A Share of Honour: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 4

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Take them back, please, Sub. And get them into the Wrennery by ten if you can. Better get moving.”

  Sharp began, “Jack, this is my boat—”

  “If you want to keep it, get these girls ashore.”

  Sharp changed colour. The others showed mixed surprise and embarrassment. But they were moving. Jack smiled at Sally Thirsk. “I’ll be writing to Paul in a day or two. I’ll give him your love, shall I?”

  “If you like.”

  He hadn’t the slightest intention of writing to Paul: it had been something to say, an olive branch. Dixon muttered, “I’ll see you all to the jetty.” The blonde was thanking Sharp for his hospitality, and trying to include Jack in her smile as well. Sally, Paul’s girlfriend, seemed nervous and tongue-tied: she was, of course, extremely young. It was very awkward for Sharp, obviously, but it was his own fault because he shouldn’t have had them on board in the first place.

  Paul’s girl said abruptly, as if the words were forcing themselves out, “I heard that news broadcast about the battle in the Far East and your father’s—I mean Paul’s father’s—ship … I do hope he’s all right.”

  He told her drily, “He will be. Don’t worry.”

  “Yes, it did sound as if—”

  She’d blushed. The blonde one, Maureen, interrupted: “Coming,

  Sally?”

  They straggled out, silent now with embarrassment. Sharp looked furious. Alone with him, Jack said, “I’ll accept that drink you were offering me, now. Just to show we’re still on the best of terms.”

  “Think we are, do you?”

  “Well. Put it this way. If we aren’t, it’d be your loss, not mine. I’m running the NTU party; I’m totally responsible for it, and I’m not risking having anything go wrong, not even for the sake of your sunny smiles.” He shook his head. “Cut out the nonsense, Tubby. I’ll have a drink with you here, or you can come inboard and have one with me in Gourock. Take your choice.”

  “Here.” Sharp poured a tot of Plymouth gin, the neck of the bottle rattling a little on the glass. Jack took it and added water to it. “We’ll forget it now, Tubby. But you won’t have any more Wrens on board this boat. Or any other outsiders either.”

  “You’d get me fired, is that the message?”

  “Without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “Sure our masters would oblige you?”

  “Certain. Not only is this my show, but I’m irreplaceable and you’re not. Frankly, yours is a chauffeur’s job, to get us there and possibly bring us back. I could take a spare ML skipper and teach him to drive this craft in half an hour. I could do it on the way to you-know-where, if necessary.”

  “You don’t mince words, do you?”

  “No reason to, is there?”

  “In fact you’re quite a shit.” He wasn’t smiling. And he’d had quite a lot of gin, Jack guessed. “I mean frankly and privately, just between the two of us.”

  “I told you, Tubby. Being liked or disliked doesn’t matter to me in the least. What does matter is getting the job done and if possible staying alive. If you and I can work together without friction, fine. If we can’t, you don’t fit.”

  Sharp smiled. “On which happy and fraternal note—”

  “Up yours.”

  Drinking … Sharp studying him, over the glass. Then he put it down, and sighed. “OK. I should not have had them down here. But Bellamy’s working in their outfit, and they’ve been pestering him to wangle a visit for them, so—” he shrugged. “I said OK, just this once. There’s no damage, is there?”

  “They could spot something, and talk about it afterwards. To friends, or family, or even to be overheard in some pub. A spy doesn’t go around in a black cloak and clutching a dagger, these days. He might even look like a naval officer. And this thing’s dicey enough without risking leaks. Just imagine the reception they’d lay on for us, if they guessed we were coming!”

  It was why he hadn’t telephoned Fiona during the weekend. He’d wanted to: to hear her voice, tell her he was still alive and crazy about her, that he would be back. And to hear from her that it was all solid and watertight between them … But there could, remotely, have been a risk in it. Suppose she’d told some close friend that she didn’t know whether she’d see him again—even that he was off on some kind of special operation? And someone else picked it up and wanted to know about the operation? There were such people, they existed … Suppose her telephone was being tapped, and a call came through from him at Falmouth? Then they’d know where to start sniffing. The odds might be thousands to one against, but the possibility was there.

  It had taken a lot of self-control, not to pick up a telephone. She might have been working, anyway, though. She was in the MTC and they did have weekend duties, and she’d owe her friends a few after all the time she’d spent with him, swapping duties to match his own weekends in London … Which seemed so long ago, now. At least six months, it might have been, since he’d said goodbye to her on that last Sunday evening.

  He’d write to her, before they pushed off. To his mother, too. For no reason except it was the sort of thing one did, that was expected, in circumstances like these. Several of his team had been drawing up wills, and asking him to witness them.

  A formality, he thought. A precaution. Like looking left and right before you crossed a street.

  Sharp asked him, “What was that young one—Sally—saying about some relation of yours in the Far East?”

  “Well.” He sipped his gin. “There was a news release a few nights ago about action in the Java Sea. Did you hear it?” Sharp shook his head. Jack told him, “My half-brother is captain of Defiant. One of the old Dauntless class. And it seems she was the only ship to come out of it intact. The only one they didn’t mention as being sunk, anyway.”

  “He is all right, then.”

  Nick, Jack thought, would always be “all right.” As if it had been ordained, right from the start, that he was to be the survivor. Right from Jutland in 1916, when the elder brother had drowned and Nick had come out of it by the skin of his teeth and with the first of his many decorations—as well as having become the heir to the baronetcy. He’d hogged it all, and the luck seemed still to be sticking to him. Leaving it to Messrs Jack and Paul Everard to pay the family’s dues to bad luck?

  But—lucky in war, unlucky in love. Nick didn’t know it yet …

  Sharp murmured, staring down into his glass and looking sad, “Four days. It’s going to be bloody difficult, keeping my hands off Maureen for four whole days.”

  Making an attempt at a joke: accepting force majeure and deciding to remain friends in order to keep his job … Dixon came back, and his relief at finding the atmosphere so cordial was plain. Sharp told him, “Pour yourself a drink, Harry.”

  “Right.” He asked Jack, “You—sir?”

  “No more, thanks … Whereabouts in Canada are you from?”

  “Toronto.” He put the bottle down. “Know it?”

  “Halifax is the only bit of Canada I’ve seen.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s a hell of a lot of it west of there.” The Canadian raised his glass. “Here’s to Friday.”

  Friday, which would be the twenty-seventh, was the day the Chariot force was scheduled to sail for St Nazaire. If it did sail. There’d been a problem brewing up in the past few days, and Hawkins had told Jack about it. There’d been some mention of it this evening, too, on board Atherstone. It was the business of the RAF’s contribution, the diversionary air attack they were supposed to be laying on in order to distract the attention of the German gunners. To start with, Churchill had vetoed the second stage of it, the bombing of the Old Town area, for fear of killing Frenchmen; and now the RAF had cut the bomber force from seventy to thirty-five—the aircraft were required for some other purpose, apparently. The army brigadier in charge of planning was raising hell about it; C-in-C Plymouth—Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, who carried the overall naval responsibility now—seemed to think it didn’t matter; a l
ot of tempers were rising to boiling-point, and Mountbatten was being asked to intervene. It was being hinted that without the promised RAF cooperation the Chiefs of Staff Committee might, on the Army’s recommendation, propose cancellation.

  Nobody believed it would be cancelled. But the mere possibility of that happening was dispiriting. Trolley had told Jack that the effect on the commandos’ morale would be devastating. They were at a peak of readiness, really straining at the leash.

  The dress rehearsal, Exercise Vivid, had gone off quite well. The ships had been able to practise their different steaming formations and other manoeuvres, and the commandos had familiarized themselves with the processes of embarking and disembarking, settling down for the sea passage, and so on. They’d simulated an attack on the docks at Devonport. The main lesson had been that powerful searchlights at close range had a blinding effect that could lead to a lot of confusion if you weren’t ready for it. The NTU knew it already, but the ML skippers had found the experience salutary. Officially the object of the exercise had been to test the dockyard defences, and the defenders—including Home Guards—had beaten off the assault, to their own considerable satisfaction.

  Campbeltown, the former American destroyer which had more recently become British, now looked decidedly German with her twin raked funnels. Other changes gave her a grimly combative appearance: with armour plating all round her bridge and wheelhouse, armoured screens welded to her decks as protection for her commandos during the approach to the lock gate, eight new Oerlikons crouching in circular armoured nests and a 12-pounder on her foc’sl, she was more missile than ship—especially if you happened to know that her foc’sl was packed solid with high explosive.

  She’d been lightened, and drew three feet less than she had originally, but it was still touch-and-go whether she’d manage to scrape over the Loire estuary mudbanks, and the need for the highest possible tide was one consideration in the timing. Another was the fact that the nights were becoming shorter, and a reasonable period of darkness was essential for the withdrawal. They would be sailing from Falmouth on Friday 27 March, and the assault would take place at 0130 on the twenty-ninth.

  If Campbeltown ran aground in the river, her commandos would be taken off her in MLs and the force would go in without her. The caisson, the one target that had to be destroyed, would then be dealt with by the commando demolition experts with plastic explosive, and by MTB 74’s delayed-action torpedoes.

  If MTB 74 made it to the target area. She’d been getting a lot of machinery problems lately.

  Hawkins had told him, “There are always last-minute snags, on this kind of jaunt. It’ll be all right on the day …”

  The reason Ultra had been recalled, less than a week after she’d sailed for that fourth patrol, was that a new convoy operation was being organized from the Alexandria end. Four ships were to be sailed for Malta under the protection of Admiral Sir Philip Vian’s small force of cruisers and destroyers, and Shrimp Simpson was preparing as many of the 10th Flotilla boats as possible for patrols off the Italian ports as distant cover to the convoy.

  Vian hadn’t caught up with the two enemy convoys he’d gone hunting for, apparently, but he’d collected the cruiser Cleopatra and the destroyer Kingston out of Malta, despite heavy Luftwaffe attacks; having gained one cruiser he’d then lost one—his own flagship, Naiad, who’d been torpedoed and sunk fifty miles north of Sidi Barrani, during the return to Alexandria. He and most of her ship’s company had been picked up by Naiad’s sister ship Dido.

  Ultra entered Marsamxett Harbour at dawn, Roger flying, and berthed alongside Lazaretto for long enough to de-store and get the sailors’ gear ashore, and to land half of them for a two-day sojourn in the rest camp. Paul had volunteered to stay with the boat. For one thing, there were torpedoes to be embarked, but anyway this was to be only a short spell in harbour. Also, he could make himself useful in the harbour diving routine—which, since it was still a novelty, he enjoyed. A final consideration was that a short stand-off might be good for McClure, who was still suffering from the news of his brother’s death and the effect of it on his parents. He’d been doing a good job of trying to hide it, but you couldn’t hide much for long when you lived at such close quarters.

  Wykeham decided he’d stay too. In fact he had little choice, because there was a lot to be done before they sailed again. Wednesday night was scheduled as departure time. Ruck had accepted an invitation to stay with friends of Shrimp’s, a retired officer and his wife who had a house on the other side of Valletta: the husband had some job on the Governor’s staff, and kept open house for submarine captains.

  Janaway, the signalman, had reported on board as soon as Ultra came alongside. He’d been passed fit for duty. He was critical of Tibbits’ workmanship on the Jolly Roger: the stitches were too big, he complained, and so was the star under the new crossed gunbarrels. He refused to accept that a 4000-ton ship did warrant a bigger star than would have been accorded to a tug or a schooner. Lovesay, the second coxswain, teased him, saying the only thing Janaway didn’t like was the fact he’d missed the patrol: if he’d been along with them, he’d have sewn on a star twice that size. They nearly came to blows about it.

  But there was also a new bar sewn in the upper left quadrant of the flag, for the fast escorted ship they’d sunk in that night action on the surface, a week ago. Shrimp Simpson knew all about it, even before they’d got back to Malta, from Intelligence sources. The ship had been the German motor vessel Vulkan, 7300 tons, and she’d been carrying a load of Tiger tanks to Benghazi, replenishments for Rommel’s armoured divisions. Transporting tanks had been the Vulkan’s specialist role, and there’d been several attempts in the past to get her. Her sinking was a feather in Ruck’s cap, and the loss of the brand-new battle tanks could be reckoned as a serious one for the Afrika Korps.

  The main successes by other 10th Flotilla boats during the past week had been two U-boats sunk, one by Unbeaten (Lieutenant-Commander E. A. Woodward) and the other by Upholder (Wanklyn), both in the Adriatic. It was a second enemy submarine kill for both of them: they’d each sunk one in January.

  On the debit side, Sokol had been near-missed while lying alongside Lazaretto. Thirty-six battery containers had been cracked, and she was now in dockyard hands. And a major setback had been the destruction of Shrimp’s pig-farm and the rest of the menagerie with it. A direct hit during one of the many air attacks had killed all the livestock, including the bad-tempered turkey. All the meat that had been recoverable was being minced up to provide a final boost to the flotilla rations; but those roast pork dinners would be sadly missed … Also, there’d been bombs dropped two days ago on Sliema, the northern suburb not far from the base in which submariners had flats with the object of getting away from the bombing. Those used by the wardrooms of Sokol, Urge, Unbeaten, P34 and Unslaked had been virtually demolished. Luckily none of the sailors’ flats had been hit; and whether the Luftwaffe could have known they were attacking submariners’ accommodation was a matter for speculation. The loss of the farm was the more serious of these mishaps anyway. Malta was down to siege rations: the workmen tunnelling out new underground workshops at the Lazaretto base, for instance, were now reduced to 900 calories a day, as opposed to the official “norm” of 3000. That convoy was needed, all right.

  Paul took Ultra out for her daily dip, on that first day back from patrol. As they cast off from Lazaretto, Janaway carefully lowered and folded the Jolly Roger; he was intending to unpick the offending stitches during the day. And Paul had unopened mail in his pocket, for perusal in the underwater peace and quiet. There was nothing from his father, but there were two letters from the USA, one from his mother and one from a girl he’d known in college. He took the boat out to her allotted buoy—just around the bulge of Manoel Island and in the wider part of Marsamxett Harbour—and Lovesay secured a bow-wire to it; then he backed her so she was just clear of it, and flooded her down gently to rest in about sixty feet of water. He wondered, reading
letters in his bunk, whether any of his correspondents could have believed that their letters would be opened and read on the bottom of a Mediterranean harbour.

  He heard a few explosions during the day—they’d be bombs falling in the harbour, probably aimed at the base and landing in the creek—but nothing came near Ultra. When he surfaced her that evening the skies were clear of raiders: within minutes, half a dozen gleaming wet submarines were queuing to get in alongside Lazaretto or to the off-lying buoys. Paul secured Ultra between buoys, and two other boats berthed on her, with the long floating gangway linking them to the gallery steps.

  That evening, best of the week, was ITMA night. Tommy Handley, with Colonel Chinstrap and Mona Lott, and others … Every loudspeaker in every submarine as well as in the base itself had the familiar catch-phrases rolling out. Then the BBC news from London: it started with an admission that the Japanese had landed in the Andaman Islands—a stepping-stone from Burma to Ceylon?—and continued with an Admiralty announcement of new successes by our Mediterranean submarines. Those selected for mention were the two U-boats and the German tank-transport: the names of Wanklyn, Woodward and Ruck were given as commanding officers of the submarines concerned.

  So Ruck was one of the greats, now?

  Most of the flotilla was either here already or due back within the next day or so. Unslaked wasn’t back: but she had a long haul from her billet off Palermo—round the top-left corner of Sicily and then the dived passage through QBB 255, the Sicilian minefield. The base was crowded, with so many in at the same time, all preparing for the convoy operation, and there were a lot of friends around, some of whom he’d missed seeing for some while through being at sea when they were in harbour, and vice versa; there was a very cheerful atmosphere in and around the heavily bomb-damaged base.

  Work went on all night. In Ultra, four torpedoes in the tubes had to be hauled back out of them so that CPO Gaffney and his assistants could perform maintenance routines on them; then they had to be reloaded, so as to leave room in the TSC racks for the four reloads which would be embarked subsequently, up at the torpedo depot. Electricians were working on the gyro, and ERAs had a job to do on the after periscope gland, which had been leaking unacceptably fast during the last few days off Tripoli. The engineroom was strewn with dismantled bits of the port diesel, and in the control room battery-boards had been taken up for Roffey to top up some of the cells: you could only get around the boat by jumping or climbing over things or swinging Tarzan-like from overhead pipes. But by dawn most of the loose items were back in place and the chasms covered, so that Wykeham could pilot her out into the harbour for another day in hiding.