Stark Realities

by Stark Realities (retail) (epub)

  Otto said, ‘Hard a-starboard. Full ahead port.’

  To get out from under before the bloody things got down this deep. The destroyer having come over in a curve, charges from her throwers might well be flung out farther to port than if she’d been steering a straight course: so a jink to starboard might be as good a bet as any. It was mostly a matter of placing bets, though. You used what skills you had, and beyond that could only tighten your gut, set your jaw, tell yourself it couldn’t be worse than drowning in Flanders mud under heavy shellfire.

  Less bad, in fact. Over sooner, and—

  She’d convulsed. Like having driven into explosive rock. And more of it: the closest ever. Men had been sent flying, lights had failed, gyro alarm shrieking, trim gone to hell and two more bursting close – Christ Jesus, could have been right in the bridge. Stahl was back on his feet with a flashlight on the depthgauge showing forty-eight metres – bow-down, going down so fast she could have been heading for the bottom: like so much cement, except cement didn’t crush, not like a tin tube could. He’d stopped both motors and put them half stern, emergency lights were glowing weakly, men were picking themselves up, coming to their senses. He – Otto – had got to the gyro controls and pulled its fuse, telling Stahl and Riesterer, ‘Steer by magnetic.’ Steer where, and what bloody difference could it make, might have been the question. She was still diving, all that the screws working astern were doing was shaking her, her downward momentum too much for them to check. Stahl shouting, ‘Fifty-six metres, sir!’

  ‘Blow diving tanks eight and ten!’

  Boese was seeing to it: checking vents shut and kingstons open before opening the blows. Blowing those two forward main ballast tanks rather than just the bow tank because it was imperative to stop her dive, and if you blew only number ten and it wasn’t enough to stop her quickly you might not have time to think again before it really was too late. And he preferred to spread the effort over eight and ten main ballast rather than nine and ten, not to put all the new buoyancy in her snout, although he’d just heard some panicky report of water forcing entry up for’ard somewhere, and she was getting near sixty metres, well below test depth; from here on down there was a real danger she’d implode. That old nightmare: and if there was damage for’ard, why hadn’t – well, that question was answered now. Hofbauer, whom he’d sent for’ard to investigate, reporting that water was spurting in at high velocity via the fore ’planes’ hull-glands, which were accessed from the torpedo-stowage compartment. Boese had got a pump running on that bilge, and Hintenberger and Mechanician Haverkamp had gone for’ard, more or less sliding downhill to get there.

  Boese now reporting, ‘Blowing eight and ten, sir.’

  Already taking effect too. Needle in the gauge still close to sixty but seemingly hesitating there. Beginning to edge back. Angle coming off her, bubble sliding towards the centre.

  ‘Stop both motors.’

  ‘Stop both, sir… And – stop blowing?’ Stahl worrying about his trim, adding, ‘She was light – so if it was only the charges that sent her down—’

  ‘Stop blowing eight and ten.’

  Boese seeing to that, Stahl requesting permission to vent the tanks outboard – which would send up huge air bubbles. Couldn’t vent them inboard, though – not tanks of that size, into the boat’s atmosphere. Boat meanwhile at forty-five metres, rising fast and now with a steepish up-angle growing on her: Stahl had been right – employing drastic corrective measures could send you from one kind of emergency to another very suddenly.

  New one coming now – unconnected, but both Stahl and Otto saw it coming a second before Klein gasped, ‘Fore ’planes jammed, sir—’

  ‘Fore ’planes in hand!’

  To put them into hand control you had to by-pass the telemotor system at this end, and ship heavy steel bars up for’ard where they were already working on the leaking glands. Torpedomen would jump to that now; and once the bars were rigged and in hand, orders in regard to putting on so many degrees of ‘dive’ or ‘rise’ would be passed verbally by men stationed between here and there. Boese flat on his face opening the by-pass, having first to remove a screwed-down deck-plate to get at it. He’d shut the blows to eight and ten main ballast, but the tanks still being full or half-full of air she was fairly rocketing up: thirty metres, twenty-five, coxswain struggling with the after ’planes which weren’t as yet making any impression on the angle or rate of ascent. As the only way of checking it, Otto had told Stahl yes, vent eight and ten main ballast outboard. All these things had been happening in the last fifteen or twenty seconds, in conditions amounting to pandemonium, and since Boese was still on his knees, Hofbauer had jumped to the panel of vent levers, opened number ten then shifted to eight, jerking the short steel levers over, but with only limited result, no clang of eight’s starboard vent dropping open as it should have done. It was an external tank, had vents in its top on both sides; it would vent completely through the one that had opened, but not as instantly as it should have done.

  Twenty metres. Ten, nine, eight. Surfacing, for Christ’s sake. Periscope standards showing above the waves by now. Five metres, four. The bridge would be exposed and streaming, the gun emerging, fore-casing awash. Rolling – feeling the sea now, and more than that too – what he’d been expecting and was half-ready for, ringing crash and impact of an explosion overhead as the first shell hit the standards or the bridge. Next one would hole the pressure-hull – if they knew what they were doing. No time to think about it, this was it, come-uppance, another ten seconds you’d be finished and bloody deserve to be. Air all gone from both tanks though, all main ballast full: he’d shouted ‘’Planes hard a-dive, full ahead both motors!’ Fore ’planes in hand and hard a-dive… To drive her under – as she began to wallow into it in any case, and another shell burst in the bridge – or the tower, could be, in which case it would fill now as she ploughed on down.

  3

  Anne Laurie got home to Chester Square just before six-thirty p.m. on this dark, wet Saturday, having hoofed it all the way from the Admiralty despite a steady, soaking rain. She’d given up waiting for her omnibus, left the queue as several others had done, then had the damn thing pass her before she’d covered more than 100 yards. Her route on foot wasn’t all that far, though – the length of the Mall, then Buckingham Gate and through the last bit to the square. She’d have had to walk that part of it anyway. She shared the flat with Sue Pennington, sharing the rent too, but only after it had been quite heavily subsidised by Sue’s father, who owned a brewery.

  There were three letters on the doormat. She skirted around them, hung up her dripping mac and stood the umbrella in the stand, went into the bathroom and dried her hands before coming back and scooping them up. Two were for Sue and the other for her – Forces’ Mail, from Harry St Clair, his handwriting clearly recognisable even if he hadn’t filled in ‘sender’s name’ on the back.

  He was a major now: on his last short leave he’d been a captain, and in 1916, when he and Charles had gone into the field, they’d both been subalterns.

  Charles had been killed about six weeks after landing in France. He and Anne had married three weeks before that, and Harry St Clair had been best man at their wedding.

  Read this later, she decided. To get warm and clean was the priority. Including removal of wet shoes. Good strong shoes, part of her kit as a 3rd officer in the Wrens, which she’d had to become in order to work in the Intelligence Division, although she contrived hardly ever to wear the uniform – except for the shoes, in this sort of weather. Item two now anyway – in slippers, riddle out the stove and feed it some coal. Sam Lance was coming for her at eight, taking her to the Ritz. If she gave the stove half an hour to itself after the riddling, might get about two inches of warm water which she’d leave in the bath in case Sue wanted it.

  Sue was a cryptographer, and like Anne was employed by ID – Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy – but more specifically in that Holy of Holies Room 40, the ultra-e
fficient and ultra-secret organisation that intercepted, decoded and/or decyphered virtually every signal the German Navy sent. Others too – diplomatic stuff, on occasion. Including an extremely hush-hush item that was known to the few who’d heard of it as the Zimmermann telegram. Room 40 – which in fact was now known as ID 25 and occupied not only Room 40 but about a dozen others as well, in the Admiralty’s Old Building – had broken that. Anne had assisted in the translation and her boss, ‘Blinker’ Hall – her ultimate boss – had kept it in his own quite extraordinarily capable hands, rather than allow it to become lost or simply wasted in those of senior admirals or politicians. He’d handled it to such good effect that it had been largely instrumental in coaxing America into the war. He’d been plain Captain Reggie Hall RN then, was now Rear-Admiral Hall, KCMG – a genius who when he thought it necessary worked twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day and was adored by everyone who worked under him.

  Apart from Sue, the cryptographers were all male, all extremely brainy as well as interesting in themselves, drawn from many different backgrounds: academics, former diplomats, scientists, businessmen, two naval schoolmasters, a barrister, an historian, and so on. Most of the young civilians had by now been forced into naval uniform, which annoyed them.

  Anne was no cryptographer. Couldn’t even manage the Times crossword. At least, not often. Her contribution to the business was her fluency in the German language. French as well, but German was what the Division as a whole and ID 25 in particular had need of. Many of the cryptographers had some German and a few were bilingual, but a fair proportion were mathematicians, not linguists. In any case, decrypting was their trade.

  Stove now filled, could be counted on to do its best. Somewhat limited best, admittedly. One put on gloves for the riddling process, otherwise had to wash off coal-dust in very cold water, the stove not being up to much until it got into its stride. As Sam Lance had commented when she’d explained this to him, ‘Do without the gloves, you have the makings of a vicious circle there.’

  He was American, a lieutenant-commander in the US Navy, one of six assistant naval attachés working at and out of the American Embassy. His boss, the naval attaché, Captain Powers Symington USN, had become a close friend and admirer of Blinker Hall. As had Admiral Sims, the US Navy chief here. Blinker briefed Sims virtually every day, withholding no information that could be of use or interest to him, only giving him to understand that the intelligence came from agents in the field, not Room 40. The existence of Room 40 and its codebreakers was a closely-guarded secret, with which the powers in Washington were not to be trusted.

  Sims, as it happened, agreed on that point. Not in relation to Room 40, which he’d never heard of, but on Washington’s weak security.

  No hurry now: the stove had to be given time. Get out a dress that was fit to wear – well, she knew which one – and a few other things, then read Harry’s letter. She could visualise him as he’d have been when writing it: hunched in a dugout lit perhaps by a storm lantern, Harry in mud-stained khaki writing the letter maybe on a board or a book on his knee, and from outside the rumble or mutter of the guns. He was a very, very nice man, she thought, and was obviously a good soldier; he’d been a staunch friend of Charles’s and had been stricken by his death. When she thought of him, she saw Charles too: Harry’s face squarish with a blunt nose and a thick black moustache, Charles’s longer and narrower with a slightly cleft chin and a brown moustache. And that quirky smile she’d loved.

  To kill a man like that, she’d asked herself. Like squashing a bug. She’d thought about it, puzzled over it a thousand times. The futility and cruelty of it, the stupidity. And the numbing shock that bloody telegram had brought her.

  Thousands – millions – of equally bloody telegrams, of course: and the same applying to every one of them. Obviously. It was just that one’s own was the one that opened one’s eyes to the irrevocability, the lasting remorse, the injury that no-one ever could ‘kiss better’.

  Returning to the sitting-room in dressing-gown and slippers, she picked up Harry’s letter, slit it open with her thumb and dumped herself on the sofa. He’d written,

  Dearest Anne. Just a few lines while I have the chance to let you know that all is as well as I suppose one could expect it to be. In fact things have been looking up, rather, as I imagine you know – with the bird’s eye view of everything that you must have in your job – at least as I imagine it – you must in any case have a clearer view of events and probabilities than any of us here can, with our noses more or less literally in the mud. There is an awful lot of that stuff about. But there’s hope too, now – which is amazing, wonderful. I must say this, Anne – if only Charles was around to see it and feel it! Of course, one mustn’t count one’s chickens. It may not be quite on its last legs yet. Personally I think it is, but – anyway, the one thing I do want to say, Anne, is that when it is over, if I’m still here and in one piece, if I could muster the damn nerve and cheek to – well, I’ve got to put it in plain words – not to replace Charles, which no one ever could, but to refill a little of the space he occupied in your warm and lovely heart? Now I’ve gone further than I’ve dared go before, but please, just give it thought? What sort of future I’d be able to offer you I can’t say, but my uncle—

  She looked up, palming the letter, hearing Sue’s key in the door. Read the rest of it later: there were only a few more lines. She wouldn’t marry him, though. Might well marry Sam. Marrying Harry St Clair would seem like trying to replace Charles. Stay friends with him for life – please God – but not—

  No. Harry as one might love a brother, Sam – well, as a lover. Not that he was her lover, in that sense.

  Didn’t want to be rushed into it, was all. Wanted to be certain. Did not want to remarry while still at war.

  Was that only prevarication? Reluctance to commit oneself to any second marriage – replacement marriage as it might seem to be?

  ‘Anne, you home?’

  ‘Sure am!’

  A groan. ‘Talking American these days, are we?’

  ‘That was just slang, not necessarily American, it’s common parlance. Did you get a tram, or—’

  ‘A lift, from Danny Boy.’

  ‘Oh, did you, then?’

  Sue in the doorway, spotting her letters on the Chinese table, darting in and snatching them up, inspecting both and dropping them. ‘Nothing.’ A sigh. Anne knew who it was Sue was hoping to hear from. She was shortish, fair-haired, rather stocky, in a tweed skirt and jacket. Freckles on her nose. When she could get away, she hunted with the Grafton; despite the brain power – which didn’t stand out a mile but was there, all right – she was not by nature or inclination an indoor girl. Looking again at her letters: ‘Correction – not “nothing”, by any means. I only meant they can wait, one doesn’t exactly drool… Stove OK?’

  ‘Pulling itself together, I hope. Thought I’d bath, then you could top it up, by which time—’

  ‘Good wheeze. What time’s Uncle Sam coming for you?’

  ‘You’re impossible. But – eight.’

  ‘Remind me, he’s – thirty-five, is it?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘And you’re twenty-four.’

  ‘And a widow-woman. That ages one, you know.’

  ‘In your mind it may, but no other way. I’d have guessed you were twenty-two at most. I’ve some news that should interest you, Anne.’

  She’d got up, to go and try the water, but now paused. ‘Good news, I hope?’

  ‘The German family you knew, the’ – a second’s hesitation as memory faltered – ‘von Mettendorffs, the son a U-boat commander?’

  ‘What about him – or them?’

  Controlled alarm, and contrived lack of any great interest, Sue noted. The same guarded manner Anne had affected when telling her about them – oh, eight or nine months ago, when amongst names in an intercept from U-boat Command listing new submarine appointments had been that of von Mettendorff, Otto, Oberleutnant zu S
ee, appointed to UB81 in the Flanders flotilla, in command. In the course of a routine meeting at which Sue had been present, Anne had told a fleet paymaster by name of Thring, who’d set up the Operations Division’s U-boat tracking-room, ‘This one – von Mettendorff, first name Otto – must be the brother of a girl I knew at the Berlitz School in Frankfurt.’ She’d added, ‘I met him only briefly – but I’m pretty sure his name was Otto, and he was transferring to U-boats, doing some conversion course. For what that information’s worth…’

  She’d shrugged, making it clear that to her it wasn’t worth a row of beans, she was only mentioning it – disclosing it – as a matter of form. It had also emerged – because Anne had later mentioned this too – that in her interview for the Intelligence Division job a year earlier, when she’d applied for transfer from the Foreign Office after Charles had been killed – she’d felt the need of a change, and Sue had told her there might be a job going for another fluent German-speaker – she’d put it on record that she’d had this friend Gerda with whom she’d shared student digs in Frankfurt where she’d been studying German at the Berlitz School. She’d also spent some of the summer holiday period as a guest of the family on their estate in Saxony – summer of 1913, that had been – and in the course of it briefly met Gerda’s brother Otto, then a junior naval lieutenant – or sub-lieutenant, he might have been, she wasn’t certain; her stay on the estate near Dobeln had only overlapped with his few days’ leave by – she thought – one day.

  ‘Could have been two or even three. Honestly don’t remember.’

  Thring had told her, ‘It’s no great issue, anyway. Many of us have met dozens of ’em, here and there. The fleet review at Kiel, for instance – all hobnobbing like Billy-oh.’ A second thought then, and he’d contradicted himself: ‘Well, actually not all that much hobnobbery… Anyway, quite right of you to own up – eh?’

  He’d chuckled at the concept of ‘owning up’. Anne had been slow to react to what had been intended as a joke, and Sue had suspected then, as now, that she must have known Otto von M. rather better than she’d willingly have ‘owned up’ to. This seemed to Sue to be the only viable explanation. And so what? Had a bit of a fling with a Hun – pre-war, and when she’d have been not long out of school, for heaven’s sake. No-one else’s business; just interesting, that was all. He must have been a very personable young Hun, she thought. Anne was discriminating to a fairly high degree. Sam Lance, for instance, whom she’d been more or less fending off for quite some time now, was a most attractive as well as thoroughly decent man, and she was still barely encouraging him at all. Unless she was doing so on the sly, of course…