by Tim Jeal
Tony Cassilis grinned at him as he burst into the wheelhouse.
‘Bad luck, skip.’
‘Better take this sea more on our beam, Number One,’ said Mike, trying not to sound reproachful, since he had not seen the wave coming either.
‘Starboard 5,’ Cassilis grunted to the coxswain.
‘Starboard 5, sir.’
Tony studied the swinging compass. ‘Steer 170.’
‘Course 170, sir.’
Looking at his imperturbable first lieutenant, Mike knew that, despite appearances, Tony would already be worried about the conditions they might face when making their rendezvous. After all, he would be the officer going ashore in the dory to contact the four agents and eighteen airmen, now supposedly waiting on a small island to the west of L’Aber Wrac’h inlet. If Mike’s navigating officer could manage to find Le Petit Tuyau – a twisting and extremely narrow channel fringed by submerged rocks – they could anchor in the lee of Beguen Island, enabling Tony to steer for the beach without fear of his dory being swamped by breakers.
Luciole was not really large enough to carry back to England a party of more than twenty people in rough weather. In any case, her dory and smaller pram dinghy could, between them, only accommodate seven passengers at a time, necessitateing four journeys to the beach and back if the whole party were to be embarked. For this reason, an MGB was keeping station a few cables to starboard. To start with, the gunboat would remain five miles offshore, while Luciole – less likely, in her Breton colours, to attract German interest – would go in close to locate the escapers. A signal on the secure S-phone radio link would then summon the gunboat and her launch to collect the airmen, while Luciole took on board the agents. Without the darkness, the blacked out buoys, the enemy forts, and the reef-strewn approaches, the plan would have been almost straightforward.
As always at the start of a mission, Mike turned his back on all predictions. Instead, during successive crossings he strove to empty his mind and enter a state of impersonal watchfulness. From this mental sanctuary, only a change in the engines’ rhythm, an unexplained light or shape, could rouse him to action. But, as dusk fell – and the two Beaufighters that had given daylight air cover flew northwards – Mike’s anxieties about Andrea denied him his usual inner calm. By offering to tell her son about them in the summer, she would only have meant to prove the strength of her love. But since his own future was so uncertain, her pledge merely reminded him of this.
Living from day to day was the best Mike could manage, and what was wrong with that? Thoughts of the moonlit school room and the touch of her pale smooth body made him feel weak with happiness, even standing in the cramped wheelhouse with the bulky coxswain by his side and the smell of bilge water in his nostrils.
Two months earlier, Mike had brought back his first boatload of airmen from France. As British raids on the U-boat pens at Lorient intensified, more and more bombers were shot down over Brittany. Soon Mike’s rescue missions doubled. The ramifications were endless, and not just for him. Local farmers were stretched to the limit concealing these dangerous airborne guests from the Gestapo. Agents and resistance groups suffered from increased German vigilance. And when life became more hazardous for returning agents, it became more hazardous for Mike. For everyone’s sake, the airmen had to be rescued as quickly as possible. The more they were ferried about from barn to barn, the greater the chances of a dropped cap or brass button betraying them. And if that happened, their rescuers could easily sail into a storm of gunfire on the rendezvous beach.
At the back of the wheelhouse, Mike pulled back the curtain concealing his navigator’s fat but neurotically restless figure. Over the chart table a bulb burned almost as dimly as the glow from the helmsman’s compass. As usual, Tom Bruce had prepared a graph of the heights above or below water of the major rocks on their track at different times. In a few hours, when Mike saw white foam boiling close to the ship’s hull, he would put his trust in his navigator, unless Pierre Norbert became hysterical. In which case Tom, who was on excellent terms with the Breton, would still demand angrily of Mike whether he preferred the opinions of ‘an ignorant French fisherman’ to those of a man who had been navigating officer on a destroyer.
Shortly before midnight, the bridge lookout thrust his head round the wheelhouse door.
‘Light flashing Red 30, sir.’
Mike noted down a bearing and handed it back to Tom, who replied, almost without hesitation, ‘Ile Corce lighthouse.’
Everyone in the wheelhouse was now keeping an eye out to starboard, knowing very well that the Germans only permitted lighthouses to function when they had a convoy on the move.
‘Why not take a rest?’ Mike murmured to Tony, who would be leaving within the hour.
‘I’d rather not.’
Mike understood his feelings. Commanding Luciole’s two small boats demanded not only good judgement but a liberal helping of luck. The two men ventured onto the bridge and saw the swell racing along an outlying reef like a white sea snake. ‘You’ll be fine behind Beguen Island,’ insisted Mike.
Tony shrugged. ‘If our party-goers actually turn out to be there.’
‘They’ll be on Runiou if they’re not.’
‘That’s a great comfort,’ remarked Tony drily.
Mike did not answer. He knew as well as Tony that there were three German blockhouses guarding the foreshore opposite Runiou, and that the tide-race between the two islands frightened even local fishermen. Though Tony would be taking a compass (inside a condom to keep it dry) and a waxed chart, these would be useless in the dark, with rain squalls reducing visibility to a few yards. Even with the help of night glasses, the two men could barely make out the coast.
The agreed signal from the airmen and agents would be a blue light, spelling out the letter ‘R’ in morse. Though whether, in the heat of the moment, the correct signal would be given – and whether an incorrect one should actually be ignored – were matters which would soon be out of the hands of those left behind on the trawler.
Not trusting his echo-sounder, Mike ordered a seaman into the bows with a sounding line. The depth was three fathoms as they turned south-east of Beguen with both engines reduced to 600 rpm. The message relayed from the bows, seconds later, was two fathoms.
‘Slow ahead both,’ Mike cried into the engine room voicepipe.
The next depth from the leadsman was one and a half fathoms. On a falling tide they could go no further; Tony would not be sheltered by the mass of Beguen after all.
‘Stop both engines,’ ordered Mike and then, after the answering clangs, ‘Let go.’
As the anchor slipped away silently on its coir-grass rope, Tom clamped the rubber-cupped earphones of the hydrophone to his head and listened. Suddenly, his expression changed.
‘Fast-moving diesels to the north-west,’ he sighed, handing Mike the earphones.
Mike listened with a sick feeling in his stomach. ‘Uneven beat,’ he muttered. ‘Must be two or more.’
‘I guess they’re the outer screen of a convoy,’ said Tony. ‘The one they lit the lighthouse for.’ Neither he nor anyone else wanted to admit the possibility that these E-boats might be operating alone. If they were, they were probably already homing in on the MGB. When Tony left the bridge to join his waiting boat crews, Mike continued listening, hoping in vain to hear the deeper sounds of a convoy. A blazing burst of starshell, out to sea, ended his hopes. When Mike relinquished the headphones he could hear with his own ears the unmistakable mutter of distant E-boats. A moment later, gunfire echoed beyond the islands: a cacophony of six-pounders, 20-mm Oerlikons and Lewis guns. Even if the MGB was lucky enough to give the E-boats the slip, she would almost certainly be damaged and therefore unable to do anything further on this mission. Luciole would be on her own then, and every man on board was praying that the E-boats’ commanders would not start searching for companion vessels.
As a large searchlight swept the sea north-east of Beguen, Tony reappeared wear
ing a naval cap and a uniform coat under his life jacket. It consoled Mike to know that, if caught, members of his boat crews would not be executed, this fate being reserved for everyone on the trawler in their fishermen’s clothing. Yet their French identity had to be kept up at all costs. If an E-boat challenged Luciole while her boats were ashore, Pierre would shout back in French, claiming to have lost touch with other fishing boats due to mechanical trouble. The searchlight was still moving, illuminating rocks and islands.
‘Better wait and see what the Germans do at Penhir Fort,’ Mike told Tony. This blockhouse had a field of fire commanding the channel behind Beguen, and was armed with a 76-mm cannon.
After five minutes, the firing at sea stuttered to a halt, and no sound came from the blockhouse. The fainter hydrophone noise suggested the E-boats were moving away to the north. Whether they had sunk the MGB or were still pursuing it, Mike had no means of knowing, since his R/T operator was getting nothing on the S-phone link. Ten minutes later the searchlight went out and Mike ordered the boats to be launched.
When they were lowered there were no words of farewell. Silence on deck was a firm rule, with all lights banned, including cigarettes. Steep waves were piling up as the tide flowed out past Beguen and met a freshening wind. Mike smiled down at Tony in the dory, then waved to Petty Officer Ginnery in the dinghy. Tony was taking two ratings as oarsmen, and had a leading seaman in the bows, clutching a sub-machine-gun. In the smaller boat, two oarsmen completed Ginnery’s crew. The rowlocks had been oiled and muffled, and both boats moved away silently.
However many missions Mike went on, it never got any easier waiting for his boats to return. The longer the wait, the worse the strain. The absence of pounding feet on the decks and the unfamiliar silence in galley and engine room always got on his nerves. Staring landwards, he glimpsed heavy vehicles crawling along the coast road and prayed that enemy troops were not gathering.
Fear licked at Luciole’s hull and rolled under her like an evil reptile. Everyone on board knew that their lives were in the hands of the landing party. If they could manage to avoid detection, no searchlight would snap into revealing brilliance; no bursts of tracer rip across the water, leaving Luciole’s decks running like a butcher’s counter. Everything depended on those few men out there in the darkness.
When the boats came in sight again, they were tiny specks, low in the water, battling a wind that moaned in the trawler’s rigging and flung spray from the caps of the waves. For an age, the two dots appeared to make no progress, but the last of the tide was still with them and they came on steadily. As they bumped alongside at last, the oarsmen sagged forward, exhausted. Tony had managed to cram into the dory five unshaven men wearing odd remnants of flying kit, bizarrely augmented with berets and filthy overcoats. Several carried the forks and baskets which had helped to disguise them as seaweed gatherers. In the dinghy sat three of the four agents looking more shaken and emotional than the airmen, who, by now, were cheerfully climbing the scramble nets onto the trawler’s afterdeck.
‘No talking till you’re below,’ mouthed Mike in a stage whisper. The way these men thought themselves safe now that they were in the hands of the navy both touched and irritated him. Their relief was wholly understandable; but, since they must have been told that the wind was blowing straight towards German gun emplacements, their chattering was absurdly irresponsible.
Before rowing away again to pick up more airmen, Tony chose fresh oarsmen for both his boats.
‘Wind’s getting up,’ said Mike, leaning out above Tony’s bobbing dory, wishing he knew how to convey his affection without making the moment harder.
‘Crikey! Is it really?’ muttered Tony.
‘The tide turns in half an hour, so don’t expect any help from that quarter after that.’
‘We’ll do what we can, skip.’
They were both speaking in forced whispers. Mike said, ‘Have you considered putting four oarsmen in the dory and towing the dinghy?’
‘She’d swing too much in this wind.’
Mike nodded. ‘You may be right. Where are the rest of the grey jobs?’
‘On bloody Runiou, worse luck.’
‘Turn back at once if your rowers are tiring. That’s an order.’
‘Sir!’ A hand raised in mock salute.
Mike ignored this. ‘Bloody well come back, okay, and don’t take all night about it.’
For the next half-hour, Mike was crushed by pessimistic presentiments. But, to his joy, the boats returned only a little more slowly than on the first trip, having taken full advantage of the slack before the tide turned. All the agents were now on the trawler, and half the airmen. They agreed to return one more time.
At three in the morning, Mike was still waiting for the boats to reappear, and blaming himself bitterly for having let Tony go again. He stood alone just aft of the galley, leaning against one of the gallows on which trawl nets were suspended when not in use. With his binoculars fixed on the strait between Beguen and Runiou, it scared him to see no trace of either boat. Squalls were tossing up larger waves, forcing him to consider starting an engine to take the strain off his coir-grass anchor line. If it came to this, he would certainly regret not having used a heavy anchor chain. It would be horribly ironic to have avoided a few seconds of metallic rattling only to find himself dependent on a noisy engine for several hours.
A translucent glow was lighting the eastern horizon by the time Mike finally spotted his boats. Both vessels were side by side, and, through his glasses, he saw a man being transferred from the dinghy to the dory. He lowered his binoculars sadly. Tony had decided to sacrifice the larger boat to give the smaller a better chance of returning. Already perilously low in the water, the dory, with Tony aboard, was blown back behind Pen ar Guarc’h reef towards the dunes. The water there was too shallow for Mike to risk bringing Luciole in to assist them. He could have wept with frustration. If Tony and his sailors were not drowned, or shot, or taken prisoner, they would have to be rescued within the next ten days, along with the remaining airmen.
Waves were breaking over the dinghy, but somehow she kept inching closer to Luciole. What this effort was costing the oarsmen Mike tried not to imagine. Sensing that the little boat was wavering, he ran to the wheelhouse where he gave the order to start both engines and weigh anchor.
By the time the men on Luciole’s foredeck could throw a line to the dinghy, she was sinking. Mike broke his rule of silence and used the ship’s tannoy to order every sailor out on deck to pull the men up the nets, and hoist the waterlogged vessel aboard. If that dinghy sank here, she would probably be washed ashore, handing the Germans evidence of the navy’s visit, and advance notice of their inevitable return. The dory ought not to pose the same problem, since Tony would bury her in the dunes if he could stay long enough on the beach. After the engagement with the gunboat, the Germans would be searching every beach and cove for evidence of a landing.
Dreading the interview he would soon be having with Tony’s grief-stricken Elspeth, Mike gave his orders to the helmsman almost absentmindedly as Luciole entered Le Petit Tuyau. Imagining the woman’s angry tears, he felt almost relaxed about the possibility of meeting E-boats beyond the rocks. But bowel-loosening fear soon reasserted itself. Nothing could rival the fear of imminent death.
Soon after dawn, the protective cloud layer blew away, but the sky remained as empty of danger as the sea. And when Luciole’s air escort joined her seventy miles south of the Lizard, only the irrepressible vomiting of several airmen was spoiling the celebratory mood below decks.
*
Mike walked into the Polwherne Hotel shortly before eleven in the morning, after a night entirely without sleep. He felt like a diver in an invisible diving suit, weighted down and distanced from the world around him. As he was sitting in his office, waiting to give Captain Borden a preliminary report, he slipped into a deep sleep that ended abruptly when his telephone rang. The Wren operator was telling him she had a Dr Pauling on the
line.
‘Do you want to speak to him, sir?’
Mike couldn’t think who the hell this doctor was, until, like the flash of a 6-inch gun, the answer scorched his mind.
‘Put him through,’ he sighed, not wanting to speak to Andrea’s husband but knowing he would not sleep unless he did.
‘That you, Harrington?’
‘Speaking.’
‘I’m back in the village this evening, so what about coming over for a spot of lunch tomorrow?’
‘If Mrs Pauling doesn’t mind.’
‘Why on earth should she?’
‘Well, if you both want me …’
‘Right then. That’s settled.’ A slight pause. ‘I was thinking that the boys might find it amusing if you could bring over a bosun’s chair. We could rig it up between a couple of trees in the garden.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Noon tomorrow.’
‘Fine.’
Mike pounded both his fists on his desk like a child in a rage. Not because he still did not know whether the MGB had limped into another port, and not because Tony might be lying dead on the sand with the waves breaking over him. No, he was distraught because Andrea’s husband was coming home today, stopping her getting away tonight to make love to him. Mike rested his forehead against the table and groaned.