There hadn’t been anything sure about that, either. Battery readings taken just now by Blackie Cole had shown density readings that were horrifying, well below the safe-discharge limit of 1.180.
‘Pilot – behind me on the ladder, on my legs.’
Jake shambled over. There was always pressure in the boat when she’d been down for a long time. You could see it on the aneroid. When it was really bad, a captain opening the hatch without extra weight to hold him down could be blown out and killed.
‘Chief ERA in the control room!’
Lofty Adams called through for him. Grumman came in: vast, lumbering, nodding to the other ERAs, stopping with a hand like an oily leg of mutton on the edge of the bulkhead door.
‘Sir?’
‘The minute the top hatch is open, Chief, I want the gas engines started. Half ahead – three hundred revs starboard and a standing charge port. But no delay, not one second’s.’
In case they met a patrol boat or other trouble, and had to dive again; at least the engines would have sucked the foul air out of her and drawn some of the fresh kind in.
Hobday had sent another blast of air into number three; and the list was no longer evident, as the tower emptied and she regained stability. Two hours, Wishart had said – so Jake remembered. If they were lucky enough to be left to themselves, they’d have two hours on the surface now, before dawn and daylight forced them down again.
Then what? For a full charge in normal circumstances the battery needed eight hours. Jake wasn’t up to thinking that one out. His mind pleaded, Let’s just get up there – please? Hobday told Wishart, ‘The tower’s empty, sir.’
Ellery jumped up on the ladder, pulled the pins out of the clips and then jerked the clips free. He grabbed the hinged bar and pushed upwards on it, climbing another rung on the ladder in order to force the hatch up and back, clanging heavily into the tower. A splashing of water, about a bucketful, rained down into the control room. The signalman jumped clear, and Wishart went quickly up the ladder. Jake followed him, into an odour of seawater and wet metal. Rush of air, a violent hissing, whistling: the port-side scuttle and deadlight had been stove in, leaving a jagged hole, and the boat’s pressurised stink was gusting out of it. Higher up, he grabbed hold of Wishart’s legs, wrapping his arms round him above the knees and holding tight. He heard him working at the clips on the top hatch, and suddenly the hiss of escaping pressure thickened to a roar as Wishart eased the last clip off and held the hatch’s opening force on it. Foul air rushed up round them: a fog came with it, an evil-smelling mist pouring out of the boat’s sewer-like compartments. Wishart flung the hatch open and yelled downward, ‘Start the engines!’ Jake bawled it down and climbed after him, heaving himself up out of the hatch’s rim and into the wet bridge and the incredibly clean night air. In the pause before the diesels coughed and spluttered into life he heard, from not far away in the darkness on the beam, a dog’s high, mournful howl.
A Marmaran dog!
Chapter 8
‘Let us pray.’
Fifth day: Sunday morning … Wishart glanced around the control room at the bowed heads of his ship’s company. CPO Crabb’s grey-streaked one was immediately in front of him, and Rinkpole’s dome gleamed beside it. Leech, the stoker PO, had cut himself shaving, and a twist of blood-soaked cotton-waste clung to the side of his thick neck. Wishart’s eyes rested for a moment on the depth-gauges with their needles static at seventy-five feet; E.57 was bottomed, off the west coast of Kalolimno Island, and there wasn’t a hint of movement on her. Satisfied, he opened his prayer-book at one of the strips of signal-pad he’d put in as markers, and began to read into the warm underwater quiet, O most blessed and glorious Lord God: we thy poor creatures whom thou hast made and preserved, holding our souls in life and now rescuing us out of the jaws of death, humbly present ourselves again before thy Divine Majesty to offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, for that thou heardest us when we called in our trouble, and didst not cast out our prayer…
There’d have been some prayers all right, Jake thought. Most likely every single member of the ship’s company had asked the Almighty for assistance at least once during the passage of the straits. Wishart had whisked some pages over, switching adroitly from one prayer to another: that first one, if he’d gone on with it, would have let him in for asserting that at some point they ‘gave all for lost, our ship, our goods, our lives’, and this would have presented an unjustifiably defeatist attitude. He continued instead, Thou has showed us terrible things and wonders in the deep, that we might see how powerful and gracious a God thou art, how able and ready to help them that trust in thee…
Jake had been looking at ERA McVeigh when Wishart had spoken of ‘terrible things and wonders in the deep’, and he’d almost burst out laughing, thinking that Angus McVeigh might be about the most terrible and wondrous of the lot … It was astonishing to think that only five days ago he’d had his work cut out just to remember these men’s names; he felt now as if he’d known them all for years.
It had been about two-thirty on the morning of the third day when they’d surfaced at the Marmara’s western end. There’d been two hours of darkness left; they’d spent them travelling eastward at six knots with one engine pumping the beginnings of new life into the tortured battery. Before dawn Wishart had dived her and taken her in close to the northern shore, to lie bottomed all day in twelve fathoms near a headland called Injeh Burnu. A day’s rest, proper meals, clean air to breathe … During the day, Rinkpole and his torpedomen had drawn back the torpedo from the starboard tube, the one that had been flooded when the mine went off, done a full maintenance routine on it and then reloaded it. And Leading Seaman Dixon, the LTO, had got the gyro compass back into commission. The bigger repairs – to the conning tower and the leaky control-room deckhead – had had to wait.
That evening they’d got away from the coast and surfaced well out in the deep water. Heading north-east on the gas engines and charging all the time, they’d met no surface craft at all, and they’d taken this as evidence that the Turks had no idea they’d got through. Otherwise they’d have been hunting for them. Wishart, on the bridge with Jake that night, had murmured, ‘Probably imagine they’ve made their straits impassable. Silly asses!’
‘Wonder how Louve’s come through it.’
‘Oh, those froggies’ll be all right.’
There’d been hammering and filing noises from the tower under their feet, and for some time Grumman and Knight were down inside the casing, under the gundeck, using a shaded torch to examine the rivets that fixed it to the pressure hull. Those were the loosened ones – from the strain of pulling against that net – and Grumman’s view was that the flooding of the tower had loosened them still further.
‘Tower made ’er list; an’ when she lists over you got the weight o’ the gun pullin’ sideways.’ He’d moved one ham-like hand at an angle to the other. ‘So there’s all that movement actin’ on the rivets, twistin’ at ’em. I reckon we oughter take the gun an’ the gun-mountin’ right off ’er, sir.’
They’d done it yesterday, in daylight, right out in the middle with no land or ships in sight. ERA Knight had taken care of technical problems while Roost and his gun’s crew did the donkey-work. Barrel and breech had been manhandled into the fore hatch – which had been opened for the bare minimum of time needed to get the loads struck down into the submarine – and were now stowed up for’ard in the tube space. The heavy circular mounting had then been unbolted from the gundeck, manoeuvred along the casing to the bow in order not to risk damage to the saddle-tanks, and there eased overboard to sink into four hundred fathoms of water. Leaving a slight trim adjustment for Hobday to attend to. And while that had been going on, Grumman with McVeigh and Bradshaw had bolted a steel patch on a rubber seating to the outside of the hole in the tower, and welded a back-up patch to the inside of it, with packing between the two to guarantee its watertightness. Hobday meanwhile had had both engines pounding away to
bring his battery up to scratch; it hadn’t been quite up, although the repair jobs had been completed, when the lookout on the bridge had sighted a wisp of funnel-smoke and they’d had to dive. Mid-morning, that had been; Hobday had grumbled at having had to cut the battery charge.
‘Another half-hour, she’d have been right up.’
‘We can’t risk being spotted, Number One. The most vital thing now is not to let ’em suspect we’re here.’
During the day, paddling eastward at periscope depth, they saw two freighters, one gunboat and about a dozen sailing craft, most of them dhows. The gunboat hadn’t been patrolling, and her behaviour had reinforced their belief that the enemy were quite unaware of a submarine having gate-crashed their private sea. She’d been making about eight knots on a straight course, heading towards Rodosto; she hadn’t been zigzagging, there’d been men lounging on her upper deck, and both her guns had canvas covers on.
E.57 had surfaced at five in the evening; there’d been nothing at all in sight, and Wishart had ordered ‘hands to bathe’. They came up in groups of four men at a time; the procedure was to dive in, climb out, work up an all-over lather with salt-water soap and then go in again to wash it off. Nick had jumped at the chance of a swim, and so had Burtenshaw, but Robins had passed his up. And last night when all nominally clean-shaven men had shaved, preparing themselves for the Sunday morning service, Robins had abstained and advised the other two to do likewise. Nick had seen the point; it would be better to look scruffy and un-British when the time came to land. They were to be provided with some kind of local garb – whatever Turks or other denizens of Constantinople wore – and clean-shaven faces would have looked out of place. So now the three passengers were the only men in E.57’s control room who weren’t spruced up.
The rendezvous with Louve was scheduled to take place at dawn. Nick was more than ready for the move. Being a passenger had been bad enough in Terrapin but in this submarine it was worse still. One felt not only useless and idle but actually an encumbrance, an unnecessary body getting in the way of men with work to do. It would be a relief to move under one’s own power, make one’s own decisions. Not that he’d much idea what decisions, what sort of problems he’d be faced with. It was no good even trying to guess what opposition or what help there’d be. Robins was certainly no help: Nick had tried to get some background information out of him, about the situation ashore and so on, but the man was either as ignorant as he was himself or jealous of his special knowledge. It was just as well, Nick thought, that he wasn’t going to have to rely on Robins later, that they’d be splitting up as soon as they’d got ashore and met Reaper’s people – whoever, for God’s sake, they might be … Robins had said once, answering a probe of Nick’s, ‘The Grey Lady’s the king pin. You’ll get everything from her, or she’ll see you get it from some other quarter.’ Then, realising he’d actually given a fairly straight answer to a question, he’d turned testy, asking, ‘Did Commander Reaper not brief you fully?’
‘Well, yes. As far as he could.’
‘Ah.’ Smirk. ‘Quite!’
Robins, of course, loathed Reaper. Nick didn’t bother to stand up for him, though. A sneer as nebulous as that wasn’t easy to take issue with; and Reaper was capable of fighting his own battles.
What had Reaper told him? Anything else that he ought to have in mind and hadn’t? He didn’t think so. Only the times and positions for the two rendezvous appointments. Beyond that, one had a free hand to act as circumstances dictated. It had been Reaper’s personal decision to bring Nick into it. As the operation had been conceived originally, he’d said, Burtenshaw had been no more than a ferret to flush Goeben out of her hole. He’d been a throwaway: no great difficulty in putting him ashore with Robins, and while he wasn’t expected to achieve anything directly with his bag of explosives the hope was that his having been put ashore at all would alert and alarm the Germans to the possibility of sabotage attempts; so they’d move her out of the Horn, to where E.57 or Louve could get at her. Reaper’s intention was that with Nick to steer him along, the Marine might make a real job of it. Implicit in the London plan – the one Reaper had been saddled with and which he’d now amended – was that Burtenshaw was likely to be caught, soon after he’d landed. It was the kind of Whitehall cynicism that Reaper said he’d met before and never put into action in any of the stunts he’d handled. Nick had wondered whether his own participation was likely to make all that much difference. Reaper, he was aware, had a high opinion of his abilities, but that opinion was based on a performance – the Flanders coast raid – which Nick felt owed a great deal to sheer luck.
Mightn’t Reaper be only throwing away two amateurs instead of one?
Remembering that talk with him, pacing Harwichs quarterdeck as night closed down on Imbros … Reaper had gone on to discuss what was expected to happen after Turkey capitulated. He’d said it was virtually certain that a British naval force would be sent through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea to support the White Russians in the Caucasus and Crimea.
‘Not that your poor old Leveret is likely to be part of that.’
‘I suppose not.’
And damn that, too. To have had a prospect of action – surface, destroyer action – instead of just the fizzling-out of the war and the onset of peacetime formality, would have brightened things considerably. It might even have made this submarine trip tolerable. He’d have been able to look forward to getting back to a world he knew and understood and could handle, felt at home and happy in. As it was, he faced a dogsbody job with little prospect of excitement in it. But he didn’t want to show Reaper how low his spirits were; he said, ‘At least it is a command, sir.’
Reaper had laughed. ‘You’ve learnt not to look gift-horses in the mouth then, Everard!’
Bravo, he’d been referring to. And what that appointment had led to.
Wishart had read out a prayer for the King’s Majesty. Now he turned the pages to another of his markers, and started on the ‘Prayer to be said before a fight at Sea’.
O most powerful and glorious Lord God, Lord of Hosts, that rulest and commandest all things: Thou sittest in the throne judging right, and therefore we make our address to thy Divine Majesty in this our necessity, that thou wouldest take the cause into thine own hand, and judge between us and our enemies. Stir up thy strength, 0 Lord, and come and help us, for thou givest not always the battle to the strong but canst save by many or by few… And how often in past centuries, Nick mused, must Christian invaders of these territories have asked their God to ‘judge between them and their enemies’. A nicely preconceived judgement they’d have been expecting too, seeing that the enemy in those days had been Islam. It wasn’t now: despite what the Turks were up to at the moment, the real enemy was as Christian as they were themselves, and would probably be requesting much the same degree of assistance. Only Christian pressure from one side and Christian bungling on the other had brought Islam into this war: plus the fact that a small group of thugs in Constantinople had all the power in their hands … McVeigh was staring at the deckhead, and Lewis was counting something on his fingers. Eggs? Potatoes? Wishart had shut his prayer book; he glanced at the depth-gauge and then said, ‘The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.’ A general growling of ‘Amen’ finished it. Heads that had been bowed turned upwards as he cleared his throat, looking round at them.
‘It wasn’t any joy-ride, was it? But you came through it splendidly. I knew you would, and you proved me right. Thank you, and well done.’
He met Weatherspoon’s eyes, small-looking behind those thick glasses. The telegraphist’s head shook briefly, answering the unspoken question. Wishart told his ship’s company, ‘About dawn tomorrow we’ll be meeting the French boat and transferring our passengers to her. After that we’ll settle down to patrol across the exit from Constantinople. Louve is watching it at the moment. We’ll be there all ready for Goeben if she obliges
us by coming out and providing a home for Chief Petty Officer Rinkpole’s torpedoes.’
The TI smiled faintly, ran a hand over his bald head. Wishart went on, ‘It’s vital that if Goeben does come out we should sink or cripple her. That’s what we’ve come this far for. Don’t imagine that getting through the straits was the tricky bit and now it’s all routine. It won’t be. We’re in the enemy’s back-yard and the game’s only about to start. So – on your toes every minute, eh?’ He turned to Hobday. ‘All right, Number One. Fall out, please. Get her off the putty when you’re settled.’
‘White watch, watch diving!’
As the compartment emptied, leaving only watch-keepers at the controls, Wishart invited Nick and Robins to join him at the chart table. He used dividers to measure the run to the dawn rendezvous.
‘Eighteen miles. We’ll potter up that way all day, surface when it’s dark in order to charge the battery, and we’ll be there on the spot in plenty of time. Louve at the moment is here: so she has hardly any distance to come to meet us.’
He’d pointed at a pencilled rectangle a mile wide and eight miles long straddling all the likely courses out of Constantinople. He told Robins, ‘After we put you in Louve, we take that area ourselves, and after she’s dumped you off she’ll be going to a long-stop patrol line at the western end.’
In case Goeben got past E.57. She’d have to get by the Frenchmen as well before she reached the Dardanelles. Wishart asked Robins, ‘Where’s your landing spot, d’you know?’
Robins stared at him for a moment, then glanced at Nick. There’d been a policy of not letting the left hand know what the right hand was planning. E.57 might have been sunk, in the straits, and there had been no reason for the submariners to know the details of the shoreside operation. But now, there didn’t seem much reason why they should wot know. Nick told Wishart, ‘Constantinople.’
‘What?’
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 19