Deed of Glory (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  He fumbled the Colt pistol from the hook below the screen and belted it around his waist as Joe returned to the bridge. They were not being hit now because the guns had switched their target when the launch crashed into the quay but the din was no less. Joe shouted, “Come on!”

  The stern of the launch was ablaze and they flinched from the heat of it. Ward asked, “What about the engine-room—”

  “Finished!” Joe broke in.

  “Bowman?”

  Joe pulled at his arm. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s nobody left! Believe me! I went through her before I came up here. The commandos are ashore, what’s left of them. Now come on, Jack! She’s going!”

  She was. As Ward followed Joe down into the bow the launch slithered astern, grinding on the rocks as the current tugged at her. Joe jumped, then Ward, but the bow shifted from under his feet so that he fell face down on the slip with the river washing over him. He spat it out, swearing, crawled out of it and up the steep concrete slope.

  Beare waited at the head of it, down on one knee behind the low wall that ran along the quayside, his Thompson gun with its pencil-torch glowing blue held in one big hand. With the other he pointed across the quay. “See that alley, sir? In there.”

  To their right lay the Old Mole with its blockhouse and the gun in it still belching flame. The river was alight with petrol and blazing launches floated on it. To the left and ahead stood the Old Town, the jumble of its roofs serrated against the sky. Between town and mole was a rough square of quayside lit fitfully by the glare from the river and the sweeping searchlights, reflecting silver from the railway lines that traversed the quay. About two hundred yards away to the right and across the quay stood the high, square outlines of warehouses with a black valley running through them. Beare was pointing at the mouth of it.

  Ward nodded, “Seen.” Joe Krueger was trotting over the open ground and now he disappeared into the black cleft. Ward turned for one last look at his temporary command. Phoebe was twenty yards out from the quay and blazing along her length, the Oerlikons drooping and bent on their mountings, her deck nearly awash. She would sink in minutes.

  Beare peered past Ward at the empty slip. “You’re the last, sir?”

  Ward answered flatly, “Yes.” Out of a crew of fourteen he and Joe Krueger were the only survivors.

  Beare straightened and started across the quay. He did not crouch but ran upright and so did Ward as he followed, jumping over the railway lines that curved along the quayside. Yelling came from somewhere to his left and a machine-gun fired. The tracer sailed down from high on the roof of a house beyond the Southern Entrance and passed over Ward’s head, aimed at launches still trying to land at the Old Mole. Then he plunged between the tall cliffs of warehouses, the darkness there intermittently dispelled by the light from the launches burning on the river, a glare that washed in and out of the alley as the sea washes into a cave. He passed Joe Krueger and Beare, moved deeper into the alley. The commandos crouched against the foot of the wall. Spencer, Ryan, Driscoll, Lockwood and little Jimmy Nicholl. The pencil-torches made blue pinpricks in the gloom, the white webbing belts and ammunition pouches were pale stripes against the khaki battledress that blended into the shadows.

  He came on Peter Madden, standing with one shoulder leaning on the wall, Thompson gun and eyes trained ahead into the alley. He only glanced at Ward then away, but Ward saw his teeth show in a grin. Peter said, “This is a right bloody party.”

  Ward asked, “How many have you got left?”

  “You’ve seen them: five. Beare and me make seven.”

  “There’s two of us: Joe and myself.”

  Madden glanced quickly at him again. “Is that all? Just you two?”

  “That’s all.” Ward thought the other launches would have fared little better and some of them worse.

  Peter Madden said quietly, “My God.” Then he called “Sergeant Beare!”

  “Sir!” Beare came out of the darkness to stand beside them.

  Madden said, “We’ll move through here at the double and across Roy’s bridge.” Ward wondered if Roy or any of his men were alive. He thought he had seen them dropping down from Campbeltown but he remembered the awful fire concentrated there. Madden was going on: “I’ll lead, you bring up the rear. Carry on.”

  Beare disappeared and they heard his voice relaying the order. Ward said, “I’ll stick with you, Peter.”

  “Let’s get on with it. We’re late.” Madden broke into a run, rubber-soled boots thumping softly on the pave or concrete underfoot, racing through the alleys that wound between the warehouses. The darkness was riven again and again by flashes of gunfire and the fingers of searchlights overhead, that lit their way for a second then left the darkness deeper than before. They turned a corner, Ward loping long-legged at Madden’s shoulder. Men crowded the alley before them and Madden fired the Thompson as he ran. The group dissolved, some swerving away, yelling, into another alley and out of sight, others falling. Ward ran around them as he followed Madden.

  He tried to remember the lay-out of the area as he had memorised it from the model and the maps, tried to fix his position and heading but it was one thing to study a model, another to charge through a lightning-shot blackness. He thought they were close to the bridge…

  They broke out on to a quayside, passing between a warehouse on their right and a tall building on their left. The Old Entrance lay before them, a rectangle of dark water, and Campbeltown on the dock gate two hundred yards away to the right. To the left was the bridge. Had Roy and his party reached it? At the foot of the landing slip on this southern side of the Entrance lay Ryder’s M.G.B . So had Newman got ashore? Figures of men appeared to the left, crossed with the bands of white webbing and Madden shouted the password, “Weymouth!” He added his name: “Madden!”

  They passed through. Ward thought he saw Newman and Terry, the Intelligence man—and a German soldier? A prisoner, hands held high? But he ran after Madden to the bridge and across. He needed to stick with the group: otherwise, in his dark uniform with no white webbing, he could easily be mistaken for a German. Roy and his men had taken the bridge and were holding it but Ward only saw the dark shapes of them where they crouched or lay and the spurts of flame as they fired. His boots thumped loud on the bridge, softened once across it. He glanced over his shoulder at the hurrying figures of the commandos. Beyond them, in the middle distance, were the squat minesweepers tied up to the quay but he could not see the five destroyers. He faced forward. The aerial photograph had showed the E-boat berthed just here by the Old Entrance but she wasn’t there either.

  Madden had not slackened his pace, intent on making up some of the time lost. They ran along a road. To the left was the basin with harbour defence boats and more mine-sweepers. Machine-guns aboard them hammered but their tracer slid towards Roy’s party at the bridge, the men at the guns not seeing the racing figures of Madden, Ward and the others as they ran in the shadow cast by the buildings on the right of the road, an unbroken line of workshops and offices, each built on to its neighbour. About two hundred yards from Roy’s bridge lay the office they sought, with the suite above where Dönitz could look out on his U-boats in their pens across the basin. Flame spurted from an upstairs window a score of yards ahead and the slug ricocheted, droning, off the cobbles of the road. Madden threw himself down close by the wall and Ward sprawled beside him.

  Ward said, “That’s the place.” It was last but one of the buildings and those on either side of it looked to be some sort of stores with small windows set high. This was a three-storey office with a closed door at the head of a short flight of steps, ground floor windows on either side of the door and other windows above them. Those on the ground and first floors were open but the top ones were closed; light reflected from the glass. The firing had come from one of the open windows. There was a buoy-yard on the other side of the street. Ward could see the huge cylinders and cones of the buoys, eight or ten feet in diameter. They were in the yard f
or repair and some were freshly painted, he could smell it. There was a racketing din in the rest of the dockyard but no firing here because the men in the house could not see the two lying close by the wall.

  Peter nodded agreement and lifted a hand. Beare sidled along the wall and Peter asked, “All here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Madden gave his orders: “Covering fire, a plastic charge on the door, grenades at the windows, then in.” That was all he needed to say; they had done this before.

  Beare walked back, growling orders, and Nicholl, Lockwood and Driscoll slipped across the road and disappeared among the buoys in the yard. Ryan and Spencer came up, Joe Krueger with them and he crouched behind Ward. Beare moved past taking Ryan and Spencer with him and they waited ahead of Madden, pressed against the wall, watching the buoy-yard. All three had slung their Thompsons from their shoulders. Ryan and Spencer held a grenade in each hand, Sergeant Beare the plastic explosive in one hand, fuse, igniter and detonator in the other. The beam of a searchlight on one of the minesweepers in the basin slid across the faces of the buildings. It lit the upper floors but left the street below in darkness.

  Madden said, without looking round, “We’ll go in at the door.”

  Ward pulled back the sleeve on the Colt pistol, cocking it, and heard the double, oiled click as Joe Krueger copied him. He pushed off the safety catch and eased the hammer to half-cock. Now he only had to thumb it to fire.

  The Thompsons opened up from the darkness of the buoy-yard and splinters flew from around the first floor windows. Beare and the other two moved quickly forward, crouched double to pass below the first ground floor window. Ryan in the lead jumped over the steps at the door and set his back to the wall by the further window while Spencer waited by the nearer. Beare worked at the door, moulding the plastic explosive over the lock, attaching the detonator and fuse. The Thompsons fired short bursts from the buoy-yard, sounding like a stick drawn steadily across railings, a solid hammering. The Thompson fired fat .45 slugs and was a man-stopper.

  Beare pulled at the igniter and stepped clear of the door, his back against the wall. The Thompsons ceased firing. An explosion in the dockyard shook the ground and Ward wondered: a demolition party blowing up a winding-house? He took a breath and another, got his legs under him. Madden was on one knee, ready to go. A rifle barrel poked cautiously out of an upper window but was, drawn back in as the charge on the door exploded. Timber scattered across the road and dust boiled out of the doorway. As Ward ran in behind Madden he saw Spencer toss a grenade through the ground floor window then step a pace out from the wall to lob another in at the window above.

  Beare was first in at the door, leaping up the steps through the dust cloud and running inside, Thompson firing, Madden close behind. Grenades burst in the ground floor rooms in the space of two strides. One of those long strides took Ward to the top of the steps and the other into the blackness beyond.

  The light came on and the bulb glowed yellow through the hanging dust above Ward’s head. He was in a long hall with a door each side and stairs at the end leading up. Beare and Madden were crouched either side of the hall and a tall German officer stood at the top of the stairs, pointing a machine-pistol down at them. Ward saw this in the fraction of a second as the light came on then grenades burst in the rooms above, the flashes coming through the open landing doors and silhouetting the man at the head of the stairs. He staggered and a burst from his machine-pistol chewed plaster from the stair-well. Ward grabbed the electric light bulb and yanked it, flex and all, out of the ceiling. The hall was again as black as a chimney but the darkness was immediately ripped as Beare fired.

  Into the silence that followed Madden shouted, “Ryan? Spencer?” There had been heavy firing in the rooms on either side but that had ceased now. Their ears rang but they could hear distantly beneath them a voice crying out or screaming.

  Spencer called from the room on the right, “O.K. in here, sir! I’m coming out! Lockwood’s with me!”

  There was a long burst of Tommy-gun fire in the other room then: “Driscoll here, sir. I’m coming out.” They heard the doors open, scraping on rubble, and Driscoll said, “I could hear somebody moving up there so I put a few up through the ceiling.”

  Madden warned, “Get against the wall!” He shoved Ward there. “The chap upstairs might try the same dodge.”

  He did. Plaster fell from the ceiling as a burst from the Schmeisser ripped along the floor of the hall. Madden asked breathlessly, “Where’s Ryan?”

  Driscoll answered, “Copped it, sir.”

  “Wounded?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. I used my torch to take a look.”

  The exchange was deliberately flat. Ryan had been a close friend.

  Little Jimmy Nicholl still crouched out in the buoy-yard covering their line of retreat. In the hall they froze as the searchlight beam returned and the passing fringe of it swept in at the shattered door, lighting the dust-coated faces of the men pressed against the walls. High-pitched shouting, perhaps a woman’s voice, still came up from below and as the beam slid away Madden called, “Joe! Find out what the hell is going on down there!”

  “O.K. !” Krueger started to move along the wall, past the bottom of the stairs, searching for a way to the basement. Madden went on: “Driscoll! You go with him. Use your torch if you have to, but look out.”

  Ward felt Peter grip his arm. His eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom and he made out the pale smudge of Peter’s face. Madden said, “I’ll go for the stairs. Beare and the other two to cover and you follow up with them.”

  Peter was going alone because he was short of men. Ward said, “To hell with that. I’m coming.”

  “Bloody fool.” But Madden accepted, “All right. Now!”

  The Thompsons made an ear-shattering din in the confines of the hall, lighting it with their muzzle-flashes, saturating the top of the stairs with their fire. It ceased when Madden yelled and started for the black cliff of the stairs. Ward went with him, long legs hurling him up three steps at a time so that he was ahead of Madden when a light came on again, this time illuminating the stair-well above them. It showed him a landing with open doors to left and right, a length of corridor ahead. Then he threw himself down at the top of the stairs and a burst of fire from above and behind kicked dust and splinters from the wall close overhead, showering him. He squirmed back down on his belly, frantically trying to get out of the sight of the man with the gun and felt Madden hauling at his legs. He caught a glimpse of a boxed-in second flight of stairs leading up to his right and light spilling down them, then he was back under cover on the first flight and sitting up.

  Madden’s face glistened with sweat in the yellow light spilling from the landing and he swore: “Crafty bastard! The stairs leading up to him are behind this wall.” He rapped it with his knuckles. It went up on their right and gave back the dull, solid sound of brickwork. “No shooting through that. The light’s behind it as well. He commands this landing and anybody on it’ll just be a sitting target.”

  Beare came up behind them and held out a grenade. Madden took it and stood up on the top stair, flat against the brick wall. “Squirt him—and the light, if we can.” He pulled the pin from the grenade and the clip sprang free. He leaned forward, lobbed the grenade around the corner of the wall and up the next flight of stairs. It burst and the three of them shoved forward, scattering along the landing. Madden and Beare sprayed the top of the stairs with their Thompsons. The light bulb swung up there in drifting smoke, then went out.

  Ward was on the floor, blind in the darkness. He rolled in through the doorway on the left of the landing and squirmed forward on his elbows, pistol held before him. Behind him another grenade exploded, the Thompsons hammered and then there was a ripping burst from high in the house. Silence. Outside the searchlight washed the face of the building and slid on leaving the room dark again but Ward had seen enough. He stood up an
d moved forward past the bed almost to the window but stopped short of showing himself there. Two soldiers lay dead close by the window, sprawled on their backs. There was no one else in the room.

  He called Madden, who entered and stood by the door, breathing quickly. “I’ve checked the room across the landing. Nothing in there.”

  Ward said, “He’s here.” He lifted a German navy great-coat from the bed and held it out.

  Madden felt at it in the gloom; there was a faint glow from outside where the searchlights made artificial moon-light. The braid on the coat showed yellow and was stiff under his fingers. “He must be with the others on the top floor.” He paused, then: “I said ‘others’ but I think there’s only one left, well back from the top of the stairs and out of reach of grenades. We chucked one up but he’s still active; he probably rigged some sort of barricade up there. I think he knows what he’s doing. Tricky.”

  An explosion shook the building through its foundations, the sound of it coming like a clap of thunder. Shards of broken glass still hanging in the windows fell and smashed on the floor. Plaster cascaded around them, the dust setting them coughing and Ward said, “That could be the north gate.”

  “Sounds good, anyway.” Madden called, “Sergeant Beare! Anything moving up there?”

  “Nothing moving, but he laughed just before that charge blew.”

  “What?”

  Then a chuckle came again from the landing above and a voice echoed in the well of the stairs, “Komm’, Tommi!”

  Beare said, “We’ve got a right one here, sir.”

  Madden answered, “Let’s go and get him.”

  Joe Krueger called from below but his words were lost in a burst of firing out in the basin. He shouted again: “Better come down an’ see what I’ve got!”

  Madden demanded impatiently, “Can’t it wait?”