The Bonny Boy

by David Black

  As they are going down, they hear the pinging echoing through their own hull.

  Then the sound of pebbles hitting them. Blake, looking round the control room, never ceases to be amused how everybody always looks up when noises enter the hull, as if there was going to be something to see apart from the curve of their own boat’s pressure hull, woven with its filigree of pipes and cable runs.

  ‘Both targets slowing down, sir,’ says Freer, trying to whisper and still be heard.

  The sound of more pebbles hitting their hull. It is the noise an anti-submarine echo-sounder makes, when the pings it sends out hit your hull, and go bouncing back to tell the enemy where you are.

  The Italian Navy’s anti-submarine equipment is nowhere near as sophisticated as the Royal Navy’s Asdic. Their escorts sail with just a Heath-Robinson lash-up, sounding sets originally designed to find the sea bed for you and basic hydrophones to listen for any noises in the water. But if they manage to acquire you, well they’ve done their job. And Nonpareil has been acquired. Everybody can hear it, and they know what is coming next.

  ****

  Don’t believe anyone who tells you, that you get used to depth charging.

  ‘The target to port is ten degrees off our stern, sir!’ calls Freer, ‘and the starboard target, twelve degrees. Still closing, sir.’

  ‘We’ll be hearing them ourselves in a moment, Freer,’ says Harry, leaning aft so he doesn’t have to shout to be heard in the Asdic cubby.

  And indeed, there they are.

  Ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky!

  The sound echoes through the control room; the eyes go up; there’s a ping and another handful of pebbles. Then Freer says, ‘Target one, sir … her turns … she’s going dead slow … target two coming in now …!’

  Ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky!

  Until the noise seems directly above them, and they can all feel it like it was crawling on their skin. Then the splashes … one, two … a cascade. Then two more as the noise of the escort’s propellers fade for’ard, and away. The depth charges are coming down.

  ‘Group up! Full ahead together! Port thirty!’ yells Harry.

  For Nonpareil is in a dead zone now; the escort has loosed her weapon right over where she knows her quarry to be, but as they pass, the escort’s sound gear will lose her quarry in the noise of her own propellers.

  So Harry is ordering a high-speed swerve to the right, to at least be out from under the depth charges when they detonate, and to be even further away when the noise of them finally subsides, and the enemy start pinging again to re-acquire.

  As Nonpareil turns and puts on her spurt – and in the space before the depth charges fill the water with noise and blast – Harry wonders why the second escort isn’t piling in too, to add her load to the barrage of explosions that is about to break around them. Until his train of thought is obliterated …

  RAH-BUUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!

  RAH-BUUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!

  The rippling detonations fill their ears with roar, and the concussions slam into Nonpareil’s hull like a boxer landing body-blows. The control room is filled with a snow of paint flakes and cork insulation, a shatter of glass as the face of a gauge disintegrates. As Harry is looking at Prosser’s face, hanging there in the shaking air a mere two feet from the end of his own nose, he sees him bite his lip as he makes ticks on the plot, counting the number of charges as they go off; and he thinks, everybody has their own way of coping with a depth charging.

  But as the reverberations from the last explosion die away, there is no eerie silence of the sea. There is another noise to fill their ears, one that has not gone away and seems to cling to them. The other escort is still there astern, moving up slowly, still pinging. And then the pings find them again, another handful of pebbles rattling their hull, telling them they are re-acquired. And Harry knows now why the first escort has been hanging back.

  Freer calls the changing bearings of the escort that dropped the depth charges. Harry watches Prosser mark the plot. It quickly becomes apparent that the enemy is circling round for another attack, while the escort astern of them continues to hang back, pinning Nonpareil like a specimen with her pinging, guiding her consort in.

  ****

  Harry had already brought their attempt at flight to an abrupt halt, stopping their motors, so the boat was hanging there, 120 feet down in the Sicilian channel, below where the sunlight can penetrate. Blake joined him at the plot, and for a terrible, gut-wrenching moment wondered whether the Eyeties’ tactics had frozen his new skipper.

  The Eyetie anti-sub boys had been getting markedly better at their job over the past few months; everybody in the Tenth had noticed. But then Lt Gilmour hadn’t been here through the summer; he’d been doing his Perisher. Blake could see the glazed look in the lad’s expression as he stared blankly at Prosser’s handiwork, like somebody had tumbled his gyro.

  But suddenly Harry was all action. He stepped to the back of the control room, and over his shoulder ordered Prosser to ‘get the big chart out’ as he stuck his head round into the Asdic cubby where Freer sat in his t-shirt, eyes half shut, with the device’s headphones clamped over his ears like a medieval sallet.

  ‘Freer,’ he whispered.

  The rating looked up, astonished out of his concentration. Harry saw an older lad, very dark hair and a face of horizontal lines, the thick eyebrows, the flare of his nose, a mouth devoid of frivolity and saturnine, and immediately felt re-assured. No air-head kid this.

  ‘It’s the one who’s dropping the depth charges I want to know about, Freer,’ said Harry. ‘Obviously keep your ears open for everything else, but target one, the bomber, I want to know exactly where he is and what he’s up to.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  ‘Good man.’

  And then Harry stepped back into the control room, and gestured to Blake to lean in. He knew all this whispering was a joke, but it seemed to concentrate everybody’s mind on the need to stay quiet when an enemy hydrophone operator was hunting you.

  ‘I think we both know what that cunning sod upstairs is up to,’ he said to Blake.

  Indeed they did; everybody’s standard script for a depth charge attack was that you pinned your target with whatever A/S gizmo God had granted you, and then you all piled in, dumping as much high explosives on the enemy as you could chuck in one heave. Oh, and you all went over at high speed, so you could get out of the way before the damn things blew your own stern off when they detonated.

  It meant you were able to land the heaviest punch; but it also meant you “lost” the target.

  If you’d actually sunk the bugger, there were usually tell-tale signs – oil, debris – or you might even blow him to the surface. But if there weren’t, you had to circle back around to where you thought your sub was, and start trying to re-acquire the bugger all over again.

  But not these Eyeties, thought Harry. Target two was hanging back so he didn’t lose his contact, staying just outside the kill range of the depth charge blasts so that when all the roar in the water subsided, his hydrophones would catch the final turns of any submarine escaping at speed before her skipper grouped-down again and went silent. He would have the sub’s bearing, and could simply turn the echo-sounder on again, and direct the other escort quickly back for another run.

  In the standard script for a depth charge attack, the submarine had a fighting chance to sneak away. But with this cunning sod’s new tactic, that chance had narrowed to practically nothing. Harry needed a better tactic, but before that he needed to keep outsmarting this one.

  Freer resumed his commentary; Eyetie one was coming back. The bearing he called put it on their port quarter. ‘High-speed HE,’ intoned Freer, ‘he’s coming in fast.’

  ‘Right,’ said Harry, ‘All those last charges went off shallow. Being a sneaky bugger, he’s probably not going to make the same mistake twice. So we’re going to wait until he’s got his eyes shut tight and going for
it, then sod Eyetie two, we’re going to duck to port fast and drop another thirty feet.’

  The control room crew were used now to Harry giving them a running commentary, and they liked it. Not every skipper did, and it left you hanging there, as much in the dark as the poor bastards in the engine room. Unsettling, especially as being in the control room meant you had jobs that required you to respond fast, which as anyone would tell you, was a lot easier if you knew what you were responding to.

  Not even old Flannel Ferneyheugh told them what was going through his head in an attack; but then many suspected that was because there was very little.

  And then the Eyetie was on them again.

  Ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky!

  Getting louder and louder, until Harry, announcing each word precisely and without hurry, called, ‘Group up, full ahead together. Port thirty! Keep one five zero feet!’

  And they were off, leaning into Nonpareil’s turn as the enemy ship went thundering overhead …

  RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY!

  … and the splashes as the depth charges entered the water echoed down.

  The propeller sounds eddied away, and there was silence, not even the sound of breathing. And then the click! The tiny noise you always hear, as the first detonator fires.

  RAH-BUBUBBUBBUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!

  RAH-BUBUBBUBBUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!

  ****

  Another pattern of seven charges detonates around them.

  There is the smashing of glass, on the third blast the lights go out and the emergency lanterns take a moment to cut in. They are in gloom, in a strange ether world. The next blast ruptures a high pressure air line somewhere aft, and they hear the scream of it before a valve is turned, isolating the break.

  The sudden silence before the next blow lands on their hull is terrifying in the way a fanfare might elate you, and then …

  RAH-BUBUBBUBBUMM-DAH-DUMMM-DUMMMN-DUMMMN!

  That was close, thinks Harry, but doesn’t say, because he knows he can’t. He’s the skipper. He remembers Andy Trumble, and the depth-charging of Trebuchet up there in the cold, dark Arctic. Trumble, standing in the middle of the control room, looking every inch the way a skipper should – unperturbed, slightly bored maybe, the way you would if you were waiting for a bus. And at that, Harry starts laughing to himself; remembering when he was a student, reading a line of graffiti on a Glasgow bus shelter: “In loving memory of all those who died waiting for the Number 15”. How apropos.

  What he doesn’t see is the crew watching his quiet laughter. And then the explosions stop, and Harry says to nobody in particular, ‘Italians. They always were a noisy set of so-and-sos!’

  There are a few smiles around the control room; a shared rolling of the eyes; breathing out, at last. The crew thinking: Maybe this Harry Gilmour isn’t the non-event we’d thought he was; maybe the stories are true after all. And if he’s not that bothered, why should we be? Bloody Eyeties! He’s right; a noisy set of so-and-sos.

  It is Blake who first notices that Harry hasn’t ordered group down, dead slow. All the noise and churn from the depth charging has died away, but they are still going flat out, making a racket from their speeding props the Italian fleet would be able to hear all the way back to La Spezia.

  They hear the pinging starting up again.

  Harry is standing next to Prosser now, pointing at the chart the navigator has magicked up onto his tiny table.

  ‘How long to run to here?’ asks Harry, but Prosser is finding it difficult to concentrate as the pebbles start hitting again. But he does concentrate, while Blake frets about why they are still going full ahead together. Everybody else is all ears.

  Prosser’s slide rule flashes. ‘Twelve minutes at full ahead,’ He finally announces. In the time in between, Freer has started his chant again. Eyetie One, the enemy with all the depth charges, is coming back. Harry sees Blake staring at him, and realises.

  ‘Sorry, Number One,’ he says, ‘Look, here, how shallow it is. We haven’t got another fifty feet beneath us, see?’

  Blake steps over and sees.

  ‘Using these tactics, he’s going to pin us eventually,’ continues Harry, almost whispering now. ‘We need to get out from under that bloody echo-sounder. The channel starts shelving to four hundred feet in places along this contour. We need to get there. Because that’s where the current will be.’

  ‘Sir?’ is the best Blake can manage. What current? What’s he talking about?

  ‘Look,’ says Harry, twisting the chart. ‘The Med is two basins, thousands of feet deep. The Sicilian Channel is between them. Seldom more than four hundred.’

  ‘High-speed HE. Target one closing fast from starboard quarter,’ says Freer. ‘Target two is maintaining bearing. Continuous pinging.’

  Harry continues, unperturbed, ‘There is a continuous inflow of surface water from the Atlantic Ocean. It passes through the Strait of Gibraltar, and flows along the north coast of Africa. It’s at its most powerful in summer, when evaporation in the Mediterranean is at a maximum. The evaporation makes the surface water becomes more saline, its density increases and it sinks. But as more surface water comes in, it pushes this dense stuff the only place it has to go – back towards the Atlantic as a westward current running below the inward current. It’s like the Med is breathing, inhaling surface water from the Atlantic and exhaling dense water in a countercurrent below. The barrier between those two salinity levels is impermeable to echo-sounder pinging. If we can get below it, Eyetie One can’t find us.’

  RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY!

  … and they hear the depth charges splashing, on their way down again.

  ‘Starboard 30! Keep two zero zero feet!’ Harry calls over his shoulder. He turns back to Blake. ‘Crawling along just trying to dodge him isn’t going to work. We need to make a run for it and hope we find a thermocline quick.’

  All that and a student of hydrography too, thinks Blake, who in his own time has seen many people take chances and knows a thing or two about odds. On this one he agrees with his Skipper: they’re dead men if they hang around much longer under that damn Eyetie upstairs. Blake hasn’t a clue about counter-currents or salinity levels; and Jesus Christ! What’s a thermocline? But what the hell, it’s worth a punt.

  They are hit by another succession of explosions. The blasts seem to drive them down by the stern. Harry desperately wants to lift the sound-powered telephone and hear a damage report from his warrant engineer; but he knows if there is damage he should know about, the engine room will tell him. And right now they’ll be busy, so let them get on with their job.

  The noise in the water subsides. Harry is breaking all the rules by not ringing for dead slow and trying to sneak away. Because he knows, even if he does, the sneaky Eyetie waiting right above his stern will still re-acquire him in minutes. So he keeps running for deeper water even though he is giving the enemy a sound target as big as a barn door. The pinging re-commences, and they are re-acquired, and round they go again.

  Every time the depth charging escort goes over, Nonpareil dodges and then dives so that the charges themselves fall to port or starboard, and always above them.

  The Italians are using German WBH charges – almost 530 lbs of explosives in steel cans that tumble towards them at 14 feet per second – and at over 150 feet, if they detonate anywhere within 15 feet of Nonpareil’s hull, they will inflict serious damage. But Nonpareil is at 200 feet now, and the added water pressure means the depth charges’ kill radius is shrinking all the time.

  Harry’s doing other sums in his head too; if he orders his evasive manoeuvre just as the escort commits, but before she actually starts rolling the charges over her stern, it gives him roughly 20 seconds to get as far away from their blast as possible.

  The charges are falling in patterns of seven. Harry keeps checking Prosser’s ticks to make sure he is counting correctly; and he keeps checking Prosser’s plot to see how far to
the 50-fathom line. The damage control reports are coming fast now: HP and LP air lines fractured all over the boat; the detonations aft have loosened both the propeller shaft glands and water is spewing into the aft auxiliary machinery spaces and the stokers’ mess. The weight of water means Blake and Lansley are having to fight to hold trim, and they are not being helped by the fact that several flanges holding lengths of trim tank connector pipes have been ripped asunder. Crew in each of the boat’s compartments are working furiously to isolate and fix the leaks. For’ard, several of the re-load torpedoes’ lashing bars have sprung, and the petty officer LTO has a gang frantically trying to re-secure them, so the one-and-a-half-ton beasts don’t break free and start rolling around.

  Everyone is so busy they don’t notice at first that although the pinging has re-started, no pebbles are hitting their hull.

  Freer is calling the bearings of both escorts, and neither of them are closing fast, in fact their bloodhound – escort one, who has been steady on their trail until now – is drifting off to port.

  ‘Group down, all stop!’ calls Harry, keeping his voice low. ‘Silence in the boat.’

  Then he looks at the depth gauge. It shows just over 280 feet now. There is less than 15 feet below their keel. Have they sunk below the thermocline? Are they in the denser, more saline westward current? Another burst of pinging, then silence.

  Harry says to Blake, but everyone hears him, ‘They’ve lost us … They’re listening for us instead,’ continues Harry, turning and grinning at everyone in the control room, ‘So, shhh!’

  Freer continues to call the bearings. Escort one is crawling further and further to port. A few minutes pass; another set of pings. No pebbles. Harry risks a smile at Blake.

  Then they hear it in the boat.

  Chicka-chicka-chicka-ricka-chicka-RICKA-CHICKA-RICKA-CHICKY-RICKA-CHICKY!

  The sound of a torpedo boat’s propellers spinning up to high speed.

  Freer calls out, ‘High-speed HE. Escort one under helm, turning towards … closing fast.’

  ‘He can’t know we’re here,’ whispers Blake, even though it’s too late for silence.