by David Black
But Mr Gilmour had had the words. ‘All watertight doors remain open unless the boat’s actually flooding or there’s a direct order from me,’ he’d said, as he un-dogged the door himself. ‘If we’re going home,’ he added, ‘we’re all going home together.’
Yup, Ainsworth remembered thinking to himself when he’d heard that, if anything had to be said about this, those were the words to say it.
Thus bonds between men are forged at sea.
But right now, Ainsworth was in the cosy wardroom, with its floral pattern cushions, deckhead lampshades and screw-on, framed photos of the King and Queen, and the River Dart from Kingswear, and a pin-up of Betty Grable, and he was paying close attention to young Mr Gilmour’s plan.
****
Another roar of aero engines came out of the night, this time so close overhead Harry was silently grateful he still hadn’t ordered the main search periscope up yet, otherwise the bloody great Jerry might have clipped its head. Even though Scourge had been on the surface for over an hour, Harry’s night vision didn’t even give him the sense of the shadow passing overhead, but he smelled the draught of engine fuel.
‘How many’s that now, Mr McCready?’ Harry asked.
‘Number six, sir,’ came the reply from the aft end of the bridge. McCready was back there, keeping an eye to seaward in the unlikely event anyone might try to sneak up behind them. Harry had learned the hard way, many times, the danger of letting anybody sneak up behind you.
Ahead, the dark, flat expanse of desert was in the process of being sliced up by scores of narrow, weak beams of light from the headlamps of a dozen or more vehicles. Harry could see shadows passing among them; the unloading was well underway, but it still wasn’t time to start the mayhem.
Close to the western horizon, the sky was a riot of flashes, some rippling, others eruptions, and low in the sky, flares of all descriptions, guttering in the night. Artillery duels, tracer breaking the rim of the night. A full-scale armoured battle.
Scourge was a mere couple of hundred yards off the beach, Sub Lt Harding having conned them down a winding avenue of shoal. Harry had ordered him to lay a course to get them as close in as possible, but only to a position where there were at least two easy passages to deep water should an emergency arise. And there she lay, with no current or surf to move her; her main diesels were still running, still pumping charge, with no danger of anyone ashore hearing them above the clatter of aero engines and the elemental rumbling of the guns away to the west. But the close-in racket was going to change any time now as that last aircraft came to a halt.
‘Finish with port and starboard diesels,’ Harry called down the voice pipe, ‘Up search periscope.’
And in the closer silence, he heard the big ’scope slide up out of the periscope stands behind him. As it did, the last noise of an aero engine from over the desert died, leaving only an indistinct low growl of trucks working up and down their gearboxes drifting out to them.
Harry stepped back from the bridge front until he was standing over the conning tower hatch. ‘Well, Mr Powell. What do you see?’ he called down, and Sub Lt Powell began his narrative. Harry listened until he had the picture: the parked Ju52s in various states of unloading; the stacked jerrycans of fuel and presumably the boxed artillery or tank shells; the lorries queuing for cargoes, and the first ones moving away now, presumably towards the road and the frontline. The time had come.
‘Deck gun crew close up,’ he called down the hatch, and no sooner had he said the words, when out of the red light below came Hooper’s cap and shoulders wearing a duffel-coat against the night chill. Harry stood back to let him and his gun crew up and over the bridge wing. Below in the conning tower, the ammunition daisy chain were forming to pass the three-inch shells through the two shell chutes that opened through the tower’s forward face. Everybody seemed to know where to stand and in what order; there was no shuffling or shoving. Scourge, Harry couldn’t help noticing again, really was a tight crew. He leaned over the bridge front and saw that Hooper already had the gun cleared, loaded and swung out.
‘Bearing for the parked aircraft, Mr Powell,’ Harry called down the voice pipe this time. Powell had reported the Ju52s were in a ragged line, tucked into the first file of trucks. Harry could see none of it however, and Hooper on the deck below, even less. Powell called out the bearing and Harry repeated it. Hooper fine-trained the gun. They had already worked out the sums to calculate a range from what Powell was seeing through the periscope: now they were about to find out if it worked. Harry repeated Powell’s range call, ‘Seven hundred yards.’ And the barrel rose slightly. Harry looked down at a kneeling Harding and peered with the aid of Harding’s torch at their position relative to the target on the tiny folded face of the chart he had propped in front of him on one of Mr Petrie’s little engine room stools. Harding’s pale face looked back, smiling. It looked a good set-up.
‘One round for range,’ said Harry over the bridge front, ‘Shoot!’
There was a crack! No flash – they were using flashless powder. Directly there was the sound of another crack from out of the desert, then a pause before Powell’s disembodied voice came up the voice pipe, ‘Up one hundred!’
Harry repeated the call, and was adding, ‘Fire when ready!’ when the gun went off again; Hooper already had it loaded. Another detonation, but this time Powell didn’t need to call his observation of the fall of shot; from out in the dark of the desert a huge finger of flame shot up into the sky, even before the noise of the hit came echoing back.
‘Targets bearing right,’ he heard Powell call. He was telling Harry there were more aircraft, more lorries, along a ragged line running to the right of their last hit. And Harry called it down to Hooper, and then he ordered, ‘Continuous firing!’
Scourge’s gunlayer didn’t need telling twice.
The rounds went out like a slow drum roll. Crack! Crack! Crack! Between each shot, Hooper would step in and turn the traverse wheel with another twist of his wrist … Crack! Crack! Crack! … so that he walked the shells along the line. Twice Powell called, ‘Up one hundred!’ Harry repeated and Hooper tweaked the range.
The rim of the land rising up from the beach on their port bow seemed even blacker as it hit a horizon of fires and random explosions. Picked out in it Harry could see the odd skeleton of an aircraft’s tail, or vehicle speeding past. Matchstick figures dance around its edge. No fire was coming back at them. In fact Harry wondered if Jerry even knew it was them doing all the damage.
‘Switch target to ammo stacks!’ It was Powell, his voice tinny out of the pipe.
What was this? Was he countermanding Harry’s orders? Or was he asking? In the time it took for the gun to go crack! again Harry had decided he didn’t care. If Scourge’s “guns” had his eyes on the targets, then Captain Gilmour was backing his judgement.
‘Confirm!’ called Harry, and Powell called up the new bearing and range. It took Hooper less than seven seconds to traverse his gun and turn the range screw, and then he was firing again. It took another 38 seconds for him to detonate an entire stockpile of crated 88mm anti-tank shells. The flash was like an eruption of burning white silk that seemed to peel itself apart across the desert floor. The light of it flared like some giant x-ray, capturing a diorama of burning aircraft and vehicles, freezing them for just one moment before the blast obliterated everything in a wall of smoke and sand that hit them like a supersonic hailstorm so that everyone on deck had to cower and shield themselves. This close, the noise from it seemed far away, but the blow was anything but, compressing the air from their lungs, hitting them with all the intimacy of a Joe Louis haymaker.
Ten
Scourge had remained on patrol off the north African coast for just over three weeks, yet still managed to return to Malta with all but two of her torpedoes unfired. Of the ones she did fire, the first was at a bizarre-looking steel raft they’d encountered off Derna, and it missed because Harry had ignored Farrar’s warning that its draugh
t was too shallow; the torpedo, bang on target, had shot straight under only to explode on the beach. The second one was also fired at another of those bizarre rafts, but only after Farrar had assured Harry with the load the thing had aboard, they had a chance. This time their torpedo hit, and blew the ungainly tub in two.
Farrar had called them “F-lighters”. When Harry looked up the type in the recognition book, he discovered F-lighter was a Royal Navy name for a Kriegsmarine supply craft officially designated as a Marinefährprahm. They were long, low and flat with a tiny wheelhouse aft and an elegantly sweeping hull line that appeared as if it had been wrapped around a very basic steel box. They were about 150 feet long and 20 feet in the beam, and weighed in at under 250 tons. Their three diesel engines were originally designed to drive lorries, and as Farrar had assured him, they weren’t very fast – 10, maybe 12 knots empty and with a following breeze. It was their draught that was the problem. Even loaded to the gunnels, they seldom drew more than seven feet.
Harry had never seen one before. Still, he’d learned a lesson: always listen to your Jimmy. One of many lessons he’d go ashore with. In fact, as they’d nosed their way to one of the pontoons below Lazaretto’s wardroom gallery, Harry was already thinking about the long talk he wanted to have with Hubert later, about this command business, and what he was supposed to be doing to do it right, in the quiet of his office, over one of the Commander (S)’s celebrated pink gins – once he’d had his interview with Shrimp.
The interview had come and gone, but there had been no Hubert to discuss matters with later. He was gone, back home to Blighty and replaced by a very affable new boy called Hutchinson who sported a DSO ribbon, won when he’d been skipper of Truant and had torpedoed the German light cruiser Karlsruhe in the Skagerrak back in 1940. ‘Call me Hutch,’ he’d said when introducing himself to Harry, and then proceeded to do much of the talking. It appeared a lot had happened back here on Malta since Scourge had sailed three weeks ago.
While Eighth Army had been launching its offensive on the El Alamein front, Jerry had stepped up his raids on Malta again in an all-out onslaught aimed at not only completely knocking out the island’s three main airfields, but in bringing any semblance of normal life above ground to an end.
Not that life had been easy before. For some time now, Harry had been told, there had been no gas or electricity for any of the civilian population apart from the hospitals. And no petrol for vehicles. Together with a total absence of coal, or indeed firewood, it meant ordinary people were totally dependent on the mobile kitchens for cooked food and that no-one could heat water for a bath – except, curiously enough, at the submarine base. Here the engineering shop had rigged up some gimcrack arrangement that burned waste sump oil, so that crews returning from patrol could look forward to the small luxury of a warm bath. If they could scrounge some soap.
It was small compensation for being denied the use of the island’s rest camps up north because there were no lorries or buses on the roads anymore to take the tired crews there. Shore leave had to be spent in a series of patched-up apartments in Sliema, or on the base itself. Not that many wanted to roam very far; there was no more beer in the bars, just local rot-gut wine, and all the dance halls had closed, not that anyone much felt like dancing anyway. As for diversions involving the opposite sex, there were no girls around either seeing as no matter how much money they might make, there was nothing to spend it on. And although some cinemas still opened, no-one wanted to face the gaunt, haunted looks of the locals, or even most of the soldiers on the island; they were like one long silent rebuke to the young British submariners, who knew they were being fed much better simply because they were being sent out to fight. Even though everyone was agreed now, they felt safer on patrol.
The only good news was that Jerry hadn’t been having it all his own way in the skies above Malta, according to Hutch.The last contingent of Spitfires and the new tactics from the new Air Officer Commanding had rendered the Luftwaffe’s intensified raids too costly, which was why, when Scourge had come steaming home, matters had quietened down considerably.
His perfunctory briefing over, Hutch had told him that a relief crew was already going aboard Scourge to, ‘sort her out,’ and that Harry and her crew were to, ‘bugger off and have a lie down.’
He said, ‘I understand the time before when you came in, you were bounced straight back out on patrol again. So this time the Captain (S) and I don’t want any housekeeping to eat into your chaps’ Egyptian PT.’
For Harry, since he was a skipper now, that really was something to look forward to because even in a shot-to-hell, forward-operating flotilla like the Tenth, Shrimp had made sure all skippers had their own cabins ashore. They might just be monk’s cells like Hubert’s office, hollowed out of the rock at the back of the Lazaretto, but they were still personal spaces, which was more than anyone else had – and they had curtains you could draw for privacy. Except new skippers now had to share, and in Harry’s cabin, when he opened the wardrobe door there was a big hole where the back should have been, and a drop to a pile of rubble. Still, the other lieutenant who’d been assigned to share it with him was out on patrol, so it was all his for another week, or maybe longer, depending.
Before all the sleep he planned, he had drinks to buy and be bought, in among the rubble of the Lazaretto’s wardroom gallery, especially since they’d returned with some nice new decorations on their Jolly Roger.
There was the red bar for the torpedoed F-lighter and then a white one for the small bunkering tanker and no less than five white stars for all the small coasting schooners by gun action. Not to mention the forward supply strip and all those Ju52s. There had been much debate on how to show up that one, there being no precedent for one of His Majesty’s submarines actually blowing up an airfield and all the aircraft on it, even if the airfield was only a temporary one. Shrimp had been particularly complimentary about that action and their Jolly Roger, especially CPO Ainsworth’s elegant solution as to how you depicted an aircraft destroyed that you hadn’t actually shot down, or how you depicted an air strip you’d blown up. He’d stitched on a single red line with a pole and windscock at one end, and then sewn a row of six bent aircraft silhouettes’ noses into it.
Also, Harry was intending to put Hooper in for a DSM for the whole patrol: he’d been so bloody marvellous on that 3three-inch gun of his, more like a five-mile sniper than a seaman gunlayer.
****
They’d had their fight yesterday. It had begun immediately Harry had arrived at Wincairns’ villa. ‘I will not be someone you just “fit in” when you feel like it,’ Katty had hissed at him. ‘I saw your boat come in! And you have the nerve to only turn up here a day later!’ That had been how it started. He quickly lost track of where she went after that. And she’d shown no signs of letting up on him by the time Wincairns had returned that evening. In the stony silence that had greeted him, he’d asked Harry to stay for supper. Harry had declined. Later, when Katty had left the terrace to go in and start cooking, Wincairns had asked again, this time archly offering to make himself scarce if Harry wanted to stay for more than just supper.
‘Heavens!’ Wincairns had said, with a knowing smile, ‘there’s more than enough room here.’
‘Thank you, George,’ Harry had replied, because Wincairns had from the start insisted Harry call him by his first name, ‘but I fear if I were to sit down at your table tonight, I would not survive the lampuki,’ the exquisite smell of which was already wafting from the kitchen.
Wincairns, who Harry was finding to be a thoroughly affable chap and fine company, gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘I know what you mean,’ he’d said, showing him to the door, ‘Katty has many charming and alluring attributes, but the streak of Lucrezia Borgia in her isn’t one of them.’ He paused, then furrowing his brow and going all serious, he added, ‘But come back tomorrow morning … no, no, I understand why you think that’s a bad idea, but trust me. It’s important. If you still care for h
er even a little, come back. She wants you to. Believe me. It’ll be fine.’
The next morning she’d opened the door to him as if nothing had happened, and taken him straight to bed.
Now they were out on the Sliema promenade. Their favourite café was a ruin these days, strafed by 109 cannon shells, so they were just strolling in the afternoon sun. There had been no raids yesterday, and so far, no raids today. But neither commented on it, the way you’d never say, ‘it’s stopped raining’ in case you tempted fate, and it started again.
Harry had just mentioned Toby Challoner for the first time, and they were walking through the silence that had followed. Flt Lt. Toby “Chally” Challoner, an RAF reconnaissance pilot who’d made a name for himself through the height of the island’s siege by his daredevil exploits. And who had won Katty’s heart before Harry had arrived, and then won it back again.
‘When I went looking for you at Scots Street,’ Harry had said, ‘someone told me he’d been posted back home. And he’s somewhere in England, and a squadron leader now.’
That’s when the silence had followed.
He’d walked Katty home, and spent the evening getting drunk on the wardroom gallery back at Lazaretto, thinking to himself just how damned tricky this women business could be too.
The next day found him slumped, hungover, on a dghaisa being rowed across Marxammsett Harbour to the steps on the Valetta side. The Maltese on the single oar was a short, withered man the colour and texture of flayed leather, in shapeless, frayed clothes, with the conversation and the countenance of Charon, the Styx ferryman. He brightened up when Harry offered him a cigarette, and said if he gave him five, that could be the fare, which was okay with Harry. It was a lot less than the dghaisamen used to charge when he was last here – even a single cigarette got you a lot further these days – and since all coinage had disappeared from the island while he’d been gone, even paying with the smallest paper notes, ‘no change, mister’ meant you always got stung.
