Patrol to the Golden Horn

by Patrol to the Golden Horn (epub)

  ‘Stop port’

  ‘Stop port, sir … Port motor stopped.’

  Wishart ordered, ‘Everyone who’s free to move, get over to the starboard side. Pass that for’ard and aft.’ Lewis sent the message into the torpedo stowage compartment. Ellery, sweat gleaming through the fuzz of brown beard around his mouth and running down the deep channels in the skin of his neck, passed it aft. Wishart stood watching the bubble in the small curved spirit-level on the deckhead.

  ‘It’s moving already, damn it!’

  ‘Enemy’s stopped, sir.’

  Wishart nodded, still watching the bubble. Only a few men had had time to move, and the angle was already coming off her. Jake could feel her swinging over. Now a dozen or twenty men would have moved an average of, say, five feet; surely it oughtn’t to make this much difference. She was on an even keel, already. Wishart’s attention still on the bubble, which was the size and shape of a small broad-bean in the green-tinted tube. She was going on over, listing the other way …

  ‘Back to your stations!’

  But she was still swinging over – as if having once started she couldn’t be stopped. Wishart muttered, ‘She’s gone cranky. Doesn’t make sense, damn it. She’s—’ He pulled out a handkerchief to mop his streaming eyes with. Everard looked as if he more or less understood what was puzzling everyone; the Marine just as plainly did not. ‘She’s – stopped again …’ Wishart, frowning at the bubble. ‘Just gone over and hanging…’ He sounded relieved, Jake thought, that she hadn’t gone right over — or at any rate far enough over to slop acid out of the battery cells. Weatherspoon reported, ‘Enemy still layin’ stopped, sir.’

  Enemy listening to them, in fact. Just as he had before when he’d followed them along, starting and stopping and holding his distance astern of them. It struck Jake that if the Turk was out to drive them mad he was going about it in a very shrewd way. Also that the last time he’d trailed behind them like this there’d been a mine barrage ahead and he’d more or less herded them into it.

  Wishart suddenly slapped his forehead.

  ‘I’ll be damned!’

  Hobday glanced round at him. Wishart told the outside ERA, ‘Get a wheelspanner on the conning-tower drain, McVeigh. Stand by to just crack it and then bang it shut again double-quick.’

  ‘Aye, sir…’

  Hobday muttered, staring at the hatch, ‘Of course … I must be cuckoo!’ Wishart told him, ‘Get a pump working on the bilge. Account for everything, eh? The weight – and after the bang I heard a flooding sound – and now the list, and everywhere else normal. Top-hamper pulling her over … Be ready to run both pumps together if we have to.’

  He watched McVeigh clamp a wheelspanner on the valve-wheel of the conning-tower drain. The pipe led from the bottom of the tower to the bilge; if there was water up there – if the boat had dived with her top hatch open, for instance and you opened that valve, seawater from the tower would flood down into the bilge at full sea-pressure.

  Wishart must have been thinking about that, too, and decided to check his theory where the pressure wasn’t quite so great.

  ‘Belay all that. Wait, McVeigh.’ He told Hobday, ‘Come up to forty feet.’

  Hanging over to starboard like this she felt like a duck with one leg shorter than the other. Clumsy: and in any emergency she’d be clumsy to handle too. But she was lumbering upwards now as the ’planesmen coaxed her towards the surface – a surface that would be dark now. It felt better – Jake thought – to be going up. Admittedly they could be rising into nets or mines; but by this time they’d be getting past that Kodjuk bulge of land, the rounded headland pressing in like a corset and giving the straits the inward curve of a belly-dancer’s waist, and once the boat got out to where they widened again – let’s not, he thought, follow that simile too far – her chances of running into lethal obstructions should become less with every yard she covered. His hands were resting palms-down on the chart, and he watched forefingers and middle fingers crossing. He didn’t want to be caught off-guard again; too often, as one had begun to relax, something damnable had happened … Hobday was making adjustments to the trim as the boat came up; Wishart ordered, ‘Thirty feet.’

  ‘Thirty, sir.’ Weatherspoon called out, ‘Enemy movin’, sir!’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘Can’t say yet, sir.’

  Thirty-six feet. Thirty-five. Hobday glanced round at Wishart, obviously wondering whether he should still take her right up, with an enemy up there on the prowl. Thirty-four feet — thirty-three …

  ‘Comin’ towards, sir. Follerin’ astern, like before.’

  ‘Closing?’

  ‘Very slow revs, sir.’

  Following, then. Exactly as he’d done before.

  Waiting for them to suffocate, or for the battery to die?

  There was only one place where the straits narrowed again significantly, and that was off Gallipoli, roughly eight miles further on. But in any case this stretch was only two miles wide. There could be minefields, or mined nets anywhere.

  ‘Thirty feet, sir.’

  Wishart looked at Weatherspoon. The leading tel nodded. ‘Still comin’, sir.’

  ‘Closing?’

  A shake of the head: ‘Not loud, sir.’

  ‘Right.’ Wishart told Hobday, ‘Pump on the bilge.’ He looked at McVeigh: ‘Ready?’ The spanner was hanging from the brass wheel; McVeigh reached for it. ‘Aye, sir.’ Hobday reported, ‘Pump’s running on the bilge.’ You could hear it, from down there out of sight, making a noise like some monster child sucking on an already empty mug. Wishart told the ERA, ‘Crack it, and shut it again immediately.’

  The Glaswegian took a grip with both hands on the shaft of the spanner, and swung his whole weight on to it. The noise of water jetting through the pipe had the suddenness of a gunshot: its roar stopped dead as McVeigh jammed the valve shut again. There was a slopping sound from the bilge; but the pump would be returning that gushing intake to the sea now.

  ‘There’s our answer, then.’ Wishart reached up and banged his fist against the hatch. ‘Tower’s full. The one space we didn’t think of checking. That’s where the extra weight’s come from and that’s what’s heeling us over.’

  ‘Enemy closin’, sir!’

  ‘Seventy feet.’

  Crabb and Morton flung their wheels around, and the ’planes slanted to drag her down. Morton hissed, ‘Give us some angle, ’swain?’ Crabb told Hobday, ‘She’s awkward, sir. Slow answerin’.’

  ‘Bound to be.’ Wishart didn’t seem to have been made unhappy by his discovery. It would present certain immediate problems – surfacing would be a slow and rather dangerous procedure – but at least the mystery had been cleared up, and depending on precisely what the damage was it could probably be repaired, later on. He told Crabb, ‘Have to manage as best we can, cox’n. Engine-room department’ll have their hands full, though, once we get into the Marmara.’

  He’d glanced round at the ERAs as he said it: at McVeigh, Knight, Bradshaw. Bradshaw looked as if he’d just climbed out of a bath, except that there was nothing clean about him; he’d tied a rag around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Knight looked as if he’d been crying. Come to think of it, everyone looked pretty frightful. Eyes particularly. Holes in skulls with water running out of them. Little Agnew, propped against the after bulkhead under the telegraphs’ brassy gleam, could have been the ghost of some lost child. Roost, square and upright at the wheel, blinked continuously and regularly, as if a motor moved his eyelids while he watched the lubber’s line against the image of the compass card. It was just as well that the master compass, above their heads in the flooded tower, lived in its own watertight binnacle. The long and stringy frame of Stoker Adams, in the starboard after corner, was drooped into a sort of S-bend: knees forward, head and shoulders slumped, the eyes red-rimmed and glaring murderously from under matted brows. None of us, Jake thought, can look much like the portraits in our parents’ living-rooms. Even th
e passengers … Adams, though, looked particularly fiendish, possibly nastier even than McVeigh; he was yellow-skinned and the gloss of dirty sweat made him seem almost orange.

  Wishart cocked an eyebrow at Weatherspoon. The leading tel told him, ‘Close now, sir.’

  The needle in the gauge was approaching the 55-foot mark, and Crabb, anticipating a sluggish response, was already easing the downward angle of the dive.

  ‘Agnew – I shan’t be using telegraphs. Go and sit in the doorway and pass orders by word of mouth.’

  ‘Sir.’ The boy looked grateful as he edged over past Ellery. Wishart said, ‘Anyone who doesn’t have to stand, sit down. Pass that through the boat.’

  ‘Seventy feet, sir.’

  ‘Very good … Here comes Willie.’

  They could hear him suddenly — the thump-thump-thump of that churning screw. Trawler – gunboat, whatever Willie was … Almost over the top: but not quite, the volume of sound was still rising. Overhead just about – now. Jake wondered if the Turk might be dropping depth-charges.

  If he was, they’d be on their way down now, floating down, turning end over end as they sank through still black water towards the submarine … The – no … He’d seen this point rather late, and he recognised an unusual slowness in his mental processes: if the trawler had been dropping charges she wouldn’t have been moving at such slow speed. The Turk would blow his own stern off, that way. And one’s brain was, undoubtedly, working at a similarly low speed. Oxygen starvation? He heard the enemy go over and the sound of him begin to fade, saw Wishart staring upwards at the deckhead as he listened too. Poor lookout if his brain had brakes on … Everyone was sitting, squatting on the deck, leaning against whatever came handy, and Jake let himself slide down too. Use less oxygen: skipper should’ve thought of it before. Hell of a good man, though. This afternoon – after the noon snack and tot of rum – Jake had taken over again in the control room, and Wishart had come and sat down too; they’d chatted for quite a while. At first Wishart had talked to Smith, the tattoo’d torpedoman who’d been sharing the watch with Jake; he’d talked about Smith’s harmonica and how he’d learnt to play it, and from that to the Smith family in Hampshire. The torpedoman’s father was a water-bailiff on some rich stretch of the Test, and Smith was full of stories about fish and fishing and poachers’ ways. Wishart had had some fishing stories of his own to tell. When that conversation ran dry, he’d turned to Jake.

  ‘Go back to the Mercantile Marine, will you, when their Lordships release you?’

  He’d shaken his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s a bit – difficult, in some ways.’

  Eventually Wishart had got the whole thing out of him. About Jake’s mother alone and panicky, and no one but him to care for her, take his father’s place.

  ‘Your father must have been away a lot, surely?’

  ‘Then she had me with her.’

  ‘My dear old lad—’ Wishart had seemed genuinely concerned – ‘parents do lose their children. Not lose, in any final sense, but—’

  ‘Then most of them have each other to fall back on?’

  ‘Listen.’ Wishart waved a hand, wiping out Jake’s arguments. ‘Your mama isn’t the only widow in the British Isles, not by a very long chalk. Thousands and thousands of ’em, millions of ’em, old lad. And some of ’em have lost sons as well as husbands, poor things.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. But – well, some people take things harder than others do. And in this particular case …’ It had been hard to explain. His mother wasn’t at all worldly, she wasn’t equipped for living on her own. She was childlike; at an early age he’d discovered that she needed him more than he needed her, and that she worried needlessly and constantly about any decision she had to make for herself. Like a child struggling to cope with an adult world. Jake’s father would come home after a few months’ absence, unravel her self-made problems and put everything straight for her, settle this and that and ask X and Y to keep an eye on her, and go off to sea again. Sighing, Jake suspected now, with relief? As he had done, after that terrible ‘compassionate’ leave?

  ‘Enemy’s stopped again, sir. Couldn’t only just ’ear ’im – if ’e’d gone another minute I wouldn’t ’a ’eard ’im stop.’

  The pattern was not the same as it had been before. Before, the Turk had stayed back, kept his distance astern of them.

  ‘Either he’s changed his tactics, or he’s lost us. Or he thinks we’re sunk, left the other one trawling for us and he’s gone on about his own business.’ Wishart was talking to Hobday. Leaning on the ladder, mopping at his face with an already sodden handkerchief. He swivelled, leant on it frontwards, one foot on its bottom rung and his arms extended upwards, hands grasping a higher one. ‘Number One.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Hobday’s skin looked as white as paper; the lower half of his small face was gilded with ginger stubble. Wishart told him, ‘I think we’ll go up and have a look. Dark now – and we’re doing no good as it is.’ He pushed himself off the ladder. Jake thought he was working hard in the effort to think straight, act straight. ‘Thirty feet.’

  ‘Thirty feet, sir.’ Hobday asked him, ‘Use the port shaft, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thirty, sir …’ Crabb and Morton worked like machines, coping skilfully with the awkwardness of handling her with the list on. By ‘going up’, Jake realised, Wishart couldn’t be talking about surfacing. It would be a dangerous thing to risk here even if she was in good shape and undamaged. With the tower flooded, they’d have to wallow up there while it drained down to the bilges and the pump shifted the water overboard; until the tower was empty you couldn’t open the lower hatch, and until you were on the surface you couldn’t start the draining process. So for several minutes the submarine would lie blind and helpless. But if only – he shut his eyes – if only it could be possible … To surface, get moving on the gas engines, with fresh air flooding through the boat!

  Something to dream about …

  He forced his eyes open, pulled himself together. They would be surfacing. Not yet, but a time would come – a little while yet, some way to go, just a matter of hanging on, and then there would be a moment when the engines would roar into life and you’d feel the sweet, cold air, drink it, wallow in it: the thought was enough to make you cry with longing for it…

  You needn’t worry for two seconds about me, you know.

  Wishart had said to him this afternoon, ‘Look here, old lad. You say you might take some job or other, anything to stay near her … Have you considered how that would be? Thousands and thousands of men have awful, humdrum jobs – jobs they loathe and just have to struggle on with, year in and year out – near killing ’emselves in the process. Would you contemplate that – when you don’t have to, when you’re a seaman, a first-class one, highly trained and experienced and a very, very useful man?’

  There’d been a pause then: close to them, on his blanket on the deck, Everard had muttered something in his sleep. Wishart asked Jake, ‘What advice d’you think your father would give, if he was here to give it?’

  Jake had pointed out that if his father had been alive to give advice, the question wouldn’t be arising in the first place. Wishart brushed that aside; and Jake had only been stalling, trying to stave off an argument that was entirely right and logical as Wishart saw it but which didn’t take into account the deep, emotional feelings running counter to it.

  ‘D’you think in the long run it’d do your mother most good for you to be in some frightful job, coming home each night done-up and dispirited – needing to get drunk to forget it, and turning green with envy when you run into some old shipmate who hasn’t thrown up the life he was born for – that, or having a son who’s happy, getting on, commanding his own ship soon enough – that fellow, coming home a few times each year, a son she’d be really proud of?’

  ‘Well, it’s more than—’

  ‘Listen to me, old lad. That would be taking your father’s place. That’s what he
’d like to hear about when she joins him!’

  ‘Thirty feet, sir.’

  Wishart checked the gauge and the bubble. He looked over towards Jake.

  ‘May get a fix in a minute, pilot … Number One, bring her up slowly and carefully to twenty feet.’

  ‘Twenty feet, sir. Handsomely now, cox’n.’

  McVeigh hoisted his scraggy, scarecrow-like frame to its feet. He looked like something that had been run over by a horse-tram in Sauchihall Street, but he was alert enough to realise he’d be needed now to operate the periscopes. Ellery got up too; Wishart was waiting near the after periscope, and on that small one it was necessary for relative bearings to be read off a bearing-ring on the deckhead.

  ‘Twenty-two feet, sir.’

  ‘Up periscope.’

  ‘Twenty-one …’ The brass tube was hissing upwards, drops of greasy moisture glinting on its bronze, grey grease clinging wetly to the wires. The bulky eyepiece end came up clear of the well; Wishart grabbed the handles at knee-height, and before the single lens jerked to a stop at eye-level he’d jerked them down and settled to the search.

  ‘Twenty feet, sir.’

  ‘Black as pitch …’ Muttering to himself as he circled, right eye pressed against the lens, left eye shut. He stopped only halfway round, snapped the handles up. ‘Down!’ McVeigh depressed the lever, sending the periscope slithering back into its hole in the deck; Wishart murmured, squeezing for’ard between Roost’s position and the ladder, ‘Can’t see a damn thing with that one.’ Looking at McVeigh again he raised his hands and twitched the fingers, and McVeigh sent the big ’scope sliding up. A necklet of drops of water glistened like diamonds around the gland where the big tube passed through the deckhead.

  ‘Depth?’ He’d clicked the magnification in. Hobday answered, ‘Twenty feet, sir.’ Wishart circled slowly, his toes against the raised sill around the well … ‘God almighty!’

  He’d trained back the other way: his throat bulged as he swallowed.