by David Black
‘Carry on.’
Carey, brows knotted. ‘D’you order him to do that, sir?’
The Skipper smiled his evil smile. ‘And upset the hands like that so gratuitously? Of course not.’ The smile continued. ‘But if they have to go ashore, he’s probably just saved their lives,’ his eyebrows shot up, ‘. . . all our lives . . . what an enterprising officer Mr Gilmour is turning out to be, Mr Milner,’ he said directly to the Tigger, who was frowning now. ‘. . . for a schoolboy. You should take a leaf out his book.’
The Skipper sat back, still smiling to himself, his mind no longer on the game.
‘Dive! Dive! Make your depth one hundred feet, bring her on to zero-seven-zero!’ It was the Skipper at the periscope. The klaxon sounded as he slapped up the handles and the scope shot down. ‘Asdic! Pulse to Trumpeter: Dive! Dive! Now!’
Leading Telegraphist Devaney, in his cubby, hit the Asdic for the agreed pings. Harry could hear them echoing out as Carey, barking orders, shut all the blowers on his trim board in quick succession, opening the vents, letting the water flood back into her ballast tanks, taking her back down just as she was about to break surface.
‘Bloody Trumpeter was already up,’ announced the Skipper to no one in particular. ‘A shagbat. The shaggiest bat ever. Lolloping out of that cloud bank that doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.’
‘Shagbat’ was submarine for a patrolling aircraft, probably enemy but you never knew. Up here it could have been a Jerry or a Russian. One as bad as the other. The Bucket reached her depth and as all her pump noises faded, Trumpeter’s could still be heard, announcing that her descent had taken much longer than The Bucket’s.
‘Bugger,’ said the Skipper. ‘Mr Gilmour to the control room!’
Harry, in his smart new Ursula suit and watch cap screwed tight, scuttled forward through the press of sailors. He had been aft, standing under the engine room hatch with a deck party. Between him and the Tigger’s party under the fore hatch, they’d been waiting to go up top for the Tigger to fire a breeches buoy line from his .303 so they could haul Trumpeter’s dinghy and Skipper aboard for a quick conference on what to do next. The sun was all but down and by flashing Morse code through their periscopes, both submarines had agreed to risk surfacing while there was still just light enough to complete their manoeuvre, but a low cloud bank to the south-east kept rising and receding, buggering about with the oncoming darkness, and as it had transpired, masking oncoming aircraft until it was too late.
‘In five minutes I’m going to stick the attack scope up,’ said the Skipper. ‘You read all these damn recognition charts. I want to know whose shagbat that is. You’ve thirty seconds. OK?’
Harry was tempted to say, That’s not bloody long enough to find the damn thing in a darkening sky and then work out what it is! But he settled for ‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘Periscope depth!’
They waited.
‘OK, Harry,’ said the Skipper. ‘Go!’
Harry got into position behind the smaller, second scope. He didn’t need anyone to read off bearings or ranges; this was just to be a quick shufti.
‘Up periscope!’ called Harry, snapping the handles down as it rose, and swivelling the viewer knob; he was already looking through the periscope even as the head was still rising, catching a brief glimpse of dappled surface before the head broke clear. He began to traverse, keeping it slow, counting in his head . . . and there it was. He knew it right away. A smudgy, over-sized orange-crate, with two barn doors tied to its boxy sides by way of wings; and a single biscuit tin on top with a prop on it, held on to the whole rickety structure by a builder’s trestle and guy ropes.
‘Down periscope!’ Harry snapped shut the handles and stood back. ‘It’s a Russian. A Beriev MBR-2 flying boat. The Soviet navy’s equivalent of a Walrus.’
‘Twenty-two seconds,’ said the Skipper who’d never taken his eyes off his watch. ‘Well done, young Harry. A Russian. He’s bound to have seen Trumpeter. At least! Damn and bugger! Bugger! Bugger!’
They waited until well after dark to convene their council of war, bobbing beneath a clear Arctic sky wreathed in sheets of shimmering green, rippling across the dome of darkness high above the horizon. Two little tin cans in the vastness of the Barents Sea, and dwarfed by a display of aurora borealis as big as space itself. It delivered light enough for the Honourable Bertie and his navigator to make the trip in Trumpeter’s dinghy without mishap; any random curses from the ratings charged with their safe conduct drowned in the burble of both boats’ diesels pumping charge into their batteries as they rode, stopped on a deep, magnificent swell marching in from the east.
The Tigger on the casing and Harry on the bridge kept The Bucket riding a safe distance from Trumpeter, and kept Harry from hearing the details of the tactical debate going on below. Every time he looked across at the other submarine, the pale white number daubed on her conning tower glittered a little in the spectral light like a reminder of opportunities lost. Neither boat had managed to paint their numbers out before leaving Lerwick – the rain had stopped them – and neither boat had space to carry that much paint to do the job en route. Ivan in his shagbat had indeed spotted Trumpeter; the two boys paddling the Honourable Bertie across had confirmed it. So now Ivan knew there was a submarine sneaking around his twelve-mile limit, and that it was British. But did Ivan know there were two? That question, Harry surmised, must be central to the talk going on below. He wasn’t wrong.
The Bucket departed the rendezvous point immediately after seeing the Honourable Bertie and his navigator home, heading to put herself as far inshore and close to the tangle of islets and headlands at the entrance to the Litsa River as possible before first light, when the shortening Arctic autumn days would force her to dive.
‘We’re banking on Ivan having only spotted Trumpeter,’ the Skipper had told them. ‘And if she continues to bugger about out here, trailing her coat, we’re hoping neither Ivan nor Jerry will be looking inshore, where we’ll be.’
The fjord leading up to the river mouth was like a huge nibbled kidney running from north-east to south-west. Grainger at the periscope had navigated them down the three-mile, narrow dog-leg into its plump middle on a flowing tide, taking bearings on headlands and islets, keeping them to the main fairway indicated on their ancient chart, while Devaney in the Asdic cubby double-checked the depth beneath their keel by frequent pings from The Bucket’s echo sounder, sucking the ends of his beard between calling out the feet beneath them.
Harry at the chart table wrote down all the figures and did the sums on his trusty slide rule, marking the chart and noting all the errors between what the chart claimed, and what Grainger was actually seeing and Devaney actually hearing. The discrepancies were depressingly large. But they’d got there in the end, drifting a further two and a half miles to a position behind the south-west bulge of the kidney, hanging at a depth of thirty-five feet with over thirty fathoms beneath their keel, and the Skipper back on the periscope, looking almost directly due east, sucking in his cheeks, then blowing them out, like a jazz trumpeter.
‘Down periscope!’ he said. ‘Well, they’re there all right. Port Boris is full. Harry, sharpen your pencil and get ready to write fast.’
Harry looked at the chronometer. The final glowing of the sun would be directly behind them, falling on the Skipper’s target, while masking their periscope in shadow. Even so, the Skipper wasn’t going to have it sticking up longer than was necessary.
‘Devaney, what’ve you got?’ The Skipper was leaning back against the main scope, talking over his shoulder, staring at the attack scope’s well.
Devaney, headphones stuck to his greasy mop of hair, was also listening in on his hydrophones to the sounds of many small propellors, and to the burbling pumps and other innards of numerous much bigger ships: ‘Multiple HE, all inshore from zero-three-eight to one ten. All small craft, lots of movement. Also, lots of background machinery, too many sources to count . . . all statio
nary.’
The Skipper nodded. ‘Up periscope!’
The control room was tense. They were, after all, in a place they shouldn’t be and every second their scope was on the surface, there was a chance that some bright-eyed lookout would spot it. Even a docker on a cigarette break might see the thin steel tube. At least they weren’t underway; at least there was no danger of showing a ‘feather’.
‘Three jetties running out at ninety degrees from a long running wharf. From left to right, first jetty; three transports, one on the left, two moored alongside on the right. First transport, two thousand tons; on the right, inboard, big, four, no, four and half thousand tons; out board, another two thousand tonner. Next jetty . . .’
The Skipper described and Harry wrote; eight merchant ships ranging from 2,000 – 8,000 tons; a floating crane and a long wharf curving round from the hump of the kidney, stretching to a point off their beam. A dozen or so lighters moored along the wharf, discharging cargo; numerous small craft plying to and fro; and two small tugboats, also moored along the wharf. On the rising ground away to their starboard a large hut and tent encampment; and beyond that, what looked like the start of another. Between them, a railway sidings. The Skipper also counted eight anti-aircraft emplacements of varying calibre. But nothing heavy, just 20-mm . . . no 88s, thank god . . . and no warships either.
Then there was the vehicle park: lots of military vehicles, lorries, halftracks, at least a dozen light tanks, and several stacks of very large packing cases. And then on the big bugger, the 8,000 tonner, on her aft well deck was an Arado floatplane. And alongside, moored to a floating jetty was another, bobbing on her huge, ungainly floats.
Oh, and there were men everywhere, bundled up in cold-weather gear; working, busy, preparing. And they were Jerries all right, said the Skipper, and no mistaking; Kriegsmarine ensigns on every ship and flagpole; not a hammer and sickle to be seen anywhere. You wouldn’t know this was the bloody Soviet Union, said the Skipper.
Then there was the final observation, or rather failure to observe. There were vehicles, there was what must be a barracks, but there were no troops. Harry wrote it all down, and when the Skipper was finished, he allowed Harry a quick sweep around, so that he could more accurately sketch what had been described to him.
He saw a tree-less, blasted landscape of low brown hills, all rock and grizzled brown scrub speckled with snow-filled dips; with Port Boris sitting on it like a scab . . . and then to his astonishment, it suddenly became a floodlit scab. The entire dock area was instantly bathed in a chemical light. It took him a moment to register what had happened: giant lights perched atop metal masts, sparkling in the gathering gloom; but then why shouldn’t there be floodlights? The Soviet Union didn’t need a blackout. It wasn’t at war.
‘Dead slow ahead,’ called the Skipper, and The Bucket began inching towards the jetties. ‘Devaney. Keep up a constant pinging on the echo sounder. Keep calling the depth as we move in.’
They were moving against the final flow of the tide, which was complicating Harry’s attempts to calculate the speed of their progress over the ground. Grainger was jammed up against him at the table, marking the depths as Devaney was calling them. It would be slack water soon, and then when the ebb was well and truly going, they would ease back out into the middle, then surface in the black night and let the tide carry them down the fjord and out to sea.
Meanwhile the Skipper was obviously testing the approaches to the jetties, making sure the deep water ran clear, all the way up to . . .
Crump.
The dull noise echoed through the hull just a fraction of a second behind the impact. Not that it was much of an impact. Everybody did a little lurch, and the Skipper hissed ‘All stop!’ distracting everyone from the fact that they weren’t moving any more, anyway. He grabbed the mic, ‘Skipper here. Forward torpedo room, report.’
There was no damage.
Over the preceding minutes, Devaney’s depth chant had been tracing a steadily rising sea bed. It had been getting shallower count by count, but not by that much . . . but then the echo sounder only looked down, not forward.
‘A reef,’ said Grainger, right by Harry’s ear. ‘And not on the chart, either.’
‘A reef indeed,’ said the Skipper. ‘Up periscope. Mr Grainger . . . do my readings please.’
Grainger stepped forward and read off the bearing and the angles for range from the periscope’s bevels; Harry did the sums and called it.
‘Bugger,’ said the Skipper. Everyone knew what he meant.
Assuming one might want to fire torpedoes at the assembled shipping, there would be no shot to be had from way out here in the Bay with its deep water and sheltering darkness. The reef was in the way . . . even at the height of the high tide, no torpedo was going to make it over that protective wall of undersea rock.
Before ordering ‘Down scope’, the Skipper took one last look. He saw a train come around the corner. A troop train.
Chapter Twenty
They’re more or less the same the world over: about twice the size of a football, made of cork and painted bright red, with that little rime of green weed to mark the height of their bob above the waves. Fishermen use them to mark the end of a gill net or a fleet of lobster creels. In other words, it was a buoy. And here it was, sat between them on The Bucket’s wardroom table, just like any other buoy, in every aspect apart from one: it had a flag sticking out of it. A makeshift flag on the end of a steel rod; a ripped square of sailcloth painted, inexpertly, with the Union Jack.
‘She was quite a modern job. Big. About the size of one of our Tribals,’ said the Honourable Bertie, describing the destroyer which had been stalking Trumpeter since first light, while The Bucket had been exploring up the fjord. He kept a proprietorial hand on the buoy. ‘I thought she was a Jerry, but my Jimmy said she was definitely a Soviet, and lo and behold, when she whipped round beam on, there it was: a bloody great red flag the size of a boxing ring, flapping from her foremast.’
The Honourable Bertie went on to describe how he’d had Trumpeter trail her coat for the Russian; holding at thirty feet with all her pumps and machinery going, cranking up her electric motors and scooting here and there with the periscope up, creating not so much a ‘feather’ as a bow wave as big as the Queen Mary’s.
‘He came right at us a couple of times,’ the Honourable Bertie said, ‘swerving away at the last minute. He was big, but he was nippy too. And well handled. Then he just hove to, beam on to us, and started flashing SOS directly at my periscope. I hadn’t a clue what was going on. I never saw any chap in less distress. Then, all of a sudden he opened the throttles and was away, and when I did a sweep back to make sure no baddies were sneaking up behind me, there it was, bobbing about in his wake.’
‘With that dangling from it,’ said Andy Trumble, jabbing a long metal container – the sort they used for keeping flares dry.
The Hon Bertie nodded. ‘And with this in it.’ He slapped the table and the sheet of stiff cartridge paper unrolled across it. It was a Soviet naval chart of the Litsa Fjord and approaches, its corner adorned with a Soviet naval ensign and lots of tight Cyrillic script. The chart itself showed all the channels, navigation markers and depths from the mouth all the way to the small port facility which The Bucket had just returned from scouting.
‘Thoughts?’ said the Skipper.
The Honourable Bertie, his torps, Harry, Carey and Grainger were sat round the table. The Tigger was on watch, on the bridge, as both submarines lay hove to barely a boat length apart in the shadow of one of the islets at the entrance to the fjord. A force 6 wind was blowing from the east; there was no sky, just the dark, and the moaning of the wind and whipping spray, and sound of the sea beyond the barest shadow of a headland. And it was bitterly cold.
The Trumpeter’s dinghy was alongside, her two paddlers in the forward torpedo room being fed piping hot ky, the navy’s version of cocoa. The Bucket had her dinghy in the water, too, aft and being minded by a c
ouple of ratings; in case any vagary of wind or sea drove the two submarines together, the dinghies would act as fenders. Neither boat was running its diesels. The batteries might well have needed charging, but in the pitch dark who knew who was about, and they didn’t need all that racket to attract attention.
It was cold in the boat, too, with no engines running. The little huddle sat muffled up in Ursula suits, scarves and mittens, watch caps jammed tight on, hunched in the insipid light seeping from under the lampshade dangling between them. The scene looked like some oil painting of a Jacobean conspiracy in progress.
‘It’s a trap,’ said Grainger.
Harry didn’t agree, but didn’t open his mouth.
Grainger continued: ‘The depths will be all wrong; there’ll be hidden reefs. They’ll lure us in, then depth charge us to the surface; either hand us over to Jerry or parade us through Red Square in funny pirate hats.’
‘Or just shoot us,’ said the Honourable Bertie, with a broad grin. ‘Us aristocrats anyway!’
The Skipper sucked and blew again, then said: ‘We got in and out and only hit one reef. And they’ve got it marked on the chart. And they don’t know we’ve already been in and out. As for depth charging us . . . from what? There were no warships in there, and anything going in now, we’d hear it. The chart’s accurate. But why?’
Now this was Harry the clever clogs’s domain. The other grim-faced fighting sailors all sat around, brows knitted to stop any useful thoughts escaping, trying to knot the ones remaining into a plausible answer. But Harry had the drop on them: he knew, courtesy of having had history rammed down his throat from an early age, reading the papers, listening to his father’s sneering contempt as he sat by the wireless, railing against the BBC Nine O’Clock News, dismantling all the pretensions behind the realpolitik as practiced by men of affairs.
