by David Black
Now that they were here, Harry had been expecting Verney to come out and guide them in. But Verney wouldn’t be so daft as to approach, flashing recognition signals all over the place if there was a strange boat hanging about, intentions unknown. So, Harry was waiting. For what? Who knew? Bloody hell! Was there no end to the fuck-ups and the calamities?
Biddle hadn’t heard a peep on Asdic out of the stranger, not even a clashing pan in its galley. And McCready, on account of his night vision, was on the periscope, whipping it up every ten minutes for a quick all-round look and then down again. Nothing. It was almost ten p.m., long after dark, if you could call that moon-drenched bay up there dark.
The air in the boat by now was truly fetid, and Scourge’s ratings not on watch were handing out barley sugars with their tin mugs full of water and refilled water bottles to try and help with all the coughing; and with all those bodies, the stink was pretty ripe too – bodies and piss. Because getting about along Scourge’s jammed gangway also meant lots of the soldiers weren’t bothering trying to fight their way to the heads anymore and were just pissing into the bilges when the urge became too much. Squalor didn’t even begin to cover it. And pretty soon, tempers would start fraying. Where the bloody hell was Verney? And even if he did turn up, what were they going to do about that bloody boat up there? A milk run. It was just supposed to be a milk run.
And then McCready piped up, ‘Light, on…’ and leant back to read the bezel, ‘…red ten, sir… flashing recognition signal. Flashing…’ and he turned the periscope slowly to starboard, ‘…he’s flashing to our chum hiding behind the headland now, sir… heavens! The lights are on! It’s a fishing boat, sir. He’s just switched on all his lights…’
‘HE!’ called Biddle from the Asdic cubby. ‘Bearing green one three zero. Someone’s just started a small engine… petrol one by the sound of it, sir.’
Harry relieved McCready at the ’scope. Indeed it was a fishing boat, one of the local caiques. He swung back, and there, not far away, a mere lump in the water and someone flashing a torch, the letter ‘V’ in morse, all around the horizon. V-force. Bloody Verney, at last. The clown! He wanted to kiss him.
‘Surface!’ called Harry. ‘Gun crews stand by to close up!’
Unfortunately, Verney’s arrival provoked more mayhem. The strange vessel had been one of the town’s fishing boats that had stayed out that night on purpose, waiting for Scourge.
‘The Eyeties scream blue murder,’ Verney had said, once his little dory – with Probert on the oars – the fishing boat and Scourge had all trotted up. ‘But nobody pays any attention… the fishing boats are always skiving off, dropping anchor off the other smaller islands all the time… because the fishing’s good or they fancy a party. The Eyeties might not like it, but they’re used to it. No, I needed that boat out here waiting because I want to collect my V-force boys. We’re the surprise attack! Oh, and by the way, this is Alex.’ A tall, tanned man who’d come from the fishing boat stepped forward, once handsome but going a bit to seed now; a local, of course, in his duck trousers and pyjama shirt. ‘He used to be deep sea, but he’s come home again for all sorts of reasons you don’t want to ask. He’ll be your pilot getting into the harbour. Lay you alongside the wharf smoother than Fred Astaire.’
Most of the V-force had bunked down aft with the stokers, so it was just a matter of getting them up out the aft escape hatch. A lot of their kit, however, was for’ard. And what a palaver that turned out to be, finding it behind the torpedo reload racks, getting it over the piles of paras, up out the torpedo loading hatch and onto the fishing boat. Over two sweaty hours, with lots of swearing. Then they were off.
‘We’ll fire a flare,’ said Verney. ‘…a green one!’
And so it was just a matter of waiting, again.
Hours passed. Then there was a burst of fire. Then nothing. And then, with barely an hour to go until first light, a flash, like a grenade going off, some more firing – rifle shots – then bursts of automatic. A real fight. And then silence. Until the green flare went up in a spluttering chemical whoosh! The tall Greek, who’d been ‘deep sea’ turned, smiled at Harry and gestured towards the harbour entrance.
Oh well, what the hell, thought Harry. ‘Slow ahead, together,’ he said into the bridge voicepipe. ‘Helm. Steer two six zero.’
*
The sun well up, Harry sat outside the same café Verney had been drinking at with his new-found local cronies two nights ago, regarding, with a mixture of curiosity and resignation, the small clutch of Italian soldiers squatting on the stone stand in front of the wharf. With them were two sullen German soldiers, barefoot and in their uniform trousers and singlets only. Verney’s prisoners.
Behind them, the paras were still hauling themselves up through Scourge’s torpedo loading hatch, being assembled by one of their captain’s subalterns and then parcelled off in penny packets into the town, lugging their kit, all of them in crushed, stained desert battledress, smeared with oil and God knew what, but all of them with their maroon berets still spick and span and firmly in place.
‘We had to drag the Italians out of their charpoys,’ said Verney, sipping arak from an ancient tumbler. ‘A lot of shouting and bawling at first, but a burst from Rabbett’s Tommy gun shut them up. We had to fight the Jerries, though. These two eventually put their hands up, but there’s a few dead ones up there and one that soon will be. But another lot legged it into the scrub. Can you believe it? I mean to say, it’s an island! Where do they think they’re going to run to?’
‘I suppose you’ll be expecting me to haul your catch over there back to Thirios?’ said Harry.
‘You don’t mind, do you? You’re a pal,’ said Verney, toasting him. ‘I’ll be coming too though, so me and my lot will keep an eye on them for you. We’ll be no trouble.’
Harry was resigned by then, he shrugged and smiled and just started looking around to pass the time.
The little town was timeless. If Socrates had come strolling up in his sandals and introduced himself, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The houses, bathed in that fierce Aegean light now, all heat and shadow, were mostly small stone boxes, some of them two or three stories, rough-hewn so that it looked like the stones had merely been slotted together, no plaster or cement, and they rose in ranks up the steep, rocky cliff faces of the harbour which sat like a stopper on the end of the long channel that led in from the sea.
There were no streets as such, just steep alleys that climbed up between the houses, front doors right onto the cobbles. And one road that led directly from the wharf, out of the town and over the hill behind it.
A few civilians were starting to show their faces, emerging from the doors, laughing and curious and slapping and cheering the little bands of paras as they marched up the alleys to their positions surrounding the town. Harry couldn’t help but notice how skinny and starved the people looked. But of course they were; neither the Jerries, nor Mussolini’s mob were ever going to waste space on their transports to ship in food and medicines for a local population who so obviously must have hated their presence.
So he supposed his presence here now, and all these grumpy paras must’ve seemed like a victory to these poor people. A thing to make them happy again. Just like his sailing past the Italian battle fleet that day off St Pauls’ Bay. He’d been happy for those Italian sailors that day, happy not to have to kill them anymore, for them all to get to go home.
But he didn’t feel happy right now. This didn’t feel like victory.
Right now, the utter pointlessness of what had happened here just overwhelmed him. What on earth were these Jerries and Eyeties sitting over there actually doing here in the first place, in this unspoilt nowhere, wrecking these poor, inoffensive people’s lives? Why? What was it about fucking Adolf Hitler’s so-called fucking worldview – his Weltanschauung – that made it necessary for these idiots to come all the way down here and starve these poor souls half to death?
He suddenly felt heartsi
ck and for a moment, he wondered whether he was going to start crying.
For a moment, he wondered about feeding these poor people, a sort of gesture to show compassion hadn’t totally passed from the world, getting the crew to distribute food from Scourge’s mess stocks. But he dismissed the idea instantly. It would be some time before they’d be re-victualling again, and he could imagine the looks he’d get from the crew if he ordered them to start throwing their tins of ham and fruit salad to the locals, no matter how hungry they were. His crew had to eat too.
When he looked back at Verney, he saw him gazing around as well. Sanguine, the killer’s poise, no longer clinging to him. He almost looked like an ordinary bloke, apart from that dirt-ingrained battle smock and the weaponry draped about his person.
An idea suddenly occurred to Harry, a sort of experiment he could conduct to see what kind of man might live inside the Olly Verney who now sat before him.
So he started talking; a stream of consciousness about everything that had just been going through his mind. All of it. Including the bit about wondering whether he was about to start crying.
Verney looked surprised at first, then, chin cradled in his palm, he began to listen without interrupting, rapt, in fact, right to the end. When he said, ‘So, you too, huh?’
Seventeen
There was a pall of smoke rising above the harbour on Thirios; you could see it from miles away. And now, as Scourge rounded the headland into the big bay, Harry could see both Howsham and Alconbury were now anchored outside the bar. He’d known about the air raid long before he’d sighted the smoke. Scourge’s radio room had picked up the island’s base transmitter, alerting the SNO who had been at sea, that it was under attack two days ago, and then the SNO’s signal from Howsham to C-in-C Med in Alexandria.
The damage hadn’t been much, or so the signals had said. Nobody had said why. They were going to have to get back to find out all the grim details. But that had taken a lot longer than anticipated.
Scourge’s trip back to Thirios had been dogged by a series of failures and breakdowns – lots of stops and starts – and a grim Bert Petrie’s face being seen too often in the control room.
The oil-spattered warrant engineer had first turned up in the passage opposite the wardroom to report to Harry that there was flooding in the engine room and they were going to have to heave to.
‘It’s not your fault, Bert. The boat needs a refit. It’s needed one for a long, long time now,’ Harry had told him.
When Petrie had finished his report and was heading back aft, Harding had leant into the passage to make sure he’d gone then turned back with a smug smile. ‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? You owe us all a drink, sir.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Verney had asked.
‘Oh one of our ancient rights,’ Harding had said, looking mock studious for Verney’s benefit. ‘From back in the mists of time. True throughout the Andrew and ever has been. A rating in your division comes knocking on the wardroom door… seeking you out… on a business matter… you pay the forfeit… you have to buy the wardroom a drink.’
Nobody had felt like laughing; of course, they’d been worrying about what they were going to find when they got back to Thirios, and anyway, Petrie’s face had sucked any remaining cheeriness right out of the boat.
What had happened was the gland packing around the port diesel exhaust muffler valve had failed and water was just running through the valve stem and thence into the bilges. The bilge pumps had been running hot, and there was a danger that allowing time for each of them to cool off in sequence might let the flooding reach the electric motors. So Scourge had to stop while Petrie effected repairs.
But that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Not on Scourge. Because the way things had always worked on Scourge was things didn’t go wrong in Petrie’s engine room. If ever anything looked remotely as if it might, he’d always had it stripped down and fixed before it did. Up until now.
Then they’d hit one of those inter-island currents – eddies flung off from the masses of water at play between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, far away to the north. And they took the hit beam on which had caused Scourge to roll and the rising bilge water to splash the port armatures, putting a full earth on them and putting the port motor out of action. Petrie had tried to cure it on the go, but after several hours hove-to again, he’d concluded they’d need to go alongside to effect a fix, which meant they were down to one motor, the starboard one.
Having repacked the port diesel exhaust muffler, they dived just before first light. They’d only been down a few hours when the starboard motor main bearing began running hot, then ‘wiped’. All the power to the propeller shafts stopped, and the number one and the wrecker had to bring the boat to stopped trim at sixty feet, which was uncomfortable even on a good day; and after he’d stripped it out, Petrie had even brought the offending bearing to the control room to show Harry. It had been clear to see the bearing surface was scoured and torn and blackened from heat, with patches of lining material torn cleanly from the steel backing. ‘Wiped’, in other words.
Petrie said, ‘…Dirt contamination aggravated by concentrated loading.’ And then he’d added sullenly, ‘We need a new one.’
Without motors, Scourge could not make any headway submerged. The rest of her journey would have to be completed on the surface, on her diesels. At that point, not knowing what type of aircraft and how many had attacked Thirios, Harry was reluctant to go up in daylight. So, more hours’ delay, dived, wallowing at stopped trim and relying on emergency lighting just to see. And no galley stove until they could rig it to the emergency generator.
It was only after they’d navigated in through the bar on their main engines, not as handy as doing it on motors, and secured alongside one of the town jetties that they learned the raid had just been three Ju 52 transport aircraft, probably with a couple of Gefreiters in the back, booting the bombs out the door. Not a serious raid, hence the ‘no significant damage’ signal.
‘They were the ones left on Rhodes, I expect,’ said Verney to Harry later, when’d he’d wondered why had Jerry bothered. ‘Jerry sending a message. Whatever he was planning before, he is never going to let us get away with this. They’ll be back. They’ll get more aeroplanes and more ships, and they’ll be back. They’ve already got the troops, after all. There’s the ten thousand still languishing over there on Rhodes. And its just twenty-five miles that way,’ gesturing towards where that enemy stronghold lay over the horizon.
‘Less quite a few Italians,’ added Harry.
Verney smiled, ‘Indeed. Less more than a few Italians.’ A little laugh, then, ‘You should’ve been there on Symi when we rounded the ones there up… just how keen they were to carry on the fight for Fascism!’ And then he really did laugh.
*
Scourge was creeping along her patrol line between the islands of Andros in the west and Samos over towards Turkish territorial waters. It was well into the last dog watch, and she was on the surface, her radar raised and on, cruising along at just eight knots, cramming charge in and looking for any Jerry reinforcements coming south from the Adriatic.
‘Bridge, Asdic. Multiple HE bearing red two zero.’ It was the bridge voicepipe talking, Harry couldn’t place the voice. Not Biddle, one of the other ratings.
‘What do you make of it, Asdic?’ he said into the pipe.
A long pause. ‘It sounds a fair way away, sir. Not heavy. Lots of light engines.’
‘How many? Can you tell?’
There was an even longer pause, then, ‘Can’t tell, sir.’
‘Control room, bridge. Pass the word for Number One.’
He didn’t want to go to diving stations right away; he’d get the gun crew closed up first and then tootle over and see what they were dealing with. No point in getting everybody up and running about just for a mob of fishing boats out for a night’s work.
Working this patrol line was the first sensible job Scourge
had been given since being assigned to this operation, and Harry wanted to ease her back into her old ways, doing what the Scourges did best: hunting down the enemy and sinking him.
The downside, however, was they weren’t heading into this patrol fully armed. When the signal traffic after the Ju 52 raid had said, ‘No significant damage,’ it wasn’t strictly accurate, certainly from Scourge’s point of view. The caique she had discharged all her torpedo reloads into had been sunk. Shrapnel from a bomb hit on one of the stone wharves had riddled her hull, and she was now lying in twenty-six feet of water at the head of Thirios’s port. The torpedoes were still intact, or so divers had found. But how to get them back up again? A problem for another day. In the meantime, Scourge would have to sail with only the torpedoes already in her tubes: seven altogether, six bow and one stern.
But before all that, Petrie and his men had gone to work on Scourge’s engines while Harry had set off to report to Cdr Pleydell.
And there, on one of the jetties, had been Kit Grainger, heading back to Alconbury on the destroyer’s launch. He’d offered Harry a lift.
‘Been negotiating with some local cut-throat over the possibility of another quiet consignment of the local rotgut,’ Grainger had cheerily informed him. ‘It’s surprisingly palatable for something that’s closer to paint stripper than a Grand Cru. After you’ve presented your homework to his nibs, come for lunch and sample a tipple. You know where to come,’ Grainger had said to him, jauntily jabbing his thumb at Alconbury riding at anchor, back again out beyond the long spit of sand that separated the anchorage from the bay. ‘We’re at the bar.’
