Decia was living with her father in Harrogate. Drake was to learn that her family was very rich, and although her father had come up the hard way, Decia wanted for nothing. The business was wool, and with three armed services to clothe and keep warm, Britain needed the mills as never before.
Drake had thought of going south to London. Harrogate sounded quiet. A backwater. But it was obvious that Niven wanted to repay him for his encouragement, and as he had no people of his own in Britain, a shared leave seemed the obvious thing.
Just thinking about her made him uneasy. She was small and very dark, with a husky laugh and a way of looking at you. Direct. Testing you.
The glasses slithered across the wet bar. ‘Next, gentlemen!’
Drake handed him some money and pushed through the packed bar with his beer.
They had all made him welcome, and he had had a royal time. The next occasion when they had invited him for a short leave he had accepted without hesitation. Knowing why. Hating himself for it, but still imagining he could break off his interest when he chose. She and Niven must have been having a row about something. There had been tension. A stiffness between them.
She had invited Drake to go for a ride on one of her horses, and Niven had appeared almost relieved at the interruption.
Later, in the big Yorkshire house, she had been showing him the library, and had climbed up to get a book for him. One of her ancestors had taken his share of the wool trade to New Zealand.
She had stumbled, and he had caught her. He could feel her lithe body now. Even here. Her breast against him, the amusement in her dark eyes giving way to sudden uncertainty.
He had found himself touching her hand, casually, if he crossed a room. Gauging her reaction. She never appeared to notice. But she never removed her hand either.
He sat down at the table and said abruptly, ‘Here we go, Dick. Better cadge a lift to the base after this.’ He watched him over the glass. Before it had been bad enough. Niven had been in another boat. They met most days, but it was not the same as now. The base captain had told them before this last leave.
‘Promotion has come through for Tom Latham, so you’ll need a new diver. Dick Niven is the lucky man.’
It was never a good thing to break up a team, and Latham, the previous diver, had been in the flotilla from the beginning. But he deserved his chance like everyone else. It still did not help Drake’s conscience. To see Niven sitting in the midget submarine, going over every detail together. Knowing all the while that he wanted to see his wife. No, he needed to.
He could ask for a transfer. He dismissed it instantly. It would be wrong. Drake would rather cut off his hand than let down the skipper, David Seaton. With a new diver to get used to, and then to lose his Number One as well, it was asking for a disaster.
And it was quite obvious something was in the wind. The leave had been shortened by two days. The Navy did not waste telegrams just for the hell of it.
God, what a bloody mess.
Richard Niven watched two R.A.F. officers having a beer-drinking competition, their faces rigid with concentration.
It would be strange to start in a new boat, he thought. He did not know much about his commanding officer, David Seaton, other than by reputation. How he had survived was a mystery after what he had done, and his deeds were common knowledge. But as a man he seemed vaguely distant, withdrawn. But once in his little command it would be different. He glanced at Drake. He and the skipper were close friends. That should be good enough.
Niven pushed his immediate future to the back of his mind. He could do the work, and had been reared and trained as a naval officer. For a career, and not as another exciting section of life as it seemed to be to Drake and many of the others.
He caught sight of himself in a mirror on the wall and imagined he could hear Decia’s voice. ‘Don’t you ever relax, Richard? Can’t you forget what you are, just for a few hours?’
He sighed and knew Drake was watching him. Niven was one of the youngest officers at the base, but one of the very few who had married. In wartime, they said…. He downed the beer angrily. When you thought like that you were halfway dead. He had to keep a sense of proportion. The war might last for years and years. He loved Decia. She was right for the family.
Niven thought of their last night together. The angry words, and then her hands coming to him in the darkness, exploring him, wanting him.
And he had been unable. He still did not understand why. Worry about the recall? Actual fear which he had so far failed to recognise?
He had felt her move away, her perfume hanging to the pillow like a final bitter taunt.
‘I’m ready.’
Drake looked at his watch. ‘The bar will be open at the base.’ He looked across the room and added, ‘Hell, there’s old Alec. We’ll take him along with us.’ He waved and started to push through the crowd.
Petty Officer Alec Jenkyn watched the lieutenant’s fair hair rising above the drinkers like that of a Norseman. He was small and wiry, with narrow shoulders and the sallow complexion born of many engine rooms. Jenkyn was twenty-nine, but looked much older, and had spent thirteen of those years in the Navy. As he followed Drake’s thrusting progress towards the table he thought back to when he had transferred from an ordinary submarine to X-craft. His mates had pulled his leg. And on the strength of it, it had sounded odd. Three officers and one rating cooped up together in a steel cylinder.
It wouldn’t work. Couldn’t. But it had.
As engineroom artificer of Lieutenant Seaton’s stubby command he was satisfied. Glad to be back.
Drake towered over him. ‘Hi, Alec. We’re off. Thought we might go together.’
Jenkyn nodded. ‘Right, sir.’ He looked warily at Niven.
Drake said casually. ‘This is Sub Lieutenant Dick Niven. Our new diver.’
‘Glad to meet you, sir.’
Jenkyn stood up, suddenly confused, and angry with himself because of it. He had seen the straight stripe on Niven’s shoulder. A regular. Like himself. But oh how different. Tom Latham had been a car salesman in civvy street. This one had all the signs. The day he calls me Alec I’ll hang the bloody flags out.
Drake asked, ‘Good leave?’
The petty officer searched for his small bag under the table. Good leave. South London. Bombed streets. A cat crying at the door of a house for its food, and there was only the wall with the door left standing. And his mother. With her beautifully laid table which quivered each time a train thundered past on its way to Clapham Junction. Knives and forks arranged like soldiers. Jelly, bread and butter. The chairs facing the table. Waiting. How she managed such a spread on her rations and what he could fiddle from the P.O. chef at the base was a bloody miracle.
He fumbled with his bag, giving himself more time before he faced Drake and the impassive subbie.
Jenkyn had wanted to sit down at the table and get through his mother’s carefully prepared ‘tea’. But she had tapped the old clock on the mantelpiece and had said reprovingly, ‘Just hang on, Alec. Wait for your Dad and Jimmy to get here from the works.’
It happened each time. It was a nightmare. A relentless, haunting nightmare which his mother seemed to move through unscathed.
He could picture the table, starkly, in his mind. The tea-cozy. The ticking clock. The room he had seen on countless leaves from a dozen ships and from every corner of the world.
His father and his young brother Jimmy had been killed in a hit-and-run raid over Wandsworth on their way home from the factory. Blown to bits in the wink of an eye. Nothing. That had been six months ago. And she was still waiting for them. Her broken mind unable to accept it. The police, the A.R.P. people, the Welfare, even relatives had failed to budge her.
Good leave? It had been bloody hell.
‘I know where we can get transport, sir.’ He faced the others.
Drake winked. ‘Knew it. Old Alec can fix anything.’
Jenkyn followed them to the door. You don’t know
the half of it, mate.
Outside it was already as black as a boot, and they felt sleet on their faces like cold spittle.
At the bar an artillery officer held out his glass for a refill. He said to the landlord, ‘They seem a cheerful bunch.’
The landlord glanced at the young officer’s uniform. Brand new, like its owner. He remembered Drake, and all the others who had come and gone through that door, although he was not supposed to know what they were doing.
‘I expect they’ve got their troubles too, sir.’
2
The Machines
DAVID SEATON CROSSED THE depot ship’s deck and stood by the guardrails to look at the pontoons alongside. He had come out from the austere surroundings of the shore base immediately after an early breakfast, but here, aboard the Cephalus, the daily routine was well under way. Thuds and clattering drills from the workshops deep in the hull, while some oilskinned seamen tried without much success to clear the overnight ice and slush from the decks.
Below the ship’s side, barely moving between the massive pontoons, were three midget submarines. With their rounded hulls covered in ice and frozen snow, they looked for all the world like dead whales.
Seaton moved to the accommodation ladder, treading carefully to avoid a painful fall to the deck and thereby raising the first laugh of the day for the onlookers.
The officer of the day, his nose glowing red over a woollen scarf, saluted and grinned.
‘Going aboard, sir?’
Seaton nodded. Even he did not really know why he had come out.
The O.O.D. added, ‘The buzz says that there’s an operation in the wind.’
‘I know.’ Seaton tested the top tread of the ladder. ‘But I’ve not been told anything.’
He touched the peak of his cap lightly with his fingers as he began to descend the ladder, while the O.O.D. and gangway sentry sprang to attention and saluted. Although he was going from the tall-sided depot ship into a tiny submarine which was not much bigger than one of her power boats, Seaton was still a commanding officer, and tradition and custom decreed that he should be treated as such, no matter how strange it might appear to an outsider.
Below on the pontoons it was colder. Much colder. And the wind which pushed a procession of noisy cat’s-paws along the ship’s pitted waterline explored his body as if he were naked. He was wearing a stained dufflecoat over blue battledress, a thick sweater and his seagoing leather boots. The latter were so old and scuffed that they were more brown than their original colour, but like him had survived everything. He sometimes felt that if he were to change them, so too would his luck.
His own boat was the outboard one, her number, XE 16, almost covered with crusted snow. He glanced at the other two, XE 17, Rupert Vanneck’s command, and XE 19, whose urbane commanding officer, Gervaise Allenby, looked upon her much as the owner of a private yacht.
Seaton paused, his gloved hand on the safety chain around the pontoon. There had been another of the new midgets too, XE 18. She had been exercising at sea, under tow by a conventional submarine. The midgets needed to conserve their limited fuel, just as they had to save the energies of their crews until the last possible moment. They were towed underwater to a point as close as possible to their selected target, with a passage crew aboard for the same purpose. The transfer, surfaced and in hostile waters, had to be made by rubber dinghy, and as rapidly as possible to avoid detection. It was the X-craft’s most vulnerable moment, and everyone tried to think of new ways of cutting the time without increasing the danger.
XE 18 had been doing just that, practising under real combat conditions and in a heavy rain squall. Out of nowhere, a home-bound minesweeper had loomed above the little hull, and even as the towing submarine had signalled frantically for the other vessel to stand away, there had been one, terrible crash. A search had been carried out, but nothing had come to the surface. Not even a drop of oil. XE 18 had dived deep, taking her crew of four with her.
Seaton sometimes thought of them, wondering what he would have done. Would he have flooded the hull? Or would he have sat with his three doomed companions in the steel coffin, waiting to gasp out his life?
Hazard of the game. Just one of those things. The trite expressions came readily to hand, as they always did. But Seaton knew that carelessness, a momentary lack of vigilance, killed more good men than enemy action.
He walked round to his own boat and saw that the after hatch was open. Even as he watched an E.R.A. in a filthy boilersuit emerged, carrying a toolbag and a torch, like a burglar.
He saw Seaton and smiled. ‘Sweet as a nut, sir. We’ve taken good care of her for you.’
Seaton stepped on to the narrow casing and steadied himself against the periscope guard. Now he really felt back. Maybe it was because of people like this E.R.A., the unknown team who looked after every unpredictable thing. There was a strong bond between them and the men who actually took their little charges to sea. Rather like the rapport between mechanics and pilots on the muddy airfields of the Great War.
He lowered himself through the circular hatch and switched on the inspection lamps which were connected to the old depot ship. Even that link seemed vaguely symbolic, he thought.
Old and dented she might be, but the Cephalus, or Old Syphilis as she was affectionately known, could make just about anything in her outmoded workshops.
Seaton hesitated and drew in his breath very slowly. It was probably cold in the small control room, but compared with the icy wind across the loch it felt almost humid.
He caught the familiar smells of diesel and grease, of some new paint and of wet metal.
XE 16 was slightly larger than the other XE boats, and larger still than the original X-craft. Even so, she was only fifty-four feet from her snoutlike stem to her rudder, and six feet in the beam.
He let his glance move along the motionless dials and control levers. The gyro compass, the wheel, the periscopes. He sat down on the bunk which covered a chart table. Everything was in miniature. Right aft there was a watertight door which led into the engine space where diesel and the electric motor shared their world with purifiers and cooling plant, with pumps and fuel. Every inch of space had to be used, and used again. Forward from where he sat there was another oval watertight door which led into the W & D compartment, the ‘Wet and Dry’, into and from which the diver could leave and enter the boat by way of the fore hatch. Forward through yet another tiny door was a further space. Just long enough for a man to sleep, but crammed too with stores, batteries, fuel and ballast.
A small but completely independent vessel.
Seaton thought of his companions, seeing them in his mind’s eye as he studied the control room.
Geoffrey Drake was the same age as himself and a real asset to the boat. If they all survived, he should get a command of his own soon. He was totally reliable, and rarely out of humour. Before the war he had been a marine biologist employed by the New Zealand government amongst the islands. Seeking out new kinds of fish, sources of nutrition, although he always told everyone he really did it for the boating and swimming. ‘Which they actually paid me for!’ Drake’s only trouble was his height. There was no headroom in most of the hull, and even then only for the ‘less than average’. In fact Jenkyn, the E.R.A., was the only one who could walk from one bulkhead to the other without stooping.
His eye moved to the helmsman’s seat where Jenkyn sat for much of the time to steer the boat. A good mechanic, and very loyal in some indefinable way.
He thought of the new diver, Sub Lieutenant Niven. He sounded all right. It was strange to find a regular officer in so junior a role, he thought. The position of diver tended to tie a man to the job and perhaps miss the many swift promotions which only presented themselves in wartime. He was married, and at first Seaton had been troubled that he might be a death-or-glory boy, with an unhappy homelife, looking for the hard way out.
But Drake had been to Niven’s temporary home several times. He had said that
Niven’s wife was a ‘real cracker’. He had not mentioned her lately. That meant one of two things. Either Drake had got out of his depth with her, or vice versa. Seaton bit his lip. It would soon blow over when they had work to do.
He glanced at the basket-wheels, one on either beam. When on actual operation, XE 16 carried a massive explosive charge on either side, like a pack animal. Crescent-shaped, to lie snugly against the hull, each contained over two tons of amatol and a time fuse. Enough to blow the guts out of a floating dock, or a battleship, for that matter. You set the fuses, spun the wheels and allowed the charges to float to the sea-bed beneath the target, like two great, obscene leaves. Then out and away before the bang.
Seaton touched his forehead and looked at his fingers. Wet with sweat.
It had been in that last Italian harbour, dropping the charges under an enormous dock. Unbeknown to anyone on the mission, and almost everyone else, the Italian forces were to change sides against their German ally once the Sicilian invasion had begun.
The dock was important for any heavy surface unit which might need urgent repairs, and the Germans would soon seize it once they knew what was happening. It had to be sunk. Just to be on the safe side.
Seaton turned his head to listen, as if expecting to hear it again. It had been in another boat, but the memory was too stark to quibble with detail.
Within seconds of releasing their two charges, Seaton had heard the sudden rasp of metal, the hull around him quiver violently, as if in a great vice.
The men on the dock had in fact decided to flood their ballast tanks, to prepare to take on a damaged cruiser. With each terrible second it was getting lower and lower in the water, pushing the little submarine towards the bottom, trying to stamp her into the mud, to lie helpless beside the two fused charges.
Bumping and scraping, swaying from side to side, Seaton had conned the midget clear, although why nobody heard their progress, or saw them break surface to fix their bearings, he still could not understand.
Surface With Daring Page 2
