Slapton Sands (28 page)

The second explosion provided a double flash and then a boom that reached the ears of those aboard the
Skylark
across six miles of open water. It wasn't naval guns inflicting the devastation; Carnegie would have heard the scream and whistle of shells over the open channel. It was torpedoes. A torpedo had hit the second boat and detonated something volatile, something like full ammunition boxes or, more likely, crates of mortar or anti-tank shells. There was a plume of smoke now over the horizon. It billowed black and greasy above the sinking wreckage, Carnegie knew, of at least two ships.

He heard a mayday on the radio. The Yanks were under attack from a squadron of German E-Boats. He could hear the brave, pitiful sound of small arms fire as the Yanks aboard the surviving LSTs attempted to fend off the assault.
Evidently Rory Carnegie had not been the only one to hear them give their position as they waited forlornly for their British escort to Slapton Sands. Someone had been alert enough on the French coast to translate what he was monitoring and to realize its significance in time to scramble the E-boat squadron.

The screams of men in the water were clear over the
Skylark's
radio as a third explosion ripped the sky where it met the sea away over the port bow in a jagged orange streak. Carnegie looked up. It was fully dawn now, and his crew had clustered around the wheelhouse and were listening to what he was.

The E-boats sank two flotilla vessels and badly damaged a third before making a swift retreat from their hit-and-run raid. The American convoy carried doggedly on towards Slapton Sands and whatever part it was still to play in the exercise there.

‘The troops aboard the LSTs were 4th Infantry Division,' Carnegie said.

‘How do you know?'

‘By their insignia. Dead boys washed up all along the coast. There was no word about it, not publicly, but that's who they were. The Division recovered from this particular mishap, obviously.'

Alice nodded. The 4th Infantry Division had performed the successful assault on Omaha Beach. They had landed there six weeks after the events the fisherman was describing.

‘Didn't you go and see if you could help?'

‘Aye, we did. By the time we got to the spot, the surviving Yank ships were about four miles on. We could have put out, legitimately, from Teignmouth or Brixham and got to the spot by then. It doesn't take a minute to make a lying entry on to an empty page in a ship's log. We had a plausible story. But there was no one around to listen to it.'

‘There were no survivors?'

‘I later heard there were some injured men aboard the damaged boat. But there were no survivors in the water, no.'

‘Had they died of exposure? What? Did they drown?'

Carnegie looked uncomfortable. ‘They were carrying a lot of equipment. Packs, two water bottles apiece, entrenching tools. They hadn't had time to take off their ammunition pouches before jumping. I'd estimate they were carrying around eighty pounds of equipment per man. And so they hit the water hard.'

‘How did they die, if they didn't drown, Mr Carnegie?'

‘They hadn't been drilled in how to use a Mae West. You inflated those life jackets in the water, you see. But they'd put them on and inflated them before jumping. When they hit the water, with the posture forced by the Mae Wests, with the weight of what they had been unable to discard, most of those soldiers broke their necks.'

‘Oh Christ,' Alice said.

‘You seem very particular on the numbers, Miss Bourne. I'd say there were six or seven hundred corpses in the water. That would be about right for two LSTs sunk. It seems a
lot, when you look at all those yellow lifejackets littered about on the green of the sea. It seems a shocking number of dead, all of them moving, none of them living, shifting only with the swell.' Carnegie stopped. He was back there. Alice waited. ‘After a while, when you realize none of them are alive, you do stop counting. But I'd say between six and seven hundred were there. Dispersal was slow, just a gentle, onshore current. It was fewer than a thousand. It was less than the number you have suggested to me were lost.'

‘It was enough.'

‘Aye,' Carnegie said, nodding. ‘It was that, all right.'

She sat at a table outside the pub on the Slapton shore and sipped occasionally at a half-pint of cider and wrote up her notes from her own, improvised shorthand. It was eight o'clock by the time she finished. She had written Rory Carnegie's phone number in a diagonal scrawl of pencil across the bottom of her last page of shorthand notes in case another question occurred to her. He was a scrupulous man, was Carnegie, she thought. He was polite as well as fastidious. There was a sea wall on this part of the shore. It was too high to see over sat at her table, but low enough for her to lean on, standing, with her elbows. She walked over to the wall and looked out across the scrabble of stones and sand descending to the waves a few hundred feet away. She wondered what it would be like to exit a Higgins boat in surf like that, loose-bowelled, weighed down by fear and equipment, straight into the withering onslaught of German machine-gun fire.

She wanted to ask Carnegie why it was he was still so mesmerized by the sea. Why did he bother with the silly deceit of the rod and bait box to idle all day at Dartmouth harbour? It was a Joseph Conrad question, wasn't it? One for the old Polish master mariner who rested now, for ever, in a dry grave she had visited herself. Conrad had been buried in Canterbury. She couldn't ask Carnegie that, though. She didn't think he'd be able to articulate an answer. But a couple of hours of intense recollection might have uncovered more pertinent detail in his mind. He'd put together more about the Slapton tragedy than had ever been published in their official histories by either the US army or the US navy. He might have remembered something that could help confirm her own emergent theory. Or quash it.

She used the phone in the pub. ‘Mr Carnegie?'

‘Lassie.' He'd been drinking. His voice was heavy, his accent thickened. She assumed it was the weight of Scotch. But he didn't sound affronted by her call.

‘Rachel Vine told me she never got anything out of Colonel Fitzpatrick.'

She heard Carnegie chuckle. ‘I doubt that was strictly true.'

‘Nothing pertinent, I mean. I wonder—'

‘There's something you should know about Rachel Vine, Miss Bourne.'

‘Which is?'

‘She died seven years ago.'

‘But I met her. I spoke to her.'

‘Nevertheless,' Carnegie said.

‘You couldn't be mistaken?'

‘I attended the funeral. The burial was in Streatham. I saw her coffin lowered into the ground. I stood at the graveside and sprinkled earth on to its lid.'

‘How did she die?'

‘An overdose. Barbiturates washed down with gin. She had throat cancer, you see.'

‘Thank you, Mr Carnegie.'

‘Take care, girl.'

Behind her, in the body of the pub, Alice could hear Pink Floyd playing on the jukebox. The song was ‘The Great Gig in the Sky'. From its open doorway, she looked into the bar. It was dark against the sunlight, a refuge for the two or three middle-aged men seated on old chairs at wooden tables drinking in its gloom. A row of burnished copper pots adorned the far wall on a shelf flanked by a pair of warming pans. There were pictures, but you couldn't tell what their thick whorls of oil paint portrayed in the prevailing absence of light. There was nobody waiting to serve behind the bar. Probably sneaking a smoke out by the heaped beer kegs and piled bottle crates to the pub's rear. Here and there, thin shafts of sunlight penetrated to provide the bar with odd, gilded highlights. The till provided one of these. She guessed it was Victorian. It was a great curved thing, embellished with plugs and buttons, the symbols for England's old currency still featured in the narrow glass display that topped the machine. Mermaids cavorted in tarnished gilt
on its edges and rills, between the shrouds of lost ships, above sea chests half-sunk in silt with their weight of pirate booty.

Alice walked into the bar. She didn't mind Pink Floyd. She didn't think anyone would bother her there. There was something reassuring about the pub. She would wait at the bar until the bored barmaid finished her smoke. Then she would order a fresh drink. She would drink it in here. She didn't want to go back outside. It was almost nine o'clock, and she really felt that she needed a drink.

The morning of 29 April broke clear and fine. Compton was up well before dawn. He watched the spring sun come up from the road they had built themselves along the coast. He drank coffee from a flask filled in one of the kitchen blocks and smoked his first Lucky of the day. He felt sober, thorough, businesslike. He inspected the sangar from which he would coordinate the three heavy-weapons companies under his command, once they were deployed for the day's exercise. Everything there was as it should have been. He stopped for a moment, allowing the luxury of warmth to spread through the healing bruises on his back. He could smell spring flowers and early sap in strengthening sunlight from the scrub on the landward side of the road. Honeysuckle, lavender and ferns still heavy with the verdant aroma of dew. Looking up the slope, he could see the grass growing greener in swathes as the minerals got richer in the soil. Trees swayed gently in clusters on the slope of hills rising to the sky. This was a beautiful country, if you let yourself think about it.
Compton realized that he hadn't. Not very much. Not so much as a country boy might have.

Today would be the proving of him. He'd come to a decision, after the beating he'd taken in Paddington. Or more particularly, he'd come to a decision after the inexplicable let-off he'd got from that mick colonel, Fitzpatrick. A man can only ride his luck so far, his old man used to say. And wasn't that the truth?

Fact was, the enlisted men and even the draftees weren't half so bad as he'd thought they'd be. They actually respected his expertise. He'd learned his craft behind the Browning tripod in Mexico and the Philippines and Cuba. He'd scored the highest aggregate ever recorded on the range at Bragg. Any man he schooled could, by the time he'd finished with them, dismantle and put back together a machine gun blindfold in less time than it took them in the cookhouse to boil an egg. He was hard and he was humourless. He was somewhat short on social skills. But no man he tutored would go into battle behind a heavy machine gun less than expertly prepared. He'd grown, he considered, with the advent of war. He'd been experienced in combat and munitions theory before its outbreak. Now he considered himself a proven professional.

If he could keep away from working girls, Johnny figured he had a chance to make something of himself. Maybe when he got to France he could even better the old man's medal tally. That would take some doing. But why not? The fight would be long and arduous enough. And though he
felt no personal grudge against the Germans, he didn't fear them either. It was plumb against his scrappy, Southern nature ever to back out of a genuine fight.

He was looking forward to France. He anticipated it would be weeks now, rather than months, before their departure. He had been at Slapton Sands for almost half a year. The camp had gotten so entrenched and enormous, it was hard to imagine it gone. The brass talked about the ‘tail' behind the ‘teeth' of the fighting infantry, the cooks and transportation and handlers of ammunition and fuel. The ratio of noncombatants to every fighting soldier was something like four to one. So Slapton Sands had become a sort of city, or at least a substantial town. Soon they'd be all gone, though, the place dismantled, the barren earth rectangles under their clusters of hangars and cooking galleys and Nissen huts like the earth they'd churned into makeshift tracks, grown all back over with grass. Maybe in thirty or forty years, Johnny mused, someone would come to this part of the coast picnicking on a summer's day and chance upon a shell casing or a rusting bayonet blade and wonder what on earth could have transpired here.

He'd be glad and sorry to leave England. He found the place congenial enough, excepting Paddington. He'd developed a taste for pubs and for the cider they drank there in this part of the country. But the people were baffling. He found himself smiling, standing by his sangar in the spring sun, at the recollection of one of his very few attempts to integrate. Some of the officers had been pressurized into
accepting an invitation to see a movie specially shown for them at a church hall in one of the villages. It had been a double bill. The first film starred an old guy called Will Hay who was funny enough in a dopey, Laurel and Hardy sort of a way. The second film featured some guy called George Formby. George Formby turned out to be just plain fucking weird. He played the ukulele and had teeth like a retard. Some of the guys had laughed, but not in the bits they were supposed to. And there was a trailer for some other comedian called Big-Hearted Arthur Askey. It was Compton's view that a little bit of Big-Hearted Arthur would go an awful long way. Some of the guys, pissed off by too much exposure to George Formby, had thrown candies at the screen. At Big-Hearted Arthur. Where was the British Betty Grable? he'd wondered afterwards. No. The British had been beyond him. He jumped down into the sangar and fingered the binoculars worn around his neck.

According to the United States infantry manual, a heavy-weapons company was always commanded by a captain. It was a rank Lieutenant Compton expected to be offered after today. Each company comprised two sections. Each section was composed of two machine-gun squads, each of those under the immediate command of a squad sergeant. It meant that there were eight guns to a company, which gave Compton's three company command a total of twenty-four.

The weapons under his command were Browning .30 heavy-calibre machine guns. They were fully automatic,
recoil-operated and water-cooled. They fired a 175-grain bullet to an effective range of 1,100 yards, from 250-round belts. Including tripod and water, each gun weighed about 93 pounds.