In the Line of Fire (A Donald Cameron Naval Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

Cameron continued eating calmly, which irritated Able-Seaman Tomkins. He said threateningly, ‘Don’t act dumb with me, Your Lordship.’ He returned to an earlier theme. ‘Wos that wot you wos, before you joined, eh? A bleedin’ ponce?’

  ‘No. I’ve done time as a deckhand aboard a trawler,’ Cameron said. He finished breakfast and got to his feet: he towered over Tomkins, six feet to five-foot-five. ‘It was a hard life and it kept a man fit. You should try it, Mr Tomkins. You’re all gas and gut, too fat by half. You’ve been eating too well… and you couldn’t give a flea a thick ear. Not that I wish to be disrespectful.’ There was a smile on his face as he pushed past Tomkins, but it was a tight one and his eyes were hard. As he walked away he heard titters at Tomkins’ expense. He had made an enemy but you never went through life without doing that. Behind him the titters subsided as Tomkins uttered loud threats as to what he would do to WC candidates as soon as he got the chance. Men could vanish overboard during night watches in bad weather, and a time would come. Cameron put Tomkins out of his mind as the boatswain’s calls piped the watch to close up; coming out from the break of the fo’c’sle to the iron-deck amidships, he stood back for the acting Captain as Seymour came down the ladder from the bridge. He saluted smartly, and Seymour, returning the salute, paused.

  Seymour said, ‘I’ve had a word with the Cox’n, Cameron.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘I gather you stuck to your post yesterday. I’d expect no less of any man, of course, but you faced up well to your first experience of action and casualties — and you didn’t panic.’ Seymour smiled. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Seymour moved away aft. From below the break of the fo’c’sle Able-Seaman Tomkins emerged, his face twisted in anger. He might have overheard, or he might not. If he had, then there would be remarks later about arse-crawling to the officers.

  *

  Half-way through the forenoon watch a black line of cloud began to form like a mourning ribbon a little above the westward horizon; Humphries, the RNR Sub-Lieutenant, reported to the Captain, whose head was under the chart-table canopy, and Seymour emerged to study the cloud formation briefly through binoculars.

  ‘It’s coming,’ he said. ‘Not unexpected, Sub!’

  ‘No, sir. It’s moving faster than we thought, though.’

  ‘Too true. Well, there’s always the silver lining — the U-boats don’t like it any more than we do.’ Seymour swept his glasses round all the horizons. Already the line of black was extending out towards the labouring destroyer. The air was different now: a curious calm and silence over an oily swell, a swell that took the ship and lifted her, only to slide back and wallow as though at the foot of a craggy Scottish mountain. As Seymour passed the orders for battening-down to meet bad weather, and warned the shipwright’s team on watch by the weakened collision bulkhead that their reserve shoring beams might be needed, the wind took them in a preliminary grasp and white horses appeared on the water. Now the cloud extended with extreme speed, seeming to race out towards the lone vessel and place a threatening pall over her head. Then the rain came, a torrential downpour not unlike that of a tropical storm but with the cold of ice in it, rain that brought the visibility right down so that the horizons closed in around them. But just before the visibility went Cameron spotted something and made an instant report:

  ‘Submarine on the surface, sir, fine on the port bow!’

  Up came the binoculars of the Captain and Humphries. Seymour said. ‘Sound action stations, Sub!’

  As the alarm rattlers blasted out through the ship, Seymour passed the helm and engine orders to bring the after guns to bear; but the German had the advantage and was the first to open fire. She fired almost from invisibility, only the orange flame of the discharge marking her position. A shell whistled across, close above the bridge, so close overhead that Cameron felt its wind as an extra force in the gathering, Atlantic storm. A second shell sliced through the fo’c’sle debris left by the earlier torpedo attack, and exploded to bring a tremendous blast of hot air and a rain of metal down upon the reeling destroyer. A good deal fell on and around the bridge and by nothing short of a miracle caused no harm although Cameron found his oilskin sleeve torn by a fragment that pinged against his binocular-stand. By this time Carmarthen’s after guns were in action, fired virtually blind by the gun-layers aiming at the German’s flash. Carmarthen kept up the fire, but it was not returned, and Seymour decided to break off the action rather than waste ammunition upon an unseen target.

  ‘She’s probably dived,’ he said. A binocular sweep had revealed nothing. ‘If so, she’ll wait her time and try again as soon as the weather moderates.’ He lowered his glasses. ‘I’ll stay at action stations for a while, Sub, but I’ve a feeling that U-boat’s bedded down.’ He turned his head. ‘Cameron?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Nicely spotted. She almost caught us with our pants down.’ Seymour was about to say something further when the destroyer gave a violent twisting lurch, heeling hard over to starboard as a heavy sea took her, everything movable on the bridge sliding across. Cameron, torn from his position, seemed to drop like a stone, then fetched up hard against the starboard plating with all the breath knocked from his body. As Seymour shouted urgent orders down the voice-pipe to the wheelhouse, Carmarthen’s stern swung uncomfortably round so that the shattered bow began to come close to the wind and sea; and along the wires of the sound-powered telephone rigged from the collision bulkhead to the compass platform the shipwright’s urgent voice came, doom-laden.

  ‘Bulkhead’s giving way, sir!’

  Chapter Three

  It was utter chaos below in the seamen’s messdeck, and in the stokers’ messdeck below again. The shipwright and his gang, sweat-streaked, wet and dirty, fought like madmen to place more shoring beams in position and to stem the increasing leaks. As the full force of the North Atlantic was flung against the bulkhead, water was forced through, the many jets like a gorgon’s head of hoses; Carmarthen’s messdecks were never dry when any sea was running, but now they were well and truly awash with water that slopped from side to side as she rolled and dipped her broken bows under.

  Petty Officer Thomas was below now: Robens, the RNVR Midshipman, was there too but it was Thomas who made the suggestion. ‘Hammocks, sir.’

  ‘Hammocks?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Thomas’ voice was brisk and confident. ‘Plug the leaks, see.’

  ‘They’ll just saturate, won’t they?’

  ‘Every little helps, as the old lady said when she piddled in the sea.’ Petty Officer Thomas was already passing the orders. There were plenty of hammocks available, belonging to those men who had slinging billets; the others had already had their hammocks removed to act as extra shelter — as substitute sandbags, in effect, against machine-gun attack and blast — around the bridge and the close-range weapons’ crews. The lashed hammocks were now brought out from the nettings and passed forward to be battened down with timber and held fast against the many leaks. This brought some improvement though it would have no actual strengthening effect: the bulkhead’s future must depend on the ship being brought round again to lie stern first to the wind and sea. Constant reports reached Seymour on the compass platform as he attempted to do just that, cautiously, knowing that he might all too easily broach-to on the turn, and lie broadside to the mounting waves. With the engines still moving astern he tended the ship’s head and inch by agonizing inch Carmarthen swung, bringing her counter round to ease the bow to a degree of safety. Seymour appeared to be succeeding when disaster came: a big wave rolled beneath the stern and lifted it in a twisting motion; and the ship’s head came round to take once again the full force of the sea’s battering. Then it happened: there was a tremendous noise from somewhere below and the remains of the bow dipped very suddenly. In the same second the sound-powered telephone whined into the wind and the Chief Boatswain’s Mate’s urgent voice reported the bulkhead gone in the stokers’ messdesk.
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  ‘Sea’s coming up the hatch, sir, into the seamen’s mess, like a waterspout.’

  Seymour’s response came as a death-knell: ‘Batten down the hatch cover, Thomas, evacuate the seamen’s mess and clip down the watertight doors behind you.’ His face was set hard as he put the telephone down. He had given the only possible order, but it meant that any men working in the stokers’ messdeck who had survived the inrush of water would now be left under hatches to drown. In the seamen’s messdeck, Petty Officer Thomas himself ran through deepening water to the hatch and, with the assistance of a leading-seaman and two ABS, fought the cover down against the spouting Atlantic and pulled the clips across. As the upper part of the bulkhead began to break up, all hands cleared the messdeck at the rush and Thomas, having shepherded them all through into the galley flat, closed the watertight door and slammed the clips on. Moving through the galley flat for the iron-deck, he found himself climbing uphill past the engineers’ store by the fore funnel. The destroyer was stopped and helpless, the weight of water in her for’ard section having lifted the screws clear of the sea; she had fallen off the wind and now lay broached-to, broadside to the great racing waves. For Thomas’ money, the old girl couldn’t last long now.

  *

  A sea-anchor had been rigged with much sweat and foul language: three spars lashed together in a triangle and covered with canvas, with a three-legged bridle heavily weighted at one corner. It had been the very devil to construct, was awkward to handle, and in the event didn’t appear to help very much. After a few hours it had carried away. Nevertheless, when that day and night had dragged away and the next dawn had come, Carmarthen was by some miracle still afloat, though still stopped and wallowing dangerously. Seymour, hunched into a corner of the compass platform which he had not left for more than a minute or two throughout, stared across the wave-crests, knowing he must assess, and assess in good time, when the moment might come to abandon. A second’s delay would make the vital difference between losing perhaps a whole ship’s company and allowing them to live a little longer in the boats and Carley floats. Cameron, on lookout again for the morning watch, thought about that clipped-down hatch and the dead who surged about below, drifting into lockers and mess tables as the destroyer wallowed in the ocean’s grip. He had known all of them for better or worse; some had been his friends, others merely faces met in the course of duty. Carmarthen had carried a total war complement of almost two hundred men; now fifteen seamen lay entombed. Thirteen including the Captain and Sub-Lieutenant Stephenson had died in the earlier U-boat attack: the sea and the enemy together had already exacted a heavy toll, and the ordeal had only just begun. God alone could tell what lay ahead on the long haul back to the UK. And even though so many had gone, the ship was now vastly overcrowded as a result of the two main messdecks being flooded. The burned and wounded men picked up from the tanker were being accommodated in the tiny sick-bay and in the officers’ cabins and wardroom. When off watch, the officers just used the deck of the wardroom flat and the ratings dossed down where they could find shelter, the galley flat just aft of the seamen’s messdeck being the best billet if a man could squeeze in and find a space on the deck, with just the watertight door and its surrounding bulkhead holding off the Atlantic. Fires had been drawn in the galley itself as a safety precaution and there would be no more hot food. They would exist on cold bully beef out of tins, ship’s biscuits and cold herrings-in plus the daily rum issue made by the Torpedo-Coxswain and the Supply Petty Officer. Cameron, dead tired, cold and hungry and wet through beneath his oilskins as he searched the seas of his arc for signs of the enemy or indeed of a friendly ship, thought somewhat bitterly of the days before he had joined. How eagerly he and others had gone to war! Not, according to his father’s accounts, as eagerly as that older generation had flocked to the Navy and Army to give the Kaiser what for — but eagerly enough. This time there had been no thoughts of it all being over by Christmas: Hitler had asked for it and now he was going to get it. It was going to be a pleasure to give it to him.

  So far, it hadn’t worked out quite that way. On land, the Army hadn’t yet recovered from the blow of retreat from Dunkirk, though thanking God they had got so many men away to fight again. As for the sea war, Hitler appeared to be winning that as well: the sinkings in the North Atlantic had been far too many for an embattled island to bear. Men and ships took time to replace, and the cargoes were desperately wanted: food, arms and ammunition, oil fuel, the very sinews of war and the ability to continue an unequal struggle. Cameron had passed some of the ‘phoney war’ period in Portsmouth, doing that spell in the Commodore’s Guard at the Naval barracks. Phoney it had been, all right. Pompey Town had been full of uniforms, predominantly Naval, the uniformed sailors with slung gas-masks — and woe betide you if a chief gunner’s mate heard you referring to them as anything but anti-gas respirators. The barracks, crammed with eight thousand men, vastly more than it had been built to hold when at about the time of the Boer War it had replaced the old barrack hulks in the dockyard, disgorged its liberty-men each evening to roister, until their pay ran out, in the many hundreds of public houses. The civil police didn’t mind much when a rating got drunk; the Navy was honoured in Portsmouth and they looked the other way. All too soon, the drunken man might die in grotesque agony on the seas, in the flame and thunder of the guns — in agony and in honour and glory too, like the memorials to the last war said. In the meantime, he was well entitled to enjoy his fling. The girls helped, too; there was plenty of talent in Portsmouth, a good deal of it in the women’s services. Cameron had drunk his half-pints of Brickwood’s bitter in the brasserie bar of the Queen’s Hotel in exclusive Southsea along with three or four other CW candidates — in a bar where before the war a rating in uniform would have been directed elsewhere — and had met a Wren there. Mary Anstey had been brought in by a sub lieutenant from the gunnery school at Whale Island, but the sub-lieutenant had become filthy drunk and passed out and somehow or other the girl had attached herself to Cameron and after that he’d seen quite a lot of her when guard duties had permitted…

  ‘Cameron!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Seymour snapped, ‘Keep your mind on the bloody sea, man! You’ve been staring at one spot for the last three minutes.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  Portsmouth and Mary Anstey faded: the phoney war stage was of the past now and danger was real. Somewhere out there, that submarine might lurk yet, might be manoeuvring into her firing position and never mind the weather.

  The same thought appeared to be in the mind of the RNR Sub as later he came up to take over the watch, relieving decks for the Midshipman to snatch a quick, cold breakfast: Seymour ate his in his corner of the compass platform — a cup of cocoa and two slices of bread and marmalade, brought with a butlerish air by his seaman servant. Humphries asked, ‘Do you expect that U-boat to attack submerged, sir?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Seymour answered. ‘She probably wouldn’t waste a tin fish on a ship that must look about to sink.’

  ‘She could have fired off her stock, I suppose, sir.’

  Seymour said, ‘Could be. Could be one of the bastards that attacked the convoy.’

  Cameron overheard this. It was on the cards, he fancied, that the U-boat might come to the surface to finish them off by gunfire, and in that event they wouldn’t have a chance, hadn’t had a chance ever since the flooding of the for’ard decks. The after 4.7-inch guns could surely never be depressed to an angle that could hit the target, at any rate if the submarine surfaced close and astern, which she would obviously do after a look through the periscope. And currently Carmarthen, with her silent engines, was a sitting duck, unable even to steer, broadside to the sea. A sitting duck some four hundred sea miles from base… the prognosis was not good. In the meantime, however, she was being urged by the action of wind and sea in the right direction, more or less, and that was on the credit side. When Humphries, who had the duty of navigating officer, took the noon si
ght, then an assessment could be made. Cameron had gathered that it had not been possible to obtain a sight during the night hours: there had been no stars visible.

  They wallowed on sideways in a strange and somehow foreboding silence. A destroyer at sea was normally vibrant with her engine-sounds and now there were none; only the hum of the generators that kept the electric circuits going.

  *

  In a two-watch system there was scant time for the hands to work part-of-ship when off watch; sleep was necessary so that the watchkeepers could be alert when their watch came round again. Thus the routine work of the seaman divisions — fo’c’sle, iron-deck, quarterdeck — was held in abeyance and only the daymen, those who kept no watches — the supply ratings, the cooks and so on — worked normally. Though dead tired when he came off watch, Cameron found that sleep did not come. His mild was too active. Alongside him in .the galley flat lay his fellow CW candidate, by name Lavington, a former medical student who had failed his second MB examination and had thus, aged twenty-one, come into the age group for call-up. No doubt Lavington’s public school education had led to the starting of his White Paper; but he did not strike Cameron as good officer material. He was inclined to dodge the column when possible and had approached the leading hand of his watch, unsuccessfully, with a plea that his seasickness was bad enough to have him excused watchkeeping. Currently, Ordinary Seaman Lavington was looking like death warmed up and was as sleepless as Cameron.

  ‘What d’you think is going to happen?’ he asked in a strained voice.

  Cameron said, ‘Oh, we’ll make it, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘I am! Seymour knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘Well, I hope so.’ Lavington was shaking like a leaf. ‘If we’re attacked… look, what happens when we get into the air attack zone? You know those Focke-Wulf Condors — four engines, long range. They’re way beyond anything Coastal Command’s got, aren’t they? They can blow us out of the water at the drop of a hat!’