The Gatecrashers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 6

by Alexander Fullerton

  Bow-down. Crashing down. A glimpse of Brazier silhouetted against the light’s beam, tottering: Gimber holding on, but half over the side— drowning … Coming up, at last. Catching a lungful of air with sea in it: life itself consisting solely of the need to complete this—now …

  Connecting!

  Screw-threaded pin one-handed into the shackle. The two pins at rightangles but not much weight on them yet, so turning this was—was feasible, even with numbed fingers … Bomber Brazier’s shout as the rubber boat shot upwards: “Not me for one!” Brazier howling with crazy laughter: a happy man, delighted, in his element and loving it, turning with an arm up and waving to the men in Setter’s bridge to tell them, “all fast—heave in …”

  Gimber told the others, when X-12 was at sixty feet, on course and under tow at eight and a half knots again, porpoising as before, “Brazier’s round the bend. I hadn’t realised.”

  Thinking as he said it that he’d never seen the Bomber in such a state of exuberance. Towne nodded, crawling aft. “I reckon. He’s a good hand, though.”

  Ozzie Steep nodded. Expressionless. He was functioning all right, but in the manner of a zombie. He was in his first lieutenant’s seat, he’d handled her competently in the dive, caught a trim with just about the optimum weighting for’ard; now as Trigger Towne moved aft he moved the trimpump lever again, sent a few gallons from stern to bow in compensation for the shift of one man’s weight. But there was a goon-like quality about his movements and manner. Gimber thought it would be unsafe to trust his reactions in any new emergency: therefore, that he mustn’t be left unsupervised. But since the principle was to have two men on watch and one man resting, a private word with Towne, a warning to him to keep his eyes open, might answer the problem.

  Which might in any case be imaginary.

  There weren’t any more tow-ropes. Setter had been carrying one spare. And in submarine emergencies, reactions had to be immediate and right. Delayed action or the wrong kind …

  He thought, I can’t risk it …

  Hang on until tomorrow, when Setter would be dived and the tow smooth, emergencies far less likely to arise?

  Steep looked round at him. Gimber had been checking bilges. Steep said, reaching for his mug—Trigger had heated a can of soup after they’d dived, and as usual poured his own straight down his throat scalding hot— “Skipper, you ought to get your head down. I’m perfectly all right now.”

  “I doubt if I could.” Gimber wondered if Ozzie had been reading his thoughts. He explained, “Up to here with bloody Benzedrine.”

  “Oh.” Ozzie turned back to the depthgauge. Gimber slipped another tablet into his mouth. First one for several hours: he’d been thinking of cutting them out, so as to be able to get some sleep, but—glancing at Ozzie again, still unsure of him but also unsure of his own judgement … Then he saw Trigger Towne—he’d turned his head like a man on guard, afraid of being caught out doing something illegal, like surreptitiously taking that pill, and there was Towne, this side of the after bulkhead, glaring at him. He had his hand on a canvas roll of tools he’d left there behind Ozzie’s seat, and had now come back for. Crouched with his head half-turned, eyes burning out of dark holes in his head, he looked like some wild animal ready to dive back into its burrow. He shouted, lifting that hand to point at Gimber, “Oughter get in some zizz-time, skipper!”

  “So ought you, chum.”

  The ERA gestured dismissively, as the midget’s bow slammed down and brought up hard on the new tow-rope: Gimber heard, “Got jobs waiting, Christ’s sake … “ Gimber pointed at Ozzie’s back—grimacing, waggling a hand palm-down to convey his doubts; Trigger watching the pantomime, frowning, working out what it was he was being told. Then he nodded, made a gesture of helplessness before he turned away and slithered back into the engine-space. Gimber crawled for’ard to the W and D to fetch a bucket and a cloth.

  Brazier told Paul confidentially, “Louis G did a good job. He’s not bad, when he gets his finger out.”

  That had been a long speech, for the Bomber. He’d have given it some thought before he made it, too. Paul reflected, looking at him across the wardroom table, that if Gimber had made a hash of it Brazier wouldn’t have commented at all.

  The quick recovery of X-12 underlined one’s fears for X-11. The last news of her had been that Scourge had turned back to look for her. One whole day ago—and it felt like a week.

  Crawshaw said at supper, “Scourge couldn’t break W/T silence now, though, could she. Now we’ve got this close to the target, don’t we have to go right up almost to the Pole if we want to transmit?”

  “Where we are now, yes.” MacGregor pointed out, “But Scourge turned back. She’ll be a long way south still.”

  The restriction applied within a certain radius of the target: wireless silence inside this area was to be total. The last thing one could risk was for the enemy to be alerted to the presence of submarines on their battle squadron’s doorstep. But Scourge would still be outside the restricted area: so if she’d found her baby, she’d have piped up.

  Good news arrived just before Paul was due to talk to X-12 at ten o’clock: X-8 was back in tow of Sea Nymph. Paul told Gimber this, over the telephone: “X-8 did the same as you did, apparently. Tow parted, but she’s back on the lead now.”

  “What happens when the second rope busts, with no spare?”

  “Just make sure it doesn’t, Louis … No, actually I’ve been talking to MacGregor about that, and we’d improvise with a two-and-a-half-inch wire. If we had to … How are you three now?”

  “Ozzie’s back in shape, more or less. Trigger and I are so stuffed with pills we’re pretty well on automatic.”

  “Can’t you lay off the Benzedrine, now he’s fit?”

  “Tomorrow. When you dive. To which event we’re counting the minutes, believe me … No news of any of the others?”

  Paul told him falsely, “Only that X-8’s back in tow.”

  Lying to Louis Gimber was becoming a habit.

  He wondered what Louis had meant by those remarks about Jane. He couldn’t remember exactly what had been said, now, only that he’d sounded snide and that it had been unexpected and disturbing. But time itself was becoming confused, the days telescoping, and 20 September seeming constantly to recede. It would be worse still for the passage crew, he realised, especially under the influence of those pills.

  A signal was coming through. Colbey, the grey-haired telegraphist was taking it down when Paul finished his chat to Gimber and hung up the phone. He left him at it, and went back to the wardroom.

  “Signal coming in.”

  Heads lifted from books and magazines. Massingbird’s eyes, from the recess of his bunk, gleaming like an old fox’s before they shut again. Eaton with a copy of Men Only open at one of the famous “Ladies out of Uniform.” He turned it face-down, and slid off the bench. “May as well get the book out.”

  The signal turned out to be from Scourge. Twenty-four hours’ searching had yielded no trace of X-11, who had now to be presumed lost. Scourge was proceeding to her patrol billet off the target area.

  Brazier muttered, “Bloody hell.” Eaton scowling as he took the code book back to the control room safe. MacGregor muttered from his bunk, “I’m very sorry.”

  The picture had been developing in Paul’s mind while the message had been taking shape on Dick Eaton’s signal-pad. Three faces clearly defined: Tom Messinger’s, Bony Hillcrest’s, Charlie Amor’s. There was also a vision of an X-craft interior split open and under 1600 fathoms of Norwegian Sea: it would be still, by now, at rest, those bodies sprawled … The stuff that dreams were made of—and there were enough of those already, God knew. He wrenched his thoughts back to practical considerations—such as the fact that Dan Vicary’s X-11 had been one of the three boats detailed to attack the Scharnhorst, and only X-9 and X-10 were now left for that job. He guessed there might be a switch now, that either he or X-8 might be redirected from the Lützow to the Scharnhorst.<
br />
  He was in the process of turning in, on the camp-bed under the wardroom table, when the next instalment of bad news arrived. He lay still, listening to Henning and Massingbird decoding it, the engineer doing the looking-up while the torpedo officer read out the groups and wrote down the translation. It was from Syrtis to Flag Officer Submarines, repeated to all concerned in Operation Source: X-9’s tow had parted, and Syrtis’s captain had reason to be certain the midget had gone to the bottom.

  X-9’s passage crew had been Kearon, Harte and Hollis.

  It was hard to accept as fact, at first. Right on the heels of the other one. But it had happened, it was real—and you had to accept that there might be other losses too, before the attack itself went in. Paul thought of Gimber, Steep and Towne, whose chances were exactly the same as those other teams’ had been … Also, that with such a high incidence of loss on passage, FOSM probably would not order any variations to the attack plan until he knew for sure how many X-craft he had surviving.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  . . .

  As long as the bloody rope held …

  Gimber prayed with his eyes shifting between the depthgauge and the bubble, Please don’t let it part?

  Setter was on the point of diving, so as to be down and out of sight before daylight exposed her to any wandering German aircraft. She’d dived for the first time yesterday, but come up again last evening to spend the night on the surface; this was necessary both to maintain the scheduled progress northward and to charge her batteries. So for X-12 there’d been another seven hours of acute physical discomfort exacerbated by the tension of knowing the tow-rope could snap at any moment.

  Yesterday the hours with Setter dived had been marvellous. Hour after hour of smooth running. Gimber had slept for two hours, then taken over from Towne, who’d been unconscious for nearly four.

  Towne muttered now, “Get on with it, get bloody under!”

  Longing for a resumption of that peace and quiet. Also to get the act of diving over—and for MacGregor to handle it carefully, take his ship down gently, in slow time … X-12’s bow jerking upwards and to port: then the strain was off the rope and she was hanging, drifting with her bow falling quite slowly. The two could have gone already, could have been broken by that last tug. But it hadn’t—there was a yank to starboard, just as he’d been beginning to think she might be on her own … She still carried the slight list to port, oddly enough. Gimber looked at the transverse spirit-level, the one on the deckhead that showed angles over to port or starboard. She was in her gliding state again—the tow slack, no pull on her nose, but the bubble still showing the two-degree list to port.

  There was no obvious reason for it. Towne was in his seat—which was on the starboard side—and Steep was flat-out, asleep, in the fore end. The battery and its wooden cover which served as the off-watch sleeping berth was also, as it happened, on the starboard side. Nothing had been moved from one side to the other, so far as Gimber could see or recall, and an X-craft had no port and starboard trimming tanks. Most of the food and drink was stored on the port side of the bow compartment, so as the cans were emptied the tendency would be for her to be lightened on that side—the opposite to what seemed to be happening.

  The telephone buzzed; Towne stretched out a long left arm to pick it up.

  “Yeah?” He listened for a few moments. Then: “Roger.” He was halfturned on his seat, looking like a first cousin to Rasputin—gaunt, bearded, with those deepset, gleaming eyes. He told Gimber as he hung up the phone, “She’s diving now. Brazier, that was.”

  Everard would have his head down, no doubt. Setter diving quietly on the watch. Gimber would have preferred to have known Paul was awake and looking after X-12’s interests at a time like this. At this moment she was on an upward swoop with the needle in the gauge swinging past the sixty-five-feet mark. But no jerk: there’d been a long, steady pull angling to starboard, and now it had ceased. She felt loose again, drifting, bow slowly sinking as the forward motion slowed.

  Adrift again?

  About once every two minutes, that was how it felt. Imagination, of course, yet another of the coward’s thousand deaths. But there’d been no jar, no sudden wrench. And in point of fact the imagining part wasn’t so much fear as the need to anticipate, to have a mental picture of what was happening outside the hull so you could be ready to cope with an emergency when it struck. Like having worked out in advance that if this new tow did part they’d replace it with the two-and-a-half-inch steel wire rope which Setter was carrying lashed inside her casing. He’d discussed this again with Everard; the wire’s weight would make it a hell of a thing to handle, from this end, but at least it existed—another accident wouldn’t necessarily remove X-12 from the operation.

  “I’m taking her to one hundred, Trigger.”

  “Aye aye …”

  Setter would go to sixty. Gimber’s intention was to be well below her, out of the wash from her screws. These were all new techniques, history in the making; despite the facts that his mouth tasted like the bottom of an old dustbin and that he’d rather have been in Wimbledon.

  Autumn—first signs of it, the trees beginning to change colour … Except it would be pitch dark there at 0200 …

  Going quiet now. The pull was steady, all in one direction. She’d already be under, he guessed, below the surface turbulence. The time being 0200 and the date—18 September. Concentrating harder still, Gimber concluded that it had to be a Saturday. With seventeen hours of tranquillity ahead, and his own turn to take a rest.

  Except Eaton probably needed that sleep.

  He had her levelled at a hundred feet when the telephone buzzed again. Brazier informed Towne that Setter was now in trim at sixty feet.

  “How is it with you now?”

  “Better ’n it was, chum, I’ll say that … Might even get some shuteye later.” Towne was frowning, looking around like an animal suspecting danger while he listened to whatever Brazier was saying. He’d craned outward to see the depthgauge and the hydroplane indicator. Nodding: rasping into the telephone, “That soon?”

  Brazier said something else. Towne nodded. “Yeah. Right,” and hung up. Gimber said, “You’ve noticed it, have you.”

  “What is it—three degrees?” Towne got out of his seat and moved a few feet aft, to check on the position of the bubble in the transverse spiritlevel. “Just under.”

  “So what’s doing it?”

  “I’ll look around.”

  “Checked the bilges lately?”

  “Yeah, course. But I will again. Mind you, I’ve a feeling …”

  “Well?”

  “Tell you in a mo’ …” Rasputin jerked a stained thumb in the direction of their towing ship. “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Crews change over. Big eats and all night in—what about that, then?”

  “I’ll believe it when I’m inboard … Trigger, see if you can trace this list.”

  “Butterflies, Sub?”

  Massingbird, stroking his red beard, grinned at Dick Eaton across the table. Eaton was refusing breakfast: he’d drunk some tea, but declined all offers of food. His voice was thin as he told the engineer, “If a sharp pain in the guts can be caused by butterflies—yes.”

  Massingbird’s implication had been that Eaton’s digestive problem might be connected with the imminence of action. Which wasn’t either far-fetched or insulting. Paul was aware of the flutter of those abdominal insects, at times, and Jazz Lanchberry had admitted to it readily. Brazier muttered now, “You’re lucky if it’s only butterflies. I’ve got bloody great pterodactyls in my gut.”

  “Well,” Crawshaw smiled, “you’ve got room for them, in there.”

  “Is it really bad, Dick?”

  Eaton told Paul tightly, “Bad enough to hope it’ll stop soon.”

  “When did it start?”

  “In the night. I was OK on watch, so it must have started after I turned in.”

  MacGregor suggested, “Perhaps the cox’n had better take
a squint at you.”

  Submarine coxswains did some kind of medical course as part of their training. Setter’s CPO Bird would have a kit of drugs, and some implements, and a handbook of symptoms and treatments, but apart from first-aid it was likely to be rough-and-ready medicine. Eaton’s glance at MacGregor made it plain he was well aware of this.

  “I’ll be all right, sir. I’ll turn in, wait for it to wear off.”

  “Anyone else got stomach trouble?”

  Nobody had, so you could say it hadn’t been last night’s canned pilchards. Whatever it was, Paul thought, it had certainly chosen its moment, with the changeover of crews scheduled for tomorrow evening.

  MacGregor commented, “Your first lieutenants seem to be out of luck. First Steep, now Eaton.”

  “Steep’s back on the job, Louis says.”

  “So will I be, skipper, by tomorrow.”

  “Well, let’s hope.”

  “I’m sure of it. It’s just a belly-ache, nothing serious.”

  But he was barely able to haul himself up into the bunk—the upper one, against the curve of the pressure-hull—which Crawshaw had recently vacated. The pain was probably worse than he’d admitted, Paul guessed. In fact if it hadn’t been pretty bad, he wouldn’t have mentioned it at all. One had now to face the fact that he might not get over it, whatever “it” was, in time to move over to X-12: there’d be no question of taking him along in this state.

  Over the telephone at 0800, Gimber reported that the midget had a list of six degrees to port.

  “It’s the side-cargo, a slow leak on one of its buoyancy chambers. That’s Trigger’s assessment, and I agree with him. There’s nothing else it could be.”

  The side-cargoes had buoyancy chambers so that their weight wouldn’t throw the X-craft out of trim. All the banging around they’d be subjected to must have damaged this one.