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

by Alexander Fullerton

  “Couldn’t there have been a leak somewhere else, sir? The planning end, shoreside?”

  Ruck shook his head: a decisive jerk. “I and the Count fixed the position and the time after we left Malta. That’s the system, you see.”

  Wykeham nodding slowly. “So what now, sir? Home to Malta?”

  “Doubt it. But let’s find out.” He told McClure, “Let’s have the sealed envelope, Sub.”

  He didn’t seem in the least disturbed by his certainty that the Count had run into trouble.

  McClure opened the safe and took out a brown, red-sealed envelope. He gave it to Ruck, who took it to the chart table and slit it open. Newton reported, “They’re inshore of us, sir, slowed down a lot. Bearing green one-five-oh, distant, drawing right. No transmissions, sir.”

  McClure muttered to Paul, “At least I keep my bunk now.” Ruck’s murmur of “Callous little swine” was fair comment, Paul thought. An agent caught as Paoli—alias Venizelos, etc.—had apparently been caught, was liable to be tortured, probably shot after they’d squeezed all they could out of him. The sad little guy who’d sat at that wardroom table only three days ago and proposed visiting in Connecticut after the war was most likely either dead or in agony. While Ultra turned her back on him, tiptoed discreetly away … Ruck finished skimming through whatever orders were in that package: he’d folded it all and stuffed it into the hip pocket of his old grey flannel bags. Pulling out a fresh chart now, one covering the whole of the western Mediterranean. Paul and McClure, sharp-eyed for any clues, watched him slide it over the Sicilian chart and begin to check distances from here westward, setting dividers against the latitude scale and then walking them across the chart.

  “E-boats have turned seaward, sir. Green one-five-five, moving right to left, about half speed.”

  “Very good.” But they’d missed out, and they’d know it … Straightening from the chart, Ruck came back into the control room. “We’ll stay as we are for half an hour, Number One. Then if we’re still in the clear we’ll surface and pump some amps in—about three and a half hours of darkness left. But we now have nearly five hundred miles to cover, in—” he checked it out on his fingers—“in three days and two nights. So we’ll need to get a bit of a wriggle on.” It was a fact: mental arithmetic told one that with the need to be dived, slow, throughout the daylight hours, you’d need every minute of it … But Ruck looked happy—even jubilant: you could see that the events of the last half-hour had brightened him enormously. Whereas Paul had an uncomfortable feeling of treachery, desertion … Ruck was reaching for the microphone of the Tannoy broadcasting system: he switched it on, tested it by slapping it with his palm. Then, “D’you hear, there? Captain speaking … Unfortunately, we have not been able to pick up the agent. The opposition was waiting for us, and that’s certain proof they’ve nabbed him. Too bad … Now, however, we’re off westward, for a different but very special job. There’d be no point telling you at this stage what it is, but we’ll be in transit three days and two nights, and what we’ll be doing is something very important, probably a turning-point in the war. We can feel honoured to have a key role to play in it … But anyway—that’s it for now. I expect we’ll be surfacing in about half an hour.”

  McClure had been at the chart. He whispered to Paul, “Five hundred miles west takes us either to Majorca or Algiers.”

  The Count had said Sicily—Palermo—or Cagliari in Sardinia. No … he’d said both those places. And he’d had secret papers taped to his ribs: and he’d been caught. But he might have got rid of the papers first. Except he’d told them this much … Paul felt sure it wouldn’t be Majorca, anyway: Majorca was Spanish, and the Spaniards were still neutral—just …

  An hour later, on the surface, drinking cocoa round the wardroom table while the diesels rumbled, charging the battery and driving the ship westward while they sucked cold night air down through the hatch, Ruck told them, “You might as well know it now. Our so-called Count was a double agent. That’s to say, he took pay from our side and sold information to the Italians too. Our people knew it, and they’ve been keeping him on ice for something of this sort.”

  Wykeham spooned sugar into his cup. He was dressed for the bridge, due to relieve McClure up there in about ten minutes. “Are you saying he was intended to be caught?” Ruck nodded. “Complete with detailed information in which he believes. The Italians and Germans will believe it too. It’s all balls, of course.”

  “Palermo and Cagliari?”

  “Exactly, Sub.” Ruck added, “Sorry as I am to disillusion you. You thought he was rather a nice chap, didn’t you? The truth is that on at least one earlier stunt, a commando expedition to the Eyetie mainland, he sold our blokes down the river and none of them came out of it. Whatever’s happening to him now is poetic justice, you see, as well as serving a very important purpose.”

  “I wonder if he suspected something of the sort. He was pretty scared.”

  “Mostly at having to paddle his own canoe, wasn’t it?” Paul asked Ruck, more on the off-chance than in any expectation of getting an answer, “When we were in Malta, sir, you said the flotilla had some other cloak-and-dagger jobs on. Are they jobs like this one?”

  “Not really.” Ruck rubbed his jaw, nails grating on the stubble. “Well, it’ll be all wrapped up by now, so there’s no harm telling you … No, those were all to do with generals. Mostly from Gib, though, not Malta. There was a Yank general by the name of Mark Clark to be put ashore in Algeria and then brought off again, and a frog one plus some of his family to be lifted from a beach somewhere near Marseilles. He was to be transferred at sea to a Catalina and flown to Gib. General Giraud … Seraph was earmarked for those jobs, then Sybil was to run in and pick up Giraud’s staff, on the next night.” “Big stuff, by the sound of it.”

  Ruck nodded at Wykeham. “About as big as you can imagine.”

  Paul thought, putting two and two together, Algiers …

  But there was another question annoying him …

  “If we knew the Count would have been caught, sir, why risk this ship by coming back to the place where they’d be pretty certain to be waiting for us?”

  “Two good reasons.” Ruck asked Wykeham, “Suggest what they might be?”

  “Well.” Wykeham gave it a few seconds’ thought. “One you mentioned. The fact the E-boats were there proves they caught him. Since the R/V details were only settled at sea and no-one else could have known them?”

  “Right. What else?”

  Paul had stretched his mind to it … “If we hadn’t shown up, they’d have guessed we planted him on them?”

  “See what you can do when you try.” Ruck tapped the signal log. “And the news we sent out ten minutes ago, regretting the rendezvous couldn’t be kept owing to enemy interference … If the Wops can decode it, all it’ll tell them is what we want them to believe. Whereas to our backroom boys it says ‘operation completely successful.’ Right?”

  The early morning BBC bulletin confirmed a much bigger success—continuing exploitation of the Eighth Army’s victory in the desert. The RAF had achieved total air superiority and Rommel’s forces were in full retreat.

  “Another bloody day of it …” Tom Kyle muttered it to himself: barely loud enough for the helmsman or young Chalmers, his OOW, to have heard. He scowled out through salt-stained glass at a sea that was down to about force six again now. It had certainly exceeded force eight during the previous day and night. But this was the second dawn in which Opal had found herself alone, rolling northwestward and still separated by miles of ocean from convoy SL 320.

  The rendezvous was set for noon today. Kyle had wirelessed yesterday, giving his own estimated position, course and speed, and a couple of hours later he’d received the escort commander’s answer, establishing the R/V position at a certain point on bearing 030 degrees from position B. Obviously he’d expressed it that way, instead of in terms of latitude and longitude, because the Germans wouldn’t have the slightest notion wh
ere position B was, so that even if they were able to break the cypher they wouldn’t be getting anything of use to them.

  All days looked horrible to start with. In years now he hadn’t seen one that didn’t. He lit a cigarette.

  On the night of the second, running into early morning of the third, after he’d kept the shadower down for the requisite period of time and then left on a northeasterly course—up the track from which by that time the convoy would have turned away—Kyle had seen no fewer than four U-boats on the surface and at comparatively close quarters. One had fired a few shots at him and then dived, and the last of them had been about a mile ahead of him and steering the same course, gradually drawing farther and farther ahead, for more than an hour before he’d lost sight of it. It had been too rough on that course to man the gun; if the U-boat had ever looked astern and spotted Opal it must have thought she was one of its own crowd. In fact in those conditions the German might well not have seen her. The U-boats had been all over the place, obviously at sixes and sevens after that pasting by the other escorts and then the disappearance of the convoy; Kyle had been intent—having finished his performance with rockets and depthcharges farther south—on getting through them, getting through the night, joining up with SL 320 as early as possible next day. Yesterday …

  Sub-lieutenant Chalmers observed brightly, “Could be worse, sir … Gone down quite a bit during the night, wouldn’t you say?”

  Kyle felt his head drawing in like a tortoise’s. He wasn’t saying a bloody thing. Or even glancing round. Cheerfulness at this time of day set his teeth on edge. Only five minutes ago he’d been asleep, on the horsehair settee in his cabin-cum-charthouse, and it took a lot more than five minutes, in his view, for an Atlantic dawn to acquire a silver lining.

  Potts would still have his great fat head down, of course. Potts slept like a hippo, no matter what the weather was doing. Slept like a hippo, ate like a wolf. Kyle drew hard on his cigarette, and turned his thoughts to the midday rendezvous. Since Opal’s course and the convoy’s could be only just converging, probably with no more than a few degrees between them, and since the intersection of their tracks was—theoretically, anyway—less than six hours ahead, you could reckon there was probably not so great a distance between them now. SL 320 might not be far over that western horizon. 030 degrees from position B was in fact the original track, the path the convoy should have been on all the time, and Opal was right on it while the convoy was in the process of crabbing back towards it after that diversion. They’d be well astern of schedule, but Kyle couldn’t say by how many miles or hours—or days—because he was going purely by dead reckoning, having had no chance to use a sextant in recent days.

  Wind and sea were broad on the bow. Opal’s rolling was prodigious. But they were so used to it by this time that if it had stopped they’d have gone on staggering.

  Kyle had seen enough of the dismal-looking seascape. He turned his head and pink-rimmed eyes on young Chalmers.

  “I’m off below for breakfast. I’ll give Potts a shake for you.”

  “Thanks a lot, sir!”

  Chalmers’s chirpiness was intensely irritating. Twenty years old, clear-eyed, clean and smart even at sea, and too sharp-witted for his own good. He was a very reliable watchkeeper, his celestial navigation was fast and accurate, and his ship-handling was better than most—Kyle thought—he handles better than bloody Potts does, any road … But the young bugger was always so bright and willing: that was what grated, that and the fact he was so good at his job that it was difficult to find justification for kicking him up the arse, which was what Kyle found himself wanting to do several times a day … He was asking him now, “When the escort commander replied to your signal, sir, wasn’t he giving away his position to the U-boats? I mean, having gone to such lengths to get away from them?”

  Kyle had given some thought to this, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised—only fed-up—if there’d been no reply for a day or two. If the diversion had worked well, and the U-boats had been thrown off the trail, he wouldn’t have blamed Everard for clamming up.

  He pinched out his cigarette. “Depends. If there was one of the bastards still shadowing, wouldn’t have made much bloody odds, would it?”

  “No. I see …”

  Kyle had his hand on the sliding door at the back end of the bridge when the first shell scorched overhead. A scrunching, ripping noise, like tearing canvas …

  The first shots from the 37 mm had gone over, but Emsmann, the man on that gun, had the range now and was hitting. Hartwig on the 20 mm had incendiaries as well as armour-piercing rounds in his pans, and every sixth round was tracer: he used his gun like a hose-pipe, aiming with the fall-of-shot more than with the weapon itself, and at this close range it was easy and quite devastating. His orders were to go first for any close-range weapons that might be firing at them, then for the dinghy on the trawler’s stern and then the liferafts. The trawler was turning: rocking up on a big roller as it ran under her, displaying the full depth of her hull for’ard, and at the same time her length was opening as she swung to starboard. Looff saw men pouring out of the accommodation hatch in her for’ard welldeck, rushing to man the gun on her foc’sl: the 37 mm hit the foc’sl ladder when the first of them were on it, and he knew then for sure, seeing parts of men as well as ladder flying and the foc’sl-break opened, gaping jaggedly and smoking, that he had an easy killing here. In a second or two that gun itself would be smashed, and the trawler didn’t have a hope in hell. A fire had started in her bridge, and its starboard side was already partly wrecked. He called down to his helmsman, “Port fifteen, up five knots!” To counter the trawler’s turn. Surprise had played its part, but basically this was a very simple tactic that could hardly fail to succeed. He’d surfaced U 702 right astern of his target, and with the trawler on a bearing of red 30, thirty on the port bow. This enabled both the U-boat’s guns to engage, and also put them in what was a blind arc to the trawler where her only weapon—that four-inch on the wave-swept platform on her bow—couldn’t bear, was utterly useless. Now as she swung to starboard so that it should bear, his guns raked that exposed forepart while at the same time he turned his submarine to port to cross the Brit’s stern again, seeking cover while he engaged her now over his starboard side. Looff had just happened to be approaching on the Opal’s beam, closing in towards the convoy with which Drachens Three, Six and Nine were currently in contact. He’d ordered them to spread out ahead of it, and he’d been steering to join them, re-establish the pack in a position to make up, tonight, for what had been lost in the past two nights: and there right ahead of the U-boat, twenty minutes ago during Leutnant-zur-See Kurt Schwieger’s watch, had been this little hostage to fate all on its lonesome … He had the bastard cold. He had the speed advantage, and the weapons, and he’d caught him completely on the hop. There’d be a red streamer among the white ones all right, when U 702 returned to base: this might be a tiddler, but it was technically a warship. It made up—partially, and for the moment—for the maddening, highly frustrating past forty-eight hours during which Looff and most of the Drachen pack had lost the convoy, through a combination of foul weather and tricky manoeuvring by the Brits … Who’d still, anyway, lost two ships last night, one to Gustaf Becker in Drachen Three and one to young Meusel in Drachen Nine … There’d been a slight pause in the action while U 702’s bow had been pointing directly at her target: but she’d swung on round and now the guns were trained out to starboard, finishing the job off, the quick-firing 37 mm maintaining its steady rhythmic pumping crashes and the lighter, high-speed 20 mm roaring harshly, hosing its lethal stream to and fro across the already badly mauled and dying ship. When any human figure moved, even on its hands and knees, the stream shifted, found it. The trawler had got one shot off—one, with two men manning that gun for less than half a minute—before Looff had tucked his submarine back into the safe sector again: and those two men had been dead by that time. The target was still circling: its bridge was
a nest of flame, smoke pouring away down-wind, shells bursting constantly in that mess of destruction, a few missing now and then—mostly because of the motion, the way the weather was flinging the submarine around—but never for long, the gunners always came back on target very smartly. U 702 was like a prize-fighter with a heavily-outmatched opponent on the ropes and groggy but somehow still on his feet: you just went on hitting, destroying, smashing … Looff, near-deafened by the racket, most of which was from the lighter gun, the snarling 20 mm which was on the rear end of this same bridge deck; the other one was farther aft and a step lower, on the railed circular platform known to U-boat men as the “conservatory.” He shouted in Oelricher’s ear—his own voice inaudible to him, but the quartermaster heard it—“Tell Emsmann, aim for the waterline!”

  To puncture him, and sink him. That little dinghy had been blown to pieces, ditto the liferafts. But now, extraordinarily, a gun was firing at them—a light machine-gun firing in short bursts—from the confusion of smoke and fire amidships, up in the wrecked bridge. He saw it because there was tracer in it, the glow seemingly slow-moving, lifting with bright balloon-like slowness then speeding into the wicked whipping crack of bullets flashing over: he yelled, “Hit that gun!” but Oelricher was already shouting in Hartwig’s ear and pointing: and he needn’t have bothered anyway—it happened, at that moment. With the trawler virtually lying on her side, locked in the circling turn, wheel most likely jammed, Looff guessed; but all he had to do was circle too, stay astern for near-total safety while his guns cut her to pieces. The 37 mm had gone for the Bren or whatever that gun was, and it ended in that whole side of the little ship’s upperworks disintegrating. She was on her side, listing, not righting herself any more, lying on her beam with her forepart higher than her stern: but, incredibly, a man, erect, with a gun, struggling to fit it to a mounting … Another machine-gun, on some raised part in the middle of that slope of wreckage abaft the trawler’s funnel: the gun hadn’t fired when Looff saw this happening and raised his glasses, focusing on that figure and screaming a warning back to Oelricher—