Decoy (32 page)

Ned grimaced and said ruefully: ‘What we need is a tom-tom: I knew there’d be trouble when they gave them up.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you. I know Hazell is so frustrated I’m sure you’ll be getting a request from him to transfer to the catering branch.’

‘He’ll lose his trade pay.’

‘I’m sure he’s considered that and reckons it’s worth it.’

The Croupier pointed to the gridded chart on the chart table and the ordinary navigational chart, folded in half, beside it. ‘Seriously, Ned, we’ve got a dam’ long way to go.’ He looked round to see if any of the men handling the hydrophone controls, watching gauges or just passing through the control room on their way forward or aft, were within earshot, before he lowered his voice and added: ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Unless we can send a signal to the Admiralty telling ’em that we’ve captured this bloody boat and telling everyone to hold off sinking us, I don’t think we’ve a snowball in hell’s chance off getting back.’

‘Don’t forget that Germany claims – and Britain believes it – that she’s wining the Battle of the Atlantic!’

‘Come off it, Ned. No U-boats operate within a couple of hundred miles of the British Isles, and very few inside the range of Coastal Command planes. It’s only out here, at the extreme range of our aircraft, that they slaughter the convoys.’

Now, standing in the conning tower talking to Jemmy, no longer surrounded by gently swaying German sausages and hams, lulled by the whine of the electric motors, Ned felt completely defeated. Thanks to a burnt-out wireless part, ULJ and the British and Germans in her were so many Flying Dutchmen. For lack of communication and the speed of a diving plane or an approaching destroyer or frigate, they could call no man friend and expect him to listen: instead there would be a hail of bombs, shells, bullets or depth-charges. The White Ensign or RAF roundels belonged, for all intents and purposes, to the enemy. No white flag would be acknowledged – RN ships and RAF planes would (quite reasonably) assume a trick or a trap and carry on an attack.

Ned was startled suddenly to find himself in the dimly-lit conning tower and with pins and needles in his left leg. He also had an increasingly urgent desire to relieve himself (with thick woollen full-length pants, trousers and oilskin trousers made of
Ersatz
rubber, achieving that relief, he thought, would be like searching for a needle in a haystack), so he tried to focus on Jemmy.

The man, still with no sign of a twitch, was embracing the thick, shiny steel bulk of the periscope as though it was a passionate woman; he was sitting on the seat with his legs wide apart, each foot alternately touching the pedals which revolved the periscope and seat. Jemmy’s face was almost completely hidden: the large double eyepiece hid most of the upper part, reminding Ned in a bizarre thought of a masked highwayman bestowing a farewell kiss after relieving a lady of her gems. More than gems, in this pose.

Jemmy suddenly stood up, slapping at the two wood-covered handgrips, and the periscope motor hummed as the tube was lowered.

‘Nothing in sight; wind is west about Force 3, sea almost flat, seven-tenths cloud, vis may be a mile. Permission to surface, sir?’

A startled Ned agreed, and then realized that both Jemmy and the Croupier had automatically put him in his place in the hierarchy of the U-boat: he was like an admiral flying his flag in, say, a battleship: he was the ultimate authority for every major move made by the ship (and the fleet), but the battleship’s captain and ship’s company actually steamed the flagship wherever he directed.

The prospect of being in a similar position to an admiral lasted only a few seconds: Jemmy and the Croupier could not be expected to stand watch and watch about; Ned would have to take his turn. His initial alarm that he knew nothing about submarine procedures was eased by the knowledge that the Croupier did not either. In fact, running the boat depended on Jemmy and Yon.

‘Take her up!’ Ned said.

Jemmy checked the helmsman’s course and then called a stream of orders down the circular hatch to the control room. There was a rumbling below, like a complaining stomach, as compressed air drove out the correct amount of water from the ballast tanks to bring the boat to the surface.

Jemmy stared at the depth gauge, and Ned felt the slight motion of the boat increase as she broke surface and began to roll.

‘Must equalize pressure,’ Jemmy grunted as he reached up to a valve in the hatch. ‘If there’s more pressure in here than outside, I’d fly out through the hatch like a champagne cork.’

He unlatched the hatch while shouting ‘Lookouts!’ and scrambled up the aluminium ladder, followed by Ned and the four lookouts coming up from the control room.

The blast of air down the hatch startled Ned, but as he heard the whining of fans he guessed Yon had switched on powerful ventilation to force fresh air through the boat.

Jemmy had not ordered the diesels to be started, and for the moment the U-boat continued moving slowly under the electric motors. Ned’s shins bumped painfully against strange fittings on the bridge: he felt rather than saw Jemmy’s bulk and moved to one side as four cursing, night-blinded lookouts fumbled their way out of the hatch, oilskin pockets, binocular straps and shins catching on a bewildering number of projecting lugs and sharp corners all apparently specially designed to injure the unwary.

Ned’s eyes grew slowly accustomed to the dark as he gripped the forward side of the tiny bridge – like a midget inside a large dustbin, he thought inconsequentially. Gradually the forward section of the U-boat took shape, a long and narrow wedge of deep black slicing through a grey sea flecked with white.

‘Horizon clear,’ Jemmy commented to Ned and turned aft to snap at the lookouts: ‘Come on, some reports. A quid for the first man to spot Southend pier.’

‘Wigan’s bearing red nine oh,’ muttered one of the men, and Jemmy laughed.

‘That’s the spirit, but if you don’t see a destroyer until it’s too late, my ghost will haunt your ghost.’

Jemmy then shouted down the hatch: ‘Start both diesels!’

There were muffled thuds as vents opened, deep coughing as though a score of bronchitic bulls were clearing their throats, and then Ned felt the vibration in the thin plating of the conning tower start coming through the clumsy cork-soled high boots as the cylinders began firing. He caught the sudden sooty smell of exhaust fumes from cold engines, swirled forward by a random gust of wind, and heard the roar of air going into the air intakes each side of the cockpit.

‘How’s your heading?’ Jemmy called down the hatch to the helmsman in the conning tower, and as soon as he received the answer, shouted: ‘Half ahead both!’

Ned could imagine Yon, happy now his beloved engines were running. By now the noise from those eighteen cylinders would be deafening and Yon and the engine room artificers would be anxiously watching the various dials and gauges which revealed their secrets in the German language and metric measures. The largest dials, as big as frying pans, were the crankshaft tachometers, one high on each side of the corridor running between the two diesels. Then on each side were nine rectangular gauges mounted in a vertical bank, like a stack of large glass-fronted letter boxes, except that the dials behind the glass fronts recorded cylinder temperatures. Nine on one side, nine more on the other, each in effect an eye which revealed what was going on in the cylinders.

Three similar-looking gauges to one side of the vertical bank told the temperature in the exhaust manifolds. Another pair of gauges, as bulky as small searchlights and arranged on each side, were the engine room telegraphs: indicators which made a penetrating noise until an outside pointer was lined up with the inner one, acknowledging the order from the control room.

Ned had marvelled at the clever way the two huge diesels were squeezed in, each separated by the narrow corridor which ran from the control room, through a circular hatch in the bulkhead which could be shut and screwed tight to make it watertight, then into the electric room, with the two big motors which drove the propellers when the boat was submerged. Right now, with the boat surfaced and the diesels running, those motors had been turned into generators and were charging the batteries.

To a layman, the control section for each diesel was a bewildering mass of control wheels, from a few inches to a couple of feet in diameter, with so many different-sized pipes that no plumber’s feverish nightmare could equal it. Yet standing in one position an ERA could see the heat of every one of the nine cylinders for which he was responsible, the temperature of the exhaust gases, the crankshaft revolutions, the speed ordered by the captain for his particular engine (and propeller shaft), and a dozen other things ranging from the temperature and flow of the cooling water to the flow of fuel. Just beside him, fans encased in bulky trunking supplied the vast amount of air the diesels needed.

The next section aft was, by comparison, as clean and antiseptic as a medical laboratory: there each of the two big electric motors had its own control panel – ammeters and voltmeters as big as soup plates, telegraphs like those at the diesel positions, tachometers showing the shaft speeds, the rate of discharge of the batteries when the motors were driving the boat, the rate of charge when they were being turned by the diesels and making electricity.

Up on the tiny bridge, Ned felt like a man standing on the chimney of an enormous house: below him, unseen dozens of people slept, ate, talked, as remote inside the hull of the boat as they would be below a tiled roof.

Below and slightly aft on the waterline, the diesels’ exhausts alternately thundered and mumbled as waves surged over the vents, reminding Ned of an asthmatic lion lying in the corner of a cage, now roaring, now wheezing. He thought how every turn of the two propeller shafts spun the generators and sent amperes surging back into the batteries: he could picture the needles on the voltmeter dials, as big as dinner plates, gradually moving back up again. Yon will have to check the specific gravity of the electrolyte in the batteries – or, rather, someone will lift up floor plates and climb down on to the little trolley that runs along a beam past the batteries, so he can unscrew the caps and test each cell with a hydrometer, adding distilled water as necessary.

What batteries they must be: two large banks of them, each the size of a large bin, and together providing enough power to drive this boat of 770 tons displacement, seventy-five metres long and six metres in diameter, at nine knots for an hour’s spurt, but for three days if she ambled along at one or two knots. And she could do that at a depth of 100 metres…say fifty-four fathoms. And the Croupier had once received what they now knew was a BP intercept of a U-boat’s signal to
B der U
reporting that she had survived after being forced down to 245 metres – say 735 feet, over 120 fathoms – to avoid a heavy depth-charge attack. Yes, that was
U-230
, and at that depth, Jemmy had explained, the explosive effect of a depth-charge is reduced to a third, because of the immense pressure of water.

Still, the strain on the submariner’s nerves, diving to more than twice the depth for which the boat was designed, must be considerable, knowing that at any moment the hull could be squeezed like a crushed eggshell. Submariner’s twitch – doctors at the naval hospital at Haslar ought to publish a paper on it. Except, Ned remembered bitterly, the Navy could not admit it existed, any more than the RAF could admit that air crews were human beings who had a breaking point: instead the Air Ministry invented ‘LMF’, ‘lacking in moral fibre’, and that was the label they pinned on imaginative men who finally cracked up after a couple of dozen bombing raids which may well have killed half the men in the mess. The men who ought to receive those labels (the equivalent of the old ‘Unclean’ from the time of the plague) were those who lacked the moral fibre to face up to the fact that brave men could be driven only so far, and of course the psychiatrists also lacked the moral fibre to stand up to authority…

‘Commander Yorke…will commander Yorke please go to the wireless room!’

The sudden call coming up the conning tower hatch startled Ned, who at that moment was comparing going at full speed in a North Atlantic winter while standing on the open bridge of a destroyer with doing the same thing in a U-boat. Though admittedly the U-boat was a vile experience, like being lashed to the high water mark of one of the rocks at the foot of Beachy Head, a submarine at least gave you a chance to cry quits and submerge.

‘They haven’t got that bloody transmitter to work, I suppose?’ Jemmy said as Ned started down the hatch.

‘Not a hope. They’ve probably intercepted an AFO ordering all left-handed armourers to wear clean socks on Wednesday.’

Admiralty Fleet Orders sounded impressive to soldiers and airmen, but to the Navy they rarely rose in interest or importance, as a destroyer captain had once commented to Ned, to the height of Wrens’ knickers.

He felt his way carefully down into the vertical cylinder of the conning tower, with its dimmed lights. The helmsman was a shadowy figure, an Essex man called Coles.

‘How does she handle?’

‘Very odd to start with, sir. She’s so long and thin she is hard to turn once she gets off course, but at the same time that helps keep her on the straight and narrow.’

Looking down into the control room through the bottomless dustbin affair of the hatch, Ned decided to practise a rapid drop, of the kind that would be expected of him if he was on the bridge when the time came for an emergency dive.

He held the aluminium sides of the ladder, went down one rung and then kicked back with the other foot. He landed on his knees with a crash and set the floor plates rattling and the startled men at the hydroplanes swung round in their seats while Yon hurried over to help him up.

‘Sorry, sir: the call from the Croupier wasn’t
that
urgent.’

‘My fault,’ Ned said. ‘I was playing silly buggers, just seeing how fast I could get down the ladder,’