There was a silence in the cigarette-smoke-filled ward-room. Forbes said, ‘Well, I have one of my own. Has anyone any ideas on what it is you’re going to blow up?’ He paused expectantly. ‘No? Well then, let us suppose it’s a plain ammunition store, an arsenal—unlikely perhaps, so far north from the German bases, but let’s just make the hypothesis. What then?’
Bell shrugged and said, ‘We blow it up. Those are the orders.’
‘How? Do you lay a fuse trail, and then take to the boats?’
Bell said quietly, ‘We take what we find, Captain. If there’s the opportunity to get clear afterwards, we’ll make it. If there’s not...’ He left the rest unsaid. But, Forbes thought, he suddenly looked a hell of a lot older than his years. It was a pretty poor prospect, to be blown up by one’s own charges.
When the conference was over, Cameron was given the seamen’s messdeck in order to hold as many of the commandos and sappers as could be crammed in. He gave them a detailed, painstaking run-down of the intricacies of the entry channel to Vest Hammarfjord so that each man would know what to expect and would, Cameron hoped, have some chance of recognizing the various landmarks and trouble spots and of interpreting the orders as they were passed down the flotilla line. It was necessary to give two lectures, the second for the overflow; and he found that on each occasion the commandos paid him the compliment of strict attention and were not slow to ask questions. They were well aware that their lives and the success of the operation would depend largely upon making an incident-free passage inwards.
***
The following afternoon, Rear-Admiral Vian, sharp at 1500 hours, made a preliminary signal for detaching from the convoy and as soon as this was acknowledged the executive was flashed by masthead light from his flagship. Nigeria and Aurora, with their destroyer escort, swung to port and starboard, away from the convoy as it steamed on for the passage north of Bear Island to drop down eventually on the port of Archangel. The cruisers re-formed in line ahead, with the Castle Bay wallowing in the centre and the destroyers on either bow. A signal came from the Admiral ordering maximum speed, and Forbes spoke briefly to the engine-room. The soldiers crowded the guardrails, watching the convoy’s departure with the Vice-Admiral in Victorious, whose great dark bulk dwarfed all the other ships; watching the leaner outlines of Vian’s cruisers as they steamed efficiently into their stations. There was not long to go now, and all at once there was a different feeling perceptible throughout the Castle Bay. The troops were all set to go and the sooner they were away the better; by this time they had largely got over their seasickness, though each corner of the deck, each little hidey-hole in the lee of boats or by the funnel-casing or below the Captain’s quarters still held its dead-looking occupant, green in the face and shivering beneath its khaki greatcoat. Cameron looked at them with sympathy: he had suffered himself in the trawlers. He, however, had been made to work notwithstanding. The trawler skippers knew that his father, their owner, wouldn’t forgive soft treatment just because he was the son. And now it seemed as though the army, having left its troops to wallow in sickness for long enough, had something of the same idea.
A company sergeant-major came shouting along the deck.
‘Come along now, you wretched men, get fell in and show the sailors what you’re made of! Come along, come along, come along then! Sar’nt Hawker!’
‘Sar’nt-Major!’ Behind the CSM a drill-sergeant marched, incongruously smart in a well-pressed battledress and carrying beneath his arm, of all things to find aboard a ship at sea, a pace-stick. But rumour already had it that 20 and 21 Commandos had only recently been formed from an infantry battalion of the line.
‘Stir the buggers up, if you please, Sar’nt Hawker, stir ‘em well and truly up, like bloody pea soup.’ The voice was almost a scream; Cameron, glancing up at the bridge, saw the Captain with his fingers to his ears and a pained expression on his face. The Navy didn’t shout much other than in an emergency. But Sergeant Hawker, wooden-faced, stirred as bid. He poked with his pace-stick, marching along the decks with a rigid gait as though he was on parade at his regimental depot. His shouts rivalled those of his CSM; one day, he would be a CSM himself and now was the time to prove it. One by one, the seasick soldiers staggered to their feet and as the other NCOs went in amongst them, adding to the un-naval noises, they lurched into some sort of line with the rest until it was virtually a case of manning ship all the way round from for’ard to aft and back again. Then, majestically, the Regimental Sergeant-Major appeared, complete with Sam Browne belt and superfine cloth Service dress, cap pulled well down over his eyes, back straight as the Drill-Sergeant’s pace-stick. Behind him marched a person in a white singlet with red edging round the neck and sleeves.
‘Right! Now! There ‘as been too much sitting around on your backsides! I will not ‘ave it any longer! You will perform exercises under the PTA as laid down in ACIs. You will ‘op up and down and get fit!’
Forbes leaned over the bridge rail. Not aboard my ship they won’t, Sar’nt-Major,’ he called.
Mouth open, the RSM looked up. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘I’m sure you’re accustomed to breaking step when, for instance, marching over a suspension bridge?’
‘That may be so, sir. That may be so, and is so, I agree. But—’
‘Five hundred men hopping up and down in what is not a very large ship would cause a vibration, Sar’nt-Major, and endanger the expansion plates. I’d be much obliged if you didn’t hop up and down.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The RSM executed a tremendous salute. He looked stiffly forebearing but otherwise didn’t bat an eyelid. He merely changed the orders. ‘You will dismiss,’ he roared, ‘and you will dismiss gently, otherwise you will sink the ruddy ship!’
On the bridge, Forbes grinned to himself. Soldiers were a very strange lot. A few moments later they became a bloody nuisance. The CSM, following behind his RSM at a respectful distance, placed his boot squarely on a pool of recent vomit and went flat on his back, swearing luridly. The Castle Bay chose that moment to lurch heavily as a big sea swept beneath her bottom plating; the CSM slid fast for the side, out of control. He was not a large man; he went straight between two stanchions and below the chain of the guardrail, failed to make good his wild, despairing grasp, and plunged into the sea’s turbulence before anyone could reach him to arrest his progress. He went deep; he vanished from sight.
Forbes had seen what had happened. He stopped engines and put the helm over to port in an attempt to provide a lee, and at the same time the Officer of the Watch called away the seaboat. From the deck, as a capless head appeared on the surface, a lifebuoy was thrown down by one of the Castle Bay’s company. It fell wide of the mark, and the man in the water seemed to be making no attempt to swim for it. He looked dazed and uncomprehending.
The seaboat might take too long; Cameron climbed over the rail. Seeing him, Forbes called down, ‘Come back, Cameron. That’s an order. Don’t be a bloody fool!’ It was a loud shout, and Cameron heard it, but jumped just the same. He was a strong swimmer; it didn’t occur to him until afterwards that he was jeopardizing the whole of Operation Forestay. A man was in distress and that was all that mattered at that moment. Taking the water, he went deep as the CSM had. Surfacing, he dashed water from his eyes, saw the struggling man, and swam for him fast and powerfully. He reached him, saw the stark fear in the face, and grappled him, trying to get him to stop fighting the sea, to relax and leave it to his rescuer. Another surge of the sea lifted them both and flung them apart; the CSM swept down the side of the sea towards the ship’s hull, Cameron swept down the slope the other way and by sheer chance made contact with the lifebuoy, floating on the end of its line. By this time the seaboat had been slipped from the falls and was pulling for’ard as fast as its crew could make it. Clutching the lifebuoy, Cameron headed for the half-drowned man, his breath rasping at his lungs and the blood pumping loudly in his ears. Then another sea came, bigger and more vicious than the l
ast. The hull of the Castle Bay lifted and lurched heavily to port just as the soldier was once again swept Willy-nilly down the wave’s side.
The end was hideous but inevitable.
The head impacted sharply against the steel hull, sent crashing into it with the full force of the sea behind it, and it shattered. There was a brief patch of blood and then the man had gone, down into the depths, visible just for a moment as an almost headless corpse in the instant of sinking. As Cameron clung fast to the lifebuoy, the seaboat came abreast to pick him up. Yanked aboard, he collapsed into the bottom of the boat, and the crew pulled at once for the falls to hook on. As the seaboat was hoisted, Mr Hanrahan was waiting at the embarkation deck, shaking his head. Young Cameron was due to get a right bollocking from the skipper, but all said and done he’d acted in the best traditions of the service and that was something. Nevertheless, Mr Hanrahan’s face grew longer at another death: they weren’t having too much luck, not apart from the timely appearance earlier of the King George V. All in all, it didn’t bode too good. Evidently Rear-Admiral Vian didn’t think so either; already the impatient signals were coming in demanding explanations.
And then as if to make a pertinent point, a black speck was seen in the sky to the east, a speck that grew larger and was identified as a German dive bomber. As the alarm rattlers sounded, Mr Hanrahan moved at a stately double for his action station. The troops milled about, obeying the order to get below while the sailors ran like Mr Hanrahan for their stations. The dive bomber, a Stuka, made a preliminary high-level run over the ships. The anti-aircraft armament opened and put up a barrage of bursting shrapnel. Puff after puff till the sky looked like an attack of measles... down through it the dive bomber came, screaming out its high note of death, down through the bursts to attack Vian’s flagship, aimed seemingly straight for the compass platform. The din was tremendous, with every ship in action.
The attack misfired: the Stuka dropped its bombs some way off the cruiser to starboard, and climbed for another attempt, streaking up and away from the barrels of the anti-aircraft batteries and the rapid s’Butter of the close-range weapons. Vian was zig-zagging now, with his engines moving at their full speed of more than thirty knots, laying his flagship this way and that as the Stuka went into the next dive. Again it missed: missed the cruisers—but hit fair and square on one of the destroyers. Cameron believed the vessel had taken a bomb slap down a funnel. She burst apart with a tremendous roar. A sheet of brilliant white flame shot up, turning to red and then orange. Bodies, fragments of metal and general debris hurtled into the sky. A great patch of oil spread. Beneath it was nothing—nothing except what looked like a black vortex of disturbed water. It was as though the destroyer had been itself a bomb that had exploded. No one could have survived, but Vian’s flagship was seen to be heading towards the oil patch.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Stuka left them. The ack-ack barrage was intense, and in any case the aircraft’s bomb load had no doubt been expended. The flagship reported no survivors from the destroyer; the Admiral ordered the force to re-form and proceed. They all knew that they wouldn’t be left alone now, that it was just a question of time before a strong German attack came in. Their one hope would be darkness, and there were some hours to go before nightfall.
The First Lieutenant climbed to the bridge. ‘Fall out action stations, sir?’ he asked.
‘No. That bugger’ll have used her radio, Number One, and I want to be ready. Keep the troops below, too—they’ll get in the way of the guns’ crews if they’re let loose to mill around the upper deck.’ Forbes was scanning the horizons while he spoke. After a pause he said, ‘I think a word with Cameron would be in order. Send for him, please, Number One.’
When Cameron reported to the bridge, Forbes gestured him to the chartroom. The bollocking was to take place in private. Forbes said, ‘Get one thing straight, Cameron. An order’s an order no matter what the circumstances. The next time you disobey an order will be the last.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Forbes gave him a searching look; in the heat of the moment, in the overall sound of the wind and sea, it just might—just might—have been conceivable that Cameron hadn’t heard the order or at any rate could have tried to make out a case that he hadn’t. This he had not done, and that was good. The Captain’s tone softened a little but he drove the point home nevertheless. ‘The first consideration is Operation Forestay, Cameron. That must never be jeopardized never. Your action could have jeopardized it. We would have gone ahead without you, of course—no one’s indispensable. But it might have made quite a lot of difference.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That having been said, I’m proud to think that one of my officers put another man’s safety before his own. Off you go, Cameron.’
***
This time, luck was really with them: there was no further attack that afternoon. The ship remained closed up at action stations until after dusk, then reduced to second degree of readiness. As Mr Hanrahan remarked to Cameron, their good fortune was someone else’s ordeal. ‘The sods have found a better target, that’s what.’
‘The main convoy?’
‘That’s right. It’s a better prize than us, I reckon, though the Jerries won’t find it so easy when the old Victorious flies off her aircraft.’
‘Carriers are pretty good targets themselves,’ Cameron said.
Hanrahan shook his head. ‘Not really. Big, yes—hard to miss in a sense, sure enough. But their flight decks are armoured and bloody hard to penetrate, see. Which is where the Yanks’ll find they’ve made a mistake if ever they join in this lot—they give their carriers wooden flight decks, dead easy to penetrate.’
‘Why’s that?’
Hanrahan sniffed. ‘God may know, but I reckon even He’s doubtful.’ He yawned. ‘Let’s hope we get all night in, Sub. I’m getting too old for alarms and excursions. You’re all right—you’re young. This is a young man’s war.’
When the Gunner had gone on his way Cameron stood looking out across the dark sea, at the restless heave of deep waters and the blurs in the night that were the hulls of the cruisers in company, none of them showing any light whatsoever. Hanrahan was probably right about it being a young man’s war; certainly you didn’t find many men over the age of forty-five or so at sea with the RN except for captains and above. Bodies grew weary with age and minds grew unresilient, but you had to put up with that in the senior officers, which was quite a thought... there weren’t many young admirals, and at forty-seven Vian himself must be almost the youngest, and that, from Cameron’s standpoint, was scarcely the first flush of youth. The grinding strains of command... Cameron’s soliloquizing was cut into by a sudden noise behind him and he turned. It was a door opening and crashing back against the bulkhead as a man lurched through to the open deck with something in his hand.
Cameron was close enough to see that the man was a soldier, one of the commandos, wearing a sergeant’s chevrons. The bottle he was clutching could have been smuggled aboard in Hvalfjord or it could conceivably have been obtained on board, from the wardroom wine store: some stewards might not be averse to making a little cash on the side and stock shortages could be covered up by a little fiddling with the officers’ wine bills.
The sergeant stood still for a moment, focussing his eyes on Cameron. There was no one else very near; Cameron had been standing on the starboard side of the after well-deck where, for considerations of free space for the guns’ crews, the troops had not been allowed dossing billets; and at second degree of readiness only one full gun’s crew was stationed aft and this crew was manning the port-side 4-inch.
The sergeant spoke in a slurred voice. ‘Officer, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lovely for some. Sir.’
Cameron said nothing; the situation was a difficult one. The sergeant’s belligerent tone had indicated that he was not so very far off fighting drunk, and a blow from him could end only one way: court martial and reduction
to the ranks, a pretty nasty thing to have hanging over one when going into Operation Forestay. On the other hand, discipline was being shattered and if the sergeant was allowed to proceed on his drunken way all hell might be let loose. There was one way out: to summon the port after gun’s crew and put the sergeant under restraint. But arrest would also lead to the defaulter’s table if not all the way to a court martial, and a reduction to the ranks might be inevitable.
The sergeant spoke again. ‘I said, lovely for some. Too bloody stuck-up to answer. Too lovely for some. Sir. And I say sod the bloody war. What does sir say, eh?’
The voice was hard, challenging, an older and more experienced man in a mood that was telling him that the juxtaposition of rank was all wrong. Cameron said, ‘I suggest you throw that bottle overboard, Sergeant. But with the cap removed so that it sinks.’
‘Sinks?’
‘If it floats, it could give away our position. Scotch whisky, British ship, Sergeant.’
‘Balls.’
Cameron took a deep breath. Maybe it was balls. Other nationalities could buy whisky in British ports when there was any, and so far as that went the bottle could have floated from anywhere. He said, ‘All right, it’s balls. But do as I say and nothing more will be said afterwards. Be sensible. Why throw away your rank, Sergeant?’
A moment later Cameron saw the upraised arm and the bottle in the hand. The sergeant blundered forward. Cameron dodged the wild swipe and got a firm grip on the wrist. He twisted it, hard; the hand opened and Cameron grabbed the bottle before it fell to the deck, but as he brought it down it hit a stanchion and broke. Cameron threw the neck end overboard and then saw that the gunlayer of the port 4-inch had come across the well-deck.
‘Everything all right, sir?’
‘Just about, I think.’ Cameron still had a hold on the sergeant’s wrist and had forced him back against the bulkhead behind. The NCO was breathing hard but keeping his mouth shut now.
Under Orders (A Donald Cameron Naval Thriller) Page 5