Operation XD

By James Barrington

  Eddie Dawson returns in his most explosive outing yet—a World War II thriller based on true events from the author of Right and Glory and To Do or Die.
 
If an officer wants to talk, something’s usually wrong. Plucked from his unit, Eddie Dawson knows trouble awaits.
 
The Netherlands is under Nazi invasion from land and sea. Amsterdam is besieged. But the Nazis aren’t interested only in conquest; they want the enormous Dutch oil reserves for their war effort.
 
Soon Dawson understands what game is afoot: he’s an explosives expert, and there’s a load of oil that needs to be destroyed. But can he get there in time—and get out alive?
 
Based on true events, this latest James Barrington WWII thriller is intense and unputdownable, perfect for fans of Iain Gale and Jack Higgins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788630108

James Barrington

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He has subsequently built a reputation as a writer of high-class, authentic and action-packed thrillers. He lives in Andorra, but travels widely. He also writes conspiracy thrillers under the pseudonym James Becker.

Book preview

Chapter 1

12 May 1940

Northern France

Nobody has ever claimed that the back of a British army lorry is a comfortable place to sleep. Or even to travel in. Especially when the lorry in question is bouncing over a rutted and largely unmade road because the driver is in a hurry.

But Eddie Dawson, lying on a pile of old sacking that smelled quite strongly of lubricating oil and covered in a thin and scratchy army blanket that he’d found when he climbed up into the vehicle, was so knackered that within a few minutes of setting off he was already in the kind of fugue state that exists between wakefulness and sleep.

The only good thing about that particular journey, from the outskirts of the Ardennes Forest in France to the English Channel, was that at that precise moment it was nowhere near the fighting. And he had seen and been involved in more combat over the previous few weeks than he had expected to face for the entire war, unless it ended up lasting for years. The Germans had invaded Belgium and the Netherlands two days earlier to face the combined armies of the Allies – French, Belgian and British troops – but what nobody had anticipated was that the Germans would then successfully advance into France through the Ardennes region. That upland area was widely believed, at least by the French, to be impenetrable to armoured vehicles, and especially to tanks, because of the forests along the border. Events had already proved the French to be completely wrong, as Dawson had witnessed first-hand: he had faced everything from Wehrmacht troops intent on ending his personal war in the most violent manner imaginable, to main battle tanks trying to do the same thing, only with much bigger guns.

But the German advance into France was still largely tied down near the country’s northern border. The chances of the lorry being stopped by enemy troops were almost nil, and there weren’t even many Allied troops in the area: they were all in positions further to the east and north. As the lorry bounced and rattled its way west towards Calais, the countryside around the vehicle was almost eerily quiet, the only indication of the ongoing conflict was the dull rumble of artillery fire from tens of miles behind, a sound more like a distant thunderstorm than anything else.

Or at least it was quiet for the first half an hour or so. By that time, Dawson had dropped off, so that when the driver of the Austin staff car, coming up fast from behind the truck, started sounding his horn in long, repetitive blares, he somehow managed to weave the sounds into a dream that had him standing on the deck of a Royal Navy vessel making the journey back across the Channel to Dover from France, and sounding its siren in greeting or warning as it approached the safe harbour.

That happy, if wholly inaccurate, image lasted a bare few seconds, and ended abruptly when the driver of the lorry rammed his size-ten hobnailed army boot violently onto the brake pedal as the staff car swept past and slewed to a stop in front of him. The heavy braking slid Dawson bodily across the floor of the truck and slammed him head first into the steel partition behind the driver’s cab. That woke him up immediately, and angrily, and he staggered to his feet muttering threats and curses.

He realized at once that the vehicle was stationary, and briefly wondered if the truck had been involved in an accident, but he quickly dismissed that notion because he definitely hadn’t heard the sound of an impact or felt anything like that. He guessed it was just a piece of really bad driving, nothing more. But in that case, why hadn’t the truck started moving again?

Before he could do anything about it, like climb down and pin the driver against the side of the lorry and hammer his head against the steel until he got some answers, a head wearing a British army helmet appeared at the back of the vehicle above the tailgate.

‘You Dawson?’ the man demanded.

‘Yes. Who wants to know?’

‘I do. Now get your arse out of there. There’s been a change of plan.’

‘Might have bloody guessed,’ Dawson muttered. ‘Fucking army.’

He picked up the Mauser rifle and Schmeisser MP40 sub-machine gun that he’d liberated from a couple of German soldiers, now deceased, men that he and Major Sykes had encountered once they’d escaped from the doomed Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael. The stock of Dawson’s British-issued Lee-Enfield had been shattered by a German bullet as they neared the Allied lines. They’d dumped the useless rifle, and had taken the two German weapons and all the ammunition they could carry because they’d had no alternative.

‘So what’s going on now?’ Dawson asked, as he followed the soldier – who he could now see was a lance corporal, just like Dawson himself – towards the front of the truck.

‘Buggered if I know, Corp,’ the man replied. ‘I was just told to stop this lorry, get you out of it and then deliver you to where I was told you had to go.’

The reason for the truck’s sudden stop was then immediately apparent: an army staff car, commonly known in the forces as a ‘tilly’, from ‘utility’, had stopped sideways on across the front of the vehicle, virtually blocking the entire width of the road.

‘I’m supposed to be going to Calais,’ Dawson said.

‘Not any more you’re not,’ the lance corporal replied. ‘My orders are to get you to Amsterdam.’

‘In Holland?’

‘Unless you know of a different Amsterdam, yes.’

‘What the bloody hell am I going there for?’

‘Buggered if I know,’ the man repeated. ‘You know the rules, mate. Always obey the last order. Getting you to Amsterdam was the last order I was given, so that’s where we’re going. Or rather, that’s where you’re going. I’m just taking you to Dunkirk, because driving through Belgium to get to Holland ain’t going to work. The country’s full of bleeding Jerries heading for France, our lot trying to stop them, and the Belgies trying to keep out of the way of both of them. I suppose there’ll be a boat or something at Dunkirk to take you the rest of the way up the coast.’

Dawson shrugged and shook his head. As he walked towards the staff car, the truck driver leaned out of his side window and shouted at him.

‘So what am I supposed to do?’ he asked.

The lance corporal turned towards the truck, and Dawson knew immediately what he was going to say.

‘Buggered if—’ he began, but Dawson interrupted him.

‘Just go back to where you picked me up,’ he suggested. ‘Find the officer or the NCO who’s in charge of transport and tell him what’s happened.’

The truck driver muttered something under his breath, then with a protesting metallic crunch from the gearbox he shifted the lorry into reverse and began backing down the road, looking for a stretch of road that was wide enough for him to turn the vehicle round.

Dawson opened the passenger door of the staff car, put his weapons on the floor behind the driver’s seat and then started to climb into the back of the vehicle.

‘Oi, that’s for officers only,’ the lance corporal protested. ‘You can ride up here in the front, with me.’

Dawson just looked at him.

‘I haven’t had a decent sleep for about a week,’ he said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘I’d just got my head down in that truck when you started sounding your bloody horn, so I’m going to lie down on the back seat of this tilly and try and get some sleep. If you don’t like it, that’s your hard bloody luck. So just shut up, get this thing started and drive.’

The lance corporal looked at Dawson – who was at least 6 inches taller than him, built like the proverbial brick shit house, and clearly running on a fairly short fuse if the expression on his face was anything to go by – and just nodded.

‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he murmured as he opened the driver’s side door.

‘Right now,’ Dawson said, ‘I don’t care if it matters or not. That’s where I’m going to be, so get used to it.’

A few seconds later, the driver put the staff car into gear and accelerated hard up the bumpy road, probably trying to make the ride as uncomfortable as he possibly could for his passenger.

But the broad leather seat in the back of the car felt like a feather bed to Dawson after the unyielding steel floor of the lorry he’d just climbed out of, and within a couple of minutes he was, again, sound asleep.

Chapter 2

13 May 1940

Dunkirk, France

When Dawson came to, the eastern sky was already lightening with the dawn. As the Austin staff car drew to a somewhat jerky stop, he distinctly heard the unmistakable calls of seabirds from somewhere overhead, and guessed that they had reached the coast, or were close to it.

He grunted, groaned and stretched. He’d slept for the entire journey, as far as he could remember, but he was a long way from being refreshed: the back seat was far too narrow to comfortably accommodate his bulky frame. His back and the muscles of his legs ached with a vengeance, and he’d somehow managed to crick his neck as well.

On the other hand, nobody was shooting at him, which made a change, so overall he still reckoned he was ahead.

‘We’re here, Corp,’ the driver called out, obviously having heard movement behind him in the car. ‘This is as far as I go.’

Dawson sat up slowly and then extricated himself from the back of the vehicle, his movements clumsy because of the aches and pains he was suffering, and made worse by the fact that he was rather larger than the designers of the car had perhaps expected any rear-seat passenger to be. He had no kit – all that had been lost in his and Major Sykes’s escape from Belgium – but he was determined to hold on to the Mauser and Schmeisser as long as he could, so he scooped them out of the back of the car as he emerged.

He straightened up with another groan as something clicked in his spine and looked around. The port wasn’t either as big or as busy as Calais, as far as he could tell, but there were still dozens of service personnel milling around purposefully, and numerous army vehicles of various sorts, either moving about or parked in somewhat straggly rows.

‘Now what the bloody hell am I supposed to do?’ he muttered.

‘Buggered if I know,’ the lance-corporal replied, entirely predictably, then shifted the staff car into gear and drove out of Dawson’s sight and, as it happened, out of his life.

Three minutes later, Dawson was standing rigidly to attention while a smartly dressed sergeant with a reddish complexion and a bristly black moustache shouted at his face from a distance of about 6 inches.

‘Don’t you bloody try and get smart with me, Corporal. Where’s your bloody rifle? And the rest of your bloody kit?’

Eddie Dawson stared into the middle distance for a couple of seconds longer, then gave him exactly the same answer as he’d done the first time he’d been asked the question.

‘In Belgium, Sarge.’

‘That’s what I mean by a smart, bloody, answer. Give me one more and you’ll find yourself on a bloody charge. We’re in France, just in case you hadn’t noticed. In bloody Dunkirk, in fact. So how the bloody hell did you lose your bloody rifle in bloody Belgium?’

‘I didn’t lose it. I dumped it because a Jerry bullet blew the stock to pieces. It was no good to anyone after that. In fact,’ Dawson added, recalling exactly what had happened in the Belgian forest, ‘it wasn’t actually me that dumped it. It was the bloke I was with.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better, Corporal. You don’t lend your bloody weapon to anyone, ever. You should bloody well know that. And if it gets damaged you bring it back and get a new one.’

‘Sod that for a game of soldiers,’ Dawson snapped, starting to lose his patience with the sergeant. ‘We had half the bloody German army chasing after us. No way were we going to bugger about dragging a broken rifle around with us. We had enough to do just getting away from them. That’s why I picked up this Mauser and Schmeisser.’

‘Sounds like another bloody tall story to me, Corporal, and you should think yourself lucky—’

‘Actually, it isn’t,’ another voice chimed in, and the sergeant spun round to find himself looking at a slim and somewhat dapper officer wearing major’s pips walking towards him, the effect spoiled somewhat by the officer’s obvious limp.

Like all NCOs – non-commissioned officers – in the British army, the sergeant clearly believed in the old mantra: if it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t, paint it – and snapped off a crisp salute accompanied by a loud ‘Sah.’

‘This corporal is with me,’ Major Sykes said, returning the salute in a markedly casual manner and stepping forward to stand near Dawson.

The sergeant switched his gaze between the hefty corporal with his craggy, hacked-from-the-living-rock features, and the slim and handsome officer from the Royal Scots Greys. Despite their clean uniforms, both men looked as if they’d been through a lot, the officer clearly nursing some kind of leg wound, while the corporal appeared to be just generally battered, with various cuts and bruises visible, and he too, in fact, also had a slight limp.

‘Right, sir,’ the sergeant said, and saluted again.

As he turned and marched briskly away, Dawson turned to Sykes.

‘Am I, sir? With you again, I mean? And I thought you were heading for Calais, not Dunkirk.’

‘I was, but I got diverted. And you’re not with me, not this time. I just thought you had better things to do than stand there listening to that idiot trying to give you a hard time. The next ship to Dover leaves from here, not from Calais, so I’ll be on that one, with the Jerry demolition charge, so that I can tell the powers that be what we saw at Eben-Emael. The boffins there can take the device to pieces to find out how it works and decide what we can do about it. I’ll probably stay on the other side of the Channel until this leg has healed a bit better, but then I’ll be back. While I’m in Blighty I’ll be reporting on you and what you did. You might even find yourself in line for a gong, bearing in mind that you saved my life more times than I can remember.’

Sykes paused for a few moments, then shook his head.

‘Or you might get an official reprimand or find yourself facing charges of repeated disobedience and insubordination because of your consistent and stubborn refusal to obey any of my orders.’

‘I wasn’t going to leave you there, sir,’ Dawson said. ‘Orders or no orders.’

‘I know, and I’m grateful.’

Sykes extended a hand, and the big corporal shook it.

‘Thanks, Eddie. Seriously, you saved my life, but getting that demolition charge back here could mean you’ve saved hundreds of other soldiers from getting killed, and that’s far more important. And my report will reflect that.’

Dawson looked slightly stunned, not because of what Sykes had described, but because the officer had used his Christian name, the first time in his entire career in the army that that had happened.

‘Anyway,’ Sykes continued, ‘take care of yourself with whatever it is that you’re expected to do now.’

He released Dawson’s hand, clapped him on the shoulder, and then strode away, still favouring his injured leg. The major had only walked about 50 yards when a young lieutenant accosted him. They exchanged salutes, and after a very brief conversation Sykes turned around and pointed back towards Dawson. The lieutenant saluted again, and then began walking briskly towards the corporal.

‘This looks like bad news,’ Dawson muttered to himself as the officer approached.

‘Lance Corporal Dawson?’ the young officer asked as Dawson gave a somewhat weary salute.

‘Yes, sir.’

Then he just waited. Dawson had been in the army long enough to know that unnecessary conversation with any member of the officer class had a tendency to lead to additional work or duties. Before joining the Royal Engineers, he had spent five years in the Territorial Army, and he well remembered the advice drummed into him by the training corporal, a wizened and elderly – at least in Dawson’s eyes, which meant the man had probably been in his forties – individual who had seen it all and done most of it. ‘Don’t you never volunteer for nothing’ had been the man’s mantra, which, ignoring the double negative and the literal meaning of the phrase, still seemed to Dawson to be quite a good philosophy. And, like every other squaddie, he had heard all the stories about NCOs who would ask if anyone was interested in music because they needed a piano moving, or interested in food because half a ton of potatoes had just been delivered and needed peeling.

So he lapsed into an expectant silence while he waited for the officer, a clean-shaven man in his mid-twenties with dark hair, brown eyes and a tanned complexion, framed by slightly prominent ears, to deliver whatever piece of bad news he had in mind.

‘I understand you’re a demolitions specialist?’

That wasn’t exactly what Dawson had been expecting, and he nodded cautiously, remembering that the first conversation he’d ever had with Major Sykes had begun in a fairly similar way.

‘Before I joined up I was a mining and quarry engineer, sir,’ he replied, ‘so I do know my way around most kinds of explosives. If you want me to open up a new seam in a coal mine, then I’m your man, but I don’t think what I know makes me a specialist in blowing things up.’

The lieutenant – the name tag on his battledress jacket read ‘Barber’ – smiled briefly.

‘Not much call for coal mines around here at the moment,’ he said, ‘but there’s a strong probability that we will need you to do a bit of demolition.’

‘You mean the Germans have got here already?’

‘I didn’t say they were German structures, Dawson,’ Lieutenant Barber replied, ‘and I didn’t say they were anywhere near here. Come with me, and you’ll find out what we need you to do.’

Chapter 3

13 May 1940

Dunkirk, France

‘Is this him?’

‘This is Lance Corporal Dawson, sir, yes,’ Lieutenant Barber replied.

Dawson was standing near the eastern side of the harbour, at the end of a protective mole, a long stone breakwater that extended out from the shore towards the choppy waters of the English Channel. The port was busy, a line of ships and boats of various sizes and types – most belonging to the Royal Navy, Dawson guessed, from the universal grey paintwork that was so much in evidence – moored beside the mole and in the harbour itself, while still other vessels appeared to be waiting their turn to come alongside and were holding position a short distance out to sea. Squads of men were being formed up and then marched down the mole as they disembarked from the ships, while other smaller groups were heading in the opposite direction.

The lieutenant had led him to another officer, this one a captain, who had apparently been waiting beside the mole, possibly for Dawson to appear. Like Barber, he was wearing battledress, both officers with holstered revolvers on their belts, and the captain was also carrying a leather binocular case around his neck. He was clearly an older man, probably in his late thirties, with light brown hair and a somewhat world-weary expression on his regular features. To Dawson, he looked more like a bank manager than a serving officer.

‘Right,’ the captain said briskly. ‘I’m Captain Michaels, and I’m in charge of this unscheduled excursion to Holland. Let’s get going.’

‘Where, sir?’ Dawson asked.

‘Haven’t you been given any orders?’

‘Nothing, sir. Only that I’m supposed to be going to Amsterdam. Nobody’s told me why or what I’m supposed to be doing when I get there.’

‘Know anything about the Territorial Army, Dawson?’ Michaels asked, an apparent non sequitur.

Dawson nodded.

‘I’m a regular now, sir,’ he replied, ‘but I was in the TA for five years before I joined up.’

‘Good. That might make things easier. I’ll explain what’s happening once we’re on board.’

The two officers led the way down the mole. At first Dawson thought they were heading for the troopship that was moored near the end of the breakwater, black smoke belching from its funnel, but instead they stopped at a point where no vessel was actually visible.

‘Here we are,’ Michaels said, pointing to one side of the mole.

‘We are?’ Dawson said quietly, almost to himself.

‘Look sharp,’ Barber instructed, stepping over to the side of the concrete structure before dropping to his knees and backing out of sight down a rope ladder that was secured to one of the bollards.

Dawson walked over to the edge and peered down, just as Barber stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder onto the foredeck of a speedy-looking powerboat, that part of the vessel dominated by what appeared to be a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount. The grey hull and white ensign hanging limply from a short mast more or less in the centre of the boat, confirmed that it was a Royal Navy vessel. He had been to sea precisely once before, on the troopship – in reality a rusty freighter pressed into service by the navy – that had delivered him to Calais from Dover, and to him that had looked like a proper, full-sized ship. What Dawson was looking at now seemed more like a biggish rowing boat, and he hoped he wasn’t going to be travelling far in it. Perhaps it was a kind of tender or harbour boat that would ferry him to one of the ships waiting outside the port.

‘Down you go,’ Michaels ordered.

Dawson slung both the Mauser and the Schmeisser over his shoulders, got down on his knees as Barber had done, and cautiously eased his legs over the side of the mole, his feet feeling for the top rung of the ladder. The whole thing swayed somewhat alarmingly as he lowered his weight onto it, and he tightened his grip on the ropes at either side.

‘Get a move on, man,’ Michaels said. ‘It’s easily strong enough to hold you.’

That was good news, Dawson supposed, as long as it was true, though the way the rope was creaking and the feeling as the whole ladder swayed from side to side as he shifted his feet on it didn’t fill him with any particular sense of confidence.

But it didn’t break, and once he got used to the wobbly sensation as he descended, he managed to get down the last few feet quite quickly, to be joined on the deck of the vessel a few moments later by Captain Michaels.

‘Right, Sub,’ Michaels said, as a young man wearing a dark blue uniform with a single strip on the epaulettes appeared on deck from somewhere near the centre of the boat. ‘Let’s get going.’

The sub lieutenant nodded and turned away. Moments later, the dull throb of a powerful engine brought the vessel to life, and a couple of men appeared on deck and started releasing the mooring hawsers that had kept the boat secured to the side of the mole.

‘Come with me, Dawson,’ Michaels ordered, and led the way aft.

‘Is this a kind of ferry, sir?’ he asked, looking down at a long grey tube roughly 2 feet in diameter that ran along the side of the vessel, the structure balanced by an identical tube on the other side of the hull. He had no idea what they could be. ‘To deliver us to a proper ship, I mean.’

Michaels laughed shortly as they walked down a short flight of steps into a saloon below the cockpit or whatever the correct term was for the bit of the boat where the controls were located. Dawson knew that on a ship it would be called the bridge, but he wasn’t sure if the same term applied on a small boat like the one he was standing in. Barber was already there, sitting at a table on one side of the tiny saloon, studying a map that he’d spread out in front of him.

‘Definitely not,’ Michaels replied. ‘The Royal Navy doesn’t really do ferries, and certainly not armed ones. This is an MTB, a motor torpedo boat.’

Immediately the grey tubes he’d seen made sense to Dawson.

‘It’s powered by three bloody great engines and can do about 35 knots – that’s nearly 40 miles an hour to you and me. It may be small, but it’s one of the fastest boats afloat, and it’s got teeth, two torpedoes in those tubes on deck plus the Oerlikon 20-millimetre cannon mounted on the foredeck, and a couple of Lewis machine guns on single mounts on the rear deck. The navy is still trying to sort out the best weapon fit for these vessels, so they’re all a bit different. This one is number twenty-two, which is a blatant lie because the navy’s only got eighteen of them.’

Michaels paused, apparently waiting for Dawson to ask the obvious question, which he duly did.

‘So why is this one number twenty-two?’

‘Deception,’ Michaels replied shortly. ‘If you have eighteen boats, and you number them one to eighteen – in fact, one to nineteen because nobody wants to go to sea in a boat numbered thirteen, obviously – that tells the enemy exactly how many of them you have. So the navy keeps on changing the numbers to keep them guessing. According to the sub lieutenant who’s driving this thing, it used to be number nine, now it’s number twenty-two and no doubt in a few weeks it’ll have some other completely different number painted on the side.’

That made sense, but Dawson felt he was still missing the point. Missing several points, actually, and Captain Michaels was also puzzling him. He was talking to him almost as an equal, something that no officer he’d ever met before – with the obvious exception of Major Sykes – had ever done.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you don’t really sound like a regular officer.’

‘Spotted that, did you?’ Andrew Michaels said, a smile crossing his face. ‘That’s because I’m not, really. I’m more like a civilian who just happens to be wearing a uniform. In fact, until a couple of weeks ago I was just a civilian, but I was also in the TA, just like David Barber over there. But with Adolf on the warpath even some parts of the Territorial Army are now heading for the front line, whether we like it or not.’

Barber looked over at the two men and grinned.

The noise of the engines suddenly increased, and Michaels and Dawson both grabbed hold of the door frame to support themselves when the hull of the boat heeled over to starboard and the craft turned and accelerated. The speed increased, and the motion of the hull changed, banging and crashing as the bow of the craft slammed into the waves and swell of the North Sea.

At that moment, another figure appeared in the doorway, wearing the same dark blue uniform as the sub lieutenant, but with two bars on his epaulettes.

‘Life jackets, now,’ he instructed. ‘Locker on the forward bulkhead. Don’t fanny about. Just get them on. It’s going to get a bit bumpy.’

And with that he turned away and disappeared.

‘Understood, Lieutenant,’ Michaels called out to his retreating back.

Barber walked to the other end of the cabin, lifted the lid on a kind of box, then reached inside and pulled out three life jackets. He walked back to where Michaels and Dawson were standing and handed one to each man, then pulled the third one on himself over his battledress before returning to the table to study his map.

‘Let me save a bit of time here,’ Michaels said, once they had the lifejackets secured around their torsos, and raising his voice above the roar of the engines and the banging and crashing from the hull as the speed increased even more, ‘and I’ll try to answer the questions that I’m sure you’re working your way around to asking me. First, this MTB is our transport up to Amsterdam, or IJmuiden if you want to be pedantic about it. That’s a port on the Atlantic coast of Holland. Amsterdam is a fairly short distance inland from there, and that’s where we’re heading. Second, the reason you’re here is because I’ve been told you’re an expert with explosives, and that’s exactly what we’re going to need. Third, have you ever heard of the KFRE?’

Chapter 4

13 May 1940

North Sea

‘You’re looking a bit green, Dawson,’ Barber commented, standing up from his seat at the table and walking over to the lance corporal. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Not really, sir,’ Dawson admitted.

‘Not a good sailor?’ Michaels asked.

‘Not a sailor at all,’ Dawson replied, his breathing faster than normal as he tried to keep his stomach under some sort of control. ‘Just the one trip across the Channel to Calais. Pretty rough. Threw up a few times.’

‘David,’ Michaels began, but Barber was already ahead of him, opening the door of a cupboard beside the entrance door to the saloon and pulling out a somewhat battered metal bucket. He handed it to Dawson and then took a cautious step backwards, Michaels mirroring his action on the other side of the lance corporal.

‘I think I’m OK for a few minutes,’ Dawson said, then almost immediately lifted the bucket up to chest height and vomited copiously into it.

The two officers each simultaneously took another pace backwards as the sour and unmistakable smell filled the saloon.

‘Sorry,’ Dawson said thickly.

‘Not your fault,’ Michaels replied. ‘Mal de mer can affect anyone. Probably the only reason David and I aren’t doing the same as you is because we’ve both done a fair amount of yachting over the last few years, and we’ve got used to the motion of a small boat on the ocean. Better?’

Dawson nodded.

‘Good.’ Michaels pointed at the bucket Dawson was still holding. ‘You should get rid of that right away, before it stinks the place out.’

‘Where, sir?’

‘Just empty it over the side of the boat. Let the North Sea take care of it. Don’t forget to hang on to something while you do it.’

Dawson weaved his way up the stairs to the open deck, emptied the bucket into the foaming waves, and then made his way back to the saloon. Throughout the entire operation, he clung on to anything substantial within reach, because as well as being a very poor sailor, he couldn’t swim and was terrified of falling into the water.

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

‘It might be better if you lean against the side of the staircase, so that you can see the horizon,’ Michaels suggested, waving off his apology. ‘Sometimes that helps to keep your stomach under control.’

‘And there is of course one infallible way to cure seasickness,’ Barber said with a smile on his face.

Dawson looked at him hopefully.

‘Just go and sit under an oak tree,’ Barber stated.

Dawson looked blank.

‘It’s an old and not a very good joke,’ Michaels explained. ‘Oak trees don’t grow on ships, so the only way to sit under an oak tree is to be on