by David Black
‘I’ve no idea, but I’d bet Lieutenant Gilmour is not having a happy time of it,’ said Wincairns, staring, ditto, into the water. ‘We both know none of this is his fault, really. Even if he’d kept his mouth shut from the start, foreswore the pleasure of telling the Bonny Boy that he was a not-so-bonny drunk… it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Just by the very fact of his surviving… a nutcase like Bonalleck was probably going to come after him anyway. That’s the trouble with these big bombs, when fate fires one of them into the ring, you don’t have to have had anything to do with how it got there to get blown up by it.’
‘So what happens now?’ asked Philips.
‘What happens for me is I have to report up the chain of command, preferably with a sensible recommendation attached.’
‘Doesn’t it depend what the first sea lord decides to do about it?’
‘The first sea lord will do what my boss tells him to do. And I know what I’m going to recommend to my boss. Which is I go back to that liaison committee I was mentioning earlier and tell the Yanks that the attack on the British submarine was all our fault. Reus sumus… breakdown in communications… our officer in charge an old man… time he had a well-earned rest. And that’s what we tell Bonalleck too from the other end but with a bit more vim in it. Stick him on a homeward-bound tramp steamer and hand him a pair of carpet slippers when he gets off… and an order that nobody is to ever hear from him again… if he knows what’s good for him.’
‘Scot-free, in other words. I think we should shoot him, personally.’
‘Don’t be silly, George. You can’t shoot a VC without giving a good excuse. People might talk. And how do you think all this would look on the front page of the Daily Express? Where would you start, trying to talk your way out of this one?
‘Uh-oh,’ said Philips, and Wincairns looked up to see him squinting down the length of the gallery. Wincairns turned, and there, walking in the other end was Lt Gilmour, face looking like he’d seen his destiny.
‘Well,’ said Wincairns, pushing his bulk upright, ‘here’s one thing we can do right now. Go and cheer that young man up.’
*
The first thing to flash into Tom McCready’s head after he’d charged into Scourge’s torpedo stowage space was, Rule One for junior officers: Never directly approach drunken or fighting ratings, always summon senior rates to intervene first. It was a sensible rule, tried and tested down through the three hundred years of unbroken naval tradition because usually, when violence erupts, or there’s at least the threat of it, the person first intervening can normally expect a punch in the mouth too, and if that person happens to be an officer – no matter how junior – everybody ends up getting court-martialled.
So he bellowed, ‘Mr Ainsworth! To the…’
But the cox’n was already there. He’d heard the yelling and the actual scream and the thumping and crashing too and was barrelling past McCready, even as he yelled, with Gooch, the torpedo gunner’s mate, right behind him.
The tableau before them in the space was Hooper, their gun layer, sprawled against the stacked torpedo reloads, breathing in pained gasps and clutching at his right breast, with wisps of smoke from his white vest eddying up between his fingers. Before him, rolling about the deck, was Boxall, the new telegraphist, and one of the new radar lads, Mularky, who was punching seven bells out of him. The fight was taking place in amongst a scattered pile of over a dozen or more ratings’ uniform white shorts and shirts. There was also an electric iron, still plugged in and sizzling, and the debris from a makeshift ironing board smashed.
‘Get up, and stand to attention!’ yelled McCready. However, Ainsworth and Gooch were bent on their own intervention and that didn’t involve using words. The two of them bundled right in and in one great heave, had Mularky off his victim and on his feet, but it took them a few more grapples to stop the big Irishman from continuing to windmill his fists in mid-air.
Meanwhile, Boxall was struggling to get off his back. A sudden torrent of abuse and absolute filth suddenly burst forth from the bloodied Londoner’s burst mouth, and he went to push himself up from his elbows. Gooch’s right leg shot out and kicked him onto his back again. He kept his boot on the man’s chest and pressed down hard. ‘Shut your fucken mouth, boy!’ he said equably.
McCready, standing stock still and open-mouthed, watching it all, noticed Ainsworth trying to make eye contact with him. The cox’n’s face was still tight with the effort to restrain Mularky, but he managed to arch his eyebrows and give the briefest of nods back towards the space’s watertight door. ‘I think we have this now, sir,’ he said. ‘I will report to you in the control room directly.’
In other words, fuck off, sir!
*
McCready had sent for the first lieutenant right away, and he was tracked down to the Lazaretto’s wardroom easily enough. So Farrar was back aboard now, and none too happy, sitting with McCready in Scourge’s wardroom, while elsewhere in the boat, the watch left aboard and some of the harbour crew continued to clean up and make her ready for the turnaround maintenance team to start work and mess everything up again.
‘Apparently, Hooper, being the old-fashioned type he is, took exception to new-hand Boxall skimming cash off some of the more junior hands, sir,’ McCready was saying with a weary sigh. Fisticuffs on board was not a common occurrence in this boat.
‘Explain,’ said Farrar, pleased despite everything, that McCready had summoned him, the number one, and not the captain.
‘Boxall had come aboard with his own electric iron, and when we got in, he started offering to press everyone’s whites for a price… a few pennies per item,’ recounted McCready. ‘He fancies himself as a bit of a businessman, I’m told. Anyway, Hooper confronted him… told him making money off your fellow crewmen wasn’t proper. And he was making money, sir. More than a few of the younger lads were coughing up. Although they didn’t like it much, their natural tendency towards idleness overcame any scruples. And when Hooper went to tackle him about it, Boxall was well into a big load. So he told Hooper to mind his own business and go forth and multiply. Hooper grabbed him, and Boxall jammed the hot iron into his chest.’
‘Ouch!’ said Farrar.
‘Indeed, sir. It’s a nasty burn. Dispensary has sent him over to Bighi for proper treatment.’ Another sigh at the stupidity of men, then McCready continued his tale. ‘Mularky, who was still on board, heard Hooper’s yelp and intervened. A confrontation, I’m told by the cox’n, that was coming sooner or later. Wireless and radar share the same cubby as you know, and our cheeky chappy Boxall has been irritating our mercurial bog-hopper since they both joined.’
This time, it was Farrar’s turn to sigh. ‘Righty-ho. I’ll arrange a defaulters’ parade ashore as soon as I can set it up. Tell the cox’n to keep Mularky and Boxall under arrest until then. I’ll speak to Hooper myself. Stupid bugger. A man his age should know better.’
‘It’s all about the boat’s good name, he says, sir.’
‘Yes, well, I refer you to the captain’s favourite rejoinder on all such matters… bollocks!’
Oh dear, thought McCready, Number One saying a bad word… whatever is the world coming to?
Fourteen
Another bloody autumnal storm. Harry could feel the deck plates rise and corkscrew beneath his feet, even here, at periscope depth, and the splash and spray from the short, choppy seas made seeing anything out of the main search periscope all but bloody impossible, even with the bloody thing fully raised.
There was nothing around in the dark. All the Asdic was picking up was the churn of shingle on the shore ahead, and there was nothing at all to see upstairs, not a ship, boat, little island caique nor shagbat, not even an insomniac seagull; just the dull, looming mass of the island and the glimpse through the flying spume of a nasty band of surf where their landing beach should be. He was aware of their tame pongo dancing underneath the gun tower hatch. Every time Harry leaned back a little from the ’scope’s
eyepiece, he could see the young soldier’s face, all blacked-up and looking oddly detached from his body in the red wash of the control room lights. He was itching to go, but to Harry, going didn’t look much of an idea from here. Maybe things might look different on the surface.
‘Down periscope!’ he ordered and stood back as the tube slid back into the bowels of the boat. ‘Surface! Blow all main ballast tanks! Maintain heading, slow ahead together!’
And up went Scourge, into another warm, wet Aegean night.
This time, Harry sent Harding up first, then the two lookouts, then Bird, the yeoman, with his infra-red optics. By the time Harry’s turn came to go up the ladder, when he got there, everyone on the bridge’s shirts were pasted to their bodies by the driving rain. Harry estimated it was blowing a good force six, and from the land too, causing the short, stubby waves to pile up on their way shoreward; bloody awful conditions if you were trying to paddle a folbot onto that beach, somewhere dead ahead in the dark, that Harry’s night vision had yet to settle down to. He wiped the rain and spray from his face and asked Bird if he’d spotted anything yet.
The yeoman, who was already busy flashing Scourge’s identification signal over the bridge front on his infra-red light, said, ‘No response from the beach yet, sir.’
Harding was wiping off his night glasses. He’d just finished taking bearings on the headland off to starboard and two of the peaks off their bows. ‘Well, that’s definitely the island of Kos,’ he said – in his usual ‘…as if it could be anywhere else?’ tone – ‘…and we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be,’ as if he was having to ‘state the bleeding obvious… again’.
Harry ignored him. Sometimes Harding’s languorous affectations really got on his nerves, but not so much as he was going to waste a bollocking on him in front of Jack. ‘Stop together,’ he ordered down the voicepipe, and in the engine room, Mr Petrie disengaged the engine clutch and turned Scourge’s two big diesels solely over to battery charge. Then Harry added, ‘Send Sergeant Probert to the bridge.’
With the way off her, Scourge began pitching in irritating jerks, her bow pointed directly at the beach half a mile away. Probert shot out the conning tower hatch like a scalded cat and was at Harry’s side in a blur of movement. ‘Suh!’ he said, managing to make his whisper still carry all the bang of a shout.
Harry had already had several conversations with the young sergeant since they’d sailed from Malta three days ago, and he’d come across as a precise and articulate young man. Certainly, he’d come aboard highly recommended, but it was by some crowd of hooligans based on Cairo that were calling themselves the Special Boat Squadron that Harry had never heard of. When he’d asked around, one of the Malta pongos had told him there was apparently a whole mob of them back there in Cairo that had grown out of the original Long Range Desert Group, all dedicated to special ops. ‘SBS must just be the latest,’ the pongo had reasoned. ‘But it’s all just the same behind-the-lines, hit-and-run stuff. Winston loves it, apparently. Otherwise, they’d never be allowed.’
And now, here was a real live specimen.
The sergeant had proved to be a nice chap, all open-faced and easy to get along with, if a little quiet. A lot like a few of the other commando types they’d encountered, the good lads, anyway. Or so Ainsworth had told Harry when he’d asked how their guest was fitting in. ‘He’s got a harmonica in his kit, and he can hold a damn good tune,’ the cox’n had said. ‘Although if it t’were otherwise, I wouldn’t like to tell him to his face. He’s a right wiry little bugger. And the way he’s always cleanin’ his weapons, especially that knife of his… it gives you a queer twinge in your puddings, sir.’
And here they were to deliver Sgt Probert, right on time and onto the right beach. Except the conditions were bloody awful.
‘Take a look yourself, Sergeant,’ Harry said, tucking his chin in against the warm rain. ‘You’ll never make it. It makes sense to hold off twenty-four hours.’
But Sgt Probert was having none of it. The whole operation wasn’t going to get held up just because he was frightened of getting his hair wet. He was ready to go, now.
‘We’re still getting no responses from the beach,’ said Harry. ‘There might be nobody there to meet you anyway.’
A whole litany of scenarios were then recited by the sergeant – full of ifs and maybes – all perfectly plausible reasons for the friendlies being there, but just not being able to say, ‘Hi!’ back again. Better to take the chance and go, sir!
It was only because he thought the wind was veering and falling off that Harry relented, and Sgt Probert was down the hatch again to get his folbot.
The mission, as briefed to him in the Lascaris bunker, had been straightforward and urgent. And George Wincairns had been there to offer encouragement and nod sagely at the intelligence assessments as they were delivered by the briefing officer, an RN staff commander from C-in-C Med. George Philips hadn’t been there, however, because Scourge was no longer a Tenth Flotilla boat as of the start of the briefing. She was being transferred, officially, and would forthwith be under operational command of First Flotilla, based on Beirut. Well, thought Harry, at least the runs ashore will be more fun.
A major operation was about to get underway, the commander had revealed. The Allies were going to grab the Dodecanese Islands from the Axis. Until now, the archipelago between Turkey and Greece had been occupied by the Italians mostly, but since Italy had surrendered, it was thought best if the British stepped in and secured them… before Jerry did. Especially since Jerry had already got his mitts on one of the biggest: Rhodes.
‘As we speak, a small squadron of specially converted caiques, very similar to the local trading craft of the region, is carrying a raiding force to the island of Kos… here!’ And the RN Commander had given a chart pinned to an easel a martial swipe. ‘They are V-Force!’
Wincairns had given Harry a knowing look while the commander’s back was turned, as if to say, ‘Ooh! Fancy! V-Force!’
Harry had tried not to laugh.
The caiques were to drop V-Force off in secret and sail away. V-Force were then to proceed across the island to Kos’s commodious airbase, sneak in under the cover of darkness and plant bombs on all the Jerry aircraft there, and in the bomb dump and in amongst the fuel tanks, thus preventing the Luftwaffe from launching a rapid counterstrike against all the British landings scheduled for all the other islands to the south.
‘You’re probably wondering why we don’t just bomb the place,’ said the commander.
Harry hadn’t been.
‘Well, it’s because we want to use the airfield ourselves. So cratering the runways and smashing up the hangers wouldn’t be the smart thing to do, what?’ And at that, the commander had given a bark of a laugh before moving on. ‘You’re job, on Scourge, is to get inshore while V-Force’s raid is going on and wait until they’ve made good their withdrawal from the airfield then snatch them away from this beach…’ another swipe, ‘…before Jerry can get them.’
Yes, the plan did eventually include the British landing on Kos and grabbing the airfield for themselves, but the way each landing up the chain was scheduled, they wouldn’t be able to get there for at least another few days, and since nobody fancied V-Force’s chances having to hang on until the cavalry arrived, Scourge was to be on hand.
After extracting V-Force, Harry was then to rendezvous with a scratch Royal Navy squadron – sent to cover the several, disparate landing forces – and remain under the local command of its senior naval officer for the duration of the campaign, or until recalled.
‘A couple of weeks should see the whole show stitched up,’ the commander had concluded. ‘Piece of cake, as the crabfats say, what?’
And that had been that. Scourge’s turnaround in Malta had been expedited; as her presence was going to be crucial to the success of the whole op. Or so he was assured. A nippy little S-class boat like her was just the job. Nearly all First Flotilla boats were T class – and they we
re just too big. And the U and N class didn’t have the endurance – or the room for a decent stick of commandos.
It made sense. Harry had seen that. But he could also see that Scourge was overdue for a rest. Her hull and engines needed a proper refit and her crew a long lie-down. A year was the rule of thumb, and she was past that.
‘It’ll be after this patrol,’ Captain Philips had said as he shook Harry’s hand goodbye. ‘The recall signal will be waiting, and it’ll be back to Pompey for a good rub down.’
All delivered with a reassuring smile that Harry hadn’t quite managed to share. He’d taken comfort in one thing, however: the threat of his getting court-martialled must’ve been kicked down the road. Even so, the memory of Capt de Launy still made him feel queasy.
Probert was on the fore-casing now; you could see his dim shape wrestling with his folbot. He had brought its collapsed bulk up through the gun tower, and now, on the pitching, wave-swept casing, he was trying to put it together… in the dark.
Two ratings stumbled onto the casing to help him, and then the thing was over the edge, bouncing on the saddle tanks, and Probert was in it and away, his arms punching the air as he strained to paddle. The two ratings sat, crouched against the slap-slap-slap of waves hitting them as they rolled over the bows. Probert’s folbot had leapt to the side and now, before Harry’s eyes, was being swept backwards by wind and sea.
Harry on the bridge, rolled his eyes and leaned to the voicepipe, ‘Half ahead starboard, slow astern port, port thirty on the helm.’ He turned to Harding, ‘We better go back and get him before he’s blown all the way back to North Africa. He’s never going to make the beach in this crap.’
By the time they’d got Sgt Probert back aboard, he was exhausted and could barely speak. Harry ordered a double tot fired into him, and then he was tucked up and ordered to sleep; an order, which this time, he obeyed in a matter of seconds.
