Battlecruiser (1997)

by Reeman, Douglas

  Sherbrooke said, ‘Morning, Pilot. All quiet?’

  Rhodes stood massively beside a clearview screen and gestured toward the rising bank of water. In the faint light, it was the colour of charcoal, but the troughs were like black glass. Higher and higher, so it appeared that the battlecruiser was sliding abeam down an unending slope, unable to resist.

  Then the bows dipped once more and Sherbrooke watched the sea bursting over the forecastle deck and spurting through the hawse pipes, until, barely shaking, the ship raised herself again, the water boiling away over the side, or exploding against gun positions and other fixtures like froth. It looked almost yellow in the poor light.

  ‘We had a signal from Montagu, sir, but nothing really bad. One of her boats came adrift and she requested permission to go and search for it.’

  ‘You refused?’

  Rhodes nodded. ‘They know the orders as well as we do, sir. No stopping.’

  Sherbrooke gripped the tall chair which was bolted down on the port side of the bridge. Rhodes made light of it, but many officers in his position, orders or not, would have awakened the captain, if only to keep a clear yardarm. He would make a fine commanding officer when the chance came.

  He glanced through the side windows, which opened onto the flag deck. More anonymous figures in oilskins ducked and pounced, as if taking part in some ritual dance. Occasionally a flag would be unfolded, the bunting very bright against the sombre backdrop before it was stowed away. The lights were ready for the first signal of the day. All ships will exercise action stations.

  It was hard for men who had just been on watch, as well as for those who had barely slept during the brief respite in their stuffy messdecks, to obey the urgent clamour of alarm bells, even though everyone knew it was an exercise.

  Sherbrooke touched the arms of his chair and felt them press into his ribs as the great hull swayed upright again. Reliant had been described as a lucky ship. Compared with some, this must be true. It was said that when Günther Prien, one of Germany’s first U-Boat aces, had forced his audacious and seemingly impossible entry into Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with appalling loss of life, his sights had first been on Reliant. And at Jutland, when the battlecruiser squadron had come under direct and heavy fire, her steering had inexplicably jammed, the rudder helpless to prevent her from steering in a wide circle, away from the embattled squadron, and almost certain destruction.

  Unfortunately, luck was not always enough.

  There were more voices, low, contained, formal.

  Because of me.

  It was Frazier, his face reddened by the wind and icy spray.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Morning, John.’ He waited. Frazier would have been right around the ship already: he never took anything for granted. But Sherbrooke felt no closer to him than at their first meeting.

  ‘Any special orders, sir?’ He did not even bother to hold onto anything, he was so used to the ship.

  ‘Damage control, John, but this time replace the officers and petty officers with more junior ones. Good training.’

  He glanced at the radar repeater in the forepart of the bridge. The invisible eye. In the early days, it had been just a dream.

  ‘And let the Royal Marines exercise Y Turret with local control. We may not always be able to rely on miracles.’ He saw the young Lieutenant Frost peering at the bridge clock, the boatswain’s mate examining the tannoy. It was almost time. To be cursed by every man aboard. He smiled. It might even bring Stagg to the bridge.

  A messenger lowered his face to a voicepipe. ‘Forebridge?’ He turned toward Sherbrooke. ‘From W/T, sir. Signal.’

  ‘Send it up.’ It was probably a ship in distress somewhere, a convoy under U-Boat attack, an R.A.F. plane down in the drink. Important, but outside their concern.

  A figure appeared on the bridge: it was the chief telegraphist, Elphick, another man up and about early, making sure his department was on top line.

  Sherbrooke opened the signal, feeling their eyes upon him, sensing a certain relief at the break in routine.

  Afterwards, he tried to recall exactly how long he had sat with the signal pad in his hands, the neat, firm printing meaning nothing, as if it were mocking him.

  Eventually he said, ‘Immediate from Admiralty. Air Reconnaissance report that the German cruiser Minden is at sea.’ He was conscious of the coldness of his voice, the flatness. ‘Believed to have left Tromsø two days ago.’

  Rhodes, the professional, was the first to speak. ‘It was reported to be foul weather at that time, sir.’

  Frazier said, ‘She could be anywhere by now.’ He looked at the others. ‘Not here. Anywhere.’

  Sherbrooke scarcely heard. He picked up the solitary handset opposite his chair, the one with the small red light on it, like a baleful eye.

  Stagg answered immediately, as if he had been expecting it.

  ‘Bloody people! Don’t they know how important it is to watch every single move?’ Then there was a short pause. ‘Minden, eh? The one you met up with?’

  Sherbrooke said, ‘Yes, sir. The one that sank my ship.’

  He replaced the handset, and said, ‘Exercise Action Stations, if you please.’

  Frazier hesitated. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

  Just for those seconds, they were alone. Not captain and subordinate, but two men.

  Sherbrooke laid one hand on his sleeve. ‘I hope to God it never happens to you. It’s something . . .’

  The rest was lost in the screaming clamour of alarm bells and the slam of watertight doors.

  Sherbrooke slid from the chair and walked to the chart table. It had been a damned close thing.

  Rear-Admiral Vincent Stagg sat comfortably on a chart cabinet and crossed his legs. ‘Weather’s easing. Should be at Seydisfjord on time.’ He glanced sharply at the navigating officer, the only other man present besides Sherbrooke. ‘Right?’

  Rhodes picked up his notebook from the table. ‘1100 tomorrow.’

  Stagg looked around the chart room, a quiet refuge after the bridge and the comings and goings of watchkeepers and working parties.

  ‘Good.’ He added, ‘You can carry on, Pilot. I expect you have a few things to do.’

  The navigator smiled. ‘A few, sir.’

  As the door closed behind him, Stagg remarked to Sherbrooke, ‘Useful chap. Don’t want to lose him, if I can help it.’ He unbuttoned his jacket and took out a leather cigar case. ‘You can stop worrying, Guy. There’s been no more news of Minden. It’s somebody else’s headache anyway, until she’s buggered off back to Tromsø or some other godforsaken place. Things are moving at last – and as I told them at the Admiralty, it’s not a moment too soon. We need smaller but more powerful units, like Force H, for instance. Our sister ship Renown, a carrier, and a strong set of escorts have worked wonders. We can do better. I just told them to get their fingers out!’ It amused him, and he lit a cigar, smiling reminiscently at some thought of London. ‘I can be tough when I like, you know, Guy. Nice as pie if I get treated with respect, but call me pig and I’m pig all the way through!’

  He glanced up at the deckhead speaker as it squeaked into life.

  ‘Watchkeepers of the afternoon watch to dinner!’

  He corrected gently, ‘Lunch.’

  Sherbrooke, gazing at the chart table, barely heard him. Nearly six hours had passed since the signal had been brought to the bridge. Minden was out again. There had been three of them that day, when Pyrrhus had gone down. And I still cannot remember. One second on the bridge, the steel plating buckled inboard like wet cardboard, voicepipes calling and calling, unanswered by the men who lay dead or dying at their stations. And then? He stared at the chart lying uppermost on the table, The approaches to Iceland, but he did not see it. There must have been another massive explosion, and yet he could recall nothing more, only breaking the surface, gasping and shouting, crushed by the cold, the numbing pressure of icy water. And the ship had gone. No
thing. Only a handful of choking, floundering shapes. Men he had known. Men who trusted me.

  Stagg leaned forward, a lock of chestnut hair falling above one eye.

  ‘You’ve done well, Guy. Damn well. To take command at such short notice.’ His tone hardened. ‘But I wanted you as captain. I knew your record, your style of leadership – it still matters, you know.’ He was suddenly on his feet, the uncontrollable energy manifesting itself again. ‘In every war it takes time to get rid of the deadwood. Look at the last one, for God’s sake! Ideas that had scarcely changed since Trafalgar, rules that went out the window when the first U-Boats put to sea! Winning is what matters, what counts. Rules are for losers!’

  He paused beside the table, and Sherwood could smell his after-shave lotion, strong and powerful, like the man.

  ‘In Iceland we shall be joined by Seeker, a new escort carrier.’ He smiled, and watched his cigar smoke being drawn into the overhead fan. ‘She’s no giant, but it’s a start. We’ll be a small, self-dependent force. There’ll be a lot more before long.’ His smile broadened into a grin. ‘But there’s only one Reliant!’

  The grin vanished, as though its effect had been calculated. ‘I shall want you with me when we visit the admiral-commanding in Iceland. Our destroyers can refuel, and I’ll want a full report on why Montagu lost a boat. Her commanding officer has a very inflated opinion of himself . . . that’ll stop him farting in church.’

  There was a sound, and he turned and exclaimed, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! I told them I wasn’t to be disturbed!’

  The door opened slightly. It was Rhodes again. ‘Signal from Admiralty, sir. Minden is reported back in harbour. She was sighted heading for the Lofoten Islands.’

  Stagg asked sharply, ‘Where do you think she is, Pilot?’

  Rhodes answered without hesitation. ‘Bodø, sir. A big fjord on the Norwegian mainland. The Jerries built a military airfield there.’ He saw the rear-admiral raise his eyebrows. ‘It was in A.I.s, sir.’

  Sherbrooke said, ‘What else?’

  Rhodes looked at him directly. ‘Minden made contact with a Russian destroyer and some minesweepers.’ He turned to the rear-admiral, but Sherbrooke knew he was still speaking to him. ‘She sank all of them. No survivors.’

  Sherbrooke repressed the memories. There was nothing they could have done. It was far more important to discover why Minden had come out and had headed for the one anchorage where there was strong air cover, and where she would be better placed for another sortie further south, or even an attempt to enter the Baltic and return to Germany.

  But the cold reason of strategy eluded him. All he could see was the dark, crouching shape of the cruiser, her guns firing and reloading with the precision of a machine, a single weapon.

  Stagg said, ‘Keep us informed, Pilot.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I shall stroll aft . . . for some lunch.’

  Then he replaced his cigar case in one pocket, his face deep in thought.

  ‘We shall be working-up with Seeker for a few days until the two big convoys are through. Who knows, we might get a crack at your bloody Minden, eh? But I doubt it. Now, if it was Scharnhorst, that would really be a feather in the proverbial cap.’

  Sherbrooke felt the tension draining away. Perhaps Stagg was right after all. Hold personal feelings at a distance. Eyes always on the main chance . . . He almost smiled. Stagg would be a vice-admiral at this rate before anybody realized what had happened!

  Stagg remarked in an almost matter-of-fact tone, ‘We’ve been so damn busy I didn’t have a chance to speak to you about the funeral. Many there?’

  Sherbrooke shook his head, seeing again the drab clothing, the vice-admiral and his unsmiling Wren driver.

  ‘Just a few relations – some of our lot, too.’

  Stagg regarded him thoughtfully. ‘What about Jane . . . ah, Mrs Cavendish? Was she taking it well?’ He laughed, without humour. ‘Of course – I forgot. You were quite keen on her once yourself, weren’t you?’ He picked up his cap, regarding the two rows of bright gold leaves. ‘Well, now’s your chance, Guy.’

  When he had gone, still smiling, Sherbrooke waited for a few moments, signing Rhodes’s log book, giving himself time.

  He thought of her face when they had spoken together, the poise and the strength of the woman. He thought, too, of the smart Armstrong-Siddeley car in which Captain Charles Cavendish had died alone. Like the shattered photograph, it had been no accident, and Stagg knew as much.

  He heard feet outside the door, probably Rhodes, waiting to announce the next alteration of course. The ship needed him, but not as much as he needed her.

  He strode out of the chart room, and saw the relief on Rhodes’s bearded face. After all, ships were bombed, torpedoed and sunk by shellfire every day of the week. It was their world: survival was the only prize.

  He climbed into his chair, realizing that he had not eaten since the previous evening. ‘Dodger’ Long would not be happy about that.

  He leaned forward to peer at the wide, flared bows, the sea lifting and falling away on either side as the stem sliced through it, the deck glistening with spray.

  ‘Time to alter course, Pilot?’

  Rhodes gave a broad grin. ‘Course to steer is zero-one-zero, sir.’ He watched the captain’s hand touch the arm of his chair: something personal, private. Like his eyes, when the Chief Tel had brought up the signal about the German cruiser. It was something Rhodes knew he might never share, or truly understand.

  ‘Bring her round. Make a signal to the escorts to alter course in succession.’ He thought of Stagg’s obvious pleasure at the missing boat. ‘And signal Montagu’s C.O. to report on board when we reach harbour.’

  Rhodes was already busy, and on either side of the bridge the signal lamps clattered in unison, each destroyer acknowledging instantly, the lights like bright chips of diamond.

  Sherbrooke recalled the words of the elderly operations officer. They would. In that ship.

  He touched the chair again. So be it.

  The smart launch with the rear-admiral’s flag painted on either bow dashed across the water, the roar of her engines echoing from the sides of the fjord. Fragments of ice tinkled and broke from the stem like glass, and when Sherbrooke stood up in the cockpit he felt the breeze cutting his face, and wondered how people managed to live normal lives in Iceland.

  He heard Stagg’s angry voice from the small cabin. His flag lieutenant, Howe, was getting the rough edge of the admiral’s tongue again. Stagg could not be an easy man to serve.

  Everything had gone wrong, from the moment Reliant had dropped anchor. Their consort-to-be, the escort carrier Seeker, was not ready for sea. While making her final approach, she had been in collision with a local fishing trawler; it was not much, but enough to cause some damage to Seeker’s lower hull. Repairs had already begun at Reykjavik, but how long they would take was anybody’s guess. Stagg had been furious, especially when the admiral in charge had told him that the Icelandic authorities were considering taking action against the Royal Navy for severely damaging one of their fishing fleet.

  Stagg had been unable to hide his fury, even from the officers of the local headquarters.

  ‘Bloody Icelanders, they hate our guts anyway! Would have preferred the Germans to get here before us! By God, I’ll lay odds that Admiral Donitz would have taught them a sharp lesson!’

  They had gone aboard Seeker and met her captain. It had been a tense visit.

  Seeker, a Smiter Class escort carrier, was neither beautiful nor as grand as the big fleet carriers. A product of the Anglo-American lease-lend agreement, and converted from merchant-ship hulls, with wooden flight decks, they were unstable in any kind of bad weather, and would not last five minutes in the embattled seas of the Mediterranean, or with the Americans in the Pacific. But Seeker and her growing number of consorts, graceless and uncomfortable though they might be, were achieving something which, eighteen months ago, people would have believed impossible. In the vital Battle of
the Atlantic, with the mounting toll of losses of ships and their desperately needed cargoes, there had always been a vast spread of ocean where air cover could not reach. Whether the convoys originated in the U.S.A. and Canada, or from Britain and the base here in Iceland, there had always been that gap, the killing ground, as the old Atlantic hands called it. U-Boats had been able to surface with impunity, and use their superior speed to pursue convoys and charge their batteries at the same time. Then, at night, they would close with the slow-moving lines of merchantmen and attack. Losses rose higher and higher, outpacing the shipyards’ ability to build vessels to replace those sunk.

  The little escort carrier had changed that. U-Boat crews were suddenly confronted with fast fighters and bombers hundreds of miles from any kind of base, and the lesson had been learned. Now the enemy was forced to spend more and more time submerged, and at reduced speed, their ability to track and torpedo the plodding merchantmen seriously impaired. The monthly list of kills had, at last, diminished, in the Allies’ favour.

  Sherbrooke wiped his face with his gloved hand and saw Reliant lying directly ahead. Against the bleak side of the fjord, she looked completely white, and seemed to shimmer in the hard glare, her powerful hull, high bridges and funnels covered with a sheen of ice, and so still that she could have been an extension of the land itself, with only the flags and a thin tendril of smoke from one funnel to reveal her latent strength.

  Stagg climbed up beside him. ‘A beauty, eh?’

  Sherbrooke glanced at him. Calm, or resigned, he wondered.

  Stagg muttered, ‘Might be weeks before we get Seeker in company, Guy. Bloody poor show!’

  The bowman was in position, boathook at the ready. Sherbrooke saw the side-party at the top of the accommodation ladder, frozen stiff, probably, after A.C.H.Q. had sent a signal to announce their return aboard.

  ‘Waste of a day!’ Stagg’s eyes gleamed. ‘I’ll see Montagu’s captain when we get aboard. Just in the bloody mood for him!’

  The calls trilled, and Sherbrooke noticed that Stagg made a point of climbing aboard without his greatcoat. The flag lieutenant would carry it himself.