The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5

by Alexander Fullerton

  He resumed—seeing a flag signal for the speed reduction flap multicoloured to the Chauncy Maples’s masthead while he was talking—“Zigzag would cease at dusk as usual. At 2300—or earlier if they start moving in before that—we’ll go out and attack them, well out ahead. At the same time you’d turn to three-four-two degrees and increase to seven knots—or better … Hold that course and speed for six hours—and we’d be cutting the corner slightly on position B, which would help.”

  He looked back at the Burbridge, wallowing astern of the commodore. This whole scheme depended on her being able to maintain the seven knots. If she found she couldn’t, if she broke down during the hours of the diversion, SL 320 would be stuck right across the “Torch” convoy routes. The risk, when you thought of that, was terrifying in its implications: but taking a risk was surely better than facing certain disaster and doing damn-all about it?

  By dusk, when as usual the ship’s company was closed up at action stations, he’d added—in one sense—to those risks. He’d been thinking hard about the shadower astern. The point being that by leaving the convoy with only two trawlers to guard it while he rushed out ahead with his other three ships he’d be taking quite a chance: but by leaving the shadower loose astern he’d be compounding it. The solution was to detach one trawler to turn back and deal with the shadower, keep it dived during the crucial period, deafen it with depthcharges.

  The disadvantages consisted of leaving only one trawler with the convoy, and the fact that the one that did this job astern would be back there on its own with a very long way to go and only a small margin of speed for rejoining afterwards. Also, in rejoining it would have to pass through the U-boat line.

  Nick briefed Kyle of Opal for the task. He was to force the shadower down and keep him down, and he’d add to the deception by seeming to chase after the convoy on its previous course. And he would do a bit more than that, too, by way of deception. Broad of the Stella would meanwhile stay with the convoy as its sole protector.

  As dusk thickened into night, the shadower was nine miles on the starboard quarter, and Gritten estimated there were six U-boats between sixteen and twenty-one miles ahead.

  “All in a bunch, sir. Been doing a lot of yacking, last hour or so.”

  Making their plans for the night …

  In the hour between dusk action stations and closing up again for the night’s exertions, he explained his intentions to Warrimer and Scarr, and invited comments.

  Scarr said thoughtfully, “I’d say it adds up to as good a chance as we’ll have, sir.” He was going to have to do some smart work in the plot, pinpointing each contact as Harbinger moved up towards them—so that none would be left to slip through and find the convoy wide open to it. It was a point that Warrimer touched on too: “If we can keep all the U-boats at arm’s length, sir, I suppose the lack of close escort can’t really matter.”

  That “if” was a big one. The fact the U-boats were bunched together now didn’t mean they would be in a few hours’ time. Nick turned to his engineer, Bruce Hawkey, whom he’d also summoned to this briefing.

  “I’m going to need a lot of high speed, Chief. Twice as many enemies as escorts means we’ll have to be fast on our feet. Force six or no force six …”

  Jack lay on his mattress in the dark, cold, silent house. It wasn’t as cold as the wrecked shed would have been, and he’d brought up an old carpet for a blanket, but the mattress was damp from disuse and the carpet smelt of cats.

  The girl had come back at about four in the afternoon, and the child had returned an hour later. A car or bus had brought him. Jack had heard it approach and stop, then the slam of a door, and after a minute the boy had appeared and gone round the side of the house where the cart was. After this there’d been voices downstairs, and music—from that wireless in the girl’s bedroom, perhaps, although it had sounded as if it came from the central living-room. He’d heard them moving about too, doors opening and shutting, and footsteps. He stayed on his mattress, wondering whether she’d have noticed the shortfall of bread and soup: and knowing that she must … He didn’t move about at all, because he could have been heard, and it wasn’t worth the risk, and there wasn’t anywhere to go … With luck he’d have the place to himself again tomorrow, it was as good a hideout as anyone could hope for, and there was the possibility of another snack down there tomorrow. All he had to do was lie doggo for a couple of days, while the ankle mended, then skedaddle.

  It was dead quiet, and he guessed they’d gone to bed. The child would have, anyway. He could imagine the girl sewing—making clothes for herself, or patching her son’s. He supposed she might be as much as thirty: or say twenty-eight. The boy would be about seven, he thought. He’d spend his days at some village school, presumably, while she either had a job or went to visit friends or family. As long as she did so every day, he didn’t give a damn, the important thing was that her daytime absences should be routine, invariable. Otherwise it could become difficult for him, up here. The thought of a weekend was a worry: he had no idea what day of the week it was and if tomorrow was Saturday it might mean two days with no school, perhaps no outings at all. If that happened he’d simply have to grin and bear it, but one way and another it could get to be uncomfortable.

  He told himself that it was better than the shed, anyway. And to stop worrying: think about Fiona, then if he was lucky he might dream about her …

  He was dozing when the troops came.

  A roar of engines: a glare of headlights on the shutters. He was awake: the engines cut out but the lights still blazed and a voice was yelling orders in high-pitched German. Jack on his knees on the mattress, squinting down between the wooden slats, eyes narrowed against the dazzle; he could see what looked like a staff car and also a larger, open-topped vehicle, personnel carrier, the kind he’d seen when he’d been lying on the hill. Men had jumped out of this one and vanished around both ends of the house, while others combed through the sheds, pulling doors open and kicking through the piles of litter: hens squawked and scattered. If he’d been in that shed they’d have had him cold, by now he’d either have been standing with his hands up, or dead.

  The soldiers were hammering at the back door, but here in front two of them only stood and watched the house—so they must have known the place, known the front door didn’t open. Jack thought the officer who’d given those orders was still in the car; its headlights were full on, lighting the whole house-front, and he couldn’t see much past them, but he had an impression of someone sitting in there. It could have been only his imagination, stemming from the way one of the men facing the front door had twice turned towards the car as if in conversation.

  He heard the back door open, and the girl’s voice, then a male one, and heavy boots on the plank floor of the kitchen.

  If she’d noticed that some of her food had gone, would she tell them now?

  Not that it would make much odds. They were obviously about to search the whole place.

  Earlier on, before she’d come home, he’d made sure these shutters would open so he could bale out this way if he had to. Now, of course, this was out of the question. If they came up here, he’d be trapped. And the girl would be in trouble too, he realised. They wouldn’t believe she hadn’t known he was in her house. He was surprised to find this bothered him. Surprised and pleased. Touched by an impression of loneliness, perhaps, the joint loneliness of woman and child alone, unprotected? Self-analysis had never been a habit, or even an inclination, but he was aware of this feeling of sympathy, concern for her predicament as well as for his own. The emotion was short-lived, replaced by a kind of fatalism: boots were clumping around downstairs, going from room to room, and at any moment they’d finish and come to check up here. More shouts from down in front: it looked as if they’d searched the grounds and the searchers were returning to their transport. He’d been right about the man in the staff car: light gleamed on the peak of his uniform cap as he climbed out and stood with his fists on his hip
s, staring around. Then he swung to face the corner of the house and Jack had a bird’s eye view of the girl and the child, with a soldier escorting them, walking into the brightness of the car’s lights. She was wearing her overcoat and a scarf round her head, and the boy had a blanket round him. The officer didn’t move, just watched them approach, and the soldier made some kind of report; the girl began to complain—the tone was complaining, anyway—with an arm resting on the boy’s shoulders. They’d stopped, in the headlights’ beam. Behind the officer, the other searchers were clambering into their vehicle: dark, overcoated figures in forage-caps and with slung rifles. There was an exchange of questions and answers now between the officer and the girl: her answers, brief and flat, sounded like denials. Finally he turned away, gesturing to the escort to let them go. All over?

  But he’d thought it too soon. The officer had stopped, turned, and he was looking at these upstairs windows, the blank shutters facing him. Jack pulled his head back … The German had called out some new question: the girl turned her head, moved one hand wearily, a gesture accompanied by words that might have asked “Why don’t you go up and look?” The officer still staring upwards … Then the boy squeaked something and some of the soldiers laughed. It seemed to break the tension, down there and in here, too: Jack had been in no doubt at all that a search party had been about to be sent up. Instead, the officer lifted his hand in a cross between a farewell gesture and a salute and the child spoke again, his arm jerking out of the blanket’s folds: “Heil Hitler!” As sharply as if the officer’s casualness had offended the little brat. The girl’s hand stroked his yellow, close-cropped hair. The officer was staring at her now, as if waiting for something: but she was looking down at the boy, ignoring all the rest. He shrugged, swung away abruptly as if he was sick of hanging around here, wasting time; he barked an order and soldiers came hurrying from around the ends of the house and piled into the personnel carrier. The staff car’s door was being held open by its driver: the officer slid into it, and the show was over. Engines revving, headlights flaring over tumbledown sheds and darkly looming trees, the car led and the bigger vehicle followed through a tunnel of light that narrowed towards the lane then weakened, vanished as the lights were cut. The house stood silent in the darkness now, listening to the receding sounds of the two engines: then the back door slammed shut and its bolt rasped over, and Jack heard the girl’s voice faintly as she led her child back to bed. He lay staring into darkness, wondering whether that perfunctory search would have satisfied them, whether he might be safe here now for the few days he needed. Or—less optimistically—whether it meant they had some reason to suspect the prisoner they were hunting might have turned north instead of south … If, for instance, they’d found the bicycle?

  Opal, with wind and sea on her quarter, rolled and pitched like nothing on earth. Tom Kyle, her skipper, leaning out of an open glass panel in the lee side of his bridge, bawled through a tin megaphone, “Starshell, fire!”

  He’d acquired the knack of pitching his voice up so that it was audible even in these conditions. And Potts, down on the foc’sl, would have had his ears pinned back in any case.

  The four-inch cracked, flashed, recoiled. That was the second starshell on its way to replace the first one, which was low now and fading. Having no RDF, Kyle had nothing to go on except the position he’d been given just before he’d turned his ship and pointed her back down the convoy’s track. His orders were not to try and take the shadower by surprise—that way he might very easily have missed the bastard altogether—but only to force it to dive and then give it as hard a time as possible. Nine miles on bearing 207 degrees had been the shadower’s position at 2225: you had to allow for his steering the convoy course, 042, at slightly more than convoy speed—because he’d been creeping up during the last hour, gradually shortening the distance between him and his night’s targets—so in half an hour you could say the thing would have made about two and three quarter miles, while Opal, making ten knots the other way, would have covered five. This left a gap between them now of one and a quarter miles, 2500 yards, and it was over roughly the mid-point of this patch of ocean that the illuminants were being projected now.

  The gun’s crew, in oilskins and sou’westers, were hanging on for their lives down there. It wasn’t as bad for them on this course as it would be on most others, but it was bad enough, and you’d never pick a man up in this sea. Once he was in it, you wouldn’t even see him. That starshell burst blossomed, lighting the ragged underside of cloud and throwing a hazy radiance over several square miles of sea. Any U-boat there would—one hoped—assume it had been detected, and pull the plug.

  Kyle had pulled his head inside for long enough to light one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. He used Admiralty-issue tobacco, Pusser’s, flavoured with Scotch whisky. A tot of Scotch cost threepence nowadays, at sea, and it was enough to treat a half-pound tin. Kyle rolled his cigarettes one-handed, without having to look at what his blunt fingers were doing, and each one ended up as a perfectly symmetrical tube. Over the flare of the lighter, squinting past the coxswain at his asdic operator, he asked him, “Working, is it?”

  “Won’t get bugger all in this lot, though.” The operator nodded. In these sea conditions, he meant. He was hunched over his set, bald and unshaven, chewing gum, the headset clamped over his ears and two fingers delicately twisting the knob that trained the quartz oscillator in its dome under the trawler’s forefoot. The coxswain—a short, stocky man, with one side of his face scarred purple by burning—had glanced sideways at him, then away again, eyes returning quickly to the compass card, feet straddled against the violent rolling, wide-palmed hands on the wheel’s brass-capped spokes constantly adjusting this way and that. Ahead, the starshell light was dimming: it had sunk too low and its parachute was travelling laterally on the wind. Kyle pushed the megaphone out again and screamed on that same noise-cutting note, “One for his knob, lads—fire!”

  He muttered—inside again by the time the gun fired—“Sod’ll be down under by now. Less he’s bloody cracked.” The trawler hit a wave-face so hard you’d have expected damage: Kyle staggered, grabbed for support at a nest of voice-pipes, muttered, “Bastard …” The asdic operator nodded, agreeing with the sentiment: pings singing away loud and clear, regular as the ticking of a watch, and he was turning the control knob minutely between each one, a degree or so each time, directing the impulses from broad on one bow to broad on the other. Any U-boat down there would be hearing the transmissions through its hydrophones, waiting for the probe to find it, hoping to God it wouldn’t, and manoeuvring to get clear. The German would know this was a trawler hunting him, because the sound of the single screw driven by a reciprocating engine (as opposed to turbines) was quite distinctive; but he would not be in a position to know that several miles northeast convoy SL 320 would at this moment be swinging 60 degrees to port while a dozen miles beyond it Harbinger and the corvettes would be running down on their U-boat contacts, forcing them down, plastering them with depthcharges, keeping them blind and deaf and busy while those twenty-two merchantmen and their single trawler escort turned away. “Contact! Green one-nine!”

  The operator sounded and looked amazed … Kyle too. But he’d heard that echo: he snatched up his depth-charge telephone and yelled at the team back aft to stand by … “Two hundred and fifty-foot settings: got that?” Kyle always set the same depth on his charges: his view was that whatever settings you chose it was a toss-up, so there was no point messing about. He told his coxswain, “Come twenty degrees to starboard.”

  “Aye sir …”

  Wheel spinning as he flung it round. All three men in the stuffy little bridge were plainly astonished at having picked up this contact, on a set they’d had no faith in for weeks now. But you could hear the echo plainly, the sharp, clear return of each impulse bouncing back off the U-boat’s hull. Kyle had never heard a contact so clearly in all his time at sea: and tonight he’d never expected to hear any at all, with thes
e conditions and a set that only worked when it felt like it … That last starshell was low to the water and a long way off: the U-boat would have dived at sight of the first one, he guessed. Harris, the A/S man, was the ship’s eyes now: he asked him, “Got a range yet?” Harris flinching from the whisky-scented cigarette-smoke, blinking and puffing his own breath out to clear it … “Green two-four …” Despite the trawler’s swing to starboard, the target had drawn to the right: it had to be travelling fast … Harris nodded: “Range fourteen hundred yards.” As Opal turned her beam to the onslaught of the weather the degree of roll was frightening—would have been, to anyone but a trawlerman. Down below, if anything breakable hadn’t been lashed or jammed in its stowage it would have been smashed by now. Kyle grated to his coxswain, “Keep the wheel on her. Steer two-five-oh.” “Two-five-oh.”

  But he couldn’t keep men on that gundeck now, not unless they used both hands and a strong set of teeth as well to hang on with—with even then you might lose a few. He’d got his megaphone out again; he yelled, “Clear the upper deck! All hands below!” A flash of a torch from the foc’sl acknowledged it. There was a telephone connection to the gun, but it hadn’t been working lately: Kyle had meant to tell Potts to fix it, but it had slipped his mind.

  “Course two-five-oh, sir.”

  “Lost contact!”

  Several pings had gone out and found no submarine to bounce off. Harris looked dismayed: he was twisting his beam this way and that, covering a wider and wider arc and getting nothing … Jumbo Potts, Kyle’s first lieutenant, arrived from for’ard looking as if he’d been swimming: the torch in his hand was enclosed in a French letter. He was a fat young man with a round, bright-red face and small, narrow eyes. Harris muttered, glancing at him but speaking to himself, “Lost the bugger good an’ proper.” Potts said, “No wonder. Fucking thing never did work more ’n two minutes at a time.” It was a fact; the set was anything but reliable. Opal staggered to a big sea that walloped her beam-on, then rolled away from it so hard you’d think she was going right over: she hung there on her side for a moment and then came whipping back, at the same time burying her stem in a mound of foam and shaking like a duck with Parkinson’s Disease. Potts shouted, “Force eight, I reckon.”