Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  ‘I think it could be useful, Sir,’ said Harry, eager to get off the subject of the Empire’s imminent demise. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of it though. The entire Italian coastline’s there. So I’ve been pretty selective for my first shot at it. Big ports . . .’ Harry stopped as Shrimp pushed a pile of folded papers across his desk.

  ‘Those are Italian railway maps,’ said Shrimp. ‘Concentrate on the stretches of coastline where the railway lines hug it. From Policastro to Longobardi. It’s a bit of a priority, so get as many as you can written up and present yourself here at 09.00. Oh, and your friend Captain Dumaresq. Force F sailed just after dusk for another sortie down to the Tunisian coast. Let’s try for a dinner again when they’re back. I’d like to meet him. Carry on, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Chapter Ten

  Umbrage was barely more than nine hundred yards off the shore, at periscope depth, with Rais’s eyes stuck to the big search telescope. They were about six or seven miles south of the small Calabrian coastal town of Diamante. Rais had picked this spot not just because of how close the railway lines ran to the beach, but because Diamante wasn’t a port. No fishing boats wandering about, nor any danger of a passing MAS-boat dropping in: those nasty little Italian torpedo gunboats.

  ‘This should suit our purposes admirably,’ said Rais, once again being disconcertingly communicative. Then he began calling off bearings to a couple of landmarks, which Harry duly noted on the plot. That all wrapped up, Rais then ordered their withdrawal to deeper water. ‘We’ll return after 21.00 hours, and see what turns up. A pity that Eyetie holiday guide book of yours didn’t come with a train timetable, Gilmour. Anyway, I’m going to get my head down for a bit. Watch, Dived, Number One, and make sure we’re squared away to go to Gun Action before we head back in. Carry on.’

  Grainger left what could only be construed as an insubordinate pause, before he replied, ‘Aye aye, Sir.’ Then he waited until he heard the swish of Rais’s berth curtain closing, and leaning close to Harry, said with his usual irritating matter-of-factness, ‘This is all your fault, Gilmour,’ in that way he had, so that Harry never knew whether he was being funny, or whether he wasn’t.

  There had been lots of little quips on the passage up here, directed at his Eyetie coastal pilot books and his translations: little sneers about how lovely it was, they were all ‘going paddling’.

  The truth was, the Mediterranean Fleet charts of the Italian inshore waters were notoriously out of date, and closing with the coast always managed to generate a certain frisson in a boat; with everyone hanging on the echo sounder’s every ping, as it looked for a bottom or a shoal that should be there, and frequently finding ones that shouldn’t. And now along had come Vasco, with that little book written in Eyetie he’d found in a Valletta junk shop, tucked away behind a potted plant and wrapped in a job lot of medieval camiknickers – or so the story went among the for’ard Jacks. What a hoot. But behind all the hilarity, Jack actually approved: an officer who understood foreign and could use his head. Imagine it – going inshore with a Navigator who actually knew where he was going. It was enough to let you sleep tight in your hammock.

  Oh, and as for the reference to ‘Vasco’ – all Navigators got christened that by the Jacks who served with them. It was a nod to Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese sixteenth-century explorer famous for his epic voyages, presumably in the hope that their Navigator would live up to his namesake’s formidable reputation.

  After Shrimp had ruined the wardroom party for Harry, sending him off to do homework instead, Harry had worked through the night, as ordered. In the morning he presented himself. But Shrimp was busy. Something brewing down in the desert apparently; the Eighth Army was up to its tricks again. So he was handed a note and sent off on his own with his translations, across the harbour to Valletta, then up the steep run of steps to Number Three, Scots Street, where he’d been told the ‘crabfats’ lived.

  Harry walked with a spring in his step, not a trace of resentment at being denied a party and his night’s sleep, in fact rather full of himself: on a special mission for the Flotilla Captain. Not to mention secret work of operational and tactical significance. Who’d have thought it? The wee lad who used to polish the brass and the deck furniture down at the Sandbank boatyard, involved in secret work. Beat that!

  When he got to the RAF HQ, a WAAF had conducted him to a door marked ‘Dep. AOC’ and inside was Mahaddie, of all people. Much bellowing and handshaking and guff about how old shipmates should stick together, then Mahaddie asked him about Fabrizio. ‘Did that Eyetie pal of yours ever let ye know what happened to him? You know, write ye a letter. Promise you a shot at his sister by way o’ a ta very much?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry, frowning at the crudity. ‘I’m not sure they let POWs enter into correspondence with serving officers.’

  ‘Ungrateful wee wop shite,’ Mahaddie decided. ‘That was a decent thing you did for him back there. God knows why you thought he deserved it.’ Then he read the note from Shrimp, and suddenly everything went all serious again.

  ‘Follow me,’ Mahaddie had said and led him through the warren to a tiny back office where the Photo-intelligence mob lived. They took two of the books he’d brought off him and spirited them away to photograph the line maps, then his pencil translations were taken off him, and Mahaddie called out, ‘Katty!’ and Katty Kadzow, in a far more restrained but no less fetching plain grey skirt and white blouse, appeared from a tiny alcove at the back of the room. ‘This is Katty,’ Mahaddie had said. ‘She’ll type these up and get them copied and bound with their map photos. Katty, meet that Captain Bligh I told you about.’

  So, now here they were, on the Calabrian coast, armed with Harry’s translated yachtsman’s guide, ready to wreak havoc. The Eighth Army was about to mount an offensive in Libya apparently, or so Shrimp had said. And the more Malta’s submarines could choke off the enemy’s supplies, the weaker he would be against a British attack. However, sinking his supply ships was just one way to do it. Wrecking the Italian rail network was another.

  ‘Rommel’s Afrika Korps and his Italian allies require 100,000 tons of stores a week to keep going,’ Shrimp had told Harry. ‘You close one of those railway lines carrying Axis army supplies to their ports for just twenty-four hours, and you deny them up to fourteen thousand tons’ worth of stuff they need. It’s as good as sinking two freighters.’

  Up until now, they’d used commando parties to destroy rail lines. Harry had seen quite a few dodgy-looking blokes down in the other Lazaretto building, doing press-ups and arriving back from runs at all hours of the day and night. He’d wondered who they were; now he knew. When ordered, the Tenth’s boats had been carrying them and their funny little wood and canvas canoes, called folbots, to within a couple of miles of a shoreline with a railway close by. They’d row ashore and blow it up, and hopefully the submarine would still be there waiting for them when they rowed back, assuming they could find it on the high seas on a dark night, and assuming a passing MAS-boat or shagbat hadn’t forced the submarine to dive in the meantime.

  But if the submarines could get close into shore, then their gun crews could do the job without any of the risks, either to the commandos, who had to paddle in and out, or to the submarine forced to hang about on the surface off an enemy coast. Enter Harry Gilmour and his fortuitous find among the medieval camiknickers. So Grainger was right, really. It was all Harry’s fault.

  It was something he contemplated while he played Uckers with Wykham down in Umbrage’s wardroom, waiting for night to fall. That and the fact that he had now been personally introduced to the famous, the glamorous, Miss Katty Kadzow, whom he would now be required to meet regularly when ashore because she, the celebrated chanteuse by night, by day was the trusted, efficient typist, secretary and all-round Girl Friday to the RAF Photo-intelligence bods – and now she was also responsible for typing up all Harry’s translations. And it had to be Harry doing the translations, Shrimp had said. Yes, there were p
lenty of others on this island who could read Italian: Maltese in the employ of the British. But the fewer people who knew what they were up to, the happier Shrimp would be.

  Musgrave was doing them a kipper and scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Harry had told him to wake the CO when it was ready. So he wasn’t surprised when Musgrave, after he’d dumped the cutlery on the wardroom table, turned and rapped the wooden panel by Rais’s bunk. ‘Cap’n, Sir!’ he called in a firm voice. A moment passed and then the curtain was torn back, and Rais’s angelic face was staring out at them, contorted with rage. Musgrave instantly went ramrod straight, and Harry, sitting barely two arms’ lengths from Rais felt his heart sink. Back to where they’d started.

  ‘Sir,’ Harry said, ‘I told him to wake you. Breakfast’s up.’

  Rais’s wild eyes shot each one of them in turn, as though he were looking for the slightest sign he was being made sport of, then he fixed on poor Musgrave.

  ‘Do not shout at me again, Sailor,’ he said and then swished the curtain shut again, without uttering another word.

  Since they’d sailed on this patrol, it had been obvious to Harry that Rais had been trying hard to speak to his crew as if they were human beings, up until now that is.

  From the tortured little expressions on Rais’s face, and the long pauses sometimes before he could bring himself to speak, it had also been obvious he was finding it a struggle to be nice. On their first night on patrol, he’d even tried to strike up a conversation with Harry on the bridge, as they’d glided along through the night, their diesels pumping charge into the batteries.

  ‘How did you end up in the Trade, Gilmour?’ Rais had asked. A personal question. Harry at first wondered whether he’d really heard it.

  ‘Oh, by accident, Sir,’ Harry had replied. ‘I was the accident. And Captain Dumaresq pointed me in the right direction . . .’

  He’d been going to continue, but realised Rais had stopped listening and had been grimacing at one of the lookouts, whose ears had obviously been flapping, desperate to hear the officer chat instead of concentrating on the horizon. Harry waited for the explosion, but it hadn’t come. Progress, he had thought at the time.

  Now they were surfacing, and Rais was shouting again, this time at a Leading Stoker, who was shadowing the Outside ERA, doing an on-the-job, makee-learnee on the trim board. The Stoker hadn’t been executing orders fast enough, apparently.

  Umbrage’s Outside ERA, her Wrecker, had met Rais’s outburst with an uncharacteristic furious glare. Because, as Wrecker, he was in charge, and if the CO had any complaints, he should have addressed them to him. But Rais hadn’t been interested enough to notice. Rais was never interested in his crew unless they offered a target to vent his ill-nature on.

  The Wrecker was a slight man, who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty-five, known for his nervous fussing about, who seemed at least a size too small for his overalls, with only his ears keeping his cap out of his eyes – those and the springy tangle of ginger hair under it that you could bounce your hand on. He always had a pair of heavy-duty gloves sticking out of one of the bum pockets on his overalls, and a filthy rag out of one of the top ones, which he would use without discrimination to mop either his brow or polish a brass valve wheel. The main thing Harry remembered about him was that he was Welsh and his name was Parry-Jones, except everybody called him ‘Cled’, which was apparently short for Cledwyn. But not Rais. If he referred to him at all, he called him Clot, which he thought terribly witty. Especially as Clot looked like the last man on earth to get angry, and certainly not at anyone in authority.

  But from what Harry had seen of ERA Parry-Jones, there was nothing at all ‘Clottish’ about the way he performed his duties.

  In fact, the Leading Stoker on the board was a perfect example of his diligence. Mr Parry-Jones frequently rotated a couple of the Leading Stokers through the control room on makee-learn, lest he might find himself indisposed at some time in the indeterminate future when Umbrage might urgently require another hand who knew all the right knobs to turn.

  But if Rais had bothered to pay attention to his Clot right then, he would have seen a man being pushed too far.

  And then they were on the surface, but Rais was still standing by the conning tower ladder, bathed in the red light like some demon, glowering at everyone around the control room, while everybody around the control room wondered why their CO hadn’t realised they had surfaced. Grainger waited before he spoke. Deliberately. ‘We’ve surfaced, Sir,’ he said.

  Rais spun around to see the faces of the two lookouts, standing right next to him and now wide-eyed with fear of him, waiting, ready to go up on to the bridge.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for!’ he hissed, and stepped aside.

  It was the CO who was supposed to go up first, was usually already waiting under the hatch, in fact, ready to throw off the clips the moment the conning tower broke surface, to get up there and make sure nothing was waiting for them they didn’t want to see. Everybody knew that, as though they knew they’d been on the surface for long, long seconds before their CO had stepped aside to let the lookouts pass, and before he had moved to follow them. And they watched as Grainger’s flat, expressionless gaze followed Rais, as he went up into the night, and they read the accusation behind it, just as they were supposed to. Harry took his cap off and swept his hand through his hair, and looked at a deckhead cable run so that he wouldn’t have to look at anybody else.

  Harry had managed one little victory over Rais before they’d surfaced. The gun crew had been allowed to remain below until a target came into view. Rais had originally wanted them up, pronto, but Harry had cajoled him out of it. If Rais hadn’t relented, the crew would be standing by the gun now, down on the casing, with Umbrage trimmed down and riding decks awash, and the November Mediterranean sloshing around their freezing ankles, and having to stay like that for however many hours it took for a train to arrive.

  Harry, as officer of the watch was on the bridge, but he and the two lookouts were looking to seaward, making sure no baddies were sneaking up. Rais, and an additional lookout, one of the Leading Signalmen from the radio room who had a name for his night vision, were watching up and down the railway line. It was a moonless night, with the usual high, scudding clouds playing their Salome dance with the stars. And with the offshore wind, there wasn’t much of a sea running. Good for the gun crew’s chances of staying dry when their turn came to take the air, but because it meant next to no surf, it would be a bit of a hindrance when it came to the gun layer being able to register the shoreline.

  Following the line of the railway, however, was easy. Flash Eyeties, Harry had thought when he’d stuck his head out of the conning tower hatch and saw the rows of pylons disappearing in both directions. Us? We’re still running puffing billys, while the Fascists have modern electric trains.

  The Petty Officer Gun Captain had already been up, him and Rais in a huddle discussing datum lines and ranges, then he had gone back below. Now Umbrage just bobbed, hove to, bows pointed inshore, about nine hundred yards off the beach, waiting.

  Rais had picked this spot for two reasons; there were no houses anywhere in sight, not even as far inland as they could see, so with no one to hear, Umbrage’s twin diesels were still going flat out pumping charge. Also, and it had been Rais who had spotted it as they had burbled at periscope depth, up and down the shore during daylight, there was a small brick structure stuck in the middle of nowhere. And when you cranked up the magnification, you could see all the high-tension cables running in and out of it. It was obviously some kind of switchgear for the power lines. Icing on the cake for the gunners.

  And still they waited, Rais continually fretting out loud. Harry had given up worrying about how bad form it was, not because most of it was directed at him – ‘How are we going to know if there’s one of the damn things coming, until it’s on top of us?’ . . . ‘Bloody electric trains! There’ll be no chuff, chuff, bloody chuff.’ . . . �
�Can you categorically assure me that the gun crew are going to get up in time?’ . . . That sort of thing. No, it wasn’t because Rais was saying it all to him, although God knows it was hard to imagine anything more undermining of one of your officers, especially as you were about to go into action. It was because Rais was saying it all in front of the crew. The Skipper was supposed to be the strong, silent type in front of his crew before an action, as though he knew exactly what he was doing, supremely confident in manner and deed. And even if, deep down inside he wasn’t, the crew had to believe he was. Jesus Christ, it was the number one officer quality they were supposed to surgically implant in your brain before they let you loose on the fleet.

  But Harry had already shut down that nagging voice in his head. It was too late now. All that remained to be done was to keep his eyes open, and make sure his lookouts kept theirs open too, to seaward, fixed on the black rim of their horizon, waiting for the slightest break in it, the merest flash of a wake or bow wave, to alert them to something moving out there, when what they needed was nothing to be moving.

  Down below, Grainger was standing between the helmsman and the trim board, ready to move Umbrage in a hurry; and Wykham was poised over the plot, with his watch and pencil, ready to record the coming action. They waited.

  Harry had stopped looking at his watch when he heard Rais’s ‘Ah-ha!’

  He turned as Rais sang out, ‘Gun crew close up!’ And he saw a single stab of light probing horizontally in the darkness, a good distance up the railway line: a diesel locomotive’s headlight.

  ‘How considerate of you Eyeties to have got your plane-spotter books out earlier . . .’ crowed Rais, fixing the beam in his night glasses, ‘. . . just to check there’s no Allied bombers within range of your little train set, so you don’t have to bother about a blackout . . . but you didn’t think to take clever little Clive Rais into account though, did you?’