Gant called suddenly, breaking into what was becoming a depressing line of thought, “Yeoman!”
Pointing: at a light flashing from Exeter’s signal bridge. Ruddle, yeoman of the watch, had responded with a yell of “Aye aye, sir!” and a leading signalman at the port-side lamp had already sent an answering flash.
“Captain, sir?”
Nick took his eyes off the fast sequence of dots and dashes. A messenger was beside him, with a sheet of signal-pad. He recognized the sloping scrawl of Instructor Lieutenant Hobbs, “Schooly,” who’d have deciphered this wireless message down in the plot, immediately below this bridge. Before he’d had time to read it, Ruddle called, “Squadron stand by to reverse course in sequence of fleet numbers, sir!”
“Pass it to Houston.”
“Aye aye, sir!” PO Ruddle had a high screech of a voice, acquired from years of bawling down to flag-decks against high winds. Defiant’s lamp was already calling the American cruiser astern of her, and Nick was reading the decoded signal—which Doorman would have received in Dutch, from his Dutch senior officer at the other end of Java. There was a British rear-admiral there too, working with the Dutchman. Nick looked up from the signal, and told Gant, “Two assault groups coming this way. Our bird’s the eastern bunch. Said to be eighty miles offshore now.”
The flagship, de Ruyter, had begun to swing to starboard, initiating the about-turn. No fuelling for the destroyers, after all. There wouldn’t be time for it, of course. With the two forces steaming to meet each other at an aggregate speed of, say, nearly forty knots, it would be only a couple of hours before they met. He glanced again at the signal. The escort with the eastern group was reported to consist of four cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Behind them, of course, not in company with them but near enough to be whistled up when required, would be heavy striking units, battleships and carriers. However much damage you did to start with, therefore, you wouldn’t be left long to gloat over it.
But—as Jim Jordan had so aptly put it—however …
CHAPTER TWO
From the motor vessel Montgovern’s boat deck, with one shoulder against a lifeboat’s davit for support as the ship rolled, Sub-Lieutenant Paul Everard RNVR gazed around at the crowd of ships bound for Malta. Montgovern was second in the port column of merchantmen; there were four columns, each of four ships, and all except one of them were carrying mixed cargoes consisting mainly of food, ammunition and cased petrol. The food was mostly flour. The exception, the Caracas Moon, was an oil tanker, and the cased petrol distributed among the other ships was there in case, with her load of aviation spirit, she did not get through. They’d all of them be targets for the Luftwaffe and for submarines’ torpedoes, but tankers did tend to attract particular attention.
Ahead of the Montgovern steamed the Warrenpoint, nine thousand tons, and abeam of her, leading number two column, was the Blackadder, carrying the convoy commodore. Astern of the commodore’s ship and thus on the Montgovern’s starboard beam plodded the long, low shape of the big Castleventry. They and the other twelve were all fine, fast ships of good capacity, specially chosen for the task ahead of them. They’d passed through the Gibraltar Strait at dawn yesterday and they were now well into the western basin of the Mediterranean, roughly south of the Balearics, steering east with rather more than six hundred miles to go.
The strength of the naval escort was a fair indication of the importance of the operation. Ahead of the solid block of merchantmen, three cruisers in line abreast stooped and swayed to the grey-blue swell. Astern of the columns another cruiser in the central position was dwarfed by two battleships, one on each side of her. Back on the starboard quarter, not visible at the moment from here on the Montgovern,
three aircraft carriers with three more cruisers in close attendance formed a separate group. While all across the convoy’s van and down its sides were the destroyers, several as close escort on each side of the square of merchant ships and another twenty forming an A/S screen on a radius of about three miles. The whole assembly covered many square miles of sea and made, Paul Everard thought, a very impressive picture.
There was a fourth carrier too, but she had a special job to do and wasn’t part of the convoy’s escort.
The enemy knew, by this time, that the convoy was on its way. They might have known a long time ago, when it was on its way south from the Clyde: but their spies in and around Gibraltar would certainly have reported the sudden traffic through the Strait and the warships, dozens of them, steaming in to refuel and hurrying out to sea again. On top of which there’d been several submarine alarms yesterday, contacts by destroyers out in the deep field, and a few depth charges dropped, and the submarines would have wirelessed sighting reports when they’d surfaced astern of the convoy and after nightfall. More annoyingly, and just to clinch it, yesterday evening an Algeria-bound French airliner had overflown the convoy with its radio chattering excitedly.
“Bless their little Vichy hearts!” Mackeson, naval liaison officer in the Montgovern, was a soft-voiced, easy-going man. Humphrey Straight, the freighter’s master, had been very much more forthright. He’d growled, “Fucking frogs …” and spat to leeward, which had happened to be in the direction of Algeria.
“Weather’s not much cop, eh, Paul?”
Mick McCall, the freighter’s second mate, was beside him, steadying himself with a hand on the lifeboat’s rudder. He nodded skyward. “Clearing, isn’t it?”
It was, unfortunately; as daylight hardened you could see that grey areas were fewer and smaller than blue ones. At this time of year, you’d think you could have reckoned on some decent cloud cover … It was damned cold, anyway: Paul hunched into the turned-up collar of his greatcoat as McCall asked him, “Service all right, still? Food up to standard? Sleeping well, are you? No rude noises in the night to wake you?”
Sarcasm: because Paul was a passenger and McCall had work to do, watches to keep. It was only half joking, too: part of it was the Merchant Navy man’s resentment of the “fighting” navy, the men who—McCall would have said—won all the applause, the glamour. It was an understandable resentment too: sitting on this eight-thousand-ton steamer with her explosive cargo, knowing that very soon a powerful enemy would be doing his best to see that it did explode, you could understand his point of view.
Paul told him, “I’d have you know I was on the bridge for more than an hour last night.”
“My God, hadn’t you better turn in again?”
“You’re a riot, Mick …”
The whole convoy was altering course, turning to a new leg of the anti-submarine zigzag. Convoy manoeuvres, emergency turns and formation changes had been practised over and over again on the way down from the Clyde to Gibraltar; the merchantmen had acted like a herd of recalcitrant cows to start with, but the admiral had drilled them until their masters must have been stuttering with Merchant Navy-type fury, and they were handling themselves quite well now. McCall said, “I’d best be getting up there. And you ought to get below while there’s still some breakfast left … Just look at that bloody sky!”
Paul glanced up, and agreed. The Luftwaffe would be in luck, if this weather held.
In the saloon, he found fellow passengers and ship’s officers crowding the table. At first glance it looked as if he’d have to wait for someone to finish; then Mackeson called, “Here you are, Sub!” and Paul saw there was a vacant chair beside him. He helped himself to coffee from the urn, murmured a general “Good morning” as he squeezed in: someone pushed the cornflakes along, and Mackeson nudged the milk-jug his way. Condensed milk, of course; by this time any other kind would have tasted peculiar. Mackeson jerked a thumb towards Paul, and told a grey-haired, wingless RAF officer across the table, “I knew this lad’s father in the Navy twenty years ago. Small world, eh? Would you believe it, there are three damn generations of his family at sea now?”
The air-force man raised his eyebrows, let them fall again, chewed for a few seconds and then swallowed; he mutter
ed, “Remarkable.”
The three generations were Paul, his father Nick, and Nick’s uncle Hugh. Admiral Sir Hugh Everard had come out of retirement to become a commodore of Atlantic convoys: a fairly arduous job, for a man of seventy. Nick Everard was—well, Paul wasn’t sure where he was. Until quite recently he’d had a destroyer flotilla in the eastern Mediterranean, but in the last letter Paul had had from him he’d given his address as HMS Defiant and hinted—or seemed to hint—that he was taking her elsewhere.
It had been on Mackeson’s invitation that he’d spent some time on the freighter’s bridge last night. Several times since they’d sailed from the Clyde the older man had said something like: “Must have a yarn, Everard, when we get a minute’s quiet. I want to hear the news of your family.” He’d known Nick in the Black Sea in 1919, and he’d known of Hugh Everard in the same period. He—Mackeson—had gone to sea as a midshipman RN in 1918, left the Service a few years later and rejoined as an RNR lieutenant-commander in 1939. So he was about forty-two now, Paul supposed, to Nick’s forty-six.
Egg and a rasher of bacon appeared suddenly: powdered egg, as usual. The plate curved in from nowhere and more or less dropped in front of him: Paul looked round and said “Thank you” to the retreating steward’s back. Devenish, the Montgovern’s chief officer, advised from Paul’s left, “Wouldn’t bother with the courtesies, if I were you. He’s a bolshy sod … Did you get that Mention in Despatches in submarines?”
“No.” Devenish was squinting downwards at the small bronze oak-leaf sewn to Paul’s reefer jacket. Paul told him, “I haven’t been in submarines very long. Hardly operationally at all.”
“He was at Narvik.” Mackeson spoke to Devenish across him. Mackeson seemed proud of the Everards, or of his old friendship with Nick. He added, “Ordinary Seaman, gun’s crew in one of the H-class destroyers. That’s where he got it.” He asked Paul, “Sunk, weren’t you?”
Paul nodded as he began to eat. He’d been through all this last night, and the egg mixture was getting cold.
Last night in the darkened bridge, with Pratt, the third officer, in charge of the watch and Mackeson there to back him up while Captain Straight snored in the chartroom, Mackeson had suggested that Nick Everard might have taken Defiant to join the Eastern Fleet.
“It’s as likely as anything.” He’d taken another pull at his pipe. The ship was moving rhythmically to the swell, creaking as she rolled, and the night air was cold enough to mist the glass side windows. He’d removed the pipe from his mouth again; it made a popping sound as he took it out. “Unless he’s taken her home for refit, of course. And if you’re right and she’d left the station at all. If he’s still out here and you run into him, though, give him my very kind regards, will you?”
Paul said he would, of course.
“Bongo, they used to call me. Bongo Mackeson. I was a few years junior to him, of course, but I dare say he’ll remember … I wouldn’t envy him, mark you, if that’s where they’ve sent him now. Japanese are all over us, and what’ve we got to stop ’em with?”
Paul really needed to see his father. Not just for the pleasure of a reunion: there was a very personal and unpleasant situation back in England which Nick Everard had to be told about, and Paul was the only person who could tell him. It wasn’t anything to look forward to, and it wasn’t the sort of information you’d want to put in a letter for some censor to read, either.
“Are we expecting things to warm up today, Mackeson?”
Paul emerged from his thoughts. The question had come from the other end of the table, in the high, thin tones of Lieutenant-Commander Thornton RNVR. Thornton was some kind of cipher expert: code-breaking, something of that sort. He’d made it plain that his particular expertise, for which he was urgently needed in Malta, was too secret and important to be discussed. The boy on his left, toad-like in thick spectacles, was an RNVR paymaster sub-lieutenant named Gosling; he was shy and hardly ever spoke to anyone. Thornton was staring at Mackeson, dabbing at his mouth while he waited for an answer to what Paul thought had been a damn-fool question.
Mackeson said easily, pushing his chair back from the table, “Depends if we’re referring to the weather or the enemy. Damned if I know either way.”
Thornton looked offended. “Bongo” Mackeson was on his feet, bushy-browed and noticeably bow-legged: at fifty paces you’d guess he’d spent a lot of his life on horses. Leaning over his chair, he was telling anyone who cared to listen that the aircraft carrier that was doing the ferrying job would be flying-off her load of Spitfires later in the forenoon, and that there’d probably be a view of it from the Montgovern’s boat deck.
It was still cold up there at noon, when the passengers came drifting up to watch the fly-off. The ferrying carrier had hauled out to the convoy’s port quarter, with two destroyers in attendance; she had forty-two Spitfires which were to fly from here to join the RAF in Malta, then this evening she’d turn and head back to Gibraltar, her job done. The other three carriers—fighter patrols from them were up and guarding the convoy now—would carry on eastward, providing air cover, Paul guessed, until the convoy came into range of the Malta squadrons. Or as near to that point as possible. And come to think of it, there’d have to be a gap, a period when there’d be no fighter cover, and the convoy would be at its most vulnerable then. But the carriers’ Sea Hurricanes had drawn first blood this morning: just after boat drill had finished, Mackeson had sent down a message that they’d shot down a shadowing Junkers 88.
Dennis Brill, a young Army doctor, had murmured as he stirred a mug of Bovril, “So we’re being shadowed …”
There was no surprise in it. Brill looked thoughtful, more than surprised, and Paul understood the reaction. It was only that this confirmation of the enemy’s interest in the convoy brought home the reality, the certainty that before long they’d be attacked.
He and Brill had come up to the boat deck together, and Brill had stopped near Thornton and Harry Woods. Woods was a captain in the Royal Artillery and in charge of the Montgovern’s Army gunners. Thornton, the cipher expert, sniffed and murmured, “Place is getting like Brighton pier.” He made room for them at the rail, though. He was tall, an inch or so taller than Paul, and he had an irritatingly high voice.
Woods pointed. “You’re just in time.”
The first Spitfire lifted from the carrier’s deck, and curved skyward. Thornton turned his back on the scene, as if he now knew all about it. He asked Paul, “Are you going to Malta to join one particular submarine, or—”
“Yeah.” Paul nodded. “Just one.” The second Spitfire swooped away. Another stupid question, he thought. Talking to people like this one made him feel more American, more like he used to sound before the re-anglicizing process began two and a half years ago. It wasn’t intentional, the reaction simply occurred, an instinctive raising of some psychological drawbridge. It reminded him, when he thought about it, that his father had said in his own younger days that he’d had a lot of difficulty getting along with some of his superiors.
“Not simply to the Malta flotilla for an unspecified appointment, I meant.” Thornton said it sharply, as if he thought he’d been snubbed. He had been, too. Four Spitfires were airborne now. Paul explained, “I was in a submarine called Ultra. I went sick just when she was sailing for the Mediterranean, and now I’m rejoining her.”
He’d developed appendicitis a day or two before Ultra had been due to cast off from the depot ship in Holy Loch, where they’d been based during their work-up period. He’d had a pain in his gut and tried to ignore it, but then it had blown up and he’d had no option. After the long preparation, months of training and practising for the time when they’d be judged fit to go “operational,” it had been intensely disappointing. But his CO had come up trumps: he’d taken a spare crew sub-lieutenant out with him as a temporary replacement, and promised Paul his job back if he could get out there reasonably quickly. This convoy had been the first chance of a passage: there’d have been t
hree weeks’ wait in Gibraltar for the next supply submarine’s trip to the island—even if he could have got himself to Gib and then wangled the passage in her. He was scared, even now, that if he didn’t get there soon his replacement might have taken root, proved to be more useful than Paul Everard. Any submarine skipper would want the best team he could put together—particularly in the 10th Flotilla, who were fighting an extremely tough campaign in very difficult conditions. And another reason for concern was that he thought there’d probably be some spare submarine officers kicking their heels at the Malta base: several boats had been sunk or damaged in harbour by the bombing, so there’d be experienced men without sea billets.
By wartime standards Paul wasn’t experienced at all. Since the submarine training course at Blyth he’d spent six months in a training boat, then the work-up months in Ultra. At the end of the work-up they’d done operational patrol in the North Sea—it was standard routine, a shake-down patrol—and in the course of it they’d sunk a U-boat, and that was the sum total of his submarine experience.
Woods said, watching the eighth Spitfire climb to join the others, “That’ll be the first flight. Short break for refreshments now. They go in eights, I’m told.” He asked Paul, “What’s its name?”
“What?”
“This submarine, what’s—” “Ultra.”
Thornton proclaimed, looking up at the Spitfires, “Those are the only chaps who can be reasonably certain of getting anywhere near Malta.”
The Spits had formed up, and were flying east. They’d be on the ground in Malta in about a couple of hours … But this ciphering character was, truly, a jerk. You could know the odds without going around shouting them … Brill murmured, as Thornton stalked away, “He’s right, isn’t he?”
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 2