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

by Alexander Fullerton

  Nick had proposed King Haakon’s health, and Torp replied with a toast to King George. Nick showed Kari the lovely colour of Chartreuse, the green variety, when it was lit and burning; in the low, yellowish lighting with which Valkyrien’s generating plant was providing them, the flame on the glass filled the cabin with an eerie, subaqueous glow. Then for the entertainment of their guests they turned on the Tannoy to a programme of light music, “Forces’ Favourites,” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

  Kari sighed, “That’s a lovely song!”

  “As a matter of fact, I know the man who wrote it.”

  Eric Maschwitz and his wife were friends of Fiona Gascoyne’s. The club which Phyllis was opening, the Gay Nineties, was to be in Berkeley Street, a nightingale’s warble from the square. He was telling her about it when Torp asked, “The photograph of the lovely lady dressed up as a general has been removed, I think?”

  Nick saw Trench smother a smile. He told Kari, “That song’s a great hit in a London show called New Faces. It’s been running months now and it’s still packed out every night. Well—every evening—our theatres start at six now, because of the blackout. But if you do end up in England, Kari, you should see it.”

  Torp asked, “Have there been air raids on London?”

  “No. We expect them, though.” Trench asked Nick, “Have you had a chance to see Me and My Girl, sir?”

  “No, I haven’t …” But it was incongruous—he’d been about to say “not yet”—to be discussing those areas of frivolity as if one was so sure of getting back to them.

  “If I did come to London one day, would you take me to some theatres?”

  It wasn’t obvious which one of them she was talking to. They both looked at her, and at each other. Nick told her, “Either of us would be delighted to, Kari.”

  “I suppose,” Torp growled,”that if Mrs Everard does not mind you going about the world with your cabin full of pictures of different girls—”

  “There is no Mrs Everard, Commander.”

  Kari, in a dress, had seemed quite different from Kari in slacks and a thick sweater. She had not only a lovely face now, she had a figure too. One could imagine her—just—in London, dining, theatre-going …

  Torp had achieved his objectives ashore in the afternoon. He’d arranged for Knut Lange to bring the spars, and he’d got through by telephone to some fishermen friends near the fjord exits, chatted about fish long enough to confuse or bore any eavesdropping Germans, and then asked his friends to telephone to Sveodden if Hun ships entered the fjords. The message would be, “Tell Claus the animals are on their way.” They were people he’d known for years and he was confident they’d do it. Chandler had christened it “Torp’s Early Warning System,” short-title TEWS.

  Six-thirty. Wail of a bosun’s call, and a muffled bellowing from for’ard. Calling the hands: the duty PO would be roaring through the messdecks, Wakey wakey! Rise and shine! Heave-ho, heave-ho, heave-ho, lash up and stow! Show a leg, show a leg, rouse OUT! Nick didn’t have to hear it for the noise to start ringing in his head. He’d been thirteen when he’d first woken to those barbaric cries. At Dartmouth: where for sheer bloody hell … He shook his head, disliking even the memory of it. He wondered how Paul was taking to the crudities of messdeck life. At least his introduction to the Navy, at nineteen, wouldn’t be nearly as unpleasant as his father’s had been at a much more tender age.

  Trench said, breaking a few minutes’ silence, “My intention is to get the ship cleaned up, sir, during the forenoon. Starting with the messdecks. Do you want to keep one gun and the close-range closed up all day?”

  “Yes. And lookouts on the bridge, and the director tower manned. One officer on the bridge and a quartermaster on the gangway. We can do without sentries, though, in working hours. When the spars arrive, let Metcalf have as many hands as he wants. Did he finish the staging for the engine-room, d’you know, in place of the footplates they’re using for the patch?”

  “He did, sir.”

  “Good … Tommy, we’ll fly no ensign and no Jack. For the time being, let discretion be the better part of valour.”

  The shaping, rigging, and stepping of a new topmast was a job to be completed as soon as possible, because once Boyensen had done his stuff below and the generator was back in action they’d have full power for wireless transmitting, and the proper aerial height would be needed. If the raid on Namsos went badly at least it would be possible to let the C-in-C know what was—or had been—happening. If it went well, he wouldn’t let out a peep. If the Germans could be taken completely by surprise, and if communications between Namsos and the rest of Norway could be cut before the action started, it was possible—with a reasonable share of luck—that Intent might get her oil and be away before any alarm went out.

  He told Trench, “I’ll be calling a meeting in my cabin this afternoon. I’ll ask Torp to attend, and I’ll want you, and also Chandler and Brocklehurst. I’ll let you know what time.”

  He’d have this forenoon, barring interruptions, to work out some details, formulate one cohesive plan out of the jumble of ideas. It could have been done more quickly: if Intent hadn’t been immobilised, it would have been. As things were, there was time to plan it with some care. And by this afternoon, Boyensen might be able to forecast a time for the completion of his work. If his first estimate had been right, it would be done by some time tomorrow. So tomorrow night for the bust-up. Move in the dark hours: attack in the dark too, if Torp agreed that it could be done. Otherwise, at first light; but the night would be better, in order to get out of the fjords while it was still dark. Check the tides, and the shape of the harbour, and whatever the Sailing Directions had to say. It might be sensible, he decided, to talk it all over with Claus Torp before letting the others in on it. Torp, after all, did know the area and the port.

  “Number One.” He stopped near the superstructure door which led down to his own quarters and to the wardroom. “I’m going down for some breakfast. I’d like you to give Torp a message—not now, but after you’ve dealt with the hands at eight, say. My compliments, and would he join me at eleven for a cup of coffee.”

  “Just him alone, sir?”

  Nick glanced at him sharply. Trench began to look as if he wished he hadn’t asked the question.

  “Yes. Just him.”

  He was in his bathroom, shaving, when at 0700 he heard the pipe “Hands to breakfast and clean.” Scraping the lather off his face, trying to ignore the racket going on up top where engine-room hands were drilling bolt-holes ready to take the steel patch across that hole, and pondering on what part Valkyrien might play in the attack on Namsos. He thought the best use for her might be as an escape vehicle, for the landingparties and others, if Intent should—God forbid—get scuppered somehow. Valkyrien could then stay clear of the rough stuff; and Kari could be in her. For landingparties he could use Valkyrien’s two motor skiffs or Knut’s boat—if Knut was prepared to join in the operation.

  Leading Steward Seymour knocked on the bathroom door. “Surgeon-Lieutenant Bywater would like a word, sir.”

  “All right. Hang on there.” He put his razor down and went out, half shaved and with a towel round his waist, into the day-cabin. “How is he?”

  “Coming along very nicely, sir, I’m glad to say.”

  “Well done … He’ll be laid up for quite some time, I suppose?”

  “Yes, sir. To his own annoyance, he will. I’ve taken the bandages off his face now—it’s nothing like as bad as we thought at first—and he’s talking—mostly about the engines and how he ought to be down there getting on with it, etcetera.”

  “Good for him.”

  “What he needs most is rest. But he’d appreciate a visit from you, sir, if you could spare the time.”

  “As soon as I’ve had breakfast. Anything else?”

  “Only this, sir. It’s the only one since last evening’s SITREP.”

  Nick read the signal. It was from Vice-Admiral Battlecru
iser Squadron to Penelope. The cruiser was being told to take four destroyers with her and proceed immediately to the support of the Second Destroyer Flotilla in Ofotfjord.

  It didn’t look too good. If Warburton-Lee needed support …

  “We aren’t getting much, are we.” He passed the signal log back. “Anything of interest from the BBC?”

  Bywater shook his head. “There’ll be a news at eight, sir, of course.”

  When Nick had dressed he went back into the day-cabin, where Seymour had his breakfast ready. Cornflakes, and bacon with fried bread.

  “Are we out of eggs?”

  “I’m afraid we are, sir.”

  He decided he’d ask Torp whether there’d be any chance of getting fresh provender ashore here. The invaluable Knut might round up supplies from somewhere. Fresh milk, if there was any to be had, would be a change from this tinned stuff. One wouldn’t want to take food from the mouths of Norwegians, but it wouldn’t be any crime to put the Hun garrison on short rations.

  Seymour had retired to his pantry, which had a service hatch connecting through the after bulkhead, near the door to the wardroom and cabin flat. Nick began to think again about Operation Namsos.

  If the attack could be made in the dark hours, there were the alternatives of opening with a couple of rounds of starshell lobbed over the town to light up their objective and/or enemy strongpoints, or of keeping as quiet as possible, concentrating the attack on the oiling jetty alone, silencing any sentries or gunners without disturbing the garrison as a whole. It would be the neatest way of doing the job. Without a shot or a light: only some sentries to be found later with their throats cut—or discovered to be missing, if one took them prisoner—and fuel-tanks lighter by a few hundred tons, Intent slipping away to sea before the light came …

  Dobbs’s face wasn’t a pretty sight, smothered in some kind of ointment. But it was amazing to recall that such a short while ago he’d been so nearly a customer for that launching-party in the waist. Nick remembered his own impromptu prayer, and he said another now in his mind as he looked out of the sickbay’s scuttle across still, grey water towards the northwestern shore of Totdalbotn: Thank you, God. Perhaps it was only a way of hedging one’s bets: certainly he couldn’t have said whether or not he believed that God might have taken a hand in Dobbs’s recovery. But since one had asked for that intercession and then seen—almost miraculously, according to Bywater—the desired result, it would be churlish not to follow through.

  He’d talked to Dobbs about Boyensen, and his hope that he’d have the ship fit for work by some time tomorrow.

  “Only wish I could be on the job meself, sir. Seems daft—”

  “It’s fretting about it that would be daft. The more you can relax and rest the sooner you’ll be on your feet. Right, doctor?”

  Bywater confirmed it. Dobbs said he knew it: he still hated lying around when there was important work to do, his kind of work.

  “You made a very stout effort, and it’ll be in my report … Got anything to read?”

  “Be difficult to ‘old a book, sir—or turn the pages, like.”

  Both his hands were wrapped like an Egyptian mummy’s. Nick suggested, “If you had a rack of some kind—fixed or suspended about here … Then to turn the pages—Doctor, a marline-spike would do it. A spike shoved through a cork. You could wedge the cork inside the outer bandage and he’d just prick the pages over?”

  “Yeah, if I had that …“

  Bywater was doubtful about how the rack could be fixed up. Nick said, “We have one amateur mechanical genius on board who might turn his talent to it. And who probably hasn’t nearly enough to keep him busy at the moment. Midshipman Cox.”

  Dobbs grinned. It hurt him: he winced, and straightened his face. “He’s a good lad, sir, is Mr Cox. Very chummy with Mr Waddicor—well, he was.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Both Devon, you see, sir.”

  Both West-Countrymen, and both with interests in things mechanical and oily. Waddicor, the commissioned engineer, had been a cheerful, easygoing character. A clear contrast to the fussy, very proper Pete Chandler. It made sense, all right, and no wonder the boy had enjoyed escaping to the engine-room.

  He told the doctor, “I’ll send him along to you.”

  Three weeks ago, he reminded himself, he hadn’t known anything about anybody in this ship. You began to see them individually, like so many separate pieces of a jigsaw, and then you saw how they fitted in, with the ship’s function and with each other, linking this way and that to build the whole picture, the community that was a ship’s company. The whole being enormously greater than the sum of the parts.

  One of the parts being Randolph Lyte, whom he found on the bridge in charge of the lookout watch. Lyte hadn’t shaved yet, he noticed.

  “Morning, Sub.”

  “Oh—morning, sir!”

  He’d made him jump. He asked him, “Had breakfast yet?”

  “Not yet, sir. My relief’s somewhat adrift.”

  For the change of watch at 0800, presumably. But Nick’s watch told him it was still only three minutes to the hour. Then he remembered: just before he’d left the sickbay he’d heard the pipe “Hands fall in”— and that would have been sharp at 8.

  “What’s the time exactly?”

  “Five and one-half minutes past, sir.”

  He’d missed that news bulletin. But someone would have heard it … He asked Lyte, “Everything all right up here?”

  “Very quiet and peaceful, sir.”

  “We’ll change that, soon enough.” He focused binoculars on the hill where Norwegians were supposed to be keeping a lookout over Namsenfjord. If they saw anything that looked German, they were to wave a red flag. It would probably be a petticoat, Torp had said. A white one after that would mean “all clear.”

  “You’re keeping an eye on that hill?”

  “Yessir. Starboard lookout’s alert to it as well, sir.”

  “Good … When you go down, Sub, tell Cox there’s a job I want him to do for the doctor. In sickbay.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Pete Chandler was in the chartroom and on the point of going up to take over from Lyte. It was unlike Chandler, to be late like this. Nick asked him, “Did you hear the 8:00 news?”

  “Yes, sir.” He seemed cheerful this morning. “Good news, for a change. Fleet Air Arm planes have sunk the Konigsberg in Bergen harbour, and destroyers have smashed up a whole bunch of Huns at Narvik.”

  “Tell me what was said about Narvik.”

  “German losses were two destroyers sunk and five so damaged as to be unseaworthy. So they’re stuck there and presumably we can bomb them—or attack again and finish them off … Plus six supply ships sunk or burnt—destroyed, anyway—and one large ammunition ship which our chaps met when they were withdrawing down Ofotfjord. It blew up with an explosion that sent flames to three thousand feet, the man said. British losses were two destroyers.”

  “Two sunk?”

  “One sunk, one beached, sir.”

  “Didn’t name them?”

  Chandler shook his head. “It said a large number of survivors were thought to have got ashore.” He shrugged. “Sounds as if we won by an innings.”

  Nick was silent, leaning over the chart, giving the appearance of studying it, reading without actually taking into his mind what the words meant, Namsenfjorden: from the Norwegian government charts of 1900. With additions and corrections to 1931. He heard Chandler say, “Good show knocking off the Konigsberg, sir.” Six ships, he was thinking, in that flotilla. Two lost. One chance in three. Or rather—he switched to the other way of looking at it, in the process of getting a grip on this—two chances in three that Hoste was now out in Vestfjord. Probably fuelling from Renown or one of the other big ships they had up there.

  “Pilot, I’m going to borrow this chart and the Sailing Directions and the tide tables. Better have the Nautical Almanac as well.” For times of sunset and sunrise. He
added, “We’ll be having a meeting some time this afternoon, down in my cabin, and I’ll need to have you there.”

  Chandler nodded. “First Lieutenant did mention it, sir.”

  Six bells: and he had his notes roughed out well enough to go over them with Torp. He had a list of questions for him too. Torp should be here at any minute. From for’ard Nick heard the pipe “Up spirits!” and from the pantry Steward Seymour’s murmured response, “Stand fast the ‘Oly Ghost.” Same old jokes, day after day and all over the world’s oceans for—what, two hundred years?

  Mr Opie and the coxswain and a few other stalwarts would descend now to the spirit room—it was one deck below this and further aft, between the after magazine and the tiller flat, the steering-gear compartment—and draw the raw Jamaica rum which would then be mixed with water: one gill of water to half a gill of rum. Chief petty officers were allowed to draw it neat, and Paul, being under twenty years of age, wouldn’t get it at all.

  British losses, two destroyers …

  There was a knock on the door, and he called “Come in.” Trench announced, “Lieutenant-Commander Torp, sir.”

  “Thank you, Tommy … Come on in, Commander.”

  Torp said as he entered, “I must thank you for a wonderful dinnerparty.” Trench withdrew.

  Nick told the Norwegian, “I’m all set to give you a few shocks, to make up for it.” He called to Seymour, “Coffee please, steward.”

  “Shocks, eh?”

  “Better sit down and prepare yourself.” He pointed towards the open hatch. “It can wait for a minute or two.”