The one called Wally jumped up suddenly, and pointed. “Flag’s up. Stand by, gents.”
A red flag for red alert—but in this light even a white one would have looked red. Mick McCall came up the ladder: it was obvious, from his look of surprise, that he hadn’t known he’d find Paul here. He gave him a hard, questioning look before he turned to the Oerlikon gunners.
“You blokes all set?”
Beale’s answer to the question was a wink. Withinshaw’s was: “Be better wi’ a few pints inside us.” But they were ready, alert, watching the sky, the two at the guns and the others standing by with the spare drums at their feet. McCall looked at Paul again: “Someone tell you to come up here?”
“Mackeson. Idea is to keep us all busy, I suppose. The skipper did say it was your part of ship.”
Beale muttered, “Extra pair of eyes can’t do no ’arm, can it?”
McCall visibly relaxed. Paul blessed the instinct that had made him keep his mouth shut when he’d noticed that gun still covered. If he’d been Thornton he’d have made a fuss about it, and he’d have got nowhere with this bunch.
McCall said to him, “What a sunset, eh?” Then, somewhere out on the convoy’s port bow—northeastward—a destroyer opened fire.
There was nothing to see, from here. Just the sound, the hard, cracking thuds of four-sevens. And the recognition that the attack was starting. McCall said, “Here we go. Least, here I go … I’ll be up at the Bofors, Beale.”
Ahead of the block of merchantmen, a cruiser opened fire. Then a second joined in. Here on the Montgovern’s foc’sl-head the two Oerlikon gunners jerked back the cocking handles on their weapons and waited with their left shoulders towards the blaze of the dying sun.
The shooting ahead, on the bow, was thickening, but those destroyers were three or four miles away from the convoy and there was no way of knowing what their target was. The cruisers had fired a few rounds and then ceased fire, and nothing had appeared anywhere near the convoy. Slow minutes crawled by: you felt an urge to be in action, get to grips with it. Paul asked Beale, watching the sky, “Do you have tracer in those drums?”
“One in six.”
One tracer round in every six: the others would be high-explosive or incendiary.
The cruisers ahead and the Hunts to port and astern opened fire simultaneously, their gun barrels poking out on the beam, to port. The noise of it smothered the more distant sound of the barrage from the destroyers in the screen, but obviously there were two quite separate attacks being made. Now the racket astern doubled and redoubled as the two battleships and the cruiser between them added their HA armaments to the party. Most of the warships would have RDF, Paul realized: it would have been an RDF contact on approaching bombers that would have initiated the air raid warning in the first place.
High on the port side of the convoy shell-bursts were opening like black fists against the pink-flushed sky.
Beale shouted, “There. There, Art. You on ’em?”
Black against that bright background, twin-engined bombers, Junkers 88s. They were coming straight towards the convoy, undeterred by thickening groves of shell-bursts in front of them and around them. Wally muttered, “’Undreds of the bastards!”
There were dozens, though, not hundreds. Perhaps forty, Paul thought. Beale was watching them over his sights: it would be a while before close-range weapons would have any part to play. Beyond Beale and Withinshaw at the guns was the grey steel of the foc’sl with its ordered clutter of cable gear, and the gleam of surrounding sea and, a couple of hundred yards ahead, the big lumbering stern-on shape of the motor vessel Warrenpoint, leader of this number one column. To port, tracer was rising from destroyers in the outer screen, and the noise of gunfire was still mounting as ship after ship joined in.
Glancing over his shoulder, Paul could see figures motionless behind the glassed-in front of the bridge. Straight, that would be, and his first officer Devenish, and Mackeson no doubt. A small, pimple-like silhouette in the extremity of the port wing would be Gosling; a taller figure was visible on the other side. Mackeson’s idea might have seemed good in principle, Paul thought, but either of those two could have blown their lungs out through the whistles without a single peep being audible down here.
“Stand by, Art!”
Beale had shouted the warning. The leading flight of Junkers were diving shallowly towards the convoy’s centre. Others behind them, Paul saw, were banking away to their right, towards the rear. Gunfire was a solid roar and the multi-coloured tracer was thickening too, streams of it criss-crossing and converging towards the front-running bombers as they drove in, diving, holding straight courses into the explosive centre of the barrage. One was beginning to turn away, though. You saw a wing tilting as it banked; then another—and another. But others were still coming on, and Paul’s nerves jumped as Beale squeezed the trigger of his gun and Withinshaw immediately followed suit, both Oerlikons blazing out intermittent, ear-shattering bursts and the tracer-streams soaring, curving. One bomber—not one that Montgovern’s guns were shooting at, but one that had turned and was flying towards the convoy’s rear—had smoke streaming from one engine. The tracer seemed to arc away as it approached its target: the whole sky was streaked and patterned with it, multi-coloured streams of fire and, astern, the setting sun’s bonfire-like glow. A bomb-splash—the first of a stick of several, probably, but he saw only one and paid no attention to it—had risen on the quarter, between this and number two column. He was looking around, remembering that his job here was to spot new targets, not simply watch the action, when he heard the commodore’s siren from ahead, the lead-ship of column two, ordering an emergency turn to port. More bombs splashed in between the lines of ships, mounds of dark water leaping. The Montgovern’s own siren let out a preliminary hiss and then found its voice, a deep bellow of sound repeating that order: all the ships’ hooters echoing it as their helms were put over and the entire convoy, lumbering merchantmen and the warships surrounding them, turned in unison with all the guns still racketing. More bombers weaving in: on the bow now instead of the beam, black and evil-looking, bombs clumping into the sea here and there and the aircraft lifting, banking away and climbing, putting their tails to the explosive streams that were reaching up for them. The barrage over the convoy was so intense that you wouldn’t have thought there’d be a space a bomber could pass through without being hit: and it did, on the whole, seem to have kept them out on its fringes. But it was easing now, and shifting, most of it astern, in the general direction of the sunset. It had become a moving barrage, in fact, as the remaining bombers circled, probing for easier targets or gaps in the defence, the warships’ guns following them around like a boxer with a long straight left, keeping his opponent on the end of it.
Beale and Withinshaw were standing back from their guns while their assistants changed the ammunition drums. The red-headed boy, McNaught, was needling Withinshaw: “I didn’a see so many comin’ doon in flames.”
“I’ll see you in fookin’—”
Siren, for a turn back to starboard. All the ships acknowledging. The long days of practising such manoeuvres, in the Atlantic on the way south from the Clyde, were paying off: the convoy was in good formation as it turned back to the mean course. Firing still quite heavy astern and on the quarter. Paul was trying to look all ways at once, knowing there were still enemies around and that this failing light was perfect for surprise. The light was going fast now, leaking away as the source of the red glow retracted and dimmed … Gunfire ahead, suddenly: and he saw the attacker as he turned. A bomber low, wing-tilted, swooping upwards from wave-top level where it had slipped between the cruisers, who were the ones that had opened fire. The German had flames streaming from one wing’s leading edge, flickering back all over it. It passed over at masthead height, the Oerlikons starting up with an aiming-point too far astern and the midships Bofors, where McCall was, only managing three or four barks at it, much too late. Tracer rising again astern, the Hun
ts back there giving it all they had. There was a sheet of yellow flame like the flare of a huge match, and the guns abruptly ceased firing. The barraging was all on the starboard quarter and beam now; in this area, there was peace again. Withinshaw said, “That sod bought it, Ron. See it, did you?”
“No fault of ours, if he did.” Beale watched the sky, which was losing its last shreds of colour. The barrage was moving up the convoy’s starboard side. But the convoy was back on course, no ships had been hit, so far as anyone could see, and progress was continuing Malta-ward. Beale muttered, “I don’t reckon that last ’un for an 88, any road.”
Paul didn’t think it had been, either. In the few seconds that it had been over them he hadn’t had time to think about it, but in retrospect it seemed to have been a Heinkel and almost certainly a torpedo-bomber. That would account for the low level at which it had come in, and it might also explain that emergency turn. The action had started with a barrage from the destroyers on the bow to port, and that could have a torpedo-bomber attack developing. They’d have been turned away by the barrage, but they’d have hung around, waiting for a chance to press in again when the escorts might be busy fending off the attack by Junkers 88s. The convoy would have been turned to avoid torpedoes, and that last effort would have been a late comer sneaking in for a solitary, surprise attack.
It hadn’t done him any good. He’d almost certainly perished in that burst of flame … But from a position like this you could only see pieces of the action as they happened from minute to minute and in your corner of the fight; you could only guess—in lulls or when it was over—at the broader pattern of events. It was much as it had been for him as a sailor in a destroyer gun’s crew: he’d hardly ever known what was happening or which way they were going or what for; he’d simply helped to serve the gun, a creature with a voracious appetite for fifty-pound shells … And there was a feeling of enclosure, at this level: of being surrounded, hemmed in ahead and astern and to starboard by the bulks and high bridge superstructures of the other freighters. Rather like being a cow in a herd of other cows, plodding on with that feeling of being hidden in the mass. It was an illusion, of course, because to the attackers each ship was separate and a target to be got at, and any hunter worth his salt picked his individual quarry and went after it. The comforting feeling of partial invisibility also failed when you looked out to port and saw only darkness, glimmer of sea with the shadows of the night across it. It was almost night now, and the only sound of guns came faintly, distantly from astern. They might be attacking the oiling group back there, he thought.
Withinshaw mumbled, “They weren’t tryin’ all that ’ard, I reckon.”
Beale had pulled the drum off his Oerlikon. He dumped it into McNaught’s arms and turned back to begin overhauling the gun. He worked fast and deftly, Paul noticed, working more by feel than by sight. Neither of the guns had jammed even once, as Oerlikons tended to do, and it might have been because they were well maintained.
McNaught had a spare ammo drum ready, and he’d put the two part-used ones aside; it would be his job to refill them now. He was singing quietly, about Saturday nights in Glasgow: the song broke off abruptly as a new storm of gunfire broke out astern. In seconds the Oerlikons were reloaded and the gunners were standing ready, one facing out on each quarter. Tracer astern was heavy, and far brighter now the light had gone, and as well as the interlacing streams of red, blue, green and yellow the sky flickered with the yellowish flashes of time-fused AA shells.
It stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Withinshaw grumbled, “What the fookin’ ’ell …”
McCall arrived, heaving himself up the ladder from the well deck. “All right, lads?” He put a hand on Paul’s shoulder: “Okay?”
Paul was still watching the sky astern. He said, “Apparently it’s not over yet.”
“It is, you know. That was the Fleet Air Arm coming back. Trying to get down on their carriers. Nice sort of welcome, I must say.”
The atmosphere in the saloon was already heavy with pipe and cigarette smoke. Brill said, waving some of it away, “Wouldn’t imagine this was a hospital, would you?” Until about ten minutes ago he’d had the place to himself;at action stations the saloon became his first-aid centre and operating theatre.
Mick McCall fetched two cups of coffee from the sideboard, and came to join them. He said, accepting a duty-free cigarette from Paul, “Very gentlemanly introduction, that.”
“Be worse tomorrow, will it?”
“Christ, what do you think?”
“I’ve no idea.” Paul sipped coffee. “Never been on a thing like this before.”
“I’d better educate you, then.” McCall used a stub of pencil and the back of a brown OHMS envelope to make a rough sketch of the western Mediterranean. “We’re about here. Halfway, roughly, from Gib to Malta. And this—” he drew a large oval shape to the northeast of their position—“this, believe it or not, is Sardinia. By tomorrow forenoon we’ll be passing to the south of it, through the narrows here with the Sardinian coast about fifty miles to port. The Germans and the Eyeties have air bases on Sardinia, don’t they?”
“I suppose they would have.”
Those narrow waters would be an obvious place to have submarines waiting for them, he thought. McCall didn’t mention submarines, though. He told them, “By tomorrow evening we’ll be through that stretch. With any luck, we will be. Touching wood, etcetera … So—tomorrow night, here, the battleships and the carriers leave us and turn westward, and we carry on into the Sicilian narrows. Between Sicily here to port and Cape Bon on the North African coast to starboard. Through the Skerki Channel, and down here past Pantellaria—where E-boats are based, incidentally. And Sicily, of course, is virtually one large Luftwaffe base …” He put the pencil away, and reached for his coffee. “It all starts tomorrow, really.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Bob Gant had rattled down four flights of ladderway from Defiant’s compass platform to the level of her foc’sl deck and turned aft to get to the next ladder, down to the upper deck and aft—get to the fire, get it out before the enemy found it too useful as a point of aim. De Ruyter and Java had both blown up, which left only three targets for the Jap cruisers out there in the dark: and this ship was slowing, stopping, as a result of the hit in number two boiler room.
He’d reached the ladder and started down it when number three gun—the six-inch mounting between the foremast and the funnels—fired, on a bearing just for’ard of the beam. The blast knocked him backwards, flash from “flashless” powder blinded him, and for a moment he was witless, lost. He’d cannoned backwards into his “doggie,” Ordinary Seaman Pinner, who’d been following close behind him. It was Pinner squawking in his ear, “Are you all right, sir?” that brought him back to his senses. The sheer silliness of the question—it seemed silly at the time, anyway—penetrated and triggered annoyance, put him back in touch with events around him. Flames aft, voices shouting, the shouting drowned in gunfire: Defiant wallowed, rolling in the troughs of other ships’ wash. A salvo came in a hoarse rush and the top of the for’ard funnel glowed red and disintegrated. He had to get aft, see about the fire that was somewhere near the after tubes on the starboard side. He was starting down the ladder again, with Pinner in close company behind, when he heard shells going into the sea nearby. Metal whirred and whined, clanged into the ship’s side and superstructure; then a shell struck and burst for’ard, and just as Defiant’s own guns sent away another salvo she was hit again: up in the bridge superstructure, above him.
The bridge, he realized …
Back the way he’d come. Up the foc’sl break ladder, in the screen door, and climbing again. Dreading what he’d find … The top ladder was loose, twisted, the bulkhead of the lobby outside the lot was bulged and split, its white enamel paint blackened. Shouts for help, wounded men moaning, a first-aid party with Neill-Robertsons, hardly knowing where to start. In seconds, everything had gone, changed. You were in a diff
erent century, another world. Gant was in the after end of the bridge, which was completely wrecked. Haskins, the captain of marines, saw him and came over to him. He had come down from the ADP because all its circuits and communications had been cut so there’d been no point staying up there; he and his ADP crew who’d come down with him were trying to help the wounded, find the living …
The bridge deck had been blasted open from below. Rescuers were at work down there: voices and torch-beams, and the stink of smouldering cortisone. Gant didn’t want to use his own torch—it was on a lanyard attached to his belt—up here in the open. He shouted, towards the for’ard end of the bridge, “Captain, sir?”
Haskins said, “He’d have been right where the blast came through.”
One gun fired. Number two—sometimes referred to as “B” gun—the mounting immediately for’ard of the bridge. It was crewed by Royal Marines. Gant hadn’t at this stage caught on to the fact that he was now in command, possibly because not wanting it to be so his mind rejected the obvious truth. He only remembered later being struck by the thought that Everard couldn’t have been killed, because it would be too much sheer bad luck to have history repeat itself after only this short an interval. Defiant’s previous captain had died in that same corner of the bridge only a few weeks ago. They’d been off Mersa Matruh on the desert coast when they’d been jumped by a lone Messerschmitt fighter-bomber that had come whistling out of the sun and strafed the bridge with cannon-fire. The skipper had been the only casualty. It had been Everard’s inheritance of some of the same rotten streak of luck—in retrospect you could see it as one sequence of events—that having just had a destroyer sunk under him he’d been available to replace the cruiser captain.
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 7