The Destroyers

by Douglas Reeman

  Jevers asked, “I ain’t seen the Old-I mean, the captain yet, sir. “

  He licked his lips. He was a sharp-featured man, a bit like a fox, Sheridan thought.

  “Well, I expect he will send for you when he gets a moment.”

  Jevers hung in the doorway. “No idea wot it’s about, ‘ave you, sir?”

  “Have you?”

  “Well, sir,” he hung his head, “me wife still ain’t written. ” Rankin said, “If you need any help … ” The seaman nodded. “I know, sir. The Welfare.” He hurried away to the ladder in the wardroom flat. Rankin said, “I don’t know, but that chap puts me on edge. ” Wingate grinned. “How would you feel if a Yank went off

  with your wife?”

  Rankin picked up his notebook. “I’d give him the price of a meal, I daresay.”

  Feet grated on the ladder, and seconds later the probing nose of Lieutenant-Commander Dorian de Pass swung round the door.

  Sheridan asked, “Can I help, sir?”

  The Informer examined him suspiciously. “Your captain. Is he free?”

  Wingate stood up. “I’ll check for you. The chief was with him just now.”

  Rankin said hurriedly, “I’ve got to go, too.”

  The Lomond’s first lieutenant waited until they had left and remarked coldly, “What’s their rush, I wonder?”

  Sheridan shrugged. It was odd that de Pass seemed to be the only one who did not know of his own unpopularity.

  He was saying, “I’ve brought your orders. A slight change. You will be leaving this afternoon at 1730, Whirlpool, Whiplash and,Waxwing in company. Operations have arranged for a repair ship to be standing by in Seydisfjord, in case some lazy bugger has forgotten something. ” He sounded on edge.

  “That is early. Can I ask why?”

  “Captain (D) will be remaining here for a day or so with the other three ships. He wants to do some work in A. C. H. Q.” He studied Sheridan meaningly. “Still, we first lieutenants can’t have too many secrets, can we?”

  Sheridan was staggered. The Informer must be worried to share his information with him. ‘A reservist at that.

  De Pass added, “You know of the German battlecruiser Moltke?” It sounded like of course. “You’re not likely to forget her, I imagine.”

  Sheridan looked away. Remembering his captain from the past. The one who had killed himself because of the Conqueror court of enquiry. Moltke had been the one to put the old battleship down. It had been so easy for her. So terribly easy.

  Sheridan had seen her once, just before the war. 1937, when King George had reviewed the fleet at Spithead. It was like a mad dream now. But at the time it had seemed only right and proper for other nations to send representatives to the greatest review of the greatest navy. Moltke had been brand new, barely months from her builder’s yard in Wilhelmshaven.

  The pleasure boats had had a heyday, surging with carefree trippers past the towering grey ships. Hood and the French Dunquerque, the American New York, and just astern of the German pocket-battleship Graf Spee, the Moltke. She had lacked much of the lean grace of the Scharnhorst and her sister ship, and had not measured up to the later armoured giants like Tirpitz. But anyone with half an eye could not fail to recognise her latent power and menace as her impeccable ship’s company had lined the guardrails and cheered while the Royal Yacht had steamed past.

  He replied quietly, “I thought she was down south. In the Baltic. Wasn’t she supposed to be damaged by our bombing? Out of commission?”

  De Pass grunted. “So they said. Well, she’s bloody well not in the Baltic now. “

  Sheridan stared at him. “You mean, she’s up here?” “Nobody knows anything. There has been a lot of coastal fog

  around the Skaggerak and Norwegian coast. Our submarine

  patrols have not seen her. Nor has anyone else, it seems. ” “But you think-“

  “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that Captain (D) is like a wild man since he got the news. You can imagine what it means to him. He doesn’t say much, but I’ve got to know quite a lot about his moods over the last few weeks. He’s got a complete dossier on the Moltke. About her capabilities, even her captain’s record, right from the moment he was a naval cadet.”

  “I can believe that.” He felt suddenly dry. “It could make a difference to our position, I suppose?”

  “Christ knows.” De Pass’s great nose swivelled to the door as Galbraith approached from the opposite side. “I just hope that somebody in high places is all genned up.”

  Galbraith sauntered past him and sat down heavily in a chair.

  “Skipper’s free now.” He raised one eyebrow as de Pass hurried away. “Bother?”

  “Under advanced orders, Chief. Official.” He smiled grimly. “You’ll be busy again.”

  Galbraith sighed. “Ah well. Nothing lasts forever. “

  Right forward on Warlock’s forecastle Sub-lieutenant Victor Tyson was watching some seamen while they half-heartedly slapped paint on the anchor cables. It was quite warm in the frail sunlight, and across the busy jetty alongside he could see the town, the bright coats of some Icelandic girls who were strolling past the enclosing’wire fence.

  154

  It was true what they said about the Reykjavik girls. They really were beautiful. He had caught a friendly eye several times during his time ashore the previous evening, but that was all. The local male population obviously intended to keep them all to themselves. It was said that any Icelandic girl caught going round with a British serviceman would be labelled a prostitute. Even with an officer. But if they were staying a bit longer he would try his luck.

  As if to mock him, the tannoy speaker below the bridge rattled into life.

  “D’you hear there! D’you hear there!”

  The paint brushes all hovered in mid-air as if to listen.

  “There will be no, repeat no shore leave today. Hands will go to stations for leaving harbour at 1700. ” The speaker went dead.

  Tyson gaped at the tannoy with amazement. Leaving harbour? What the hell was going on?

  The tannoy intoned in a less despairing voice, “Up spirits!”

  A seaman muttered, “And stand by, the Holy Ghost!”

  Tyson swung on him angrily. “Hold your noise, damn you! I want all this cable painted before you fall out!”

  As he turned away, one of the seamen flicked his brush so that two drops of fresh paint fell neatly down the back of Tyson’s trousers.

  Midshipman Allan Keyes had just been passing the side of A gun and saw the action with the paint brush. The seaman in question also saw Keyes, and knew he had been seen.

  Keyes opened his mouth, but remained silent as Tyson snapped, “And where the hellhave you been, for God’s sake?” He gestured vaguely around the forecastle. “I can’t carry the whole ship on my own!”

  Keyes said, “Sorry.”

  He was glad he had said nothing about the paint, and saw the seaman with the brush watching him with obvious relief.

  But for once Keyes did not care about Tyson. Or anything else for that matter. For the first time in the whole of his eighteen years he was in love. Not some panting, breathless escapade with a schoolgirl at a carefully managed party, nor a demure and standoffish daughter of one of his parents’ friends, but with a real, vital woman.

  He watched Tyson as he strode angrily this way and that, and found he could feel even a sort of warmth for him. Almost. Unwittingly, it had been through Tyson that he had met Georgina. Even her name had a magic all of its own, and when he thought about it, it was like speaking it aloud.

  Tyson had been told to take a packet of despatches up to A.C.H.Q. It had been “something a bloody rating should be told to do,” according to Tyson. So making an excuse about another duty, he had arranged for Keyes to go instead. The midshipman had not minded at all. He had travelled very little, and just to sit in the back of a naval jeep amid a littler of sealed parcels and despatch boxes had been a small drama. At the H. Q. bu
ilding he had been treated as something between human and animal by a bored staff officer, and then had been told to take a further envelope over to the Americans at Camp Knox. It seemed that it had arrived in the wrong hands by mistake.

  His reception at the American camp had been somewhat different. He had been ushered into a comfortable hut, where coffee was produced, and a variety of rich cream cakes, while a lieutenant had gone off to obtain a signature for the envelope from somebody higher up.

  And then, like a vision out of a great film, Georgina had stepped into his life.

  Vivacious, very blonde, completely gorgeous in every way, she was, it appeared, an actress, one of a group which had arrived in Iceland to entertain the lonely servicemen. Although she had what seemed to be an American accent, she was, she had informed him in her low, husky voice, a Londoner. She was part of an ENSA show, which had been “exchanged” for an American USO group on the same sort of mission.

  He had listened, spellbound, to her tales of the West End shows, the great names in entertainment, cinema and broadcasting. Another, fantastic world.

  She was, he thought, a little older than himself. But not enough to matter. More to the point, she gave him a photograph, signed “To Allan from Georgina. ” She had looked at him and then with a secret smile had added, “Eternally.”

  “That will keep your friends guessing,” she had said.

  He looked up as Wingate appeared on the forebridge. The navigating officer had not repeated his rare display of anger against him. In fact, he got on very well with him, although he

  never got beyond Wingate’s outer, joking self. He went to the port ladder and hurried up to the bridge before Tyson could find him another job before lunch.

  Wingate was sitting on the captain’s wooden chair, smoking a cigarette, and letting the offshore breeze ruffle his dark hair.

  He looked at Keyes and nodded. “All right, Mid?”

  “I heard the pipe. We’re off again then?”

  “Seems that way.” Wingate eyed him curiously. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I wanted to get a message to someone. I promised to see her-“

  “Her?” Wingate swivelled round in the chair. “You’re joking, of course?”

  “No.” He shifted under his dark stare. “I met her yesterday. She’s an actress.”

  Wingate toyed with the idea of making a joke of it, and then saw Keyes’ pleading expression.

  “Well, you know the drill, Mid. Security. Nobody ever gets told. “

  “But I don’t know anything to tell her!” He was getting desperate.

  Wingate nodded. “Right. I have to go ashore for last-minute met reports.” He grinned. “But I see from your face you’d already thought of that!”

  Keyes smiled gratefully. “She’s at the women’s hotel in Borg Square. “

  Wingate remembered seeing the captain going into the same hotel.

  He said, “I’ll let her know. Tell her what a good bloke you are. “

  “Please, Pilot. Don’t stir it up for me. It’s very important. “

  He clapped Keyes on the shoulder. “Sure. Leave it to me. ” He chuckled. “She might have a friend. ” He frowned. “What’s her name?”

  “Georgina.” Just saying it aloud was like a betrayal.

  “Is that all?” He grinned again. “Never mind, Mid. I don’t suppose there are too many actresses called Georgina in that dump! “

  Tyson climbed up on to the bridge.

  “Come along, Mid! The upper deck is still in a filthy state!”

  Wingate smiled gently. “What about you then, Sub? Got bloody paint all over your trousers. Fine one to talk about filth!”

  He watched Tyson and the midshipman leave the bridge quiet and empty again. How he liked it. Tyson, all red-faced and fuming. As usual. The boy, glowing with a sort of aura in his new happiness. He glanced at the empty chart table. Poor little sod. He’d better make the most of it, he thought.

  10

  Touch and Go

  IT was five more days before Lomond and her two accompanying destroyers entered Seydisfjord and reunited the flotilla. For Drummond, as for most of the others, it had been a time of tension and concentration. Even the least experienced member of the ship’s company was now aware of the growing prospect of action, although no announcement had yet been released.

  From Admiral Brooks’s deep bunker in Whitehall to the monitoring stations in England and Iceland, a constant watch was being kept for any sign of undue excitement in the enemy’s arrangements in Norway. Whenever possible the R.A.F. maintained a careful patrol over harbours and coastal waters, seeking any sign that a familiar ship was missing, or that a new one had arrived. But as hours dragged into days, even the unexpected reports about the Moltke faded into the background. She had not been sighted again, and so the earlier references to her movements were now open to doubt.

  The real enemy was the weather. The clock came a very close second.

  Captain Kimber had sent a brief top-secret signal to the effect that the German training base for midget submarines of the type captured by Warlock was showing signs of closing down. The base was still there, and the little submarines, or “Negroes,” as they were apparently called by their creators, had been reported as before, and in the same impressive numbers. But there had been less activity, and the local Norwegian underground had signalled other information which left little doubt that the whole organisation was preparing to move south.

  At night, as he lay staring up at the darkness, Drummond had often thought about those nameless agents in occupied Norway, and any other land under the German heel. Hourly they must be risking discovery. The torture and agony which would follow capture, the punishment and destruction even of their families as a frightening example to others, it must all lurk in each man’s mind as he drew his sketches of installations and railway sidings with their loads of military stores and troop trains. Whenever he switched on his little transmitter and tried to reach London, or flashed his torch from a fishing boat to some invisible submarine off the coast, he must have held his breath. Waiting for the sharp challenge. The arrest. The beginning of unrelenting, unceasing pain.

  But the weather knew of no such problems. As the destroyers lay at their moorings in the great gash of a fjord hacked into Iceland’s east coast, they were constantly reminded of the calm which seemed to prevail as far south as Biscay and as far north as Spitzbergen. Washed-out blue skies, damp, listless air which hung in messdecks and cabins and painted everything with a dull, misty finish.

  True to his word, Kimber had arranged for a repair ship to be at hand, but as the base engineer officer had been heard to remark, “The old girls need less attention than brand-new ships.” So there had not even been much work beyond daily routine to keep the men’s minds elsewhere.

  Drummond had gone aboard Lomond within minutes of her arrival at Seydisf ford. After hearing what de Pass had said about the Moltke, he had been expecting some sort of a change in Beaumont, although he did not know in what way it might show itself. But, outwardly at least, Beaumont had displayed little but gnawing irritation.

  He had said, “When you are told you can go ahead with something, there’s nothing so calculated to get on your wick as stupid, bloody delays!”

  He had not even shown much enthusiasm for Miles Salter and his small camera crew, who had been busy for most of the passage round the coast from Reykjavik, and once in the great

  fjord had used a motor boat for further shots of the waiting destroyers.

  And Drummond had thought a good deal about the girl, Sarah Kemp.

  Fifteen minutes before their time to leave Reykjavik harbour he had been told by the officer of the guard that he was wanted on the telephone in the dock office. He had known she would see through Salter’s deception, although he had hoped it would not be quite so soon.

  She had said, “I won’t say much over this line. But I know! “

  He had tried to imagine her face on the other end of
the wire. Resigned, matter-of-fact, anxious for him perhaps.

  “I’m sorry. It had to be like this.”

  “Yes.” She had remained silent, and for a moment he had imagined she had hung up. “When you didn’t call me. About a date. I knew then, I think.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  Through the dirty windows of the dock office he had seen his own ship against the jetty, the greasy streamers of smoke from her unmatched funnels, going straight up, smearing the empty sky. No wind. Not a breath, he had thought despairingly.

  They’ll cut us to pieces.

  “I wish you had something better to remember,” she had given a small laugh, it might have been a sob, “than a silly old pipe. And all I did was moan about my troubles. ” That time he had heard her voice break. “When you knew, while I was talking. “

  He had said, “I’ll see you soon. I promise. I’m not letting you get away with it like this. You said you wanted a holiday on a volcano, remember?”

  He had heard her sniff, the impatient click of a switchboard operator.

  “Yes, I remember.” Another break. “Take care, Keith.”

  The line had gone dead. Only when he was striding back to the brow did he realise she had used his name.

  And then, on the afternoon of the eighth day, as he had been sitting in his cabin reading about the continuing successes in Sicily, the summons had arrived. All commanding officers to repair on board flotilla leader forthwith.

  Kimber was there, too, and as the destroyers’ captains arrived in their various motor boats, the Lomond’s wardroom seemed jammed tight with them and his assembled staff.

  Beaumont did not intend to waste any more time.

  “In a few minutes, gentlemen, the met officer and other interested parties will be filling in the pale patches. But I want to tell you right away that the raid is about to begin.”

  He leaned his hands on the table, and in the sudden silence Drummond could even hear his own heart beating. Beaumont must have cleared every steward, every officer not required at the meeting from the wardroom area, for the ship seemed like a grave.