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

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Yes. We’ll ride easier when that’s been done, in my opinion. We’re far too waterlogged at the moment and with the main shafts out of line there’s no point in keeping the screws under. We’ll make a start immediately after the committals.’

  Farrow sucked his teeth. It would take a bloody week, and it seemed wholly pointless except as an exercise to keep the hands occupied, which might be sensible perhaps. From a stability point of view… well, they’d ridden out one storm with the stern down and hadn’t done so badly. Any interference with the trim might have unfortunate results, but Lieutenant (E) Matthews, who could be presumed to know something about trim and stability, had spoken and that was that.

  *

  Once again, the dreadful duty of committing bodies to the deep; and this time the corpses, sewn into their canvas shrouds, floated alongside the stationary destroyer’s decks and by some hideous quirk would not move away; nor, even with the firebars sewn into the canvas at their feet, would they sink. Air, trapped in the canvas, kept them afloat. Feet down, there they remained, heads and torsos moving sluggishly to the slight scend of the Atlantic.

  ‘Bring a rifle,’ Matthews ordered. When the rifle was brought he sent several clips of .303 ammunition into the corpses and after that they slowly disappeared. The shots had scattered the seagulls, come as usual to scavenge amongst the ‘gash’ thrown overboard from the wardroom pantry, but they were soon back, wheeling and crying. Farrow looked at them sardonically; like the albatrosses of the Southern Ocean, maybe they bore the souls of mariners dead and gone and couldn’t keep away from ships.

  The bodies disposed of, the long business of baling-out the flooded after spaces was put in hand. As the magazine was opened up, Farrow drew Matthews’ attention to the western horizon.

  ‘There’s a change coming in the weather, sir.’ The customary menacing line of black was forming, low down as yet but increasing, and there was a curious oiliness on the sea, too flat a calm for Farrow’s peace of mind.

  ‘Then the hands’ll work the faster,’ Matthews said.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. But if —’

  ‘Just get on with it, will you?’ Matthews ordered testily. Farrow turned away and got on with it; there was no option, but he believed that if the stern was allowed to lift again, then the coming wind might use it, as it were, to drive the sunken stem down farther into the water. They’d been riding well enough; better to leave it. But Matthews seemed obsessed with the idea — Farrow thought — that he must reverse everything that Mr Seymour had done, Mr Seymour who was at this moment somewhere below them, spiralling down in the Atlantic wastes, Mr Seymour who’d been determined to get the old ship back to base. Matthews, he hadn’t quite the same determination; he’d wanted to chuck it in earlier, the bastard. Farrow wouldn’t forget that.

  As the distant black loomed higher, chains of men, seamen and stokers together plus the daymen, a case of all hands, lifted water from the magazine shaft in buckets, balers, galley saucepans, leather charge cases, anything that would hold water for tipping back into the sea. Under the sour-tempered lash of Matthews’ voice, they worked hard. At least it kept out the bitter cold and that was something. But their labours appeared to have no effect on the trim of the wallowing hull, and the Engineer Officer’s mood grew worse.

  ‘If anything,’ he said to Farrow, ‘she’s going deeper.’

  ‘Seems like she is, sir. Could be the tiller flat’s leaking, sir.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish, everything’s tight down there, has been ever since we sounded round after leaving that merchant ship.’

  ‘Worth checking again, sir?’

  Matthews breathed hard down his nose. ‘Oh, all right, send a man down.’

  Farrow called up Cameron, told him off to check right aft. On his way below, Cameron met Chief Stoker Peters: the Chief Stoker had made his own investigation of the tiller flat which was undoubtedly flooding through a sprung plate. ‘God knows how that happened,’ he said, sounding professionally aggrieved, ‘unless something was shifted while we were being bashed about and it’s just worsened.’

  He reported to Matthews. ‘I’ll do what I can to caulk it, sir. I’ll need some hands below.’

  ‘Right you are,’ Matthews agreed. ‘Take ‘em from Farrow’s party. And be as quick as you can, Chief. That weather’s closing in. We can’t afford to be put further down in the water.’

  The work continued, above and below decks; there was a real urgency now to get as much water as possible out of the ship before bad weather struck yet again. With the tiller flat flooding, the position had changed. Farrow was gloomy, and confided as much in Cameron and Tomkins. A lot was going to be up to them, he said. Stripey Tomkins was about the most experienced seaman rating now left, and Cameron had proved himself to be quick thinking and not prone to panic.

  ‘I’ll be relying on you two,’ Farrow said. ‘Don’t let me down.’

  It was soon after this that the full force of the weather hit them; Farrow estimated the wind at Force Ten. The White Ensign, still bravely flying from the ensign staff, cracked several times like a whip and then stood out as though starched, held like a board by the shrieking, tempestuous gale. The sky was black with heavy, low cloud and such visibility as remained was further cut by the blown spindrift that lay across the breaking crests. Water boiled along Carmarthen’s decks and the baling-out of the flooded after spaces was at once suspended by Farrow without waiting for orders from Matthews. There was a sound like thunder as one wave after another, waves that seemed to be growing larger every minute, smashed into the base of the superstructure and broke in spray that covered the compass platform and the wheelhouse ports and sent its sting aft to lash the men still on deck. Farrow’s voice roared out, ordering all hands back to the wardroom flat; they could serve no useful purpose now.

  As Matthews fought his way for’ard to the wheelhouse, Farrow made for Chief Stoker Peters in the tiller flat aft.

  ‘Need any more hands, Chief?’ he asked.

  Peters shook his head. ‘Thanks, I’ve got enough.’ He was slopping about in a foot of water. ‘It’s not men I need now, it’s new stern plating and a D2 bloody refit in Pompey!’

  *

  In the operations room at the Rosyth Naval base more convoys were indicated on the plot by now: the next westbound and the next eastbound, with their escorts who would change from the one to the other as the westbound convoy passed into the ‘safe’ zone and the eastbound one left it.

  The name Carmarthen wasn’t there any more among the escorts; she had been presumed lost and already she was past history, her place now taken by one of the four-stackers, the elderly United States Navy boats handed to Britain under the Lend-Lease agreements, weird-looking craft but more than welcome and, so it was said with tongue in cheek, capable of ten knots on each funnel, a statement that landsmen found no reason to doubt. HMS Pennsylvania was there instead of Carmarthen, though this was a fact that Mary Anstey simply refused to accept. Each time she saw Pennsylvania’s name, it was to her Carmarthen as it had been in the last convoy-escort pattern. Crazy, perhaps; but she had an inner feeling that to admit the destroyer’s loss to herself would in some way ensure that it would be lost and somehow she had a strong belief that Carmarthen was still afloat somewhere out there in the wild Atlantic gale. That gale was already sweeping in across Northern Ireland and into the Firth of Clyde; according to the reports, it was a bad one, the worst for many years. For the convoys soon to depart, this was good enough news, of course; but Mary’s mind was not on the convoys. If only the Naval Command didn’t assume a loss so readily… if only there was a better availability of ocean-going tugs… if only there were more long-range aircraft, such as Goering had at his command… there were so many ‘if onlys’ about this war. There was another: if only she and Donald Cameron had managed to see more of each other when they had both been in Portsmouth. She’d heard it said that the dead go fast when they hadn’t had a long time to become deeply known and she was finding it something o
f an effort to recall the set of his face… she forced the thought down and away. She mustn’t think in terms of death. Carmarthen would come through if she kept faith.

  That afternoon, with twenty-four hours off duty, Mary took the train into Edinburgh. As the train left Inverkeithing and passed on to the Forth bridge, the battleship Rodney was coming in, and as she approached the bridge a single shaft of sunlight, thinly breaking for a moment through the overcast, lit upon the nine great sixteen-inch guns in their triple turrets for’ard of the superstructure, and upon her ship’s company fallen in fore and aft for entering harbour, with the Cable Officer standing motionless in the eyes of the ship ready to bring her to her buoy off Rosyth dockyard once the order came from the compass platform to send away the buoy-jumper. With the battleship were her escorting destroyers and astern of her the elderly county-class cruiser Norfolk with her high freeboard and thin, raked funnels, a gracious lady from the past. Mary’s eyes filled with sudden tears as the warships passed in solemn state below the great dark-grey span of the bridge and from below a bugle-call rang out, sounding clear above the rattle of the train.

  They were all one Navy, with the same unvarying basic routine from ship to ship: dawn action stations, change of watches, hands fall in, breakfast, stand easy, Up Spirits, hands to dinner… all the way through to dusk action stations and Pipe Down. There was a security about sameness, like the Church of England’s matins and evensong; wherever in the world you found an English church, you found the comforting familiarity of the unchanging order of service. Ships were the same.

  For no real reason, she felt cheered by the sight of the ships below, passing from danger and foul weather into the port’s safety.

  *

  Every plate, every rivet seemed to be straining its guts out to keep the Carmarthen afloat, almost as though she were a wounded animal, facing death but filled with a determination to die in home surroundings. The wardroom flat was a cheerless place, a place of no hope despite the best efforts of Leading-Seaman Farrow and Stripey Tomkins, who was now proving a tower of strength. From some recess in his bulky clothing, Tomkins had brought out a mouth-organ. His repertoire was limited, but adequate. He played ‘Tipperary’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘Roll Out The Barrel’, and then went into sundry hymn tunes to which generations of British seamen had put words never dreamed of by the clergy. Tomkins got them all singing, but not for long. The future was much too bleak, as were the current discomforts. And Lieutenant (E) Matthews, sod him, used the sound-powered telephone every few minutes to ask about the tiller flat — his line to Chief Stoker Peters had, it seemed, packed up on him. Able-Seaman Tomkins, interrupted in his mouth-organ playing for the hundredth time, grew bitter.

  ‘Pity this soddin’ line doesn’t pack it in an’ all,’ he said as he banged the telephone down. ‘I don’t know what bloody use ‘e is up there, buggered if I do.’

  ‘What is it this time?’ Cameron asked.

  Tomkins wiped the back of a hand across his lips. ‘There’s a ship in sight and ‘e don’t know what it is. Comin’ up from the west, visible jus’ now and again like.’ He called out to Farrow, passing the report. Farrow moved fast for the ladder and the hatch and Cameron went up behind him. Emerging on to the quarterdeck, now lower than ever in the water, they stared out towards the west. Their world seemed bounded by the great rearing waves and the breaking crests; from aft no ship could be seen in those heaving, spindrift-filled waters.

  Farrow said, ‘Come up to the wheelhouse, Lofty. Two pairs of eyes are better than one.’

  In the wheelhouse they found the Engineer Officer slumped like a zombie against a bulkhead. Matthews said, ‘You took your time, didn’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I looked around from aft first, sir. Didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Well, look now, then. Here.’ Matthews handed over his binoculars and indicated the bearing. Farrow took a long look; two masts and a funnel were occasionally visible as the unknown vessel rose to a sea.

  Farrow said, ‘I don’t know, sir. She’s a merchantman, that’s all I can say. Can’t see her flag, sir.’

  ‘Cameron? You reckon to be an officer, I’m told. See what you can make of her.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Cameron took the binoculars, found the vessel, and steadied the glasses on her. He said, ‘I agree with Leading-Seaman Farrow, sir. And I can’t see a flag either.’ He paused. ‘She could be a stray from another convoy — or she could be one of our armed merchant cruisers, I suppose, sir.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Matthews said. ‘On the other hand, she could be a bloody Hun surface raider… one of the converted merchantmen.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ Farrow said.

  ‘So what do we do? That’s the question now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Farrow said again. There were the two alternatives in his view: one was simply to hope not to be seen — and it was highly unlikely they would be, in fact —and let the ship go; the other was to attract the attention of her Officer of the Watch by signal or rocket. Either way was a risk. To let a British or allied ship pass by would be bloody hard; but to attract a Jerry would mean the end. ‘I reckon we’d do better to wait, sir,’ Farrow said. ‘Wait till she closes and we get a better look.’

  ‘Is she closing?’

  ‘I fancy she is, sir, yes.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Matthews brought himself upright and moved across the lurching wheelhouse, grabbing for handholds. He looked sick, dead weary, at the end of his tether. ‘All right then, we wait. On the other hand…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Heroics are finished. That part’s over and done with, all right?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean, sir,’ Farrow said. He sounded uneasy. In his opinion the fight wasn’t over yet, at any rate the fight against the sea. Let them remain afloat, let the weather improve, and they could make it yet with a bit of luck. But Matthews?

  ‘I mean what I said, damn you!’ Matthews snapped. ‘We can’t fight anyway, whether we want to or not. That’s out and we all know it. That ship…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘If she’s a German, the worst that could happen would be that we’d be taken prisoner for the duration. The way things are now, we’re probably going to drown. Either that, or be finished off by bombs once the weather clears enough for the FWs to have another go at us. That’s not good enough. If you ask me, it’s just plain daft.’

  ‘The Captain —’

  ‘The Captain, Leading-Seaman Farrow, if you mean Hewson or Seymour, is dead. I’m in command now.’

  ‘Very good, sir. But as the senior seaman rating left, sir, I’d like to ask a question,’ Farrow said doggedly. ‘And it’s this: do you intend to attract that ship’s notice, sir, whether she’s British or neutral or German… and kind of see what happens?’ He paused. ‘Because —’

  ‘Because nothing. You’ll do precisely as I say, Leading-Seaman Farrow, and remember you’re a rating.’ Matthews lurched back across the wheelhouse, his eyes blazing in the fading light. Cameron noted that the Engineer Officer’s hands were shaking badly, that his whole body seemed to be in a fit of the tremors. His look was wild, far from reassuring in one who had said he was in command. ‘I have the welfare of the ship’s company to consider — their lives, man, don’t you understand that? It’s not for me to sacrifice them for nothing — nor you nor anybody else!’

  ‘In my view, sir,’ Farrow began stolidly, ‘I —’

  ‘To hell with your view.’

  ‘I’m going to say it nevertheless, sir. In my view, to bring a German vessel towards us would be an act of surrender. I don’t believe there’s any of us would go along with that, sir. Not when we’ve come so far.’

  ‘The vessel,’ Matthews snapped, sensibly enough, ‘could be British, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We have to try to make sure first, sir. That’s why I suggested waiting.’

  ‘While the light goes, and we can’t bloody well see her? Is that wh
at you suggest?’

  ‘There’s time yet, sir. We aren’t going to lose the light yet, sir. Meanwhile, she’s closing.’ Farrow was looking through the binoculars again, frowning over them as he studied the silhouette each time the vessel rose to view above the gale-lashed waves. The wind howled eerily around the superstructure, like the voice of clustering devils out to send them to the depths. Farrow could understand the dilemma Matthews found himself in; lives were always a heavy responsibility, but in the exigencies of war an escort destroyer must be considered the more vital: escorts were so desperately short and the convoys with their troops and supplies so badly in need of such protection as could be given them. The old Carmarthen could live to fight yet, if only she could be found by friendly hands and brought safely to port. She was badly damaged, certainly, but there was nothing a dockyard refit couldn’t put right, Farrow believed, and believed truly. She couldn’t be abandoned to be sunk by Nazi guns and Farrow wasn’t going to be a party to any surrender. Mr Seymour had intended to bring the destroyer in; and Mr Seymour had said something that had at first puzzled him but which had since begun to make sense. Mr Seymour hadn’t wanted that Matthews to give in to the bloody Nazis. What he had said, it had been like his last will and testament.

  Well, then!

  Maybe he was obtuse, maybe he was over concerned with Mr Seymour’s intentions as last known, maybe many things. But he’d been a good few years in the Navy and he was a tenacious man. And when recognition came to Leading-Seaman Farrow, recognition that the ship coming in from the west was a German surface raider, a former merchant ship that was probably returning home after harrying the South Atlantic shipping routes with her six-inch guns, he knew beyond doubt what he had to do.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘German?’ Matthews repeated. ‘You’re sure?’

  Farrow handed over the binoculars. ‘See for yourself, sir.’

  Matthews focused. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, she’s German, all right. You’re aware of my views, Farrow.’