And now, the Old Man’s bombshell about the value of the currency we carried in the forward strong-room. I had guessed there was a lot of money from the capacity of those leather and steel-bound boxes that had come aboard, but five million ...?
Evans eyed me over his cup. ‘It’s still not as important as the mail bags, John. Bank notes can be replaced, given time—sunken wrecks and dead sailors can’t be refloated from the bottom of the sea.’
I sucked a hollow tooth that had been nagging me for months but which I was too scared to admit to a dentist. ‘Maybe, but that much money makes us a security risk in itself, Sir. It makes this ship a doubly desirable property to anyone who’s interested.’
‘Like who, for instance? The Germans?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they would like to get hold of five million to buy themselves another couple of U- boats. But, well ... Oh hell! There’s a lot of blokes on our own side would take a big chance for that kind of a return.’
Evans smiled. ‘You think the mysterious fireworks last night were pirates then, John? That any time now we may be boarded by black-bearded sailormen with cutlasses and hooks for hands?’
While the idea was incongruous, it still didn’t appeal to my rather depleted sense of humour. ‘More like bristleheaded Huns with Schmeisser machine-guns and grenades!’ I muttered sourly.
‘That,’ said the Captain, ‘could be rather more of a possibility. But not for a few million in banknotes which would only be of use to any agents they may have in Aussie. Even then, the notes will be serialised. It might be a worthwhile risk for a common criminal, but I can’t imagine any spy worth his salt leaving a trail of banknotes known to be stolen from Cyclops, can you?’
I shook my head. Of course he was right.
‘Well, it beats me,’ I muttered, feeling one of my bloody-minded turns coming on but, even with that awareness, still wanting to pick flaws in somebody. ‘Why in God’s name did they send us out with only that ... that elastic-driven bloody wood carving out there as our only protection? If we’re so important, then why didn’t the Admiralty lay on a proper escort?’
The Old Man got to his feet and stared out of the port. I caught a glimpse of the brass surround framing the heavy foremast of Athenian, swaying easily and reassuringly on our beam. He didn’t turn as he spoke. ‘We are important, John. Very important. You already know why. But don’t let’s delude ourselves into thinking we’re the only people in this war. The Navy’s got a massive problem, and nowhere near enough ships to cope with it. Our speed is our greatest protection— our speed ... and luck! Without luck I don’t suppose an ocean full of escorts would be of much assistance. Just thank God for small mercies, John—at least we don’t have any aircraft worries so far south.’
I sniffed. ‘No, none at all ... neither ours nor theirs. Surely they could have spared us a couple of planes for air cover? We’re less than three hours’ flying time away from the S.A.A.F. bases now.’
‘Cover from what? Other planes? We’re too far from the nearest Luftwaffe fields in North Africa. Apart from U-boats our only other danger could be from their surface raiders, and I understand this area is considered clear at present .’ He saw the look of scepticism on my face and hurried on before I could get my protest assembled and fired. ‘... so what use is there in our having a Sunderland buzzing round and round above us, acting as a marker for every sub within thirty miles?’
‘Sunderlands are supposed to be anti-submarine aircraft, aren’t they, Sir?’ I queried pointedly, still unconvinced. ‘They carry depth charges, don’t they?’
He swung round to face me and I could see the argument was nearly over. It would be ‘Mister Kent’ again this time. ‘So does Mallard, Mister Kent—but you don’t seem to go much on her as a form of protection. I have no doubt whatever that air cover could be provided if necessary, but the powers that be felt it better not to furnish us with an openly displayed invitation for the Huns to come and investigate what the planes were covering. They considered it more sensible for us to try and remain undetected, rather than to revenge themselves on the enemy while we cheer—from the lifeboats.’
His argument, based as it was on the lesser of two evils, was certainly sensible. It somewhat lost conviction regarding the ‘detection’ bit though as suddenly the cabin lurched hard over to starboard under the effects of an apparently massive helm alteration while, above us on the bridge, the ship’s siren screamed two short warning blasts. The engraved coffee pot slid off the shiny silver tray with a crash and the Captain’s best Egyptian Axminster soaked up the mess of spilt grains as we stared at each other in shocked, frozen silence.
Two blasts. The emergency signal to all other ships: ‘I am directing my course to port!’
And whoever was at the wheel was directing us to port with an urgency which suggested we were under investigation—with or without air cover.
*
The Third Mate was waiting for us at the top of the bridge ladder. The Captain made it one rung ahead of me, though I could have sworn I was first out of his cabin. Maybe I had a footprint on my back?
Curtis waved an excited hand and his eyes were very bright in the flushed face. ‘Torpedo, Sir! A bloody torpedo for Chrissake! I was jus’ ...’
Evans cut him savagely short. ‘Whereaway, man?’
The ship’s head was swinging really fast now. I glanced aft and saw our wake curving sharply round as the masts lay well over against the shimmering line of the horizon with the centrifugal pull of the turn. We were almost at right angles now to our original course. Curtis blinked vaguely at the Old Man for a moment, then swung to get his bearings on the fast changing heading. ‘It came from almost abeam, Sir. Port side. I swung her into it as I thought it would help kick our stern out of the way.’
‘We must be practically heading for the sub now then, Three Oh?’ I asked sharply.
His head bobbed violently. ‘Yessir. More or less.’
‘Good lad!’ I yelled, as I ran into the wheelhouse. I’d have preferred it if we had been pulling away from the spot instead of heading right for the bastards, but a narrow bow shot was a lot more difficult for them than if we carried on swinging through a hundred and eighty-degree arc to present them with yet another five-hundred-foot-long beam target.
The helmsman’s eyes were as big as saucers as he stared at me and I could see his hands white where he gripped the spokes of the big wheel. He must have been almost as scared as I was. ‘Midships the wheel!’ I shouted, grabbing for the engine room phone.
The spokes blurred under the release from the ‘hard’ position and, immediately, I felt the deck tilting back to the horizontal as the rudder pressure eased and our head steadied.
‘Wheel’s amidships, Sir.’
‘What was your zig-zag heading before the alteration?’ I snapped urgently.
‘168, Sir. We was on the port leg.’
‘And now? What’s your head now?’
He peered into the binnacle and I could see the glint of sweat on his brow as the sunlight struck through the open doorway. ‘Er ... Comin’ up to 082, Sir, and still swingin’ to port.’
I stabbed at the phone buzzer and tried to force my mind to think. We’d already swung through nearly a right-angle. Curtis had reckoned the torpedo had come from broad on our port beam, which meant that the sub was bearing approximately, er ... 078 degrees when it fired? Allow, say, another half point to compensate for our travelled distance from there and we should be just about right on the nose. Their nose! I heard the click as the phone came off the hook down below, but I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and jerked my chin at the helmsman.
‘Steady on 073, Quartermaster ...’
I took my hand away from the receiver. ‘First Mate here.’
Someone, I don’t know who, answered tinnily from the oil-gleaming depths. ‘Aye, aye, Mister Kent?’
‘I want maximum emergency revolutions . Every turn you can give me.’
The voice sounded hur
t. ‘Christ, Mate. We’re already goin’ like shit off a shovel. The Chief’ll have my guts with gravy if ...’
My reply was hoarse with savagery. ‘The Chief’ll have a bastard TORPEDO up his backside if you don’t. Now you just get her opened up, Spanner Man. Right up!’
The pause was only fractional. ‘Aye, aye, Mister Kent. She’ll shake herself to bloody bits, though.’
‘I don’t give a monkey’s ass if we bloody FLY! Jus' do what you’re told ...’
I slammed the phone back in its cradle, then started to look for Athenian and Mallard with a sudden sense of guilt. I’d clean forgotten them when I started giving the order for the Charge of the Light Brigade to the man at the wheel. With relief I saw Athenian steaming half a mile ahead, over on our starboard quarter, the while water kicking high under her rounded counter as she slid away from us, going fast and still on her original course. A light was bleeping from her bridge structure and I just caught the end of her message ... UT WE WOULD PREFER NOT TO BE SEEN WITH YOU. Hah, hah! Bloody funny to you too, Chief Officer Henderson.
The vibration from our shafts crept up and up until I half expected the deckhead rivets to start popping. Whoever was below hadn’t been joking about shaking ourselves to bits. We must have been working up to twenty knots now, probably the fastest she’d steamed since her speed trials when she was still in the builder’s hands three years ago, in the palmy days of ’38. I wondered where Henry McKenzie, the Chief, was and felt mildly surprised that he hadn’t already presented himself on the bridge in irate, Celtic protest at the abuse of his beloved wee engines. Maybe, this time, Henry had just gone and had a stroke over the much abused carcase of his revered Company Fuel Log?
Or, on the other hand, maybe he’d just ignored the possibility of an agonising, oil-choked death in the velvety blackness of a torpedoed ship’s bowels and had swung down the long, shiny, deathtrap handrails of the engine room ladders to be with his boys and his engines, and to do his duty?
I started to feel ridiculously melodramatic and, instead, tried to wrestle with a time and distance problem called ‘Find the Submarine.’ Glancing at the bulkhead clock I guessed that we’d now been travelling down the track of the torpedo, or torpedoes for that matter, for approximately seven minutes. Which meant we were roughly two and a half sea miles from where the coffee pot had spilled on to the Old Man’s fancy carpet. I wished I knew how far a torpedo carried or what a U-boat’s attacking range was. One mile? Two? Surely no more than two miles? That meant, then, that the bloody sub was now astern of us, that we’d already passed over the area in which she was lying. Perhaps we’d even passed over the very spot where she was submerged?
A tremendous explosion from aft shocked me into realising I wasn’t the only bloke who could do sums in his head. I threw myself out on to the starboard wing just in time to stare down our wake and see the green ocean astern erupting into mushroom after mushroom of dirty, yellow-contaminated water less than ten cables off our quarter. Then I saw the little Mallard screaming round with canted decks, White Ensign board taut, as she positioned herself for another depth-charge run over the spot. I was watching the spiralling shock waves of the first explosions skimming across the otherwise sullen flat calm of the sea when Evans came up behind me and raised his binoculars.
‘Black flag up - the Grey Funnel Line signalling an Asdic contact, John,’ he said with a satisfied, frighteningly pleased expression on his red face. ‘I’d like fine to see one of those Nazi bastards with his guts spilling out in the bloody water, by God but I would.’
I stared at the Captain in shocked silence for a moment, still feeling Cyclops tremble like a fleeing animal beneath my feet. How could a professional seaman with a pretty, fairhaired daughter like he had—how could he possibly wish to see a fellow human being floating all splayed out in the silent water with his entrails waving around him, spewed from his gutted body by the terrifying force of those obscene weapons? A man who, only a few months ago, had pushed us at seventeen knots through some of the biggest seas I’d ever seen to go to the assistance of a small Arabian coaster which had screamed for help over its Heath Robinson radio through the howling frenzy of an Indian Ocean maelstrom. I hadn’t been surprised then. Just scared as the great, green water smashed over our bows and leaped and roared aft to crash, with the force of an express train, against the break of our superstructure.
... then the terrible columns of atomised water hung in the air again in the wake of the racing, worrying little bulldog of an escort, and the blast from the charges beat on our eardrums, and I started to feel the same as Evans.
I felt an almost sexual blood lust with the excitement of it all. I wanted to see the signs of victory in bloated, sundered corpses bobbing in the skin of oil and debris from the shattered hull of the U-boat. I wanted to see it so bad I could almost taste it. I wanted to see it because I knew that those men—even though they were maybe fathers of little fair-haired girls themselves—were of the same kind as the animals who had sunk Hesperia without even giving her the chance to cry for help. These were the men who had killed big Eric Clint in the prime of his life and career ... and had just tried to kill me, and Curtis, and the Old Man, and thin, nervous, first trip away from home Conway.
Brannigan came pounding up the ladder as Mallard skittered round in another of her sliding turns under full helm. I envied Commander Braid the exhilaration of handling a thoroughbred ship that could almost skim round in her own length like one of those funny little waterbug things you see on stagnant ponds back home. There came a brief flash of golden light from her foredeck and I realised it came from the brass shell casing held by one of her gun crew, stood-to and waiting for the first signs of a break in the now subsiding water. That made me think of our own museum piece aft—I’d been forgetting a hell of a lot of things in my panic—and I dropped my eyes to our poop.
Yes! There she was, pointing hungrily over to where the U-boat lay. Phyllis! What a bloody silly name for a bloody silly gun. I noticed the glint of a white cap cover amongst the khaki-clad figures of Bombardier Allen and his comrades-in-arms and grinned to myself through the tension pulling at the corner of my mouth. Charlie Shell was still unable to keep away from his pride and joy, even though he’d had his nose pushed in by the army. He’d never fired it, not once, but to listen to him you’d have thought that he and that obsolete cannon were the only things keeping the Bismarck cowering in port.
And so we waited ...
*
We waited with the sun beating down on our shoulders, and the sea burning almost yellow with the heat from it. No one moved and no one spoke, while the ship throbbed excitedly under our feet and the exhaust gases from the giant funnel above roared like some monstrous dragon into the burnished sky. The Amatol-fouled cloud on the sea was very calm again, broken only by the splaying arrow of Mallard’s wake as she hovered hungrily, gun silently alert.
We waited, staring tensely at the stain on the water. My eyes ached with the strain of peering through the binoculars, but I couldn’t look away. The knot was back in my stomach again, but this time it was a sadistic anticipation that was causing it, a glorious hope of being able to hit back, with the cards stacked on our side for a change: a sense of appeasement after our constant fear, and our running eternally south. The sheep were now the wolves and, by God, we were getting our money’s worth.
And then—like a brain that suddenly snaps—it was all savagery, and noise, and violence, and hate.
*
At my shoulder I heard the hiss of indrawn breath as Evans watched the yellow patch on the water slowly darkening. My hands holding the binoculars started to shake uncontrollably, so that I had to lean with my elbows on the teak rail to steady them. I knew that, for the first time, we were about to see the fear that had stalked us.
The dark stain grew blacker and started to bubble like a witches’ cauldon as oil seeped and rose from ruptured fuel tanks. German oil. Vulture’s blood. Christ, how I wanted to see it turn into rich,
red, satisfying plasma.
Then an obscene boil on the water. A bulge of whipped white foam and a belch of liberated air throwing great gouts of black liquid in high slashes against the burnt-yellow sky. Someone was shouting behind me and I realised it was Brannigan trying to tell the duty-trapped quartermaster at the wheel what was happening. ‘Yes! She’s coming up ... She’s coming. Oh, the bastards, the beautiful bastards ... There they come, right out of the bloody water ... Aw, Jeeeeeesus!’
For a fleeting moment I was back five years to a big room in Port Said where I’d sheepishly paid a tin of fifty Gold Flake to watch two gigantic, sweat-shining bucks doing unspeakable things to a slim, blonde White Russian kid with enormous breasts ... She’d screamed just like the Fourth as she’d writhed in the supreme eroticism.
Then I forgot about everything as the long, streaming hull rose nearly vertically from the deep. We heard the screech of desperately venting air tanks as she hung, almost motionless, on her tail like some old sailor’s nightmare dream of the terrible white whale. But she wasn’t white, she was black. Death black. The black of oil-burnt lungs, with little red and pink scars where the rust showed through. Black like the colour of Eric Clint’s drowned, suffocated face.
And, even in the milli-seconds while she was still suspended, a little man—a black little man—fell from her conning tower. A little man like the star figure that had spiralled into the air from the Commandant Joffre’s funnel. And the guns opened up on her from Mallard as she slowly tilted, then came crashing faster and faster into the waiting sea.
I heard a throaty boom from our own poop and felt the deck shiver. Phyllis was firing . by God but she was firing! Even above the smash of the shells I could hear the fat little bombardier screaming his fire orders in a high-pitched but surprisingly controlled voice. ‘LOAD! On ...! On ... On ... FIRE!', then Phyllis boomed again and the shell sounded like a Fifth of November rocket as it screeched, supersonic, through the heavy air. Then, ‘LOAD ...! On ...! On ...!’
A FLOCK OF SHIPS Page 9
