Last Lift from Crete: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 2

by Alexander Fullerton

  Napier added, “You did a good job, Everard. Never mind his boat’s crew—they’re on his conscience … Why, look at that!”

  Some kind of flare-up—and now the thump of an explosion—a few miles inland, to the north. There was a spreading glow with a halo to it, diffuse and orange-tinted. Fading now … Bell-Reid suggested, “Probably the railway junction. One of the pongoes did say they’d mined it.”

  It was ten minutes to four. It would be daylight by, say, 0550. Two hours, at perhaps a little better than 16 knots; they’d have covered at the most 35 miles before the bombing started. More than that if the Luftwaffe didn’t find them at first light, of course; but luck of that sort wasn’t anything to count on.

  Jack went to the chart. He was acting as navigator now. He’d been appointed to this ship as an ordinary watchkeeper, but the navigator had been landed in Aden suffering from stomach ulcers and Napier had shuffled the jobs around. He was keen to get the same navigator back when the ulcers were cleared up, and if he’d had a new man appointed he’d have made that impossible. Jack let down the canvas flap behind him, leant over the chart and switched on the inside light, marked the EP, estimated position, 35 miles down the pencil track. He saw they’d be just about on latitude 37 north: which to all intents and purposes was beyond the range of any RAF or Fleet Air Arm support. Even if there were any on 36 north, which wasn’t by any means a certainty.

  He switched off the light and backed out. There was a yell from Tom Overton down on the foc’sl, and the commander, who was looking down over the front of the bridge, reported, “Clear anchor, sir.”

  “Half ahead together. Port twenty.”

  Following astern of the Gelderland. Time—he checked it, took a reading of the log and entered both figures in his notebook—was 0358. One hour later than it should have been.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “Morning, Pilot. All well?”

  “No problems, sir.”

  Rocky Pratt, his navigator, had the watch. A former P&O Line deck officer, Pratt was short and stocky, and gnome-like now with the hood of his duffel pulled up. It was cold enough to need it, in this pre-dawn hour: too cold, Nick thought, for the first day of May. Wind was still from the north-west, which meant that with the ship on a course of 063 it was slightly abaft the beam, and Tuareg was rolling as she thrashed along in Blackfoot’s wake. He’d slept, in his fold-away canvas bridge chair, from 3:30 to just after 5:00; hoisting himself on to the high seat now and feeling like something recently disinterred, he almost wished he hadn’t. You had to get some rest when there was a chance to, though, or you’d be at half-cock when you needed to be wide awake: so he’d dozed somewhat uneasily with the Cyrenaican land-bulge only fifteen to twenty miles away to starboard, and now as dawn approached he was fit—or would be, in a minute—to cope with whatever daylight might bring. There were airstrips, for instance, on that desert coastline, and the aircraft on them now were German, whereas the RAF had a total of 21 serviceable Hurricanes in the whole of the Western Desert and there was an army as well as a fleet needing air support.

  Even Norway hadn’t taught the powers in London that ships couldn’t operate for long under skies dominated by the enemy. Until the Norwegian fiasco nobody had really thought about it: which was partly why most destroyers’ guns—Tuareg’s included—could only elevate to forty degrees. Fat lot of use that was, against bombers diving almost vertically. Luckily these Tribals had multiple pompoms as well, which was something to ward off Stukas with: and when the opportunity occurred there was an intention of replacing the twin four-sevens at “X” position with a four-inch high-angle mounting. But many of the older ships—of the H-class, for instance—had nothing but point-five machine-guns for close-range protection. That was all he, Nick Everard, had had in Intent, in the Namsos fjords when he’d been trapped there with the Germans invading Norway and his ship crippled, immobilized: if the dive-bombers had found her she’d have been there still, as scrap-iron. He’d been lucky, though, he’d been able to bring her out and do some worthwhile damage to the enemy en route. Then, back in England, he’d been hauled over the coals because in an earlier action he hadn’t prevented another destroyer committing harakiri.

  When he’d first got back, there’d been congratulations and applause. The Press had made an overnight hero of him: so much so that the new Prime Minister had expressed a wish to have Commander Everard brought before him. It was at this interview that Nick’s troubles must have started. Winston had remarked that it was saddening to see a campaign which had opened with such an impressive performance by the Navy going so dismally now on land; Nick had agreed, adding that the soldiers, sent in so late and so ill-equipped and unsupported against the Luftwaffe, really hadn’t ever had a dog’s chance. It so happened that he had a great admiration for General Carton de Wiart, VC, and he’d spoken as much as anything out of respect for him; he’d also been speaking the plain truth, but forgetting that the Prime Minister in his former role of First Lord of the Admiralty and as a member of Chamberlain’s cabinet had been closely concerned with the mounting of the Norwegian expedition.

  At the time, all he got was a cold stare. But 24 hours later he was facing an inquisition in the Admiralty. It wasn’t an “official” inquiry: it started with “Look here, Everard, we need your help. There’ve been some questions asked, and we have to produce some answers …”

  So he was still a commander. He’d hoped, after the Norwegian success, to have won a fourth stripe and a flotilla, to make up the leeway he’d lost by retiring from the Navy in 1930. He’d spent eight years “outside,” and now he was back in the rank he’d reached in 1926, just before his thirtieth birthday.

  All right—so he’d been an idiot …

  Eastward, there was a silvery streak on the horizon and, above it, a faintly lighter section of sky. No cloud: last night’s hope of cloud-cover for today had been wishful thinking. He swung round to see what was happening in the bridge behind him: he’d been lost in his thoughts, searching the horizon with his glasses but seeing and hearing nothing close at hand. Houston, the gunnery control officer, touched his cap.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “Morning, Harry.”

  Houston was an RNVR lieutenant. He was of medium height, like Nick himself, but corpulent. Nick was broad, strongly built, but Harry Houston was fat: if he put on any more weight, Dalgleish had warned him recently, they might have to get rid of him because he wouldn’t be able to shoe-horn himself into the director tower. He was going aft now, to the ladder that led up to it. Ashcourt, the RN sub-lieutenant, was yawning over the torpedo control panel. He was tall and slim, willowy; if he’d been dark instead of fair he’d have been rather a Jack Everard type, Nick thought. Yeoman Whiffen was in the port after corner of the bridge, lecturing the young signalman of the watch. And now Tony Dalgleish, the first lieutenant, hoisted himself off the up-ladder into the bridge’s after end and came for’ard, nodding to Rocky Pratt who was at the binnacle. Dalgleish stopped beside his captain.

  “Morning, sir. Darned cold.”

  “Be less so, Number One, if you had a coat on.”

  “Oh, soon warm up.” Dalgleish was wearing a polo-neck sweater under his reefer jacket. He reached to the alarm buzzer, held his thumb ready over it. “Close the hands up, sir?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The noise of the alarm was muted up here, but a harsh, sleeppenetrating racket down in the messdecks. Dalgleish kept it going in short sharp bursts for about half a minute. Then he turned away. “I’ll go on down, sir.”

  “Make sure they know this isn’t just routine. There’s an airfield at Benghazi, and we stirred things up last night.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Ashcourt was testing his communications with Mr Walsh, the gunner (T), whose action station was at his torpedo tubes aft, and from the director tower Houston would be lining up his sights with the receivers at each of the four, twin, four-seven gun-mountings. He’d be checking his connections wit
h the TS too, the transmitting station two decks down and below “B” gun; and higher than Houston’s steel box up there, above his head and a bit aft, Petty Officer Wellbeloved and Able Seaman Sitwell would have settled into the combined rangefinder and HA director; they’d be testing their circuits too.

  Reports were coming in now. Main armament closed up and cleared away, circuits tested. Torpedo tubes and depthcharge crews closed up, communications tested. Close-range weapons closed up … Dalgleish would be moving round the ship, seeing that men on the upper deck were wearing their anti-flash gear, lifebelts, and tin hats, and that everyone was alert and ready, wide awake. Nick reached for his own helmet and put it on. Light was flushing up that eastern sky, greying upward from an horizon which in that quarter—on the starboard bow—could just be made out now with the naked eye. Light growing steadily: you could see the sky’s greyness reflected on the sea now, on that bow. This was the period when light was confusing and attack most likely, and when the range of visibility suddenly expanded so that an enemy who hadn’t seemed to have been there one minute might be in gun-range the next. Nick, Pratt, and Ashcourt all had binoculars up, searching sea and sky: farther aft the look-outs, two men on each side in the bays where the eighteen-inch searchlights stood like huge, closed eyes, were dark, tin-hatted silhouettes slowly turning as each swept his own ninetydegree sector through high-powered glasses. And overhead the director tower trained slowly round, like the head of some animal wary of its surroundings.

  In London, it would be dark for another hour or more. He wondered if the bombers had been over again: nights were London’s bad time, while here they provided intervals of near-safety. He hoped Fiona was all right. Please, God … Here, light would come rapidly, in a minute: and it would be exactly like this two hundred miles away in the Aegean, where Carnarvon must be hurrying her convoy down from Nauplia. There, too, the curtain would be going up on a new Stuka-infested day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In Carnarvon’s bridge McCowan, the gunnery lieutenant, banged a telephone back on to its hook and told Captain Napier, “All quarters closed up and cleared away, sir.” McCowan was a thin, bony-faced man in his middle twenties, with deepset eyes and wiry black hair; he was a Scot but he didn’t sound like one. Ahead of the cruiser the Dutch transport lumbered stolidly south south-eastward, following Halberdier and with the other two destroyers, Huntress and Highflier, on her bow and beam to port. The mainland of Greece was a humpy grey division, touched by early daylight now, between sea and sky to starboard; a quarter of an hour ago, when Cape Turkoviglia had been abeam, the convoy’s distance offshore had been as little as three thousand yards. It was twice that now, but the closeness of land was Napier’s reason for having kept his destroyers only ahead and on the seaward side; by hugging the coast he was making the trip as short as possible, and as soon as it was fully light he’d be shifting the escorts into a more regular formation.

  Pretty soon now, in fact. It was already almost day. They were well out of the Gulf of Nauplia but for another hour that land would be close to starboard.

  “I’ll go up, sir.” Up to the ADP, McCowan meant. The letters stood for Air Defence Position; it was the partly enclosed platform up on the tripod foremast above the bridge, with the rangefinder-director above that. When Carnarvon had been launched in 1918 as an ordinary light cruiser the ADP had been known as the Spotting Top, but in an extensive refit from 1939 into 1940 she’d been re-equipped as an AA cruiser, with high-angle four-inch guns and a whole lot of modern fire-control devices in that ADP.

  It was light enough now for Jack Everard to be able to see Gelderland easily without glasses, and Highflier and Huntress as silhouettes against the flush of dawn. The wind was a light breeze on the starboard quarter, but here in the land’s shelter the sea was flat with that dawn shine on it: it was going to be a beautiful, classic Aegean day. Bell-Reid must have had the same thought: he murmured with binoculars at his eyes, “Splendid flying weather. Wonder if they’d let me change sides.”

  “You’d make a rotten Nazi … Pilot, what’s that?”

  Napier was pointing at a white lighthouse on a minor headland. About a minute ago Jack had been studying the chart, memorizing landmarks, and he was able to trot out the answer: “It’s a light called Aspro Kortia, sir.”

  “Sounds like something for a headache.”

  “The inlet to the south of it is Port Kyparisi.”

  Bell-Reid snorted—derisively, perhaps—a comment on a young man showing off, offering more information than had been asked for. Bell-Reid was a caustic and impatient man, entirely different from the quiet, easygoing Howard Napier, whose last pre-war post had been as naval attaché in an embassy.

  Irvine, a bearded RNR lieutenant who was action officer of the watch, was at the binnacle. Jack Everard lingered near the chart table; as navigator his duties were divided between bridge and plot. Napier—perched up on his bridge chair—and Bell-Reid and the midshipman of the watch, Brighouse, all had their glasses up, probing the circle of visibility as it expanded. Elsewhere in the bridge were the chief yeoman of signals, a leading signalman and a bridge messenger; right aft at the base of the tripod mast which formed a circular steel shelter housing the Tannoy broadcast equipment, a very young Royal Marine bugler conversed in whispers with the commander’s “doggie”—an ordinary seaman by the name of Webster—while behind them, leaning against the shelter, loomed the bow-legged figure of Able Seaman Noble, the captain’s servant.

  Jack took his eyes off the Dutch ship and glanced again at the coastline. It was a bleak, barren-looking landscape. Within days it would be overrun by Germans. To port, the sea was like a mirror throwing light into the sky: the stars had vanished and there was a loom of brilliance from just over the horizon. An empty, cloudless sky, half-lit: the question in all their minds was how long it would stay empty.

  “Chief Yeoman!”

  “Sir!”

  CPO Hegarty came forward: he was a smallish man with a flat, sharp chin like a paint-scraper. Napier told him, “Hoist: Destroyers form close screen round convoy.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Hegarty went aft, yelling down to his men on the flagdeck, one level below the bridge, for the flags he wanted to have bent on, then leaning over the back end of the bridge and watching to see each one whipped out of its pigeon-hole in the big, grey-painted locker. The signalmen could tell from the toggle-fittings on each flag which was the top or bottom of it …

  “Hoist!”The string of bunting ran up swiftly, led by the yellow-blueyellow of the destroyer flag, and the destroyers’ red-and-white answering pendants shot up in acknowledgement within seconds, pausing momentarily at the dip and then rushing close-up to the yardarms, signifying “signal understood.” Napier called, “Executive please, Chief Yeoman,” and Hegarty roared, “Haul down!” The hoist tumbled, to be gathered in on the flagdeck and the flags restowed in their slots. Highflier and Huntress were on the move at once, Highflier increasing speed and angling inwards to close up on the Dutch ship’s port beam, Huntress also cracking on more revs and at the same time going over to starboard, heeling to the turn, passing ahead of the Dutchman and astern of Halberdier in order to take station on the landward side.

  To all intents and purposes it was day now. That eastern glow had acquired a hard, hot centre growing upwards out of a strip of sea so bright you couldn’t look straight at it without being blinded.

  Bell-Reid asked Napier, “Might send one watch to breakfast, sir?”

  Napier didn’t answer immediately. He’d lowered his binoculars and he was looking around, swinging his high chair around as he examined the sky astern and on the quarters.

  “Yes.” He nodded to the commander. “And get ‘em up again and the others down there as fast as it can be done. You go down too, John; I’ll have mine up here.” He glanced at Jack. “And you, Everard. Don’t take longer than you need.”

  On his way down, Jack met Overton, the first lieutenant, coming up to take over from Willie Irvine as OO
W. Tom Overton’s action job was damage-control, below decks, and on this trip he was also responsible for looking after the army passengers. He smiled amiably at Jack: “Nice quiet morning, eh?”

  Quite a pleasant old goof …

  The breakfast on offer consisted of cornflakes, scrambled eggs made of egg-powder, and toast and marmalade; in the interests of speed he decided to do without cornflakes. The wardroom was littered with bedrolls, and some of them still contained slumbering New Zealanders. Jack sat down opposite Bell-Reid, who was chatting over his shoulder to a major with a bandaged head.

  “Steward’ll give you chaps some breakfast in half an hour or so. We have to be rude and eat first so we can be ready to receive the Luftwaffe.”

  “Don’t worry about us, Commander.” The major put a hand to his lightly bearded jaw. “Might even get to shave before I eat.”

  “Use my cabin. The steward can show you where it is, and you’ll find all you need there … Here, come and sit, have some coffee to go on with. Jenkins!”

  “Coming sir.” The steward was at the hatch at the end of the long, rather narrow wardroom. There was a sideboard under the hatch, connecting to the pantry. Bell-Reid told the soldier as he pulled a chair out, “Leading Steward Jenkins will attend to all your wants. He’ll be single-handed once we’re closed up, because we need the others elsewhere, but just tell him what you want. Right, Jenkins?”

  “Do me best, sir.” He was a large, happy-looking man; he told Jack over Bell-Reid’s head, “Your eggs is coming, sir.”

  “Good. Make it snappy, please.” He nodded to the soldier. “How d’you do, sir. I’m Everard.”

  “Our navigating officer.” Bell-Reid told Jack, “This is Major Haskins, OC troops.”

  “Glad to know you, Everard. Reckon to find the way home, do you?”

  “Oh, with a bit of luck …”

  “No fooling.” Melhuish, the surgeon commander, flopped into a nearby chair. A boozy-looking man with greying hair. “Luck’s the word for it. He spins a coin, then we bounce our way off the headlands. I’ve just been up for a breather, and we’re practically on the bloody beach.” He looked at Jack. “Didn’t know that, did you?”