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

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Make me a pair an’ all?”

  “Okay. Long as you’re not in a hurry for ‘em.”

  They wouldn’t be the smartest footwear ever seen. Not that that would be likely to attract attention here: men were wearing strips of carpet, curtains, women’s underclothes, old sacks …

  Twice in the last couple of hours there’d been alarms that German columns were approaching. The first lot had turned out to be survivors from Hardy, and the next—the sentries had been about to open fire on them, then heard a shout in English—were British merchant seamen who’d escaped from their German captors during the early-morning battle. They were lucky—they had all their own clothes, uniforms. But there was very little room to move now. A hundred and seventy men from Hardy, and forty-seven merchant navy men.

  Hardy’s captain—Warburton-Lee, who’d led the attack—had been severely wounded when she’d been ambushed by the last two German ships. His last order had been, “Abandon ship. Every man for himself. And good luck.” He himself had been out of luck: dying. They’d lashed him to a stretcher and the gunner towed him ashore, but he was dead by the time he got there.

  The merchant navy group came from several different ships, but they’d been taken prisoner when the Germans had arrived at dawn on the 9th, and held in the North Cornwall. There were 47 of them, including the North Cornwall’s skipper, a Captain Evans. They’d had a ringside view of the battle; in fact they’d been in the ring, with ships blowing up and sinking all around them. Then the Germans had ordered them ashore— with one lone Hun to guard them, and not a very bright lad at that. When the boat reached the jetty and he was about to climb ashore, he’d asked one of the sailors to hold his rifle for him.

  Whacker Harris, hearing this story for the first time, was convulsed with mirth. Recovering, he suggested, “Might ‘a been related to your oppo, Yank. You know—what’s ‘s name. Shitface. I mean Percy.”

  Paul glanced up from the tyre. It was a tough thing to cut, and if ever Brierson’s knife had had an edge on it, it had lost it now. He said, “Baldy wasn’t so bad. He’d have been okay when he’d found his feet.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Harris frowned, embarrassed. “I’d forgot the bugger’d ‘ad it.”

  By rights, Paul thought, he should have “had it” too. It was a pure fluke that he was alive. And his father—he wondered … You never stopped wondering, really, whatever else you were doing or talking about, the question-mark and the hope and the despondency were there. Extraordinary: such a short while ago, those few days at Mullbergh, good food and bachelor comfort in that creaky old house, big fires and malt whisky, and the two of them sounding each other out, rather cautiously making friends, a little surprised maybe at finding how well they got on; and now in what seemed like a flash here he was in this timber shack with a blanket for a coat and fumbling to make shoes out of some stinking old rubber, and his father was—might be a prisoner of war, might be dead.

  One of the merchant navy people was telling Harris how the Germans had seized Narvik. All over the room men were swapping stories, recounting personal experiences of the last day or so. This one—he was an engineer of sorts—was describing how three Hun destroyers had arrived off the harbour not long after daylight—a little past 5 am. One of the Norwegian coast-defence ships, Eidsvold, had been lying in the harbour entrance. She and her sister ship Norge were twins born in 1900, antediluvian-looking twin-funnelled gunboats originally classed as “Coast Defence Battleships.” Eidsvold had flashed an order to the German flotilla leader, Heidkamp, that he was to stop: and the Hun commodore had stopped his ships. He’d also sent a boat to the Norwegian, demanding to be allowed to pass into the harbour: demanding surrender, it amounted to. If it wasn’t forthcoming the boarding officer was to get himself and his boat out of the way quickly and fire a red Very light. The demand had been rejected, the boat retired, and the red flare shot skyward: two torpedoes leapt from the Heidkamp’s tubes, blew Eidsvold into two halves and killed practically all her crew of more than two hundred and fifty men. Then they’d sunk Norge in a rain of shells followed by two more torpedoes. Only fifty of her company survived. There’d been no warning: Germany and Norway were not at war: the Germans were still claiming to have come as friends and protectors.

  Paul said, sawing at his tyre, “I guess this may be the first war in history where we don’t have any damned options. I mean we have to fight the bastards.” He glanced up at the engineer. “You said the garrison commander turned traitor?”

  “So they told us. A colonel by the name of Sundlo. One of Quisling’s boys.”

  Harris sniffed. “Sod ‘im, then.”

  “Why not.” The engineer nodded. “He ordered the garrison not to resist. The Huns have a general in charge ashore now. We saw him. Twerp by the name of Dietl.”

  “Sod ‘im, too.” Harris eased himself down with his broad back against the wall. “What they givin’ us for scoff tonight?”

  Claus Torp had arranged that the telephone cables would be blown up near the village of Spillum at 0100 on the 12th. But he had bigger and better proposals too. The men who’d do the job on the telephone wires, if Nick would provide them with firearms, were suggesting they should go on from Spillum to the bridge which spanned Spillumsoren, and if there wasn’t a German guard on it they’d go across and make a diversionary attack on Namsos from the east. Probably they’d open fire on a checkpoint which the Huns had set up at some crossroads half a mile outside the town. If there was a guard on the bridge they’d attack that instead. Either way the effect should be to draw enemy troops eastward out of Namsos and divert attention from the harbour while Intent was making her approach.

  “Not a bad idea.” Nick was studying the chart. The bridge over Spillumsoren was half a mile long. For “bridge,” read “causeway,” he thought. The village was one mile this side of it and the Namsos road junction half a mile from its other end.

  “They’d have to do the cable-cutting a bit earlier, wouldn’t they?”

  “Half an hour, yes. Or leave one man there, to follow after.”

  “How will they get away?”

  “In the truck, same way they go there. But they go to the mountains after, not to their homes … They all ask one question: when will your British army come?”

  “Be nice to know that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Will you give them some guns?”

  It wasn’t so simple, when one had to arm three separate landingparties already. He asked Torp, “How many men?”

  “Five, maybe six.”

  They weren’t going to pin down many Germans for very long in that strength. But if they acted as snipers, from spaced-out positions: and they’d know the lie of the land, which the Huns hadn’t had time to learn yet … He nodded. “Five rifles. I’ll make a saving by reducing the two flanking parties by one man each.”

  They were in Nick’s day-cabin. Knut Lange wasn’t back yet; he wasn’t likely to show up much before dusk. Nick asked Torp,”How did you leave the arrangements for all this ashore?”

  “I arrange that after Knut’s boat is coming back to us tomorrow evening, when you are sure what you are doing, I go ashore to them, with the guns or not, as you decide. They will not move to cut the telephones until I am seeing them again first. All right?”

  “Yes. Excellent.”

  “Are you with us tonight, in the dinner-party?”

  “No.” He hadn’t had a chance to tell Kari. Not that that should matter. It was the real reason why he wasn’t accepting Tommy Trench’s invitation: it couldn’t be allowed to matter. He explained to her father, “Wardroom table’s big enough for two extra but not comfortably for more than that. Besides, you’re the guests they want. And—”

  “It’s a pity. Kari—”

  “—and, I’ve work to do … Now listen, Claus. Assuming the operation tomorrow night goes as we’ve planned it, don’t you agree that if the enemy’s still sitting out there and you try to get your ship out, in daylight and at your slow speed, y
ou’re certain to be intercepted and captured or sunk?”

  Torp shrugged. “I think this ship also. I think you don’t get far away from the quay at Namsos.”

  “I can fight, Claus. I have guns and torpedoes. Also, when your man’s done his stuff I can move out at 30 knots. It makes a slight difference, you know.”

  “I tell you what I can do. I can navigate. Through the fjords, the small ones. I have been thinking about this, you see. Instead of going like I was saying before—Rodsundet or Seierstadfjorden—I go through Lokkaren, and across through all the little islands to Svartdalsfjorden and Nordsundet—that will be into Gyltefjorden—”

  “You’ve lost me.” Nick went to the table, where he had the chart.

  Torp said, “I lose the Boche too, I think. Now—here… ”

  Nick dined alone. Tomorrow night, before the attack, he thought he might invite Torp and Kari here again, a quiet supper for the three of them. But solitude tonight was useful, a chance to think over the plan in peace and quiet. He had to try to envisage how things could go wrong, what emergencies might arise and what he’d do to counter them. There was also a need for forethought on the question of how he’d handle his ship if he had to fight his way past German destroyers in a narrow fjord. It would be like fighting a battle in a river. Boldness would be the key, he thought: just go straight for them, flat out and no hesitation, hit hard and early, and keep moving fast towards the open sea. Success would build on success: if you could clobber one of them, another might stop or turn back to help him, thus bringing down the odds.

  Damn old Torp for his obstinacy. Valkyrien was a pretty ship but she wasn’t worth men’s lives.

  “All right, Seymour. I shan’t need anything else.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”The leading steward nodded. “Goodnight, sir.” But ninety seconds later he was back. “That fishing-boat’s ‘ere again, sir. Just coming across the bay.”

  “Right. Thank you.”

  No reason to move. Trench would have been told, and Torp was with him. The blue boat would berth on Valkyrien and Torp would be down here soon to pass on whatever Lange had reported to him. Doomsday stuff, quite possibly. But even if he came to say there was a whole flotilla of Hun destroyers in the fjord, it wouldn’t affect the plans. Whatever the situation might be out there now, it would as likely as not have changed by tomorrow morning and changed again by noon; how things looked at this time tomorrow night—that would be what counted. At this stage it was a matter of watching trends, trying to see a pattern and understand what the enemy was up to.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Our friend the Knut’s adrift, sir.”

  Trench said it—somewhat unnecessarily. Nick grunted, and checked the time on his wrist-watch, as if Lange’s lateness hadn’t occurred to him until now, as if his nerves weren’t already racked up tight because of it.

  Pacing the quarterdeck. Trench pacing beside him because, tired of his own thoughts which had begun to go in circles, he’d invited his second-in-command to join him.

  Five minutes to ten. In one hour he ought to be pulling the hook out of the mud, getting set to move out for the raid on Namsos. And before he could do that, Torp had to be sent ashore to see his wire-cutting friends and then get back aboard again: and depending on what news Lange brought with him when he did come, there might be a need to reshape plans. He was cutting it much too fine for comfort.

  Last night, the news had been that in Altfjord was one U-boat and that in Rodsundet were two destroyers. Musical chairs, he’d thought, with a submarine now gate-crashing the party. But there had to be a purpose, a reason: and since then a little of it had begun to show, but last night he’d said to Torp, who’d come down to the cabin with Lange’s report, “Let’s wait and see what we have out there in the morning, Claus. Who knows—Scharnhorst and Gneisenau perhaps.” He’d teased him: “They know you’ve got your Valkyrien here and they’re waiting until they’ve assembled a force powerful enough to take you on.”

  “You are so funny you make me want to pump-ship.”

  “Your wardroom dinner-party will have given you that urge. Use my bathroom if you like.”

  He stole another sight of his watch. 2158. The three minutes had crawled like ten. If Lange didn’t come, he told himself, he’d let Torp go ashore at 2230 and he’d weigh at 2300. He couldn’t afford to waste any of the short period of darkness; he’d have to assume that the enemy were deployed as they had been at noon—which meant one U-boat and one destroyer alongside each other in Altbotn and one destroyer left at anchor in Rodsundet. Between first light and midday one of the two destroyers who’d spent the night in Rodsundet had gone round into Namsenfjord and then nosed slowly into Altbotn, the inner fjord, and anchored off its western shore; the U-boat had then moved in too, and berthed alongside her. Guesswork suggested that the U-boat was getting assistance of some kind from the destroyer. Or vice versa: but this was less likely, in view of Mohammed having gone to the mountain and not the other way about. But from Nick’s point of view the improvement was considerable. The pair holding each other up in Altbotn probably wouldn’t be able to get under way very quickly: one of them must have something wrong with her, and the destroyer might not have steam up now. Also, if no alarm or loud noises were made, it should be possible to sneak past them undetected, as they were blind in there to what was happening in Namsenfjord. In fact, having them bottled up in there, one might do them some damage en passant. Nip in: a couple of torpedoes: nip out again. During the afternoon he’d been giving it some thought. But Rodsundet too: with only one enemy destroyer there he reckoned his chances of fighting his way out would be better than even. He knew the German was there, and the German wouldn’t know anything until Intent hit him. Depending, of course, on how much fuss was kicked up at Namsos before that.

  That had been the lunchtime picture. How it might look now was another question. Where the hell was Lange?

  Three minutes past 10:00.

  He glanced upwards. Cloud cover was still complete. If anything it was thicker than it had been yesterday. So there’d be no bother with a moon. Twenty-five knots would be a maximum speed down-fjord, after the attack, because at full speed the funnel-glow could give them away.

  “Rifles and ammo are in Valkyrien’s skiff, sir.”

  That, from Tommy Trench, was a display of nerves. They both knew the skiff was alongside and that Nick had given orders half an hour ago for the weapons to be put in it, to save time when Lange did turn up. He didn’t answer Trench. That skiff would be hoisted on Intent’s starboard davits, after Torp had run his errand and Valkyrien had cast off. The other was already hoisted on the port-side davits. On both sides Metcalf’s upperdeckmen had riven new falls, fitted new gripes and boat-ropes, cleaned, greased, and tested the fire-blackened disengaging gear. Petty Officer Metcalf had worked like ten ordinary men since they’d been in here. Thinking of it, Nick told Trench, “When we’re out of here and the dust has settled, I believe we should think about Metcalf going through for chief. Might have a look at his Service Certificate.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  When we’re out of here …

  Lange might have run into trouble. Into a Hun destroyer, for instance.

  If he didn’t come, Nick thought, he’d use Namsenfjord. There’d been three destroyers altogether in Lange’s first report, and the whereabouts of the third was currently unknown. If it returned he thought it would more likely join the one in Rodsundet. The one on the other side was there for the U-boat’s benefit and there’d be no point in another joining them. Namsenfjord: and if there hadn’t been much of a shindy made, stern-first into Altbotn for a crack at those buggers and then away, fast, before the Rodsundet ones woke up.

  He liked that. It had a certain neatness.

  “I hear your guest-night was a success, Tommy.”

  “Guest-night …” Trench swallowed surprise. One was hardly expecting to chat about dinner-parties. He nodded. “I believe it was, sir. We were all sorry you we
ren’t able to—”

  “Fishing-boat approaching, sir!”

  “—able to be with us.”

  “I had a lot of stuff to see to.” No point in dashing about yet. The blue boat would take a little while to cross the bay. However …”Number One, let’s have the cable party closed up, and tell Lyte to shorten-in to one and a half shackles. Special Sea Dutymen in half an hour.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Bosun’s mate!”

  Intent’s engines were in full working order now, according to Torp’s translation of Halvard Boyensen’s report. Beamish, questioned by Nick, had agreed with it. They’d run a basin-trial this afternoon, at the Norwegian engineer’s request; Nick had consented in return for the man’s positive assurance that there’d be too little smoke for a German ten miles away to see. In fact, as he’d expected, the wind had backed to north-west and it blew such smoke as there was directly inshore. And the engines had functioned perfectly. Also, by that time the new foretopmast had been stepped and rigged. An interesting evolution, which had taken the whole forenoon. A mast-rope was led from an eyebolt on the foremast top, through the sheave in the heel of the topmast, back up again through a block on the other side of the foretop. Thence it was taken to the capstan on the foc’sl, the slant of it just clearing the forefront of the bridge and the flare of “B” gundeck. At Trench’s order “Sway away!” and with a couple of dozen seamen all around with hemp guys to steady it, the topmast had risen vertically like some variety of the Indian rope trick. After that, things became more complicated: the yards had to be slung up and secured, and the rigging—stays, backstays, and shrouds—of two-inch steel-wire rope, set up. Finally there’d been only the lighter work to do, like halyards and wireless gear. It looked like any other topmast now; but such a very short time ago it had been a tree, snow-covered on a Norwegian hillside.