“Swing out the davits,” Morrison called, and the long arms swung gracefully over the port and starboard sides. When they were fully extended they were locked into place with a pinion rod. “Play out the paravanes.” They went slowly down into the water, fat fish with teeth and wings.
Firedancer was not the only vessel sweeping the channel. The other two destroyers had been ordered to do so as well, and behind them, at a safe distance, steamed Prometheus and Prince of Wales. Once they proceeded down the swept channel, escorted by a dozen Royal Air Force fighters, they would sail into the North Atlantic and begin their voyage.
“Winston’s on Prince of Wales,” Hardy said to Number One.
“Churchill?”
“He’s with some American chap.”
“How do you—”
“My orders said nothing beyond the fact that Their Lordships direct Firedancer to accompany Prince of Wales and render any assistance necessary. We’re a small service, Number One, even with the Hostilities Only forced upon us by current condition. No secret remains a secret for very long. We don’t go blabbing it to the Germans, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk among ourselves. Prometheus knew beforehand, I’m sure of it, but his manner was always to ingratiate himself into Their Lordships’ confidence.” It was a Royal Navy custom to call a captain by his ship’s name, but Number One noted that Hardy said Prometheus as if it were distasteful to even form the word in his mouth.
“You’ll know more when I relay the orders to the other officers. Until that time keep the information to yourself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damned waste of time,” Hardy said, watching the other destroyers in their synchronized movements to sweep the channel.
“Sir?”
“Bloody waste of ships,” Hardy said. “Prince of Wales can outrun anything on the sea, under the sea, or in the sky for that matter. We’re just giving the enemy more targets, that’s all. A flimsy Diddo and three destroyers alongside the most powerful ship afloat. What are we to do, I ask you?”
Number One knew better than to answer. Hardy was preaching his sermon. Nothing was right, everyone’s decisions but his were flawed. Their Lordships were once again demonstrating their incompetence and if it wasn’t obvious to anyone else, it was certainly obvious to Hardy.
Number One did not dare comment on how he felt: exhilarated, excited—marveling at this impressive flotilla as it made its way with professional grace toward the open sea. He enjoyed the majesty of it all—warships steaming in a precisely choreographed dance, Addis lights blinking rapidly, colorful signal flags streaming in the fierce Scottish wind, and above all of it, in a clear blue sky, racing clouds as gray and foreboding as the warships that filled the Flow. Even the green waters, subservient to the deadly vessels, parted in a white froth, cut in two by the bows of the ships as they sailed into the North Sea.
There could never be drama like this in the courtroom, Number One decided, no matter the results of great legal minds splitting points of law into razor-thin arguments. All paled before the ceremony of war, Number One decided—even the mundane duty of escorting vast herds of convoyed ships, countless dark shapes riding easily under the orange gaze of a newborn sun—even that was drama. Of course his mood would change when the fresh food was gone and what was served in the wardroom was a questionable mix of leftovers, or when he had been at action stations for so long that sleep was only a distant memory. Or when the sea battered Firedancer for days at a time or the unyielding cold stole every ounce of strength left to him. But now he enjoyed the view afforded him by the advent of danger, even if Hardy did not.
It might be a waste of time and ships, Number One thought. It might be as Hardy said: there was nothing out there to challenge Prince of Wales.
Chapter 14
H.M.S. Nottingham, the Denmark Strait
Captain Morris Prader, DSO, took the cup of steaming tea in an enameled iron cup from Yeoman Uhl and wrapped both hands around it, grateful that, despite the open windows, they were at least within the closed compass platform of the cruiser. Had he captained a destroyer, he would have no protection.
Still, it was crowded on the platform with the officers and ratings of the Watch, including dour Lieutenant Trunburrow, his number one. They were sandwiched in among the steering mechanism, dozens of dials, gauges, the voice tube station, and the engine enunciator that jutted out over the red-and-gray-checkerboard linoleum block floor. The only compromise to the starkness of the platform were the two, high-backed chairs that sat to either side, away from the polished brass compass stand. The stand itself blossomed from the deck and bloomed gracefully into a white enameled dish that held the compass. The officer of the Watch could control the entire operation of the ship from the compass platform. And even when Prader made his appearance on the platform, and to the consternation of junior officers he was there at the most inopportune times, he let the officer of the Watch control the ship. All the officer need do was to recite the ever-changing manrta: “Wind, force two, southwest to northwest,” or whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing, “Barometer 30.10 to 30.20, unchanging. Visibility nine.” And the course and speed. Prader might dictate change in course or speed, fine-tuning the movement of his ship, or simply reminding his officers that he was in firm control of all that transpired on the vessel. He’d read an essay from that Polish chap who gave up the sea to write—nothing to Prader’s liking because it was all that philosophical and moral nonsense—but the one piece that he’d managed to wade through was “The Captain”: “To each man who commands comes a severity of life that denies him everything except duty. For his crew, the passengers, for the ship on whose deck he strides, he bears responsibility. He can no more relinquish this duty, than a mortal man can live without the heart that beats within his breast.” He could never remember that chap’s name. Never mind, it wasn’t important.
Instead, Prader would stroll, cup of tea in hand.
He’d stroll out to the bridge wings and look over the 40-mm Twin Bofors MKV mountings and if the gunners were there tending to their guns, he would chat them up. There they would stand, stiff and nervous as hell: ordnance artificers and ordinary seamen alike wondering: Christ! When is this bloody old fool going to move on?
He would, when it suited him.
Prader might show up in sick bay, looking over the eight beds all neatly made up, and speak briefly with the acting surgeon lieutenant, a very dedicated and serious chap. He might wander through the radar and fire-direction rooms and make his way aft, deep within the ship to the stoker’s mess, and from there through a 450-pound steel hatch activated by counterbalances to the transmitting station and number-two low-power room. In low-power room number two, surrounded by scores of switches, breakers, rheostats, and banks of hundreds of fuses that all hummed in expectation of action, he talked quietly with an electrical artificer and his assistant. They spoke the same language, a complicated, technical tongue that might as well have been heathen Chinese to the other ratings and seamen on board Nottingham. But this was Prader’s world—he was proficient in all things technical. He could read the sea well enough and he could certainly captain a ship because he enjoyed learning and he had learned these things in the classroom or on the ocean. But what excited him was the electronic and mechanical things that made the ship come to life—not alive, but fulfilling its expectation to operate. Nottingham, to Prader, was a vast complex machine, a wondrous example of man’s talents and ingenuity. He marveled at it, and took pride in its unexcelled ability to perform, and when Nottingham and her sister ship, Harrogate, were ordered up to the Denmark Strait, he was absolutely confident that she would do everything that she was designed to do.
Everything that she was designed to do.
In the end—and this was the point on which the lives of the officers and men of Nottingham depended—she was designed to fight. That was a fact about which there was no dispute. Her four Admiralty three-drum boilers and four steam-powered Parsons sin
gle-reduction-geared turbines driving four shafts at eighty thousand shaft horsepower, so that she could close with the enemy at thirty knots and bring her twelve 8-inch guns to bear—that was a certainty. The uncertainty lay not with the crew, or their vessel, or its capabilities—it lay with her captain. Would he be willing to sacrifice the machine that he cared so much for; would he take it where it would be horribly mutilated or destroyed; or would he, for whatever reason, Exhibit Reluctance?
Captain Prader, DSO, was chatting with an officer and eight ratings manning the two huge electronic computing tables occupying half the deck space in the transmitting room, twenty feet below the waterline. The room was aft of B Magazine and forward of A Boiler, uncomfortably pinned between fuel tanks—when he heard the announcement over the Tannoy System.
“Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Captain Prader to the compass platform, please.”
It was strange because the yeoman’s human voice was converted to electronic signals and transmitted over miles of wires to come out of a speaker box mounted on the wall. The journey was mostly by machine and yet the message sent a chill down Prader’s spine because he could read, machine or not, wires and speaker boxes aside, that something extraordinary was happening.
Cole had called Rebecca and offered to come over and help her clean up after the raid. She would be at work, she had said, but the front door would be unlocked. He surveyed the disheveled condition of the house after he arrived and couldn’t decide where to start. It was apparent she’d managed to pick up a few things after the raid, but for the most part the place was a wreck.
Rebecca came in several hours later. She looked worn out and Cole fixed her a drink.
“The tram was out most of the way and the buses were packed,” she explained as they sat on the couch.
“You should have told me. I would have picked you up.”
“I didn’t know when I left,” she replied, cradling the glass in her hands. “It was especially bad today. Jerry’s bombed the docks again. Fixing the poor souls up in the infirmary or an operating room is bad enough, but at least you can control things there. Believe it or not, it’s a sort of haven. But the corridors, they must lead straight to hell. That’s where we put the patients when there is no room in the wards. Blood everywhere, torn bodies, people screaming. One man stopped me, holding a little boy in his arms. He said, ‘Miss? Miss? Can you see to Tommy? He’s been hurt in the bombing. What shall I do?’” She took a drink and Cole could see her hands tremble. “The child’s leg was gone, Jordan. There wasn’t a drop of blood left in that pale little body. I can’t help them, can I? Not after all the life’s drained from them or there’s whole pieces missing. After a while I simply get numb. But I have to, don’t I?”
“It’s a way to survive.”
“It’s not such a bad way to handle things, is it? Simply turn your emotions off. If not, I’d go mad, more so than I am now. I don’t want to remember what I’ve seen—I don’t want those chalky white faces or shattered bodies in my dreams. I’m damaged enough, Jordan. Even before I got into this bloody business, I was damaged. I thought, ‘Here is something I can do. Here is a way to be me.’ Just my cursed luck a war breaks out. Now life is a constant, endless carousel of death.” She smiled weakly and he could see the unfathomable pain behind the mask. “So you see,” she added, “if I can keep at least one part of my life from falling to pieces …” She was talking about her marriage, of course, and Cole had a sinking feeling that she was going to tell him that they couldn’t see each other anymore.
He watched her make a drink, the silence between them saying so much more than any words could. She sat down and after taking a healthy swig fixed Cole with red-rimmed eyes.
“Doesn’t ever seem to end, does it?”
He knew that she was grieving for herself as well as for those that she fought to save. He listened.
“I’ve something to tell you.”
He watched her struggle with the words, his insides churning. He wanted to stop her from saying whatever she was going to say because he was afraid. His world was crumbling and he felt like a child again, lost, betrayed, abandoned.
“Greg’ll be coming home soon. Perhaps a month.”
Jordan sat back in the couch, trying to fight the panic that welled up in him.
“That’s what the army tells me. Thirty days. They sent me a cable at work.” She took a drink. “He’s been burned. That happens to a lot of chaps in the tank corps. He wrote me a letter when he first got there. He was afraid of being ‘lit up.’ That’s what he called it. ‘I shan’t like to be in Rebecca if she’s lit up,’ he said.”
She took another drink, finished it off, and made herself another. “Well, I suppose he was in Rebecca, when it happened. He named it after me. Ironic, don’t you think?” She pulled a letter from her purse and slowly opened it. Cole watched without saying a word.
She looked at Cole and said offhandedly: “It’s from Greg. It came just after the cable.” She opened it tenderly, took a drink, and read. “‘It won’t do any good to be cheery because there is nothing to be cheery about. Colin and Angie are dead.’” She looked up. “Those were his chums,” she said and continued reading. “‘I wish I were. The butchers took my leg and they won’t give me a mirror, so I suppose I’m burned as black as a nigger. It’s all too funny, isn’t it—I was such a handsome fellow on the arm of the most beautiful woman in London. Now I’ll be on your arm so that you can help me walk. I cry a lot, as much for myself as the other chaps. You get close enough with your fellows in a tank so that when you hear their screams, as they are burned alive, it does something to you. I was lucky, I suppose. I got blown right out of the top hatch when the shell hit. I must have looked like a Guy Fawkes rocket. All fire and smoke. I don’t know what happened. Honestly.’”
She took a drink and turned the letter over. “‘We’ve got to come to terms with some things, Becky. I’m not the man that left—I almost said that I’m not the man you loved, but I’m not sure that was ever the case. Maybe …’” She stopped reading, stuffed the letter in the pocket of her jacket, and finished off her drink.
Cole got up, fixed himself another drink, and stood nursing it.
“You’re not going, are you?” Rebecca said.
“I don’t know what to do,” Cole said. “I know what I want to do, but for once in my life, maybe, I’m trying to figure out what the right thing to do is.”
“You don’t give yourself much credit, do you?”
Cole shrugged.
Rebecca stood and moved close to him. “I may never see you again,” she said.
“You could leave your husband,” Cole said, bitterly.
“Don’t let’s argue.”
“Sure. Okay. I’m pissed off at this whole goddamned deal. I don’t want to lose you but it looks like I’m going to. That makes me angry. Not at you. I couldn’t be angry with you if you smacked me in the head with a whiskey bottle.”
Rebecca laughed and then Cole did, too.
“I shan’t do that,” she said, pressing the palm of her hand against his cheek. “I don’t know what to do either,” she said.
“Yes, you do,” Cole said, setting the glass on the mantel. He gathered her to him and kissed her tenderly. She threw her arms around him and returned the kisses, each of them lost in the pleasure.
Chapter 15
H.M.S. Nottingham, Denmark Strait
“We’ve picked up something on radar approximately twenty miles, three points off the port quarter, running roughly southeast,” Trunburrow said without a trace of emotion. “Size is indeterminate but they appear to be moving at a considerable rate of speed.”
“‘They?’” Prader said.
“Radar says two, possibly three targets, but it’s difficult to tell. Speed twenty-five to thirty knots. We were lucky enough to pick them up that far away.”
The RDF 281 radar was temperamental and prone to detect ghosts, but to Prader it was a marvel of engineering. Eyes that see whe
re no eyes before them could see—find an object in fog or rain; find a thing before it can be seen. Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.
“Masthead report?”
“Nothing, sir.” The lookout in the fore masthead high above the Nottingham’s deck might have been able to spot a wisp of smoke with his powerful binoculars if it were not for occasional snow squalls or patches of fog—the vagaries of weather in the Strait.
“Well, do we know anything for certain, Number One?” Prader said peevishly.
“ ’Fraid not, sir. Except they aren’t ours.”
“We can’t be certain of that, Number One. This won’t be the first time that the right hand hasn’t told the left what it’s doing. Let the Flow know what we have. Where is Harrogate?”
“Eighty-five miles to the southeast, sir.” Nottingham ’s companion had experienced engine difficulties and had been instructed to return to Scapa Flow. Her replacement had not yet been dispatched.
“Very well. Yeoman? Have W.T. send to Harrogate: ‘Two, possibly three unidentified targets, twenty miles southwest of my position. Stand by.’ That’s all.” Prader turned to Trunburrow. “Action stations, Number One. Better to be safe than sorry.” He leaned over the voice tube to the wheel room, located below the waterline deep in the bowels of the ship. “Helmsman? Stand by to make a forty-five-degree course alteration, south-southwest.”
“Standing by, sir,” the helmsman said.
Prader positioned himself over the compass and nodded for Trunburrow to relay the orders to the helmsman. Number One suppressed his irritation at Prader. He was the captain, yes, but he had a way of issuing commands that made a fellow feel as if he were found wanting in every respect.
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