It was more of a shock than a sound. He was falling and choking in dust and smoke, aware only that they were still clinging to each other and that the whole place was in darkness.
Only the woman’s laugh remained, but it had changed into a terrible, unending scream.
As Devane’s senses returned he tried to free himself from the pressure of wood and brickwork across his shoulders and spine. It was hard to draw breath without retching, or to know which way he was facing.
A bright column of fire spouted from the other side of the bar, and he guessed that either a gas main had caught fire or the kitchen stove had exploded.
Voices yelled and echoed around him like souls in torment, and he heard screams mingled with desperate cries for help.
He found her by the wall, and as his hands explored her shoulders and bare throat he knew that her head had fallen forward.
He gasped, ‘Claudia, for God’s sake!’ He pulled her slowly to her feet, so that she hung against him as if lifeless.
It was even worse standing up. In the dancing blue flames he saw reeling figures, the glistening reflections of blood and torn limbs, broken glass and rubble everywhere.
Someone was calling, ‘My eyes! My bloody eyes! Help me, please help me!’
An American lurched past dragging his companion through the upended furniture, his face a mask of blood.
Devane held her firmly but gently and then lifted her chin. She was breathing. She must have been stunned by the blast.
A man blundered against him and Devane shouted, ‘Go to the hotel along the road and send for help.’
The man, wild-eyed and staring, yelled back, ‘Who are you giving orders to?’
‘You!’ He saw the man fall back. ‘Do as I bloody well tell you!’
He searched his own feelings. There was nothing. Just concern for the girl. Like she had said of her dead husband, he had been at it too long. After the first tour of operations you accepted it. Or went under.
He began to lift her over a broken beam, or was it the front of the bar?
The landlord was lying face down in broken glass. There was blood everywhere.
It must have been a direct hit, probably on the rear of the pub. The floor seemed to have leapt up to meet the falling roof, so the bomb had most likely exploded in the cellar.
Devane peered down at her and saw that her eyes were wide and staring.
He said, ‘We’re getting out. You’re safe now.’
He saw one hand touch her forehead as if to assure herself she was still alive. Then as her understanding returned she tried to turn her head, to see the smoky destruction, made worse by the dancing flames, the terrible screaming.
Somewhere a bell rang loudly, and Devane guessed that ambulances and fire-engines were on their way. Just another raid. The bombs could have hit anywhere.
Two policemen crunched through the broken doors, their torches reflecting on their steel helmets.
Devane called, ‘In here. Six or seven still alive, I think.’
The first policeman paused to peer at the girl. ‘She all right?’
She whispered to Devane, ‘Don’t let them take me anywhere. I want to keep with you. Don’t let them. . . .’ She fainted again.
The policeman said to his companion, ‘Here we go again, Tom. Ready?’
The other man was staring past him, his face screwed up to withstand what was to come, what they must do amongst the carnage.
Devane stooped down and slipped his arm beneath her legs, then, carrying her very carefully, he stepped over and through the collapsed doors and into the cool air.
The place seemed to be full of people. Voices called instructions, and he heard the clatter of spades and picks as rescuers searched amongst the wreckage for survivors.
Devane walked amongst them. A woman with her hair in curlers was tying a bandage on a man’s head. A fire-engine was backing down the pavement with more men unloading lifting gear and stretchers. Devane looked at them. Amateurs, ordinary men and women who were behaving with the skilled precision of guardsmen. Like his own companies, he thought vaguely. Newspaper boys and fishermen, barristers and house painters. The war soon honed away any kind of amateur status.
She said huskily, ‘Put me down, please.’
He lowered her to the pavement and she exclaimed, ‘I’ve lost a shoe!’ Then she began to laugh, but no sound came, and Devane had to hold her against him until the paroxysm had stopped.
She whispered, ‘Thanks. Very much. Near thing.’
When he picked her up again she put her arm round his neck and peered at him. ‘All my fault.’ She rested her face against his cheek and he felt the dust rub between them like sand. ‘I saw you back there. How you coped.’ Her arm tightened across his neck. ‘Don’t leave me. Not yet.’
An ambulance flashed past, its gong ringing frantically. Across the river there was a bright glow in the sky, also a solitary column of sparks like a giant firework.
‘I won’t.’
He had to kick the door of the hotel before anyone came to open it.
The woman he had spoken with at the desk exclaimed, ‘My God! Is she hurt?’
Someone else switched on a small torch and Devane saw blood on the girl’s leg. But it was unmoving and already drying under a coating of dust.
Devane said, ‘I’m taking her to her room.’ He met the woman’s stare. ‘If you have no objection?’
The woman shook her head jerkily, like a puppet. ‘N-no. Number eleven.’
Devane started up the stairs and realized that several heads had appeared behind the counter which concealed the entrance to the cellar.
What a sight we must be, he thought, and it was then that his body began to tremble as if he had a fever.
He clenched his teeth together until the ache steadied him. It was always the same. He had made it. One more time. He looked at the girl’s bowed head. And it mattered.
The room, like the hotel, was old and musty. All different shades of brown. He sat her gently on the edge of the high bed and took her ankle in his hand.
She said shakily, ‘There’s some Scotch in the cupboard.’
Devane stood up and paused to collect himself. It had been a near thing.
He heard himself ask, ‘Scotch? Who do you know in the black market?’
She was watching him fixedly, her hair plastered to her forehead, her dress stained and crumpled as she tried to match his mood.
‘I brought it to bribe someone at the Admiralty.’ She tried to shrug but winced and said, ‘Ouch! I feel as if I’ve been in a rugby scrum!’
Devane found the whisky but there was only one glass in the room. There would be.
He filled it carefully, expecting to spill some. But although he felt as if every muscle and fibre were quivering uncontrollably his hands looked quite firm.
She swallowed and almost choked. ‘Cheers!’
Then she handed him the glass and he took a long, careful drink. On an empty stomach it was like fire water.
She pulled up the skirt of her dress and examined her thigh. There was a cut, but it looked clean enough.
Devane dabbed the dust away from the blood and felt her leg stiffen. He dared not look at her, but the touch of her skin, the feeling that they had somehow come together from pain and near-death was like a living force.
She said, ‘I’ll just wash it and put a plaster on it. You have a drink. I’ll not be long.’ She took down a dressing gown and paused by the door, her voice pleading. ‘The bathroom is just two doors away. If the bombers come back you’ll. . . .’
‘I’ll come and get you.’ He saw her smile, the way she rubbed the back of her leg with a bare foot. ‘No matter what the management thinks!’
He sat down in the solitary chair and poured another drink. He could not leave her, but he should not stay.
Another gong went clanging past the hotel. Some poor wretch cut down by flying splinters or dug out from under his house. It made the war at sea seem clean, even practical, he thought
.
The door opened and closed and she moved lightly to a wardrobe and hung her dress on a hanger. She was wearing her robe and her skin looked pink and fresh.
‘A drink?’
She shook her head. ‘Do you want another?’
Devane stood up and took her carefully in his arms. Her hair was damp, and the smell of her freshness drove away the stain of what had happened.
How long they stood like that Devane did not know or care. It was as if the world had stopped spinning for them. The hotel was completely silent, the residents probably down in the cellar again. Some of them were no doubt thinking of the naval officer with the girl in his arms. Like a war film. While they only had the brutal reality to live with, and a medal to sustain them.
She said unsteadily, ‘I should like you to kiss me.’
Devane held her more tightly, half afraid he would hurt her or that he might spoil the moment.
As their mouths met he felt her body lift and press against his, heard her moan as he opened the robe and caressed her until he thought his mind would burst.
Then she slipped free of his arms and let her robe drop unheeded to the floor. She lay on the bed, her eyes never leaving him as he tore off his clothes, nor did she speak until he was kneeling above her, her body taut under his exploring hands.
She whispered, ‘Take me now. I don’t care about tomorrow.’
They made love until they were completely spent, sparing each other nothing in their need and their awareness.
When the final All Clear wailed across the London river Devane lay with her pressed against him, one of her legs thrown carelessly across his body. He listened to her breathing, slow and gentle, then turned to look at the grey light which filtered around the edges of the shutters.
Another day for each of them. And they were alive. Alive.
As London reluctantly awoke to another dawn, men and women faced it with what resources they could muster.
Across the river, a young woman was about early to dress and make up her face with extra care. Her husband, a sergeant in the Eighth Army, was coming home today. It was such a special day. It had to be. For he was coming home with only one arm, and she must show him how much she loved him. That everything was going to be the same.
A mile or so away, another woman was going through her husband’s things. The police had called during the night to tell her he had been killed in a Chelsea pub during the raid. She had always loathed his drunken outings, every night with his mates at the pub. And many were the times she had cursed his shaky key in the front door on a Saturday night and wished him gone. But it felt different now, and the house seemed dead, as if he had given it life.
Clerks put aside their Home Guard uniforms and shaved before going to work. A housewife was lifted gently on to a stretcher by the heavy rescue team which had been digging through a flattened street for three days. When they anxiously peered down at her she merely smiled. Her world had gone, but only temporarily. She had survived.
Beside a camp bed in a concrete bunker a telephone jangled noisily, and Whitcombe yawned as he pressed it to his ear.
‘Yes?’
‘Duty officer, sir.’ He sounded freshly awake and alert. ‘The signal has just come through. Parthian has the go ahead.’ The slightest pause. ‘Shall I inform Lieutenant-Commander Devane, sir?’
Whitcombe stared at the clock, hating it. ‘No. Give him another couple of hours.’ He thought of the girl with the sad, beautiful eyes, and the fact that Devane had only had four days’ leave. ‘It’s the least we can do.’
3
Parthian
Devane clung to the side of the wildly bucking car and wondered if he had any bones left unbroken. The car, into which he had been bustled with a minimum of formality, was the final link in his bizarre journey from England. Those last two days, spent mostly in London, had been closely supervised either by Whitcombe or Kinross, and at the very least by the taciturn aide who had accompanied him through each phase of the carefully organized trip. Devane seemed to have spent days changing from one military aircraft to the next, being signed for like a piece of registered mail. Small airstrips, or ushered to some isolated building on the fringe of a larger airfield, he had tried to keep his mind alert and also snatch a few hours of sleep whenever he could.
With each hundred or so miles he travelled only the climate seemed to alter. Bright sunshine, or scalding hot sand whipped up by a desert wind, as he changed planes somewhere in North Africa. On and on, into the sun, with his tight-lipped companion giving nothing away to ease the strain and lessen the demands on his mind and body.
Often he thought of the dark-haired girl, as she had looked on that last morning, their only morning together after the air-raid. What would become of her? Was it something which neither of them would remember beyond all those other fragments left by the war?
His final departure had bordered on the idiotic, he thought, with a carefully phrased telephone call to his parents in Dorset, about a temporary shore job, with a vague hint of some public relations in the North and Midlands. A tour of the dockyards to boost morale, and that kind of thing. By the time the truth was made known he would have begun what he had set out to do. All the time he had been speaking he had had the feeling that Kinross had been listening somewhere, ready to sever the connection if he had shown signs of departing from his lines.
And now, after all the hectic hustle and bustle, he was on dry land once more. He peered out of the side of the jolting car and tried to penetrate the rolling bank of yellow dust which spewed constantly from the wheels. He was actually in Russia, heading inland from the Caspian Sea as if the devil were after him.
It was not what he had imagined. Like most sailors, he had heard plenty of grim tales about the north Russian convoys, the intense cold, with ships capsizing under a terrible top-hamper of ice. Or of the summer months when the ice edge retreated and the convoys were made to plod further and further north around Bear Island, when there was no night to hide them from the bombers and the U-boats.
But here it was rugged and untroubled. A few villages and several army encampments. Camouflage nets to hide ranks of armoured troop-carriers and half-tracks. Only the soldiers looked alien, even hostile.
There were two in the front of the car, the driver hunched behind the wheel and an army major who never stopped smoking. They spoke no English, and Devane’s companion, a lieutenant named Kimber from Intelligence, had already explained, ‘Some do, but they don’t advertise it.’
Devane tried to estimate where the nearest Germans were. The Black Sea was about seven hundred miles from east to west, and maybe half that from north to south at its widest part. Almost as large as the western Mediterranean, he thought vaguely. The Germans had long ago occupied Rumania and Bulgaria, and were now firmly rooted on the Crimean peninsula as well. Where their naval forces operated to best advantage was a carefully guarded secret as far as the Russians were concerned.
The lieutenant leaned forward. ‘Look, sir!’ He pointed at a crumbling building which still managed to look majestic among a copse of trees.
‘Czar Nicolas II had it built. A halfway residence between the Caspian and Sochi.’
It looked deserted and at peace. It was hard to visualize the Eastern Front from this viewpoint, Devane thought. Millions already dead. Vast armies revealed in layers of mud and slush with the arrival of each summer.
The major twisted round suddenly and said something to Devane’s companion. Kimber replied in fluent Russian and just as tersely.
Then he said, ‘A few more minutes. Your flotilla is up ahead of us.’
Devane wanted to laugh. He was feeling the strain of the prolonged journey and it was beginning to tell on him. Days of jumping in and out of planes, quick handshakes, curious stares from RAF men, Americans, Free French, then the Russians. No wonder he felt light-headed. There was no sea for miles and miles, and yet this humourless lieutenant had assured him that his flotilla, Parthian, was just up ahead. Ma
ybe they were all going round the bend.
A small scout car edged through the dust, a long-barrelled machine-gun swinging round to cover the car as it shivered to a halt.
Devane could see nothing but a few flat-roofed, almost Moorish-looking buildings, some trees and two armed sentries with their hands in their pockets.
More throaty exchanges, papers examined, quick searching glances at the passengers.
Devane said wearily, ‘Nice to feel welcome.’
His companion glanced at him. ‘Most of the troops around this area are resting from the Eastern Front, sir. They stayed alive by mistrusting everyone but themselves.’
Devane eyed him gravely. ‘That sounded like a rebuke.’
‘Sorry, sir. But it’s like Alice through the looking-glass out here. You work things out, then change them round completely. Then you can think like a Russian.’
Another camouflaged scout car rolled slowly down a slight incline and stopped beside them. It had only two occupants, a squarely built Russian naval officer with an impassive face, and Lieutenant-Commander Ralph Beresford.
They climbed down, and Beresford said cheerfully, ‘Glad you made it, John.’ He turned to his companion. ‘Allow me to introduce you. This is Captain Nikolai Sorokin.’
The Russian stepped forward and thrust out his hand. Like the man, it was square, with strong, spatulate fingers.
‘Welcome.’ He smiled and displayed strong, powerful teeth.
Beresford added casually, ‘Captain Sorokin is in command of local flotillas. We shall be working closely together.’
There was the briefest hint of warning in his voice. Had Devane not worked with him before he might not have noticed it.
Beresford gestured to the scout car. ‘Come and meet your chaps.’ He shot the lieutenant from Intelligence a cool smile. ‘You take care of the gear, right?’
So like Beresford. Casually said, but his tone carried more steel than a rapier.
The Russian captain gunned the engine and the little car bounced round and up the incline. At the top of the rise he stopped again, then turned to watch Devane’s reactions.
Torpedo Run (1981) Page 4
