The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  There were more yells between Syvret and a Petty Officer down here in the control room, then the Petty Officer repeated them down the sound-powered telephone. More shouting; Syvret looked up from the ’scope, his eyes hard. The PO on the phone was wild-eyed. Then nothing. Nothing was happening, no one was shouting. And the impasse went on and on and on; Harry’s mind racing ahead; thinking, what the hell is happening?

  A voice, like a distant crackling of brown paper could be heard from the headphones; the PO shouted something Harry didn’t understand and Syvret had his eyes back on the ’scope again. Harry thought, I know it’s dark, but you’ve had that periscope up a helluva long time!

  Syvret’s head came back from the periscope, and Harry could see him, half face down, mouth the word ‘merde!’ He hit the periscope handles and ordered it down, calling out once again; not angles or depths this time, but something . . . aft, it sounded like. Something else had gone wrong.

  God, but it was infuriating not being able to follow the action. The PO appeared to be ringing another number on the phone, and Syvret called out again. It was a course change. Starboard four-zero, and he was calling for more revs; a lot more. Harry watched Syvret look at his watch, then look down directly at him, and, dearie me, was there no end to this Frenchman’s bravado, he smiled a smile, as if to say: are we having fun yet?

  The PO on the sound-powered phone began speaking into the mouthpiece. Syvret checked his watch again, studying it this time. And the control room, unnervingly, was allowing him silence in which to do it.

  ‘Up periscope!’ said Syvret. He stepped forward to grab the handles, then swivelling it to port, scanning briefly, he settled on a bearing and called, ‘Check!’

  De Maligou’s frame appeared in the hatch behind the Captain; he had been following him around, leaning over him, hands on his shoulders, squinting at the angles marked on the periscope’s bezel. He called, ‘One-two-zero, red!’ And the shouting started up again.

  Harry looked from one face to another, trying to work out what was happening. He could see from Bassano’s plot, Radegonde and the U-boat were diverging. Another shout, and Bassano was over the plot, changing their heading to a wider angle, and marking their speed beside it. They were doing nine knots now and the amps must be draining out their batteries like water out of a tap. And then Syvret shouted, ‘Fire!’

  Fire, what? thought Harry, until he felt Radegonde’s back end judder, like a nightclub dancer’s shimmy, and then it repeated itself. That’s when he knew, when it dawned on him: that infernal contraption on the casing aft of the minelaying chutes – the two swivel-mounted torpedo tubes. Which was why Bassano had his stopwatch out now; they had just fired the two aft tubes, and he was timing them to target. Syvret still stood glued to the periscope, his head fixed on the bearing. Bad tactics, thought Harry, to have that ’scope still up, even at night.

  ‘First one, missed,’ said Bassano, taking his finger off the watch, Harry thinking, Christ that must have been close, and then after two beats, Bassano just managed to say, ‘Second one . . .’ before he was interrupted by Syvret shouting, ‘AHA!’ And then just a half beat later, BUUD-DUUUDDUUMMM! It came reverberating through the hull, shortly followed by a surging, swishing sound of water as the shock waves shuddered through the sea and rocked them gently on their beam ends.

  They’d got a U-boat.

  But Syvret wasn’t cheering. ‘Bring us back to one-zero-four, revolutions for three knots, down periscope. Hydrophones, let me know who else is in the water with us when that din finishes.’

  It was a teeth-grating din of tearing metal, when it got started; its sound coming through the hull, as if some giant was in a tantrum with his toys. It was a sound Harry had heard before, but not this close up. It made him shudder, and from the looks on the control room crew’s faces it was having a similar effect on them. No rejoicing over their victory here while they listened to their enemy die. And it seemed to take forever for the tangling, twisting wreckage of the U-boat to sink beyond their hearing.

  ‘Propeller sounds, bearing one-five-zero,’ the hydrophone man said at last.

  ‘Far away,’ he continued. ‘Twelve thousand metres, maybe thirteen thousand, I think.’

  That’s well over thirteen thousand yards, Harry calculated; too far for a shot.

  ‘New target is on a similar heading . . . no, wait,’ said the hydrophone man. ‘Slightly divergent. Angle is widening, but not much.’

  Bassano had already started a plot. Syvret leaned over to peer down the hatch and Bassano slid the chart so he could see. Harry took a peek too. What they saw was a pencil line marking Radegonde’s course at 140 degrees, and behind her, to port, her target. Bassano marked the target’s general course with the edge of his parallel rulers.

  ‘Definitely diverging now,’ called the hydrophone man. ‘I estimate it between one-two-five and one-three-zero. Speed . . . twelve knots.’

  ‘Bring us on to zero-four-zero,’ said Syvret. ‘Let’s aim for a track angle of ninety degrees. If we’re going to go after him, we might as well do it with a touch of finesse. Once on track, give me turns for nine knots.’

  Harry felt Radegonde go into her turn, while Syvret, standing back from the periscope, began a harangue with Le Breuil in the forward torpedo room – relayed through the PO on the sound-powered phone – none of which Harry could follow. Then it appeared to be the hydrophone man who was being berated, and Harry couldn’t quite follow that either, except it seemed to be about whether there were any other targets lurking out there.

  Bassano had pencilled in Radegonde’s sweeping turn to port, marking her progress against his watch, and pricking off her position relative to the approaching U-boat.

  ‘Up periscope!’ ordered Syvret. ‘Bearing?’ he cried, and de Maligou, still shadowing him round the ’scope, called it. Bassano measured and marked the chart. ‘Down periscope,’ said Syvret.

  ‘It will have to be a long shot, Sir,’ said Bassano, after busying himself on the slide rule.

  ‘Five thousand?’ asked Syvret.

  ‘More like six, six and a half,’ Bassano replied.

  They were talking about range. In thousands of metres. Jesus, but that was long.

  Syvret fired another bark at the hydrophone man. Harry didn’t catch the exact words, but it was obvious it was a question, and equally obvious the answer was a negative. Syvret let his irritation show in his next bark at the PO on the phone. Something about the torpedoes. All four. They were going to fire all four. And depth settings? Yes, Syvret was giving out depth settings; and gyro angles too?

  Harry, brows knitted, trying hard to work out what was being said; the torpedoes were going out fast, their spread to be dictated by the adjustments Le Breuil was to make to their internal gyro compasses. Bassano was talking now. Syvret leaned into the chart table; Bassano had scribbled timings and angles on the two converging pencil lines. ‘Track angle zero-nine-two,’ was all Harry could follow.

  Both Syvret and Bassano consulted their watches. Syvret ordered, ‘Up periscope!’

  ‘Red one-six,’ called Bassano, and both Syvret and de Maligou called it back. That must be the periscope angle, thought Harry, as Bassano called, ‘Your range on firing will be 6,400 metres.’

  Christ, thought Harry, almost four miles! That must be close to the torpedo’s maximum range. Too far! Far too far!

  Radegonde’s bows were pointing almost at right angles to the U-boat’s projected course. Travelling at forty-five knots, it would take her torpedoes less than two and a half minutes to be where the U-boat would be. It was plenty of time for the U-boat’s lookouts to spot the tracks; time and distance for tiny miscalculations to become huge. De Maligou, still standing behind his Captain, had his hands over the periscope’s handles too, as he kept his eyes on the bezel that indicated the target’s bearing; he was holding a stooped Syvret, whose eyes were glued to the periscope eyepiece on red-one-six, his shoulders showing how he held the ’scope slightly to his left, waiting f
or the U-boat.

  Seconds passed, then, as it entered the cross hairs on the periscope viewfinder, Syvret called, ‘Fire one!’ A moment later, a little bump in the water, indicating the torpedo had gone out, and then a call came from the hydrophone man that Harry didn’t understand, something about the torpedo running smooth and accurate, probably, because no sooner had he called it than Syvret ordered, ‘Fire two!’ And then with each launch, a bump, and out of the corner of his eye, Harry could see Poulenc deftly touching the trim board, compensating for the 1,400kg-worth of torpedo that had just left its tube. One, two, three, like clockwork. Harry felt a mounting elation as the torpedoes went on their way.

  Syvret had barely managed to finish calling, ‘Fire four!’ when there was a huge BUUD-DUUUDDUUMMM! and Radegonde lurched as if she had been punched on the nose; a teeth-rattling judder ran through the fabric of the boat, smashing lights and gauge dials and knocking hats from sailors’ heads. Then there was a distant follow-on of smashing crockery from the galley in the conning tower kiosk, and then from the second galley down the passageway; and a hiss of high-pressure air from ruptured pipes.

  For a fleeting moment, there was complete darkness, as all the red bulbs shattered; then the insipid yellow of the emergency lighting suffused the control room, and Harry felt Radegonde’s bows rising, and rising even more. There was a cloudiness in the air, as if the air itself had been shaken, or was it his eyes had been knocked out of focus?

  Then the shouting started all over again!

  The loudest shout came from Syvret, ‘Get her bows down Poulenc, before we broach!’

  ‘I’m flooding everything for’ard!’ he yelled back.

  But Syvret wasn’t listening to explanations or excuses, he was yelling at Bassano, while other people shouted damage reports at him. The bows began to go down again and the PO on the sound-powered phone relayed calls from compartments throughout the boat. Syvret was half way down the kiosk ladder, half in the control room, gripping Bassano by the shoulder, bending to yell in his ear; then he pushed him on his way, and, without thinking, Harry went to follow him. Syvret caught his eye, then nodded his approval as he shouted at the PO, ‘For’ard torpedo room! Put through the for’ard torpedo room to me up here!’

  By the time Harry caught up with Bassano at the torpedo room bulkhead door, acrid smoke was billowing out of it, and so were crewmen, all of them choking and coughing. No one could hear anything except for a high-pitched mechanical screaming coming from one of the torpedo tubes – the tube with the smoke billowing from around the top of its seal with a thin fan of water jetting out round the rest of it. And then the smoke suddenly stopped, and the jet of water formed a perfect bloom around the entire circumference of the tube’s inner door, like a blanched daffodil in the poor wash of the emergency lighting. One of the senior rates, a Maître, was bent over Bassano, yelling in his ear.

  Harry didn’t need telling what had gone wrong; whatever had exploded had jammed a torpedo, half in, half out of its tube, with its engine running, and its arming prop running too, no doubt, powered by water that Radegonde was accelerating into, to get more flow over her diving planes and drive her bows down to a decent depth. The explosion had also sprung the torpedo tube’s rear door.

  ‘Everybody out, Maître,’ said Bassano, ‘except the three of us. Dog the aft watertight door shut behind them, M’sieur Gilmour. Maître, bleed some high pressure air into the compartment, let’s see if we can discourage that water.’

  The water stopped to a dribble, but the pressure made Harry’s eyes and ears hurt, and the screaming of the hot-running engine made it difficult to think. The Maître was at the torpedo tube’s drain valve, but Bassano waved him away. He couldn’t shout above the screaming of the engine, but the Maître understood. Of course he did; no need to check the tube, it was obviously flooded, otherwise where had all the water come from? All three of them paused to get their breath in the smoke, and to try and think against the din.

  And then suddenly it stopped. The engine must have run out of fuel, or, more likely, the motor burned out. Then, in the immediate silence, there were two distant explosions, bare seconds apart. Harry and Bassano looked at each other, but it wasn’t until Bassano smiled that it dawned on Harry what they were.

  ‘Torpedoes one and two,’ Harry said, stating the obvious.

  ‘Bravo, torpedoes one and two,’ said the torpedo room Maître. ‘Not so bravo for torpedoes three and four . . . three must have prematurely detonated seconds after she left the tube. Blew four back into the boat, and all of us on our arses.’

  Now that he had the time to notice, Harry could see blood matted in the Maître’s blue overalls under his collar, and a huge welt on his left forearm. The initial blast must have thrown him around the compartment. Bassano gestured Harry to a first-aid box on the bulkhead, while he lifted the sound-powered phone receiver and called the control room. Bassano made his report to Syvret, as Harry sat the Maître down, pulled away his overalls and began swabbing blood away from a gash at the top of his left shoulder blade. Now that they had all found something to do, it gave them time to contemplate the fact that none of them had the slightest idea how to deal with the live torpedo jammed in the number four tube. At that moment none of them could have cared less that Radegonde had just sunk a second U-boat.

  ‘We’ll blow it out,’ said the Maître. ‘We’ll get the First Lieutenant to bleed a huge charge of high pressure air into the tube’s launch bottles, and we’ll blow the damn thing right out the tube. Let it sink.’

  Harry was applying a dressing to the Maître’s wound, but because it was deep in blood-matted hair on his back, nothing was going to stick, so he was unwinding a bandage that would have to go under his armpit and over to attach it. Harry studied the man who was looking at him now from a face the consistency of sawed wood through eyes that could not disguise his displeasure.

  The Maître was a middle-aged man, not fat, but with a middle-aged paunch, accentuated by his blue-and-white-striped vest. His tattooed arms, that were their own testament to his years in the Marine Nationale, rested on big thighs. Put a beret on him, thought Harry, and he would have looked like he was taking a rest after a hard day selling onions. Harry gave the bandage a last pull to get some pressure on the dressing, and pinned it.

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ said the Maître through his now-clamped jaws, although his grimace conveyed something far from gratitude.

  Bassano was still holding the phone. ‘That would get it out all right,’ he said, ‘but we wouldn’t live to congratulate you on your brilliant idea, Maître.’

  ‘The fucking thing’ll be live,’ said the Maître, finishing Bassano’s argument.

  ‘Why is that bad?’ asked Harry.

  ‘The charge of high pressure air hitting it will probably be enough to set off its impact fuse,’ explained Bassano. ‘And if it doesn’t, and the thing sinks, the pressure will. So if the blast from the damn thing going off doesn’t get us right on the nose, it’ll get us under the chin. Christ, even if we try going half ahead, it will probably trigger it.’

  The crackle of a voice came from the phone. Bassano listened, then explained their predicament. Then they waited in the sickly, artificial light of the debris-strewn compartment, with Harry half thinking the unthinkable thought – could it all really end here, like this, with all of them waiting on the inanimate whim of a bent torpedo, deciding whether or not it wanted to go off?

  The phone crackled again, Bassano put it back to his ear, and then he smiled.

  ‘What?’ said Harry. What could be funny about this?

  ‘We’re going to use high pressure air to push it out after all,’ said Bassano. ‘But when we do, we’ll already be going the other way.’

  The Maître grinned, as much as he could with the pain still sawing at his shoulder.

  ‘What?’ repeated Harry, irritated that he could be treated so cavalierly on the edge of his own oblivion.

  ‘The Captain is going to ring up full ast
ern, and when we’re doing it, he’ll tell us to blow the torpedo out the door,’ explained Bassano. ‘So that if or when it does go off, we’ll already be moving away from it. Far enough away, hopefully. That’s why he’s the Captain. He can think of things that should’ve been obvious to the rest of us, but for some reason wasn’t. What a clever fellow. How long do you think it would have taken us to work that one out, Maître?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you should be so hard on us, M’sieur Bassano,’ the Maître replied. ‘We’d have worked it out, by the second bottle at least.’

  Harry stood beside the Maître at the firing lever for the number four tube. Below it was the tube’s bow door activator switch. When the torpedo went out, the Maître was going to hit it, hoping the actuator that powered it was still working, and that the bow door would shut, holding the sea at bay and allowing the tube to drain. If the actuator wasn’t working, in the middle of the compartment, between the two sets of tubes, were a set of heads that you fitted an operating handle to so you could hand-crank the tubes shut; a task equal to Hercules, but only if he’d been in training, the Maître assured Harry.

  They felt the vibration through the boat as Radegonde went to full astern. Bassano, phone to his ear, cord fully stretched, had wedged himself on the deck, against the starboard torpedo storage rack. Harry had the operating lever free, just in case, and crouched between the tubes. The Maître had one hand on the firing lever, while he held on with the other. The vibration subsided, as the boat settled on her speed astern. The phone crackled with the Captain’s voice.

  ‘OK Maître, give it its blast,’ said Bassano, and they all braced. The Maître hit the lever and there was a tremendous whuuump! of air that they all felt in their guts, rather than heard; the boat jumped, and there was a grinding of metal. The Maître hit the outer tube door activator. He waited to hear the sound of its motor running, and see the little hand on the indicator move. Nothing. He hit it again. Still nothing.

  Harry, meanwhile, was counting in his head and was about to mouth, ‘A thousand and six’, when the air in the compartment was rent. None of them actually heard the explosion; it was too close for sound. It hit them. Everything physical moved briefly out of its space and for an instant all things were no longer where they should have been. Harry could see, in an eerie kind of gelatinous motion, the torpedo tube door lift entirely out of its seal, and long, rippling fingers of fire extend and grope into the compartment, then he and the Maître were in a bundle, collided in the middle of the torpedo room floor. Bassano was wrapped bodily round the storage rack, obviously, and seriously, winded. The bows of the boat kept rocking, but the fire, if there ever had been fire, and not some trick of concussion, had gone. There was a fan of water from around the torpedo tube door, and a jet of it, like a steel blade extending from a tiny fissure in its rim, and the water was generating a tremendous noise.