by David Black
He went back and plonked himself down by the two lance corporals, and began to sullenly eye the civilians.
‘I wouldn’t worry about them, mate,’ said one of the lance corporals.
Mate! thought McCready. Mate! He’d give him bloody mate!… then he remembered what Probert had told him earlier, that the commandos didn’t say ‘sir’ or salute when they were in the field, so as not to identify officers… and get them killed by any nosey sniper in the vicinity.
‘Naw,’ said the other pongo. ‘They’re here because they hate Jerry more than we do. Nobody on this island’s going blabbing. And they’re also here in case we need a hand.’
‘Good,’ said McCready, for something to say.
‘Yep,’ agreed pongo one. ‘They’re a lovely folk, the Greek islanders. But a cross-grained, ugly shower if they don’t like you.’
‘Too true, mate,’ added pongo two. ‘Even more bloody-minded than a bloody Jock!… ohh… that’s us… brew’s up. Fancy a cup?’
It was like bloody Margate on a bank holiday, thought McCready. And that was when a long line of stumbling figures suddenly appeared where a moment ago there’d just been the scrub, all being led out of the night by the lanky Greek chap he’d seen go off earlier.
*
Harry sat, watching the grubby figure of Oliver Verney, with his right leg impossibly bent up beside him and his bootless foot on the wardroom banquette while he leant over it, rubbing his ankle with some smelly embrocation from Scourge’s medicine chest. Both men were smiling inanely.
Scourge was dived now and heading south-west away from the mayhem V-Force had wreaked on Kos well behind. They’d had to leave it perilously close to first light for the wayward Verney to eventually turn up on the beach, hobbling in, using some hapless Jerry’s rifle as a crutch and being helped along by some teenage goatherd with an old-fashioned crook he’d bumped into along the way.
‘I’ve got to stop kicking next door’s cat,’ was all he’d said by way of explanation to McCready for his turned ankle and late show, to McCready, who’d been anxiously pacing the beach, feeling like he was ready to have kittens himself, so fine had they cut it to wait for this clown.
Well, he was aboard now, and they were on their way.
Harry had recognised the name right away when he’d demanded to know who this clown was that he was endangering his boat for and why the other members of his unit were so sure he’d turn up. Oliver Verney. How could he forget those warm Mediterranean nights they’d spent together? Wrecking trains on the coastal line that ran from the toe of Italy up to Naples. And how Verney had known him from a time before, even though Harry hadn’t known Verney from Adam, because Verney had watched him lighting and placing a ciggy in the gob of a wounded sailor in the rain, on that stone jetty up in Shetland after Trebuchet had come in from off the North Cape, already sinking beneath them. And Verney’s little story about how just watching Harry, with his dashing wound dressings on show, going about ministering to his wounded crew had inspired him to join up. How could Harry not be smiling, meeting a chancer like that again?
‘If I rub it with this on the outside,’ said Verney, applying another cupped handful of the stuff and rubbing briskly and then nodding to the tumbler of arak in front of him, ‘and then with that on the inside, I’ll be right in no time.’
‘Serves you right for going back,’ observed Harry, taking a sip from his own tumbler of the white spirit.
‘The hun was otherwise engaged, old chap, and it was just too good to miss,’ Verney said, looking up at him, grinning.
The reason Verney had been late, a jumbled tale told by his Sgt Dickerson, and the likelihood vouched for by his deputy, Second Lieutenant Boyd.
‘We were goin’ like the clappers for our first rally point,’ Dickerson had blabbed, while pleading for Harry to give his boss just a bit more time. ‘When we passed our original ’ole in the wire… where we’d gone in. “Hang on a minute chaps,” says Olly, and off he goes…’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Harry had said. ‘You’d been into the airfield, set your charges, they were going off, and Jerry was after you… and Olly decides to go back in through the wire?’
‘There was a couple of Stukas left we didn’t get,’ Dickerson had said, like this was a rational reason to go running back in when the enemy was running your way, looking for you.
‘He does that sort of thing,’ the other sergeant, Meikle, had said. ‘And anyway, that Jerry anti-aircraft gun we’d passed, they were shootin’ up everything that was moving inside the wire, which was mostly other Jerries…’
‘Yes, and your Olly had just gone back in there,’ pointed out Harry.
‘Ye-es,’ said Meikle, ‘but did he look like a British paratrooper? See?’
Harry had given up at that point. Which was when Boyd had said, ‘Give him time, Captain Gilmour. Please. He’s always popping up again when you least expect it. We’ve got until first light. Wait and see. He’ll be here.’
So they’d waited, and here indeed, he was.
‘…and all without incurring a single casualty… unless you count you,’ said Harry, gesturing with his glass at Verney rubbing his ankle.
Verney stopped for a moment and seemed to look a million miles away. Then he said, ‘We were only up against a mob of Luftwaffe erks. It’d have been a different story if it’d been the German army. Still, job done, eh?’
*
Harry had Harding plot him a big circle course away from Kos, on a sou’-westerly heading, so that Scourge could make a long, direct run into the island of Thirios from the west. They remained at periscope depth for the entire run, despite the clear calm weather making them highly visible from the air, a big black shadow slinking silently through the crystal clarity of the Aegean. No hiding place down there. But then, thanks to his new pal Olly, there were no Jerry aircraft around to be in the air today.
Harry let Harding do most of the periscope work since it was him navigating them through these shallows, never much more than three hundred feet beneath their keel and the waters littered with islets and reefs.
After retrieving ‘V-Force’ from the beach, Harry had opened the second packet of his orders. The papers were headed ‘Operation Hoplite’, after ancient Greek light infantry? Harry wondered. He’d never heard of any British military mind ever being imaginative enough to actually devise an operation name that had any relevance to anything like the what, why, where or when. Somebody must’ve sneaked through.
Anyway, it was a landing force made up of a random mob of Combined Operations specialist troops – they of the ‘Wings, Anchor and Thompson Gun’ shoulder flash – two companies of the Parachute Regiment and an entire battalion of the Staffordshires. There’d be signals and engineers but no artillery. The troops would be put ashore by a Royal Navy task force made up of the Hunt-class destroyers HMS Alconbury and HMS Howsham and five motor gunboats from Coastal Forces, supported by the ‘Levant Flotilla’, a rather large ragbag collection of local caiques – a very old eastern Mediterranean wooden boat design that the loonies at Combined Ops had converted as very makeshift troopships, transports and gunboats and operated directly themselves. From what Harry had heard of that lot, they were much more deserving of flying a Jolly Roger than even the submariners.
‘Winston says we’re to, “Set the Aegean ablaze!”, or some such guff,’ Verney had told him, right after he’d told him, how come V-Force. ‘“V” for Verney, of course,’ he’d said, with a winning smile. ‘And all my own work too!’
‘Isn’t that utterly childish, if you don’t mind me saying?’ Harry had asked, remembering not to call him ‘sir’, even though military discipline dictated he should’ve – Harry being just a lowly lieutenant and Olly a lieutenant colonel.
‘Got it in one, Skipper!’ said Olly. ‘And me? Mind? Don’t be silly!’
But Olly was still a lieutenant colonel and that meant Harry felt it better if he refrained from reminding him the term for a Royal Navy vessel’s
commanding officer was ‘Captain’. Some habits, he decided, died hard.
They heard the landings on Thirios long before the saw them.
The island was located at the tip of an almost perfect equilateral triangle with Tilos to the north and the northern tip of Karpathos to the east. It had been chosen as the forward base for Operation Hoplite because of its deep harbour with its long bar that reached out to the south-east and enclosed an extensive anchorage. Thirios was mostly mountainous, with two large volcanic outcrops and a jagged range that ran to the sea in the west. The north-east was relatively flat and cultivated, but everywhere else, the numerous fishing villages and a small monastery all clung to the steep hillsides and rocks.
There was no space for an airfield, but then they were going to land on Kos soon, after they’d taken Symi to the east and finally cut off the big Jerry base on Rhodes. Or so Harry’s packet of orders informed him. Where he and Scourge actually fitted into the big picture here, however, was vague. His orders merely stated he was to place himself and his boat under the direct orders of the local senior naval officer, who was apparently to be one Commander T.A.G. Pleydell RN, Howsham’s CO.
Harding ordered the periscope up for his latest all-round look, and eyes fixed to the search ’scope’s eyepiece, he announced, ‘We’re here.’
Harry had a look, and what he saw across the glass-calm sea was like a little theatrical show, with the two Royal Navy destroyers lying off the bar, signal flags fluttering in a light breeze, the blue of the sea dappling on their hulls, guns turned shoreward.
Suddenly, one of the destroyers fired, its main battery delivering a broadside to some target inland. He could also see the masts and bridge tops of the gunboats and a forest of caique masts, all inside the bar. Two gunboats now emerged from behind the bar and were running down slowly towards the furthest-away destroyer.
The problem now was to surface and join without the destroyers turning on them, thinking they were a U-boat, and blowing them to pieces; just because a packet of orders said to expect a submarine didn’t always mean everybody had read them.
‘Pass the word for Mr Ainsworth,’ said Harry. ‘And Yeoman Bird. And tell him to bring an Aldis.’
While remaining submerged, he would launch two smoke pot recognition buoys to get their attention, as per colours of the day. Then he’d extend the search ’scope to maximum, point it at the nearest destroyer’s bridge and then have Bird jam his Aldis to the eyepiece and start flashing the day’s recognition codes and Scourge’s number up it. That ought to do the trick.
*
Cdr Pleydell was a nervy bugger, Harry decided. Middle of stature, thinning tobacco hair, his recent Middle East tan was scant cover for a skin that was naturally pale, stringy of arm and knobbly of knee in his Number-Thirteen whites. He populated every sentence he spoke with ‘right’, ‘yes’, ‘well’, all in a cut-glass accent, and he was perpetually drumming fingers or shuffling papers. Their SNO.
Harry was with all the other COs, navy and pongo, sitting penned in around Howsham’s wardroom with Pleydell nearest the door, behind the wardroom table that had been dragged there and covered with bumpf for his use. The table was also effectively barricading everybody in, which Harry didn’t think was a good idea, and from the expressions on other faces, he wasn’t alone.
But none of this could blight his unalloyed joy at spotting the face opposite him; a blast from the past that had him grinning from ear to ear. It was Kit Grainger. He was waving and winking at him every time Pleydell buried his nose in a document. Kit Grainger, now a lieutenant commander and HMS Alconbury’s captain. Grainger, who’d commended his humming of All The Nice Girls Love A Sailor while they were being depth-charged back on the old Bucket; Grainger, who’d been his Jimmy aboard that ‘boat of the damned’, Umbrage, with its martinet skipper Clive Rais, dead now, through nothing else than his own stupidity. And here was Grainger again, out of the trade now, but back at sea and at last with his long-coveted dream, a command of his own. From the moment Harry had filed into the wardroom and spotted Grainger’s curious scowl of recognition, he couldn’t wait to pump his hand and buy him a large one.
He’d always been an awkward bastard, Grainger, Harry remembered that much at least. How he’d used to bait their former CO, Rais, to the point Harry thought he might be endangering the boat. But Harry didn’t really care about that anymore, not if he was asked to put it in the balance, not then, not now because Grainger was always going to be a special chum, one to be forgiven anything. What else could you accord the man who’d come back for you when everybody else on Trebuchet had thought you were dead, that night in the Soviet fjord with Trebuchet and Trumpeter’s deck guns blowing holes in those Jerry transports and the tracer criss-crossing the black night like braiding on a black satin sheet, and Harry, last seen lying there on that shattered Russian tug, his brain addled by blast and his forearm opened by splinters and the petty officer from his party swearing it was too late to go back because he was already ‘a goner’. Grainger hadn’t listened then, just like he never did, and he’d come back for him when he shouldn’t have. You didn’t forget that.
Kit bloody Grainger. Well, who’d’ve thunk it! As Harding might’ve said. Operation Hoplite was getting to be quite a reunion, what with Olly Verney sitting there next to Pleydell, looking like he was about to nod off.
But Pleydell and the pongo brigadier sitting on his other side were all about the plans and where Hoplite was going next – the island of Symi, apparently, for all those who were listening – and how Scourge was to play a key role.
‘Our orders are to deny the Germans the Dodecanese,’ the brigadier was intoning from behind his moustache. His name was Plomer, and Harry wondered if he was any relation to the Great War general, He looked antique enough to actually be him, demoted now for pockling the mess fund, maybe. ‘And to achieve that, we must first take Symi,’ he was droning on. ‘Doing that will put a noose around the German’s main garrison on Rhodes and leave us free to push on up through the entire chain.’
Plomer was obviously another of those chinless skeletons who pre-dated modern warfare, with a shiny, bald pate and crescent of hair to top his luxuriant ’tache and a swagger stick on the wardroom table, set in front of him like a form master’s cane. Harry sighed to himself; their ground commander had actually brought a fucking swagger stick to an amphibious landing!
Bad enough, but Harry had thought their orders were to ‘set the Aegean ablaze’, or at least that was what he remembered Lt Col Verney telling him. Whatever that meant. Was this different? This ‘denying’ and ‘putting nooses round’ Jerry’s neck? Did it mean the pongo top brass couldn’t make their minds up? And what the hell did ‘…putting a noose round…’ mean anyway? He never liked it when orders got mixed up with all that, ‘…into the valley of death…!’ and ‘…once more unto the breach dear friends…!’ bollocks. That was how you introduced confusion – to your own side. It didn’t augur well.
Sixteen
If Harry could’ve paced on his bridge, he would’ve. He was seething, and he wanted to step it out. But the bridge was too small and too crowded, which he hated in itself. There was him, Harding at the binnacle – taking constant bearings, trying to make sure they kept on station – the two ratings on the mounted twin .303s behind him and the four lookouts, needed especially tonight because of the surprisingly luminous newly waxing moon.
His was not any sudden flash of anger. It was a rising, cold fury at the systematic cockups that were dogging this stupid operation in which the exceedingly valuable strategic asset that had been placed under his command – namely HMS Scourge – was now being pointlessly, farcically, endangered.
His mouth was pinched shut, creating around him a serenely scary silence that all the Scourges on the bridge had seen rarely, but knew to beware.
Lt Gilmour being angry was bad joss.
Harry stepped again to the bridge front and looked down for the umpteenth time on the two huge flaccid black sh
apes draped across the fore-casing like collapsed whales. McCready was standing over them as he had been for the past hour or more, still looking as despondent. The shouty Parachute Regiment three-pipper, whom Harry had previously warned about his shouting, had gone all silent now and was sitting cross-legged, way forward, just underneath the jumping wire, as innocent as a Buddha.
‘What a fucking mess,’ Harry mouthed to himself, or thought he had. He heard a muffled snort of amusement from right next to his ear. Bird, the yeoman. He’d forgotten about him when he’d been doing his bridge body count a moment before. Bird was up here too, night glasses stuck to his eyes, waiting for Olly Verney’s little flashing torch from the beach to tell them he was back and had come up with some brilliant wheeze that’d get them out of this fucking mess.
Scourge was stuck to the glass-flat sea, less than a quarter of a mile off Symi, waiting to discharge her cargo, except she couldn’t. So the cargo – almost seventy soldiers, mostly from the Parachute Regiment – sat, stifling and sweating and not daring to swear or curse under the eye of the cox’n, all kitted up with nowhere to go.
It had been a long day. Two days if you took into account nobody had got any sleep the night before.
There hadn’t been any time to catch up with Kit Grainger after the planning meeting on Howsham, just a passing, ‘bugger me!’ each and a shake of the hands and a promise to tell all later, over ‘refreshments’. For there had been work to be done. The entire squadron had got under way and entered Thirios’s anchorage, except Alconbury because her captain had informed the SNO he was experiencing problems with his anchor mechanism. Knowing Grainger of old, Harry had suspicions about that.
