A bugle shattered the silence beyond the tent and Goudie shrugged apologetically. “We have the Royal Marines here. They do most of the fighting in the SBS but they do like to cling to a bit of ceremonial, bloody desert or not.
“Go with Able Seaman Weeks and get settled. in. You’ll not be here long, I think.”
Frazer grinned. “Sounds ominous.”
Goudie eyed him thoughtfully. “It is.”
Outside, the sun seemed hotter than ever.
Allenby said, “It’s not quite what I expected.”
Frazer clapped him on the arm and laughed. “A fine understatement, Dick, I’m proud of you!”
Goudie dropped the tent flap and signalled to the messman for another drink.
A young lieutenant entered from the opposite end and flopped down in a canvas chair.
“What are they like, sir?”
“Fine.” Goudie felt his eyes mist as the gin burned his tongue. “It’s a straightforward job. In and out, no messing. piece of cake.”
The lieutenant picked up a much handled copy of Lilliput and thumbed over the pages, looking for the one and only nude.
“I expect that’s what Bill Weston thought, sir.”
Goudie swung on him, his eyes blazing. “Well he’s dead, isn’t he? It was probably his own big-headed fault too. Lucky it happened when it did. We would have lost the boat and the whole bloody crew otherwise!” He tried to put down the glass but it was shaking too badly and he signalled for another drink instead.
The lieutenant stood up and stammered, “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to imply-“
Goudie waved him down again. “Forget it. It’s the war and what it’s doing to us. You saw Frazer, the Canadian lieutenant? Well, every bullet we use, each can of petrol we burn up was probably fought through the Atlantic by Frazer and men like him. Allenby’s different. He’s spent his time sweeping mines, then not content with that he went ashore to nobble the bloody things when they dropped in towns and harbors. Both brave men.”
He looked at his refilled glass as if he hated it. “Now they’ve come to our war. Where they’ll have to learn to dirty their hands with the rest of us.”
Lieutenant Commander John Goudie, Distinguished Service Cross and Bar and twice mentioned in dispatches, stood hands on hips and stared down at the little harbor.
“Well, there she is, gentlemen.”
Frazer glanced at his tanned profile and sun-bleached hair. Whatever tension he had sensed in, Goudie before their rough and ready lunch seemed to have vanished, if it was ever there. He followed the direction of Goudie’s gaze and mentally picked his way amongst the assorted litter of craft. Some were using the partly submerged wrecks for moorings, others lay together as if dozing in the blazing glare.
There was a sleek, gray-painted launch which could have begun life as a private yacht and Frazer said, “She must have cost a bit.”
Goudie laughed. “Next to her.”
Next to her. Frazer saw a strange, low-hulled vessel that looked very like a barge, except that it was bristling with twin-barreled cannon for anti-aircraft defense.
Goudie explained, “It’s a Siebel ferry. We captured her from Jerry just a couple of weeks ago. Fast, shallow draft, rather like a superior landing craft, they’ve been using hundreds of them for supplying and later evacuating the Afrika Korps. Very heavy armament for their size, and magnificent engines, naturally.” The last word sounded bitter.
Frazer recalled what he had heard about-Light Coastal Forces. How their MTBs and MGBs were powered by highoctane petrol engines, while their opponents mounted powerful diesels which did not “brew up” at the first salvo of tracer.
Goudie said, “The base plumber has done a great job on her, she’s running as sweet as a nut.” He looked at Frazer. “She’s yours.”
Frazer stared back at him. “Mine?”
Goudie turned to Allenby. Even though he had changed into khaki shirt and slacks he still seemed apart from all the others.
“You both have watchkeeping certificates. You will take over if the job goes rotten on us.”
Frazer said, “D’you think the Germans will swallow it, sir?”
“Hope so. It’s all we’ve got at the moment.” Goudie smiled cheerfully. “Twenty marines, some well-placed explosives, should be home for breakfast. Piece of cake.” It seemed to be his favorite expression.
He became serious. “You’ve a new killick coxswain, good chap by all accounts, called Ives. The rest are Lieutenant Weston’s old crew. Most have been in action several times.”
“Weston? He was the one who-“
Goudie eyed him impassively. “Yes. The one.”
Goudie walked down the slope, his eyes everywhere as he glanced around his command. Special Services, and the SBS in particular, had learned to use anything and everything that lay to hand, and to use it to deadly effect.
Goudie waved casually to the moored Siebel ferry and a small dinghy cast off immediately.
He said, “There’s a subbie aboard, named Archer. Good chap in a scrap. But watch him. He’s getting a bit bomb-happy.”
Frazer asked, “How many in the company?” It was all moving too fast. Suddenly he had a command, a German ferry which he was obviously expected to take into an enemy harbor. Just like that. Goudie did not appear to have any doubts about it.
Goudie said, “Twenty, excluding Archer, the coxswain and a petty officer called Gregson, the only `regular’ in the boat.”
They were ferried out to the craft by a solitary oarsman, a sailor who was so covered in oil and grease he looked as if he had just crawled through the bilges.
Frazer climbed up the low side and heard Goudie say, “No side party, I’m afraid, or band.”
Goudie’s manner and casual comments were beginning to grate on Frazer’s nerves. What the hell was the matter with him?
Allenby said, “Look at that.” He was pointing at the German flotilla insignia that was painted on the low, boxlike bridge.
A big, fair-haired man stepped from the shadows and
saluted. In the midst of the new paintwork and patched-up
bullet holes he looked very clean and somehow reassuring. “Ives, sir.” He looked at Frazer. “Acting Cox’n.” Frazer smiled. He liked that. Ives had done his homework,
otherwise why did he not select Allenby?
“I’ll take you round the boat, sir.”
Frazer said, “I saw you at Eastney Barracks.”
“Right, sir.” He touched the holster on his hip. “This is
more like it.”
He led the way up the first ladder to a long empty space where troops and stores could be carried.
Allenby was reminded of the unexploded mines he had dealt with and all the false alarms. The deserted streets and the familiar man in blue who always waited to hand over to him.
He whispered, “He looks like a policeman, Keith.” Goudie grinned. “He was.”
Then Frazer and Allenby seemed to find themselves completely in Ives’s hands; Goudie had disappeared.
They clambered through the long hull, spoke to the artificer and the two stokers who ran the engines, and the assorted bunch of hands who did everything else. Gregson, the petty officer, was a gunnery man and, despite his crumpled khakis, had a ramroad aloofness which marked him as a Whale Island refugee. The subbie, Archer, was a suave, eager-looking young man with ginger eyebrows to match the two wings of hair which poked around his stained cap. He looked slightly
crazy, Frazer thought. Too ready to smile, which made him appear all the madder.
“Satisfied?” Goudie was back as suddenly as he had vanished.
“Well, naturally I’d like more time to-“
Goudie cut him short. “There isn’t any. I shall see that you’ve finished loading by sundown. Then you can get under way. I’ll fill you in on the other items later.”
“You’re coming with us, sir?” Why should he be sur prised? Goudie was not likely to trust a green newcomer. The
Atlantic counted for nothing out here, Goudie had made that very clear.
“Of course.” He eyed him for several seconds, his bleached hair moving slightly in a furnace breeze. “Look, if you can’t
handle it, say so and I’ll have you replaced.” He was not smiling now.
Frazer said calmly, “Forget it.” He looked away to hide his anger. “Sir.”
Goudie nodded. Satisfied.
“Well, let’s go out and make a bit of history, eh?” Allenby saluted as Goudie jumped lightly into the dinghy. He said, “And we only just got here.” He sounded crestfallen.
Frazer turned his back on the dinghy. “Sorry you volunteered, Dick?”
Allenby looked at his new friend and shook his head. “Not any more.”
He was astonished to find that he meant it.
4
TO HELL WITH CAUTION
FRAZER AWOKE WITH a start, his mind instantly recording the pitch and roll of the unfamiliar hull, the regular thud of the engines.
An anonymous shadow hovered beside the bunk. “Char, sir. Oh-three-‘undred, an’ a bit choppy.” He vanished.
Frazer threw his legs over the side of the bunk and pushed his fingers through his unruly hair. He had not felt clean since they had left England. He sipped the hot tea and grimaced in the darkness. Even that tasted of diesel.
He switched on a small light and pulled on his old sea boots. They had become part of himself during all those convoys, flat calms when the U-Boats came in surfaced for the kill, or raging gales when all you thought of was staying afloat and to bloody hell with the enemy.
He peered at. his watch and remembered that last time he had seen Caryl. That had been on a week’s leave in Toronto. He could see it all, the big room at the Royal York Hotel, the inability to get a drink when he needed it most. It was the same watch. Like the boots. The luminous face glowing in the dark as she started to cry. “I can’t go through with it.” Frazer sighed and got to his feet, the deck dropping beneath him like a springboard. In his mind’s eye he could see the Sicilian coast, just as he had memorized the other details of the raid. If Goudie caught him out it would not be for a loss of memory.
They had been at sea for two days, or would have been by the time they reached the tiny fishing village where the enemy were completing their generating plant. Small it might be, but it made good sense. At the briefing before they had got under way Goudie- had pointed o,t:t a useful pier on the plan, and a narrow-gauge railway that ran from a nearby quarry, something which would certainly appeal to the Germans.
Frazer clipped on his pistol belt and thought of the man who was coming with them. He was called Major Thomas, but what regiment he belonged to or his actual role in the Special Services was impossible to fathom. As Allenby had remarked wryly, “Thomas? Never in your life. With an accent like his he should be on the other side!”
A last look round. That at least was the same as the Atlantic. Once you were on the bridge, you never knew when you would leave it.
Outside the cabin it felt cool, even blustery. Frazer climbed into the squat bridge and waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the shadows. Just after three in the morning, and they were heading south now towards Sicily having spent the whole of the two days circling and weaving up and around the coast, well clear of patrols and the enemy’s RDF.
Some of it had been unnerving, although Frazer had had nothing but admiration for the Boss’s arrangements. Once, during their first night at sea, a submarine had surfaced nearby. They had heard the roar of compressed air as water was forced from her ballast tanks, the sound of a hatch banging open, the snick (if a breech block as her deck gun was loaded.
Goudie had already said that the submarine would be there. The link between them and HQ and eventually he supposed the Admiralty and that dank cellar beneath Portsmouth Dockyard.
No signals were exchanged, but Frazer had sensed her there, had felt the hairs rising on his neck. You could call them U-Boats or submarines according to your loyalty, but he hated all of them.
Allenby came out of the darkness. “Morning, sir.”
Frazer grinned. “For God’s sake, Dick. Wait till I’m in
command of something other than this barge!”
Together they climbed onto a metal grating in the forepart
of the bridge. Goudie’s mechanics must have got a move on.
There was still a smell of fresh paint in the damp air, and Frazer saw the pale outline of a boxlike chartroom which had been hastily thrown together, made mostly of old packing cases and then painted gray to match the rest of the superstructure. It was not thick enough to stop a child’s bow and arrow but, once sealed, was completely dark from the outside, so that if required charts and local maps could be studied under the most powerful lights.
The open hold was littered with big crates which were clearly marked with Wehrmacht stencils. But their contents were not part of the North African retreat; each crate concealed two heavily armed Royal Marine commandos. God help anyone who tried to shift one of them by mistake.
Goudie came from the chartroom. “All quiet?” He nodded to Fraser. “Did you snatch an hour?”
Frazer replied, “Better than I thought’. “
Goudie was not listening. “Better get the people to action stations.” He melted into the darkness and Frazer guessed he had gone to confer with the mysterious Major Thomas.
Frazer looked around his strange command. Either his eyes were getting used to the gloom or the sky was already lighter. He saw the lookouts on either side of the bridge, the upended barrels of the flak guns framed against the creaming bow wave alongside. But still no division between sea and sky, and no stars either. A blustery morning perhaps.. It might be an unexpected ally.
Sub-Lieutenant Archer’s tall figure appeared at the steel bridge gate.
Allenby said, “Send the hands to action stations, Sub. They can take their time that way. No noise.”
Archer answered calmly, “They know what to do. There’s no need to tell them.”
Frazer turned, one elbow propped on the glass screen.
“Tell them anyway, Sub. And from now on I don’t repeat orders, right?” -
Allenby said quietly as the sub-lieutenant clattered down the bridge ladder, “You didn’t have to speak up for me, Keith. “
Frazer was surprised that Archer had made him so angry. He said, “I felt like it. Trouble with you, Dick, is that you’ve spent so much time swapping yams with magnetic mines you probably find the Archers of this world a bit dull.”
Allenby smiled. He had been out of his depth with Archer, and Frazer knew it. Archer was all the things which he had wanted to be. Well educated, good family, the right accent, the casual authority that even now, and in spite of his George Cross, made him feel like a nobody.
He crossed to the helm and compass where Ives stood like a rock.
“All right, ‘Swain?”
Ives smiled. “Fine, sir. Never thought I’d end up steering a thing like this.” He jerked his head astern. “Be better if we had no tow. Easier to maneuver.”
Allenby agreed. That was one of Goudie’s ideas. An ancient, twin-masted schooner with Italian markings was zigzagging back and forth across their wake on a long towline as if trying to break free.
Goudie had said, “Jerry needs time before he acts. Like most people in combat, he sees what he expects to see. That schooner might give us a few minutes when we most need ‘em. While the Krauts are investigating our find, we’ll blow their arses off. Piece of cake.”
Allenby found himself pondering for the first time on their chances of success, even survival.
The intelligence reports had been adamant that there was no German garrison at the fishing village. Every trained soldier was needed on the southern coast in case the Allies launched an invasion as the last of the Afrika Korps were captured or driven out. They would be required to guard the airfields too, for if they hoped to hold Sicily they needed constant fighter protection.
<
br /> He rejoined Frazer on the grating. “Right on time, er, Keith.”
Frazer looked at his shadow. Nervous, he wondered. Unlikely after what he had been through.
He said, “We’ve got enough explosives down below to wipe out half the island. Rather you than me.”
Allenby shrugged. “One charge will have to be set off immediately. I’ve been ordered to lay a second delayed-action one before we pull out.”
Frazer listened to his change of tone. Allenby felt about
trick charges and booby traps much as he did about submarines.
Ives whispered, “Here comes the major, sir.”
Major Thomas had a pair of powerful night glasses slung
around his neck and a German machine pistol tucked under
one arm. Like most of the detachment, Frazer thought, who
seemed to prefer captured enemy weapons to their own. Was
it because ammunition was easier to find, or because they did not want anything that might identify them later on?
He asked, “Where are we?”
Frazer gestured across the screen. “Thirty miles northeast of Palermo. The last of the Lipari Islands is about eight miles off the port beam.”
Thomas hunched his shoulders and stared into the darkness.
“It is the best approach. Little chance of being picked up on their RDF. “
Frazer listened carefully. Thomas spoke perfect English, but it was without tone. Like a man who is stone deaf. There was something alien about him. Inhuman.
“Flare, sir! Bearing Green four-five!”
It was a long way off, emerald green as it drifted beneath some fat-bellied clouds.
Frazer lowered his glasses. A local signal probably. A patrol boat investigating some returning fishermen. The Germans left most of the inshore patrols to the Italians. But you could never be certain. He heard one of the gunlayers shifting his sea boots on the damp steel as he swung his doublebarreled cannon towards the lonely flare.
Thomas snapped, “The sea’s getting more choppy. The bastards will sleep soundly in their beds tonight.”
He moved away and Allenby said softly, “Wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of that one!”
The Volunteers Page 5