“Are you sure? No HE?”
Another shake of the head, and this time he managed to force some words out too. “Clear all round, sir.”
HE stood for hydrophone effect, the underwater sound of a ship’s propellers. But of course the E-boat might know there was a submarine around and still not have moved: it could be lying doggo, listening …
Could be. It probably wasn’t, but you couldn’t take anything for granted. The telegraphman came back, and reported that Ultra was now running on one propeller only, one motor driving it at slow speed, and that the batteries were grouped down. It meant the submarine’s two sections of battery had been switched to operate in series, which gave slower speed, longer endurance. Grouped up, they’d be connected in parallel, maximizing the available power. But the slower you moved, the less noise you made and the longer you’d last out.
“Course three-one-oh, sir.”
Paul looked over the navigator’s shoulder at the chart over which he was sprawled as if he was trying to convince himself he was still asleep. Bob McClure was an RNVR sub-lieutenant, like himself. He’d pencilled on the diving position and the new course of 310 degrees: Paul saw that if they held to it, it would take them out across the wider part of the entrance to the straits. On that course you could run for fifteen miles or more before you’d hit Sicily. McClure yawned; he asked blearily, “Sure you saw something?”
Paul nodded. “I’m sure.”
You could imagine things, easily enough. Seagulls had been mistaken for aircraft before now. McClure stood five foot four inches in his socks; he had a swarthy complexion and brown eyes, and came from Oban in Argyll. He complained, “Well, you interrupted one of the best dreams I ever had.”
“Chasing Highland sheep, I suppose?”
Ruck asked the asdic man, “Still nothing?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Right.” He told Wykeham, “We’ll go to watch diving, and stay deep until”—a glance at the clock beside the helmsman—”five-thirty. Everard’s watch still, is it?”
Now it was dead quiet. Softly lit, and warm, with the metallic odour of electrics and behind that the pervading reek of shale-oil. Shale was the fuel on which torpedoes ran, and it was also used for cleaning, for putting a shine on the corticene deck-covering. Every submariner smelt of shale.
But so silent, and peaceful. In your mind you could visualize the scene outside: dawn reaching over the Messina Straits and the Italian mainland, first light fingering the Sicilian coast beyond. Flat shine on the surface, and the E-boat still lying motionless a couple of miles or so to the northeast now. Down here, under a hundred feet of water still retaining darkness, the submarine paddling gently northwestward, slanting across the approaches to the straits … Paul moved over to glance at the chart again. There was the fix on it which Ruck had taken not long before they’d dived, then dead-reckoning positions for the dive itself and for where they’d altered course. The pencilled track took them well clear of land: Ultra was in five hundred fathoms of water here, and right up to the Italian coast the chart showed nothing less than a hundred.
He went back to inspect the trim. No problems. The for’ard pair of hydroplanes were level, the after ones tilted in a few degrees of rise. Bubble central. Out of habit his eye checked the diving panel, where the ERA of the watch lounged, and saw that all main vent levers were in the “shut” position. It was ERA Summers on the panel,Telegraphist Flyte on asdics, and the planesmen were Lovesay and Stapleton. The gunlayer, Creagh, was helmsman; he was yawning, displaying broken front teeth—damage incurred in opening beer bottles, it was said. Most faces were well stubbled: Ultra had sailed from Malta on Wednesday, and today was Saturday.
Snores from the wardroom. Could be anyone’s; Paul couldn’t detect McClure’s Scottish accent in them, though. He wondered whether the navigator had found his way back into that dream …
You had your own dreams, anyway. Waking ones, patterns of awareness behind the conscious mind which you could bring out and inspect when there was time and your thoughts delved back to them. Call them thoughts, perhaps, or worries; but images of the outside world and people, some of them so very distant and all of it so utterly removed from this environment, had more dream quality than thought about them. His father, for instance—Nick Everard, somewhere out East and commanding the cruiser Defiant, and that whole area crumbling to Jap invasion. The whole of the East Indies and nearly all the Pacific islands had already fallen; Australia was under threat. You could only hope, and pray—and wish to God you’d written a letter, the one you owed him but hadn’t had first the courage and then the time to write.
“Hydrophone effect, sir!”
Telegraphist Flyte wide-eyed, bolt upright on the asdic stool: the fore planesman, Stapleton, turning his prematurely balding head to stare at Flyte censoriously as if he’d disturbed his dreams … Flyte amplified, “Green one-two-zero, sir. Started up sudden like.”
“Captain in the control room!”
“All right.” Ruck’s acknowledgement … There were no doors, and the wardroom was so close that if anyone farted in his sleep the watch keepers in here would hear it. A general stirring in there as others woke: and the captain was beside Paul—a medium-sized, dark-haired and dark-jowled, square-built man in flannel trousers and a torn shirt. Twenty-six years old. He asked Flyte, “True bearing?”
“Oh-five-six, sir, steady.”
If it had only just started up—and from its bearing it could only be that E-boat—you wouldn’t get much of a clue yet as to which way it was heading. It could be coming to drop depthcharges, or just to follow and continue listening while it waited for other ships to join it, or it could be setting out to patrol the coastline, or even going home for breakfast.
“Revs increasing, sir, bearing steady.” Flyte added, “Closing, sir.”
Two minutes passed like ten. Paul watching the trim. Ears strained, eyes watchful in the subdued lighting, waiting for their own first sound of the enemy’s propellers. When they were close enough, you’d hear them without headphones.
“Still steady, sir. Fast turbine, sounds like an E-boat.”
“Half ahead together, starboard fifteen.”
With its own engines and screws kicking up a row, the E-boat wouldn’t hear them now. Ruck was moving Ultra out of its path, in case this might be some kind of attack.
“Fifteen of starboard wheel on, sir.” Creagh was a Londoner, and sounded like it. The messenger reported,”Both motors half ahead grouped down, sir.”
“Steer three-six-oh.”
The motors hummed. With wheel on, there was a tendency for the bow to rise, and the fore planesman was putting on some dive to counteract it.
“Bearing drawing left, sir. Fast HE, right to left.” It wasn’t going to pass over the top of them, then. For courses to bring ships into collision, the bearing between them had to remain constant. “Slow ahead together.” “Course north, sir.”
Wykeham appeared in the gangway by the chart table, the few feet of space between wardroom and control room. Tall, fair-haired, with an aloof expression rather like a camel’s. In fact the appearance was deceptive: he was an Old Etonian and a jazz fiend, and in Gibraltar he’d taken on two civilians and a policeman, knocked all three cold and got away undetected. McClure bore witness to it, although their versions of the affair differed slightly.
Ruck raised a finger …
You could hear it—the E-boat’s screws. Passing ahead, from right to left. A rhythmic, scrunching sound: but it was already beginning to fade, drawing away on the port quarter. Ruck said, “Stop starboard.”
The question was, would it hold its course and speed, or would it stop and resume listening? Putting the same question another way, had its captain ever been aware that there was a submarine here at all?
“Starboard motor stopped, sir, port motor slow ahead.”
You couldn’t hear any E-boat now. Ruck asked Flyte, “Well?”
“Still going away, sir. Revs constan
t.”
Five minutes later, even asdics couldn’t hear anything. Ruck moved over to the chart. He told Wykeham, “He’d have been on roughly this course—here …”
“Heading for Taormina.”
“Perhaps. We know they have Mas-boats at Catania and E-boats at Augusta, down here. It’d make sense to base some nearer the straits as well.”
Taormina was only about twenty-five miles down-coast from Messina. Very likely that E-boat—or Mas-boat, if it was Italian instead of German— was going home for breakfast … Ruck craned round to tell Flyte, “Listen carefully all round. Tell me if you hear anything.”
The asdic oscillator/receiver was housed in a dome at the for’ard end of the boat’s keel. The operator here in the control room trained it around inside its dome by twisting a knob with two fingers: Flyte did it delicately, with his little finger raised. The knob was the centrepiece of a compass ring, so he could see which way he was pointing it and from which direction any sound was coming.
“All clear all round, sir.”
Ruck nodded. “Sixty feet, Sub.”
“Sixty feet, sir …”
The hydroplane operators swung their brass controlling wheels. The after planes—manned in this watch by Leading Seaman Lovesay, the second coxswain—dipped first, pulling the stern down so as to provide up-angle on the boat as a whole. Then they swung the other way, to join the fore planes in guiding her up towards the surface. Paul meanwhile used the order instrument, which was up above the planesmen’s heads, to adjust the trim by letting small quantities of sea into the mid-ships trim-tank as she rose. Rising into shallower and therefore less dense water, a submarine’s hull expanded, displacing more water and thus becoming lighter, and you had to compensate for it or she’d become too light to be held at that newly ordered depth.
There she was, now, settled. He reported, “Sixty feet, sir.”
“Hear anything, Flyte?”
“No, sir, nothing.”
“Slow ahead together.” Ruck told Paul, “Let’s take a look up top. Twenty-eight feet.”
Bringing her up again, this time right up to periscope depth. Working at it, watching the planesmen and using the trimline to compensate again, it occurred to Paul that if the E-boat’s skipper was really crafty he could be sitting up there, waiting for them to show. He wondered if he’d simulated, slowed and stopped, fooled old Flyte?
Thirty feet. He switched the order instrument to “stop flooding” and to “shut O suction and inboard vent.” Ruck moved to the after periscope, the small-diameter one, and told ERA Summers, “Up.” Summers lifted one of a pair of steel levers, like a motor car’s handbrake, and the shiny, yellowish tube hissed upwards.
“Twenty-eight feet, sir.”
Ruck grunted acknowledgement; he grabbed the handles of the periscope as its lower end emerged from the well in which it lived when it was stowed. He jerked the handles down, pressed his eyes against the rubber-capped lenses: in that position his body was still straightening as the periscope came right up and stopped. Now he was pivoting, swinging around for a quick, preliminary search. This smaller “attack” periscope had no magnification in it: its top end was not much thicker than a Churchillian cigar, and was thus less easy for an enemy to spot.
He’d done one complete circle, and sent it down, moved to the for’ard periscope and gestured for it. Summers had that bigger one shooting up; it had variable magnification and also a tilting sky search so you could look out for aircraft.
“Stop one screw, sir?”
“Yes. Stop port.”
A similar performance now, using the big periscope first in low power, then high. And obviously there were no dangers visible. Ruck was relaxing, circling quite slowly, examining the coastline. He asked the helmsman without taking his eyes from the lenses, “Ship’s head north, is it?”
“Aye, sir—”
“Port ten.” He leaned back to glance at the periscope’s bearing-ring, a graduated circle around it on the deckhead. “Steer three-two-five.”The handles snapped up: Summers sent the brass tube sliding down, glistening with grease and with droplets of water gleaming like jewels as they trickled down. He told Paul, “Get a fix on the chart, Sub. It’s light enough. Then adjust the course to pass one mile clear of Cape dell’Armi.”
He’d gone, to stretch out on his bunk, no doubt, leaving the watch to Paul. You began to notice the quiet again, the peaceful warmth of a dived patrol. A peace that could be shattered very suddenly, of course …
But there wasn’t much left of this watch, now. In twenty minutes Wykeham would be along to take over, and in less than five the watch itself, these control room hands, would change. Officers changed watches at a different time because during the main change-round the boat’s trim needed watching and adjusting.
“Up periscope. Stand by for some bearings, Jupp.”
Jupp, a torpedoman, was messenger of the watch. The ship’s company called him “Dracula,” on account of his sunken eyes and rather long, prominent teeth. Paul gave him three shore bearings to write down, together with his own observation of the ship’s head by gyro as each was taken. At the chart table, Paul translated relative bearings into true ones, put the fix on and labelled it with the time, 0555. The course to steer to pass one mile off the cape was—he laid it off on the chart, then ran the parallel ruler to the compass rose—309 degrees.
“Port ten. Steer three-oh-nine.”
Creagh spun his wheel. Ultra would have to cover five miles before dell’Armi was abeam, and at this speed it would take two hours. Paul put the periscope up again, made a quick, precautionary all-round sweep of sea and sky, and then took a closer look at the coast as the light increased. Just about on the beam was a river’s entrance to the sea, a deep gorge with a stone railway bridge across it. The railway track hugged the coastline from Spartivento right around and into the straits, and if no better targets turned up in the next few days Ruck planned to try some gunnery. A train crossing a bridge would make the best target. There were plenty of bridges and lots of trains, and Ultra had a 3-inch gun: she was the first of the U-class boats to have one, the earlier boats having only 12-pounders, which were useless. Until now the flotilla’s train-wrecking activities had been carried out by commandos landing in canoes, folboats, and armed with plastic explosive; a platoon of commandos was attached to the flotilla largely for this purpose.
No trains in sight at this moment. They’d seen a few yesterday, and begun to compile a timetable. Paul pushed the handles up: “Down periscope.”
He was looking forward to turning in, getting an hour’s sleep before breakfast. For the duration of the patrol your watches were two hours on, four hours off, but mealtimes, other jobs and interludes of action interrupted those four-hour periods, and it was never much effort to roll into a bunk and fall asleep. He’d have no problem at all doing that now.
“Happy, Second?”
Leading Seaman Lovesay glanced round from his seat at the after planes. Being second coxswain meant he was responsible for gear and operations on and inside the casing—the steel upper deck, the perforated platform built on top of the pressure-hull and on which you walked when the submarine was in harbour or entering or leaving it. The gear included the anchor and its chain cable, wires and ropes and the timber gangplank and so on—everything up there except the gun, which belonged to Creagh. Both men came directly under Paul, since he was both weapons officer and casing officer. Lovesay was in his early twenties, heavily built, with a round, genial face and a legendary capacity for beer. He nodded. “Bearing up, sir.”
“Time we all got our heads down, anyway. Is it Blue watch, now?” Lovesay confirmed it, and Paul reached for the microphone of the Tannoy broadcast. “Blue watch, watch diving. Blue watch …”
He was busy with the trim then, as the hands changed over. There was a difference of a couple of stone, for instance, in the weights of Leading Seaman Lovesay, who was going for’ard, and the coxswain, Chief Petty Officer Logan, who’d come to reli
eve him on the after planes. That change on its own would call for several gallons of salt water to be pumped aft as compensation. Other changes would tend to balance it, and you might end up much as you’d started, but if you hadn’t taken care during the change-over the submarine could have gone out of control, either diving steeply or breaking surface—which, this close to an enemy coast, was very much to be avoided.
He’d put the other screw to slow ahead, to maintain control more easily. Now he told the Blue watch messenger, a skinny youngster named Furness who’d been in trouble with some woman up on the Clyde, “Stop starboard.”
“Stop starboard, sir …” The telegraph bell rang in the motor room, as Furness passed them the order.
“We’re still a touch heavy aft, cox’n. I want to let it settle a bit, that’s all.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Hector Logan’s voice sounded as if he had gravel in his throat. He was short, lean, broad-shouldered, with a seamed, weathered face. He’d have been oversized for a jockey, but he had that horseman’s look about him. He asked, without turning his head from the gauges in front of him, “In the straits again, are we, sir?”
“Just easing ourselves in now.”
“Let’s ‘ope some bloody Wop comes easin’ ‘imself out, then.”
You could reckon that something would. Targets were plentiful, these days, with the enemy struggling to feed Rommel’s army in the desert— at this precise juncture, to supply his advance towards Egypt. In fact it had slowed, pretty well stopped, while he tried to build up his forces for a renewal of the push and to take Tobruk—then Egypt, the Canal, the whole Middle East …This Malta submarine flotilla existed primarily to stop the supplies—fuel, ammunition, food, equipment and men—from getting across to Africa: and the enemy, well aware of it, were going all out to smash the flotilla. Two boats had been lost last month—February— on patrol: a detached observer might have seen that as natural attrition, because operational submarines did risk being sunk, obviously, and the 10th Flotilla’s losses were running at about 60 per cent. But there was more than that to it. The Germans had moved U-boats from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, and shifted more bombers from their Russian front to Sicily, not only to strike at Malta—particularly its dockyard and airfields—as they’d been doing for a long time now, but specifically to stop the operation of submarines. They were going for the base itself, the Lazaretto building on Manoel Island, as well as for submarines in harbour. Parachute mines last month had destroyed the seamen’s messdecks and the hospital; the frequency and weight of the attacks were increasing steadily.
A Share of Honour: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 4 Page 2