Convoy of War (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘That’s right. Cypher. Officers only.’

  ‘Course, yes. You wouldn’t know what was in it, would you?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a short silence. The curtains over Frapp’s scuttle swayed inwards to the Ardara’s roll: the swell was heavy still. Firing the six-inch from a ship with such a roll on her would be like trying to train and lay the turrets aboard one of the old County Class cruisers, the 10,000-ton three-funnellers with so much freeboard they rolled their guts out in a flat calm. Frapp tried again, all his curiosity, his innate seaman’s urge to pick up the latest buzz, consuming him.

  ‘Dare say you may have heard something, Bunts,’ he said. ‘Being up there on the bridge, like?’

  Mouncey shook his head. ‘Not a thing. Not a bloody thing. Commodore, he don’t say much.’

  ‘Williams, though?’

  ‘Likewise. Williams don’t know he’s born, half the time.’

  ‘Not even a buzz?’

  ‘Not even a buzz,’ Mouncey said firmly, tongue in cheek. He’d heard all right — enough to have some idea at any rate. He’d heard Lieutenant Williams speak the name, Winston Churchill. That was about all in fact, apart from the Commodore’s order that nothing was to be mentioned thereafter. Maybe Winnie had some special task for the escort, but if he had, then Mouncey didn’t know what it was. And he wasn’t going to open his trap about Churchill. If Frapp talked around the ship, which he would, the Commodore would know very well who to pin it on: himself, Leading Signalman Mouncey, who had no intention of risking his rate. He finished the second whisky and looked hopefully at his empty glass for another, but in vain.

  ‘You can bugger off,’ PO Frapp said sourly, having developed a sudden dislike for the sharp-faced little leading signalman, ‘if you’ve got no bloody buzzes.’

  Grinning, Mouncey left the cabin. ‘Useless bloody article,’ Frapp said as the door closed.

  ***

  Williams had been with Kemp on the bridge for the latter part of the night and remained there when the Commodore went below for a wash and shave and a change of clothing. And breakfast, which Williams had already been down for. Wartime or not, the food was good. No rationing for those who ploughed the waves in merchantmen or warships. Williams had tucked into grapefruit, cornflakes with condensed milk, kipper, fried egg, bacon, sausages, hot rolls and marmalade and several cups of steaming coffee. Now he felt good as he paced the bridge, back and forth like Kemp, really feeling the assistant commodore and in charge of the convoy until Kemp returned. If anything should happen, it would be up to him to deal with it in the first instance and he rehearsed in his mind what he should do — not for the first time: it was the duty of an officer to think ahead, to visualize situations, use his imagination; and in that imagination Lieutenant Williams had dealt with all manner of emergencies. Fire below, the appearance of a periscope, sudden aircraft attack, the advent of a German pocket-battleship, man overboard, collision between ships of the convoy, some hiatus in the engine-room, defective steering for one reason or another, the sudden and unheralded impact of a torpedo. There was potentially any amount of drama at sea and Williams knew that his list of rehearsals could never be complete; it was always the unexpected, the unrehearsed, that tended to happen and then you were liable to be caught out. Nevertheless Williams went on dreaming, seeing himself as the saviour of the convoy, the one who had in fact thought out the unexpected in advance and had dealt with it, his sense of the dramatic and the heroic dimmed only a little by what would prove to be the fact: his immediate reaction would be to obey the Commodore’s standing order: If anything should happen, call me at once. And in the meantime, the transport’s Officer of the Watch, if not her master, would have acted.

  After a while Williams’ thoughts shifted elsewhere: they shifted homeward to Hounslow. He thought of his father, travelling daily to the City in a crowded District Line train, carrying his gas-mask dutifully — his father had always been dutiful. If anybody asked him to do anything, he did it, like sacrificing the iron railings in front of the house in aid of the war effort, fondly imagining they’d be turned into guns to blast off at Hitler. Williams believed that to be nothing more than a ploy, something dreamed up by Lord Beaverbrook, or Churchill himself, to make the man in the street, the civilian, feel he was doing his bit. His father had been angry when he’d suggested that on his last leave, telling him he shouldn’t belittle what the civilians were doing. Look, his father had said, at the Home Guard and, come to that, the ARP wardens like himself. He’d got in such a state that Williams had banged out of the house, calling out to his mother that he would be back late, and had gone to the pictures and sat through Deanna Durbin.

  He’d gone by himself, wishing he had a girl to take. He hadn’t got a girlfriend and really he couldn’t understand why. He’d tried hard enough but somehow things never seemed to click, or not for long. It wasn’t as though he was a freak: he knew he looked smart in his uniform, top button always undone, handkerchief tucked into left sleeve, stiff collar, cap at a Beatty-ish angle, never a hair out of place. To think of some of the scruff girls went out with! But whenever he found a girl who seemed likely, he never had the right conversation. Perhaps it was too naval; even the odd Wren in Portsmouth or Greenock or wherever seemed to tire of naval slang and his yarns about old so-and-so and how tight he’d got last time in port. It always petered out, generally by way of a broken date followed by excuses, but once by more direct methods. A leading Wren called Judy, in Greenock.

  She’d stopped suddenly one early evening, in the main street while they’d been on their way to the Naval Officers’ Club for a drink.

  She said impatiently, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Paul!’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ He’d stared, blankly. He hadn’t done anything that he was aware of.

  ‘Stop looking at yourself, can’t you?’

  ‘I — ’

  ‘You haven’t missed a shop window yet,’ she said, really angry. ‘Talk about Narcissus! Looking over your shoulder all the way along.’

  He was hurt; his face flamed and he blurted it out. ‘Oh, piss off, why don’t you!’

  Then she had slapped his face. There happened to be a naval patrol passing, trudging along the gutters wearing belts and gaiters, watching out for ratings who failed to salute officers. The seamen had grinned openly; Williams had been mortified. Of course, he could have run the girl in — a leading Wren, striking an officer, a Court Martial offence if ever there was one! Anyway, that was the last he’d seen of Judy. She had been fairly recent, not long before he’d got his present appointment as assistant commodore, and he wished she’d lasted. It was nice to have a girl at home to think about when upon the lonely wastes of the sea. It wasn’t the same, having only his parents to think about, the romance was absent.

  But a time would come; Williams thought ahead to Halifax. Canadian girls might be more forthcoming, less inhibited and less formal than their English counterparts. After all, Canada had been a pioneering country with wagon trains, gold rushes, saloons and doxies. Some of that spirit must linger yet.

  Williams was thinking un-naval thoughts when the escorting destroyer on the port bow of the convoy began flashing back towards the Commodore and was answered by Signalman MacCord, who reported to Lieutenant Williams.

  ‘Contact, sir, bearing red two five!’

  Williams went into the wheelhouse at the double and, wrenching back the voice-pipe cover to Kemp’s cabin, called the Commodore to the bridge.

  SIX

  Aboard the Stephen Starr the engines were turning over again but Captain Redgrave’s condition had worsened and Flynn was a worried man. The wound was an angry red and the flesh was very swollen and there was a lot of pus. Flynn began to worry about gangrene: could you get gangrene of the thigh? You probably could, and being high up made it the more serious. It wouldn’t have far to go to reach the torso, which was something you couldn’t very well chop off. Flynn consulted with the chief officer and the chief stew
ard, out of the Captain’s hearing — Redgrave was continuing to insist on remaining in the wheelhouse and was shivering most of the time like a castanet.

  The chief steward reckoned he had a smattering of medical knowledge; it had been he who had advised Flynn over the preparation of kaolin. Now he confirmed Flynn’s worst fears.

  ‘Gangrene,’ he said. ‘Gangrene for sure. Only one cure.’

  Flynn knew what that was. He looked up at the chief officer, his face crumpled with anxiety. Hardy said, ‘We can’t do that. Amputate, I mean. We could be wrong, and anyway we haven’t the know-how.’

  ‘No, sir, nor the anaesthetic.’

  The chief steward said, ‘There’s always Scotch. That’s how they did it in the sailing ships. Fill ’em up, uncorked bottle in the mouth.’

  Hardy said, ‘No, we can’t possibly do it. It’d kill him.’

  ‘He’ll die if we don’t, sir.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ The chief steward went on, ‘I’ve seen gangrene before now. In the trenches, in the last lot — I was a pongo then, and never no more, that’s why I came to sea the moment I got my demob back in ’19. Gangrene took ’em off like flies if they didn’t get back to the base surgeons fast. Which they didn’t half the time.’

  Hardy nodded, faced with a wicked decision — what to advise the Captain. And suppose he went unconscious? Then it wouldn’t be a case of advice but of making up his own mind to it. Flynn was thinking of what they hadn’t got aboard: scalpels. Or if they had once, they hadn’t any more. Of course, the galley had knives and the chief steward could procure something, say one of the big cleavers used by the ship’s butcher. Or maybe a nice slim carving knife ... but that wouldn’t go through a thigh bone, it would have to be a cleaver. Flynn shuddered. He made a suggestion even though he knew Mr Hardy would have thought of it already. He asked, ‘How about sending a message, sir? Ask for assistance ... or medical advice, sir, maybe?’

  Hardy was definite. ‘The Captain would never authorize breaking wireless silence. Nor could I.’

  ‘But that Focke-Wulf, sir. They know we’re here.’

  ‘A while ago now — we’ve moved on, back into anonymity. We can’t jeopardize that, Flynn. In any case, where would the assistance come from?’

  There was no answer to that; the convoy, presumably the nearest ships to them, wouldn’t send a doctor back, not now. There was just a chance they might pick up a homeward-bound Fix convoy but that was very slim, it would be like the needle-search in the haystack, since they had no idea of the sailings out of Halifax date-wise. Anyway, it would take too long. Flynn had an idea that if the chief officer didn’t decide to operate mighty fast, then the Captain was going to join his wife and kids — and maybe he’d not be minding that at all.

  ***

  When Mason Kemp reached the Ardara’s bridge the action alarm was sounding and the guns’ crews were already doubling to their stations while down below Mr Portway once again supervised the running-out of the fire hoses. Kemp, through his binoculars, watched the escorting destroyer on the port bow of the convoy breaking off to make its attack on the reported bearing and a few minutes later felt the heavy thuds as the depth-charges exploded deep down. Spouts of water rose and the destroyer on the starboard bow raced across under full power to join in the attack, and there were more explosions. So far as Kemp could see there was no result: no patch of oil, no black, sinister bows or conning-tower emerging hurt, just nothing.

  Then there was a shout from Williams. ‘Port beam, sir! A periscope, I’m almost sure.’

  Two seconds later confirmation came from Leading Signalman Mouncey. ‘Torpedo trails, sir, port beam, two of ’em coming straight for us!’

  Kemp saw them, between the two leading ships of the port column. He spoke to Captain Hampton, urgently. ‘Turn towards, Captain — ’

  Hampton gave the order: ‘Port twenty!’

  Ponderously, the big transport swung to point her bows to the torpedo trail and give a smaller target. Hampton watched closely, ready to check the swing. Kemp said, ‘Hoist the warning signal, Mouncey.’

  ‘Going up now, sir.’ Mouncey had the flags already bent on. A colourful hoist sped fast to the signal yardarm. Now it would be up to the individual ships to take their own avoiding action; Kemp held his breath, gripped the bridge rail until his knuckles stood out white. The trail of the tin fish was now plain to see, coming down on them to pass along their port side.

  ‘I think we’re in the clear, sir,’ Hampton said.

  ‘Yes. But some other poor bugger probably isn’t.’ Kemp waited in anguish. Astern of him now that he had turned, the ships of the convoy were moving on. The Aratapu, also of the Mediterranean-Australia Line, was one of those coming up to dead astern. Behind her was a 15,000-ton ammunition ship, fortunately with empty holds ready for Halifax. Farther out to the north were the one remaining tanker and a number of cargo vessels. The double explosion came within the next two minutes and Kemp swung round to see a sheet of flame and an outpouring of thick, black smoke from the 15,000-tonner. A few more seconds and another explosion came, from farther aft this time — the convoy was drawing ahead of the U-boat now. Kemp passed the word to Hampton to bring the Ardara back on her course, and as he did so he saw the escorts racing back along the convoy’s flank, about to go into another attack.

  Williams made his report to the Commodore. ‘First casualty, sir, SS Bellman, master, Captain Harkness. Two torpedo hits. Second, SS Cerberus, Captain — ’

  ‘Yes, all right, Williams. Hampton, I’d like you to take her in and stand by the Bellman, if you please.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Boats away?’

  Kemp nodded. ‘She’s going. And we can leave the U-boat to the escort. But keep way on — circle round.’

  Hampton passed the orders. The staff captain and chief officer left the bridge at the rush and along the boat deck three nested boats were swung out on the davits and run on the falls to the waterline, their crews embarked at the davits. Slipped, they pulled away fast as the troopships circled, a rescue fleet making for the ammunition ship, which was well down fore and aft and settling in the water, an obvious loss, as was the Cerberus which was being attended by boats from another cargo vessel.

  Two more gone ... Kemp’s face was sombre. There would be more casualties, more families back at home shattered. He watched as later the Ardara’s boats came back to be hooked on to the falls and hoisted to the embarkation deck. The moment they had been hooked on, Kemp had given the order to increase speed again. As the shivering survivors were lifted out Kemp heard screaming, a sustained high note of agony. He clenched his fists, fought to resist an urge to put his hands over his ears. He was thinking that the ship’s doctor was going to be a busy man and hoped he’d be found sober enough to cope. Looking aft from the bridge wing he saw the doctor with his assistant, the recently qualified man from Bart’s, bending over the injured men, then his attention was distracted by Lieutenant Williams.

  ‘Message come from the radio room, sir. Another Admiralty cypher. Addressed Commodore, sir, prefix Most Urgent.’

  ‘Very well, get on to it.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Williams turned away and went at the rush down the ladder to the boat deck and his cabin, where he brought the naval cypher tables from the safe and got down to work. It was not a long signal like the previous one. From the bridge Mason Kemp watched as the torpedoed vessels disappeared in a swirl of sea, both of them abandoned just in time. The escorts carried on with their attack. The convoy proceeded, the columns sorted out again. No collisions: that, Kemp thought, was something to be thankful for. He looked out towards the Aratapu, steaming majestically in her grey paint, and wondered how many years would have to pass before both she and the Ardara would be back in the company’s colours of light blue hull with dark blue boot-topping, and brilliant white upperworks. Or whether indeed either of them would survive the war.

  ***

  The embarked survivors
had been sorted out now. Those who were fit were allocated cabins by Purser Pemmel’s staff and arrangements were made for them to be provided with dry clothing and a meal, plus hot drinks or brandy. One of the seriously injured was the master of the ammunition ship, who had been taken by the blast as he had leaned from his port bridge wing just at the moment one of the torpedoes had hit. There was little left of his face and the head injuries were bad. With the other wounded he was carried below to the sick bay. The ship’s surgeon had never known the place filled up. In peacetime the casualties had been mainly seasick passengers and they hadn’t needed the sick bay’s facilities, or the hospital as it had been called then. There had been the occasional heart attack or stroke, and those had usually remained in their own staterooms, at any rate if they were travelling first class. The hospital’s inhabitants when there were any had tended to be tourist class, the sharers of cabins, who paid less than the first class for the ship’s medical facilities and surgeon’s fees. And since the outbreak of war and the requisition by the government, the Ardara had been lucky in her convoys. She had sailed mainly south around the Cape of Good Hope for Australia, returning with Australian and New Zealand troops. Down there the threat had been principally from the German commerce raiders, surface ships that the Ardara and her consorts had mercifully not met.

  So the doctor was unprepared mentally and was shaking like a leaf at the thought of his own inadequacy to cope. Just before the boats with the survivors had been hooked on to the falls, he had taken a stiffener and he knew the result was on his breath even though he had sucked a couple of peppermint tablets. Everyone else knew it too: peppermint on the doctor’s breath had only the one meaning.

  Sister Jackie Ord took him in hand. ‘Dr Barnes can manage, Doctor.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. He’s very competent.’

  ‘If there’s any difficulty ... ’

  ‘He’ll have your advice, Doctor, naturally.’