2 November 1942: General Montgomery to Chief of the Imperial General Staff: I think he [Rommel] is now ripe for a real hard blow… It is going in tonight and… if we succeed it will be the end of Rommel’s army.
Same evening. Adolf Hitler to Field Marshal Rommel: I and the German people are watching the heroic defensive battle waged in Egypt with faithful trust in your powers of leadership and in the bravery of the German-Italian troops under your command… You can show your troops no other way than that which leads to victory or to death.
‘All right, then.’ Max Looff glanced up at Franz Walther, Willi Heusinger and the quartermaster, Oelricher. They were round the table in the wardroom – Oelricher by invitation, since he messed next door with the engine room artificers and the coxswain. Looff said, ‘Comments of a constructive nature will be welcome.’
U 702 was rolling heavily on the surface twenty miles north of the convoy. It was afternoon now. They’d spent the forenoon reloading one torpedo tube and bringing in the spares from the external stowage in the casing. Most of the reload fish were carried internally, except for those two outside the pressure-hull, one for’ard and one aft, but they’d now been moved in through the hatches and secured in the racks. The weather hadn’t made it an easy operation, by any means, but as they were bound to need all their torpedoes and conditions weren’t about to improve, Looff had opted to do it while it was still just feasible: one fish at a time, first stemming the sea with a stern hatch open, then turning stern-to for the same job for’ard. He’d advised the other Drachen group captains who’d used any torpedoes to do the same. Looff had expended three so far, which left him with eleven.
He was steering northeast at six knots, which was the convoy’s present rate of advance – according to Drachen Six, Ernst Pöhl, who was shadowing from the quarter. Pöhl estimated the Brits were making seven to seven and a half, but with a zigzag taken into account it came down effectively to about six. And at this low speed, with wind and sea on the beam, U 702 was behaving like a drunken cow. It was tempting to dive, get under all the rough stuff, but he wanted to keep a lookout for other members of the group who were close by, and it could be put up with at least until the battery was fully charged. It was rather a luxury, too, to be operating in this zone where there was no chance at all of being jumped on by aircraft. Meanwhile there were signals to be sent and received, and after he’d finalised this plan of action for tonight and passed precise orders to each of the other COs he’d take her a bit farther along the convoy’s track before he dived. The peace and quiet was something to look forward to: and you could still use wireless, by shoving the mast up.
‘The first point to note is that the convoy has been regrouped, during the forenoon. Six columns only – so it’s a somewhat tighter formation covering a smaller area. Not exactly to our advantage, I admit, but – well, can’t help whittling ’em down, can we?’
It was a blow that Knappe, Drachen Four, had been lost last night. Werner Knappe had managed to get part of a signal out, just before the end: he’d been hit by gunfire from the escort’s only destroyer, and hadn’t been able to dive, and then another hit had blown off the diesel intakes and swamped the engines. So he’d had to stop and take his punishment: the signal had cut off in the middle of a word.
Ernst Pöhl had missed a wonderful chance, early this morning. Probably because of increased wave-height limiting his periscope vision. The passenger liner had dropped right astern of the convoy; she’d been on her own, a sitting duck, and Pöhl had been just too late catching-on to this situation. The convoy had slowed to allow the straggler to catch up, and before Pöhl had been able to get inside torpedo range the steamer had been enfolded in the convoy’s embrace again: worse still, the destroyer, having got her there, was starting an A/S sweep back southward, directly towards him. As he was there primarily to shadow, not to make single-handed attacks, he’d got out of the way, swiftly. It had been an intelligent bit of guesswork on the part of the escort commander, Looff considered, to have realised that the odds were a U-boat would by that time have been trying to get into position to attack.
Pöhl and his Drachen Six had had a lucky break two nights ago. A shell from a trawler had hit him as he dived, very close to the convoy: the hit had been right aft, on the casing. It had scared the daylights out of everyone with its noise and percussion, but had done no damage to the pressure-hull or anything else that mattered, only tangled some steel up there. It was pure luck that Ernst wasn’t playing a harp duet with Werner Knappe, right at this minute: and lucky for everyone else up there too, since the only songs he’d ever known had been dirty ones. But there was a lesson in that experience – not to dismiss trawlers too lightly.
‘So.’ Looff’s pencil tapped the diagram he’d been working on. ‘Here’s the convoy, and these are the escorts as they were deployed last night. We can see it now, well enough – their stations and modus operandi. Corvettes: here, and here. These two stick rather closely to their own corners. And these three objects, the trawlers, are similarly limited. As, of course, they’d have to be, and it would be easier for us if they were not… The exception to the rule seems to be that when ships are torpedoed, the trawlers hang around them for rescue purposes, at least for a while, and this of course leaves certain sectors open to attack. My idea last night was based on this factor: to have one assault by several boats create alarm and confusion, and then three more of us coming in to reap the harvest. Unfortunately it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped – and tonight, therefore, we’ll make one simultaneous attack, as shown here.’
From each bow of the convoy a U-boat would approach at an angle of about thirty degrees to the line of advance. It was a reasonably good bet that these two – they’d be Drachens Eight and Five – would draw the full attention of the two corvettes, who’d romp out after them. This would leave the centre open except for the destroyer, which if it stuck to last night’s system would be placed centrally and poised to rush out ahead to break up attacks before they got in close. So for the entertainment of the destroyer – whose captain was obviously the escort commander – Drachens Two and Three would attack the convoy head-on, midway between Drachens Eight and Five and with about three thousand metres between them initially. Whichever the destroyer picked on, the other would go on through, while the one attacked would dive and be ready to surface and press in again as soon as the destroyer diverted to the other.
‘This way I believe we can’t fail to get at least one boat into the front of the convoy with a free hand to pick targets, and no escorts to interfere – they’ll be busy elsewhere, at least for some time. And of course if they cease to be busy, those boats can then surface and wade in, help themselves… Meanwhile Drachen Eight and Drachen Five, who’ve come in on the bows, will either dive and re-surface, or dodge round their attendant corvettes – they’ll have the speed advantage – and come in again on the flanks. Simultaneously with this, Drachens Six and Seven will sweep in from port and starboard – here, and here – to attack from the quarters or astern. If the flank trawlers – these boys – should be drawn towards Drachens Four and/or Five, then the quarters will be undefended; otherwise the rear would be the place – just one trawler in the way shouldn’t be much of a problem for the combined talents of Oberleutnants Pöhl and Horsacker… Eh?’
‘Excellent, sir.’ Heusinger nodded. ‘You’ll have ’em by the balls. But may I ask—’
‘Yeah.’ Franz Walther had been about to speak when the first lieutenant had annoyed him by jumping in first. ‘You didn’t say what we’ll be doing, sir.’
‘I’ve saved that until last.’ Looff pointed, with the pencil’s tip. ‘We start up here, somewhere between Köning and Becker.’ Those were Drachens Two and Three, coming in frontally, from the northeast. ‘My intention is to move in wherever the door’s open, depending on which way the cat jumps. We’ll be just far enough out to control the start of it, then to take advantage of results as they show up. I would guess this scheme should give us at least six kills tonight: and what I would hope—’ he raised a hand with two fingers crossed – ‘is that the convoy will be opened up so well that I can get right inside it. I want that passenger ship. Also, there are two tankers in there.’
Franz Walther murmured, ‘Passengers.’ He wrinkled his blunt nose. ‘The Dönitz doctrine?’
It was a kind of joke, from the U-boat men’s angle. Flag Officer U-boats’ orders in the context of killing human beings as well as the ships they sailed in had been cleverly ambiguous; this was what made it mildly amusing, to the sea-going cynic. The issue was whether crews as well as ships were legitimate targets, and the admiral had contented himself with pointing out that without crews, Allied ships couldn’t sail. The logical conclusion was that for men to drown couldn’t be at all a bad thing. It pleased some U-boat captains to take it a few steps further: for instance, when time and circumstances permitted, to destroy a ship’s boats on their davits by riddling them with machine-gun fire before torpedoing the ship. Others felt differently, sharing the traditional instinct of the seaman that a man in the water was a life to be saved.
Looff told Walther, ‘What I’m thinking of is my score. That liner’s a fair size.’
Heusinger suggested, smiling, ‘Thinking of bonfires too, sir?’
That old fable… Looff had a suspicion that Franz Walther knew the truth of it – that it was rubbish. Walther was smart, and saw through things: whereas this self-ingratiating Willi Heusinger was really still a boy, and typical of the kind who’d enjoy having a CO who laughed when he watched tankers burn… How would he like to know, Looff wondered, that the same CO, alone in his bunk at nights, often woke shaking like a man in fever – in a helpless, mother-seeking funk?
As likely as not Franz Walther knew it. Or guessed. He’d been around, seen other captains in similar shape. You tried to disguise it, but – well, nobody else succeeded. And the top brass ignored it, because they wanted you at sea, wanted the last gasp out of you… This was something that Looff had come to recognise and cling to during those few days in the base just recently: that practically everyone had trouble with his nerves. After a while… Not the new boys, who were so busy being heroes: but after a certain stage, when you’d come to the conclusion that you were not a hero and saw the stark reality – that the odds were you’d drown… If there was any heroism at all, he’d decided, it was being like this and carrying on, putting up with the shakes and the mental screams and assuring yourself between whiles that you were OK, could see it through… Walther’s brown eyes were on him, thoughtful, understanding: and if he was aware of that aspect of it too there’d be no contempt in such insight.
Oelricher cleared his throat, and spoke for the first time. ‘If I might make one comment, sir. It’s he nodded – ‘excellent… But wouldn’t it be more effective – that’s to say, really guaranteed to succeed – if we postponed it twenty-four hours, so we’d have the other two as well?’
There’d been a signal from Kernéval to the effect that two Sixth Flotilla boats who’d been on their way from Brest down to the Mediterranean were being diverted to join the Drachen group. Otto Meusel and Klaus Ziegner were travelling in company and had been ordered to rendezvous with Drachen One as soon as possible. They’d be here some time tomorrow and they’d become Drachens Nine and Ten. It would have been inviting bad luck, Looff thought, to have re-allocated Werner Knappe’s number in the group.
He agreed with his quartermaster, up to a point.
‘You’re right, of course. But there’s no reason to wait for them. After all, our lord and master is crying out for blood: and time isn’t completely unlimited.’
The rest of that signal from U-boat headquarters had said,
This convoy with its weak defence should be annihilated. There can be no excuse for even one ship emerging from the air gap. The Black Pit must swallow it.
‘Tomorrow night, if this plan has proved itself – and mind you, we may learn some lessons and find it can be improved – well, we’ll repeat it, only in a more elaborate form with nine boats instead of seven. I’ve already considered this, in fact. All things being equal, I’d employ the newcomers as back-ups to Drachens Eight and Five – two more attackers going in on the bows at the same time as the two – or three, counting ourselves – from ahead. Well, Oelricher?’
The quartermaster nodded. ‘I would say there’s no doubt at all you’ll be giving the C-in-C exactly what he wants, sir.’
‘But don’t we always?’
Franz Walther chuckled at his own humour. Black-rimmed nails, greasy hair over his collar, face as fuzzy as a dog’s and with discoloured teeth that could have been a dog’s too. Even his eyeballs looked as if they could do with a good rinse. And he was as efficient a chief engineer as you’d find afloat. Heusinger was looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion in his expression: he wasn’t used to Walther yet, and they were such contrasting types – Heusinger youthfully fresh, well groomed and clean… Looff, who was neither as scruffy as his engineer nor as immaculate as his first lieutenant, said, ‘I intend to give him what he wants. Even before that signal I had decided—’
‘Signal, sir.’
He glanced up – at Kreis, the PO telegraphist. Kreis said, ‘From Drachen Six, sir.’
Looff read, Convoy reduced speed to four knots at 1515.
‘Well, I’ll be – damned…’ He looked up at Walther, who was squinting in an attempt to read the scrawl upside-down. ‘We even have a few extra days now in which to make a job of it.’
Jack Everard lay in a depression that was no more than a fold in the ground, in roughly the geometric centre of something like four acres of sloping stubble. Beside the slot he was lying in was a low outcrop of rock and some gorse and nettles; the rock would account for the fact that these few square yards in the middle of the field had never been ploughed. He was wet, cold, hungry, and his left ankle wouldn’t support his weight. He’d used Frank Trolley’s knife to cut and trim a stick, in the woods where he’d hidden before daylight came and from which he’d moved only a few hours ago; using the stick he was able to hobble along, slowly. The knife had been under the edge of a platter on the table in that village where they’d had the meal: it was the kind you’d expect to be kept in a sheath, but someone must have used it earlier that evening for cutting meat, and Trolley had managed to liberate it. Frank’s word for surreptitious acquisitions, that was. Jack had pulled it out of Frank’s sock, in the early hours of this morning beside the railway line, and now it was in his own.
This was a good hide, as hides went, because it didn’t look like one. A platoon of soldiery had been through the wood where he’d been earlier; that had been the sort of place you’d search for a man on the run. They’d reappeared on the road down there at the bottom, re-embarked in their trucks and gone off to draw some other covert a long time ago now. There’d been no reason for them to have beaten over this field: only someone unusually astute or experienced in such matters would have guessed there could be cover for a man here, even though from the road below the gorse must have been in plain sight just as the crossroads was from up here. There were some small houses around it, and several times military vehicles had stopped, soldiers getting out for a smoke while others knocked on doors. Now, the crossroads was deserted, and the occupants of the houses weren’t visible.
He wondered again whether the sensible thing might not be to give himself up. He had one lump of hard bread in his pocket and no idea where the next bite after that might come from… The worst aspect was he hadn’t got far enough from the place where he’d jumped – and where they’d have found Frank Trolley’s body, which he’d had no time or way of doing anything about. The reason for this, of course, was the sprained ankle, which had slowed him down so much.
There was still no movement below: but smoke rising from a chimney and a bicycle propped against a gatepost showed there were people around somewhere. If he just stood up now, hobbled downhill, surrendered?
What made him reluctant to do so was the fact it would be so irreversible an action. Here and now he had his options open, to some extent. There was no guard with a rifle trained on him, no wire, lights, machine-guns on towers. If he got up and staggered down to the houses, there damn soon would be. Earlier when he’d considered this there’d been troops about, and he’d stayed put for fear they’d shoot if he moved: it would have saved them trouble. But giving oneself up to civilians might provide some small measure of insurance: there’d at least be witnesses to the fact he had surrendered. On the other hand he’d be putting himself back in their trap, possibly for years. And Fiona alone in London: or before long not alone…
Hold out for just a day, he told himself. Then maybe another – until the leg was back in commission and the local hue and cry might have died down. They might give up, thinking he’d got away? Then it would only be a matter of moving south until one hit either the frontier or Lake Constance. Which could be negotiated – somehow…
But that was it: the state of freedom, uncomfortable as it was at the moment, had taken a lot of achieving and did not have to be thrown away if it could be (a) prolonged, (b) endured. The priority had to be Food, Acquisition of: then some kind of shelter, and eventually, mobility.
Move north, initially? Which the searchers would not expect? If one could move at all, go north, lie up for a few days and then slip southward to the border?
Having come this far – and cost old Frank his life?
Frank Trolley wouldn’t have made the train-jump if he – Jack – hadn’t been so set on it. Even then he’d had his doubts about it. Jack remembered sitting there beside him and thinking while the train beat out its drumbeat rhythm for mile after mile, He doesn’t have the compulsion that I have: with him it’s only duty…
He’d have been alive now, if one hadn’t—
Aircraft. He turned his head slowly, carefully, and saw it flying into sight over the wooded shoulder of the hill on a course parallel to the south-leading lane. On that course it would pass almost right overhead, and it was at no more than – he guessed, having turned his face down and pressed himself into the trough of muddy weeds – three or four hundred feet.
From the air, he supposed this might look like a hide. And perhaps a man on his face in a shallow groove in the middle of a field of stubble would be seen from up there for precisely what he was. The din was growing, a loud bang-banging from the light plane’s engine: it was a monoplane, small, khaki or green in colour, clattering through the sky. A military spotter-plane, probably.
Getting fainter now… Turned away?
He didn’t move. No point at all in moving… His quick glimpse of the plane was imprinted on his brain, and to get rid of it he turned his thoughts to the road below and the pasture on its other side – and wondered whether if the flyer had seen him he’d find some place to land. But of course, he’d have a wireless… Definitely receding now, in any case. Thinking of the road, crossroads and houses, he saw again in his mind’s eye that bicycle leaning against a gate.
The plane was flying south. On a weaving, searching course – which accounted for its swing away just at this point – but definitely leaving. For the moment, anyway.
A bicycle wasn’t a difficult thing to hide, even in open countryside. He was thinking ahead, to a time when he’d need to get rid of it… If at dusk it was still there: and if one could crawl to the far hedge and then down in its shadow to the lane, then – hobbling – over to the gateway where the bike might still be. Then, if it was, the question would be whether an ankle you couldn’t walk on might be sound enough to push a pedal.
Mike Scarr, swaying to the ship’s wild motion and with his sextant at his eye, yelled ‘Now!’ The bosun’s mate’s bark into the voice-pipe matched that shout, and in the plot Scarr’s assistant recorded the chronometer time to within half a second. Scarr peered closely at the sextant, to read off the altitude of Deneb, the last of the three stars he’d shot; he’d get position lines from the three of them that would intercept to give Harbinger’s precise position. He knew already that Madeira was roughly 170 miles on the starboard bow, but until he’d worked these sights out he couldn’t have guaranteed the dead-reckoning position within ten miles or so.
He looked around now, lowering the sextant and holding it against his belly to keep it out of the intermittent spray. The horizon was almost invisible as the last of the daylight leaked away. Half a minute after taking that last sight he couldn’t have taken another, for that lack of an horizon. The ships of the convoy, spread from right ahead to broad on the starboard bow, were becoming indistinct, so that each looked exactly like its neighbours and all of them merging into darkening seascape, encroaching night.
‘I’ll go down, sir.’
They were still closed up for dusk action stations. The skipper – on his high seat, and as usual with binoculars at his eyes – only grunted. It was about as much as anyone was getting out of him, at present. He’d seemed to come out of his shell – or try to – twice during the first dog watch, though: once when he’d told Carlish, ‘After this trip, Sub, I can see no reason why I shouldn’t sign a watch-keeping certificate for you’ – and Carlish had been overjoyed – and then a bit later he’d asked Matt Warrimer whether everything was all right below; meaning in effect whether Warrimer felt he’d got control of things in his new role as second-in-command. Warrimer had assured him quickly that there were no problems: and he’d been noticeably glad to be asked, to be putting on record the fact he’d slipped so effortlessly into that very demanding job. Scarr had seen and recognised this; and as a rather easy-going RN officer himself, Warrimer the Volunteer Reserve man’s go-getting attitude rather amused him. Scarr thought Warrimer would probably be just the same when he was back in the City in his bowler: a thruster, dedicated to a kind of cheerful one-upmanship.
The skipper had a deckchair set up behind his tall seat now, and he’d been taking cat-naps in it during the day. Since dawn this morning he hadn’t been off the bridge for more than a few minutes at a time.
Starsights had been possible because a rising wind had ripped holes in the cloud-cover, permitting glimpses of the heavens. The wind was about force five, with a sea to match, and the forecast was for an increase to force six. Scarr realised, taking another glance upward as he left the bridge, that there’d be some patchy moonlight later. It might be a factor to the advantage of the U-boats, who’d been doing a lot of talking, up ahead and on the convoy’s beams. Gritten had come to the bridge earlier and told the skipper, ‘Never ’eard so much yacking from one pack, sir!’
They’d be planning their night’s tactics. And a moon would help them – if they used it carefully – by reducing the advantage of the escorts’ RDF.
He was in the chartroom, working out his sights with the aid of logarithm and cosine tables, when he heard the order passed to relax from action stations. So it would be dark up there now: the ship’s company would get down to a hasty supper, getting it finished and the messtraps cleared away as fast as possible, before the night’s troubles started.
There… He had the position. A neat intersection, and the DR estimate hadn’t been far out either. Having pencilled the date and time against it on the chart, he entered the latitude and longitude in his notebook. At the moment, SL 320 was pretty well up to schedule – thanks to having been a few hours ahead of it yesterday. He was shutting the notebook, finishing, when the door slid open and the skipper came in.
‘Know where we are?’
‘Close to where we reckoned, sir.’ Scarr moved over. ‘And where we’re supposed to be.’
‘That won’t apply much longer.’
At four knots, the Burbridge’s best speed now, they’d be losing something like seventy miles a day. Even without any more diversions. He was checking it out on the chart, walking the dividers up the marked track. He muttered, ‘Just how late we’ll be getting to position B…’
‘Shall I—’
‘No. Go and get something to eat, pilot. Or some fresh air. You’ll be stuck in the plot again all night.’
Scarr glanced at his captain again, as he turned away. Telling him he needed this, that or the other, for God’s sake! Everard looked about ten years older than he had a few days ago. Warrimer had mentioned it to Ian Mackenzie, the doctor, and Mackenzie had reacted irritably… ‘If he doesn’t sleep, won’t eat, and worries himself sick, what can I do about it?’
Scarr had never thought of his captain as a worrier.
The door slid shut. Alone, Nick found the answer to that question of arrival at position B, the point where they were due to alter to port again: and the answer was they’d be twelve hours late. Instead of midnight tomorrow, noon the day after. So – and here was the vital aspect of it, on top of the fact they’d be in U-boat territory for several days longer than intended – he took Cruance’s tracing out, to check how far astern of SL 320 ‘Torch’ convoy KMS 1 – the main assault force from the Clyde and Loch Ewe – would be crossing. Whether indeed there’d be any margin at all…
Well, there would be. And it would be adequate. But nothing like as much of a gap as had been intended.
Cruance, and others, who by now would have read a signal despatched from Harbinger four hours ago, would be having kittens. The signal gave them SL 320’s position, course and reduced speed, losses to date, estimated strength of the U-boat pack and the destruction of one of them, and it had ended with a request for reinforcement of the totally inadequate escort force. Cruance and company would be biting their nails down to the knuckles: they wouldn’t have any escorts available for reinforcement, and they’d be sweating at the danger to their ‘Torch’ convoys. And understandably…
The Americans would be all right. This convoy’s track for the past three days had coincided almost exactly with the route the US assault force would be following after its loop southward. UGF 1 with its escorting Task Force 34, carrying 34,000 troops under Lieutenant General George S Patton and aiming for beaches around Casablanca, would be ploughing this very patch of ocean at midnight on the fourth – two days’ time – and they’d have a clear passage, U-boat-free water right up to the Moroccan coast.
He’d pulled out a pipe, and he was filling it when the chartroom door slid back again. PO Steward Foster edged in, balancing himself and a tray against the ship’s gyrations. And talking before he was even through the door: ‘Got the buzz you was off the bridge at last, sir. Thought you might care for a bite before you goes back up. Coffee, this is – strong, way you like it, sir – and in this dish ‘ere…’
‘Thoughtful of you, Foster.’
‘’ave to keep body an’ soul together, sir, don’t we?’ Charley Foster put the tray down on the chart. Rattling on… ‘Specially since they say our playmates is about to ’ave another go at us.’ He was keeping up the patter, Nick appreciated, so as to get him to start eating before he remembered he wasn’t hungry. Like a nanny with a small child: except for some of the terminology… ‘Right lot of sods as they are… You’ll find this is quite a tasty drop of corned-dog ’ash, sir…’
‘Stand by to surface.’
‘Stand by to surface, sir.’ Wykeham glanced round. ‘Check main vents.’
The Count was dressed as a Sicilian peasant. Loose trousers, rough shirt, sheepskin jacket that smelt of sheep, and a shapeless hat. He was sitting at the wardroom table, waiting, and very nervous now that the moment had almost arrived.
‘Depth?’
‘Forty-one fathoms, sir.’
They’d spent the last few hours of daylight making a periscope reconnaissance of the area. There’d been nothing about, either afloat or on shore, to suggest the enemy could have been expecting a visit.
The Count had asked again, this morning, ‘Why, truly, I do not have commando this time, for the boat and so forth?’
Ruck had spread his hands ‘Count, I do not know!’
‘Before, you say there is no commando available for me?’
‘I was guessing, that’s all – what reason there could be. I know a lot less than you do, Count. Didn’t you put this question to whoever gives you your orders?’
The Count had only shrugged. But it was obviously bothering him a lot. Paul had suggested privately to Ruck that he, Paul, might take the job on. ‘Wouldn’t be much to it – just paddling one of those things half a mile and bringing it back again?’
Ruck had snapped, ‘The hell you will!’ And no explanation.
Paul was up for’ard now in the torpedo stowage compartments, chatting to CPO Ron Gaffney, the TI. The folboat had been hauled out of its rack and lay on the deck, with a line from its after end which would be taken up through the hatch when they’d surfaced. Paul and the second coxswain, Leading Seaman Lovesay, were the only two men who’d go up top; from down here the torpedo-men would manhandle the canoe up into the open hatch, and Paul and Lovesay would drag it up and launch it, while the hatch was being shut and clipped again.
The Count was carrying papers identifying him as Carlo Paoli, and a medical certificate proving he was a consumptive, which would explain his not having been enlisted. He also had a sealed package of documents taped to his ribs inside the shirt. Paul had shaken a hand that was far too soft to be either a canoer’s or a peasant’s, and told him, ‘See you in a couple of nights, Count.’
‘Perhaps.’
The quiet hero, going to his doom. But the brown eyes were definitely scared.
‘Ready to surface, sir.’
Ruck was at the periscope, circling, taking a last look round. He pulled his head back from the lenses and asked Newton, the asdic operator, ‘Anything?’
Enemy propellers, Newton was listening for. Patrol boats: E-boats or MAS-boats, in ambush. It had been known.
‘Nothing at all, sir.’
Ruck snapped the handles up. ‘Surface!’
Air roared into the tanks, and hydroplanes swung to hard a-rise. The signalman pushed the lower hatch open then came down off the ladder to make way for Ruck, who climbed up into the tower – in seaboots and waterproof Ursula suit with its hood up, binoculars slung round his neck. The depthgauge needles were circling fast now: twenty-five feet – twenty – fifteen…
‘Ten feet, sir!’
At Wykeham’s yell, Ruck pulled off the second clip and flung the top lid open. Salt water rained down into the tower as Ultra lifted herself into the dark offshore silence, sea still sluicing away through the holes in her bridge deck as he climbed out of the hatch, dragged the voice-pipe cock open and took a preliminary all-round look with the naked eye. Then a more careful sweep around with glasses, while the signalman and a lookout emerged behind him. Two thirds of the surroundings consisted of black coastline; Ultra had been brought up with her stern to it, bow pointing at the open sea, but land enclosed her from beam to beam, Cape Zafferano to port and around the stern to Cape Cefalu on the other side.
Wykeham had stopped blowing. The submarine lay at rest in slightly loppy but well sheltered water. Weather-wise the canoeist should have few problems. Ruck called down, ‘Open fore hatch, up folboat. Ask our passenger to join me in the bridge.’ The signalman and the lookout moved like automatons, slowly and steadily turning with their glasses probing the darkness. Ruck had turned his attention to the shore.
They were getting the fore hatch open: he could hear the clangs as they worked at the clips inside. Then the Count arrived, shouldering against him. At that moment Ruck saw the two blue flashes.
‘There’s your man.’ He pointed. ‘Bang on time, and in the right place.’
They had to wait a full minute before the flashes were repeated. They came from the deepest recess of the bay, right astern, well to the east of the village of Termini.
Pitch dark, and very quiet. Aware of the closeness of that enemy coast, men kept their voices low… The Count didn’t speak at all. He’d been in such a sweat of anxiety all day that Ruck had been wondering how or why he’d ever got into this kind of work. But he did know a certain amount of Carlo Paoli’s background – a lot more than the Count knew he knew – and his sympathy was limited.
It had to be.
He heard the slam of the fore hatch shutting. So they’d already got the boat up on the casing and they’d be easing it over the side. He told his passenger, ‘Go on down, Count. Just keep your boat pointing at those flashes, whenever they show up, and you can’t go wrong. Same when we come back to collect you, aim for our flashes. And please be on time – I’m not allowed to hang around for long after I’ve shown a light. OK?’
Everard’s voice floated out of the dark: ‘Boat’s in the water, sir.’
‘He’s on his way.’ He took the Count’s arm, to help him over the side of the bridge, where footholds led down to the catwalk that ran around it. ‘Over you go. Good luck… See you in two nights’ time, Count.’
Carlo Paoli climbed over without answering. Ruck heard a murmur down there where Everard would be meeting him, leading him for’ard around the gun while Lovesay held the canoe alongside.
Paul murmured, ‘Easy does it. A bit slippery here.’ The Count’s heels were noisy on the casing. He was wearing farmers’ boots, while Paul was sure-footed in rubber soles. Lovesay, in more traditional seamanlike fashion, crouched barefooted on the casing’s edge, steadying the boat and also holding the double-bladed paddle. Paul found the Count’s hand, and shook it: it was inanimate, unresponsive, like shaking a dummy’s hand. He said, ‘Good luck. See you soon. I’ll have a tot of rum poured ready for you.’
‘Goodbye.’
It was all he said. He was shaking, panting with a shortness of breath induced by fear. They helped him into his boat: Ultra was lying low in the water so the transfer wasn’t difficult. Lovesay passed the paddle to him: ‘OK, sir?’ He didn’t answer. They angled the canoe out, and sent it clear of the submarine’s side with a push. Half a minute later it was moving shoreward, the paddle circling rather clumsily, with too much splash, and the course erratic. Darkness swallowed it. Paul and Lovesay climbed up into the bridge, where Ruck had just passed the order for three hundred revolutions on the diesels with a running battery charge both sides.
‘Well done, you two. Go on down now.’
The diesels rumbled into action. Ultra was to move east, dive off Cape Milazzo before daylight and spend a day and a half patrolling north of Messina. Then back here, to pick up the Count on the following night.
Paul said later, over a mug of tea at the wardroom table, ‘Wonder what our friend’s doing at this moment.’
Ruck glanced at him: after a pause he remarked, ‘It’s a fairly extraordinary operation, this.’
‘I know.’
‘What d’you know?’
‘The Count told me. He’s contacting local partisan leaders to alert them for very big landing operations both sides of Palermo – and in Sardinia, near Cagliari. Whole armies, tanks, the lot. I suppose this’ll mean the beginning of the end – particularly if we’re about to roll ’em up in the desert now.’
Ruck swallowed, put his mug down.
‘That what he told you?’
Paul nodded. ‘He warned me he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But as it’s going to start any minute now it can’t make much odds. I suppose this is what all the flap was about in Malta, rushing everyone out on patrol?’
Ruck shook his head. ‘I’ll be damned.’
Wykeham asked from his bunk, ‘Didn’t you know this, sir?’
‘There’s one thing I know for sure.’ He wagged his head again. ‘They’re pretty damn smart, our lot. My God they are.’
Jack’s right leg had done all the work while the injured one just suffered. He’d got down to the crossroads by crawling down the length of the hedge at the far side of the stubblefield: it had been dark before he’d risked moving out of the hide. Crossing the road, hobbling on his stick, had been the dangerous bit. But the bike had still been there: if it hadn’t, he didn’t know what he’d have done. There’d been no lights showing from the houses – blackout regulations, no doubt – and he’d got away without a sound except for the nerve-twisting squeak of the turning pedals. He’d turned into the lane that led north – north by west, to be accurate – using the Pole star for a leading mark.
He’d stopped now because there was a muddy track and a random-looking collection of farm buildings around it, just off this lane. In the glimmer of starlight the place looked deserted and neglected. There was a farmhouse – a cottage – and a barn with a sagging roof, and sheds that might have been old chicken-houses. No lights anywhere: but you wouldn’t have expected any.
He’d eaten the lump of hard bread while he’d been lying in his wet hole in the field. Hunger, as well as the ankle and the fact he was completely played-out, was a problem. At some periods he’d been wondering if he’d been stupid, whether if he was capable of travelling at all – which he was now proving he was – he shouldn’t have steered directly for the frontier, to get out as quickly as possible; whether this wasn’t a bit too clever… He’d covered about six or seven miles, he thought: it hadn’t been exactly fast travel, but it had been a lot faster than he’d have managed on foot. There’d been only one stop, a panic blundering into the ditch, bicycle and all, when a lorry without lights had come trundling round a bend. In the past half-hour or so nothing had moved except rabbits and scared pigeons making as much row as pheasants when they took off.
Ride on a mile or so, find a place to hide the bike, then hobble back and lie-up in one of those sheds?
Woodsmoke. He sniffed the air, and knew the farm was inhabited – which had been likely anyway, but which one could think about in two ways. For a hide pure and simple, an abandoned place might be safer… He wondered, forcing his tired brain along, Would it? Wouldn’t they tend to look twice at empty places? Well – anyway, the other aspect – there’d be food around. A farm that was being worked would surely have a few edible items: potatoes, swedes, corn – you could chew corn, blowing the chaff out…
He was probably more exhausted than he’d ever been. This was a factor one had not only to contend with but also to take into account – recognising that the urge to stop, rest, give up was part of that tiredness. One was not in a condition to arrive at major decisions: so postpone them, just hang on, and something might turn up… He told himself, as if he was addressing a subordinate, to ride on for a mile: if he didn’t come across a better place in that distance he’d hide the machine and come back here. As long as one didn’t bite off more than one could chew, allow daylight to catch one in the open: by dawn he had to be well hidden. Ditto bicycle: and not in the same place. He pushed off, began the painful one-footed pedalling again: squeak-squeak, squeak-squeak…
Astern, the sky glowed red over SL 320. A ship on fire: several torpedoes had found targets in the last quarter-hour. That blaze could be one of the two oilers.
‘Port twenty!’
Harbinger had just put one U-boat down – charged it, seen it dive and then plastered it with a shallow-set pattern of depth charges. She was turning back now because the battle had closed in around the convoy. Both corvettes were chasing RDF contacts – fresh ones, having had some before and lost them – most likely when they’d dived. The picture on the plot was a full one and fast-changing but what it amounted to was the U-boats were all around and attacking simultaneously: the chatter that Gritten had listened to during the day would have been the planning of what was happening now.
‘Midships.’ Warrimer saw the skipper checking ship’s head on the gyro repeater. ‘Steer two-one-five.’
At full revs, plunging southward. The moon was a glimmer through driven cloud: at intervals it had been giving quite a lot of light. Depth charges burst in deep, muffled thunder – a long way off; another torpedo-hit was like a vicious answer to that sound. The blaze surely had to be an oiler, although it didn’t look quite like that sort of fire: the two of them had been right in the centre of the convoy, they and the Burbridge placed like the kernel in a nut, encased… TBS stuttering in, Bearcroft taking it, Eagle, this is Fox, U-boat surfaced after depthcharging, engaging – out.
The bastards were everywhere…
‘Course two-one-five, sir!’
Explosion. A flash: like ammunition going up, or a tank of gasoline. And TBS again,
Eagle – Gannet… Convoy’s slightly out of shape, sir, but Opal’s in there somewhere trying to organise them. The one on fire is the Malibar, and Stella’s standing by her. The Springburn’s gone down and so has number twenty-four – the Harvest Moon. I have a new contact on three-five-five, three miles – investigating – out…
Two sunk, one burning, but no oiler… About five minutes ago, Warrimer remembered, the skipper had asked Guyatt for a report on what was happening on that side of the convoy; this had been his answer. But the five minutes had felt more like half an hour.
‘Range and bearing now, Sub?’
Wolstenholm bawled, ‘U-boat surfacing – red oh-five, sir!’
Against the glow from that burning ship – and close, easy to see… Warrimer was passing orders to his for’ard guns. Black, wet-gleaming hull emerging from the whitened waves: the German imagining the field was clear here, so he’d come up and cruise in undetected, draw some blood? Warrimer had his glasses on the filthy, predatory thing as A and B guns both fired and the skipper shouted, ‘Stand by the port thrower!’
The range was too short for anything except ramming: so he was about to lob a depth charge – like tossing a huge grenade… Guns rapid-firing, but the ship was bucking like mad and shellspouts had gone up right, left, short, over… Chubb called, ‘Port thrower ready, sir!’
Harbinger with the sea on her quarter, corkscrewing: there was a danger at high speed in these conditions that the screws might race in thin surface water as her bow dug in and she stood on her head like some old duck. When they’d first spotted the U-boat there’d been no-one visible in its bridge: the German captain would have become aware just about now that he wasn’t alone here. Shellspouts lifted short again: and the thing was diving… The skipper was leaning over the wheelhouse voice-pipe, judging his moment to start a turn and have her swinging as he lobbed the charge away into the patch of churned foam where the enemy was vanishing like a snake into its hole… ‘Starboard ten!’
Torpedo hit – distant… Harbinger responding to her rudder’s drag… ‘Thrower stand by… Fire!’
Looking aft, Warrimer saw the black cannister – the size of a tar barrel but packed with 750 lbs of high-explosive – flung out on a high, curving, forward-inclined trajectory, thrown that way by the ship’s own forward and swinging motion. Chubb’s voice echoed the skipper’s as he thumbed the firing button: now he was telling Timberlake to reload the thrower, and Warrimer guessed Timberlake would be snarling at the unnecessary instruction. Harbinger plunging with her head down as she turned… ‘Midships – meet her, cox’n…’
Warrimer had all guns loaded and trained out on that side. If the single charge had the extraordinary luck to hit the jackpot, bring the U-boat up, X gun and the point-fives would be in it too, this time. But if the skipper had driven his ship straight at the target so as to drop a shallow pattern, at such close quarters it would have been impossible not to ram; Harbinger could have staved-in her bow, or wrecked her screws as she ran over the submarine, and an incapacitated Harbinger was too high a price to pay for one dead U-boat, at this stage of the losing game.
A white mountain rose with thunder in its base. A great cauliflower-shape of sea flinging up… Warrimer told his guns, ‘Set range zero, point of aim that explosion, stand by!’
It was a toss-up: but the U-boat could suddenly be there, floundering…
‘Midships. Steer one-five-oh. One-eight-oh revolutions.’
Carlish called from the plot voice-pipe, ‘Surface contact bearing one-seven-five, four thousand one hundred yards, sir!’
Another one: two miles away. The froth was subsiding, sea boiling as it fell back into itself, wind-driven spray lashing away for several hundred yards and whipping the surface as white as if it had been painted. Guns trained and loaded, gun-layers’ fingers on the triggers, layers’ and trainers’ eyes against the rubber eye-pieces of their sighting telescopes. But no target yet.
‘Stand by one full pattern with settings one-fifty and two-fifty feet.’
He was altering course again: to run over the same spot, assume the U-boat would have held on towards the convoy: he’d drop a pattern, and Harbinger would be on course either to rejoin the convoy or to chase after that new RDF contact. The Germans were like fleas on a dog’s back tonight: except their bites were lethal. ‘Asdics?’
‘Nothing yet, sir.’
The water would still be churned-up, from the explosion of that charge: it was too lively a sea in any case, for good A/S results. If it got much worse there’d be interference to spoil the performance of the 271 RDF, too… Leading Seaman Garment yelled from the asdic cabinet, ‘Torpedoes approaching, port beam!’
A split second, for that to sink in… Then Nick’s shout – ‘Hard a-port, full ahead together!’
Looff swore. He was in the tower, on his seat at the attack periscope, and the destroyer’s racy profile had begun to shorten. She was swinging her bow into the direction of the attack, sea cascading like white fire as her engines flung her into the turn. Moonlight glittered diffusely through spray around the top lense of the periscope. There was still a chance, one of his three fish might still hit…
If in the next few moments the destroyer wasn’t blown to bits, she’d be counter-attacking with depth charges. Within seconds, he was going to have to go deep.
‘Torpedoes still running?’
‘Running, sir!’
They wouldn’t have run to that range yet, though…
Looff groaned in his mind, Please – one hit?
When he’d climbed out into U 702’s streaming bridge and found he was being shot at – one shell streaking overhead and another sending a column of white up close to starboard – he’d crash-dived to fifty metres, put his helm hard a-port and taken her right round in a fast spiral with full grouped-up battery power on the starboard screw. The single explosion had rocked her: it must have been close, considering that shallow-set charges were less effective than those in deeper water. But there’d been one over-riding thought in his mind: that this was the destroyer, its captain was the escort commander, and if he could be eliminated – after all, here he was, for God’s sake, out here on his own and there was a chance! – the rest of the job of butchering the convoy would present very little difficulty. It was the kind of opportunity that revealed itself in a split second, and part of Max Looff’s success as a U-boat captain had been to recognise such openings and take instant advantage of them.
The destroyer was bow-on now: being aimed so accurately at U 702’s periscope that you could imagine the Brit could see it. Which was an impossibility in this sea… He’d known where the torpedoes had come from, that was all, he was charging down the tracks. Looff’s hands were tight on the periscope handles and there was an incipient tremble in his taut muscles: if there was going to be a hit he wanted to see it, and it could come at any second!
But you’d hear it anyway. And he ought, he knew, to be taking her down now…
Holding his breath. Mesmerised. Shaking. Lips drawn back, teeth clenched…
He’d gasped, as if something inside had snapped, and his right hand had moved without being told to, depressing the lever that sent the ‘scope down. Its motor humming as it sank, shaft glistening with grease and saltwater droplets. It was as if the decision had been made for him, some voice other than his own rapping out ‘Flood Q, two hundred metres, full ahead both motors, starboard twenty!’
Going deep – to safe depth – and turning away from the direction of the convoy because the Brit up there – who’d be over the top and shovelling out depth bombs at any moment – would expect him to turn towards it… Climbing down into the control room as his boat angled steeply, spiralling to starboard with Q quick-dive tank flooded to drag her down all the faster, he saw questions in several pairs of eyes. He shrugged, muttered, ‘Can’t win ’em all.’ A glance from Franz Walther, at the smile on his captain’s sweat-gleaming face: Walther had turned back again, busy with the trim, but with a faintly sardonic look as if the astute brain behind that oil-smeared, hairy countenance had recorded the phoniness of the smile, seen the quivering of nerves behind it… Screws raced overhead, churning like a meat-grinder. Looff felt a dryness in his throat: he glanced instinctively at the depth gauge and saw the needle swinging past the hundred-metre mark. The deep-dive capability that would take them right down to two hundred metres was a life-saver. He told Heusinger, who’d been gazing at him with that blank, really rather stupid expression he tended to assume in times of crisis, ‘It was worth a try.’
A nod: with surprise, at having been favoured with such an explanation. Even an apology, it might have been! There was interest in Oelricher’s covert glance as well. But it had been worth trying: if it had come off, the success would have been of major significance. It would also have been regarded as a tactical master-stroke, knocking out the one really effective escort, and escort commander, as a prelude to massacre.
Depth charges thundered – astern, and well overhead. One all on its own, a maverick deeper than the others, burst close enough to make the lighting flicker. Looff crowed, with his head back and his hands on his hips, ‘We’ve heard hundreds much closer than that, my friends!’ Then – ‘Slow ahead both motors.’
Three torpedoes had been expended. Leaving eight. Only two tubes had torpedoes in them, though, one for’ard tube and the single stern tube. Depth gauge needle passing the hundred and fifty mark… Walther, working at the trim, was taking some of the angle off the boat, to slow the rate of descent, and pretty soon now U 702 would be below the effective range of British depth charges. There’d be no point trying to get to the convoy now to join in the action: there was tomorrow night, and the one after, and a few more after that… He told Heusinger, ‘Prepare to reload those three tubes.’ It had to be done, and it was a good reason to stay deep for a while: you couldn’t safely move heavy torpedoes around when you were being flung from beam to beam.
At 0200, by which time the U-boats seemed to have withdrawn, Harbinger’s W/T operator took in a cyphered reply to the signal she’d made earlier. It read:
It is essential that you keep to the timetable. Ships unable to maintain station should be abandoned and sunk. Reinforcements will be sent to join you as soon as ships are available.
The skipper – he was on his high chair, Carlish at the binnacle now – had grunted at Bearcroft to read it out to him. He gave an impression, to Warrimer, of a man in isolation, a man with a slow fire smouldering and liable to erupt. As it had, at one point… Harbinger was two miles ahead of the convoy, zigzagging broadly across its front. The corvettes were stretching their areas to cover the bows and beams while the trawlers rounded up stragglers and chivvied others back into formation. But taking Harbinger through the middle of the herd during the worst period of its disruption, when both rescue ships – the Mount Trembling and the Archie Dukes having this duty now – had been stopped, transferring survivors, the ships as weather-breaks creating shelter in which their boats could work, by no means without danger to their crews – the eruption had come when he’d found the Burbridge also stopped, with a boat alongside and tackles and jumping-ladders rigged, hoisting a wounded man in a stretcher. He’d stormed at the Burbridge’s master, over the loud-hailer: by stopping he was putting all his passengers at extreme risk – which didn’t equate with the benefit to a few survivors – and by dropping astern he was adding to the problems of the escorts. Survivors, wounded or not, could be taken into any ship except the Burbridge: why in the name of God did he think he’d been kept in the centre of the convoy, cossetted like the oilers? The Burbridge’s master had called back, when the tirade ended, ‘All right, captain, keep your wool on…’ Harbinger had surged on, ranged in close to the Chauncy Maples to request the commodore, in coldly formal terms, to order the Burbridge not to stop again.
Warrimer had never heard his captain rave like that before. He hadn’t known him or served with him long but he wouldn’t have believed he was capable of such loss of temper. You could almost feel the heat of anger still radiating from the hunched, brooding figure while Bearcroft read out that signal: there was a moment or two of silence, and then a quiet, ‘Put it on the log, Chief.’ He raised his voice: ‘Bring her round, Sub. Starboard wheel, back over to the other wing.’ Asdics pinging: an accompaniment to the noise of wind and sea and the ship’s creaking, jolting, slamming progress. He’d taken another bite at his sandwich – Warrimer had organised kye and corned beef for distribution to all hands at their action stations – then tossed it away to leeward… ‘Chief – take this down!’ Shouting over the general racket… ‘Same addressees. “Your – whatever that time-of-origin was – MV Burbridge passengers include wounded men and nursing sisters. Transfer to other ships in present weather conditions is impossible. Following this night’s sinkings convoy now has twenty-three ships surviving but pending arrival of reinforcements further losses are inevitable.” Ask the doctor to code that up, Chief.’
The night’s losses had been the Malibar – who’d burnt because she’d had two hundred tons of palm oil in her number two starboard D tank, and when she was torpedoed abreast numbers two and three holds it had ignited and engulfed the bridge – and the Springburn, also in column one, the Harvest Moon and the Danish Tylland. Four losses seemed to be the nightly quota – ‘par for the course’, Bruce Hawkey the engineer had called it… Harbinger was rolling like a drunk as she turned her port beam to the thrust of wind and sea; the moon was a filtered radiance, but it would be setting soon. Carlish called down, ‘Midships. Steer oh-seven-five.’
‘Oh-seven-five, sir…’ CPO Elphick’s low, phlegmatic tone… And in sharp contrast to that drawl, an explosion – torpedo-hit – somewhere down there on the beam. Then you could see exactly where – flame spurted, lighting in silhouette a black tracery of ships’ masts and upperworks, fire reaching skyward, widening and brightening so fast that there could be no doubt they’d got one of the two oilers – and they’d been in the centre…
White rockets rushed up to burst flaring under low black cloud. And a snowflake now, back over the convoy’s other quarter…
The trawler Gleam had been plugging up between the slightly crooked columns three and four. For a time there’d been only three ships in column four, since it had had a vacant billet at the tail end to start with and then the leader, the Tylland, had dropped astern, sinking, and had been abandoned. Cartwright, Gleam’s one-eyed skipper, had led the Orangeman from column six to the rear of column four, and he’d been trying to get the others ahead of her to close up – as much as anything in compliance with the escort commander’s orders to get the oilers and the Burbridge surrounded again. The Cressida had taken the Tylland’s lead position, but there was a large gap into which the next two had to be persuaded to shift up. Cartwright, chewing one of his black Burmah cheroots, had been on the Redgulf Star’s port beam, between her and the Burbridge, addressing the oiler’s master by loud-hailer, when the other one – the English Ardour, in column five – went up in a crash and a blast of flame. Cartwright immediately put his wheel hard a-starboard, rang down for maximum revs from his ship’s single screw, and turned under the Redgulf Star’s stern to get to the stricken, blazing ship. But the rescue ship Archie Dukes, the English Ardour’s next astern in column five, had put her helm to port, simultaneously stopping engines – partly to avoid running into the burning oiler but also to come up on her windward side and stand by for rescue work. Collision between the trawler and the Archie Dukes was narrowly avoided by Cartwright holding full starboard wheel on and just grazing under the rescue ship’s counter, so closely that he had to reverse his rudder in order not to swing his stern into the Dukes as he swept by. In this way he ended up three cables’ lengths astern of the burning, exploding tanker, on her starboard quarter and in the still-overwide gap between columns five and six. He was turning again, to get up there and risk the flaming leeward side of the Ardour – likely as not there’d be crewmen in the drink on that barely-approachable side – when he saw the U-boat diving, no more than a cricket-pitch length ahead of the trawler’s bow. There was no time for the Gleam’s gun to fire: it couldn’t have been depressed far enough to hit, at such close range, and the Cimba in column six was directly in the line of fire; Cartwright’s first lieutenant was yelling at the gun’s crew to get off the foc’sl and hang on… This was only seconds before the trawler crashed into the submerging U-boat. Gleam had been rising to a wave: her forepart swung down into the German’s hull abaft the conning tower, smashing into the engine-room section like a huge axe-head. Flames from the oiler lit the whole scene in flickering red and yellow, showing the two ships locked together at right-angles and Cartwright leaning out of an open window in the front of his bridge with the black patch in place over his left eye and the cheroot jutting from between his teeth; he’d stopped his engine just as he’d struck, and then put it astern. He had to spit the cheroot out before he could bawl down for all hands to get up on deck.
As Gleam withdrew her stem from the enormous hole it had carved, the U-boat rolled over and sank. But Gleam wasn’t going to float long either. Cartwright’s first lieutenant came back to the little glassed-in box of a bridge to tell him that the crew’s quarters down for’ard were rapidly filling. It was a big compartment and it meant there wasn’t a hope of saving her. Cartwright rang down to stop the engine – knowing that while it was still running his chief stoker would not have obeyed the order to come up – and ordered the dinghy and the two Carley floats to be cut loose from their stowage. Most of the convoy had drawn clear by this time: there was only the sinking trawler, the blazing tanker, the Archie Dukes with her boats in the water picking up bodies in some of which there might yet be life, and Astilbe nosing up into the flames with hoses gushing from her foc’sl.