by James Philip
At 22:08 hours – the scope went up twice an hour but at twenty-five and thirty-five minute intervals, never on the hour or the actual half-hour – it was twenty-four year old Philpott’s ‘turn’.
“Bloody Hell!” He muttered. “You need to look at this, skipper!”
Francis Barrington disagreed.
He liked his executive officer and was confident that he one day he would be an accomplished captain of one of Her Majesty’s Submarines. Presently, however, he was something of a rough diamond with one too many rough edges needing to be cut to size.
He half-smiled a grim smile.
“Belay that, Number One,” he said gently. “Scope down please!”
Barrington waited patiently.
“What did you see, Michael?” He asked in that paternal, friendly way he preferred to employ when trying to convey important matters to his subordinates. He was abysmal at shouting at people and besides, he honestly did not believe that shouting did a lot of good in the long run. Likewise, other than in a life or death situation he would not dream of in any way slighting or belittling one of his officers in front of his men. Moreover, in this case it would have been a waste of time because Michael Philpott was already realising the error of his ways.
He had been the man at the attack periscope. He had seen what he had seen and he had delayed firstly, communicating what he had seen; and secondly, taking action. He was starting to wear a hangdog look.
“There’s a huge firework display going on somewhere beyond Parata Point, sir. Possible big explosions and a lot of what looks like light AA fire hosing all over the sky.”
The older man thought for a moment.
“No nearby surface contacts?”
“Er, no, sir.”
Barrington sighed, resisted the temptation to ‘air’ the attack periscope for a ten second ‘look’ at the situation.
“Right,” he decided, speaking as if he was taking his executive officer into her personal confidence. “We’ll drop the snork and sit at a hundred feet for an hour or so before we head south. We’ll stand off the mouth of the Gulf of Ajaccio to get a straight line look at whatever is going on in Ajaccio, Number One.”
Ninety minutes later and some five miles off the broad entrance to the Gulf of Ajaccio, Barrington could see fires burning in the distant port, or rather the glow of big fires painted on the underside of the clouds above Ajaccio. Evidently, it seemed that somebody in England had not been satisfied with just sinking of a couple of destroyers; either that or the RAF had felt a little left out and joined in the fun. Briefly, he considered taking Alliance into the wide bay south of the burning town but quickly talked himself out of it. His job had been done, very well done, and stooging around any longer was asking for the sort of trouble that neither he, nor his boat needed.
In any event the order from Malta to make his best underwater speed to a new patrol area was received at 23:57 hours.
Alliance was to take up station off Rosas, a small coastal town and port in the extreme north eastern corner of Catalonian Spain very nearly within touching distance of the French border.
Francis Barrington had quirked an involuntary grin when he read the decoded plain text.
‘Rosas’, now there was a name to play with. He had read all of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower stories, positively lived and breathed the career of Horatio Hornblower. Rosas was where Hornblower had fought HMS Sutherland to the death against four French ships of her own size and weight of broadside in ‘A Ship of the Line’. The story had ended with the Sutherland sinking in Rosas harbour surrounded by the dismasted, crippled hulks of her four foes with the hero of the piece about to fall into French hands; a cliff-hanger marvellously resolved in the sequel ‘Flying Colours’ published in 1938.
Back in 1942 the captain of HMS Alliance had imagined, falsely, that he was destined to live that dream in another, different war when he was posted as an RNVR – Royal Navy Volunteer Reservist – freshly minted sub-lieutenant to Malta in 1942. That had been a nightmare experience. The constant bombing, the dreadful attrition against the Italian Navy in the fatal waters around the Maltese Archipelago, the drip, drip, drip of boats lost and friends consumed in that war. He had been a very young man, in many ways younger even than his years with no real experience of the world, people or of anything much in particular. Looking back his wartime experience in the Mediterranean had been a bewildering melange of terrors and blunders that he had been outrageously lucky to survive. He had believed he had left all that behind him and that his seagoing days were long over; and then the cataclysm had fallen and that unexpected letter had arrived called him back from the wilderness. Suddenly, a life unfulfilled had acquired new meaning.
Now in a few days time he would be steering Alliance into the same waters sailed by his younger self’s Georgian hero.
Oh, to be the captain of a 74-gun ship of the line in Nelson’s Navy!
To place one’s ship alongside another and do battle like men of yore!
Oh, to fight with steel and blood and iron, not Torpex, at ranges far too far apart to be able to see one’s enemy’s eyes...
It was all nonsense, of course.
People said that one in four, possibly as many as one in three of the population of the planet had perished in the October War or from the sickness and famines in its aftermath. Hundreds of millions had died or were suffering still, and all Francis Barrington, RN (Reserve) could think about was aping his fictional role model!
How ridiculous was that?
Barrington had gone to his cabin to decrypt the sensitive part of the communication from Flag Office Submarines, Malta. Now he returned to the control room.
The boat was still running quiet as she crept out to sea to the west of Corsica like a thief in the night, seeking sea room before the dawn when she would run north west at eleven knots on her diesels with the snork up.
“We have new orders,” Barrington announced, unable to eradicate a certain quiet pleasure from his voice. “We are congratulated for our good work in these parts and are required to make ourselves scarce. Pronto!” He smiled and made eye contacts around the compartment. “Further, we are to make best underwater speed to a new patrol area off the Spanish coast north of Barcelona. Specifically, we are to watch and report on shipping movements in, around and out of the Spanish port of Rosas, before proceeding north to stand off Perpignan. That is all. I will let you all know if I receive any further clarification of our orders. You may pass on what I have said to other crew members.”
Barrington joined Michael Philpott at the plot table.
The younger man opened his mouth to apologise for his earlier inadvertent lapse at the attack periscope.
Barrington chuckled, raised a hand to pat his shoulder.
“Live and learn, Michael,” he said quietly. “That’s the ticket.” A wayward thought crossed his mind. “I suppose that after the excitement of earlier today we ought to see if we’ve got a Jolly Roger in our signals locker, what?”
Chapter 5
Saturday 6th June 1964
Damman, Saudi Arabia
Fifty-one year old Major General Thomas Daly’s aircraft had landed thirty minutes before the first giant explosion within the sprawling US War Stores Depot in the desert west of Damman.
The commander designate of all Australian and New Zealand ground troops in the Middle East might have been forgiven for thinking the gods were against him as he clambered out of his car, surveyed the debris-strewn quayside and contemplated the still burning warehouses adjacent to where the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ammunition Ship Retainer had been moored twenty-four hours ago. The bow and stern of the ship, fire scorched and twisted almost out of all recognition stuck out of the water at unnatural angles, and tens of tons of ordnance, fixed naval and tank rounds and shells mostly, lay in the tangled steel and shattered brickwork...everywhere.
“You must be Tom Daly!” Called a comfortably proportioned naval officer who, even at a distance; was clearly of a similar vi
ntage to the newcomer. Several predominantly youthful staffers followed in the other man’s wake as he approached the Australian.
“I’m Nick Davey. Flag Officer, ABNZ Persian Gulf Squadron, presumably on account of my many and egregious sins committed in a former life,” the Englishman declared cheerfully. “Dear, dear,” he tutted, “this is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”
The two men shook hands, taking the measure of each other.
The Australian’s gaze shifted to the small, sinewy, scarred man of indeterminate middle years standing beside Davey with a holstered Webley revolver on his waist band.
“This is Fleet Chief Petty Officer McCann,” the Englishman declared. “VC!” This he added with a barely suppressed chortle of delight.
“Mister McCann,” Daly saluted cursorily and stuck out his right hand.
Nevil ‘Spider’ McCann was still not reconciled to his new rank – one specially made up for him by the First Sea Lord, Sir Varyl Begg – and the notoriety that was the fate of all holders of the Victoria Cross. His days on HMS Talavera had been among the happiest days of his life and secretly, he yearned to be back on the old Battle class destroyer; but Talavera was gone, her survivors scattered to the winds and as his late wife had often observed ‘the Devil always makes work for idle hands’, so once he discovered Peter Christopher was being sent to America he had put in a request to be reassigned to sea duty. Shortly thereafter, he had found himself on the aircraft carrying Read Admiral Davey to South Africa to join HMS Tiger on her passage around the Cape to the Persian Gulf.
“After that business at Malta,” Daly inquired as she shook the smaller man’s hand, “I’d have thought you’d earned a good rest ashore, Mister McCann?”
“I lost my wife on the night of the war, sir,” the former Bantamweight boxing champion of the Mediterranean Fleet explained respectfully. “There’s nothing to keep me in England. Admiral Davey was so kind as to request my services on Tiger, sir.”
Daly and the two Englishmen fell into slow step.
The Australian had not canvassed for, nor expected to be sent to the Middle East. He had thought his fighting days were over after Korea. A native of Ballarat in Victoria he had attended the Duntroon Royal Military College in the Australian Capital Territories before being commissioned into the Light Horse Regiment. In the late thirties he had served in the British Army on the North West Frontier in India, and thereafter ‘enjoyed’ a crowded and varied career during World War II. Rising to Brigade Major of the 18th Brigade at Tobruk he later attended staff school at Haifa in Palestine preparatory to joining the 5th Division in New Guinea as Senior Staff Officer. By the end of that war he commanded the 2/10th Battalion in the invasion of Balikpapan in Borneo, earning a Distinguished Service Order. Post war he had had spells at the Joint Services Staff College in the United Kingdom, during which he had met and married his wife, Heather. Back in Australia he had been posted to Duntroon and in 1952 gone to Korea to take command of the 28th Commonwealth Brigade, becoming the first Australian to command a combined Australian-British infantry formation in that conflict. But all that seemed an awfully long time ago and a long succession of staff jobs since had not been the ideal preparation to lead men in what seemed likely to be an extremely bloody campaign.
“Sabotage, we think,” Nick Davey offered, looking around at the destruction as smoke billowed across the dockside. “At the time this was going on there were several attempted assassinations in Riyadh according to our Saudi hosts. Cairo is in flames, they say. My intelligence people think all the trouble was caused by Soviet ‘sleeper agents’. They may be right; first time for everything, what!”
“We must have lost a lot of ordnance, Admiral?”
“I’m told most of the AP rounds for your Centurions were offloaded or sitting on the quayside ready for transport north. Retainer was making ready to cross deck reloads onto my frigates and destroyers. Most of my ships have half-empty magazines.” Nothing in Davey’s manner gave Daly the impression that this was remotely troubling him. “Never mind! Worse things happen at sea, what!”
Spider McCann had hung back a few feet so that the two commanders could converse confidentially. The officers could get on with their chit chat and he would watch their backs in the meantime. The wreckage all around him told him everything he needed to know about how ‘safe’ the ships and the men of the ABNZ Squadron were in this particular harbour. That was why whenever his Admiral went ashore he had plenty of his men – armed to the teeth - loitering in the vicinity.
“If you say so, Admiral...”
“Nick, old man. I’ve never been one to stand on ceremony and I’m too old to change my ways now.”
“Tom,” the Australian volunteered, a little taken aback. Even in this day and age most British officers of his acquaintance were sticklers for their ‘prerogatives’, rights and ranks. Even though he and Davey were of equivalent seniority in their respective services, it was unsettling to encounter a man so obviously unconcerned with the old ‘proprieties’. “Good to meet you, Nick.”
The Englishman waved around at the scene of devastation.
“If the bastards think this will make us pack up and go home they’ve got another thing coming, Tom!”
Chapter 6
Saturday 6th June 1964
HMAS Anzac, Shatt al-Arab
The pre-war navigable channel had not so much shifted as split into two distinct openings at the margins where the Arvand River flowed into the Persian Gulf. HMAS Anzac had grounded twice before Commander Stephen Turnbull had called forward the smaller, shallower draught Ton class minesweepers HMS Essington and HMS Tariton to lead his ship, drawing fourteen feet, and the bigger HMAS Sydney with a draught of twenty-five feet up river. The two deep water channels merged about five miles upstream where, it was discovered the ‘navigation’ had shifted some fifty to a hundred yards closer to the western shore of the Faw Peninsula than it had been the previous occasion Turnbull had taken Anzac up to Abadan some three weeks ago.
This had prompted dark premonitions that it might be problematic to bring Sydney, the former aircraft carrier now operating as a fast transport ship, alongside the unloading jetties at Abadan. When the Red Army arrived in Basra Province the garrison at Abadan was going to need every tank, round of ammunition and all the reinforcing Commandoes that Sydney was bringing up river. However, as dawn broke over the grey, churning waters of the great waterway of the ancient Mesopotamian world Anzac’s constantly pinging sonar was consistently indicating fifteen to twenty feet under her bow as he accepted the TBS – ‘talk between ships’ – handset from the bridge speaker.
“Anzac speaking,” he drawled, squinting into the brilliant sunshine bathing the bridge. Just an hour after full dawn it was getting hot, very hot even for a man acclimatised to the dry, fiery heat of the New South Wales outback.
A mile down river the Sydney was idling in the mainstream, treading water awaiting the arrival of a pilot to con her inshore.
Silvery towers rose above the metallic sprawl of the refineries spread across Abadan Island less than a mile away, as Stephen Turnbull surveyed the approach to the oiling piers and wharves. Tanker skippers had been the only westerners who really understood the moods of the Shatt al-Arab, where to find deep water and how to keep out of trouble but the river had been closed to civilian traffic for over a month now. It was only a matter of time before the Red Air Force – whether by design or error – attacked Abadan or began to prey on shipping on the Arvand River.
Since the Soviet invasion of Iran much of the Abadan complex had been shut down; and the tankers had diverted to Damman-Dhahran where the Saudis had been only too keen to accept - probably worthless - notes of credit issued by the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
They said there were hundreds of tons, perhaps, thousands of tons of gold, silver, platinum and other rare, and in current times hugely precious metals buried under the ruins of London; that the Army had moved in to guard the vaults of the Bank of England from
looters. They said that millions of diamonds and gems of every description were in ‘sealed off’ subterranean safe rooms; that the wealth of the old Empire was waiting to be unlocked to pay for the rebuilding of a new, garden city London. But talk was cheap and the rumour mill insatiable; to the best of his knowledge there was very little of any substance to lent any real value to the notes of credit buying every drop of the Middle Eastern crude oil that now reached British ports.
“My intention is to hold station in mid-stream or in the general vicinity while Sydney docks and unloads,” Stephen Turnbull said, trying not to sound overly tongue-in-cheek. The Soviets would be listening to every word spoken over the unscrambled VHF link; the Russians were not the only ones who dealt in ‘smoke and mirrors’ tricks. “Please send me a pilot boat. I may need to move a mile or two up river to anchor overnight. Anzac Out.”
Actually, what he had in mind was taking the Anzac, Essington and the Tariton up beyond Khorramshahr, and if possible, all the way to the outskirts of Basra where a before the war an ugly industrial area had been spreading along the eastern bank of the river opposite the old city. This industrial’ area was home to hundreds of workshops, the river’s eastern bank was where fishing boats were hauled out of the water for repair, and nets were dried and patched. In the warren of small factories, some of which were built right on top of the Iraq-Iran border, lay the real ‘industry’ of Iraq. The whole district had been evacuated after the abortive Iraqi armoured incursion in Iran north of Khorramshahr. If it remained deserted it might be possible to steam right up to Basra. But that was looking too far ahead. Turnbull’s mission was firstly, to see if the Arvand River was navigable south of Basra – it ought to be even though he winter melt waters from the far north were exhausted and the level of the river was falling towards its annual low - and; secondly, to look for trouble.
