Convoy East (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  Champney gestured ahead and to port. ‘Two groups. One dead ahead, the other off the port beam.’

  ‘No sign of them being attacked.’

  ‘They’re still distant, Chief. The escort’s after them. We’ll hear the depth charges before long.’

  ‘And we’re getting nearer to Malta.’

  ‘Slowly, yes. Too damn slowly!’

  Turnberry looked down at the crowded decks. ‘Those poor buggers,’ he said. ‘Not much chance, if we go down. Too far off Malta for swimming, I reckon! Have you any plans for them, Captain?’

  Champney’s answer was brief. ‘No. What can I do? Boats enough for the ship’s company only. Two Carley floats. My job’s to dodge the torpedoes in the first place and I can’t even do that under tow. I’m hamstrung, Chief...dependent on the destroyer to swing us as necessary — and in time. It’s a tall order.’

  Turnberry nodded. ‘I feel somewhat superfluous too. No bloody engines! We just sit and take it. No help anywhere.’

  ‘There’s the escorts, Chief. And God. Don’t forget it’s Malta we’re making for now.’

  ‘So what?’ Turnberry looked blank.

  ‘Dobbie. Sir William Dobbie’s the Governor of Malta. Late the Royal Engineers...who’re all said to be mad, married and Methodist. I don’t know the truth of that somewhat wide statement. But I do know Dobbie’s a very religious man.’ Champney grinned. ‘A lot of prayer could be wafting out towards us, Chief. Guardian angels being invoked...that kind of thing. Heaven keeping a good watch.’

  Turnberry stared. ‘You believe in all that, Captain?’

  Champney said, ‘Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. I’ve known prayers to be answered before now. And I’m doing my share of praying, I can tell you!’

  ‘Well,’ Turnberry said. ‘I suppose it can’t do any harm.’ He wondered if the Old Man had been doing any praying for his engine-room. If he had, it hadn’t worked, that was for sure. He left the bridge, went below again and descended the steel ladder into the after tank space, now emptied, the narrow compartment immediately adjacent to the watertight bulkhead, making heavy weather of it with his arm in a sling. He had words with his second engineer: there was some water on the deck, not much, but enough to show that the seams were tending to weep a little and that was not good news. But it was a very slow ingress; it would be a question of time and Turnberry believed they could make it. Malta was now within around a day’s distance. Aboard the ship, they were doing all they could. Now they were in Mussolini’s hands. And God’s.

  II

  By this time the destroyers of the escort had picked up their targets and were homing in, following the urgent ping-ping of the Asdics. The submarine packs were not far off the convoy, and the concussions of the depth charges could be felt throughout the Wolf Rock as they exploded below the water to bring great spouts hurtling into the sky. Lambert reported the bow of a submarine emerging from the sea on the port beam, a bow that fell back, sliding to the bottom probably, as Kemp picked it up with his binoculars. Below at the watertight bulkhead, Turnberry watched the seams in growing alarm: the depth charges had been too close for comfort. The reverberations had increased the seepage of water. The attack continued, more and more heavy explosions sending their shock waves through the Wolf Rock’s plates.

  Reports of the watertight bulkheads reached Champney and Kemp.

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ Kemp said. ‘What’s your assessment, Captain?’

  Champney shrugged. ‘Fifty-fifty. The Chief ‘ll be doing what he can. Which won’t be all that much. There’s little enough room down there for rigging more shoring beams and such. He’s already put chocks across to the bulkhead aft, and —’ He broke off as a voice-pipe whined in the wheelhouse. He went inside, listened, came back with another report.

  ‘Chief’s hurt,’ he said.

  ‘Badly?’

  ‘Very badly. A shoring beam came down, a long drop. He’s pinned to the deck and unconscious.’ Champney added, ‘O’Dwyer’s been informed and is on his way down.’

  Kemp met his eye. ‘Your ship, Captain. But if I were you, I’d ask for an army doctor.’

  ‘I was going to say the same thing,’ Champney said. As he turned to call down to the deck, a signal came from Captain (D) in the destroyer flotilla leader: his radar had picked up the approach of a strong body of aircraft from the northwest. This signal had just been received when the aircraft-carriers were seen to turn into the wind and start flying off their fighters. And in the same instant specks were seen in the sky, keeping high until they were over their targets, and then coming down at full throttle like angry wasps, tearing off from their squadrons and dropping to the attack. Within the next half minute the machine-guns were raking the crowded decks of the Wolf Rock and men were scrambling for cover and bodies were falling over into the sea as the bullets bit. Screams came up to the bridge and Kemp, looking down, saw the decks red with blood. At his side a naval gunnery rate fell slack in the straps of the Oerlikon. Kemp pulled the body clear and laid it on the deck, and took the man’s place, getting his sights on as the next Stuka came down in its dive.

  III

  It was Chief Officer Harrison who found Dr O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer had emerged from his cabin just as the first of the Stukas had come in. He had stood for a moment listening to the racket and had then turned back. Harrison, descending from the bridge to go down to the tank space aft of the engine-room, saw him and went into his cabin behind him.

  ‘You’re wanted, doc. The Chief’s bad. Don’t say you didn’t know. The bridge had the report you were on your way.’

  ‘The army doctors...they’re more up-to-date —’

  ‘They have other things to do now, that’s if they’re still alive. Get down there, or else.’ Harrison loomed over him, big and threatening. ‘Now’s the time to justify your existence.’ He reached out and seized hold of O’Dwyer, turned him, and propelled him out of the cabin, along the alleyway and down towards the engine spaces. From outside came the roar and shriek of the attacking Stukas, the concussions as the bombs exploded, once again close along the Wolf Rock’s sides. There was more machine-gun fire, the rattle of bullets on metal, the chatter of the ship’s ack-ack armament and the stench of cordite. O’Dwyer was shaking uncontrollably. He had his bag with him, the ready-prepared bag with hypodermics and pain-killing drugs: it fell from his hand as the ladder, the vertical steel-runged descent into the tank space, was reached. Harrison caught it in time.

  He said, ‘Over you go.’

  ‘I — I can’t. It’s a death trap down there. You don’t seem to understand.’

  Harrison, his face grim, his shirt clinging wet with sweat, said, ‘Get down where you’re needed. Or do you want me to truss you up like a bloody chicken and lower you on the end of a rope?’

  O’Dwyer stared at him, his face working, eyes wide and red. He was seeing again his experiences in the last war, hearing not the present sounds of attack and defence but the roar and thunder of the German artillery on the Western Front, the terrible chatter of the machine-guns that on the Somme had mown down twenty thousand British and French troops in the first ten minutes of the battle, hearing the desperate cries of wounded men as they were brought back to the field dressing station, hearing the crump of the shells that had landed well to the rear of the front line. Suddenly he screamed and as Harrison moved towards him threateningly he took a step backwards, caught a leg against the hatch coaming, and toppled over. His body bounced once off the steel bulkhead and then he went down like a stone, another scream echoing back behind his fall.

  Harrison was going down the ladder like a monkey when the torpedo hit.

  IV

  On the bridge, they had had no chance of avoiding the enemy’s strike. Kemp had spotted the torpedo trail, coming in on the starboard beam. He called to the yeoman of signals.

  ‘Lambert, make to Probity, haul round to starboard!’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Lambert, feeling in his guts that this was the end, clacked out
the urgent message on his Aldis. Almost immediately the towing destroyer altered to starboard and the towing pendant took a sharp angle to the Wolf Rock’s bow in a last-ditch attempt to narrow the target, to head both ships towards the torpedo and manoeuvre so that it passed harmlessly along one side. In a ship under its own control this might have been successful even at so late a stage; but under tow the process was too unwieldy and slow. While the Wolf Rock was starting to turn, the torpedo hit. There was a vast explosion just below the waterline on the starboard beam; the ship lurched sickeningly, the deck trembling beneath Kemp’s feet as he braced his body against the guardrail in the after part of the bridge and looked down.

  ‘Slap in the engine-room,’ he said to Champney. ‘Lucky in a way...seeing it’s already full of water! But we’ll be main deck awash any moment now. That’s if the transverse bulkheads don’t hold. I’m going down to see for myself, Captain.’ He looked around. ‘Where’s Finnegan?’

  ‘Here, sir.’ Finnegan’s head appeared at the top of the starboard ladder. He was streaked with sweat and oil. Kemp gestured him back down the ladder and started towards it himself. Finnegan clattered down ahead of him. Kemp said, ‘We’ll take a look at the damage, Finnegan.’

  ‘I’ve already been down as far as possible, sir. I reckon it’s been contained by the water, largely anyhow. The bulkheads —’

  ‘Our last hope,’ Kemp said. ‘How’s the girl, Mrs Pawle?’

  ‘Dead scared, sir.’

  ‘Let’s hope that’s a good sign.’

  For a moment Finnegan looked puzzled; then he ticked over. If Susan was showing fear, fear that she might die, then maybe she preferred to live after all. But that was a long shot: no-one would want to die in pain and terror, in rising water or in the red hell of a burning metal box. He followed the Commodore down the internal ladders towards the water-logged engine-room, now presumably a shatter of twisted ladders and broken machinery. The ship felt desperately sluggish, becoming more so as the waters extended as far as the remaining bulkheads fore and aft, the last bulkheads that would have to hold if the ship was to survive. He knew what would be in the Commodore’s mind: abandon, or not? The troops who had survived the machine-guns might be safer off the ship or they might not. Finnegan remembered the last time, knew that Kemp also would have that in mind — the gunning down of the swimming men. As they came towards the remains of the after tank space Kemp set his mind at rest on that point.

  ‘We’ll stay aboard as long as possible, Finnegan. It’s the only hope. Not that it’s much.’ Kemp had the troops foremost in his mind: they were targets, so long as the attack lasted, wherever they were. But at least the ship offered a little more protection than the water, and they were to some extent defended by Petty Officer Ramm’s close-range weapons.

  Kemp and Finnegan reached the tank top abaft the engine-room. As expected, it was flooded, the water coming up to well over the deck above and sloshing to starboard as the Wolf Rock settled with a nasty list. Kemp had difficulty in keeping his feet, found himself impacting heavily against submerged projections as he moved.

  A moment later he saw a body coming to the surface of the scummy water: Turnberry, dead as mutton, maybe from that blow on the head from the shoring beam, maybe from drowning. Kemp pulled the body clear of the water. Finnegan said, ‘The doc went down there, sir. So did the chief officer.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I saw them, sir.’ Finnegan didn’t add anything to that statement. It was a hundred to one that O’Dwyer and Harrison were both dead; there was no point, as he saw it, of saying anything now to the discredit of a dead man. Up to a point, O’Dwyer, like Harrison had died in the execution of his duty. That was good enough. And Finnegan said nothing further when Kemp commented that Dr O’Dwyer had turned up trumps in the end.

  Kemp turned away, back towards the ladder leading to the midship superstructure. He said, ‘The ship’s wallowing...like a slug in a plate of porridge. But I’ve a feeling she’s going to stay afloat for long enough.’

  ‘I’ll get the flags out, sir. For the Malta arrival.’

  Kemp gave him a sharp look. ‘Is that meant to be funny, Finnegan?’

  ‘Why, no —’

  ‘There’ll be no damn bullshit when we enter, Finnegan. The only flag we fly will be at half-mast.’

  Finnegan wished he could recall thoughtless words. Old Kemp didn’t like losing men and never mind death’s inevitability in time of war. When the convoys were out, so was the enemy. And so it would go on, convoy after convoy, time and time again, until the whole goddam thing was over and done with. Finnegan’s hope was that so long as it all lasted, he would sail the seas with John Mason Kemp.

  V

  No attack ever lasted as long as it felt it had; when the Stukas came under the darting Seafires, they withdrew: there was always another day, another convoy. Likewise the Italian subs: the destroyer escort accounted for another two beside the one that had surfaced so briefly earlier. Two depth-charge-damaged boats that also surfaced stayed there until they were blasted out of the water by the 6-inch batteries of the Glamorgan, the nearest of the heavy cruisers. The attack had left its mark: two more armaments carriers sunk, two more shattering explosions, sheets of orange and white flame, flung debris to rattle down into the Mediterranean or over the remaining ships of the convoy. All that, and much blood to stain the decks of the Wolf Rock, many bodies to be given a sea burial.

  As the attack was called off and a kind of silence came, Kemp reorganized the remains of the convoy into its ordered lines for the onward passage through to Alexandria, Port Said and Trincomalee. Next day, in the late afternoon, the gallant, bomb-torn island of Malta was raised on the starboard bow. Kemp made his signals to the ships in company: the Langstone Harbour behind her tug would break off from the convoy with the Commodore’s ship and would enter Malta. The remainder would steam on at convoy speed and would be overtaken by Kemp aboard Probity, when the Commodore with his staff and the WRNS contingent would be transferred at sea aboard the Orlando. Just for now, it would be goodbye. It was also hail and farewell by exchange of signals to Jake Horncape aboard the Langstone Harbour: there would be no opportunities for a meeting of one-time shipmates; Kemp’s job was to leave Malta the soonest possible and rejoin his convoy.

  Later, as the evening shadows lengthened and the day drew with Mediterranean suddenness towards dark, the Wolf Rock and the Langstone Harbour approached the breakwater across the entry to the Grand Harbour. Signals were exchanged between the Commodore and the Naval signal station at Lascaris: among other things Kemp reported that he intended landing a WRNS rating believed to be pregnant. He asked for instructions as to her disposal. Aboard the Langstone Harbour Captain Horncape was also receiving signals, congratulatory ones containing his berthing instructions and advising him that discharge of his cargo would begin immediately, the precious foodstuffs being lightered off while his ship was still in the stream off Fort St Angelo. A part of Jake Horncape’s mind was on his silver wedding anniversary, this very day...he hoped Nesta had remembered.

  As the Wolf Rock came slowly through the breakwater behind Probity, now assisted, as was the Langstone Harbour, by the dockyard tugs, Kemp became aware for the first time of the crowds of Maltese citizens and British servicemen lining the shores of the Grand Harbour. From the parade ground of Fort St Angelo, famed in history, from Customs House Steps and the battlements of Lascaris, from Sliema Creek and French Creek and Dockyard Creek, from overburdened dghaisas being propelled by their single oars across the fairway of the Grand Harbour, a storm of cheering rose. There was not much response from the troops aboard the Commodore’s ship; they were all too weary, too deadened by their experiences of the Stukas’ raking fire, too conscious of so many of their mates who’d been colandered in that terrible fire. The decks, washed down now by the hoses, showed no mark of all that beyond the structural damage and the scored paintwork and woodwork where the bullets had hit or ricocheted, but the memories were
fresh enough. Before the light went, those aboard the entering vessels could see the waving and the flags, could sense what their arrival meant to a beleaguered garrison and a starving population battered near to insensibility by the long German and Italian bombardment.

  Finnegan, on the bridge with Kemp, was impressed by the poignancy of the occasion and said so. ‘They’re mighty glad to see us, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kemp said sombrely. ‘And I’ll tell you something, young Finnegan: I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes later tonight.’ He said no more; Yeoman of Signals Lambert, overhearing, understood: probably before the Commodore had left the ship to rejoin the convoy, before the discharge of the Langstone Harbour’s cargo was even begun, the Eyeties and the Jerries would be over the island once again, bombing, strafing...Malta wasn’t the place it had been in peacetime, though no doubt the bars and brothels would be as busy as ever. Lambert thought of his wife back in Pompey and wished there was a chance of mail coming off, but knew there wouldn’t be. They would all have to wait for news of their families until a good while after arrival in distant Trinco.

  On the shattered fo’c’sle Petty Officer Ramm looked across at Malta, glad — the only one who was — that there would be no mail. Bad news could always wait so far as he was concerned and he was still apprehensive about that Pompey barmaid. He would have appreciated a run ashore in Malta, fill himself up with booze so as to forget for a spell, and maybe spend a quid or so on a woman. Turning, he looked aft. He saw Wren Smith, waiting mutinously with her metaphorical bag and hammock and being cat-called by some of the troops.

  ‘Missed opportunity,’ Ramm said to Able Seaman Cardew. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Never mind, lad. Probably wouldn’t have looked at me any road. Not enough bloody gold on me sleeve.’ He was thinking of Chief Officer Harrison, now confirmed as dead along with Dr O’Dwyer. Jock Campbell, below with his work sheets and his stores lists and his once-again sacrosanct linen room, was also thinking of Harrison. Not that he wished anyone dead, of course; but death did wipe out a worry or two. Wren Smith could fulminate all she wanted once ashore, and no doubt would, but with Harrison gone so was her sting. Nobody was ever going to believe her. Jock Campbell felt he could look forward to a secure future once again.