Convoy (42 page)

‘The rest of you,’ he said casually, ‘have to do the fighting. Half a dozen will seize the rest of the ship, but particularly the bridge. I don’t think you can manage it…’ he saw enough resentment showing in their faces to know that the challenge had worked, ‘but we’ve no choice.’

‘Now first of all, the ship’s saloon. That’s going to be the temporary jail. Any Swede who surrenders goes down there. There may be two doors leading into it, there usually are in most ships, one from the corridor on each side. Lock one. Then once we have prisoners I want one of you standing guard just inside the other door juggling a couple of hand grenades. These Swedes haven’t fought anything more dangerous than hangovers for many generations, but they’ll recognize grenades. Any trouble, toss in a grenade, step outside and lock the door: you’ll have time.’

‘So don’t worry about killing ’em sir?’ Jenkins asked.

‘If they try to kill us, or resist what we’re doing, we kill, yes, because we don’t have enough time to argue the toss. At 8 o’clock that U-boat will attack again. He’s got three or four torpedoes left. Four British or American ships, fifty men on board each. He can kill a couple of hundred of our chaps unless we stop him, and we can’t stop him if any Swedes interfere.’

‘Ah,’ Jenkins said, taking an appreciative suck at his teeth. ‘A grenade in the saloon… What a bang! It’s going to take a lot o’ soap and water and O-Cedar to clean the Swedes off the panelling.’

‘Right now, remember the saloon is a sort of refuge as well as a cell. What I’m hoping to do is this.’ For the next five minutes he sketched out his plan, conscious that he was overworking phrases like ‘I hope by then that we’ll…’ and ‘by then the
Echo
should…’ and ‘providing the Swedes don’t…’ Phrases, phrases…they had a meaning, but so did notices on the gate like ‘No hawkers or circulars’, ‘Stirrup pump kept here’, ‘Beware of the Dog’, or the list of Sunday services on the church notice board with, next to it, the rota for the Home Guardsmen who nightly stood guard in the tower, armed with a motley selection of weapons (usually their own 12-bore shotguns) against a German airborne invasion.

Six o’clock. It would be dark outside, pitch dark because it was a no-moon period. Yorke signalled to the men to get ready, and ten of them trooped through to the head, where Jenkins issued them with grenades and, for the lucky few, revolvers and automatics. Reynolds agreed that his automatic should be given to Jenkins; Mills had decided that only he would carry grenades to the engine room. ‘Give me a couple,’ he said. ‘I know when and where they can be thrown. I don’t want some keen type chucking a grenade into a whole lot of copper fuel lines. Nothing like that for stopping the lorry on the level crossing.’

At two minutes past six Yorke was at the top of the ladder with Jenkins undoing the second screw of the lock.

‘Don’t bother to put the blasted things in your pocket,’ Yorke snapped impatiently as the man finished unscrewing it with his finger. ‘We won’t be needing them again.’

All the men were on the ladder or standing in a crocodile at the foot of the first step, holding the shoulder of the man in front. The moment the door opened the cabin would be thrown into darkness by the automatic switch.

As the third screw came out Jenkins went to put it in his pocket and then tossed it over his shoulder, producing a prompt, ‘’Ere, watch it Jack, bloody near ’ad my eye out!’

‘Can’t do anything right,’ Jenkins grumbled.

‘You take the Swedish captain,’ Yorke reminded him. ‘Four stripes, hair blond and like a Brylcreem advertisement. Leave the albino with three stripes to me. He’ll be on the bridge.’

‘“In the King’s name!” That’s what I’ll tell him. Those buggers boarding the
Altmark
used up “The Navy’s here!”’

Jenkins had a sense of history – providing all this worked. If it did not, then the proud shout repeated at the court martial following the diplomatic incident was going to cause giggles and then outrage. Yorke could hear the disapproving sniffs from the presiding admiral (he was sure he would get an admiral, if only to satisfy those lemons at the Foreign Office who would be telling the ambassador in Stockholm what to say to grovel to the Swedes) for letting the King’s name be brought into it. Mind you, if it all worked the Chief of Naval Information (not to mention the present First Lord and the other proud former First Lord now in Downing Street) and the whole of Fleet Street and the BBC would fairly trumpet the four words that Jenkins, exasperated by four small screws, had just uttered.

‘Last one, sir,’ Jenkins said, tucking the makeshift screwdriver into a pocket with one hand while he undid the screw with the fingers of the other.

Yorke looked down at the men behind him on the ladder. ‘Shut your eyes, all of you; start getting your night vision. You too, Jenkins: you can open the door with your eyes shut.’ He shut his own eyes and at once became conscious for the first time for an hour or more that the propeller shafts were still spinning below them; that outside the sea was hissing its way past and below a U-boat was gliding through the water like the Swedish ship’s shadow. By now the electric torpedoes would have been slid into the torpedo tubes,
Oberleutnant
Heinrich (he might of course be a
Kapitänleutnant
) would have chosen his targets for the night, and whatever happened a number of men had only a few hours of life left – either the German crew of the U-boat, or men in Allied merchant ships.

He found he had little sympathy for the U-boat men. Too many naval officers regarded hunting U-boats as a sort of sport, where the Teds were alternately the hunter and the hunted, but anyway keeping to some sort of rules. In fact that was rubbish; it had been almost true at the beginning, but the
Athenia
had been sunk within an hour or two of the war starting, and had been packed with children. By now there were far too many authenticated reports of lifeboats run down by U-boats to kill trained officers and men when a single ship had been torpedoed; too many cases of U-boat captains tossing grenades into lifeboats full of survivors – dozens of boats had remained afloat so that a frigate on passage, or even a fast merchant ship sailing by herself, spotting a lifeboat on the horizon, had raced up to rescue the survivors – and found it full of the remains of dead men, many blown to pieces by the grenade. Occasionally, but all too rarely, a man had been left alive who could identify the U-boat, and presumably somewhere in the Admiralty a file was being kept, giving numbers, positions, and dates, so that when the war was over the U-boat commanders could be traced and brought to trial. The Ted of this war was a different bird from the Ted of the last war: too many of the present ones were fanatics – not fanatical Germans, which was understandable, but fanatical Nazis. Many Germans seemed to have two loyalties, to the Fatherland and to the Party. The Fatherland tended to be the same vague patriotic focus that the British had, except that a Briton would be embarrassed if anyone started talking about ‘the Motherland’ and the more vulgar would make some wisecrack about pregnant girlfriends, but from the German prisoners he had seen, and from intelligence reports he had read, the real Nazis were killers: they could, and consistently did, bomb open cities – he remembered watching Canterbury burn one night, praying that the Cathedral would be saved – and their fighter planes could and did blaze away at shot-down RAF pilots as they drifted down with parachutes. He had seen that happen too during the Battle of Britain: the parachute began falling faster and faster, sometimes catching fire and sometimes twisting up as a distraught woman might wring a handkerchief, and the black speck at the end of it would hit the ground at near terminal velocity, a bloody mass of jelly.

He had night vision by now. ‘Open the door,’ he told Jenkins. He felt the man wrestling with something, and then the door was flung open, putting the light out. He opened his eyes to see the doorway as a grey rectangle, a patch that was not quite so black as the rest. Those flecks and blurs were the crests of waves. Beyond them, where he could not see her, the
Marynal
kept station astern of the
Penta
.

His knees felt like weak springs. One grenade was clinking in one jacket pocket, a second bulging in the other, and his revolver was a hard lump held in place by the waistband of his trousers. Now he had his men under control, but the moment he gave the word they would split into three parties, and the failure of one could mean the failure of the whole affair.

Silence and surprise were their only allies. If one of his men gave an excited shout, one started running so that an unsuspecting Swede became alarmed, it would spoil everything. They had to creep, open doors quietly, gently prod a dozing Swede with the blade of a deck knife…

As his night vision improved he could see more details: the swan-neck pipe sticking up from the deck aft there, ventilating some tank; the stanchions of the rail through which he had seen the waves swirling. He turned and said down the ladder: ‘Right men, let’s get started.’

Jenkins was clipping the door in the open position so that it did not slam back and forth as the ship rolled, and Yorke stood to one side as Mills came out. The engineer found Yorke’s hand and shook it. ‘Best o’ luck. Use the engine-room telegraphs for orders if need be, but give me a buzz on the phone when you can: it’ll be nice hearing your voice.’

‘Listen for the ring in about ten minutes!’ Yorke said with a heartiness he did not feel. He counted the three seamen following Mills. Each was holding the next man’s jersey: Mills was taking no chances that seamen who might well have never before been into an engine room would get lost in the approach.

Now Watkins and the other signalman. Both were carrying deck knives: the blades were dull but unmistakable in the darkness. Suddenly Yorke thought of night vision again.

‘Watkins!’ he hissed. ‘Listen. When you get to the wireless cabin, just open the door. That’ll put the lights out. Then wait. Count thirty seconds. Then the pair of you nip in and shut the door. The lights suddenly coming on again should dazzle the Swedish operator as much as you, so you start off equal.’

‘Thanks sir,’ Watkins muttered. ‘And a moment later I’ll have my knife at his throat.’

Six men on their way. Now a seaman accidentally brushed against Yorke so that the grenades in his pocket clinked. He was the first of the next six, who were coming with him and Jenkins to secure the captain and the bridge.

Yorke led the way along the starboard side and felt Jenkins, as instructed, grab the tail of his coat. They all walked slowly, like a crocodile of schoolgirls keeping close against the wall in heavy rain as they made their way from one school building to another.

Clear of the poop and up to the coamings of number four hatch. It’s a damn dark night; not even a poacher’s moon. Now the mainmast, the derricks sprouting out of its base and stowed flat, two across the top of number four hatch, two lying forward over number three hatch. Toe stubbing against something, probably a ringbolt. A glance to starboard to see, distant and almost ghostly, the ship abeam in the next column, ploughing along silently, no sign of human life, just smothers of white at the bow as she shouldered her way through the waves. Now level with the square shape of a liferaft stowed at an angle against the mainmast shrouds, tilted and held by a single wire and toggle so a clout with a maul would send it toppling into the sea.

Past number three hatch and there’s the after end of the accommodation and bridge section, a rectangular black box stretching from one side of the ship to the other. At the forward end the bridge with the squat funnel just abaft it, and the wireless cabin a tiny square box just abaft that, by itself with aerials reaching up to the triatic stay between the masts, out of the way so that there was no risk of anyone touching them while the transmitter was working.

And here was a companionway. One way to the bridge was to enter the accommodation through one of the doors on this level and walk forward along the passageway until directly under the bridge, and then go up one of the internal companionways, passing the captain’s accommodation one deck below. Or up this first ladder on to the top of the accommodation, which was the boat deck, and along it, passing the wireless cabin and approaching the after side of the bridge. And that was the way they were going: it meant that if necessary they could give Watkins – who should be ahead of them – a hand at the wireless cabin, and there was almost no chance of meeting anyone. The danger of walking through the accommodation, on the other hand, was that someone, perhaps on his way to the toilet, would take one look at a bunch of hairy seamen tiptoeing through the accommodation and let out an almighty bellow.

Up the ladder and pause at the top while Jenkins caught hold of his coat to re-form the line of men. Ahead was the wireless cabin, where Watkins and his mate should be in control. Still the slow shuffle. The eye usually spotted a sudden movement but rarely saw anything moving slowly. This trudge was bad for the nerves – his nerves, anyway. He could usually steel himself for a quick dash but hated the slow build-up. Abreast the wireless cabin now. He pressed Jenkins back a little, the signal to stop, and broke away to tiptoe over to the big steel box. No one outside the door and no shouting inside. Watkins was in control, he could be sure of that.

He turned back towards Jenkins and was pleasantly surprised to see how little the group of men showed up in the darkness. Against a dark background, a bulkhead for example, they would be invisible.

The bridge was one deck higher, up that steel ladder. Captain Ohlson’s cabins were here, in the section just below the bridge, on the same level as they were standing. Yorke again stopped; nudged Jenkins and pointed to the door into the cabins. ‘Count to ten and then go in!’ he muttered as Jenkins and another man glided away.

Yorke began pulling himself up the steel ladder, Reynolds and the rest of the men following him. He paused for a moment to reach under his coat for the revolver tucked into his trouser band. He cocked it carefully, and although the clothing muffled the click it sounded very loud. Very loud indeed to someone with his thumb on it who was half scared that the tug of a piece of clothing would result in the gun firing, with dire results to his manhood.