by David Black
The only good news was that the mines didn’t go live until the clips were released; and even when they were live it took a very hefty impact from a lot of tons of moving steel to fire the horn triggers. Because nobody wanted odd bits of flotsam, or a curious seal, setting off the damn things. This much Harry knew.
‘So, we are going to have to surface and take a look at what is jamming it,’ Syvret continued, sipping his coffee. He grimaced, and looked over to Harry’s cup, which was still half full.
‘If M’sieur Le Breuil is correct,’ he added, leaning back to the little cupboard where he kept the wardroom brandy, ‘and it is a derailed mine, then someone from the engineers is going to have to go in there and fix it . . .’
‘Beyfus?’ Harry interrupted. ‘Your engineer chap?’
‘Too fat,’ said Syvret, topping up Harry’s coffee with a shot of brandy, then his own. ‘He couldn’t squeeze in.’
Syvret raised his glass, ‘Salud!’ and he drank. Harry followed his lead and returned Syvret’s lopsided grin with one of his own.
‘It’ll have to be one of the lads. That’s where you come in,’ Syvret continued. ‘You are going to have to explain to whoever’s going, how to do it. What nuts to loosen on the rack and what end of the pinion to hit with a hammer. So you better get reading. Oh, and the weather upstairs is even shittier than your minelaying mechanisms. I’ll let you know when we get into the lee of something and can start work.’
And with that, Syvret patted Harry once on the shoulder and was gone, back to the control room. Harry pulled the binder towards him, opened it again, and with the plans by his side, began to read.
Meanwhile . . . Syvret nosed Radegonde inshore. The weather was indeed shitty. The back end of a spring gale, with driving rain and a chopped and confused sea running from the south-west. Even at this time of the year, dawn was starting to break early at this latitude, so it would soon be light. Not the best of times for a submarine to surface in enemy waters.
As far as Harry could see, the system worked on a toothed chain – the rack – which was set into and looped along the deck of the mine chamber, for’ard to aft. Resting vertically on each rack were the boxes holding the mines. The boxes ran on rails either side of the rack, and were clipped on to the rack’s teeth by A-rings, which to Harry’s eyes, were just bigger versions of the little chrome thingies that held the bath pug to the overflow.
The mechanism was driven by two big cog wheels – the pinions – one for each rack, and each was driven by a pair of actuators that could draw power from either the batteries or the diesels. When you turned it on, the pinions’ teeth locked with the rack’s teeth, and what followed was the elegance of simplicity; round went the pinion and around went the rack, pulling the mines to the hole at the end; and when the rack turned under, the mines fell off. Bob’s your uncle.
That was how the mechanism worked. How you fixed a jam – fixed it without wrecking the mechanism – was another matter. There was the step-by-step procedure for disengaging the pinion; there were the pressure points in the system where leverage could be applied to loosen the rack, unseat it and remove blockages, then shift it back; procedures you had to follow so as not to break links, or damage teeth, or reseat the mechanism out of alignment. Harry was an intelligent lad and with a lot of sweat generated on his brow, jabbing his finger between the text and plans to keep his place, and careful, lip-moving concentration, he could visualise what might have to be done. But to explain it in French, to a loose-limbed grease monkey whose education had probably never extended beyond three years of secondary schooling – schooling that had probably only been completed months previously rather than years – that’s when Harry knew how this had to play out.
Apparently there was one other task expected of Harry before the unjamming of the minelaying mechanism could begin. He learned of this when Syvret summoned him aft to the crew mess. Harry stepped through the watertight door, clutching his set of plans – it would have been a waste of time bringing the binder for what he was intending – and was confronted by a tall, pasty-faced and pimply youth, with a matted mop of curly hair and a vacant expression that Harry took to be fear.
The boy was encased from neck – and wrists – to ankles, in a black rubber suit, sealed at the extremities, and with splatters of chalk dust round the holes. When he moved, puffs of the stuff would appear where it wasn’t quite snug. Beyfus, de Maligou and several matelots in foul-weather gear were crammed into the compartment too. So was Captain Syvret, and he was holding out a Davis Escape Set. Harry stared at it.
‘Nobody knows how this . . . thing . . . works,’ said Syvret, loosely dangling the set. ‘You need to show him.’
Harry looked blankly at him, then he noticed that above the rubber-clad youth was the aft escape hatch. He stopped breathing. A wave of old fear washed over him, until he noticed how the boat was rolling, and realised they must already be on the surface. He started breathing again.
‘The mine chamber will be as good as flooded,’ added Syvret. ‘He’ll need this if he’s going to work in there.’
The Davis Escape Set was a Royal Navy device for assisting submariners to escape from sunken submarines. It consisted of a rubber bag with a rubber corrugated tube sticking out of it and an oxygen bottle fitted to its bottom. Inside was a canister of CO2-absorbing chemicals. You breathed in and out through the tube. The chemicals scrubbed what you breathed out, so you could breathe it in again without dying of CO2 poisoning. The oxygen was there to fill the bag as a life jacket, if you needed it, or to give you something extra to breathe if what was going in and out of your lungs wasn’t quite doing the trick.
Harry had encountered the damned things twice in his career. Once, in the training tank at Fort Blockhouse, when he thought he was going to drown; and a second time, off the Firth of Forth, getting out of his first submarine, its bows in the sea bed in 150 feet of water and a bloody great hole in her.
The Davis Escape Set Syvret was holding out to him was the first one he’d seen aboard Radegonde. It didn’t take long to work out why. Radegonde had been equipped with this piece of kit, but because it was British they’d never worked out how to use it. Just like the bloody minelaying mechanism. None of that mattered now.
‘He’s not going,’ said Harry, nodding at the boy.
Syvret held back the set. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll go,’ said Harry.
From the look on Syvret’s face, Harry knew he didn’t have to spell out the logic of his decision. But Syvret had to make at least a show of having to be convinced.
‘What if you make a mess of it? You are, after all, at your own admission, not an engineer,’ said Syvret. ‘How do I explain to your Lordships of the Admiralty that I have lost one of their Liaison Officers?’
‘There’s over 300 pounds of explosives in every one of these bloody mines,’ said Harry. ‘If I mess up, the only person you’ll be explaining anything to will be St Peter.’
Everybody laughed. Even Harry.
Syvret gestured to de Maligou. ‘Get the boy out of the suit.’ Then to Harry, ‘A moment with me, please M’sieur Harry.’ And they squeezed back through the watertight door into the motor room.
‘When we load for operations, they load the mines first,’ explained Syvret, with his hand on Harry’s shoulder, ‘while the mine chamber deck is still above the water. Then they load everything else: fuel, food, torpedoes, my brandy, the vin rouge, the crew; and pretty soon the chamber is under the water. I explain this to you, just so you know we’re not doing this on purpose, making you have to splash about in very cold sea.’
‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Harry formally, but with his lopsided grin. Syvret decided the grin didn’t actually make him want to kill Harry as he’d feared. In fact, he quite liked it. Royal Navy sangfroid. Why not? They had to be good at something, these damned rosbifs.
‘Just one other thing,’ Syvret said, no longer sharing the grin. ‘About only having to explain to St Peter . . .
that’s not strictly accurate. If, when you’re in the chamber, and Jerry shows up . . . I’m going to have to dive the boat and get out of here.’
Syvret didn’t have to explain any further.
‘I know, Sir,’ said Harry. He hadn’t. Hadn’t even thought of it. But he knew what it meant. Still, Royal Navy sangfroid dictated ‘I know’ was the right thing to say.
‘Well, let’s get you kitted up,’ said Syvret, this time in English, out of politeness. ‘Do you like our frogman suit, by the way? It’s Italian Navy; made by Pirelli, the tyre people, apparently. De Maligou purloined it back in 1939. We use it for harbour work; the boy goes down and checks all the valves and vents, untangles Stalin’s lead from the props, that sort of thing . . . What? You look surprised?’
‘Stalin has a lead?’ Harry said, drily, and Syvret laughed and slapped him again on the shoulder, which Harry found bloody irritating.
Chapter Nine
Harry cannot remember ever being so cold. They gave him beer before he went into the water. He had frowned at that. ‘Piss in the suit,’ de Maligou had explained. Harry had looked revolted; de Maligou had raised his eyebrows, and said again, ‘Piss in the suit.’
Harry had resolved it would never happen. After hitting the water, his resolve had lasted less than ten seconds.
And now here he is. Suited up, the Davis Set looped round his neck, nose clips and goggles fitted, the bone of his skull creaking with the cold, and his extremities burning painfully with each slap and dip into the water.
He creeps along, clinging to the submerged section of Radegonde’s casing and lowers himself down into the mine chamber’s launch chute. The chute itself is underwater and follows the line of the casing as it tapers towards the stern in a lip; if you look for’ard, it disappears into an elliptical void, chopped off at the top and bottom, and the hole angled back. Just inside it he can see a mine sitting, black and menacing, on its rack. Each time his hands and feet make contact with the slick steel it feels like blows on wounds already numbed by shock. The weather is indeed grim. A group of swaddled crew are on the casing to supervise Harry’s efforts; they are hunched against it. Among them are de Maligou, Beyfus and Le Breuil. Syvret is on the bridge, and below, Poulenc stands over the hydrophone operator, listening for Jerries.
To port is an islet, about 150 metres off; all grey rock and shiny green moss. An endless roil of pearl-grey cloud hangs low over everything There should be no aircraft up in weather like this to spot them from the air.
Boat and land are rimed with skeins of moisture, and it drizzles, like it’s been drizzling since the beginning of the earth and will do so until its end. But if Harry is looking at the view, he’s not aware of it. He’s only aware of the cold, and a sea that is all confused chop, splashing his face repeatedly as he clambers into the hole. They’d tried the for’ard chamber inspection hatch, but a collective sticking of heads into that hole had concluded the errant mine, if that was indeed the problem, was not at that end of the rack. So it is up to Harry to go in the arse end, and sort it out from there.
Getting into the suit had been an epic task in itself, involving an incredible amount of chalk dust to force his limbs into the obscenely clingy, cold rubber. Despite the sealed neck and cuffs, the suit is far from watertight, but after the beer passing through him, and the initial amount of water seeping in, what is there has started to warm up courtesy of his body heat. But the cold is still making him slow and clumsy.
Attached to lanyards, Harry has a torch; a prise bar, an adjustable spanner and a hammer; the lanyards run from a belt on his waist to a webbing bag slung diagonally over his left shoulder. Toes, numbly clinging now to the tumblehome of the rack, only his head is still above water, the Davis mouthpiece gripped in his teeth as much to control his chattering; his goggles endlessly being splashed and slapped by seawater, he shines the torch into the chamber; and there they are. The mines: big black dinosaur eggs, bristling with spikes, receding into the dark. He feels himself rocking slightly to the roll of the boat. Harry tries at first to clamber over the top of the mines – anything to be free, even for moments, from the deep chill grip of the sea – but the clearance between the mines and their horn triggers, and the chamber head, is too narrow. He must go down, where the depth of the mine boxes will give him all the room he will need. The water closes over his head, and the cold is like a pressure, crushing his skull until his jaws feel locked.
He pulls himself through a green gloom that ripples in torchlight; hauling himself along by the mine boxes on the outboard side of the rack. The boxes themselves, so close, yet they seem to loom. And he keeps banging himself against steel – his knees, elbows, even his head – but the blows have lost any sharpness in the cold. He is counting the mines as he passes them, as they curve over his head; no horn triggers on the bottom to snag on his Christmas tree of kit; a silent thank you. He is aware of the coils of line peeking from the mine boxes, and the boxes, like vegetable crates with little engraved Bakelite plates on them – ‘Hoist Here’, ‘Release Clip I.P.’ – and although he is counting, the cold makes him forget.
He has no idea how many he has passed when there, in the torch beam, lies the derailed mine. Oh God. What a bloody mess. At least the mine lies on this side of the rack. He mouths another silent thank you. He will not have to go back down and up the other side to wrestle it back on to the rails. He must stop and look. What has happened? But his brain feels like congealing tar, and he is having trouble turning what he sees into thought. It’s the cold; he knows that. But it isn’t helping. Con-cen-trate!
The picture is slow in coming, but he sees eventually; it is the mine in front of the derailed one that is jammed. The one behind has hit it, and been itself hit from behind, causing its inboard wheel to jump out of the rail, distorting the A-ring pulling it, which in turn has toppled the mine box off the rails completely, jamming the mine by one of its horn triggers against one of the mine chamber’s ribs. The trigger, Harry sees, with a dull, throat-tightening fear, is bent; and with every roll of the boat, the mines behind are giving it another push.
He manhandles himself back down the chamber, shining the torch around the mine in front, looking for the cause. He finds it. Its A-ring, which attaches the mine box to the rack and looks for all the world like a percussionist’s triangle, except made of High Tensile steel, has failed. He can’t see why, but it has. It is now just a twisted steel bar, peeled off its mine box, almost straightened, free of the rack’s teeth, but now jammed tight into one of the rack’s links, bringing the whole bloody mechanism to an abrupt halt.
Harry looks closer, the bar has been bent by the pressure of the link’s spindle and it’s well and truly in there; there’s going to be no pulling it out, and with it stuck, nothing’s going to be moving anywhere. There is the sound of metal scraping together very close as the boat rolls again; it is the derailed mine’s horn trigger, being ground against the rib.
Oh god, oh god, oh god. I can’t do this, he thinks. He is too cold to scream it. Maybe the mine will just go off, and the cold will stop and all this will be over. He doesn’t know what makes him go on. Brain first; work it out. To free the twisted A-ring you need to uncouple the link. The drawings; think. The links are not riveted are they? If they are . . . Don’t think about that. Think about . . . yes, it is a bolt and nut . . . and the nut is on this side of the rack! Yes! That’s why you decided to come up this side. Remember. It wasn’t random. The adjustable spanner. Yes, yes, yes. Just undo the nut and prise out the bolt. Yes.
He fumbles for the spanner, forcing his numbing fingers to be steady. He finds it, and its lanyard is fouled by the prise bar’s lanyard. He has to stop and untangle them. Take your time. He stretches out on the chamber’s deck and peers in to where the twisted A-ring is sticking out, bent from the rack. He leans in with the spanner. There is no space between the rack and the bottom of the mine box to attach it to the nut and get any leverage on it. He wants to smash and smash and smash the spanner against the
twisted A-ring. But he doesn’t. He pulls back.
The prise bar. If he levers this side of the mine box off its rail, he can create more space. The cold has leached every ounce of strength out of his arms. He tries to raise the box. Pressing down with arms that have no power, and pushing up with a shoulder he can’t feel any more, the box comes up a fraction. But how does he keep it here? The box drops.
The hammer! He fumbles the hammer out of the webbing bag, and undoes its lanyard. If he loses it now into the rack’s sump . . . but he doesn’t think about that. He levers the box up, and with his foot pushes the hammer under one of the box’s wheels. It doesn’t work. The box comes down and the hammer skitters from under it. He just manages to trap it with his foot. He is getting very, very cold now. Sleepy cold. Think. The hammer. The rail. He tries fitting the hammer’s head into the rail and when he does, he immediately wants to kiss whoever designed it. The hammer’s head fits, almost neatly, into the groove. He pushes it in, leaving the handle sticking out at an angle, close to the mine box’s wheel, and using strength he doesn’t have, raises the box again . . . higher . . . a bit more . . . higher. And with his foot, he pushes the hammer upright and under where the box’s axle should be . . . and lowers, slow, gently, feeling the hammer taking the weight, but still going slow, slow, until the fucking, bastarding . . . BOX! . . . is resting on the hammer. He feels for the spanner again, and stretches out again, and leans in under the box, groping for the link nut.
Harry will never really remember everything he did in the mine chamber on that morning in early April 1941 somewhere off Stavanger. How he got the nut off, eventually, using the prise bar at some point to lever the spanner; or how he managed to catch the nut when it twirled free, before it vanished into the rack’s sump; or how he remembered to get the bar out, and not leave it lying there to jam up the rack later. It would all forever be a blank. So would how he’d managed to realign the bolt into the link holes and rescrew the nut so the rack would work again.