by David Black
‘I want you to send a signal, en clair, to Halifax and to our special little mailbox,’ said Harry as Cantor sat down at the radio transmitter and got himself plugged in. ‘I want you to give our position and report we are hunting Durandal, and intend to sink her as a result of her sinking the neutral American freighter Pascagoula, and then murdering her crew. Then ask for a message received. Send it twice.’
Cantor replied, ‘Aye Aye, Sir’, as he was supposed to, but his body froze in a way that said he had a lot of questions. As he started to draft the words he’d transmit, he couldn’t help himself. ‘The Americans will already know by now, Sir, what happened. From our earlier coded signals. You asked them to be forwarded, Sir. Remember.’
Harry put his hand lightly on Cantor’s shoulder; the message was clear. Shut up. Then he relented and said, ‘It’s not for the Americans. It’s for the French.’
‘The French, Sir?’
‘That Vichy station Durandal’s been gibbering away to,’ said Harry, looking over Cantor’s signal. ‘Between them, they’ll be able to get a fix on us, won’t they? If they’re not asleep, or drunk?’
‘Not a fix, Sir. You really need a triangulation for that. But they’ll get a box that they’ll know we’re in. They’ll know we’re here, Sir.’
‘Good. Now get tapping, Lionel. And if anyone asks, deny everything. And if that doesn’t work, say you were only obeying orders.’
Harry sat in the wardroom with a coffee, most of which he lost carrying it from the small pantry as the boat corkscrewed up and down waves that were now following no particular direction; churned by the storm. He wedged himself in on the banquette, and reflected on what he had done.
Radegonde was a good boat; a happy boat, and an efficient boat. They might not do things Royal Navy fashion, but they were a good crew who knew what they were about. And Gil Syvret was a good Skipper. It was a knowledge that made Harry search his conscience; and it told him he had barely a fig leaf of an excuse for what he had done. He could say he wasn’t really a member of her crew, that he was an LO to another, foreign navy, and that was where his loyalty lay; he had different priorities, and sending signals updating his chain of command as to what was going on aboard his posting was one of them. But he didn’t believe that, and he knew Gil Syvret wouldn’t countenance it. And maybe that was why he couldn’t let Radegonde continue on her course, or let Gil Syvret pull apart all the bonds of trust and loyalty that bound this crew and their service; just because politicians had fucked it all up and put bad men into positions where they could do bad things, and because Syvret, their Captain, couldn’t let it pass. Because Syvret was bound by his ever-so noble, finely wrought moral certainty as to why he fought; as if it was his own special bloody altar.
Maybe Syvret had a point. Maybe all good men should have their own special bloody altar to serve in a chaotic, immoral world. Harry didn’t know, but right now he was buggered if he was going to stand around and let Gil Syvret sacrifice himself on his; or any of his crew, or any other crew for that matter. Harry’s signals would warn Durandal off and Radegonde would be left to hunt an empty ocean for a quarry long gone. Let the politicians sort out Durandal’s atrocity. Radegonde still had its war to fight, and its sailors to bring home safe.
At length Harry found himself wondering who would actually court martial him for what he’d done; and what offence they would decide to call it. It would certainly be an interesting conundrum of jurisdiction. But in the end, he decided he didn’t care; he’d sorted it out in his own mind. He was doing this for his friends; for their own bloody good, which he could see, even if they couldn’t.
Radegonde battered on into the night, until eventually Harry guessed Captain Syvret and all his sketches and guesses must have been just about on the money as he could feel from the boat’s movement that the sea state and the wind had actually moderated, albeit a very little. They must be in the system, butting into the counter-clockwise, cyclonic winds and waves; which were themselves being butted back by the onward advance of the storm’s front. Harry wondered how the bigger, leaky Durandal was faring, going round the storm, far to the south.
Sometime in the night, a commotion woke Harry from where he was wedged sleeping on the wardroom banquette. Engine room crew were running forward, or at least trying to, given the heave and roll of the boat; figures made unnatural in the red light, their silhouettes bug-like as they awkwardly clutched canvas tool sacks in one hand, while trying to steady themselves with the other. Harry lurched up to follow.
He went through the control room, and there was the Captain and Poulenc with the deckplates up, and Beyfus, the senior engine room rating, half in the hole. Torchlight was spilling up and another matelot was wrestling something from below. It took a moment for Harry to work out that they were rummaging in the forward battery space.
Radegonde carried two huge batteries to drive her electric motors while submerged. Harry knew all about batteries from his previous boats, mainly because they were so big, mean and potentially dangerous.
‘You’ll have seen an ordinary car battery,’ the Warrant Officer Engineer aboard HMS Trebuchet had once observed to him. ‘Six cells, each producing two point two five volts when fully charged, and generating forty-five to fifty amps.’
Harry couldn’t remember Trebuchet’s battery capacity, but Radegonde’s two had 126 cells each and could generate over 15,000 amps in parallel. And they were big buggers; when Harry translated it to imperial measurements, each cell was about fifty-four inches high, fifteen inches deep, and twenty-one inches wide, and weighed about 1,650 pounds – that was almost 750 kilogrammes. Lumped together, her two batteries weighed in at something over 200 tons – a tenth of her total tonnage submerged. But it was not the size that posed the threat to those who depended on them.
Like a car’s battery, the cells were made up of lead plates, suspended in an electrolyte solution of sulphuric acid and distilled water. As the cells were charged, the water would break down and produce hydrogen gas. That required an elaborate ventilation system to draw any hydrogen off and discharge it outside the pressure hull, because, as any schoolboy would tell you, hydrogen, if allowed to accumulate, becomes explosive and would sooner or later blow up the submarine.
And that wasn’t the only hazard, or the most insidious for a crew sealed in their hull beneath the waves. All submariners feared salt water contamination of the batteries. If salt water got into the electrolyte, chlorine gas would be given off – and if it was a lot of salt water, it would be an awful lot of chlorine gas. That was why each cell was secured in a special, acid-proof glass container. A container that could sometimes crack if handled too roughly, as it might be by the continual pounding of a storm.
Harry was suddenly aware of Le Breuil at his elbow; he had been on watch in the control room when Harry had passed, but had stepped forward to see what was happening.
‘Anything?’ he asked. Harry looked at him blankly.
‘They think some of the battery cells might have cracked,’ explained Le Breuil. ‘They’re testing the pH.’
As he said it, Harry saw Beyfus, who was clutching a long strip of something, look up at the Captain and nod grimly. Harry didn’t want to know anymore. He turned and lurched and grabbed his way back to the wardroom. There was nothing he could do.
‘They’ve put some lime down,’ said Syvret, sitting with Harry at the wardroom table later, drinking fresh orange juice from a can; no galley could remain open in these seas, and nothing hot could be served. He was drumming his fingers, not really paying attention to what he was telling Harry. ‘It’ll help neutralise any acid that’s already escaped. Beyfus thinks he’s identified all the cracked ones, so we’ve isolated them. I know we’re not drawing that many amps just running on the surface, so what he’s left us with is more than enough. Also, we’ve reduced speed at bit, and we’ll make sure we keep her head into the seas as much as possible to reduce our roll and try and limit any further damage. I’ve told Beyfus to have a
team of greasers nurse the bilge pumps like babies. We’ll keep them going flat out, to keep the seawater levels in the bilges right down; although they’ve got a lot to handle since we need to keep the conning tower hatch open to keep feeding air into the diesels, and a lot of water is coming down that hatch. God, it’s never ending.’
‘You could rig some canvas or tarpaulin under the hatch,’ offered Harry. ‘Catch the big lumps, then try to bail it. I saw that done on Trebuchet.’
Syvret pursed his lips. ‘Hmm. Not a bad idea. Every little bit helps. I’ll tell the Maître principal. Who’s a clever boy then . . .’ and he smiled at Harry and reached over and pinched his cheek!
‘Cheeky bastard!’ Harry had been in danger of telling him, but Captain Syvret was gone, off to stay busy; to keep his eyes from rolling with fatigue; to keep focused on his mission. The rest of the boat was busy too; busy conning her through this bloody tempest; too busy, in fact, to let show their sullenness at being made to drive Radegonde towards a rendezvous that no one except the Captain wanted to keep; and that Harry hoped against hope, he had managed to sabotage.
The sun must have come up somewhere beyond the roiling cloud and rain, because apparently the bridge crew coming off watch said the sky had grown lighter. The storm continued moving north, its violence increasing as Radegonde rose and tumbled over the huge seas, now well down into its north-easterly hemisphere, where its northerly advance was shouldering its cyclonic winds and waves to greater strength.
Harry had been up again for a couple of hours, wedged in the control room this time, with a handful of Davis Escape Sets. Other cells had cracked in the night; there was more gas. Enough, in fact, for Captain Syvret to order Le Breuil, the torpedo officer, forward into the torpedo room with his crew. He then ordered the watertight doors at either end of the compartment above the battery space to be sealed. When the time came for Radegonde to fire her torpedoes, Le Breuil and his men would be there, ready to do their duty, sealed in with their weapons and cut off from the rest of the boat, their shipmates and their Captain; reachable now only by the sound-powered telephone system. Alone, waiting for orders no one could be sure they would obey.
With what passed for daylight above, the red lights were out. Beyfus and his engine room team were spread out on the control room deckplates, struggling with tools and battery straps, waiting for the Captain to order them back into the sealed compartment. They would search for other damaged cells, to isolate them too, and to lay the last of the boat’s lime in a final attempt to neutralise any further leaking acid. But they could never succeed if it meant they had to breathe the chlorine gas generated when the salt water mixed with battery acid. And the only way they could breathe anything else was to use a Davis Escape Set and its oxygen bottle. This wasn’t what the sets were designed for, but they’d have to do. And since Harry was still the only man aboard who knew how to work those damn Davis Sets, that was why he was on hand to fit them on Beyfus’s men; to make sure they knew how to operate them to give them clean air to breath and not air laced with chlorine, burning their eyes and nose, and their throat and lungs; burning them until the mucus drowned them.
What they really needed was calmer seas so the forward torpedo loading hatch could be wide open, and the conning tower hatch too, so the blowers could go full blast to air the boat and Beyfus’s men could rig a chain hoist, lift each damaged cell out and clear of the main battery, and then drain and clean it and assess it for repair. But none of that was going to happen while they moved through the arms of a tropical storm.
It was while Harry was waiting that the shout came.
‘Captain to the bridge!’
‘What in God’s name . . . ? Harry mouthed.
Syvret was already halfway up the ladder, neatly dodging the tarpaulin sheet bellied with water below the hatch, and the length of rubber tubing the engine room boys had rigged to suck the seawater out instead of trying to bail it.
The lookouts had to have spotted something. But what on earth would be where they were now, in a storm system? Surely no other ship would be insane enough? Surely no aircraft? Could it be wreckage? Could it be . . .?
Syvret was back down the hatch, his boots knocking the hose out of the tarpaulin trap, spewing seawater everywhere as it drained clean. He looked first at Bassano, who now had the watch in the control room, and Poulenc who should have been sleeping but was never going to be sleeping, not through this, and then at Harry.
‘It’s Durandal!’ Syvret said with an almost breathless disbelief. ‘I can barely make her out through all the shit that’s flying about up there, but I’m sure it’s her. Five, six miles. She’s standing right towards us.’
Harry stood frozen as he watched Syvret reach for the sound-powered telephone. He was obviously going to tell Le Breuil to clear the torpedo tubes for firing; and then he stopped. There would be no torpedo fired from Radegonde in this sea. Even Captain Syvret, the man with a mission, knew that. If you fired one to run at a depth of two metres on a crest, it would run only until it exploded out of the wave and would instead go flying through mid-air; and if you fired on a trough, yes, it would run at two metres depth, but only until the next wave rose, and then it would suddenly be running at a depth of a dozen metres; and even then only if the washing machine forces of the waves themselves hadn’t already tumbled its guidance gyros and sent it diving into the abyss. Nobody would be firing torpedoes. Not in seas like this.
This wasn’t meant to happen. Radegonde was meant to have emerged from the storm system and be back astride Durandal’s great circle course direct to Casablanca; waiting for her in calmer waters, with her torpedoes primed and ready to fire. But Durandal was here, in the middle of the storm, slicing through its most turbulent quadrant, coming for them.
All Harry could think was, what have I done?
Poulenc was away and up the hatch to the bridge. But Captain Syvret just stood, fixed to the control room deckplates, wearing an expression of immaculate incomprehension.
‘Your orders, Sir?’ said Bassano. Syvret just looked at him. Then he snapped out of it, all too aware that the control room crew were all witnesses and needed his response.
‘Helm, steady as she goes,’ he called up to the man at the wheel. ‘Give me revs just for steerage way.’ Other orders followed, but Harry switched off to the technical French and tried to work out in his head what was happening and what their options were. He was interrupted by Syvret grabbing his arm. ‘Harry, on the bridge with you. Give the First Lieutenant another pair of eyes.’
Harry climbed out into an insipid grey light and a maelstrom of turbid, moving slate-coloured mountains, each one streaked with roiling tendrils of white spume. The air was cold and filled with tiny packets of flying water. They were going down a steep gradient, and a wall of water was advancing from the other side of the valley. He had to crick his neck back to see the crest, and hold on to prevent himself being thrown into the well of the bridge front. When he looked down, he could see Poulenc crouching there in its lee, frantically waving to him to get down. Harry obeyed, bracing his feet against the lip of the conning tower hatch combing, as he felt Radegonde begin to rise; and then stall. Her bows are digging into the advancing wave, he thought. And then he was under water; a huge mass of it had hit him, pinning him to the deck, his lungs bursting, until, just as suddenly, it was gone, sluicing away leaving him gasping as he felt Radegonde come up on the crest.
As he stood, a solid wall of wind hit him, coming over the starboard bow. Binoculars would have been useless in all the flying spray, the best he could do was squint, just off the line of the wind; peer into an endless succession of crests. And then, as he felt the boat beneath him begin to tilt towards its next plunge, there she was, climbing into view; the bow and then the barrel of the 12-inch gun rising up to crest her own wave. She’s closer than six miles, was Harry’s first thought; his second was that Durandal was under helm, turning bow on to them, and then with Harry’s last glimpse of her through stinging ey
es, he was certain: Durandal’s gun was rising from its stowed position.
Harry was now staring directly into another advancing wave; the wind was gone, and the boat was running downhill fast.
Durandal had heard his transmissions all right; but she had not run. Instead, there she was, charging towards them, preparing to fire that monstrous great weapon. Syvret was suddenly beside him.
‘I think she’s going to fire at us, Sir,’ said Harry.
Poulenc was at his shoulder, nodding in the affirmative. ‘She’s adjusting her heading to fire,’ he said.
‘He won’t want to try his traverse mechanism in this sea,’ said Syvret half to himself. ‘It’d be like opening the front door, she’d take in so much water through that stupid turret.’
All three dropped behind the bridge front to await the next wave, and as they did, above the roar of the tempest, they heard the dull report of Durandal’s gun. Harry was incredulous; had Boudron gone mad? He could never hope to hit them with such a wild shot . . .
‘He’s ranging,’ said Syvret, in the moment before the next lump of water dumped itself on them, and Harry finished the thought himself; to see where the shell landed: how much over or short, ahead or behind. De Vatry’s gunner would be more considered when aiming his next shot.
Harry and Syvret, crouching in the bridge, didn’t see where the first shot landed. The water from the last wave subsided around them and Harry looked into Syvret’s streaming face. What were his options now? He had to hold this course; he didn’t have the luxury of heaving-off and running through a cross sea, not unless he wanted to do more damage to his batteries. He could dive, but diving would put a full load on them, and who would want to be underwater in a boat filling with chlorine gas? And fighting? That wasn’t really an option either, now. No torpedo could work in this, and no gun crew could survive a minute on the submarine’s casing, even if he could find volunteers to try and fire their little deck gun. And what about ramming? There was always ramming. But ramming meant murdering in cold blood Le Breuil and his men, now sealed in the forward torpedo room, trapped by the gas-filled compartment behind them; no way back into the boat for them.