Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  And in the background there’d been loud bangs, two, or was it three; all close. And The Bucket reeling – or had that just been his head catching up with him as unseen hands threw him hither and thither?

  He wasn’t aware that the transport the Tigger’s gun crew had left untouched had a deck gun of its own, mounted on its stern, probably a 3-inch job; or that while the crews of all the stricken ships had leapt ashore, the gun crew on the one they had missed had remained at their posts.

  The Jerry crew only got off a couple of rounds before The Bucket sped past; the wreckage of the transport moored to their outside masking their line of fire. But one of the rounds hit home, gouging a hole in The Bucket’s casing just abaft the conning tower before exploding in the sea in a fountain of red-hot metal splinters.

  Leading Seaman Titmuss had still been on the deck putting rifle rounds into the dinghy, because they didn’t have time to collapse it, and they didn’t want to leave it for any other bugger to play with . . . and the Tigger had just turned to tell him to get a bloody move on. And now Titmuss was dead and the Tigger was lying there, breathing in short hiccups, with his chest swathed in gauze and a morphine sheen on his porridge-coloured face; eyes rolled half up into his head.

  ‘Rig the boat for silent running,’ the Skipper was saying. ‘Shut down all unnecessary machinery and lighting.’

  He was saving battery amps; they hadn’t had much chance to charge the batteries before the parachute flares had driven them under, and there had been less than ninety minutes on the surface at the rendezvous, before being driven under again by an insipid sunrise . . . heralding four hours of what passed for daylight in the Arctic in late October. And now they were out at sea it looked like Jerry had caught up with them. Multiple high-speed screws, approaching fast from the west: it could only be the landing force escort.

  ‘Four, five, maybe more,’ Devaney had said.

  Harry got up and eased himself into his white pullover, with its sleeve sliced off to fit over his wadded and bandaged forearm. The watch jacket wouldn’t fit. He noticed his pistol was still lying on the table where they’d stripped it off him; he noticed it only because it struck him as quite comic that he hadn’t once unholstered it during the action.

  The pain in his arm was back, so the morphine was obviously wearing off; that was good because it meant he was becoming clear-headed again, and bad because he didn’t know how much worse the pain in his arm might get. That didn’t matter right now, because he couldn’t stay there anymore, not with the Tigger lying there, and the vision of the four Russians spattered around the deckhouse wouldn’t wipe from his mind, nor the fact that Jerry was coming after them now.

  He gingerly picked his way to the control room and sat down at the fruit machine. The Skipper nodded at him: ‘How’s Mr Milner?’ But Harry couldn’t find the words to answer, so the Skipper just smiled thinly and went back to work.

  They were going up to periscope depth, and as Carey called off the depths, the Skipper waved Harry over to stand beside him, then called for a bearing on the approaching propeller sounds. Devaney called them and the Skipper positioned the periscope tube before ordering it up.

  ‘Five seconds, Harry. Tell me what they are.’

  Harry knelt and grabbed the handles as the tube came up, jamming his eyes on to the rubber eye pad. The surface was quite rough, chopped with spray and white crests, but there they were.

  It’s amazing what the eyes take in, in the shortest time. The lead ship, angling in on them across the port bow, the long, clean fo’c’sle, with the two shielded single-mount guns, superimposed, one above the other; and that squat, blocky bridge abaft them, with the big bridge wings; and the mast with the single, high cross-tree and that silly little cupola stuck on above the bridge, with its searchlight. And the others all the same. Harry knew them all right. Had even built a model of one as a boy.

  Harry stepped back. ‘Down scope. Four Leberecht Maass-class destroyers, another set of masts to the north, so five ships at least. They’ve all got bones in their teeth.’

  Foaming white bow waves meant they were moving very fast.

  The Skipper nodded: ‘Fleet destroyers? Big?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Take her down to three hundred feet, number one. Slow ahead together, maintain this course.’

  He’s going deep, thought Harry. It’ll be ‘full ahead’ and a turn as they go overhead, their hydrophone sets useless amid all the turbulent water churned up by their own screws.

  It was cold in the boat, and the air was fuggy with that second-hand taste. The silence was so complete you could actually hear the odd drip of condensation.

  Ra-bumm-rumm-rum-rum!

  ‘Depth charges!’ called Devaney, urgent but trying to keep his voice down. ‘Bearing three-four-zero degrees. They’re quite a way off, though.’

  ‘Trumpeter,’ said the Skipper.

  More depth charges, then Devaney again, tentative: ‘Targets changing course. Moving to starboard.’

  The destroyers Harry had seen had been charging towards them, strung out like a line of beaters trying to flush their sport. There had been maybe as much as three ship lengths between them and if they’d continued piling on the way they were going they would have missed The Bucket completely; but somebody had picked up Trumpeter.

  ‘They’re executing some manoeuvre, sir . . . it’s like they’re wheeling away from us; like guardsmen . . . two new targets, baring two-five-zero. Closing us . . . slow,’ said Devaney.

  Suddenly they could hear a faint noise, like a badly oiled sewing machine, running away: the sound of high-speed ship’s propellors. Everyone listened as it got louder. It was the end ship of the line of German destroyers, wheeling north, closing in on Trumpeter. But then Devaney was also calling out two more targets: two more surface ships, moving wide, coming at them.

  The Skipper ordered: ‘Stop together’ and The Bucket hung there, three hundred feet down; a darker solid mass, suspended in the vast, dark immensity of the Barents Sea, silent, as the bustle of the hunt unfolded way above them.

  There was a full load back in the torpedo tubes; all hands had been called at the rendezvous, and while the diesels charged the batteries, they worked like navvies to manhandle the six remaining one-and-a-half ton monsters and make them ready to fire. The Bucket could fight back if the Skipper wanted to.

  Harry had been lying in the wardroom waiting for his senses to return after that exploding cannon shell had rattled them, wondering how he had got back to The Bucket. It was Lascar who told him while he was pouring sweet tea into him, how when the dinghy had first returned, Grainger had jumped from the bridge; how he’d pushed aside the young sailors, all wide-eyed with shock and trembling as they clambered out on to The Bucket’s casing; how he’d just grabbed the painter from Clunie and knelt so his face was looming over McTiernan. There were words, but Clunie, who told the boat all about it, hadn’t been able to hear them above the din of the action; all he caught was Grainger demanding, ‘. . . but did you check?’ and McTiernan, face all black and tight, not being able to answer. And Grainger just jumping back into the dinghy and snatching the throttle out of McTiernan’s hand, kicking them off The Bucket’s saddle tanks and gunning the dinghy back toward the tug.

  Lascar, who didn’t talk to officers, had told Harry every last detail; then promised him an extra large dollop of his special oosh once the galley re-opened.

  Now Grainger was hunched over the chart table, eyes on the gyro compass repeater and the engine rev counter, with only his head to do the sums; working out how far they had travelled each time the Skipper altered course; plotting as near as dammit where they came to rest each time they moved. As if nothing had happened.

  Harry said ‘Thanks, Kit’ and Grainger gave him a sly wink: ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone that you . . .?’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone that I let you get away with using my first name.’

  Harry smiled, and so did
Grainger, eventually.

  The sewing machine sound had all but faded from their ears, but Devaney’s disembodied voice was still calling the shape of the game from out of the gloom: ‘. . .the multiple targets, ahead . . . moving away to starboard. Other two targets, steady on two-five-zero. Still closing.’ And the Skipper, standing by the attack scope, leaning like a spiv on a street-corner light, pinching his bottom lip.

  Harry turned in his seat to face the crowded control room, all the bodies crushed together in the space like rush-hour passengers on a crowded London tube, when the whush-whush of slower propellors made everyone look up.

  ‘Nearest target moving to cross our bows,’ said Devaney, and then it sounded as if someone had thrown a handful of pebbles at the hull; and instantly everyone reached for something to hold on to. The Skipper even stopped pulling his lip.

  Harry didn’t know what it was at first, but from the looks on the old hands’ faces, he realized that this was what it sounded like when Jerry picked you up on his echo location gear; a guess confirmed when Devaney pronounced, ‘Nearest target slowing and turning towards us . . . bearing three-four-eight . . . other target’s gone to high speed . . . moving fast to our starboard.’

  Then a new sound echoed through the hull. Like sewing machine sounds, lots of sewing machines – rickachiky, rickachiky, rickachiky!

  The propeller sounds became confused now; fast and slow. Then more handfuls of pebbles, lots more, until the high-speed screw sounds seemed to saturate the space around them.

  ‘Second target coming in fast, steady on fifteen degrees, going over our top . . .’

  ‘Twenty degrees down,’ said the Skipper, ‘full ahead together. Take us down another hundred and fifty feet, Mr Carey, fast as you like!’

  Another 150 feet? They were already at 300, their maximum recommended depth. Harry’s eyes darted around the control room; until he stopped, not wanting to appear nervous, which he wasn’t. He was scared shitless. All fear of the German attack had gone, replaced by a cataclysmic vision of the ½-inch thick plate encasing them crumpling, then rupturing as the pressure of the sea crushed their flimsy life-supporting tube to scrap.

  He was so distracted by this vision that he didn’t pay attention to the thrum of the German destroyer’s screws as she passed above them; his eyes were fixed on the bevel of the pressure hull a mere foot from the end of his nose, instead of looking up like everyone else. He also missed the four ragged splashes of the depth charges entering the water.

  Each charge weighed 240 kg and they sank towards The Bucket at a rate of fourteen feet per second. Their time fuses allowed them to be set to explode at anything up to about 550 feet; by setting the time, they set the depth. If you were at about 300 feet, and if Jerry could get them to within twenty-five to thirty feet of your submarine’s hull when they went off, the blast would rupture your pressure hull. The kill radius got bigger the shallower you were. The only thing that could save you was going deeper: the deeper you went, the more the water pressure acted to contain the blast.

  Going deeper also meant it was less likely the damn thing would go off underneath you. The underside of a submarine had lots of holes: vents to let ballast water in and out of the tanks that let you dive and surface; vents that a depth charge could tear apart. Also, more crucially, all the little valve inlets and outlets to the pressure hull were there, from bilge pumps to the WC vent. Weak spots that could be torn open by the shock wave from a depth charge and send you to the bottom.

  But The Bucket was moving away from the position in the ocean where Jerry had dropped his charges. The destroyer had picked them up first on its echo sounder, sound pulses bouncing back, revealing a big solid shape hanging in the water where none should be. Jerry’s other detector device – his hydrophones – were only for listening to machinery sounds, pumps, propellors. But The Bucket was hanging there silent.

  Once Jerry had started his attack, however, the water became so full of competing noises it didn’t matter whether The Bucket remained silent or not. Water being such a good medium for sound meant Jerry couldn’t tell one racket from another, or what direction it was coming from. So the Skipper had chosen that moment to fire up the motors and dive.

  The concussion, when it comes, is stupefying, felt more than heard, although the roaring din makes Harry’s eyes swim. Two blows slam the boat laterally, and then down by the stern. Harry is flung from his seat, slamming his back against the chart table and his arse on to the deckplates.

  There is the sound of breaking glass.

  Harry reaches out to the chart table to steady himself and two more concussions slam into the hull; the solid-steel deckplates seem to ripple beneath his buttocks as if turned suddenly to jelly. The noise hurts and the very air in the control room seems to turn to whisp in the gloom and is left hanging in layers. The crushing sound is replaced by the sound of a waterfall, so that at first Harry believes it to be a rushing in his ears; but it isn’t. It is the sound of the ocean rushing back into the flash voids created by the depth charges’ detonations.

  ‘Four hundred feet,’ Carey says into the stunned silence. They are continuing down. A flurry on the trim panel. ‘Steady at four-fifty.’

  ‘Starboard thirty!’ says the Skipper. To Harry, dazed and still on his arse, they are behaving as if nothing has happened.

  ‘Mr Grainger,’ the Skipper continues, ‘mark the time and keep the count please.’

  ‘Fourteen-thirty-eight. One, two, three, four,’ replies the navigator.

  Harry gets to his feet, and moves to the after bulkhead door and wedges himself in.

  ‘Other target closing fast,’ says Devaney, ‘from our stern now.’

  The sewing machine sounds, rickachiky, rickachiky, rickachiky!

  Harry hears the splashes this time and he grips the door flanges until he feels his fingers hurt. He keeps on feeling them hurt until the blows land again, so that he feels his eyeballs palpitating and his arse lift from his perch. Lumps of cork insulation fall from the deckhead, and the emergency lighting flickers. The blows once again seem to push the stern down, and this time Harry can see the deckplates jump.

  More concussions.

  ‘Five, six,’ Grainger is saying, when more blows hit the boat. They are preceded by a distinct click. It is barely half a second before the concussion, but Harry knows he has heard it.

  The control room goes completely dark. Like a switch into oblivion. Harry cannot see even the shadow of the door rim, inches from his face. Then, when the bucking stops, a torch beam; then two, probing into the whispy air. Someone turns the red lights on, and the control room is revealed again. A single, wire-fine jet of water prescribes a geometric line at right angles from behind the trim board. The outside ERA is there with his wrench, insinuating himself into the pipework. The concussions have loosened a pipe joint. Harry has no idea how vital it is, but the Petty Officer is hard at work tightening the flange-securing bolts when the tannoy rasps into life.

  ‘Control room, engine room. The aft escape hatch has jumped, we are making water.’ The voice is that of Partridge, the Engineer. Harry knows about escape hatches, he’s used one. And on the one he’s used, as long as the inboard access hatch is secure, it would be just another ton or so of water Carey would have to compensate for on his trim board.

  The sounds of propellors recede.

  ‘Stop,’ says the Skipper, and echoing from aft is the sound of water flooding into The Bucket’s hull. With the way off her now, Harry feels the boat tilt beneath his feet, stern heavy. Carey works furiously at the trim board but stops when the Skipper calls ‘Stop’. They are going silent again. If Carey runs the pumps to move water from the after bilges forward and balance the boat, now that all the thrashing about upstairs has stopped, Jerry would hear them. The only other way to restore the trim is to start the motors, and go ahead with the bow planes angled against their forward momentum to keep them level; but Jerry would hear that too. To do nothing means the stern bilges, and all the aft
spaces will fill, and The Bucket will plunge, stern first, to the seabed.

  The sound of propellors return.

  The Skipper says to Grainger: ‘Lay me a course for the coast. Put me inside the islands and reefs.’ Then he turns to Carey: ‘Get the bilge pumps going. Take us down to five hundred feet and trim the boat.’ Then: ‘Group up. Full ahead together, stand by for evasive manoeuvring. Hang on everyone. We are about to become the centre of attention.’

  As the prop sounds increase, Devaney calls in the approach of the next attack. Jerry must be hearing them loud and clear, but Jerry has a conundrum of his own to deal with: above a certain speed, his own propellors will drown out the noise of any fleeing submarine, because his hydrophones cannot differentiate between the sounds. But in order to launch a depth-charge attack, Jerry needs to work up to full speed, otherwise he won’t get clear in time and the blast from his own depth charges will blow his stern off. So in those few moments, between last contact with the submarine and dropping the depth charges, Jerry is deaf and The Bucket is free to dodge any way she wants.

  ‘Target one has commenced his attack,’ says Devaney. They can hear her screws begin to whine.

  ‘Steer port thirty,’ says the Skipper. Too much noise in the water to hear the depth-charge splashes now; but explosions are a different matter. They are heeled hard over when the concussions, in quick succession, push them farther . . . much farther, as if laying the boat on her side. The crash of unknown objects being thrown around the boat punctuates the diminishing roars of the depth charges. Harry feels his shoulder, cracked and bruised off the door combing.

  Grainger counts the detonations: ‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.’ Then he passes the Skipper heading for the coast, and the Skipper immediately orders The Bucket to turn towards Norway. Going flat out submerged at nine knots, they will burn all their battery power; within minutes, let alone hours, they won’t have enough amps left to light a Christmas tree. They must go slow; at under three knots it will take the best part of six hours to get there, more if they are constantly dodging Jerry’s attacks. But it will be dark soon.