A Twist of Sand

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  Blacklock was a sound enough man to keep his mouth shut in the bar, but I could see he was thunderstruck.

  "Have to make arrangements to get that damn great plane in here without wrecking itself in the bomb-holes. More joy for the pick-and-shovel brigade." He. looked at me with respect.

  "You must be quite a boy in your own way," he said. Fancy sending a special plane out to fetch you. Personal service in war-time —- me!"

  The C.O. looked thoughtful. "When do you think the Lancaster will arrive?"

  Blacklock laughed. "He'll have time for a night's sleep. I'll give you the E.T.A when Gib. signals it. I don't know which will be worse, trying to bring her in at night, or during the day when the Jerries are sure to pick her up. We could get her away better at night, though," he mused, "but, Christ! can I get her off that piddling little runway? I hope they have the good sense to fill her up at Gib." He turned to me with a grin. "You'd remember it all your life if Malta fell because we used up all our petrol to fly out one of the Admiralty's favourite torpedo-boys."

  Blacklock excused himself and shot off, with characteristic energy, to cope with the physical problem of handling the big machine. The C.O. was silent for a long time.

  "Why do they want me in London?" I asked. After all, the Admiralty doesn't send a special plane for a submarine officer just because he sinks a battleship. Other submariners had done every bit as well and there were other men just as able, if not more so, than myself. My tired brain, a little muzzy now with the gin, simply balked at the mental jump and would not go over it.

  So I said to the C.O.: "Tell me if you can, why should the Admiralty want me in such a hurry? They don't just want to pat me on the back for being a good boy."

  "Geoffrey, I don't know any more than you do. I could think of some reasons, but they're obscure and I'm sure they don't fit. But you can take it from me, if the Admiralty can take the trouble to arrange and send out a bomber — and if the R.A.F. is willing to let it go at this particular juncture of the war — then you're a damn important personage, make no mistake. Just think of the paper work alone to get the R.A.F. to lend one of its precious bombers to the Navy! It looks like a decision which couldn't have been made except at the very highest level — maybe even the chiefs of staff. I could imagine the hell any service head would kick up at being told to send one of his fighting units for the purpose of picking up just one man. You're in cottonwool from now on, Geoffrey. No risks. No courageous wanderings when there's a raid on. You'll take orders from me to keep yourself as safe as a new-born prince."

  I grimaced: "Yesterday I was simply a submarine commander who felt he'd done a job of work. I hadn't had a bath for three weeks. Now I feel unclean with all this limelight focused on me. I felt better on the bridge of the Trout. In the light of all this," I burst out, "it's a pity the Ities didn't get Trout — to hell with ' utmost priority! '

  The C.O. said harshly: "You can keep that sort of maudlin talk for somewhere else. Those boys of yours are a damn fine bunch, and I wouldn't like to think of them at the bottom of the sea just because you're facing something you don't know." He stood up and eyed me unrelentingly. "You'd better get a good night's rest. We'll try and get you out of here sometime to-morrow if the raids are not too heavy."

  I suppose that at that time there were fewer drearier places than the huts grouped round Malta's much-bombed airfield. For the hundredth time I changed my position on the scuffed, hard chair and pulled up my greatcoat collar, not only to keep out the chill, but the unrelieved glare of the unshaded lights. The place looked stark, kicked about; indeed it was. It was no fitting portal of glory for the men who, day after day, set their faces against the impossible odds of the great bombing squadrons which sought to destroy not only the airfield, but Malta itself. Blacklock had been hovering around, but his main concern was chivvying the weary workers filling in bomb craters from the last raid of the day, and trying to get a few precious extra yards of runway to help the heavy Lancaster bomber off the field. I could see he was inwardly dubious. Gibraltar had given us a short signal about five hours ago that the plane had left there; we weren't likely to have any more news until she arrived after the long 1,000-mile haul from the Rock.

  The pulsing of heavy engines cut the thick silence of the early hours.

  Blacklock joined me. "I hope to God they don't pile that monster up on my runways," he said. "It's bad enough having to give them our precious petrol, but it would be hell if they chewed up what's left of the airfield. Besides," he added, "after these top priority signals, I've got to swaddle you in cottonwool. If they don't get that bloody great thing off the deck again, I feel they'll court martial me. You'll probably be beyond the powers of court martial if she doesn't lift." He grinned, but he was nervous.

  The flarepath came on.

  "All in your honour," said Blacklock. "I wouldn't dare unless it were vital. As it is, it might bring the Stukas in post-haste." He glanced anxiously round, a man naked In his enemies.

  The cumbersome shape teetered down on the extremity of the runway. It ran on and on. I thought it would never stop. Blacklock drew the breath between his teeth. The giant slowed, creaked, and turned towards the apron, the propellers cutting arcs of pale light.

  "Bloody fine landing!" exclaimed Blacklock. "Bloody fine! Fine being the operative word. They've sent you a good pilot, laddie, if that landing means anything. Get those lights out," he shouted to someone in the darkness above in the control tower.

  Before the great bomber had stopped rolling the airfield in total darkness. Blacklock and I went forward while he shone his torch on the crew's entrance. Four men emerged, walking with that stiff, uneasy gait a man has after a long flight.

  Then fifth pair of legs emerged and an Australian voice "Malta he jewel of the sterling area! Holiday in suns Malta! See Malta and the worst bloody airfield I've ever seen! Push it over the Cliff!"

  "That's what the jerries are trying to do. I Blacklock." He turned to the ground crew. "Get her fuelled up. Anything else needed?"

  The Australian looked at him in astonishment.

  "What do you mean fuel her up? I'm getting fuelled up myself before I take this cow back. I want a bath and a night's rest." With heavy sarcasm he wheeled on Blacklock. "We've been flying chum, remember? Fifteen hundred miles to Gibraltar way out to sea, and another thousand here. See?"

  I admired Blacklock then, and saw what had got him to the top.

  "You're taking that bloody great thing out of here just as soon as I can get her filled up. Two hours, maybe."

  The Australian turned away truculently. "Bugger you," he said.

  Blacklock didn't argue. "See here," he said evenly. "If you are not fit, or your crew is not fit, I'll put another crew aboard, but that Lancaster is going to be on its way back to Gibraltar before daylight. Out of the way of the Jerry bases on Sicily and the mainland. Make up your mind."

  The Australian faced about, and in the stronger light I could see the lines of fatigue round his mouth. But he changed his tune in the face of Blacklock's stiff line.

  "What's the hurry?" he demanded. "Who's this bastard we've got to get back without so much as an hour's rest? Churchill's younger brother? Why can't the bomber stay here for tomorrow at least?"

  Blacklock was fast losing patience. "First, because I say so. Second, because that plane will be bombed to pieces in the first raid tomorrow morning. Third, I don't want more of a mess made of my runways than necessary. Fourth, because this is the man you're taking back. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Peace. ' Utmost priority,' that's why they sent you in the first place."

  The Australian looked round with his eyes narrowed with weariness. "OK." he said. "Fill her up. Call me when it's done. She's OK. otherwise. I suppose we have time for a cup of coffee?" Then his manner changed. "Don't let those bastards of a ground crew into the plane before we get stuff out of her."

  "What stuff?" asked Blacklock suspiciously.

  "There are three crates of whisky and three of gin i
n the bomb-bay," he grinned. "And about the same number of tinned food. I figured you miserable bastards would need something to cheer you up." 'Utmost priority' he mimicked.

  Blacklock slapped him on the shoulder. "Sorry about this, Aussie. We could have had a party."

  "Ah, well," sighed the Australian.

  Two and a half-hours later the big bomber stood quivering at the end of the runway, brakes hard on with the great Rolls-Royce engines roaring defiantly. Spurts of blue flame flickered over the cowlings as the Australian revved them up to almost full boost against the brakes. Then the flarepath came on momentarily, the brakes were released, and we catapulted forward. Had it not been for my strap, I would have been thrown from the metal-backed seat on to the mattresses the crew had slept on on the floor. The great machine bucked and roared as the pilot fought to get her off I he tiny runway. The tail came up but it seemed an eternity. Then it slowly lifted and with the Rolls-Royce engines bellowing we lifted clear and swept out to sea. Even as I looked back, the flare path went out, and we were alone over the sea for all the long flight back to England.

  V

  Suicide — by Submarine

  "The third man is dead," said the Flag Officer (S)., "You'll take his place. The list is short. The others are beyond telling the Germans."

  An old submariner himself, the Flag Officer (S) did not waste his words — or his time. The Admiralty looked bleak and cold in the late London spring; chill it seemed to me after being used to the friendly bite of the Mediterranean sun. Bleaker still looked those eyes over the top of the desk. They reminded me somehow of Rockall, the lonely isle in the Atlantic — they only changed their shade of greyness, sometime* stormy, sometimes still, but always grey and bleak with the chill of the near Arctic.

  I did not reply. The sudden transition by air from one place to another has always left me feeling as if a part of me had been left behind; it requires time to catch up again.

  "Are you tired, Peace?" the level voice snapped. Dear God! Was I tired of people telling me I was tired! First at Malta, where I had been fussed over — sleep and rest. And now the Flag Officer (S) himself. Something inside me tightened.

  "Of course I'm tired," I replied savagely. "I sank a battleship and had God knows how many depth-charges dropped on me for God knows how many hours. I come straight off patrol and I fly for God knows how many hours in a cold uncomfortable plane with everyone swaddling me in cottonwool. I am tired, but I can be a damn sight tireder. If you had hidden behind a shelf of sand for nine hours… "

  The hard look which struck terror into the hearts of so many, and my own now when I realised the folly of such an outburst, changed to one of surprise and the Arctic eyes became slightly less grey.

  "What's that?" he whipped out. "What's this about a shelf of sand? There's nothing in the report."

  "They probably didn't consider it worthwhile burdening the air with so much detail," I replied. "It was this way, sir…" I told him about Trout's long ordeal and how I had chosen the undulation on the sea-bed as my protection. I must admit I made it longer than I normally would have done, but while I kept talking I felt he might overlook my nervous outburst.

  When I had finished, he said quietly: "I owe you an apology, Peace. When I saw you there I thought I was seeing what I have seen so many times: a fine officer, but his battle reflexes shot to hell. I had three submarine commanders on my list for this job, and it was the battleship that tipped the scales in your favour. A moment ago I had doubts. Now I am ordering you to do it." He smiled slightly. As a once a brilliant submarine commander in World War I, he still knew that you can only push a submarine commander so far and then — the enemy gets him.

  He leaned back in his leather chair.

  "Three men know about this thing. I will tell you who they are: Myself, the Director of Naval Intelligence, now you. One other man knew, but he is dead. The Gestapo saw to that. I tell you that the fate of the whole war at sea depends — and I do not say may depend, but depends — on the success or otherwise of the mission I have for you."

  He pressed a button and lapsed into silence, but the cold eyes watched me, probing, mesmerising, seeking out the hidden weakness of the instrument he had chosen.

  "Show in the Director of Naval Intelligence," he said.

  I got to my feet as the grave, sad-eyed man came in.

  "Hallo, Peter," he said. He spoke like a world-weary diplomat. He seemed to have reached a stage beyond sadness at human ferocity and had only compassion left. He looked at me. "So this is your man?" It was a different type of scrutiny, a subtle, diagnostic friendliness, but not less deadly than the scalpel-like probing of the Flag Officer (S).

  "Tell him," he said curtly.

  The newcomer sat on the edge of the desk with one leg swinging idle. He lit a cigarette and gazed for a moment at the cold view beyond the windows, as if mustering his thoughts.

  "You will see," he said didactically, "that I have no papers with me. There are no papers. All I have is a message sent by our agent at the Blohm and Voss yards. It was a longish message, and that is probably why they caught him. His Majesty's Government will never have the opportunity of rewarding him." He said it without a trace of irony, but rather with pity. It might have been an epitaph for a Spartan.

  "You may guess," he went on, "although you may not know, that the Germans have been working on forms of submarine propulsion other than conventional methods for some time."

  I shook my head.

  "You've been too busy sinking things to keep upto date," he murmured reprovingly. "What would say were your two main problems in a submarine? You, as a practical exponent of the art?"

  The schoolmasterly chiding held no hint of the venomous subject it treated: slow coughing to death in a steel coffin in fifty fathoms of water; no hint of our excruciating passion for more speed to evade the hunter.

  "Fresh air and speed," I replied.

  "May I congratulate you on your man, Peter? I suppose a submarine commander doesn't have much time to waste his words."

  "Fresh air and speed," he went on quietly. "Yes. Four words tell the whole story. The Germans are getting the answers, too. They are well ahead of us."

  The Flag Officer (S) stirred slightly in his chair. The burden of that terrible summer and its more terrible winter in the North Atlantic lay heavily on his heart. Half a million tons a month sunk, they said.

  "They seem to have given priority to air," the easy voice went on. "They are working on a kind of hollow tube that will supply air to the vessel while it remains submerged" He consulted his mind. "The Dutch had something of the sort at the outbreak of war. They called it something like… ah, yes, snort or snorchel."

  I listened in amazement. "Why" I exclaimed, "give a submariner a thing like that and, and…"

  "Precisely," he smiled. "And one poses a whole new series of tactical problems of the greatest import. I am simply a glass through which rays of information shine, I hope not too dully." He smiled faintly at the stern eyed man at the other side of the desk.

  "Now the Blohm and Voss people" — he said it as one might name a favourite tailor of close acquaintance — " have evolved a prototype which they are calling Type XXI. It is fully streamlined and is fitted with what we will conversationally call a snort. It will do sixteen knots submerged, has six bow tubes and carries twelve spare torpedoes. I evaluate its firing power at eighteen torpedoes — I think kipper is a distressing piece of naval slang — in thirty minutes."

  The man behind the desk stirred again. That schoolmasterly voice meant, translated into the practical, a burning hell of tankers sinking, men dying in agony, or freezing to death in perishing seas. The cold eyes were so cold that years later I was still to remember them.

  "The Type XXI also has a new kind of range-finder — again, well in advance of us or the Americans — which enables him to fire his torpedoes from thirty-five metres down without using his periscope at all."

  I jumped to my feet. "No, that's impossible!"


  My informant looked at me mildly. "By no means, my dear Lieutenant-Commander. It is a reality. By this coming winter in the North Atlantic there will be scores of the Type XXI at work. I assure you you have no reason to doubt my information."

  I looked at the glum face of the man in the chair and accepted, as best I could, what the chief of Intelligence was saying.

  "Air and speed, you said Lieutenant-Commander," he went on.

  My words tumbled out: "But the Type XXI solves them both sir — all the air you want, and all the speed."

  "By no means," he replied. "Both are a step forward, But by no means absolute."

  "What do you mean by absolute, sir?" I asked with heavy humour. "My boat might make a single burst of nine knots in an emergency, but three or four would be more like it. I'd have to charge batteries the next night when the air was foul anyway. This Type XXI — why, it's unbelievable."

  "Your problem," he replied dogmatically, "is having to come absolutely to the surface, stop and recharge, or run on the surface and recharge. The Blohm and Voss beauty sails below at snort depth, runs her diesels and charges her batteries. She is still vulnerable, and that snort is vulnerable too. Her motive power is only an improved version of the old — ours, for example."

  "Give me a boat like that, and I'd go damn near anywhere, sir," I said vehemently, for the idea fired me. Think, if I had had a fast, manoeuvrable ship like that for that battleship attack…

  "I say the Type XXI is quite vulnerable," he said. quietly, "and I am sure with — ah developments — we shall be able to cope with it."

  This high-level talk was sweeping me off my feet.

  "But you know, Lieutenant-Commander, the Germans are an imaginative lot. If we had had the initiative to develop the Type XXI, we would have concentrated exclusively on it. But the German is a perfectionist. He wants something better than that. So instead of concentrating, he diversifies his energies. Air and Speed. Absolutely. I can say that the TYpe XXI is obsolescent.