Prime Minister to General Alexander: I send you my heartfelt congratulations on the splendid feat of arms achieved by the Eighth Army under the command of your brilliant lieutenant, Montgomery… ‘Torch’ movements are proceeding with precision and so far amazing secrecy…
Ultra paddled slowly, quietly, in towards the beach near Termini where at 0200 she was due to meet and embark the Count. She was still a few miles offshore, with Cape Cefalu a dozen miles away to port. Ruck was taking her in at periscope depth: he was at the periscope himself, straining his eyes into the dark, and he had Newton – Ultra’s senior asdic rating – on the set. The submarine’s motors were running at slow speed, grouped down, meaning that the two sections of her battery were connected in series, as opposed to parallel which gave greater power. This way she was getting about one and a half knots and keeping propeller noise to a minimum. On operations of this clandestine kind you had always to be on guard against the possibility of ambush, which accounted for Ruck’s extreme circumspection.
The ambusher might be a U-boat, or E-boats, or destroyers. A U-boat lying dead quiet and listening through its hydrophones would be the most dangerous: the first you might know of it could be the sound – detected too late – of torpedoes racing at you. You could imagine it visually, here and now: a submarine’s black shape somewhere between this point and the shore: tubes ready, bowcaps open, captain motionless at the periscope and hydrophone operator nodding as he picks up the sound of approaching screws… It could be real. Happening at this moment – if, for instance, the Count had been caught and talked to save his life: or if there’d been a leak elsewhere… Ruck was on his toes and being very, very wary, more so than usual: he was entering the enemy’s back yard, and if the enemy had known he was coming they’d have had it staked out.
Bob McClure was at the chart table, watching points for Ruck, checking the boat’s slow progress on the automatic log. The log’s constant clicking was the loudest sound in this midships area of the submarine: otherwise there was only the soft hum of the motors and an occasional quiet movement from Ruck or one of the control room watchkeepers. A planesman putting on a few degrees of angle; the helmsman fractionally shifting his wheel; the messenger clearing his throat. It was very warm, to match the stillness: Ultra had spent the whole of the day motoring westward along the Sicilian coastline, and electric power made for central heating.
It also drained the battery. In normal patrol routine they’d have been on the surface now, running a diesel charge to top it up.
It was 1 am, 5 November. One hour to go to the rendezvous. Paul was flat on his bunk, sleepless, listening to the small sounds from the control room, trying to figure out an answer to a problem that was bothering him, and hearing pages turn – Hugo Wykeham, at the table, reading Edgar Wallace… Wykeham had been into the control room a short time ago, offering to look after the trim for Ruck, but the skipper had told him not to bother, McClure could handle it.
Paul wished he could see the Count now, this minute, wherever he might be. On the beach, perhaps, already there and waiting for Ultra’s blue light to show. Or in some farmhouse with a bunch of cut-throat partisans… He might have a good yarn to tell when he came back on board: and he’d be in a better frame of mind, one might hope, better than the blue funk he’d been in when he left.
The puzzling aspect of this situation was what the routine was going to be for the re-embarkation. Paul had asked Ruck about it: for instance, space would have to be cleared for the canoe in the torpedo stowage compartment before they surfaced, and it should have been happening now – with only an hour to go, and the TSC resembling the Black Hole of Calcutta, crammed with all sorts of gear that would have overflowed into the rack-space formerly occupied by the folboat. Moving stuff around wasn’t easy, because the compartment was so full of it: to reorganise it you’d have to pile a mountain of stuff out in the gangway first. But Paul had also wanted to get a decision on the drill with the fore hatch: for instance, whether he’d go up that way himself, or use the bridge hatch so as to be available on the casing before they got that for’ard one open.
Ruck’s answer to all of it had been, ‘I’ll let you know.’
‘But all that clobber for’ard, sir—’
‘Plenty of time. Don’t worry.’
He could hear Ruck circling with the periscope, the shuffle of his tennis shoes as he moved round the raised sill of the periscope well. Then his voice asking his navigator, ‘How far to go now?’
To the rendezvous position, he’d mean. Wykeham had stopped reading, and was waiting to hear the answer. McClure provided it from the chart table, which was just across the gangway from this space: ‘Two point four miles, sir.’
Ruck grunted acknowledgement. Still circling. Faint clicking from asdics as Newton trained around with his ears turned to any whisper from the black surrounding water. Paul looked over the edge of his bunk, down at Wykeham, the slightly balding top of that Old Etonian head. ‘D’you understand the form with the canoe? What the hell I’m supposed to do with it?’
Wykeham glanced up. ‘I wouldn’t dream of making a suggestion, Sub.’
Ruck’s voice: ‘How much water under us, pilot?’
‘Hundred and ninety feet, sir. Not shelving much yet.’
Paul said quietly, ‘I told the Count we’d have a tot of rum for him, when he gets back.’
‘And where will that come from?’
He hadn’t given it much thought. He said, ‘I’ll ask the coxswain.’
‘Easier to give him a slug of Scotch.’ Nobody drank at sea, in the wardroom, but there were some bottles in the wine locker. Wykeham pushed his novel aside, and reached for the poker dice in their leather cup. ‘If we get him back… Want a game, Sub?’
‘D’you think there’s some doubt?’
‘I’ve no idea at all… Come on, turn out, let’s roll ’em.’
He slid down on to the bench. ‘Are you thinking he might not make it?’
‘Agents have gone adrift before, haven’t they.’ He passed him one of the dice, to spin for starters. ‘Ace up, king towards…’
‘At this rate we won’t be anything like in position by oh-two-double-oh.’
‘Doesn’t look like it, does it.’ Wykeham murmured, ‘Skipper knows what he’s doing, Sub… That’s a queen to your miserable ten, so I start. Here come five aces.’ He threw a low straight, in one, the rattle of the dice startlingly loud in the surrounding quiet. ‘I’ll leave it at that, this time. But let’s have that cloth on the table.’
‘Hope to God we do get the old twister back.’
‘“Twister” is about right…’
At 0140 Ruck ordered Diving Stations, and when the hands had settled down at their posts and Wykeham had adjusted the trim he had one motor stopped. Making the boat’s propulsion even quieter. He’d already decreed ‘silent running’, so the order was passed to the motor room by word of mouth instead of by the noisy telegraph, which was loud enough to be heard miles away, under water.
McClure told him, ‘At oh-two-double-oh we’ll be two and a half-thousand yards short of the R/V position, sir.’
Ruck took his eyes off the periscope lenses, looked at McClure, and nodded. Then he resumed his slow, concentrated search. Newton, on asdics, had his eyes half-shut as he trained all round, listening intently, his entire concentration out there in the cold blackness with the fishes.
‘Signalman.’
Jannaway started… ‘Sir?’
‘When we surface I want you behind me on the ladder, carrying the Aldis with the blue shade on it. But you’re to stay on the ladder, right in the hatch. I’ll take the lamp from you when I’m ready, and I’ll do the flashing: all you have to do is plug it in and pass it to me, and stay where you are. Clear?’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘If we have to dive, I may throw you the lamp. Just get the hell out of the way and make sure the lamp’s lead is clear of the hatch rim. Shout down any “dive” order that I give, as you drop down. I do mean drop. It’ll need to be the fastest dive anyone ever saw.’ He pulled his head back from the periscope again, to address Wykeham now. ‘Point is, Number One, I don’t intend opening the voice-pipe. Nor do I want her fully surfaced. I want the top lid a few feet out of water, that’s all. Get the idea?’
Wykeham nodded. ‘Eight feet on the gauges?’
‘That’ll do. We’ll stay on the motors. On the order “dive”, full ahead grouped up, and flood Q. You can expect that order, so be ready for it.’ He’d put his eyes back to the lenses again. Nobody understanding much yet. The orders were clear but the reasoning behind them wasn’t. To be surfacing at least a mile short of the position, and expecting to stay up for no more than seconds, and yet needing the blue lamp as if the Count would be there to see it, in range to see it…
Perhaps Ruck was hoping to get the Count started on his canoe trip, then to run in dived and surface again in the right place, not having had to hang around and wait after the first showing of the light? But the Count had been told to steer for it: and if after one lot of flashing it didn’t appear again he’d have no mark to guide him.
‘Depth?’
‘Twenty-nine feet, sir—’
‘Keep her up, for Christ’s—’
‘Sorry, sir.’ Wykeham was fiddling with the trim. With so little way on her, it needed to be a very accurate one. Also the closer you came to land the more uneven the salinity and therefore density might be, if there was any mix of river water.
‘Twenty-eight feet, sir.’
‘Hear anything, Newton?’
‘No, sir.’
McClure prompted, ‘Five minutes to oh-two-double-oh, sir.’
‘Port twenty.’
‘Port twenty, sir.’ The helmsman span his wheel. Wykeham told the second coxswain, ‘Put some dive on the fore planes, Lovesay.’ Under helm, the bow tended to rise. The helmsman reported, ‘Twenty of port wheel on, sir.’
Paul was thinking that as a canoeist, the Count was very much an amateur, and without the light to steer by he’d panic, go any way except the right one. He’d miss the rendezvous, and he’d be invisible in the dark. And Ruck wouldn’t risk his ship by hanging around.
‘Steer north.’
‘Steer north, sir…’
Swivelling her right around, turning her stern to the beach. So he wasn’t intending to go any closer in, wasn’t taking her even within a mile of the pick-up position?
‘Stand by to surface.’
Wykeham ordered, ‘Check main vents.’ And a minute later, when the reports were complete, ‘Ready to surface, sir.’ Paul decided that this must be intended as a test surfacing, to make sure the bay was empty. When he was sure of it, he’d go on in and find the Count. Well, he had to: it was what he’d brought Ultra in here for, the only reason for being here at all!
Questioning Newton again: the asdic man shaking his head in that goofy way of his, repeating, ‘Nothing, sir…’ Ruck looked across at Wykeham, and nodded. ‘Half ahead together. Surface!’
‘Blow one, three and five main ballast!’
Quinn, the bearded artificer on the blowing panel, wrenched the valves open. Jannaway had opened the lower hatch, and he had the Aldis ready with its rubber-covered lead coiled over his shoulder. Ruck started up the ladder as air blasted into the tanks: Jannaway followed close behind him. Hydroplanes were at hard a-rise and the boat was lifting, depth-gauge needles circling slowly and then faster round their dials and Wykeham intoning, for Ruck’s information up there under the hatch, ‘Twenty-two… Twenty feet, sir… Eighteen… Sixteen…’ At twelve, one clip swung off, clanking as Ruck released it: at ten feet, second clip, and the hatch flung back, water cascading down and Wykeham yelling at Quinn over the racket of HP air coursing through the pipes, ‘Stop blowing!’ Cold night air wafted down. A lot of sea had come down too, ladder and hatch-rims still dripping into a pool of it on the corticene-covered deck. Ultra wallowed, rolling sluggishly in low waves, really only partly surfaced and in just a little better than neutral buoyancy; there’d be very little of her in sight above water. Enough to show up on direction-finding apparatus, of course: and any enemy with hydrophones would have heard her surfacing, which was a very noisy process… Ruck would be displaying the blue lamp now; a second ago he’d shouted for it, to Jannaway, he’d be pointing it in the direction of the beach and giving three blue flashes – pause – three more – pause – three more… Wykeham ordered, ‘Stop together. Group up.’ To be ready for the ‘dive’ order if it came.
Newton instigated it – wide-eyed, bawling: ‘HE right astern, fast turbine, closing!’
‘HE’ stood for hydrophone effect. Propeller noise. He’d howled it like a dog affected by the moon and Jannaway had heard it up there in the top hatch and repeated it, a booming, echoing cry of alarm in the steel drum of the tower. Ruck’s shout followed instantaneously: ‘Dive, dive, dive!’
‘Open main vents, flood Q, full ahead together!’
Paul thinking, in the rush of movement as the vents banged open all along her length, He was right…
The signalman dropped like a ton of deadweight with the lamp clutched against his chest. He was crashing through the lower hatch when the top lid slammed shut and Ruck called ‘Hatch shut, one clip on!’ An OK that it was safe to continue to dive. By this time, two seconds later, the top hatch would be under water anyway: and as it would have been distinctly unsafe not to take her down, the alternative would have been to shut the lower hatch, trapping the skipper in the tower. Fortunately that had not been necessary. Jannaway was on his back in that pool of water, then scrambling aside, getting out of the way of Ruck’s equally fast but less uncontrolled descent.
‘Sixty feet. Well done, signalman.’ Ruck was soaking wet, and panting. He asked Newton, ‘How close? I saw some damn—’
‘Here.’ Newton’s eyes were wide, his body upright, rigid on the stool, and the long forefinger of his left hand was pointing directly upward. ‘Coming over – now…’
Enemy screws raced over, fast and loud, a singing churn that had barely passed before it was repeated – a second one close astern of it. Passing very fast, though, and already fading seaward. Newton said, his torso seeming to shorten as he relaxed, folding down into his customarily slumped pose again, ‘E-boats, sir.’
‘Group down, slow ahead together. Port twenty. Blow Q.’
There had been a welcoming party.
But no depth charges. Not yet, anyway. They might not be carrying any: they might have been expecting a clean kill on the surface with torpedoes, or their guns.
‘Going round to starboard, sir. Circling, I’d say.’
‘Midships.’ Ruck told Creagh, the helmsman, ‘Steer three-three-oh.’
The Germans had known exactly where to find them, Paul realised. Except for the fact that Ultra had been a mile to seaward of where she should have been, and Ruck handling her as if he’d known beyond doubt they’d be here. If he had not been so extremely cautious, Ultra would almost surely have been blown apart by this time.
‘Course three-three-oh, sir.’
‘Very good. Stop starboard.’
One motor only: to take her softly, softly out to sea northwestward.
Newton reported, ‘Enemies bearing green seven-oh, moving left to right, sir.’
Heading back inshore, then. Ruck murmured, mostly to himself, ‘Thought they had us on toast, I’ll bet.’ He looked at Wykeham and told him flatly, ‘They’ve got the Count. That’s the only way they could have known precisely where to jump us.’
‘Couldn’t there have been a leak somewhere else, sir? The planning end, shoreside?’
Ruck shook his head: a decisive jerk. ‘I and the Count fixed the position and the time after we left Malta. That’s the system, you see.’
Wykeham nodding slowly. ‘So what now, sir? Home to Malta?’
‘Doubt it. But let’s find out.’ He told McClure, ‘Let’s have the sealed envelope, Sub.’
He didn’t seem in the least disturbed by his certainty that the Count had run into trouble.
McClure opened the safe and took out a brown, red-sealed envelope. He gave it to Ruck, who took it to the chart table and slit it open. Newton reported, ‘They’re inshore of us, sir, slowed down a lot. Bearing green one-five-oh, distant, drawing right. No transmissions, sir.’
McClure muttered to Paul, ‘At least I keep my bunk now.’ Ruck’s murmur of ‘Callous little swine’ was fair comment, Paul thought. An agent caught as Paoli – alias Venizelos, etc – had apparently been caught, was liable to be tortured, probably shot after they’d squeezed all they could out of him. The sad little guy who’d sat at that wardroom table only three days ago and proposed visiting in Connecticut after the war was most likely either dead or in agony. While Ultra turned her back on him, tiptoed discreetly away… Ruck finished skimming through whatever orders were in that package: he’d folded it all and stuffed it into the hip pocket of his old grey flannel bags. Pulling out a fresh chart now, one covering the whole of the western Mediterranean. Paul and McClure, sharp-eyed for any clues, watched him slide it over the Sicilian chart and begin to check distances from here westward, setting dividers against the latitude scale and then walking them across the chart.
‘E-boats have turned seaward, sir. Green one-five-five, moving right to left, about half speed.’
‘Very good.’ But they’d missed out, and they’d know it… Straightening from the chart, Ruck came back into the control room. ‘We’ll stay as we are for half an hour, Number One. Then if we’re still in the clear we’ll surface and pump some amps in – about three and a half hours of darkness left. But we now have nearly five hundred miles to cover, in—’ he checked it out on his fingers – ‘in three days and two nights. So we’ll need to get a bit of a wriggle on.’ It was a fact: mental arithmetic told one that with the need to be dived, slow, throughout the daylight hours, you’d need every minute of it… But Ruck looked happy – even jubilant: you could see that the events of the last half-hour had brightened him enormously. Whereas Paul had an uncomfortable feeling of treachery, desertion… Ruck was reaching for the microphone of the Tannoy broadcasting system: he switched it on, tested it by slapping it with his palm. Then, ‘D’you hear, there? Captain speaking… Unfortunately, we have not been able to pick up the agent. The opposition was waiting for us, and that’s certain proof they’ve nabbed him. Too bad… Now, however, we’re off westward, for a different but very special job. There’d be no point telling you at this stage what it is, but we’ll be in transit three days and two nights, and what we’ll be doing is something very important, probably a turning-point in the war. We can feel honoured to have a key role to play in it… But anyway – that’s it for now. I expect we’ll be surfacing in about half an hour.’
McClure had been at the chart. He whispered to Paul, ‘Five hundred miles west takes us either to Majorca or Algiers.’
The Count had said Sicily – Palermo – or Cagliari in Sardinia. No… he’d said both those places. And he’d had secret papers taped to his ribs: and he’d been caught. But he might have got rid of the papers first. Except he’d told them this much… Paul felt sure it wouldn’t be Majorca, anyway: Majorca was Spanish, and the Spaniards were still neutral – just…
An hour later, on the surface, drinking cocoa round the wardroom table while the diesels rumbled, charging the battery and driving the ship westward while they sucked cold night air down through the hatch, Ruck told them, ‘You might as well know it now. Our so-called Count was a double agent. That’s to say, he took pay from our side and sold information to the Italians too. Our people knew it, and they’ve been keeping him on ice for something of this sort.’
Wykeham spooned sugar into his cup. He was dressed for the bridge, due to relieve McClure up there in about ten minutes.
‘Are you saying he was intended to be caught?’
Ruck nodded. ‘Complete with detailed information in which he believes. The Italians and Germans will believe it too. It’s all balls, of course.’
‘Palermo and Cagliari?’
‘Exactly, Sub.’ Ruck added, ‘Sorry as I am to disillusion you. You thought he was rather a nice chap, didn’t you? The truth is that on at least one earlier stunt, a commando expedition to the Eyetie mainland, he sold our blokes down the river and none of them came out of it. Whatever’s happening to him now is poetic justice, you see, as well as serving a very important purpose.’
‘I wonder if he suspected something of the sort. He was pretty scared.’
‘Mostly at having to paddle his own canoe, wasn’t it?’
Paul asked Ruck, more on the off-chance than in any expectation of getting an answer, ‘When we were in Malta, sir, you said the flotilla had some other cloak-and-dagger jobs on. Are they jobs like this one?’
‘Not really.’ Ruck rubbed his jaw, nails grating on the stubble. ‘Well, it’ll be all wrapped up by now, so there’s no harm telling you… No, those were all to do with generals. Mostly from Gib, though, not Malta. There was a Yank general by the name of Mark Clark to be put ashore in Algeria and then brought off again, and a frog one plus some of his family to be lifted from a beach somewhere near Marseilles. He was to be transferred at sea to a Catalina and flown to Gib. General Giraud… Seraph was earmarked for those jobs, then Sybil was to run in and pick up Giraud’s staff, on the next night.’
‘Big stuff, by the sound of it.’
Ruck nodded at Wykeham. ‘About as big as you can imagine.’
Paul thought, putting two and two together, Algiers…
But there was another question annoying him…
‘If we knew the Count would have been caught, sir, why risk this ship by coming back to the place where they’d be pretty certain to be waiting for us?’
‘Two good reasons.’ Ruck asked Wykeham, ‘Suggest what they might be?’
‘Well.’ Wykeham gave it a few seconds’ thought. ‘One you mentioned. The fact the E-boats were there proves they caught him. Since the R/V details were only settled at sea and no-one else could have known them?’
‘Right. What else?’
Paul had stretched his mind to it… ‘If we hadn’t shown up, they’d have guessed we planted him on them?’
‘See what you can do when you try.’ Ruck tapped the signal log. ‘And the news we sent out ten minutes ago, regretting the rendezvous couldn’t be kept owing to enemy interference… If the Wops can decode it, all it’ll tell them is what we want them to believe. Whereas to our backroom boys it says “operation completely successful”. Right?’
The early morning BBC bulletin confirmed a much bigger success – continuing exploitation of the Eighth Army’s victory in the desert. The RAF had achieved total air superiority and Rommel’s forces were in full retreat.
‘Another bloody day of it…’ Tom Kyle muttered it to himself: barely loud enough for the helmsman or young Chalmers, his OOW, to have heard. He scowled out through salt-stained glass at a sea that was down to about force six again now. It had certainly exceeded force eight during the previous day and night. But this was the second dawn in which Opal had found herself alone, rolling northwestward and still separated by miles of ocean from convoy SL 320.
The rendezvous was set for noon today. Kyle had wirelessed yesterday, giving his own estimated position, course and speed, and a couple of hours later he’d received the escort commander’s answer, establishing the R/V position at a certain point on bearing 030 degrees from position B. Obviously he’d expressed it that way, instead of in terms of latitude and longitude, because the Germans wouldn’t have the slightest notion where position B was, so that even if they were able to break the cypher they wouldn’t be getting anything of use to them.
All days looked horrible to start with. In years now he hadn’t seen one that didn’t. He lit a cigarette.
On the night of the second, running into early morning of the third, after he’d kept the shadower down for the requisite period of time and then left on a northeasterly course – up the track from which by that time the convoy would have turned away – Kyle had seen no fewer than four U-boats on the surface and at comparatively close quarters. One had fired a few shots at him and then dived, and the last of them had been about a mile ahead of him and steering the same course, gradually drawing farther and farther ahead, for more than an hour before he’d lost sight of it. It had been too rough on that course to man the gun; if the U-boat had ever looked astern and spotted Opal it must have thought she was one of its own crowd. In fact in those conditions the German might well not have seen her. The U-boats had been all over the place, obviously at sixes and sevens after that pasting by the other escorts and then the disappearance of the convoy; Kyle had been intent – having finished his performance with rockets and depth charges farther south – on getting through them, getting through the night, joining up with SL 320 as early as possible next day. Yesterday…
Sub-lieutenant Chalmers observed brightly, ‘Could be worse, sir… Gone down quite a bit during the night, wouldn’t you say?’
Kyle felt his head drawing in like a tortoise’s. He wasn’t saying a bloody thing. Or even glancing round. Cheerfulness at this time of day set his teeth on edge. Only five minutes ago he’d been asleep, on the horsehair settee in his cabin-cum-charthouse, and it took a lot more than five minutes, in his view, for an Atlantic dawn to acquire a silver lining.
Potts would still have his great fat head down, of course. Potts slept like a hippo, no matter what the weather was doing. Slept like a hippo, ate like a wolf. Kyle drew hard on his cigarette, and turned his thoughts to the midday rendezvous. Since Opal’s course and the convoy’s could be only just converging, probably with no more than a few degrees between them, and since the intersection of their tracks was – theoretically, anyway – less than six hours ahead, you could reckon there was probably not so great a distance between them now. SL 320 might not be far over that western horizon. 030 degrees from position B was in fact the original track, the path the convoy should have been on all the time, and Opal was right on it while the convoy was in the process of crabbing back towards it after that diversion. They’d be well astern of schedule, but Kyle couldn’t say by how many miles or hours – or days – because he was going purely by dead reckoning, having had no chance to use a sextant in recent days.
Wind and sea were broad on the bow. Opal’s rolling was prodigious. But they were so used to it by this time that if it had stopped they’d have gone on staggering.
Kyle had seen enough of the dismal-looking seascape. He turned his head and pink-rimmed eyes on young Chalmers.
‘I’m off below for breakfast. I’ll give Potts a shake for you.’
‘Thanks a lot, sir!’
Chalmers’ chirpiness was intensely irritating. Twenty years old, clear-eyed, clean and smart even at sea, and too sharp-witted for his own good. He was a very reliable watchkeeper, his celestial navigation was fast and accurate, and his ship-handling was better than most – Kyle thought – he handles her better than bloody Potts does, any road… But the young bugger was always so bright and willing: that was what grated, that and the fact he was so good at his job that it was difficult to find justification for kicking him up the arse, which was what Kyle found himself wanting to do several times a day… He was asking him now, ‘When the escort commander replied to your signal, sir, wasn’t he giving away his position to the U-boats? I mean, having gone to such lengths to get away from them?’
Kyle had given some thought to this, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised – only fed-up – if there’d been no reply for a day or two. If the diversion had worked well, and the U-boats had been thrown off the trail, he wouldn’t have blamed Everard for clamming up.
He pinched out his cigarette. ‘Depends. If there was one of the bastards still shadowing, wouldn’t have made much bloody odds, would it?’
‘No. I see…’
Kyle had his hand on the sliding door at the back end of the bridge when the first shell scorched overhead. A scrunching, ripping noise, like tearing canvas…
The first shots from the 37mm had gone over, but Emsmann, the man on that gun, had the range now and was hitting. Hartwig on the 20mm had incendiaries as well as armour-piercing rounds in his pans, and every sixth round was tracer: he used his gun like a hose-pipe, aiming with the fall-of-shot more than with the weapon itself, and at this close range it was easy and quite devastating. His orders were to go first for any close-range weapons that might be firing at them, then for the dinghy on the trawler’s stern and then the life rafts. The trawler was turning: rocking up on a big roller as it ran under her, displaying the full depth of her hull for’ard, and at the same time her length was opening as she swung to starboard. Looff saw men pouring out of the accommodation hatch in her for’ard welldeck, rushing to man the gun on her foc’sl: the 37mm hit the foc’sl ladder when the first of them were on it, and he knew then for sure, seeing parts of men as well as ladder flying and the foc’sl-break opened, gaping jaggedly and smoking, that he had an easy killing here. In a second or two that gun itself would be smashed, and the trawler didn’t have a hope in hell. A fire had started in her bridge, and its starboard side was already partly wrecked. He called down to his helmsman, ‘Port fifteen, up five knots!’ To counter the trawler’s turn. Surprise had played its part, but basically this was a very simple tactic that could hardly fail to succeed. He’d surfaced U 702 right astern of his target, and with the trawler on a bearing of red 30, thirty on the port bow. This enabled both the U-boat’s guns to engage, and also put them in what was a blind arc to the trawler where her only weapon – that four-inch on the wave-swept platform on her bow – couldn’t bear, was utterly useless. Now as she swung to starboard so that it should bear, his guns raked that exposed forepart while at the same time he turned his submarine to port to cross the Brit’s stern again, seeking cover while he engaged her now over his starboard side. Looff had just happened to be approaching on the Opal’s beam, closing in towards the convoy with which Drachens Three, Six and Nine were currently in contact. He’d ordered them to spread out ahead of it, and he’d been steering to join them, re-establish the pack in a position to make up, tonight, for what had been lost in the past two nights: and there right ahead of the U-boat, twenty minutes ago during Leutnant-zur-See Kurt Schwieger’s watch, had been this little hostage to fate all on its lonesome… He had the bastard cold. He had the speed advantage, and the weapons, and he’d caught him completely on the hop. There’d be a red streamer among the white ones all right, when U 702 returned to base: this might be a tiddler, but it was technically a warship. It made up – partially, and for the moment – for the maddening, highly frustrating past forty-eight hours during which Looff and most of the Drachen pack had lost the convoy, through a combination of foul weather and tricky manoeuvring by the Brits… Who’d still, anyway, lost two ships last night, one to Gustaf Becker in Drachen Three and one to young Meusel in Drachen Nine… There’d been a slight pause in the action while U 702’s bow had been pointing directly at her target: but she’d swung on round and now the guns were trained out to starboard, finishing the job off, the quick-firing 37mm maintaining its steady rhythmic pumping crashes and the lighter, high-speed 20mm roaring harshly, hosing its lethal stream to and fro across the already badly mauled and dying ship. When any human figure moved, even on its hands and knees, the stream shifted, found it. The trawler had got one shot off – one, with two men manning that gun for less than half a minute – before Looff had tucked his submarine back into the safe sector again: and those two men had been dead by that time. The target was still circling: its bridge was a nest of flame, smoke pouring away down-wind, shells bursting constantly in that mess of destruction, a few missing now and then – mostly because of the motion, the way the weather was flinging the submarine around – but never for long, the gunners always came back on target very smartly. U 702 was like a prize-fighter with a heavily-outmatched opponent on the ropes and groggy but somehow still on his feet: you just went on hitting, destroying, smashing… Looff, near-deafened by the racket, most of which was from the lighter gun, the snarling 20mm which was on the rear end of this same bridge deck; the other one was farther aft and a step lower, on the railed circular platform known to U-boat men as the ‘conservatory’. He shouted in Oelricher’s ear – his own voice inaudible to him, but the quartermaster heard it – ‘Tell Emsmann, aim for the waterline!’
To puncture him, and sink him. That little dinghy had been blown to pieces, ditto the life rafts. But now, extraordinarily, a gun was firing at them – a light machine-gun firing in short bursts – from the confusion of smoke and fire amidships, up in the wrecked bridge. He saw it because there was tracer in it, the glow seemingly slow-moving, lifting with bright balloon-like slowness then speeding into the wicked whipping crack of bullets flashing over: he yelled, ‘Hit that gun!’ but Oelricher was already shouting in Hartwig’s ear and pointing: and he needn’t have bothered anyway – it happened, at that moment. With the trawler virtually lying on her side, locked in the circling turn, wheel most likely jammed, Looff guessed; but all he had to do was circle too, stay astern for near-total safety while his guns cut her to pieces. The 37mm had gone for the Bren or whatever that gun was, and it ended in that whole side of the little ship’s upperworks disintegrating. She was on her side, listing, not righting herself any more, lying on her beam with her forepart higher than her stern: but, incredibly, a man, erect, with a gun, struggling to fit it to a mounting… Another machine-gun, on some raised part in the middle of that slope of wreckage abaft the trawler’s funnel: the gun hadn’t fired when Looff saw this happening and raised his glasses, focusing on that figure and screaming a warning back to Oelricher—
Tom Kyle had sent Chalmers down to get the old water-cooled Lewis out and mount it on its stanchion on the engine-room hatch back aft. Potts meanwhile had finally managed to get the Vickers GO set up on the signal deck on the starboard side of the bridge. Taken him a bloody age, at that. The Lewis hadn’t been used in a year or more: they’d been in the Med then, on the Tobruk run, and it had been salvaged out of a dump at Mersa; all the trawlers stuck extra weapons on, whatever they could scrounge from the dumps, for AA defence on that desert coast. It might have been a fine weapon in its day (in 1914, say) but it turned out to be a pain in the neck on board Opal, jamming solid the moment it saw a Swastika or those black crosses. So it had been stowed down for’ard in the bosun’s store. Kyle had sent Chalmers for it partly to get rid of him and partly because the radio operator, amongst others, had been killed, and he considered it important to get a signal out before the aerials and the set went to blazes, to let the escort commander of SL 320 know what was happening. He mightn’t be aware there was a U-boat this close to him, and Kyle flattered himself at being a dab hand with a morse key: he managed it, too, despite having been hit in the shoulder and having a useless arm that hung dripping, luckily without any feeling in that side at all. As soon as he’d got the message away he went down to help Chalmers – Potts had been killed by then, and the Vickers and that bit of signal deck had gone with him. There was no steering, no control, no purpose that Kyle or anyone else could have served up here: the coxswain was draped across his wheel, dead and smouldering and with cortisene all burnt away around him, reeking. Kyle found the boy dead too, his skull smashed by a cannon shell like an exploded egg, in the for’ard welldeck, with the Lewis gun under him and some belts of .303 ammunition wrapped round his shoulders. The only men alive now were dying, and Opal was sinking by the stern and listing too, perhaps about to turn turtle, by the feel of her. Kyle pulled Chalmers’ body off the gun, hefted it in his good arm and staggered aft to the engine-room hatch, which was blackened and blistered but intact, although the mounting for the gun was slightly askew and he could see he’d have a problem. There was nothing else he could usefully have been doing, though, not the slightest point in trying to help such men as might still be living, since there was no hope at all of survival. There were no rafts, and U-boats never bothered with survivors. He knew this so well that he didn’t think about it: the only practical thing to do was take a few Germans with you, make it slightly less joyful an occasion for them. The gun in its cylindrical water-cooling jacket was a heavy, awkward load, and one-armed it was a hell of a job to get it up on the slanting hatch-cover. Cursing it steadily and fluently, a growling noise that sounded like someone else beside him swearing and grunting in his ear. The ship was low in the water, sluggish as if the sea was glue. He got the thing up there finally, then remembered – cursing himself for it, a loud shout of profanity – that the ammo belts were still draped round Chalmers’ torso. He was turning to ease himself down from the hatch-top when U 702’s 20mm sewed a straight line like explosive stitchwork right up the trawler’s slanting centreline, bursting the old Lewis into flying scrap a second before it sent Tom Kyle reeling scarlet to his Maker.
Instead of a cross, the albatross
About his neck was hung…
The effort of recall passed time, and occupied the mind. His greatest accomplishment so far had been to recapture half Swinburne’s Forsaken Garden, which when he’d memorised it in the English class at Dartmouth had been considered somewhat outré. But now the Ancient Mariner was going to have to wait a while, as it was time to go down and reconnoitre for some grub.
The child had gone off to school and the girl, wearing the same clothes and carrying the same basket, had left soon afterwards, as she had on the previous two days. Before these departures there’d been the standard early-morning routine as well – the boy to the well with a bucket, sometimes several buckets – his mother opening shutters and seeing him off to school before she fed the hens. Peering down between the slats of the shutters, Jack saw too – as he had yesterday – that she also went into the henhouse and collected the morning’s eggs. Yesterday she’d done it twice, morning and evening, and during her absence in the afternoon he’d gone out there and found three still warm in the straw nests. He’d considered boiling them in a pan of water on her stove, but he’d baulked at taking such a liberty: it had seemed excessive, for some reason. He’d thought better of it since: eating the eggs raw up here later, he’d wished he’d gone ahead and cooked them. There’d have been no traces for her to have seen, just from a pot having had water boiled in it. And he could have used the heated water afterwards for washing. He’d taken some bread yesterday, and a mutton bone with meat on it, and drunk some milk from a jug. He’d also washed himself, without soap, in a bucket of ice-cold water, and his appearance afterwards in the mirror in the girl’s bedroom had been somewhat reassuring. He’d approached it with trepidation, remembering the shock he’d given himself that first day; but yesterday the eyes had seemed less crazy, the expression altogether less savage. As a result, he supposed, of having had some rest and a certain amount of sustenance, and shelter.
The ankle was less painful, too. Sprains did heal themselves, given time and rest. Moving out of his room now and down the stairs, negotiating the heap of junk that blocked them lower down, he hardly put any weight on it at all. He’d become adept at hopping on the sound foot, and taking weight on his arms against walls and so on; and feeling generally better now, stronger in spirit as well as physically, he wanted the ankle to mend quickly so he could be on his way. He thought the bike would still be in the place where he’d hidden it. There’d been no further signs of the military, which there surely would have been if they’d found it; they’d been searching for an escaped POW at the very time it had disappeared, and they’d hardly have failed to connect the two phenomena. They might well have assumed their quarry had taken off in a southerly direction, and that search would have been a formality, compliance with an order to check all buildings within a certain radius. Something like that. It had seemed perfunctory, at the time.
Today, his programme was to go out and get some eggs, then heat water in a saucepan and boil them. He’d been over-cautious yesterday, and raw eggs were fairly unappealing even to a very hungry man. Whereas hard-boiled ones, with some bread if he struck lucky again—
He stopped dead, in the kitchen doorway.
She’d laid a place at the table. A setting for one. Knife, fork, German sausage and a peeled, hard-boiled egg, two thick slices of black bread, a tumbler with a jug of milk beside it.
He stood frozen, gaping at it. Scared stiff of it. It was like looking at a baited trap. He was as shocked as he might have been if there’d been someone sitting there with a pistol pointing at his head.
But as his mind began to unfreeze, he realised that she might have set it for herself. Or for the child… That was it! The child would be coming home early from school – before she was expecting to get back herself – so she’d left his meal ready for him.
It was the obvious solution. But for a moment he’d been really frightened. Nerves on edge: he hadn’t appreciated what strange tricks solitude could play. Staring at the setting on the table, actually frightened…
She’d left it for the child. Obviously. And he’d better make it snappy now, he realised, because if that was the boy’s lunch he might be trotting up to the door quite soon. Nasty little Nazi that it was: Jack remembered that bony little arm shooting up, the rapped ‘Heil Hitler…’ But now… move. Egg-hunt first. No – visit to the outside WC first, en route to the egg collection. Via a window, since as usual the back door was locked. The child would have its own key, presumably: unless she hid one for it somewhere outside – which might be worth investigating… It was most likely a half-day at school – a Saturday, probably. In which case tomorrow would be Sunday, they might not leave the house at all and he, Jack, might therefore be confined to his room. Facing, among other deprivations, foodlessness. So the thing would be to gather quite a few eggs and hard-boil them all. Then straight back upstairs, before the return of junior. Eat a couple of the eggs today, save the others – and perhaps take one of those two slices of bread?
The child would hardly complain at getting only one slice. If it did, its mother would tell it not to talk nonsense. Might take a slice and a half, in fact: cut one slice neatly in half with that knife, and keep the half-slice in case tomorrow was a Sunday?
He set a pan of water on the stove to start heating while he was outside. And he found five eggs. Good for him, bad luck for the girl. He felt sure it was eggs she took away with her every morning in the basket. Probably traded them for other items such as bread, milk, sausage…
The child did not come home for its lunch. Jack was lying on his mattress several hours later when he heard someone approaching and knelt up quickly, peering through his shutters: it was the girl. At about the same time as she’d returned on the last two days, and as usual carrying a loaded basket. She went round the side of the house to the back, and he heard the back door open and bang shut.
Then – distantly but clearly, echoey through the half-empty house – he heard her laugh.
In London, Rear-Admiral Aubrey Wishart slammed a black ’phone down and snatched up the red one.
‘Wishart.’
Listening…
‘I know. As a matter of fact I’ve just been on a visit to the Tracking Room. It’s true he’s a long way astern of station, and it’s also quite plain the U-boats are homing-in on him again… Yes, agreed, SL 320’s in for some more rough stuff, at least two or three more nights of…’
Listening again. Impatience in his manner.
‘Close, yes. But he’s back on the rails again now, and he’ll know as well as you and I do that he’ll have to stay on them. He knows the score, he’ll handle it.’
Wishart reached for a cigarette, put it in his mouth, groped for a lighter. The voice from the other end of the scrambled line continued for a while, then ended with another question. Wishart drew smoke hard into his lungs.
‘I can tell you positively that he would never have intended losing them. He’d have seen he had to do some damn thing, though, and what he’s just done may have saved half a dozen ships. Or more. But if there’d been any likelihood of actually losing the U-boats he’d have put the kibosh on that when he answered the first call from Opal, wouldn’t he?’
Another interruption… Then, ‘I agree.’ Smoke gusted round the telephone. ‘Very sad. And that’s two of his three trawlers gone, which rather brings one back to his request for reinforcements. As I said before, it seems perfectly justified – especially now his primary task is damn near completed – and that convoy’s going to be lucky to survive even in single figures!’
He rocked back in the chair, scowling at the ceiling.
‘Yes. Admiral Ramsay has been kept informed.’
Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was running the London end of ‘Torch’, as Deputy Allied Naval Commander – deputy to A B Cunningham. Sir Andrew Cunningham and his staff were already in Gibraltar, and General Eisenhower would be joining them in the tunnel some time today. Not that convoy SL 320 came into the scope of their enormously complicated plans: the red-herring operation was entirely peripheral to the main one.
‘No.’ Wishart frowned into the red telephone. ‘Nobody can send him orders now without risk of blowing the gaff and wrecking the whole bloody thing – just when it’s on the point of accomplishment. And if I know Nick Everard, he’d ignore your orders anyway. My worst time, let me tell you, was three days ago before he took matters into his own hands. I’ve known him more than twenty years, he’s there because I knew damn well that if anyone could…’
He’d been interrupted again. He listened for only a few seconds this time. Then he cut in: ‘I’m sorry, Joe. I’m very busy, and this isn’t getting us anywhere. The only way you could possibly help is by sending him the reinforcements he’s asked for. What the hell would you propose – a PQ seventeen?’