Nick muttered, ‘Must have taken a second crack at it, out of his stern tube or a beam one.’
He hoped that was it. And that the hit had been in some vital spot, not something they’d be able to deal with and get the ship moving again. If she was stopped permanently she’d be a sitting duck, at Wishart’s mercy.
Burtenshaw suggested in a hoarse, pleading whisper, ‘If she’s done for couldn’t we give up now?’
‘Wait.’ Overhead, the sailor was back and reporting to the leutnant. ‘What’s he telling him?’
‘I missed the start of it, but—’
The kapitan-leutnant was shouting down to them in German. Nick caught one word – a German version of ‘torpedo’. He could have cheered – for Wishart, and with personal relief; but relief was premature, because the guncotton could blast them at any moment. Burtenshaw translated in a fast, excited gabble, ‘It was a torpedo-hit aft and she’s stopped because the steering’s smashed and they think one shaft as well. He says they’re finished anyway so why don’t we—’
‘Yes.’ Nick cut him short. ‘Tell him we’ll disarm the charge.’
Or rather, he thought, as the Marine began shouting up towards the hatch, You’ll disarm it … But he’d go with him, to see he didn’t bungle it. It was a matter of getting to that other messdeck and down to its bathroom flat, digging the case out from the hammocks and yanking the detonator out of the explosive. It would serve no purpose to have it go off; if Goeben was immobilised, the job — Reaper’s job – was done.
Chapter 14
‘What we knocked off was her main rudder. She had two, you know, one behind the other. Stern’s so narrow they couldn’t fit ’em side by side, and they needed a certain rudder area and that’s how they achieved it. The little one on its own is quite useless. But we’d bent the port shaft too, and made quite a decent hole in her quarter, with surprisingly extensive flooding.’
Wishart was filling in some details of the story, in Truman’s cabin aboard Terrapin, at anchor in the entrance to the Bosphorus. Truman wasn’t present; he’d been summoned to an interview with the Chief of Staff, aboard the flagship. Wishart was telling the story mainly for the benefit of Johnny Treat, his navigator who’d been stricken with appendicitis back in Mudros. Treat had come through as a passenger in one of the other destroyers; he was still pale, convalescent-looking, and fed up at having missed this Dardanelles trip which looked sure to have been the last offensive submarine patrol of the war.
His CO went on, ‘I had the other beam tube ready, and the stern tube as well. After that hit she’d stopped, so of course we were able to catch up with her quickly enough, and I was about to make a real job of it at close range when damn me if I didn’t see her ensign being struck. By courtesy of Everard here. He’d had the gall to point out to the German commodore that they’d no hope of getting anywhere – except to the bottom when we put some more fish into her – and that it’d be Turkish colours, not German, that he’d be hauling down, and that even if by some miracle he managed to get her back into Constantinople it’d be about as humiliating for him as anything could be … Not bad, on the spur of the moment, and after spending half an hour or more sitting on a bomb. Eh?’
Reaper nodded. ‘Not at all bad.’
‘They weren’t far off shooting us as spies.’ Nick explained, ‘The mind does tend to concentrate.’
‘Whatever the circumstances—’ Reaper stubbed out a cigarette – ‘the fact remains, it worked. And the Commander-in-Chief is by no means displeased. As you’ll be discovering for yourselves presently.’ He looked from Nick to Wishart. ‘Both of you. What’s impressed him most, apart from the achievement of the desired result, is the way you pushed ahead with the operation in the face of numerous setbacks. Louve – Robins – the lack of a reception committee for the landing party …’ He glanced up. ‘Oh, one thing I’d best mention – the Admiral has had champagne put on ice for us.’
Wishart licked his lips. ‘Crikey.’
‘His flag lieutenant was kind enough to warn me. In case any of us had thought of taking a stiffener before we went.’
Great days were upon them suddenly …
The war wasn’t quite dead. But the German fleet had mutinied. Admiral Scheer had been preparing a fleet sortie, offensive action that would have led to a showdown such as the Royal Navy had been praying for ever since the inconclusive results of Jutland. But the men of the High Seas Fleet had refused to take the Kaiser’s ships to sea. They’d seen enough of British guns at Jutland: their propagandists might claim they’d won that battle, but it was significant that they weren’t ready to come to the test again. Significant, and also bitterly disappointing for the Royal Navy.
The news had come yesterday by signal. So in the letter that Nick had just had from his uncle, in the first mail to be brought through to Constantinople, there’d been mention of the battle that was expected. By now, Vice-Admiral Sir Hugh Everard would be as disappointed as any other of Beatty’s officers. As Beatty himself must be … But Hugh Everard had had no other news. He’d not seen or heard from Sarah. So the sense of vacuum persisted: and Nick realised, after he’d read quickly through the letter, that he’d been expecting news – of Sarah, and of the kind he’d guessed at. Because Sarah might have arranged for him to hear of it through his uncle. Because she couldn’t send it to him herself, directly, and also because – well, if he’d been right with that other piece of guesswork, the idea that he and she were never to discuss it or even to admit that there could be anything to discuss … Family news, reaching him by a roundabout route of her own devising – implying nothing, compromising no one …
Well, it could have been like that.
Nick had never appreciated how deeply his uncle felt for Sarah until a few months ago when Hugh had come to visit him in hospital, after the Zeebrugge raid. He’d said quietly, privately, ‘Look after her, Nick, if she should ever need it. I should, if I were ever in a position to be of service – but none of us can tell what’s in store … I know you’re fond of her, and that she is of you; and we both know she’s drawn a wrong card, eh? She’ll not complain of anything – she’s too brave, by half – I mean she’d never ask for help. That’s my point – without asking, she may need it. Be ready, Nick, and a weather eye open?’
If he had any sense of shame or guilt, it was from knowing how shocked Hugh Everard would be if he knew. Nick had a greater respect and affection for his uncle than he had for any other man on earth.
Coming out of his thoughts, he focused on Reaper, who’d just lit another cigarette and was regarding him steadily through its smoke.
‘Well, Everard? Now this is over, what’s your future?’
In the long run – unpredictable. In the more immediate sense it was cut-and-dried and dull as ditchwater. He told Reaper, ‘Suppose I’ll beg a passage to Mudros, to take up my appointment to Leveret.’
‘Ah.’ Reaper blinked. ‘Leveret. Quite.’
Something odd in his expression, though. Some private knowledge or speculation?
As if he was holding back a laugh … And Nick was back in memory in a room in a requisitioned boardinghouse overlooking the destroyer anchorage in Dover harbour; he’d faced Reaper across a work-littered table and tried to mask his disappointment at the news that he was to join Bravo – a shaky old relic, outdated and outworn. Nobody had mentioned that he was being appointed in command.
Reaper was wearing that same secretive, tricky look that he’d worn then. He murmured, watching smoke drift towards the deck-head, ‘Yes. Of course.’ Johnny Treat, Wishart’s navigator, asked, ‘What happened to the Marine?’
Reaper turned to answer him. ‘Burtenshaw is busy demolishing gun-emplacements and other fortifications in the Dardanelles. It’s what he knows about, d’you see.’
There’d been some demolition and gun-spiking by landing-parties from destroyers moving up-straits behind the mine-sweepers, but only a preliminary clearance, enough to ensure the safe passage of the fleet. It had
been a biggish fleet that had come through, a procession of warships sixteen miles long. Most of them had been British, but there’d been some French and Greek flags among the White Ensigns. The Greek battleships Kilkis and Lemnos, for instance, which, before they’d been presented to the Greeks, had been the USS Idaho and Mississippi.
Nothing German floated here now. Goeben lay in the shallows of the Gulf of Izmid, where if her bulkheads collapsed from the weight of water inside her she’d have a soft bottom to sit down on. She’d struggled into the gulf on one screw and well down by the stern, and lain for nearly a fortnight with E.57’s reloaded bow tubes trained on her while her own men removed the breechblocks from her guns and the warheads from her torpedoes. Nick, as prize master, had supervised this drawing of her teeth.
A fair part of the British force that was anchored here now would be going through the Bosphorus in a day or two, into the Black Sea. Reaper, who was abreast of all the Intelligence reports, had said they’d probably see action soon enough. If not against Bolshevik-manned warships, at least in support of shore operations. General Denikin’s drive into the Caucasus, for instance: he had 30,000 White Russians in his force, and the Cabinet in London had decided that he should be supplied and supported through Novorossisk, which he’d captured from the Reds at the end of August. And there was another White army in the Crimea: and the new Republic of Georgia, which had declared its independence from the Bolsheviks, was most likely going to need help in defending its littoral and the oil port of Batum against invasion from the north.
Action soon, then: and Terrapin, this destroyer in which he was sitting so comfortably now, was to be part of the squadron that was going in. While he, Nick, would be back in the Aegean, his enemies boredom, officialdom, envy of these people … Reaper was looking at his watch. The motorboat had just been called away, and presently it would be lying at the gangway waiting to carry the three of them to the flagship. Reaper nodded: ‘Five minutes. Are we all chamfered up?’
Spit and polish for the C-in-C. Admiral Sir Somerset A. Gough-Calthorpe had scored his own huge success: his armistice negotiations had been brilliantly conducted, entirely off his own bat, and the extent of his command and responsibilities was enormous now: he was High Commissioner of Turkey, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean and of the Atlantic as far as Cape St Vincent: the Black Sea, Caspian, Red Sea and the Danube were all in his command. General Allenby was his subordinate: Gough-Calthorpe, in fact, was God, so far as the Middle East was concerned. Wishart suggested to Nick, ‘If you want passage westward, wait two days and you can come back with us. That’ll make two passengers – you and Jake Cameron.’
‘Well, that’s very kind, and—’
Reaper interrupted. ‘He may not be requiring passage westward.’
‘Sir?’
‘Would you be terribly chagrined, Everard, if someone else took over Leveret?’
So he’d been right about that hooded, secretive look. He sat watching Reaper, waiting for whatever this new thing was. Not allowing himself to hope too strongly…
‘Well?’
‘No, sir. I’d presume there was some – some interesting alternative.’
Reaper laid his half-cigarette down in the silver ashtray.
‘Following the mutiny in the High Seas Fleet, a German naval surrender has to be prepared for. Amongst other needs is that for officers in certain categories of seniority and command experience who speak good German. Chaps of that sort are wanted back home immediately. And—’ he paused, just fractionally – ‘Lieutenant Commander Truman is one of them. Consequently—’
‘Terrapin!’
‘Damn it, if you’d allow me—’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘As you say – Terrapin. I’ve suggested to the Chief-of-Staff that you might be considered suitable to relieve Truman in command. Should he agree, and should the Admiral concur, a signal will have been exchanged by now, I imagine, with Captain (D) in Mudros. On the other hand—’
On the other hand …
At odds of ten to one on, it would have been agreed by now. If Truman was to be relieved, he’d have to be relieved at once, since Terrapin had been earmarked for the Black Sea expedition. What other destroyer captain would they find available here at Constantinople? Reaper knew it too: if he hadn’t been sure of it he wouldn’t have raised the subject, not until he’d had an answer to his proposal. Nor, probably — come to think of it – would he have expanded as he had earlier on the subject of what awaited a Royal Navy squadron on the other side of the Bosphorus.
He wouldn’t be grinning at him like that, either.
Wishart was smiling too. Benign, big-brotherly: fresh from the deep minefields and the nets.
Nick found himself on his feet. ‘Sir – I really don’t know what to say, I—’
‘Let it wait, then.’ Reaper stood up too. ‘Over the champagne, I dare say you’ll think of something.’
Author’s Note
The Englishwoman who appears here as the Grey Lady was in fact known – according to Francis Yeats-Brown in his book Golden Horn – as the White Lady of Pera. In using her as a fictional character it seemed best to change her shade. But she did (Yeats-Brown records) buy General Liman von Sanders’s Mercedes Benz tourer, for the purposes stated and from his soldier driver, and for a while she had it guarded by a performing bear.
Enver, Talaat and Djemal escaped that night while the fuses were drawn, but all three came to sticky ends soon after. And Goeben, when Admiral Gough-Calthorpe reached Constantinople, was indeed in the Gulf of Izmid and, with extensive flooding aft, was moored in shallow water in case she foundered.
For readers to whom technicalities are of interest I would mention that details of E.57 were obtained from builders’ plans in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and from General Orders for Submarines 1913, Notes for Officers under Instruction November 1918 and an E-class crew-list and watchbill, all in the RN Submarine Museum at Fort Blockhouse, Gosport.
The submarine-ambush episode is factually based. It happened in 1915. The French submarine captured intact by the Turks was the Turquoise, and operation orders found in her led to the German submarine UB 15 keeping a prearranged rendezvous with the British E.20. E.20, a sitting duck, was torpedoed and lost with all hands.
E.57 is of course a fictional creation; only 56 E.’s entered service. But Saxton White’s attempt to reach Goeben in E.14, after the German sortie in which the monitors were sunk, did take place and did result in the loss of E.14 and the death and posthumous VC of her captain. White’s was in fact E.14’s second VC: the first had been awarded to Lt.-Cdr. E.C. Boyle, who commanded her in 1915.
A.F.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1978 by Michael Joseph Limited
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
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Copyright © Alexander Fullerton, 1978
The moral right of Alexander Fullerton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591528
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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