“Is he? I guess I’m an optimist.”
“You’d have to be, wouldn’t you?” Woods, the gunner, made a face. “I mean, submarines, for God’s sake.”
A lot of people reacted in that way, because they didn’t know about submarines, what it was like and how it got into your blood, how you’d have hated, now, to be anything but a submariner. It wasn’t worth the effort of trying to explain. He asked Woods, instead, “D’you stay in this tub? Go back in her?”
“I stay in Malta. Relieving some character who’ll make the trip home in her. Same with my blokes.”
His soldiers, he meant. He had about a dozen of them to man the four-inch gun on the stern. As well as soldiers there were some naval DEMS ratings on board to look after a forty-millimetre Bofors—it was on this boat deck, in a raised steel nest abaft the funnel—and some Oerlikons. DEMS stood for Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships. Other extra personnel on board included Mackeson’s staff—an RN signalman and a W/T operator. The same kind of set-up applied in all the other ships as well.
Brill pushed himself upright. “Anyone for a stroll?”
Woods declined. He had work to do, he said. Paul set off with the doctor, who’d been a medical student until very recently. He wondered, as they paced around the midships superstructure, up one side and down the other, how many miles of this deck he’d covered in the past week. “Taking passage” was a dull business, after the first day or so; hence the interest in watching something as repetitive as one fighter after another taking off from a distant aircraft carrier … He had a novel half-read down in his cabin, but he’d found that reading palled too. It was a combination of boredom and nervous anticipation, he thought, that prevented your mind really settling to anything.
That, and a sense of impatience, the fact that all he was really interested in was getting to the Malta flotilla and Ultra.
After a few circuits they stopped, and leaned on the timber rail at the after end of the boat deck. There were life-rafts here between the big grey-painted ventilators, and a ladder each side led down to the after-well deck and the hatches to numbers four and five holds. Three Jeeps and a truck with RAF markings were chocked and lashed down there between the hatch-covers; in the port-side gangway off-duty crewmen were squatting to throw dice. Brill offered Paul a cigarette: “Did old Mackeson say three generations of your people are at sea?”
“He missed one out. There’s a sort of in-between that makes it up to four.” He stooped, shielding a match for their cigarettes. Then, straightening, “There’s me, my father, and the old guy who’s a convoy commodore. That’s the three. But also my father has a young halfbrother called Jack. Young enough to be his son, but happens to be his half-brother—less than two years older than I am, for God’s sake … Look, more Spits.”
A second batch had begun to take off from the carrier. She was broad on the convoy’s beam now as the block of merchantmen swung to the port leg of the zigzag. There was a white embroidery on the sea: not bad conditions, Paul realized, from a submariner’s point of view, with that camouflage for the feather of a periscope and the swell too low to make depth-keeping difficult. What with that and the largely clear sky that would help the Luftwaffe … Then he noticed something else: that the spaces between destroyers in the outer screen were wider than they had been earlier. Counting, and allowing for similar spacing in the sectors he couldn’t see, he thought there weren’t more than a dozen destroyers out there altogether.
The others would be fuelling, presumably—as some had done yesterday—from the oilers that were following a few miles astern. There were two fleet oilers with their own destroyer escort, and Mackeson had told him they’d be turning back for Gibraltar tonight.
He swung around, leaned on the rail beside the doctor. Brill asked him, “Is this Jack relation in the RNVR, like you?”
“Is he hell. He was at Dartmouth. Lieutenant RN, now. He was in a cruiser that got sunk off Crete a year ago, but he got ashore and then worked with the partisans, guerrillas or whatever they call themselves. There were soldiers on the run to be got out, and weapons and stuff to be brought in for the resistance effort, and Jack was in and out of the island a couple of times by caïque. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. They gave him a DSC for it—either for that or for whatever went on earlier.” “Another bloody hero.”
Brill sounded disgusted. Paul smiled, looking at him. The doctor had a triangular-shaped face, pale and with rather large, dark eyes in it. A bit like Mickey Mouse, really. Paul’s smile faded as he thought of telling him, Jack Everard’s a shit. If he’s a hero, give me cowards … Instead he said, “He’s back in England now. Some small-ship job.”
And preparing to take part, in whatever small ship it was, in some fantastically hazardous operation. In London a couple of months ago Jack had let Paul glean that much, then he’d clammed up. And turned his attention to quite different interests.
Jack Everard, Paul thought, was a twenty-four-carat bastard: and Mrs Fiona Gascoyne, who was tipped to marry Paul’s father, was a bitch of roughly the same quality.
If his father had left the Mediterranean, Paul thought, he’d have to put it down in writing. When you were the only person who could tell him, and personal survival couldn’t exactly be guaranteed, you couldn’t just wait for a chance meeting.
But of all the lousy jobs …
“Those aren’t Sea Hurricanes, surely?”
Brill was pointing. With the convoy on this leg of the zigzag you could see back through the lines of ships, past the oil tanker Caracas Moon, which was number three in column three, and the American freighter Santa Eulalia next to her, to the group of aircraft carriers and cruisers following astern. A fighter had just taken off from one of the carriers, and a second was following it into the air now.
He told Brill, “They’re Grumman Wildcats.”
You learnt aircraft recognition with your trousers down. “Own” and enemy aircraft shapes were displayed inside all lavatory doors in ships and training establishments, so you had them in front of your eyes for at least several minutes every day. He looked over at the ferry carrier, out on the beam: the second batch of Spitfires was high above her, formed up and departing. He said, “Funny to think those guys’ll be in Malta in time for tea.”
And we, he thought, had better be shuffling down for lunch. He glanced down to check the time, and his eyes were on his wrist-watch when the deep thump of an explosion reached them. It had a muffled quality: an explosion under water was his first guess. Depth charge, maybe?
A second one, now—a duplicate of the first. And smoke was spreading over one of the big carriers astern. A third explosion, and a fourth. Four torpedo hits on that one carrier? She was listing, smoke pouring up. He couldn’t see where the cruiser had got to, the C-class anti-aircraft cruiser that had been with the carrier. Behind the smoke, maybe. He wished he had binoculars. He muttered, trying to make his eyes do binoculars’ work, “Four hits … Christ, look at her!”
Brill was staring, gripping the rail. The smoke cleared enough to show the big ship right over on her side; then it drifted across the line of sight again like a curtain. All distant, soundless and somehow unreal: it was more like watching a film, a newsreel or something, than seeing something happening in real life. Over there, at this moment, men would be dying: burning, drowning. You leaned on a rail and watched it, because there wasn’t anything else you could be doing.
Smoke clearing suddenly: and it had cleared, he saw, because the carrier had gone. Sunk—just like that … Other passengers were crowding to the rail and asking questions. Brill asked Paul, watching a swirl of destroyer activity back there, “How many men would there have been in her?”
“I don’t know. More than a thousand.” He added, “I guess a lot’ll be picked up.”
“God, let’s hope—”
“Yeah.” He thought, Let’s … There were six hundred miles to go, and the battle had opened with the convoy losing about one third of its air defences.
CHAPTER THREE
The Java Sea was a blue-tinted mirror reflecting heat, and the steel of the cruiser’s bridge was hot to touch. Nick took his eyes off the ship astern and turned to face the leading seaman who’d been waiting for him here behind the lookout positions on the port side of Defiant’s bridge. “Well, how’s it going?”
Williams had a long, narrow jaw and a high, similarly narrow forehead. Deep-set brown eyes, rather close together, held Nick’s steadily. “Going on all right, sir.”
“I thought we might have a chat, before we get too busy.”
A smile … “Can’t happen too soon, sir, far’s I’m concerned.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well. Get a crack at the bastards this trip, won’t we, sir?”
Nick had told them so, in a broadcast he’d made over the Tannoy.
And he could understand Williams’s personal desire to hit out, kill some Japanese … He said, “I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot—about your wife, I mean—and I keep coming to the same conclusion. I honestly think she must have got away. When they shut down the dockyard offices they’d have cleared out to Sumatra probably, then Batavia or Bandoeng.”
Bandoeng, in the interior of Java behind Batavia, had been Wavell’s headquarters and it was the Dutch headquarters now. Nick went on, “Then they’d have evacuated—civilians, surely—from the south coast. From Tjilatjap. The odds are she’s in Ceylon now, or Australia. I’d guess Ceylon.”
“She’d’ve left word for me, sir. I know that.”
“If she’d had the slightest notion that you’d be back. But for all she could have known we might’ve been in Australia by that time. I couldn’t have said for sure we were coming back.”
“She’d still have left word, in case, like.”
“She might not have been given time to. Anyway, who was left—to leave word with, I mean? Must have been panic stations by that time. You saw for yourself how it was ashore then.”
Williams nodded. “Wish I never had seen it … I’d like to see it your way, sir, but—”
“Try allowing yourself to. You aren’t helping her by torturing your-self—isn’t that what it amounts to?”
“Padre said something like that, sir. But it’s what’s in your mind, not what you’d like in it. It’s—well, seeing things like they are, sir.”
“I think you should allow yourself to admit the possibility that you’re wrong. Stop thinking, and just damn well hope. The way things are out here at the moment—well, for God’s sake, it’s not only you and your wife—”
“It is to me, sir.”
It would be to me, too, if I thought Kate had been stuck in Singapore. By Christ, it would …
If she’d been there and disappeared, been left behind, he’d have gone half mad. Imagining it, he could admire Leading Seaman Williams’s restraint. And there was substance for a different, personal reflection in that. If when you approached bedrock, the level of bare survival as a goal, it was B and not A who kept coming into your mind, didn’t it tell you something?
If you let it?
Well, Kate was in this half of the world, and Fiona was ten thousand miles away. And Kate was an Army nurse who’d been on active service, she could have been in Singapore, so in any connection of that kind she was naturally the person you’d think of.
And here and now, in any case, it wasn’t of much consequence. Williams’s state of mind was, because Williams was one of about five hundred individuals in this ship for whose welfare he, Nick Everard, was responsible. He was one of five hundred moving parts of one machine.
Back in the bridge, he unslung his binoculars from the back of the high seat and put their strap over his head. There’d been no sign of an enemy yet, but there would be soon. Doorman had wirelessed a request for air support: Nick thought he might as well have asked Father Christmas for it. Some of these cruisers had carried spotter aircraft when they’d arrived out here, but they’d all been landed weeks ago. In some places if you gave the garrison an old seaplane you doubled the local air defences. But this force’s first sight of the Japs’ eastern assault group might well be an enemy spotter plane scouting ahead of their ships.
And none of these Allied ships had RDF, either.
Doorman had stationed the three British destroyers ahead of the cruisers, and he’d put the Americans and Dutch astern. The cruisers were in line ahead. With inter-ship communications as limited and slow as they were, it was the simplest formation for him to control. He was leading, in his flagship de Ruyter; then came Exeter, then Houston, Perth, Defiant, Java. So the admiral had the two heavier-gunned ships astern of him.
“Signal, sir.”
Hobbs—“Schooly”—had brought this one up himself. Wanting a breath of air, no doubt—understandable, because all the below-decks compartments were stiflingly hot, and the plot below this bridge, where he did his coding and decoding, had the sun beating on its steel walls from dawn to sunset. Some ovens might be cooler … The signal was an English-language repeat of an answer to Doorman’s request for air support. All available fighter aircraft had been sent to cover a torpedo-bomber strike against the Jap transports, the troop convoy whose escort was somewhere just over the horizon now. Nick could guess what was meant by “all available fighter aircraft”—half a dozen American-built Brewster Buffaloes. Slow, clumsy, easily out-manoeuvred by the Zekes. The Buffaloes hadn’t been built for the tropics either, and in Malaya they’d suffered from carburettors that oiled up when their engines were gunned for take-off. To counter this, some bright RAF engineer designed a home-made filter stuffed with Tampax. The RAF bought up all the Tampax from all the chemists in Singapore, then, explaining that they needed it for Buffaloes.
He passed the signal back to Hobbs.
“Comfortable down there, are you?”
Schooly’s sweat-running face creased in a smile. “No danger of frostbite, sir.”
Nick beckoned to Gant, as Hobbs left. He told the commander, “No air support is available to us.”
“I am surprised, sir.”
“At least we know that anything we see is hostile.”
“Ah.” Gant nodded. “That’s a comfort.”
“See that Haskins knows it, will you?”
Haskins was the captain of marines, and at action stations he controlled the ship’s air defences. The paymaster lieutenant who’d had the job when Nick had taken command hadn’t been too bright at it, so there’d been a reshuffle of some action duties. Haskins had a detachment of about fifty Royal Marines under him.
“Cup o’ tea, sir?”
Able Seaman Gladwill, Nick’s servant, was beside him with a tray of tea and biscuits. The china, Admiralty issue, was white with pink roses around the edges; Gladwill’s thumbs, hooked over the ends of the tray, were spatulate and black-rimmed. He was a bird-fancier, and kept canaries in the lobby outside the cuddy. He muttered, as Nick got up on to his high seat, “Warming the bell a touch, sir, but I thought while the going’s good, like.”
Behind Nick and to his right, on the step at the binnacle, was Charles Rowley, a lieutenant-commander who was the ship’s first lieutenant and senior watchkeeper. His shaggy brown hair needed cutting; grey eyes in a deeply tanned face were watching Perth, their next ahead. The sea was churned white but still quite flat here in the dead centre of the other ships’ wakes: Defiant was so steady that the only danger to the tea in the cup was the old girl’s shaking, the constant vibration in her steel.
There was a certain incongruity, to be sitting here sipping tea from flowered china when there was a fair certainty of being in action within the hour …
“Signal, sir.”
It was the chief yeoman, this time, CPO Howell’s ruddy complexion and prematurely white sideboards. The rest of his hair was shiny black. Howell had played rugger for the Navy at one time.
“Thank you, Chief Yeoman.” He put down the cup with its awkward little handle, and now he read the signal. It duplicated a Dutch original announcing that th
e Jap troopships had turned away northeastward.
Only the convoy: not the cruisers and destroyers. The transports were being kept out of danger while the warship escort cleared a path for them. The report would probably have originated with the RAF torpedo-bombers that had been sent out earlier. It was a pity they had been, really.
There’d been one signal that he hadn’t shown even to Bob Gant. It was an Intelligence report which had reached Doorman before they’d sailed from Surabaya yesterday, and Doorman had apprised his captains of it when they’d met on board the flagship. It had indicated that two Jap carrier divisions had been coming south towards this area and that one of them was thought to be steering for the Sunda Strait, presumably to pass through it and operate south of Java. If this was so, there’d be enemy surface and air patrols blocking any chance of escape south to Australia or northwest to Ceylon.
A buzzer sounded, and a light was flashing on the W/T office telephone. The chief yeoman had jumped to it, pushing a messenger aside. Now he swung round to face Nick.
“From Electra, sir—‘Enemy in sight, bearing north!’”
He glanced round. Gladwill materialized, like a rubbery-faced genie, to remove the tray. Gant, who’d been smoking his pipe on the other side of the bridge, took it out of his mouth as he pivoted and Nick told him, “Close the hands up, Bob.” The pipe had vanished. One of Gant’s hands, unbidden, rested in the small of his back, on that damaged spine of his; the other was on the red-painted alarm button sending the morse letter “S”—“S” for surface action stations—reverberating through all the ship’s compartments. Nick saw a string of bunting run to Perth’s yardarm: the flags were almost edge-on from this viewpoint but there was enough flutter in them for him to read them as flag “N” with the numerals 3-6-0 below it: “N” meaning “enemy in sight” and the numerals standing for the compass bearing, north. He told Rowley, who was still officer of the watch until Chevening arrived to take over, “Warn the engine-room.” He saw Greenleaf, known as “Guns” but more formally as the PCO, principal control officer, and told him, “We’re likely to be up against four cruisers and fourteen destroyers.”
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 3