The Destroyers

by Douglas Reeman

  “W/T office. Get me the leader.”

  Beaumont must have been hanging on the line. When he heard the codeword, Lipread, he merely said, “As we planned, Keith. Phase two. You lead. “

  Drummond returned to the open bridge, suddenly very alert and on edge. He had anticipated a last-minute change round. Beaumont had hinted at it often enough. Lomond in the lead, with Warlock covering the entrance and watching over the mine-laden Whirlpool. It was probably a right decision. If anything happened to the first ships into the fjord, a change of tactics would be needed, and double quick.

  Archer said, “I’m with Military Intelligence, by the way. He grinned. “And am I glad to be in a British ship again!”

  “I’ll try and keep it that way. ” Drummond hesitated. “If we catch a packet, I hope you’ve got the right papers?”

  Archer patted his jacket. “Of course. ” He grinned. “NAAFI manager. “

  Drummond found he had become completely relaxed, remote from any sort of tension. “What else?”

  The Norwegian came back with Wingate. He was holding a mug of cocoa.

  “All arranged, Captain. We meet a fishing boat a mile or so out. We must leave the exact position to her skipper. An old friend. He will guide us past the point. The rest will be, er……”

  Wingate remarked, “Busy?”

  “Yes. Very busy.”

  Drummond asked him quietly, “Do you have papers to explain your presence on board, if we get into trouble?”

  He shrugged. “I will not be taken. Have no fear of that.” He sounded weary. “One more risk is no matter. Not if it means a victory. “

  Sheridan crossed the bridge. “Any orders, sir?”

  “No. We remain at action stations. But see if you can rustle up some hot drinks for the lads. Go round the ship yourself. Have a word with as many of them as you can. Especially the green ones. You remember what it was like for you. The first time. The grand slam.”

  “I will.” Sheridan turned up his collar. “Funny about Captain (D) though.”

  “Funny?”

  “Keeping well back, I’d have thought, sir.” He pointed above the screen. “Mist is getting worse. Met reports said there could be a pea-souper closer inshore. Still, I suppose he knows what he’s doing.”

  Drummond said as he made to leave, “And take care, Number One.” What she had said. “No heroics, just a good, clean job.”

  Sheridan showed his teeth. “I don’t know about clean, sir. But thanks. And the same to you.” He was gone.

  Drummond settled himself in the chair. A quick time check, although he had already seen the watch in his mind.

  “Here we go, Pilot. Revs for twenty knots.”

  He heard him speaking into the voice-pipe to the wheelhouse, knew the other ships astern were waiting to follow. Like a bloody cavalry charge. Just over four hours to go. Provided the poor old girl didn’t shake apart as she sliced over the swell. But the sea was smoother now. That could mean that the fog was drawing nearer.

  Drummond felt the deck shudder and then begin to vibrate more steadily under the chair. Faster, faster, the old screws slashing the sea into a sharp-edged line which was cut short astern by the swirling mist.

  He pictured the destroyers on Warlock’s quarters. Waxwing, commanded by the flotilla’s most junior skipper, Lieutenant James Lovat, R.N. Son of a rich brewer. Young, but deadly in a pitched battle. On the other quarter, Lieutenant-Commander Bill Selkirk in his Ventnor, a tough reservist, a professional sailor in peacetime. The only one to voice doubt at Drummond’s action which had left Warden to perish with most of her company. They had worked very little together, but Selkirk had a reputation for getting things done. The hard way.

  Still the revolutions mounted, and he could imagine Galbraith in his rattling, screeching world below the waterline. Watching his gauges, shouting or singing unheard in the din.

  And Rankin above the bridge with his fire control team, and Vaughan sitting with his gleaming instruments and his effeminate S.B.A Noakes in the T.S., Keyes at the plot table, young Tyson with the secondary armament aft. And Sheridan. He would be keeping the ship afloat if things went very wrong. Or sitting in this chair if a shell put paid to the Warlock’s captain.

  But all in all it was a good team, he thought. Perhaps better than average. He smiled to himself. Each individual captain would be saying just that. He had to, if he hoped to stay sane.

  The nearer they drew to land, the more the Norwegian officer seemed to come alive. He stood beside Drummond’s chair, gripping the rail below the screen with both hands, his head moving occasionally from bow to bow, as if he could smell the approaching channel.

  “Depth?”

  “Thirty-seven fathoms, sir.” Hillier bobbed down to await the next question or command.

  Drummond did not look at his watch. He could feel the dawn probing up across the port bow. Apart from the feeling, it was

  such an unreal situation that the Norwegian’s confidence was reassuring, to say the least. They were dashing through thick, milky fog at twenty knots, with nothing to guide them but Lyngstad’s unwavering skill and local knowledge.

  “Bring her round a point to port, please.”

  In the strange light he looked like the statue of an old Norseman. Tall and gaunt, with a ragged beard thrusting above his fisherman’s jersey.

  “Course one-four-zero, sir.”

  The Norwegian said calmly, “My friend’s boat will be appearing any minute now, I think.”

  Drummond did not say anything. He felt it might break the spell and leave them all helpless. He hoped to God that the other ships astern were still on station. For with shallowing water to starboard, and the end of the minefield to port, any deviation could be final.

  Lyngstad added, “Be clearing soon, too. But the work will be-“

  He swung round as a lookout snapped, “Ship, sir! Fine on port bow!”

  “Half speed! ” Lyngstad waved his arms wildly as the grubby little trawler loomed out of the mist. “I knew he would be here!”

  The trawler was already gathering way, her hull pirouetting round as she swerved to take over the lead. If her skipper had been shocked to see the destroyer dashing straight for hi n, he gave no hint as he handled the little boat with apparent panache.

  Archer was standing on the port gratings. “The enemy’s R.D.F. station is over there, high up on Vannoy Island. Our friends ashore must have done their work all right. We’d have had all hell down on us otherwise, fog or no bloody fog!”

  “Ten fathoms, sir.”

  “Good.” Lyngstad looked at Drummond. “Tell your helmsman to keep as close to the fishing boat as he can.”

  Wingate stooped over the voice-pipe as a messenger called, “X gun report they can see Ventnor following astern, sir.” He grinned with sudden relief.

  Wingate looked up. “Did you think we were all alone? Tch, tch!”

  Drummond felt the movement of cold, misty air against his face. Lyngstad was probably right about the fog clearing. He made a sudden decision.

  “Hoist battle ensigns, Yeoman!”

  Lyngstad drew his gaze from the small patch of clear water ahead of the bows and said simply, “I have a flag, Captain, I was hoping …” He did not finish it, but pulled the rolled flag from under his reefer.

  Drummond said, “Yeoman. Run up this one beside ours.”

  He watched the white ensigns breaking out on the masts, the other, smaller flag, red with its blue cross, rising firmly to the upper yard. He saw the Norwegian’s face and guessed what this small gesture meant to him.

  Lyngstad said, “Now I know we will succeed today! Thank you. “

  The Norwegian flag licked out abeam, and it was like a signal.

  Very slowly at first, and then with gathering haste, like a first curtain, the mist started to edge clear, laying bare the tall green side of an island, a strip of glittering channel and a solitary, anchored patrol boat.

  Lyngstad said harshly, “She is yours now
, Captain!” Drummond gripped the rail. “Open fire!”

  12

  In Deadly Earnest

  IT seemed to take an eternity before the two forward guns responded to the tinny fire gong. They recoiled on their springs almost together, the double explosion echoing and smashing back from the nearest land as if they, and not the anchored patrol boat, were under attack.

  Drummond held his glasses jammed against his eyes, feeling the deck buck, his ears taking in Rankin’s voice across his intercom, the startled cry from a lookout as the explosions shook the bridge.

  “Range oh-one-oh! Shoot!”

  Again the guns spat out their tongues of flame, and Drummond saw a tall waterspout rise directly alongside the little vessel, another burst skyward far beyond.

  “Down one hundred! Shoot!”

  The next pair of shells smashed into the vessel together. She must have been built entirely of wood. Timber and jagged fragments were hurled into the air, and the oily water of the fjord pockmarked with scattered debris. There was fire, too, long plumes of it licking from abaft her small, boxlike bridge, where a few frantic figures were emerging like frightened insects.

  Drummond shouted, “Secondary armament! Fire when ready! “

  Immediately, as if anticipating the order, the bridge Oerlikons rattled into life. Drummond saw their lazy lines of scarlet tracer lifting away ahead of Warlock’s bows, before criss-crossing and intermingling like hammers of hell across the stricken patrol boat. The twenty-millimetre shells completed what the heavier ones had begun. Sparks and flames enveloped her from step to stern, and while here and there a forlorn swimmer was trying to splash away from the listing hull, others were being forced into the inferno between decks under a fusilade of tracer and metal.

  “Port ten!” Drummond moved his glasses slightly. “Midships. Steady as you go!”

  He heard Rankin yell, “Cease firing! Shift target Green four-five! Range double-oh-eight!”

  From somewhere astern he heard the jarring crash of gunfire as the other destroyers followed through the narrow entrance to the fjord. Shells were exploding everywhere, the results mostly hidden in the retreating mist.

  He saw Rankin’s new target even as the first gunlayer shouted, “Layer on!”

  It was a high-sided freighter of some five thousand tons. From what he could see in the drifting mist and gunsmoke, he guessed she was the depot ship. There were small derricks lining her main deck, and alongside he could just make out the outline of a moored pontoon.

  Lyngstad shouted, “The submarine tender! Many of the crews under training live in her! ” He was wildly oblivious to the crashing detonations, to the harsh rattle of automatic weapons which made thought a painful effort.

  “Shoot!”

  The four-inch shells made bright red eyes in the ship’s side, and then, as they exploded deep within the hull, deck fittings and whole sections of steel were hurled high into the air.

  Someone was firing back from her high bridge with a machine gun. Drummond’s mind recorded its impartial rattle, the almost gentle sound of a Spandau. Then he felt the impact of bullets below the bridge, the banshee whine of ricochets, before another shell slammed into the depot ship and ignited either a paint store or a locker full of signal flares.

  Warlock lurched drunkenly and then picked up speed again, and as he glanced over the screen Drummond watched the bow section of the smashed patrol boat bouncing away in a welter of spray and tiny splintered fragments. A man who had been

  clinging to a broken hatch-cover was plucked away and down into Warlock’s churning screws, his mouth wide in a silent scream as he vanished into the white froth.

  He snapped to Tucker, “Make a signal to Waxwing. Attack with torpedoes!”

  “Sir!” Hillier was staggering across the swaying gratings. “Midget submarines on the port bow!” His face was like chalk. “Must be a hundred of them!”

  Drummond swung round, his eyes and mind recording everything in the same second. Tucker’s lamp shuttering his signal to Lovat’s ship which was careering across Ventnor’s stern. The strange, sharp-edged slipways of raw concrete which had been built for the sole purpose of launching and training the German crews. Up, partly hidden by camouflaged nets and low trees, he saw the long huts, workshops and stores which had made an idea into a reality which would soon have been used against the Allies. He recalled in the same instant the dead crewman in the Falmouth mortuary. His slitted eyes. The girl who had leaned against his slab without even a flicker of interest.

  He yelled, “Depth-charge attack! Minimum setting!”

  Wingate shouted into the handset and then added, “Shallow there, sir! No more than twenty fathoms!”

  Someone else had finally been roused from his bed ashore. Bullets made thin, harmless-looking weaves of tracer as they probed above the mist and smoke, the tiny balls of fire so deceptively slow until they reached their apex and then lashed down on the advancing ships with the fury of bandsaws.

  Further inland he heard duller thuds, grenades or mines, he did not know. Only that the Norwegian underground were doing their part, pinning down German outposts as they were awakened by the frightening roar and thunder of exploding shells.

  Drummond seized Wingate’s arm. “Tell the yeoman to warn the other ships to keep clear!”

  He ducked as a glass panel was shattered from the screen. He felt tiny pointers stinging his cheek, the taste of blood on his lips.

  The two after guns were bearing now on the depot ship and other installations nearby. The slender barrels rocked back on their mountings, and once Rankin yelled wildly, “Look at that one go up! A hit, the bloody bastards!”

  Even in all this Drummond’s mind noted that he had not known Rankin to lose his show of calm so completely. “Depth-charges ready, sir!”

  He craned over the screen, seeing an Oerlikon gunner directly below him, strapped by his harness, while his gloved hand beat an urgent tattoo on the breech as his assistant hoisted a full magazine into place. Right aft he saw the crouching shapes of the depth-charge parties, bent double like athletes as they tried to stay away from bright sparks which were being struck from the metal decks by an invisible machine gun.

  “Fire! “

  The port charge was hurled from its thrower in a puff of smoke to fall within a few feet of the outer trot of moored submarines. A squad of soldiers suddenly came around the nearest building, rifles at the high port, their helmets bobbing up and down as they skidded to a halt at the sight of a destroyer surging past the slipways with every weapon firing.

  The depth-charge exploded violently, shaking Warlock from stern to bow like a terrier mauling a rat. Men fell cursing and yelling as she swayed dizzily away from the blast, and almost before they had recovered, a pattern of charges rolled from her stern and blasted the water a hundred feet higher than the mainmast truck.

  Tucker was yelling, “Signal from Ventnor, sir! More gunfire astern!”

  “Captain (D) coming in to support us.” Wingate dashed some fragments of grit and flaked paint from his face. “About bloody time!”

  Drummond kept his eyes on the creeping, dodging figures which were darting through the smoke towards the remaining submarines. The crews which had been berthed ashore would be trying to save their craft. As any trained sailor would. They must be stopped.

  “Slow ahead both engines!” He coughed in a down-draught of greasy smoke from the funnel. “Tell Guns to shift all he’s got to that target!”

  A deafening roar came at them across the water and bounded against the hull like a living thing. Through the trapped smoke and haze within the fjord he saw a spreading sheen of red and

  gold, spilling out until it had covered every inch of water in a fierce, throbbing glow.

  “Torpedo attack completed, sir.”

  Lovat would have enjoyed that. Each of his three torpedoes must have made a direct hit on the depot ship. At that range it would need an idiot to miss.

  Even through the roar of gunfire, t
he echo of Lovat’s own salvo, they heard the groan of fracturing plates and frames, the eager thunder of inrushing water.

  Wingate crouched over the compass, with Lyngstad shouting directions into his ear.

  Occasionally the hull jerked to a blow from some well hidden cannon ashore, and high above the bridge the air seemed to be constantly alive with tracer and shrieking steel.

  Astern, Selkirk had manoeuvred across their wake again, and was pouring a devastating fire into the jumble of midget submarines. It was impossible to tell the difference between those which had been capsized by the depth-charge attack and those which, if handled properly, might still escape. Shells were bursting everywhere. On land, in the water and dead in the middle of the low black hulls.

  Figures ran amidst the bursts of smoke and fire like demented beings, others were plucked away by the machine guns’ scythe of tracer which swept back and forth with relentless efficiency. The guns cut down running men and wounded alike, picked up smoking corpses and tossed them about like bundles of bloody rags before moving on again. Several huts were ablaze, and from one came the crackle of exploding small-arms ammunition until a direct hit blew the building into pieces.

  All the bridge party ducked and looked up as a twin whistle, sharp and abbreviated, ripped overhead, followed immediately by a violent bang. The hull gave a long shiver, and the water alongside danced in tiny white feathers of spray.

  “Shore battery!” Lyngstad had to shout before anyone looked at him. “They must have been able to repulse our people!”

  Again the shriek of shells, and an even louder detonation. The first fall of shot was clearly visible. Two great oval necklaces of salt spray where two shells had burst side by side. Like huge, melancholy eyes.

  Drummond shouted, “Call up Captain (D). Tell him I require support now!”

  Again the shells ripped above the vibrating mastheads and the streaming flags. Almost flat trajectory. The guns must be firing from a site on the island directly abeam.

  Rankin was snapping, “Shift target! Red eight-oh! Range oh-one-five! Commence … commence … commence!”