All those sleeping Germans: without the slightest notion of what they’d be getting for their breakfast.
“Midships. Meet her.”
“Meet her …”
“Steady!”
“Steady—two-seven-eight, sir.”
“Steer that.”
He was back at the viewing port, close to the release gear of the sidecargo; with his face close against the port, to cut out reflections, he could see the barnacled curve of the tanker’s belly as X-12 passed slowly under it. Gimber, looking up frequently at the other port, had the boat steady and level at forty feet. Paul said, “Here we go, then.” He put the switch to “on”: the light came on in the clockface. The fuse was now activated, and in five hours—eight twenty-five—it would detonate two tons of Torpex. He used both hands to turn the wheel, which was like a motorcar’s steering wheel—anti-clockwise, to release the charge.
He’d turned it as far as it would go, and nothing had happened.
“Still there.”
Turning the wheel back a little, he jerked it over hard, putting weight on the last part of its travel. It came up short and hard, and wouldn’t budge another centimetre, but the side-cargo was still attached, with its fuse running. He tried once more.
No bloody good …
Almost as if this was only confirmation of something he’d expected. Recalling the doubt he’d had yesterday, when he’d wanted to set it to “safe,” and a signal from Sea Nymph on the day before the crew-change: X-8 having had to ditch her side-cargoes, and one of them exploding and wrecking her. There’d have been some good reason for ditching them, and they’d surely have been set to “safe”—and still exploded …
“Give you a hand, skipper.” Brazier, coming aft from the W and D. “Sharp kick may be all it needs.” Gimber’s left hand went to the trim-pump lever, to compensate for the transfer of that not inconsiderable weight. At least Brazier had taken off his lead-weighted diver’s boots. He began trying to make the releasing gear work, as if he’d thought he had some magic touch which Paul lacked.
“Might try the rod.”
It was a heavy bar with a screw-thread on it, which you could wind out through a special gland in the ship’s side. It was stowed nearby, with a lashing on it, and Brazier was on his side, reaching between other gear to free it. X-12 was still under her target but about to run out under the target’s stern.
Brazier got the rod free. He shipped it, fitting its end into the socket designed to receive it. It was a device intended for checking that the sidecargo had dropped away, not a tool for shifting it. Still, it might help—and God only knew what else … He was cranking it around.
“Main motor stop. Port twenty. Slow astern.”
To hold her more or less under the oiler’s screws, and turn her. The charge might release suddenly, and you wouldn’t want it any farther away than this from the target. Taking a look through the stub periscope he could see the oiler’s screws and the heavy black-painted rudder up there in shimmery, greenish water. It slid away to the left as the X-craft turned, stern-first.
“No joy, skipper.” Brazier had the rod in but he couldn’t turn it any further. “Won’t budge.”
Lanchberry muttered, “Bugger’s bloody well got to budge.”
Gimber working desperately at the trim …
“Far as it’ll go.” Brazier scowled at the rod, rubbed his head, as if to stimulate some alternative way of doing it. Paul told Gimber, “Stop main motor. Slow ahead.”
“Thank God.” Gimber’s mutter was addressed to himself, expressing relief at being able to put the screw ahead again. The stopping and going astern, turning inside her own length with the oiler’s screws only a few feet above the casing and Brazier’s weight shifting aft at that same crucial time, had not provided him with much light relief. Brazier was having another shot at moving the wheel of the releasing gear, perhaps hoping that with the disengaging rod wound in there now it might have some effect. You could see—looking back and up through the ports—the glint of daylight receding, the oiler’s screws against the last crescent shine of it, wavery like a mirage. X-12 was now creeping the other way, towards her intended victim’s bow, but under her port side instead of the centreline.
“Come two degrees to starboard, Jazz.”
“One double-oh.”
“Switch it off, skipper, d’you think?”
“God, yes.” He reached to the switch, and flipped it up. You couldn’t turn the clock’s fuse-setting back, but you could deactivate it by the switch. The fact you couldn’t turn back the timesetting meant that whatever alternative plan you fixed on now, you’d be stuck with a five-hour delay on this fuse. Or six-hour: it could be advanced, but not retarded.
Brazier was still persevering with the wheel. Gimber, who’d been pumping ballast for’ard from the midships tank, had just pulled the lever back into its pump-stopped, valves-shut position, having compensated for the Bomber’s move.
The Bomber said, “You didn’t switch off, skipper.”
But he had.
He’d also checked that she was middled under the oiler. “Come back to oh-nine-eight, Jazz.”
The light still glowed on the fuse-clock’s face. He flipped the switch the other way—to “on”—then back to “off” again. The light still burned; the fuse was still activated and running down. It was an enclosed circuit, you couldn’t get at the wiring—which was just as well, because if you’d tried to you’d quite likely have short-circuited the clock and fired the charge.
Four hours, fifty-six minutes to run.
He announced, for the information of Gimber and Lanchberry, also as a start towards rationalising the situation in his own mind, “We have a sidecargo that won’t leave us, and its fuse won’t de-activate.”
He’d had no nightmares since the crew-change. This was understandable, he thought: once you’d started, you were no longer projecting, anticipating. But this was the stuff of nightmares now—so much so that you felt there had to be some way of snapping out of it, waking up. Solutions ran through his mind like high-speed film. Bottom her here, set the other side-cargo to a shorter fuse, and abandon ship by DSEA. Well, you couldn’t. You’d give the game away, wreck the others’ chances—let Tirpitz off the hook. So—all right, drop the starboard cargo with a five-hour delay on it, get over to Aaroy with this port one still ticking, bottom under Lützow if she was there or Scharnhorst if she was not, and abandon—by DSEA, one at a time, through the W and D. You’d have lost nothing, that way—except all four of you in the bag, POWs.
“Skipper.”
Brazier looked as if he’d had an idea. Paul was conscious of the others’ eyes and ears on him: they were waiting for his decision, the way out. Conscious also of the oiler’s bulk overhead, shutting out nine tenths of the filtered surface light. Gimber had more up-angle on the planes than she’d been carrying before; he’d overdone the flooding for’ard by a pint or two, must have decided to leave it alone until Brazier moved back to his kennel. Still dickering with that second plan, Paul was also troubled by his uncertainty about the gear in general: when so much of the system had gone haywire, should one trust in a five-hour fuse-setting giving you five hours before it blew?
He’d glanced at Brazier. “Yes?”
“I’ll go out, skipper—release it from outside. It’ll only be hanging on by an eyelash, all I’d have to do is prise.”
“No.”
It was his first mistake.
Trench said, “As everyone knows now, Lützow had avoided the submarines who were waiting just off those fjords by steering due west instead of northwest or north, which was what anyone would have expected. The submarines who’d towed the X-craft over were positioned in an arc designed to intercept a sortie aimed at interfering with QP 16—which was the whole object of the exercise, naturally.”
He picked up a stalk of straw and drew it across the top of the wire cage. The mink dashed out of her nesting box, and the same hand that held the straw moved to insert
a metal shield between the box and the wire run, thus shutting Mum away from her litter. You could see that this annoyed her. She was coal-black, with a glossy sheen to her slim, agile body, and small, furious eyes. Trench dipped his one hand into the straw of the box and brought it out full of what looked like very small chippolata sausages.
He was counting them. “Eight.” He told the mother, “There’s a clever girl.”
“Eight’s good, is it?”
This was May—kitting time for minks, worldwide. He nodded. “We get as many as eleven or twelve in a litter occasionally, but the average is about five.” He’d put them back, and shut the lid. As he lifted the shield out, the mother whipped in like a streak of ebony. He made some cryptic note on the card above that box, and moved on through the shed.
“It’s as well to bear in mind that one knows a lot more than one knew then. All I was aware of at the time was that Lützow and nine big destroyers were at sea and hunting for my convoy. Might run into them at any minute—or might not. As I’ve explained, the weather was deteriorating and visibility was rotten. One minute you’d see perhaps five or six miles, and the next perhaps not even fifty yards.”
“Oddly enough it was clear and calm that morning in Altenfjord. There’d been some wind during the night, but it had dropped again.”
“I dare say. Conditions are often highly localised, up there. But our weather was moving in towards the coast in any case … Oh, I did also know that our battle squadron had sailed from Iceland. The heavy mob’s usual tactic, if they had nothing else to go on, would be to steer straight for the enemy’s base—either to cut him off and force him to action, or scare him into thinking he’d be cut off if he didn’t get the hell out fast. Which as you know he usually did—largely because Hitler’s orders to his stooges effectively vetoed acceptance of any risk. They could attack only if they were in overwhelming strength. He hated his big-ship Navy, you know. Under the skin, anyway. Its commanders had always tended to be gentlemen—which Adolf so plainly was not. At the same time he was highly protective of it—any loss reflecting personally on him. The Graf Spee affair was a prime example, wasn’t it—scuttle, so nobody could say they’d sunk her. And Lützow—I suppose you know, her name originally was Deutschland, but the dread of having his Deutschland sent to the bottom, and the ridicule that would follow—well, he had her re-christened.”
“She’d turned south, incidentally.”
“Yes. But I had no way of knowing it. In fact all I had opposing me were the destroyers. Nine, against my five, and much more heavily armed—but you know all that. The first real news I had of them—and bear in mind I’d no doubt Lützow would be behind them somewhere in the sleetshowers—was an enemy report from Legend. She was on the starboard wing of the screen—and as I was expecting any attack to come from the south, it was rather a surprise. It was less than an hour after sunrise, we’d fallen out from dawn action stations and redeployed into day cruising formation. Legend’s signal told me she had two ships in sight to the nor’ard—on a converging course, speed estimated as about eight knots.”
“No radar contact?”
“No. Conditions were bloody awful, of course. And within half a minute of that signal, Legend reported the enemy had turned away and gone out of sight. I told her captain—John Ready—to investigate and Leopard, who was the nearest to her, to support her. I stayed with the convoy, but had Laureate and Lyric form line astern of me on its other bow, and for the time being I left Foremost where she was, astern. There was a minesweeper each side, and the trawlers were on the quarters. I’d alerted the new commodore— Claypoole—to the situation, of course, and the tactics we’d adopt if surface action did develop were all cut and dried. Of course it had to depend on which way the cat jumped—the cat, as I believed then, being Lützow.”
He’d stopped at another nesting box. The whole of the shed, which was about forty yards long, was noisy with the squeaking of baby minks, but somehow he could tell when he was passing a box that had a newly arrived family in it. He’d stop, put his ear to it for confirmation, then go through his counting and card-marking routine.
“Only three. Below par, you see. What we do is we take a couple of kits from one of the outsize litters and add them to the very small ones. If it’s done in the first few days the mothers don’t know the difference.”
Walking on. This was only the second of about a dozen sheds. He told me, “It was three quarters of an hour before Legend established contact. I heard gunfire before Ready came through on TBS. Two signals—first his own saying he and Leopard were in action, engaging four enemy destroyers who were on a parallel course, range four miles; then a report from Leopard that a larger but unidentified ship astern of the destroyers had opened fire. Only its gun-flashes had been seen, from Leopard’s director tower. To me, this could only mean one thing—Lützow. In fact it must have been a destroyer who’d become separated from those others, but in the circumstances it was a natural enough conclusion to jump to. It left five enemy destroyers not yet accounted for, but I obviously had to move out and join in. I told Crockford of Foremost to act in accordance with previous orders, and invited Claypoole—the American vice-commodore who’d taken over Insole’s job—to make a ninety-degree diversion to port. Crockford knew what his job was—as the convoy turned away, if there was an enemy in sight he’d lay smoke between them. The sweepers were also to make smoke, but they were to stay with the convoy, chivvy the lads along and see they hung together. Foremost would hold the middle ground—and she had the speed, of course, to put herself and her smoke wherever it might be needed. One thing I ought to tell you. Crockford had talked to me that morning, over the radio-telephone, when we were all at dawn action stations. Around two a.m. that would have been. He told me Nick Everard had been up and dressed and wandering about the ship. He still didn’t know what was happening, or why. He had some impression that he was taking passage in order to take up a new appointment—a cruiser squadron, Crockford said he’d mentioned, and he was disturbed by a belief that he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to his wife. Anyway, they’d got him back to his cabin and persuaded him to turn in, and so on. That young doctor I’d had transferred into Foremost to look after him, unusual name, but oh, Cramphorn—got it rather heavily in the neck from me for having let it happen. He was as shocked as anyone, I think; he’d fallen asleep or gone to the heads, I don’t remember. He was responsible, but well, I gave him hell, I’m afraid. It wasn’t fair—he couldn’t have slept for about a week, poor fellow. But Nick could have gone over the side, you see, in the state he was in—that was what made me tear Cramphorn to shreds over TBS. I’d told Crockford to put him on. Crockford was rather a quiet, easy-going sort of man—I made up for that.” He shrugged. “You know how I admired Nick Everard. And it was his life I was concerned for.”
Pausing near the door at the far end of the shed, Trench was obviously deeply concerned about the way he’d treated the young doctor. I could well understand his anger: he’d picked Cramphorn himself, as one who’d do a good job conscientiously and keep his—Trench’s—hero alive for him. I liked Trench already, but I found myself liking him the more for this display of a nagging conscience over what was really quite a small thing. Cramphorn would surely have accepted the blame, and he’d have seen the rebuke as justified, particularly so from Trench; and he’d soon have forgotten it altogether. Whereas Trench had never forgotten, and still blamed himself for having been too harsh.
As a matter of fact I’ve encountered this kind of thing before. Old men’s pigeons coming home to roost, and in their transit of the years changing into vultures.
I said, “Cramphorn would hardly have expected congratulations.”
Trench pushed the door open. He said without looking round, “I was tearing a strip off him at two-thirty. By seven he was dead.”
I caught on, then. Like a punch on the nose. Astonished that I’d been so stupid. Because obviously. I’d known …
“Where was I … Oh, yes.
Belting out north-westward, Laureate and Lyric astern of me, thirty-four knots across a long, flattish swell and with a gusty snowstorm in our faces. Impossible to use binoculars—half the time you couldn’t even see your own foc’sl. I had Legend and Leopard on radar by that time, I think—must have had—and I was getting frequent reports from John Ready over TBS. His exchange of gunfire with the four Huns—or five, counting the one astern of them that was supposed to be a heavy cruiser and which I was intending to attack with torpedoes if I could get into position to do so—well, those exchanges had been brief and sporadic, just a couple of salvoes snapped off between snow-showers. Well, you can imagine.”
I could, indeed … Moloch, Laureate and Lyric in line-astern, thrashing across the long rolling swells with spray sheeting back from high-curving bow-waves, their stems plunging and then soaring, tossing green sea back across the guns; snow blinding, driving horizontally, the ships racing directly into it and into the icy wind carrying it. Guns’ crews and torpedo crews, oilskinned and tin-hatted at their weapons, needing to hold on and to watch footing and balance on steel decks often awash and constantly tilting, lifting and dropping through thirty feet or more a dozen times a minute. Trench was on his high seat, in the port for’ard corner of Moloch’s bridge, with—behind him—his first lieutenant and torpedo officer, Henderson, at the torpedo director sight, navigator Jock McAllister at the binnacle, Sub-Lieutenant Cummings taking reports from plot and radar, yeoman of signals Halliday and other bridge staff—a signalman, lookouts, messengers, communications numbers—crowding the pitching, jolting, spray-swept platform. Abaft and above their heads the director tower trained slowly to and fro, searching out gaps in the surrounding curtains of foul weather—Gareth Williams, gunnery officer, with his rate officer beside him, presiding over director layer and director trainer in the front seats. If and when there was anything to shoot at, all the guns would be aimed and fired from here.
The Gatecrashers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 6 Page 31
