* * *
Cole was with Rowbottom on the main switchboard, freeing Dixon to work on the gyro. Jake had been tinkering at it with him; he came back now to join the others at the wardroom table. Passing Hobday, who was leaning against the ladder and humming to himself as he watched the trim, he offered, ‘Like me to take over for a spell?’
Hobday’s otherwise sharp nose had a round end to it, like a knob. Gleaming with sweat on it, it was more noticeable. He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you when I do.’ Wishart was saying, ‘Mistake to take too much for granted, but it looks as if they must have reckoned we were on our way out of the straits when we popped up. Otherwise there’d be hunting craft now like fleas on a dog’s back.’
Jake said, sitting down, ‘You mean a Turkish dog.’
‘You have a point.’
Robins had one too: ‘What made us shoot down and hit the bottom as we did?’
‘We had to get deeper quickly, to avoid that Turk. At twenty feet the bridge and periscope standards aren’t far under the surface, you see. But we must’ve been in or on a high-density layer of water – to break through it we had to take in ballast and speed up. It did the trick rather too well. And we were in shallower water than we’d thought.’
Robins rolled over on to his back. Question-time was over, apparently. Jake asked Burtenshaw, ‘Don’t you want any explanations of anything?’
‘Since you mention it.’ The Marine pointed to a brass flap in the deck amidships. ‘That bearded chap sloshed two bucketfuls of what looked like dirty water down through the hole there. Is that a reasonable thing to do?’
‘The battery tanks are down there. Two of them. The cells stand on wooden gratings, and if you get a crack in one of them you get acid spilling. To neutralise it we dump in a solution of common soda that washes through under the grating and gets pumped out at the other end. If you didn’t, the acid would burn a hole, eventually – and there are ballast tanks further down, under the batteries. Also, if salt water mixed with the acid you’d get chlorine gas, which – well, you’re hot on science, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, red-hot.’ Burtenshaw quoted from some textbook, ‘“Yellowish-green gas of pungent and irritating odour and peculiar taste. Acts violently on the lungs and causes—”’
From outside the hull – for’ard somewhere – a harsh, rasping noise …
‘Stop together – slow astern together!’ Instantaneously, Wishart had taken over. Nick thought, trying to keep out of everybody’s way, Here we go again …
Jake Cameron headed for his chart table. Moving away, he’d knocked Burtenshaw’s book off the corner of the table. He turned back, and picked it up.
‘Sorry.’
Burtenshaw nodded, and finished that quote: ‘“-causes death by choking”.’
‘What?’
‘Chlorine gas. Causes—’
‘Oh, yes.’ He went to the chart table. The scraping noise was drawing for’ard as the boat gathered sternway to clear the mine wire. Jake saw that Wishart had recently put a new DR on the chart and that at about this time they should have been altering course to starboard, eastward, to round Nagara Point.
‘Stop port. Starboard ten. How much water here, pilot?’
‘On the DR there’s thirty-one fathoms, sir.’
‘Magnetic course to clear Nagara?’ Wishart saw Dixon still working on the gyro. ‘Leave that. I want you on main motors, Dixon.’
The scraping noise stopped. In the thick silence Jake told his captain, ‘Course of north sixty-six east should take us down the middle.’ Wishart nodded, giving the thing time. Crabb’s and Morton’s eyes were fixed on their gauges; Morton, as ever, streamed with sweat. McVeigh’s mouth was slightly open, showing his yellow teeth. The other two ERAs, Knight and Bradshaw, stood motionless, staring at fixed points on the deckheads, their expressions perhaps deliberately preoccupied. Signalman Ellery squatted near Agnew, close to the after bulkhead; his brown eyes in the monkeyish face never seemed to look anywhere except at Wishart. Agnew looked tired. He was a growing lad and he needed regular sleep. Burtenshaw, in the chair opposite Nick’s, was leafing without much apparent enthusiasm through the pages of his Tolstoy, while behind his shoulder Able Seaman Louis Lewis leant against the curved edge of the latched-back bulkhead door and picked his nose with a thumb and forefinger. Lewis was not, Nick thought, the ideal choice for a wardroom messman.
‘Stop starboard. Midships. North sixty east did you say, pilot?’
‘Sixty-six, sir.’
Wishart cut into the helm and telegraph acknowledgements. ‘Port fifteen. Slow ahead together. One hundred and fifty feet.’
Roost’s broad, countryman’s face was placid, amiable as he spun the wheel. Port wheel, starboard rudder. ‘Fifteen o’ port wheel on, sir.’ The motors’ forward thrust allowed screws and ’planes to bite, and the ’planesmen had her edging downwards. Jake, staring at the chart, wondered whether the middle of the channel, the track he’d just pencilled on it, was really the best bet. One might alternatively have hugged the shoreline around the point or gone over to the northern side. But for that matter one might also have spun a coin. The mines might be anywhere. This might be the best track, or the worst. He saw again in his mind that line in his own erratic scrawl, You needn’t worry for two seconds about me, you know. But thinking of her, of what might become of her if she were left alone, that brought worry. Real, and sharp. He told himself not to think about it: to remember that thing about the coward dying a thousand deaths. Of course, one could argue about whether it could really be considered ‘brave’ to be unimaginative; but that wasn’t the point, it was a matter of control, of simply not allowing the imagination that much rope. Mental discipline, he told himself. He was leaning with his forearms on the chart, looking down at the shape of the Dardanelles and this zigzag bottleneck in the middle of them. He decided that even if it was not cowardly it was damn silly to allow oneself to think about the one and only aspect of one’s situation that made this kind of ordeal difficult or frightening. (Begging a question slightly there: but never mind, the basic reasoning was sound enough.) The reason you did think about it, of course, was that it was there, real, and it was bad, so your mind dug away at it in order to flush it out, beat it somehow. But you couldn’t: and you knew by now that you couldn’t, so surely to God—
A clang- sharp, and then reverberating. On the other side, starboard side, amidships.
Several pairs of eyes – heads – had jerked in the direction of the sound. Jake had caught his breath; he let it seep away through clenched teeth. That clang had been the slap of a mine-wire against the submarine’s side, and now it had begun its grinding passage aft along the saddle-tanks.
‘Stop starboard. Port ten.’
Jake looked over at the passengers. Burtenshaw was facing the other way; he couldn’t see if he was reading or just holding the book and listening. Robins, up on the bunk, had his eyes shut and he’d jerked his hands up to press their palms against his ears. Well, when you’d nothing to do except lie there and listen … Only Everard was watching what was happening in the control room. Jake wondered if he was scared, or as unruffled as he looked. That lack of expression could well be a mask: as one knew only too well oneself … He turned back to the chart. He heard CPO Crabb’s report, ‘Hundred an’ fifty, sir’, and the other two – young Agnew’s and the helmsman’s. He realised, studying the chart, that in fact there wasn’t really any alternative to this track that Wishart had put them on. The straits ahead at Nagara were less than one mile wide from shore to shore, there was very little room on the northern side, and closer to the point itself there were several shallow spots. Also, there was a note on the chart in his own recent Indian-ink lettering about a reported inshore current on that side. It had put Goeben on the beach here — obviously she’d tried to cut it too fine, but a submarine certainly couldn’t afford to monkey with it. If she got swept up on those shallows the Turks would get some easy target practice, they’d take their time about
blowing her to pieces. What it came down to was brutally simple: that to get through this narrow stretch you had to take your chances with whatever mines or nets they’d planted in it.
Chapter 5
‘Down periscope.’ Wishart told Hobday, ‘Still too murky for a fix. But we’re more or less in the middle, and that’s what matters.’
The clock on the for’ard bulkhead showed two thirty-five. By dead reckoning E.57 should have been more than two miles past Nagara Point. After another two-and-a-half miles they’d be out of this widening funnel of land and in a position where an eighteen-mile run on one course would take them through to the Marmara. Two-and-a-half miles, with the submerged tide added to the boat’s slow grouped-down speed, would take half an hour; and barring accidents or interference the final run could be expected to take another three or four.
Wishart moved over the the chart table and leant on it beside Jake Cameron. A favourite attitude for them both, Nick thought, glancing that way. Characteristic. Seen from the rear like this, their posteriors, side by side, looked elephantine. Burtenshaw pointed: ‘You could move that column over to this one.’
‘Ah.’ Nick rather wished the Marine would allow him to play this game of patience on his own. He nodded.
‘So I can.’ Burtenshaw was on the other side of the table, seeing the cards upside-down and trying to spot each opportunity before Nick did. He moved the file of cards. ‘Thanks.’ Patience, indeed; and a card out of Wishart’s hand, the example of his dealings with Robins. Wishart’s voice reached them quietly from the other side of the compartment: ‘I think we can trust the DR all right. We’ll turn here—’ he poked with dividers at the next and last turning-point, an alteration of about thirty degrees to port into that long home stretch – ‘say at five past three.’
Jake nodded. ‘Puts us about halfway.’
‘It’s not the mere distance that counts, pilot, is it? In terms of the bally awkward bits we’re the devil of a lot better off than halfway!’
The Narrows were behind them. A few hours ago the thought of being through and on this side of them had been a kind of mirage thought, a distant dream to long for. In fact the process of getting this far hadn’t been nearly as tricky as it might have been.
‘Plenty of water.’ Wishart was checking the soundings on the chart, along the pencilled track. The nearest sounding to the DR position indicated a depth of fifty fathoms – three hundred feet. He muttered, thinking aloud, ‘Might try it at a hundred. Get us the tide and—’ following the soundings all along that track ‘—yes, safe enough all the way. H’m?’ He nodded, and pushed himself off the table. ‘Hundred feet, Number One.’
The farther out she got now, into the wider northeastern reach, the less likely it was that there’d be mines or nets. The narrow sections were the obvious ones to block. A feeling of relief had begun to make itself felt as much as half an hour ago, when Nagara Point had been reckoned to be just abaft the beam. The preceding period had been unpleasant and getting more so, and it was about then that they’d begun to realise that intervals between mine-wire encounters had been lengthening. Up to that point, they’d been shortening. From there on until Wishart had ordered periscope depth for this last check on their position, the boat had been motoring quietly along without incident.
Now she was gliding down again. Hobday murmured, ‘Easy with the angle, cox’n.’ He was wary of the tricky densities, anxious to avoid another nose-dive or more bouncings on the seabed. If she tried one of those stunts here she’d hit nothing until she was three hundred feet down, and that was well below her tested depth.
After a period of tension, its lessening produced a sense of ease, even of exhilaration – at having come through, survived the hazards. You knew it could start again, but it never felt as if it would; it felt as if the strains were over, the testing process left behind for ever. There was a tendency to joke, and for the jokes to seem funnier than they were. Everyone was relaxing without anyone admitting to having been in a state of tension: and when you thought about it, even that seemed funny … A number of men requested permission to go aft to the heads; they’d been allowed to, one at a time. Not to the heads themselves, except for two men in the last few minutes, because at depths below thirty feet you couldn’t use them. Sea-pressure prevented them being blown, discharged, when the boat was deep. For use below thirty feet there were buckets behind the engines.
Twenty-six feet: twenty-seven … The ’planesmen were easing her down very gently.
Robins, in Hobday’s bunk, propped himself up on one elbow as the needles crept down past the thirty-feet mark.
‘Are we past the Narrows yet?’
Wishart had just propped his weight against the control-room ladder. He glanced round, towards that corner, and nodded.
‘Yes. We’re—’
A jarring thump: and then heavy slithering noises overhead.
‘Stop both. Half astern both.’
‘Both motors half astern, sir!’
It sounded like something weighty being dragged along the casing. It had started up forward near the bow, but – well, whatever it was it must be sliding up the jumping-wire and the wire would be pushing it upwards, right over the tops of the two periscope standards if the boat maintained her forward motion. But she wasn’t; she was going astern now. She jerked: it was a sort of lurch, quite a powerful one. A fish would be like this when it had taken a hook and the line suddenly tightened so that the fish felt it for the first time and tried to wrench away.
‘Stop together. Group up.’
Robins had flopped down, and shut his eyes. Burtenshaw rested his forehead on his clasped hands on the table top. Everard was rather slowly shuffling the cards.
Grouping up was going to shake the guts out of the battery. Jake Cameron read the log, noting the figure and the time in his navigator’s notebook, then marked a new and corresponding DR position. Doing that, he broke the lead of his pencil. He had plenty of spares in the rack, already sharpened.
Unlikely to be a mine-wire. Net? But when it had got hold of her she’d been at about thirty feet, and now she seemed to be right under it. A net with a bottom edge at thirty feet would hardly seem worth laying, in fifty fathoms.
The submarine’s motors were stopped, and yet she was rock-steady, still. Wishart looked from the gauges to Hobday.
‘Trim can’t be all that perfect.’
The needles were so static that the gauges might have been shut off. The for’ard one read thirty-six feet and the coxswain’s a foot more than that. The bubble in the tube reflected the same bow-up angle.
Nick was shuffling the cards still. If it was a surface net, there might be mines below it. It was a combination that had been used for some while in the Dover Patrol’s defences in the Channel. You forced the U-boats to dive in order to pass under the net, and they dived into a curtain of mines. It had seemed a good idea, as a device for catching German submarines, but from where he was sitting now his view of it was somewhat different.
Wishart said, ‘My guess is we’re not in a net, but just hanging on the bottom of it somehow.’
He looked quite calm, thoughtful, trying to work it out. Hobday suggested, ‘Might be the gun hooked in it.’ Wishart nodded. ‘I thought of that, but what about the jumping-wire?’ Other faces reflected his own puzzlement. He shrugged. ‘Anyway, let’s see if we can spare the battery and break loose by flooding alone. As last time, only static.’ He told Hobday, ‘Stand by the internal main ballasts.’
He didn’t mean all of them: just the ones that had kingstons. Hobday ordered, ‘Stand by “A”, “B” and “Z” kingstons.’ Hobday had switched over to his ‘calm’ tone. Lewis scuttled over to crouch in the wardroom corner with his hands on the wheel of ‘B’. That internal was under the for’ard battery tank, and the shaft from the wheel ran down inside the chain-locker, which was immediately for’ard of it. About six feet further for’ard, in the torpedo stowage compartment, Able Seaman ‘Close- ’aul’ Anderson folded his
long body down so he could get a grip on the operating wheel of ‘A’; and in the after ends Stoker Peel would be ready by this time to open the stern tank, ‘Z’.
Wishart called for’ard, ‘Open “A” kingston!’
There was a small lurch, as the sea rushed into the tank. The bow might have dropped about an inch. The needle in the for’ard gauge had quivered; now it was still again.
‘Open “B” kingston!’
Lewis wrenched the wheel round. You could hear the movement of the gearing in the shaft and the slam of sudden pressure entering the tank below. From above, outside the boat, there was a creak, a sound of straining; then nothing more.
Crabb muttered, ‘Somethin’ gave, up top, sir. By the gun, I reckon.’
‘Third time lucky, cox’n.’ Wishart ordered, ‘Open “Z” kingston!’ Ellery, at the bulkhead doorway, passed it aft, and a second later the boat trembled very slightly. Not enough to make any difference on the gauges, but the bubble had shifted for’ard by about a quarter of one degree. And everything was silent now: warm, close air, nobody moving, smell of oil and sweat and the yellowish light glinting on brass and on the running condensation on the paintwork and on the shine of pale, sweat-damp, stubbly faces.
Wishart looked disappointed. Annoyed, perhaps – but not, Nick thought, particularly worried. It might be an act, he realised, or it might be that to the submariners this was less hair-raising than it seemed to an outsider.
‘Pity. Have to use some juice after all.’ Wishart rubbed his jaw. ‘Never mind. Once we’re past this lot we’ll be home and dry. We’re – what, grouped up?’
Agnew confirmed it.
Jake was thinking that dawn would be breaking soon, up there. Daylight would flush the surface of the straits and light the hills. This submarine was only ten yards below the surface, and she was suspended probably from large, brightly-coloured buoys which presently she’d start tugging to and fro. Ten minutes ago they’d been preparing to congratulate themselves, thinking they’d come through the worst of it. He told himself soberly, That was the silly thing. This is the reality. We knew it was going to be difficult and here we are, it is, and we’ve some way to go yet, that’s all.
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 11
