Deed of Glory (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  Afterwards Ward told Joe of their own particular objective. Joe said only, “Dönitz!” He was silent for a long time, thinking about this, and CHARIOT. Then: “Well, as I recall you did say this could be unusual.” He drawled out the word. “I’ve heard about British understatement but this is ridiculous.”

  *

  On Tuesday, 24th, they were off the Eddystone again for practice firing and it was dark when they returned to their berth at Falmouth. Quartermain was not there to meet them and he had sent no word.

  It was a long time before Ward slept that night. Quartermain’s information about St. Nazaire came from Catherine so if he received no information then it meant either that she had none to send—or she was unable to send it. That was not an easy thought for him to push to the back of his mind. Catherine…

  *

  That day her chief had called her into his office. “Ah! Mademoiselle. I see from my diary that you asked for leave of absence this weekend.”

  Catherine apologised for making such a request so soon after being away, but, “My aunt in Paris is very old and the winter is hard on the elderly. I wish to travel on the night train, that is Thursday night, and return on Sunday to be at my desk the next day.”

  “Ah! No. I regret, Mademoiselle, that is not possible. I may need you to interpret on the Friday. I am told to expect a German visitor.”

  Catherine persisted, “Surely, M’sieur, he cannot be so important, this visitor.”

  Her chief smiled, leaned over the desk and said in a low voice, “The apartment over the Abwehr office is to be complete for that Friday.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh!” By now the purpose of that particular apartment was an open secret.

  “Exactly. But, Mademoiselle, suppose you took the train on Friday night and returned on Monday?”

  Catherine smiled. “Thank you, M’sieur, that will be just as convenient.”

  *

  All the Fairmiles were to complete with stores on Wednesday, 25th. Those carrying demolition parties would also be loading three or four hundredweight of explosives and fuses.

  Most of the stores for Phoebe were boxes of ammunition and grenades for the commandos and Peter Madden came with them. He was standing with Ward and Joe Krueger on the deck of the Fairmile where she lay alongside when Quartermain’s silver-grey Daimler rolled along the quay and stopped beside her. He did not get out of the car, just wound down the window and crooked a finger. Ward and the other two went ashore and saluted.

  Quartermain said flatly, “We had word out of France last night—” He paused.

  Peter Madden prompted, “Yes, sir?”

  Ward thought, That means she’s still all right.

  Quartermain said, “It’s the night of twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth. That’s the night before CHARIOT.”

  They were all silent for a moment, then Peter Madden said, “So it’s scrubbed.”

  Quartermain took off his cap to run a hand over neat silver hair. He was carefully shaved, looked lean and fit, but tired. “For now. We just wait for another chance.”

  “We’re not likely to get another as good as this.” Peter Madden was not smiling now. Jenny Melville was at the wheel of the Daimler but he did not look at her. He scowled at the pile of stores on the quay. “This bloody lot will have to go back then.”

  Quartermain said, “No. Behave just like the others for the time being and carry on loading.” It could be bad for morale if one launch unloaded again. “And don’t say anything to your men. I’ll do that, later. Now I’m going to tell Commander Ryder.”

  Jenny Melville drove the Daimler away as they saluted. They saw the rest of the stores taken aboard and then walked up and down the quay, three quiet men, bad-tempered with frustration. Once Madden kicked furiously at a wooden bollard and said, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in a hurry to leave all this.” It was a fine, sunny day, an early foretaste of spring. “I’m not a sort of khaki kamikaze, but when you train and wait for a long time, then the chance comes along and you lose it at the last by just one day, it’s a let-down. I feel like biting somebody.”

  Ward grunted agreement.

  They did not hear the return of the Daimler until it drew up alongside them and stopped. This time Quartermain threw open the door himself and stepped out quickly. He was smiling. “Ryder’s decided everybody’s ready, the weather’s right, so is the tide at St. Nazaire, and hanging around twenty-four hours would only add to the risk of Jerry finding out. So he’s going a day early.”

  Ward sucked in a breath then let it out. “Then it’s on!”

  Quartermain nodded. “You sail tomorrow. Original plan.”

  Peter Madden noticed Jenny Melville that time. He smiled at her but she looked away, anxiously biting her lip.

  Quartermain said, “There’s something I want to show you.” They climbed into the Daimler and he took them up the hill to Ryder’s headquarters in the house on the cliff-top. There he introduced them to the squadron-leader Ward had met in Richmond Terrace and pointed to some aerial photographs laid out on a table. Ward and Madden studied them, Joe peering over Peter’s shoulder.

  Quartermain said, “You’ll see five ships lying close by the Old Entrance in the St. Nazaire basin.”

  Ward saw them, nodded, and the squadron-leader said, “To us they look like destroyers.”

  “The point there,” Quartermain put in, “is that they each carry three guns of 4- or 5-inch. That’s another fifteen bloody guns!”

  The squadron-leader used a pencil to point to a slim shape in the basin but just north of the Old Entrance. “And this looks like an E-boat.”

  Ward looked up quickly as Quartermain said, “Our information out of France confirms all of that. It is also that the destroyers go to sea and return by the Southern Entrance to the basin while the E-boat uses the Old Entrance.”

  The squadron-leader asked, “Anything sinister in that?”

  Ward smiled. “Not really. The E-boat captain is the junior and so he’d have to wait to use the Southern Entrance until all the destroyers had passed through the lock, so he chooses the Old Entrance instead. The lock there won’t take a destroyer but it is big enough for him. So when he comes home he makes his own way in without queueing up behind the others and he gets alongside quicker.”

  The squadron-leader’s brows lifted. “Is that important?”

  “If you have to take on oil, water, ammunition and stores before you can go ashore on the town—yes, it is.”

  “Ah!”

  Ward stared at the photographs. “Peter and his men will have to pass that E-boat on their way to their objective.” He glanced at Quartermain. “You said you wanted one.”

  The admiral shook his head. “One of the objectives of CHARIOT is to blow up the Old Entrance and the Southern Entrance, so there’d be no way of getting her out. Stick to your main objective.”

  Ward shrugged. He would rather have the E-boat than Dönitz because they would learn quite a bit from the boat but the admiral would tell them damn-all. It would be good propaganda to kidnap Dönitz but so would it be to steal an E-boat out of a German harbour. Furthermore, while the loss of Dönitz might impair the efficiency of the U-boat offensive, its fleet would hardly fall apart. The U-boats would still have to be fought and beaten, one by one, at sea.

  That night they embarked the commandos, secretly and under cover of darkness. Phoebe was ordered to ferry a detachment, one of several who would sail aboard Campbeltown, from the Princess Josephine Charlotte to the old destroyer. Afterwards they would take aboard Peter Madden and his men.

  Ward stood on the bridge as Phoebe closed Campbeltown. The Devonport dockyard had converted her for the raid. Her two after funnels had been taken out and the two remaining cut with a rakish slant aft so in the night she would loosely resemble a German torpedo-boat, their term for destroyer, of the Möwe class. She rode high in the water because every pound of weight, equipment, fuel and water not essential to her part in this raid had been taken out of h
er. Her torpedo tubes and the 4-inch in the bow were gone, the 12-pounder had been moved from aft into the bow and she now mounted eight 20mm Oerlikons on “bandstands” set above the deck.

  As they lay alongside, Ward requested permission to go aboard and it was granted. Jameson the Sub remained on the bridge of Phoebe while Ward and Joe walked the deck of Campbeltown. There was armour plating around her bridge and wheelhouse. More was riveted to the deck, but upright, four lines of it stretching forward and aft making low protective walls behind which the commandos would shelter on the final approach. The deck teemed with them now as they came aboard.

  Campbeltown was changed but she was still enough of a twin to Boston for it to be an eerie feeling to walk her deck; this was Boston reborn. And for Joe the Buchanan of his youth. Ward and Joe Krueger stood in silence, remembering other ships, other faces in the night, many nights. Then Joe, aware of what lay ahead for his old ship, said abruptly, “I’m going back aboard.” He walked away.

  Ward understood, turned to follow him and came face-to-face with a soldier taller than most of the others. He was bulky with webbing equipment, grenade and ammunition pouches strapped about his body, and he carried a Thompson submachine-gun slung from one shoulder.

  Ward stared, “Patrick!”

  His cousin grinned at him. “I thought I might bump into you, sooner or later. I saw you buzzing about in a motor-launch a couple of times. You stand out a bit on that thing. I used to have one like it in the bath.”

  Ward said, “Don’t be so bloody rude or I’ll leave you to walk home.” The launches were to bring back the commandos after the raid.

  Patrick asked, “You’re on this party?”

  Ward nodded. Patrick had changed, by God! The languid man-about-town was buried in the past. This was a soldier, tough and competent, looking you straight in the eye. “I saw your exhibition.”

  Patrick said, “The best one wasn’t there.” He had finally painted Sarah and got it right, finished it the last time he saw her and left it with her. He had a letter from her in his pocket now, unopened, to be read later when he found time and a quiet place aboard this ship, probably not until they were at sea.

  “There was one of a boy on a road…” Ward paused, not knowing how to put his feelings into words. “I never thought paint on a canvas could talk but that one certainly spoke to me.”

  Patrick hitched at the Thompson gun, settling it more easily on his shoulder. “Paris is—was—marvellous. I had a hell of a good time but I worked damned hard as well. I didn’t take the war seriously till I woke up one morning and found I had to drive like mad for the coast to get out. We weren’t strafed but we saw it going on a long way ahead of us. When we got up there the Stukas had gone and there was just this one car and the boy in the road. It was quiet as the grave. We took him on to the next town and left him at a convent. He never cried at all, never said a word.”

  Ward watched him, remembering the party Aunt Abigail had thrown for her son’s return. “So you got drunk.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then you joined the Army.”

  Patrick shrugged. “I suppose I’d have done that anyway. It seemed to be popular.” And, with a flash of the old Patrick, “One likes to be seen where the best people are, you know.”

  Ward’s own people waited for him. He said, “We’ll try and have a drink afterwards.”

  Afterwards?

  But Patrick only grinned, “Good idea, Jack.”

  *

  CHARIOT sailed.

  Ward conned Phoebe out of Falmouth at two in the afternoon of the next day, 26th March. There were the two escorting destroyers, Atherstone and Tynedale, and the attacking force: one old, obsolete destroyer, one motor-gunboat, one motor-torpedo-boat and sixteen Fairmiles. It was not an impressive flotilla with which to assault Hitler’s European fortress.

  Mountbatten had told Newman, the commando colonel, that he believed the commandos could get in and do the job but he did not expect many of them to come out again so any man could stand down if he wished. None did. Ward thought Mountbatten had been honest and must have enormous faith in the men to tell them that. But St. Nazaire was six miles inside the estuary of the Loire, so for six miles the little ships would be running between the banks of a river lined with waiting guns, alert and ready.

  Ward had telephoned his brother Geoffrey before sailing and told him, “I want you to stay with Mother for the next few days.”

  Geoffrey was silent for a moment, then he said heavily, “I see. Like that, is it?”

  “A bit hairy. Any problems at your end?”

  “You mean the Perseus Group?” Another long silence but Geoffrey broke it, saying, “No. I can cope.” It was a flat statement of fact, no doubt in his voice at all: Geoffrey was his own man. When he went on his voice was different again, fumbling for words. “Look, Jack, be careful. You’re a great bloke.”

  “You’re not bad yourself. Cheerio.”

  “Good luck!”

  So—from now on Geoffrey would run the Perseus Group in his own way, right or wrong, and Ward was leaving no loose ends.

  But it was a very odd feeling.

  13: “Dönitz is there…!”

  As the ships of CHARIOT sailed, Hauptmann Engel climbed into the front of his old Citroën and Pianka drove along the side of the St. Nazaire basin then across the bridge leading to the town. They bumped out from under the web of girders that formed the suspension of the bridge and Engel saw a group of naval officers, white jerseys showing at the necks of their blue jackets. He recognised some as U-boat officers and one who was not. This was the first time Engel had seen the captain of the Schnellboot ashore, though he had watched the boat pass in and out of the basin several times during the last few days.

  So had Henri—and had told London.

  Engel said, “Pull in here.” Pianka obeyed and the Citroën came to rest beside the group. Engel poked his head out of the window and called, “Rudi!” Then as one of the officers glanced around: “What the hell are you doing here? The last I heard you were in the Baltic.”

  Rudi Moller, short and jaunty, grinned and stepped over to the car. “Since last September I’ve been working out of Holland but now they’ve sent us down here with Schmidt’s Fifth Flotilla for a bit.” He jerked his head at the basin and the five destroyers tied up there. Rudi added, “They probably thought we could do with a rest and they were right.”

  Engel studied him and saw the lines of strain on the young face. “Tough, eh?”

  Rudi Moller shrugged. “A long winter and long nights. Most of the time you can’t see what you’re doing and when you can, the Tommies throw all kinds of stuff at you.” He grinned. “But a couple of nights’ sleep and I’ll be as good as new.”

  “I’ve got an office and a bottle on the other side of the basin, just along from where your boat is berthed,” Engel told him. “Look in and I’ll give you a drink.” He nudged Pianka and the Citroën pulled away. Engel thought Rudi was looking older, edgier, worried behind the grin. The war was getting to him, as to all of them.

  The Citroën headed north out of St. Nazaire. There was a damp chill in the air and Engel wore his long greatcoat and rubbed at his knee. After five kilometres he said, “Next on the right.” And as Pianka changed down, swung into the turning: “That wood ahead.”

  They drove down a narrow lane between high hedges for 400 metres and passed no house, saw no one. The wood was dense, carpeted with undergrowth and the trees met above the lane and made it a green-lit tunnel. Pianka slowed to a crawl at Engel’s bidding and they went on until they came to a gap in the hedge with a clearing opening from it. Engel said, “Here.” Pianka turned into the clearing and stopped the Citroën. Only then did he see the man crouched at the gap in the hedge and keeping watch on the lane. It was Horstmann, Grünwald’s lieutenant.

  Another car stood in the clearing, a Renault as old and battered as the Citroën. Pianka muttered, “The little shit is showing some sense at last.”
The Renault looked anything but a Gestapo vehicle.

  Grünwald himself stood by the Renault. He came forward as Engel got out of the Citroën and they met between the cars. Grünwald said, “I’ve got him.”

  Engel asked, “What do we know about him?”

  “He’s English. He came over in 1937, an admirer of the Party and the Leader, attended the rallies and offered his services. There was an idea he might be used as an agent in his own country but that had to be abandoned.”

  “Why?”

  “Drink. One and he talks, two and he shouts. He was totally unreliable for that work.”

  “What about this?” Engel snapped sourly, “One wrong word and they’ll bury him!”

  “He’ll stay off it,” Grünwald assured him, “It’ll only be for a few days. He’s not a drunk, not an alcoholic so don’t be put off. He’s good, smart and quite an actor. Besides, it fits—we shot down a plane only last night, and no survivors. He can do the job.”

  Engel asked, “Why? Why will he do it?”

  Grünwald blinked at the question then stated what seemed obvious to him, “He wants to get on in the Party and the Service, like the rest of us.”

  Engel scowled at him, brooding and thought: Don’t include me. Grünwald and this English traitor wanted money and power, by any means. They were two of a kind. He said, “He’s one of your lot?”

  Grünwald shrugged. “He’s S.D., yes.” S.D. meant Sicherheitsdienst, another name for Gestapo. “Does it matter?”

  “Not so long as he knows this is my operation and that he is responsible only to me.”

  Grünwald looked surprised. “Of course.”

  Of course? Engel growled, “All right, fetch him out.”

  Grünwald called, “Turner!” He explained in an aside to Engel: “We had a pay-book for a Turner that fitted him.”

  The man got out of the back of the Renault and joined them. He wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force sergeant with the airgunner’s badge, trousers tucked into flying boots. He was tall and thin, bare-headed, his brown hair cut short. He was handsome in the way that Horstmann was handsome, with well-chiselled features, firm mouth and chin.