Storm Force to Narvik: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 1

by Alexander Fullerton

  Wishart told him quietly, “Intent and other destroyers were with the Second Flotilla for this operation. The other ‘I’s were doing the minelaying, but Intent’s the only one of them not fitted for it, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Gauntlet had to turn back—day before yesterday—to look for a man lost overboard. Hopeless in that weather, but—” He checked that. The hopelessness of survival in that kind of sea was obvious and hardly a point to dwell on, in the circumstances. “Nick was detached to go back and locate Gauntlet. Mainly I suppose because of the stream of reports about German units sailing or about to sail. This morning just after eight Gauntlet sent an enemy report—investigating unidentified ship. Then a sighting report, two Hun destroyers, and finally it became one Hipper-class cruiser and ‘engaging with torpedoes.’ Some little while after that Intent signalled—this was the first we’d heard from her—’Am in company with Gauntlet, about to engage enemy cruiser with torpedoes, Gauntlet damaged in earlier attack.’ Since then—well, nothing. And no reply to signals addressed to Intent and/or Gauntlet.”Wishart finished,”It’s gale-force from the north-west and conditions are pretty awful.” He paused, and looked into that blue, unblinking stare. “I’m—so dreadfully—”

  One of the hands moved, stopping the offer of sympathy. And the waiter had paused beside them with the trolley, on his way back across the room.

  “Touch more of the Stilton while I’m this way with it, sir?”

  Hugh shook his head. Wishart cleared his throat: “No, thank you.”

  The waiter began to move the trolley on; Sir Hugh told him, “That contraption could do with a spot of oil.”

  In the ante-room, drinking coffee, Hugh asked him,”What’s being done?”

  “Whitworth’s turned south with Renown, hoping to intercept the cruiser—Hipper, whatever the damn thing is—and the C-in-C has detached Repulse with Penelope and some destroyers.”

  “Where’s Forbes now?”

  “North-east of the Shetlands. He’s left now with Rodney, Valiant, and Sheffield, plus destroyers. But Admiralty has now ordered the cruisers out too—which means disembarking their troops first.”

  Sir Hugh stared at him.

  “Disembarking them?”

  Wishart nodded. “They’d been embarked for this plan I was telling you about—R4. The idea was to be on the top line for moving troops into the main Norwegian ports once the Hun showed his intention of invading. Now, R4 seems to have gone by the board. The First Cruiser Squadron’s being sailed from Rosyth as soon as the pongoes are all ashore, and Aurora and her destroyers from the Clyde. Aurora was going to escort the transports that we’ve had sitting there full of troops.”

  “So if the Hun is invading, we’re giving him a free hand once he gets ashore?”

  “I suppose the object is to stop him getting ashore.”

  “And d’you think we’ll manage that?”

  “Not if we stay out in the middle of the Norwegian Sea—no, I do not … But as I did say, I’m not as well-informed as—”

  “Sounds like the beginnings of a thorough-going mess-up, doesn’t it.”

  He said no to the offer of a glass of port. And since they’d left the dining-room he hadn’t mentioned Intent or Nick. He sighed now, blinking, like a man wishing he could escape from his own thoughts.

  “Well. Splendid luncheon, Wishart. Most enjoyable.”

  “Hardly that, sir, I’m afraid.”

  “I’d better let you get back to work now, though. But—if by any chance you did hear anything—”

  “I’ll telephone. You’ll be at home this evening?”

  “Later on, I shall be. I’ve a thing or two to see to before I get back on the train. I may even be in the Admiralty myself, by and by. Twist an arm or two about a job.”

  “I wish you success, sir.”

  “But they may not give me any news, d’you see. And I can’t prompt ‘em, because then I’d be letting ‘em know you’d blown the gaff. So—”

  “You could call me. Here.” Wishart found a card and scribbled a number on the back of it. “This is my extension—temporarily. I’ll try to wheedle any news there is out of Max Horton, if I can get in to see him. He gets shown everything, of course.”

  “You’ve been very kind. I appreciate it.”

  “If there’s anything I can do at any time—”

  “Thank you.” Hugh stood up. Looking round the room, taking long, slow breaths; he seemed to be searching for faces that he might have recognised. And to have drawn a blank: he turned to Aubrey Wishart.

  “Nick will be all right, you know.”

  The calm, relaxed tone of voice made the assurance almost convincing. But Wishart had a mental picture suddenly of that wilderness of sea and the gale’s howl, the ice-grey emptiness: in his mind it stayed empty, a wild and bleakly inimical seascape with only the screeching gale-driven gulls as proof that any form of life existed there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  His Majesty’s destroyer Hoste, 1,490 tons displacement and 34,700 shaft horsepower, was being tossed around like a toy in a bathtub. And Paul Everard, huddled in stiff, ill-fitting oilskins in the lee of “B” gun, was enjoying every minute of it.

  It was the contrast. The fact that he was feeling well, superlatively well, when for the last three days he’d felt that sudden death would have been a mercy.

  He’d felt so ill, so locked in sickness that nothing in life, past, present, or future, had been anything but nauseating to think about. Taunts and jokes from his messmates and from the others of this gun’s crew—well, five out of the six others, because Baldy Percival had been just as sick—had, after a while, become easy to put up with. Just noises in the background, merging into the rattling, thumping, crashing of the ship, pounding of machinery, wind and sea noise. Try a lump o’ pork-fat on a lanyard, Yank—swaller it then ‘aul it up again! You could oblige them with a smile before you grabbed for the bucket: buckets being infinitely safer in this weather than getting anywhere near the ship’s side. But what was worse than the gibes was the inner depression, the hopelessness engendered in one’s own thoughts and memories. He’d even begun to attach importance to his mother’s contemptuous disparagement of his plan to come to England and join up … “Paul, honey, you’re no dull-witted sailorman! You’re civilised, you’re smart, you’re going to be rich one day!”

  He’d told her—fond of her, devoted to her really, but aware that they’d never see eye-to-eye in certain major areas—”I’m an Everard.”

  “The hell you are. And if you are—just a lick of Everard, and that’s all it could amount to—do yourself a favour and forget it! Be a Dherjhorakov! Be even a Scott, for Christ’s sake!”

  Dherjhorakov had been her family name. Grafinya Ilyana Dherjhorakova. Grafinya meaning countess. She’d had a brother Pavel who’d been murdered by the Bolsheviks during their escape, and one of the earlier battles she and Paul’s father had had—this was one of her lines of reminiscence, how she and her first husband had fought all the time—had been whether to christen their son Pavel or Paul, which was the name’s English equivalent.

  Scott was the man she was married to now. He had a machine-tool business and the war wasn’t doing him any harm at all.

  His father must have won that row about the name. Paul wondered whether he’d ever won another. He’d met his father briefly in London after he’d first arrived from the States, and then at Christmas at Mullbergh, the family place in Yorkshire; before this, the last time they’d seen each other had been in 1930 when Paul had been just a child. Ilyana had effectively prevented correspondence during the intervening years. Paul’s impression—well, one of his impressions—of Sir Nicholas Everard, Bart., was that he was as different from the woman he’d once been married to as one animal species is different from another. It was impossible to imagine him and Ilyana storming at each other. In the face of her outbursts— frenzies, furies, or raptures, and all totally unpredictable—wouldn’t he just have c
lammed up, walked away?

  If Ilyana’s stories were half true, no, he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d changed? Or he’d been in an unnatural state of mind: meeting his son, and knowing she’d have told him about the past? Paul wanted to do her justice. Ilyana wasn’t anything like the driven snow and the things she said to people weren’t always God’s literal truth, but in a situation like this, talking to her own son about his father when she’d known they’d be meeting sooner or later, would she have sent up that much smoke without fire?

  Listening to old Sir Hugh—Paul had visited him at his house in Hampshire—you wouldn’t think there were any weak spots anywhere, on Nick Everard. But nice as he was, the old boy was also strongly prejudiced; he’d gone to considerable lengths, for instance, not to mention Paul’s mother’s name.

  Stay out of it. Yesterday and for two days and nights before that it felt like the weight of the world sitting on your shoulders, and no way out from under. It doesn’t have to be like that, though, it isn’t, it’s not your lock to pick. Let it stay locked. And render unto Caesar: accept that Commander Sir Nicholas Everard is a hell of a fine sailor and seems a more than ordinarily nice guy. So all right, she wants to project a different view of him, let her.

  Dozing …

  Jammed in as close as possible behind the gunshield; not much space between the shield and the gun itself, and several other bodies in there too. At least they all wedged each other against the fiendish pitching and rolling, upward staggers and downhill rushes. Jolting, battering: rather like being in a motor-car that ran into a brick wall several times a minute and, in between the crashes, bounced up and down on solid tyres.

  The saying was that the Navy used to have wooden ships and iron men, and now had iron ships and wooden men. But nothing made of wood and getting this treatment would have lasted long.

  “Oy, you, Yank!”

  Waking: aware at once of the enormous pleasure there was in simply feeling well …

  “How’s that?”

  “Got yer ‘ead down, ‘ave you, Yank?”

  Bow-down, and the vibration of racing screws shaking the whole ship, humming in her steel. Ventilator fans roaring. Solid water smashed against the other side of the gunshield, slashed at the bridge’s forefront and the wheelhouse above their heads. He yelled as Hoste’s bow began its upward swing, “Want something?”

  It was Vic Blenkinsop, the sightsetter, who’d shouted at him. Vic was sitting under the gun’s breech-end with his knees drawn up as far as possible into cover, and as usual he had a length of spun-yarn as a belt around his oilskins. He also wore a red woollen cap under his tin hat, and the earphones of the telephone headset were pushed inside it with the helmet jammed down on top of everything and the curved headpiece hanging down in front, looping under Vic’s bright red nose. With that narrow, bony face he looked like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

  “What’s up, Vic?”

  “Char’s up, that’s what. In the galley. An’ you’re the lad to nip aft an’ fuckin’ fetch it.”

  “Okay.”

  He might have argued, just for the sake of an argument, but he was feeling too damn good. Not just healthy, but exuberantly so. His spirits matched—it occurred to him as he struggled out of the heap of men and out behind the gun—matched the ship’s dance, the gale’s roar. He felt like doing a fandango of his own: or bursting into song …

  Steady, boy. That’s pure Dherjhorakov!

  The fanny, tin receptacle for tea: or rather, for the dark brown paint-remover which destroyer sailors referred to as tea: Lofty McElroy was passing the fanny out to him. Tea from the galley was a new idea, some kind of dummy-run for something called Action Messing.

  “Thanks, Lofty.”

  “Don’t go over the side, lad, ay?”

  “Lofty, I am profoundly moved—” he bowed, with a hand grasping the edge of the gunshield—”by your consideration for the safety of my person. Had I not heard this with my own ears—”

  Ducking sideways to avoid flying sea, he’d staggered and fetched up hard against the loading-tray. If his ribs hadn’t been padded by two sweaters and the oilskin, they’d have suffered worse. McElroy yelled, “All I’m considerin’, Yank, is the safety of my fuckin’ tea. Get a wriggle on, willya?”

  Wind and sea were on Hoste’s starboard side. Checking on this before choosing his route to the galley, Paul looked out across a heaving grey-white foreground, saw other destroyers strung out in line abreast, battling through the storm. Two, he’d seen then: and far apart, so there’d be one between them and temporarily hidden in a trough. Eight altogether, he thought; there’d been nine before, and now the battlecruiser, Renown, had left them and taken one destroyer with her. Nobody knew much about what was going on; and during the last few days he’d been too ill to care. All he knew was they’d come a long way north, so far north that there was hardly any period of darkness. In another month, in these latitudes, there’d be none at all. Land of the midnight sun … Well, presumably there was land not far off, but if it had any midday sun, even, it was hogging it all to itself. He went down the port ladder, the leeward side, to the foc’sl deck, and turned aft—keeping close in against the wet grey-painted steel of the bridge superstructure—past the screen door and down the ladder at the foc’sl break. The whaler was creaking in its davits, straining against its gripes as the ship rolled over, over—almost right over—while he held on tight to the bottom of the ladder. If you went over the side, in this stuff, even if someone saw you go they’d never find you: you’d be gone, finished. Now she was rolling back: he reached the galley door, pulled the one retaining clip off it, climbed in over the foothigh sill, and slammed and clipped the door behind him.

  “Gawd, it’s the stars and fuckin’ stripes. An’ better late than never. ‘B’ gun, is it?”

  Paul nodded.

  Perry, the duty cook, was too scrawny to be much of an advertisement for his own art. Crew-cut, and in a boiler-suit draped in loose folds around him but sleeveless, sleeves torn off so that his long arms, stringy-muscled, extruded like white tentacles. A cigarette-stub was stuck to his lower lip. Hoste carried two ordinary cooks and one leading cook, and Perry was about as ordinary, Paul thought, as a cook could get to be. Although—when you saw him here in the galley—you had to admire anyone who could cook anything in this cramped black hole: even if the ship stood still occasionally …

  One of the arms came out, clawing for the fanny.

  “Right then.”

  Two other men were in here, over on the other side. Green, a telegraphist, and a man called Cringle who was either a bridge messenger or a lookout.

  “Did say ‘B’ gun, didya?”

  “Absolutely, old pip.”

  It was intended to sound ultra-British and thus, from someone they all called “Yank,” amusing. But it seemed to annoy Cringle.

  “Tryin’ to sound like ‘is dad.”

  “Eh?” The cook, with Paul’s tea-fanny under the urn’s tap and brown liquid gushing into it in a steamy jet, looked over his shoulder at the messenger. “Whose Dad?”

  Cringle jerked his head. “The Yank. ‘Is guv’nor’s skipper of the Intent. The one Sparks ‘ere says ‘as bought it.”

  Silence. Perry looking at him now as he turned the tap off. Cringle’s words sinking in slowly.

  “Now wait a minute.” Questions were forming on top of each other, out of complete surprise and—already—an unwillingness to believe … How did anyone know about his father? And Intent—was she around, even right here with them, one of the ships he’d been looking at? But then—no … That expression “bought it”; it was current slang, over this side, for busted, shot. Disliking Cringle, he looked at Green: all telegraphists were called “Sparks.”

  “What is this? D’you mind?”

  Green shrugged, stared blankly at the cook. Perry looked at Cringle, who told him, “I ‘eard ‘em ‘aving a natter on the bridge. Intent got sent off—yesterday, was it?” Green nodded, staring at Paul now. Cri
ngle went on, “On account that other—Gauntlet, ain’t she—’adn’t showed up still. Forenoon today there’s this palaver goin’ on, skipper an’Jimmy, an’Jimmy asks, ‘What about this Everard lad what’s the son of Intent’s captain, the OD we got aboard ‘ere?’—sort o’ thing. Skipper rubs ‘is nut a while, then ‘e says no, ‘e says, don’t tell ‘im, Intent might still turn up, no use warmin’ the fuckin’ bell, ‘e says. Aye aye, says Jimmy. Well, later on I gets talkin’ with Subby Peters, an’ ‘e says yeah, you’re right, ‘e says, but best keep your fuckin’ mouth shut, see.”

  Paul took the fanny, hot and heavy now, from Cook Perry. He rested it on his own end of the stove, holding on to it so it wouldn’t slide or slop: and one hand on the door, so he wouldn’t slide. He looked at Cringle as the ship dipped, jolting, stubbing her bow into the sea, shaking as if she was trying to bore her way into something solid.

  Did that bastard know what he’d just told him?

  “That’s what you’re doing, Cringle, is it? Keeping your fucking mouth shut? D’you do much of that, with your mouth? Maybe you’ve nothing else to do it with?”

  Hate and rage were sudden, overwhelming. A cold rage. Not reasoning: just there.

  “I’ll shut your mouth, my little Yanky-lad!”

  He was trying to push past Perry. Five or six years older than Paul, a head taller and a lot heavier. It made no odds at all. Everything contributed: the whole damn set-up, and the fact there was nothing he could do about it. What he felt—or did not feel—about his father was a background to the questions that weren’t answered, only raised: like was any of this story true, had Intent been here and where was she now, what if anything had happened while he’d been spewing and feeling sorry for himself. You were born into a situation that wrapped itself around you and you couldn’t influence or change: then other things developed out of it and you were still helpless, shut off, impotent.

  He could do something about this bastard Cringle, though. That thick, soft-looking throat: hit there first, then—