by David Black
Boyd had been concentrating on trying to see what the Jerry left in the guardhouse was up to when Rabbett’s ‘Oi!’ had brought him up short. He turned to look where Rabbett was pointing, and out beyond the fence, tearing down the town road at great speed and perfectly lit by the fuel dump blaze, was a Jerry armoured car and three Hanomag half-tracks.
Leaving by the front door was no longer an option.
It was one thing after another.
‘Right, back the way we came,’ sighed Boyd, and he turned until he was looking into Miller’s troubled expression. He stared at it just long enough to think, Fuck me! Get a move on! and then, …what’s up with him? when Miller yelled, ‘Get down!’
Boyd turned and looked where Miller was looking. Maybe three hundred, three hundred and fifty yards ahead of them, a moving, burning tributary of fuel was well into the process of seeping across the road from the fuel dump and was eddying around the bomb dump’s berm. Its advancing, flaming tendrils must already be probing through the berm’s entry gap. Getting down sounded like a good idea. But maybe putting a bit more distance between them and the dump might be a better one.
‘Run!’ yelled Boyd. Rabbett and Miller didn’t need telling twice.
Verney’s team got to the wire fence, and Meikle bent to start snipping through. He went fast and was quickly crouched inside the lower roll, holding back the cut wire. Not a word had been spoken. Dickerson went through first, and Verney was halfway when an angry, challenging shout came from the centre of the darkness, slightly above and off to their left.
‘Halt oder wir öffnen Feuer! Hände hoch! Kommen Sie undidentifizieren Sie sich!’
‘He says, “Kommen-sie outen, mit yer hands up!”’ whispered Verney. ‘I think we should do as we’re told.’
The three commandos came out from the tangle of the wire, and as they did, Verney began shouting at the Jerry like he was punching him.
He started off with a good haymaker of a ‘Dumbkopfs!’ And then, as far as Dickerson and Miekle were concerned, a torrent of violent gibberish followed, but each bark was landing home like the Jerries might have wished Max Schmeling should’ve done against Joe Louis.
When Dickerson and Meikle looked up, they could see the Jerry, a dark shadow with the muzzle and magazine of a Schmiesser machine pistol protruding, standing on some sort of parapet that, now they were looking, they could see were sandbags. Twin gun barrels… really quite substantial gun barrels… peeked skyward behind him. It looked like there were other heads peering over the sandbags too.
The Jerry’s pose had stopped being aggressive immediately Verney had begun his tirade; now the figure stood as if he’d come to attention. The words that came barking back out the night from him were larded with contrition.
‘Mein Herr! Ja, mein Herr!’ The Jerry was shouting back, the way you do when you repeat your orders to show you’ve understood.
‘Die Englischer fallschirmjäger sind im Umkreis! Das Feuerunterdrücken, mein Herr! Jetzt anfeuern, mein Herr!’ Verney yelled and pointed into the night.
And the twin gun barrels behind him depressed and disappeared for a moment, only to appear the next, and begin firing, the steady bump! bump! bump! of a 20mm cannon, pumping out at unseen targets in the middle of the airfield. By the time the reeling and chastened Jerry looked back, Verney and his men were gone.
‘I told him the perimeter was full of British paratroopers,’ wheezed Verney as he ran. ‘And then I demanded to know why they weren’t gunning them down!’
Dickerson and Meikle wheezed with laughter too as they ran. The boss was always pulling stunts like this, shouting at Jerry as if he was an idiot… and it always worked… which always made it funnier. And thinking about it as they ran – since they had nothing better to do, pacing it out into the night – they shuddered, each to themselves, at the system of discipline and command that must prevail in the Wehrmacht to get those poor bastards, just like them, to jump like that. I mean to say, the British Army always did a good line in bullshit-baffles-brains… but the Huns? Christ, almighty! And then there was a flash like the opening of the fabric of the universe followed by a roar louder than the last trump and a wall of blast that made them all stumble and reel like they’d been slammed by the side of the world.
The bomb dump.
On the other side of the airfield, Boyd and his men had been running too, after his order to run, run for their lives. But it felt to Boyd, right then, that they’d been running for far too long without anything going bang! yet. It must be right now, it must be now that it was going to blow.
Running, thinking – the bomb dump had been on Boyd’s mind since they’d all gone charging through the wire fence – how Jerry getting in the way had meant they’d had to swerve, stopping them getting their own bombs into the bomb dump. But funny how events change stuff and how now, all bloody mayhem was breaking loose, and they’d turned to start running for the door themselves. Why not, on the way past, just chuck the last of their Lewes bombs in amongst all that Jerry ordnance by way of a parting gift? Just the job. Except, as he was running towards the bomb dump berm, it had never in a million years occurred to him that the fuel dump across the road – and all the leaking, burning fuel spewing out of it – might be about to do the job for him before he got there.
Because when that bomb dump went up… you didn’t want to be around. So it was good to turn and be running away, to be putting the distance between them. God knew how many tons of shite was in there. And it must, must be about to go any moment now…
Then he saw something that made his heart sing. He was looking at the edge of the perimeter road as it began to curve and the little drop beyond it.
‘Ditch!’ he screamed and launched himself through the air in an amazing diver’s arc. Rabbett and Miller tumbled in behind him, and as they hit the dirt at the bottom, each wriggled and pressed against the shallow lip of it, trying to insinuate themselves into the very earth, contemplating solemnly the minutiae of the tiny pebbles and gravel their noses were pressed into as they waited.
And then there was light.
It came as a physical thing, but not as physical as the thumping, crushing ripples of the blast wave that came seconds later and raced and rolled over them, sucking the air from their lungs and, it felt like, the very pulp from their eyes. It had been the bomb dump’s berm and their pitiful excuse for a trench that had saved them from the full lethal effects of that terrible, levelling blast, although the steel debris that began raining down in the seconds that followed threatened to get them in the end. Which was why, even though scorched and winded, they got up and started running again. They didn’t wait to see the mess the blast had made of the Jerry flying column that had been coming down the road.
Fifteen
Harry was on the bridge, leaning against the aft periscope stand, gazing into the night. It was crowded up there but strangely silent. Scourge had a full charge on now with no need to run the diesels, so she was gently wallowing in the slight swell as she waited for a signal from the beach, which was why Yeoman Bird was up there with his infra-red look-a-scopes, along with four other lookouts and Harding doing his Vasco stuff, making sure they were exactly on station and ready to run in when V-Force’s TacHQ started flashing their call sign with their own infra-red Aldis lamp.
The very mention of ‘V-Forces’ and ‘TacHQs’ brought forth another snort of derision from him. Bloody idiots. But he couldn’t help smirking to himself too; three and half years of war hadn’t quite knocked all the schoolboy out of Harry Gilmour either.
It was exquisitely warm, with a high-vaulting sky, bursting with stars from horizon to horizon, and now, so close to the predicted time, Scourge was at diving stations. Pretty soon it would be time for the torpedo loading hatch on the forward casing to open and Number One to emerge, leading Sgt Probert and his folbot and then the casing team and their coiled grass hawser.
The plan had been thrashed out round the wardroom table earlier, over cocoa. When Bird got t
he agreed signal, it meant V-Force was going ahead with the op, which ‘wouldn’t take long’, Probert had assured them. V-Force would sneak in, give it lots of flash, bang, wallop and then leg it hell-for-leather back across the island, with the fair chance that Jerry might not be far behind. So everything had to be ready for them on the beach. On the other hand, they might manage to sneak away in the confusion, then there’d be more time to disembark. But best to be prepared for all eventualities. Which was why Harry had ordered the twin .303 machine guns up. The weapon was mounted and manned now by a gunner and an ammo tray feeder, right beside him on the conning tower’s aft bandbox. Bloody right the bridge was crowded tonight. He shuddered to think of the carnage trying to get down that conning tower hatch if he had to give the tit a double hit. Hooper and his three-inch gun team were waiting below in the gun tower.
But it was very quiet. And there were a lot of eyes on the horizon, watching in case it stopped being quiet. Below, Biddle was on the Asdic set, listening for the slightest propeller sounds out there in the deep, and those two new ratings had the radar going too, its boxy cage aerial raised on the stand above him, scanning the sea’s surface and the skies. Smudger Smith and Darky Mularky, them and their set in the wireless cubby with that new leading telegraphist. What was his name again? Boxall, that was it. Number One had told him all about Boxall. And Able Seaman Mularky.
‘I changed the watch list to make sure they are both on duty now in the wireless cubby together as often as possible,’ Farrar had told him. ‘There will not be any private grudges aboard this boat.’
‘And they understand that?’ Harry had asked.
‘Oh, I’ve left that to Mr Ainsworth, to ensure they both fully comprehend the level of conduct expected of them while serving aboard Scourge, sir,’ he had replied, with the faintest of evil grins. ‘So I’m sure they do. Now.’
Boxall had still to come before Harry on his charges. Captain’s report, nothing else would do. After all, he’d inflicted a nasty wound on the Scourge’s darling with that scullery maid’s iron of his. Their ace gun layer, Hooper, wasn’t the type to bear grudges, but the fact that the rest of the crew were ‘somewhat sanguine’ on the issue, according to Number One, led the two of them to conclude that Hooper must be playing a long game when it came to settling with the now notoriously gobby Boxall. And, they also concluded, everybody knew it.
Ah, all life is here, said Harry to himself, as he contemplated Number One’s deft handling of it all. And that made him smile because hadn’t he been the clever one, deciding to look beyond all his earlier doubts about Farrar’s fuddy-duddyness and look to his qualities as an officer instead. Yes indeed, Mr Farrar’s conduct these days had definitely justified his writing that letter, currently sitting in Captain Philips in-tray, seven hundred and fifty miles back in the Lazaretto base, recommending Farrar sit his Perisher. If that didn’t call for a smug smile, what did?
Thinking about long games, as he waited, his mind drifted back to a very old friend indeed: CPO Gault, who’d turned up on Malta while he’d been at sea, as HMS Talbot’s senior chief. He hadn’t been able to believe his eyes when he’d seen him after getting back from that last patrol. There had been old times and news to chew over, like how Ted Padgett sent his best, how, with his sea-going days over, the old warrant engineer from Pelorus had conned his way into a berth on the training staff at the new Royal Naval Engineering College at Manadon, above Plymouth, so he now caught the bus to work every day. How he had insisted his new grandson be called Henry, after Harry, and how he, Harry, hadn’t had the heart to tell Gault that his name wasn’t actually the common short form but a reference to an Inner Hebridean island. All life, indeed.
Then, he recalled, they’d talked about the Bonny Boy.
‘It was Shrimp Simpson who first asked me about you and him,’ Gault had said. Harry remembered he’d just nodded, not knowing where this was going. But Gault had continued, ‘Then the rumours started, and I told Captain Philips what I knew, then that bloody captain from C-in-C Med turned up like bloody Torquemada… they’re onto him now, Mr Gilmour. They must be. Whatever he’s been up to, he’s not going to get away with it anymore. Jesus! What a fucking madman!’
Harry wasn’t so sure about the Bonny Boy not getting away with it anymore.
He’s not your friend Capt Philips had told him about the C-in-C’s Torquemada. How their ‘interview’ had rolled out certainly gave the truth to that:
Capt de Launy: Who issued you the orders for those patrols?
Lt Gilmour: The S Twelve, sir.
Capt de Launy: How did he communicate them?
Lt Gilmour: He told me, sir.
Capt de Launy: Was this customary? Normal? In your experience, was this how other flotilla captains did it?
Lt Gilmour: Normal, sir? Um. What is normal, sir? Captain Simpson used to issue railway dockets with just the billet square and recall date scribbled on it, sir.
Capt de Launy: But there was always a written document?
Lt Gilmour: Yes, sir.
Capt de Launy: Yet there was no written document for your orders to patrol off Port Vendres?
Lt Gilmour: No, sir.
…and the same for the op to dispatch Kesselring and for the billet as guard boat at the scrag end of the Sicily landings. No. No. No written documents.
On, and on, meticulous, unrelenting, back and forward, question after question and the scratch, scratch of de Launy’s pen – for there’d been no writer in the room to take it all down. No witness, just the two of them.
And yet, throughout the whole process, not once had de Launy asked him if he suspected Captain Bonalleck of actually being out to get him. Or even if he wondered why he was being asked all these questions? Harry remembered with a thin smile, resolving at one point to actually ask de Launy what all this had been about, but only after he’d finished.
He didn’t get the chance. The last question came and went, and then it had just been, ‘That will be all, Lieutenant Gilmour. Dismiss.’
And you don’t argue with a four-ringer when he tells you that.
Isn’t that right? He silently asked the stars, head right back, gazing up at them now, suddenly thinking this is much how an ancient Greek must have seen this sky two thousand years ago. What it must have felt like to have been one of those to whom the world was so new.
He gave his head a shake, his mind was drifting off on another reverie instead of keeping his eye in. That was the bloody trouble with this waiting. Your mind rattled on if you weren’t busy. He always used to try to keep it on track, going over the plan, trying to come up with everything that could go wrong and what to do in each eventuality. Sometimes it worked, but other times, like now, it didn’t. Maybe some chaps had the mental steel, patrol after patrol, like the old aces, Bryant or Tubby Linton, or Wanklyn, except Linton and Wanklyn, the greatest ace of all, were now dead. So maybe it was a godsend Harry Gilmour wasn’t one of them; a good thing that keeping his eye in felt like he was trying to ride a penny-farthing at 90 mph across an oil-and-water skid pan with marbles randomly scattered on it.
‘Jesus!’ It was a soft utterance, from behind him, but delivered with emphasis.
Then, ‘Wow!’
Then, ‘Sir!’
He was already turned and stepping to the bridge front for a better view when the stretch of skyline between the two peaks off the port bow really lit up and the first roils of flame could just be seen tipping above the base of the ‘V’ between.
‘Wowser, indeed,’ Harding was muttering, gazing open-mouthed at the spectacle. ‘That’ll teach someone to light their farts.’
Then the thud of the explosion echoed over the water.
Harry leaned over the voicepipe, ‘Tell Sergeant Probert it’s time to get his folbot up and get going.’
The business ashore was obviously now well underway.
*
Tom McCready was standing on the beach with nothing to do. His face was all blacked-up, and he was feeling partic
ularly stupid, especially because of the way the little group of Greek civilians were looking at him and sniggering behind their hands.
First, there’d been all the excitement when the first fireball on the horizon got massively bigger and just kept burning, then there had been the flash and then moments later, the thunderous boom that had been like a volcano going off and the fact that, despite the distance, even they had felt the pressure of the blast wave.
It had all made Tom think getting blacked-up was just the start of something big that he was going to be part of, and then Probert had rowed him ashore with the grass hawser’s bitter end in his lap. When they’d scrambled up the beach, it had become apparent that none of those civilians were blacked-up and neither were the two commando lance corporals waiting with them. What were those civilians doing there anyway?
And now, Probert had disappeared into the scrub at the head of the beach with one of them, the tall, distinguished-looking young chap who should’ve been sitting on a tavern veranda discussing The Iliad, not out gallivanting in the middle of the night like one of Daphne du Maurier’s smugglers. So now he, Sub Lt Tom McCready, had been left with nothing better to do than watch these two pongo non-coms fiddling with their blasted primus stove, trying to get a brew going.
He went over to check the hawser again, where it had been made fast to a boulder the size of a saloon car. The hawser hung slack as it snaked away into the water, with life jackets tied at regular intervals along its length to help keep it afloat when the weight went on.
Because when the time came, the idea was for all those on the beach to hand-over-hand out to Scourge and then get hauled aboard by Cox’n Ainsworth and his party on the casing. He and Probert had also brought along a stretcher when they’d rowed ashore, in case there were any wounded to transfer, although that was going to be awkward. The stretcher, with a casualty aboard, wouldn’t lie lengthwise on a folbot, so they would have to ship it athwart, with one man rowing, and the other in the water, keeping it close to the hawser and making sure the stretcher didn’t tip one way or the other and the patient end up in the ogin.
