ledge.

Wiedermann spoke sharply to the man, but I assured him no harm had been done, and between us we wheeled the thing over the flat rocks, and pulled it up to the top of the grass bank beyond.

“I can manage all right by myself now,” I said. “Goodbye, sir!”

He gave my hand a hard clasp.

“This is Thursday night,” he said. “We shall be back on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights, remember.”

“The British Navy and the weather permitting!” I laughed.

“Do not fear!” said he. “I shall be here, and we shall get you aboard somehow. Come any one of those nights that suits him.”

“That suits him?” I laughed. “Say rather that suits Providence!”