“Aye aye, sir.”
“Messenger—give Sub-Lieutenant Everard a battle-bowler.”
“RDF reports second formation right ahead, closing!”
Two lots of attackers now. They’d want to end it before sun-down, Paul guessed. They’d be alarmed by the possibility of the ships getting under the Malta fighter umbrella by first light, perhaps. Not that it could be done, in fact—unless the Santa Eulalia was sent on alone?
Get one ship in, rather than lose two?
“Green nine-oh, torpedo-bombers!” The lookout in the bay below Paul had half risen from his seat, pointing. He yelled, “Angle of sight zero!”
Someone in the bridge announced, “They’re Heinkels, sir.”
“God damn and blast it.” The skipper told Simpson bitterly, “Slip the bloody wire.”
It might have been a month, by the feel of it, since the Montgovern had steamed through the Gibraltar Strait. And he’d changed, he felt, in that time. Passing Gib, he’d been younger, too hopeful, too blithely confident, too bloody ignorant.
Hadn’t Beale seen that, and laughed at it?
No laffin’ voices now. Just guns’ voices, all of them familiar. The destroyer’s four-inch alone, at first, and then the American freighter’s heavy defensive barrage. Her gunners were US Navy men, Pratt had said at some stage. The half-tanker had only the four Oerlikons on her bridge now, but every little helped. One Heinkel III went into the sea, and the torpedoes from the other two weren’t seen after they hit the water. The formation right ahead turned out to be Malta Spitfires: they arrived too late to break up the Junkers attack but shot two of them down as they flew away towards Sicily. No damage done, only time lost. Time, ammunition, fuel. That much less aviation spirit for the fighter defence of Malta: that much more time to be spent at sea—tonight, tomorrow … Considering that he’d had a few hours’ sleep last night and another sleep after his swim, Paul felt extraordinarily tired. Perhaps Grant had given him some sedative. He didn’t want to go below, though; he’d sleep up here, he thought, when it was dark and the dusk attacks were over. He thought he might even be able to sleep standing up, if he had to. Like a horse: lean on the back of the lookout bay, lift one foot on to its toes behind you, lower the head and sleep. Even the guns mightn’t wake you.
“Hello, there. Everard, isn’t it?”
Ainsty’s RN sub-lieutenant shook Paul’s hand. “I’m Carnegie. How goes it? Ears okay now?”
Carnegie looked younger than Paul thought he looked. He also looked, if anything, more tired even than Paul felt. Everyone you looked at was in a state of near-exhaustion. These people would have been at action stations continuously, he guessed, for the last four days.
“Hear about the Italian cruisers?”
“I heard some were on their way south, or—”
“They’ve turned back. RAF recce planes fooled them into believing they were guiding some powerful force of battleships to intercept them. By putting out a lot of phoney signals, and so on. So the Eyeties have turned tail and they’re legging it for home.”
“That was smart work.”
Carnegie nodded. “Mare Nostrum is Italian for Naples harbour. The inner harbour, actually … Now I’ve got to go down and see to that frigging wire. See you later.”
He’d gone. Ainsty’s gunners were training their weapons fore-and-aft and ditching empty shell-cases as she returned to her station astern of the Caracas Moon’s fore section. She’d nose up close, and a sailor on her foc’sl would lob a heaving-line across for the eye of the wire to be attached to it. (In the tanker they’d have hauled the wire up inboard, while the attack had been in progress.) Then the wire would be hauled in and made fast; and then on again, Malta-wards, waiting for the next assault to come in, and with possibly only thirty-seven miles to cover now.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Stop together.” Nick Everard put the telephone down and lifted his glasses for a look at the motorboat, which was lying waiting a cable’s length on the port bow. Through gathering darkness he could see three men in its sternsheets: they’d be the boat’s coxswain, and Lieutenant Wainwright, and probably the sergeant of that marine section. The rest of the Sasul RM party would be inside the cabin. Defiant was losing way, sliding up towards the stopping-point where he’d embark the marines and hoist the boat. He’d sent it over from the mangrove inlet just before he’d started to move the ship out; it had been reasonable to use the powerboat instead of a cutter this time, because the channel’s hazards were marked with spar-buoys and Wainwright, who’d been in charge of the cutter this morning, knew his way in and out.
Nick wished he knew his way out. He’d weighed it up and made a choice, but the spin of a coin might have been as good a way to decide it. The Alas Strait or the Lombok Strait, both of them almost certainly patrolled. Heads or tails …
He’d begun extracting Defiant from her mud-hole just as the light was going. Breast-wires to the shore, hand-tended on both sides of the foc’sl and with the capstan running so they could apply tension this way or that as necessary, had kept her bow middled in the inlet while the wire to the stream anchor was being hove in on the quarterdeck. That part of it had been an awkward, inch-by-inch progress, but as soon as her stern had been out of the creek, and a leadline had confirmed that there were a few feet of water under it, he’d given her a touch astern on one screw, and she’d come out like a cork from a greasy bottle. A short churn of the same screw running ahead had stopped her then, while the stream anchor was weighed—a hose playing on it over the stern to wash half a ton of mud off it as it rose.
It hadn’t been possible to turn her until she was out through the gap where, on the way in, Ormrod had buoyed a rock on each side of the channel. Nick had conned her out stern-first, very carefully and slowly, with Ormrod showing a fixed blue light from a whaler to guide him down the middle. When he’d got her out and clear of that gap he’d turned her inside her own length, using one screw ahead and one astern, while Chevening watched the bearings on the two spar-buoys to ensure that in the process of turning she remained over the same safe spot. Then the whaler shot alongside and was hooked on; as soon as it was clear of the water he’d had his ship under way, both screws slow ahead, following the marked channel to this point off Sasul.
Gant called from the after end of the bridge that the motorboat was out of the water.
“Slow ahead together. Steer three-one-five. And—Wiley—steer as fine as you did this morning.”
“Aye aye, sir. Both telegraphs slow ahead, sir.”
“Pilot, is it one and a half miles now?”
“One-point-four, sir. We overshot a little.”
“Tell me at one-point-three.”
Rounding the Sasul island and its rock surround, now, on the same track he’d come in by but in reverse. He was tempted to cut the next corner, and according to charted information he could have, but it would only have saved a few minutes. He’d been very lucky, he knew, to have got away with so much already. One should thank God for it, he told himself, not get over-confident and start taking risks that weren’t essential.
There’d be risks enough that would have to be accepted, in the next few hours. Tonight, either the gamble paid off, or you lost everything. “Everything” being a cruiser and her company. The personal side of it, his own, didn’t count for much and wasn’t an element in his thinking; except he’d like to have seen Kate again, and Paul. He’d like to have talked a lot with Paul, tried to steer him clear of some of the family complications. Paul would make out all right, though. By tomorrow’s sunrise he might have become Sub-Lieutenant Sir Paul Everard RNVR, but he’d wear that all right too, once he got used to it.
Sunrise here tomorrow would be only midnight in the Mediterranean. By sunrise there, it would be midday here, and by that time Defiant would be either in the clear—or getting on that way—or under a lot of water.
Cross your fingers …
He could do that with his left hand.
“We�
��ve run one-point-three, sir!”
“Stop port.”
“Stop port, sir …”
The bearing on Paliat was all right. But on this course, heading almost straight towards it, the bearing didn’t change much anyway. The log-reading was what you had to go by.
“One-point-four, sir!”
“Port ten.”
He had to bring her round to two hundred and forty degrees now, for a leg of two and one-fifth miles. Then due south for six miles, which would take her clear of Sepanjang’s southwest corner. And then … Well, that was the crucial decision. He’d made it, for better or for worse; and he’d used Gant and Chevening to help him in the process.
He’d sent for them to meet him in the chartroom at half an hour before sunset, when the marines had been recalled to the ship and were on their way from the two villages, the hilltop and the southern beach. He’d shown Gant the signal from Bandoeng about the heavy naval traffic in Lombok and the destroyer on guard in Alas.
Gant murmured, passing it to Chevening, “Seems to put the kybosh on both exits.”
“What’s your view, pilot?”
“Don’t know, sir … It’s—well, it’s not good, is it … Might we go west, try the Bali Strait?”
He shook his head. “I don’t even think much of Sloan’s chances there now. With a stream of enemy ships through Lombok, turning west—they’re all cutting across the exit from the Bali Strait, aren’t they? If they’re still coming through, that is … Another point, though—if they’ve bothered to put a patrol on the Alas Strait, the odds are they’ll have done the same elsewhere.”
You could just about spit across the Bali Strait. You could guard it with a rowing boat.
Gant was rubbing the small of his back, where the pain was. He asked, “I imagine you’ve formed an idea or two already, sir?”
“Nothing hard and fast. That’s why I’m enrolling your brains as well. As I see it, we have a straightforward choice between the Lombok Strait and the Alas Strait. This signal’s time of origin was just after noon. We don’t know what time the observations were made—by aircraft, submarine, or shore observations, whatever—but we must assume, I think, that it describes the position as we’re likely to find it. And on that basis, Bob—what would you do?”
“I’d forget Alas, sir. Because it’s narrower than Lombok and we do know it’s guarded. I’d go for Lombok—with your dummy funnel up, and hoping to be taken for one of their lot.”
“Pilot?”
“I think I agree with that, sir.”
It had been his own first reaction, too, when he’d first seen the signal. It was an attractive idea because Lombok was the nearest of the straits, and the widest, and the direct, head-on approach appealed to him. But there were some aspects of it he didn’t like. He said, “The traffic through Lombok can’t go on indefinitely. I imagine they’re sending forces through to take Tjilatjap, cut off any evacuation and any ships that may be there. Perhaps put some troops ashore somewhere; but it’s a phase that could well be over.”
He hoped it was, for Jim Jordan’s sake. But he was only prodding, looking for aspects he hadn’t thought about already.
Chevening nodded. “It might be wide open, now.”
“Would you leave it wide open, if you were a Jap? While you were taking the trouble to block Alas?”
“Fair point, sir.” Gant said, “The fact is we know they’re blocking Alas, and we can give Lombok the benefit of a doubt. If they’ve been rushing ships through there, they may not have got as far as putting a watch on it yet. You’d tend to watch the holes you weren’t using, wouldn’t you?”
“Perhaps …You’d just dash through, Bob, would you?”
“Well—if one went through at about twelve or fifteen knots … Not too much dash, but not looking too sneaky either.”
Chevening said, “My feeling too, sir.”
“And you may well be right.” His own mind was open to the idea, at that stage. Baulking still at the thought of all that traffic, the prospect of having Jap ships challenging him, or sending other signals that he wouldn’t know how to answer. Except by shining a light on their beastly flag, which in any case he wasn’t keen to fly. The thought of a challenge and having to identify himself was the real snag. There were advantages too, though. It was close, and he could travel fast through it and be a lot farther south by first light than he’d be if he took the longer route via Alas.
But the wide-open, easy-looking Lombok Strait still gave him the shivers, for some reason.
“Do we have a large-scale chart of the Alas Strait?”
The folio for these waters was in the top drawer of the chart table. He lit a cigarette while Chevening thumbed through the labelled front edges and then pulled out chart 3706.
Nick leaned over it, smoking and ruminating. After a few minutes, he thought he might have found the answer.
“Right. Pilot—you’re captain of a Jap destroyer, and your orders are to anchor in the Alas Strait where you can cover anyone like us trying to break out of the Java Sea. Where’ll you drop your hook?”
The requirements were for water shallow enough to anchor in, and to be able to see right across the Strait. He thought there was one place more suitable than any other; and two other possibles that you’d discard in favour of the first.
Chevening said, “Either in this area—here, or here—or on this patch just north of Petagan.”
“You can only be in one of those places, though.”
“The Petagan area’s ideal, sir. Good view across the entrance, ten fathoms or a bit less, and you’d be covering this Sungian Strait as well.”
“Why not here on the east side, your other possibles?”
“Because a ship could slip into the Strait through the Sungian backwater and you wouldn’t see it.”
“That’s true, you wouldn’t. But if you were lying there near Petagan, what if a ship came hugging the east coast, down inside all these islands? Bob?”
Gant had been nodding, agreeing with the navigator’s choice of anchorage. He answered, “Because that’s a complicated passage. It’s not even labelled as a channel, the way the Sungian route is. Also, I think if I was a Jap, I’d be expecting any Allied ship to appear from the west, not from that way.”
“Exactly my own thought.” Nick was studying the chart again, looking for anything he might have missed. But this did look like the answer. He might kick himself when at dawn tomorrow he found himself not very far south of the islands—because it would take longer … Petagan: he felt sure that no destroyer captain in his senses and with that purpose would pick any other anchorage.
Steering south now, at twenty-five knots. In five minutes he’d be bringing her round to a hundred and twenty-five degrees, which would take her across the northern approach to the Alas Strait at a distance from it of about thirty miles. After three hours on that course, he’d turn south. An hour of that, and Defiant would be slipping in between the islands of Pandjang and Seringgit, then turning southwest to follow a zigzag route between the mainland of Sumbawa and the island that fringed the northeast entrance to the Alas Strait.
Nothing about this plan was foolproof or guaranteed. By now there might be a whole flotilla patrolling the strait. Or there might be Japanese ashore in Sumbawa—in the act of landing, perhaps, in Labu Beru Bay for instance, which was an inshore stretch he meant to sneak through. If there was anything like that going on, he’d run right into it—just as Perth and Houston had run into an invasion force in the Sunda entrance … But so far as he knew, there were no Japs on Sumbawa yet, and while they were so busy with Java they probably wouldn’t have time or forces to spare. Also, Gant had been right about an approach from the east being unexpected. That destroyer would have been out there to thwart any escape attempt by one British cruiser and one American destroyer, which the Japanese had known to be in Surabaya. The cruiser had sailed yesterday at sunset—heading west—and disappeared, and the destroyer had still been in Surabaya at this last suns
et. The Japs would be looking for the cruiser, and waiting for the destroyer to make her run for it, but they wouldn’t be looking for anything to show up from the east.
So the cruiser that had departed westward, and since grown another funnel, would be slinking into Alas from the east.
And Sloan would be on her way now. Jim Jordan’s ship would be in the Madura Channel, going flat out for China Point, then Cape Sedano and the Bali Strait. In which, please God, there would be no guardship. Fervently, Nick wished Jordan luck.
But he needed some more luck for himself too. Now. It wasn’t only the passage through that strait that he had to worry about. If there was a lot of stuff passing through the Lombok gap, at least some of it would be coming down past the Kangeans. So right now, and at any time in the next few hours, Defiant might find herself in the middle of it.
Chevening warned him, “Coming up to the turn, sir, for course one-two-five degrees.”
Guns and tubes would be closed up all night. The last thing he wanted was any kind of action, but he wasn’t intending to be caught napping, either.
“Now, sir!”
“Port fifteen.” He called over his shoulder: “Yeoman?”
“Sir?”
“I want the Rising Sun hoisted aft, Morris.”
“Rising—”
Morris had gagged on it, for a second. Recovering, he muttered, “Rising Sun, sir, at the main gaff—aye aye, sir.”
Lack of enthusiasm: Nick shared it. Survival before scruples, though. It hadn’t made him feel nearly so uncomfortable a year ago to fly the Italian ensign for a short while. It was perfectly legal, too, provided you hauled it down before you opened fire. He still thought, Ugh …
“Midships.”
“Midships, sir!”
“Steer one-two-five. Have yourself relieved at the wheel now,Wiley. I’ll want you on it again in four hours’ time.”
“Aye aye, sir. Steer one-two-five, sir …”
Nick looked round for Gant. “If we run into anything, Bob, which God forbid, I may need to floodlight that rag. Warn them on the searchlight platform. But let them have an Aldis ready for it, not the big light.”
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 29
