Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  The wing commander got up from his chair. “We’ll have to get along,” he said. “Come on. We’ll talk down to the Transport.”

  Chambers said, “May I go and get my coat sir?”

  “Yes — be quick.” The boy turned to leave the room. Dickens called after him, “Bring a torch, if you’ve got one — the battery’s run out in mine. Can’t get about the Dockyard without a torch in the blackout.”

  “I’ll bring mine, sir.”

  He left the room, and managed to slink in unnoticed through the back door of the mess to fetch his coat. In the office that he had left the wing commander put on his own coat. Then he turned to the squadron leader.

  “It doesn’t look so good,” he said.

  Petersen shook his head. “It doesn’t.” He turned to the other. “Be careful you don’t get him rattled,” he said. “He’s a good lad, you know. I should be surprised if he’d made a mistake like this.”

  The wing commander bit his lip. “It’s the Navy I’m afraid of. They’re liable to tear him in pieces.”

  The squadron leader nodded ruefully. They left the office and walked down towards the transport yard; a car was waiting for them there. The squadron leader said:

  “I suppose that notice about not bombing submarines this afternoon was because Caranx was coming in?”

  “Yes.” The wing commander hesitated. “I suppose I should have made it clearer.”

  “We usually do let the pilots know what’s going on,” the squadron leader said deferentially.

  The wing commander bit his lip, and they walked on in silence. He had framed his notice in that way because he had been irritated with Hooper, because he thought that the junior officers were getting insubordinate and should be disciplined to concentrate solely upon the job that they were told to do. He reflected that his instructions had been carried out to the letter. Chambers was blameless, technically. The notice had said that no submarine was to be bombed in Area SM up till 1530; the action had taken place at 1541 according to the trawler’s signal. Caranx, if it was she who had sunk, was late upon her schedule; she should have passed that spot an hour before.

  Still, if the pilot had known Caranx was expected he might have taken special care . . .

  That was absurd. You couldn’t fight a war if every order had to be explained, to everybody. In this thing the whole fault lay with the Navy. If Caranx was dangerously late upon her schedule she should have sent a signal; he could have changed his orders then.

  His heart sank as he contemplated the future. If Caranx really had been sunk there were the makings of a blazing row that would go straight up to the Cabinet.

  Chambers was waiting for him at the car; they got into the back seat together in the utter darkness and were driven into Portsmouth. They said very little on the drive. The flying officer was frightened and confused. He was not certain of himself. He was sure in his own mind that the submarine he had sunk was not a British ship; he could not satisfy himself with proof. Once Dickens said, “You’re quite sure that you saw the hydrovanes?”

  The boy said, “I saw one of them, sir — the port one at the bow. It was painted grey — not coloured, like ours are.”

  “But you saw it properly — clear of the water?”

  “It had water on it, sir. But I saw the colour of the paint.”

  “You’re quite sure of that, Chambers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They relapsed into silence again. The wing commander sat brooding in his corner. Ten minutes later he said, “How did you know which area you were in?”

  The flying officer explained the steps that he had taken. The wing commander nodded in the darkness; it was reasonable. Still, it was very near the knuckle. The pilot reckoned he was two miles to the east of Area TM, but two miles wasn’t much deviation in the thirty miles that he had flown from his last known position. The older officer was sick with apprehension. If this thing had occurred in Area TM their goose was cooked. The trawler evidently had not known where she was, for she had signalled Area SM/TM.

  The car drew up to the Dockyard gate and put them down; no cars could move about the Dockyard in the blackout. That rule had been made for safety, following on the discovery of a terribly battered car upon the concrete bottom of an empty dry dock, with two dead naval officers in it. They were stopped at the gate by the Dockyard police, who telephoned to Captain Burnaby for authority to pass them through.

  Inside the Dockyard the darkness was intense. The wing commander said, “Got that torch?”

  Chambers pulled out the rabbit lamp, and lit it. The white rabbit glowed luminous in the darkness; by its light they made their way over railway lines and between railway trucks, past docks lined with empty, deserted ships, past the caissons of dry docks sheltering the monstrous bulk of great vessels ablaze with welding torches and vibrant with the clatter of the riveters. Presently they turned down a quiet alleyway and came to the Georgian building where their meeting was to take place.

  Captain Burnaby occupied an office of an antique style. It was a tall, white-painted room, with high windows between straight white columns with clean, vertical lines. It was a room that had heard the affairs of many frigate captains in its day. It was still redolent of them. The framed charts upon the wall themselves were anything up to a hundred years old; a coal fire burned brightly in the Georgian grate. A modern touch was given by the battery of telephones upon a wide, old-fashioned desk.

  There were three naval officers in the room, who came forward from the fire as the two Air Force officers came in. Captain Burnaby said grimly,

  “Good evening, gentlemen. We’ve been waiting for you. Wing Commander Dickens — this is Commander Rutherford, from Blockhouse. And Lieutenant Commander Dale.”

  Dickens bowed slightly. He said, “This is Flying Officer Chambers.”

  The captain moved towards a green baize covered table, laid out with paper and pencils for a conference. “This is not a formal meeting,” he said succinctly. “But I think we shall get on more quickly if we take it as such.” He seated himself at the head of the table, in the position of a chairman, and motioned to the wing commander to take the seat at his right. Chambers hurried to sit down beside the wing commander, leaving his hat upon the captain’s desk with the lamp inside it. The other naval officers sat on the captain’s left.

  For a moment Chambers studied the naval officers, and his heart sank. The massive, square-cut features of the captain were set in a grim mould; the iron-grey hair and the bushy eyebrows were those of a martinet, a hard, efficient man. In comparison, he thought he saw a gleam of kindliness and understanding, even of sympathy, in the appearance of Commander Rutherford from Fort Blockhouse, the submarine depot. The last of the three was a dour, scornful young man with raised eyebrows.

  Burnaby said, “Well now, gentlemen, we’re here to get the facts of what occurred this afternoon. That’s the first thing, before we can decide what action we must take.” He turned to the commander from the Submarine Depot. “Rutherford, will you tell us first what orders Caranx had?”

  The commander said, “She had orders to proceed here from Harwich, sir.”

  “Quite so. On the surface, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes. She wouldn’t dive unless there was a very good reason for it. She was coming round to have—” He checked himself.

  The captain said, “I don’t think that’s material.” He turned to Dickens. “She was coming back for certain work to be done.”

  The wing commander nodded.

  The captain turned again to Rutherford. “Now, tell us her scheduled route and times.”

  The commander took a paper from his attaché case and laid it on the table. “This is the operation order I made out,” he said. “It’s rather long.” He turned its pages over. “She was due to pass from Area SL to Area SM at 1430, and from Area SM to Area TM at 1500. In the order for closing the areas against attack I gave her half-an-hour margin each way on those times.” He paused, and then said, “She sho
uld have passed the Gate between 1600 and 1615. If she was later than that she’d have to anchor in the Roads.”

  The captain said, “Exactly.” He picked up the sheets of buff typewritten paper, and glanced them over rapidly. “This is a copy of what you sent me. Yes.” He scrutinized the list of copies sent out at the head of one page. “I see. And this sheet went to Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force.”

  He turned to Dickens, and put the paper before him. “This is the sheet that you received, Wing Commander?”

  Dickens nodded. “That’s right.”

  The naval officer, pressing his point home, passed the paper to Chambers. “And you saw this before you went out on patrol?”

  The pilot took the paper. It began with a short statement that a British submarine was to proceed upon the surface in a westerly direction. Then followed a string of areas and times restricting submarine attack.

  The pilot said, “I’ve never seen this.”

  Captain Burnaby’s mouth set into a thin, hard line; the bushy eyebrows drew together. He stared grimly at the young man. He said, “Can you explain that, please?”

  The pilot blushed, and hesitated. Dickens interposed.

  “You saw a shortened version of it on the notice board?”

  Chambers said, “Yes, sir. I took a copy of it in my notebook.”

  Rutherford said, “I don’t see how it could be made much shorter than it is.”

  The captain said mercilessly, “In what way was the notice that you saw different from this sheet, Mr. Chambers?”

  The young man said, “It was the same, I think, except for these first sentences.” He pointed to the typescript.

  The wing commander said, “I think that’s right. We left out that for secrecy.”

  The naval captain stared at him for a minute. He was about to say that he was not accustomed to his orders being hacked about, but he thought better of it. Instead, he said to the pilot, “Was the notice that you saw intelligible to you, Mr. Chambers?”

  The flying officer hesitated. “I understood that no attacks were to be made in certain areas at certain times,” he said. “I didn’t know why.”

  The commander from the submarine depot leaned forward. “You didn’t know that one of our submarines was coming in, then?” he said kindly.

  The boy turned to him gratefully. “No, sir. I didn’t know that.”

  There was a tense, pregnant silence for a few moments. Then Captain Burnaby said, “Well, the Court of Enquiry will go into that, no doubt.”

  He picked up another paper from the table. “The signal from T. 383 gives 1541 as the time of the attack, in Area SM/TM.”

  Chambers interposed. “It was definitely in Area SM, sir.”

  “That is what I want to hear about next, Mr. Chambers. If she was in Area SM you were clearly within your rights in attacking, subject to reasonable care. In Area TM you could not attack at all.”

  The boy said, “No, sir. But she was in Area SM all right.”

  The naval captain eyed him keenly. “How did you establish that?”

  “I set out the course and distance run from my last known position, on the chart, sir. She was a good two miles inside Area SM.”

  “Have you got the chart here?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  The sour-faced young lieutenant commander spoke up. “How far away was your last known position?”

  The pilot turned to him. “I made it about twenty-six sea miles.”

  Lieutenant Commander Dale raised his eyebrows slightly higher. “Two miles drift wouldn’t be much of an error in the sort of navigation that you do, would it? I don’t see how you can be so sure about the area.”

  Chambers said, “I wasn’t two miles out.”

  Dale shrugged his shoulders. “The trawler doesn’t seem to be so certain, or she wouldn’t have signalled Area SM/TM.”

  Burnaby turned to the pilot. “I take it that you plotted the position carefully, upon the chart.”

  The boy hesitated awkwardly. The three naval officers sat staring at him. At last he said, “I didn’t pencil the position in. You can’t do that when you’re flying the machine.”

  The captain said, “I understand you have a second pilot.”

  “I hadn’t got a second pilot today, sir. He’d gone sick.”

  Lieutenant Commander Dale spoke up again. “How did you do the chart work, then, if you couldn’t leave the helm?”

  “I had the chart on the seat beside me. I laid off the course and distance run with a parallel ruler.”

  The young naval officer’s upper lip curled slightly. “Working with one hand?”

  “Yes.”

  Dale turned to Captain Burnaby. “I don’t see any proof of the position here, sir,” he said sourly. “You might be anywhere, working like that.”

  The captain said, “I quite agree with you.”

  There was an awkward silence. The pilot stared at the glass ash-tray on the green baize tablecloth, flushed and miserable. He began to feel that they were all hostile to him; their minds were made up. He knew his navigation methods hadn’t been according to the book, but he had faith in his position. He was used to rapid chart work under difficulties.

  He tried to explain to them. He said, “I really don’t think I was two miles out in the position, sir. I made decent landfalls all through the patrol.”

  The young lieutenant commander raised bored eyebrows slightly higher. Rutherford, from Fort Blockhouse, nodded, but said nothing.

  Captain Burnaby said, “Well, the trawler buoyed the place, so we shall know before long where it actually happened. Now, Mr. Chambers, will you tell us just what occurred, from the time when you first saw the submarine until the moment when she sank.”

  The boy said, “I saw her first about two miles away. It was beginning to get dark. I couldn’t make out any detail — just that there was a submarine there. Then I went straight up into the cloud.”

  They sat staring at him, silent, as he told his story.

  The lieutenant commander, Dale, listened with all the overbearing confidence of youth. He had little knowledge of the Air Force, or of anything outside the Navy. He had entered at the age of fourteen and had lived in, and lived for, the Navy ever since. He was efficient. He hated inaccurate, slovenly work. He never made mistakes himself; they were unnecessary, beastly things. Only damn fools made mistakes. Here was this blushing, stammering young ass who had the insolence to say that he could work out a position accurately working with one hand upon a chart that was sliding about on a seat cushion. The result was that he had made mistakes — not one, but a whole flock of them, and one of them had caused the Caranx to be sunk. He listened in a cynical, cold rage.

  Rutherford listened sympathetically. He was closer to the disaster than the others. He knew all the officers of Caranx intimately, had messed with them for months. Most of his service life had been spent in submarines and he had known several disasters. He had come to realize this one only an hour before, but already he had accepted with a numbed acquiescence that never again would he meet Billy Parkinson, or play a round of golf with Stone, or drink a beer with Sandy Anderson. Presently he would have to write the letters, to Jo Parkinson and Dorothy Stone, and to Anderson’s mother at Dalry. From his experience he knew how these things happened. Good men, honest competent chaps, made a mistake — a hatch had been left open one time. As a young lieutenant he himself had very nearly sunk his own submarine by doing the wrong thing with a lavatory flush. If it were true that Caranx had been lost by this young pilot’s mistake, the fault was rather in the system that put such power into the hands of inexperienced young men. There was no blame in his mind for Chambers. He had been older than that when he had had his trouble with the lavatory.

  Captain Burnaby listened with a mind overlaid with policy. Throughout his service life the strategy and tactics of reconnaissance had been his specialty. He had been in destroyers for much of his time, and had risen to the command of a flotilla. Now he w
as in this shore job and in intimate liaison with the Royal Air Force. For the first time in his life he drew reports from a service that he did not control. He felt like a horse in blinkers. He could not reach out quickly and pull in his information as he had done all his life; he must ask another service if they would get it for him, and they would only do so if they had the time to spare, or so he felt. He was perpetually maddened and infuriated with the restraint. He believed with all his heart and soul that the existing system was totally wrong, that the aeroplanes patrolling the narrow seas should be under naval control, staffed by the Navy, part of the Fleet Air Arm. Most of the Admiralty, he knew, agreed with him. Dual control was inefficient, and mistakes were bound to happen. One of them had happened now, and a valuable unit of the Navy had been sunk by this young fool. Perhaps after this the Cabinet would listen to the Admiralty case. The Caranx was a bitter and a serious loss, but if through her the Navy were to gain control of its own air service she would not have been lost in vain.

  Dickens sat warily watching, sitting on the fence. He knew all that passed in the simple, direct mind of Captain Burnaby; he realized the political aspect of the matter to the full. He could not help his pilot and he did not much want to. If Chambers had really sunk the Caranx it was a bad show, a piece of inefficiency discreditable to the Royal Air Force. The pilot would have to suffer, as a matter of course. It was much more important that the relations of the Navy and the Air Force should not be impaired; in time of war there must be no internal quarrels. He knew the Navy wanted their own coastal patrol; he believed that they had too little experience of aeroplanes to take it over, especially in a time of war. Dickens sat quiet, watching the naval officers and their reactions, biding his time.

  They heard him to the end in silence; only from time to time the captain prompted him. He finished, and sat staring round at them unhappily. “That’s all I can remember,” he said at last.

  Captain Burnaby said, “I take it, then, you never saw the letters on the conning tower at all?”

  The pilot said, “No, sir — I didn’t. I never bothered about them once I saw that there was no identification marking on the hydrovanes.” He paused, and then said, “I did look for them once, but there was smoke all round the conning tower.”