The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Chief Yeoman—by light to the commodore, ‘Starboard now please’ … Number One, I’ll turn up this bugger’s wake.” “Target course three-four-oh, sir!”

  He heard the clack-clacking of the eight-inch Aldis as Wolstenholm passed that pre-arranged signal to the commodore. Nick had left it open, whether it would be to port or starboard, but either way it would be a double emergency turn, two successive swerves of forty degrees each time. The convoy would end up steering due south. Daphne and Iris would be in the lead, Gilliflower and Prunella to port, Viola and Aquilegia to starboard: Daphne’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander Charles Rose RNVR, would be commanding the six corvettes.

  “Message passed, sir!”

  “Very good.” Harbinger rocking smoothly across the swell. Back aft, on the quarterdeck, Timberlake would be fretting over the imminent loss of yet more depthcharges.

  “Bearing oh-four-one, range one thousand and fifty yards!”

  The turning circle under fifteen degrees of rudder was eight ship’s lengths … Depthcharges a long way off to starboard were a muted thunder. He bent to the rim of the voice-pipe: “Port fifteen.”

  “Port fifteen, sir!”

  “Bearing oh-oh-three—”

  He heard the wail of the commodore’s siren, and told Bearcroft, “Make on TBS to the close screen, ‘Comply with previous orders.’”

  “Fifteen of port wheel on, sir …”

  But the turn was going to be too sharp: she’d end up inside the U-boat’s track—or where he guessed that track would be … He told Elphick, “Ease to ten.”

  “Ease to ten, sir!”

  Reducing the angle of rudder, so the turn would be less tight. Harbinger still leaning hard to starboard as she swung—and more depthcharges exploding, somewhere out there in the night.

  “Bearing three-four-three, range four hundred, target moving left to right!”

  “Midships and meet her.”

  The U-boat had altered course, in the last half-minute …

  “Meet her, sir …”

  Reversing the wheel, that meant, to take the swing off her … “Carlish—tell the engine room to stand by to make white smoke.” He’d warned Hawkey, and the other destroyers too. Corvettes, which lacked the equipment for making white smoke, had been told to have smoke-floats ready on their sterns. Nick ducked to the pipe again: “Steady!”

  “Three-five-five, sir—”

  “Steer three-six-oh.”

  “Target bears three-five-four, range two-fifty yards … Lost target, sir!”

  “Change depth settings to two hundred and fifty feet—”

  More underwater explosions rumbled distantly. And from the other direction a new howling from the commodore’s siren was the order to his lumbering consorts to begin the second stage of that evasive turn. At this moment, as they turned, each of the corvettes would be dropping a second smoke-float in its own wake. The first would have been dropped as they made the first turn: the end-result would be a large area of sea dotted with floating cannisters emitting a grey-white, surface-hugging fog … And the reason for deepening the depth-charge settings at this last minute in the attack was that losing the target at 250 yards indicated it was almost certainly deeper than 150 feet. The asdic beam in vertical cross-section was elliptical in shape, and couldn’t be raised or lowered, so as you ran towards a contact you lost it when it passed out of the lower limit of the beam.

  “Two-fifty feet set, sir!”

  “Stand by … Fire one!” As chancy, he thought, as a coconut shy. Couldn’t be helped. The closer the better, and ideally right on top of the bastard, but the main thing was to shake him, scare him, keep him down and too busy to wonder where the convoy might be … “Fire two! Fire three!” To have a reasonable chance of success you needed two ships on the job, so that one could stand off and maintain the asdic contact while the other ran in to drop depthcharges; then they’d swap places, one reloading while the other attacked, contact being maintained by one or other all the time: until the U-boat was finally brought to the surface, or until you heard the underwater crash that would be its hull imploding … Nick ordered, “Tell the engine room, start making smoke … Chief Yeoman—TBS to destroyers, ‘Make smoke.’” Astern, the charges exploded, deep ringing blasts impacting on the ship’s hull, and the sea lifting in humps in her wake and on the quarters—where in a minute there’d be smoke drifting, adding fog to rain, reducing visibility to just about nil. The other three would be adding their quota to it while they continued to hunt and bomb their targets: and the U-boats’ ears would be filled by four lots of churning screws as well as by intermittent explosions of depth-charge patterns. And the smoke might hide a convoy, or might not: over a widening area no periscope view or glimpse from a daringly-surfaced U-boat would tell its captain anything at all: none of them would have any way of knowing that the convoy of thirty-five surviving merchantmen was slipping away southward, hidden in the smoke-thickened deluge and with the sounds of their propellers getting fainter every minute.

  “Starboard fifteen.”

  Please God, may there be no others down south there, to make this whole exercise a waste of time …

  The last of that pattern had exploded, its echoes reverberating away through fifteen hundred fathoms of black water. Binoculars were sweeping the surface as the turbulence subsided. Distantly, another destroyer’s charges sounded like a roll of muffled drums.

  “Fifteen of starboard wheel on, sir …”

  “Contact, contact! Bearing two-five-five—”

  “Midships.” Damn it … “Port twenty.”

  The German must have reversed his turn, swung sharply to port just after they’d lost contact. So that pattern had gone wide, and he’d be thinking he was clever …

  “Bearing two-five-two, range eight-fifty yards—”

  Watchful reported over TBS that she’d lost her target. Nick snapped, “Tell him to join Goshawk … Midships.”

  Throbbing asdic pings were being reflected back very clearly, the sharp, hard echoes that come unmistakably from a U-boat’s hull. Down there in the black water, a steel eggshell casing at the very tips of the hunters’ fingers: you needed to grasp it, crush it …

  “Bearing two-five-nine, range nine hundred … Moving left to right now …”

  Wriggling like some kind of snake … “Set charges to three hundred feet. Steer two-eight-oh. Tell the engine room to stop making smoke. Chief Yeoman, pass that order to the others. One-eight-oh revolutions.”

  After the fourth run, asdics couldn’t regain contact. A wider cast, a curving track designed to cross the U-boat’s escape route at some point no matter which way it might be steering, still failed to produce results. Frustrating: but not unusual …

  “Had the sense not to hold to a straight course, obviously.” Graves muttered, “Can’t win ’em all, sir.”

  The main achievement was that the U-boats had been held off, that there’d been no shouts for help from the convoy. Nick thought, Touch wood: plenty of time yet … The whole scheme could fall to ruin so easily and suddenly, and he had to be ready for that too—for the worst, which would be sudden slaughter, loss of ships and lives for which he, Nick Everard, was directly and personally responsible—losses he would actually have caused, through trying to pull a fast one.

  Bruce lost her contact only a few minutes later. Nick called down to the plot, where Mike Scarr was at work with two assistants, and elicited that Goshawk and Watchful were seven miles southeast. Bruce was four miles away on 080 degrees.

  “What’s my course to join Goshawk?”

  “One-three-oh, sir.”

  Scarr had had the answer ready, anticipating the requirement. More depthcharges rumbled, shivering Harbinger’s steel: so those two were still on their target.

  “Chief—TBS to Bruce, ‘Join me. My course one-three-oh, speed fifteen.’” He told Chubb to take over the conning of the ship and bring her round to that course. Hoping to God the convoy was in the clear, with no U-boats trai
ling it, no separate concentrations lying in wait ahead of it. The corvettes would only use TBS in emergency or when an enemy was already in contact with them, so continuing silence on the air was a reassurance. He reminded himself again—it would only take one second for the sudden shattering of that silence …

  “Bruce acknowledged, sir.”

  “Very good.”

  Chubb reported, “Course one-three-oh, sir.” Harbinger see-sawing at half speed across low, rolling ridges glistening pock-marked under the lash of rain.

  At 2230—the time at which they might have expected the convoy on its original course to run into the U-boat pack—Goshawk and Watchful made their kill.

  Harbinger and Bruce had kept clear of the hunt, had spent the past hour patrolling a wide circumference around it, like circling an arena in which two matadors alternately played their bull. If the U-boat had broken away from them there’d have been a good chance of picking it up again here in the deep field; in fact it might have been difficult for the German captain to know which way to run, when he had two hunters on top of him and two guards widely separated on the perimeter and constantly moving round. Nick hadn’t evolved this tactic in any deliberate way, it had simply arisen from the circumstances, but it wasn’t a bad scheme at all, in a situation where you had the ships to spare. Harbinger and Bruce were protecting the hunters too, against interference by any stray U-boat that might have been in the vicinity and tempted to come to its friend’s assistance. A destroyer moving slowly on a steady course, or even stopped, holding a U-boat in its asdic beam, would make an easy target for another.

  Nick had relaxed his crew to the second degree of readiness, although officers and key ratings were still closed up. Nick on his tall seat, hunched against the rain, watching the contest in the centre. Watchful had made a pass, dropped a pattern with deep settings, at twenty minutes past the hour. You knew they’d been deep ones by the sound of the explosions and the amount of disturbance on the surface: and he was watching the time because of the arrangements he’d made with the convoy’s commodore … Goshawk’s captain had told him over TBS when Harbinger and Bruce had first arrived, “I think Fritz is in trouble. He’s slowed down, and we’ve heard some funny noises.” Then there’d been some minutes of alarm when the U-boat had given its tormentors a false target, an SBT—submarine bubble target, known to the Germans as a Pillenwerfer. It was a kind of underwater bomb which a submarine could eject to explode chemically in the sea, fizzing strongly enough to provide an asdic echo very much like the real McCoy. If the operator on the surface let himself be fooled by it long enough, the U-boat had a chance to creep away. But Goshawk’s man had caught on quickly, swept around and picked up his real target again.

  You could imagine—if you cared to think about it—how sickening that must have been for the Germans.

  After Watchful’s last deep pattern had burst, there were sounds of the enemy’s pumps running and tanks blowing. Searchlights from both hunting ships swept the surface, with guns’ crews standing ready, weapons loaded. But nothing appeared, asdics still held the contact, and Nick, watching through wet binoculars, hearing his own asdic’s regular, penetrating pulses and Chubb’s low Australian tones as he kept her circling, saw Goshawk gathering way, the white plume of bow-wave lifting as she picked up speed, running in for a fresh attack.

  He’d thought, crossing his fingers, This one, now … Imagining those people down there, you could almost feel sorry for them. If you could think of them as just ordinary human beings.

  Deep thunder: then the surface quivered, lifting in patches that heaved and boiled. Harbinger felt the kicks of them in her steel belly: and then another—

  “Submerged explosion, sir!”

  That shout had come from the HSD—Higher Submarine Detector—Leading Seaman Garment. Tony Graves, who’d been with him in the tiny A/S cabinet, was backing out, pulling earphones off his head. “That was it, sir. Not a doubt.”

  Searchlight beams swung, criss-crossing. Goshawk slowing, heeling under a lot of rudder. Calling now on TBS: Bearcroft answered, and the message came as, U-boat believed destroyed. Searching for evidence.

  Circling on: waiting, and believing it, everyone in Harbinger’s bridge knowing it—there’d been cheers, and there was some chatter now … but you did need evidence, and the only real proof would be the grisly kind. A U-boat could try to persuade its tormentors to consider it dead, and leave it, by spilling oil and firing wreckage and clothes out of a torpedo tube: so you needed more than that.

  Goshawk spoke up again, Surface is thick with oil fuel. Other stuff as well. I’m lowering a boat.

  You could smell the oil. Goshawk was lying stopped, Watchful circling her, and out here Harbinger and Bruce circling both of them, all four ships with their asdics and RDF active. Bruce was the only one, Nick realised, that had not participated in the destruction of a U-boat on this trip. Watchful had taken part in two successful hunts. Polishing off three of them wasn’t at all bad, particularly if there were no more losses from the convoy … But Peter Instance, Bruce’s lieutenant-in-command, would be feeling a bit out of it.

  He’d have to look forward to better luck next time, that was all. Bruce just hadn’t had the luck to be in the right place at the right moment. Instance and his A/S team were just as competent as any of the others: and the four together, backed by the six corvettes, were getting better at it with every trip they made … He heard Chubb’s voice, into the wheel-house voice-pipe: “Port five …”

  Then the TBS again: Jock Audsley’s voice, My whaler has recovered one complete body and a number of—er—assorted spare parts. Also gear and papers. Seems it was U 102.

  For a moment Nick had the numbers confused, and linked that one with the so-called “ace,” Max Looff … Then he remembered that Neumann had said Looff’s boat was U 122, not 102 … But something else in his mind: it was that flippant assorted spare parts … Audsley, Goshawk’s captain, was a very civilised, thoughtful man: the questionable humour was self-protective, a product of this endless nightmare of a battle, the need to make a joke of horror.

  He swung round to Carlish. “Sub, ask the pilot for a course to rejoin the convoy, at twenty-five knots. Then go aft, shake Lieutenant Neumann and inform him with my compliments that we have just destroyed U 102.”

  He thought, We’re all bastards …

  By dawn the rain was finished and the cloud-cover was breaking up, giving a very pretty sunrise—shades of pink deepening into scarlet over bluish, low-lying haze. If you’d been imaginative enough you might have seen that brilliant hoop of colour as a triumphal arch into which convoy and escort were streaming as they left the Greenland air gap behind them.

  The course was due east. The convoy had steamed south for three hours, as Nick and the commodore had agreed it would, then altered to east. He’d brought his destroyers down at twenty-five knots on 170 degrees and made the rendezvous before midnight. During the run south they’d listened to HF/DF transmissions astern, and Nick had guessed at bewildered U-boat captains surfacing and wondering what had hit them, where they were, where the hell the convoy might be, where was the vanished U 102 …

  Goshawk and Watchful were flying the signal U-boat sunk.

  The convoy hadn’t been molested at all. The commodore had signalled thanks and congratulations, and Nick wondered how many of the merchant captains might realise how lucky they’d been, how easily the scheme could have ended in disaster. He guessed the commodore, who was a retired vice-admiral of about the same vintage as Nick’s old uncle Hugh, would have a shrewd idea of it, would be drawing his own sighs of relief as he looked around at his surviving company of thirty-four valuable ships, crews and war cargoes plugging east into the lurid dawn, on course for Malin Head and, with air patrols likely to be around from about this point on, comparatively secure.

  Until next time … And meanwhile there was no discomfort in the knowledge that if he had not backed his hunch, some of those freighters would now have been under nine
thousand feet of water, in the ocean-bed silt with dead men inside them: men who instead, in just a few days’ time, would be in the arms of wives, parents, lovers, children. It was an enormous, really frightening privilege to have been in a position to influence an outcome of such huge importance: for the rest of one’s own life, he guessed, one would remember it and feel humbled by it in a way that would be very difficult to explain.

  Except perhaps to Kate.

  The colours of the dawn were fading, becoming nondescript, more typically Atlantic shades above the still fiery curve of the horizon. Thinking of Kate now, not ships: of the hope there’d be a letter waiting—even a letter she might have posted in England.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Premier Stalin:

  We shall attack in Egypt towards the end of this month, and “Torch” will begin early in November … “Torch” will be a heavy operation in which, in addition to the US Navy, 240 British warships will be engaged … Naval protection [to convoys to North Russia] will be impossible until our impending operations are completed. As the escorts are withdrawn from “Torch” they can again be made available in northern waters.

  The convoy had split up into its various sections according to ports of destination, and the six corvettes were continuing into the North Channel, where they’d hand over to local escorts. Harbinger, Goshawk, Watchful and Bruce had separated from the rest and diverged to turn in around Inishowen Head and enter Lough Foyle. They’d be stopping to take in fuel from the oiler that was anchored in the lough just off Moville, then continue on to Londonderry, twenty miles inland.

  It was a grey day with a southwest wind and low, fast-moving cloud. Greenish water with a lop on it, reflecting the green of the surrounding land. He put Harbinger alongside the oiler, and Goshawk secured opposite her; they’d fuel simultaneously while the other two lay off to await their turn.