by David Black
Harry didn’t mention the sneer with which Bonalleck’s pep talk had been delivered, the, ‘See if you can do as you’re told this time, Gilmour,’ line with which they parted at the gangway.
Shrimp listened closely, but there was still no answer to the question uppermost in his mind: where had the British authorisation for this op come from?
Then they were onto the prep for the op, the commandos coming aboard and the weapons cache, all delivered by a very efficient detail of US Navy sailors, busy as bees in their dainty little white ‘Dixie’ caps, who had made no effort to hide their wrinkled noses on encountering the operational squalor aboard HMS Scourge as she got ready for yet another war patrol. The boat had been over a year in continuous action, if you counted her time under Bertie Bayliss, and no matter how much Izal they used on every return, the reek of the old tub had never gotten any sweeter.
Folbots and an inflatable, to carry their cargo ashore, had gone down the torpedo loading hatch, watched by Harry and Sam Bridger, the Commander S12. Bridger, all big blonde hair and beard, his brow uncharacteristically scrunched and his arms folded. He’d asked Harry for a look at his C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet confirmation signal for the op. But there hadn’t been one. If there had been, both men knew it should have passed across Sam Bridger’s desk.
Vice-Admiral Henry Harwood might have been new in the job as C-in-C, back there in Alexandria, but he’d still have wanted to approve the use of one of his boats by an Allied power on such an unusual mission. It wasn’t just that, however, that had been making Sam Bridger uncomfortable. He knew all about Scourge’s last patrol, and you couldn’t miss the stuff going on between young Gilmour and their boss, Captain Charles ‘the Bonny Boy’ Bonalleck. And he hadn’t liked it.
But again, Harry said nothing of this in his narrative. Nor did he mention the undertone of friction between Scourge’s crew and the commandos on the run across to Sicily, especially between Second Lt Pettifer and the wardroom. Harry just stuck to the story.
And then Captain di Marco had come down with the sniffles.
‘According to the orders, Captain di Marco was key to the op, sir,’ said Harry. ‘He could speak Italian, and he was to do all the liaison work with the people ashore who were to guide his party to and from the villa, and who were looking for their reward in the form of the arms cache and a considerable sum of money to help them in their struggle. But Captain di Marco had quickly become incapacitated. He was coughing and sneezing, and by the time we were round the corner and off Cape Zafferano, he had a temperature of a hundred and four and was practically raving. So we had to think again.’
And Harry, in his head, was back sitting at his wardroom table in the tiny the little alcove off Scourge’s main passage, being challenged on his own boat by that smug, lugubrious Subaltern Pettifer, going on about ‘my orders are my orders… sir.’
Harry knew all about orders; he had his own. But they’d been blown out the water by di Marco’s flu, or whatever lurgy it had been that had poleaxed the bastard.
However, there were other matters on Harry’s mind – like the Bonny Boy’s malevolent intent against him and his boat and what would happen to both him and his crew if they returned to Algiers without even trying to complete their mission.
Because he knew, as far as the Bonny Boy was concerned, Scourge had failed to complete her previous mission. That she had never stood a chance of doing so hadn’t mattered to the Bonny Boy, in fact, Harry was now convinced that was why he, in particular, had been sent in the first place.
That last patrol had been to a stretch of coast astride the Franco–Spanish border, one along which Axis blockade runners routinely ferried vital iron ore for the Jerry war machine. And something Harry had never heard of until then. Before ordering Harry to go in and disrupt the trade, before informing him that a successful patrol in those waters would shorten the war, the Bonny Boy had assured him that the original minefields covering the passage were no longer a threat – blown away by storm and current. The path to glory was now clear.
But the mines had still been there.
The Bonny Boy had lied to him.
He’d also failed to mention the system of safe-conduct ships: neutral vessels allowed to trade with the Axis powers, guaranteed safe passage by the Allies because they also carried medicines, food parcels and other life-giving supplies for Allied prisoners of war and interned civilians, ships that routinely passed through this new patrol billet the Bonny Boy had assigned to Scourge. That Harry had learned of such ships had happened only by accident, and a signal alerting all Allied units to the impending passage of one such ship, right through the middle of Harry’s billet, had only been thrust under his nose while he was in the process of attacking said ship. Oh, the signal had been sent in plenty of time, but Captain Bonalleck hadn’t deigned to pass it on. If Scourge had sunk her… Harry felt sick every time he thought of the international furore that would have resulted, of the blackening of his personal reputation and that of the Royal Navy, to have sunk a neutral merchantman, sailing under a safe-conduct pass from the British government. And of the malignant smile that would’ve been on the Bonny Boy’s face.
No wonder the Bonny Boy had been furious on Scourge’s return; his plans had all gone awry. However, if Harry returned again, having failed to carry out another mission, well… There were always other ways to destroy the name of an officer who consistently failed to press home his attacks.
So, Harry was buggered if he wasn’t going to press home this one. But since Plan A had all but fallen apart, he was going to do it his way, and that way wasn’t going to involve either him or his crew in cold-blooded murder, even if the ‘target’ was an enemy field marshal. If all that mattered was depriving the enemy of their theatre commander, then kidnapping would work just as well, and wouldn’t that provide an even bigger propaganda coup? Even a junior RNVR two-ringer like him could see the potential of marching a Nazi big shot into the Tower, alive and well, for the world’s newsreel cameras. Much better than having shots of the big Jerry lying in his bed, unarmed, drenched in gore and very dead being flashed around the world, to fanfares of outrage by Josef Goebbels.
So that’s why he’d told Second Lt Pettifer, rather forcefully, that he was on Captain Gilmour’s boat, and that Captain Gilmour was in charge of this op now. And there was a new plan. And if Second Lt Pettifer was refusing to co-operate, ‘well, we can all turn around and go home, and you can explain to your bosses why you decided to throw away the best chance we’re ever likely to have of nabbing one of Hitler’s most senior henchmen.’
Pettifer hadn’t had an answer to that.
But that was all backstory that Harry had no intention of troubling Shrimp and Wincairns with. He completely failed to mention that his new plan had been to kidnap, not murder, and since the way he was telling the story made it look like the decision to nab the Jerry intelligence officer had been taken on the spot, he was happy to let that stand. There’d be too much to explain if he didn’t. All that stuff would just have to remain between him and the uppity subaltern; after all, it looked like Second Lt Pettifer was going to emerge from the whole bizarre saga with considerable credit, so let’s just hold our noses and let that one pass downstream, he’d thought to himself.
‘It was out the question I was going to leave the boat, of course,’ said Harry, back at his narrative, ‘even though I am an Italian speaker.’ It was time to explain to Shrimp and Wincairns exactly what his new plan had been and how he was going to execute it. ‘So if the op was to go ahead, the Italians had to come to me so as I could explain what was going to be required of them.’
Wincairns asked, ‘Why was it out the question? Why not decide to lead the team ashore yourself, seeing as you speak Italian? Then you’d have been on the spot if circumstances had changed.’
‘Not with us jammed up against the enemy’s coast, Mr Wincairns,’ said Harry. ‘I am Scourge’s captain. The boat is my responsibility, first and foremost. Mine.’
> Harry then described the band of cut-throats Pettifer had brought back aboard, sullen at the inconvenience of being bounced around in folbots and soaked into the bargain, just to be lectured at by an officer as young as this one, albeit in their own language, but with an accent that was an atrocity in itself.
‘I don’t know who our American friends back in Algiers imagined they were dealing with,’ Harry had said. ‘But these so-called partisans looked more like mafia gangsters than Guiseppe Garibaldi.’
Little laughs all round. And then they were onto Harding’s report of the action ashore; how Kesselring hadn’t been there, but his intelligence officer had, along with all that lovely paperwork.
‘So now we come to your decision to disobey a direct order from Twelfth Flotilla’s Captain S… to return to Algiers on completion of the op,’ said Shrimp. ‘You didn’t. You went the long way round Sicily and ended up here, at Malta. Even though you must’ve known the gravity of the decision you took. The extreme peril you placed your boat in, by leaving your designated billet. Why?’
Why, indeed?
Harry had thought long and hard on that one. Of course he knew the peril he’d be in. Any submarine leaving its patrol billet, for whatever reason, automatically becomes a target for its own side’s anti-submarine forces. In war, that’s the rule. Every submarine is the enemy unless you hold a docket saying otherwise.
But how could he explain the real reason to these men? How could he explain that to the real navy, the one run by grown-ups with a war to win and with scant patience to waste on a pipsqueak lieutenant with fantasies about a senior officer with an Ahab complex, supposedly out to kill him?
‘The waters between Sicily and the Tunisian ports were crawling with Italian A/S, sir, as I’m sure you’re aware,’ said Harry, brows knitted as if reflecting on a decision that had been difficult to take. ‘I knew from the intelligence reports I’d read that another convoy was in the offing. It’s a narrow corridor, and the only one they have left to channel their supplies to what’s left of the Afrika Korps, so they were patrolling it tightly, sir. Very tightly. So, I decided that with the wealth of intelligence we’d bagged, it would’ve been a shame for our side to lose it just because Scourge’s luck ran out to some Regia Marina corvette, sir.’
Shrimp smiled. So did Wincairns. Harry formed the opinion neither had believed him, even for a second. But neither of them said a word.
To fill the silence, Harry added, ‘Also, from reading all the intelligence briefs, I knew we had nothing immediately north of Sicily. No RAF or Fleet Air Arm up there and nothing from Twelfth or Tenth Flotillas indicating we had any boats on patrol. So, I, eh, decided to risk it, sir.’
After another few moments of deliberative quiet, Shrimp got up, fetched a bottle of brandy from one of his filing cabinets and began filling tumblers for the three of them. For breaking his patrol billet, Harry knew that Shrimp had every justification for relieving him of command right here, right now, with immediate effect, which was why he was holding his breath. Except Shrimp was smiling now, not scowling. He raised his glass and said, ‘Bottoms up, Captain Gilmour. It was indeed quite a bag you brought home.’
‘Especially the Herr Oberst,’ added Wincairns, raising his glass too. ‘Oh, they are very excited about that back in Cairo and at Eighth Army.’
*
‘Your man, Harding,’ Wincairns had asked airily, later, while they were sitting outside Harry’s favourite café, still there on the promenade in Sliema, a survivor of the bombing. ‘Why, when there was no Kesselring to kill, did he not just plug the next best thing instead?’
‘The Jerry colonel, you mean?’ said Harry, vaguely.
‘Yes,’ said Wincairns. ‘Kidnapping him strikes me as quite a departure from the script. Were you angry? Did you consider he’d exceeded his remit? A spot of over-interpretation in the orders department?’
‘No,’ said Harry, but he wasn’t really paying attention, too busy thinking to himself about what Wincairns had just told him previously: the piece of ‘news’ that had been dangled so as he’d go for a drink with Wincairns in the first place, instead of straight along to the Lazaretto’s wardroom; ‘news’ that Wincairns insisted he should hear from him first before someone blurted it: that Katty Kadzow had gone and that he’d probably never seen her again.
‘Of course, maybe you didn’t actually order Lieutenant Harding to do any execution,’ mused Wincairns, sipping the cheap rot-gut the café still sold, despite the lifting of the siege. It was a lovely day – hot, everything blue from the sea to the sky with only the rubble still lying about everywhere, bulldozed into piles, and the wire entanglements along the beach below to show there was still a war on.
Harry looked up, paying attention again. ‘He used his initiative,’ he said, ‘and decided not to commit a war crime. So no, I wasn’t angry.’
‘Excellent,’ said Wincairns, clapping his hands. ‘Glad to hear it. No charges or official incriminations flying around then, to attract attention to a very tidy piece of work, Mr Gilmour. I commend you on the decisions made by you and your crew, from a purely selfish point of view, of course. Not only do you stumble on intelligence gold, but your junior also makes it look like you never grabbed it in the first place. Very nice. And when you bring it back, you bring it back to Monty, not Ike. Oh, I know I said we’re all in this together… share and share alike… and I’m sure Ike would’ve been very generous with its contents. But this way, we don’t have to wonder, do we, eh? Very nice. We are all very pleased with you, Mr Gilmour.’
Which Wincairns knew not to be true. Twelfth Flotilla’s Captain S hadn’t been at all pleased with Harry. Wincairns knew this because he got to see all signals zinging their way to, from and across the entire Mediterranean theatre. It was part of his job. Even though no one knew what his actual job was. So when that absolute corker dropped – the one Captain Bonalleck had fired off to Shrimp on learning where his missing submarine had ended up – Wincairns had made a note. He’d said nothing at the time, of course; he never did when little warning lights flashed.
The only thing this ‘Bonny Boy’ character hadn’t accused young Gilmour of was interfering with the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. There was obviously something amiss between the two of them, personally. Some bad blood with a long-nurtured reek to it. Except that Wincairns had known young Gilmour for some time, and his reputation as a fighting sailor. None of the ravings in the signal made any sense. Quite the opposite when you considered what Gilmour had just pulled off. But it did prove one thing: the Bonny Boy had no idea what Scourge had come back with, which was good. In the meantime, Wincairns was sure Captain Simpson could prevail upon some of his own higher-ups to tell this Bonny Boy character to put a sock in it.
Also, from this last little chat it was obvious now Gilmour wasn’t going to go all officious over folk not obeying orders, which meant there should be no noisy fallout from the op from this end. And as long as that remained the state of play, Wincairns didn’t care.
In fact, Wincairns really did suspect Harry had ordered his navigating officer not to murder Kesselring, even if he had been there, that kidnapping had always been his plan. Some people might have thought that overly squeamish, but Wincairns didn’t; he called it smart. He’d remember that about young Gilmour. He’d even felt a slight twinge for the lad, having had to tell him his exotic night-club singer squeeze had gone and married a USAAF supply major while he’d been away.
Three
Scourge was heading out into the Ionian Sea on a steady course, pointed directly at the island of Cephalonia, three hundred miles to the north-east. They were running at a handy twelve knots, but the water streaming over Scourge’s casing looked oily and viscous, so she felt sluggish beneath her captain’s feet. Storms, really big ones, were rare in any part of the Med in June, but obviously, nobody had told this one coming.
They’d sailed from Malta just over two hours ago, with the glass already falling fast, but not as fast as it had fallen
in last half hour. Harry was on the bridge, with Harding as watchkeeper and two lookouts doing their best to scan a dark horizon that even Harry could see was thickening with big, black banks of cloud heading their way. Even as he was standing there, he could feel the deck plates beneath his feet begin to rise and fall in a steadily building wave.
He gazed into the wall of impenetrable night. The sky wouldn’t start to lighten for several hours yet, so Scourge really had to keep going on the surface if she was to keep to her timetable. Because she had a date, halfway up the Adriatic, which it had been impressed upon Harry Scourge had to keep. It was the reason they had sailed, intentionally, into the teeth of this oncoming dirty weather.
Harry wondered how the main package they were carrying would fare once they’d entered the tempest, whether its scrawny frame would be worth delivering. He could see ‘the package’ right now, sitting there in the PO’s mess, hunched over his piping hot tin mug of Ky as if the steam from it was the only heat keeping him alive. Staff Sergeant Willie Reynolds. Gaunt, pale and looking terminally dazed since he’d come aboard – one hand for his satchel of code books and the other for his beret, which he couldn’t keep on his head on account of all that unruly blonde tow exploding everywhere, like a burst sofa. Why on earth hadn’t he had a haircut first? Probably because he had to spend all his time looking after all that bloody radio kit he was also lugging with him.
There was another item attached, but he was an altogether more robust package: Corporal George Hibbert, a short, wiry, and as it quickly became apparent, eternally cheerful Royal Marine, who was always spruce, polite and self-effacing to the point of being practically invisible. He was Reynolds’ ‘assistant’, or in other words, go-fer and bodyguard. On his second look at Hibbert, Harry suspected that much more lurked beneath his affable, easy-going surface, and that here was a man you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
