Submariner (2008) (14 page)

‘Turbines, would that be, sir?’

‘Fast turbines, all of ’em. Cruiser, two destroyers, probably working up to twenty-five knots.’

‘Course oh-four-five, sir.’

Knox had the headset back on, had trained to that bearing and was fingering the knob a degree or two this way and that, eyes
narrowed in concentration. The set in this listening-out mode was no more than a directional hydrophone, its operator’s skill
lying primarily in the recognition and interpretation of sounds received.

Warmth, quiet, general fug. Own nerves a little taut: really did
want
this cruiser. Meeting CERA McIver’s scowl: ‘All right, Chief?’

‘Reckon the fuckers’ll come out, sir?’

‘Can’t even be sure they’re in there. But if they are …’ A shrug, hand raised with fingers crossed.

‘Aye …’

He’d drifted through to the wardroom, where an hour or so ago they’d enjoyed a supper of cold tongue and tomatoes, both canned,
getting that over early in the hope of having their hands full later. McLeod and Jarvis were both at the table, McLeod reading
Edgar Wallace, Jarvis scribbling in what looked like a diary. Diaries were
verboten
, so it couldn’t be, had to be his memoirs.

McLeod said, ‘No activity as yet.’

‘Nearer dark’s the more likely time.’

Jarvis nodded: ‘That’s your Wop for you, all right.’

‘On the other hand they may be whooping it up in Cagliari. Could have been there since noon or earlier.’

‘
But
–’ McLeod – ‘to have covered both alternatives we’d have had to be in two places at once, and
either
way –’

‘Captain in the control room!’ Adding – Danvers continuing, in more or less one utterance as Mike shot through – ‘Knox reports
fast turbine HE on green 138, sir.’

Bearing of the Palermo exit channel, near enough. Mike said, ‘Diving stations.’ A feeling of having guessed right, after all.
Relief tinged with surprise, oddly enough. Adding as the rush began, ‘Well done, Knox.’ McLeod was at the trim, ordering half
ahead both motors – ensuring sufficient power to maintain control of her during the wholesale shifting of body-weights. Hands
closing up swiftly and quietly, looking pleased about it as they always did. Action being what they were here for, worked
for,
wanted
, put up with the hazards and fairly considerable discomfort for. Although Fraser the HSD, in headphones still warm from Knox’s
ears, was looking uncertain as he minutely adjusted the set’s bearing, eyes beady on the compass dial while most of the concentration
was through his ears. Coxswain and PO Tubby Hart on hydroplanes, AB Smithers at the wheel, Telegraphist Martin on a stool
in that corner as telephone link to the fore ends and tube space. Newcomb at motor-room telegraphs, and of course Ellery at
the panel – knees-bending to bring the periscope up, Mike having glanced his way with a small movement of both hands. CERA
McIver standing back out of it at the moment but ready to play his part if that was the way things went. All in all, in the
space available – Danvers taking up some of it at the chart table, Jarvis too, at the Fruit Machine – if you’d had a ship’s
cat it wouldn’t have been
easy to swing it round. Mike at the periscope meanwhile completing a quick check on the overhead – sky darkened by cloud but
also streaked here and there with colour. He pushed the handles up: having shown as little periscope as possible for as short
a time as possible, bearing in mind that at these increased revs it would have been feathering.

‘Come down to slow both when you can, Number One.’

‘Aye, sir.’

Fraser, then: ‘E-boats, sir, not destroyers. On 140, 144, right to left – revs for like twenty, thirty knots –’

‘Not transmitting, then.’

‘No, sir, too fast.’

‘Yes.’ Initial chagrin at their not being the destroyers was mitigated somewhat in guessing this could be a preliminary to
the heavier ships’ emergence. Also recognition that with the light fading as it was, there couldn’t be much prospect of a
dived attack. Delay therefore essential: two requirements before one could surface being (a) darkness, and (b) absence of
bloody Mas-boats.

‘Both motors slow ahead grouped down, sir.’

He’d grunted acknowledgement to McLeod. ‘Where now, Fraser?’

‘Green seven-oh, six-five, sir – still right to left –’

Circling, according to the picture in his mind. Wide, anticlockwise sweep of this gulf, engines screaming, slim hulls crashing
across the choppy, darkening water. They were much more likely to be Italian Mas-boats than German E-boats, on this side of
Sicily. Similar to E-boats – fast patrol craft, some
very
fast, one type credited with a speed of forty-seven knots – equipped with torpedoes, machine-guns and depth-charges, although
they were too small to carry many, depth-charges being heavy, bulky things. The prefix MAS, according to
Jane’s
, stood for
Motoscafi Anti-Sommergibili
.
Sommergibili
meaning submarine.

Weren’t hunting
this Sommergibili
, anyway. If they’d had reason to believe there might be one lurking in the gulf they’d have reduced speed and begun an asdic
sweep – pinging, seeking contact, which at high speed was impracticable. They couldn’t even have been listening-out on theirs
as
Ursa
was on hers.

He told McLeod, ‘Forty feet.’

‘Forty feet, sir.’

‘Then let’s have one motor stopped –’

‘Aye, sir –’

‘– and switch to night lighting.’

Red bulbs replacing white ones, so his own eyes and the lookouts’ would be at least partially adjusted to night vision by
the time he surfaced her. Angle on the ’planes, meanwhile, bubble in the inclinometer a couple of degrees aft. With dusk thickening
– and as yet nothing to look at anyway – might as well play it safe. Didn’t stop one
hearing
whatever might be happening up there.

Fraser’s voice intoned, ‘Directly towards, sir. Green 75, green 80 …’

Having circled the gulf, he thought, now steering west. To round Cape Gallo, maybe? Either that, or they’d turn inside it.
At the chart, the moving picture in his mind telling him they’d turn short of the shallower water this side of Gallo, be on
course then to return to their starting-point, top end of the swept channel.

Meeting their chums there maybe, ostensibly having cleared their exit route for them?

Stupid
buggers, though. What purpose served?

He could hear them now. Everyone could. Similar to the approach of a distant train, sound expanding on a rising note – Doppler
effect – starboard side and here already – coming over
now
. McLeod rubbing the back of his neck, reporting, ‘Forty feet, sir.’

Crashing
over. In other circumstances might have been alarming – often had been – but since these were totally unaware of the presence
right under them of one of the 10th Flotilla’s more distinguished
Sommergibilis
–

Gone over. Falling note now, and contracting – port quarter, anyway somewhere abaft that beam. Helms over now, boys, or you’ll
be running into Gallo, might regret it … Pencil-tip moving lightly on the chart, sketching their likely westward curve, then
checking the bearing of the swept channel exit from
Ursa
’s position now. He asked Fraser, ‘Anything around 142?’

Trying that. McLeod meanwhile proposing, ‘Stop port motor, sir?’

‘Well, why not.’

Seeing as the less noise you made the better you heard whatever there might be to hear. The Mas-boats’ racket had faded to
a distant, dying murmur. Presumably holding on,
not
turning inside Gallo.

Making for
where
, then? Trapani’d be in their range, all right. Or Marsala. Cagliari even, but not at anything like that speed.

Fraser told him, ‘Nothing on that bearing, sir.’

‘Port motor stopped, sir, starboard slow ahead grouped down.’

‘Very good.’ Saving amps as well as keeping quiet. He told Fraser, when the HSD had uncovered one ear, ‘Listen-out all round
but concentrate on 140 to 145.’

Time, 2212. At the chart table, pondering the advantages /disadvantages of staying down another twenty or thirty minutes or
going on up pretty well right away. It would be dark enough by this time, but a contingency to be wary of was a possible return
of the Mas-boats – completion of joyride, tearing back around the headland. Change the whole setup:
Ursa
being as yet undetected, which was the way to be:
once spotted, much less good. Even worse, to be stumbled on in the minute or two of surfacing, blind and helpless.

Would be a relief to get up there, though. Fresh air for one thing, start getting the battery up for another,
and
be ready for the cruiser if it did come out.

As likely now as it had seemed an hour ago?

Knowing the answer near enough, but still checking – dividers set at fifty nautical miles for each two-hour interval at twenty-five
knots, and starting now – 2215. Answer being no, they wouldn’t make Cagliari before daylight, which one might assume would
be the whole point of making a dark-hours passage.

At thirty knots instead of twenty-five, though?

The hell with it. He cocked an eyebrow at Fraser: ‘Anything?’

Shake of the head – hadn’t needed to
hear
the question. Mike said, ‘Twenty-eight feet.’

‘Twenty-eight feet, sir …’

At the scope – a glance at Ellery – and he had his eyes at the lenses, his body straightening in parallel with the brass tube
as its top window broke surface. Tumble of dark water flecked with pearls and diamonds, streaky night sky roofing a close-up
of jumpy surface, but horizontally – middle distance or beyond – damn-all. Three hundred and sixty degrees of that. He snapped
the handles up.

‘Stand by to surface.’

Get up there, breathe night air, get the box in shape for tomorrow’s dived patrol. Not forgetting the Garibaldi, but not expecting
it either. Facing this now – that he’d had a presentiment growing on him of having missed the bus. Could be wrong, but at
this moment it was how he felt – maybe through having expected action and almost seen it coming, then had nothing out of it
but bloody Mas-boats arsing around up there. Hearing McLeod’s orders and the
responses to them: main vents checked shut, HP blows open, etcetera: thinking to himself in the motors’ hum and the aura of
soft reddish light that if the sod
was
in there he might well be staying put, on station for action against the Gib convoy when that time arrived; in which case
air reconnaissance from Malta would be likely to spot him there and Shrimp would leave
Ursa
here to mark him.

So in the end – touch wood …

McLeod had put both motors to half ahead.

‘Ready to surface, sir.’

2240 now.
Ursa
low in the sea’s white-streaked blackness, with four of her main ballast and ‘Q’ flooded, engines pounding in a way you’d
imagine them being heard onshore in Palermo even; but in reality enfolded by the night and by the sea’s own murmur, audible
to keen ears at maybe a thousand yards, half a mile, not much more. On course due west across the gulf’s wide northern approaches,
sea-mist limiting visibility in some sectors, despite a wisp of brand-new moon showing occasionally between whorls of high,
thin cloud. The Gallo headland from this perspective was like the hump of a whale’s back – whale floating in mist though,
not water, the mist in fact confusing visibility as much as limiting it.

McLeod’s watch – having relaxed from diving stations to Red watch, patrol routine. Lookouts in the bridge Barnet and Simms
– leading stoker – both in wool hats, sweaters, oilskins, glasses permanently at their eyes as they slowly swivelled, their
backs against the periscope standards. One eternal truth being that maximum efficiency of looking out was a major factor not
only in finding targets but in staying alive.

Like the U-boat they’d sunk in the Norwegian Sea in the course of
Ursa
’s work-up patrol from the Clyde. McLeod had had that dived watch, the first dog, made the sighting at medium range in a sea
rough enough to have been
making depth-keeping difficult. Within minutes of his startled ‘Captain in the control room!’ Mike had fired a salvo of four
fish, hit the German amidships with one of them and broken him in two, the bow section taking long enough to sink for both
McLeod and the coxswain, Swathely, at Mike’s invitation to have a brief sight of it through the periscope. There’d been no
possibility of survivors, and part of the satisfaction had been that it had been outward bound from Bergen to the North Atlantic
killing-ground where it would inevitably have made its own contribution to the month’s death-toll of British and Allied seamen.
And if it had had one sharper-eyed or wider-awake lookout in its bridge, who might have spotted
Ursa
’s periscope of which several feet must have been exposed at the time for either McLeod or Mike himself to have had any view
at all over the foam-crested ridges of that force 6 – those noncombatants’ deaths instead of the predators’. As it
had
been, forty or more Germans in one torpedo blast, for the want of a better-trained pair of eyes.

‘Bridge!’

McLeod stooping above the voice-pipe, still with binoculars at his eyes: ‘Bridge.’

‘PO Tel, sir. Cipher the captain will want to see.’

‘Tell him I’m coming down.’

‘Captain’s coming down.’

In the hatch, clambering down through the rush of air into the soft light and the jolting warmth. Lazenby was there waiting
for him: also Swathely, Ellery, Fraser, all to put it mildly showing interest, the telegraphist offering Mike a sheet of pink
signal-pad – pink for Secret – with his own blue-crayon scrawl on it. Mike held it under the chart light, read
To: S.10, repeated Ursa, Swordsman, V. A. Malta, C-in-C Med and Admiralty. From: Unsung
.

Unsung
, for Pete’s sake …

Garibaldi-class cruiser torpedoed and sunk in position 38 degrees 51 N. 9 degrees 33 E.