Torpedo Run (1981) (38 page)

Beresford was cocking a German Luger which he had brought aboard with him.

‘Three to one, if Red Mackay stays out of it. Not good. Not good at all.’

‘Steady on north eighty east, sir.’ Pellegine was completely absorbed. He paused to glance at Metcalf by his side. ‘All your fault, this is. On me bloody birthday too!’

Carroll said dryly, ‘Happy Birthday, Swain!’

Devane gripped the screen and stared directly ahead. He could see the old ship much more clearly now. Moving from port to starboard like an ungainly pier. There was so much smoke, the other boats might be anywhere.

He made up his mind. ‘All ahead full!’

As the hull lifted violently to the instant surge of power, Devane thought he heard Chalmers say, ‘Without
Kestrel
? No chance.’

Devane gripped a safety rail and bent his knees as the MTB continued to gather speed. It was like riding her, a living thing, the bounce . . . bounce . . . bounce as the hull tore across the swell, hurling aside great banks of foam like a plough through snow.

Beresford asked breathlessly, ‘What d’you want me to do?’

Devane looked at him. ‘No passengers here, Ralph!’ He laughed. ‘Bridges has an injured foot. Give him a hand on the port m.g. mounting. You’ll be nice and handy if anything unpleasant happens in here!’

He turned towards the freighter again, shutting out all of them except for Priest and his six-pounder. It was like charging headlong to ram the old Turkish tramp steamer. Like Twiss, a crash, a great fireball, then nothing.

A seaman yelled, ‘Come on, old girl! Shift yerself!’ The man sounded excited, jubilant, as if it was the greatest thing in his life.

Devane gripped the rail more tightly to suppress his sudden despair. Dear God, I don’t want to lose her now.
Claudia
.

He heard Pellegrine say fiercely, ‘I’ll bet we’re makin’ those Turks sweat!’

The MTB with the scarlet number I painted on her rearing bows was flashing towards the freighter at thirty-nine knots, and when Devane glanced astern he could not see Mackay’s boat at all.

‘Port ten.
Steady!
’

He watched narrowly as the old ship appeared to slide towards the starboard bow. Faster, faster, the MTB had never bettered this speed, even on her trials.

He tried to level his binoculars with one hand while he held on with the other.
One hand for the King, but keep one for yourself.
He smiled, remembering the old CPO instructor who had said that at their peacetime drills. A million years ago.

Here comes the bloody ship. She was pitted with rust, and her lifeboats looked as if they had not been painted for years.
Tiny faces peered down from the open flying bridge, a Turkish flag fluttered from somewhere like a talisman.

Devane let the glasses fall to his chest and felt the spray sting his face like hail. If the rudders jammed now they would blow the neutral ship sky-high.

‘Across her stern!’

He darted another glance at his men. Taut faces, slitted eyes, bodies stooped as if to withstand the shock as they hit the great pall of black smoke.

The high stern loomed above them and there were more vague pictures. A man in a chef’s hat waving and yelling soundlessly. The Turkish flag, unnaturally clean against so much rust and filth, the smoke making Chalmers cough, the nearness of collision which Pellegrine had judged so finely that Devane could have sworn their keel left the sea as they bounded over the other ship’s wake.

‘E-boat! Port bow!’

‘Open fire!’

Guns banged and rattled into life, the cone of tracer lashing across and settling on the leading E-boat like a web.

The range was falling away so that Devane saw the other two Germans moving apart as the towline was slipped and the other commander hurried to support his leader.

It took an age, or so it seemed, for the Germans to react. Devane could hear his men yelling and cursing as they fired and reloaded until the gun muzzles were shimmering with the heat.

He imagined how he would have felt. So close to safety. Just a battered freighter, and then, like an avenger, the MTB had burst through the smoke, every gun firing. Casualties often occurred when a ship was homeward-bound. Lookouts tired, men relaxing, thankful to be spared from yet another op. Then, out of the sun, the unexpected aircraft, or the track of a torpedo cutting through the water towards you.

Now it was happening to Lincke. They could not defeat three E-boats, but he would get Lincke.

Tracer whipped overhead and cut past the old freighter which had made a frightened turn to avoid being hit.

Devane pointed at the leading E-boat. ‘That one, Swain!’

Everyone near him knew what he meant, and from aft he heard the sudden crack of the twin Oerlikons as the damaged E-boat, parted from her tow, began to drift across the sights.

‘Hard a-starboard! Steady. Hard a-port!’

Zigzagging and rolling wildly, the MTB swung towards the second E-boat, and Devane saw the shells and tracer bursting along her bridge and then hurling equipment and buckled plating into the air like paper.

Devane felt the hull jump, the whine and clatter of steel as the leading E-boat turned swiftly in an attempt to cut him off from the damaged one.

But as they tore past Devane heard the clang of depth charges being lobbed over the quarter and tensed as they exploded together, one almost alongside the drifting boat.

Two to one
. The damaged boat was tilting steeply, and some rubber dinghies were already paddling away.

Devane fell, knocked from his feet as cannon shells hammered into the chartroom and exploded against the bridge structure. The cracks and bangs were deafening, and Devane saw blood on his legs and thought he was already fatally wounded. But it had been the boatswain’s mate who had been hit, killed outright by a cannon shell. It had left a hole in his body big enough for a man’s fist, and his eyes were still wild and staring, fixed at the moment of impact.

The hull jumped and quivered again as more shells ripped through the planking, some exploding in the PO’s mess where Pellegrine had painstakingly written letters to his flighty wife. Others had penetrated the small galley, and gone on to shatter the W/T cabin and kill the telegraphist even as he tried to reach a fire extinguisher.

‘
Hard a-port!
’ Devane clenched his jaw as bullets clattered around the bridge.

Leading Seaman Priest was crawling away from the six-pounder, and Devane saw Beresford, his hair streaming in the wind, slide behind the controls to replace him.

Priest rolled over and lay on his back, waiting to die as his blood pumped steadily into the scuppers.

The second E-boat was streaming smoke and slowing down, her bow wave falling away as the Oerlikon guns
cracked over her in twin lines of tracer, smashing down gun crews and wounded alike, and setting fire to some ready-use ammunition which turned the upper deck into a death trap.

Devane dashed the spray and sweat from his eyes and stared wildly at the remaining E-boat. There she was turning again at full speed, her forward guns spewing balls of tracer towards him as she levelled off on a converging course. He saw the insignia on her bridge, the tiger stripes and the little Union Jacks and Red flags painted on the bridge to display Lincke’s ‘kills’.

Now they were meeting at last. Only the survivors in the rubber dinghies and those still aboard the burning E-boat were here to see it.

The gratings bounced under Devane’s seaboots, and he saw smoke spurt through the planks. He smelt burning, and knew that a fire had started between decks.

He saw Chalmers staring at it with sick fascination and yelled, ‘Get down there! Take a spare hand from the Chief and
put that fire out
!’

A bullet smacked through the flag locker and Carroll stared at the neat hole it had left within six inches of his thigh. He exclaimed, ‘I’ll go!’

Chalmers staggered to the bridge gate. ‘No! I’m all right!’ Then he was gone, half falling into the smoke as Pellegrine put the boat into another fierce turn. More crashes shook the hull, but every gun was still in action.

‘Hard a-starboard!’ The smoke was getting worse. Devane squinted at the veering shape of the enemy vessel. ‘Depth charges!’

But Lincke was ready. As two more charges exploded, hurling up twin columns of spray, he swung away, the E-boat’s hull barely splashed as the water cascaded down again.

Pellegrine grunted with pain as a wood splinter, gouged from the bridge itself, struck him in the forehead like a barbed dart.

When Metcalf tried to help him he snarled, ‘Leave it be! I’m still alive!’

Metcalf ducked as more splinters of steel and wood shrieked above the bridge, and then heard Devane yell, ‘Help
Bunts!’

Carroll had fallen awkwardly, with one leg bent double beneath him. Between clenched teeth he gasped, ‘Shot right through! Get a dressing, mate!’ Then he fainted.

As the MTB, her motors roaring and bellowing in protest, thrashed round yet again, matching burst for burst with the E-boat, throughout her small hull her company fought their individual battles.

In the blazing galley Lieutenant Chalmers and a youthful stoker used axes and extinguishers to quell the fire and to free a wounded seaman who had been carried below for safety.

The engine room, half filled with smoke and fumes, was punctured in several places, but the three motors were still holding their revolutions as Ackland, his boiler-suit soaked in water from a leaking pump and spray which had burst through the deck above, darted around them like a tortured slave. His young helper, an ERA whom Ackland had already ear-marked for promotion, rolled in the bilge waste and leaking oil, his arms outspread as if he had been crucified. A heavy bullet had hit him in the back and he had died alone, his cries unheard in the roar of motors he had served so well.

The Oerlikon gunner too was dead, and had to be dragged bodily from his harness before Torpedoman Pollard, the boy from the Newcastle slums, who cheeked the officers and all authority with supreme confidence, could take his place and reopen fire.

Lieutenant Dundas rushed to the bridge to replace Chalmers and looked at the dead seaman and at Carroll whose leg was wrapped in a heavy shell dressing.

He exclaimed, ‘We’re taking water, sir!’ He swung away, retching, as a cannon shell exploded beside the port machine-gun and threw the man’s leg into the air like a lump of meat.

Devane did not answer. The E-boat was turning again. Lincke had dropped a smoke float as an additional shield as he prepared for another attack.

The starboard machine-guns fell silent and he heard the seaman sobbing and blaspheming as he struggled to deal with the stoppage. The weapons had overheated, had fired
almost every belt of ammunition.

Once again the hull gave a violent jerk, and Devane knew they had glanced off part of the sunken E-boat.

Dundas ran to the voicepipe and then repeated, ‘Chief says the starboard rudder is sheered off and the starboard outer shaft is overheating fast!’

‘Stop starboard outer, Swain.’

Devane felt it like a wound in his body. It was all for nothing. He saw the E-boat’s striped outline moving rapidly through the drifting smoke, passing over two swimmers and forcing them under the hull as she headed straight for the MTB.

‘Belay that order! I want full revs!’

Devane ignored the startled glances and ran to the opposite side. Below him he saw the dead machine-gunner dangling from the shattered guns, the blood from his severed leg joining with that of Leading Torpedoman Kirby who had been killed a few seconds earlier.

Lincke was there. Still coming.
Let him come.

‘Straight for him!’

Devane ducked as bullets cracked into the bridge. One hit Carroll, killing him as he lay unconscious from his wound, so that he died quietly like the man he was. The man who had taken his horse and cart around the houses, chatting up the young wives and dreaming of the day he could join the Navy.

In his engine room Ackland watched his gauges and knew that the speed was already dropping away. Outside, in that other world of death and stark colour, he knew the moment was close. He thought of the garage where he had worked on the Great North Road, the day-trippers in the sunshine, the bad days when nobody came. Devane wanted full speed. It would destroy the motors and probably the whole bloody boat. He sighed. What the hell. They were all done for anyway.

Dundas shouted, ‘Power’s dropping!’

Devane nodded, his eyes smarting from the smoke, from the despair, as he accepted that it was almost done.

The big E-boat had turned yet again, so that she appeared
to be at right angles to the port bow, her guns flashing, although her after weapons were badly damaged and firing only in spasmodic bursts.

‘Six-pounder’s jammed, sir.’ Metcalf stood looking down at the forecastle, his voice husky and unsteady.

Devane looked past him, expecting to see Beresford dead. But he was sitting with one hand on the gun, the barrel of which still pointed away from the enemy. Its power had gone. It was useless.

‘What’ll you do?’ Dundas was trying to tie a handkerchief around his wrist with his teeth.

Devane watched the slowly moving E-boat. Lincke was that confident. It was time for the kill, and he was savouring it. He could even see Lincke’s white cap on the bridge as he climbed up to watch. As Devane had done during the raid on Mandra.

He’s not even going to let me surrender. Would I have done the same for him?

Devane watched the forward guns on the E-boat’s protected deck train round until they seemed to be pointing directly at him. He felt the motors slowing down, heard the uneven rattle from the damaged shaft.

Shoot, you bastard! It’s what you wanted. A sitting duck.

The snarl of racing engines cut above the other sounds, and as Devane ran across the bridge he saw Mackay’s MTB tearing through the smoke, her guns flashing vividly as she cut through the wall of smoke like a rocket.

Devane saw it all in a split second. Lincke’s figure swing round, his hat flung from his head as the E-boat’s bridge was raked by tracer.