{"product_id":"dark-voyage-isbn-9780812967968","title":"Dark Voyage","description":"\u003cb\u003e“In the first nineteen months of European war, from September 1939 to March of 1941, the island nation of Britain and her allies lost, to U-boat, air, and sea attack, to mines and maritime disaster, one thousand five hundred and ninety-six merchant vessels.  It was the job of the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy to stop it, and so, on the last day of April 1941 . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eMay 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the \u003ci\u003eSanta Rosa\u003c\/i\u003e, she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmö.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut she is not the \u003ci\u003eSanta Rosa\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the \u003ci\u003eNoordendam\u003c\/i\u003e, a Dutch freighter. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coast–a secret mission, a dark voyage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA desperate voyage\u003c\/i\u003e. One more battle in the spy wars that rage through the back alleys of the ports, from elegant hotels to abandoned piers, in lonely desert outposts, and in the souks and cafés of North Africa.  A battle for survival, as the merchant ships die at sea and Britain–the last opposition to Nazi German–slowly begins to starve.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA voyage of flight\u003c\/i\u003e, a voyage of fugitives–for every soul aboard the \u003ci\u003eNoordendam\u003c\/i\u003e. The Polish engineer, the Greek stowaway, the Jewish medical officer, the British spy, the Spaniards who fought Franco, the Germans who fought Hitler, the Dutch crew itself. There is no place for them in occupied France; they cannot go home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom Alan Furst–whom \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e calls America’s preeminent spy novelist–here is an epic tale of war and espionage, of spies and fugitives, of love in secret hotel rooms, of courage in the face of impossible odds. \u003ci\u003eDark Voyage\u003c\/i\u003e is taut with suspense and pounding with battle scenes; it is authentic, powerful, and brilliant.\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eBlood of Victory\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Furst] glides gracefully into an urbane pre—World War II Europe and describes that milieu with superb precision.”\u003cbr\u003e–JANET MASLIN, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Densely atmospheric and genuinely romantic, the novel is most reminiscent of the Hollywood films of the forties, when moral choices were rendered not in black-and-white but in smoky shades of gray.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Furst’s achievement is a moral one, producing a powerful testament to fiction’s ability to re-create the experience of others, and why it is so deeply important to do so.”\u003cbr\u003e–NEIL GORDON, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richly atmospheric and satisfying.”\u003cbr\u003e–DEIRDRE DONAHUE, \u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003eALAN FURST is widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eNight Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBlood of Victory\u003c\/i\u003e. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York.UNDER SPANISH FLAG\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the port of Tangier, on the last day of April, 1941, the fall of  the Mediterranean evening was, as always, subtle and slow. Broken  cloud, the color of dark fire in the last of the sunset, drifted over  the hills above the port, and streetlamps lit the quay that lined the  waterfront. A white city, and steep; alleys, souks, and cafes, their  patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away. Out  in the harbor, a Spanish destroyer, the Almirante Cruz, stood at  anchor among the merchant steamers, hulls streaked with rust, angular  deck cranes hard silhouettes in the dusk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn board the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion  Line, the radio room was like an oven and the Egyptian radio officer,  known as Mr. Ali, wore only a sleeveless undershirt and baggy silk  underdrawers. He sat tilted back in his swivel chair, smoking a  cigarette in an ivory holder and reading a slim, filthy novel in  beautifully marbled covers. From time to time, he would remove his  gold spectacles and wipe his face with a cloth, but he hardly  noticed. He was used to the heat, the effect of a full day's sun on  the ship's steel plate, and, come to that, used to these ports,  hellholes always, Aden or Batavia, Shanghai or Tangier, and he was  much absorbed in the noisy pleasures of the people in his novel. On  the wireless telegraph before him, a gray wall of switches and dials,  the ether crackled with static, his duty watch had less than an hour  to run, and he was at peace with the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen, from the static, a signal. On the BAMS frequency--Broadcasting  for Allied Merchant Ships--and, he thought, far out at sea. He set  the book face down on the work shelf below the radio, put on the  headphones, and, with delicate thumb and forefinger, adjusted the  dial for the strongest reception.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQ, Q, Q, Q.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor this message he didn't need the BAMS codebook--not since May of  1940 he didn't. It meant I am being attacked by an enemy ship and  he'd heard it all too often. Here it came again, the operator fast  and heavy on the key. And again, and again. Poor man, he thought. His  fellow radio operator on some battered old merchantman, tapping out  his final message, his ship confronted by a surfaced submarine or an  E-boat raider, the shot already across her bows or her engine room  torn apart by a torpedo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat Mr. Ali could do, he did. Opened the radio logbook, noted the  date and the time, and recorded the anonymous cry for help. DeHaan,  captain of the Noordendam, would see it when he put the ship to bed  for the night--he never failed to check the logbook before going to  his cabin. If they had been at sea, Mr. Ali would have notified the  captain immediately but now, in port, there was no point. Nothing  they could do, nothing anyone could do. It was a big ocean, British  sea power concentrated on the convoy routes, there was nobody to  challenge the enemy or pick up survivors. The ship would die alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe signal went on for a time, fifty seconds by the clock on the  radio array, and likely went on longer still, perhaps sending the  name of the ship and its coordinates, but the transmission  disappeared, lost in the rising and falling howl of a jammed  frequency. Bastards. Mr. Ali watched the clock; five minutes, six,  until the jamming stopped, replaced by empty air. He was taking the  headphones off when the signal returned. Once only, and weaker now,  the ship's electrical system was almost gone. Q, Q, Q, Q, then  silence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeHaan, at that moment, was ashore--had just left the gangway of the  harbor launch and approached a battle-scarred Citroen parked on the  pier, taxi tarzan painted on its door, its Moorish driver stretched  out in the back, hands clasped beneath his head, for his evening nap.  DeHaan looked at his watch and decided to walk. The rue Raisuli was  supposedly just beyond the Bab el Marsa, Gate of the Port, which he  could see in the distance. He had been invited--ordered, he thought,  that was the honest word--to a dinner given by a man called Hoek.  Other than the fact that such things never happened, a perfectly  normal request, so, one better go. Put on the shore  uniform--double-breasted navy blazer over a soft gray shirt and dark  wool trousers, and the tie, blue with a silver spaniel--and go.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe walked purposefully along the quay, thanking his stars as he  passed a Norwegian tanker berthed at the pier and caught the rich  aroma of aviation fuel. Of all the ways he didn't want to die. DeHaan  was tall, seemed tall, and lean, with strength in the arms and  shoulders. Regular features: a North Sea face, gray eyes, sometimes  cold, sometimes warm, with seafarer's lines webbed at the corners,  and rough, fair hair, almost brown, its first gray--he'd just turned  forty-one--visible in sunlight. A certain lift to this face; pride,  maybe, of profession not position--good as any man, better than none.  Thin lips, not far from a smile, that Dutch set of the mouth which  found the world a far more eccentric, and finally amusing, place than  its German versions to the east. He had big hands, appreciated by  women, who'd told him about it. Surprise to DeHaan, that idea, but  not unwelcome.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShould he have worn his uniform? The Hyperion Line had one, plain and  blue, for their captains, traditional on the first day of a voyage  and never seen again, but DeHaan disliked the thing. It wasn't, to  him, a real uniform, and a real uniform was what he'd wanted. In May  of 1940, when the conquering Germans had stripped out the filing  cabinets of the Royal Dutch Navy administration building in The  Hague, they'd surely found, and just as surely refiled for their own  purposes, the 1938 application of one DeHaan, Eric Mathias, virtually  begging for a commission, and service on a destroyer, or a torpedo  boat, or anything, really, that shot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe walked past the railway station and, a few minutes later, entered  the narrow streets behind the Bab el Marsa gate--another world.  Fragrant, the Maghreb. Stronger than he remembered; twenty-five years  at sea, he thought, and too many ports. Fresh orange peel on the  cobbled street, burning charcoal and--grilled kidney? He rather  thought it was, nothing else quite smelled like that. Ancient drains,  cumin, incense. And hashish, nothing else quite smelled like that. A  scent encountered now and again aboard the Noordendam, but one mostly  ignored it, as long as the men weren't on watch. He was himself, as  it happened, not entirely innocent of such things, the stuff had been  one of what Arlette called her vile little pleasures. One of many.  They'd used it one night in her room in the rue Lamartine, balancing  tiny morsels on a burning cigarette end in an ashtray and sucking up  the smoke through a tightly rolled hundred-drachma note he'd found in  his pocket. Then they'd made ferocious and wildly chaotic--Ah, this!  No, this! But what about this?--love, after which he'd fallen dead  asleep for ten hours then woke to make Arlette a colossal Dutch  pancake swimming in butter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the rue Raisuli, Arab music from a dozen radios, and two Spanish  Guardia, in their Napoleonic leather hats, strolling along in a way  that told the world they owned the street. Which, officially, they  did. Tangier had been since 1906 an International Zone, a free port  trading in currency, boys, and espionage. Now Spain had taken control  of the city, incorporated into Spanish Morocco, which meant that  Casablanca was French, ruled from Vichy, and Tangier Spanish, and  neutral, and governed by Madrid. But DeHaan and everybody else knew  better. It was, like Paris, one of those cities emphatically owned by  the people who lived in it. And how, DeHaan wondered, did Mijnheer  Hoek fit into all this? Trader? Emigre? Decadent? All three? Number  18 in the rue Raisuli turned out to be a restaurant, Al Mounia, but  not the sort of restaurant where important people gave private  dinners.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeHaan parted the bead curtain, stepped inside, and stood there for a  moment, looking lost. This can't be right, he thought. Tile floor,  bare wooden tables, a few customers, more than one reading a  newspaper with dinner. Then a man he took to be the proprietor came  gliding up to him, DeHaan said, \"Monsieur Hoek?\" and that turned out  to be the magic phrase. The man clapped his hands twice and a waiter  took DeHaan through the restaurant and out the back, into a courtyard  bounded by tenements where life went on at full pitch; six stories of  white laundry hung on lines strung across the sky, six stories of  families eating dinner by open windows. From there, DeHaan was led  through a damp tunnel into a second courtyard, an unlit, silent  courtyard, then down an alley to a heavy, elaborately carved door.  The waiter knocked and went on his way as a voice from within called  out, \"Entrez.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInside, a small, square room with no windows and, except for a  ceiling painted as the night sky--blue background, gold dots for  stars, a silver sickle moon on the horizon--there was only fabric.  Carpets covered the walls and the floor, a circle of hassocks was  gathered around a low table with a brass tray that occupied most of  its surface. As DeHaan entered, a man seated in a wheelchair--made  entirely of wood except for rubber tires on the spoked  wheels--extended his hand and said, \"Captain DeHaan, welcome, thank  you for coming, I am Marius Hoek.\" Hoek had a powerful grip. In his  fifties, he was pale as a ghost, with sheared fair hair and  eyeglasses that went opaque, catching the light of a lamp in the  corner, as he looked up at DeHaan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRising from their hassocks to greet him, the other dinner guests: a  woman in a chalk-stripe suit and a dark shirt, a man in the uniform  of a Dutch naval officer, and Wim Terhouven, owner of the Netherlands  Hyperion Line--his employer. DeHaan turned to Terhouven, as though  for explanation, and found him much amused, all sly grin, at the  prospect of the famously composed Captain DeHaan, who couldn't  imagine what the hell was going on and showed it. \"Hello, Eric,\"  Terhouven said, taking DeHaan's hand in his. \"The bad penny always  turns up, eh?\" He patted DeHaan on the shoulder, don't worry, m'boy,  and said, \"May I present Juffrouw, ah, Wilhelm?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFormally, DeHaan shook her hand. \"Just Wilhelm will do,\" she said.  \"Everybody calls me that.\" She wore no makeup, had fine, delicate  features, was about thirty-five years old, he guessed, with thick,  honey-gold hair cut very short and parted on the side.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"And,\" Terhouven said, \"this is Commander Hendryk Leiden.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeiden was broad and bulky, bald halfway back, with a drinker's  purplish nose, a sailor's wind-chapped complexion, and a full beard.  \"Good to meet you, Captain,\" he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Come sit down,\" Terhouven said. \"Enjoy the walk over here?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeHaan nodded. \"It's the same restaurant?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The private room--who says it has to be upstairs?\" He laughed. \"And,  on the way, a taste of the real Tangier, assassins behind every door.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Well, that or couscous.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilhelm liked the joke. \"It's good, Al Mounia, a local favorite.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeHaan lowered himself onto a hassock as Terhouven poured him a glass  of gin from an old-fashioned ceramic jug. \"Classic stuff,\" he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"They sell this in Tangier?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTerhouven snorted. He had a devil's beard and the eyes to go with it.  \"Not this they don't. This came across on a trawler in May of '40 and  flew with me all the way from London, just for your party. Real  Geneva, made in Schiedam.\" He tapped the label, hand-lettered and  fired into the glazed surface.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"My friends,\" Leiden said, \"with your permission.\" He stood, glass  held high, and the others, except for Hoek, followed his example.  Leiden paused for a long moment, then said, \"De Nederland.\" In one  voice, they echoed his words, and DeHaan saw that Hoek, knuckles  white where his hand gripped the arm of the chair, had raised himself  off the seat to honor the toast. They drank next to victory, Hoek's  offering, and, from Wilhelm, success in new ventures, as Terhouven  caught DeHaan's eye and gave him a conspiratorial flick of the  eyebrows. Then it was up to DeHaan, who'd been desperate for the  right words from the moment Leiden lifted his glass. Finally, as the  others turned to him in expectation, he said, quietly, \"Well then, to  absent friends.\" This was conventional and wellworn but, on that  night, with those friends in a Europe held by barbed wire and  searchlights, it came back to life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTerhouven said, \"Amen to that,\" and began to refill the glasses. When  he was done he said, \"I propose we drink to Captain Eric DeHaan, our  guest of honor, who I know you will come to appreciate as I have.\"  DeHaan lowered his eyes, and was more than grateful when the toast  had been drunk and the group returned to conversation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTerhouven told the story of his flight from London, on a Sunderland  flying boat, his fellow passengers mostly men with briefcases who  were rather pointedly disinclined to make conversation. A nighttime  journey, hours of it, \"just waiting for the Luftwaffe.\" But then,  \"the most beautiful dawn sky, somewhere off the coast of Spain, the  sea turning blue beneath us.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHoek glanced at his watch. \"Dinner should appear any moment now,\" he  said. \"I took the liberty of ordering--I hope you don't mind, it's  better if you give them time.\" A good idea, it seemed, they were  happy enough to wait, the table talk wandering here and there. You  had to be Dutch, DeHaan thought, to know that the gin was at work.  Not much to be seen on the exterior, everyone calm and thoughtful,  attentive, in no hurry to take the floor. They were, after all,  strangers, for the most part, together for an evening in a foreign  city, who shared little more than citizenship in a conquered nation,  and its corollary, a certain quiet anger common to those who cannot  go home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Years since I've been back,\" Hoek said to Terhouven. \"Came out here  in, oh, 1927. Looking for opportunity.\" An unvoiced naturally  lingered at the end of his sentence--Holland was a trading nation  which had, for centuries, used the whole world as its office, so  commerce in foreign climes was something of a national commonplace.  \"And I found a way to buy a small brokerage, in ores and minerals,  then built it up over the years. They mine lead and iron, in the  south, and there's graphite, cobalt, antimony, asbestos. That's in  addition to the phosphates, of course. That pays the rent.\"New York Times bestselling author of Blood of Victory [quote]-- Janet Maslin, The New York Times","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304841793765,"sku":"NP9780812967968","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812967968.jpg?v=1767724721","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/dark-voyage-isbn-9780812967968","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}