Love For An Enemy
Page 24
A grey day: decidedly Novemberish. Low grey overcast, and a darker shade in the west, over the desert. Yesterday and the day before had been mostly clear, with patches of high, thin cloud and a cold wind from the north. It was the same wind now but there was a threat of rain in it as well.
The officer of the watch was on the other side, in conversation with the Captain of Marines. Currie went over to him.
‘My boat called away yet, Harvey?’
‘Oh – God, yes.’ He was an idiot, this fellow. Glancing round for help – ‘Quartermaster—’
‘On its way back from Barham, sir.’ The P.O. pointed at a white blossom of bow-wave – and a felucca with its lateen sail full, but still being rowed furiously to get clear of the powerboat’s wash. ‘Had a trip to fit in first, sir. Won’t be a couple of minutes.’
He checked his watch. ‘That’s all right, then.’
Barham, moored about two cables’ lengths from Valiant, made this part of the great harbour look better furnished than it had been. A sister-ship of Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, she’d suffered major damage during the Crete evacuation in the summer and had been sent down to Durban for repairs. Now she was back again, and welcome.
Not, he reflected, that her return could make up for the loss of Ark Royal. The Ark had been on yet another excursion to Malta with aircraft reinforcements, had flown in about forty Hurricanes and a squadron of Blenheims, and she’d been torpedoed the following afternoon on her way back to Gib. Despite strenuous efforts to save her, she’d sunk next morning, only twenty-five miles from home.
‘Your boat’s alongside, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ He went down the gangway and stepped aboard the picket-boat, returning the midshipman’s salute. ‘Know where to take me, Horrocks?’
‘Arsenal Basin opposite Number One gate, sir?’
‘Right.’
Currie was a messenger-boy, this morning. Calling on the Rear-Admiral (Alexandria) to collect a by-hand-of-officer report on the state of the harbour defences, with particular references to countering two-man torpedo attacks. This despite the fact that there’d been a general lessening of expectations on that score, over the last couple of weeks. The prevailing Staff view now was that if an attack of that kind had been intended, it would have happened by this time. It was two whole months since the attack on Gibraltar, after all. Also, there’d been an air attack here, night before last. The first since June. Not as heavy as that June raid had been; no bombs had fallen in the harbour, only a few in the dockyard and in the Arab quarter that fringed it. But the Germans’ target must surely have been the battlefleet, and if their Wop allies had been planning a submarine attack why should they have bothered sending Ju 88s from Crete?
The bombers had flown inland, got their bearings over the Delta and unloaded their bombs on the way out seaward. Even on a moonless night the Delta was highly reflective from the air, apparently. One ’plane had been shot down by AA fire. Anti-aircraft defences were one of the responsibilities of the port admiral – Rear Admiral Creswell, whom Currie was on his way to see now – and they were remarkably effective, a heavy concentration of guns and searchlights over a barrage of balloons, with the high-angle guns of ships in harbour joining in for good measure.
The boat had rounded the coaling arm and was heading across open water towards the opening into Arsenal Basin. Giving Medway, the submarine depot-ship, a wide berth – and slowing. The snotty no doubt aware as he eased his throttles that he’d be in bad trouble if his wash hit the trots of submarines alongside, rocking them against each other and endangering the thin plating of their saddle-tanks.
Only a few T-class there, and one minelayer. Mitcheson, of course, had been at sea for about ten days now. In his absence Currie had found himself a squash partner who could sometimes beat him. He was an electrical engineer, name of Fallon, who’d approached him at standeasy a week earlier with the challenge ‘They say you’re a dab-hand on the squash court, Currie…’ They’d played that day – a Wednesday, ‘make-and-mend’, meaning no work after noon – and on the Saturday, and would have been doing so again today if he – Currie – hadn’t committed himself to taking Solange to see the Marx Brothers’ film The Big Store.
He wished he hadn’t, now. Fallon had been keen for a game. He was a better player than Mitcheson, too. And to Josh Currie, who was good at it, squash was important. Trouble was, when Spartan came back from patrol he’d be more or less obliged to drop Fallon for as long as Mitch was around: and he didn’t want the man to feel he was being made use of – for one’s own temporary convenience. Not that he didn’t enjoy Mitcheson’s company: he did. Although it was also a fact that Mitcheson did rather make use of him: when Lucia wasn’t working, squash didn’t enter Mitch’s thoughts at all.
Another thing altogether, about this visit to the cinema, was that Solange, attractive as she was, was so damn young. Compared to Simone, for instance… Simone, whom he missed dreadfully. Her husband was not only back in Alexandria, he seemed to be permanently on watch in his wife’s bar, had an extremely unpleasant manner and weighed about seventeen stone.
* * *
Rear-Admiral Hector Creswell was a large, bluff-mannered man. Currie had met him before, at a meeting in the Commander-in-Chief’s office at Gabbari, and he’d wondered then whether the bluffness wasn’t mostly camouflage for a shrewd intelligence which for reasons of his own the Rear-Admiral preferred not to display to all and sundry. It was known that the C.-in-C. held him in high regard.
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Currie, sir.’ He’d stopped just inside the door, with his cap under his left arm and the sealed brown envelope in the other hand. He’d signed for it in the outer office where Creswell’s minions worked, and he’d been on the point of leaving when a bull-like roar had summoned him in here.
Creswell took the pipe out of his mouth, pointed at the envelope with its stem. ‘That bumf there, Currie. There’s only one thing in it that matters. I only drew it up – or rather they did, in there – because I was told to, by my lords and masters. None of it’s worth a damn except this one item which is of considerable importance and which I want drawn to their attention.’
He nodded towards a chair on Currie’s side of the desk. ‘Sit down, man. Sit.’
Feeling rather like a labrador, he did so, noticing that there was a model gibbet on the desk. The doll-like figure suspended from it had gold braid practically from wrists to elbows. Creswell saw him looking at it.
‘That’s Pound. Ruddy Dudley.’
Britain’s First Sea Lord…
‘The point I want your employers’ noses rubbed in, Currie, is that a month ago their Lordships authorized the dispatch to me by air – by air, mark you – of a Type 271 RDF set. Radar, as they’re now calling it. Well, if it’s coming by air it must be a damn slow aircraft they’ve put it on. And in my view we need the thing. I want to set it up on the Pharos peninsula over there – to supplement the Indicator-Loop and the Harbour-Defence Asdic, which I suspect may be a great deal less efficient than they’re cracked up to be. You following me?’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sure—’
‘There you’re wrong. Can’t be sure of anything at all, from those idle brutes in London. I’ve made the point in that treatise you’ve got there, and I want the Commander- in-Chief’s personal attention drawn to it. Not have it filed away by some damn clerk. We need that radar set, we need it now, and if they’ve sent it to the wrong place they’d better get their fingers out and send another – immediately – eh?’
‘Best I can do, sir, is quote you to the Chief of Staff. I’ll do so—’ Currie checked his watch – ‘I hope, in about half an hour.’
‘Do that. I’ll telephone him myself, when he’s had time to read it. You just make damn sure he does.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘H’m.’ Creswell poked the effigy of Sir Dudley Pound with his forefinger, set it swinging. ‘Off you go, then.’
* * *
In the interval between the Gaumont British News and the main film, she asked him whether Ned Mitcheson was still away. He nodded. ‘Must be.’
‘Wonder where he is now, this moment.’
‘Well.’ He shrugged. ‘Probably under water.’
‘Isn’t that an amazing thought?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Did you see the birthday present he gave Candice?’
He put his mind back. He himself had given Candice ajar of bath-salts. ‘Oh, yes. That submarine brooch.’
‘Did you know one of his crew made it for him? Filed it up from a piece of silver? Ned said it had probably been a silver spoon, but where that came from it might be better not to ask!’
‘Does Candice wear it?’
‘Heavens, yes. But Lucia was a bit put out, poor darling. You can see her point – it’s rather a personal thing – I mean, being what he is, you know – if he’s giving anyone submarine brooches, you’d think—’
‘Wasn’t Lucia’s birthday though, was it.’
‘She’s getting one, in any case. Ned’s having it made while they’re away this time. Oh, here we go…’
The lights were dimming, for the film. Currie watching the titles but not really seeing them – thinking about Lucia and Mitcheson – having been started on this tack by the brooch business – wondering about the depth of Lucia’s feelings, whether she was anything like as much in love with Mitcheson as he was with her. Whether she might be only having fun – amusing herself, in typically Alexandrian fashion.
He found it hard to know. He’d barely seen them together lately, except in glimpses at the Seydoux dance. Before that – well, only the first night, after her mother’s wedding, and one other evening, at the Etoile.
Lucia steering Mitcheson clear of him, he wondered? But there was no reason she would. Until this moment, in fact, it hadn’t occurred to him. He thought again – impossible to tell. None of one’s damn business, maybe. Except that one had been responsible for their meeting in the first place – and that Mitch was taking the affair very seriously indeed.
Maybe she was too.
One did have to allow, he admitted to himself, for a degree of prejudice on one’s own part. One ingredient being envy. Having made one’s own approach to her, a long time ago, and been firmly repulsed. He shrugged mentally, thinking Chaq’un à son gout: or, in plain English: You can’t win ’em all.
But Mitcheson was a surprise too, really. So unlikely a candidate, one might think. A nice enough fellow, but his whole character and background, all that Dartmouth and R.N. training – or rather conditioning – resulting in the kind of stuffiness that had been so noticeable that first evening at Simone’s, for instance.
Then one sight of her, and – snap…
‘Josh.’ Solange’s hand groped over to find his. ‘You haven’t laughed even once!’
* * *
Mitcheson pushed up the handles of the big periscope. He was wearing an Ursula jacket – he’d be getting wet, in a minute. Spartan was closed-up at gun-action stations.
‘Down periscope. Sixty feet.’
‘Sixty feet, sir.’
The brass wheels’ spokes glittered as the ’planesmen span them – in opposite directions, Lockwood’s clockwise, the coxswain’s anti-clockwise. Forbes had his hand up to the trimming telegraph, to lighten her as she nosed down. In the wardroom the table had been unhitched from its fastenings and pushed aside, and the steel ladder folded down from the gun tower hatch. The magazine was open, a few shells ranged on deck, and the gun’s crew were grouped near the ladder. Five of them: layer, trainer, sightsetter, breechworker, loader. Ammunition-supply hands too, in the gangway near the machinery-space hatch.
‘Gunlayer?’
‘Sir.’ Charlie White – stocky, crop-headed, a middleweight contender for the 1939 Chatham Division boxing championship – had his gunlayer’s telescope slung from one shoulder. Teasdale made room for him as he came through. The needles in the gauges were swinging past the forty-feet marks and Willis was beginning to take some of the angle off her. Mitcheson told White – and Weir, the sightsetter, who’d edged up behind him – ‘Target’s a MAS-boat in tow from a God knows what. Small steamer, salvage vessel, big trawler – what matters is it has a gun that looks like a three-inch on its foc’s’l. That’s your point of aim, White. Knock the gun out, then shift target to the bridge. Towing ship first, MAS-boat afterwards.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Sixty feet, sir.’
‘Very good. Oerlikon gunner—’
‘Sir!’
Sparrow, the wardroom flunkey. He and his loader – Leading Cook Hughes – and two ammunition-supply numbers, Ordinary Seaman Colman and Telegraphist Winslow – were waiting in the passage-way outside the wireless office, Colman with a rope with an iron hook on it coiled over his shoulder. They’d be hauling up ammo pans for the Vickers machine-guns as well, if the Vickers were going to be used. An Oerlikon drum, bulky as well as heavy, would be hauled up on the rope on its own, while Vickers pans would go two at a time in a bucket. Bright and Gresham, the Vickers gunners, were standing by with their guns on the deck beside them; whether or not they’d be wanted would depend on the shape and form of the opposition – which you’d only know about when you got up there.
Mitcheson told Sparrow, ‘You engage the MAS-boat. Keep him busy while we deal with the towing-ship. All right?’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Right, then… Range 4000 yards, deflection four right. Shoot.’ That order ‘shoot’ gave White the go-ahead to open fire as soon as his sights came on. Mitcheson gestured to Tremlett to open the lower hatch. He – Mitcheson – would be the first up, then McKendrick, then the Oerlikon gunners, while simultaneously through the guntower hatch the order of emergence would be layer, trainer, sight-setter, breech-worker and loader, with ammunition-supply numbers closing-up behind them when they were out. There were ready-use lockers up there from which the first projectiles would come.
McKendrick came back from the wardroom and told Mitcheson, ‘Ready, sir.’ Meaning the gun’s crew were on the ladder, waiting.
‘Group up. Full ahead together.’
‘Group up, sir – full ahead. Main motors grouped up, sir—’
He waited, while the power came on: you heard it, felt the vibration as her screws bit, drove her forward.
‘Blow two and four main ballast!’
‘Blow two and four, sir.’ Halliday wrenched those two high-pressure blows open. Air thudding into the tops of the tanks, and a noise like sand-blasting in the pipes. The ’planesmen were fighting to hold her down now, their ’planes at hard a-dive to counter the sudden and increasing buoyancy. Speed through the water helped, the thrust of the sea against the down-tilted hydroplanes: but they couldn’t have held her for long.
‘Surface!’
The wheels swing over, ’planes angling up to release her. Forbes has a referee’s whistle between his teeth. Mitcheson’s on the ladder, climbing, McKendrick close behind him, head well back clear of his heels. Right under the hatch then, breathing the cold reek of metal and salt water, Mitcheson wrenching one clip off then pausing with his hand on the other, Forbes shouting up from the circle of artificial light down there below them – below Sparrow, whose head’s between McKendrick’s feet – ‘Thirty feet – twenty-five – twent
y – fifteen…’
At ten feet, he blows his whistle. The second clip swings loose and the hatch is flung up, slams back, the boat’s upward impetus carrying her on up through an eruption of foam and tumbling green water. A few gallons splash down into the control room. He’s in the bridge by then, with the sea still draining down through the free-flood holes in its deck, opening the cock on the voicepipe, his eyes riveted on the enemy ships as he straightens and focuses his binoculars on them. McKendrick’s out of the hatch too, vaults up on to the bridge’s forefront, the sloping ‘cab’ above and immediately abaft the open guntower hatch; he has a bird’s-eye view of the crew around their gun, getting it into action. No signs of reaction from the enemy – yet. Ideally they won’t wake up until the first shell hits them – or at least is on its way. The gun’s unclamped, training round, layer’s and trainer’s telescopes have been shipped, the breech is open and the first round’s slammed in, the slim black-painted barrel moving only enough to counter the boat’s roll and pitch now, telescopes in focus on the ships still plugging along two miles away on the bow. The sightsetter, Weir, yells ‘Range zero-four-zero, deflection four right, set!’ Randy Sewell slams the breech-lever up to shut the breech, screams ‘Ready!’ White’s and Churchman’s hairline sights are on the target and White presses his trigger: the gun fires, recoils, cordite-stench reeking in the wind, that first empty shell-case clanging out on to the steel deck and a new shell’s banged in. Breech shut: ‘Ready!’
McKendrick has his glasses up, is waiting for the fall of that first shot. Mitcheson too. The diesels grumble into life, and the splash goes up left, a blob of white that hangs against the greenish-grey background for a moment, then vanishes. McKendrick’s shout corrects for line: ‘Right six – shoot!’
You have to get the line right first. Until you have that it’s impossible to know whether you’re short or over. The Oerlikon’s opened up now, its harsh blare coming in short bursts from the back end of the bridge. One round in six is tracer, the rest high-explosive and incendiary; the tracer makes finding the target simple and Sparrow’s already hitting. Second fall of shot meanwhile is in line, but short. ‘Up 400: shoot!’ The enemy’s turning towards, though, so deflection will change again, although the one on its way there now should be about right – the Italian’s profile has only just begun to shorten. They’ll have cast off the tow, of course. Have done – the gap between them’s widening fast. And that gun’s just fired: first response. Luck can still play a part in this – but there’s no time for crossing fingers. And you’ve hit him: a flash, a burst of muck… ‘Left six – shoot!’