Strike from the Sea (1978) (29 page)

Ainslie ran to the rear of the bridge, realizing that another man had fallen to his knees, clasping his stomach and gasping in agony as Menzies tried to pull him to the hatch.

The whole bay seemed to be filled with fire and smoke, and when he managed to jam the binoculars to his eyes he realized that the
Sudsuya
was beginning to turn turtle, her aircraft spilling over the side, one catching fire like a moth in the flames as it fell.

He shouted wildly into the smoke and din, ‘
We did it!
’

Two further shells burst near the submarine. One warship at least was in pursuit. To catch the carrier’s executioner or to pick up her company, which would her commander decide? Another pair of shells exploded slightly to starboard, an answer to his unspoken question.

Ainslie yelled down the voice-pipe, ‘Stand by stern tubes! We might get this one as we clear the headland!’

He did not hear any acknowledgement for at that moment something struck him violently in the shoulder. For an instant he thought that a piece of one of the periscopes had been cut down by gunfire and had fallen on him. Then as the searing pain exploded through his body he started to fall, his arm shining with blood in the drifting tracers.

Menzies was kneeling beside him, cradling him away from the side where two holes had suddenly appeared.

Ainslie gasped, ‘Tell Number One, Yeo! Tell him to –’

Then the pain tightened its grip, and he found himself spiralling down into darkness.

14

Survival

AINSLIE BECAME AWARE
that someone was wiping his face and throat with something cool, but when he opened his eyes it felt as if the lids were glued together.

Everything was blurred and indistinct, shapeless and somehow disconnected from his dulled mind.

A face loomed in front of him, Petty Officer SBA Hunt, his eyes screwed up with concentration as he examined his patient.

‘You all right, sir?’

Ainslie felt his mind cringing and knew something was about to happen. Then he heard it, the threatening roar of screws, the sudden shock of explosions against the hull. The deck swayed up and down, forward and back, and as some kind of realization came back to him he knew he was in a cot, a webbing strap over his chest to hold him secure. He felt numbed, his limbs like his mind, without proper function.

He heard glass and other objects clattering across the deck, and when he craned his head over the edge of the cot he saw mess everywhere. Broken bottles and tubes, torn bandages and a bowl full of blood-stained dressings.

The noise was coming back again, sawing away at his brain, then two more crashes as depth-charges burst overhead.

So they had got out and were submerged. He groaned and tried to move, but Hunt seized him and forced him back. His hands were smooth and soft like a woman’s but his grip was like steel.

He said, ‘You’ve been hurt, sir. My orders are to make you rest.’

Ainslie stared at the cot above him. ‘How long?’

Hunt shrugged. ‘Two hours, sir. Maybe more.’ He winced as the submarine bucked wildly and swayed to one side for several seconds. ‘God, I’m scared to death.’

Ainslie looked at him, seeing his terror and able to admire his determination not show it.

Someone groaned, and when Ainslie peered over the other side of the cot he saw the seaman who had fallen at the rear of the bridge. He was propped in a sitting position, tied with bandages and straps, in one corner of the sick-bay.

Hunt said wearily, ‘I’ve drugged him best I can, sir.’

Ainslie watched the wounded seaman. His face was ashen, and there was a lot of blood on his dressings.

Hunt added softly, ‘I can’t let him lie down and die in peace, sir. He’s hit in the lungs. Nothing more I can do for him. He’ll drown in his own blood if he lies down, you see?’

Ainslie reached up and touched his injured shoulder, feeling the bandages, the way his arm tingled with the mere effort of movement.

Hunt said, ‘Splinter, sir. Bad one, but nothing broken, as far as I can tell.’

Crash . . . crash . . . crash!
Triple charges exploded nearby, and more racing screws thundered overhead. A bottle rolled across the deck, and Ainslie knew the boat was turning and changing depth at the same time.

And it had been going on for over two hours. The realization was like a spur, and he gasped, ‘Get me up. I’ve got to go.’

Hunt tried to grin. ‘Well, sir, it’s more than my life’s worth.’

Feet crunched on glass and Sub-Lieutenant Jones, the seaplane’s observer, staggered through the door.

‘Number One sent me, sir. To see how you are.’ He almost fell as the hull tilted right over again and every light flickered dangerously.

‘Fine.’ The pain was returning. Hunt’s drugs must be wearing off. ‘What’s happening?’

Jones crouched by the cot and held on to it with both hands.

‘Three destroyers from the Jap base, sir. They’ve been after us all night. But we bagged another with the stern tubes just after we left the place. Like you were telling us when you were hit.’

His face was dripping with sweat, and Ainslie could almost smell his fear. Up in the sky in some flimsy seaplane with his rough-and-ready pilot he would do anything. Down here was something different. Quinton had probably sent him to give him something to do, to keep his mind off it.

‘What depth?’

Jones shook his head. ‘I forget, sir.’

‘Tell Number One I’m all right.’ His eyes focused on Hunt. ‘How many did we lose?’

He shrugged. ‘Two killed.’ He did not look at the propped-up figure in the corner. ‘Another to go soon. And four injured, mostly by being thrown about.’

Hunt crouched down as the drumming screws came towards them again. ‘Oh God,’ he whispered, ‘I can’t take much more!’

Ainslie tensed, holding his breath. until his head swam, as the destroyer’s engines thundered louder and louder and then quite suddenly began to fade away.

He looked at Hunt and was shocked to see the tears running down his face. He had bunched his hands together as he waited for the final pattern of depth-charges to split the submarine’s hull wide open.

Ainslie wanted to comfort him, to thank him for all he had done for the wounded and the dying. But nothing would come out, and he felt his mind going away once more down the spiralling tunnel.

Then Quinton was leaning over him, his forehead cut by flying glass, his face lined and weary with strain.

Ainslie tried to speak lucidly. ‘I heard that last one, John. Has it gone?’

Quinton smiled down at him. ‘That was two hours ago, Skipper. You dropped off again.’

It was not possible. Perhaps he was dying and they were trying to make it easy for him. How could it be two hours? He looked over the cot and saw that the man had gone from the corner and a body lay covered by a sheet beside the door.

Quinton said quietly, ‘We are out of it, Skipper. A bit battered here and there, but we made it. Thanks to you.’

The tannoy said, ‘First lieutenant in the control room!’

Quinton ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging paint flakes and grit. ‘I’ll be back, Skipper.’

He darted a meaning glance at the SBA, and as Ainslie turned his head he saw another needle going into his arm.

He tried to protest, but it was already too late.

In the control room they stood around like dazed survivors, their feet amongst the litter of broken gauges and equipment blasted from their fittings by the endless bombardment.

Some of the men were still looking at the deckhead, listening for the destroyers, the hunters after their kill. Others stared at nothing, eyes dulled by fatigue, spent to a point of collapse.

Forster had his head in his hands, elbows propped on the vibrating plot table.

Once more, he had survived.

Halliday finished tying a bandage around a stoker’s arm and said gruffly. ‘We’d better get to it, lads. You never know. They might come after us again.’

Lucas nodded, his mind still reeling from the noise, from the feeling of being crushed in a vice of pain and violence. All through it he had thought of Ainslie being brought down, bleeding, from the bridge. Of Halliday’s grim determination through each mind-bending crisis. Of Quinton, riding the boat, legs astride, shouting orders and abuse, encouragement and curses, holding them all together.

Quinton said, ‘You’re right, Chief. We’ll get some food and drink laid on, too.’ He smiled painfully. ‘Skipper’s going to be all right.’

As they began to put themselves together again, Gosling handed over the helm to Voysey, the second coxswain. When he stood up he felt his bones creak, his fingers sore from gripping the wheel.

He looked at the yeoman of signals and winked. ‘Reckon you were right, Jock. After we get clear o’ this little lot, I’m putting in for a nice cushy billet ashore!’

They both knew it was unlikely. But a few hours earlier so too had been their very survival.

Ainslie remembered very little of the passage back to Singapore. Drugged into a state of half understanding what was happening, he lost count of time and distance completely.

In moments of awareness, as the searing pain of his wound made him sweat and writhe in the cot, he heard many feet passing the sick-bay, the sounds of repairs being carried out seemingly everywhere.

Only Quinton and Halliday ever visited him, and then rarely and for short periods. Ainslie guessed it was by careful agreement between them and Hunt to keep him quiet, to prevent his
joining in the boat’s affairs as she headed very slowly back to harbour.

Hunt took good care to see that when he left the submarine on a stretcher his journey to the hospital was as painless as possible.

It was like being in a nightmare, or helplessly drunk. Ainslie dimly recalled the sunlight, the tall conning tower looming above him as he was carried towards the brow. Faces looking down at him as he passed, some smiling, others just watching, remembering perhaps how they had shared all of it with him.

The events which followed his departure from
Soufrière
were equally confused. Gliding along an endless corridor, his drugged mind trying to count the lights as they passed overhead.

Then cool stillness, more faces bobbing above him, scissors cutting away at the dressings, eyes without faces above their masks, giving nothing away.

And then a bed somewhere, a small white room without windows which he guessed was underground.

His wound, the great loss of blood, added to his fatigue, were enough to keep him unconscious for much of the time.

Once or twice he awoke, struggling with his sheets as he heard distant explosions. But they were bombs falling, not depth-charges. As a patient nursing orderly explained to him, ‘It takes time, sir. You’ve got to realize that you’re out of it. For now, anyway.’

Ainslie thought a lot about that. The
Soufrière
, and the Japanese carrier capsizing in flames. With the tired dignity that most ships seemed to show when they died. As the days passed and he felt his strength returning he was able to put his thoughts in order, to remember the sequence of that last terrible attack. It was not so easy as the nursing orderly imagined, to let go, to forget.

Eventually Rear-Admiral Granger came to see him, a doctor close at hand to make sure Ainslie was not worn down by questions.

Granger sat on the only chair in the room, his plump legs crossed, somehow incomplete without the pipe.

He said, ‘I would have come earlier, but they thought it best this way.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Looking after you all right?’

Ainslie tried to push himself up on one elbow, but it was
hopeless. He fell back again and said between his teeth, ‘I’d like to know what’s happening, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Granger nodded slowly. ‘Of course. Your exploits in Area Item Fox made tremendous reading. Your first lieutenant put in a good report, and with what I knew already it seems you did the impossible. If we’d known just how many Jap warships there were in the bay, I don’t think we’d have let you go at all. But it’s done, and the
Sudsuya’s
on the bottom for good.’

Ainslie closed his eyes, feeling the prick of emotion, the nearness of collapse and shock.

He said, ‘What about me, sir?’

Granger replied cheerfully, ‘Oh, they’ll be getting you away from here, I expect. I’m like everyone else. Waiting for orders.’

Ainslie opened his eyes and looked at him. It was no use. Granger had told him nothing.

He asked, ‘Are we holding the enemy back, sir?’

Granger came to a decision. ‘No. In my view, the Japs will be down to the Johore Strait in a couple of weeks. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. I could lie to you, but you’ve done too much, seen too much to deserve that kind of deceit. It’s bad, all the way. I’m organizing another convoy to evacuate some more of the women and dependants. It’s a race against time, nothing else.’

Ainslie lay very still, aware of the steady throb beneath his bandages, the unnatural quiet of the underground room.

‘The Torrances, sir? What happened?’

Granger looked at his shoes. ‘Still here. Guy Torrance has been a bit difficult about the boats he was having built. We need them now, but he’s being bloody awkward, to put it mildly. Trouble is, and this is just between us, there are lots of people like him. Heard of a case the other day. The poor bloody Army wanted to dig slit trenches across the golf course, but the club secretary wouldn’t hear of it. Anywhere else, the Army would have kicked his backside out of it. But this is different.’ He added with sudden bitterness, ‘
Good old Singers
, it will never fall to a bunch of Japs!’

Ainslie felt his strength dropping away in spite of his efforts. ‘I should like to return to my command as soon as I can, sir.’

‘No doubt you would.’ Granger saw the doctor frowning at
him. ‘You’ll be moved from here pretty soon. Beyond that I can’t say.’ He stood up and gave a great sigh. ‘I wish to God I was at sea. That I
do
know.’

Ainslie saw the door close and realized that the rest was missing. Granger and the white-coated doctor had vanished, like the dying seaman in the sick-bay.