Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Well, it was going to be a fairly straightforward run. Wind almost permanently abaft the starboard beam, hopefully; steer 250 degrees and keep on going until you raise the coast of Africa, then starboard, thirty and into the funnel of the Straits of Gibraltar and Bob’s your uncle – or a piece of cake, as the RAF johnnies were wont to say.

  ‘What happens now?’ asked Mahaddie.

  ‘We just need to get out past that big headland there, get the sails up, and then it’s turn left for Gibraltar,’ said Harry.

  ‘That easy, eh,’ said Mahaddie, dubiously. ‘How far did you say it was again?

  ‘Ooh – seven hundred miles, give or take. Piece of cake, really,’ said Harry, his teeth shining in a smile in the half-light. And Mahaddie, who’d been watching him all the while as Harry had prepared the boat – moving surefooted over its deck, loosening the mainsail’s tabs and freeing the halyards, shackling the jib halyard to the head ready for hoisting, running the sheets back into the cockpit, dipping the fuel tank and opening the cock to feed the tiny inboard engine – Mahaddie had found himself actually believing Harry. But then Mahaddie had never seen a fighting sailor about his business before, and certainly not a Royal Navy one.

  Chapter Six

  Harry was looking at his CO’s arse, thinking how big it was, in that sulky way you do when you’ve finally come to terms with the fact that you don’t like someone. Lieutenant Clive Rais’s arse wasn’t actually that big, because nothing about Rais was that big: it was just because Rais was bent double in front of Harry and the arse was pointed right at him. The other end – the head end – was fixed to an attack periscope, and crouched over the CO was the Chief Petty Officer, not quite in the way, peering at the periscope’s bezel, ready to call off the latest bearing. They were at Diving Stations – the Trade didn’t use the surface skimmer’s ‘Action Stations’, because if a simple mistake while you were diving or submerging a boat could sink you, calling Diving Stations was alert enough for anyone.

  Another enemy convoy was in their CO’s sights, the fifth in two days. Harry wondered if everyone else was wondering what he was wondering: was this one going to end any differently from all the others? When he looked around the submarine’s control room, the stone-set faces gave nothing away, except to the initiated; each one was flat and expressionless, showing neither enthusiasm nor insolence – just blank, a textbook example of Jack, browned off.

  Harry found himself wishing he was back on that gaff-rigged sloop, Carmen. How long ago had it been since that particular passage through paradise had ended? Ten days? Less? And now here he was on his new submarine. Not the HMS Nimuae he had originally been appointed to, but HMS Umbrage. And, judging by the mood of the crew he had come to know over the past week, never had a submarine been better named.

  Life with Carmen’s crew had been jollier. Not at first, admittedly. But until that RN motor gunboat had intercepted them twenty miles south-east of Marbella, demanding to know since when did Scotland have its own navy, they’d been having quite a jolly time.

  The memory of it was making Harry smile even now: how, after they had made it away from the coast of Majorca, he had found the signal flag for the letter ‘M’ in the yacht’s signal locker, and hoisted it as their ensign – the ‘M’ flag being a perfect saltire.

  On Umbrage right now, there was no jollity; you could have cut the atmosphere in the control room with a knife. The time was 12.20. They had gone to Diving Stations over half an hour ago, interrupting a puerile harangue by the CO directed at the First Lieutenant. So that, at a time when the CO and the First Lieutenant should have been concentrating on their attack, they were still silently seething at each other. It was a little drama made all the more depressing by the fact that Harry knew one of its actors all too well, from a long time ago.

  How much easier life had been on the Carmen. Of course Fabrizio had started out beside himself with fury, and the bombastic and deeply irritating Group Captain Mahaddie had done nothing but glower and await an excuse to visit violence on the poor young Italian. But as Harry had noted many times before, from crewing on rich men’s yachts, smooth sailing on a long reach can have a soothing effect on even the most troubled soul.

  The atmosphere had been further helped by the discovery of wine on board, and by Harry’s little talk to them about how they could each have a little shot at sailing if they promised to behave themselves. And how that could be a good idea too, because Harry wasn’t going to be able to stay awake for five days on the trot, and if they could each take their turn on the tiller it would make all the difference between them getting to Gib and surviving, and them getting lost and foundering.

  Also, the story Harry had concocted about how they’d all happened to be here went a long way towards pacifying Fabrizio. How Harry and Mahaddie had planned their escape all along, but at the last minute they’d been rumbled by this vigilant Italian officer, and so they’d had to overpower him and take him along to prevent discovery – and that was why he was their prisoner. They’d managed to settle down and enjoy their wine and the sunsets after that.

  Until the gunboat picked them up and took them into Gib, where Fabrizio had been bundled off by a pair of evil-looking pongoes, with not even a chance for a proper goodbye. And Harry and Mahaddie had been shoved aboard a Malta-bound Sunderland less than ten hours after they’d been put ashore, without even a chance for a drink and a steak in one of the rock’s famed hostelries.

  And then Harry had been introduced to his new Skipper.

  Except no one on HMS Umbrage was allowed to call him that. For Rais, ‘Skipper’ really was an endearment too far.

  ‘Just so as we understand each other from the outset, Mr Gilmour,’ had been this CO’s first words to Harry, ‘I’m not the Skipper. Skipper is what you call the chap on the bridge of the Gosport ferry. I’m the Captain.’ And before Harry had even had the chance to say ‘Aye aye, Captain’, Rais had added, ‘And I am an exacting Captain. I know what I want from my crew, officers and men. What might have passed for efficiency on your other submarines won’t be good enough on my submarine. Nothing is “good enough” for me. I only accept the best. And you’re going to give that to me, at all times. All times. Carry on.’

  And that was it. Not even a handshake. Was it only last week?

  This current ‘atmosphere’ had been brought on by the First Lieutenant asking Rais if he really thought it was necessary to surface briefly to allow their new Navigator, Harry, to attempt a quick noon shoot and thus confirm their exact position.

  The First Lieutenant had doubted the wisdom of such a course of action as it was doubtful whether the sun would even make an appearance, let alone be out long enough for Harry and his sextant to do the business. Then there was the risk of being spotted by the Italians this close to Genoa.

  The CO had exploded.

  Throughout the harangue, the First Lieutenant had been wearing an expression on his face that some might have taken for a measure of contrition, but Harry knew better – because he knew this First Lieutenant of old. His name was Kit Grainger, and he and Harry had served together before, on HMS Trebuchet. Grainger: the man who had come back for Harry, and saved his life.

  No, Harry recognised the expression on Grainger’s face only too well. It was irritation. Grainger was irritated with himself, that he’d been silly enough to actually offer a suggestion to this new, and obviously inexperienced, CO. If you knew Grainger, you couldn’t miss it, not in the tiny, confined space of the control room of a U-class submarine. And that was when Wykham, another impossibly young and daft RNVR Sub-Lieutenant, who was officer of the watch and completing his next regulation all-round look on the periscope, sang out, ‘Captain to the control room!’, obeying the set-down regulation protocol, even though the Captain was standing barely three feet from him, before announcing, ‘Smoke on the horizon, bearing north-west!’ Because unlike Trebuchet, this submarine, Umbrage, was a strictly-by-the-book boat.

  Rais had practically shouldered youn
g Wykham off the periscope, if someone so slight could do that to someone so gangly.

  ‘Group up!’ Rais had shouted.

  No need to shout, Harry had thought at the time. We’re all standing right here.

  ‘Full ahead, together! Eighty feet!’

  At eighty feet, Grainger, on the trim, had levelled them, and Rais had ordered, ‘Port, ten!’ and away they’d gone, sprinting towards the target. Just like the last time, and the time before, and the time before that – and before that one too.

  Then it was up and down, and up and down again, to periscope depth, for Rais to ‘have another look’; Rais ordering, ‘Group down’ to take the way off her, and having the boat plane up to periscope depth – from Group up, to Group down, the motor room crew aft, reconnecting the armatures driving the propeller shafts from ‘parallel’ for high speed to ‘series’ for slow.

  Harry, standing at the chart table, pencil and ruler in hand, had already begun a plot on the attack, ready to note every manoeuvre Umbrage made on the chart. But there was nothing to note. Harry knew how it should be happening: Rais, closing the range to the target, getting their boat into a firing position; Rais, doing it by calling out what he saw – the tactical picture, the range and bearing and estimated speed of the target – for Harry to mark on the chart, and more importantly, for Wykham to dial into their fruit machine. Wykham, who now stood before it – the electromechanical box of tricks tacked by the aft wall that separated the control room from the ASDIC cubby, that crunched all the numbers and then spat out the direction their bows should be pointing in when they fired their torpedoes, so that they had at least some chance of hitting the enemy. But it wasn’t happening. Harry had no data for the target, and neither did Wykham. Rais wasn’t telling them. No one even knew what the target was. It could’ve been a gash scow or the battleship Vittorio Veneto.

  ‘HE still bearing now red-one-five,’ called Tuke, their Leading Telegraphist, who was a dab hand on the ASDIC – just a disembodied voice coming from the cubby next door. ‘Still two targets. One, small . . . high-speed diesel . . . slow. The other . . . big marine engine . . . steady one-two-oh revs. She’s a rattly one, Sir. Like she was straining herself. Twelve knots, I reckon.’

  So it isn’t the battleship Vittorio Veneto, thought Harry. HE meant hydrophone effects – the engine noises picked up by their ASDIC set on passive, and as Tuke listened, their bearing was narrowing slightly. So the target was advancing toward them obliquely, from their port bow, and from all the helm orders that were being barked out by Rais, Harry worked out it must still be one hell of a way off.

  ‘Just the numbers, Tuke,’ said Rais, taking time off from muttering to himself, one arm linked through the rungs of the conning tower ladder, gripping it like grim death, while he banged at the risers with his other hand in a steady rhythm. ‘You’re not paid to reckon.’

  Officers’ callous arrogance towards their crews was nothing new, yet it sounded strange coming from Rais, directed at a sailor old enough to be his father, with not much short of two decades in a blue suit – a highly experienced ASDIC operator and submariner. And Rais, who looked all of fifteen if he were a day, and such an angelic child, with his floppy blond hair, cherub’s cheeks and cupid’s-bow, bee-sting lips. He could only have been about five foot five or six inches tall. He was even wearing his officer’s white short-sleeve shirt, with its epaulettes with the two solid RN Lieutenant’s rings on them. And it still even looked clean, all the way from Malta to here in a submarine.

  Up and down again they went – Rais taking his ‘all-round looks’, swivelling round, flicking the up handle, then back again, all the while uttering not a single ‘The bearing is that’ for the Petty Officer to read off the bezel above his head and sing out. Rais was now cursing all the time, yelling that he needed more speed, draining amps from Umbrage’s batteries with every bound. Harry shuddered to think about the look that must now be on their Leading Torpedoman’s crusty old fizz, back aft in the motor room, as his two darling motors were being flogged flat.

  And then there was Grainger, off to the side, attentive to his trim board, making sure Umbrage was always under complete control regardless of what wild revolution the CO might order. But like a bystander. Like he wasn’t involved. No wonder Jack was browned off, caught between a Skipper with his ‘L’ plates still up and a Jimmy – as Jack called all First Lieutenants – who is spending the commission just standing around waiting for the Skipper to fall on his arse so he can laugh at him, when he should be presenting his Captain with a boat and crew, ready to go to war.

  They were up again, after executing some sharp turns when down at eighty feet. We should never have to go that deep, thought Harry, even though he could guess why Rais had ordered it. Here in the Med, the water was sometimes so clear, any patrolling shagbat could spot their shadow down to fifty or sixty feet, especially those little Cant floatplanes, with their huge wing areas, that went so slow they could practically hover. But it was winter now, and the patchy cloud and the wind ruffling the surface would have made them invisible even at periscope depth – not much more than twenty feet.

  Those were all things Harry knew already, the bits of lore you picked up as a matter of course. But Rais hadn’t seemed to. Probably because he wasn’t the sort of chap you could tell things to – certainly not if you were just the Navigator. That was the Jimmy’s job, ensuring the Captain was up to speed on all the latest tactical ruses, and Grainger would certainly know, yet he hadn’t told his Captain. So they’d been going up and down, wasting amps, and time – time that would have put them closer to their target, whatever the bloody thing was.

  And then the shout. Rais, like he was hailing the next ship in a squadron, in a North Atlantic gale, ‘The bearing is that!’

  The Petty Officer practically leapt into the air. He quickly recovered, leaned in to see the bezel that showed the angle Rais was pointing the periscope, and swiftly read it off. Harry heard Wykham pipe up from over his shoulder, repeating it back, and then Harry heard the bearing being dialled in.

  ‘Range . . . is that!’ yelled Rais, turning the knob on the little device in the periscope that split the target, showing one image of it superimposed on top of the other. All you had to do was rotate that knob and it would move one image down until its waterline was touching the mast tops of the lower image, and the bezel above your head would give the angle subtended in minutes for whoever was reading off the bearing data to see.

  The Petty Officer called, ‘Thirty minutes!’

  And now all Rais had to do was guess the target’s mast height, divide it by the minutes’ reading and then he had . . . ‘Range. Four thousand yards!’ called Rais.

  A mast height of about 120 feet, calculated Harry, so the target must be pretty big-ish.

  Wykham called it back and dialled it in. Then nothing. Harry was busy dashing down the new numbers, updating his plot, so he didn’t notice right away. Silence. That wasn’t right. Rais hadn’t called the target’s speed. Wykham needed to dial in the speed if he were going to get a director angle out of the bloody machine; the DA which told you . . .

  ‘She’s a cargo-passenger job,’ Rais was saying smugly, his eyes still glued to the periscope. ‘Old, fat and fully laden . . . Seven thousand tons or I’m a Dutchman. More, even . . .’

  Two things flew into Harry’s mind: You’ve had that bloody periscope up too long! And that, over his shoulder, Wykham was going white and was shaking, waiting to hear Rais call the speed, and it not coming – Wykham, now terrified he was fucking it up.

  ‘. . . and I’ve got us on a near-perfect 95-degree track angle,’ continued Rais, oblivious. The control room was getting its tactical picture now, all right. Well done, thought Harry, the words laden with sarcasm, for all they were unspoken. A 95-degree track angle. After all his slewing about the ocean, Rais had actually managed to get Umbrage into such a position that when she fired her torpedoes, they would cross their seven-thousand-ton quarry’s course at almost rig
ht angles. Perfect, indeed, but four thousand yards was a hell of a long shot. And unless somebody told Wykham the damn thing’s speed, the damn thing could be anywhere when the torpedoes actually got to the target’s track.

  And then there was another voice in the control room. It was Wykham’s again, and there was a quaver in it. ‘Shall I make target’s speed twelve knots, Sir?’

  Harry thought, Good lad, you’ve been paying attention, remembering Tuke’s call from the ASDIC cubby, all those hours ago, although Harry knew it had been bare minutes.

  ‘Silence in the control room!’ It was another gale-strength bellow, and Rais shot upright at the periscope as if it had electrocuted him, and was glaring, wild-eyed. The noise, in the tiny space, was like a physical slap. Harry took in the tableau: the Petty Officer, big Jonners Roscorla, had had to jerk out of Rais’s way.

  The PO was a solid Cornishman through and through, his black curly hair greying now, on a head like a cannon ball – an impressive man who, in a past life, looked as if he might have served a 32-pounder on Nelson’s Victory, and maybe he had; his face, grim and angry. Harry noticed the face of the wiry little Outside Engine Room Artificer too. It had turned inboard at the CO’s yell, when it should have been facing the other way, glued to his trim gauges. It was a study in alarm. From the stiffened shoulders of the senior rates on the planes, their backs to him, Harry guessed they were wearing similar expressions. And then there was Grainger, the bastard: that same stone-blank face, just watching, giving nothing away . . . And all the while, Umbrage – the boat that it was his duty to keep at the peak of full fighting efficiency – was on the verge of fucking up another attack.