Sink or Capture! (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  Part Two – Narvik

  7

  “Ah!” Hannah’s eyes were closed. She lifted under him, quivering, then collapsed. Her body went slack and he lay on top of her, felt her legs slide down to lie outside of his. For a while they were still and she kissed him, arms around him, then let him go as he rolled away.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his watch. He had plenty of time. But he meant to catch that early train to Scotland. He would be aboard Glowworm when she sailed. The light was growing outside, the cold pallid light of a winter’s day. The curtains were drawn back and he could see Hannah’s clothes scattered in a trail across the floor where he had dropped them last night.

  This was her service flat, rented when she came to London from the States. He no longer had a base in London and anyway, this was a far cry from the spartan cell he had rented until he went to Montevideo. Hannah Fitzsimmons had brought him here as soon as she could get him out of hospital, though the doctors would not pass him fit for sea. She told him that first night, mumbling, her mouth on his, “I don’t want you fit for sea. But fit? Let’s see … “ Her hands seeking and finding …

  Now he had persuaded Admiralty that he was fit to join his ship. They had sent her to sea, with Galloway in temporary command, a week ago. Smith had raged but the war would not wait for him. Cassandra had gone to patrol off Norway and the destroyer Glowworm would take him there to join her. He hoped he had persuaded Admiralty to his way of thinking on another matter, John Galloway’s application for transfer, but he would have to wait and see.

  Hannah watched him now. Her mouth had gone down at the corners but when he turned to her she smiled. She pushed up to kneel behind him where he sat, arms around him, long fingers gently stroking the new, pink scar tissue on his leg. The head wound had appeared dramatic but proved minor. It was the bullet that ripped through the thick part of his thigh that kept him in hospital.

  He reached for her but this time she pulled away. “I’ll grab a shower and cook you some breakfast.” She swung her legs off the bed and walked away from him. She wondered, Why did you get involved with this guy? And remembering, This is 1st April. That figures. You sap. But I won’t make it tough for him. I won’t drag along to the station or beg him to come back because that’s goddamn stupid. He’ll come back if he can. Please God.

  And she wouldn’t cry until she was in the shower.

  Smith rolled out of the bunk as the alarm rattlers sounded. He had left Hannah’s arms and bed a week before. Now the grey steel walls of the tiny box of a cabin, rust-streaked and sweating with condensation, closed him round. The deckhead above him was lined with snaking steel pipes. This was the destroyer Glowworm, 1300-odd tons and soaring and plunging like a lift in this storm off the coast of Norway. He had slept, fully dressed, for only a few minutes after standing down from dawn action stations. Now he threw back the blanket and yanked on his seaboots, grabbed cap and oilskins from their hook and ran.

  Glowworm had sailed from Scapa Flow as a member of the destroyer screen escorting the battlecruiser Renown, flying the flag of Admiral Whitworth. He was leading a mine-laying flotilla to the Vestfjord, the approach to the Norwegian port of Narvik. The mines were to be laid in the “Leads”, the narrow strip of sea running down the Norwegian coast. They were intended to stop the passage of ships carrying iron ore from Narvik to Germany. Cassandra would rendezvous with Renown and her escort in the Vestfjord when Smith could transfer to her. That had been the plan. But Glowworm had separated from the rest of the force to search for a man fallen overboard and had not yet rejoined. She was alone and now about to go into action.

  The destroyer’s narrow passages and companions were filled with running men, but not crowded and elbowing. They avoided each other and collisions automatically out of long practice so the streams of them went their different ways without check. They hurled bawled comments at passing familiar faces, joking and on edge, snatched from sleep and thrown into this disciplined stampede — to what? Hours of boredom closed up in a gun team on the exposed and freezing cold upper deck or in a magazine far below — or awful wounds and death?

  “I’d just come off watch!”

  “If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t ha’ joined!”

  “Roll on my bloody twelve!” The end of the twelve years he’d signed on for, but he wouldn’t get out now until the war was over.

  Smith slipped into the stream going his way and as he ran pulled on the oilskin over the thick sweater he wore, his jacket left hanging in the cabin. He came out on the deck and headed forward to the bridge. At the foot of the ladder he met Buckley, who asked, panting, “Know what it’s all about, sir?”

  Smith shook his head. “Come on, but keep out of the way.” He started up the ladder to the bridge that would be crowded and where spectators who got in the way would be unwelcome. He was a spectator as he was a passenger aboard the destroyer, with no post to fill in action, no orders to give. He had to heed the warning he had given to Buckley and on the ladder he thought that it had been a waste of breath; the leading hand knew already.

  And Buckley, climbing at Smith’s heels, muttered to himself, “Does the bastard think I was born yesterday?”

  Roope, Lieutenant-Commander and captain of Glowworm was already on the bridge with his staff, binoculars to his eyes. Smith did not disturb him but asked a sublieutenant, whose wind-reddened face hid inside the hood of his duffel coat like a cowled monk, “Good morning. Why the alarm?”

  The monk blinked at that “Good morning” but answered, “Destroyer sighted off the port bow. You can just see her without glasses. We think she might be enemy.” And he raised his own binoculars to peer out at the distant, blurred ship.

  Smith could barely make her out. The storm still raged so he looked out over towering crests of waves, through driving sleet and snow. Visibility was down to three or four miles at best. The other ship was a grey blur in the middle distance. Was she a destroyer? An enemy? He borrowed the glasses from the Sub and as he lifted them to his eyes heard Roope order the turn to port that would point Glowworm at the destroyer, and: “Challenge!”

  The searchlight’s shutter clacked as the signalman flashed the challenge at Roope’s order. And that was a destroyer out on the horizon, no doubt of it, and Smith thought she was an enemy. He lowered the glasses. An answering light now flickered from the upperworks of the other destroyer and the signalman, now with telescope to his eye, reported, “She claims she’s Swedish, sir.”

  Roope shook his head, “I saw that but I don’t believe it. Open fire!”

  There was a pause while Glowworm pitched and plunged through the big seas then the salvo gongs clanged and her 4.7-inch guns fired. Smith lifted the borrowed glasses again to watch the fall of the shot, thought he saw splashes lift near the far-off grey ship and heard confirmation come down through the speaker from the Gunnery Officer controlling the firing up in the director control tower: “Short!”

  The guns fired again but the grey ship had narrowed as it turned away, blurred further as it slid off into the murk. It was seen for a few seconds longer then was lost in the dark background where sea merged with lowering sky without sign of the join.

  The Sub grumbled, “Gone away.”

  Smith returned his glasses. The guns had fallen silent. He stared with the others on the bridge at the place where the enemy destroyer had vanished as Glowworm shoved through the big seas towards it. The other ship did not reappear but they waited, Smith uneasily.

  He wondered if that was because of some premonition but then told himself that was nonsense. Or was it because of the continuing worry and bewilderment over Sarah? God knew he could not understand what was happening — had happened — to her. He remembered her shouting to him in the Jossingfjord: “I want to stay with them!”

  Why?

  While he was in hospital he had been visited by an official from the Foreign Office who had told him that representatives from the British embassy in Oslo had sought out Sarah.
The Norwegians had held her with the crew of the Altmark but she had not gone with them when they had returned to the ship and sailed it back to Germany. She had stayed in Norway, first at the German embassy in Oslo but only for one night. She had then travelled north with one German SS officer to a remote village, Heimen. The representative from the British embassy who went there to see her gave it as his belief that the village had been selected by her escort for its remote position. He thought that Sarah had gone there, or been taken there, so he would be able to contact her only rarely. But he said that she had still insisted that she wanted to stay with the SS officer escorting her. Again — why?

  Smith had already worried long and fruitlessly at that question and now had time to brood over it once more as Glowworm searched. He stood wedged in a back corner of her bridge where he had some protection from the howling wind, driving sleet and rain, and would not be in the way of Roope and his bridge staff.

  But he had another visitor while he was in hospital, Hannah Fitzsimmons leaning over him and smiling. “I warned you I would track you down.” She gave him some ease of mind: “I know Sarah, maybe better than you do. Remember we were together in Poland and for weeks — no, months — after that before she found you in Montevideo. And this business smells. Sarah would never sell out. There has to be something we don’t know.”

  She also brought ease to his body, her arms locked around him, her voice husky and breathless in the dark, “Was that good? That was good!” And finding each other again later in the night. Night after night.

  A big sea broke inboard and hurled icy spray into his face. But he had left Hannah as soon as he could get to sea. He could have been with her now. He laughed at that and at himself then, but stopped when he saw the Sub staring at him.

  Buckley had disappeared but now came staggering to Smith’s side, balancing precariously against the pitch and roll, clutching a steaming mug in each hand. He held out one: “Kye, sir.”

  Smith said, “A poor substitute.”

  Now Buckley stared at him. “Sir?”

  “Never mind.” Smith took the cocoa, wondered how Buckley had conjured it up with the ship at action stations but did not ask and said only, “Thank you.” He sipped then gulped at the sweet heat of it as he went back to his thoughts.

  They were not of Hannah now and the moment of wry humour had passed. Sarah had no apparent reason to go back to Germany and a very good one for staying away: just before the outbreak of war she had been involved in an underground organisation in Berlin that was engaged in smuggling out of Germany people persecuted by Hitler’s regime. She knew the SS and was afraid of them; she had told Smith how they worked, how they had treated some of her friends. If she went back to Hitler’s Germany she would be executed — or worse, sent to a concentration camp where dying took longer.

  In the early sedated and bemused days in hospital he was haunted by one possible reason and he had forced himself to face it. In his years spent in Intelligence he had encountered more than one double agent. Suppose Sarah had infiltrated the rescue organisation and betrayed it to the Gestapo? Then pretended to “escape” herself through Poland and used her British passport and the name of her father, a Royal Navy captain, to carry out some spying mission for German Intelligence? She had told him that she had been happy in Germany for a long time, that she had been fond of a young German naval officer, Kurt Larsen. It was a possibility, that could not be denied.

  But he did not believe it, could not believe it of the girl he had come to know, however briefly, in Montevideo. She was his daughter…

  And later, cold logic told him that was not a possibility. Because Sarah had been on a British ship, Orion, bound for a British port. She could not have known that she would be captured by Altmark.

  But still he was left with the question: Why did she want to stay with the enemy?

  “Ship! Fine on the port bow!” That yell came from the masthead and the glasses on the bridge swung onto the bearing. Smith cursed his lack of a pair of binoculars and stood waiting behind the Sub, shifting from one leg to the other with impatience. He could see another darker smudge on the dark frieze of the blurred joining of distant sea and sky. A ship, but that was all he could make of it.

  Then the Sub said jubilantly, “Looks like we’ve found her!” He shoved the binoculars reluctantly into Smith’s outstretched hand.

  Now the ship leapt out at him, a picture still furred at the edges but recognisable as a destroyer. The same? The mottled camouflage of her paint looked similar but — he thought the ship first sighted had more sheer to her bow than this one and a clipper stem.

  His unspoken thought was echoed by Roope, who said, “That’s another one of ‘em. Open fire!”

  So there were two enemy destroyers now and Smith knew their types. Either one of them was bigger and a shade faster than Glowworm, but Roope was going to fight them. Of course. There was always a chance, a very, very slim chance that he would win or anyway survive. He could certainly hope to cripple one or both of his adversaries for Renown and her destroyers to finish off, or for them to be out of action for a long time. Meanwhile Glowworm’s wireless operator was busily sending out signals to the Fleet reporting the presence of this enemy force.

  And Roope was expected to fight, by Admiralty and the public. That was tradition, and Smith also lived and was ready to die by it. Roope turned then and his face was expressionless but his eyes met those of Smith who saw determination — and a shared understanding?

  Glowworm’s guns fired again and this time they kept on firing. The enemy destroyer replied. Neither scored a hit on the other despite the range being barely three or four miles now but conditions for gunnery were appalling. Both destroyers bucketed, pitched and rolled over the huge green seas, the barrels of the guns now pointing at the sky then down into those same heaving waves. Smith thought Glowworm was close with several salvoes. Roope was closing the range. Then the other ship turned away, though still firing and with Glowworm in pursuit. Smith clung to a stanchion to stay upright, narrowed his eyes against the spray, sleet and rain that lashed his face and wondered: Where was the other destroyer? Was Glowworm being led onto her?

  He thought he saw her, farther still beyond the fleeing ship, looming out of that grey haze of sleet, rain and wind-whipped spray that fogged the middle distance. Then he became aware of Buckley staggering up to his side and the big leading hand’s hoarse voice saying, “That’s no bloody destroyer, sir!”

  Smith looked again and now she was a little nearer, a little clearer. She was not a destroyer. Could she possibly be friendly? Smith did not think so and that was confirmed when he saw the stabs of flame from the big guns in her turrets. Then after thirty-odd long seconds the shells fell short of Glowworm. The spouts of dirty sea water they threw up dwarfed those lifted by the enemy destroyer’s guns, looked to tower high above Smith where he stood on the bridge. He said, “That’s a heavy cruiser. Firing eight-inch guns.” She could be one of two: Blucher or Hipper.

  He listened to his own voice, calmly commenting. He wasn’t putting on an act to try to impress Buckley with his coolness. He did not try to create impressions with Buckley, anyway; they had known each other too long. He felt calm — or stunned? He thought that he had reason to be in shock. He knew he was looking at the doom of Glowworm and probably staring his own death in the face.

  Roope was turning Glowworm away. His duty now was to send another signal to the Fleet, not to try to fight a cruiser like this, with her 8-inch guns and heavy armour, twice the length of a football pitch and ten times the tonnage of Glowworm. But he was already too late. The next shells from those big guns struck home on his ship and she staggered under them. Then she was hit again and she could not survive long under the hammer of those guns. Smith knew Glowworm’ could not escape — and so did Roope. He turned her again now and headed once more towards the cruiser. And into her fire.

  “We’re doing no good here!” Smith shouted that at Buckley as Glowworm was hit repeatedly
. He gave a jerk of his head and with Buckley following him he clawed his way down a shell-twisted ladder to the deck. There they found a gun that was short-handed through men lost to wounds. The pair of them stripped off their hampering oilskins and filled the gaps, a leading seaman and a captain passing ammunition to the loader.

  He bawled, “We’ve got another couple o’ hands, Jim!”

  The layer swung around in his seat long enough to blink at them, at first without recognition because of Smith’s lack of badges of rank, but then identifying this captain on passage. He was not amused nor impressed; this was no time for either. The gun had got badly needed replacements and that was enough. He shouted, “We’ll be getting an admiral next, Brummy.” And he turned back to his dials.

  The men at the gun got some protection from the gun-shield that covered front, sides and top of the gun but it was open at the back. So they were left vulnerable to the scything splinters hurled by shells bursting behind them. Some of those splinters were as big as a fist and all of them were ragged steel. They slammed and screamed around the gun but Smith and Buckley were not hit.

  Glowworm was taking this punishment because Roope was working her into a position to fire his torpedoes. Smith, squinting around the gun screen with eyes smarting from cordite smoke, coughing from the reek of it, tried to estimate the distance between him and the cruiser. He thought it was about three thousand yards away when Roope turned Glowworm broadside to the cruiser and fired his torpedoes. The “fish” leapt from the tubes in the waist and dived into the sea. Smith thought he saw the tell-tale bubbles marking the trail of them but could not be sure because of the big seas that were running and churned into foam by Glowworm’s manoeuvring, the tops of the waves blown off in spray spread like a blanket over the tossed water. The torpedoes might have gone on diving to the bottom of the ocean or surfaced uselessly. Or they might run straight and true to their target.