Decoy

by Dudley Pope

  A standard ship’s lifeboat containing twenty-three shivering, cursing and sodden men thought to be possessed of diabolical cunning (it must have been a sunny day) yet already wishing they had never heard of the sea, a few Sten guns greased and wrapped in oiled canvas, a few metal boxes with ‘black bangers’ sitting in them like emu eggs – this miserable bunch were Britain’s champions in the contest against Germany. Hitler had pitted Commodore – no, Admiral, he had recently been promoted – Dönitz and all his U-boats, about five hundred by now, and all his Enigma makers and cipher experts, and electric torpedoes with magnetic pistols which exploded the torpedo when triggered off by a ship’s magnetic field, against them. Laughable. Had history juggled the time so that, instead of the Armada, Spain sent Don Quixote astride his spavined Rosinante, to be met by the Black Prince on the playing fields of Eton, the whole affair to be reported by Beachcomber? What a one-sided tourney that would have been. Yet as the British crowd prefers supporting the underdog, they’d probably have cheered the Don and hooted so loud against the Black Prince that his charger would have bolted, although his wife Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, would certainly have then gone on to the field and put the crowd to flight.

  There was some comfort in thinking about jousting, because the heavy armour must have kept the wind out, and presumably one had armourers ready to clean the armour and polish it after the battle – and grease it, too: a squeaky visor or one which stuck open, exposing one’s cowardly grin to swift dentistry from an opponent’s sword, could be troublesome.

  Knightly combat – now all that was left of it was proof of some of Newton’s laws, and phrases used mostly in heraldry. A coat of arms – how many realized that it was originally a way of identifying yourself? A dozen knights in a dozen suits of shining armour sitting on a dozen heavy horses also clad in armour looked as alike as a dozen wine glasses. So each wore a sleeveless silk coat, like the colours a modern jockey wears to distinguish his horse’s owner, and on the silk his lady embroidered the arms of his family. Some Yorke forebears five hundred years ago must have pulled on their silken coats of arms, been hoisted up on to their horses (a knight in full armour was done for if he fell: some wretched fellow could creep up, flip open the visor and cut his throat!), raised their lances to their wives or mistresses, and galloped off to find glory or a clangorous end. They certainly never thought that one of their descendants would be pulling down the hood of his duffel coat as he sat in a lifeboat, the tiller tucked under his arm as a vastly foreshortened lance. Gentlemen of England now abed shall think themselves accurs’d… Well, perhaps, but he was prepared to swear that the twenty-three gentlemen of England (and Scotland, Wales and Ireland) now in this boat wished they were abed at this moment – as no doubt was Hitler’s champion, B der U himself. Ned visualized the hard-faced little man Dönitz, with his large ears and close-cropped hair (several photographs of him were pinned up on the wall of ASIU, on the ‘Know Your Enemy’ principle), tucked up in a warm bed near Kernével. No doubt a comfortable French chateau had been requisitioned, and German Navy cooks probably sliced leberwurst where previously a gourmet cook juggled truffles which pigs had rooted up in the chateau’s own grounds…

  Jemmy was shaking his arm insistently. ‘Two hours, Ned: time to change the watch!’

  So two hours had passed while he had been riding with Rosinante, picturing Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent – who was by chance one of his forebears – along with the Black Prince, whose tomb in Canterbury Catherdral was a reproach to all the Cromwells, Harry Pollitts and James Maxtons of this world – and the Major Gateses, too, the pro-Germans now interned on the Isle of Man because of their opinions before the war.

  Changing the watch involved only physical contortions: as soon as Ned passed the word, the man at the inboard end of each oar changed places with the man sitting outboard. The inboard man had been doing the work, from the position of most leverage. The man outboard had tried to doze, holding on to the oar as instructed, so that it should not be lost overboard if the inboard man let go.

  Jemmy slid across the short aftermost thwart and took the tiller. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he said. ‘Now you see why I’m a submariner.’

  Dawn came with the dreary slowness of departing toothache. The Croupier commented sourly: ‘You can now see what’s making you miserable. I prefer the dark.’

  Daylight revealed a desolate scene: wave heaping upon grey wave, white crest after white crest ripping off its top and scattering to leeward in cold spray which made eyes raw. But was it so cold? Ned felt warmer, until he considered it, pulling the hood of his duffel over his face to keep out the spray. No, it was no warmer because obviously it could not be; quite simply he was getting used to it. He knew from bitter experience when the Aztec sank that after a while one did not really feel the cold. One could see the effect of it – pinching flesh did not produce pain – but not feel it. One just grew weaker, and the onset of hunger produced that stage in the process of surviving where the strong came through and the weak gave up; where the real leaders still made the decisions and gave the rest the will to live, and the hearty blusterers who in less stringent times passed for leaders, kept quiet, only too glad to leave decisions to others.

  Strange how if you covered your head and face it seemed less harsh. The man who invented duffel coats should die a millionaire. Yet it was somehow symptomatic of – well, the British Isles – that the duffels issued to the Royal Navy were thin compared with the Royal Canadian Navy type. Yes, here in the tiny tent formed by the duffel’s hood you did not hear the hiss of the wind. It did not whine because there was no wire rigging or anything else to cause a whine. What did wind sound like in a desert, with no buildings to buffet and no trees? Presumably just a hiss; a roar if it was very strong. The sea was not comparable to the desert because the wind tossed up the waves and there was always the sound and feel of waves and spray. Oh to be a Bedouin safely in his tent in a sandstorm. Yet no doubt the stifling Bedouin, breathing in sand, dreamed of being in a boat at sea, where there was no sand and no heat. No satisfying the customers, Ned thought, and dozed off.

  He woke momentarily lost – the hospital after the operation on his hand, with Clare at the Palace Street house, on board the Marynal while chasing the U-boat in the convoy, in a desert somewhere… He pulled back the duffel hood and saw a grey and white desert of waves that moved eastwards with an awe-inspiring relentlessness. Perhaps not so high as when he had dozed off, though pushing back the hood brought back the drumming and buffeting in his ears.

  ‘Want a spell?’ he asked Jemmy.

  ‘No, I’m all right. Wind is easing. Sea flattening a bit, too.’

  ‘Still not gentlemen’s yachting weather, though.’

  ‘But we’re not gentlemen,’ Jemmy said.

  Ned pulled back the sleeve of his duffel to see his watch. ‘Seven o’clock. Time for breakfast.’ He leaned forward. ‘Sergeant Keeler, are you awake?’

  A burly figure in kapok lifejacket and duffel swivelled round to face aft, thin strands of blond hair plastered over his brow, blue eyes red-rimmed from salt spray. He looked like the amiable village baker; in fact he was a Royal Marine commando and was more skilled in killing men than anyone else Ned had ever seen. A quick flip with a cheese wire from behind and a knee in the back killed a sentry silently; an edge-of-the-hand blow across the windpipe from the front was as effective. Dagger, cosh, rifle butt, length of gas pipe, Bunsen burner hose filled with lead shot, an old sock containing beach-worn pebbles, Sten gun, Bren, Lewis, revolvers, automatics… Sergeant Keeler handled them with such familiarity as if they were childhood toys.

  Yet he was softly spoken, with a Midland country accent, perhaps Herefordshire, and his round face and ruddy complexion seemed to belong on a farm. Keeler was a kindly man; the sort of person that made a good father. The only thing was that at the earliest age possible he had entered the Royal Marines – this before Hitler’s attack on Poland
– and as soon as the special Marine commando units were formed, had volunteered. From what Ned could make out, being a Royal Marine commando made Keeler flourish like a well-manured and expertly pruned rose tree: corporal, sergeant instructor, and then a reputation for being the best man with a cheese wire, able to lob a grenade into a bucket at twenty paces, the best all-rounder with a Sten, the best with what Keeler always referred to as ‘the small stuff’, revolver and automatic… When Ned had called on the Marines with a letter from Captain Watts and said he wanted the loan of some Marines and their best sergeant for a month, the Marine colonel had nodded and said at once: ‘Keeler’s your man, from what Captain Watts says,’ – what had Watts written? Ned wondered – ‘I’d be inclined to let Keeler pick his own team. Sounds a bit “death or glory”, so you want the best.’

  Well, the colonel had been right: Keeler had kept his team on their toes and also trained the seamen in the finer points of close-range fighting. An innocent cheese wire, normally seen on a cheese board with a wooden toggle at the end, became a murderous garrotte; the place in the human body to insert a dagger for maximum effect… Keeler had turned a blasé Jemmy and a bored Croupier into keen students of silent killing and, with Ned, they had been fascinated by Keeler’s descriptions of the three commando raids on the French coast in which he had taken part. None had ever been made public. None had involved more than thirty men, and each had a specific task. One had been to take a couple of scientists (put into uniform in case they were captured, and so that they would not be shot as spies) to attack a radar station on the cliffs close to a French village.

  Jemmy had added a few words to the story: putting the two boffins into uniform would not help: since Hitler had announced his notorious ‘Commando Order’, all captured commandos were executed anyway. Keeler had laughed and admitted that the boffins had worn uniform for another reason: it was important, if they had been captured, that the Germans did not guess the real reason for the raid. Two men who obviously were not commandos might give the game away, so the boffins had to be beefy men who, like the rest of the party, were well equipped with vicious weapons.

  But now crouched on the lifeboat thwarts, Sergeant Keeler and him team of professional killers looked just as weary and weather-beaten as the rest: unshaven, faces grey with cold and fatigue, hunched over oars like galley slaves in their tenth year of rowing Barbarossa. They would stand a close inspection through a U-boat periscope: they looked like genuine survivors. Still, Ned thought, after twelve hours in a lifeboat in this weather everyone was a survivor.

  ‘Sergeant, will you deal with the rations?’

  For two or three days they would eat well: the chief steward of the City of Norwich had put sliced hams and cuts of roast lamb, well cooked chops and steaks in one box: in another were sliced bread, a selection of boiled and roast potatoes, cucumber cut into thick discs, radishes, carrots and hard-boiled eggs, as well as jars of piccalilli and bottles of Lea and Perrins. A third box held a selection of fresh and dried fruit, bought on previous trips to other lands and now stored: dates and currants, apricots, oranges and apples, huge raisins…

  As Jemmy watched Keeler begin to hand round the sliced meat and another man passed round bread from the other box, he commented: ‘We’re going to notice it when we’re reduced to lifeboat rations!’

  ‘Yes, but with this lifeboat gourmet food you all have to stay alert: the quickness of your hands must deceive the Teds’ eyes.’

  ‘Guaranteed,’ Jemmy said, ‘as long as the cold cutlets last.’

  ‘The chief steward reckons three days, and the ham longer. The bread was specially baked.’

  Jemmy shivered. ‘I’d have thought it was cold enough to keep the meat longer. You didn’t tell me that being in a lifeboat is like trying to get comfortable in a draughty refrigerator.’

  ‘Ah, thanks Sarn’t,’ Ned took a thick slice of cold lamb and passed it to Jemmy, and then took another piece for himself.

  Keeler apologized for the lack of piccalilli. ‘Bloody onions keep rolling off, sir. Thought I’d keep it for calmer weather.’

  ‘Yes, and when the meat’s not so fresh,’ Ned said.

  Ned munched and Jemmy took bites as he moved the tiller with the other hand, frequently having to push with his body to overcome the oars on one side.

  ‘I’m sure this bloody boat’s warped,’ he complained. ‘It keeps turning to port.’

  ‘The chaps on the starboard side are pulling harder,’ Ned said, and called them. A couple of minutes later he asked Jemmy: ‘That better?’

  ‘Yes, Sorry Ned, I’m not thinking too well at the moment.’

  ‘I’ll give you a spell.’

  ‘No, it’s the Croupier’s turn.’ He shouted, and the Croupier, sitting in the forward part of the boat beside Yon, heaved himself upright and began to scramble aft, climbing over the thwarts and careful not to get jabbed in the ribs by the looms of the oars as they moved backwards and forwards in erratic rhythm.

  ‘Not much hope of spotting anything – anything spotting us, rather, Jemmy said. ‘A U-boat would have to have its periscope raised twenty feet to keep the lens clear of this spray.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it surface?’ Ned asked. ‘Not much chance of being spotted by aircraft out here!’

  ‘That’d depend on the skipper. What luck has he had so far, how many torpedoes he has left, what fuel, how many days to the end of his patrol. Yes, and crew morale. That’s likely to be a problem for Dönitz these days. Okay, the Teds are winning the Battle of the Atlantic – the figures make that clear enough – but we are sinking quite a few boats. They’re building so many it doesn’t make much difference to the balance, but it does to the men.’

  ‘In what way?’ Ned asked. ‘They know they’re winning, they know new and better boats are being designed and launched, and according to the Resistance boys, the submariners are the heroes – even to the French girls in places like Brest.’

  ‘Oh yes, the survivors have a fine time. But I wonder how many officers and men in U-boats on the day war broke out are still alive today? The engine-room artificers of September 1939 who have survived are probably lieutenants (E) by now; the nervous sub-lieutenant who was then general dogsbody is probably one of the ace commanders – if he’s lived this long.’

  Ned gave a dry laugh. ‘You sound like a Ministry of Information hand-out to the Press!’

  Jemmy slid a couple of feet across the thwart so that the Croupier could sit down and take the tiller. Jemmy, his head jutting out of the hood of his duffel like a hen staring from its nest, leaned across towards Ned.

  ‘Plain statistics, old boy. Say they had fifty subs then and now have four hundred. What are the chances of those early subs surviving? But even if they do, the best men get moved on to the newer boats. The newer boats get the tougher jobs and (because they certainly have longer range) the most distant ones, with more chances of being intercepted and sunk.

  ‘Do some sums, Ned. How many of those original fifty young sub-lieutenants have survived? How many commanding officers, and, probably more important, how many engineers? How many of those original crews? More than two years of war, so say half at the most, scattered among the other boats. Each has a memory of Old Heinrich, or Herman, or Ernst, who went out on patrol with U-so-and-so and never came back.’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ Ned protested, ‘you make it sound as though they’re losing!’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m trying to make you see it through an ordinary submariner’s eyes. Yes, he knows the Reich is winning; he hears of little else but numbers of Allied ships sunk and gross tonnages. He hears that one of the aces has just sunk his hundredth ship. He knows Kretschmer sank 325,000 tons, but also knows that one day Kretschmer didn’t come back. Prien may have sunk the Royal Oak in Scapa, but Prien too is dead.

  ‘So Heinrich, commanding U-555 at the age of twenty-six, hero on shore,
a sub-lieutenant only a year ago, an Oberleutnant six months ago, and now making his first trip as Kapitänleutnant and with an Iron Cross round his neck like a priest with his rosary, hoping it will ward off the devil in the shape of depth-charges, has his hopes – and his memories.

  ‘Just as I dream of potting two snipe with two barrels, so Kapitänleutnant Heinrich dreams of potting the Queen Mary with one torpedo and a battleship with another, and returning triumphantly to Brest or Lorient or Sant-Nazaire, where B der U welcomes him with a brass band and the news that an admiring Führer has made an immediate award of the Knight’s Cross with Diamonds, Oak Leaves and Tea Leaves.

  ‘But – there’s always a but – while Heinrich dreams of sink the Queen Mary, he has nightmares about a pattern of depth-charges going bang in the night followed by the sound of spurting water as the lights go out and the hull starts crumpling up. Ned, I know how Kapitänleutnant Heinrich feels as he tries to sleep in his cabin. I know because my cabin was probably about the same size.’

  Ned finished chewing the last piece of lamb and looked round, half expecting to see a black-painted and rust-streaked tube like a drainpipe, with a large prism on the top, sticking up out of the sea and eyeing them, like a giraffe looking over a wall.

  ‘Yes, I follow all that, but what’s it got to do with Heinrich not thundering along on the surface?’