4 November 1942: General Alexander to Prime Minister: After 12 days of heavy and violent fighting the Eighth Army has inflicted severe defeat on the German and Italian forces under Rommel’s command. The enemy’s front has broken…
A cock woke him with its crowing: he’d been having a dream with that noise in it, listening to it in his sleep. He knew immediately where he was, and why, and that he couldn’t have slept for more than about an hour. He could see it would be daylight soon. He’d drunk water from a ditch, and eaten a carrot and the centre of a rotten onion; he was very hopeful that before long he might find an egg or two. They’d have to be eaten raw, but with the number of hens that were roosting in at least one of the other sheds there’d have to be some, somewhere. The problems were going to be (a) moving around in daylight without being seen, (b) getting to the eggs before someone else did; the two requirements in combination might prove difficult to accomplish.
He’d disturbed the hens, when he’d tried that hut first: there’d been a lot of flapping and squawking, and he’d been expecting someone to come running from the house – with a gun for a fox, perhaps… But the hens had gone back to sleep and no-one seemed to have heard. He’d found this broken-roofed, open-sided shed, full of old timber and sacks, straw and other rubbish – kindling for the house fires, he guessed. The straw and sacks were wet, but he’d made a bed of them, a nest that might be improved on when it was light.
Dawn was spreading from behind the house, which from as much as he could see at this stage seemed to be semi-derelict. Well, say in bad repair… He could see that its roof was uneven, and the surroundings over-grown. The house had shutters on its windows, all of them fastened. To the left was a clump of trees in a circle that might surround a duck-pond.
He’d hidden the bicycle in undergrowth half a mile up the lane. It was well covered, and he’d be able to find it again when he was fit to leave and head south. He felt that his decision had been the right one, that he did have a chance and it would have been stupid not to try. If it didn’t work and he was caught, at least he wouldn’t spend the next couple of years in Offlag IVC wishing to God he’d had a bit more staying-power. Meanwhile he hurt more or less all over and he knew he’d be black with bruises. He’d massaged the sprained ankle, and he’d been trying to keep it propped up so that it ached less. He had the thought of eggs in his mind quite a lot: an egg was nourishing, he was extremely hungry, and he knew he was going to need all the strength he could gather. They would be raw, of course: he’d shut his eyes and try to believe he was in the flat in Eaton Square, in bed with Fiona, swallowing Prairie Oysters.
She’d still be indulging in such pleasures, he guessed.
Because of the way she looked, and the way she was.
Break some bastard’s bloody neck!
He’d heard the actual words, and knew he’d muttered them aloud. Talking to himself, with his eyes fixed like a wolf’s on the silent house. Shack, whatever… And with muscles taut – as if he’d been about to do exactly that – spring out, break a neck… But forcing himself to relax now, to be sane: and with a resolution in mind, a vitally important one – that if he came face to face with the farmer or anyone else and couldn’t get away, he’d surrender, not try to escape by using violence. That would be fatal, you’d have the whole countryside out looking for you, and the hunt would have only one end. You had to stay sane and cautious, despite that kind of image in the mind: images and desperation driving one to the brink of madness. He told himself he could stand it: he’d been on the run before – in Crete, eighteen months ago. Of course, that had been quite different, in a lot of ways: for instance, it had been mostly warm, during the first months, and he’d had plenty of companionship, and the locals had been well-disposed… But thinking about himself as he’d been such a short time ago was like thinking about a younger brother. That girl in Alexandria, for instance – how shocked he’d been when he’d discovered she had a husband! Really only months ago, and he’d been so innocent and naïf…
A door had opened. Alert, straining his ears, he heard a female voice call out in German. Then the same door banged shut. Silence now. The sounds had come from somewhere on the other side of the house, probably the back of it. So it was, after all, inhabited. Well, it would have to be – someone had shut the hens up, last night, before he got here. The house’s front door, in the middle on this side facing him, was still shut, and by the look of the grass it wasn’t used. There was a cart lying half on its side, one wheel missing and a shaft broken: he was looking at that corner of the house when a child appeared – a boy. Short pants and a thick wool jacket. That was a well he’d gone to: he’d tossed a bucket down, and the winch-handle clanked over. Jack smelt woodsmoke, a new fire starting. The boy was winding the bucket up now. You could imagine the fire in there, warmth, food… He heard the boy grunt with the effort of lifting the full bucket over the well’s brick surround: then, leaning sideways almost horizontally to balance the weight, he’d gone staggering round the corner of the house and out of sight.
At least he knew where to get a drink. It was light now, more or less. He could make out a few rows of what must be cabbages, and a stack of logs. But it was coal-smoke he was smelling now: some ground-floor shutters were being pushed open from inside.
The sun came up red, angry-looking, between the house and the clump of trees. Nobody else had appeared. He’d heard a woman’s voice, and a sharper one which was probably the boy’s, and after about half an hour he saw them both – mother and son, or big sister and little brother – as they appeared around that same corner. The boy wore a coat and cap now, a cap with a shiny black peak, and he was carrying a school satchel. The girl was in a woollen dress with a shawl around its upper part. They were coming this way and she had a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Mother, Jack decided: it was the proprietory, affectionate attitude of a parent. The path they were following – a beaten track through orchard-length grass with patches of nettle in it – would bring them close by this shed. He kept absolutely still, with his eyes half-shut in case their whites showed: he guessed, seeing her at close quarters, that she was in her middle twenties. She was fairish, though not exactly blonde, with a round face and a rather solid figure – broad-hipped, heavy-thighed. Her hips swung attractively as she walked with a long stride that made the boy trot now and then to keep up with her. She was swinging a bucket too, and doing most of the talking – in German, of course, which he didn’t get a word of, but at the end of the track leading to the lane it was obvious she was calling parting instructions after him: ‘Work hard and mind you come straight home!’, something of that sort.
He heard the hen-house being opened, and the noise of birds stampeding out. She’d be feeding them from that bucket: he could hear her talking to them while she did it. Then the sound of a car engine: it came down the lane and stopped, a door opened and shut and then it moved on again, no doubt with the child inside it. The girl was in sight again, and she’d stopped to listen. School bus, he guessed, or neighbour.
He watched the girl go back around the side of the house. Then there was nothing to watch for a long time, except the sun’s slow rise into cloud. A cold wind from the north bent the chimney-smoke away to his right. He wished the girl would reappear, but she didn’t. While she was hidden in the house, he couldn’t make any move: all he could do was wait. She might live alone in the house with the boy – there might be no farmer, father: or there was one and he could be sick, or lazy… But she was young: a husband of her own age-group would almost certainly be in uniform and in the war, wouldn’t he?
After a while the door at the back of the house was opened, and it was about five minutes before it shut again. Stretching his imagination to account for all the circumstances as seen or heard, he guessed there might be an outside lavatory, a privy at the back. As they had no running water here, used that well, there’d have to be, he thought. He was in need of it himself – which was probably what made him think of it – but to move out of his shed would have been foolhardy and to relieve himself inside it unwise: he’d no idea how many days and nights he’d be spending here, and it was uncomfortable enough without that. The length of his stay had to depend on whether he could get some food: but for the moment, having eaten and drunk so little recently, the other urge was controllable.
An hour might have passed. Hens pecked close by without taking any notice of him, and the morning turned greyer, colder. He was thinking he was going to have to creep away and prospect elsewhere when the door at the back opened and shut again and a few seconds later the girl appeared round the side where the wrecked cart was. She was wearing what looked like a man’s overcoat and a woollen hat, and she was carrying a basket; she walked straight down the path towards the muddy entrance from the lane, and disappeared.
Jack lay still, watching the house and listening. Only the hens moved, muttering to themselves. The cock might have turned in again. There was no sound from the lane.
He’d had various kinds of rubbish on top of him: he pushed it off now, extricated himself as quietly as possible, and crawled out. The hens eyed him suspiciously and moved away. He was against the corner of the shed, crouching with his weight all on one leg while he looked around. Nothing moved. He hopped around to the back, leant one shoulder against the planks and did what he’d been wanting to do for quite a while.
It seemed he had the place to himself. Unless there was some inactive, housebound husband, parent, grandparent, grandparents plural… But there’d been no voices. The only times he’d heard the girl’s voice had been when she’d had the boy with her and when she’d teased the hens. But the one thing there had to be inside the house was food.
Eggs – he remembered that intention, suddenly, and stopped. Then thought – try the house first. Eggs as fallback, last resort…
The back door was locked. A path of cinders led from it between unweeded vegetable patches to the brick-built lavatory he’d expected. A rickety fence beyond it separated vegetable garden from orchard. No gate, so that land didn’t belong to this house. Turning back, he saw that all the shutters, upstairs and downstairs, were closed and fastened; but he knew she hadn’t shut the ground-floor ones in front. He went back – through nettles and brambles on the other side of the house, so as not to walk right into her if she happened to be coming home at this moment – and tried the front windows. Sash windows, with heavy frames in bad condition. The first one he tried wasn’t latched, didn’t need to be because it was stuck solid: the next moved easily. He slid it up, climbed in, shut it again behind him. Despite his clumsiness – the sprained ankle made him less agile than he might have been – he’d made very little noise, but probably enough to be heard by any inmate who wasn’t stone deaf. He waited for a few moments, listening: he was in a bedroom and it was obviously the child’s. No sound from anywhere: the house felt empty, he just about knew it was. He crept out, into a passage. Dead-end to the left, two doors in the facing wall, an open end to the right: he went that way, into a central hall that was evidently the main living area. The front door, the one she didn’t use, was on his right now, there was a heating-stove in an alcove with wood piled near it and heavy, ugly furniture grouped to face it, and a flight of stairs leading up above a door that led into the kitchen. The passage he’d come through was continued on the other side of this living room, with a drab-coloured curtain covering it.
The upstairs rooms had to be out of use: the staircase was blanked off with stacked packing-cases, furniture, some rolls of carpet and other stuff. It was the kitchen, anyway, that drew him. He’d started towards it before caution made him stop, warned him to check the other rooms first: there could be old people here, or a bed-ridden husband… He hesitated: then thought that if he did find someone in the house and have to bolt for it – without having had anything to eat…
Kitchen.
Entering it, he was facing the inside of the back door, the door they used. On a dresser on his right, three-quarters of a loaf of bread. And a smell of soup or stew: it led him to a covered pot simmering on a coal stove. He tore off an end of the loaf, dipped it in the steaming tureen, and ate.
Like a dog. Feeling like a dog. Grunting, gobbling, with his eyes fixed on the rest of it… Gasping, then, out of breath, leaning against the wall with his injured foot stretched out in front of him. Two things stopped him wolfing the whole lot: he needed to check the other rooms and didn’t know how long he’d have before she came back, and two, if he didn’t take too much she mightn’t be sure any had gone. If she did realise she’d been robbed, he might not find a meal here tomorrow. But leaving any of it at all wasn’t easy. He stared at it, swallowing, licking his lips, shaking…
In the other downstairs wing the rooms contained some furniture but were obviously not in use. Junky furniture was layered in dust, and beds had only mattresses on them. There’d be room for a large family in this place, and most likely there’d have been one here not so long ago. Dispersal would have come through males being called up, females drafted to services or factory work; just as the war had split families in England. He limped back into the living-hall, through it and into the other section of passage, looking into the other rooms. One contained a wash-stand, tin bath, drying-rack and ironing board, another contained only an iron bedstead, and the third was the girl’s. Standing, looking round – and on the dressing-table one object held his eye: a photograph frame with no photograph in it. An empty frame, wood with silver corners, placed where you’d expect the portrait of a husband, lover, or parents: prominent, yet empty.
There was a wireless beside the bed: it had a fern design in fretwork on its front panel. His eyes followed a twist of dangerously frayed flex to the lamp on the dressing-table. Moving closer, glancing again at the empty frame, he saw his own face in the mirror.
He stood rooted, horrified…
The creature staring back at him out of red-rimmed eyes was nearer beast than human. Bearded, filthy, mad-eyed, with multi-coloured bruises showing through dirt and beard. He could hardly believe it was himself: it wasn’t only hideous, it was actually frightening. If you were searching for a prisoner on the run and you came face to face with this, wouldn’t you pull the trigger?
He muttered, ‘Christ…’ And the creature’s lips had moved… He turned his back on it, with the thought that if the girl who slept in that bed caught as much as a glimpse of him—
She wouldn’t. The guards at the frontier – Swiss – would be the first to have that pleasure.
Clearly – he shut the bedroom door behind him – the girl and her child were the only occupants of this house. With the stairs blocked, there couldn’t be anyone using the top floor. He decided he’d take a look up there, anyway, make sure… He crawled over the pile of junk: then he was on bare boards, climbing, hauling himself up on heavy bannisters draped with cobwebs.
There was a wide landing, but since the ends of the house sloped inward there were only two rooms to the right and two to the left. Electric wiring slung from nails hung in dusty loops. From the front room on the left a badly-fitting shutter allowed him a wide view of the front area – the hen-house, the broken cart, the semi-collapsed shed where he’d spent some hours and to which he’d have shortly to return: he reckoned he’d last a day and a night, all right, on that hastily gulped snack. Then he’d look for more: by that time his ankle might have mended well enough so he could take off again, unearth the bike and pedal swiftly south… Beyond the sheds he could see right down the track to the lane, and it was all empty. He thought of the eggs again: he’d have time, it wasn’t likely she’d be back all that soon, he guessed. She’d gone out dressed for outdoors and carrying that basket – for shopping, or to deliver or acquire something – and there was no shop or dwelling within several miles. Perhaps the basket had been full of eggs? But even then, he’d find one or two…
Unless she got a lift back, from wherever she’d been going. Then she might not be long.
Just one more small piece of soup-soaked bread?
Negotiating the furniture on the stairs again – one might assume it had been cleared out of the upstairs rooms – he noticed in passing that it included some mattresses. They were in the middle, surrounded by other stuff. The thought of them was in his mind while he devoured his second helping, thinking also of the discomfort to which he was now returning – to be there, hidden, before she got back. With a few hens’ eggs to keep him going… But the idea of a mattress to lie on, to rest the ankle on: what a dream! Impractical, of course: even if he could have dragged one out there it would be too big for the space, it would show up.
He stopped chewing.
Drag a mattress upstairs? Into the empty front room with the view, over the empty downstairs wing?
Harbinger, zigzagging across the convoy’s rear, was climbing mountains, shooting rapids, hurling herself from beam to beam. The wind was up to force six, with a sea to match it and a bite in the air more like winter than autumn. The convoy ploughed on ahead, at the reduced speed of four knots and in six columns with only three ships in columns one and six, four in the central ones, and the Burbridge and the Redgulf Star as second ships in columns three and four respectively. The corvettes were out ahead, trawlers at the sides; the corvettes and Harbinger had refuelled this forenoon.
Mike Scarr had the afternoon watch, and Nick was slumped in his deckchair under an oilskin. Scarr thought he was asleep – and he was, off and on, but it was a light, fitful sleep with two figures jostling around in his brain. Twenty-two and five. Twenty-two was the number of ships left in convoy, five the number lost to U-boats last night. If you divided one by the other, even through the fog of semi-consciousness you had to see that in four or five days’ time SL 320 would have ceased to exist.
It was unthinkable.
But – you had to think about it. Because with the destruction of the convoy the whole operation would be aborted too. The U-boats would be right where the ‘Torch’ convoy routes converged into the Gibraltar Strait: they’d have run out of targets, but maybe not out of torpedoes… And the conclusion was that in the interests of ‘Torch’, quite apart from keeping as much as possible of this convoy alive, it was entirely up to SL 320’s escort commander to pull something new out of the bag.
But how the hell…
The prospect was so terrible that it only belonged in nightmare. But he was awake now, and it was real: and the core of the reality – like an uncovered nerve in a tooth, agonising every minute of the days and nights – was the Burbridge. Even if it was all in the mind: the coincidence of a ship full of nurses – plus one’s own cowardice, not daring to ask, or even look too closely… There was a degree of sense in it as well as cowardice, moreover: because if fate – fate assisted by Cruance and company – had played such a filthy trick on you and you knew it, you’d then be facing the dilemma, practical and moral, of protecting that one ship even at the expense of others.
He heard Scarr call down for an increase in revs. He had a vague recollection of having heard a similar increase being ordered only minutes ago. Harbinger must have dropped astern of station, perhaps held to one leg of the zigzag for too long. He was trying to force his mind back to the problem of new tactics – which there could not be, with a four-knot convoy, like a mouse already crippled in a room full of cats – when the wireless office bell rang, and a signalman shouted into the voice-pipe, ‘Bridge!’ There was a gabble, hollow-sounding in the tube: then the signalman – it was Bloom – telling Scarr, ‘Signal from the commodore, sir – Burbridge has completed temporary repairs, convoy speed now seven knots!’
‘Very good.’ Scarr hesitated, deciding whether or not to wake his captain. He came to the right conclusion. ‘Captain, sir?’
‘Yes, pilot.’ He spoke without opening his eyes, or moving. His brain was doing all the movement, in these few seconds. ‘I heard it.’
It made all the difference in the world!
He pushed off the oilskin, sat up, nearly fell out of the chair as the ship lurched hard to port: then he was on his feet. He put his glasses up, training them on the rear ships of the convoy – which was in the act of zigzagging, slanting over to starboard of the mean course. There were only four ships in that rearmost line abreast, since columns one and six lacked tail-end Charlies. Grey hulls were sheathed in white and rolling ponderously as they turned, masts and upperworks rocking against the backdrop of pale-grey sky, Harbinger’s bow slamming down into an advancing cliff-face of green water, burying itself in its white explosion, the ship jolting solidly from the impact, sea and spray sluicing over. Then she was climbing again, and the convoy’s grey, slow-moving mass was back in sight… He pointed, called to Scarr, ‘Take her up to pass between columns two and three. I’m going down to the chartroom, but I’ll be back before you get there.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’ Scarr’s thin face, running wet, dipped to the voice-pipe. ‘Starboard fifteen! One-eight-oh revolutions!’
Nick slid the chartroom door shut. The outline of a plan was in his mind, but its detail needed checking, on two levels. First in terms of the convoy and the U-boats trailing it, and second in relation to the ‘Torch’ convoys approaching from the north and northwest. And it wouldn’t be good enough to get SL 320 away from the U-boats, even if that were possible; for better or for worse, he accepted the obligation to keep the sharks with him, draw them north. As Aubrey Wishart would have known he would: which would be why he’d picked him for this lousy job… All he could hope to do was keep their teeth from closing on his convoy’s throat – for a night, or even two nights. It wouldn’t be an escape, it would be a respite. Those U-boats had tasted blood, they knew there was plenty more: it would only be necessary to provide them with the scent and they’d keep their snouts to the trail.
The bad weather ought to help.
Working swiftly: extending the convoy’s progress by two-hourly intervals from its present position. But at four knots, not seven. Until – say – 11 pm tonight…
Midnight would be the German’s optimum time to attack. Say 2300, then, to make the move. The commodore might take some persuading, to reduce speed now, return to the four-knot crawl. But it was essential the Germans shouldn’t know SL 320 was now capable of almost doubling its speed of advance. With that card to play, and the heavy weather, plus a strike by Harbinger and the corvettes well out ahead – leaving the convoy with only two trawlers as close escort when it turned and put on speed?
Then, if it worked tonight – a repeat tomorrow, only the other way, back on to the ordered route?
He slid the parallel rule across, on its ribbed brass rollers. Having increased to seven knots tonight, there’d be no point in slowing again. That cat would be out of the bag… Now, Cruance’s overlay: this was the acid test, whether SL 320 could make this diversion and still cross those ‘Torch’ convoy tracks far enough ahead to take the U-boats clear of them.
Well… Checking them off, one by one. If the Burbridge could maintain seven knots from here on, it looked as if it would be all right. Just all right. No worse than holding a straight course at the lower speed would have been. There’d be a finer margin than Cruance would have liked, obviously: but this was compromise, an attempt both to achieve the vital success of that huge invasion operation and have a few ships of this convoy survive. Those few to include the Burbridge…
He checked over his workings again, more slowly and very carefully. Courses, times, distances: and the likely spread of U-boats at 2300 when they deployed for their night assault. HF/DF reports during the forenoon indicated that by now all except one shadower would be ahead of the convoy’s beams; a few hours ago there’d been one – the pack leader, in Gritten’s assessment – out ahead, and the rest on the beams and quarters but moving up. The usual tactics, in fact, clawing up ahead while one remained astern to report convoy alterations and snap up any straggler. You had to trust to luck that the convoy’s simultaneous change of speed and course, with darkness and bad weather to hide it, would throw that shadower off the scent. If there’d been just one more corvette, he’d have sent it back to cope with that threat. The fact was, he hadn’t, and lack of escort vessels was the big difference between this ploy and one he’d used in that last North Atlantic trip, when he’d used smoke to obscure a very drastic emergency turn. Tonight, bad weather would do the smoke’s job. But that last time he’d had six corvettes to leave as close escort with the convoy: there was a hell of a big difference between six corvettes and two trawlers.
The speed trick would be something new. If the commodore agreed to it.
When he got back to the bridge, the convoy was returning to its mean course and Scarr was aiming Harbinger’s stubby, foam-drenched stem at the gap between the Mount Trembling and the Bonny Prince.
‘Steady!’
‘Steady, sir.’ The quartermaster’s voice floated from the voice-pipe. ‘Oh-three-nine, sir.’
‘Steer oh-four-oh.’
‘Steer oh-four-oh, sir…’
Nick told Signalman Bloom, ‘I’ll need the loud-hailer in a minute.’
He’d used it earlier in the day when he’d talked to Cartwright, skipper of the sunk trawler Gleam: Cartwright, who was now Graves’s guest in Astilbe, had bawled over to him – Yorkshire accent booming over the welter of foam between the two ships as they steamed side by side – ‘Weren’t supposed to ram, I know that, but truth is I didn’t neither, bugger bloody well impaled himself on me!’
Chubb had muttered vulgarly to Warrimer, ‘Sounds like a bugger’s defence, to me…’
Practically every ship had survivors from others on board. Astilbe had the entire crew of the Gleam plus some survivors the trawler had picked up previously, and five men from the English Ardour.
The Mount Trembling and the Bonny Prince were abeam. The Mount Trembling being one of the rescue ships now. Asked how many survivors he was accommodating, her master replied, ‘Too bloody many!’ He amplified this to ‘More’n I have crew.’ She was only about 1400 gross registered tons; the smaller ships were always picked for the rescue job, since they tended to be more manoeuvrable. Harbinger pushed on up between the columns, between the Columbia and the Omeo: from both of them there were waves in answer to the destroyer’s hail. Looking at the plodding, plunging merchantmen as they fell astern, Mike Scarr wondered which of them might be afloat by tomorrow’s dawn. It was like musical chairs, or Russian roulette: and when you thought of ships that had been here a day or three days ago it was like recalling, not without effort, the names of acquaintances from a distant past. To port now was the St Eliza, and coming up to starboard the taller, bulkier shape of the Burbridge. Scarr saw his captain move over to the port for’ard corner of the bridge, taking the hailer with him and plugging it in on that side to talk to the St Eliza, his back to the passenger ship as they overhauled her. He was asking the Eliza’s master what survivors he had on board: the answer was twenty-one, all from the Dutchman, the Toungoo… While on the other side the Burbridge loomed over them, her rails crowded with waving passengers of whom a fair proportion were women, Harbinger’s captain was the only man on her upper deck not waving enthusiastically back to them. Then it was the Coriolanus to port, and the Chauncy Maples to starboard; with the convoy beginning a turn, altering to a port leg of the zigzag.
‘Come down forty revs and close in a bit, pilot.’ He’d crossed over, plugged the loud-hailer in on that side. ‘Hello, Chauncy Maples. Commodore to speak by loud-hailer, please, if he’d be so kind.’
Sandover had seen him coming, and was ready for it.
‘Good afternoon, Everard. What can we do for you?’
‘I want to suggest you reduce convoy speed, Commodore. Back to four knots, until eleven o’clock tonight. Then crack on to seven again, with a sixty-degree emergency turn to port. I’ll be up ahead to keep the U-boats busy with this ship and both corvettes, while you speed up and turn away. I hope we might get a fairly peaceful night this way.’
‘What about the no-diversion rule?’
‘It’ll have to be broken again. Otherwise you’ll soon have no convoy left. We could get back on track by another turn tomorrow night – if the Burbridge can keep her end up, now… But I don’t see much alternative, Commodore.’
Pause, as he lowered the hailer. Weather-noise, ship-noise, and Scarr’s orders to the wheelhouse… Sandover would be thinking it over. Knowing nothing of those ‘Torch’ convoys, the great armada that was on its way, the reason behind the no-diversion rule… But he’d realise something did have to be done, if any part of SL 320 was to have a chance of getting through.
‘All right, Everard. Tell me what you propose in detail.’
The herd was lumbering round again, zigging the other way. Nick threw a glance over his shoulder and saw that Scarr was on to it, only waiting for the right moment to pass the helm order. The destroyer needed comparatively little rudder to match her turn to that of the more cumbersome freighters: but she’d need extra revs now, being on the outside of the turn, to stay up close to the Chauncy Maples.
He raised the loud-hailer. ‘I’d propose reducing to four knots now – before they notice we’re capable of more. Now – right away, sir?’
‘Very well.’
He resumed – seeing a flag signal for the speed reduction flap multicoloured to the Chauncy Maples’s masthead while he was talking – ‘Zigzag would cease at dusk as usual. At 2300 – or earlier if they start moving in before that – we’ll go out and attack them, well out ahead. At the same time you’d turn to three-four-two degrees and increase to seven knots – or better… Hold that course and speed for six hours – and we’d be cutting the corner slightly on position B, which would help.’
He looked back at the Burbridge, wallowing astern of the commodore. This whole scheme depended on her being able to maintain the seven knots. If she found she couldn’t, if she broke down during the hours of the diversion, SL 320 would be stuck right across the ‘Torch’ convoy routes. The risk, when you thought of that, was terrifying in its implications: but taking a risk was surely better than facing certain disaster and doing damn-all about it?
By dusk, when as usual the ship’s company was closed up at action stations, he’d added – in one sense – to those risks. He’d been thinking hard about the shadower astern. The point being that by leaving the convoy with only two trawlers to guard it while he rushed out ahead with his other three ships he’d be taking quite a chance: but by leaving the shadower loose astern he’d be compounding it. The solution was to detach one trawler to turn back and deal with the shadower, keep it dived during the crucial period, deafen it with depth charges.
The disadvantages consisted of leaving only one trawler with the convoy, and the fact that the one that did this job astern would be back there on its own with a very long way to go and only a small margin of speed for rejoining afterwards. Also, in rejoining it would have to pass through the U-boat line.
Nick briefed Kyle of Opal for the task. He was to force the shadower down and keep him down, and he’d add to the deception by seeming to chase after the convoy on its previous course. And he would do a bit more than that, too, by way of deception. Broad of the Stella would meanwhile stay with the convoy as its sole protector.
As dusk thickened into night, the shadower was nine miles on the starboard quarter, and Gritten estimated there were six U-boats between sixteen and twenty-one miles ahead.
‘All in a bunch, sir. Been doing a lot of yacking, last hour or so.’
Making their plans for the night…
In the hour between dusk action stations and closing up again for the night’s exertions, he explained his intentions to Warrimer and Scarr, and invited comments.
Scarr said thoughtfully, ‘I’d say it adds up to as good a chance as we’ll have, sir.’ He was going to have to do some smart work in the plot, pinpointing each contact as Harbinger moved up towards them – so that none would be left to slip through and find the convoy wide open to it. It was a point that Warrimer touched on too: ‘If we can keep all the U-boats at arm’s length, sir, I suppose the lack of close escort can’t really matter.’
That ‘if’ was a big one. The fact the U-boats were bunched together now didn’t mean they would be in a few horns’ time. Nick turned to his engineer, Bruce Hawkey, whom he’d also summoned to this briefing.
‘I’m going to need a lot of high speed, Chief. Twice as many enemies as escorts means we’ll have to be fast on our feet. Force six or no force six…’
Jack lay on his mattress in the dark, cold, silent house. It wasn’t as cold as the wrecked shed would have been, and he’d brought up an old carpet for a blanket, but the mattress was damp from disuse and the carpet smelt of cats.
The girl had come back at about four in the afternoon, and the child had returned an hour later. A car or bus had brought him. Jack had heard it approach and stop, then the slam of a door, and after a minute the boy had appeared and gone round the side of the house where the cart was. After this there’d been voices downstairs, and music – from that wireless in the girl’s bedroom, perhaps, although it had sounded as if it came from the central living-room. He’d heard them moving about too, doors opening and shutting, and footsteps. He stayed on his mattress, wondering whether she’d have noticed the shortfall of bread and soup: and knowing that she must… He didn’t move about at all, because he could have been heard, and it wasn’t worth the risk, and there wasn’t anywhere to go… With luck he’d have the place to himself again tomorrow, it was as good a hideout as anyone could hope for, and there was the possibility of another snack down there tomorrow. All he had to do was lie doggo for a couple of days, while the ankle mended, then skedaddle.
It was dead quiet, and he guessed they’d gone to bed. The child would have, anyway. He could imagine the girl sewing – making clothes for herself, or patching her son’s. He supposed she might be as much as thirty: or say twenty-eight. The boy would be about seven, he thought. He’d spend his days at some village school, presumably, while she either had a job or went to visit friends or family. As long as she did so every day, he didn’t give a damn, the important thing was that her daytime absences should be routine, invariable. Otherwise it could become difficult for him, up here. The thought of a weekend was a worry: he had no idea what day of the week it was and if tomorrow was Saturday it might mean two days with no school, perhaps no outings at all. If that happened he’d simply have to grin and bear it, but one way and another it could get to be uncomfortable.
He told himself that it was better than the shed, anyway.
And to stop worrying: think about Fiona, then if he was lucky he might dream about her…
He was dozing when the troops came.
A roar of engines: a glare of headlights on the shutters. He was awake: the engines cut out but the lights still blazed and a voice was yelling orders in high-pitched German. Jack on his knees on the mattress, squinting down between the wooden slats, eyes narrowed against the dazzle; he could see what looked like a staff car and also a larger, open-topped vehicle, personnel carrier, the kind he’d seen when he’d been lying on the hill. Men had jumped out of this one and vanished around both ends of the house, while others combed through the sheds, pulling doors open and kicking through the piles of litter: hens squawked and scattered. If he’d been in that shed they’d have had him cold, by now he’d either have been standing with his hands up, or dead.
The soldiers were hammering at the back door, but here in front two of them only stood and watched the house – so they must have known the place, known the front door didn’t open. Jack thought the officer who’d given those orders was still in the car; its headlights were full on, lighting the whole house-front, and he couldn’t see much past them, but he had an impression of someone sitting in there. It could have been only his imagination, stemming from the way one of the men facing the front door had twice turned towards the car as if in conversation.
He heard the back door open, and the girl’s voice, then a male one, and heavy boots on the plank floor of the kitchen.
If she’d noticed that some of her food had gone, would she tell them now?
Not that it would make much odds. They were obviously about to search the whole place.
Earlier on, before she’d come home, he’d made sure these shutters would open so he could bale out this way if he had to. Now, of course, this was out of the question. If they came up here, he’d be trapped. And the girl would be in trouble too, he realised. They wouldn’t believe she hadn’t known he was in her house. He was surprised to find this bothered him. Surprised and pleased. Touched by an impression of loneliness, perhaps, the joint loneliness of woman and child alone, unprotected? Self-analysis had never been a habit, or even an inclination, but he was aware of this feeling of sympathy, concern for her predicament as well as for his own. The emotion was short-lived, replaced by a kind of fatalism: boots were clumping around downstairs, going from room to room, and at any moment they’d finish and come to check up here. More shouts from down in front: it looked as if they’d searched the grounds and the searchers were returning to their transport. He’d been right about the man in the staff car: light gleamed on the peak of his uniform cap as he climbed out and stood with his fists on his hips, staring around. Then he swung to face the corner of the house and Jack had a bird’s eye view of the girl and the child, with a soldier escorting them, walking into the brightness of the car’s lights. She was wearing her overcoat and a scarf round her head, and the boy had a blanket round him. The officer didn’t move, just watched them approach, and the soldier made some kind of report; the girl began to complain – the tone was complaining, anyway – with an arm resting on the boy’s shoulders. They’d stopped, in the headlights’ beam. Behind the officer, the other searchers were clambering into their vehicle: dark, overcoated figures in forage-caps and with slung rifles. There was an exchange of questions and answers now between the officer and the girl: her answers, brief and flat, sounded like denials. Finally he turned away, gesturing to the escort to let them go.
All over?
But he’d thought it too soon. The officer had stopped, turned, and he was looking at these upstairs windows, the blank shutters facing him. Jack pulled his head back… The German had called out some new question: the girl turned her head, moved one hand wearily, a gesture accompanied by words that might have asked ‘Why don’t you go up and look?’ The officer still staring upwards… Then the boy squeaked something and some of the soldiers laughed. It seemed to break the tension, down there and in here, too: Jack had been in no doubt at all that a search party had been about to be sent up. Instead, the officer lifted his hand in a cross between a farewell gesture and a salute and the child spoke again, his arm jerking out of the blanket’s folds: ‘Heil Hitler!’ As sharply as if the officer’s casualness had offended the little brat. The girl’s hand stroked his yellow, close-cropped hair. The officer was staring at her now, as if waiting for something: but she was looking down at the boy, ignoring all the rest. He shrugged, swung away abruptly as if he was sick of hanging around here, wasting time; he barked an order and soldiers came hurrying from around the ends of the house and piled into the personnel carrier. The staff car’s door was being held open by its driver: the officer slid into it, and the show was over. Engines revving, headlights flaring over tumbledown sheds and darkly looming trees, the car led and the bigger vehicle followed through a tunnel of light that narrowed towards the lane then weakened, vanished as the lights were cut. The house stood silent in the darkness now, listening to the receding sounds of the two engines: then the back door slammed shut and its bolt rasped over, and Jack heard the girl’s voice faintly as she led her child back to bed. He lay staring into darkness, wondering whether that perfunctory search would have satisfied them, whether he might be safe here now for the few days he needed. Or – less optimistically – whether it meant they had some reason to suspect the prisoner they were hunting might have turned north instead of south…
If, for instance, they’d found the bicycle?
Opal, with wind and sea on her quarter, rolled and pitched like nothing on earth. Tom Kyle, her skipper, leaning out of an open glass panel in the lee side of his bridge, bawled through a tin megaphone, ‘Starshell, fire!’
He’d acquired the knack of pitching his voice up so that it was audible even in these conditions. And Potts, down on the foc’sl, would have had his ears pinned back in any case.
The four-inch cracked, flashed, recoiled. That was the second starshell on its way to replace the first one, which was low now and fading. Having no RDF, Kyle had nothing to go on except the position he’d been given just before he’d turned his ship and pointed her back down the convoy’s track. His orders were not to try and take the shadower by surprise – that way he might very easily have missed the bastard altogether – but only to force it to dive and then give it as hard a time as possible. Nine miles on bearing 207 degrees had been the shadower’s position at 2225: you had to allow for his steering the convoy course, 042, at slightly more than convoy speed – because he’d been creeping up during the last hour, gradually shortening the distance between him and his night’s targets – so in half an hour you could say the thing would have made about two and three quarter miles, while Opal, making ten knots the other way, would have covered five. This left a gap between them now of one and a quarter miles, 2500 yards, and it was over roughly the mid-point of this patch of ocean that the illuminants were being projected now.
The gun’s crew, in oilskins and sou’westers, were hanging on for their lives down there. It wasn’t as bad for them on this course as it would be on most others, but it was bad enough, and you’d never pick a man up in this sea. Once he was in it, you wouldn’t even see him. That starshell burst blossomed, lighting the ragged underside of cloud and throwing a hazy radiance over several square miles of sea. Any U-boat there would – one hoped – assume it had been detected, and pull the plug.
Kyle had pulled his head inside for long enough to light one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. He used Admiralty-issue tobacco, ‘Pusser’s’, flavoured with Scotch whisky. A tot of Scotch cost threepence nowadays, at sea, and it was enough to treat a half-pound tin. Kyle rolled his cigarettes onehanded, without having to look at what his blunt fingers were doing, and each one ended up as a perfectly symmetrical tube. Over the flare of the lighter, squinting past the coxswain at his asdic operator, he asked him, ‘Working, is it?’
‘Won’t get bugger all in this lot, though.’ The operator nodded. In these sea conditions, he meant. He was hunched over his set, bald and unshaven, chewing gum, the headset clamped over his ears and two fingers delicately twisting the knob that trained the quartz oscillator in its dome under the trawler’s forefoot. The coxswain – a short, stocky man, with one side of his face scarred purple by burning – had glanced sideways at him, then away again, eyes returning quickly to the compass card, feet straddled against the violent rolling, wide-palmed hands on the wheel’s brass-capped spokes constantly adjusting this way and that. Ahead, the starshell light was dimming: it had sunk too low and its parachute was travelling laterally on the wind. Kyle pushed the megaphone out again and screamed on that same noise-cutting note, ‘One for his knob, lads – fire!’
He muttered – inside again by the time the gun fired – ‘Sod’ll be down under by now. Less he’s bloody cracked.’ The trawler hit a waveface so hard you’d have expected damage: Kyle staggered, grabbed for support at a nest of voice-pipes, muttered, ‘Bastard…’ The asdic operator nodded, agreeing with the sentiment: pings singing away loud and clear, regular as the ticking of a watch, and he was turning the control knob minutely between each one, a degree or so each time, directing the impulses from broad on one bow to broad on the other. Any U-boat down there would be hearing the transmissions through its hydrophones, waiting for the probe to find it, hoping to God it wouldn’t, and manoeuvring to get clear. The German would know this was a trawler hunting him, because the sound of the single screw driven by a reciprocating engine (as opposed to turbines) was quite distinctive; but he would not be in a position to know that several miles northeast convoy SL 320 would at this moment be swinging 60 degrees to port while a dozen miles beyond it Harbinger and the corvettes would be running down on their U-boat contacts, forcing them down, plastering them with depth charges, keeping them blind and deaf and busy while those twenty-two merchantmen and their single trawler escort turned away.
‘Contact! Green one-nine!’
The operator sounded and looked amazed… Kyle too. But he’d heard that echo: he snatched up his depth charge telephone and yelled at the team back aft to stand by… ‘Two hundred and fifty-foot settings: got that?’ Kyle always set the same depth on his charges: his view was that whatever settings you chose it was a toss-up, so there was no point messing about. He told his coxswain, ‘Come twenty degrees to starboard.’
‘Aye sir…’
Wheel spinning as he flung it round. All three men in the stuffy little bridge were plainly astonished at having picked up this contact, on a set they’d had no faith in for weeks now. But you could hear the echo plainly, the sharp, clear return of each impulse bouncing back off the U-boat’s hull. Kyle had never heard a contact so clearly in all his time at sea: and tonight he’d never expected to hear any at all, with these conditions and a set that only worked when it felt like it… That last starshell was low to the water and a long way off: the U-boat would have dived at sight of the first one, he guessed. Harris, the A/S man, was the ship’s eyes now: he asked him, ‘Got a range yet?’ Harris flinching from the whisky-scented cigarette-smoke, blinking and puffing his own breath out to clear it… ‘Green two-four…’ Despite the trawler’s swing to starboard, the target had drawn to the right: it had to be travelling fast… Harris nodded: ‘Range fourteen hundred yards.’ As Opal turned her beam to the onslaught of the weather the degree of roll was frightening – would have been, to anyone but a trawlerman. Down below, if anything breakable hadn’t been lashed or jammed in its stowage it would have been smashed by now. Kyle grated to his coxswain, ‘Keep the wheel on her. Steer two-five-oh.’
‘Two-five-oh.’
But he couldn’t keep men on that gundeck now, not unless they used both hands and a strong set of teeth as well to hang on with – and even then you might lose a few. He’d got his megaphone out again; he yelled, ‘Clear the upper deck! All hands below!’ A flash of a torch from the foc’sl acknowledged it. There was a telephone connection to the gun, but it hadn’t been working lately: Kyle had meant to tell Potts to fix it, but it had slipped his mind.
‘Course two-five-oh, sir.’
‘Lost contact!’
Several pings had gone out and found no submarine to bounce off. Harris looked dismayed: he was twisting his beam this way and that, covering a wider and wider arc and getting nothing… Jumbo Potts, Kyle’s first lieutenant, arrived from for’ard looking as if he’d been swimming: the torch in his hand was enclosed in a French letter. He was a fat young man with a round, bright-red face and small, narrow eyes. Harris muttered, glancing at him but speaking to himself, ‘Lost the bugger good an’ proper.’ Potts said, ‘No wonder. Fucking thing never did work more ‘n two minutes at a time.’ It was a fact; the set was anything but reliable. Opal staggered to a big sea that walloped her beam-on, then rolled away from it so hard you’d think she was going right over: she hung there on her side for a moment and then came whipping back, at the same time burying her stem in a mound of foam and shaking like a duck with Parkinson’s Disease. Potts shouted, ‘Force eight, I reckon.’
‘Could be rising seven.’ Kyle had a new cigarette waggling in his mouth; the grease on his hair gleamed in the faint light from the binnacle; his face was bony, hollow-cheeked, a nervy drinker’s face… ‘Bloody asdics. Got him by the knackers one minute, then—’ he shook his head. Potts commiserated, ‘Fluke gettin’ anything at all, sea like this. Eh, skipper?’ Harris nodding, agreeing, but still searching, finding nothing, pings going out unanswered: Potts, who’d done an A/S course quite recently, suggested, ‘Could’ve turned towards us, run under us, run out of the beam and away astern?’
They stared at him: and he was right. The U-boat had been travelling to starboard, might easily have been circling: then, heading directly for its hunter, it would have passed out of the elliptical beam, vanished…
‘Starboard twenty. Bring her round to oh-seven-oh.’
Reciprocal course: if she could get round across this sea without actually bashing herself to pieces… Kyle checked the time: the escort commander’s orders had been to sit on top of this one for at least thirty minutes, but it was only 2314 now and this meant it had to be badgered for another twenty yet – and it could be a couple of miles away, or at least, half a mile…
‘Depth charges, sir. Northeast, long way off.’ Listening, twiddling the knob, not pinging now, listening to the rest of the U-boat pack getting clobbered up there while the convoy slid away northwestward. Kyle told him to get on with it, never mind bloody depth bombs, this bastard here was the sod that mattered, he had to be kept deep and nervous. Opal fighting her way round… He shouted at Potts to go aft to the depth charge party, have them stand by to drop single charges at one-minute intervals. That might entertain the Hun for half an hour… Then for an hour after that, plugging northward at her best speed, Opal would try to make herself look and sound like a whole convoy. She’d drop a depth charge now and then and fire off some rockets. U-boats up ahead, already confused by the other escorts’ attack on them, might not be too difficult to fool, in this blinding weather. But finally, Kyle faced the task of getting his ship past them – through them or round them – and the long haul from there to rejoin the convoy – with a top speed of just over 10 knots, no bloody RDF, weather going from piss-poor to flaming awful and SL 320 already God only knew how far away, getting itself hidden in the night.