Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Douglas Reeman
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
1. The Men
2. The Machines
3. A Very Long Way
4. Trevor
5. Time of Arrival
6. No Choice
7. Start the Attack
8. The Unexpected
9. One Down
10. A Problem
11. The Trap
12. Gesture for the Dead
13. – And Escape for the Living
14. The Secret
15. It Was to Be Expected
16. Citadel
17. Goliath
18. With Daring
Copyright
About the Book
Hiding, lying in wait on the sea bed, is EX16, one of the most important ships in the Royal Navy. She’s not much to look at, and she’s only 54 feet long, with no defensive armament. But her four-man crew knows that the outcome of the war could depend on this midget submarine.
Seaton, her commander, understands what his men face. There is the boredom, the discomfort, the jealousy and bickering; and already they have confronted enormous dangers on desperate raids into Norway. Now, poised for the attack on a secret Nazi rocket installation, Seaton must hold his crew together for the hell that awaits them…
About the Author
Douglas Reeman did convoy duty in the navy in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. He has written over thirty novels under his own name and more than twenty bestselling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.
Also by Douglas Reeman
Badge of Glory
A Prayer for the Ship
The Deep Silence
The Destroyers
Dive in the Sun
Go in and Sink!
The Greatest Enemy
The Hostile Shore
High Water
HMS Saracen
The Last Raider
Path of the Storm
The Pride and the Anguish
Rendezvous – South Atlantic
A Ship Must Die
Send a Gunboat
Strike from the Sea
To Risks Unknown
Torpedo Run
Winged Escort
With Blood and Iron
To Kathleen Nathan
In friendship
Author’s Note
When I am doing the research for my books I am constantly being reminded of the courage of ordinary men and women in times of war.
At no time was I more aware of this fact than when I was re-visiting Norway for Surface with Daring. I saw the fjords and harbours which had been penetrated by British midget submarines, and had the privilege of speaking with some of the Norwegian Resistance who once helped to make each operation a reality.
Even in the face of constant danger and brutal reprisal, results were achieved which, looking back, seem totally impossible.
D.R.
1
The Men
THE CAMOUFLAGED THREE-TON BEDFORD slewed round on the narrow track, its wheels churning in a mixture of dirty snow and loose stones, and came to a shuddering halt.
The Royal Marine driver glanced first at his solitary passenger and then at the grey stone building which lay astride the track like a wall, and said cheerfully, ‘This is it, sir. ’Ome sweet ’ome.’
Lieutenant David Seaton lowered himself stiffly from the cab and felt his back and muscles protesting at the discomfort of the ride and the many varied miles before it. He took his case from the driver and nodded. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
The truck hardly needed camouflage, he thought. It was covered with mud and filth from end to end, a product of hard and continuous use.
He stood in the bitter wind until the Bedford had manoeuvred back towards the main road. If you could call it that. Then he looked at the grey building, examining his feelings, hoping for some sort of comfort. There was an entrance porch in dead-centre of the wall, and a small, sand-bagged hut, within which he could see a muffled figure watching him curiously.
Seaton picked up his case and walked quickly towards the entrance. Perhaps it was because he was tired from the journey, but the strong north-westerly which blew in from the Atlantic felt extra cold, his body less able to withstand it.
He paused once again and slitted his eyes against the wind to peer down at the pewter-coloured stretch of water below the hillside. Loch Striven, a strange, compelling place, which gave an impression of secrecy and danger. It was surrounded by barren rock slopes, and these, with just two days of the year left on the calendar, were streaked and patterned with snow.
There were several blurred vessels anchored in the loch, as if they had never moved. One, a straight-funnelled ship, her outmoded hull surrounded by a clutter of pontoons and tenders, was half-covered by snow, as if she were freezing solid.
He smiled, despite his unusual apprehension. H.M.S. Cephalus, submarine depot and repair ship. Even at a distance she seemed more welcoming than this isolated building.
A petty officer emerged from the little hut and saluted.
‘Oh, it’s you, sir.’ He grinned. ‘Good leave?’
Seaton considered it. It should have been good. They had all been looking forward to it. Getting away. Hiding by losing identity in the crowd.
He thought of London. Battered, brave and tired. Christmas carols in a pub somewhere, while bombs had rattled the glasses behind the bar.
Seaton realised the P.O. was staring at him and said, ‘Fair enough.’
Inside the building the wood-panelled walls were bloomed with damp, and the trailing Christmas decorations gave an added touch of something past.
He must be one of the first back, he decided. Those who had taken local leave would return last or late. It was always the same.
He thrust open the door marked ‘Wardroom’ and saw some logs burning in the big fireplace at the far end. It must have been a snug place in peacetime, he thought. Then it had been called The Lodge Hotel, and people in tweeds had come to shoot and fish, and to tramp the hillsides above the loch. Then they would come back here. To this big room with its fire, and a welcome which was carefully hidden by the stone exterior.
Above the long mantel was the new name and crest, H.M.S. Syren, with the proud motto beneath, ‘Out of the deep we are here’.
A door opened and a white-coated steward peeped in at him.
Seaton sat in one of the many battered leather chairs and raised his feet to the fire.
‘Tea, sir?’ The steward regarded him bleakly. ‘It’s too early to open the bar as yet.’
Seaton yawned. ‘Tea then.’
Four hundred miles and a bit from London. Train, bus, train, launch, and finally the camouflaged Bedford. It had taken two days. Well, sir, there is a war on.
Seaton looked up at the dangling paper decorations, remembering the pre-Christmas excitement, the drunken laughter and flushed faces. Like end of term. A festival. Perhaps, if just once somebody had admitted it, they were all surprised to be able to celebrate. To be alive.
He realised with a start that he was unnaturally hot, just as moments earlier he had been half-frozen. He stood up, realising he was still wearing his heavy greatcoat. No wonder the steward had looked at him so strangely. Maybe he was fixing him in his mind, another face to remember. To add to the list.
Seaton walked to a wall mirror and threw his cap and greatcoat onto a bench seat. For a few moments he studied his reflection, as if seeking something. To reassure himself.
He was twenty-six years old, but felt ten times that age. The face which stared
back at him was pleasant, with dark brown eyes and unruly hair which he should have had cut during his leave but had forgotten to do so. He looked very pale, and the lines on either side of his mouth were deeply etched. Strain. Probing tension. It was all there.
He wrinkled his nose and turned away from the mirror. Going round the bend. No doubt about it.
The steward re-entered with a tray and some hot scones.
‘Local,’ he said proudly. ‘Got them myself.’
Seaton watched him pour the tea, knowing the man was bored and lonely. But he did not want to talk. Not to anyone just yet.
The steward left the wardroom and slammed the door. Bloody officers.
Seaton sat down again and studied the empty chairs. Some would soon be filled. Others….
He sipped the tea and thought back over the months. In two days it would be New Year’s Eve. How would 1944 be different from the other years?
It was more of a sense of disappointment and anticlimax, he decided. They had gone through so much, and the cost had been high. His eyes strayed to the crest again.
Syren and the elderly depot-ship anchored in the loch were the headquarters and training base of one of the Navy’s midget submarine flotillas.
He ate the first scone very slowly, to make himself think.
At first most people had thought it was just one more harebrained experiment to postpone the inevitable stalemate of war. The Italians and the Japanese had had varied successes with their human torpedoes, ‘chariots’, and the Royal Navy’s own attempt to sink or cripple the giant German Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord had not failed for want of determination.
Then had come the midget, the X-craft, a submarine in her own right. With a crew of four, two heavy explosive charges to be laid beneath a suitable target, it had been accepted by both Admiralty and War Cabinet with cautious optimism.
For David Seaton and many others it had all started here, in Loch Striven. They had come from all sections of the Service. They had been volunteers, from the regular Navy and from the Reserves, drawn together by an eagerness to do something vital, or out of curiosity, and because there are some who will volunteer for anything if it sounds dangerous enough.
Seaton did not know why he had sent in his name. Like the bulk of the Navy, he was a ‘temporary-gentleman’, an R.N.V.R. Maybe that was why he liked the enclosed world of midget subs. There was no formality. Just total self-reliance. Dependence on the little team around you.
He had served in a destroyer, and had then transferred to conventional submarines in the early days of the war. When there were nothing but retreats, or strategic withdrawals as the pundits called them. As junior watchkeeper in a submarine Seaton had seen the strain turn his commanding officer into an old man. He smiled tightly. He must have been about my age then. While German U-boats had made the Atlantic into their own killing-ground, British submarines had had to grope closer inshore in search of targets. The North Sea, the Baltic, or trying to knock off Rommel’s supply ships in the Mediterranean. That was when the memo had been sent round. Quietly, without fuss. Volunteers required.
From the moment he had first come to this grim-faced building Seaton’s life seemed to have been speeded up, like a faulty but exciting film.
Training and exercising in a fifty-one-foot X-craft. Creeping about the bottom of the loch, playing hide-and-seek with the M.F.V. tenders and two First World War submarines which were permanently attached to the base.
There had been a lot of mistakes, and too many accidents. X-craft had dived to the bottom and stayed there. Several men had been killed even towards the end of their training. But there had been few complaints. It was like nothing else. It was thrilling, frightening, but held on to its exclusive members with a grip of steel.
You were no longer an onlooker, one more carried along as part of a job. You were it. Or so it had seemed then.
1943 had been a violent year, but for once had leaned over to help Britain and her allies. The hurt of Dunkirk and Singapore, of blasted cities and great ships sent to the bottom faded a little as the last of Rommel’s once invincible desert army was driven out of North Africa. In the summer the Allies had made their first stab to regain a foothold in Hitler’s Europe, and with Operation Husky, the greatest amphibious operation ever envisaged, they had landed in Sicily, and had stayed there.
Seaton and many of his companions had been there, and two months later when another invasion had been launched on Italy’s mainland he had been promoted to his own command.
As he thought about it, one scone still untouched on the plate, Seaton’s fingers moved up to his jacket. The Distinguished Service Cross and Bar. Not bad for twenty-six, they said.
They had been recalled to Scotland after the Italian job. Those who had survived.
Seaton had immediately been given a new command, a slightly larger boat, and only just off the experimental list.
For months they had thought about it. The biggest target of all. Never mind the great floating docks and harbour installations which were vital to the enemy’s survival, a battleship, and the greatest one ever created, the Tirpitz was something else entirely.
With the war progressing in Italy and the Americans making impressive strides in the Pacific, it was clear that every major warship would soon be needed for the final acts of each campaign. But many British units were kept constantly moored at Scapa Flow and other harbours just in case Tirpitz or her graceful consort Scharnhorst should venture from their Norwegian lairs and break into the Atlantic as Bismarck had once almost done. The valuable troop convoys and deep-laden supply ships from Canada and America would be easy prey for such massive armament, and even if both ships were eventually sunk the damage to morale, the setbacks in men and machines might be overwhelming.
Seaton could recall the excitement when the raid had been announced, the X-craft which had been chosen to attack Tirpitz had been given the final briefing. They had been at the other base, but everyone here had known about it.
Tirpitz was lying deep in her well-defended fjord with nets and booms and every modern anti-submarine device available to protect her. The attack might succeed. But if not, another had to be ready. Seaton’s boat and the two others which made up the new flotilla were put at first-degree readiness. Towing-sub-marines, passage crews for the midgets, plans, charts and recognition signals. Seaton had felt that he could find his way blindfolded to the Tirpitz in a dinghy.
Then the news had arrived. Not much of it, as the X-craft crews had all apparently been either captured or killed during the operation. But according to reports from the Norwegian Resistance and local intelligence agents, Tirpitz had been hit, and badly so. If she was not out of the war for good, it would be for long enough, or until more conventional means were employed to finish what the midgets had started.
It should have been a great moment, and yet despite all else, and the uncertainty of what had become of the crews, of faces which were familiar to many of Seaton’s companions, there was a sense of shock. Of loss.
Never mind, somebody said. There’s still the Scharnhorst. We’ll go for her instead.
The day after Christmas the news had broken. Scharnhorst had died as she had endured, fighting to the end. In an Arctic blizzard she had gone down under the guns of Admiral Fraser’s Duke of York, with few to survive those bitter waters.
The last of Germany’s major warships had gone. The battles would be for the supply routes, as they had always been, and for mastery of the narrow seas, to protect invasion ships, and to ferry back the wounded.
Seaton looked at the motto on the wall. ‘Out of the deep we are here’.
There did not seem to be much left for midget submarines any more. His head lolled and he was asleep.
The bar of the Royal Hotel was packed wall to wall. Lieutenant Geoffrey Drake stood with his stomach pressed against the polished counter, holding on to a hard-won beach-head. Around him uniformed figures of every service and rank surged in a noisy throng, and the beer flowe
d like a tide-race. The little fishing village of Port Bannatyne had never really recovered from the shock of the friendly invasion.
Now, Service boats came and went from the piers, and the whole loch was reserved as a submarine exercise area. The Royal Hotel was the most popular of the drinking haunts, and even though it was a hard trudge uphill from the waterfront, the beer and genial host made the trip worthwhile.
Geoffrey Drake was almost six feet tall, with the wide shoulders and slim hips of an athlete. He was very fair, with level blue eyes and a firm mouth, and looked like an open-air man. And as the gold shoulder flash on his jacket proclaimed, he came from New Zealand.
He yelled, ‘Two pints, Pete!’ He twisted at the bar and gave a thumbs-up to a sub-lieutenant who was guarding his place at a table. ‘Not long now, Dick!’
He turned back to the bar again, feeling the same twinge of uncertainty. Guilt. Just seeing him there, relaxed, calm-faced, brought it home to you. You never really knew with Dick. Sub Lieutenant Richard Niven, Royal Navy. He always appeared to be so cool. But seeing him there. Drake shivered. When had it started? Why the hell had he let it happen at all?
He knew he had merely been putting it under the carpet. Don’t look at it and it will go away.
They had met in the old flotilla in the early part of the year. Niven had been new to X-craft, a diver with no combat experience at all. Drake had lived near the sea all his life, and his present submarine existence was like an extension of what had gone before. Off duty ashore he had found himself discussing his pre-war days of underwater exploration, with nothing but a pair of good lungs and a spear gun to protect him from marauding sharks.
Niven knew no other life but the Navy, and had entered the R.N. College at the tender age of twelve. In the past months he had proved himself in one difficult action, but his outer reserve had changed little, Drake thought.
God, if he knew. He felt the sweat prickle under his shirt. And it had started, as so many things do, with an act of kindness.
When the flotilla had been re-planned to allow for casualties and transfers, they had been given a week’s leave. It had been then that Drake had met Decia. He had not even realised Niven was married. He seemed too young. Unfinished, in some way.
Surface With Daring Page 1
