‘Ease to five, sir … Five o’ starboard wheel on, sir.’
‘Tell the TI I’ll be firing both bow tubes, to start with. Midships.’
‘Midships, sir. Wheel’s—’
‘Steer one-three-oh.’
‘One-three-oh, sir!’
‘Slow ahead together.’
Roost was easing the helm as she approached her firing course. Wishart was reducing speed each time he pushed the periscope up, because at lower speeds there’d be less feather where it cut through the calm surface. Calm-ish, anyway. But there was enough white flecking for reasonable security, thank God. The closer E.57 came to her target, the briefer would be her periscope’s appearances.
‘Twenty-two feet.’
‘Twenty-two, sir.’
To show less periscope. The less that stuck out, the less there was to catch an enemy eye. The alternative to holding the boat a couple of feet deeper would be to lie or crouch low, not have the stick hoisted right up. The best answer was a bit of both. Wishart muttered, ‘May they all be cross-eyed with schnapps. Up periscope.’
‘Course one-three-oh, sir!’
‘Twenty-two feet, sir.’
‘Very good.’ He jerked down the handles. ‘Stand by for enemy range-and-bearing.’
Up for’ard in the tube space CPO Rinkpole, with Blackie Cole and Close-’aul Anderson, was going through the routine of bringing his bow tubes to the stand-by position. Firing reservoirs had been charged, shutter doors opened and the clutch reported clear. Now they were blowing water up from the WRT tanks to surround the fish inside the tubes and at the same time equalise the pressure inside with that beyond the sluice doors, the front caps of the tubes, so that those doors could be opened.
‘Starboard tube full!’
Rinkpole shut off the air to the starboard WRT. Cole reported the port tube full as well. You knew when they were full because water shot out of the vents. So much machinery, pipes, pumps, wheels, air-bottles and so on in this cramped, cave-like space that the torpedomen had to worm about like reptiles.
‘Open sluice doors!’
There was a wheel with geared shafts on each tube. The shutter doors, beyond the sluice doors, were opened or shut by one larger, central wheel, between the tubes. Stinking hot … Anderson was using both his hands now; his messmates had got tired of his famous broken wrist and he’d been shamed into declaring it fit for use again.
‘Clutch up side-stops to firing bars!’
When the firing mechanism was activated, the side-stops that held the fish from sliding about inside the tubes were automatically withdrawn. Rinkpole saw those connections made. He ordered, ‘Open screw-down outboard vents’, and reported back via Lewis to the control room that bow tubes were standing by. Wishart had already received a similar report on the stern tube from AB Smith, and Finn had the beam tubes standing by as well. Wishart sent the big periscope down and moved to the smaller, after one, the attack periscope. He ordered, ‘Bow tubes to the ready.’
‘Open stand-by valves.’ Rinkpole snapped it, and Cole and Anderson moved like lightning: ‘Tube ready, tripper down, vent closed!’
Rinkpole eased the two safety-pins out of the firing gear. He called back to the control room, ‘Bow tubes ready.’ Wishart could fire electrically from the periscope now; alternatively, Rinkpole could do it in the tube-space by hand, triggering the shots from his wooden seat between the white-enamelled tubes. In his mind the TI was whispering to his torpedoes, his babies whom he’d nursed and cosseted for so long against just such a moment and purpose as this one; he was asking them, Now don’t you go and let me down, my dears …
* * *
Deep in the ship’s belly, as far below the waterline as E.57 would be at periscope depth and with half a dozen vertical ladders and solid hatches between this point and the nearest exit to fresh air, the messdeck was identical to the one they’d come to before. And there was a hatch in it and a ladder leading down, just as there had been from that other one. The kapitan-leutnant sent them down it; he had a revolver in his fist and, behind him, a sailor with a rifle and bayonet.
Nick went down – into a flat with a hammock-netting and a door through to a bathroom flat. And in this space at the foot of the ladder where the hammock stowage was, one bulkhead was faced with concrete …
It was like a dream with elements of reality distorted, lopsided, a nightmare in which you’d come to a place you’d been in before, and yet hadn’t. The effect was muddling, disorientating, and when you set it into the background knowledge that somewhere quite close by there was a burning fuse and enough explosive to split the ship’s side open … He got it, suddenly. The mess-deck above them now had to be immediately aft of ‘their’ messdeck. This bathroom flat would share plumbing with that other one – adjoining it, and with only a thin sheet of steel dividing the two. The two access flats connected with the washplaces in an athwartships direction and must be similarly close. That concrete-strengthened ship’s side bulkhead ran along the outside of both. It meant that the guncotton and the smouldering fuse could be no more than ten feet from where he stood now as Burtenshaw, white-faced, came down the ladder to join him.
The kapitan-leutnant sat in the hatchway above them, pistol held loosely in one hand with its barrel pointing downwards, towards them. He was looking up into the messdeck, passing some order to the attendant rifleman.
‘What’s that he’s saying?’
‘Telling him to report that we’re in 4C messdeck’s washplace. There’s a telephone just up there, apparently.’
‘How long a fuse did you set?’
They were both whispering, with their backs to the man on the ladder up above them.
‘The whole lot. I don’t know how much there was. I should have cut it to a set time but I didn’t think of it. I don’t know how long.’
‘Half an hour? An hour?’
‘I tell you I don’t know…’
Or he wasn’t capable of putting his mind to it. He looked terrible. Not only sheet-white, but sweaty, wet-faced. He’d muttered on the way down, ‘We can’t just stay there – to be blown up or drowned, like rats in a trap—’ The kapitan-leutnant had shut him up, then, while Nick had thought about rats in traps, and that German U-boat they’d drowned here in the Marmara, and thoughts like tit for tat… Burtenshaw said it again now: ‘We can’t just – stay here, and—’
‘We can’t do anything else, Bob.’
It was what they’d come for. What a submarine and her whole crew had risked their necks for. And Reaper had said, ‘Any effort – or cost.’
* * *
Wishart had accepted Jake’s estimated enemy course and speed of two-one-eight, nineteen knots. He threw a glance at McVeigh, and the attack periscope slid up. ‘Watch your depth!’
She’d slipped downwards by six inches. Coming back up now. Wishart was crouched at the periscope with his knees bent and his arms draped gorilla-fashion over the spread handles. McVeigh’s pink-rimmed eyes never left him. Young Agnew was twitching with excitement and trying not to show it. ERA Geordie Knight, usually calm and placid, was flushed, aggressive-looking. Stoker Adams was stooped like a mantis, breathing jerkily, eyes glaring under jutting brows. Ellery quick-eyed, hovering behind Wishart. Wishart had the periscope set at the firing-angle he’d worked out; he trained left now though, checking on how far his target had to come before her stem would cross the hairline in the glass. Resetting it before he sent it downward: and now he’d stopped it, brought it whizzing up again. Bit of a periscope artist, Aubrey Wishart. He was making one more quick check: and snapping the handle up. ‘Down.’ On his knees: counting seconds like a man praying. He moved his fingers, curling their tips upward about an inch, and McVeigh caught the signal, pulled the lever: the bronze tube was a pillar of greasy yellowish metal skimming up. He grabbed the handles and stopped it three feet off the deck.
‘Stand by.’
‘Stand by, sir!’
Seconds crawling past. Jake, leaning over the cha
rt table, shut his eyes and thought Please, God …
‘Fire one!’
Triggering the starboard tube, he’d also given the order verbally in case the electrical firing system might have failed. A thud, long hiss of venting air, rising pressure in the boat: Wishart shouted, ‘Damn the bloody thing!’ His eyes stayed at the lenses. Hobday had whipped round, and Wishart snapped, ‘Fire two!’ Another thud and hiss; that was the tube venting after the discharge and then filling from the compensating tank. Wishart ordered, in a state of fury, ‘Port fifteen, port beam tube to the ready! ’ He snapped at McVeigh, ‘Dip!’ He meant him to lower the periscope and raise it again immediately: a periscope kept up for longish periods of time was far more likely to be spotted. Wishart told Hobday, ‘First one broke surface and ran wild.’ Pointing suddenly over Hobday’s shoulder – ‘Keep her down!’
Nineteen feet – eighteen – and bow-up angle increasing. Sixteen …
‘Open “A” kingston!’
For’ard, Rinkpole felt the upward lurch and heard the order to flood that for’ard tank. He guessed there’d been some hang-up in the timing of the inflow of water compensating for the loss of the torpedoes’ weight, and that Hobday couldn’t have seen the upset quickly enough to have dealt with it before she started tilting up. Now the bow dipped from the extra weight in ‘A’: she was bow-down, diving. He ordered, ‘Shut sluice doors!’ One of his fish – the one he’d done a routine on and then dreamt about – had run amok, and he was shamed, mortified. Climbing off his seat he rasped at Anderson, ‘Goin’ aft to the beam tubes.’ But Wishart’s warning echoed in his memory: We certainly shan’t get two chances …
On Goeben’s bridge they’d seen the first torpedo leap almost right out of the water and then topple in a great splash and vanish. Steinhoff had barked a helm order and twenty-three thousand tons of German steel had heeled hard as she swung away to starboard, turning her bows towards any torpedo that might not have gone crazy. The battlecruiser had been about halfway through her turn when E.57’s periscope standards, and then the top of her conning tower, had come foaming up into sight; another sharp command had increased the angle of rudders, tightening the turn in some hope of catching the submarine, ramming her. But she’d dipped under long before there was any chance of it, and a few seconds later the second fish had streaked past, leaving its effervescent trail fifty feet clear to port.
Helm was now reversed, to bring her back on course. There was a lot of shouting into voicepipes and telephones, and turrets were training back to where they’d started from. The English submariners had certainly got their boat down again quickly: but in terms of an attack they’d really made a mess of it.
Below, they’d felt the lurch and heel of the big ship’s full-rudder turn, and heard the whirr of machinery as the turrets near them trained around; then they heard the kapitan-leutnant ordering the rifle-toting sailor to find out what was going on. He’d gone to the telephone on the messdeck up there, and Burtenshaw told Nick what he was doing. The man was coming back now, and reporting to his officer.
Burtenshaw said, ‘There’s been a torpedo attack. Missed. The submarine’s well astern now.’
He was panting, needing a breath between each two or three words. Nick stared at the sick-looking face; he thought, That only leaves us, then… He felt ill himself: until now, he realised, there’d been some hope that they might not have had to see it right through to its highly unpleasant end. He told Burtenshaw – as much as anything to keep his spirits from rock-bottom – ‘If or when the charge goes off, go straight up that ladder. Well, I’ll lead, if you like – but don’t think about his revolver, because for one thing he’ll probably miss and for another he’ll more likely be running like a rigger for the upper deck.’
Burtenshaw shook his head. ‘When it goes off – I told you, it’s big, there’ll be no hope of—’
‘Bob, there’s always hope!’
Cock-and-bull, he thought. And never know now, about Sarah… But in the same mental breath he realised that he did know: as clearly as if she was speaking to him inside his head he knew for certain that he’d guessed the truth. And nobody else now would ever know it. Only Sarah herself. Would she ever tell the child, he wondered? She might: honesty, her forthrightness, might make her do it. But on the other hand – Burtenshaw’s eyes on him, all fear as they shifted to the bulkhead, visualising (Nick guessed) the explosion, the steel splitting and the concrete cracking open, the inrush of sea and the hatch up there slamming shut on them: Nick shut his mind to it, tried to shut it also to the sense of suffocation, claustrophobia much stronger than anything he’d felt in Wishart’s submarine. He told himself that Sarah would not tell her – his – child the truth, because she’d realise that to do so would be to shift the guilt, lump a burden on the child which it had done nothing to deserve. Not its fault, and not Sarah’s: only his, Nick Everard’s, and he’d be gone, leaving her to carry it alone. Burtenshaw whispered hoarsely, his eyes frantic, ‘Don’t you feel anything?’
Difficult to know, for a moment, what he’d meant. Nick had closed his eyes: like a long, slow blink. Now he’d opened them and nodded. Burtenshaw was glistening: all sweat. Nick was too: thinking about it, he could feel it.
‘Yes. As much as you do, probably.’
Or more. Like a suppressed scream in the mind, a scream you needed to let out and couldn’t. Not shouldn’t, but could not. Like the man up top who knew your uncle and coldly, politely, sentenced you to this. Expressionless, to all intents and purposes mute – as Sarah would have to be about the most important, vital thing in all her life. She’d have the urge to scream it, too. If one could have grovelled, sobbed or—
Please God, let us out of this?
* * *
Wishart had spun her fast to starboard, using one screw full ahead and the other full astern, risking the trim they’d only just recovered and weren’t too sure of yet – risking anything for the unexpected second chance. A very long-shot chance – if it existed at all. Long range, and with the submarine badly placed; she was just about on the German’s beam, which meant the fish would approach him from abaft it, actually having to chase after him to some extent instead of going in to meet him at something like right-angles to his course.
They’d been deep, struggling with a haywire trim. When Hobday had regained control and they’d got back up to periscope depth Wishart had expected to see nothing more than Goeben’s smoke as she steamed away towards the Dardanelles.
Rinkpole reported from the beam tube space, ‘Starboard beam tube ready!’
‘Up periscope.’ He’d only briefly dipped it. ‘Stand by. Ship’s head?’
‘Two-six-oh, sir.’
‘Twenty-one feet, sir—’
‘Fire!’
He’d slammed the handles up. ‘Thirty feet. Full ahead port. Port fifteen. Port beam tube to the ready.’
Another shot – at even longer range and a still worse angle?
‘Thirty feet, sir.’ Hobday wasn’t taking his eyes off the trim for a second, this time. He’d no idea what had gone wrong before. Agnew had swung the telegraphs around and Roost had spun his wheel; Rinkpole called, ‘Port beam tube ready, sir!’ Firing from this other beam would mean sending the fish off to chase Goeben from her quarter. The rate of closing, Jake realised, subtracting Goeben’s speed from the torpedo’s, wouldn’t be much more than twenty knots.
‘Slow ahead both.’ Wishart watched her head as she swung. If that last fish had been going to hit, Jake thought, they’d have heard the bang by this time. Range, torpedo speed and stop-watch time told him so quite clearly. Wishart said, ‘Midships. Steer oh-six-five. Twenty-two feet.’
‘Twenty-two, sir.’
The ’planes angled to bring her closer to the surface. Twenty-five feet. Twenty-four.
‘Up periscope.’
The small, low-powered one again. Even at this range he wasn’t taking chances of being spotted.
The boom of the torpedo exploding was a smaller sou
nd than they’d have expected. The long range, of course – and the much louder bangs they’d been subjected to in the straits. It was such a small sound that Jake hadn’t thought of it as a hit at all. But now shockwaves following the explosion came like a double echo to confirm success: unless, of course, the fish had only dived and exploded on the bottom … Wishart grabbed the periscope’s handles, jerked them down and put his eye to the single lens. They heard him gasp, saw the flash of incredulity and then joy. He’d swallowed, found his voice.
‘Right aft. God, what a fluke!’
He whooped, suddenly, flung his arms up, did a little dance. Men were cheering, slapping each other on the back. CPO Crabb muttered, glowering at his depth-gauge, ‘Bloody mad’ouse …’
* * *
As the crash of the torpedo-hit boomed and shuddered through the ship, for a second Nick’s taut nerves reacted as if it had been the much closer, louder bang which he’d been expecting, trying to be ready for. In that second he thought his heart had stopped: and beside him Burtenshaw had jerked rigid as if he’d had an electric shock … Then there was a stillness, a sensation of the surroundings dying: and that, Nick realised as reality and sense came back, was the machinery slowing, stopping. Lights began to flicker and weaken as power failed. Somewhere in the distance there was muffled shouting and an alarm-bell ringing: and immediately above their heads the kapitan-leutnant was sending his man to the telephone again, to find out what was happening. Burtenshaw croaked, ‘Make a dash for it?’
The man on the ladder was watching them. In the half-light his face was indistinct but Nick had an impression that he was smiling, hoping they’d try to rush him. Imagination, perhaps: but he could see the pistol, light gleaming on its barrel. Also, they could hear the sailor bawling into the telephone: and now it sounded as if he’d got an answer, that he was in conversation with someone up there.
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 29