Decoy

by Dudley Pope

  Copyright & Information

  Decoy

  First published in 1987

  Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1987-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,

  Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755104420 9780755104420 Print

  0755117840 9780755117840 Pdf

  0755119304 9780755119301 Mobi

  0755120434 9780755120437 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.

  Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.

  Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.

  In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:

  ‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.

  Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’

  The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.

  The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.

  In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.

  As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.

  Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

  All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.

  ‘Expert knowledge of naval history’ — Guardian

  “An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” — Observer

  ‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ — Sunday Times

  ‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ — Observer

  Dedication

  In memory of my shipmates killed or wounded when Convoy

  SL 125 was caught in the ‘Great Blackout’.

  Author's Note

  Size and performance of U-boats varied with the type. The one described in this narrative is similar to one version of the Mark IX. The ‘Great Blackout’ occurred exactly as described: a convoy in which the author was serving was caught in it and attacked by a pack of ten U-boats with disastrous results. The criticisms of the Ministry of War Transport, previously the Board of Trade, are made from first-hand experience of their lamentable lifejackets and lifeboats which were probably responsible for more British seamen’s deaths than torpedo hits.

  Dudley Pope

  Yacht Ramage

  French Antilles

  Chapter One

  Yorke pulled down his tired-looking leather bag from the luggage rack, said a polite farewell to the old lady who had sat beside him in the train for the whole tedious and gritty night journey from Glasgow to London, and joined the crowd shuffling their way to the door at the end of the corridor. It had been a bitterly cold trip: the heat had never come on despite repeated assurances from the guard, and that combined with the blackout blinds ensured that the freezing air stayed stale.

  The old lady was intriguing: small (about the same size as Clare, which meant a fraction under five feet), with white hair cut short in a severe style which made it seem she was wearing a Greek helmet. The in
evitable venerable but comfortable cashmere jersey worn above an old tweed skirt of a dark green and black tartan matched the silk scarf, which was a folded square knotted at the back in cowboy fashion, with the triangle of material in front. Her shoes were black brogues, the tongues of which showed that they were more familiar with saddle soap than patent polishes.

  Blue eyes, fading now; a thin and aristocratic nose which might have been carved from ivory. The lips had lost their colour but the rest of her features had the slight tan of a person who spent much time outdoors and showed that as a young woman she must have been one of the most beautiful in Scotland.

  At first glance it was hard to tell if she was very poor and keeping up appearances or very rich and completely unconcerned. They had spent the night spasmodically dozing and waking in the dull blue light to find that one or the other’s head had leaned to rest on a shoulder, and slowly, as was the way with Britons, they had begun to talk when the rattling of the train and sheer discomfort finally drove out sleep in a miasma of grit and locomotive smoke as it plunged through long tunnels.

  She had casually asked if he was just starting convalescent leave, and when he had said no she had nodded at his left hand, whose skin was purple and criss-crossed with scars which had just healed.

  No, he had been to sea since that happened, he told her and she asked no more: not because of the CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES poster above the seats opposite but because she was leaving him to explain or not, as he wished.

  Instead he asked her if she was coming down to London to shop. She had shaken her head ruefully. ‘No coupons left. And at my age fashion is comfort. This skirt — I remember I was wearing it when I took the younger boy off to boarding school. That must be twenty years ago!’

  For a few moments, although the blue eyes were looking at him, they were seeing only memories. Of that younger boy? What was he doing now, a grown man?

  ‘And now I’m wearing it again.’ She might have been talking to herself: Ned was not sure.

  ‘To meet him?’

  ‘No, to collect his medals. And one for his bro.’

  She said ‘bro’ as a schoolboy might refer to his brother: obviously it was a familiar phrase in their family, and as an only child he felt envious for a moment.

  A mother collecting her sons’ gongs? That was strange. Normally, if the sons were serving abroad the local commander-in-chief presented them; if in Britain, most probably the King. He looked round at her, and she nodded, but with pride rather than sadness. ‘Posthumous,’ she said quietly, ‘both of them.’

  What medals, what service, what did they do? He would probably be at the next Investiture — a DSO for the Aztec affair, a DSC (so they told him) for this latest business. Should he mention it in case he saw her there? Yet if they met again what could one say to a woman who had given two sons in exchange for at least three medals?

  ‘Both were pilots. The elder was at Cranwell when the war started,’ she said. ‘The younger was Volunteer Reserve. The elder flew through the Battle of Britain untouched. Spitfires. He finally commanded his squadron. He was killed two months ago. Intruder operations. It is such a long war.’

  Yorke nodded. ‘Their father?’

  ‘He died a couple of months after the second boy. Now this old wreck,’ she tapped a knee with the index finger of her hand, ‘is left to farm 15,000 acres in the Highlands. Sheep mostly.’

  Again Yorke nodded: there was nothing to say. By now, at this stage of the war, it was a familiar story, whether the bereaved woman farmed 15,000 acres or took in neighbours’ washing. Death was very egalitarian.

  ‘That’s the ribbon of the DSO you’re wearing.’ Not a question, just an observation. The preliminary, he realized, to a reference to her sons. ‘The eldest boy was invested in that, and he was awarded a DFC, too. Twenty kills. An ace,’ she said.

  He decided against mentioning that his DSO was the result of destroyer operations: she might ask details — although he thought not — but railway carriages were no place to discuss the Aztec affair, and the last business was sufficiently secret for even those in the know to keep silent.

  ‘You’ll be married?’

  He shook his head. ‘Engaged, I think.’ As he was realizing how foolish the ‘I think’ must sound she nodded. ‘I know. My husband never proposed to me either: it was an unspoken thing.’

  Then he noticed that dawn had crept up beyond the blinds, and soon the train had started rattling into the grubby suburbs of London. Grubby from centuries of soot: battered from months of the Luftwaffe. Bombs had bitten ugly jagged gaps in terraces of houses, and where incendiaries had arbitrarily gutted factories and churches there were only blackened boxes. After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren had designed and built fifty-one churches, apart from St Paul’s. An appropriate time to remember an odd fact.

  She was being met, so she did not need any help with her luggage, she said, thanking him, and adding gently that, until his left hand had healed more thoroughly, he should avoid carrying old ladies’ baggage.

  And then he was being jostled along the platform. The small jagged potholes, as though someone had run amok with a pickaxe, were mementoes of the latest bomb splinters, and the bigger holes had been roughly touched up with cement. Ovaltine for Night Starvation, Peter the Planter and Mazzawattee Tea, Stephen’s Ink with its blue blot — the metal advertising signs were still high on the walls but rusty measles marks revealed where they had been peppered by bomb splinters.

  ‘Thetrennowstendinginpletfondsevingisthe…’ The ghostly announcement reverberated across the station like an incantation. Foreign troops and old ladies sipping tea in the buffet cocked their heads alike in a hopeless attempt to understand what was being said and looked puzzled, defeated by the electrically amplified Essex accent or a bureaucratic fool who had never learned about punctuation. Experienced British travellers looked warily at the arrival and departures boards, usually discovering their train was being treated with the anonymity it did not deserve, so that harassed porters had to brush aside the anxious inquiries with hurried gestures.

  The locomotive at the head of their train gave a relieved sigh, as though it was going to sleep, and most of the passengers in front of Ned disappeared in a cloud of drifting steam. A small Polish officer, noticeable in his czapka and smartly tailored battledress, stood beside several suitcases and a kitbag, looking for a porter, as though off for a social weekend instead of joining a new unit after having fought his way across Europe, and only Ned noticed that he was wearing the Virtuti Militari, Pour le Mérite, the Polish equivalent of the VC.

  A ticket collector waited at the platform gateway, although all tickets had been taken on the train, and behind him two military policemen, red cap covers making them stand out like dowagers at a garden party, eyed the passing passengers. On the watch for deserters, men absent without leave? As Ned approached, one nudged the other and stepped towards him, blocking his way and giving a wrist-vibrating salute.

  ‘Commander Yorke, sah?’

  He has seen the Brigade at work, Ned thought. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Message from the h’Admiralty, sah. Would you telephone Capting Watts h’at once, sah?’

  ‘Very well,’ Ned said, ‘thank you.’ And realized he had no pennies. ‘Can you change sixpence?’

  ‘H’indeed, sah,’ the man said, diving into his pocket. Yorke realized that the military policeman had anticipated that Lieutenant Commander Yorke was bound to arrive bereft of pennies. As a sixpence was exchanged for copper coins each man eyed the other’s single medal ribbon. The military policeman had the Palestine General Service ribbon, indicating long service. Ned guessed that dilatory or nervous soldiers could offer few excuses to this MP that he had not heard many times before.

  Ned squeezed into a telephone kiosk (wondering why they always smelled of urine even though the men’s enormous lavatory was nea
rby), pushed in two pennies, dialled WHI 9000, and then asked for the extension.

  Captain Watts, head of the Royal Navy’s Anti-Submarine Intelligence Unit, was cheerful. ‘Thought I’d save you coming in. Today’s Thursday, so take the weekend off and start in again on Monday. You hoped you were finished with graphs, diagrams and statistics? Want to get back to sea duty, you say? Dammit, you’ve just been to sea! Anyway, this is an open line, so we’ll discuss that on Monday. Not that there’ll be any discussion. Well, Joan’s just put a note in front of me. Wish I could read her writing. Hold on a moment.’

  Ned could picture Watts at his battered desk deep down in the Citadel, the new and supposedly bombproof operational centre next to the Admiralty building, sitting beside the Mall and looking like a Foreign Legion fort which had lost its desert and was manned by Tuaregs wearing bowler hats and armed with umbrellas. Joan, the Wren officer who was Watts’ secretary but who seemed to keep the Unit functioning, would be explaining to Watts with ill-concealed impatience.

  ‘You there? Yes, well, what Joan had written down in her execrable Roedean writing — ’ there was a pause, when obviously Watts had his hand over the mouthpiece, ‘well then, correction: it was Battle Abbey, she says. It seems to me she’s listed your social engagements for next week. She thought you’d like to make sure you had some clean collars and your shoes polished. Ready? Monday, here in the office; Tuesday, see the PM at teatime. That’s 5 p.m., so it means brandy time. You come with me. What about? This is an open line. Wednesday you work here like a peon. Thursday, Investiture. You can take two guests. Yes, yes, I’ve passed the word and she’s being given the day off. Friday, you’re back here, and you’ll be expected to stand us all a gin. Remind me to tell you about having a hook sewn on your uniform for Thursday. Why? Do you expect His Majesty to sew on the bloody medal? Only one hook, for the DSC. The DSO goes on a ribbon round your manly and well-scrubbed neck. That’s all for now. See you on Monday. You’ll be at Palace Street until then? Good.’