by John Winton
“I’d forgotten he was in this exercise! “
The Bodger caught Wilfred’s eye.
“That,” he said sombrely, “puts a different complexion on it altogether. With Black Sebastian in the hunt this is not going to be as easy as I thought.’
“Black Sebastian!”
The control room echoed the words. So might souls abandoned in hell have whispered the syllables of Prince Lucifer’s name.
6
Captain Jasper Abercrombie Sebastian Persimmons, D.S.O*., D.S.C*., R.N., known in and out of the submarine service as Black Sebastian, was a living justification of the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. An ex-submariner himself, he had become the finest anti-submarine captain afloat. His knowledge of submarines and their capabilities and his insight into the mind and thoughts of a submarine captain made him a deadly opponent.
There had often been speculation inside the submarine service on the cause of Black Sebastian’s return to general service. The popular theory was that the number of submarine officers Black Sebastian returned to general service through nervous breakdowns became too great a drain on the submarine service’s manpower.
Whatever the reason, Black Sebastian now hated submariners with the unreasoning, implacable hatred of a renegade for his former companions. His hatred had made his perceptions keener. Just as Captain Ahab, with almost supernatural accuracy, could foretell the presence of Moby Dick, so Black Sebastian, by nothing more than the pricking of his thumbs, could feel the presence of a submarine. “I can see a periscope at five miles,” he once said, “and I can smell a snort at ten.”
It was no idle boast. Black Sebastian had proved it again and again, flushing a submarine from cover where his rival escort captains had drawn blank. Now, as he swept across the van of the Task Force, Black Sebastian sensed the familiar tingling which told him he was close. Although his asdic operator had only caught a fleeting contact and had been unable to classify it, Black Sebastian knew in his bones that he was getting warm.
Sixty feet down and three miles to starboard, The Bodger was well aware of his danger.
“Sonar, give me constant reports on that H.E. Designate Black Sebastian.”
“Designate Black Sebastian, sir, roger. Black Sebastian, three-five-five, moving rapidly right, transmissions varying.” The Bodger’s attack was already nearing completion. The attack team had re-created from the stream of bearings and ranges The Bodger had given them a plan picture of what The Bodger could see through the periscope. They had also made predictions and deductions which The Bodger could not see and fed them into the calculation. Now, the final firing bearings were approaching solution. “Black Sebastian fading, zero-zero-five.”
“He’ll be back,” said The Bodger. “Bugger him. Up periscope.”
An attack on a task force through a defending screen was the supreme test of a submarine captain’s skill and judgment. It was also a severe strain on his temper. Captains had been known to trample members of their attack teams underfoot and physically to assault their trimming officers if the periscope dipped below the surface for an instant. With such captains, an attack was such excellent entertainment that the sailors who were not in the attack team drew lots for the privilege of standing in the passageway whence they could hear the sound-track. The Bodger was using the smallest periscope for periods of five seconds, just long enough to take one all-round look and a range and bearing of the target. While the periscope was down, The Bodger paced the control room, crossing from the periscope to the plot, from the plot to the sonar room, and from the sonar room back to the periscope, executing as he went a nervous, jerking hop and jump, like an abbreviated Hungarian mazurka. He wiped the palms of his hands on the seat of his trousers each time before seizing the periscope handles.
“Bodger Agonistes,” murmured Dagwood.
The Bodger was in a perfect attacking position, if the Task Force maintained its present course. He had no need to manoeuvre to close the track, nor was there any danger of him being overrun. He was like a swordsman who need do nothing except allow his opponent to run upon his weapon.
“Surely they must zig soon. I’m bloody certain Black Sebastian got a sniff of us.”
“Black Sebastian faded. Last bearing zero-two-zero.”
“I wonder what that crafty old bastard’s up to now?”
Black Sebastian was huddled on the starboard wing of his bridge, scowling at the sea. He was a very tall man with a hooked nose and a broad black beard. His complexion was pale and his eyes shadowed in deep sockets and he had the pointed ear-tips and arched eyebrows of a Rubens satyr, but his face lacked the same jolly devilment. His whole appearance suggested a powerful but hostile personality. As he leaned over the rail and studied the disposition of the Task Force, he looked like the reincarnation of a medieval torturer, or one of those terrible figures of the Inquisition who would eat a good dinner and go downstairs to watch their servants with fire and rack extort a recantation.
“We’ve gone too far.”
Black Sebastian’s Navigating Officer was a very brave man, the only man in Windfall who dared to question the Captain.
“I think it more likely we’ll find him ahead of the Task Force, sir,” he said. “After all, sir, we’re only five miles inside the first submarine area. . . .”
“I tell you we’ve gone too far you incompetent nincompoop! He’s got past us. We’d better get back there before he does any damage. Starboard thirty. . . .”
Windfall and her two wing escorts wheeled back towards the Task Force.
“Five degrees to go, sir! “
The Bodger was nearing his moment of truth. Little Richard now filled the whole of the periscope aperture. The Bodger could see every detail of her mammoth sides and superstructure, the aircraft ranged on the flight deck and the men moving around them. The Bodger felt that he only needed to get just a little closer to be able to read the names on the backs of their overalls. Swinging right, The Bodger could see Windfall’s silhouette lengthening on the horizon as she turned. He’s clicked, thought The Bodger, but he’s just too damned late.
“On, sir! “
“Shoot!”
“Stand by One . . . Fire. Stand by Two . . . Fire.” Wilfred steadily counted off the torpedoes. The submarine shuddered as they left the tubes. A new sound, an angry buzzing like the wine of a nest of infuriated hornets, invaded Leading Seaman Gorbles’ ears.
Windfall’s asdic operator also picked up the sound and timidly, like a man who knows his voice will release an avalanche, he reported it.
“Torpedo H.E., three-one-five, moving right, sir.”
“WHAT!”
Black Sebastian’s roar shook the bridge windows. He stood stock-still, his lips trembling, his fingers clenching and unclenching, and for one delirious moment Windfall’s action bridge team thought their Captain was about to drop dead of a stroke. But they had underestimated their man. Black Sebastian may have been temporarily unbalanced by fury but in the few seconds which had elapsed since he heard the report of the torpedoes he had seen Little Richard’s emergency turn to comb the torpedo tracks, he had estimated the torpedoes’ probable course, and he had already calculated the possible position of the submarine.
“Steer two-six-zero.”
“Contact, sir, probable submarine, two-six-five!”
Black Sebastian recovered himself in time to prevent an undignified yell of triumph.
“Now we’ve got him! Steer two-six-five.” He glowered round his bridge action team. “If he gets away, I’ll break the lot of you,” he said sincerely.
Like many large ladies, U.S.S. Little Richard was quick on her feet. But she was not quick enough. Seahorse’s six torpedoes, set to run deep, spread out and enveloped her in a wide fan, passing ahead, underneath and close astern of her. The torpedoes were expendable and ran on until their fuel was exhausted and then sank. For exercise purposes, however, they had done their work. Little Richard had been sunk, or at best, badly damaged.
The Bo
dger could not resist remaining at the periscope to witness the results of his handiwork until Leading Seaman Gorbles’ voice recalled him to more pressing matters.
“Black Sebastian regained, louder, moving left, zero-four-zero. Transmissions constant, transmission interval four thousand yards. In contact, sir!”
“Let’s get the hell out of this,” said The Bodger. “Flood ‘Q’ I think we’ve overstayed our welcome as it is.”
It would be foolish to stay gloating at the periscope and run into the arms of the escorts, like a man who carried out the perfect bank robbery and was still there admiring his own brilliance when the police arrived.
Just before the periscope dipped, The Bodger caught a glimpse of Black Sebastian and his two henchmen. They made a brave sight, approaching at full speed, their quarterdecks almost submerged in the soaring wakes, their bows flinging spray over the mastheads, and the attack flags whipping at the yard-arms.
“Cor crikey,” said The Bodger admiringly. “They’ve got their tails up now and no mistake. . . .”
“Black Sebastian zero-three-five, bearing constant, transmissions constant, transmission interval two thousand five hundred yards, attacking, sir!”
“Blow ‘Q’ sir?” asked Derek, looking anxiously at his depth gauges, which were unreeling as though demented.
“Not yet. Where’s the layer here?”
“Marked one at two hundred and fifty feet, sir,” said Wilfred. “Slight one at five-fifty.”
“Seven hundred feet,” The Bodger ordered. “Planes hard a-dive. Lose the bubble Coxswain.”
Seahorse dropped like a bird with folded wings. No asdic set was needed to hear Black Sebastian now. The ghostly bats’ squeaks of his transmissions could be heard plainly against the hull. Black Sebastian was coming down upon them like Sennacherib himself. The Bodger had the eerie sensation that he could feel the man’s personality reaching down to grapple him. The Bodger made up his mind.
“Blow ‘Q’. Full ahead together. Hard a starboard!”
Seahorse slipped sideways and downwards in a tight circle which took her underneath the heart of the Task Force where The Bodger stopped the shafts. Seahorse glided on under her own momentum, leaving behind her a curling wake of turbulent water which made an excellent asdic target. Black Sebastian’s henchmen pounced gleefully upon it and began to weave their complicated ritual patterns above it.
“Black Sebastian very faint, one-seven-eight, no transmissions. Lost contact, sir.”
Now what the hell’s he up to? The Bodger asked himself.
“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,” said Dagwood, aloud.
“They threatened its life with a railway share,” continued The Bodger, grinning. “Fall out the attack team.”
Black Sebastian admitted himself nonplussed. He lashed himself, and his asdic control crew, with his self-reproach. He had committed one of the basic errors of warfare. He had underestimated his opponent. The juicy target upon which he had urged his group had been whipped away and a dummy substituted. Black Sebastian did not believe for a moment that his group were investigating a real contact. He understood very well what the submarine captain had done. It was a manoeuvre Black Sebastian had practised many times himself. Furthermore, the submarine captain, whoever he was, had jinked the right way, diving into the middle of the Task Force where Black Sebastian was baulked by the train of surface ships.
Remembering that lightning evasion, Black Sebastian began to wonder about the submarine captain. There were very few submarines in the exercise with such a turn of speed.
“Pilot, get me the bridge exercise card.”
Black Sebastian ran his eye down the list of submarines.
“H.M.S. Terrapin, H.M.S. Angelfish, Farfarelli, the Italian. La Veuve, the Frenchman. The Nuclear Job. Seahorse . . . Seahorse.”
It was too late to chase through the middle of the Task Force now. Black Sebastian decided that it would be better to wait in the rear. Sooner or later, the submarine would come up and then, Black Sebastian thumped a fist into his palm, he would be waiting. Black Sebastian signalled that he had lost contact and withdrew to the rear of the Task Force. He could see an American escort group on the far side taking up the search where he had left off.
“And the best of All-American luck to you too,” growled Black Sebastian.
Between Black Sebastian and the Americans, H.M.S. Great Christopher was preparing to launch aircraft.
“Great Christopher about to launch aircraft, sir,” said the Navigating Officer.
“I can see that, blast you. If they’d flown off that search at dawn, when they bloody well should have done, they would have kept that submarine down until we got past. As it is, against the sort of submarine these vermin are building themselves these days, they’re pissing against the wind, that’s all they’re doing.”
Looking like an Inquisitor faced with a more than usually obstinate heretic, Black Sebastian hunched himself in his bridge chair and settled down to wait.
The Bodger raised his glass.
“Well, men. Here’s to Black Sebastian, bless his cotton socks.”
“Cheers, sir,” said the rest of the wardroom. It was very rare for any of the wardroom to drink during an exercise but, as Wilfred said, it was not every day you crashed an escort screen at its strongest point, fired six fish into the largest warship afloat and got clear away again.
“We’ll stay here for a couple of hours,” The Bodger said. “See if the shouting and tumult dies down a bit. Then we’ll hop up and make our damage report. I’ve just realized, we didn’t even make an enemy sighting report.”
“I think it’s just as well, sir,” said Wilfred. “That would have given us away before we’d even had a chance to get close.”
“Probably. What course did we estimate the Task Force was steering, Pilot?”
“Due East, sir.”
“Well, we’ll steer that for a bit. With any luck we might get another shot! “
“That must have given Black Sebastian something to think about, sir,” said Dagwood. “I’d love to have seen his face when he realized he’d lost contact.”
The Bodger shook his head. “We haven’t finished with him yet by a long chalk. Black Sebastian isn’t the sort of man who gives up as easily as that. You’ve got to appreciate that he isn’t really exercising with you at all. He positively hates you. He wants to see us and all submariners wiped out for good. He looks upon us as vermin, to be stamped out on sight. The most important thing to realize about this whole business is that the best anti-submarine weapon the Navy’s ever had and is ever likely to have is the personality of the escort captain. It all comes down to human terms in the long run. I remember a fellow who commanded a frigate during the war telling me that he only actually saw a U-boat once, after they’d forced it to the surface in the Atlantic. He said that when he saw that shape lying there on the water, he quite literally saw red. His first impulse was to charge down on it and ram it and batter it to death, shoot all the survivors and hang any that he missed from the yard-arm at once. Now, when a man like that manages to control himself and harnesses the energy he generates to a frigate’s ship’s company, that’s when people like us have got to look out! Black Sebastian is like that. He’s the kind who never gives up. He’ll chase up every disappearing radar contact and investigate every echo. He makes everyone’s lives a misery to them but he gets results and when he does get a submarine . . . he’ll stay with it until Doomsday.”
Just before noon, The Bodger yielded to Gavin’s suggestion that they go up for a sextant shot of the sun’s meridian altitude. Seahorse came up to a hundred feet while Leading Seaman Gorbles listened carefully all round for any sign of hydrophone effect. Hearing nothing, Seahorse rose cautiously to periscope depth. The Bodger had no sooner taken his first look through the periscope when he flooded “Q” and ordered a depth of seven hundred feet again.
“Jesus!” he said. “It was some kind of bloody yacht, stopped about
twenty yards away! It was so damned close that all I could see through the periscope at first was a row of bloody rivets! “
At noon, Black Sebastian got up from his chair and stretched. If he was a submarine captain, he would be coming up just about now.
“Old Istagfurallah is very excited about something, sir,” said the Navigating Officer.
“What’s that?”
“He seems to’ve got some bee in his burnous. . . .”
Black Sebastian snatched up his binoculars. Istagfurallah was steaming excitedly round in small circles, firing off salvoes of fireworks and sounding long blasts on her siren.
“I’ll tell you what he’s got, you cretin!” bellowed Black Sebastian. “He’s got a submarine! While we sit here in several million quids’ worth of frigate with our thumbs in our bums a flea-ridden Sheikh squatting on his prayer-mat does everything but gaff our target for us! Look at them! “ Black Sebastian gestured at his wing escorts, nosing industriously about on each side. “Bloody square-eyed addicts with free-flood ears, goggling all day long into their infernal idiots’ lanterns and flapping their ears at a lot of clicks and bangs! They should get out into the fresh air for once where they can see what’s happening! My God, we’re going to be too late again! “
The spectacle of Black Sebastian and his two henchmen closing him at maximum speed was too much for the Sheikh. It had been a disturbing morning all round. First, an infidel periscope had broken the sacred hour of noon and nothing discommoded a true believer more than being-spied on by strangers at his devotions. Now he was menaced by three Touareg frigates, the Forgotten of God. It was too much. The Sheikh swung round and withdrew to the south. Flying a banner which read: “Go Home Lawrence” the Sheikh disappeared rapidly over the horizon and took no further part in the exercise.
“Now we’ll get him!” cried Black Sebastian. The Sheikh had given them an excellent datum position.
But The Bodger was not to be caught a second time. He went deep, lay very low, and like Brer Rabbit, said nothing. Black Sebastian searched vainly for six hours and then withdrew under instructions from the flag-ship. When The Bodger returned to periscope depth in the late evening, he found a clear sea and sky.