‘Sir.’ Clark could think of nothing more appropriate to say.
‘Now,’ Tovey went on, ‘what you ought to know about is that we have every reason to suspect matters are moving forwards. I am sure you understand.’ Tovey paused.
‘I think so, sir, yes.’
‘Good. Well, suffice it to say that the enemy have moved the battleship Tirpitz into Norwegian waters. We may assume she is not alone.’
The importance of the news caused a contraction in Clark’s gut. ‘Quite so, sir.’
‘So, it seems to us that you should not delay in working-up. I require only a formal notification by the hand of an officer that you are in all respects ready for sea duty. I shall then inform the Admiralty. You will then receive your intelligence briefing from Captain Gifford; thereafter you shall proceed and act independently.’ Tovey paused and a note of irony crept into his voice. ‘You are not officially under my command, Clark. However, the only obligation I am laying upon you is a signal to the effect that you have not succeeded and that your failure exposes vessels under my command, whether they be men-of-war or merchant ships. D’you understand? The Admiralty will require the same intelligence, but I am most insistent that I am informed directly.’
‘Of course, sir. It is my understanding that I shall be making few transmissions, but that a failure requires a warning to be sent to both you and to the Admiralty.’
Tovey nodded. ‘Good.’ The commander-in-chief paused again and appeared to be making an assessment of Clark. Whatever his private thoughts the admiral concealed them and held out his hand. ‘Good luck, Clark.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Saluting, Clark retired and made his way back through the warren of steel passages until he emerged through the blackout on to the upper deck. He found himself too far forward and walked aft until he found his former guide on the quarterdeck. Three-quarters of an hour later the picket boat put him back aboard the Tyne, from where he made his way across to Sheba.
‘The officers are waiting for you, sir,’ Frobisher said as they exchanged salutes. ‘We’ve held tea.’
‘Oh, well then,’ Clark said, pleased at the consideration, ‘let’s get on with it.’
They made their way down to the wardroom and Clark accepted the cup of tea the steward handed him. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ Clark began, looking round at the faces of his officers, ‘I think it is time you began to understand something of what our purpose is. Most of you have already rumbled that something’s up, quite what is still secret, but I can tell you that we are bound on special service and that this will take us well to the north. I shall be drawing on stores of Arctic clothing for all of us and I am asking you all to give the matter of extreme conditions some consideration. You, Fridtjof,’ he said to Olsen, ‘will have to keep us as warm as you can and to ensure we’ve steam enough to clear off any ice accumulations. Now, I cannot at the moment tell you how long this trip will last, but we must also conserve fuel. If things become protracted we’ll have the opportunity to refuel, but in any operation of this nature it pays to be economical. Now, I don’t need to tell you that all our equipment must be in tip-top working order. We’ll be working-up in the next week or so, just as soon as the mods have been made here.’ He looked round again. ‘Any questions?’
‘Well, quite a few actually, sir, but mainly what are these “mods”?’
‘We’re to have two torpedo tubes fitted, Number One…’
‘Hence the torpedoes we’ve retained!’ put in Pearson, adding the non sequitur, ‘Now I understand why we’ve got all those bloody charts of the Barents Sea.’
‘For what do we go north, sir?’ Olsen asked.
The pertinence of the question struck them and Clark saw them all alerted by Olsen’s query.
‘I wish I could tell you,’ Clark dissembled, ‘but beyond saying that they’re arming us with torpedoes, I am unable to enlighten you.’
The silence of polite disbelief that followed this lack of information ended in a rising buzz of speculation. Predictably Pearson initiated it; given Tovey’s single revelation about the Tirpitz, Pearson’s guess had a certain credibility: ‘I bet we’re to go and hide in the ice and spring out on a pocket battleship!’
‘Don’t be so fucking silly, Derek,’ snapped Frobisher. ‘The whole Home Fleet is waiting to do that. You don’t think…’
‘But we could be a sacrifice… a what you call a decoy, yes?’ Storheill broke in.
‘That’s more like it,’ Frobisher agreed grudgingly.
‘Unless we are just a weather ship for the Home Fleet,’ Pearson speculated with undiminished fervour.
‘What, with specially fitted torpedoes?’
‘Well, that may not be such a silly notion,’ Clark put in, unwilling to remain aloof in case they guessed, as he suspected they might, that he had known all along. ‘With more convoys running up to Russia, the further north they can be routed, the more difficult it would be for enemy air strikes to reach them from northern Norway. Perhaps, if not weather, we might usefully report on ice conditions, even act as an ice pilot…’
‘Routing a convoy through ice would not only take it out of range of aircraft, it might also make it less vulnerable to U-boats!’ Pearson added relentlessly.
‘Huh!’ Frobisher commented monosyllabically but, for the time being, they had to be content with that.
‘There is one more thing,’ Clark said, capturing their attention. ‘I’ve some forms in my cabin to enable those of you who haven’t done so to make your own wills.’ As a dolorous silence fell on the little assembly, Clark rose, picking up his hat and turning to Frobisher. ‘Well, Number One, I suppose you’d better clear the lower deck and I’ll go and repeat all this for the benefit of the petty officers and ratings.’
* * *
‘Small arms, .303 ammo, white paint, K rations, Arctic kit…’ Clark murmured as he ran his fountain pen down the last of what seemed to him now to have been an endless number of lists. Since he had joined the ship these had covered almost every moveable object within her fabric, he concluded, sitting back and lighting a cigarette. Then he swore, set his cigarette on the ashtray and wrote: ‘paintbrushes’, adding vocally, ‘I’ll bet we don’t have enough of them in the store to paint the whole bloody ship.’
‘I begin to feel like Shackleton or Worsley,’ he remarked wearily over dinner, as he reminded Frobisher to indent for some more paintbrushes. ‘Endless lists of stuff we might never need… Anything else anyone wants?’ he asked, looking round the table.
‘Only some more packing, Captain,’ said Olsen, ‘and that is already on its way. They have been very good to us aboard Tyne.’
‘Yes. I’m glad to hear that,’ Clark said, regarding the mashed potatoes before him with little interest.
‘Did you say Worsley, sir?’ Pearson piped up.
‘Yes,’ said Clark, ‘why?’
‘Well, he taught us navigation at King Alfred,’ responded Pearson, referring to the so-called training ship for volunteer officers at Hove in Sussex. ‘She’s a stone frigate, where…’
‘Yes, yes, Derek, we know what the King Alfred is and what we have to thank it for,’ Frobisher said testily, adding, ‘though I heard it was just an old garage on the sea-front…’
‘Well, perhaps, Number One,’ Olsen cut in, ‘an old garage is a modern British stone frigate.’
They chuckled and the undaunted Pearson went on, ‘Old Worsley was a marvellous chap, sir. He navigated Shackleton’s boat across the Southern Ocean…’
‘Yes, I know,’ Clark replied.
‘He’s a brilliant navigator…’ Pearson added.
‘He must be if he taught you anything,’ Frobisher said with a grin at the irrepressible sub-lieutenant.
‘Well we had to learn a lot quicker than you chaps at Dartmouth,’ Pearson riposted sharply.
‘He’s got you there, Number One,’ Clark said in a low voice.
‘He’s an impudent little toad, sir, and for his impertinence he can be duty officer to
night.’
‘Oh, that’s not fair, Number One,’ Pearson protested.
‘Little boys should be seen and not heard. Write that out five hundred times and I’ll let you off.’ Frobisher set his knife and fork down and looked at Clark. ‘You sailed with Worsley, didn’t you, sir?’
‘Did you, sir?’ Pearson said, leaning forward and staring past Storheill and Frobisher, his eyes wide with wonder. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Clark said, finishing his own meal. ‘I was on his expedition to the Arctic in 1926, aboard the brigantine Island. It’s a long time ago.’
‘Blimey!’
‘There, Derek. Now what do you say to calling the Old Man a bit slow coming alongside that last destroyer?’
‘I did not say that, Number One!’ the embarrassed and flushing Pearson exclaimed.
‘It sounded like it to me,’ Frobisher said, catching Clark’s eye and winking.
‘Sir, the first lieutenant is stirring it, sir. I said no such thing…’
‘May you be forgiven your fibs, young man,’ Frobisher said archly.
‘Sir, all I said was that I was surprised that you had, er…’
Clark burst into laughter at the young man’s discomfiture and even the two Norwegians saw the amusing side of this very English scene. After he realised Clark was not angry, Pearson himself began to laugh, though he mouthed imprecations at Frobisher. As the laughter subsided, Clark said, ‘Well, perhaps in the next few days you can have a turn at manoeuvring the ship, Pearson. Then you’ll really have grounds to criticise me.’
Recalling the scene late that night as he lay unsleeping in his bunk, Clark thought the wardroom atmosphere very satisfactory. He could not know what Olsen and Storheill thought, of course, beyond the most superficial judgement based on observations of their day-to-day conduct, but their ready amusement at Frobisher’s guying treatment of the baby of the mess augured well. As for Pearson, well, he seemed a good-hearted young man and it would not hurt him to have a little of his enthusiastic outspokenness knocked out of him by Frobisher.
The following afternoon the welders pronounced themselves satisfied. They had cut large oval apertures either side, under the flare of Sheba’s bows, just forward of the break in the forecastle. Inboard, against these, they had lined up and secured the torpedo tubes, bolting them through the upper deck and running the pipework to a compressor squashed into the forecastle paint store. As a consequence, the hundred one-gallon tins of white paint requisitioned from the depot ship were piled on the foredeck, lashed to the racks for the spare torpedoes which had also been welded on to the foredeck. The whole lot were covered by tarpaulins to conceal them from the cameras or binoculars of reconnoitring enemy aircraft.
The torpedo tubes were placed under Frobisher’s especial charge, a measure that disappointed Pearson, whose position as gunnery officer, in charge of the ship’s four-inch gun, had led him to suppose that anything forward of the bridge that went bang, was his by right.
‘Never mind, Derek,’ Frobisher had consoled him cheerfully. ‘You can look after them when I’m killed.’
While the artificers from the Tyne completed fitting the Sheba’s unorthodox armament, her ship’s company were busy salting away the additional stores they had embarked. This included a quantity of tinned food and additional ammunition, including twenty-millimetre shells.
Frobisher queried the supply of these with Clark, but he shrugged his shoulders and went on board the Tyne to enquire. He had struck up something of a friendship with the engineer commander under whose wing the armourers worked and who had had their torpedo tubes prepared.
‘Sorry to bother you again, sir,’ he said, locating the engineer commander in his cabin, ‘but my first lieutenant’s just reported a load of twenty-millimetre shells have come aboard. Unfortunately we haven’t got anything to put ’em in.’
‘Yes you have,’ the commander replied. ‘I’ve had special instructions to cut away your after Hotchkiss mounting and give you an Oerlikon. We’ve better places to put them, but you must be someone very special, Commander Clark, or you have friends in high places.’
And so they were fitted with the Swiss anti-aircraft gun and, as Pearson insisted, two spare barrels. The work delayed them further, but Clark received no prompting signals from the distant flagship. Presumably Tovey knew all about their progress, and the additional fitting of the Oerlikon.
* * *
By and large their sea trials were successful. Clark drilled his men relentlessly for three days, sending them repeatedly to action stations, but conserving his ammunition. He intended to work them up again in the Arctic, when he could reveal their purpose and practise their attack amid the ice. He was relying upon at least a short period prior to intercepting Orca to bring them to a high pitch of efficiency. For the time being they carried out trials of the Asdic, echo-ranging off isolated rocks until content with the kit before requesting the promised submarine. Clark let Frobisher handle the first hunt, eager to see how the younger man conducted it. Frobisher was uninspired, a by-the-book tactician, running his opponent down with a casual competence helped by the unlayered nature of the water and the ability of Carter’s team. He fudged the last few yards, failing to predict the submarine’s last-minute evasion, and the grenade thrown overboard to simulate the depth-charge attack was accorded a ‘possible’ status by the submarine commander in the debrief afterwards. At the time Carter evinced some irritation, exchanging a quick, intimate shake of the head with Clark. The small, insubordinate gesture was an indication of that symbiosis Clark and Carter had themselves achieved. Clark ignored it.
‘Not bad, Number One, not bad,’ he said. He handled the afternoon attack himself. The submarine commander, on his mettle following the close shave of the morning, dodged and weaved, ran deep and then attempted a bold counter-attack, but Carter, revelling in the chase, and Clark, delighted in the quick responsiveness of Sheba, had the measure of him. After the small detonations of the grenade, the submarine surfaced in their wake and signalled indignantly: ‘Ouch!’
‘I think we have hunted more U-boats than he has ships,’ Clark concluded in a remark to Frobisher, but which was intended as a compliment to Carter.
That evening the Sheba lay alongside the oiler, filling her tanks to their uttermost capacity, with ullages reduced to the minimum. In his cabin Clark wrote his report to Tovey, summoning Pearson to convey it to the flagship.
‘This is to be placed into the hands of the C-in-C’s chief of staff and nobody else, Derek, d’you understand?’
‘Perfectly, sir.’
‘And no lingering in the wardroom, or anywhere else on the flagship, for that matter.’
‘No sir.’
‘Tyne’s sending a motor boat for you. I’d hate to see you pulling alongside the Kay Gee Five in one of our horrible little punts.’
When he returned two hours later, Pearson found the wardroom a rather jolly place, filled with tobacco smoke and the fumes of gin. Clark and Frobisher were roaring with laughter over some joke made by the submarine commander and his first lieutenant. The engineer commander was also present, while Olsen and Storheill bent over a chessboard, looking up from time to time and exchanging inconsequential remarks with the others.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you were having a party in my absence,’ a rather crestfallen Pearson observed.
‘It seemed like a good excuse,’ Frobisher quipped. ‘Anyway, you got to go aboard the big, big battleship and shake hands with the grand fromage.’
‘I didn’t see Sir John,’ Pearson said a touch petulantly.
‘Any messages, Sub?’ Clark asked. Olsen and Storheill looked up from their game.
‘Well, the chief of staff did say he hoped we’d get our whale, sir. Bloody cheek, I thought it.’
‘Did you tell him you thought it a bloody cheek?’ Frobisher asked.
‘No, of course I bloody didn’t, Number One!’ Pearson turned and left the wardroom.
‘Don’t be too hard on him, Nu
mber One,’ Clark said.
‘No, he is a good fellow,’ added Storheill.
‘Go and get him back for a drink, Per,’ Frobisher said. ‘Tell him I’m buying.’
The Last Escort
February–March 1942
‘I’m sorry about all this cloak-and-dagger stuff,’ Gifford said, smiling up at Clark as he settled in the small armchair in Clark’s tiny cabin and accepted a glass of gin. ‘Seems a bit melodramatic.’
Clark sat opposite his visitor, having turned round the uncomfortable upright chair that served him at his desk. Gifford wore a dark suit and looked every inch the senior civil servant, though a perceptive observer might have judged him a naval officer in disguise. He had arrived by air only an hour earlier.
‘I can only say, sir,’ Clark responded, ‘that from my perspective it’s fairly terrifying.’
‘I can imagine,’ Gifford said unimaginatively. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
Gifford set his glass down and turned to his briefcase, opening it with an ominous click of its twin locks. He drew out a large, bulging Manila envelope and handed it to Clark.
‘I’ve brought your ship’s mail. We’ve collected it from its various addresses. I don’t mind telling you it took some organising!’
Clark set the package aside as Gifford handed him a second, thinner foolscap envelope. It was addressed to him and marked, in addition to instructions as to its disposal, Most Secret. To be opened only when above the 66th Parallel.
Clark placed the packet on his desk and took yet a third, though smaller, envelope Gifford held out to him.
‘You can open that now,’ Gifford said with an amused smile. Clark withdrew a small, leather-bound book. It was musty with age and its covering boards were loose. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t get a better copy, but you’ve the better of the two we need.’
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