Band of Brothers

by Band of Brothers (retail) (epub)

  ‘Can’t be much fun, being shot at.’

  ‘None at all. But you’re shooting back at them too. I don’t remember whose it was, but there’s an Old Master painting of two dogs fighting—know the one I mean?’ She hadn’t known it; he’d explained, ‘What gets you is each of ’em’s only concerned with what he’s dishing out. Seemingly doesn’t give a fart what’s—you know, like the other’s fangs are in him. Action’s like that. Afterwards you might get windy, but at the time—see, there isn’t time. Happens so fast… Nothing like your bloody horror of a job, incidentally. I swear to you, that’d scare me bloody rigid… Rosie, you’ve done it—done it twice and got out again, thank Christ, so—’

  Her hand on his… ‘Leave it, Ben?’

  Alan Barclay was in the bridge’s port forward corner, near the hatchway; he shifted to let Ben out. Emerging from his burrow into darkness, muffled engine-noise, weather-noise and a cutting wind. On this course the gunboat was rolling more than pitching.

  ‘Searchlight still burning?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  Not with the naked eye as yet, he couldn’t. He put his glasses up, picked the light up at about thirty on the bow. Distance from here about 8,000 yards. Whatever it was there for… It was a weak-looking beam—and foreshortened at the moment, from this angle. Still heartening, though—an indication, touch wood, that the target and its escorts mightn’t be long coming.

  It wasn’t as dark as it had been. Cloud-cover was still about ninety-five per cent, but its thinning had improved the general visibility, he thought, since he’d last been up here. He could see not only 866, Monkey’s boat, quite easily—874 now too, as his vision adjusted itself. Crossing over to starboard to join Stack: passing behind Charlie Sewell—at the wheel as if rooted there—and observing that others present were young Carter, the Liverpudlian trainee tanky, and the out-of-work Radar Operator, AB Wheeler—and the signalman, of course, Miller.

  ‘Up for air, Ben?’

  Stack’s eyes cat-like in the shifting darkness, binoculars momentarily removed a few inches from them. Ben told him, ‘Also to mention we’ll be six thousand yards offshore in three minutes’ time. You didn’t decide—I think—whether to lie cut or patrol on an east-west track then.’

  ‘We’ll come round to west, and—tread water… Three minutes, you say.’

  ‘Two, now. Be 2240, then. Not as black as it was, uh?’

  A grunt. Stack with his glasses at work again. ‘Other hand, the cloud’s still there. No moon, doesn’t look like there will be either. I’m betting on Mike sitting tight now. Stay where he is and—as we planned it.’

  ‘Waiting for us to move first?’

  ‘When we have a target, up to us he doesn’t have to wait.’

  ‘Might best hold on as we are, then. Get in closer.’

  ‘Maybe…’

  Ben had his own glasses up, sweeping slowly from bow to beam on this starboard side. Eyes fairly well-adjusted by this time. He reminded Stack, ‘A minute to go, sir.’

  ‘We’ll alter to southwest. Gain bearing on ’em and close in a bit. Another quarter-mile inshore, maybe. Guessing-game, at this stage… What’s magnetic for southwest?’

  ‘South fifty west, near enough sir.’

  ‘Starboard wheel and steer that, Cox’n.’

  ‘Starboard wheel, sir. South fifty west.’

  No need for any signalling. Moncrieff would follow round.

  ‘Number One—depth-charges on the top line, are they?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Fifty-foot settings.’

  ‘And starshell?’

  ‘I’ve warned ’em, sir.’

  ‘Starshell’ in fact meant illuminating rockets, which were fired from the side of the forward six-pounder mounting.

  ‘Course south twenty-five west, sir.’

  ‘Very good.’

  Ritual reply… Stack with his glasses trained out to port—close to the beam, now she was on this course—to where that searchlight was still poking around. Erect on his seat, his line-of-sight over the coxswain’s head, over Barclay’s too, Barclay on the port side also favouring that sector. Good reason therefore for Ben to concentrate his own looking-out effort on this starboard side. He settled down to it: sweeping slowly, carefully, feet straddled, body balanced against the laboured corkscrewing motion she’d adopted on this course. The swell was less noticeable than it had been, he thought, wind and a short, choppy sea gradually replacing it. More white water, and more salt-spray flying; binoculars’ front lenses didn’t stay dry for long.

  Cleaning his own—again—in shelter close under the wind-deflector, using a handful of cotton-waste. Remembering Rosie’s question about whether one got frightened when going into action: but that recollection for some reason blurring into one of Joan, long before she’d become Joan Stack, asking him with her bare arms round his neck and her mouth close to his ear—he’d had two ears that worked, in those days—‘Don’t believe in wasting any time, Ben, do you?’

  She’d been right—he never had. Although this had in fact been their second meeting, at a party in a house near Ipswich, and the conversation—fragments of disjointed conversation—had taken place in an upstairs nursery, with the light off. That there was no lock on the door had worried him, a little, particularly as with some help from him she’d removed her smart Beevac uniform with its green tabs and silver ornamentation. He’d never heard of BVAC until he’d met her, but knew by this time that it stood for British Volunteer Ambulance Corps, that it dated from the previous war and that Beevacs weren’t paid. Joan had become one because the organization had commandeered a wing of her family home, which was somewhere on the Welsh border; she’d been on the point of joining-up as a ‘Free’ Fanny—a fairly incredible statement, at any rate to Australian ears, but he’d then learnt that FANY stood for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, also dated from the ’14–’18 war, and that the ‘Free’ ones, like Beevacs, made a point of doing without pay—but there they’d been, the High Command or somesuch, basing themselves right there in the ancestral pile—so she’d joined them. ‘The uniform’s really damn smart—don’t you think, Ben?’ She’d told him at an earlier stage, ‘I drive bodies around, in a brake converted to an ambulance. It’s mostly the airfields up this way that keep us busy. Absolutely ghastly sometimes, the poor brave darlings… You’re free some weekends, are you, Ben? Can you fix them in advance?’

  ‘No. Never. But there are maintenance periods, for instance. Engines tend to break down quite a lot, and—repairs, sometimes, and so forth… You’re really beautiful—well, as you know—’

  ‘I have a beautiful disposition, too. Not that it’s much use to you if you’re out there on your little boats night in, night out. You are, I know, Polly told me. Killing Germans, before they kill you. Frightfully good idea… Except weekends as well, that’s not so good. Ben, listen—have you ever been to Melton Mowbray?’

  She’d sounded a bit potty sometimes, but was actually very bright. An original, for sure. Her father had died not long before this and her brother Gareth had become the Earl. How Ben had met her was that she was working from a BVAC detachment at Ipswich, just up the road from Felixstowe where he, Bob Stack and Monkey Moncrieff had been based at that time, and a fellow MTB officer, Sam Garnish, had a sister Polly who was also a Beevac, and she’d brought Joan with her to a party at Felixstowe. Then at the second encounter—a dance, during which he and Joan had holed-up for a while in the nursery—Ben had brought Polly, and Joan’s escort had been this Welsh Guards friend of her brother’s. The brother had been expected but had gone down with ’flu, so Billy Bartholomew—‘Billy Bigarse’, Monkey had called him—who was to have given the Earl a lift down in his Alvis Speed Twenty, in the event came on his own. And proceeded to warn Ben, after complaining that he and Joan had been dancing together all the time, that he and she were unofficially engaged. It was an ‘understood thing’ between him and her family, he’d alleged.

  Ben had asked her about it in the nursery, and
she’d snorted.

  ‘Think I could be that desperate?’

  ‘Well. Why I asked. Didn’t seem too likely.’

  ‘Even less so than he may choose to think. He keeps asking, and he’s rich—so Gareth’s in favour—’

  ‘Makes no odds?’

  She’d shaken her head. ‘I’d love to be rich, but—crikey, not with Billy…’

  Melton Mowbray—that question she’d fired at him—had he ever been there, which at that stage he hadn’t—was simply a place-name that appealed to her, which she’d therefore had in mind as a venue for a weekend. There’d been others too—Market Harborough for one. The criteria had been that the names should have a good ring to them and that they should be well removed from any naval connections or locations where she or her family were known. The risk of bumping into some acquaintance was small enough in Ben’s case, since he knew hardly anyone in England and virtually no-one who wasn’t in the Navy, but for Joan it was a very different matter. Total strangers recognized her, from having seen photographs of her in such journals as The Tatler. He remembered her asking him—it might have been at Ashby-de-la-Zouch—‘Wouldn’t want me getting a reputation, would you?’

  She had a reputation. Sam Garnish had told him, having had it whispered to him by Polly, that to Polly’s certain knowledge she’d had at least two steamy affairs which all her friends had known about. Also that brother Gareth really had been trying to pressurize her into marrying Billy Bigarse, before she became virtually unmarriageable in their own stratum of society. Ben had truly liked her, though. She’d been enormous fun, and forthright, in an odd way completely honest. She’d really got under his skin, for a while—or begun to, the affair hadn’t been only physical. But he must have had his guard up, even then; when she’d told him that once she did commit herself that would be it, for keeps, no other man would ever get a look in, he’d pretended not to recognize it as an encouragement to him. Then again, the line about not getting a reputation—not at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, but at Hucknall-Torkard, this had been—she’d added, ‘I’m only a year younger than you are, you know?’ He’d been twenty-seven then, and had happened to know that she was actually a year older than him; but her point had been that it was perhaps getting on for time she married, before that reputation of hers became just the tiniest bit sullied. And when he’d queried why she couldn’t simply snap her lovely fingers at any one of a hundred or so highly eligible young men, she’d asked him, ‘D’you think we’ve got money, Ben? With that awful great mausoleum of a house to keep up? We haven’t a bean. My dear papa drank most of what we did have—and the rest’s debt, all sham!’

  ‘Why not transfer to one of the services where you’d get paid, at least? What d’you live on, meanwhile?’

  ‘Oh, one manages…’

  ‘What about old Billy?’

  ‘While you’re at it, why not offer me the shady side of Jermyn Street?’

  The brother helped her, he thought. Wherever he got it from. Selling things from the ancestral home, perhaps—pictures, silver. There’d certainly been some of that going on.

  But then old Bob had come on the scene, and dropped at her feet like a clean-shot duck. The first clear indication of it that Ben had was when she’d asked him, in a pub in—in one of those places—‘Bob Stack doesn’t know about you and me, does he?’

  ‘Of course not. Nobody does.’ He remembered it now—a mid-week rendezvous in an improbably-named hamlet not far from Diss in Norfolk, both of them as always with alibis that put them not only elsewhere but also miles apart… ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Sam Garnish, perhaps?’

  ‘Are you saying you’ve told Polly?’

  ‘I’m not mad, Ben!’

  Then she’d shrugged, thinking about it. In memory, he could see it, see her: and the bar, seedy old yokels eyeing her across the room, a reek of shag tobacco and the rain pelting down outside in a solid, semi-frozen deluge. It wasn’t the Ritz, that was for sure. She’d acknowledged, ‘Polly might have—put two and two together and made five, I suppose.’

  ‘Better be careful, then.’

  ‘My darling, I am, you know I am, but—’

  ‘Why’d you ask about old Bob?’

  ‘Because—’ he’d seen her hesitate, then decide to go ahead and tell him—‘I think he’s going to ask me to marry him. Actually, he did sort of half-propose, I pretended not to understand… I’m almost sure that’s what he was getting at.’

  ‘Good grief.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He’d shaken his head, thinking it had to be a joke…

  ‘Why, Ben? Bob’s all right, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s tops. Absolutely. Sound as a bell. But—hell, you wouldn’t want to marry an Aussie, would you?’

  ‘Try me and see.’

  ‘Why pick on Bob, though, what’s he done?’

  ‘Funny swine, aren’t you. But—like you, in a way, he’s—well, different.’

  ‘From Billy Bigarse and his mates, you mean. Yeah, that’s a fact. I still couldn’t see you and old Bob—well, strewth—’

  ‘I like him, Ben!’

  ‘So do I, like him a lot, but that’s no—’

  ‘He’s no pauper, either. His father’s got about a million acres out there, he told me.’

  ‘News to me. But—OK, if he says so.’

  ‘And two million sheep. Or thereabouts, I wasn’t making notes, actually.’

  ‘Actually. No. I suppose you wouldn’t. Comes to the same thing, anyway—miles and miles of bugger-all except bloody sheep. That draws you, does it?’

  ‘Not—irresistibly, no. Bob does, though.’

  Frowning, serious, not wanting to be made fun of… Ben thinking—still not really believing in it—Pinch me, I’ll wake up…

  Bob had had a blind spot about her too, though. Still did have, presumably. Poor bugger. But how could you have warned him? She’d meant that stuff about committal, going straight and spurning all others: at the time she’d clearly meant every word of it. Warning Bob off her, even if one could have brought oneself to do it—which for obvious reasons one had not—well, no-one in his right mind could have. And if one had, Bob would have disregarded it. He’d been seeing it as she did or even more so—the real thing, till death do us part, etcetera. All you’d have done if you’d tried to cast any sort of shadow was write yourself off as an eighteen-carat shit.

  * * *

  Rumbling southwestward. 2244 now. He’d memorized, for later entry in his notebook, the time of the last alteration—2239—and had the overall picture in his mind, as well as one knew it—the outline of the coast from Pointe de Barfleur to Cap Levi, roughly where Furneaux’s MTBs would be patrolling—or lying cut, as the case might be—a couple of thousand yards inshore—and the line of this unit’s slightly oblique approach from seaward. The main imponderables being (a) the timing of the Heilbronne's arrival off the point, (b) the strength and disposition of her escort, and (c) where any other enemy forces or patrols might be. Guessing there had to be such forces: otherwise who’d been letting off all that tracer? Who’d blown up and then lain stopped and burning?

  German versus German—just possibly. It had been known. Itchy trigger-fingers, faulty recognition, assisted sometimes by bad staff-work. Otherwise—Mike Furneaux off the rails, running his own show?

  Less likely. Especially as there’d been no enemy report.

  Cleaning his front lenses again. Thinking that whatever was out there, it wouldn’t be at any great distance now. Not if the Heilbronne still was coming. Which please God she had to be… This was the natural focal point, the meeting of the ways; whatever was about to happen would happen here. The gunboats at low revs taking it hard meanwhile, plunging and wallowing… Bob Stack searching across the bow, Barclay over on the port side still, further aft the lookouts’ black shapes outlined against whitened astern. Each of them, as it were, isolated, absorbed… He put his own glasses up again: clean and dry, for the moment. Starting abaft the b
eam, training slowly left, body swaying to counter whatever angle was on the boat while head and shoulders stayed level, the lenses’ intersecting circles shifting slowly around a barely definable horizon.

  Stack was probably right about not using radar if you didn’t have to. Might well have taken his cue from Peter Dickens—a highly successful and popular SO of MTB flotillas up there on the east coast in recent years, who’d stated at one briefing at which Ben had been present that he’d as soon switch on radar as he’d break W/T silence or light a cigarette. Adding—or this might have been on some other occasion—that in his opinion the radar sets available to Coastal Forces were significantly inferior to the human eye, in all but the most extreme conditions such as a combination of pitch darkness and thick fog.

  The Yanks had bloody marvellous radar in their PT boats. If Coastal Forces could have had that gear it would have been another thing altogether.

  Sweeping back now, left to right. A small up-and-down movement now and then helped to identify as much of an horizon as was visible. Reflecting further on the business of Bob Stack and Joan: that he must have known she’d had a fling or two. Odds on, she’d have told him so, as much from wanting to play it straight as to forestall any gossip he might hear later. And he’d have accepted it as water under the bridge, none of his damn business, any more than past affairs of his own were hers.

  And she would not have named names. Say that for her, she did have her style.

  Glasses wet again…

  ‘Light flashing—’ a yell from Wheeler—‘red seven-oh, sir!’

  Barclay then: ‘Letter V—Victor—challenge!’

  And repeating, flickering out of the night again broad on the port bow—direction of Barfleur, roughly—‘V’, three shorts and a long. It wasn’t the current British challenge.