by Alan Evans
It is our joint understanding that nothing prevents your returning to the same area to carry out the same tasks.
(2) INTENTION
(a) You will return to the Field by Lysander…
Catherine read on to the end, then went back to the beginning. She read the instructions again and again until she knew them by heart while Quartermain stood at the window, staring out, unhappy.
The girl finally signed the instructions and passed them to him. He replaced them in the briefcase and said, “All pretty much as before, the movements of shipping and so forth. But Dönitz—you’ve told us where to find him, now we must know the night.”
“That is understood.”
Quartermain was silent a moment, then: “I don’t want you to go.”
“I know.” She stood up, went to him and kissed him. “Will you do something for-me?”
“Of course.”
*
Catherine went in to dinner with Ward that evening. He had bullied, cajoled and bribed to get a bottle of wine from the steward and they ate a cheerful meal. Quartermain sat alone, pleading that he had papers to read and he spread them on the table for appearance’s sake. But afterwards he went to their table and said to Ward, “There’s something I want to show you. It’ll take a couple of hours.”
Ward stood and stooped over Catherine, “See you later.”
“Au revoir.” She smiled up at him.
He stroked a finger gently down her cheek and went away with Quartermain.
They drove to Southampton. It was raining now, the snow turning to dirty slush. German bombing had laid the city waste, whole streets razed to the ground, nothing left of the houses but a jagged frieze of stunted, broken walls. As they passed through the gates of the dockyard Quartermain said, “We’re going to the King George V dock. Peyraud has confirmed that its construction is almost identical to that of St. Nazaire. He’s pinpointed the places for locating demolition charges, and the commandos are already using it for training.”
They stood side by side in the night, close by the dock, the bottom of it hidden in darkness like the pit. The water of the harbour outside was flecked with white where a breeze riffled it. The same wind drove rain into their faces and Quartermain muttered bad-temperedly and turned up the collar of his coat.
He said, “I know you are worried about the passage of time but set your mind at rest. Mountbatten has got his ship and CHARIOT is on. Look—”
He pointed towards the landward end of the dock and Ward saw men materialise out of the darkness. There looked to be a score of them, running in a loose file, making little sound because of the rubber-soled boots they wore, their legs topped with bodies made huge by the massive packs they carried. They were faceless, their features smudged with black, anonymous in the khaki battledress they wore.
They ran past Ward, their backs straight, their arms moving like pistons. He asked Quartermain, “How much do those packs weigh?”
“Around ninety pounds.”
They had run the length of the dock, a quarter mile, and ran on now. One party went to the winding-shed that held the machinery for opening the dock gate, another to the gate itself.
Quartermain stirred. “You won’t see any more now, not in this darkness. Come on.” He started back the way they had come and Ward paced alongside. Quartermain said, “They started doing it in daylight, then practised laying the charges blindfold, now in the night.”
Ward asked, “Do they know what it’s for?”
Quartermain shook his head, “No. They believe it’s just one more course. They’re giving it all they’ve got because they always do; nobody could work harder. But all they expect at the end of it is the satisfaction of having achieved another skill and, maybe, a few days’ leave.”
“Will they get it?”
“No. There isn’t time.”
They came to the Daimler, walking in silence. Ward had expected the admiral to be at least enthusiastic now that CHARIOT was definitely to go through, but he was morose and walked with hands deep in the pockets of his coat. Ward could see him scowling as he got into the car.
Ward followed and the Wren driver, Jenny Melville, closed the door. Ward said, “Thank you for telling me, showing me.”
He bent his head to peer at the face of his watch. Quartermain saw the movement and said, “There’s no hurry. You earned this trip, at least, after your fine effort on that raid. Besides, I had another reason for dragging you over here.” Quartermain’s hand came out of his pocket and he thrust an envelope at Ward. “This was her idea. She said she couldn’t face a parting.”
Ward took the envelope. That was all he could see in the gloom inside the car. He turned it over in his hands then put it away in his own pocket. “She’s gone.”
“Yes.” Quartermain frowned. “I’m sorry. I can understand how you feel.”
“Can you?” Ward turned his black stare on Quarter-main. “I’d like to break somebody’s bloody neck!”
*
He packed his kit at the house and caught a late train out of Portsmouth station. He was rejoining his ship. The train was as full as they always were and Ward stood shoulder to shoulder in a corridor jammed tight with weary sailors going home. Because of the blackout the lamp bulbs were painted blue and so were the windows except for one small circle in the middle of each pane to let passengers see the station when the train stopped—if it stopped at a station. This one did, sometimes. At other times it ground to a halt and there was nothing but blackness to be seen.
In the dim-lit, smoke-filled atmosphere Ward could barely make out the features of men only yards away. In the compartment behind him they sat sleeping, wedged together so that they swayed as one to the rocking of the train, as if in hammocks aboard ship. A sailor slept stretched out precariously on each luggage rack above the heads of his fellows. Some of the men were soldiers, and their rifles were stacked among the kitbags and packs that were crammed on the floor between their legs.
The train waited for long periods in sidings, leaving the track clear for freight trains to rumble slowly by. Somewhere a child cried fretfully, unceasingly. Ward leaned his arms on the wooden rail across the window, used them as a pillow and dozed fitfully.
They would raid St. Nazaire before the month of March was out.
Catherine had written words of love to him but now she had gone to France and he was going to sea again.
11: Dirty Bill
The night was dark and overcast and still, the kind of night on which you could expect an attack, and Boston was in E-boat Alley again. She slid her knife-edged stem through a quiet, oily sea making barely a ripple. They were hunting E-boats but it was Dirty Bill they hungered for.
Boston was alone. When she had left the dockyard after her boiler-clean she did not go back to convoy duty, but instead was sent patrolling. The change was welcome. Now Boston was not stuck at the tail-end of a convoy, itself a big, spread target and out in the middle of the channel swept through the minefields. Instead she crept along at the inshore edge of the channel, feeling her way from one marker buoy to the next. She showed no light, made no smoke and little bow-wave or wake. This particular tactic was Ward’s idea; he could not forget how Dirty Bill had lain inshore of a buoy to launch her torpedoes at the Missouri Star. But this was their third night out: convoys had been attacked on each of the two previous nights and aboard Boston they had seen the far-off glow of starshell, heard the gunfire faint with distance and the muffled thud! of a torpedo striking home, but Ward and Boston had found nothing.
He thought, We need a bit of luck. He could feel that the tension on the bridge was slackening now because the night would soon be over and all the hours of patient searching had gone for nothing. He lowered the glasses and rubbed at his eyes. Try again in a minute. There were plenty of others searching, anyway, the two look-outs and Phillips the Guns, Mason the navigator and Joe Krueger in his fur cap. Tired or not, surely one of them would spot something? If there was something to spot.
> When Ward had returned to the ship after the raid, Joe asked him, “Good leave, sir?”
“Very.” Remembering Catherine Guillard. Then, flatly, “No.”
Joe blinked at that sudden turnabout but wisely changed the subject. “See any shows?”
“One.”
“Good?”
“I won’t forget it.”
He would not talk about it, could not, but instead told Joe about Patrick. On his way back to the ship Ward had a couple of hours to spare in London and sought out the gallery in Cork Street where Patrick’s work was on show. It was crowded and he edged through from painting to sketch to painting. He had gone there curious; prepared simply to stare uncomprehendingly and give the experts the benefit of the doubt but instead he found that this was work he could understand. One painting in particular caught his attention: it was of a long, straight road, dusty under a bright sun. A car lay at the roadside, doors hanging open, abandoned, a burst suitcase beside it spilling clothing into the dust. A small boy stood in the foreground, his face dirty, eyes staring out of the picture. For Ward it was the sunken Lancastria, bombed cities, the blazing Missouri Star, the whole waste and misery of war set down in awful simplicity.
Others held him, like the one of soldiers on the march among snow-capped hills, their figures made tiny by the immensity of the backdrop yet each one vibrantly alive. The face of the leader in the foreground was strained with effort, dogged with determination: this man would never give up.
But at the end Ward went back to the boy.
He learned that every picture had been sold—and for prices up to a hundred pounds. That was getting on for two years’ pay for a corporal. Patrick was on his way to being a financial, as well as an artistic, success.
And the rest of the family? One of Geoffrey’s periodic letters had reported, very briefly, on the progress of the Perseus Group. The context of those letters varied but there was always a request somewhere for advice or a decision—and Ward knew why. He himself had got out from under his father’s wing when he joined the Navy and went to Dartmouth, but Geoffrey had stayed and worked under a man who always insisted on taking the final decision. With the habit of deferring so beaten into him Geoffrey was finding it hard to learn to stand on his own feet.
Another letter, from his mother at home in Northumberland, said she had just finished a four-week concert tour of army camps throughout Britain. Her brother, uncle Daniel was touring the States, singing Verdi and Rossini and complaining bitterly about putting on weight after leaving the rationing of England…
Ward lifted his glasses again, stared into the blackness. His own artistic career had stuck at thumping out ‘Bless ’em all!’ at ship’s concerts in pubs ashore. He grinned. Still, he’d been right about Patrick. Those years in Paris hadn’t been wasted. The grin slipped away. He’d been wrong about this bloody patrol.
Boston was closing the green-lit buoy that marked a wreck. There were many in this channel and Dirty Bill was responsible for a number of them. Ward ordered, “Star-board ten,” to take Boston around the wreck.
“Starboard ten, sir.”
There was quiet on the bridge.
Ward told the coxswain, “Meet her…Steer that.” He straightened, now looking out towards France over the heads of the others on the bridge.
Catherine was there. She had returned there over a week ago.
He concentrated on his ship, conned her carefully around the wreck and back on her course to the next buoy marking the channel, but a part of his mind was with the girl. He had had no word from Quartermain. In the car that night he had talked to the admiral of killing—he had learned to keep the hatches battened down on his temper but had not succeeded then—and he’d meant what he said. If Catherine were harmed and there was one man somewhere who was guilty, then he would break—He checked there. Face to face, would he kill? On the raid to bring back Peyraud he had fired not at men but at threatening shadows in the darkness. In June 1940 he had looked over the sights of his pistol at an enemy—then had walked away. So—
“There’s the next buoy. On the bow.” That was Phillips.
Mason, the navigator, said, “Seen.” He bent over the compass to take the bearing.
Ward picked up the distant winking light. There was a long way to go yet.
Phillips grumbled, “Not a bloody thing. If we go on like this we’ll be back on escort work in a day or two, I’ll bet you.”
Joe Krueger said, “It can happen when you least expect it.” He paused, then added bitterly, “Like Pearl Harbour.”
He fell silent and Ward waited, the pair of them slowly sweeping the darkness ahead with their glasses. Then Joe went on, “This war with Germany, now, that was no surprise. I took a working vacation in Europe back in 1937, France, Germany—rubber-necking most of the time but I looked at a lot of powerboats and engines so that made the trip tax-deductible.”
Ward took the glasses from his eyes and asked, “E-boats?”
“No, but I got to know the engines those beauties use. You catch one an’ I’ll make her go.” Joe’s teeth showed in a grin. “Anyway, I told you I spoke German with my grandfather back home, right? So the language there was no problem. I saw the torchlight parades and talked to people, listened to Hitler’s speeches and I didn’t need any translation.” He turned to look at Ward. They were all quiet on the bridge, listening. “Around about then a lot of people still thought Hitler was a funny little guy with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, hooting and hollering and pounding a desk with his fist. I didn’t think he was funny; I could see a war coming.”
He faced forward and he and Ward lifted their glasses together. Ward swept from starboard to port. Cat’s-paws of foam flecked a sea that was near flat calm. There was the buoy, and they were slowly, silently closing it—He saw the shadow as the lookout and Krueger spoke together: “E-boat port side of the buoy!” “Boat red one-oh!”
The E-boat lay just outside the little circle of radiance spilled on the sea by the lit buoy. It might have been anchored or even tied up to the buoy itself. Ward put his mouth close to the voicepipe: “Port ten!”
“Port ten…ten of port wheel on, sir!”
Ward said, “Coxswain! There’s an E-boat about two cables ahead. You’ll have to be quick down there when I give you the word!”
Adams’ voice had an edge of excitement as it came up the pipe: “Aye, aye, sir!”
Softly, hoarsely, Phillips was passing orders to the guns: ‘…four hundred! Load!” Ward watched the low silhouette of the boat ahead, just an irregular slab of greater darkness on the sea, while below him on the fo’c’sle he saw the crew of the 4-inch shifting quickly around their gun.
The muffled clunk of the quietly closed breech came up to him as he ordered, “Meet her…steer that.” Boston’s bow pointed at the low, black shape and she was closing it steadily, slipping over the surface of the sea like a shadow. How close could they get to the E-boat before her lookouts spotted them? Ward thought her crew might not be seeing too well in the night, their vision marred by the light on the nearby buoy. And they would not be looking for a ship coming from this quarter because they were hunting convoys that would be steaming out in the middle of the swept channel.
Ward said quietly, “Be ready with that light.”
The rating manning the searchlight on the wing of the bridge acknowledged in a barely audible whisper.
Phillips’ low, husky call to the 4-inch came: “Three hundred!”
If they could get close enough Ward would ram. Boston’s bow would cut through the E-boat like a knife through butter or ride over her, grinding her under. There was a stillness on the bridge as if they all held their breath. Then diesels burst into life ahead and their roar came bellowing back across the water. Ward, eyes fastened on the German, his hands cradling the brass bell-mouth of the voicepipe, mouth right over it, ordered, “Full ahead!”
“Full ahead, sir!”
Ward straightened quickly and shouted to guns and searchlight
: “Fire! Light her up!”
“Fire!” Phillips bawled it; no need for quiet now. The E-boat was moving ahead as the 4-inch recoiled, the barrel seeming to jerk back from its own muzzle-flash. The slam of it firing and the crash as it burst came almost as one because the range was so short. The two carbons in the searchlight were crackling as the gun fired and struck arc now, creating a point of intense light that the big, dished mirror threw out in a dazzling beam that fell on the E-boat just as the shell from the 4-inch struck and burst in a flash of yellow flame aft of the low, open bridge. The boat was barely 200 yards away now and the light showed her stern tucked down in churning foam as the big diesels gathered the leverage to hurl her forward. There were figures on the bridge and at the cannon in the waist, swinging it round to point at Boston. The white beam lit up the E-boat for all its length and made plain the insignia painted on the side of the bridge: a skull and crossbones.
“Dirty Bill!”
Ward was not sure afterwards if they had all yelled or whether the words were only in his mind. At the time he had only one thought: to destroy the E-boat ahead. Boston’s engines were quickening but her responses were slower and she had nothing like the manoeuvrability of the E-boat.
Ward ordered, “Starboard ten!” To point Boston’s stern ahead of the E-boat, setting her on a course to intercept and at the same time turning her so the port side Oerlikons would bear. The 4-inch fired again and that shell went over, the plume of water lifting beyond Dirty Bill. The cannon of the E-boat was firing and so were the machine-guns. Tracer was flying, pale where it cut through the searchlight’s beam but outside it like a string of shooting stars in the dark of the night. The cannon shells were striking or ricocheting, howling off Boston’s hull but, unresponsive as she was, her bow was still coming round in time to point ahead of Dirty Bill. The 4-inch fired. The E-boat was turning away but Boston was almost on top of her and the range down to a hundred yards. The 4-inch shell burst on the E-boat and her cannon stopped firing. There was a flicker of yellow in the waist of her and then a soaring pillar of flame.