He shook his head. ‘Not sleepin’, sir.’ With his torpedoes he was like a hen with chickens. Jake picked up the dividers to measure the run to the caïque rendezvous; they’d be diving in an hour or less, so as to be out of sight before daylight came. The same routine as yesterday: except this time Wishart would believe anything Weatherspoon told him.
‘All right, pilot.’ Wishart came off the ladder. ‘Room up top for you now.’ He eyed Jake’s solid frame meaningfully as he said it. Jake stared back at him: he didn’t think there could be more than a few pounds between their weights.
‘D’you mean you’ll be staying below now, sir?’ Wishart jerked his head. ‘Get up there.’
‘Is Lieutenant-Commander Robins staying on the bridge?’
‘He’s under the weather. Has to be fit for when we meet our caïque.’ Wishart shrugged. ‘Not for long.’ The bridge seemed to be full of very little men. One of the pair abaft the hatch would be Robins, of course. Jake asked Hobday, ‘Who’s the lookout?’
‘Stone.’
Andy Stone, Leading Stoker, Hostilities Only, railwayman from Newhaven. In the dark, he and Robins, lieutenant-commander from the Foreign Office, were identical black gnomes. Hobday said, ‘That’s ten minutes watchkeeping you owe me.’
‘If you’ll agree it’s ten minutes hanging around the control room you owe me.’
‘Damn sea lawyer …’
He wasn’t a bad fellow. A bit pompous sometimes, but quite a decent sort. Jake’s eyes were adjusting to the dark; it took a few minutes to tune them in, which was partly why OOWs and lookouts didn’t change watches at the same time. Hobday told him, ‘Course oh-seven-six, three-two-oh revolutions, running charge port side.’
‘Any special orders?’
‘None except we’ll be diving on the watch before long, and I’d like a shake before we do.’
‘Why?’
‘What d’you mean, why?’
That was the area of pomposity. Thinking the boat couldn’t be dived unless he was there to catch a trim. Jake shrugged in the dark. ‘No skin off my nose … Anyway, I’ve got her.’
Alone – except for the two silent figures further aft – with the throaty grumble of the diesels and the wash of the sea, a little spray occasionally flashing over from the starboard side. There was more motion on her up here, of course, since the bridge’s fifteen feet of height made for an upright pendulum effect, swaying to and fro while waves broke regularly against her sides, swept aft, frothed over the saddle-tanks and surged across the trimmed-down hull. If she hadn’t been as trimmed down as she was, low and weighted in the sea by full or half-full tanks, there’d have been a lot more roll on her. He’d jammed himself against the for’ard periscope standard; there was a bracket at just the right height for his elbow to hook over. In worse weather than this, bridge watch-keepers would lash themselves to the standards with ropes’ ends, and now it was just a matter of steadying oneself well enough to be able to concentrate on a careful looking-out with binoculars. The other two were propped against the after standard. Like twins, book-ends, one each side. Astern, beyond their silhouettes, white froth alternately heaped up or spread, disintegrating, as the submarine’s afterpart swung up and down; at one moment you’d glimpse the shiny black whaleback of her, then it would be all churned sea humping, bursting upwards as the two sides met and merged. There was only a faint whiff of exhaust fumes; the wind was taking it away to port. Leading Stoker Stone, with glasses at his eyes, was like a small statue slowly turning, the binoculars’ length foreshortening as he swung, pivoting on his heels. A serious, very reliable man, was Andy Stone. His ‘young lady’ in Newhaven – Lewis had said her name was Florence – would be getting a very steady, sound provider, when she took him on.
When the war ended … That phrase, that idea, was everywhere. Jake was sweeping down the port side. He didn’t know what the answer was going to be to his own post-war problem. See what she thought about it, perhaps. Wishart had been right, but Wishart didn’t know it all, didn’t know her, for instance. In the sense that Stone was a railwayman and took it for granted he’d be a railwayman again, he – Cameron – was a seaman, and could see a similar sense in continuing to be one. If he found that she could take it in the same way – for granted, something she wouldn’t question unless he questioned it himself? The problem had come close to solving itself more than once in the last few days. Once or twice in the straits, and yesterday’s Hun … Spin of a coin. But a certain amount of skill and watchfulness came into it, it wasn’t only luck. Lowering the glasses, resting his eyes for a moment as he turned back to start on the port bow and sweep across and down the starboard side, he saw Robins standing hunched, inactive, useless. If he was so determined to stay up here, couldn’t he at least add a pair of eyes to the looking-out?
Beneath his dignity, perhaps. What a creature to send on a jaunt like this one! Only kind of chap they could get for it, perhaps. Others all fighting, and plenty of them dying, dead. When you thought of the horrors of the trench-lines … He’d paused, sweeping back now, over a place where he thought there’d been a flash of broken water. Nothing, though. Easy to imagine things. He thought, starting a search on the bow again, that he – all of them – were lucky, truly very lucky, with this job. Nothing could be as awful as that sort of fighting. Nothing. But the static war had ended now, by all accounts; armies were moving forward, sweeping across Europe. Swinging down past the beam now: he’d thought suddenly that the diesels’ note had changed, risen and thickened: then the truth hit him in two stages, the first a suspicion of what it was and the second a jolting awareness of danger and the need to act. In the next fragment of the same split second he’d thought it might be more distant – not dangerous, only sound carried in the wind; then it was loud again, louder, beating down out of the night sky astern, everything at once and no time to think, he’d shouted, ‘Down below!’ and the other two were a blur in the dark as he yelled into the voicepipe, ‘Dive, dive, dive!’ Flashes – fire-stabs and cutting streaks and an explosive hammering, a black bat angling over – seaplane, he glimpsed its cigar-shaped floats and its gun-muzzle flaming, engine-noise deafening as it crashed over. Stone yelled then, ‘This orfficer’s ’it, e’s—’ Something… Pieces of metal flying from the after standard: but noise receding, black as pitch, main vents crashing open: he’d got hold of Robins and Stone screamed at him, ‘Done for – no use, sir—’
‘Get below!’
Dragging Robins, hearing the engines cut out and the dwindling racket of the seaplane, the pounding of the sea as the submarine wallowed down. His hands were wet, sticky: Robins had been hit and badly hit, but that didn’t necessarily make him dead. Inside now on the ladder, trying to get Robins down inside too: it was incredibly difficult and the sea was loud all around him, gurgling and thumping, crashing against the plating as she dipped under, angling down. He had one hand on the grip under the hatch’s rim, the other wrenching to free a leg that was still in the way. Sea would be flooding over at any moment. A hand from below grabbed his own leg, let go and struck at him, and Wishart bellowed, ‘Get down and shut the hatch!’ He’d accepted Stone’s belief, obviously, that Robins was dead. But the hatch still had that leg in it – or something; water spouted, leapt over. There’d been spray and splashing but this was solid, lopping over, green sea beginning to pour in and no chance whatsoever of getting the hatch shut. So – lower hatch … He let go of everything, and dropped. One foot hit the rim of the lower hatch, twisted, and pain shot through his ankle: then his shoulder had struck in about the same place and he’d cracked his face hard on some fitting in the tower; the sea was a flood now, drenching down. He heard a shout of ‘Shut main vents!’ and thought of the seaplane up there quite likely circling for another run: if Wishart took her up this soon they’d – Jake had fallen through the lower hatch and on his way through he’d grabbed its handle so as to drag it down and shut the sea out. Robins’s body must have been carried through the top one by the rush of water
, and now it came thumping down like something falling off a butcher’s hook. The hatch was swinging down with Jake’s weight on it and the sea on its other side to add to that: he saw Robins’s face in sharp, clear close-up, a death-mask sheeted in blood and with one eye open and entirely white, and then the hatch had crunched down like a nutcracker crushing bone and brain and flesh. Nightmare: beyond it, the scene in the control room was a reality in which he, part of the nightmare, was an intruder. Above him the hatch was ringed with pink and scarlet, a dripping stain …
‘Cameron!’
He focused on someone who turned out to be Aubrey Wishart. ‘Seaplane, Stone said?’
Take nodded. ‘By the time I heard it, its gun was—’
‘All right.’
Wishart wasn’t looking at him now, and Jake was aware, mostly from expressions on other faces, of the state he was in. He wasn’t seeing only the horror of Robins’s death, he was looking beyond it too, wondering whether the operation, the landing part of it, had been knocked out in that burst of machine-gun fire. And shock at the danger he’d put the boat and all her ship’s company in, by messing about up there: although what else he could have done – not knowing whether he was dead or—
‘Go and wash, pilot. Signalman – get a bucket and swab, clean this up.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Thirty feet, sir.’
‘Bring her up to twenty. But don’t rush it.’ He glanced round, frowned at seeing Jake still standing there. ‘For God’s sake, man—’
‘Sorry, sir, I—’
‘Everard, you’ll go ahead with Burtenshaw, the two of you, I take it?’
* * *
Hobday suggested, ‘Doesn’t the seaplane’s attack on us suggest they’re wide awake, know we’re here and know we’ve sunk their U-boat?’
‘They’ll know we’re somewhere about, I’m sure.’ Wishart’s tone was patient. This was a council of war. They’d surfaced, drained the tower, buried Robins’s remains. Dawn had given him a colourful send-off, theatrical lighting effects in silver, bronze and crimson while Wishart had read the burial-at-sea prayer and they’d put the body over, weighted with twelve-pounder shells. McVeigh meanwhile had examined the periscope standards and found that apart from chipping and scoring by machine-gun bullets there’d been no damage done. Six minutes later they’d dived again. Jake had the watch now and the meeting with the caïque was to be at five a.m.
Wishart answered Hobday, ‘They’ll have heard our wireless transmissions, for one thing. But the seaplane attack was nearer the old rendezvous position than the new one, and I’d say it was unlikely that Reaper’s friends ashore would have set up a new plan that wasn’t secure. Their necks are just as much at risk as ours, one might suppose. But we won’t just charge up to the caïque without taking a damn good look around first – if that’s what’s worrying you.’ He turned to Nick. ‘You haven’t said much, Everard.’
Nick glanced up. ‘Isn’t much to say, is there?’
‘Well, you were expecting some sort of help from Robins—’
‘Only that he was going to pass us on to someone or other when we got ashore. Now the caïque’s crew’ll have to do it. Or there may be a reception committee in the caïque, for all we know. Alternatively—’ he looked at Burtenshaw – ‘we have the name of a hotel or hotel bar in Pera – place called the Maritza – and the code-name of a – er – lady-friend of Commander Reaper’s.’
‘And you’re happy with that?’
‘Happy?’
Hobday chuckled at his surprise at such a question. But Wishart was waiting, apparently expecting some sort of answer. Burtenshaw did look quite happy, now he’d got over the shock of Robins’s death. At least he was under the orders of someone who’d talk to him occasionally. Nick saw Jake Cameron hovering close by, listening to the discussion; he asked him, ‘Are you happy?’ Cameron shrugged. He looked tired and withdrawn. Nick offered, ‘Come along with us, if your skipper’ll spare you.’
‘Not a chance.’ Cameron’s eyes met Wishart’s for a moment. Wishart said, ‘Best navigator I ever had. I’m hanging on to him.’ Cameron felt himself colour slightly, and turned away. He’d been thinking, in the last grim hour or two, wondering if he hadn’t been taught something, given a lesson in priorities and clear thinking. Robins hadn’t been helped, and the boat might easily have been lost. Now if when he left the Service he took a shore job, would it do the old woman the slightest good, long-term?
The parallel was a loose one, but it was there all right. It told him that he needed to acquire a capacity for ruthlessness: not just for his own sake, but for everyone else’s too. As he moved back towards the ’planesmen he heard Wishart explain to Everard, ‘What I meant was, are you worried at going ahead with this now?’
There wasn’t time to be worried. There wasn’t time to think about being worried. Nick told Wishart, ‘I’d be far more worried not to be going ahead with it.’
Burtenshaw, still pale although the boat was steady now, nodded faint agreement. Wishart looked thoughtful. ‘Not a bad answer, that.’
Not bad: but mad?
Nick was reacting to events as if they were real – as if he’d seen Robins dead, Robins’s skull crushed in the hatch, Robins’s blood and brains all over Cameron: and as if he, Nick Everard, was actually going to make this attempt to blow up one of the most powerful fighting ships afloat; but he didn’t believe in it, any more than someone tossing about in a half-waking nightmare believes in what he’s dreaming.
‘Good God, look at this!’
He focused on Hobday, who’d come up from somewhere below the table. There was a dream-like element … But it was a canvas parcel – bag – that Hobday had thumped down on to the table.
‘Gold sovereigns, by golly!’
Wishart murmured, as if he didn’t believe it either, ‘I’ll be damned.’
Hobday had found it in a drawer that Robins had used. Burtenshaw said he knew about it. He’d forgotten: but Robins had mentioned that he’d be taking five hundred pounds in gold for someone ashore.
Burtenshaw didn’t know who for. They counted it: there were twenty rolls and twenty-five sovereigns in each roll.
‘Better take it with you, Everard. Dare say someone’ll pop up and ask for it.’ Wishart glanced round at the hovering messman. ‘What d’you want, Lewis?’
‘Spot o’ breakfast, sir?’
‘Well – if you’re quick with it …’
Pilchards, washed down with what Lewis thought of as coffee. Burtenshaw closed his eyes and turned away from it, although Nick warned him there was no telling when they’d next get a meal or what it might consist of. There were some jokes then, about Turk menus, which didn’t make the Marine feel any better. Nick ate rapidly and hungrily, with a pistol already strapped to his side in a webbing holster, while E.57 closed in towards her appointment with the caïque.
Chapter 11
The caïque’s crew certainly weren’t feeding them. No food, no drink. No sign of anything like friendship either. They were sailing them into Constantinople all right, but whether they’d cut their throats before they got there or sell them to the authorities on arrival was anybody’s guess.
At first Nick had hoped it was only a strangeness that would wear off, mutual suspicions that should dissipate as they all got to know each other. Now, the best part of a day later, he’d no wish at all to know them any better than he did already. There were four of them: wolf-like men with cunning, vicious faces, and all four were armed with knives. When Nick had asked for water to drink there’d been whines and finger-twisting gestures: money… Then unmistakable threats.
No money, no drink …
The money was in Burtenshaw’s rucksack with the demolition stores. It would obviously be far too dangerous to let these people get a sniff of it.
A day of dirt, discomfort, hunger and – above all – thirst. But now Constantinople, which for hours had been a shimmer of white and green in a distant, bluish haze, was enclosing th
em as the caïque’s sails drove her in on the southerly breeze. Three cities in one, glowing in the light of the dying sun. The mosques and minarets of Scutari to starboard and Stambul to port burned like the embers of a fire; ahead lay the entrance to the Bosphorus, the gateway to the Black Sea – to Odessa, the Crimea, Batum; and on the caïque’s port bow, beyond Serai Point and on the far side of another half-mile of blue water, Pera’s white buildings gleamed among the dark slim cypresses. Blue water, white stone, green foliage, white sails everywhere, and the sun setting it all alight. Here to port Stambul’s sea-walls showed double, reflected upside-down in the water at their feet. It was startlingly beautiful, making you believe in the most highly-coloured travellers’ tales; with more immediacy one was aware that beyond this point of land — Serai – where presently the caïque would swing round on to the port tack, Galata Bridge straddled the entrance to the Golden Horn, where Goeben lay. A kind of Holy Grail built of grey steel, armed with eleven-inch guns, scheduled for destruction.
By two men in a sailing-boat with pistols and a bag of bombs?
It could be a mistake, Nick realised, to let the mind dwell on the sheer unlikeliness of such a hare-brained scheme succeeding. Just press on, he told himself. Like bringing a ship into a tricky, windswept anchorage in the dark: no good dithering, taking her in too slowly, or you’d just drift into worse danger. You had to grit your teeth, get on with it.
Burtenshaw, happy to be leaving the responsibility to Nick, was suffering now from nothing except thirst. He waved a hand in the direction of Stambul.
‘Santa Sophia.’
‘What?’
‘That big dome with the four minarets round it. Built by the Emperor Justinian in about five hundred AD as a symbol of Byzantine Christianity. Gone Mohammedan now, of course. Hence the added minarets.’
‘Where d’you get all this from?’
‘Well, it’s famous.’ He shrugged. ‘And one learnt a certain amount about the ancient world – at school, you know?’
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 23
