Convoy East (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  Greta, eh.

  His worries returned, the worries about the popsie in the Commercial Road pub. Women were funny, very unpredictable. He’d made the mistake of calling her a bitch that last time, when she’d said she’d followed him home. She might be brooding on that; she could have come to the conclusion, the correct one, that he had no intention of ever leaving his wife.

  IV

  ‘Well, Finnegan. How’s she making out?’ Kemp had been watching discreetly, from the wheelhouse.

  ‘Shaky, sir.’

  ‘Of course. She’s probably scared to death of lifting that one leg off the ground, never mind the support.’

  ‘I reckon that’s right, sir. She was shaking like a leaf.’

  Kemp was scanning the convoy, feeling in his bones that the current peace couldn’t possibly last. The Axis powers wouldn’t be content with an abortive attack, the score was going to be evened up before much longer. Lowering his glasses he said, ‘Miss Forrest told me you’d worked a minor miracle, Finnegan.’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, you. Just by talking.’

  ‘Listening, sir. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Yes, I appreciate that, Finnegan. The ready ear.’ Kemp paused, then added, ‘She’s an attractive girl. No doubt she’ll marry again one day.’

  ‘One day maybe, sir. Not for a long while, I’d say.’

  Kemp nodded thoughtfully. After a moment he said, ‘That leg. The medicos can work miracles these days, I believe. Look at Group Captain Bader for instance. Two wooden legs, and still flies. It takes guts but it can be done. She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well, I sure hope so,’ Finnegan said with palpable sincerity and feeling. Then he grinned. ‘Sir, I guess you sounded as if you were reassuring me, not Mrs Pawle herself. I —’

  ‘I just happen to be talking to you, Finnegan, not to Mrs Pawle.’

  ‘Why sure, sir, but -’ Finnegan broke off, still grinning. ‘You’re not matchmaking, by any chance, are you, sir?’

  Kemp gave a gruff laugh, somewhat embarrassed. ‘Good God, Finnegan, not with you at all events! Poor girl’s got enough on her plate without that.’

  Finnegan said solemnly, ‘Sir, I guess that sounds unkind, really unkind. Maybe Wren Smith’s more in my line.’

  Kemp turned to face his assistant, his expression hardening. ‘Not funny, Finnegan.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘That girl has problems too. So, by God, because of her, have I!’ Finnegan’s face was expressionless as he said, ‘They won’t blame you for it, sir. You don’t have to worry.’

  Kemp glared, then relaxed. He said, ‘Get out of my sight, young Finnegan, you’re becoming offensive. Go and do something useful for a change. Work your charms on Miss Hardisty.’ As the sub-lieutenant saluted and left the wheelhouse, Kemp reflected sardonically on young officers with his assistant particularly in mind. He was good at his job, and he was a young man of courage; had he not been, he wouldn’t have joined in the war before his own country had become involved after Pearl Harbor. He was keen and reliable and painstaking in his duties, very conscientious. But with women? Kemp’s memory took him back to his previous assistant, also of the RCN VR, also American. Young Cutler...A young woman called — he remembered — Roz. In the Station Hotel at Oban, with a convoy forming up in the Firth of Lorne...he’d had to chivvy Cutler towards the drifter that was waiting to take them off to join the convoy. Roz had been a little tight and he’d heard her, clearly, refer to him, Kemp, as an old fuddy-duddy who was jealous because he was past it. It had been fairly obvious that she and Cutler had spent the previous night together. He recalled another in Cape Town, one whose name now escaped him, an admiral’s daughter of the ‘twin-set and mummy’s pearls’ variety whom he’d met with Cutler quite by chance, and he’d bought them a drink in a hotel. She’d been very charming, had made a pretence of being overcome at meeting a convoy commodore, and had uttered the classic comment that daddy always said the convoys were awfully important. Kemp could still shudder at that. He recalled also that the family home was in what she called Bodders, which being interpreted was Bodmin in Cornwall.

  There had been others, quite a number. All very natural for a young sub undergoing his first experiences of the sea life and all that went with it. To seamen, women always had loomed large: Kemp himself hadn’t held back, though it had not been quite so free and easy when he’d been a young man. They didn’t hop into bed quite so readily as now, they had mostly wanted at least a promise of marriage first, except of course for the scrubbers that were always plentiful in the world’s ports. The one trouble with young Cutler had been that he couldn’t help flirting — an old-fashioned word that made Kemp realize his own age — and Finnegan was in many ways a replica of Cutler. Young officers in wartime...Susan Pawle was very vulnerable to being led up the garden path. That could happen however recent the loss of her husband. There was a long way yet to go to Trincomalee and the final splitting-up of the convoy and she could come to rely on Finnegan if he cared to manipulate her heartstrings.

  That must not be allowed to happen. Not that it was any of his business, of course, unless and until it interfered with the conduct of the convoy. But John Mason Kemp, who had two sons but not the daughter he and Mary had always wanted, felt himself thinking along fatherly lines towards a helpless girl who was at a very critical stage of her life.

  He sighed and resumed his vigil, the eyestraining business of watching sea and sky for anything that might have escaped the lookouts or the probing antennae of the radar and the pings of the Asdics as they swept ceaselessly around the orderly lines of ships. He wondered how things were aboard the big transports, the ex-liners of peacetime days. There had been some exchange of signals between the Masters and the Commodore, mainly but not wholly concerned with the conduct of the convoy and the problems of station keeping. Reading between the lines of some of the strictly non-operational signals, Kemp had suspected the occasional disagreement with the army as represented by the OC Troops aboard each of the transports. These latter were mostly good fellows but the army could be difficult and was often stodgy, bound up with regimental codes and practices and whatnot. They seldom took very well to sea life, and to being under the command of the Master. The sea was to them a thing apart, an alien environment that rolled and pitched and caused even regimental sergeant-majors, and colonels, to be seasick at embarrassing moments. The strangeness could lead to friction at times. The soldiers, or anyway the officers and NCOs, chafed at inactivity and the lack of opportunity for exercise; and the break in the infantry training programme, the training that to be effective had to be continuous, was unwelcome, especially so when action lay ahead of them, most likely, quite soon after the disembarkation at Alexandria.

  Kemp knew something of their orders: they would be backing up the Eighth Army, newly under the command of General Sir Bernard Montgomery, said to be an unconventional and pernickety officer. So far things had not gone well for the army in the western desert and Montgomery was to be the new broom. He had already started sweeping: a number of senior heads had fallen. Those troops out there, rolling gently in the blue water of the Mediterranean, would probably find themselves striking out across the Libyan sands, possibly towards Tobruk and its German garrison, almost as soon as they had disembarked.

  If they reached Alexandria in the first place: Kemp believed now that the earlier attack on the convoy had been something of a feeler. The main weight of Mussolini’s navy had not yet appeared from Taranto as expected. His feeling of unease had increased, was increasing faster as the convoy came nearer to Malta, nearer to the Sicilian Narrows that lay between Cape Granitola at the western tip of Sicily and Cape Bon in Tunisia.

  Captain Champney came up the ladder to the bridge. He said, ‘You’ve been a long while on deck, Commodore.’

  Kemp shrugged. ‘Can’t be helped.’ He grinned, a tired grimace. ‘We’ve all been brought up to long vigils, Captain.’

  ‘A couple of hour
s’ sleep wouldn’t come amiss. Why not take the chance while—’ Champney broke off as a lamp began flashing from the Nelson. It was the masthead lamp, making an all-round signal, to all escorts and merchantmen. Somehow, it had the appearance of urgency. The yeoman of signals began reading off the message. Half a minute later he reported, his voice breaking the fraught silence between Commodore and Master.

  ‘From the Flag, sir, addressed all ships. Prepare for action against main body of Italian Fleet observed by our reconnaissance aircraft thirteen miles ahead and closing at maximum speed estimated twenty-seven knots. Message ends, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Yeoman. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Lambert turned away to his signalling projector. Kemp did the sum in his head. He said to Champney, ‘Twenty-seven knots, speed of convoy fifteen, closing speed forty-two knots. What do you make it, Champney?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes. Then we’ll be inside their range.’

  Kemp nodded. ‘Action stations, if you please, Captain!’

  His face grim, Champney went into the wheelhouse and pressed the alarm. As the rattlers sounded throughout the ship, more signals came from the Flag. So far no submarines had been picked up by the Asdics — they might yet come, but for now the threat was the heavy Italian ships, the battleships and cruisers, and very likely more Stukas from the German airfields in Sicily. The heavy ships of the escort — Nelson, Rodney and Malaya together with the cruisers plus the three aircraft-carriers astern of them — would form the line to lie between the enemy and the convoy. The destroyers would remain with the convoy which was to come under the sole and direct of dens of the Commodore responsible for its safety.

  Kemp passed his immediate orders to all merchant ships: Convoy will scatter.

  FOURTEEN

  I

  ‘Buggeration,’ Petty Officer Ramm said in some annoyance: he had been foiled by the action alarm. Miss Hardisty had taken Jean Forrest at her word and had lost no time in ordering a full kit muster by all Wren ratings. Their kit, smalls and all, was to be laid out neatly in rows with the owners standing beside their property, the muster being held in the alleyway outside the chief steward’s cabin. Petty Officer Ramm would contrive a passing visit. Or would have done if it hadn’t been for Musso.

  The Wrens had started straggling along carrying their armfuls of gear when the alarm had sounded. There was then total confusion as the word came from First Officer Forrest to get the girls into their action quarters. A good deal was dropped and taken on deck by an unkind draught of wind whistling through from a hatch. Knickers, navy pattern, flew into the air accompanied by bras and other things. PO Wren Hardisty, purple in the face with embarrassment as she saw Ramm looking, a grin on his face, before he went off at the double towards his guns, ran about in an attempt at salvage until a shout from the Commodore on the bridge told her to get below immediately.

  ‘Never mind the undies, Miss Hardisty. Life’s more important than girdles!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Miss Hardisty fled, a large bottom wobbling. Petty Officer Ramm, from his position now by the close-range weapons on monkey’s island, caught a glimpse of a stocking hanging from a stanchion. What a bloody lark, he thought, it beat the old Coliseum in Edinburgh Road in Pompey by a mile. Wrens...and not a chastity belt among the lot.

  II

  One more signal came from the Flag as the Commodore watched his charges scatter on their separate courses: action imminent. As Lambert made his report to Kemp the telephone from the crow’s-nest burred and Captain Champney answered.

  He said, ‘Ships in sight ahead, hull down.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. Are we up to full speed now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll be doing a good deal of manoeuvring. Helm, not engines. Though frankly there’s not a hell of a lot of point unless we come under attack from the dive bombers. You can’t predict the fall of shot from surface vessels.’

  ‘Speed the best protection,’ Champney said.

  ‘That’s it. Just bugger off, to be frank! Sounds cowardly, but it’s prudent.’

  Champney nodded. He, like Kemp, was thinking of the packed troop transports now on their westerly courses to head them away from the heavy batteries of the Italian battleships. The Flag had signalled that the attack was believed to include the Giulio Cesare carrying ten 12.6-inch guns and the almost new Vittorio Veneto of 35,000 tons with 15-inch batteries, plus an as yet unknown number of heavy cruisers of the First Division of the Italian fleet. The heavy gun-batteries could cause havoc among the transports. Captain Champney had never served aboard liners, but he had enough imagination to appreciate the horrific scenes that could result from a hit on a big troopship crammed to the gunwhales with soldiers out of their element. Officers and NCOs who had only just about learned port from starboard, fires starting, electrics thrown off the beam, darkness along the troop-decks and alleyways adding to the confusion. Those troopships were vastly overcrowded, something like five thousand brown jobs each where in peacetime they would have carried around fifteen hundred passengers at the most. True, soldiers were a disciplined bunch but even military discipline could crack when the floating world that contained it was basically unfamiliar. A badly listing ship, with the water rising to one side until it lapped the lower promenade decks, the troopdecks starting to flood if the heavy shells had fractured the watertight doors or blown holes in the side plating, and a rush of men desperate to claw their way up to the open air...Captain Champney was glad enough to be where he was.

  ‘Opened fire, sir!’ This was a shout from Lambert, whose binoculars were trained aft towards the British battle line and the enemy beyond, and had picked up the ripple of flame that had come from beneath the towering midship superstructure of a battleship now identified positively as the Vittorio Veneto. A few moments later there was a curious whine and a rush of air, right overhead. Kemp and Champney ducked instinctively, and moments later great columns of water rose from the sea around four cables’-lengths ahead of the Wolf Rock and a little on the starboard bow.

  ‘Ranging salvo,’ Kemp said as he straightened. ‘Somewhat over but the gunnery’s not bad. Let’s hope our chaps are as good.’

  Lambert heard this and, though he offered no comment, he didn’t rate the Eyetie gunners as highly as the Commodore: they would have been ranging on the British battleships for a start, not the convoy itself, and Lambert reckoned they were not over but a bloody sight too far over, for there was now a considerable gap between the Wolf Rock and the Flag. The ships of the convoy, obeying the scatter order from the Commodore, were all over the place, making for all points of the compass other than easterly. Lambert wasn’t too worried: there was plenty of British weight between him and the Eyeties and he didn’t for one moment believe the Eyeties would break through. And now the British battleships were in action, the great 16-inch batteries of the Nelson and Rodney, eighteen guns all told, plus the Malaya’s eight 15-inch guns, blasting away in a Guy Fawke’s-night of flame and smoke.

  But it wasn’t just the Eyeties: now the Stukas were coming in, great buzzing dragon-flies coming down from the north-east, coming in at speed, getting into position for their dive-bombing attacks.

  Kemp said, ‘That’s the strategy. Surface ships to engage each other, the Stukas to attack the convoy. Musso trying to knock the lot off.’ He called up to monkey’s island above the wheelhouse. ‘Petty Officer Ramm!’

  Ramm looked down over the guardrail. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Don’t waste your ammunition, Ramm. I know the temptation, but hold it till they’re within range.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Ramm withdrew, sucking his teeth. Gunner’s mates didn’t need to be told the obvious but he knew Kemp had a point. In the last attack the close-range gunners had certainly blasted off long before their fire could be of any use. It was a human enough failing but Ramm had already had words with his gunnery rates about it and he had them again now as he stood by the Oerlikons.

  �
�You. Able Seaman Cardew.’ Cardew, a three-badgeman, was now Ramm’s senior rating in place of Leading Seaman Nelson. ‘No pooping off too soon, right?’

  ‘You know me, GI,’ Cardew protested.

  ‘Yes, I bloody do, which is why I spoke. So hold off, Commodore’s orders, right?’

  Cardew nodded. ‘Whites o’ the buggers eyes, I s’pose.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Ramm left monkey’s island, clattering down the vertical ladder to the starboard wing of the bridge. Able Seaman Cardew, beery face a startling red in its surround of white anti-flash gear, uncomfortably tight in the Oerlikon harness because the beer had also attacked his stomach over the years to the extent that he was known as Beer Gut, peered into his sights and leaned backwards, elevating his gun as the first of the Stukas suddenly dipped its nose and came down flat out in a horribly hostile shriek. It looked like a personal attack on the Commodore’s ship. As the Wolf Rock altered away under full starboard helm, Cardew acted in a self-preservative way and squeezed his trigger. The tracer went upwards, arcing uselessly, and there was a crescendo of a roar from the gunner’s mate below.