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

by Philip McCutchan

  Seymour went to the voice-pipe and called the engine room. An ERA answered; the job would take a long while yet, he said. Seymour said, ‘Tell the Engineer Officer, we’re in some danger of collision with the Westward Bay until the engines can turn over. I’ll give you good warning to clear the engine-room and boiler-rooms if it looks likely.’

  *

  Night came down and still the ships lay silent, heaving in the swell, with the wind keeping up its eerie sigh and whistle around the masts and yards, making the wire of the triatic stay between mainmast and foremast sing weirdly. Carmarthen was like a ghost ship; below in the engine-room the work proceeded without respite, all hands bent to the urgent task of getting the shafts turning again. Not too much reliance was being placed on the arrival of the rescue tug; they were by now well away from their previously reported position, and it was known throughout the ship that the Captain had decided not to break wireless silence to report his present whereabouts. To do so during or immediately after an attack was one thing and was acceptable and often necessary; but not in present circumstances. Two sitting ducks could be very quickly and easily despatched if any surfaced U-boat should pick up the signal and alter towards them, or. if the monitors in the German naval or air bases in France should intercept and order an attack. The risk was too great: as ever, the various risks had had to be assessed and the lesser chosen. That was a captain’s responsibility, and everyone knew it; but there were those who criticized and said that the fastest possible tow back home would have been better than hanging about in cold and danger, waiting to be found, as found they very likely would be, by a stray U-boat on the prowl. Every minute they were out here increased that danger. That was how Lieutenant (E) Matthews was thinking while he worked, but he didn’t voice his opinions. As an experienced man he knew that if you undermined the Captain’s authority, you undermined your own at the same time, for your own derived from his.

  On the compass platform Seymour stared with aching eyes through his binoculars, watching the Westward Bay’s great bulk — watching with difficulty, for the night was dark and in wartime no ship burned navigation lights or any other kind of light that would be visible on deck. The night was playing tricks: sometimes the Westward Bay seemed to be in one place, at other times elsewhere. It was devilish hard to determine whether or not she was closing; even the old lookout’s trick of looking away for a while, or skirting the watched object, failed to work.

  *

  At Number Three gun, Cameron, acting as communication number from the gun to the control tower at the after end of the bridge, chatted with the gun-layer, Able-Seaman Hodge. Hodge was a two-badgeman who had once been a leading-seaman but had been disgraced for bringing drink back aboard after a night’s leave. That had been some four months earlier and having behaved himself in the meantime Hodge hoped soon to get his killick back. Hodge was a small man, dark and skinny, with a perky manner. He was married and had two children, living in Pompey, where the German bombs were inclined to fall now and again, and he was perpetually worried, this showing in a creased forehead and puckered eyes. He was rather like a monkey, Cameron thought. He was talking now about his family, rather less well-off now he had reverted to an able-seaman’s pay, which was basically four shillings a day and a little more with his hard-lying money, his badges and his non-substantive rating of seaman gunner, plus an insufficient marriage allowance. It all added up to little enough, as he remarked.

  ‘Navy’s all right if you’re single,’ he said. ‘Just don’t get hitched, that’s all!’

  ‘I won’t,’ Cameron said with a grin.

  ‘Not till you get that ring, eh?’

  ‘Ring?’ The word held marital connotations at first, then Cameron ticked over. ‘Oh — commission. Not then either, so far as I know at present!’

  ‘No popsies?’ Hodge asked with an invisible leer.

  Cameron said, ‘No, not really.’ Mary Anstey was there in his mind, all right, but no more than that. Things might develop if he saw more of her, but very likely he would not. Both of them were subject to draft chits, to the whims and requirements of the service, and they might be ordered any-where where there was a naval presence and that meant half the world. His home was in Aberdeen, hers in London. Since joining, Cameron had had one long leave of fourteen days and he’d gone home for it; that was a pattern he had decided to stick to, anyway for the foreseeable future. He felt he owed that to his mother and father. Also, he knew a number of girls in Aberdeen whom he would be glad enough to see again, and they him for that matter. Hodge continued talking — dripping, in the lower-deck phrase for complaint — about his enforced absence from Pompey and his home comforts, but very suddenly he stopped and said, ‘Christ!’

  ‘What?’

  Hodge yelled, ‘That merchant ship, she’s bloody near on top of us!’

  A moment later the alarm rattlers sounded throughout the ship.

  *

  Seymour, cursing himself and the bridge lookouts for not having seen the Westward Bay’s proximity much sooner, grabbed the cover off the engine-room voice-pipe. ‘All hands on deck!’ he shouted. ‘Clear the engine-room and boiler-rooms, fast as you can.’ He looked aft through his binoculars; the big ship had loomed very suddenly, seeming to thrust without warning through the poor visibility, through the night’s total blackness, right aft. Seymour sent a warning by Aldis, a fairly useless warning since she couldn’t stand clear with her defunct engines any more than he could himself. As the ratings poured up from below, Seymour cupped his hands and shouted down to the upper deck.

  ‘Stand by to abandon ship! Petty Officer Thomas, are you there?’

  ‘Here, sir,’ came the Chief Boatswain’s Mate’s voice from the iron-deck.

  ‘Get fenders out and a party to the sick-bay at once.’ Seymour turned as someone came up the ladder at the double. ‘Ah, Robens. Take charge of the sick-bay party, will you, and stand by to get the sick to the boats and Carley floats.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  ‘How’s Crucible, d’you know?’

  ‘Making progress, sir.’

  ‘Well, I hope he’ll be able to keep it up. Off you go, Snotty.’

  Robens clattered down the ladder again. Seymour gripped the compass platform guard-rail tight, waiting for the bump. It would be more, much more, than a bump, and never mind the pathetic fenders. The two ships would grind together and Carmarthen, half under already, wouldn’t have a dog’s chance of surviving. The battering effect of the waves would see to that, as they churned her plates against the side of the Westward Bay. Riveted seams would go and that would signal the end. Once again Seymour’s task was to assess the moment when he should abandon; that must not be left too late, for men would be mangled between the two hulls if they hit before he gave it; nor must it be given too soon, for to abandon would mean inevitably that many would die in the freezing cold of the water before they could be hauled aboard the boats, and to cause men’s deaths unnecessarily would be unforgivable. They might never need to jump at all. A miracle could happen at the last minute.

  Seymour stood and sweated as he heard the orders being passed for the whalers to be swung out and lowered. The ships were coming closer now: had the moment come? He believed not yet; the Westward Bay’s bulky profile was altering and he believed she was swinging away and might stand clear with any luck.

  Yes, she was swinging…

  Seymour scarcely breathed.

  Then the Westward Bay showed her starboard side, the side to which she was listing, and in the same moment a surge of the sea, some cruel fate, took the semi-waterlogged Carmarthen and seemed to lift her and throw her towards that great listed steel side. Seymour cursed savagely: the moment to abandon had gone, if ever in fact there had been the time at all. He shut his eyes and prayed. Then the crunch came, a tremendous impact that threw men to the decks throughout he ship. There was a great shudder and an ear-splitting shriek as steel met steel, and the destroyer gave a curious whipping motion as she came broads
ide against the merchantman. There was an agonized cracking noise from overhead as the Carmarthen’s masts impinged against the bulwarks above, and a tangled mess of metal came down with a resounding crash on the upper deck, on the guns and torpedo-tubes and on the compass platform itself: Seymour jumped back as something whizzed past his face and smashed down atop the chart table at the after end of the bridge. It was all hell now; the Westward Bay’s listed side loomed overhead like the lid of a coffin, a coffin that was about to close. There were screams as men who had been thrown to the destroyer’s side were caught and nipped between the two ships, nipped and flattened as though taken by a steam-roller. From the deck above, someone shone a light down, a bright light on the end of a wandering lead, taking a justifiable risk. In the beam Seymour saw stark horror: his whole starboard side seemed to shine red with blood and, as he watched, a man’s severed head came rolling for’ard along the iron-deck, to fetch up at the root of the ladder leading to the break of the fo’c’sle.

  There was nothing to be done now but wait and carry on praying. Then he heard a voice shouting strongly into the wind against the noise of the grinding metal; he fancied it was Cameron’s but couldn’t be sure. ‘Bearing-out spars!’ the voice called. ‘It’s worth a try!’

  Bearing-out spars… Seymour blew out his cheeks. Useless in these conditions — they worked alongside a jetty in a flat calm, but hardly now. Yet that voice was still shouting, urging the hands on to bring out the big lengths of timber and lay their ends against the side of the Westward Bay, then back themselves up against the superstructure and shove and push with every last ounce of their strength. But why Cameron? What had happened to his officers and petty officers? Seymour, realizing his own uselessness on the compass platform, went down the ladders at the rush to lend a hand himself. Cameron could be right after all; it was worth that try in the absence of anything better. At the foot of the starboard ladder the severed head had now rolled away again but Seymour found a body being gradually ground to fragments as Carmarthen’s gunwale scraped against the Westward Bay. Robens, the RNVR snotty, nineteen years of age. Lurching after Seymour found Petty Officer Thomas, his arms around stanchion, clinging like death, both legs taken straight of above the knees as clean as a surgeon would have done it.

  Then he saw the bearing-out spars being sent into position and as four men moved past him, staggering and sliding on the bloody deck, he joined them. The spar was laid against the merchantman’s plating in the streaming light from above and along the starboard side other bearing-out spars also went into action. Seymour, his back against one of the torpedo tube mountings, thrust with all his strength. Incredibly, after while, Carmarthen began to move outwards a little. It was the devil’s own task to hold the ground won, but they did it, and Leading-Seaman Farrow and a party of ratings appeared of deck with more fenders which they lowered over the side and made fast to cleats and bitts. These acted as a protection to the hull itself, but the superstructure was still smashing hard into the tilted side of the Westward Bay and all manner of damage was being done; but this would be mostly superficial. As the destroyer was held off, Seymour handed over to one of the men who had brought the fenders, and took charge of the bearing-out operation as a whole. He shifted the spars for’ard working almost inch by inch, and inch by inch Carmarthen was borne away astern, moving with agonizing slowness toward the bow of the Westward Bay, where she was taken by the full force of the wind. Her stern came round quickly, and at the same time the huge looming bow above her decks came round to starboard, swinging into the wind, and smashed into Carmarthen’s sunken fo’c’sle. There was a lurch and a twisting motion that was felt throughout the whole ship; Westward Bay appeared undamaged as she swung away and clear. The ships moved apart; fate alone would keep them that way. There was nothing any man could do.

  Seymour, making his way back to the battered compass platform to survey the damage there, met Sub-Lieutenant Humphries and ordered a full report on the destroyer’s sea-worthiness.

  *

  The casualties had been little short of catastrophic: Robens had been joined by no less than fifty-three seamen and stokers crushed to death or drowned. The Torpedo-Coxswain, who had remained on duty in the wheelhouse to do what he could to tend the helm, was the only senior seaman rating left, apart from the badly-smashed Chief Boatswain’s Mate, Petty Officer Thomas, who was under sedation in the sick-bay and would never go to sea again. The Gunner’s Mate had gone, as had the Torpedo-Gunner’s Mate and all the divisional POS. There were any number of injuries, many of them serious. It was a holocaust, and had been largely due to the parting of the lifelines when the superstructure had been damaged. Seymour’s face was like dead ashes as a dim and watery dawn came up and the gale continued to blow at full force. It wasn’t the casualties alone: there had been further damage to the ship’s structure during the grinding together of the hulls and a number of leaks had started. Also, the quarterdeck had buckled slightly under the heavy gale-driven impaction; and when the masts had gone — and there was any amount of clearing away to be done along the upper deck and compass platform — the transmitting and receiving aerials had gone, so had the H/F D/F, and all of them were lying in a thousand pieces where they had not gone overboard altogether. The Petty Officer Telegraphist was not hopeful in regard to a repair. It would prove beyond the ship’s capacity; it looked more like a dockyard job, he said.

  ‘Just do your best, Wilkins,’ Seymour said.

  ‘I’ll do that, sir. I may be able to rig something up, but it’ll not have much range, sir.’

  Seymour had to be content with that; and he got no more joy from the Engineer Officer. In fact the news from that quarter was hopeless and final: during the violent battering against the Westward Bay’s side, or more probably when the merchantman’s swing had carried her into the Carmarthen’s fo’c’sle, the ship had taken a twist and the shafts themselves had bent the stern tubes. Not much, but enough: the shafts wouldn’t turn again. Seymour listened bleakly to the mad roaring of the wind, and the sound of the spume-topped sea as it dropped aboard and raced along the decks to turn the destroyer into something resembling a submarine.

  Chapter Eight

  Leading-Seaman Farrow was now acting in the room of the drowned Petty Officer of the iron-deck division, men known collectively as iron-deckmen. He had a word with Cameron while the latter was at work around Number Three gun.

  ‘Reckon you did all right, lad,’ he said. ‘Gettin’ out the spars… it was good work, was that.’

  ‘I’ve seen them used before.’

  ‘Maybe. Well, I reckon you saved the ship —’

  ‘Oh, not—’

  Farrow put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t believe anyone else was going to think of it, lad. Me — I should have done, for one. I didn’t. You did. Might even say the skipper should have done or Jimmy. I reckon we was all taken flat aback as you might say.’ He paused. ‘Anyhow, I’ve had a word with the ‘swain. He’ll see that Jimmy knows where the credit’s due.’ He slid down the ladder to the quarterdeck, vanishing before thanks could be uttered. Cameron appreciated what Farrow had said and what he had done, too. It was utterly unselfish: Farrow, as a long-service RN rating having to stand by and see an HO ordinary seaman vault over his head to a commission, might well have sucked his teeth and said nothing to anyone. It would have been understandable, but it hadn’t happened. Cameron got on with his work which, this early morning, was to help in clearing up the general debris of a terrible night. There was mess and confusion everywhere; and during that morning watch some of the ratings had the shattering experience of finding limbs buried beneath the remains of the masts and top hamper. Cameron himself was one of these: his gruesome find was an arm still in a seaman’s blue jumper-sleeve, both arm and sleeve ripped off at the shoulder. It was a right arm, as could be seen from the red woollen non-substantive badge upon it: it had belonged to a seaman torpedoman second class. Was he dead, or was he below in the wardroom, now acting as an overflow sic
k-bay? It didn’t really matter which, Cameron supposed. Arms couldn’t be stitched back on again, muscle, sinew, bones, nerves, flesh… one day perhaps, but not yet. Whoever it belonged to, the arm was just ‘gash’ now, seagull food.

  Cameron pushed it overboard along with the rest. A sea took it and surged it for’ard, tossing it above the sunken fo’c’sle and those other dead in the submerged stokers’ messdeck. It was a bloody awful war, all right.

  Just then Stripey Tomkins manifested behind Cameron. ‘I ‘eard what the killick said, Your Lordship —’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Stripey. The joke’s an old one by now and you’re getting tedious.’

  ‘Tedious?’ Tomkins’ mouth sagged open; the action revealed that he stood in need of a toothbrush. ‘What’s that, then?’