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

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Starboard twenty-five.”

  Glimpses: of Afghan away to port with two Stukas going for her at once, Afghan heeling so far over under a lot of helm that he was looking almost straight into her bridge; a bomb-burst flinging up sea ahead and Tuareg driving through it, dirty water drenching down on them, swirling down through the gratings; Drisdale doing a little dance, shaking first one foot then the other, his white buckskin shoes filthied from that torrent. Cursing: and PO Whiffen advising him in a piercing yell, “Shouldn’t a joined, sir!” Then the far-off sight of a destroyer on her own, steaming towards Crete under a cloud of shell-bursts, bombers trailing her like flies. That would be Hereward, closing the Cretan shore to give her soldiers and ship’s company a chance of reaching it when she sank. Four Stukas now attacking Tuareg: Afghan helping with her pompoms: Afghan with all her guns poked up and flaming, defiant, angry-looking, beautiful. The Stukas seemed to be ganging up against one ship at a time, and each time you came out of one of the onslaughts it was a surprise to find you’d got away with it.

  At 0730 Houston had Force B in sight from the director tower. Even from the bridge you could see the bombers over them, a constant procession of them to and from Scarpanto. Soon afterwards, a new signal to C-in-C reported that Orion had been near-missed and damaged and that the force’s speed was now 21 knots. Orion’s captain had been severely wounded by a Stuka’s machine-gun bullet. Nick remembered that fighter cover had been promised for 0530 over this Strait. But at that time Force B hadn’t been in the Strait: the fighters might have come, found no ships to cover, flown home again? Then he remembered: Rawlings had signalled that one-hour delay, last night … Anyway, the only fighters here had black crosses on their wings.

  “Flight of 88s coming up astern, sir!”

  Ashcourt: he had a telephone, at the back end of the bridge, to the point-fives and the for’ard pompom deck, and he was directing them to fresh targets after each one had passed over. He was spotting for himself and also getting reports from the tin-hatted look-outs each side of the bridge.

  “Midships.”

  “Midships, sir …”

  You lived by the minute but you had to reckon on hours, on a daylong battle. Dodging, you held as closely as you could to the southeasterly course, getting back to it each time as soon as possible. Every yard made good in that direction was a good yard. Habgood had reported the rudder centred: Nick told him, “Starboard fifteen. Steer one-foursix.” He was watching one that looked like attacking at any moment. Up ahead there seemed to be a lull, with Force B’s ships in sight now from Tuareg’s bridge and pushing on under a clearing sky-cap, an absence of shell-bursts or attackers. One quick glimpse through binoculars had told him this: another now confirmed it. Bomb-splashes rising like geysers between the two Tribals were from the Ju88s, three of them at about five thousand feet. That Stuka was going for Afghan, not Tuareg: Tuareg’s pompoms and point-fives flaming at it. And it was the last of them: there was nothing up there now but the muck hanging, shredding away in the wind. One Stuka, its bomb somewhere in the sea, was departing, and gunfire had petered out.

  Peace was uncanny. There were ship and sea noises instead of the roar of guns: there was time to take note of being alive, ships unharmed, on course, catching up on the main body up ahead. Blue sky, blue-andwhite sea, Afghan sleekly impressive as she wheeled back into station.

  Swimming slowly: becoming aware of himself doing it—of having been doing it, semi-consciously, for some time. Cold water. Very cold.

  “Give us a tow, sir?”

  A Carley float, thick with men, and other men in the water round it holding on. A few of them laughed at the comedian’s request, and the same man called, “We could accommodate one more, sir.”

  It was a kind thought, but the float was already overcrowded. He swam on, looking for a float where there would be room for him. He’d been pretty well whacked out before this swim had started. Oil in the water here: the sea was loppy but it was probably the oil that was holding it down, preventing the small waves from breaking. The waves were high enough to prevent one seeing far, though: a radius of five to ten yards, he thought, was about his field of vision.

  Clutterbuck swam into it. Blinking steadily: he’d lost his spectacles, poor chap. When he saw Jack, he stopped swimming.

  “Why are you going that way, Everard?”

  “Good as any, isn’t it?”

  “Ah.” An eyebrow lifted. “You pays your money and you takes your choice … Hey, look out!”

  An aircraft was approaching, low. Jack waited, just dog-paddling slightly, otherwise motionless in the water, and the thing roared overhead. Live men attracted bullets, he’d seen that time and time again. There was aircraft noise a lot of the time but it was mostly high up, and one had only to be careful of the low ones or of a circler that might be looking for something to use its guns on. Wavetops were breaking in his face: he was out of the oil-patch, then. Clutterbuck was swimming slowly away, going towards the sun; it was easier to go the other way, so it didn’t blind you. Might have suggested that, if one had thought of it.

  Brassey’s face, Brassey’s rasping voice: You’re a right good ‘un, Everard.

  As if he hadn’t reckoned on living: and at that, he’d most likely reckoned right. But frankness in the face of extinction—things not mattering that had mattered, rank-consciousness no longer operating. Face like a squeezed lemon with stubble on it, a man with a lifetime of naval service behind him calling you a right good ‘un, for God’s sake … The mind roamed free while the body remained trapped in the swimming stroke and another aircraft zoomed low somewhere close: the sudden stammer of its guns came like torture to the brain, as if the brain could feel the bullets that would be ripping into helpless swimmers or a crowded float. He’d stopped moving again while it passed, until the sound had faded. Not all that many of the pilots did it, and perhaps only a minority of them enjoyed the killing, but there had to be a fair proportion of psychopaths up there, he thought.

  Getting bloody tired. Waves breaking in your face didn’t help much, either. Might be why Clutterbuck swam east? The hell … Poor old Brassey: right good ‘un he was …

  He’d stopped swimming, his body telling him it was a pointless as well as painful exercise. Slumping with his face down in the water: holding his breath and then expelling it through pursed lips as the sea washed over him. All that exertion earlier …Drifting into thoughts of brother Nick: whether he and his destroyers had got away with it, or been sunk too. Aircraft noise again: he pulled his face up, gulped air mixed with salt water: it wasn’t a low-flyer, he thought, not one of the blood-lust merchants, just one passing over. Keep swimming, you’ve had your rest. Swim all the way to that—

  All the way back to Gabrielle. Of course he’d ring her …

  That boat!

  Making his eyes focus: one hand up quickly to clear them. It was a whaler he was looking at, clinker-built, greyish-blue, full of men. But room for more, he thought, certainly for one more. It was rising and falling, rocking, by no means overfilled. He’d turned himself towards it, water breaking in his face again in stinging whiteness, and one man in the boat had seen him. He was pointing, shouting.

  Three yards—or ten, it might have been. Some of the men were trying to paddle the boat towards him with their hands. No oars, then. The one who’d spotted him was standing, leaning forward with his hands on the boat’s gunwale; he seemed to be about to launch himself over, come and fetch him. Talking over his shoulder to a stir of men behind him as the boat rocked over.

  “Hang on there, sir, I’ll—”

  It was young Brighouse, for God’s sake. Beside that first chap: Brighouse was clambering over, coming for him. Pausing to shout, “Shan’t be a jiffy—”

  Roar of an aircraft engine suddenly very close: a fighter dipping, swooping at the boat. He heard the hammering of its guns, saw flashes, a wave broke in his face. The Messerschmitt had swept over, banked in a sharp turn, engine-noise thunderous as it hu
rtled over in another pass. He was face-down in the sea, jarring underwater thumping in his ears. Head up again, sucking at the air: noise fading … The boat lay a few yards from him, broadside-on and low in the water with its upper strakes in splinters, no sign of human movement in it. One man’s body was slumped over the bow, head and shoulders in the sea as if he’d been trying to drag himself away.

  “Dido, sir …”

  Nick couldn’t pay attention to whatever his navigator was telling him. He was aiming Tuareg at a diving Stuka. Stooped above the voicepipe, ready to jink her away when he saw the bomb coming. A quick glance now, though, at Drisdale—he was staring out towards the cruisers—and back quickly to face this obscene attacker.

  The lull was over and the storm had broken. Tuareg and Afghan, rejoining Force B, were thrashing up into station on the wing of the destroyer screen, under waves of attacks by 87s and 88s. During that lull the Luftwaffe must have been reorganizing, girding themselves for this all-out assault. Nick had thought he’d seen concentrated attacks before: but this …

  The bomb was falling away from that shrieking, spread-legged horror.

  “Port twenty-five. Two-four-oh revolutions.” He looked over at the cruisers, saw more diving Stukas, ships’ guns all flaming up into the permanent haze of smoke, the self-renewing clouds of shell-bursts. There was something wrong with Dido’s for’ard guns, though: he put his glasses on her, and saw that she must have been hit on her B turret. She had three twin turrets for’ard, and in the turret in the centre one of the pair of barrels simply wasn’t there, the other was twisted up, bent nearly double.

  Bomb-splash to starboard. “Midships.”

  “Midships … Wheel’s amidships, sir.”

  “Starboard fifteen.”

  “Alarm astern—Stuka!”

  He could hear its howl rising over the din of gunfire. Even now Carnarvon was in the back of his mind, a shattered hulk in the deep-sea darkness. Habgood had reported 15 degrees of starboard wheel on: he told him, “Increase to 30 degrees of wheel. Three-six-oh revolutions.”

  “Stone the crows …”

  Back aft, Mr Walsh had grabbed Dalgleish’s arm, pointing: at a Stuka diving vertically on Orion. Literally vertically: like a dart dropped out of the sky. Dalgleish had to look away, attend to other business, barragefire from “X” and “Y” guns at a flight of 88s coming up on the quarter: Mr Walsh goggling, seeing the bomb come away and the Stuka go straight on, straight into the sea in a huge fountain-splash right ahead of her. The bomb burst on her A turret, turret dissolving in flash and smoke, then the smoke clearing to show that pair of guns wrecked and naked to the sky, the turret’s armoured casing blown right off. Orion’s B turret had been knocked out too, in the same explosion: so now she had only her after six-inch turrets and the midships four-inch mountings on each side. None of that “A” turret’s crew could possibly have survived.

  Dalgleish was looking over at the flagship now: he hadn’t seen it happen but he could see the results of it now. The sudden roar of pompoms and point-fives brought his attention back to things close at hand: a Stuka that had attacked Dido and levelled out down on the sea was racketing clumsily up across Tuareg’s stern, exposing its whole disgusting underside as it banked and lifted. Tuareg’s close-range weapons—Afghan’s too now—were all at it, seeing the chance of a kill and wanting it, needing it … You could see the tracer converging, hitting, the little flashes and then the start of fire as the incendiary rounds ripped in, and the Stuka was suddenly a flying torch with a German frying in its cockpit: Mr Walsh hit the port-side Vickers GO torpedoman on the back—”‘Old your fire, lad!”

  Bullets and shells were precious, not to be wasted. There’d be hours of this yet, before they got out of the Stuka radius.

  Battling southward: still praying, minute by minute, for the promised air support.

  Orion’s captain had died of his wounds at about 0930, soon after she’d been near-missed in a multiple attack. Now, just over an hour later, here was another one: eleven Stukas were going for the flagship. They came over through a heavy barrage, dipping their yellow snouts one by one and close on each other’s tails.

  A minute later, from Tuareg’s bridge the flagship was invisible among the bomb-splashes, her seven thousand tons and five hundred and fifty feet of length completely hidden in the bomb-churned sea. Nick thought, She’s gone … As if the whole world was going, piece by piece. All the guns in all the ships barraging to protect her: and the Stukas still getting through. Then she was in sight again, steaming out of the holocaust: but stricken, swinging away off course with smoke pouring out of her. Steering gone, or jammed: out of control and badly hurt. Some of those bombs must have burst inside her, and she had more than a thousand troops on board as well as her own complement of about six hundred.

  “Port fifteen. One-eight-oh revolutions.”

  All the other ships were turning, dropping back to stay with the flagship. You could imagine the struggle inside her, the desperation to smother fires, tend wounded, get her back into control. You had to try not to think about the troop-filled messdecks.

  Jack Everard lay across the whaler’s bow, resting on a dead man’s body, half in and half out of water. He’d clawed up over the body, using it as a bridge while the whaler tipped, heavy with sea and dead men inside it.

  Sea washed red over and around the bodies. There were about eleven of them. The boat had been riddled with bullets and it was waterlogged, waves slopping over the shattered gunwales; the weight of the bodies inside it was lessened by the fact they’d all been wearing lifebelts, some of which had not been punctured. It was also the reason for a few of them floating near the surface, only barely restrained by the top edges of the boat as the whole mass lurched sluggishly to and fro.

  The only face he could recognize was that of a leading signalman named Durkin. He lay on his back, partly supported by an inflated Mae West, and as the boat and its contents rocked so did the killick’s head. When it faced to its right it looked quite normal, but each time it flopped over you could see where the back of the head had been smashed. Durkin’s head wasn’t the only thing you didn’t want to look at twice.

  There was no reason for it, no way to understand it, no advantage to anyone in these men having been turned into corpses. With time to think, not much strength in him for the moment, and the horror all around him, under him, Jack wondered whether the Messerschmitt pilot could have explained it.

  Brighouse, the snotty, wasn’t visible. He’d be in the sea, Jack guessed. Brighouse had been in the act of climbing over the side to come and help him; he’d have been hit then and gone on over, and if his Mae West had been perforated he would have sunk. They floated afterwards, brought up after a certain time by the expansion of internal gases.

  He’d got his breath back, more or less. He shifted, to get himself up higher and look around. The whaler’s bow went down deeper and the body under his left knee shifted: he had nearly all his weight on the other foot, on the top of the stem-post. The boat was like a half-rotten log, only just on the positive side of neutral buoyancy. There were two drowned or shot men not far away, supported by their lifebelts and with waves breaking right over them, but neither of them was small enough to be young Brighouse. The best thing to do now, he decided, would be to get these bodies out of what was left of the whaler. If its timbers remained buoyant it would be better than nothing to hold on to.

  Orion was turning back again, recovering. She was magnificent, Nick thought: a wounded lion refusing to lie down and die, crawling back into the fight.

  “Midships, sir!”

  “One-four-two revolutions. Steer one-four-six.”

  The destroyers were gathering round their flagship, and Dido had dropped back too. The Luftwaffe was at this moment conspicuous by its absence, but it was likely to return at any moment. When it did, Orion would have her hand held tightly.

  Italian MAS-boats—torpedo craft—might pick up Carnarvon survivors. The MAS-boats, one had
heard, had saved a lot of men from other sinkings—from Gloucester and Fiji, for instance.

  Drisdale was looking at him expectantly: as if he’d said something to which he now expected a reply.

  “Say something, Pilot?”

  He’d shaken his head. “Only being wildly humorous, sir.”

  “Sorry I missed it.” He put his glasses on Orion again: she’d just spewed another cloud of yellow smoke from her funnel, and her speed had dropped to almost nothing: you could tell at once by the way her bow-wave dropped. He cut Tuareg’s speed to match: the others were all doing the same, and watching for the flagship to gather way again.

  Still no Stukas.

  “How far are we from Scarpanto?”

  “Hundred and twenty miles, sir.”

  At noon, two Fulmars appeared from the direction of the desert. It was a marvellously comforting thing, to see aircraft that weren’t enemies. They stayed with the ships for about an hour and then flew south again. Orion was still in trouble, with sudden speed variations and gushing multicoloured smoke; each time she slowed the whole force fell back, clustering around her, praying she’d get going again and knowing she might not. Junkers 88s attacked at 1300, and again half an hour later, and the last attack came at 1500—by which time the force was only about one hundred miles from Alexandria. Several of the destroyers in the screen had been damaged by near-misses. Most of the ships were very low in ammunition: Orion had only a few rounds left.

  “It’s a mercy the Luftwaffe decided to call it a day, sir.”

  Dalgleish said it, after he’d leafed through the signals on the log. Orion had two hundred and sixty dead inside her, and rather more than that number wounded. Nick was thinking of a letter he was going to have to write, to Sarah. Saying … what? I had no option but to leave our son to drown.

  Who’d understand it, who hadn’t seen this kind of war? Sarah, of all people?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN