Not Thinking of Death

by Not Thinking of Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘Not for that. To mention it in the letter, so he knows I know, and – oh, I suppose you think I’m nuts, but—’

  ‘I think you’re bloody marvellous. As you well know – or should do.’

  ‘Well.’ A laugh. ‘You’re entitled to your own illusions, I suppose. But – Rufus, I’m sure Pat’ll just suddenly turn up—’

  ‘Can’t turn up too suddenly.’ He drew in a breath. Every time his thoughts went back to her, it hit him… ‘I spoke to your father this evening, by the way. He didn’t know anything, either. Grousing that they hardly ever hear from her… So – fingers crossed. Say a prayer for me, will you?’

  ‘Don’t you think your own might be heard, when it’s for someone else?’

  ‘I’m in love with her, you know.’

  ‘She is with you, too. As I’m sure you know. Rufus, I was about to say – I know about Tracker.’

  ‘About – you mean—’

  ‘Trumpeter.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, Suzie… I’d hoped you might not. Not that there’s any reason to feel – you know, superstitious, or – well, it was just that you might—’

  ‘Rufus—’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s all right – I know there’s no – reason… I was nearly sick when I first heard, but – I’m worried now, but – you know, like I’m always worried. Perhaps a bit worse than usual because he’s not with you… But don’t hide things from me – please, from now on? If – when you do have news, whatever it is, please—’

  ‘All right. I must say, you astound me. As I was saying a minute or two ago—’

  ‘I know – I’m bloody marvellous. No – it’s just that I don’t want always to have to think there may be something you aren’t telling me. Anyway – better hit the sack now. Early start, a Spitfire to deliver to Brize Norton. Bliss, but one does need to be more or less compos mentis. So – sleep well, darling Rufus, and – thanks for the call.’

  ‘Chris, Suzie, is the luckiest man on earth.’

  He thought wryly, hanging up, At least his girl will be here when he does get back…

  * * *

  ‘Layin’ stopped mostly, sir. Both of ’em, must be.’

  There were only two destroyers now because three had left at about midnight, the sound of their screws fading in the direction of Namsenfjord. It had seemed like good news at the time – three gone, only two left: step in the right direction.

  But it was possible they’d only gone to refuel.

  Just after five, now. This time yesterday Tracker had been in the fjord, with an hour to go before surfacing for the battery charge – and expecting to spend the day there, then quietly re-embark the landing party and creep away – undetected and unheard of. He’d been telling himself Six days to Suzie…

  Mottram came back into the wardroom, having left Bellamy on watch in the Control Room. He said as he sat down, ‘No other explanation for it, they think they’ve got us there. In fact they must think they’ve killed us. Question is, why should they still be hanging around?’

  There’d been two more charges dropped – soon after the three destroyers had returned from their trip westward. Four charges in all, therefore, and if they reckoned that was enough they certainly did have to believe they’d made a kill. Chris wondered whether they might be fishing for evidence of it – proof of a submarine’s destruction.

  No. If you wanted that – something to float up that might serve as proof positive – you’d drop more charges, split her open so she’d spill her guts: and they’d have done it long ago.

  The Norwegian, Kjellegard, was at the table. Mottram had told him his job was to look after Dr Heiden; he’d been in there with him, but the German was asleep now – audibly so, breathing in short gasps, under a blanket on that narrow bunk… He, surely, had to be the clue to this: he was the reason Tracker was here at all, he was central to the whole thing, so – surely… He asked Kjellegard, ‘Did you say the Gestapo were hunting Dr Heiden?’

  A nod. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, d’you think the German navy might have to prove they’ve done him in?’

  Chief muttered, stifling a yawn, ‘That’s a thought.’

  ‘Done in?’

  Mottram showed interest. ‘You’ve a point there. Could be the answer.’ He looked at Kjellegard. ‘The Gestapo know Dr Heiden is – was – escaping by submarine. Is that what you told me when you arrived on board?’

  A nod. Slightly puzzled expression, though.

  ‘They knew he might be, or they knew he was?’

  ‘Captain, sir.’ Bellamy, in the gangway. ‘One destroyer’s leaving, sir.’

  ‘Is it…’ Mottram pushed himself up, followed Bellamy into the Control Room. Kjellegard asked, pointing that way with his head, ‘Is good?’

  Chris nodded: he was listening to the voices in there. French muttered – he’d just woken from a doze – ‘Better than a poke in the eye – at least, if I heard right—’

  ‘Quiet a minute, Sub…’

  Trying to hear… The asdic watchkeeper – a Glaswegian, name of Anderson – telling Mottram, ‘Revs for twelve, fifteen knots, sir.’

  ‘Nothing else near it? Nothing coming?’

  A silence – he’d been checking on other bearings. Then, ‘No, sir. Just the one. Range still opening.’

  ‘What’s this one doing?’

  ‘Layin’ stopped, sir. No – movin’ one screw – dead slow… Stopped again. He’d be just holdin’ his position – would’n he?’

  ‘Yes…’

  French muttered, ‘Why can’t he just piss off?’ Glancing up, then: ‘Hey, hear that?’

  No-one could have failed to hear it: the destroyer’s cable clattering out. And the asdic man’s voice again, telling Mottram unnecessarily, ‘Droppin’ his hook, sir.’

  Kjellegard asked Chris, ‘What is that?’

  ‘Destroyer’s anchoring. Dropping anchor.’

  Bellamy called to Mottram from the chart, ‘Could be in quite shallow water there, sir.’

  The Norwegian spread his hands. ‘Is good?’

  ‘No.’ Chris told him, ‘Not good.’

  It meant the German was going to stay a while. A ‘while’ being – well, open-ended. Chris was gazing upward, at the white-enamelled deckhead: when you heard underwater sounds it was natural to look in the direction they seemed to be coming from, but now he was noticing the sheen of condensation on that white paint – drips forming. Cork chips in the paint absorbed most of the condensation, but after you’d been down an unusually long time the cork tended to become saturated. So he’d been told – never experienced it before, only on several occasions had the chips come raining down like confetti when depthcharges had burst too close for comfort. But the air wasn’t too good, either: his own breathing was shorter and harder than normal, and Chief was yawning almost continuously. Tracker had been dived for nearly twenty-four hours, he realized.

  Chapter 19

  There was still some cloud around, at Haywarden, but true to the forecast they’d given her at Silloth it was much lighter and more scattered. At Silloth it hadn’t been so good. She brought the Spitfire down neatly enough to raise no eyebrows, and taxied it over to the fuelling point. Fuelling was the only reason for stopping here. She’d have made it from Silloth to Brize Norton in one hop, but an RAF maintenance engineer at Silloth had warned her that this machine had an above-average gas consumption – or was alleged to have; they’d checked it over and found nothing wrong, but were bound to recommend a precautionary stop along the way. Suzie would probably have accepted the assurance that the Spit was in good order and stuck to her plans – keeping an eye on the gauge, of course – if it hadn’t been for visions of Jane Ascoli’s ‘told-you-so’ if the machine had let her down.

  As the Hurricane almost had, yesterday: and having come that close to it, she wasn’t risking it again. What had happened was the selector lever which operated the Hurricane’s undercarriage had jammed, wouldn’t move when she was preparing to land at Silloth.
She’d made several circuits, struggling with it; the same lever selected not only the undercart but also the flaps, so she’d been faced with a belly landing, flapless – considerably reduced control – with possibly dire effects on both ’plane and pilot. But on her third or fourth circuit of the field the lever had responded: and after a safe and normal landing she’d realized that her main anxieties in those minutes had been (a) the prospect of being crocked up when Chris got back, (b) the wagging fingers back at Hatfield.

  At Haywarden a glamorous but rather snooty WAAF officer gave her coffee in their mess. Suzie’s hands still shook, but she’d developed a way of handling a cup and saucer which cut out the rattling. It probably looked a bit strange, but it was less embarrassing than the castanets had been. A rather worse manifestation, though – of this state of nerves, whatever they’d call it – was that she’d found she couldn’t sign her name. When she had to sign chits – for the fuel, for instance – her signature went haywire. She’d first noticed it at Henley; last night in her hotel room she’d practised for about half an hour and found no way of controlling it.

  It would wear off, please God. When Tracker got into Dundee and she had that call from Chris.

  She’d written to him last night, before Rufus telephoned. Her handwriting didn’t seem to be affected: it went a bit wild occasionally, but she thought it always had. And to him she could just sign herself ‘S’. But having poured out her heart to Chris, she’d dreamt of Toby Dymock: in the dream she’d been waiting for him to get back. Chris hadn’t come into it at all, might not have existed.

  The sleeping mind was never in one’s control, she’d told herself about fifty times. Knowing damn well that there was no vestige of any such feelings in her waking thoughts, but still oppressed by a sense of guilt that they should have been lurking in her subconscious.

  As if one chose one’s dreams, for Christ’s sake. She’d had some real beauties, in her time. Lighting another cigarette, and smiling at a remark the WAAF had made… She was on the ground at Haywarden for about an hour: two cups of coffee, two fish-paste sandwiches, four or five cigarettes. There’d been time to kill, her Spit hadn’t been the first in line for fuelling and the ground staff had obviously been busy. The WAAF was really quite a pleasant girl – woman, years older than Suzie – but women flyers did tend to put a lot of such people’s noses out of joint. She’d noticed it before. Envy, jealousy – whichever. She could understand it, too: in the WAAF’s shoes she’d have been envious of First Officer Cameron-Green, ATA.

  Airborne again, on course for the Midland Gap – to pass between Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton – she noticed that the Spit’s oil-pressure was on the low side. It was all right – sixty pounds to the square inch – but she was fairly certain it had been higher than that on the way down from Silloth. Had been – surely… The acceptable range of oil-pressure was between fifty and one-forty pounds to the inch: so there was no cause for panic, just that she’d have been happier to see it somewhere over the halfway mark.

  Which it must have been, earlier on. Otherwise she’d have reported it at Haywarden.

  Better watch it, she told herself. That and the fuel-gauge.

  * * *

  Just before noon the destroyer began to shorten-in her cable.

  Nobody commented, in the wardroom. The engineer, Caulfield, rolled over on his bunk and pointed upwards, with a hopeful look on his now almost fully bearded face, and Bellamy muttered something; but that might have been in his sleep. The Norwegian lieutenant poked his head out of Mottram’s cabin, looking from one to the other interrogatively: Chris came from the chart-table at that moment, saw the question on the soldier’s face and shrugged – wordlessly answering, ‘God knows…’ Nobody was speaking any more than they had to, now. He flopped down on to the padded bench and leant with his elbows on the table, face in hands.

  Cable still clanking in. The Norwegian had retreated into the tiny cabin. He’d been dozing in there on the deck, on his back with his knees drawn up, beside the bunk in which the German – Heiden – was still comatose and breathing more erratically than before.

  He wasn’t the only one. Some were panting like dogs; and Chris felt as if he had a feather duster in his lungs. Thinking about it, he realized that he was panting too. He’d also been getting spasms of light-headedness, and had noticed symptoms of the same condition in others. It wasn’t the syndrome of easy laughter under tension – taut nerves leading to reactions being more quickly triggered – but the beginnings of carbon dioxide poisoning producing an effect not unlike the early stages of drunkenness – the giggly stage, and waves of reckless optimism.

  In effect, a kind of lunacy. The only justification for optimism – or for hope, say – would be if the destroyer which was about to leave was not replaced. And even that thought was – well, ludicrous, more of the same idiocy: he knew that another destroyer would take this one’s place. Knew also, largely from research conducted since the Trumpeter disaster, that what followed the happy-go-lucky stage was a general lassitude, disinterest in – well, really in anything. Including survival, or steps that might be taken towards it. And to fend that off – apart from getting up into the fresh air well, there wasn’t anything. Except what he’d already seen to – the distribution of Protosorb, a chemical substance that was supposed to absorb some of the poison from the air. It came in the form of white crystals, which were now spread on shallow trays on the deck all through the boat.

  Reduction of CO~2~ was the only hope. Letting oxygen into the atmosphere, for instance, got you nowhere, because the poison would still be present: you couldn’t dilute it, and when its proportion in the atmosphere reached about 10 per cent, you were dead.

  Then you wouldn’t have any more worries. And that seemed funny. Remember it, to tell Suzie…

  He remembered her telling him that Rufus Chalk was going great guns with her sister Patricia – whom Chris had met but didn’t as yet know well. Very attractive, and smart, sophisticated. More so than Suzie. Although they were sisters and when you saw them together the likenesses were obvious, they were really quite different types. Chris smiled to himself, thinking Good luck to old Rufus – but I’ve got the pick of the litter.

  She’d told him – he could hear her voice clearly, picture her as she’d said it – ‘If I had to prophesy, I’d say he and Diana’ll split up, and he’ll marry Pat. ’

  ‘Really think so? ’

  ‘Really hope so. I’d love to have Rufus for a brother-in-law.’

  ‘Hey – he’d be mine, too…’

  He thought, listening to the German’s cable still coming in, that whether or not Rufus Chalk ended up as Suzie’s brother-in-law, he’d be a big help to her, getting her over this.

  As he’d done before, that other time. Well – Diana, of course, and the flying: that was the way they told it… But Christ – as if she hadn’t been through enough. Poor kid. Poor darling Suzie.

  Anyway, one wouldn’t stay passively down here, as it were do a Trumpeter. Before it got that bad, Mottram would surface, obviously. Chris had thought quite a lot, off and on, about what they might do when the time came. There’d been some general talk about it too, at some stage – about torpedoing the one at anchor for a start, then running for it. There’d be lives lost, inevitably: but only some, not—

  The cable’s clanking stopped. He straightened, listening; heard Mottram’s quiet, ‘Damnation…’

  ‘Drawing left, sir.’

  It had started again. He understood that pause, could picture events up there quite clearly. Whatever they called it in German, there’d have been a report from the destroyer’s fo’c’sl of ‘Cable’s up and down’ – meaning the slack was out of it, it was leading straight from the hawsepipe to the anchor on the sea-bed – and the skipper, being ready to move, would have ordered ‘Weigh’.

  Which they were doing now. Breaking the anchor out of the sea-bed, and heaving it right in.

  Mottram put his head round the corner from the Control
Room: Chris raised his head – he’d been resting it on his forearms – and stared back at him, blinking. Mottram told him, ‘Changing the guard. Another one coming out.’

  It wasn’t any great surprise.

  Earlier – several hours ago – they’d continued their debate on the Germans’ motive in keeping a guardship over what they believed to be a submarine they’d sunk. Starting from the logical deduction that it had to centre on Dr Heiden, and the guess that the Gestapo might want proof of his death – well, that was it. The Gestapo would want proof of it for the simple reason that if Heiden wasn’t in that submarine he’d still be at large in Norway, would still have to be hunted down: and it mightn’t do them much good to go back and report, ‘We think he’s dead.’ If he was still on the loose he might still get out, taking his knowledge with him. So they’d want a body. And – harking back to an earlier thought about dropping more depthcharges to blow the thing open – if they did that, they wouldn’t necessarily have the right one conveniently floating up, in fact they might well destroy it – wouldn’t then know whether it had been there or not. They’d want a recognizable corpse. And that wreck which they thought they’d done-in with a single charge – plus three others for luck – was in water shallow enough to anchor in, therefore shallow enough to get divers down: and that was what they’d be waiting for. A diver or a team of divers, and the necessary gear.

  It made sense. Explained why one was facing suffocation.

  But – he reminded himself again – that was not the case. The Trumpeter factor had to be kept out of mind: shouldn’t even have got into mind, until now he’d hardly given it a thought. But conversely, the fact this was Tracker who’d started life as Trumpeter wasn’t any guarantee of survival either. Something like twenty T-class submarines had been lost this far, and there was no reason Tracker shouldn’t become the twenty-first.

  At some point – it might have been an hour ago or twelve, one hadn’t much grasp of time retrospectively – Mottram had murmured to him privately, ‘Sorry about this, old chap. Damned unfair – when you don’t even belong here.’