77

“How is it that everyone can get back on board on time except you, MacQueen?” asked the indignant captain. He was sitting behind the small desk in his cabin, and the first lieutenant stood smugly behind him. They both wore turtleneck sweaters, and the first lieutenant wore his cap with a crown and fouled anchor badge. MacQueen wore a stiff white shirt with black tie, and he was standing at attention with brown gloves on his hands.

“There was an air raid in London, sir,” replied Patrick MacQueen. “Things got a bit mixed-up.”

The captain leant over the open log book on his desk. “Air raid, was it?” said the captain. “We have just lost a destroyer, the escort that picked up the survivors was also lost, a wolf pack is right across our route, and we don’t know what they’re firing at us. Don’t give me lame excuses, MacQueen. You’re in the shit. Officers should set an example, for God’s sake!”

“They are shoving torpedoes right up our ass, sir,” replied Sub-Lieutenant MacQueen.

“What in the hell does that mean?” asked the first lieutenant. They both looked at Patrick as though he had gone crazy.

“Wait a minute,” said the captain, raising a cautionary hand to the first lieutenant. “If I heard you right they are coming from astern. They aren’t magnetic at all—they’re acoustic! That’s it! They’re guided by the propellers and they home in on them. Jesus, MacQueen, if you’re right, you may have just saved your neck.”

Patrick MacQueen had no idea why he had said that. He had just repeated what the consul had said. He looked blankly at the captain.

“I don’t know whether you are smart, or dumb, or what you are, MacQueen,” said the captain. “I won’t kick you off, but you’ll be on duty for one helluva long time with no leave. Number One, get me a bumboat. I want to visit the senior officer of the escort group, and I will take Rip Van Winkle here along with me.”

On board the senior officer’s destroyer, Sub-Lieutenant MacQueen repeated the words—and then he was forgotten as they returned to the HMCS Fleur-de-Lis.

“Tow something behind to make a racket,” ordered the captain.

“In the middle of the ocean?” gasped the senior officer. He was English and skeptical of all North Americans. “We’d blow it up with our own depth charges.”

“Stream a bucket astern with a steam hose in it,” said the captain. “Launch it over the stern whenever the convoy is attacked. Get steam into it from the boilers—that should deflect ’em.”

“We’re sailing in an hour,” grumped the senior officer. “I think it’s crazy, but anything’s better than nothing. They’ll have a good laugh at the Admiralty, anyway, and maybe you’re right. I don’t know your source, but the language sounds odd to me. Make ready for sea and let’s get on with it…. Fighting a war with buckets! My word!”

Patrick quickly changed and the ship got ready for sea. The first lieutenant was not entirely happy that MacQueen had escaped with only an admonition and not the reprimand that he had recommended. The signal flags were hoisted into the long northern twilight, and the Aldis lamps blinked once more from bridge to bridge. Bells rang in engine rooms and lines were cast from the jetties. The senior officer’s destroyer slipped past the heading for the Foyle, and he flicked a thumbs-up gesture from the railing of his bridge. The corvettes wheeled slowly into line astern and followed him one by one. The high dark hills of Donegal lay on the port side of the Inishowen Peninsula, and Magilligan Point closed the neck of the Lough to starboard. They passed the tankers at Moville and headed for the open sea. The wolf packs were back under the waves, and Freda’s legionnaire state seemed a long way away.

They joined the convoy and headed into the worst of it. The captain ordered Patrick to draw up a design based on exact specifications that were discussed with the engineer chief petty officer. This the captain would send to naval service headquarters in Ottawa, a group of men not known for their imagination. The ship plunged into the northern seas, and the convoy was attacked. The night sky was illuminated by snowflakes and star shells and lines of curving tracer, while the explosions of depth charges crumped through the deck plates and the ocean rocked and tossed all of these playthings with savage glee. It was wet and gyrating and sleepless as men struggled against enemy, ocean, and themselves.

A twenty-member U-boat wolf pack named the Leuthen Group had positioned itself across the main convoy route south of Greenland, and a dangerous traffic jam was developing in the North Atlantic. The destroyer that had been sunk had been the senior officer of an assault escort group diverted from the Bay of Biscay. The two convoys initially involved were both westbound, one escorted by the British and one by the Canadians. One was a slow convoy and the other a fast convoy. The merchant ships were without cargo and sailing high out of the water. Each of the twenty U-boats was armed with acoustic torpedoes.

According to orders, HMCS Fleur-de-Lis streamed its bucket astern in the stormy seas, and desperately zigzagged at the front left corner of the heaving merchant ships. Two U-boats surfaced within the lines of the convoy itself, and crisscross tracer rounds from the merchantmen bounced off the waves and ricocheted into the sky. At dusk one of the friendly slips mistook the Fleur-de-Lis for a conning tower and fired, raking her from stem to stern.

Lieutenant MacQueen had abandoned the electronic equipment so prized by the captain and stationed himself on the sea-swept gun platform. He recognized the little purple balls growing larger and shouted for his gun’s crew to drop to the wet deck.

“Where is Karamchuck?” shouted MacQueen through the gale. The gun layer, a youth from Manitoba, was nowhere to be seen. The ship heaved broadside into a giant wave and shuddered to avoid the looming mass of the merchantman ship, which could have cut the Fleur-de-Lis in two without noticing.

The boy was found in the showers below the gun platform, lying in a washing pool of blood, his head shot in two. The merchantman, at the corner of the convoy, was sunk that night.

The convoy was finally turned over to the Triangle Run to continue the battle, and the oil-hungry C Group headed in for St. John’s. Port War Signal Station blinked its welcome, and they straggled through the anti-submarine net under the bleak towering cliffs and berthed at the south-side jetties. They were encrusted with salt, rusty, and battered, but the wolf packs had had their day. The air gap was being closed, the strategy was being changed, and security was being tightened as everyone now concentrated on the coming invasion of Europe.

A naval staff car waited for the captain at the dock, and he was hustled to the headquarters for an urgent meeting with Captain D. MacQueen was duty officer, and all the others went ashore. The bosun’s mate was an ex-prize fighter from Charlottetown who had sparred with Wacky from the old army days, and he had been a patient of Dr. MacQueen. The duty watch cleaned up, dried out, and put everything else off until tomorrow.

Late that night the captain returned on board and the bosun’s mate roused Sub-Lieutenant MacQueen. The captain was alone in the wardroom. His hands were steady and he frowned at Patrick.

“Sit down, MacQueen,” said the captain in a level voice. “I may be a little drunk, but we have to have a little chat. Despite our agreement, I have to put you ashore. You’ve been up to something and nobody will tell me what it is, but apparently you have some strange friends. I was quite prepared to like you, but now I don’t know. It’s not my business anymore.”

Patrick MacQueen was shocked. His face drained of blood. He had barely started—and now they were stopping him again. How could he have faith in anything if everything he touched ran into a brick wall? He should have told the captain everything, but he didn’t. How much did they really know? On the surface, it was surely incriminating.

“If I suspected,” said the captain, “that you were having communication with the enemy, I would hang you from the yardarm. I don’t think that is your style. I think that you are just plain stupid and you are in love with your cock. That I can forgive, but not if you menaced any of your comrades’ lives.”

“What do I do, sir?” asked Patrick. He tried to block it all out of his mind, but he knew that this was a dividing point within him that would haunt him the rest of his life.

“You will get off this ship,” said the captain. “In the morning, I don’t want to see you. You will put your things in the barracks and report to Captain D at 0900 hours. I will take over as duty officer. Leave.”

Patrick MacQueen rose to his feet, sudddenly feeling bitter hatred for this man sitting in front of him. He is a reject from an empire of travelling salesmen, thought Patrick MacQueen bitterly. He is a drunk and he’s persecuting me. He is the scouring of the sea, and he’s a nervous wreck, and I will kill him.

The captain glanced up into MacQueen’s seething hatred. “You are something of a scholar, MacQueen,” said the captain. His eyes did not waver. “If you can’t sail with us then write about us some day. Tell anybody who will listen what in the hell we were doing out there. At the end of this war is a pit and I will drop into it. You won’t, MacQueen. You are a survivor—because you have just now learned how to hate.”

The captain rose and climbed the ladder to his cabin. Patrick wanted to howl his frustrations to the moon. The bosun’s mate tapped on the open door. “Some of the boys would like to see you in the mess deck, sir, just for a minute.”

Sub-Lieutenant Patrick MacQueen followed to the seamen’s mess deck. The gunner’s mate was there with some of the others. They had been secretly saving some of their rum ration.

“We heard that you were leaving, sir, and we wanted you to join us for a drink,” said the gunner’s mate. This was another act that could ruin Patrick, but he accepted the enamel mug of rum and downed it.

“I’ll get you a car through the pool, sir,” said the bosun’s mate. “You’ll probably want to be gone before the others get back.”

Scuttlebutt travels fast. “Why are you being put ashore?” asked one of his gun’s crew.

“Because he’s a rating’s man, that’s why,” said a voice from behind him.

Patrick left them and packed his belongings. It was after midnight, but they carried his gear to the waiting car and the bosun’s mate piped him over the side.

In the barracks, the duty officer assigned him a bare and empty cabin. They were accustomed to strange officers turning up at odd hours here. He promised to call MacQueen at 0700 hours. MacQueen fell asleep as though suddenly drugged, and the night was black, without any star shell.

Captain D sat at his desk, with a cat curled up on his shoulder. He fingered a long letter opener and eyed the young sub-lieutenant sitting erectly in the chair in front of his desk. The desk was clear except for one filing folder stamped TOP SECRET: NO COPIES: CAPT D FONF EYES ONLY. He had broken the sealing wax and decoded the message himself.

“I have a little record of you here,” said Captain D, tapping the filing folder with the letter opener. His face was a battlefield, seamed and pocked and hacked out of porous stone. “You seem to be rather irresponsible, if that’s not understating the case. If you think that you are a Canadian knight errant you had better disabuse your mind. This is no laughing matter, and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty would like to hang you from the neck until dead. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Patrick.

“In my opinion, having now met you, you are a misguided fool but you are not a traitor. You have caused many important people a great deal of trouble, and you should be assigned a nursemaid. Are we still clear?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Patrick MacQueen.

“Yes, yes. Newfoundland is not Canada, and there are no RCMP here to keep an eye on you, and we are too busy. So, on the principle of hiring a thief to catch a thief, you will be recommended to the chief of staff as the security guard officer for the entire command. Your immediate superior was in the Mounties as an inspector, understand? And he is a very keen fellow.”

“Yes, sir,” said Patrick MacQueen.

“They are an angry mob on the verge of mutiny. Instead of putting you in front of a firing squad you will command it. Get in there and clean that mess up. This base is unsafe and someone might blow it up. Those tunnels in the hills are pointed at us like giant rifle barrels, and are full of cordite. So, you can see that I have a personal interest in your new work.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Patrick MacQueen.

“Right!” said Captain D. “We’ll bury this file very deep, with only my access, and I will now take you to the wardroom and buy you a drink. You have been more trouble than Admiral Doenitz.”

The English captain plodded to the wardroom with the Canadian sub-lieutenant and bought him a pink gin. “What is your seniority?” asked Captain D.

“The twenty-second of December, 1941, sir,” replied Sub-Lieutenant MacQueen.

“You can’t take over the guard at that rank,” observed Captain D. “We’ll backdate your seniority, which will make you a lieutenant dating from last December. Congratulations on your new rank.”

“I am delighted, sir,” said Lieutenant Patrick MacQueen. “That means that I now have to buy you a drink.”

“Why not?” said Captain D. “The navy will be on the sea long after both of us are gone. It’s a bit early, but the sun is over the yardarm somewhere.”