A Share of Honour: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 4 Read online

  Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press

  BY ALEXANDER KENT

  Midshipman Bolitho

  Stand Into Danger

  In Gallant Company

  Sloop of War

  To Glory We Steer

  Command a King’s Ship

  Passage to Mutiny

  With All Despatch

  Form Line of Battle!

  Enemy in Sight!

  The Flag Captain

  Signal-Close Action!

  The Inshore Squadron

  A Tradition of Victory

  Success to the Brave

  Colours Aloft!

  Honour This Day

  The Only Victor

  Beyond the Reef

  The Darkening Sea

  For My Country’s Freedom

  Cross of St George

  Sword of Honour

  Second to None

  Relentless Pursuit

  Man of War

  Band of Brothers

  BY DOUGLAS REEMAN

  Badge of Glory

  First to Land

  The Horizon

  Dust on the Sea

  Knife Edge

  Twelve Seconds to Live

  Battlecruiser

  The White Guns

  A Prayer for the Ship

  For Valour

  BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN

  Halfhyde at the Bight of Benin

  Halfhyde’s Island

  Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest

  Halfhyde to the Narrows

  Halfhyde for the Queen

  Halfhyde Ordered South

  Halfhyde on Zanatu

  BY JAMES DUFFY

  Sand of the Arena

  BY DEWEY LAMBDIN

  The French Admiral

  Jester’s Fortune

  What Lies Buried

  BY JAMES L. NELSON

  The Only Life That Mattered

  BY C.N. PARKINSON

  The Guernseyman

  Devil to Pay

  The Fireship

  Touch and Go

  So Near So Far

  Dead Reckoning

  The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower

  BY JAN NEEDLE

  A Fine Boy for Killing

  The Wicked Trade

  The Spithead Nymph

  BY FREDERICK MARRYAT

  Frank Mildmay or The Naval Officer

  The King’s Own

  Mr Midshipman Easy

  Newton Forster or

  The Merchant Service

  Snarleyyow or The Dog Fiend

  The Privateersman

  The Phantom Ship

  BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON

  Storm Force to Narvik

  Last Lift from Crete

  All the Drowning Seas

  A Share of Honour

  BY R.F. DELDERFIELD

  Too Few for Drums

  Seven Men of Gascony

  BY NICHOLAS NICASTRO

  The Eighteenth Captain

  Between Two Fires

  BY JOHN BIGGINS

  A Sailor of Austria

  BY JULIAN STOCKWIN

  Mutiny

  Quarterdeck

  BY DUDLEY POPE

  Ramage

  Ramage & The Drumbeat

  Ramage & The Freebooters

  Governor Ramage R.N.

  Ramage’s Prize

  Ramage & The Guillotine

  Ramage’s Diamond

  Ramage’s Mutiny

  Ramage & The Rebels

  The Ramage Touch

  Ramage’s Signal

  Ramage & The Renegades

  Ramage’s Devil

  Ramage’s Trial

  Ramage’s Challenge

  Ramage at Trafalgar

  Ramage & The Saracens

  Ramage & The Dido

  BY V.A. STUART

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  Guns to the Far East

  Escape from Hell

  BY DAVID DONACHIE

  The Devil’s Own Luck

  The Dying Trade

  A Hanging Matter

  An Element of Chance

  The Scent of Betrayal

  A Game of Bones

  On a Making Tide

  Tested by Fate

  Breaking the Line

  Published by McBooks Press 2005

  Copyright © Alexander Fullerton 1982

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Limited

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover Painting by Paul Wright

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fullerton, Alexander, 1924-

  A share of honour / by Alexander Fullerton.

  p. cm. — (The Nicholas Everard WWII saga ; bk. 4) ISBN 1-59013-095-2 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Everard, Nick (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History, Naval—20th century—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6056.U435S53 2005

  823’.914—dc22

  2005009359

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  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If we are mark’d to die, we are enow To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men the greater share of honour. Shakespeare: Henry V, before Agincourt

  From a German staff report, late 1941: “The most dangerous British weapon in the Mediterranean is the submarine, especially those operating from Malta … a very severe supply crisis must occur relatively soon …”

  From Admiral Raeder’s reply: “The Naval Staff agrees entirely … [and] considers immediate measures to remedy the situation imperative, otherwise not only our offensive but the entire Italo-German position in North Africa will be lost.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mist clinging to the sea’s dark surface thickened the night: lights on the coast six miles away seemed to quiver through it. The submarine, with her main ballast tanks partially flooded, was trimmed down to lie low in the water, to present a low silhouette and also so that she could dive quickly if she had to, slip under literally in seconds. Her diesel engines growled through muffled exhausts, driving her shorewards at only a few knots but also pumping fresh power into her batteries. That steady grumble and the swish of the sea along her sides were the only sounds, and they’d have been inaudible a few hundred yards away, but here in enemy waters they seemed frighteningly loud. Sub-Lieutenant Paul Everard RNVR, hunched in the front of Ultra’s bridge with binoculars at his eyes, wouldn’t have addressed the two look-outs in anything above a murmur: you were in the enemy’s backyard and you knew it, felt it.

  Enjoyed it, too … Despite the fact that in the forefront of his mind was the knowledge that an enemy could show up at any second, and that wh
en it happened he’d have about one more second in which to react— and react the right way, at that. Straining his eyes, living through them, aware that behind him the look-outs’ concentration would be as total as his own, Paul could feel the tension in himself and them, the sense of solitariness in an enclosing perimeter of threat and danger; he could feel the tautness of his own nerves and awareness of personal responsibility for other men’s lives racking up the tension. At the same time his mind didn’t need to separate itself from the work of probing the darkness to know that this was what he’d wanted, aimed for, that he wouldn’t for any price have been anywhere but here.

  That land on the bow, with the lights flickering along it, was the toe of Italy.

  “Bridge!”

  Without taking the glasses from his eyes, he lowered his face to the voicepipe and answered in a quieter tone than the helmsman’s, “Bridge.”

  “Captain coming up, sir.”

  And he could hear him, clambering out of the upper hatch, the top of the conning-tower. James Ruck, Lieutenant, DSC, RN. Paul edged over to make room for him. Nobody had any reason to speak, for a while: Ruck became another pair of eyes, a fourth probe of the predawn dark and a hostile coast. He asked, after a few minutes, “How are the Measures?”

  “No movement, sir.”

  By “Measures” he meant the pair of shore lights that represented some kind of anti-submarine device, almost certainly direction-finding equipment. Malta submariners had christened them “Mussolini’s Mysterious Measures,” short title MMM. The pair of lights burned horizontally to each other: if they swung to the vertical, chances were an E-boat would soon come racing seaward along the beam. So when they changed position you dived, and within ten or twenty minutes heard the A/S patrol pound overhead.

  Ruck had his glasses on the local pair now. It was anyone’s guess why they worked on some occasions and not on others—like now, when this submarine was well within any direction-finder’s range. Perhaps it was because she was almost bow-on to them: trimmed down like this, she’d be showing about as much reflective surface as a floating oil drum. The general opinion was that the lights were an adjunct to the direction-finding apparatus, their only purpose being to guide patrol-craft towards intruders.

  Ruck muttered, “You’d think they’d be on their toes, in a spot like this.” Paul murmured, “Probably all pissed.”

  Ruck grunted; he was stooped over the gyro repeater, sighting across it for land bearings. He’d get a left-hand edge of land, and a cross-bearing on Cape Spartivento. He said, still at it, “Dive in about half an hour, Sub. I’ll give you a shout.” A searchlight beam sprang out, swinging skyward and then down to sweep along the coastline to the left; as it lifted again another joined it, criss-crossing. Those lights were near Cape dell’Armi and they’d been on and off several times during the night; now they were illuminating the headland on which Ruck was taking his left-edge bearing. He murmured, “Thanks, chums.” Then he’d gone, to transfer the fix from his memory to the chart; Paul heard the clatter of his boots in the hatch, and he was alone again, taking another quick glance at the MMM lights. They were still horizontal. He pivoted slowly, examining every foot of the surrounding darkness.

  Diving in half an hour: that would make it about 0500. Paul’s watch now was from 0415 to 0615, so he’d have about an hour’s dived watch-keeping while they motored underwater into the approaches to the straits. The Messina Straits, the gap between Italy and Sicily; this was the southern end of them. It was a prime area for targets, but it was also well patrolled, an obvious place for submarines to haunt and therefore to be hunted.

  Land, dotted here and there with lights, lay from broad on the starboard bow to fine on the other. Another half-hour, and making-good about five knots, meant Ultra would be roughly three miles from the coast when she dived. By the time it was fully light—around the time he, Paul, would be handing over the watch—she’d be getting into the funnel of the straits and probably be less than a mile offshore.

  The MMM lights were still horizontal. The closer you got to them, he supposed, the more you’d need to be alert to them … This time yesterday, when they’d arrived for their first day of patrol on this billet, they’d approached along the western coast, the Sicilian side, and there’d been no Mysterious Measures there. He shifted to the left, to begin a new sweep on the bow again.

  And stopped. Moving the glasses slowly back the other way …

  A dark patch: something darker than its surroundings. Low to the water, and right ahead. He was holding his breath, taking another moment in which to make certain he wasn’t only imagining—

  “Look-outs down!”

  They were in the hatch, tumbling in, one on top of the other. Paul said into the voicepipe, “Dive, dive, dive!” then dragged down on the lever of the cock that shut it, sealed it against the sea: he’d jumped into the hatch on the head of the second lookout and he was reaching up to drag the heavy lid down over him. The diesels had cut out abruptly and main vents had opened to let air out and water in: the sea was rising, surrounding and engulfing, sweeping over, noisy through the conning-tower’s steel. He’d got the hatch shut and he was forcing the clips on, then pushing in the brass cotter-pins to hold them shut; at the same time he called down for the captain’s information, “E-boat lying stopped right ahead, sir!”

  In the control room the signalman, Janaway, was standing ready to shut and clip the lower hatch.

  “How far off was he, Sub?”

  Paul told his CO, “Mile—half a mile—hard to say, sir. Only just visible, not distinct at all, but low and small, so—”

  “Might they have seen us?”

  Several other pairs of ears waited for the answer, sharing the captain’s interest. The depthgauge needles were swinging past the forty-foot marks. Hugo Wykeham, Ultra’s tall and urbane first lieutenant, controlling the dive with an eye on the planesmen and a hand on the instrument through which he passed orders to the trim-tank operators, told Engineroom Artificer Quinn, “Shut main vents.”

  Quinn, bearded—as opposed to merely unshaven, like most of the men around him—slammed the levers back. “Main vents shut, sir.”

  Paul was telling Ruck he didn’t think the E-boat had spotted them. At least, he’d no reason to believe it had.

  Ruck told Wykeham, “One hundred feet.”

  “Blow Q, sir?”

  He’d hesitated, then nodded.”Yes.” He turned to the helmsman. “Port ten. Steer three-one-oh.”

  Blowing the quick-diving tank, Q, was a calculated risk, because it would make a noise, which in the circumstances was undesirable. But it had to be blown sooner or later: you couldn’t easily get the boat into trim when it was full, not without making at least as much noise by pumping for quite a long time on a bow tank. It was better to get it done with. Wykeham nodded to Quinn, and the ERA opened a valve to send high-pressure air thumping down the pipe into that tank to blow the water out of it, back into the sea. When its indicator light went out he reported, screwing the valve shut, “Q blown, sir.”

  “Ten of port wheel on, sir.” “Vent Q inboard?”

  “No,” Ruck told his first lieutenant. “But I want slow grouped down on one screw as soon as you can manage it.”

  Wykeham took stock of his trim, the balance of the submarine. Until you had her in trim you needed a certain speed through the water in order to hold her to the ordered depth; perfection was a “stop-trim,” when she’d hang motionless, with no way on her and neither rising nor sinking. He seemed to have things reasonably in control, anyway—the hydroplanes weren’t having to work hard, and the bubble in the fore-and-aft spirit level was just half a degree aft of the centreline. He glanced round at the telegraphman—Able Seaman West, who was also the gun trainer—and told him to go aft and pass the word to group down and stop the port motor. Wykeham was passing the order by word of mouth because the telegraphs made a clanging sound and the E-boat lying up there would have hydrophones, a pair of earphones clamped to some
close-cropped skull … Ruck asked his own asdic operator, Newton, “Anything?”

  Newton’s expression was always vacant when he was listening. He shook his long, narrow head. He was a goofy-looking man at the best of times.