Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  ‘There’s a current flows through the Sicilian Channel, from the western Med basin,’ said Harry, tapping the notes on his chart. ‘We’ve been motoring against it. But it’s a surface current. There’s another deeper current runs underneath, going in the opposite direction from east to west. It’s more saline, and usually a lot deeper. But there’s less than one thousand feet under us right now, so maybe that deeper current has got pushed up around here. Anyway, I think we just bumped through the layer between the two. I’m not sure how fast this deeper current runs. I’ve got no references on board. But it’s going to affect our position. We just need to think about it.’

  Grainger smiled, and nodded. ‘Do that.’

  The day passed.

  Then, about an hour before sunset, Rais appeared back in the control room, and without saying a word hit the night alarm twice. ‘Diving Stations!’

  Musgrave had been in the galley getting his ingredients ready for the crew’s breakfast. Harry, by the chart table, could see him through the control room door, having to chuck everything into a big pot and stow the now unusable mess pronto; as the crew thundered through the boat to close up.

  ‘HE?’ called Rais.

  ‘No HE,’ said Tuke from the ASDIC cubby.

  ‘Twenty-eight feet,’ said Rais. Periscope depth. Rais snapped his fingers. Unbelievable, thought Harry. Parry-Jones hit the lever anyway, and the periscope slid up. Rais did his all-round look. Harry could see the sunlight shining out of the eyepieces, reflected on his face as he went round. When Rais sent the periscope back down, he saw Harry looking at him. Harry had no idea what expression he’d had on his face, but Rais looked as if he’d been slapped.

  What had he seen? Then it dawned on Harry, and probably on everyone in the control room: he hadn’t expected it to be still daylight. If he’d bothered to glance at the chronometer . . . but no. And yet he was committed now.

  ‘Surface, Mr Grainger!’ said Rais, pausing before adding, ‘That means I want to go up, for all those who need asking twice.’

  Orders and responses, and Umbrage began to rise. Harry wondered about advising Rais about the currents, and how they might be off billet by now. But his heart sank at the prospect, and it sank even further when he accepted that meant he was becoming as bad as Grainger.

  And Umbrage was about to surface into broad daylight.

  Even though, as everybody knew, that if there were major units of the Italian fleet heading this way anytime soon, there’d be shagbats everywhere, looking for submarines.

  ‘I’m going to take a sighting to make sure we’re still on billet, and I’m going to cram as many amps into our batteries as possible before we meet the enemy,’ Rais announced to the control room. Rais justifying himself? Had that really happened? Was he apologising for surfacing while the sun was still up? There was no point in thinking about it: Rais would do what he was going to do.

  Harry was glad to see Parry-Jones on the trim board for all the little tweaks that might be required to bring her up smoothly, and that he had the Leading Stoker back on the dive board, showing that he trusted him. Umbrage began to roll again as she came up into the turbulence being churned up by the still raging gale, and Harry wondered if that was why the poor Leading Stoker was looking slightly ill.

  Umbrage was really lurching now: a beam sea. Rais went up the ladder and opened the lower conning tower hatch. His two lookouts had already filed into the cramped space beneath him. While all this had been happening, Grainger, who had made no comment on the wisdom of surfacing in daylight, had stepped into the wardroom and had now re-emerged, buttoning himself into his Ursula suit; he was going up too. Harry wondered why, then it dawned on him. To try and head off any tantrums if it turned out Harry’s current had indeed pushed them way off billet.

  Grainger looked at the depth gauge. ‘Ten feet!’ he called up into the tower. The upper hatch would be clear of the surface now. They all heard Rais yell back, ‘One clip off, two clips off’, and as he did, a deluge of water came down on them. Grainger went up into it, following the CO to the bridge. Harry immediately called the periscope back up. He wanted another look. It wouldn’t take a shagbat a moment to pop over the horizon. Handles down, and he had his face slammed against the rubber rests, and he began a low-power scan of the horizon. He saw it almost immediately, no more than a dot as he began turning the periscope, and then, because it was so low, it vanished behind a wave. He leaned back, a quick look at the bearing on the bezel above his head.

  ‘Possible aircraft contact, green-five!’ he yelled at the top of his voice, leaning back so he was shouting it up the hatch. Doing it because the control room messenger was still trying to get a bucket up under the bridge voice-pipe, to catch the water that drained out of it when you opened the lower voice-pipe cock. Harry couldn’t make out the shout that came back from the bridge – a yell lost in the noise of the wind and sea in the hatch.

  Then everything happened at once.

  ‘All main vents indicating open! Flooding Q!’ It was the Leading Stoker on the dive board, yelling as he spun the valves. He was diving the boat. Why the hell was he doing that? Harry glanced: the lad looked manic, sweat standing out on his forehead despite the chill in the boat with the hatch open. Harry braced to feel Umbrage begin to fall away beneath him, but instead he felt her begin to rise. He didn’t understand . . . then she began to lean over. A wave had them. A goffer. A big one. There was another unintelligible scream from the bridge, and suddenly a full bore of sea came down the hatch, everyone instantly knee-deep in water. And flushed down in it was Grainger: a flailing body being blasted on to the control room deck plates, except before he hit them, the water abruptly shut off to a dribble, because Grainger, as he had come through, arms flying, had snagged the hatch stirrup on one of his Ursula suit sleeves and dragged it shut, and the column of water coming down the upper hatch behind him had slammed the hatch against its seals, and was now holding it there.

  Harry was instantly up the ladder, dogging the hatch down, water pissing all over him, Umbrage falling away beneath him now. Fast, then faster. He could feel fear pulse through the control room.

  That wave. It must have swamped them: one of those big bastards that when they broke over you it was like being under water. Was that what Rais had been yelling back at him? A goffer was coming? And Rais? He must still be on the bridge. But he couldn’t think about that, nor that the Stoker on the dive board was diving the boat. No one had ordered him to do that. My God! The bloody CO was still on the bridge, the Jimmy had been on his way up. The boat had surfaced. And now it was diving again. And the conning tower above him was filling with water. And they were going down fast, falling like a stone. Harry had to stop the dive.

  ‘Full ahead, together! Full rise on the planes! Shut main vents! Blow Q! Stand by main ballast tank, blow valves!’ Harry heard the orders being called; before he realised it was his own voice talking: not yelling, or screaming, like the pressure in his chest made him want to, but cool and firm and clear. ‘Mr Parry-Jones!’ he called – not Clot, with a sneer, like Rais. Not Wrecker either. ‘On the dive board now, please. What’s our depth?’

  ‘Going through one-eight-zero feet, Sir, and diving! We are very heavy, Sir!’

  ‘We are very heavy, Sir!’ The words you never wanted to hear on a submarine. The planesmen’s heads turning; the Cox’n, Chief Petty Officer Libby, on the helm, looking back at Harry, his face lined with alarm. And the other Chief in the control room, Big Jonners, alarmed too. Those were sights Harry never wanted to see either. And Harry thinking, Jesus Christ!

  ‘Put another puff of air into one and six main ballast! Planesmen, twenty degrees up angle. Mr Parry-Jones, start pumping from M tank,’ Harry, hearing his own voice again. His best ‘orders’ voice. Nobody looking around themselves now, wondering what was happening; doing their jobs instead.

  ‘Two-zero-zero! . . .’ Mr Parry-Jones continued to call; another calm voice, and methodical; ‘Two-two-zero! . . . Two . . . Zero
-zero again, Sir . . . Rising . . . One-seven-zero!’

  ‘Mr Parry-Jones! Bring us up to sixty feet and then hold us at that depth, please. If we need to, cycle one and six main vents to hold her, and please inform me. And when you trim us, remember we have a flooded conning tower.’

  ‘Aye aye, Sir. Maintain sixty feet,’ said Parry-Jones, definitely not a Clot now. Umbrage rising, planing up; back up, under control again. Harry looked down at Grainger, a sodden heap on the deck plates; something not right in the way his left arm was flung out; the side of his head open, and blood, in swirls through the sloshing seawater. And where was Rais now? He knew the answer before the question formed. Rais was gone. Overboard. A tiny speck, floundering alone for a moment, on a storm-whipped ocean, with no life jacket to support him, only sea boots filling with water and a sodden Ursula suit to drag him down. And that bloody Leading Stoker. Where was he? There he was, ashen, still standing by the dive board. Frozen to the spot.

  ‘Mr Parry-Jones,’ said Harry, ‘relieve your Leading Stoker, please. Tell him he is to confine himself to the Stokers’ mess until I send for him.’

  ‘Aye aye, Sir.’

  Then Harry turned to the control room messenger. ‘Petty Officer Bell to the control room. And tell him to bring his medicine bag.’ Dinger Bell, who treated all the minor gashes, crushed fingers, the runs and fevers, as well as looking after their torpedoes and guns. It looked like he was going to have his work cut out fixing up Grainger. Harry would worry about that later. He turned and called up the for’ard passageway.

  ‘Two ratings to the control room, now!’

  Two sailors suddenly appeared, and were promptly told, ‘Get Mr Grainger into the wardroom, please, and get all his gear off’, and then, leaning back again, ‘ASDIC: anybody about up there?’

  Suddenly, everything was business as usual in the control room. You could no longer feel the pulse of fear that had run through it, gone now.

  Tuke, leaning out of his cubby, said, ‘No, Sir. But, Sir?’ Something in his voice. Harry turned to look. Tuke was frowning, like he wanted to explain something, but . . .

  And the ‘but’ Harry understood immediately. Serving under Lieutenant Rais had made Tuke reluctant to sing out.

  Harry took the three steps to the cubby. ‘What is it, Tuke?’

  ‘You know when you were mentioning to Mr Grainger, Sir, about the currents.’ Tuke looked apprehensive. Why? Harry was suddenly worried, until again it dawned on him. Tuke wasn’t concerned about the currents, he was concerned about speaking out, and was now shitting himself because he was confessing to having eavesdropped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry, trying a winning smile, ‘I’d noticed the planesmen seemed to be wrestling with her, as though the buoyancy had suddenly changed. I thought it might be a thermocline, which was why I mentioned it. Was I right?’

  ‘Oh yes, Sir,’ Tuke all grins now. ‘It was. I just wanted to say what it means, Sir. The change in water temperature especially, rather than the actual current, Sir. It means you probably don’t have to worry about anybody upstairs, Sir. As long as we’re still under it. Any Eyetie anti-sub kit, it won’t be able to pick us up under the temperature layer.’

  ‘Thank you, Tuke,’ said Harry. ‘Useful to know.’

  ‘Sixty feet,’ sang Parry-Jones.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It had been a big wave. Umbrage had begun to rise on it, and it had broken over them, right at the same time as Harry had been calling out, ‘Aircraft!’ and not hearing what the CO had been screaming back. The Leading Stoker on the dive board hadn’t heard either, but he had heard, ‘Aircraft!’ And he knew only too well how the CO’s wrath fell upon any hapless Jack who didn’t jump fast enough, sometimes even before he’d been told to. So he’d asked himself: what normally happens the minute someone shouts, ‘Aircraft!’ You dive the boat. So he had dived the boat. Harry would worry what to do about him later. Right now he had the Cox’n, Chief Roscorla, Parry-Jones, and the Warrant Engineer, Mr Crabtree, in the control room and they needed to discuss matters.

  ‘Firstly, gentlemen, we have a conning tower full of water above us. I intend to stabilise the boat before any attempt is made to recover the CO,’ said Harry, in charge now. He hadn’t made any announcement to that effect; he didn’t have to. Umbrage had only two officers left standing, and Harry was the senior one.

  Umbrage’s four most senior rates each nodded grimly. Stabilising the boat? Mr Gilmour would get no argument out of them about that. That water had to go. A conning tower full of it made them unstable, especially in that transition from dived to surface. Right now, they were still at sixty feet, steering 110 degrees, and their motors delivering revs for three knots, just enough to counter the deep current trying to wash them into the western basin.

  ‘The conning tower drain valves are working, Sir,’ Parry-Jones had told Harry, ‘but there’s no water coming through the system. It’s blocked somewhere.’

  Harry took his cap off and rubbed his face, as if trying to rub into it all the coolness and detachment he felt a CO needed to show his crew at a time like this, but struggling. Thinking to himself, What next? Mr Crabtree cleared his throat. ‘We have a set of separators, Sir. I can prise the hatch off its seal without you having to open it. It’ll let the water jet out of the hatch. But it’ll take a while.’

  Harry looked at them all in turn. ‘I don’t see what good draining water out of the lower hatch is going to do, if the upper hatch is open to the sea.’

  ‘Actually, Sir,’ said Parry-Jones, ‘I think there might be some good news . . .’ and he trailed off, looking at Big Jonners. And Big Jonners said, ‘We don’t think the conning tower is full of water, Sir. Me and Mr Parry-Jones, we think the CO shut it before he . . . well, was lost.’

  Harry didn’t dare ask, he just stared hard, willing the news to justify their optimism.

  Parry-Jones spoke first, being the Outside ERA and knowing about trim. ‘It doesn’t feel as though the tower is actually full, Sir. We’ve kept a very careful record of how much we’ve had to pump out from M tanks to get back in trim and it just doesn’t equal a conning tower full of water. By our calculations, it’s probably not much more than half-full. And that means the upper lid must be shut. If we could just get most of the water out first, we could open the hatch and let what’s left flood into the bilges and pump her.’

  Poor Rais, thought Harry, for the first time. And he had a momentary vision of the cherubic little face, drenched in spray, clinging as huge cold lumps of Mediterranean sea swirled around him, vanishing into the conning tower of his boat. He would have known the lower hatch had been shut, and would have felt Umbrage falling away beneath him. He must have sensed whatever was passing for the line between the surface and the deep on that raging sea, going past him: clinging there, alone and nowhere to go. He must have made the conscious decision then to jump on the upper hatch, and physically slam it down, hoping as the boat dived, the water pressure would effectively seal it shut, and himself off from all hope of saving.

  ‘Do it, Mr Crabtree,’ said Harry, trying to look like a CO. ‘Mr Roscorla, see if you can rig the elephant’s trunk to funnel what comes pissing out more directly into the bilges. I’d rather not have to wear my sou’wester while I’m standing watch.’

  ‘Aye aye, Sir,’ said Mr Crabtree, although you couldn’t see his mouth move beneath his big, black, full set – beard and ’tache – that sat across his big round head like thatch and climbed like liana up the side and into the line of his oily watch cap, which he touched with an oily fist, and was gone.

  ‘Aye aye, Sir,’ said Big Jonners, with his jaw set firm in complete approval of his orders.

  ‘Mr Parry-Jones,’ said Harry, ‘it is my intention that we hold here. We’re not going anywhere until the tower has been drained, on the principle that it’s probably better not to rock the boat while she’s in this condition, unless it’s absolutely necessary. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, aye aye, Sir! Most definit
ely. Best not to rock her.’

  ‘Carry on, Mr Parry-Jones.’

  Harry turned to Wykham, standing back by the chart table, who was staring at him with his mouth slightly open like some groundling in the Globe Theatre’s yard, watching a particularly ripping performance of Henry V or Tamburlaine. ‘Mr Wykham,’ he said, trying not to smile, ‘you have her. I’m going to see how Number One is doing.’

  Three steps and he was in the wardroom. Grainger had been cut out of his Ursula suit, and was lying stripped to the waist, face down on the back banquette, his skin looking fishy-white in the pale glows from the space’s two cosy little sidelights. A big torch sat on the deck: they’d obviously needed more light at some point, but it was out now. The table had been unshipped to let Mr Bell get at him. Everything looked surprisingly neat and homely and the air was full of a reassuring antiseptic smell. Bell was kneeling, finishing swathing the First Lieutenant’s upper torso in bandages, and was being assisted by a Leading Torpedoman, who was helping prise Grainger up off the table, while Bell did another turn of bandage around him, each movement accompanied by a gurgling grunt from Grainger.

  ‘The noise you heard earlier was Mr Grainger,’ said Bell, whose sailor’s bashed-about face had none of the sympathy you usually saw when sailors were helping wounded shipmates. Harry hadn’t heard any noise. Too distracted, probably. He pushed himself in to kneel beside Grainger’s head, trying not to stare too hard into the slice in it, which looked exactly like what it was – two folds of meat held together with cross-hatched gut, and a smear of iodine yellow down the ragged edge.

  ‘You’d’ve screamed too,’ said Grainger wheezily. His face was grey and lined with pain. Harry hadn’t heard any screams. Too busy, definitely. Funny what you screen out when you have to. He turned to look at Bell, who was kneeling beside him, his lips tight as he glowered at his patient. Harry was close enough to see beads of sweat in the man’s two-day whiskers.