Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Their Navigator Mr Yeo’s last sighting had used the port of Ras Lanuf, where the convoy was clearly intending to dash into, so that had probably been accurate. But that was far astern now, and it really was the most damnable coast: no headlands on its one long flat sandy beach, and certainly no handy church steeples – not even a minaret or village or even a goat-herd’s dunny. Something you could fix. So the Jimmy was giving Mr Yeo a hand, trying to triangulate their position on something else. The Jimmy’s latest estimate was 30 degrees 34 minutes north, 18 degrees 21 minutes east, which wasn’t far off the Navigator’s, but all they had to corroborate was the frayed nineteenth-century chart that the echo sounder only matched the fathom lines with when it felt like it. Bill was holding the chart for his Jimmy now, below the bridge, with the red torch shining on it.

  Acting Lieutenant Gilmour, except you called him Lieutenant. The ‘Acting’ bit just meant their Lordships hadn’t got around to filling in the bumf that would make him ‘substantive’. It also meant that, if their Lordships changed their minds, he could be bumped all the way back down again without having to generate any further bumf.

  Even after just a few days at sea, you could tell the new Jimmy was one of those ‘let’s just get on with it’ sort of blokes. And at least he’d never called one of those godawful Address to the Troops meetings, where you all had to sit and listen to the latest Herbert to be inflicted on you telling you how you were all going to be doing your jobs better, now that he’d arrived.

  Harry had been the exact opposite. ‘From your reputation, you Nicobars all seem to know what you’re about,’ the new First Lieutenant had said to Bill after their first walk round, ‘so I suppose the best order I can issue is, “Carry on!” and ask you to bear with me while I get in step.’

  Bloody hell, had been Bill’s first thought, and he remembered having to consciously stop his jaw from hitting the deck plates. He’d said much the same to the Warrant Engineer and the PO ‘Guns’ and the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate over sippers in the mess.

  With everybody else the new Jimmy met on his initial wanderings around the boat, right down to the lowest Able Seaman, the story had been the same. A bloke would be polishing a knob or tightening a grommet, or in the mess with a mug of steaming Ky, because it didn’t half get chilly in the Med in winter, and the Jimmy’d suddenly appear: ‘Hello, don’t stop what you’re doing. I’m Lieutenant Gilmour, the new Number One. Who are you, and what is it you do?’ Every Jack aboard, all twenty-seven of them. If he carried on like that, people might start thinking he gave a stuff.

  And now they were off the Libyan coast. Just over a week out and a signal had come through from Captain (S), ordering them off their previous billet in the Gulf of Taranto, and to head south in a hurry.

  Of course, by now everybody on board knew they were looking for a convoy. Even though the signal alerting them was marked ‘For CO eyes only’. Carey had decoded it himself, then had immediately shown it to Harry. And Harry had told CPO Sutter, and then the Warrant Engineer; and they’d told everybody else. Details corroborated by the wardroom steward, who reported back on every word every officer ever said. So everybody knew the where, the when, the how and the why: only fair, if you were being asked to put your arse on the line. And once you were at sea, on patrol, what was the point in holding stuff back from the crew? Who were they going to tell? That was life in the Trade, the way it should be.

  ‘Well, we might as well be in a fountain in Trafalgar Square, for all I can tell,’ said Harry with a grim smile at Bill, ‘but don’t tell the Captain.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what?’ said Malcolm Carey, standing right next to them, looking to seaward. They had been told to expect a lot of MAS-boat activity, and even the odd Jerry E-boat prowling up and down.

  ‘The question of my relative utility as a help to our Vasco,’ said Harry. ‘I think we should ask Grot McGilveray for his assessment. I could do with a laugh.’

  ‘Ah, the wisdom of Leading Seaman McGilveray,’ said Carey absently, not removing his glasses – his shape a dark shadow leaning against the bridge. ‘He sees everything in terms of competition, of course. So I would imagine it would all come down to the odds for the most useless he’d be offering . . . between you, men’s tits and a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest.’

  Harry and Bill grinned at each other, their teeth two little lines of dull glow in the inky night. ‘Which I’d win,’ said Harry.

  ‘A racing certainty,’ said Carey, the smile in his voice, ‘but let’s not let that stop us from trying, eh, Mr Gilmour?’

  ‘Bridge, control room. Echo sounder shows forty-seven feet under the keel!’ came a voice from the bridge voice-pipe. ‘Still shoaling, Sir.’

  Harry, who was officer of the watch, ordered ‘Starboard, fifteen’, and Nicobar began to swing seaward a little, following the line of the shoal. As she did, Harry matched the depth just called to the markers on the chart, and made another guess as to their position. And so on they went, up the coast. The plan was to keep inshore of whatever was coming their way, to use the shadow of the land to hide their silhouette, and to be where the escorts would never think of looking, when they started firing.

  They’d turned into the shallows way back at 17.41 hours local time, not long after the desert sun had set with its usual abruptness, like a light switch going off. The time now was just coming up on 01.40.

  ‘Multiple HE, bearing red-zero-five.’ A voice coming up the bridge voice-pipe, from the ASDIC cubby. Carey dropped down the hatch to go and find out more. Harry telegraphed ‘All stop, together’, and Nicobar began coasting to a halt, her diesels still running, but now just pumping amps into the batteries. There was no point him scanning the horizon ahead, not given his night vision, so he covered Nicobar’s stern, while the two lookouts searched ahead for the first hint of approaching shadow. Everybody concentrating. Harry told Bill he should go below now; the bridge chart work was probably over for the evening.

  ‘Bloody horizon keeps getting obscured, Sir,’ said one of the lookouts. ‘There’s a load of squalls out there, running inshore.’

  This boat wasn’t Umbrage: everybody was expected to speak up. Your experience was there for the boat to use.

  ‘Ever wonder how the brass hats get to know these things?’ Carey asked Harry, as they continued to scan the dark horizon. ‘When Jerry gets his sailing orders? And what’s in them? D’you think it really is all down to recce pilots the likes of your cobber Challoner? D’you think he really is flying so low he can read through the window their movement orders as they pile up on the signaller’s desk?’

  Harry sighed, smiling. ‘Or maybe somebody among the brass hats is using their brains?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Carey, night glasses still glued to his face. ‘Gold braid corrodes brains. It’s been empirically proved. And anyway, look at us. Up and down the Med like a whore’s drawers. Where’s the intelligent design in that. Umm?’

  Harry, a vision before his eyes of the big Mediterranean sitrep map on the wall in Scots Street. ‘Well, according to the RAF PR maps, General Auchinleck’s Operation Crusader has run out of steam about fifty miles back up the coast,’ he said. ‘It’s not a great leap to assume Rommel is sensing he’s finally fought Eighth Army to a standstill and has started digging in. But he’ll need to get stuff up to his troops fast, and with the Desert Air Force still giving him merry hell all along the roads back to Tripoli, let us assume he needs to move it by other means. And what better means than by night-time dashes by whatever fast cargo ships he has to hand. Along the coast, inshore, and behind his offshore minefields. And who best to put a stopper on his rat run? Us. The ones we don’t sink, we drive out to sea. Which would tally with what Shrimp’s told you in his signal. That Force F is out there waiting.’

  Carey lowered his glasses and looked at him. ‘D’you think up stuff like that just to annoy me?’ he said.

  ‘You did ask,’ said Harry. ‘Just trying to rationalise for you how the
se intelligence johnnies think.’

  ‘Being rational doesn’t tell you the time, though, does it?’ said Carey, his voice all smug as he put the night glasses back to his eyes. ‘It’s the timings I’m talking about. How come every time Shrimp sends us a signal telling us what the enemy is up to, he always seems to know the when, as well as the where? Explain that, smarty-pants.’

  In truth, Harry had often wondered where all the intelligence came from: how the brass seemed to know so much about what the enemy was up to. How many patrols had he been on when they’d somehow managed to be in the right place at the right time? But where was the fun in admitting that to his CO.

  What he said was, in a tone of voice you’d use to deal with a slow child, ‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’ Then all nonchalant, as if no longer interested, ‘You said it yourself a minute ago.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yep. Challoner’s flying so low he can look in the window and read the sailing orders off the signal pads. Obvious.’

  ‘Smart alec,’ said Carey, glasses down now so Harry could clearly see that mischievous grin on his face. ‘If anyone asks you how you knew that, you’d better tell them it was me who told you. That’s an order.’ And just as the words were spoken, the sky was suddenly full of noise, and straight out of the night flew a shagbat – from the land side, so low you could smell the reek of exhaust fumes from its engine.

  Harry, spinning round, astonished, looking up as its dark, djinn-like shape filled his vision. He blinked, and it was almost as if that very action had caused the two bombs to fall from beneath the little aircraft’s wings. Two black shapes tumbling free. The first one seemed to be coming right for the end of his nose, and the other – his eyes barely having the time to register – looked as though it were going to go sailing over his right shoulder. The shagbat had gone over his head, so close he had felt the draught of it – a Cant Z.501. Had he really identified it in that flash of a second’s glimpse? And the head and shoulders of the little goggled Eyetie perched in its open-nose gun pit, glaring down at him – had he really seen that? And then to his left there was the most God-almighty splash, and when he looked back, the bomb he thought was going to hit his nose had just a gouged a gout of iridescent seawater into the air a bare dozen or so feet beyond their casing. Harry instinctively flinched, but no explosion followed. Then a huge splash from his other side told him the other bomb had also gone directly into the sea.

  He wanted to hit the diving klaxon, but that was the CO’s job, and anyway, there wasn’t much over twenty feet of water under them. Carey, beside him, pressed the night alarm instead for a collision warning, sending the Nicobars to seal off her watertight compartments so she might survive if the next bomb hit her – and did go off. And as he did so, the second bomb detonated. Harry felt the concussion of it rebound up through his guts, and a draught, as another great gout of water went up about twenty yards off their starboard beam. While the blast was still echoing, lumps of water and bomb casing were splashing and rattling down.

  ‘Shagbat!’ said Harry. ‘Came out of the shadow of the land. I didn’t see it until it was on top of us. One of those Cant orange crates.’

  Carey put his hand lightly on Harry’s chest. ‘I didn’t see it at all. As you were,’ he said, and lifted the voice-pipe. ‘Finish with diesels.’

  As Nicobar’s diesels shut down, they could hear the distant whining now of the little Italian floatplane’s single engine, somewhere out there in the night; it seemed to be moving ahead of them, and out to sea. Harry could feel the boat wallowing slightly on the waves from the bomb blast.

  ‘And I bet he didn’t see us either,’ said Carey. ‘At least not until he was right on top of us. If we don’t go charging about, and just stay still, he’ll never find us again.’

  Harry suddenly realised he’d been holding his breath. He breathed out again in a deep sigh. It seemed to really amuse Carey. ‘As tension mounts,’ said Carey, arching his eyebrows, his tone like the background voice on a B-picture melodrama.

  They waited in silence. The whine of the little Cant drifted back, and then drifted away again. ASDIC continued to report multiple HE, still on the same bearing, getting a little louder with each passing minute, getting closer – the ASDIC man now beginning to identify individual returns: a couple of heavy ones, and a whole scatter of lighter. Then, on the bridge, they heard it – a little burble rising out of the sound of the lapping sea, and the wind in the periscope shears; the sound rising a little, then getting lost, and then coming back again, and then stronger: the low steady thump of marine diesels in the darkness.

  Carey lifted the voice-pipe. ‘Starboard, twenty.’

  Then he rang the telegraphs, slow ahead, port, slow astern, starboard. Nicobar started to pivot more than turn, on silent electric power, until her bows were pointing directly seaward.

  ‘Depth?’ Carey called into the voice-pipe.

  ‘Two-five feet, Sir,’ came back from the ASDIC cubby, then, ‘Sir. Target bearing drawing aft . . .’

  Now that he had moved the advancing enemy ships to his beam, Carey was expecting a bearing of red-nine-zero or less; he took a deep breath.

  ‘. . . Main HE now bearing red-five-zero, and bearing is drawing for’ard now, Sir,’ came up the pipe. The convoy was veering seaward, away from them. Then the voice spoke again: ‘. . . But there’s still two HE contacts on red-eight-five. They’re separating . . . Sound like MAS-boats, Sir, but a bit heavier. Still low revolutions. They’re creeping, Sir, but closing on us. Dead slow. Main HE now on red-three-zero. Still two heavy engines . . . three, maybe four, smaller contacts. Moving away.’

  Carey knew what all that meant, and so did Harry. Their little shagbat friend, not content with dropping two presents on them, had given the game away. Blabbed, telling anyone who was listening, There’s a submarine in your way: two steps to the side, quickly. As for the two contacts creeping towards them, sounding like MAS-boats, but bigger – they both knew what that meant.

  German E-boats.

  Bastarding things!

  Some MAS-boats were lovely, Italian style written all over them. Strip off the popgun on the foredeck and the racks either side for a torpedo or two, and the racks at the arse end for ditto depth charges, and you’d probably want one yourself: all polished wood, and some even had wheelhouses with nice big glass windows, like a rich man’s launch.

  German E-boats weren’t like that. They weighed in at about one hundred tons and were just over 115 feet long, with low-swept lines and a bridge that looked more like an army pillbox. In their guts they had three huge Daimler-Benz diesels generating almost four-thousand-shaft horsepower. Throttles wide open, they could shift at the speed of a torpedo – over forty-five knots. There were two, and on some types four, torpedo tubes sunk into their streamlined upper works, and they bristled with a 37mm cannon and three 20mm Bofors guns. On their sterns, the ones deployed to the Med all had twin depth charge racks – some carried a dozen charges. If two E-boats were after you, you were in trouble.

  ‘Harry,’ said Carey, ‘nip down and get Mr Yeo to sort me out the shortest route to deep water. And get a signal ready to send to Force F. No point in radio silence, now they know we’re here. I’m not hanging about any longer than we have to with two E-boats about.’

  ‘Aye aye, Sir.’ And Harry was gone.

  Carey stared into the impenetrable darkness. He could just make out another squall as a shimmering curtain of deeper night, moving from starboard to port. The muted sounds of the enemy’s engines in the night came and went beneath the sound of the sea. Nicobar was still heading offshore at a steady four knots on her motors and Carey was trying to work out why the Jerries weren’t racing down the coast towards where the shagbat must’ve said there was a submarine. Why were they just pottering along?

  The Navigator’s voice came up the pipe with a course for the ten-fathom line. Carey ordered full ahead, together on the heading. It was going to take them the best part of ten minutes
to get there. ASDIC reported the convoy HE was still heading seaward, moving diagonally across their bows, a long way out. The two likely E-boats were still on the same track, closing on a bearing that would see them pass astern.

  Then Sub-Lieutenant John Napier, Nicobar’s other RNVR officer, was on the pipe, telling him he’d coded a signal for Flag Officer, Force F, alerting the cruiser force to likely size, course and current estimated position of the enemy convoy. The minute they transmitted, the Jerry E-boats, a mere few miles away, would know exactly where they were. Not that it mattered. With the convoy’s divergent course now, even with the N-class’s extra turn of speed on the surface, they were never going to be able to get themselves into an attack position before sunrise, and trying to catch up submerged in daylight was never going to be a runner. Only Force F had a chance now to intercept the enemy, so the sooner Nicobar sent her signal the better.

  There was a problem, however. They might send their radio transmission to Force F, loud and clear, but atmospherics in the central Med were notorious. Your signal might get picked up clear as a bell on first transmission by, say, an E-boat five miles away, or even half a world away in Halifax, Nova Scotia; but the ship just over the horizon you were sending it to might never hear it in a month of Sundays.

  Which was why Carey ordered Mr Napier not to transmit right away, but to get the gun crew squared away, and be ready to close up for Gun Action, but to load with star shells only. He had a fallback plan.

  Carey let the minutes drip by. The E-boats passed dead astern, still unseen in the night, and now no longer heard; the enemy convoy had long ago passed beyond earshot. Carey ordered Harry to plot the enemy’s likely course that would take the convoy to the known inside edge of the enemy’s offshore minefield, and where it would then turn, to run parallel with the coast.