He still thanked God he hadn’t told Rosie about it. As he might have done, self-deprecatingly, being unaware at that stage that Rosie’s hatred of Germans was quite exceptionally intense.
With some reason, too. Knowing what her job was, you could guess at some of it. In her sleep—this last night—she’d moaned, writhed, wept, cried out in French, then really screamed, slippery with sweat and fighting him off when he’d tried to interrupt the nightmare then comfort her as she came out of it, still sobbing.
He’d told her later, ‘Rosie—listen, you must not go back. Not on any account, Rosie. Please—promise me, darling—’
‘I’m sorry. Crazy dream—’
‘What was it about?’
‘Oh—nothing.’ A long, hard sigh… ‘Nothing. Just—’
‘Just my left foot it was nothing!’
‘Nothing I want to remember, Ben. Or talk about. Ever…’
‘Char or kye sir?’
He broke out of his thoughts—more or less. In the plot, on the stool that hinged down, forearms on the chart and a shoulder against the bulkhead for stability, inhaling smoke from a duty-free cigarette… For obvious reasons you couldn’t smoke on the bridge or upper deck at night, but you could down here with the ports and companionway blacked out. A mental close-up of Rosie in semi-darkness still blurred his mind—a life-size negative through which he was looking at Carter, Ordinary Seaman William J., acting steward and galley hand and also now under instruction—Ben’s—as an embryo ‘tanky’ or navigator’s yeoman. Mainly because he had neat handwriting and could spell, and had volunteered for it.
‘Thanks, Carter. Kye’d be fine.’
Cocoa, that meant. The boy glanced at the QH, on his way down to the galley flat. He was pale, with deep-sunk eyes, crewcut yellowish hair and overlarge ears, and he came from Liverpool. Ben had never bothered with a tanky—meaning an assistant, who’d correct charts and so forth—but Carter was keen to learn and he’d agreed to try him out.
Checking the QH: through a haze of smoke, transferring the coordinates to the gridded chart.
Slightly off track. Enough, though, to realize you’d be significantly off it if you held this course for another hour, say. In fact you wouldn’t—if only in view of the small, gradual changes in the tidal stream’s strength and direction as the hours passed; there was also the effect of wind. As things were at present this would be very slight, but it was still a contributing factor.
He called into the voicepipe, ‘Bridge!’, and Stack’s answer was immediate: ‘Yes, pilot.’
‘Better steer three degrees to starboard, sir. South forty-three west.’
‘OK.’ More distantly, then: ‘Hear that, Cox’n?’, and Sewell’s acknowledgement, ‘South forty-three west, sir.’
Carter reappeared, with an enamel mug of Admiralty-issue cocoa. It was supplied in bars which had to be scraped into powder with a knife, and lower-deck gourmets used custard-powder as well as condensed milk to thicken it. A flavouring of rum was not unheard of.
Ben stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Thanks.’ Nodding then to Wheeler, the radar operator—dressed for the bridge, on his way up to do a stint as lookout. Dark, scrawny, with deep-sunk eyes—the look of a mad priest, Ben had thought when he’d first met him.
‘Evenin’, sir.’
‘Set all right now, is it?’
The 291 radar set; they’d had a lot of trouble with it. Wheeler held up two crossed fingers: ‘Never know your luck, sir.’ Ben reflecting that Stack wasn’t likely to be using the damn thing anyway.
On his own again, he had the big chart out, to check on whether at the two-thirds stage—2100 say, just over an hour’s time—if there was an all-clear from the Albacore reconnaissance, whether times and distances really would work out. For the MTBs particularly, if they went on ahead then at thirty knots.
Should, he thought. He could see it roughly in his head, and had faith in Stack’s own prescience. But having thought about it some more—in the back of his mind, almost sub-consciously—and still having that slightly anxious feeling…
No harm in checking, anyway. ‘Walking’ his dividers along the pencilled track, on course 216 true…
Amazing. The MTBs would be ten miles northeast of Pointe de Barfleur at about 2130. So reducing to ten knots then, they’d be as close inshore as they’d want to be by 2230. While the three Dogs, maintaining the present twenty-one knots, would arrive in that ten miles NE position at 2200. Reducing to slow speed, then, silenced, they’d be half an hour behind the MTBs, which would use that much time getting into their waiting position inshore.
Bloody perfect. Spot-on.
But—he saw this suddenly, as in a double-take—only as long as the reconnaissance report confirmed Stack’s expectations, was it spot-on. Otherwise, the end-result might be something like a dead heat. Or even worse… Pausing again for thought: realizing that Bob’s answer would be that if the reconnaissance told him the enemy were dashing straight across—OK, he’d let Furneaux off the leash at once. But—it was a large ‘but’ too—the recce effort couldn’t be infallible, guaranteed. The Albacores mightn’t spot what in fact might be there. Easily might not. Even with their ASV radar.
Solution?
Well—surely to detach Furneaux and his boys not at 2100 but at 2030. More than an hour at thirty knots was certainly not to be risked without good reason—the risk being that of engine breakdowns—but the situation—viz., important target possibly about to slip through one’s fingers—would surely justify it.
On the bridge, he expounded this theory to Stack, who cursed but then led the way down to the chart. ‘Don’t bloody well let go, Ben, do you…’
‘Well—’
‘Come on. Show me.’
‘We’re here, sir. At 2100 we’ll be—’
‘Plot!’
The voicepipe from the W/T office. Ben leant to it. ‘Plot.’
‘Weather forecast, sir.’ Leading Telegraphist Willis added, ‘In the bucket.’
‘Right.’ He fished it up—a small cylinder, pulled through the pipe on a lanyard. Extracting the folded sheet of signal pad, handing it to Stack; he sent the carrier down again. Stack meanwhile reading the forecast out aloud. Wind was predicted to veer from southwest to west by midnight, and to increase to force 5 or 6 by first light.
Not so good. In rough seas, small ships like these were severely handicapped.
‘By first light—’ Stack put a stopper on that kind of thinking—‘we’ll have sunk the bugger and gone home.’
Chapter Three
As yet there’d been no report from any Fleet Air Arm reconnaissance. The Hunt-class destroyers west of Cap de la Hague would be waiting for it too, Ben guessed. Stack meanwhile had decided that if there was no news by 2030, OK, belt and braces.
‘Time now?’
‘Twenty twenty-nine, sir.’
‘Good enough.’ Straightening from the voicepipe. The gunboat with her nose up as she climbed a swell, a rolling mass of black water lifting ahead then creaming aft deck-high, a certain amount of spray lashing over as she levelled and started down again. The swell was no bigger than it had been an hour ago—might even have been down a little—but to a ship of this size it was quite big enough.
The flat-bottomed MTBs would be feeling it a lot more, of course.
‘Signalman!’
‘Sir!’
‘Dusty’ Miller… Ben arriving in the bridge at this moment, joining the skipper, Barclay, the coxswain—PO Charlie Sewell like a permanent fitting at the wheel—a lookout with binoculars at his eyes, and Miller already cradling a blue lamp. Stack was telling him, ‘Make to Mike One: Flag 4, K for king.’
‘Flag 4, K king, aye aye, sir.’
He could have used R/T, voice radio; but the high-frequency type fitted now was long-enough range to be liable to interception. So why risk it? If you could read the Germans’ inter-ship chitchat, chances were they’d read yours. It would only need a few words of English to tell them that Royal Na
vy units were in the offing. Whereas when you were in contact with them anyway you weren’t telling them anything—they’d know it. Surprise was a primary objective—virtually an imperative, for small wooden ships going out against much larger and more heavily armed steel-hulled ones. Miller had his blue-shaded Aldis stuttering: a call-up—two or three ‘A’s to ensure having the addressee’s attention—then the message which had been pre-arranged at the briefing. Flag 4 in the Coastal Forces Signal Pamphlet meant ‘Attack with torpedoes’, and the addition of the letter ‘K’ as a special code tonight enlarged this, telling Furneaux to push on ahead to Pointe de Barfleur and position his unit for an attack on the Heilbronne from inshore. The MTBs were to take advantage of the planned diversionary attack from seaward by the MGBs, but if for any reason this was delayed—late arrival owing to engine breakdown, for instance, or other mishap—they weren’t to wait for it.
The choice of the letter ‘K’ was in memory of Rod King. Stack had told the MTB skippers when they’d been winding-up the briefing, ‘Chalk this one up to him, eh?’
‘Message passed, sir!’
An advantage of the quarterline formation was that the other three would have read the signal and be ready for Furneaux’s move. As now… In 875’s bridge several pairs of glasses including Ben’s were focused on that leaping patch of white as it seemed visually to explode, the brilliance expanding, bursting outward, and the note of the four boats’ engines—twelve in all, three engines each—rising sharply at the same time as it increased in volume. Another pre-arrangement—Furneaux’s with his COs—was that at this juncture they’d adopt Order One, line ahead, instead of quarterline. You could see it happening—the three of them angling inward, slanting into his wake—throttles open, the boats flinging themselves at the black undulations of sea ahead.
Furneaux himself already level, and overhauling; had passed, and this was 562 abeam now, thunderous roar beating across the rolling gap of water: then 564, and 563, jumping the swells like game-fish and the four of them well closed up, virtually nose to tail, a single cohesive unit. Stack had his glasses on the last of them—young Newbolt—drawing away ahead now, fine on the bow. 875 beginning to roll and corkscrew across the furrows like a somewhat larger game-fish herself as the MTBs’ combined wash hit her. Stack half-turning—‘Bastards…’—grabbing at the binnacle for support… ‘All engines 1800 revs, Number One!’
‘1800, sir.’ Barclay, in the forefront near the telegraphs, cranked the handle of the rev counter. 1800 would give her about twenty-five knots instead of the twenty-one that she’d been getting from 1500. Over the next two hours, therefore, putting her eight miles ahead, arriving off Barfleur roughly twenty minutes earlier than she would have at the lower speed. Touch wood… 1800 was regarded as the maximum revs permissible on a continuous basis—continuous as distinct from short bursts of up to thirty or thirty-plus knots as was frequently required in action.
Stack had told the signalman to pass ‘George 25’ by blue light to 866—telling Moncrieff, ‘Speed twenty-five knots.’ Bland in 874 would read it too. The rolling was savage at this moment, still in the wash from the MTBs—whose departure would make a fine painting, Ben thought—if you could get it right, the real guts of it, not just a picture of boats going fast on each other’s tails but somehow put over that sense of purpose, aggression, imminence of action.
How you’d achieve it, he didn’t know. Only had a conviction that it should be possible. He guessed the answer would come through getting down to it—taking the plunge and then bloody slaving at it. Rosie, indirectly, had said something more or less to that effect, just yesterday.
‘Eighteen hundred revs on, sir!’ Then Miller’s report: ‘George two five passed, sir!’ Yells high-pitched, to beat the racket of sea and engines. Ben lowered his glasses, having to go back down to his plot now, log the increase in speed and the departure of the MTBs, etc. Accepting as he went down that the stuff about painting must have come into his thoughts through having had that conversation with Rosie about it last evening, when she’d asked him whether he’d done any since she’d last seen him, and he’d had to confess he hadn’t.
‘Except sort of in my head.’
‘Ideas for it, you mean?’
‘Yeah. I think strewth, I’ll paint that—’
‘Why not do it?’
‘Well. One day…’
He’d made pencil sketches, from time to time, and notes to remind him how it had looked and felt, this or that particular scene, what there’d been about it that had got to him. But why he hadn’t taken any of it further than that conceptual stage—well, the obvious let-out was not having the gear handy or the time or a place to do it, but the more basic thing was being scared that if he tried now he’d only be turning visions into dogs’ dinners.
She’d warned him, ‘Wait too long, you might never do it. Might get permanent cold feet.’
‘You’re so right.’
‘But the fact you care and think about it as much as you do—’
‘Care about you, Rosie. Love you…’
He was in the plot, with her voice in his ears and image in his mind while logging the speed increase—tagged as 2030—and now marked the position on the chart, noting the log reading… Halfway over, roughly; but the second half should be covered in twenty minutes less. Barring misadventure, of course. Meanwhile—well, it was now two hours before high water at Dover, and the tidal stream atlas told him the easterly set would be running at a rate of 1.6 knots. Not enough difference there yet to bother with. And the position by QH—dead right, they were where they ought to be. For the moment, therefore, no problems. Even the continued non-arrival of any follow-up reconnaissance report might be a case of no news being good news. If the Albacores had done their stuff and found nothing, the inference would be that the Heilbronne and her escorts were taking the coastal convoy route.
Bloody idiots, if they were.
He went down to the wireless office, which was on the deck below, starboard side of the galley flat, between the officers’ heads and the CO’s cabin. It was a tiny, cramped compartment mostly filled with radio gear, cramped enough anyway but more so in an SO’s boat, like this one, in which you had two telegraphists instead of only one, as well as extra gear. Both with headsets on—they were keeping listening watch, with the switch broken on the transmitting side, for safety’s sake—heads turning as he pushed the small door open and looked in: Ordway’s expression sharp, terrier-like, Leading Tel. Willis rather donnish, affable, as he shifted the earphone from this side… ‘Social visit, sir?’
‘You could call it that. How’re we doing?’
The warmth of electrics, cigarette-smoke hanging blue, a pin-up on the bulkhead. Several empty tea or kye mugs, and Saturday’s Daily Mirror. Nothing much was happening, apparently—nothing on the air other than what Ordway referred to as ‘the usual garbage’. But even in the present comparatively quiet sea-state it was thunderously noisy. Something like going over Niagara in a barrel… He chatted with them for a minute, then went back up to his plot, folded the seat down and lit a cigarette.
A glance at the clock, as he expelled the first plume of smoke. Any minute now, Stack would be sending the hands to action stations.
He wished he’d been able to ’phone Rosie before they’d sailed. To check she’d got back all right—let her know he’d wanted to check, had been missing her ever since her train had steamed out of Haywards Heath this morning. He’d told her he’d ring if he could but might not be in a position to, in which case he’d try on Monday evening instead.
‘Saying you might go to sea tonight?’
He’d shrugged. ‘We do sometimes. Earn our living?’
‘Don’t go getting yourself smashed up again, that’s all.’
‘I’m not planning on it.’
‘You go on like a mother hen about me, Ben, but your job isn’t exactly undangerous.’
‘Comparatively, it is. And straightforward, damn sight less frightening. Mother
hen, huh… Well, I’ll say it again—please, don’t offer to go back?’
‘You look after yourself, I’ll look after myself. In any case, as things are at this moment—’
‘You said in the night they’re short of trained agents and sooner or later—’
‘I promise you I won’t just suddenly disappear. As you said you dreaded most.’
‘Dread it all. I want you safe, out of it. Christ, you’ve done enough, Rosie. Why are they short of agents anyway—because so many have been caught, or—’
‘Because more are needed. There’ll be an invasion before long, and before that—you know what the job is, the Resistance have got to be armed and organized—’
‘Change your mind, marry me?’
She’d said earlier, ‘I don’t want to be widowed a second time, Ben.’ And had gone on quickly, cutting short his protest to the effect that there was no reason to think she would be, ‘Even if we did—get married—we wouldn’t see each other any more than we will from now on, please God. Now you’re here instead of at the back of beyond. There’s no damn point—’
‘Except I love you.’
‘Well, me too. I mean—love you… Ben, let’s be together as much as we can, and—’
‘When the war’s over, then?’
Fingers on the back of his neck: ‘Your hair’s much too short.’
‘Has to be. The admirals insist.’
‘Well, the hell with—’
‘I agree. But Rosie—after the war?’
She’d sighed. Warm breath in his ear. ‘Ask me then, if—’
‘No ifs—’
‘If you still want to. Could be a long time, you know.’
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