Red Dawn (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 4)

by James Philip

  He stumped over to the tactical plot.

  “The sneaky buggers must have put about as soon as the island was between us and them, sir,” Max Forton, the boat’s Executive Officer commiserated.

  “We’ll retrace our course. Hopefully, we’ll pick up the Kutuzov again.”

  There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the theory it was just that this was going to be one of those days when nothing worked out as planned. An hour later when the submarine crept up to periscope depth north of Elasa there were no big ships on the horizon.

  “Sound room reports distant cavitations! No constant bearing, sir!”

  HMS Dreadnought had sailed from Devonport over three months ago with a full set of Admiralty charts for the area her orders required her to patrol. The boat’s chart locker was therefore, cluttered with a plethora of highly detailed and meticulously updated charts of the Western Approaches to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. At Gibraltar, Dreadnought had not taken on board a new set of charts for the Eastern Mediterranean because that would have given the lie to the fiction that she was heading back to England. For the last week the most sophisticated weapon in the Royal Navy’s armoury had been navigating with the aid of a school atlas and half-a-dozen out of date large scale sea maps – they hardly deserved the title ‘charts’ – Max Forton had had picked up in a bookshop on a walk along Main Street just before Dreadnought departed the Rock. In a peacetime scenario in which the boat could use its active sonar to monitor the depth of water beneath the keel and any nearby obstructions – like rocks, wrecks or anti-submarine ships – the lack of adequate charts would not have been a problem. He would have avoided moving too close inshore, but the boat’s safety would not have been overly compromised. In the current situation where the last thing he wanted to do was to advertise the boat’s presence, stumbling around unknown and uncharted coastal waters was akin to Russian roulette.

  Crete’s north-eastern extremities curved raggedly away from the body of the island into the north. The resultant peninsula was a jagged, wooded sparsely inhabited region of coast deeply pitted with sheer-sided, treacherous anchorages some of which were large enough to hide ships much larger than the Admiral Kutuzov. Close inshore Dreadnought’s battery of hydrophones would be baffled with back echoes and deflections; they would have to be almost on top of a contact to be certain of what kind of beast they had by the tail.

  “Here!” The Captain of the Royal Navy’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine decided, stabbing a point on the tactical plot ten miles due north of the tip of Cape Sideros. “We’ll take the boat down to three hundred feet and work our way up to here. Nice and slow. Five knots will do it.”

  It took nearly three hours to get into position but as Dreadnought eased up to periscope depth everybody on board could hear the onrushing screws of a big ship. The trouble was it was the wrong ship.

  “Chapayev class cruiser, there is a big eight-six-two on her side!” Simon Collingwood growled.

  He stood up straight.

  “Down periscope! Make our depth two-zero-zero feet if you please!”

  “Eight-six-two makes her the Komsomolets, sir!”

  “Thank you.” Simon Collingwood smiled like a wolf who has spotted his next meal. “Everybody on their toes please! The Komsomolets is in company with at least three, maybe four escorts. One of them is going to run right over the top of us in the next two minutes. I only got a look at her bow on but she looked like a Krupny class destroyer. I didn’t get a good line of sight on the other ships in the screen.”

  While Dreadnought moved invisibly to the north the destroyer thundered over her stern like a runaway express train as the submarine quietly slid into the depths. No matter how many times a big ship ran over the top of him Simon Collingwood’s blood pulsed faster and harder with the exhilaration of the moment.

  “I want bearings on all the surface units around us please!”

  It soon became apparent that the Komsomolets, a slightly – only very slightly – smaller and earlier version of the Sverdlov class ships, carrying a similar main battery of a dozen six inch guns in four triple turrets, was in company with at least four other warships.

  Simon Collingwood started doing the maths: a Great War battlecruiser, two Soviet cruisers, at least half-a-dozen ocean going escorts. For all he knew it was the tip of the iceberg and more worryingly, if so many surface warships had survived the destruction of the Black Sea ports; how many Soviet submarines might also have escaped the holocaust? Put a respectable number of surviving surface units from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet together with the Turkish Navy, which before the October War had boasted at least ten former US diesel-electric submarines on its lists, and suddenly, the Royal Navy’s presence in the Eastern Mediterranean started looking awfully threadbare.

  “Active pings!” Called a sonar man.

  “What bearing?”

  “Three-one zero! Very distant, sir!”

  The Captain of HMS Dreadnought noted his Executive Officer’s raised eyebrow. He shrugged.

  The distant thump of underwater explosions were audible.

  The faraway detonations were like thunder, half-imagined on a sultry summer afternoon. Except they went on, and on, and on for minutes, slowly drifting south as minutes turned into a half-hour and then an hour.

  Somewhere to the west, perhaps ten to fifteen miles away ships were rolling old fashioned drum depth-charges over their sterns. Other vessels were shooting clusters of small anti-submarine mortars.

  It went on for eighty-seven minutes.

  “How many big bombs?” Simon Collingwood asked idly.

  “Over two hundred, sir.”

  “Maybe they stopped because they ran out of depth charges?” Max Forton suggested dryly.

  His Captain grimaced. In the last few days he had witnessed the Yavuz expending antique eleven inch rounds as if she had access to an unlimited supply of such arcane – and presumably unobtainable and therefore irreplaceable in modern times - ancient ordnance. No munitions factory on the planet had manufactured shells to that specification since 1945; and when the old ship’s magazines were empty that, as they say, was that! Now they had listened, thankfully from afar, to a depth charge attack that would have been considered unforgivably, possibly criminally, profligate in a U-boat hunt in the North Atlantic in 1943.

  Those were the facts but what did it mean?

  Some kind of realistic exercise to shake the cobwebs out of ships and crews which had been sitting in port for most of the last year? Or a plain simple demonstration of naval muscle? Or both?

  “Contact bearing one-two-zero!”

  “Range five miles!”

  “Bring her up to periscope depth if you please, Number One!”

  “More contacts bearing one-two-five degrees!”

  The Komsomolets and her escorts had moved off to the south-east. Another group of ships had been responsible for the overlong and recklessly exuberant depth charging somewhere out to the west. Now a third set of contacts was coming towards them from a few points west of south.

  Dreadnought rose gently to periscope depth.

  The day was turning stormy and waves were breaking over the periscope mast as it dipped up out of the depths. Visibility, which had been several miles earlier in the day had closed in and Simon Collingwood did not get a good look at the nearest contact until it was less than a thousand yards away.

  “Skoryy class destroyer!” He called, clicking the camera button repeatedly. The colour of the great dark flag streaming out from the approaching destroyer’s forward tripod mast was not readily decoded by the human eye, everything was grey and the shadows were almost black such was the weight of the descending overcast. But the flag would be red; it could only be cardinal blood red. The escort was tearing across Dreadnought’s bow with a great bone in her teeth, crescents of white water sheering away from her forepeak as she raced headlong through the choppy seas.

  Simon Collingwood swung the perisco
pe to the left.

  “Sverdlov class cruiser. Looks like the Admiral Kutuzov but I can’t be sure.” He kept taking photographs, the winding mechanism constantly in motion, whirring lowly above his head. The big ship was throwing up a broad bow wave even thought she was only making fifteen or sixteen knots. “Looks like a second Skoryy class escort behind her and the two M class destroyers that were in company before...”

  A shadow had flitted across the lens.

  He flipped the ‘sky’ switch on the right hand twist grip of the attack periscope, peered into the greyness of the clouds. Circled, circled, straining his eyes.

  And then he saw it.

  “Down scope!”

  He swung around to face Max Forton.

  “Take us down to three hundred feet!”

  He collected his wits.

  “Warn engineering for maximum revs on my command!”

  The deck under his feet canted forward.

  “There was an old-fashioned float plane right on top of us,” the submarine’s commanding officer announced flatly. “My assumption is that it spotted our scope.” Dreadnought could not outrun the Admiral Kutuzov’s escorts but they could not hunt her while they were charging around like that Skoryy class destroyer. Most shipboard sonar was useless in a vessel travelling faster than fifteen knots.

  Simon Collingwood briefly considered running silent, playing cat and mouse, but only briefly. The way these fellows had carpet bombed large tracts of ocean with big World War II type one-ton depth charges, he had no intention of keeping in close company with them. Besides, so far as he knew he was not actually at war with the men in the ships above him. If he was he would have flooded down his torpedo tubes by now. No, he would dive deep and run for open water at top speed and then at a safe distance, rise close enough to the surface to transmit a sighting report and await further orders.

  Chapter 34

  Sunday 2nd February 1964

  Manoel Island, Malta

  Petty Officer Jack Griffin pulled the tarpaulins off the piles of scrap metal and wiring littering the ground along the shore. Behind him the low hump of the island between Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks rose gently to meet the still intact sixteenth century outer bastion walls. Within the wall a single large thermobaric – fuel-air – bomb had extinguished all human life in a split second; and other than to pick up the body parts, nobody had yet attempted to reclaim any part of the old fort which, as HMS Phoenicia, had previously been the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean.

  “Most of this equipment,” the bearded, mightily peeved Petty Officer complained, “had salt water in it at some stage, was damaged in the bombing, or was destroyed by the half-trained monkeys who salvaged it. A lot of the kit that ought to be here, the good stuff, isn’t here at all. Those arseholes,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the barge tied alongside the crazily canted stern of HMS Agincourt grounded on the rocks of Sliema Creek a hundred yards away, “have probably half-inched the best stuff!”

  A weather-beaten fishing boat was lashed to the stern of the sunken destroyer. It seemed that this vessel was the abode of the ‘dockyard approved and appointed salvage master’ and several of his male relations.

  Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had actually thought it was a stupid idea, not to mention impractical, trying to refit HMS Talavera using materials salvaged from her sunken sister ship. However, in the Royal Navy a man got used to being given – if not stupid, then less than thoroughly thought through – orders, so he had been game. Until, that was, he had taken a look at the scrap beneath the tarpaulins.

  HMS Talavera’s Master at Arms, Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann sniffed the air as if something smelled bad.

  Peter Christopher did not need to spend overlong investigating the scrap heap to know that somebody somewhere not a million miles from where he stood was cheating the Royal Navy.

  “Mister McCann,” he said stiffly. “I would be obliged if you would organise a party to board that barge and that fishing boat,” he nodded towards the offending articles, “to detain all those persons you encounter and to search the same for contraband.”

  It was all the licence that HMS Talavera’s senior non-commissioned officer needed.

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  The scowling, teak hard little man who had once been the Mediterranean Fleet’s flyweight – or bantamweight, nobody seemed to know which - boxing champion marched purposefully back down the jetty towards HMS Talavera.

  Peter Christopher turned back to Jack Griffin.

  “I want you to compile and inventory of all the big items – don’t bother with the small stuff that people always walk off with in their pockets – comparing what has been recovered from the Agincourt with Talavera’s original technical commissioning manifest. The two ships should have had a more or less identical sea-going rig. I want to know what is missing and I want to know it as soon as possible. Any questions?”

  For once in his life Jack Griffin did not have any questions, or any personal, pithy or otherwise, comments he cared to share.

  Miles Weiss, Talavera’s Gunnery Officer and senior surviving watch keeper after Peter himself, was waiting for his acting Captain when he returned aboard.

  “Those people,” Peter Christopher growled, nodding towards the salvage barge, “have been filching equipment from the Agincourt. The ‘salvage’ they’ve piled up on the shore is scrap. Most of the sounder items in the pile have been damaged in the salvage operation.”

  “That’s a poor show,” the younger man frowned. “Goodness, that’s like grave robbing!”

  “Yes, it is,” his commanding officer agreed sourly. “When Mr McCann returns to the ship he will have several guests. They are to be accommodated in the brig until I decide what to do with them.”

  “Whatever you say, sir. But isn’t that going to cause an awful stink?”

  Peter Christopher gave his friend a hard look.

  Miles Weiss grimaced.

  “I’ll make sure they’re thrown in the brig, sir.”

  “Good. I’m going ashore. I want to talk to somebody in authority at the dockyards!” It was still early and hardly anybody was about as he walked through the trees on the landward side of the old ramparts and knocked on the frame of the guard house door. HMS Phoenicia might lie abandoned and for the while, forgotten but the rest of Manoel Island had rapidly been re-colonised by the Royal Marines, the Redcaps and the crew of the depot ship HMS Maidstone, moored in Lazaretto Creek. “I want a car for official business,” he demanded brusquely.

  “But it is Sunday, sir.”

  “I don’t care if it is Christmas Day!”

  Ten minutes later a dusty old Humber with dented chrome fenders was forthcoming. It was driven by a boy soldier – he could not possibly have been eighteen – who had yet to acquire a Mediterranean tan.

  “What’s your name, Private?”

  “Timpkins, sir. Royal Warwickshire Regiment, sir!”

  “How long have you been on the island?”

  “A week, sir.”

  “Do you know your way around?”

  “I know the way to Mdina, sir. And Luqa. And I went to the dockyards yesterday!”

  “Try and find the dockyards again.”

  The boy was a surprisingly accomplished driver. Peter Christopher commented on it and he discovered Private Timpkins had grown up helping out in his father’s garage in Nottingham. No sooner had he joined the Army than he had been posted to the garrison motor pool.

  At first it seemed as if the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta were closed.

  Well, it was Sunday.

  After driving from gate to gate it eventually transpired that the Dockyard Office at Senglea ‘never closed’. Parking up in the shadow of HMS Ocean, whose crew was taking on stores unconcerned, and therefore unhindered by the absence of civilian dockyard workers, Peter Christopher walked, unchallenged into the ground floor lobby of the two storey, ugly concrete post-Second War building. He quickly discovered t
hat although the offices might ‘never close’ that on a Sunday they were open only in a Wild West ghost town sort of way. On the ground floor two ratings from HMS Ocean were minding the front desk.

  They snapped to attention when Peter Christopher walked in.

  “I’m looking for somebody in charge?” He informed the two seamen.

  “Sorry, sir. Don’t know who is in charge, sir. There are a couple of Maltese gentlemen upstairs but we don’t know who they are. They were here when we came on duty, sir.”

  There had been soldiers on guard at the main gate otherwise the dockyards seemed wide open; practically anybody could walk in. How hard would it have been to sabotage HMS Torquay?

  “What’s upstairs?”

  “That’s where the Dockyard Superintendent and the Under Managers have their offices, sir. I think there may be a board room up there, too, sir.”

  Peter Christopher strode up the stairs and emerged onto a single corridor with offices off to each side. Most of the doors were locked. He walked down the corridor, reading nameplates.

  “Can I be of assistance to you, Commander,” a soft, tired voice inquired from behind his shoulder.

  Peter Christopher turned on his heel.

  The lean, greying man in shirtsleeves had emerged from a door near the stairs that the younger man had not tested. He viewed the tall Lieutenant-Commander thoughtfully for a moment.

  “I certainly hope so!”

  The other man nodded.

  “I’m the duty Under Manager today,” he explained. “Why don’t we continue this in my office?”

  The two men marched to the first open door, half-way down the building. Peter Christopher did not look for the name plate on the door as he followed the older man inside.

  “Please take a seat, Commander.”

  HMS Talavera’s Captain hesitated and then accepted the hard chair as his host settled behind the cluttered, somewhat battered desk set at an angle across one corner of the musty room. The atmosphere smelled of old paper, tobacco smoke, grease and oil.

  “Commander Christopher, isn’t it?”