by David Black
Thuddudd!
Harry felt that one up through his sea boots; Scourge coming off the crest of the last wave with a particularly heavy belly flop. It was the thing you noticed about filthy weather in the Med. For a sea supposedly as tranquil as it was compact, when it turned, it became a short, nasty little maelstrom – no long rolling seas to stretch you out. It was bam! bam! till you were punch drunk, and a wind pushing each wave higher with scant troughs between so that the crests toppled on you as often as they lifted you.
Which was why he’d had his chat with Mr Petrie, the warrant engineer, about what they’d do when this bastard really got going if they were going to keep running on the surface. Harry squinted across a wide, dark waste of water that was becoming increasingly spume-streaked even as he watched. Funny thing about the sea; it could be vast and empty, but it could cocoon you too. Here they were in the middle of a war – a terrible war engulfing nearly the whole world – wherever the hands stood on the clock or at whatever angle stood the sun or moon in the sky, somewhere there was disintegration, suffering, death across all of Europe, Russia, the Far East, the Pacific. But right now, on their little cockleshell – a speck with not even a gull or a star for company, all alone in the teeth of a storm – life was exhilarating. He was clinging to the bridge screen as they climbed and bucked and shouldered wave crests aside in welters of spray and wind – warm wind, not the knifing you got in the North Sea or Atlantic – here he really was. Not really thinking about anything – not the war, nor the Bonny Boy, or Katty running off with a Yank, or even the defaulters’ list his boat had accumulated from her stay in Algiers, that he still hadn’t worked through – just alive in the moment, enjoying himself here, on this little patch of water, right now, plunging deep into enemy waters, on their way to contribute their own little penny’s worth to the whole bloody conflagration, and he was having fun.
Within an hour, the storm was upon them. Right back to when he used to crew on rich men’s yachts, Harry had loved it when it came on to blow. He never got sick, but not all his crew shared his constitution. And he shuddered a silly-grinned shudder when he thought how quickly it would be getting squalid down below. He especially felt for poor Staff Sgt Reynolds. Most of the time, the crew would be there to help, for Jack was usually the most compassionate of creatures when they had aboard as guests those not fortunate enough to be sailors; until you got a really good blow. Then all their care and attention went into holding on themselves, and their solicitousness ended up in the scuppers along with the contents of their own guts. Not all sailors were ‘good’ sailors, not even the experienced ones.
Farrar, the Jimmy, had already ordered the ‘birdbath’ shipped – a device like a child’s paddling pool, fashioned out of canvas, that sat beneath the lower conning tower hatch to trap all the seawater that came flooding down every time a wave broke over the bridge, except that it never quite managed all of the water so that everyone in the control room knew they were in for a drenching, just as if they’d been upstairs on watch.
Not that anyone cared about the drenching, but water getting into the boat’s electrics and instruments was another matter, a real danger if the drain from the birdbath wasn’t channelling the water into the bilges fast enough. Because you couldn’t just shut the conning tower hatch – that was how the diesels sucked down the air to fuel their combustion chambers. Shut the hatch, and her two 1900 horsepower diesels would have had all the air out the boat in a matter of seconds.
But in a storm like this one was shaping up to be, you were definitely going to get big green ones coming over, so big you were going to have to shut the hatch. Which was why Harry had agreed a scheme with Petrie for him to have a stoker permanently watching the engine room barometer for the second it started to move – which it would, rapidly, if the hatch was shut – and then he’d automatically shut down the diesels and either clutch in the electric motors or wait one and then immediately blast in high-pressure air to blow-start the whole shebang again. There’d be no bothering with the engine room telegraph, wasting seconds ringing back acknowledgements.
Down below, from the bounce and clang of his deck plates, Warrant Engineer Petrie was already expecting the first yell from the stoker to ‘stop together!’.
On the bridge, Harry had clipped on his safety harness to stop himself being washed overboard and ordered Harding and one of the lookouts below. So it was just him and Leading Seaman Frear left to mind the shop. Not that they were ever likely to see anything in this; the entire Italian battlefleet could probably have passed within a mile of them and they’d have been none the wiser.
The walls of water, with only the streaked foam and residue of phosphorescence picking out their height, were coming faster and furiouser now. In a matter of mere minutes, Harry watched as it all passed from being a joyride to something far more serious.
Scourge was shouldering the sea as it rolled in on her at angle, just behind the starboard fore-planes, so she was corkscrewing, at times wildly. The sea state had become so bad, it was now no longer safe to continue on a heading that cut across the waves. Scourge was in danger of rolling so far beyond acceptable limits that serious damage must inevitably occur. Altering into the run of the sea was now the only option. He leaned into the voicepipe and called a course change to starboard. His order was heard through a welter of water coming down the pipe that soaked the helmsman below.
On the bridge right then, if you could have seen Harry’s face through the plaster of spray and his chin tucked into his Ursula suit, you would have seen a rueful grin as he reflected on the quiet complacence he’d been feeling a mere half an hour ago, as he’d been absently contemplating this man he’d become, the certain smug pride he’d been feeling that here he was exercising command at sea in wartime, aboard one of His Majesty’s submarines. Whereas the only feeling he was conscious of right now was fright. And bloody right too. It was getting pretty damned hairy! Which was another funny old thing about the sea – how it put you in your place whenever it felt like it.*
Scourge was forced to run far to the east-south-east during the night in order to keep her head into the seas. She was well away from where she should have been for a nice, quiet, submerged daylight run through the Straits of Otranto and into the Adriatic. Daylight now had revealed a vast, spume-streaked waste, with sea and sky leached of all colour. The wind had abated and the wave crests were less scrunched together so that the boat felt like she was riding them instead of being thrown, violently, from one to the other.
Harry had opted to not dive at dawn, as would have been standard operating procedure. He’d decided to stay surfaced for a while yet, finding it hard to imagine any Regia Aeronautica pilots would’ve been keen to get airborne in all this, let alone to fly through it to this dead-end corner of the Ionian Sea.
The main reason was the state of the boat. She had emerged from the storm with a bit of a bashing, and the crew had taken a bit of a bashing too. Two dislocated shoulders, six sailors with bruised or cracked ribs, and there was an urgent necessity to begin pumping bilges because of all the vomit sloshing around in them.
Also, they’d been pumping amps out of the batteries all through the night. Although Scourge had sailed from Malta with a full charge, she’d had to go to motors on numerous occasions during the storm, the conning tower hatch having to be firmly shut to stop waves flooding the control room. That had burned amps at a hell of a rate. They had also been depleting their HP air tanks. Every time he had to start the diesels again, Mr Petrie had to fire yet another blast of HP just to get the crankshaft turning. And he’d had to do it a lot. Also, seawater had shorted out the main blower which meant that in order to maintain full buoyancy, the ballast tanks had required frequent blasts of HP air too, further draining this precious commodity. Which was making Mr Petrie concerned because having full HP air bottles wasn’t just a luxury. That was what you used to blow the water out your ballast tanks when you wanted to surface.
So every time he started the
diesels, he had to parcel out the power, not only to turn the propellers and drive the boat but to recharge the batteries and power the pumps that recharged the HP air bottles too.
Mr Petrie hadn’t said anything, he never would, but Harry had the sense he was thinking this young skipper was flogging the poor old boat harder than was wise.
When the sun was well up, they could no longer avoid diving. Below now, Harry sat with Mr Petrie’s scribbled calculations before him on the wardroom table, and Mr Petrie sat watching him, cradling a cup of coffee which Harry had ordered the wardroom steward to load with a shot of brandy. Mr Petrie had smeared his face clean before coming for’ard from the engine room, but it was still the usual impassive wall beneath the same greasy watch cap. Harry was glad his first lieutenant, Nick Farrar was on watch in the control room, sparing him any furrow-browed disapproval over Mr Petrie’s overalls and the oily mess they were making of the wardroom banquettes. The only sound was navigator Miles Harding’s light snoring from the curtained bunk across the passage.
The calculations were all to do with how long it was going to take to get the batteries and the HP air bottles fully recharged.
‘There’s no answer to it,’ said Harry. ‘We’re just going to have to skulk about for a day getting everything topped off before we go for the straits.’
Enough flogging, he was saying to Mr Petrie. Mr Petrie acknowledged the gesture with a brief nod.
A chart of the Ionian Sea was spread over the table, and Harry sketched an imaginary circle on it about a hundred miles west-nor’-west of Zante. He told Mr Petrie this was where he intended to surface at nightfall and start all the charging they’d need to get all the dials pointing in the right direction. To the north, the fifty-mile gap between Italy and the coast of Albania was definitely a submarine choke point and well patrolled by the Italians, even at night. So they’d need to keep well clear to do all this charging. Then it would be a matter of a last-minute surface dash before dawn so as to close the Straits of Otranto before diving for the run through. Mr Petrie nodded again. But all Harry was thinking now was delay, delay, delay. He was never going to make his rendezvous at the top of the Adriatic now. It was like fate was conspiring to confirm all the bad things he imagined the Bonny Boy must be saying about him, how he could never just obey orders, never get anything right.
Mr Petrie took his figures and went aft again, and Harry sat back gazing into space. He could have done with a game of uckers to take his mind off everything. But Farrar was on watch, Harding was out for the count and young Tom McCready, his RNVR sub lieutenant, was for’ard overseeing the re-securing of the stores stacked around the torpedo reload racks after the buffeting they’d taken.
McCready was his new guns‘n’torps officer now since the Bonny Boy had taken Powell off him and sent him off to be Jimmy on another boat. Lt Jeremy Powell RN had deserved the promotion, but by God he missed him. Life had been so much smoother with four officers under him, not just three.
The euphoria he’d felt earlier, battering into the start of the storm, had evaporated. As had the relief that he’d finally made it out of the Bonny Boy’s clutches. Scourge’s return to Algiers after that last patrol had been like sailing down Alice’s rabbit hole. Captain Bonalleck hadn’t bothered to come on deck to welcome Scourge back from engaging the enemy. Only his deputy, Cdr Sam Bridger had been there with a friendly wave. That wasn’t right. It was the sort of thing crews couldn’t help but notice. And when Harry had stepped into the ‘Captain S’ office on Ellann Vanin to deliver his patrol report, Captain Bonalleck had actually made him stand while he’d delivered a vicious, forensic bollocking. Before he’d even heard the report’s details. Making one of his flotilla COs stand after returning from patrol? And bollocking him? It was… unheard of, even if Lt Gilmour had made a balls-up. Everybody made balls-ups. At least he’d brought his boat back safe. There’d always be another patrol.
And then, nothing. Smiles all round, drinks in the wardroom, no mention of past patrols or of any bollockings. As if nothing had happened. Harry remembered the unreality. Everybody had known about that bollocking. Christ, they’d probably heard it. How the Captain S had accused Gilmour to his face of deliberately ‘failing’ to follow orders. But that wasn’t all. To make matters worse, the scuttlebutt was that there hadn’t been any ‘orders’ in the first place, at least not written ones. An atmosphere permeated the flotilla. There was this overwhelming sense that the world had somehow stopped being as it should be. The other flotilla officers were twitchy, everybody was walking on eggshells. Something was definitely ‘up’. And if that wasn’t enough, the eternally laughing and joking Sam Bridger was always looking pensive every time he saw Harry.
The crew were ‘off’ too. They’d hardly been trotted up when the defaulters’ list had been opened for business. All the usual nonsense – brawling with depot ship crew and lads off other boats keen to intrude on their personal grief that the Captain S had it in for them, drunkenness, and one usually demure leading torpedoman who’d kept losing his cap every time he’d stepped onto a gangway. You weren’t allowed to let your cap go over the wall, even if it was only the wind to blame; there was a charge for that.
‘And then there’s our dexterous friend, Leading Seaman Cross,’ Lt Harding had added when presenting Harry with the latest list. ‘He’s had a busy night.’
‘Red’ Cross, the helmsman who’d helped him put the torpedoes through that tiny harbour gap at Monte Carlo.
‘Oh God,’ said Harry. ‘What’s he done now?’ Sighing, because Cross was becoming as dab a hand at trouble, as he was at conning the boat.
‘Oh, the usual,’ said Harding, unable to suppress a wry grin. ‘Drunk and uncatchable.’
Harry didn’t want to think about it anymore. He started folding the chart.
*
Two hundred-odd miles behind him, back on Malta, Captain Simpson, the S10, was staring at paperwork on his own desk: two signals, one from C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet and the other from the Admiralty in London. The first was seeking ‘clarification and comment’ on an attached signal from Captain S12. On the face of it, the language of S12’s signal was dry and cold, but in naval context, the bloody thing was practically hysterical. It was a litany of accusations against Lt Harris John Gilmour RNVR, officer commanding HMS Scourge, so long and laborious that they just blended into noise before his eyes. Apart from the conclusion, that this officer should be put before a court martial. No wonder C-in-C Med wanted a ‘clarification and comment’ from Lt Gilmour’s current CO.
Except the second signal said that Shrimp was no longer Harry’s current CO; it was appointing him Commodore, Western Approaches, and ordering him to Londonderry to command all the North Atlantic convoy escorts based there. He stared at both signals. The first was confirmation enough, if it had been needed, of Shrimp’s early instincts that he should be getting Scourge and her ‘hot potato’ skipper well out of the way, quick time. Which was why he’d packed him off on that cloak-and-dagger op, all the way up the Adriatic, with all that haste he hadn’t needed.
In the usual run of things, he’d have assigned Scourge to one of those the COPP teams he’d been saddled with, shuttling them back and forth to the Sicilian beaches in preparation for the Operation Husky landings. The COPPs – Combined Operations Pilotage Parties – were back and forward every night, charting potential landing grounds for the landing craft, with the subs carrying them, having to close with the enemy coast to launch and collect their canoes – all highly risky stuff. But as the boats involved were all operating close to base, they were eminently recallable. And Shrimp hadn’t wanted Scourge recallable, her crew here to be questioned, at least not until he’d worked out what had really led to Harry’s decision to withdraw to Malta after that last patrol and not obey S 12’s orders to return to Algiers.
The second signal made it imperative that he do that now, and quickly. That was when he had his idea.
Chief Petty Officer Gault. Shrimp knew him from
way back on the China Station. In fact, had been good friends with him in the way relatively junior officers could be with their senior rates in the trade. The reason he was thinking about him now was because Shrimp had had him sitting right there, opposite him, a mere couple of weeks ago – Gault straight off the cruiser that had brought him to Malta, clutching his orders appointing him HMS Talbot’s boatswain, Talbot being the official name of Tenth Flotilla’s ‘stone frigate’ base.
And because Shrimp also remembered that Gault had been aboard the unfortunate Pelorus when she’d been rammed and sunk by a British merchant ship early in the war, along with a certain Sub Lt Harry Gilmour, and that their boat had been commanded at the time by the legendary Bonny Boy Bonalleck. There was no doubt in Shrimp’s mind that it was wrong to do what he was thinking – just not done, un-naval, beyond every custom, against all norms of discipline and command – but Shrimp was going to do it anyway. He was going to get his old friend and shipmate up here, pour him a glass of brandy and ask him outright if he had any idea what the bloody hell was going on between that old bastard Bonalleck and one of the best young submarine COs in the Med.
Four
‘I was thinking we might as well use the time to rig for Sunday service,’ said Harry, sprawled out on the wardroom banquette, cradling his cup of coffee. ‘Then I can tell the crew where we’re taking Sergeant Reynolds and his radios. Let them know the reason we’re crashing the Adriatic, then give them a sing-song to take their mind off it. What d’you think?’
Harding sat up and leaned over the far end of the wardroom table. He’d been reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy before Harry had interrupted him, Harry thinking as he contemplated Harding’s choice of book that really the chap was never done confounding him.