Convoy of War (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  Frapp asked, ‘What is it, sir?’

  ‘Suspected commerce raider, Frapp.’

  ‘One of them pocket-battleships, sir?’

  ‘Don’t know. Just keep on top line, that’s all. It could be anything.’ The term commerce raider covered a lot of ship types. Williams stared around, the eagle-eyed look of a genuine gunnery officer. ‘Frapp ... ’

  ‘Yessir?’

  Williams pointed. ‘The gun barrel, Frapp. Seagull droppings. Have it cleaned up.’

  Frapp bared his teeth and muttered sotto voce, ‘Need bloody stuffing you do.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘I heard — ’

  ‘I said, needs some buffing up, sir. See to it right away, sir.’

  ‘You do that, Frapp.’ Williams moved away for’ard.

  When Williams was out of earshot Frapp said to one of the guns’ crew, ‘You there. Officer has birdshit on his mind. Get rid of it, son.’ He looked out to starboard. He couldn’t see anything, except that the escort was redeploying. Three of the heavy cruisers were heading out for the bearing, moving fast, with great swathes of sea sweeping back from their knifing bows, and the old R-Class battleship was moving ponderously astern of them. Frapp said, ‘If it’s a bloody Hun out there it won’t bloody linger. The raiders don’t attack escorts the size of ours. Not unless they’ve gone clean round the bend like Harpic.’

  On the bridge Kemp had come to the same conclusion. ‘Just shadowing, I fancy.’

  Hampton nodded. Brigadier O’Halloran, whose promise about bridge-keeping hadn’t lasted all that long, had come up when the alarm rattlers had sounded; now he asked questions in a somewhat hectoring voice. He knew little of sea warfare, in fact he knew nothing, but was keen to learn.

  ‘Mean they’ll report back to Berlin, Commodore?’

  ‘Most likely to the U-boat packs direct. Submarines can receive whilst surfaced for battery charging and so on.’

  ‘Uh-huh. How come they shadow inside our radar range?’

  ‘Because they have to, it’s inevitable. They shadow by means of their own radar and the range is the same as ours. Or they catapult off their spotter aircraft and the effect’s the same. They’ll just have picked us up and now they’ll be getting out at maximum speed.’

  ‘Just buggering off, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’ The radar reports had confirmed this already: the range was widening fast, very fast. It was possible the raider was one of the German battle-cruisers, the Scharnhorst or the Gneisenau. If so she was going to get away; the escort wouldn’t leave the convoy too far to the north, in case the German ship proved to be a decoy. The convoy was the main concern. But Kemp knew that from now on the unknown ship would remain in spasmodic contact, approaching to get its radar echoes and then making off again at speed, breaking wireless silence with impunity to report to the U-boat packs. With her presence already known to the convoy, there was no point in attempting anonymity ...

  There was a low rumble from across the sea, like thunder.

  O’Halloran said, ‘For Christ’s sake. That’s gunfire.’

  Kemp nodded. ‘Very distant. This begins to look like an attack on someone else, not us.’

  ‘A westbound convoy?’

  ‘I don’t know. So far as I’m aware there shouldn’t be an OB at sea just now. And the escort’s radar would have — ’ Kemp broke off as an urgent report came from the radio room abaft the wheelhouse and chartroom.

  ‘Mayday, sir. Reads: “Am under attack by heavy German ships.”’

  ‘Call sign?’

  ‘SS Stephen Starr, sir.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Kemp blew out his breath. Arse-end Charlie from the OB — up to the time they’d left Halifax there had still been no news and the assumption had been, as day after day had gone by and the freighter had failed to show, that she’d fallen to a U-boat. Not so, evidently: she’d struggled on, plagued with her doddery engines, doing her best to reach Halifax and load for home, without her master who had died aboard the Prince of Wales. Now she was being blown out of the water ... Kemp’s grip tightened on the bridge rail and he cursed aloud into the teeth of the wind blowing across the North Atlantic.

  O’Halloran asked, ‘What’s the Stephen Starr, Commodore?’

  ‘A small ship. Just a small ship with not much speed and engines that should have been taken out and scrapped years ago.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Not much loss, then. That’s fortunate.’

  Fury swelled in Kemp’s head. The veins stood out, but he contained the explosion. It would be bad for the convoy Commodore to fall out with the OC Troops, very bad. There was plenty Kemp wanted to shout at the soldier, to talk of courage and guts and determination and a sense of duty to an island nation facing the threat of starvation if ships, small ships such as the Stephen Starr as well as the bigger ones, didn’t get through Hitler’s U-boat blockade. But he had the feeling O’Halloran wouldn’t understand how seamen felt about these things. The brigadier had the look of a dug-out, a real relic of the last war, almost a blimp. Possibly he had served under Douglas Haig or the other top generals, men who accepted enormous casualties with a shrug of the shoulders, regarding the men as no more than cannon-fodder to form a vast platform of corpses over which one day the Allied armies would march in victory upon Berlin.

  No more gunfire was heard after that single salvo, and within the next half-hour the cruisers of the escort were to be seen returning once more, appearing over the southern horizon. As they came closer the signal lamps began flashing from the flagship and Leading Signalman Mathias reported.

  ‘To Commodore, sir. “Enemy out of range. No survivors ex Stephen Starr.”’

  She must, Kemp thought, have gone in one God-Almighty burst of flame and torn metal. He felt deathly cold inside, imagining the horror of the holocaust. There was nothing unusual about it, in terms of the war at sea, but he felt a special responsibility for the game old ship that had been a lame duck almost from the start. As more signalling came from the flagship, Kemp passed another order.

  ‘Secure action stations.’

  The convoy moved on, once again under full close escort.

  ***

  ‘Beg pardon, sir.’

  Pemmel, in his cabin, looked up from his desk. His visitor was Mr Portway. ‘Well, Mr Portway?’

  Portway shuffled and coughed into his hand. ‘I was just wondering, like. What decision you’ve reached.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Still considering, like.’

  ‘Yes.’ Pemmel hadn’t been sent for by Kemp as he had half expected to be, to receive the advice cut off by the action alarm earlier. No doubt the Commodore was busy: by all accounts Kemp wasn’t the sort of man to forget conveniently. Pemmel said sourly, ‘You’ll be told in due course, Mr Portway.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Another cough. ‘That young woman, she flaunts herself. It’s not right. A man’s a man all said and done.’

  ‘That’ll be all, Mr Portway.’

  ‘Now look, don’t you forget — ’

  ‘Out!’ Sheer anger brought authority to Pemmel’s voice, and a sudden red blaze to his eyes. Portway looked startled, opened his mouth, shut it again and backed away to the door. He went out. Pemmel sat on, chest heaving, face flushed, fists clenched on the desk top, hammering. Damn it, he was the purser, he wore three gold bands on his cuff with white cloth between, he was in charge of the whole catering department from the chief steward down. And now he believed he might have the measure of Portway. Fat and flabby and full of spurious bravery when he thought he had his superior in his grip — but a basic coward who could be put in his place by a show of authority? Or by a counter threat: Pemmel had had those earlier words with Jackie Ord and knew a thing or two. His hand shaking with the anger that was still in him he took up his telephone and called Kemp’s cabin. He was in luck: Kemp answered.

  ‘Commodore here.’

  Purser, sir — ’

  ‘Yes, Pemmel.’
/>   ‘Thank you for seeing me, sir, and listening. I’ve found an answer, so — ’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. The best way is for you to make your own decisions, you know. From now on, I don’t want to know any more about it.’

  Kemp rang off. When he had done so he wondered if he had sounded too peremptory, too much as though he was washing his hands. But it had never been his concern and Pemmel had vastly overstepped the mark by talking to him about it in the first place. On the other hand a fellow officer of the Line had been in difficulties ... but what he had just said was true: a man in the position of a purser should make his own decisions without wanting his hand held.

  Below in his cabin, Pemmel used his telephone again, this time to the main office. ‘Purser here.’ An AP had answered. ‘I want a word with Crump, the night steward — when he wakes. No special hurry. See to it, please.’

  ***

  The rumours ran round the ship: word about the sinking of the Stephen Starr had spread and most of the ship’s company felt as Kemp had done. Arse-end Charlie was a special mate, a flaming nuisance to the escort and the convoy’s safety but a plodder who’d done his honest best to catch up. So there was a good deal of talk about the Stephen Starr’s fate and much speculation as to who had sunk the ship. There was no hard information about that, but it was obvious that something heavy was at large, and according to the navy as represented by Petty Officer Frapp the chances were that it was a pocket-battleship such as the Deutschland or the Admiral Scheer, carrying six 11-inch guns in her main armament, plus smaller guns and torpedo-tubes.

  But according to Frapp, who was talking to Bosun Bush at the after end of C deck, even a pocket-battleship was unlikely to attack. ‘Escort’s too strong,’ he said. ‘The buggers don’t like being out-gunned, Bose. I’m not worried.’

  ‘Pongoes are,’ Bush said, grinning.

  ‘Sod them,’ Frapp said disinterestedly. ‘Brown jobs get on my wick, all that stamping and saluting!’

  ‘And puking. My lads spend all day with the deck hoses, sluicing down. Still, you get used to it. Fare-paying passengers, they puke too.’

  ‘Been long in the liners, have you?’

  ‘Forty years, about,’ Bush said briefly. He wiped the sleeve of his tunic across his nose. ‘I was an AB in the Titanic.’

  ‘Was you?’ Frapp looked at Bush with a new interest. The Titanic was history and high drama, an unsinkable ship, a bloody great iceberg, the band playing and all those deaths — and succour in fact not all that far off if there hadn’t been some sort of communications balls-up. ‘What was it like that night, eh?’

  ‘Bloody,’ Bush said. ‘You’ve no idea ... and I don’t ever want it to happen to me again.’

  ‘Don’t blame you, mate!’ Frapp said with feeling. ‘But at least there won’t be any women and kids. That’s apart from the nursing sisters, of course. But it’s not going to happen anyway. Like I said — we’ve got a nice strong escort.’

  Bush gave a sardonic laugh. He’d been in a sight more convoys than Frapp had, in the merchant ships at any rate, the sitting ducks, the main target for attack.

  The day wore on, taking the HX nearer home, beginning once again to close the sea area to the south of Cape Farewell, moving homeward slowly through waters that would become more and more dangerous as the sea miles fell away behind, the wakes streaming back towards the New World. That New World was in evidence on the bridge throughout the afternoon watch; and with apparent peace around the convoy for a while Kemp took the opportunity to get a couple or so hours’ sleep. He would be on the bridge throughout the night. For now he left the brigadier to Lieutenant Williams, who strode from one side to another briskly, at O’Halloran’s military pace, like a dog trotting by his master’s side. Williams tended to be rank conscious and although he regarded the brigadier as a has-been like Kemp the air was thick with sirs.

  ‘Young, to be Assistant Commodore, son.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Responsible job ... ’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A lot of sea experience?’

  Modesty would be in order. ‘A fair amount, sir.’

  ‘RNVR. They call you the Saturday-afternoon sailors, don’t they, son?’

  ‘Er ... yes, sir. But there’ve been a lot of Saturdays since the war started, sir.’

  ‘Oh, sure there have. Still.’ O’Halloran chuckled. ‘Like God, maybe.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your navy. Moves in a mysterious way — get it?’

  This was O’Halloran’s idea of a joke; he chuckled again. Politely, Williams laughed. But he didn’t like being patronized; and the brisk walk was wearing him out. It was, however, interrupted half an hour later when another message reached the bridge from the radio room, this time a cypher from the Admiralty. When broken down this proved to be another warning: as on the outward voyage, a strong presence of U-boats was believed to lie across the track of the HX convoy to the southeast of Cape Farewell, and this time no one at the Admiralty had any doubts that they would attack. Later an air strike might come. The fleet aircraft-carrier that had been standing by with fighter squadrons embarked had been ordered to sea from the Clyde to rendezvous with the HX convoy. In the meantime Kemp was to alter course to the south in an attempt to outflank the U-boat packs.

  THIRTEEN

  Kemp broadcast the word throughout the ship; after that O’Halloran addressed his troops. Everything was okay for the moment, but before the next dawn they might be in the thick of it, he said, repeating what the Commodore had already told them. They had to be ready for anything and before dusk action stations that evening there would be an extra boat drill to ensure that every man knew exactly where to go in an emergency. The ship’s Captain, he said, would say a few words about that.

  Hampton went to the microphone. ‘Captain speaking to you all, but with special reference to the troops.’ He paused: there was a silence around the ship, above and below. ‘If we’re hit, we may have trouble with the generators — that has to be considered. The alleyways could be in darkness. My ship’s company will of course assist with torches if that happens, but some of you may have to feel your way to your boat stations. You should make very sure you’re familiar with the ship’s layout. Above all, act calmly. We don’t want panic — I’m sure there won’t be, but for the great majority of you this is your first experience of the sea, and I understand the difficulties of an unfamiliar background. There is a first time for every one of us. One more thing: if it should happen that I have to give the order to abandon, then there will be strict and absolute discipline along the embarkation deck — the deck from which you embark into the lifeboats. For the purpose of abandoning ship, or any other emergency in a sea sense, the orders of my officers, petty officers and leading hands will take precedence over those of your own officers and NCOs. There will be total obedience to those orders for the sake of every soul aboard. That is all.’

  The broadcaster clicked off and throughout the ship the men took stock. To the troops, an unfamiliar world it certainly was, and one that wouldn’t keep still. Some had got their sea legs, many hadn’t. Almost to a man they were from the rolling Canadian prairies, a few from towns such as Edmonton or Calgary, none at all from the coastal areas. They had never before been confined in a steel can that rose and fell and lurched from side to side, criss-crossed with alleyways and filled with ladders and stairways, the air itself noisy with the continuous hum of dynamos and forced-draught blowers and vague engine sounds from deep below, and with the peculiar smell that always filled a ship at sea, compounded of wax polish, a vague oiliness, tinned air and, in a troopship, human sweat and its effect on serge uniforms.

  There was a decided nervousness along the troop decks. Aboard a ship you couldn’t get away. Not that many of the men would think of running from action; but if you did want to when aboard ship, there was nowhere to run to other than a leap overboard. That was something they might have to do anyway if the worst happened. One of the ser
geants had had a word with a bloke who looked important and knowledgeable: Master-at-Arms Rockett, ex-Regulating Petty Officer RN. The pongo had asked a question: what would happen if any of the lifeboats got damaged by a torpedo explosion?

  That got a sour answer: ‘Use one o’ the others, that’s what. You’ll be told ... and no torpedo hitting below the waterline’s all that likely to damage the boats. Though it could ’appen. What’s more likely is that we’d get a list one side or the other and if the list’s big enough, well, then likely we couldn’t get the boats away on the other side, not unless we slid the buggers down the plates like a load o’ kids on a playground slide. All right?’

  ‘Then what?’

  MAA Rockett moved up and down on the balls of his feet, like a bobby. ‘’Ave to jump, wouldn’t you? But no panic, now. This is all ’ypothetical. We’ll cope, you’ll see. We’re used to it, mate.’

  Nevertheless the word spread. Not via the sergeant; but the conversation had been overheard and the galley wireless went into instant operation and there was just the tinge of a fear-smell as the Ardara moved on towards boat drill, dusk action stations, and nightfall.

  ***

  A knock at the purser’s cabin door and Crump appeared. ‘You wanted to see me, sir.’

  ‘Yes, Crump. Come in. Sit down.’

  For the second time since leaving the Clyde Crump sat in the purser’s cabin. This time, no drink: Mr Pemmel was being formal — formal yet friendly and a shade oily with it. Crump knew what it was all about. But he wasn’t going to speak till he was spoken to.

  ‘Crump ... ’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘You were a primary witness. You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Crump sat with his hands on his knees, staring over the purser’s head at the white-painted bulkhead behind. Pemmel said, ‘You saw it all.’