Eagle at Taranto (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  Nobody knew the answers to the questions. There was no past form to go on, no previous, similar operation. This was a first. Tonight they would write the book. Tonight they would learn the answers.

  Mark’s sense of inevitability, of following a long, pre-ordained path, was strong. The operation that had been only a vague possibility in those far-off summer days, was here now and real. Events followed one another with the regularity of a ticking clock. He walked and talked on the flight-deck with Tim, stood at his shoulder on the goofer’s platform abaft the bridge and watched the first wave of twelve Swordfish fly off one by one into the night. He and Tim went below and dressed in their flying-kit: navy trousers tucked into flying-boots, leather sheepskin-lined Irvine jackets zipped up, Mae West lifejackets strapped on, leather helmets, gloves. Tim picked up the big bag that held his chart-board and instruments and they climbed the ladders to the flight-deck. Once again Doug Campbell would not be going with them: his cockpit was needed for the long-range fuel tank.

  By the light of the moon they made their way through the nine Swordfish ranged aft. Their Pegasus engines bellowed, with blue flames licking from the exhausts. Their wings were still folded back for close packing on the flight-deck so that they looked more like huge four-poster beds than aircraft.

  The air felt chill. Mark climbed up Ethel’s side and slid into the cockpit. Hardy leaned over him, helped him secure the locking-pin of the Sutton harness, then laid a broad hand on Mark’s shoulder and bawled into the Gosport tube, “Good luck, sir!” His round face was serious. Mark looked past him and saw Laurel standing on the deck below, peering up worriedly. The two mother hens. Ward felt a surge of affection for them and nodded, grinned, took the tube and fastened it to his helmet so he could speak into it. Hardy climbed down and Mark worked through his pre-flight checks, squinting at the instruments in the orange light of the cockpit, ran up the engine and tested switches. Finally he called Tim: “Can you hear me?”

  “As if you were only a few feet away.”

  He was, with just the big dustbin of the overload tank between them.

  Mark looked down at Laurel and Hardy, spreadeagled now on the deck and holding the ropes of the chocks wedged under Ethel’s wheels. Their faces were grey blobs in the darkness, turned up to him. He lifted a thumb to indicate to them: ready.

  Illustrious was making twenty-eight knots, the funnel smoke a thick stream and veering around as she turned into wind. The sea was black and silver under the moon and laced with green phosphorescence. The flight-deck lights came on, twin lines of them seeming to close in as they ran away towards the bow and the night sky lifting beyond. A green light flashed from the bridge then another blinked on the flight-deck and the first Swordfish rolled forward and sped away, lifted off. That was Ginger Hale, leading this second wave, a great man to go to war with: cool, skilled, brave.

  Mark waited, alone and lonely now. Campbell, Laurel and Hardy, the other air crew, were all miles away. But he was calm. The green light blinked at him, Laurel and Hardy snatched away the chocks. Ethel rolled forward, briefly halted as Laurel and Hardy spread the wings and slammed home their locking-pins. Mark tested the aileron controls. Green light again. He let Ethel run forward, accelerating down the narrow lane between the lights, then lifted her off, heavy with the three-quarter-ton weight of the torpedo under her belly, but climbing away into the night.

  He found the others already in the air and joined the circus of shadowy Swordfish with blue formation lights marking their big double wings with the struts and bracing wires between. They circled widely above Illustrious and Mark turned his helmeted, goggled head to look down at her. The escorting destroyers were shadows on the sea, his eyes led to them by the white arrows of their wakes. The carrier was picked out by the twin ribbons of her landing lights.

  Mark counted heads as another Swordfish clawed its way up to those already circling: seven.

  Where were numbers eight and nine?

  Below on the flight-deck a cursing crowd of fitters and riggers worked furiously to disentangle two Swordfish with their wings locked together. When that was done the aircraft had to be checked to see if they had suffered damage, if they were still fit to fly on the operation. At the end of it there was relief and frustrated bad temper equally shared.

  Ethel droned on, gently banking, through the night sky, Mark counting the shadows and the pairs of lights again but getting the same answer. Until at last another came slowly up: eight.

  Still waiting, circling, for five minutes — ten. Mark was uneasy, sensing that something had gone wrong. Where was number nine? Broken down? Flopped in the drink?

  Tim Rogers said, “Signal from the ship: Carry on.”

  So nine was not coming. They were down to eight.

  A blue torch blinked from the Swordfish of Ginger Hale, the leader: form up. Mark eased Ethel into the formation: two “vics” of three Swordfish, and one of only two. The course was north-west for Taranto and they climbed steadily to three-thousand feet then levelled off. Mark tilted back his head now and again to look at the clouds above him. They steadily thickened to a solid ceiling.

  It was then that Tim shouted, voice blaring distorted in

  Mark’s ears: “— Almighty. Look Queenie...her tank...”

  Mark’s head jerked around and he saw Queenie, L. 5Q. She carried bombs, not a torpedo, so her overload tank could be strapped under the fuselage. Now one of the straps had broken and Mark looked just in time to see the other strap give and the tank fall. Queenie followed it, skidding sideways and down, was lost to his sight. Without the overload she did not have the range to carry out the operation and would have to return to Illustrious.

  Now they were only seven. Lucky seven? What price the jinx now? They had set out from Alexandria with a striking force of twenty-four that was now reduced to nineteen. That was a loss of almost a quarter and they had yet to come under fire — the twelve in the first wave were still an hour from Taranto.

  It did not matter. He had that feeling of inevitability again. The attack would go on.

  They did not talk for a long time but that was not unusual. Mark’s mind was on his flying and Tim worked on his chart. Despite the Irvine jackets, the boots and gloves, they were very cold in the open cockpits. It was lonely in the night. There were the other Swordfish lifting and falling gently, as on a carousel. There was the Gosport tube, but in the night and the cold, between the cloud ceiling and the sea, with the battering slipstream and the engine’s roar, there was loneliness.

  Tim Rogers broke the verbal silence: “The first wave should be close to Taranto now.”

  Mark looked at his watch. “Yes.” He wondered about the twelve Swordfish an hour or so ahead. Williamson led them and his plan was to attack from two directions. Half of the planes were to drop bombs on the inner harbour to create a diversion, also to lay a line of parachute flares along die eastern shore. All six Italian battleships were moored at that eastern end of the harbour, near the town. Williamson meanwhile would lead one flight of three torpedo-carriers in over San Pietro island and then the Taranto breakwater before turning north onto their targets. The other flight of three torpedo-carriers would cross the submerged breakwater north of San Pietro, fly across the harbour and then turn south. The two attacking flights would have the battleships between them and that should help to confuse the naval gunners. Mark thought: If any of Williamson’s Swordfish ever got as far as the ships...

  4 Taranto

  The freighter had sailed in convoy from Benghazi bound for Catania in Sicily but she was detached before arriving at that port and sent instead to Brindisi. This pleased the captain and most of the crew because Brindisi was the ship’s home port and they would be able to see their families. On the morning of the eleventh, however, a wireless signal re-routed the ship again, this time to Taranto, amid general cursing. The naval party aboard did not curse because they were all from the north of Italy anyway. The prisoner they were there to guard did not curse either. Jamie Dunb
ar did not want to go to Italy at all.

  That evening he and a young tenente of the Italian navy leaned companionably on the rail below the bridge as the freighter passed in through the entrance to the great harbour. To starboard the long breakwater ran out from Cape San Vito, to port lay San Paolo island. Two guardships, each with a gun forward and aft, were moored in the half-mile-wide entrance, with an anti-aircraft battery mounted on a lighter. Jamie could just make out the silhouettes of the guns in the dusk.

  The tenente said softly, “Mare Grande. The great harbour of Taranto.”

  Jamie looked out across the four-mile-wide expanse of water and said, “We’ve got a pond like this in Hyde Park.”

  The tenente smiled, seeing the joke. He was correct but friendly towards Jamie, who was polite, and with an effort of will, obedient. He was looking for a chance to escape but the tenente had not given him one. He and the six seamen and the petty officer in the naval party had been aboard a destroyer sunk at Tobruk. They were returning to Italy for leave and redrafting to another ship, so they were given the task of escorting this prisoner.

  There was no doubt which was the prisoner. The tenente was casually immaculate in his uniform but Jamie wore an assortment of clothes found for him in the hospital. The big Italian patrol sent out, nervously, to seek their own dead and wounded outside the wire at Sidi Barrani had found him. He had lain unconscious near the craters made by the mortar bombs. The medics with the patrol had cut and ripped away his clothing to locate the score of small shrapnel wounds and stop their bleeding. They had carried him back behind their lines near-naked under a blanket.

  The freighter steamed slowly across the Mare Grande. Jamie could see cruisers anchored inside a protective screen of barrage balloons swaying gently in the wind above the harbour. Beyond the cruisers and closer inshore were six great battleships.

  The freighter slid on over water like glass and the tenente said, “We anchor off the Commercial Basin for the night.” In fact they moored to a buoy, then the watch on deck lowered a boat and let a ladder down the side. Jamie watched them from the corner of his eye; you never knew what little piece of knowledge might be useful. Possibly the tenente guessed this. He glanced at the men working by the glimmer of screened lamps and a three-quarter moon; the harbour and town were blacked-out, scarcely a pin-prick of light showing. “The captain goes ashore to report and receive his orders. I think, tomorrow, you go ashore.”

  Jamie thought, Damn-all chance of getting away ‘so far, and a sight less once I’m dumped in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  The tenente slapped Jamie’s shoulder gently, sympathetically, “Come. You go below now.”

  Jamie was locked in his cabin for the night. First he swore out of frustration but when he’d got that out of his system he sat on his bunk. He had to think of some way of smuggling his few illicit possessions ashore. He had collected them — stolen would be a more accurate term — in the course of the voyage. He had taken anything he could, like a jackdaw, because — like the little pieces of knowledge — he did not know when they might prove useful. There was a packet of biscuits, a table-knife, a box of matches. They were tucked down into a crevice behind the bunk.

  He looked from the scuttle, with the deadlight screwed down over it so no light would escape, to the door. If he unscrewed the deadlight the scuttle was still too small for him to slip through. The door was ordinary, with a lock he was certain he could force with the table-knife, but a sentry armed with a rifle stood outside. There were louvred ventilator slits at the top of the door. If Jamie stood close against them he could see the sentry, just, through their angled slats.

  All of this he knew only too well. Tonight, as on other nights, he could see no way of escaping. He climbed bad-temperedly into bed and tried to read the newspaper they had allowed him, but he could only pick out a few words of Italian that he knew. He swore again, threw it aside and settled down to sleep. They had disconnected the switch so that his light stayed on. He turned his back to it and closed his eyes.

  The thought came suddenly: He and Mark Ward had got on the last time they met. If only that big, black-haired devil were here, then together they’d be able to get out of this.

  Bert Keller asked, “How about you? ‘Nother bianco?”

  Katy shook her head. Her glass of white wine still stood half full.

  Bert waved a lean hand at the waiter behind the bar: “Strega.”

  “Signore.” There was a quick smile from the fat, greying Italian too old for military service; he liked the affable Bert.

  They sat at a table in the bar of the hotel, Katy chic in a navy-blue suit and a white blouse that set off her tan. Bert said lugubriously, “Boy! How unlucky can you get? I could turn in an actual eye-witness account of Mussolini’s invasion of Greece but the bastards won’t let me file the story.”

  Katy said calmly, “Count your blessings. Anyway, how much did you see with your head stuck in that ditch?”

  Bert looked his old self again: lazy, rumpled, his long face creased in a sardonic grin. Not like on the night she had dragged him from the stream and feared he was dying. When the bullet smashed into the torch she was holding, it numbed her arm to the shoulder for hours, but first the shock of it had sent her sprawling beside Bert, winded and half dazed. Some time later she became aware of soldiers around them, their rifles menacing. There was an officer, young and excited, volubly taken aback at finding a blonde, frightened and very emotional American girl on this black night of rain. She was soaked, plastered with mud, and her hands shook but now her fear and anger found a target. She dressed down the subaltern as if she were a general. Maybe something of her naval captain of a father had rubbed off on her. “We’re neutrals, you trigger-happy clowns! Americanos! And this is an old man, a famous newspaperman! If he dies I’ll see you shot, goddamn you!”

  So four of the soldiers dumped Bert on a stretcher and then the little party headed for the rear: Katy, Bert, the stretcher-bearers and two soldiers with rifles slung on their shoulders as escorts. All Katy remembered of that march through the night was the firing and the continual banging of grenades from the direction of the house. Both faded behind them as they slipped and slid down the track to the road. They trudged back along the edge of the road until they came to an ambulance.

  The light was growing now: grey under low clouds, streaming rain. Trucks ground up the road and soldiers, heavily laden with packs, ammunition and rifles, tramped in straggling files on either side. The puttees wound around their calves were daubed with mud and their boots were great shapeless lumps of it. They were excited, keyed-up, but already their feet were dragging. They had found the marching in this weather and this country hard going. They did not look like a victorious, invading army.

  The ambulance took Bert and Katy to a field dressing-station where a doctor tended to Bert and said he would be all right. There was also, soon, an intelligence officer who interrogated Katy and was sceptical of her story that they were U.S. correspondents. Their passports were back in the house, Katy told him. He did not believe that, either, and there was a shouting match which ended when Katy told him icily, “When I get to our embassy in Rome I’ll see you busted down to a buck private! Now go to hell and leave me alone!”

  He went away, muttering under his breath and uneasy, leaving Bert and Katy under guard. When he returned later in the day his manner was still distant but he brought their passports and luggage, or what was left of it. He said the soldiers who had found Kristos, Katy and Bert had assumed from Kristos’ uniform that he had come from a military strongpoint. Since old Constantine’s house was nearest, they had attacked it and bombed their way in. Regrettably there had been some damage but that was the fortune of war.

  The valises were bundles of seared rags, Katy’s cameras handfuls of junk, but the passports, though stained and battered, were intact. She thought bitterly that the paper always seemed to survive, remembered it blowing among the dead in the desert.

  She asked about Kristos,
Constantine and his wife, and when she and Bert could be returned to Athens. The officer answered that Kristos was dead but the old couple had been found hiding near the house and allowed to seek shelter with another Greek family along the road. He did not know what arrangements would be made for Katy and Bert but was certain they would not be passed through the lines into Greek-held territory. He seemed to derive some satisfaction from that.

  He was right. The Italians shipped them back to Italy on the first returning transport. It berthed in Taranto and they had been there almost two weeks now, while Katy made her arrangements and Bert wheedled, argued, trying to change her mind. As he would to the end.

  He sprawled in a deep chair away from the bar now, one arm dangling loosely like that of a rag doll, a cigarette between the hanging fingers, smoke rising in a thin thread. He said, “I fixed my passage back to Cairo this afternoon — as far as Istanbul, anyway. The ship sails tomorrow in the forenoon and she has plenty of room aboard. Not many passengers these days, with the war.” He paused a moment, watching her, then asked, “But you’ve had it?”

  Katy replied patiently, “I’ve told you: that plane leaves for Lisbon the day after tomorrow and I’ll be on it. I’ve done my time.”

  “Time, hell! You know I just have to say the word and they’ll extend your contract and keep you on the assignment with me.”

  Katy shook her head. “No. Remember, we cabled the States that I was finishing, going home, the first day we got back here.” Bert studied the strega in his glass and Katy said, “Bert. Look at me.” And when he met her eyes she asked, “You didn’t send that cable, did you?”

  Bert cleared his throat, “Look, honey, I thought if you had a week or two to think things over —”