“Don’t know what to make of it, sir.” Parker shook his head. Pinkish scalp showed through thin, pale yellow hair. “Job for ‘em inboard, I reckon.” By “inboard” he meant “in the depot ship”; it made no difference that it happened to be a shore base.
“Course one-five-oh, sir.”
Ruck told Parker and Newton, “Leave it now. Leave it switched off.” He looked at the clock: it was coming up for 5 pm. “Silent routine. Pass the word quietly.” He meant not by telephone, but through the bulkhead voicepipes from compartment to compartment. “We’ll stay at this depth for one hour, then come up and—”
He’d stopped talking. Listening, to a distant churn of screws. A murmur: it grew—then faded. He waited a few moments, to make sure of it, then began again: “One hour, then we’ll go up and see what’s what. If they leave us alone that long. Settle down, everyone.” He let himself down, to sit on the deckboards with his back against the slope of the ladder. Quinn sat too, and Pool, and the telegraphman. And if anything came south through the straits now, Paul thought—also squatting—nobody’d know it. Victory to the trawlermen, who’d have ensured some surface force a safe passage. But Ruck had no option, he had to get his submarine out to sea.
With or without asdics, Paul guessed, Ultra would be coming back inshore tomorrow. You could bet on it—on a whole day dodging around—deaf, most likely, and when she had to go deep, blind as well.
The hour dragged by. Two dreads lingered in his mind: one was the sound of the trawlers closing in again and finding them, the other the likelihood of Bob McClure agitating for a game of noughts and crosses.
To make this less likely he edged away a bit and turned his back on him, pretending to be asleep while he listened—as everyone else was doing— for those screws. But it was all right: at six, when Ruck ordered “Open up from depthcharging” and brought her up cautiously to periscope depth, sky and surface were clear of enemies. He pushed the handles up.
“Forty feet. Relax to watch diving, Number One. We’ll surface at eight.”
McClure had the first surface watch. It was rough: the boat was slamming through the waves, and night air sucking down through the tower was cold, made colder by the salt water coming with it. Wykeham had proposed rigging the “bird bath,” a canvas affair that fitted round the ladder to contain the splashing, but Ruck said it wasn’t worth it. He might have had a premonition of what sort of night it was going to be.
Before eight-thirty a pair of MMM lights swung to the vertical position: McClure dived the boat, and what sounded like an E-boat or Mas-boat passed over the top ten minutes later. Ruck surfaced her again at nine.
Supper, consisting of hash with boiled potatoes, was ready at nine-thirty. Ultra was steering south, to put a few extra miles between herself and the Measures, with a standing charge on one side to feed the battery. It was a case of starting from scratch now, because an interrupted charge was useless. To do any good it had to be maintained over a period of hours and gradually reduced as the density of the electrolyte neared its ceiling.
Ruck leaned back in the wardroom chair, and spoke in the direction of the galley. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” was tinkling from the loudspeaker, a tenuous link with some other, utterly remote world.
“Very good hash, Shaw!”
With the boat staggering around as she was, you had to hold on to it as well as eat it. Shaw’s stubbled countenance appeared round the bulkhead.
“I’ll convey your compliments to the chef, sir.” Wykeham muttered, “My God!”
Ruck asked Shaw, “Going to be a maître d’hôtel after the war, are you?” “Gentleman’s gentleman, sir, I thought.”
He’d withdrawn. Wykeham said, “He’s been reading Wodehouse. Sees himself as Jeeves, in a smart house in Mayfair, up to his goolies in buck-shee port.” He looked at Ruck. “Likely to be a bit tricky tomorrow without asdics, sir?”
Ruck hesitated. “Well—”
The klaxon roared: ear-splitting, beating engine noise and the boat’s violent, sea-bashing motion. Ruck and Wykeham vanished: Paul hung back to let the rush get by. The racket of the sea was all directly overhead, as her hull slipped under the waves leaving only the tower for them to hammer at; as he arrived in the control room McClure was just appearing, feet-first and soaking wet, and the needles in the gauges were circling past the twenty-feet marks. By this time the boat was quiet and steady, under all that turbulence.
“Looked like an E-boat, sir, reciprocal course, on the port bow.”
“Forty feet. Group down.” Ruck turned to McClure. “Same fellow coming back, perhaps. Think he saw us?”
“No reason to think so, sir.” McClure muttered to Paul, unzipping his Ursula jacket as he edged past him, “It’s a real bitch, up there.”
It was where they had to be, though. Ruck gave the E-boat a quarter of an hour to get clear, then surfaced again. If it had been sitting up there waiting for them, he wouldn’t have known: with no asdics, and the periscope useless in pitch darkness and bad weather, he’d had to take a chance on it … He said afterwards, shedding a wet oilskin in the gangway opposite the wardroom, just after 10 pm, “Let’s hope that’s the last of it.”
Wykeham put his hands together and intoned, “Amen …” From the speaker over his head a girl singer was insisting huskily that all she needed was to know in the night the nearness of you. He opened his eyes and murmured,”If I were in a position to oblige you, madam, be sure I would.” Paul was getting dressed for his watch: an extra sweater, and a towel around the neck under the Ursula. You’d think the jacket’s hood would stop water going down your neck, but it never did. Sitting, now, to slide the trouser legs over his seaboots, so the boots wouldn’t fill with water. In a U-class submarine’s bridge you weren’t far above water level even when the sea was flat: when it was rough, you were virtually in it. And the deck you stood on, in any submarine’s bridge, had brass-bound holes in it, so as to let water run down when she surfaced; but water could fly up through them just as easily.
Ruck said, “I hope not to see you again for a couple of hours, Sub. But for Christ’s sake pull the plug if you have the slightest reason to.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“And keep an eye on those bloody shore lights.”
With luck they’d be out of range of the Mysterious Measures by now, he thought, as he climbed up through the hard rush of air into the wet, bucking bridge … McClure told him that Ruck had given him hell for not having known those trawlers had been closing up on them. Up here on the bridge, after they’d surfaced at eight, he’d fairly chewed his balls off, he said … OK, so he’d left it too long without shoving the periscope up: he hadn’t had any way of knowing the fucking asdics had gone for a loop, had he?
He went below, to his ration of corned beef hash … Those lights were only pinpoints, hardly visible even through dry binoculars … Salt water bursting over the bridge was more or less continuous, and from time to time green sea came solid, dumping itself right into it.
Searching, straining his eyes into the wet blackness, knowing how easy it would be not to see some threat close at hand: imagining Ultra as a dark, plunging shape in the overlapping circles of some enemy’s binoculars. If you let yourself feel it, there was a hollow in your gut. But awareness of danger was, surely, essential to survival.
Twin points of light still horizontal …
He swung back, to search the sea ahead again: white-streaked, heaving. Ultra’s long and slim, bat-eared bow soared while her after-part buried itself in the sea; then the bow came crashing down, smashing and ploughing black water into white foam that rolled aft engulfing, exploding upwards, outwards, overhead and underfoot, solid first and then its residue like heavy rain as her forepart came clear and began its climb again, the submarine rolling hard the other way after her dizzy tilt to port. Inside that forepart, that long gyrating tube of steel pointing like a finger at the clouds now, men were sleeping …
The towel inside his jacket was already
soaked. It felt better to have it there when you went up on watch, but it never did any good. Jammed between the front curve of the bridge and the for’ard periscope standard, eyes slitted into flying sea, muscle-power exerting itself in natural opposition to the boat’s unremitting attempts to dislodge him, he thought that one factor in Ultra’s favour tonight was that Italians weren’t exactly celebrated as foul-weather sailors. They’d tend to be inside their harbours, or in sheltered water. Although that E-boat—
German, probably; E-boat as distinct from Mas-boat. So that thought hadn’t got far … Ultra was listing hard to starboard, leaning over almost to the horizontal and then hanging, as if in two minds whether to swing back or to carry on over, turn turtle: and light sparked—grew—fierce, white, right overhead, flood-lighting a wide circle of surrounding sea. He heard one of the look-outs shout, “Starshell!” and he was already turning and opening his mouth to shout, “Down below!” Shutting the voice-pipe cock and a green wave slopping over as the dark figures behind him jumbled into one mass melting downwards, Ultra standing on her tail now as if to look up and see what the hell that flare was; Paul was in the hatch, a thumb pressing the klaxon knob while the other hand grabbed the underside of the heavy lid to drag it down over his head. Klaxon-roar down below and sea thunderous around the tower; one clip on, now the other: his fingers, stiffened by cold, fumbled as they slid the retaining pins into the clips. He slid clattering down the ladder.
Ruck was asking the look-outs, “Starshell? Sure?”
Paul told him, “More like an aircraft flare, sir.”
“Sixty feet.”
Steadying, as she nosed down into blessedly calm water.
From HM S/m Ultra’s log, night 26/27 March …
2250 Dived for aircraft flare.
2308 Surfaced. Co. 150°, 300 revs stbd, standing charge port.
2313 Dived, shore d/f lights vertical.
2328 Surfaced. Co. 150°, 300 revs stbd, stdg chge port.
0100 Altered co. 320°.
0445 Dived in posn 37°50’ .5 N, 15°33’.4 E Altered co. 005°.
They’d dived on the watch—in Paul’s watch. It had come as a surprise to be shaken for it at 0400 and realize there’d been no alarms since he’d turned in, half an hour after midnight. Now they were at periscope depth and nosing up towards the Messina Straits again with Cape dell’Armi eight miles on the bow; daylight was growing greyly from the east and the weather looked as if it might be moderating. There was shelter in here, of course, from the nor’wester.
Ultra’s telegraphists had intercepted a signal at 0130 this morning to S10 from one of the boats patrolling off Taranto, reporting that heavy surface units had passed southward during the night.
“Up periscope.”
ERA Summers sent it up. The small after periscope, to start with. Without an operator on the asdic stool, the control room looked half empty. And it was a peculiar feeling, to have no hearing: you realized how much you’d relied on that machine and how handicapped you were going to be without it. He’d completed the search, left the small periscope to find its own way down into its well, crossed to the big one as it rose. Pulling the handles down, switching to low power, to start with an air search. Then, still in low power, a quick all-round inspection of the sea, for anything at close range. For the third, slower search, he switched on the magnification.
Still half dark. He could make out the lighthouse building on dell’Armi well enough, and the left edge of land where the coastal railway ran north through Reggio Calabria, but this was only because of the land’s height and the fact that the daylight was getting to it before it affected the sea’s surface. Periscope range at sea level couldn’t be more than four or five miles at most, he guessed. Or three … “Dip it, please.”
The brass tube slid down, paused, rose again.
Ahead, where the straits were, was an emptiness floored with undulating sea and roofed with grey cloud, framed by a hard edge of land on the right and a less distinct land-mass to the left. He circled away from it, slowly right around, encountering nothing except one lonely gull gliding above and around the periscope. Its curved yellow beak opened and shut soundlessly as it squawked, banking black-tipped wings to the up-draught from the sea. He settled on the hazy area of the straits again.
Two small, dark smudges. Like midges on a dirty window.
Gone now. You could easily imagine things, when you looked too hard … Then he saw one of them again … the one to the right. It had a white speck under it that appeared, then vanished, came again before he lost it altogether. The eyepieces had misted: he reached up to the wad of periscope paper skewered on a wire hanging from the deckhead.
Much clearer. And he could see them both.
Destroyers? “Down.” He jerked the handles up. “Captain, sir …”
CHAPTER TEN
Jack Everard woke suddenly—in Sauerkraut’s chart room, a tiny space like a cupboard with a bench-like berth in it. He threw off the blankets and reached for his boots and sweater. Coming up for 7 am—on 27 March: Friday … The Chariot force would be at about the limit of its run south: in fact they’d be roughly on the same latitude as St Nazaire, though 160 miles west of it. The intention was to circle southward and then turn up, only changing to a direct course for the Loire entrance after dark tonight.
They’d passed Ushant—seventy-five miles west of it—at midnight. It had been a pleasant evening, with moments of hilarity. As Sharp had said—like a joyride. Yarning, playing cards and cribbage: with all navigational responsibility in the hands of the force navigator—an RN lieutenant by the name of Green, who was in Atherstone—there’d been no strain on anyone. The training had been hard work and seemed to have been going on for ever, and right ahead of them was the cliff-edge, the great leap into the unknown; now, in this interval, with not a damn thing you could do about any of it any more, there was time to draw breath, crack a joke, sing a few songs … Songs had included solos by Sergeant Bowater—his favourite numbers, repeated several times, being “Trees,” “Without a Song” and “Old Man River.”
Probably the same sort of thing had been going on in the other ships as well. Although the MLs, those carrying commandos, must have been overcrowded. Sauerkraut was well off in that respect, since she had only two more than her normal German complement on board.
Jack left his little cubby-hole and went up into the bridge. Sharp and Dixon were both there, and Shawcross was on the wheel. Dixon saw him first, and nodded. “Morning, sir.”
Sharp turned, then: “Ah … Sleep well?”
Sharp seemed better at sea. Less idiotic, Jack thought, in direct ratio to distance from land.
The force was in its anti-submarine formation, the disposition for daylight passage that was designed to look like an A/S sweep. In the centre, Campbeltown with the MTB in tow had Tynedale and Atherstone on her quarters; ahead, and spread back in echelon to the beams, the sixteen MLs formed a screen, spaced out ahead and down the sides in a shallow inverted V. Sauerkraut was keeping station astern of Tynedale; on her starboard beam, two cables’ lengths away, the MGB was in tow of Atherstone.
Last night, when Jack had turned in, the force had been in night cruising order, three straight columns plugging southward under a hazy-looking moon. The moon would be full tonight, for the assault: the two requirements, a spring tide and a full moon, happening to go together.
“When did we open out like this?”
“About three-quarters of an hour ago … Pretty sight, eh?” It was. The morning was clear and bright: the ships and launches dipped and swayed to a low, blue swell, bow-waves curling sharply white. “Flag-hoist on Atherstone!”
Dixon reported it, with his glasses up. It would be the order for altering course southeastward: and it was coming right on schedule, since the time was just on 0700. Answering pendants were already either close up or pausing at the dip on all the other craft. Sharp called back to his signalman, “Close up!” He told Shawcross, “Follow Tynedale round, when s
he turns.”
Dixon said, “Executive signal.”
The flag-hoist was dropping, fluttering bright-coloured down from the Hunt’s yardarm. All the answering pendants were coming down too as the leading ships put their wheels over. The MLs would have to adjust their speeds as well as courses, the inside ones slowing and those to starboard speeding up, to maintain formation on the turn. Jack took out his cigarette-case: “Smoke, Tubby?”
“Thanks.”
Sharp had dated the blonde Wren, Maureen, for next Wednesday evening. It happened that Wednesday would be April Fools’ Day, but he said she hadn’t caught on to that. And in any case—he’d suggested tentatively, wanting Jack’s reaction—”We might make it, don’t you agree?”
“Why not?”
Before Wednesday, though, if they “made it” at all—long before that he, Jack Everard, if he was alive and mobile and back in England, would be in London, and the hell with Falmouth … But he didn’t think much of Sharp’s taste in women—preferring that blonde to Paul’s little number, Sally …
Early yesterday evening, when they’d been steering southwestward down the coast of Cornwall, he’d explained to Sharp—and afterwards separately to Dixon, because the Canadian had to be in a position to take over if Sharp was killed—that if the Möwe-class torpedo-boats were still in the St Nazaire Basin when the attack went in, re-embarkation would have to be from the Old Entrance, not the Old Mole. He’d been discussing it with PO Slattery and Sergeant Bowater first, then invited Sharp to join them—down below, with the E-boat rolling quite a bit at that stage, Sergeant Bowater feeling the effects and trying not to show it.
“Main point as far as you’re concerned, Tubby, is that if the commandos find they can’t hold this bridge”—he touched the plan of the port layout—”because of fire from the Möwes, then none of the people who’ve landed that side of it will have any hope of getting through. We, and all the commandos working on that side of the Old Entrance, will need to be taken off about here, instead.”
A Share of Honour: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 4 Page 24