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

by Alexander Fullerton

  For each man the pipe shrilled and a volley of rifle-shots crackled into the sky. Five splashes, and within seconds of each there was nothing to be seen in the boil of sea. He read the Lord’s Prayer: and that was it … But he saw Tommy Trench staring at him hard, imparting to him by the stare that there might be something else expected of him.

  He told them, “These were our shipmates. When they were alive we took them for granted. Now we know how valuable they were—to us and to the ship. Let’s remember it—because it applies here and now to every one of us: we are all dependent on each other, and every single man has his own value and importance.”

  Those five had been more valuable than most. Intent was not only wounded, she was chronically short of doctors, engine-room staff, technicians. The thought reminded him of ERA Dobbs; he turned the prayer-book’s pages back quickly to Visitation of the Sick.

  “A prayer now for ERA Dobbs. Surgeon Lieutenant Bywater is with him now in the sickbay, but he does not have—very good chances … Oh father of all mercies, we fly unto thee for succour on behalf of thy servant George Amos Dobbs, now lying under thy hand in great weakness of body …” Taking a breath—this shouting was hard work—he saw with dismay that the words which lay ahead were about “unfeigned repentance” and Dobbs’s “pardon” and a request that he should be granted “a longer continuance amongst us.” It wouldn’t do; he was stopped, totally unable to bawl such stuff into the face of present reality—a crippled ship and a battering sea on a coast which might already be swarming with the enemy, and a man lying close to death because he’d taken it on himself to try to save his mates. It wasn’t Dobbs’s fault they’d died anyway. The words came suddenly and naturally and with a kind of anger: “Save him, please God, for us and for this ship and for his family at home. Give him the strength to recover from his injuries. Please God—let him live!”

  This time the “amens” came sharply, resonantly. And shutting the prayer-book, Nick was suddenly aware of plain liking for the men around him: of understanding and respect for them. Instinct told him too that the empathy was two-way: he’d reached them, and they were beginning to feel they knew him. He hadn’t thought of it or remembered it until this moment, but it was a phenomenon he’d encountered before and was recognising now from twenty-something years ago. He could see it reflected back at him from a couple of dozen different faces as he looked round at them. They were seeing him as a human being: in time, liking would grow into confidence. It didn’t matter whether or not they knew it. The marvellous thing was that it was there, to be tapped and to be built on.

  He told them, “We’re going into Namsenfjord, and up to the town of Namsos if the engines hold up long enough, to find shelter and some help in patching up our damage. We need oil-fuel too, and I hope to find some there. It’s possible the Germans are on the point of invading Norway; they may even be there ahead of us. In that case, we’ll be somewhat up the creek. But—” he went on, over a burst of laughter—”but they won’t be expecting us, either.”

  A snow-shower obscured the headland. In about half a mile, though, they’d have it on the starboard beam, and the shoal would be well clear to port, and they’d turn down into the fjord.

  “Kye, sir?”

  “Thank you, Mid.”

  Midshipman Cox was offering him a mug of cocoa. It was a pleasure to accept it. The kettle was plugged in on the starboard side of the bridge, on a brass-edged step there. Cox went back to prepare another mug, making a paste of cocoa powder, sugar, and condensed milk and then adding the hot water. The cocoa powder was produced beforehand by scraping a block of pusser’s (Admiralty-issue) chocolate, and old sailors reckoned that in a good cup of kye the spoon should stand up straight without support; but this involved the addition of custard-powder as a thickener, and was a taste for connoisseurs.

  Cox was a problem that Nick would have to tackle sooner or later. Chandler said he was lazy, untidy, and sloppy at his work—work which consisted largely of correcting charts and other navigational publications. Also, he was hopeless as a navigator and uninterested in it; a star-sight took him an hour to work out and was usually all rubbish when he’d done it. What made this particularly surprising was that he was RNR, and Royal Naval Reserve officers—even embryo ones, which was what a midshipman really was—were usually the best navigators you could get. Conway, Worcester, and Pangbourne, all the merchant-navy training establishments seemed to be way ahead of the RN college in injecting the navigator’s art into their cadets.

  Nick thought Cox was the only exception to the rule he’d ever come across. And worse than the incompetence was—according to Chandler— the boy not seeming to give a damn about it.

  “Aircraft green one-seven-oh!”

  Think of the devil … Cox had yelled it. Rising from his cocoa bar he’d caught a sight of it, put a mug down, and snatched up binoculars … “Almost right astern, sir. Moving left to right, angle of sight—five degrees.”

  To be visible under the cloud it would have to be pretty low.

  “What does it look like?”

  Nick and Chandler were both out on that side, looking aft, and not seeing it yet. Cox said, “Passed astern, sir.” Meaning it had gone out of his sight. He was moving—uphill, at the moment—over to the port side. He answered Chandler’s question: “Can’t tell what it is, sir. In and out of cloud and—” He had it in his glasses again and so did both the port-side lookouts. Then: “Flown into cloud, sir.”

  It had been flying up-coast, northwards from the direction of Trondheim; or it had come from seaward and was doing a leg along the coastline. It could have been Norwegian, or German, or an aircraft catapulted from one of the Home Fleet’s big ships and doing an inshore reconnaissance. Whatever it was, if its pilot had seen something way off on his starboard side that was very small and grey, foam-washed, and not moving fast enough to be noticeably moving at all, he’d have had no way of distinguishing it at that range from about half a million rocks.

  “Well sighted, Mid.” Credit where credit was due. And the corollary too: he called back to the starboard after lookout, “You should have seen that first, Kelly.” It had stopped snowing, and the entrance to Namsenfjord was opening out, its westward coast seeming to fall back as the vista opened. The entrance here was about two miles wide; at the limit of present visibility he could see where it narrowed to less than half that. But—he wiped the front lenses of his binoculars and tried again— you could see beyond that too, to a further broadening.

  “Can we come round yet, Pilot?”

  “In about ten minutes, sir.”

  A bit stiff-necked, was Pete Chandler. Very good at his job, but sometimes unnecessarily meticulous. He’d drawn a pencil track and he was going to stick to it: well, that was his intention. Nick suggested mildly, “We don’t have to go smack down the middle, do we? Isn’t it all deep water?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “Let’s come round now, then.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Deadpan … The navigator stooped to the voicepipe. “Starboard fifteen.”

  If that had been a Home Fleet aircraft, Nick thought, it would not, probably, have been searching for Intent or Gauntlet. They’d have written them off, hours ago. C-in-C and Admiralty and the vice-admiral Battle-cruiser Squadron—Whitworth—had every reason to assume that both ships had gone down.

  How long would the Admiralty wait before they notified next-of-kin?

  Aubrey Wishart was in the Admiralty and, being Aubrey, would have his ear to the ground when anything was happening. He’d know of that early-morning engagement, the enemy reports, and the ensuing silence. And since Nick had recently put Uncle Hugh in touch with him he’d get to hear about it too. He’d keep his mouth shut, though, as long as there was any doubt; basically he’d always been an optimist, and he’d been in love with his young sister-in-law Sarah for—oh, twenty-five years?

  Honourably, of course. He’d have kissed her cheek a few times, sometimes touched her hand and found the experience
thrilling, something to think about when he was lonely … After his brother, Nick’s father, had died, Nick had half expected Hugh to propose to her. But he’d overlooked the existence of the Table of Affinity, of course: A man may not marry his brother’s wife.

  She’d have refused him, anyway. Her husband’s death hadn’t done anything to remove Sarah’s hair-shirt, that ghastly outcome of past sins and present rectitude … Whoever put that Table of Affinities together could have expanded it in some directions: he could for instance have added A man may not go to bed with his father’s wife.

  Incredible—to know her, see her now. And she’d been like this—to him—ever since he’d returned from the Black Sea in 1920. Coldly formal, untouchable—actually and figuratively. And at that time she’d still been young and pretty, she hadn’t succeeded in turning herself as she had now into an old maid. Caustic, dried up … Although Uncle Hugh still seemed to regard her as a raving beauty … At first he’d seen her transformation as an act, a cover-up aimed at making sure no one ever guessed the truth: even to destroy that truth, erase it from his mind as well as from her own—the truth being that Jack, supposedly Nick’s half-brother, was actually his son. But even if that was how it had started, as a deception that was supposed to last forever and to cover events that wouldn’t be referred to by either of them even if they’d been alone on some mountain-top, it had changed into something stronger and less rational. Now, she hated him. For what he’d done all those years ago, and again for what he’d done more recently.

  Above all he remembered the loathing in her eyes ten years ago, on the wide front steps at Mullbergh when they’d returned together from the church, from burying Nick’s father, her husband. He’d muttered, speaking his thoughts aloud more than talking to her, “I feel as if I’d killed him.” Her hand on his arm stopped him, halfway up the steps, and her eyes blazed in that dead-white face inside its frame of black: she hissed, “Didn’t you?”

  Grey-green mounds of following sea still unending, lifting her and tilting her on their summits before they allowed her to slide back and down again and rolled on disdainfully as if they hadn’t noticed her or felt her weight.

  “Midships!”

  “Midships, sir. Wheel’s amidships, sir.”

  “Steer south fifty-two east.”

  “South fifty-two east, sir!”

  The engine’s thrum had seemed to falter. Chandler had noticed it too, looked round quickly towards Nick …

  Steady again, and plugging on. He let out a breath of relief. This lee shore would not be a place you’d choose for breaking down.

  Sarah loathed him, he thought, as a symbol of her own guilt and shame. But there’d been some basis for that accusation.

  In 1929, in the autumn, he’d come up to Mullbergh on his own in order to break the news of his impending divorce from Ilyana. He’d been executive officer of a battleship in the Mediterranean Fleet for the previous two years, and now he’d been appointed to the staff of the Senior Officers’ Tactical Course at Portsmouth, but he had some leave due to him first. Much of it was to be spent conferring with lawyers and providing Ilyana with “grounds.” Providing her with them, for heaven’s sake!

  His father had been furious, utterly opposed to allowing a divorce in the family. Nick had expected some fuss to be made: as a boy he’d been aware of frightful upheavals at the time of his Uncle Hugh’s divorce. But that had been so long ago; divorce in these days had become far more commonplace, acceptable.

  Not to Sir John Everard, though. And certainly not when it was his own son and heir who was instigating it. A son and heir whom he could not, incidentally, disinherit, in terms of the entailed estate. He made it plain that he regretted this. Nick might have left at once, but it happened to be the Mullbergh pack’s opening meet next day, and it was a long time since he’d ridden to hounds; also, he had the faint hope that if he stayed another day or two some opportunities might arise to make his father understand how he had absolutely no option in the matter of the divorce.

  Which was to involve this stupid sham of a convention, that he should provide the grounds, allow Ilyana to divorce him … After Malta, for God’s sake! And after—he had to face it now—ten years of shirking the truth … He kept remembering a remark he’d overheard at the time of his marriage to her. The marriage had been contracted primarily to save her life, since the Admiralty had decreed that no more White refugees were to be brought out of Russia in HM ships. The only way to get round this had been to turn Countess Dherjhorakov into Mrs Everard: but in any case he’d been in love with her. Or infatuated. Or that and also influenced by the circumstances, the approaching horror of the Red advance and knowing what they’d done elsewhere, the unspeakable savagery and the sheer impossibility of leaving the tiny, exquisite, and fantastically brave Ilyana to the butchers and the rapists. The fact they barely knew each other hadn’t counted: she was there in front of him, he could see her, he knew what she’d been through already and what struck him most forcibly was the combination of ultra-femininity and high courage: all he had to do, he’d thought, to make a go of it, was measure up to her. And that snide remark—one young Russian nobleman had said it to another, in French and in Nick’s hearing—Ilyana Dherjhorakov? Yes, I know who you mean. Here, is she? The one they say used to ride horses, until she discovered men?—he’d dismissed it as clever, cruel, unfounded gossip. It was the way those people talked. Only much later did he remember it and recognise its accuracy.

  And the last time had been in Malta: where his own captain had summoned him to the cuddy for pink gins and spoken of forbearance, wisdom, the folly of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face; and then an admiral with a famous name had talked paternally of the good name of the Service and the reputation of the Everards. Again it had been a nobleman, of sorts—but an Englishman and a senior officer. The Mediterranean Fleet had gone on its summer cruise; Nick had been with it in his battleship. Back in Malta afterwards he’d found that Ilyana, only just returned to the island, was evasive, uncommunicative, peculiar in manner. It had been the start of Paul’s schooling, his first term at prep school in England; she’d gone to collect him and bring him out to Malta for his summer holidays; but she’d left early, the day after the fleet had cleared Valletta, and gone not to England but to a villa at Menton. The villa was owned by a White Russian cousin and had been lent to a certain British officer, a man with aristocratic connections, who until recently had been in Malta. There’d been a photograph in a glossy magazine, and a letter to Malta from someone who’d seen them at some princely party; and then a few more bits and pieces and suddenly it was common knowledge all over Malta, from every gunroom and wardroom in the fleet to the Union Club and the governor’s palace …

  He remembered the admiral, himself not unconnected in high places, telling him uncomfortably—the interview had obviously not been arranged on the admiral’s own initiative—”You’ve a brilliant record, Everard, and potentially a great future in the Service. A little caution now, a few second thoughts, would certainly not be harmful to your prospects. I’m bound to warn you on the other hand that a scandal of such dimensions could be—frankly, disastrous …”

  The scandal could be avoided. The divorce could not.

  In fact he didn’t hunt, that day at Mullbergh, and neither did his father. In the morning the head groom came to report that he couldn’t saddle Sir John’s stallion. The animal wouldn’t let him into its box, and it was kicking the place to bits. Nick’s father flew into a rage: he shouted at the groom that he was sacked—as of that moment, with no wages, notice, or reference. In the first place he didn’t know his job, in the second he was a coward; in the third, if the horse was in such a state it was his own, the groom’s, fault to start with. Sir John stalked out, taking a crop with him. Five minutes later, with the same groom’s help, Nick managed to get his father’s unconscious body out of the loose-box. He had extensive bruising, some cracked ribs, a broken wrist, and slight concussion.

  N
one of which kept him quiet for long. Within a few days he was shouting from his bed that Nick’s behaviour had always been a source of annoyance and embarrassment, and that if he continued with his plans for this divorce he needn’t bother to come back to Mullbergh until he— Sir John—was dead.

  “All right. If that’s how you feel.”

  But there was no train he could take that day. And a few hours later, passing by to tell Jack—who was in the sickroom—that Sarah wanted him downstairs, he heard his father lecturing the boy about his future in the Navy. Jack had already expressed the wish to try for Dartmouth.

  Sir John was instructing him, “Model yourself on your half-brother David. If David had lived he’d have been well on the way to becoming an admiral, by now. Brilliant—brave as a lion—why, there’s not the slightest doubt he’d have gone to the very top!”