A FLOCK OF SHIPS

by Callison, Brian

  The U-boat was lying low in the water by now, angled well over to port with her conning tower and gun platform almost brushing the water. I couldn’t see the surface around her for the white-whipped foam as Mallard opened up with light weapons while, on the little warship’s fore-deck, her gun crew moved like well-lubricated machines and empty brass cartridge cases sparkled in the sunlight.

  The submarine’s ratings were leaving her fast now. Half-naked men, some of them enormously distended under inflated life preservers, all terror stricken ... except for those who were already dead, ripped to bloody tatters before they even hit the water. I felt the shock-wave snap at my eardrums as our gun boomed again, then a tremendous explosion in the after part of the U-boat’s conning tower sent her light ack-ack gun spiralling high into the air.

  I saw a man run with the hopelessness of death along the bloated buoyancy tanks, tiny matchstick legs jerking desperately towards the comparative safety of the smoother water at her bow ... then the funny little Swan Vestas figure seemed to disintegrate as the sparking ricochets chased him along the black casing and overtook him. I watched an arm come off and still the legs kept on running for the impossible sanctuary ahead, then one of the legs came off too and the running corpse just fell apart, still travelling forward.

  And suddenly I didn’t want to see any more blood, and I didn’t hate the Germans for what they did to Eric, and I wanted it all to stop ... Please God, make it STOP!

  And the Old Man was still gripping his Barr and Strouds and saying over and over again, ‘Oh, the bastards ...! The bastards ...!’, and I really wasn’t sure, this time, whether he meant Them or Us.

  And Brannigan had stopped screaming his commentary to the helmsman and, instead, was heaving and sobbing over the wing of the bridge as he spewed his guts up beside a curiously silent, thoughtful Curtis.

  And Phyllis shouted hate again from the poop, and ... and ...

  *

  ... and, just as suddenly, it was all over.

  The mess in the water was quite a long way astern of us by the time the Lewis guns stopped chattering and the ugly, pink-tinged foam ceased spurting round the shattered hull. The steel-helmeted ratings round her four-inch had stilled, too: standing motionless and inspecting the havoc they’d wreaked on their enemy. I wondered how they felt right then. Had any of their flushed young faces gone a shade paler? Or wasn’t that allowed when you wore the uniform of one of the fighting services? Despite the sickness in my stomach I felt a grudging surge of respect for Braid and the smooth Admiralty machine which he manipulated.

  Phyllis coughed once again from our poop and we felt the shiver in the deck as a last blossom of flame and black smoke bloomed at the base of the German’s conning tower, now lying flat on the water. Typical bloody woman, Phyllis—always had to have the last word. Then the bombardier’s almost girlish voice yelled, ‘Check! Check! CHECK!’ as the cigar­-shaped cadaver of the enemy reared up slightly, silhouetting a skeletal jumble of rudder, hydroplanes and propeller against the shimmering, burnished horizon.

  Maybe it would have been more appropriate if she’d blown up then. Disintegrated in a million spiteful fragments of Nazi steel and Nazi men as a last Teutonic blast of hate—a threat of what might be waiting for us, too, her murderers. But she didn’t. She just slid silently below the surface, leaving only a few blisters of bursting air and half a dozen black-humped shapes face down in the gore-pooled, diesel scum.

  The last glimpse I caught before I turned to look for Athenian was the little grey Mallard dropping more yellow canisters off her stern. Life-rafts this time, like she did for the Frenchman. She must have had a nest of them below somewhere and I wondered if she would have enough of them left for us, if we ever needed them. She didn’t stop, though—the orders said ‘No survivors.’ I don’t really think she had any need to anyway.

  Not this time, either.

  *

  From the wheelhouse I glimpsed the flash of white teeth as the quartermaster grinned fiercely at me, but it vanished quickly when he saw the look on my face. I ordered a full ninety-degree alteration to bring us back on an overtaking course with our sister, now several miles ahead and still going like a racehorse, then reached wearily for the engine room telephone.

  The receiver was snatched off below when I’d hardly touched the call button. It was the Chief himself. ‘WHIT?’ he yelled above the pounding background of machinery.

  ‘Kent here, Chief. You can take the kettle off the gas now.’

  McKenzie sounded aggrieved. ‘Aye? And about bluidy time too, man. We’re havin’ tae haud the engines together wi’ rubber bands doon here.’

  I grinned without humour. ‘Put ’em back in the box again then, Henry. Maybe one day we’ll need you to go really fast.’

  There came a pregnant silence from below and I thought for a moment he’d hung up on me. Then the broad accent came back, tinged with grudging curiosity. ‘Did we sink the bastards, John? Did we nab them good and bluidy proper?’

  I looked at the phone, then back out to where Curtis was wiping his mouth thoughtfully with a stained hankie. ‘Oh, we nabbed them, Henry,’ I said quietly. ‘We nabbed them good and proper, all right!’

  The answering screech of Highland joy and satisfaction rebounded round the wheelhouse as I gently put the receiver back on its hook and stepped out to the wing in time to meet Charlie Shell rushing up the ladder followed by an almost hysterical Cadet Breedie.

  ‘Did you see us perform back there?’ screamed Charlie in flushed excitement. ‘Oh, Jesus, but did you? Were you watchin’?’

  The Third Mate excused himself abruptly and hurried into the chartroom, leaving Shell standing there in his filthy, oil-grimed white shirt and shorts, with the grey stains of cordite smearing his sweating red face. I nodded and tried to look suitably impressed, though, by this time, my head was splitting and the bile in my stomach felt as if it were eating its way through the very lining. ‘You did a bloody good job, Charles. You and the army both.’

  He grinned like a Cheshire cat. ‘Yeah? You really think so?’ He turned to the Old Man. ‘Now can we paint a little U-boat on the side of the funnel, eh Sir? Like they do on the Raff planes when they bag a Jerry.’

  I saw the Captain hiding a smile. He was looking pretty sick too, but Charlie was just like a kid at a Christmas party. It was dead funny, even to us on the bridge who’d had to stand and watch, and suddenly go off war, and killing, and bestiality, ‘Not on the funnel, perhaps. Mister Shell,’ Evans said solemnly. ‘But I don’t suppose a small, discreet one on the side of the monkey island would harm anyone, do you, Mister Kent?’

  I shook my head. No, it wouldn’t do any harm. Anyway, it wasn’t the little painted U-boats I was worried about, it was the big, black, real ones. Maybe, one day soon, some leather-jacketed Kapitan-Lieutnant would be painting a little white Cyclops on the side of his conning tower. But, every dog has its day.

  ‘Breedie can nip down for some paint and a brush, Two Oh,’ I said, smiling at the pleased look on Charlie’s face. ‘But only a small one, mind.’

  I glanced astern at our curving wake. It lay behind us like a great question mark. It suddenly struck me that, for a short time, we had been heading almost directly towards our destination for a change. Now we were running away again, steaming practically due south. It couldn’t go on for ever, sometime soon we were going to have to stop avoiding trouble and just go straight for it. Very soon.

  A few minutes later Breedie came back with the paint and the Second Mate was climbing the vertical ladder to the top of the wheelhouse. I wondered perhaps if he shouldn’t put a long line of hump-backed, face-down little men up there too.

  With a tiny, matchstick half-man running frantically at the end of it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It took us over two hours to catch up with Athenian, and only then after we’d flashed her a sarcastic signal advising her that THE BADDIE HAS BEEN SMACKED YOU CAN STOP RUNNING NOW DEAR END, followed on a rather sourer note f
rom Mallard asking: DO YOU RUN YOUR ENGINES ON FEAR OIL QUERY ... PLEASE REDUCE TO FIFTEEN KNOTS CONTINUE ZIG-ZAG FORTY DEGREES EVERY SEVEN MINUTES SIGNED BRAID END.

  Which meant that Bill Henderson’s crowd had to spend the next two hours swanning about like a drunk in an earthquake and getting nowhere fast. One thing for sure—no ambushing U-boat Kapitan would ever figure out an attack plan for a ship behaving as irresponsibly as she was ordered to right then.

  The Old Man couldn’t resist another crack at Bert Samson when finally we drew up on her beam and she was able to settle back into a somewhat less gyrating passage through the water. Our Aldis flashed again from the wing.

  COMCONVOY TO MASTER ATHENIAN ... RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST YOU KEEP BONDED LIQUOR STORE LOCKED FOR REMAINDER OF VOYAGE SIGNED EVANS END.

  He grinned as wide as Charlie Shell with his painted submarine when he read the reply.

  MY WATCHKEEPERS TOO USED TO KEEPING STATION WITH CYCLOPS TO KNOW WHAT STRAIGHT COURSE IS ... ALSO REF BONDED STORE IF COMCONVOY WOULD CARE TO BOARD FOR MASTERS CONFERENCE NO DOUBT LIQUOR PROBLEM WILL CEASE TO EXIST SIGNED SAMSON END.

  Evans and Bert Samson were professional enemies of long standing but, unlike Bill Henderson and me, they didn’t exactly hit it off on a social level either. As with Evans and Cyclops, Captain Samson had been master of Athenian since he’d taken her over from the builders and, also like Evans, he was a tough, iron-hard, first-class seaman. Actually, if anyone ever belied his name from a purely physical point of view, it was Bert Samson. At first sight he was a tiny, wispy, almost cadaverous man who even had to stand on a little wooden platform when the ship was docking so that he could get high enough to see over the dodgers. I sailed with him once and I’ll never forget standing on the foc’slehead as we berthed and, looking aft, seeing Bert Samson up on his little box peering down suspiciously at me from the vast height of the bridge—all one could see was a great, flat, wide-brimmed cap over the grey canvas screen with just the merest slit between the two for eyes. It was only when you met him that you realised the tremendous force of personality behind the frail exterior; the stubborn, go to hell if you don’t like it attitude. A very irascible little seadog, was Samson of Athenian.

  At precisely 1526 hours we altered course again. The two merchantmen, flanked maternally by the skipping Mallard, swung round together and, when our bows had settled on the new heading, we were at last homing on a course for the Cape. It was do or die now. Had it been pure coincidence that, so far, all signs of enemy activity had emanated from the area into which we were now steaming? If not, then should we have stuck to our original routing, even after the death of the Commandant Joffre and even though it would have meant refusing to shy away from those mysterious pyrotechnic displays on the horizon? I still didn’t know. All I was sure of was that we’d been lucky so far. Very lucky. If Curtis hadn’t seen those tell-tale tracks earlier ...? If ... If ...?

  I watched as Charlie Shell, now the officer of the watch, chalked up the complex system of courses, times and alterations on the blackboard in front of the helmsman. Not for us any more of that ordinary ‘straight’ zigzag—now we were to run on a fast, previously calculated pattern devised with the express purpose of making it as difficult as possible for any waiting submarine to anticipate our course as we closed on them. It was nerve-racking, it was dangerous, but by God it was damned reassuring to me.

  The signal from Mallard lay on the flag locker before me. COMESCORT TO MASTER CYCLOPS: REPEAT TO MASTER ATHENIAN ... her signals branch was having a busy time today ... COMMENCE ZIG-ZAG PATTERN THREE SEVEN REPEAT PATTERN THREE SEVEN MEAN COURSE 085 DEGREES TRUE REPEAT 085 DEG T SPEED EIGHTEEN KNOTS GOOD LUCK ALL SHIPS SIGNED BRAID END.

  Zig-zag pattern thirty-seven. Braid was really taking precautions after our last brush with the, on that occasion, happily unfortunate enemy. All merchantmen of our type carried several plans of the compensating alternate headings I’ve described, and the pattern we were about to embark upon was one of the most complicated. I smiled ironically to myself—new and even more effective zig-zag schedules were probably included among the contents of the three bags we carried, the bags this was all about. So far on this voyage we hadn’t wasted a lot of time on deviating from our straight route other than in the frightened little squiggles we’d been performing over the past twenty-four hours which, nevertheless, cumulatively were carrying us farther and farther from the original. Now we were heading inshore, however, we were really going to weave as we went.

  I glanced again at the course board. We’d all be certifiable before this trip was over—first a 25-degree alteration to port with a run of six minutes at eighteen knots, then a 10-degree swing to starboard; two subsequent small alterations of 5 degrees port for eight and five minutes respectively, then a massive, hair-raising, starboard turn through 60 degrees, and so on. If the watchkeeper was a genius and the helmsman could steer straight as a tram driver, the legs would in theory compensate themselves and we could start all over again forty-seven minutes later. And incidentally, while all this was going on, we would have covered a lateral sea distance between the outer extreme legs of some two miles. A U-boat commander wouldn’t need a periscope an' stop-watch to plot his attack—he'd need a crystal ball.

  The Second Mate stepped back and grinned wryly at me as he admired his handiwork, then the zig-zag clock itself, a sort of alarm pre-set to ring in time for each leg and vital in such a complex manreuvre, gave a sharp ‘ding’ and the quartermaster put the wheel over after a nod from Shell and a glance up at the new heading. Charlie Shell watched as the bow bore round—we were now coming up on to the big, sixty-degree swing—while I peered nervously over to see how Athenian was doing.

  We were swinging fast now and I bit my lip as the sea room between us and Athenian closed rapidly. Charlie came out and stood beside me watching anxiously as we drew together. Obviously they hadn’t started their turn on her bridge yet. Shell blinked at me queryingly, the distance was down to less than four cables and still narrowing. There wasn’t a soul to be seen on her bridge wing. What the hell were they doing aboard Bert Samson’s boat?

  Charlie shuffled nervously. Even though I was up there with him, unless I formally relieved him it was still his watch and his was the primary responsibility. Four cables was quite a good distance, still two-fifths of a nautical mile, but, on a merging course like this, wasn’t nearly far enough for peace of mind. Collision at sea is one of the nightmares we all had to live with: so much so that, until one was actually in a situation like this, with two great ships in close proximity, one just tried not to think about it. All one could do was study the antiquated and obsolete ‘Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea,’ which in theory should but, in actual practice, didn’t always manage to. Anyway, who had the responsibility for keeping clear in a crazy, wartime set-up like this?

  Shell couldn’t stand it any longer and started to walk across to the wheelhouse, presumably to wake them up over there with a series of short blasts on the whistle. I heard him tell the quartermaster to ease the helm and slow the swing down, then, as I lifted the binoculars, I saw the after end of Athenian’s smoke-blackened centrecastle start to widen as her stern came round and she, too, commenced her alteration. I called to Charlie and he came back in relief. Together, we watched as the gap between us steadied to an even closer three and a half cables.

  For anyone who doesn’t know the sea I suppose it’s easy to frown and wonder what all the fuss and nerves are about: to ask how two modern ships with highly competent officers and in full sight of each other, both steaming on the same mean course, could possibly run the risk of collision. But it’s happened before, too often, even without the added stresses and strains of a critical zig-zag plan such as we were involved with. It’ll happen again when this war’s finished—maybe even more often as, presumably, merchant shipping increases in numbers and density. If there are any of us left to increase upon.

  No doubt after the disaster it’s comparatively simple for a Court of I
nquiry to pronounce learned judgment, following months of deliberation, on what should have been the correct actions—to be decided in split-seconds by the various watchkeepers involved—taken to avert a maritime collision. No doubt it’s also easy to overlook such intangibles as the fact that a ship travelling over shoal water tends to sheer into the deeper, adjacent channel. Or that there is an undoubted form of magnetism acting between two converging hulls known as ‘inter-action,’ which appears to have the contradictory effect in that, from the bows to midships, they tend to repel each other, while from midships to aft they seem to draw together. And finally, that there is such a thing as the human element—the fact that no two minds can work in complete synchronicity and understanding when viewing the same problem from different angles.

  As a further example of how everyone could assume that they, themselves, were in the right and that it was up to the other bloke to give way, Athenian’s second mate came wandering out on their port wing, took one look at us—which, to my biased mind, he should have done a bloody sight farther back—then grabbed for his Aldis. GO AWAY CHARLIE I GET NERVOUS WHEN I’M ACCOSTED ...

  I left it to Charlie Shell to deal with his opposite number across the water, which he did with an aggressive GET KNOTTED PAL IT IS YOU WHO ARE SOLICITING US.

  Then Mallard, carrying out an optimistic Asdic sweep ahead of us, had to join in the act too. Braid had obviously seen the incident and wasted no time in admonishments.

  COMESCORT TO MASTER ATHENIAN ... SUGGEST YOU DROP FIVE CABLES ASTERN CYCLOPS TO AVOID PHYSICAL VIOLENCE BETWEEN WATCHKEEPERS IF NOT BETWEEN VESSELS SIGNED BRAID END.

  *

  Larabee was leaning over the rail at the top of the boat deck ladder as I climbed it, having just completed my after-dinner rounds of the ship. His private bodyguard, a bored-looking able seaman, lounged at the entrance to the wireless room, which also annoyed me. If he hadn’t been up there, then the Bosun would sure as hell have had him chipping rust or up to his elbows in soojee. Then I remembered that the daywork men would have been finished for the night by now anyway, so I didn’t say anything.