Mackerel drove slowly eastward, a mile and a half offshore, approaching Dunkirk Roads. Six forty-five p.m: seven o’clock was the ordered time for her rendezvous with the rest of the mine-laying flotilla. Able Seaman Dwyer hailed again from the foc’sl break, below the bridge to starboard: ‘By the mark, five!’
Pym said to Wyatt, ‘As it should be, sir.’
Pitch-dark, bitter cold. Last night there’d been a sliver of moon, enough for the Gothas to see Dover and the coastline by; there was none tonight. Very little wind or sea. Christmas Eve: but it didn’t feel like it, except for the biting cold, and even that wasn’t the snowy-Christmas sort of cold. It was damp and penetrating, utterly un-jolly, Nick thought. They were all muffled up against it: greatcoats or duffels or oilskins, sweaters over more sweaters over flannel shirts; scarves, gloves, Balaclava – and either Gieves inflatable waistcoats or the issue swimming-collars. Thin men looked fat, fat ones like dirigibles. It didn’t feel like Christmas or like anything else that anyone ashore could know about: only like the Dover straits and a black night and twenty tons of mines to plant in the enemy’s front garden. The mines were aft there on their rails, with Mr Gladwish nursing them like a tomtit sitting on forty great cuckoo’s eggs. Highly sensitive and destructive eggs: their presence and deadweight aft gave one the unpleasant feeling that one was piloting a floating bomb.
Dwyer had hove his lead again. It was far more of an expert job than anyone who’d never tried would have imagined, but he was an expert leadsman. He called now. ‘And a quarter, five!’ This was a narrow passage of comparatively deep water inside the shoals and minefields and with shallows and the land itself to starboard; one had used it so often in the past eighteen months that one could have told from the soundings as he sang them out if the ship had strayed so much as thirty yards to one side of the channel or the other. There was plenty of water here, for a destroyer drawing no more than sixteen feet — or a bit more than that now, with the extra weight of the mine-load on her – but depth enough, so long as she held her course well inside the channel, which narrowed, as it approached Dunkirk itself, to something like a cable’s width. The leadsman hailed again: ‘Less a quarter seven, sir!’ Wyatt muttered. ‘Very good’ – as if the man could possibly have heard him… Since Nick had reported to him back in Dover that the ship was ready for sea with all hands on board, and Wyatt had curtly acknowledged his salute and told Mr Watson ‘Stand by main engines’, he and Nick hadn’t exchanged a word. The night and the minelaying operation lay ahead of them, and that was all there was to think about now; soon after dawn they’d be back in Dover, and Mackerel would go alongside the oiler to top up her tanks, and he, Nick Everard, would presumably hand over to some new first lieutenant.
Where would he be sent – to a battleship, as a junior watch-keeping officer?
Much better not to think about it.
He’d been stupid. He could see that now. He’d played into Wyatt’s hands. If you had a captain who’d speak up for you and fight to hang on to you, you could weather a scrape or two. When you hadn’t – and your record hung on one single incident where you’d come out well instead of badly…
‘And a half eight, sir!’
This was the deepest patch that they were passing over now. The sea hissed like a great cauldron of soda-water along Mackerel’s black sides as she slid up the channel at six or seven knots. About as dark as ever it could be. Dwyer wouldn’t be seeing the marks on his line where it cut the water’s surface; he’d be allowing for the two and a quarter fathoms between his hand and the waterline – the ‘drift’ was the technical term for it – and as the ship passed the lead’s position on the bottom and the line came vertical he’d subtract that distance from the amount of line he had out.
‘And a half, seven!’
Pym said, ‘One thousand yards to go, sir.’
Converting for mines had taken five and a half hours. It wasn’t a difficult evolution. Mackerel was one of a handful of destroyers fitted for it, with bolts and brackets all there in the right places, and her ship’s company had done it often enough before. First the stern gun and the after tubes mounting had to be unbolted, lifted on a crane and slung ashore. Then the crane picked up the mine rails and put them aboard, and they were bolted down like tram-lines to both sides of the quarterdeck and iron deck, with an extended chute from each set of rails over the stern, so that the mines would drop well clear of the propellers. A winch was fitted at the stern and another for’ard, respectively for hauling the mines aft and forward; the release gear at the chutes was operated by a single hand-lever.
It had taken another hour to load the forty mines, each weighing half a ton, and secure them properly. Each mine rested on its sinker, which was like a low trolley with wheels to run on the rails. These were the latest magnetically-fired mines, called M-Sinkers; they’d replaced the useless Elias.
Dwyer called out, ‘By the mark, five!’
Wyatt said, ‘Starboard ten.’
‘Starboard ten, sir.’ Mackerel heeled slightly to the turn. Such breeze as there was crept up from astern, grew for’ard, blew in over the port side as she swung seawards under starboard helm, port rudder.
The old moon – in fact its last quarter had hardly been glimpsed by human eye – was dead, and the new one as yet unborn. A perfect night, therefore, for laying mines. Or, for that matter, for another German destroyer raid; and the purpose of this new minefield would be to catch any raiders on their return to base. The rest of the Patrol’s destroyers – about two dozen, if you excluded the thirty-knotters and the ten or twelve M-class and Tribals on stand-off or under repair – would be at sea and hoping to catch them before they made for home. Dover harbour had been emptying fast by the time Mackerel had sailed.
The mines were to be planted between Zeebrugge and Ostend. The field’s eastern end would be five thousands yards off Blankenberg, and the western end seven thousand – three and a half miles – off de Haan. The approach was to be made from the north after a wide detour up around the outside of Bacon’s summer netting area, his Belgian coast barrage from behind which he launched the monitor bombardments. The detour would take the flotilla clear of known minefields and shoals, avoid too close a proximity to the German coastal batteries, and take them clear, too, of Weary Willie, the trawler guardship off Middelkerke.
Wyatt said, ‘Midships.’
Slow speed, and a black, quiet sea. A sharp awareness of the need to keep it quiet. Burglars embarking on a night’s thievery might feel like this.
‘Meet her, and steer north.’
‘Steer north, sir…’ The coxswain’s small silhouette bobbed as he flung the wheel around. Wyatt must dislike this situation, Nick thought. His yearning to come to grips with Heinecke, who might well be at sea tonight with his ‘Argentinians', would make the need to avoid any kind of action highly frustrating. Destroyers carrying mines were forbidden to engage an enemy unless that enemy fired first: then they’d be permitted to defend themselves. But one bullet, let alone a shell, would be enough to explode that cargo aft.
You had to shut your mind to everything except the simple object of the operation: sneak, in, lay the mines, sneak away again.
‘Course north, sir.’
‘Should come up with ’em soon, pilot, shouldn’t we?’
‘We should, sir.’
Everyone was looking out, using binoculars, as Mackerel approached Hill’s Pocket, the anchorage between the shoals where she’d been ordered to rendezvous with Moloch, Musician and two French destroyers, all of them carrying mines.
The leadsman’s hail came up through the darkness: ‘By the mark, ten!’
At ten fathoms the mark was a piece of leather with a hole in it. Dwyer must have had two fathoms in hand; so he’d have the mark for thirteen – a strip of blue bunting – in the slack of his line.
‘Ship eighty on the starboard bow, sir!’
Charlie Pym sounded pleased with himself. Wyatt said, ‘Slow together.’
‘Flashing, sir!’
Porter was on to it. It was the challenge for the night, and he was already ending the reply on his hand-lamp. Wyatt told the coxswain, ‘Port ten.’
‘Port ten… Ten o’ port wheel on, sir!’
The ship that had challenged was flashing something else now: Nick read, and Porter called out for Wyatt’s information, Take station astern of ‘Musician’. She is now four cables on your port bow. Course will be east-north-east speed ten. Subsequent alterations of course and speed without signal according to operation orders.
‘Midships – meet her!’
‘Meet her, sir.’
‘Steady!’
Pym said, ‘I can see Musician, sir. More like three cables than four.’
‘Good.’ Wyatt told Leading Signalman Porter, ‘Make to Moloch, Ready to proceed.’ Porter’s lamp began to spurt its dots and dashes; Wyatt ordered, ‘Starboard five, half ahead together, two-five-oh revolutions.’ Bellamy repeated the helm order, the telegraph bell clanged, and Pym was passing the speed order to the engine-room; out of the darkness to starboard came an acknowledging ‘K’ from Moloch. Wyatt told the coxswain, ‘Midships, and steady on north-east.’ Moloch was moving off; you could see the froth of white under her counter as she put on speed to give the Frenchmen room to drop into station astern of her. After them would come Musician, and Mackerel would bring up the rear; which meant that when they reached the laying position in three hours’ time, Mackerel would be the first to get rid of her mines.
Nick wondered whether they’d allow him to volunteer for the RNAS. Learning to fly couldn’t be all that difficult. Vereker and his friends were a splendid bunch, but they weren’t particularly brainy. And flying would be a lot better than being sent back to big-ship life – with Wyatts lurking round every corner.
‘Musician’s signalling, sir.’
Pym getting in first again. Charlie Pym the blue-eyed boy. Now there was someone who’d be right for a battleship appointment – with half a dozen snotties to do his work for him, and plenty of senior officers to suck up to… Pym knew, of course, what had happened ashore last night and what Nick’s position was now; everyone in the ship must know it, by this time. It was more than likely that Charlie Pym would be nursing hopes of stepping into the first lieutenant’s job.
If Wyatt allowed that, he’d be showing rotten judgement. Pym was lazy, and he had no understanding of, or level of contact with, the lower deck. The impression you got of Pym was that what mattered to him was his own position instead of what he could make of that position as a contribution to the ship’s efficiency and happiness. The senior ratings – Chief Petty Officers Bellamy and Swan, for instance – disliked him; naturally they wouldn’t say so or consciously show signs of it, but when you knew them and lived among them, worked with them, you could sense it; and it was virtually certain, Nick considered, that if Pym became first lieutenant Mackerel would go to pot.
Perhaps Wyatt knew it? He might. Wyatt was no fool, behind that bullish stare and aggressive manner. Professionally he wasn’t, anyway. Might he be, in terms of personal judgement? Nick knew he didn’t understand his captain. And could half the trouble be that they were simply different kinds of animal? The Navy’s answer to that would be clear and blunt enough – and reasonably so – but perhaps for oneself it was something to give some thought to. Faced with authority in a form that seemed hostile or critical, did one tend towards a hedgehog attitude?
Nick had dim, approaching destroyer-shapes in the overlapping circles of his binoculars. The French destroyers. No need to report them: Wyatt had picked them up himself, and muttered something to Pym about them. Nick thought of himself as a boy at home at Mullbergh, and his father’s dislike of him, the long years of mutual hostility, with David the heir as favourite and himself as the unwanted lout: that was how he’d felt. And curled up, inside the defensive spines?
Musician had signalled, Let’s go. Follow father. Wyatt told Porter gruffly, ‘No reply.’ Moloch’s wake was a pale smudge in a black haze; the lean grey shapes of the French destroyers, closing in from eastward, shortened as they swung round to follow her. Musician was coming in from the opposite direction to take her place in the flotilla, but Mackerel was already where she had to be: Musician was therefore sliding into a gap in a formed line, as opposed to Mackerel tagging on astern of her. So much for ‘follow father’: that signal had been unnecessary in the first place, and Wyatt, without saying a word, had let Musician’s captain know it.
Able Seaman Dwyer’s singsong tones cut upwards through the dark: ‘And a quarter, ten!’ Mackerel must be passing over the deepish patch inside the Breedt bank. Nick asked Wyatt, ‘May we secure the lead, sir?’
‘Yes please.’
He leant over the rail: ‘Dwyer! Secure the lead!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Wyatt said tersely as Nick turned inboard, ‘We’ll remain at Action stations, Number One.’
In the chartroom, Midshipman Grant was preparing to keep a running check on Mackerel’s position, course and speed in relation to the operation orders, partly so as to be ready to give a dead-reckoning position quickly if Pym or the captain wanted one and also so as to be able to pass a warning up the voicepipe to the bridge when alterations of course or speed were to be expected.
The orders, in a heavily-sealed buff envelope, had arrived after they’d converted and oiled and embarked the mines – great red-painted eggs as high as a man’s shoulder as they sat on their wheeled, rectangular sinkers. Forty of them, twenty a side, brought in over the stern and hauled forward by winch, and each one then checked on the rails before the next was run up against it. It was rather scary, to imagine them as they would be in a few hours’ time, under water, tethered down in the cold and secret sea by the wire cables now coiled inside the sinkers: one could think of those great harmless-looking red things as monsters, evil, trying now to appear bland and stupid but ready at short notice to change into lurking, death-dealing horrors – which they would do within – what was it, half an hour? – when the soluble plugs on their firing-mechanisms melted in the water. Very different from the earlier British mines, the sort invented by the Italian Commander Elia. The Elias had had a mechanical firing device, a hinged lever that had to be tripped. As often as not, it struck, and failed to do its job. The Board of Admiralty had distrusted such new-fangled ideas as electric detonation, so they’d opted for the mechanical system; whereas the Germans had had mines that worked, right from the beginning of the war, and it had given them a considerable advantage.
Those days were fading into history now. Jellicoe had pressed hard for hugely increased supplies of the M-sinker type, a year ago, and they’d recently been coming through in thousands. (It was the same sort of thing in the Air Service; a year ago, naval pilots had taken their rations of bombs to bed with them, to prevent brother-pilots pinching them while they slept.) Supplies of all these things had been greatly helped by America’s joining in the war, this last April. But in any case this was a new Navy now, re-born out of war experience, and William Grant was extremely proud to have a place in it.
He put his face to the voicepipe.
‘Bridge?’
‘Bridge.’ Pym’s voice. Grant told him, ‘We should alter to north twenty-one degrees east in two minutes, sir, and increase to twenty knots.’
‘Very good.’
Grant lit a cigarette, taking it from a silver case that had his family’s crest on it. It had at one time been a cravat-pin case, the property of his great-grandfather, who’d served at sea under Nelson. Grant’s grandfather had been an admiral, following in the same tradition; but his father had been in the Army in India, and had died of typhus when his son had been only three. One of the greatest puzzles in William’s mind, and one which he knew he’d never be able to solve, was what could possibly have induced his father to become a soldier – in India or anywhere else.
Perhaps he’d blotted his copybook, or the Navy for some reason hadn’t wanted him.
He heard, through the voicepipe from the bridge, Wyatt ordering the change of course and increase in revolutions. One could visualize the dark, slim shapes of the destroyers ahead already filing round to port, lengthening as they turned, the white churn of foam piling as they put on power… Expelling smoke, he looked down at the chart again, where the track stipulated in the orders had been laid-off in pencil, with distances and compass courses pencilled in beside it. He called the bridge again, and told Charlie Pym, ‘Forty-five minutes on this leg, sir.’
‘All right, Mid.’
There’d been a period, when Grant had been fourteen and fifteen years old, when he’d been terrified that the war might end before he could get to sea. In 1914, Dartmouth had been emptied of its cadets, boys of thirteen upwards all sent straight to ships; but subsequent terms, new arrivals from the prep schools, had been held back, tied to school desks and the parade-ground, while the sands of war had seemed to be running out. All those ‘big pushes’ that had been so certain to end the war: how they’d been dreaded, at Dartmouth! But they’d fizzled out, one after another, and now one wondered whether it would ever end. Certainly the Americans were in now which should help; but to counter-balance their weight had come the Russian collapse and the transfer of thousands of seasoned German troops from east to west. Some newspaper articles had suggested that it could go on for years yet.
Anyway, he’d made it. If he hadn’t, he’d have felt all through his life that he’d missed the greatest opportunity a man could ever have. And when one thought that some of one’s friends, contemporaries, were actually still at school…
‘Midshipman Grant, sir!’
The Leading Telegraphist, Wolstenholme, was peering at him through the hatch from the wireless office. A normally placid, quiet man, a Yorkshireman, Wolstenholme looked agitated.
‘Signal, sir – urgent!’
Grant leant over, and took the sheet of signal-pad on which the message had been scrawled in blue indelible.
It was from Flag Officer Dover to all ships and shore-stations in his command, and repeated for information to various other authorities; it said Enemy wireless activity suggests attack on straits by surface forces is to be expected.
Grant moved back quickly to the voicepipe. Wolstenholme was still craning through the hatch. He was a well-fed man, with small brown eyes set in a pale, roundish face. He said, nodding towards the signal, ‘An’ us wi’ mines aboard!’ Grant yelled into the voicepipe, ‘Bridge!’
Able Seaman Dwyer stowed his leadline and canvas apron in the appropriate locker on the upper deck, just abaft the foremost funnel, and then began to pick his way aft. You had to go carefully in the darkness, and an old hand like Dwyer went very carefully; all there was to see by was the faint glow of phosphorescence from the broken water from the destroyer’s black steel sides, and it wasn’t much.
Cockcroft, at the midships four-inch – which was between the second and third funnels – was in the process of detailing two men to take round cutlasses, rifles and revolvers. He looked up, and saw Dwyer’s grey head going by.
‘Who’s that? Dwyer?’
Dwyer admitted it. He explained. ‘Been in the chains, sir – now I’m goin’ aft to me action station.’
‘Good.’ Cockcroft handed him a .45 revolver on a webbing belt; a pouch on the belt held ammunition. ‘Give this to Chief Petty Officer Swan, would you, and wish him a happy Christ-mas?’
‘Aye aye, sir. An’ all the best for 1918 to you, sir.’ Dwyer went on aft. His station was in the emergency steering position, with Swan.
From the twenty-inch searchlight platform, where he was sitting with his boots dangling over his only remaining pair of torpedo tubes, Mr Gladwish watched him pass.
‘Oh, Dwyer!’
Easily recognizable, that grey head. Most of the Mackerels were youngsters; most destroyer men were young, these days. There were still some old sailors about, of course, but since the outbreak of war one destroyer had been lost every twenty-three days, on average, while hundreds had been built; it thinned out the old hands, rather. Dwyer had stopped, and he was staring up at the gunner (T) on the searchlight platform.
‘Sir?’
‘lssuing small-arms, are we now?’
‘I’ve a pistol ’ere for the Chief Buffer, sir, that’s all.’
‘Well, aft with it, and smartish, d’ye hear?’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ He shrugged to himself as he went on aft past the space where the other lot of tubes should have been. He knew what was agitating the gunner: Mr Gladwish didn’t like firearms near his mines. Couldn’t blame him, really; you only need to have one pistol dropped, and going off by accident. And you’d only to see Mr Gladwish and CPO Hobson, his torpedo gunner’s mate, when they’d been priming the things, just before the ship sailed from Dover. The gingerly way they’d handled the cylindrical primers, carrying them like babies then lowering them as gently as if they were objects of the finest crystal glass into the primer-cavities in the mines. The signal from shore Prime mines was always the last to come, when everything else had been seen to and the ship was ready to sail. Then Gladwish and the TI, trusting none of the other torpedomen to handle so delicate a job, would each unscrew twenty cover-plates, fit twenty primers, tighten forty retaining screws… Dwyer sympathized. It was bad enough having the mines aboard, let alone messing about with them. The sooner the last one clanked down the rails and out of the stern trap into the sea, the sooner Dwyer – and about ninety other men – would feel safe again.
Squatting on the deck of the stern superstructure were the crew of the after four-inch, the gun which had been landed. They were the mine-handling party now, they and the torpedomen who would normally man the after tubes. Dwyer stopped, and stirred the gunlayer with his foot.
‘Treat them ’orrors gently now, Archie lad!’
Archie Trew, who was also an AB but young enough to be Dwyer’s son, pulled his legs back out of the way.
‘Give each of ’em a good kick before we lets it go, don’t we, boys?’ Trotter, his sightsetter, commented, ‘’ighly disintegratin’, that might be.’ Dwyer went in through the screen door and down the ladder to the wardroom flat. Ammunition-supply ratings greeted him with a demand for news, information as to what was going on; he told them, ‘Windin’ up them mines, that’s what… Course, if you over-winds ’em – well…’ He gestured, rolling his eyes.
‘Bloody things!’
The young stoker who’d muttered that sounded as if he’d meant it. He looked it, too: over-wrought, or ill… Dwyer told him, ‘Keep your wool on, Sunny Jim. Steady does it…’ He went aft again at this lower level, past the wardroom pantry and store and through two more stores to the steering-compartment, right by the rudder-head.
CPO Swan, extraordinarily, was shaving. He’d used scissors first to remove the bulk of his ‘set’, and now he was scraping his lathered chin with a bone-handled cut-throat razor. A bucket of water steamed gently between his spread feet. In this aftermost compartment of the ship there was quite a lot of motion on her, but it seemed not to occur to Swan – any more than it did to Dwyer, who’d been at sea at least as long as the Chief Buffer had – that using a cut-throat while standing on a deck that rose and fell six feet or more five times a minute might involve some hazard. In fact his hand’s sureness seemed totally unaffected by the pitching.
Dwyer asked him, ‘Shavin’ off, then?’
An eyebrow rose. Swan said, without moving his lips, ‘Sick of ’aving me soup strained.’
Dwyer smiled. ‘You mean she’s sick of it?’
The eyebrow flickered again. Swan took soap off the blade with his forefinger, and started on the other cheek. You could see already how different he was going to look. Dwyer sat down on the casing of the steering motor, and delved in his oilskin pocket.
‘Brung me ’ome-work. They reckon we’ll be three or four hours closed up, on this lark.’ His home-work was the final binding of a new tobacco prick. Leaf tobacco, Admiralty-issue and of course duty-free: you spread the leaves, sprinkled them with rum every day for a couple of weeks or so – a few drops from the daily tot wasn’t much to spare – and then you rolled the leaves tightly into a hard-packed, rum-flavoured cylinder, which had then to be bound in a wrapping of tarry spunyarn. When it was finished and in its owner’s expert view fit for smoking, he’d shave his daily requirement from the end of it, slicing the cross-section of the prick with his seaman’s knife. He didn’t call it a seaman’s knife, though; he called it a pusser’s dirk.
Swan drew the razor rasping down his throat, and flicked lather off the blade again. Dwyer asked him, without looking up from his work, ‘True about Jimmy, is it?’
By ‘Jimmy’ he meant ‘the first lieutenant’. Swan murmured. ‘McKechnie’s the Scotch idiot as caused it, cox’n reckons. Wasn’t no need at all.’
‘Ah.’ Dwyer wrenched the yarn tighter, and snatched another turn. ‘Lose ’im, though, will we? Lose Jimmy, I mean?’ Swan didn’t answer. Dwyer went on, after a minute’s silence, ‘Always did seem daft, to me. If you got a good ’and aboard at sea, real good ’and, like – well, why bother ’im when ’e’s ashore?’ He gritted his teeth as he put more strain on the yarn. ‘I never did see the sense in that.’
Swan put his razor on a ledge, and squatted down to sluice his face. He told Dwyer, with water streaming off it, ‘That’s why you never made more ’n Able Seaman, Dwye ol’ lad.’
Pym answered a new call from the voicepipe. Mackerel was lifting slightly to the sea now, a short rocking-horse type motion that barely wet the foc’sl deck. Down there, the bow gun’s crew were none the less crowded into the shelter of the gunshield; you didn’t need to be wet to be freezing cold, in the Channel in December.
It wasn’t Christmas Day yet. Not quite yet, Nick thought. What do we do at eight bells, though – sing Old Lang Syne?
No. That was for Hogmanay. And where might he be, by that time? In Scapa Flow? New Year horseplay in a battleship? Pym said, into the voicepipe, ‘Bridge.’
‘In about three minutes we should alter to east-north-east and stay on that for fifteen miles, sir. No change of speed.’
‘Very good.’
Wyatt said, ‘All right. I heard.’ He had his glasses on Musician’s stern, that heap of white that you could see even when you couldn’t see the ship herself.
A quarter of an hour ago they’d had the signal about Hun wireless activity. Wyatt had thought it out in silence; then he’d commented, ‘Precautionary, one might suppose. Huns may be sending Christmas messages, for all we know.’
The thing was, Nick realized, that there was nothing they could do about it, except carry on with the operation and hope that if the enemy was at sea they didn’t meet him. Not in this vulnerable, explosive state.
Pym failed to understand. He laughed, as if Wyatt’s remark had been just a pleasantry. Wyatt cut into the false sound of it.
‘Have small-arms been distributed, Number One?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Cockcroft had reported five minutes ago that he’d seen to it. Cockcroft’s action station was aft, in charge of the midships and stern guns; but he had only one, tonight, to look after. The for’ard four-inch had Clover, the gunner’s mate, as its officer of the quarters, and besides this Nick could easily control it himself over the forefront of the bridge.
He wondered about the whisper of some ‘special operation’, the rumour he’d heard them talking about the other night in Arrogant. It had been connected, or seemed to have been, with the gossip about a new admiral taking over. Nothing more than that, really, had been said, and it seemed to grow from a belief that if Bacon was being relieved it would basically be for not having pursued a sufficiently aggressive policy against the U-boats. So it could be just wishful thinking: or a barking-back to Bacon’s own dreamchild, his plan for a ‘Great Landing’ which had now been abandoned. Its object would have been to land a force that would have linked up with the Army’s advance – the one that had stopped at Passchendaele – and captured the Belgian ports. There’d been a mass of yarns about the plan: how it had involved using 600-foot floating pontoons, a kind of pre-constructed harbour jetty which monitors would push into position against the sea-wall at Middelkerke, four or five miles behind the German line. The pontoons had been designed by an engineer called Mr Lillicrap – which may have been partly why they’d been talked about so much. But that scheme had been abandoned, and this rumour might well be just wishful thinking: by the CMB men, for instance, who felt starved of action. Harry Underhill had said that several of the CMB officers had gone off on some mysterious course: and Elkington – Rogerson’s guest, from the thirty-knotter Bravo – had a story that a friend of his just down from Scapa had told him privately that Admiral Keyes, who headed the Admiralty committee that had been putting pressure of one kind or another – this was gossip again, of course – on Bacon, and who was also director of the Plans Division at the Admiralty, had been up at Scapa having private talks with Beatty. That certainly did sound as if something was in the wind; and if it involved the whole Fleet, not just this Patrol, it would have to be something fairly big.
Keyes had been the commodore commanding submarines, at the beginning of the war. Rogerson had said he was a live wire, he’d give them something to do. And he’d been in the Dardanelles, as Chief-of-Staff to Admiral de Robeck. A man of action…
That was how rumours started, of course, and were built up. Adding to the structure, item by item, and probably none of them in any way connected with each other. It could be nothing – simply the expression of a desire for action. But – could one, all the same, volunteer?
Pym blurted suddenly, ‘Sir, they’re altering—’
‘Damn it, pilot, I’ve got eyes!’
Wyatt had snapped Charlie’s head off… Now he told CPO Bellamy, ‘Port ten, cox’n.’
‘Port ten, sir.’ Following Musician round. This was the start of the second fifteen-mile leg of the round-about route. It would bring them to No. 8 buoy, a fixed marker in 51° 30’ north, 2° 50’ east. From there they’d edge down south-eastward towards the Belgian coast. In fact, almost directly towards Zeebrugge; towards – conceivably – a head-on encounter with any German destroyers that might be coming out of Zeebrugge. But it would be no less surprising or unlikely to meet them here, now, or in half a minute’s time: there, in that sea that looked empty, like an enormity of black ice crackling down the ships’ sides as they pushed steadily, watchfully north-eastward. Air like ice too: and outside a radius of a few hundred yards it looked as solid as the water under it, as impenetrable and as good a cover to an enemy as it was to these mine-layers. If you met raiding Germans the meeting would be at close quarters: sudden, savage, shattering.
There’d be no time to think. Not a spare second.
Nick got Cockcroft on the navyphone to the midships four-inch.
‘Sub, make sure the guns’ crews are on their toes, wide awake all the time. Go and tell the GM the same. There may be Huns about, and if we run into them we’ll be alongside ’em before we know it. Understand me?’
‘Absolutely!’
‘But we do not fire unless we’re fired at. Drive that home to Clover too. All right?’
‘I’ll have a chin-wag with him right away – I mean—’
Nick put the ’phone quickly on its hook. Cockcroft’s manner and habits of speech would have been understandable if he’d been RNVR instead of RN. Somehow he’d survived the Dartmouth conditioning without letting any of it get inside his skin or skull. One might have thought that to achieve such a feat a man would have to be either incredibly strong-minded or thoroughly obtuse; but Cockcroft combined an easy-going lightheartedness with a brain that was in full working order. It was phenomenal.
Nick had his glasses at his eyes, adding his contribution to the general effort of looking out. Mackerel and the ships ahead of her were thrusting into the night at twenty knots, and if one reckoned on an enemy flotilla approaching at the same speed the gap between them would be reduced at a rate of almost one land-mile per minute. With a range of visibility of something like five hundred yards, there’d be no room for late sightings or slow reactions. He wondered, as he tried to distinguish where sea ended and sky began – but you couldn’t, they were as black as each other – about that rumoured special operation. And about his own motives for wanting to volunteer for it. As an escape? But it wouldn’t be: there’d be an inquiry into that pub row in any case, and nothing would save him from having to face it… But – well, if the worst came to the worst, to be allowed to volunteer for something of that sort would be quite a different matter from being simply kicked out of one’s ship. Was that it: a question of how his leaving Mackerel would look to other people?
And by other people – Sarah?
There was no one else to consider. Uncle Hugh would know precisely what had happened.
The dream he’d had: calling her name, talking to her in his sleep, dreaming that he and she were – that Sarah, and not Annabel, had been in his arms… One had to face it, and – displace it. Otherwise it nagged on in one’s thoughts. But the mind had a life of its own; this had nothing, surely, to do with will, intention, desire, any waking thought of her. To think of the dream wasn’t to think as one had thought in the dream.
He’d thought he’d glimpsed something: something more solid than the empty night. In that split second he’d jerked the glasses back, holding his breath for steadiness and to keep the lenses from fogging-up.
Nothing. So easy to imagine…
Sarah – as close as Annabel had been?