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

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Tone normal: eyes slightly more expressive. Ashcourt had had enough experience of battle recently, of this kind of battle, to realize they’d be very, very lucky now to get away intact. It wasn’t just a threat from those four bombers, or from those eight, but from the hundreds that would be coming very soon. The ships had been spotted—which had been inevitable, but it had happened sooner than it need have—and one of them was lame, and the Stuka base was only sixty miles away.

  You could see the land clearly now, from south-east to south-west, and the sun’s first rays were spotlighting the higher inland peaks. The nearest bit of coastline was a promontory called Spinalonga, ten miles away. One lot of 88s seemed to be going straight on, still, while the other four aircraft circled round astern: if they kept circling they’d be coming up on the port beam in a minute.

  “Alarm ahead—Stukas! Right of the sun—”

  “All guns follow director. ‘A’ and ‘B’ with red barrage—load, load, load!”

  The 88s were coming up on the port quarter in a loose straggle and in shallow dives: ahead, the Stukas were above the sun and hard to see. Nick heard the fire-gongs from down for’ard as Houston launched an up-sun barrage from “A” and “B” guns, leaving “X” and “Y” in the control of PO Wellbeloved from the open-topped HA directorrangefinder up behind him. All noise now … Stooping near the voicepipe with his eyes slitted against the glare, watching for Stukas attacking, he heard Carnarvon’s guns and Afghan’s: then Ashcourt’s noise-piercing yell, “Alarm port! Port quarter—Messerschmitts!” Nick had the ACP telephone—fumbling it as he still watched for Stukas … “Port quarter, Messerschmitts!” The racket of a fighter’s engine confirmed it: an Me 110 out of nowhere, blasting across ahead and banking round to starboard towards the cruiser: and others were over her already in swallowlike swooping rushes, one bomb just short then one hitting near the base of the foremost funnel: there’d been a flash and a burst of smoke and debris and now a plume of smoke trailing back. Stukas coming now—and they, like the Messerschmitt fighter-bombers, were also going for Carnarvon. She’d been hit again, for’ard, and the last of the Messerschmitts had straffed her bridge with its guns. Stukas’ sirens swelled in triumph over the bedlam of gunfire. A spout of sea rising close to the cruiser’s quarter was a bomb from an 88: she seemed to stagger as a second struck her, right aft. The raised four-inch gundeck amidships—the gun-mounting on it—had been blown clean out of her in the blast of yet another hit; and she was on fire aft, more bomb-spouts rising on the far side of her, in the sea but near enough to hurt. One Stuka was diving steeply at her, another close behind it, both sirens screaming: the first one’s bomb tumbling clear, shining as it turned over in what looked like slow motion with the new day’s brilliance flashing on its fins. New day dawning in a rush of disaster, precipitate and stunning, a nightmare bathed in sunrise, drowned in noise. Carnarvon lay stopped, stricken, like a boxer overwhelmed before anyone had heard the bell for the new round: you had an urge to appeal to some non-existent referee, ask for a new start …

  “I’ll see if I can find him, sir.” Jack heard himself shout it over the thunder of guns and the howl of Stuka sirens. Napier looked round with a suggestion of a smile that was noticeable because this wasn’t much of a time for smiling. He’d nodded. Carnarvon was on fire and had some flooding on the port side aft, several other areas of damage below and above decks, and Stukas still swarming over. It was eight or ten minutes since the first bomb had hit.

  It was Bell-Reid, his second-in-command, whom Napier wanted found. He’d glanced round, as Jack moved away: “Clear the bridge!”

  There was a general movement to obey: look-outs, signal staff, messengers. Willy Irvine nodded at Midshipman Wesley: “Go on, Mid.” Jack stopped at the plot voicepipe to tell young Brighouse to clear out too; going on aft to the ladder he found himself joined by McCowan, Clutterbuck, Midshipman Burk, and the rest of the director’s and ADP’s crews, who’d been ordered down when the power circuits had failed. Clutterbuck shouted in Jack’s ear, “Last man over the side’s a sissy!” Pompoms and point-fives roaring: Jack hurried on down into the ship, and Napier, glancing behind him into the near-empty bridge, found Able Seaman Noble, his servant, still standing there.

  “Away you go, Noble!”

  “Ready when you are, sir.”

  Napier told him, “I’m waiting for news from the commander. You carry on, now.”

  “All the same to you, sir, I’d as soon as—”

  Both men staggered as the ship lurched from an explosion. You could hear the rising shriek of another diving Stuka. Noble shouted, “Oughter blow up your lifebelt, sir.” Pointing at Napier’s dark blue covered Mae West.

  Napier looked down at it and nodded, and one hand moved to free the inflation tube. The other gestured brusquely: “Off the bridge, Noble. Do what you’re bloody well told, will you?”

  Jack had gone down two ladders: to the lower bridge, then to the level of the for’ard gundeck. Now another, to the foc’sl deck: and another still, to the upper deck but under cover, inside the foc’sl deck’s shelter. It felt as if he was forcing himself to keep on going down. Men were mustering in here by divisions, here and up for’ard in the seamen’s messdeck; until the order came to abandon ship, it was healthier to be under cover. Down again: the PMO and the younger doctor, Holloway, were using the lower-deck crew space as a dressing-station and operating theatre. There’d been casualties among ammo-supply and damage-control parties, and there were sights one tried not to look at; on the upper ladders Jack had heard McCowan say that two of the four-inch guns’ crews had been wiped out.

  Several minutes ago Napier had given the order to prepare to abandon ship, but he’d been unable to contact the commander, Bell-Reid, who’d gone down earlier to visit various trouble spots and should have reported over the sound-powered telephone from the lower steering position. That was on the platform deck, almost in the bottom of the ship and vertically below the bridge. In the lower deck, emergency lanterns glowed, hoses had been run out and men were struggling to manoeuvre stretchers up through hatches, through thickening smoke and the reek of fire, the ship’s compartments booming and shuddering to bomb-explosions in the sea around her. Like a dark, noisy, enclosing cavern. Damage-control parties were getting out, getting up towards the air and daylight: they’d been told to, with the stand-by-to-abandon order. Buchanan, the engineer commander, was on his way up to report to Napier; Jack asked him if he’d seen Bell-Reid, and he had not. When the commander had gone down, Carnarvon hadn’t been in quite as hopeless a state as she was now; the only fire inside her then had been the one right aft, and Buchanan had still been trying to get her engines going. While there’d been that degree of hope, plus the expectation of getting her under control in emergency steering control, there’d been no talk of abandoning her. Everything had got much worse very quickly: in something like six minutes she’d been hit by four more bombs, there’d been an explosion in No. 1 boiler-room, the steering-gear compartment right aft had been wrecked and flooded, and a fire somewhere between No. 2 boiler-room and the for’ard engine-room was threatening the midships four-inch magazine. That magazine should have been flooded by now, but no report had reached the bridge.

  On one of the ladders, Jack met a stoker petty officer named Berwick. He asked him if he’d seen the commander anywhere.

  “Can’t say I have, sir.”

  “He was supposed to be going down to the lower steering position, I believe.”

  “Ah, but we shut it off, sir, that section … Christ, then—”

  “Why did you—”

  “Fire, sir, very fierce, started in the LP supply room—so the ‘atch over that lobby—”

  “He may be down there.” Nightmare, suddenly. But real: and he was in it. With the peculiar feeling that he was down here on his own orders, his own victim … “Listen, Spo—if we can’t open that hatch, we could get to him from aft along the lower passage. With a
couple of hoses going to hold the fire back—”

  “What’s the fuss, Everard?”

  Commander Bell-Reid: and he had his doggie, OD Webster, trotting faithfully at his heels. No need for the rescue attempt, then: relief was huge. The stoker PO actually laughed with the relief of it: Bell-Reid glared at him, and Jack explained, “We thought you’d been shut in, sir, in the lower steering position. We were working out how to try to get you out.”

  “Very civil of you.” Bell-Reid nodded. “Thanks. But where the hell’s Overton, d’you know?”

  “Afraid I don’t—”

  “Mr Overton’s dead, sir.” Berwick added no detail. Jack gave Bell-Reid the message he’d come down to deliver: “The captain’s anxious for you to get in touch, sir. He sent me to find you. He’s ordered standby-to-abandon-ship, and—”

  “I know that, damn it.” But with telephone circuits mostly dead it was hard to know who knew what. Bell-Reid had spotted someone he wanted: he shouted, “Mr Brassey!”

  Brassey was a warrant officer, gunner. A scrawny man with skin like yellow parchment; he looked now as if he’d just been down a coal-mine. Bell-Reid asked him, “Is the bloody thing flooded now, or isn’t it?”

  “What I’m after, sir. Should’a been, but I just got the buzz there’s lads in there wounded.”

  “Inside the magazine?”

  “I dunno, sir, but that’s what I ‘eard. If it’s right I could use some ‘elp.”

  “How did you hear it?”

  “Young Clark, sir. He’s a good ‘and but he was—well, shook up. And he couldn’t shift ‘em, not on his own. Weren’t making all that much sense like, sir.”

  Bell-Reid looked at Jack.

  “Give Mr Brassey some support, Everard?”

  He nodded. “Aye aye, sir.”

  It hadn’t been his own choice, this time.

  “There’s your help, Mr Brassey. Get it flooded double quick. If it blows up she’ll go down like a stone before we’ve got the wounded out of her. Petty Officer Berwick here’d like to go along too, I expect.”

  How men might have been wounded in a magazine deep inside the ship, without the magazine itself having exploded, was a mystery. But with fires near it, it did have to be flooded, obviously …“Here, Everard!” Bell-Reid called him back, handed him a box; there was a hypodermic in it and a flask of some fluid. “Morphine. Up to that mark there is one effective dose to kill pain. All right?”

  He nodded, stuffed it inside his shirt so he’d have his hands free. Blundering aft through smoke, darkness, and the noises of the tortured, dying ship. Sinking ship. Well, not yet: there might be time to get down there, do whatever had to be done and get back up again. Don’t think, just do it … The only torch they had was Mr Brassey’s: they were three decks down and moving aft along a passage that ran down the ship’s side—the starboard, higher side—flanking the two boiler-rooms and engine-rooms. It was narrow, and with the list on her the deck slanted so that their shoulders bumped along the inboard bulkhead as they moved from one watertight door to the next, having to stop to open each one and then shut it again behind them. The farther aft they got the hotter and smokier it was: it was the eye-watering, lung-racking reek of burning paint, corticene, rubber. The bulkhead on the left, the inboard one, was hot to the touch. Behind him, Berwick called out something about smoke-helmets in the damage-control headquarters beside the engineers’ store—if the damage-control parties hadn’t taken them all up top with them when they’d evacuated. But that meant lower deck, back aft. There was a transverse bulkhead with the wardroom and officers’ cabins aft of it, warrant officers’ mess and gunroom—the gunroom being an unusual feature in a cruiser of this class—this side of it, and various offices and stores for’ard of that before you came to the marines’ messdeck. Smoke-helmets were going to be a necessity: Jack already had a wadded handkerchief—cotton-waste, Berwick had—to breathe through, and they were going to have to get right inside the magazine, which extended down into the hold and had the seat of the fire somewhere close to it. The noise of the guns was muted this far down, but each near-missing bomb was like a kick in the head.

  Carnarvon lurched suddenly, just as they were getting through a door: it was as if there’d been a big shift in ballast that had increased the list to port, and the heavy door swung back on the gunner. Brassey cursing: the stoker PO shouted, “Now then, ‘old steady there, old girl!” Keeping his own spirits up … A bulkhead had gone, probably, letting sea flood into another section of the stern. For one blind moment Jack did let himself think about it, feel it: the hatches and ladders overhead, hatches slamming and ladders twisting under distorting strain as one end of her filled and the sea rushed thundering through. He knew what it looked like from outside, but here he was in it; he could have let his nerve go, turned and made a break for it; but he’d allowed himself that flash of imagination deliberately, to prove to himself he could master it, and he’d already wrenched his mind to another area—to the fact that there were wounded men down here, helpless men who’d drown like kittens in a sack if they weren’t brought out. Behind it was a memory—it would last him all his life—of the Dutch transport Gelderland, with men waving from her scuttles as she sank. He’d regained purpose, balance, a sense of direction and of urgency outweighing fear. Breathless still, and shaking inside, but it was the answer, the antidote to fear, having purpose and having to concentrate on the detail of achieving it: it enabled you to tolerate the fear, live with it.

  Through what seemed like hours …

  They got two wounded men. Flash or blast—Mr Brassey reckoned—had passed down the shell-hoist from the midships four-inch mounting to the ammo lobby 25 feet below it. A single shell had exploded in there, probably in the arms of the handler. It had blown that one man to pieces, plastering him over the lobby’s bulkheads, and badly wounded two others inside the magazine. One had had an arm torn off and one side of his head scalped to the bone, the other multiple punctures and broken ribs, perhaps lethal internal injuries. The morphine acted quickly, but getting them up and out of the magazine and then out of the flat up to the next deck wasn’t easy. It was greenhouse-hot, stifling, the deckheads raining condensation. The fire had reached the battery rooms, and the switchboard room was a furnace behind its clipped steel door. The way up from this section was by a vertical steel ladder to an armoured, watertight hatch in the deck above: up there, they were above the edges of the fire. Berwick had left a hose running, to safeguard the line of retreat; the canvas of the hose was steaming from the deck’s heat and the water might have been gushing from a hot tap. But worst of all, they found that the fire had broken through on the starboard side, upwards from below to this higher level: the realization that there’d be no getting back the way they’d come hit all three of them at about the same moment.

  Berwick had opened the magazine flood-valves: she wouldn’t blow up now, not from this cause: and now they’d got the two wounded men up, dumped them for a moment in a swirl of hot water that reddened around them. Like corpses: and by flickering yellow torchlight their rescuers looked to each other like ghouls: bloodstained, sweating, filthy. Bombs were still exploding and close-range weapons were in action, but it sounded as if all the four-inch had been knocked out. Or no ammunition getting to them now.

  Jack took Brassey’s arm and tilted the torch upwards so its light would shine on the underside of the big armoured hatch at the top of the next ladder: there was a manhole-size smaller hatch in its centre, oval-shaped and held shut by the usual heavy clips. Steel an inch thick. Brassey grunted, “You’re a big bastard, Spo.” Berwick went up the ladder, Brassey shining the torch up past him at the hatch. He got two of the clips off: then the third wouldn’t budge as easily. Jack thought, watching upwards, It’s got to … Berwick was straining at it now, using all his weight and grunting with the effort: he was braced with his feet well apart on the ladder, shoulders bunched, both fists locked on the handle of the clip. He was a very powerfully built man: Jack knew
that if he couldn’t move it neither he nor Brassey need even try.

  “Sledge-’ammer.” Panting, chest heaving, Berwick stared down into the torch beam. The ship rang from an explosion for’ard. She’d go—they all knew it—at any moment: there’d be a movement, a sudden shift in her angle in the water, and she’d go in one swift slide. Berwick said, “Won’t do it wi’out a sledge.”

  “Won’t do it, then.”

  Brassey stared at Jack. He looked like something dug up out of a wet grave. The stare dredged an alternative, the only one, out of Jack’s mind.

  “We’ll have to try to get for’ard up the port side.”

  The low side, where the flooding was. Berwick was clambering slowly down the ladder. Brassey growled, “What if it’s up to the fuckin’ deckhead?”

  The answer was, Then we shan’t get through. There was incipient terror in his mind but he had a hatch jammed shut on that too. And he’d told himself, while he’d been waiting in an agony for Berwick to open the other one, that you could drown outside the ship as easily as inside. All right, so in here you’d be trapped, you were trapped, but—

  Shut up …

  The ship had a pronounced list already, and she was deeper by the stern than she had been when they’d started this. That port-side passage might be flooded right to its roof, and even if it wasn’t, if she tipped over by another degree or two when they were in it, they’d stay in it. But with that hatch stuck—you could guess, from bomb-damage up top when the mounting itself had been blown over the side and flash had penetrated to the magazine—there wasn’t anything else left to try.

  “We’ll be lucky, you’ll see.” He told them, “Let’s keep close together. Mr Brassey, you come in the middle with your torch. I’ll go first with this chap.” The man with no left arm: the badge on the remaining one was a star with the letter “C” in it, marking him as a cook.