The Gatecrashers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 6

by Alexander Fullerton

  Gimber didn’t know about the loss of X-11 yet, of course, or about X-8 being motherless.

  Steep was mopping wet surfaces on the starboard side, behind Trigger’s vacated seat. Trigger, back there in the after end, was in the midget’s narrowest, tightest space while he lubricated the tail-clutch mechanism. It would be like lying in a pipe that had uncomfortable projections in it, and so constricting that you’d have problems with your elbows as you worked. When she turned her snout up—which she was doing now, a surging bowup swoop—he’d be head-down, as good as stuck until she levelled again. But she’d been dragged up and then pulled hard to port—a solid jar right through her as the tow-rope stretched bar-taut. You could visualise the movement out there in the black water: it didn’t exactly soothe the mind to do so, but imagination tended to operate on its own, didn’t ask permission, the pictures simply flashed in there, matching the gyrations … Bow falling now. There’d been a compensating jerk to haul her back on course; Gimber had seen Steep’s apprehensive glance for’ard at the same time as in his mind’s eye the Manilla tow had slackened and then sprung rigid again: the downward swing of the bow had checked, but then continued. Setter was tormenting the midget like a child dragging a puppy on a string. The tow-rope came up all-standing for a second time: mentally he saw it quivering-taut, stretching ruler-straight through black turbulence. That jerk had been powerful enough to have wrenched her stem off. Gimber had felt it in his own body, like the hideous jar a man might get from the rope as he drops feet-first through the trap.

  Christ, imagination …

  Quiet, suddenly. He was waiting for the next upward drag, the cycle of violence to recommence.

  But it didn’t. Hadn’t. She was bow-down, and the needle was beginning to swing slowly around the face of the depthgauge. Ninety-three feet—ninety-five … Three degrees bow-down: ninety-eight feet. He felt it, then—a sensation of drift, of idling in the water without steerage-way or any grip from the hydroplanes.

  Gimber leant sideways, reached for the telephone.

  Nothing. No jerking from the tow-rope either. X-12 was in a smooth glide: and the telephone line was dead. A hundred and four feet on the gauge, bubble six degrees aft of centre. Downward movement accelerating: a hundred and ten feet. Gimber snapped, “Blow one main ballast!” Steep throwing himself into Towne’s seat and reaching to the HP air valve. The hollowness in your gut might have been fright but there wasn’t time to take notice of it, and another precious moment passed while he reminded himself, No use using the screw until she’s got her bow up … A hundred and twenty feet. Gimber had seen Ozzie check that the vent-levers were in their shut position before he’d wrenched that valve open. One-twenty-five feet. Air was scorching through the pipe to the for’ard main ballast tank. One-thirty feet, bow-down angle eight degrees, a minute object sinking through a vast surrounding mass of sea. In spite of the bow-down angle Trigger Towne was appearing feet-first, wriggling backwards out of the engine-space, panting like a dog.

  Levelling. Gauge showing one hundred and thirty-nine feet, Gimber’s left hand had pulled the trim-pump lever aft, and now with his right he closed the main motor field switch—to start the motor—and then span a twelve-inch hand-wheel through the positions for slow, half and full ahead grouped down, on through slow and half to full ahead grouped up: this was maximum forward power, the two battery sections linked in parallel to put full power on the motor. As he’d begun to throw the speed-control wheel round he’d ordered “Blow number three main ballast!” Steep had opened the valve, and now he and Towne were changing places. Gimber knew he’d have to take a chance on Steep now—let him take over here at the controls so that he, Gimber, could be in the CO’s position for surfacing, opening the hatch and then getting out on to the casing. But first things first … He beckoned to Steep, and he’d stopped the trim-pump. He shouted to Towne, “Stop blowing one!” She’d been taking too much of a bow-up angle. The midships tank was still blowing, though, to give her overall bodily buoyancy: it wasn’t a time for halfmeasures, and he’d be wanting her well up, when she surfaced, as high in the waves as she’d ride. He was getting out of the seat, to let Ozzie in. Telling him—because he was already out of reach of the rheostat control—“Half ahead grouped up.” Then he tapped Trigger on the shoulder: “Stop blowing three!”

  Theoretically he should have stopped her at periscope depth, not taken her straight up. He should have held her there while he took a look to make sure he wasn’t surfacing her right under Setter’s bows—Setter perhaps having guessed the tow had gone, and turned back to search. But (a) this wasn’t likely, (b) even at periscope depth—nine feet, or even less in this sea, Setter would still have run her down if she’d been there to do it, (c) you wouldn’t see much anyway, in this weather, and (d) at eight feet she’d be unmanageable. So you could forget the drill book.

  Ozzie was doing all right. Something rather odd about him, but he wasn’t making any mistakes.

  The next telephone check was to have been at 0300. In sixteen minutes. They wouldn’t know the tow had parted until they found the phone was dead. In sixteen minutes at eight and a half knots Setter would have covered just over two miles: two sea miles—well, 4250 yards. It would take her about the same time again to get back to where the rope had snapped: or a bit longer, if MacGregor reduced speed, which he probably would do, because spotting the X-craft with her low freeboard in this wild sea wouldn’t be at all easy. All they’d know in Setter was that the tow had parted at some time between 0230 and 0300, and they wouldn’t know with any certainty that X-12 hadn’t done a nose-dive to the bottom.

  Gimber told Steep, “Soon as I’m up there and the induction’s open, start the donkey, half ahead.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Fifteen feet. Twelve … At nine she was rolling like a barrel.

  “Officer of the watch, sir!”

  Paul swung round. The lookout told him, “Tow may have gone, sir. Saw an end washing loose. Least, I think …”

  He’d dipped to the voicepipe, “Control room—tell the W/T office, check communications with X-12—quick!”

  “Aye aye sir!”

  “Time?”

  “Oh-two-four-nine, sir.”

  May Louis Gimber have been wide awake and on his toes …

  “Bridge—telephone line’s dead, sir!”

  He’d expected it, and was ready for it. “Stop port. Port twenty-five. Shake the captain, tell him the tow’s parted. Shake the X-craft officers too.” It was up to MacGregor who else got shaken.

  The casing officer—Henning—and the second coxswain, surely; but that was his business. Setter was swinging, taking green seas over as she turned across the wind.

  They won’t see us …

  Teeth clenched, eyes slitted against wind and salt water, muttering to himself, desperate … X-12 battling through waves more than over them. Not even the sharpest-eyed lookout would spot her, except by pure chance.

  All right, he told himself. All right. Calm down. It’s up to me to do the spotting!

  And in fact—getting used to it now—the motion wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Waves were crashing over her but she was riding it well, forging ahead at about three knots; it was a quartering sea and she was rolling, naturally. He spoke to her, told her that she was doing marvellously, that he was pleased with her. He had no rope lashing, but both arms wrapped around the induction pipe. At this stage he could spare both hands for his own safety.

  He was reckoning on an interval of twenty to thirty minutes before he’d have much chance of seeing Setter, but he still searched for her, straining his eyes through the flying spray in case his calculations were wrong. He was doing this, and going over the figures again in his mind, when he did see her. He couldn’t believe it, at first, thought he’d imagined it—but that was her, all right! To port—a white flurry of broken water, and in the next blink the black loom of her conning-tower above it. Two or three more blinks, to make certain it wasn’t his imagination
playing tricks. It hadn’t been. He estimated that she was between two and three cables’ lengths away.

  “Aldis! Quick, now!”

  He’d warned Ozzie to have it ready under the dome. The price of getting it up on to the casing was a few bucketfuls of salt water sloshed down into the boat. Then he had the lamp out and the hatch shut again, he was rising to his feet with both arms round the induction pipe and the Aldis in both hands.

  During that gymnastic feat, he’d lost sight of her.

  Fright was sharp, breath-stopping. He knew that if they passed each other without contact, it might never be regained. This was no sheltered loch or bay X-12 was floundering in. The effort now was to steady his mind as well as his body and the lamp; hugging the pipe while the craft under him bucked, rolled and pitched … He had the lamp’s pistol-grip in his right hand, its weight on his left forearm: he pressed the trigger, swung the beam slowly left, scything horizontally across the wavetops.

  And—he bellowed it into wind and sea—”There!”

  So pleased that he told X-12 again, “Good girl!” Although she was still trying to fling him off. Like talking to a crazy horse, trying to placate it … Setter was on the beam to port. They’d seen Gimber’s light, obviously. He watched her, saw the turn she was making—slowing, and turning about forty degrees to port, putting herself beam-on to the sea. It was an invitation to him to bring X-12 up into that lee, into the small amount of shelter to be found there. MacGregor had swung her into that position, and he’d be working his motors as necessary to hold her there: motors, not diesels now, because diesels couldn’t be put astern, either in Setter or in the midget.

  Setter must have reversed course quite soon after the tow parted, he realised. Paul Everard was, on the whole, fairly clued-up. Gimber was turning X-12, to get her up close and in Setter’s lee: Setter’s own Aldis on him like a searchlight. Throwing herself every which way as she turned: and he was passing the lamp down, Ozzie snatching it from him and the hatch banging shut, after some more sea had burst in. Rising, clinging to the pipe, relief still enormous but subsiding somewhat in facing up now to the business of passing a new tow. It was an exercise that had been practised often enough, and it would be done without any exchange of signals—nobody needed to explain to anyone else what to do.

  When he had her in Setter’s lee and bow-on to her, about fifty yards clear of her port side, he called down the pipe to Steep to stop the Gardner, take out the engine clutch and put the electric motor to slow ahead. This gave him the manoeuvrability he needed. Setter, broadside-on to the weather, was rolling like a cow. It wasn’t much of a weather break, for all that. Better than nothing. Lying bow-on to her, X-12 was both stemming the sea and in the best position to accept the new tow. Setter’s Aldis lit activity down on her sea-swept fore-casing, near her gun: men in waterproof clothes and lifebelts were inflating the rubber boat and coiling down the Manilla rope. Two men moving aft now with its inboard end—clambering cautiously around the catwalk, clinging one-handed to the rail surrounding the tower. That inflatable boat would be used again in a few days’ time for the change-round of passage and action crews.

  Slow-ahead speed on the motor was just about keeping her where he wanted her, countering the sea’s drift and providing enough steerage-way for Trigger Towne, as helmsman, to hold her head on the ordered bearing. Ozzie Steep, meanwhile, ready for orders to reach him through the pipe—slow down, speed up … Steep seemed to be functioning, more or less. Give it a day or so, Gimber thought—watching the work on Setter’s casing, waiting for the new tow to be floated down to him—and Trigger and I might get some rest. Have to cut out the Benzedrine intake first. You couldn’t keep going for ever on bloody pills, anyway … The rubber boat was being launched over Setter’s side. A cluster of men on the casing there, some standing and some kneeling: one of them was climbing down into the boat while others held it alongside. The one climbing down—he recognised that man-mountain easily enough. They were passing the end of the Manilla down to him: the whole evolution floodlit by an Aldis from Setter’s bridge, and going exactly as they’d rehearsed it, in Eddrachillis Bay. It hadn’t seemed real, there, more like a game, an exercise to keep them all busy: but it was real now, and he was very glad indeed they had rehearsed it. The tricky part—which would be coming during the next few minutes—was beginning to look more dangerous and difficult than it ever had before. Because he could only hang on here, watch the thing develop: he wasn’t going to leave the induction pipe until he had to. When the time came, he’d be flat on his face on the midget’s bow, with the sea washing right over him: and he’d need both his hands to work with, with no spare for holding on.

  The only sense in which he was eager for it was to get it over.

  The boat was clear of Setter’s bulging saddle-tanks. Men behind her gun—they had a small degree of shelter there as well as a curve of guardrail for security—were paying out a light line attached to the boat, and also the Manilla. The man in the boat, rubber-suited and—when the Aldis flickered over him—larger than life, was Bomber Brazier.

  X-12’s bow was drifting off to port. Quite a long way off. Now, of all times … Gimber shouted down the pipe, “Watch your steering! Half ahead, main motor!”

  It was all right. She was coming back on course. Half a minute, and he was able to order slow speed again.

  Brazier was such a mild, placid sort of individual that in the early stages of the training programme there’d been a tendency to pull his leg. The way he so seldom spoke—just listened, smiling … Then one evening in a pub an RAF character made one taunt too many, and Brazier, as usual, laughed: but he did a double-take, then, and knocked the flight lieutenant across the bar and through a door which had looked quite solid until he hit it and went through it. It had been generally agreed afterwards that any of the Bomber’s friends could have made the same remark and got away with it: from a stranger Brazier had considered it de trop.

  Time to move. The boat was more than half-way over. Tossing about, with Brazier kneeling in the middle with the end of the Manilla in his big hands. From Setter’s casing they were paying it out yard by yard, not feeding him more weight than they had to. In that fragile, cavorting boat, keel-less and extremely unsteady, having to keep his balance while keeping both hands free for handling the rope, it wasn’t by any means an easy job. Not even for Bomber Brazier.

  Gimber eased himself down to casing level. There was a low enclosure of rail to cling to here: it protected the night periscope, which was a fixed protuberance set in a stub above the casing. When you made use of it you’d have the boat only just covered, that stub like an eye just breaking surface. Gimber crawled forward over the well containing the fore hatch—the outlet from the W and D—and down a step to the narrowing section for’ard. There were holes in the casing for fingers to hook into. He was already soaked through to the skin, crawling not through foam but at times through solid water—having to hold his breath as she dipped, stopping, just hanging on while the sea dragged at him. He got a hand to the mooring cleat on her bow: this was fine, enabling him to haul himself right for’ard. Waves breaking in his face and right over. You had to enclose yourself in the immediacy of the task, never see yourself as it were from the outside or think of the risk or the forces involved, the performance—your own—as breathtaking as any high-wire artist’s. If you’d let your imagination loose to that extent, you might easily discover that you were terrified. Then you’d fumble, hesitate, doubling the chances of failure—failure here being synonymous with disaster. Lifting his head and shoulders clear, he saw the boat with Brazier in it a dozen feet away, tilting on a crest. Brazier yelled something but he didn’t hear it: he was holding on with one hand, reaching over the midget’s snout with the other, groping for the towing-slip. The old tow should have dropped clear, since Trigger had released it from inside and then reset the gear to accept the new one. It was a simple-enough device: the towing pin was locked by an interrupted ring; by turning this until the g
ap in the ring coincided with the position of the pin, the pin hinged away and the tow was released. Gimber heaved himself for’ard until his head and shoulders projected well over the bow: as she lifted, exposing her whole stem, he could see as well as feel that the slip was clear. One step at a time … But lifting again now, and ready for Brazier: through a film of salt spray he had a bird’s eye view of him while the rubber boat was in a trough. Still a yard too far to reach … Brazier with the end of the tow gripped under one arm, pointing this way and ready to be passed over. From Setter’s casing they were inching out both the tow-rope and the boat’s securing line, knowing he was almost in the right spot, that a bigger wave than usual could lift him and the rubber boat and dump them right on top of the X-craft—if they let out too much slack at this stage. But from their angle and in the dark it would be extremely difficult to judge the distance, despite Setter’s Aldis being on the boat and on X-12, blinding in Gimber’s salt-washed eyes. Reaching: the tow’s shackle dangling … Brazier for some reason howling like a wolf as Gimber reached towards him. Brazier continued, not howling, but bellowing, a gale-beating volume of sound out of those huge lungs so that Gimber caught a few words of it—“… for a life on …” The wind’s howl and the waves’ crashing drowned it, while Gimber’s hand grasped the shackle: the rubber boat rocked sideways, spinning, Brazier nearly ejected but swaying his weight back in the nick of time, yelling the last words of what had evidently been a question: “… the ocean wave?”

  Gimber had his boat’s sharp stem under him, between his elbows, while his hands clawed at the end of the Manilla—most of its weight across Gimber’s boat, but even this yard or two of it extremely heavy: he was forcing the shackle towards the towing slip. Choking, coughing out salt water, and blind …