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armed?”
    This was not a bad guess. Germany had armed merchant freighters and they’d been more than efficient. Sailing under false flags, with guns cleverly concealed, they approached unsuspecting ships, then showed their true colors, took the crews prisoner, and sank the ships or sent them off to Germany. One such raider had recently captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet, which mattered because whale oil was converted to glycerine, used for explosives.
    But Leiden smiled and shook his head. “Not that we wouldn’t like to, but no.”
    “Well, of course I’ll do it, whatever it is,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”
    “What about them? They serve on the
Noordendam,
under your command.”
    DeHaan nodded, as though that were the answer. In fact, such business as Leiden had in mind was first of all secret, but sailors went ashore, got drunk, and told whores, or anybody in a bar, their life story.
    Leiden leaned forward and lowered his voice—
now the truth
. “Look,” he said, “the fact is that all Dutch merchant ships that survived the invasion are to come under the control of what’s called the Netherlands Ministry of Shipping, and most will then be under the management of British companies, which would put the
Noordendam
in convoy on the Halifax run, or down around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Suez Canal to the British naval base at Alexandria. But that won’t happen because the Royal Dutch Navy has chartered her from the Hyperion Line, at a rate of one guilder a year, with a Dutch naval officer in command.”
    DeHaan saw that Leiden and Terhouven were looking at him, waiting for a reaction. “Well, it seems we’ve been honored,” he said, meaning no irony at all. They truly had been, to be chosen in this way, though he suspected it would be honor bought at a high price.
    “You have,” Terhouven said.
Now live up to it.
    “It’s not final,” Leiden said, “but there’s a good possibility that your sister ships will be run by British companies.”
    “Lot of nerve, they have,” Terhouven said. “What’s the old saying—‘nation of pirates’?”
    “Yes,” DeHaan said. “Like us.”
    They all had a laugh out of that. “Well, it’s just for the duration,” Leiden said.
    “No doubt,” Terhouven said sourly. The Netherlands Hyperion Line had come into existence in 1918, with Terhouven and his brother first chartering, then buying, at a very good price, a German freighter awarded as part of war reparations to France. Governments and shipowners, over the centuries, forever had their noses in each other’s business—bloody noses often the result.
    “You’ve been at this a long time,” DeHaan said to Leiden.
    “Since 1916, as a young ensign. I tried to get out, once or twice, but they wouldn’t let me go.”
    This was not necessarily good news to DeHaan, who’d taken some comfort in Leiden’s being, from the look of him, an old seadog. But now Leiden went on to describe himself as “an old deskdog,” waiting a beat for a chuckle that never came.
    “Haven’t been to sea all that much. Not at all, really,” Leiden said. Then smiled in recollection and added, “We never got out of Holland—six of us from the section—until August. Snuck down into Belgium one hot night and stole a little fishing smack, in Knokke-le-Zoute. Hardly any fuel in the damn thing—that’s how the Germans keep them on the leash—but there was a sail aboard and we managed to get it rigged. All of us were in uniform, mind you, because we didn’t want to get shot as spies if they caught us. We drifted around in the dark for a time—there was a good, heavy sea running that night—while our two amateur sailing enthusiasts had a,
spirited
discussion about which way to go. Then we realized what we looked like, ‘bathtub full of admirals’ somebody said, and we had to laugh. Office navy, that’s us.”
    DeHaan glanced at Terhouven and saw that they’d both managed polite smiles—Leiden may