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

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Stop together.”

  “Stop together, sir …”

  Still going deeper. Minimal lighting throwing deep shadows. Light caught the leak on the gland, gleamed on spouting, cascading seawater. Ruck told Quinn, “Blow one main ballast.” Quinn wrenched the valve open on the panel. It was all happening very fast, all within seconds of the final crash of that last pattern, but each word or move in isolation, and set in the weirdness of the circumstances, seemed to mark the passage of a much longer time. It would be different, Paul suspected, if he’d had work to do.

  “One main ballast blowing, sir!”

  Yelling, to be heard over the rush of HP air. Which the Italian A/S men might well be hearing too. Guessing, if they did hear it, that the submarine they were hunting was in trouble. Depth now 340 feet.

  “Stop blowing!”

  Quinn jammed the valvewheel shut. He used a wheel-spanner, his personal possession, as highly polished as old silver. Ultra was on an even keel at 365 feet. Now 362 …

  “Slow ahead port.”

  “Slow ahead port, sir …”

  “Get Roffey in here to check the battery tanks … Ship’s head?”

  “Oh-two-three, sir.” Creagh’s tone was apologetic for being three degrees off the ordered course. Ruck moved over to the chart table, and Paul moved out to give him room. Ruck wanted the battery tanks checked to find out whether it was true that some containers had been cracked. If they had, acid would be leaking out of them into the tank they stood in. Then if salt water got into the same tank, you’d get chlorine gas seeping up through the deck.

  Chlorine …

  It killed fast, and painfully. There was already a peculiar smell, and it very probably was gassing from the batteries, but it wasn’t chlorine. Not yet. This sort, from a played-out, damaged battery, was heavy, hung close over the tops of the cells. He thought he remembered being taught this … Ruck said from the chart table, “Two hundred feet, Number One.”

  Screws pulsed over. The same warning every time … Ruck’s tone had been normal, unflustered; he looked haggard, but so did most people after the tension and sleeplessness of the past twelve hours.

  “Two hundred feet, sir.”

  Wykeham’s voice was normal too. And shallow-set charges were exploding ahead. The first bad shots for quite a long time. “Want me, sir?”

  Roffey: rotund, harassed-looking. Worried for his precious battery. And who wasn’t … Ruck told him, “Check both tanks for cracked containers, would you?”

  If there were some cracked, he’d find acid in the bottom of the tanks. Pool had dragged the A/S stool over to the after periscope, and he was standing on it to get at the periscope gland in the deckhead. He was soaking wet, taking the whole brunt of it. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the water had run straight down into the periscope well, but at the rate it was leaking now even the well would have filled up before long. Two resulting factors would be, first, chlorine gas, from the salt water getting into number two battery tank, and, second, the fact that the boat would be taking in extra ballast, and she lacked the battery-power to run the pump and compensate for it.

  Nobody would know how it had been, down here. Submariners who’d been through very bad attacks would have a good idea of it, could guess; but it would always be, ultimately, a private matter. For Ultra as for Unslaked, and all the others who’d gone before them and would come after. You took your story with you.

  “Two hundred feet, sir … Open one main vent?”

  “No. Hang on with that for the moment.”

  “She’s light for’ard, sir.”

  “Can you hold her down on the fore planes? Lovesay?” “I reckon, sir. Just about.”

  Screws rushed over. Ahead, Paul thought. Ruck might have thought so, too; he told Creagh, “Starboard fifteen. Steer oh-nine-oh.” If a batch of depthcharges was floating down ahead, why motor into them when you didn’t have to? He was talking to McClure now … “All right, we can’t be very certain of it, but we must still be roughly about—well, say in this patch here.” He’d pencilled a circle on the chart. “Agreed?”

  McClure nodded. He grew stubble unevenly: Paul had told him only this morning that he looked like a badly worn lavatory brush. If he and Ruck were right about Ultra’s position, she was quite close to Cape Spartivento and southeast of it. They’d been on mostly easterly courses all through the first hours of this long period of persecution, and there was also a southeasterly set just here. Ruck tapped the chart with a pencil. “So we’ve got shallow water north of us. All along here. Look—two miles out, and less than fifty feet.”

  So what? Lie on the bottom? Until the air gave out completely and you suffocated?

  Depthcharges shook her slightly, from the port side. Ruck ordered, “Port fifteen.”

  “Port fifteen, sir—” “Steer oh-two-oh.” Making for those shallows …

  The fore planes were at twenty degrees of dive, to hold her bow down. With the voltage right down that screw wasn’t turning very fast, and the less movement she had through the water the less effect the planes had. Quinn had joined Pool in working on the periscope gland, both using the same stool and the same huge steel wrench, leaning outwards to put their combined weights on it. Like some circus act: and both of them dripping wet. Pool grunted, “Tight as we’ll get her, Tom.” Quinn disengaged himself by half-falling backwards; Wykeham caught him, held him up. Pool said, getting down more safely, “We’ve taken up what slack there was, sir.”

  And the leak had slowed. Ruck nodded. “Well done. I’ve a new job for you now, Chief. And you, Sub.” Paul moved closer. “Chief, get a couple of stokers and all the open-ended cans they can lay their hands on, and fill up the cans with oil. Old engine oil, lube-oil, anything. As many containers as can be packed into one torpedo tube. Sub, you round up some loose gear. Clothing, your own cap, at least one sailor’s hat with a submarine ribbon on it, a shoe or two—anything else that floats. Cushions, a locker door, one of the wardroom curtains … Get it all up for’ard and tell the TI to load it all into one empty tube. With Chief’s oil. Then he’s to keep the bow-cap shut and wait for further orders. Get it?”

  He nodded. Wykeham said, “She’s getting hard to hold, sir.”

  “We’ll vent it when we fire the tube. We’ll vent Q at the same time.”

  Wykeham’s glance met Ruck’s: and Paul saw that look, saw it meaning, Last resort … For all their calmness, that was how it was. And the object would be to make the Italians think they’d sunk her: they’d see oil and gear, following the air-bubbles. It might fool them, as long as they were watching the surface for signs of that kind—which they were likely to be doing. They’d have searchlights on the water after each batch of depthcharges exploded; and it wasn’t so long to dawn now, anyway.

  But even if it did work—Ultra couldn’t surface, and the battery was dead, and the air wasn’t going to sustain life much longer. What he’d be telling them with those signs would be no more than advance notification of the truth …

  Screws scrunched over: faint, not directly overhead, audible for only about two seconds. Paul squeezed past McClure, to get to the door leading for’ard and unclip it. Roffey, on its other side, was already pulling clips off—the door could be secured from either side—in order to return to the control room. He told Ruck, “Most of the containers in number one section’s cracked, sir.”

  “Check this one now.”

  At slow grouped down, the one motor was barely turning that screw, barely giving the boat steerage-way.

  Depthcharges burst: claps of thunder in the middle distance. Off to starboard and rather shallow-set again: more sound than danger … Wykeham looked round at Ruck again, his raised eyebrows expressing a possible admissibility of hope. Ruck wasn’t buying any of it: and he was right not to, because—suddenly—you could hear the asdic pings. His head moved, indicating the surface, drawing Wykeham’s attention to them. Little trilling squeaks, as one of the hunters found her again and fingered her.


  First fingers, then claws …

  Up for’ard, talking to Gaffney in the TSC, Paul heard it too and tried to shut it out. The torpedomen had been confined behind their watertight door for a long time: they were full of questions that weren’t easy to find answers to.

  The pinging ceased.

  Italian A/S man deciding it hadn’t been a submarine contact, moving on to search elsewhere?

  Asdics did, frequently, pick up false contacts. But then, false hopes weren’t hard to come by, either.

  Smoke drifted, gunflashes and searchlights flaring through it: the noise of fighting and wrecking was still mostly behind them—eastward—but there was also a lot of machine gunning from the right now—in front as well, sporadically, he guessed from the other side of the basin—but it was getting quite heavy to the right. That would be where assault and demolition parties would be pressing through to the top end of the Normandie Dock and from there to the swing bridge at this end of the Penhouët Basin: that bridge had to be destroyed quickly to stop German troop reinforcements getting into the port area. Jack’s team were against the wall just short of the corner—close to their target but on their own, the problem being that as soon as they moved round it they’d be easy meat for the guns on the other side of the basin. The E-boat, if it was there, would be roughly two hundred yards from this corner. They’d come ahead of the commando assault party instead of following it up: it was his own fault, he knew, for landing too soon. There’d been demolition parties as well as assault parties landing from the destroyer, and as it had turned out he’d been right on their heels, even among them: so No. 5 Troop wasn’t in position yet, and around that corner the NTU would be unsupported instead of having commandos just along the quayside to take and return a lot of the fire—if not all of it—from across the water … He told Bowater to stay where he was, and moved back. “Slattery?” He was there; so were Pettifer and Lloyd, Rayner and Merrit, each torpedoman loaded with a pack of plastic explosives as well as his other equipment. Jack told them, “Hold on here for a minute. I’m going with the others for a shufti along the quayside.” He asked Pettifer, “You OK?”The ERA nodded, still panting from the fast sprint. He was older and heavier than the rest of them, and he was also the one member of this bunch who could not be spared. Jack could be dispensed with, because Slattery could take his place, but Pettifer was a lot of eggs in one basket, thanks to ERA Wolf having dropped out. Too late to worry about that now: too late to worry about anything … A shell struck the building somewhere above them, showering brickwork; he’d left them, and he and Bowater, with Corporal Dewar and Marines Bone and Laing, were running at a crouch for the corner.

  Campbeltown had still been under heavy fire from all directions when he’d led the team across her. There’d been dead and wounded soldiers all over her, and fires below decks which her naval crew were fighting to put out in case the flames spread to the huge explosive charge in her for’ard messdeck. There’d been problems getting from the destroyer’s crumpled stem down to the caisson in which it was embedded: steel ladders provided for the purpose had been shot away, and dangling ropes were smouldering. They’d got over, anyway, and over the caisson to the dockside. Demolition teams were already starting work there, under heavy fire which their protection parties were returning and in places eliminating. The opposition had been coming from both sides of the Forme Ecluse and from the roofs and upper floors of buildings; shells were exploding in Campbeltown’s superstructure, some of her Oerlikons were still in action, tracer ricocheting off her … Even if her gunners weren’t stopped by the enemy, or called to evacuate over her stern—as they would be before long—they’d have to cease fire soon or they’d be hitting their own people as the surviving commandos swarmed ashore and began to attack their various targets.

  Jack had been running then, with the naval party behind him and the Marines in a loose covering formation around them; off to the right Captain Roy’s troop was attacking the pumping house, a great concrete cube lit by flashes and searchlight beams sweeping over. The German guns on its roof were the commandos’ primary interest, after which they’d move on and a demolition section would move in, to blow up all the pumps and gear. The NTU couldn’t very well have stopped and waited for No. 5 Troop to finish that job on the rooftop guns, largely because there was no cover here; and with an empty quayside ahead, and the tempo of the action quickening and thickening all around, the natural thing was to push on towards the objective. It was his own plan that was at fault, a misconception about timing which had escaped everyone else’s attention too. The hell with it: spilt milk … Mortar shells crumping down close to the right. Behind, grenades were being lobbed up on to the pumping house roof, and machine guns were creating a solid, continuous blare of noise; on his left, down in the approaches to the Old Entrance, a burning ML swung helplessly across another’s bows. A lot of things were going wrong, but you’d expect that; a lot of other things would go right, and the great success already scored was that Campbeltown was securely lodged like a giant time-bomb in that primary objective, the lock gate. He wondered whether Trolley had got ashore: a lot of them would not have. Running fast, crouching, zigzagging along the dockside; noise building to incredible heights behind them and action spreading to the left as well. Laing spraying an upper window with bullets from his Lanchester as they pounded under it: glass shattered and a gun ceased fire.

  About eighty yards from where they’d rushed off the caisson a commando demolition party was disappearing into some kind of block-house, their own protection party covering them: the blanco’d webbing was a hell of a good idea, you could recognize your own side a mile away … Bowater and Dewar, leading, began shooting, still running while their guns blazed: their target was a group of helmeted Germans who’d appeared from the right, from an open archway in that eastern end of the same building beside which—farther along—the naval team were waiting now. Flash lit them, and two of the Germans went sprawling; one darted back into the archway and disappeared, and three more went sprinting down the jetty. Dewar sent another of them skidding on to his face: one of the survivors stopped then, turning, with his arm back over his head. All four Marines were firing at him and he didn’t stand a chance, but the stick-grenade came flying, was in mid-air as he died. Dewar got his boot to it, full-toss, and sent it over the edge of the quay. The racket was solid and deafening: when guns fired you saw it but heard nothing different, for the rest of the noise absorbed it; and you had to ignore the bedlam, all the surrounding action and its racket and confusion, keep your mind on your own objective. At the corner, with the battle going on behind them and only enemies in front, there’d been a chance to pause and recognize discretion as having the edge on valour—for a moment, a breath or two, a thought … The objectives being, one, the E-boat if it existed, two, the U-boat shelter, and neither being achievable by tearing straight round the corner and having his men cut down on an exposed quayside.

  But at this point, Jack discovered as soon as he got round the corner with the Marines, it wasn’t exposed. The quay had two sheds built on it, between the front of the buildings and the water’s edge. They were both narrow; the nearer of them—in front of him now—was about ten yards long, and the one to the right was more like sixty. With an eight-foot gap separating them.

  He pointed at it. “There.”

  Sprinting for the gap … He went flat, between the sheds, and the four Marines flopped down around him. He crawled forward. Bowater muttered, “Not E-boats, are they?”

  They were harbour patrol-craft. Launches, with no fixed weapons. They weren’t important. He got over to the far side of the gap: there was a lot of noisy action on the right now, the Penhouët direction. Diagonally to his left across the black, oily water of the St Nazaire Basin he could see the great bulk of the U-boat shelter. To the left again was a blockhouse which was clear to see because of a searchlight on another building beyond it: there were guns on that roof. Oerlikons by the look of them, and they were spouting tracer
-streams at some target on this east side of the basin. Either No. 5 Troop moving up to its holding-area at the bridge, or troops working on the other side of the Old Entrance— where, come to think of it, the military commander would by now be setting up his headquarters post. Those guns could be engaging any target between the Old Entrance and the Old Mole, and they’d be a problem for Roy’s commandos.

  To the right—north—of the patrol launches, two minesweepers lay side by side, and helmeted sailors were standing by their guns. Those, undoubtedly, were his problem.

  He pointed them out to Bowater, and made sure he’d seen the guns. There’d be heavier weapons—4-inch or 2-pounders—on the ships’ foc’sls, which of course one couldn’t see from here: the ones visible were machine guns in the bridge superstructure.

  Bowater had nodded. “E-boat?”

  “Probably higher up. You’ll have to take care of this lot for us. While we’re rushing the E-boat—if it’s there … Let’s get the others up here.”

  They left Dewar and Laing in the gap, and Bone went back to collect the naval party. Jack and Bowater ran on behind the big shed, up to its northern end. He guessed that Roy’s troop would be at the bridge by now. The battle was in progress in all directions, totally enclosing them— except for their front, the water that was to be their battleground—in noise and flash. He remembered that when they’d first had the bad news that there were five torpedo-boats in here, the military commander had proposed rushing them from the quayside, and the idea had been turned down because there wouldn’t have been enough men available. Now, these two armed minesweepers would have to be dealt with in much the same fashion by the four Marines.

  They got to the end of the long shed just as the flash of a huge explosion ahead and to the left lit the underside of the clouds like a light flaring in a tent. That could have been the Penhouët Bridge going up, he thought; or maybe the inner gate control post. The commandos would be fairly chewing the place up by now. And the teams from that area would be falling back along this quay, when they’d finished, so it would be just as well to have the minesweepers’ guns knocked out.