The Torch Bearers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 5 Read online

  “Aye aye, sir …”

  Asdic pings throbbing out into deep-churned sea were getting nothing back. It was needle-in-haystack stuff tonight. And nothing had shown up from that pattern of charges.

  “Course to resume station, Sub?”

  Carlish would get it from Mike Scarr, the navigator, who was down in the plot with the RDF display at hand to help him, as well as an automatic plotting table. Nick lowered his glasses, to clean them for the umpteenth time. That U-boat might have been damaged, would surely have been shaken, but it had not been destroyed: and it was always a matter of fine judgement—in fact often dilemma, a toss-up—how long to stay out in the deep field and hunt, how soon to break off a search and get back. You wanted to kill U-boats, you longed to kill them and from time to time you managed it, but the golden objective remained—as laid down so emphatically in WACIs, Western Approaches Convoy Instructions, the escort vessels’ bible—Safe and timely arrival of the convoy.

  Of convoy after convoy. Month after month, year in and year out. More of it in foul weather than in the other kind. A brutal, interminable struggle, straining men and ships through the limits of endurance. The Atlantic was the artery of continuance, survival and eventual victory, the constant fighting-through of convoys its pumping heart.

  There’d been depth-charge explosions out to port, heard on asdics but inaudible over the surrounding racket and at such range; but Goshawk had drawn a blank too, and had reported that she was resuming station. Harbinger was back again, near the convoy’s starboard rear corner, Bruce a few miles abeam to port. The stern position was the best at night, Nick thought, for an escort commander. You had the whole field out there in front of you, you had only to crack on some extra power to get to wherever trouble might be starting.

  The commodore had swung his ships back to the original course, shortly after Goshawk had gone to investigate that contact. Nick was on his bridge seat, hunched with binoculars at his eyes. All escorts were back in station, waiting for the next interruption to the convoy’s steady progress: it could start with a bell ringing, or a buzzer, or a call over the radio telephone, or the heart-stopping thud of a torpedo crashing home … Gritten had reported two U-boats talking to each other five or six miles astern: it was quite possible they’d been the ones out to starboard who’d been forced to dive and had now surfaced again to call their friends, reporting the convoy’s last observed position, course and speed, letting colleagues up ahead know it was up to them now … The pair astern would have their work cut out to get back into attacking positions, at any rate during this night, because although they were technically capable of seventeen knots—as opposed to the convoy’s seven and the corvettes’ maximum of fifteen—they wouldn’t manage anything like full speed in present sea conditions.

  Touch wood, they’d be out of the action for a while, at least. This was truly lousy weather for submarine operations, and it would be tempting for any U-boat to dive to sixty or a hundred feet where they’d be quiet, level, warm and dry. And safe … But Admiral Dönitz’s centralised control of them would make that impossible: and there’d be others deployed ahead still, and perhaps out on the beams as well, keeping pace, guided by “homing” signals, virtually on strings from that U-boat HQ …

  It had been a fairly easy task, protecting Atlantic convoys during the spring and summer of 1942, mostly because since America’s entry into the war at the end of 1941 the U-boats had been concentrating on the US east coast, enjoying their second “happy time.” The first had been in 1939 and early ’40 when the Royal Navy had been desperately short of escorts: but ignoring British experience and advice, the Americans experimented with everything except convoys. In March the rate of sinkings had risen to average nine ships a day, and most of them had gone down within sight of the US coast. More than half a million tons a month … The hard lesson had been learnt, eventually, and by the end of May the “happy time” had been over; by July the U-boats had shifted their main effort to the mid-Atlantic air gap, the area out of reach of air patrols from either side. There were a lot of U-boats at sea, too, by this time, they’d been coming off the slips faster than the Royal and Canadian navies had so far been able to destroy them; the packs were concentrating in mid-Atlantic, and off Freetown in Sierra Leone, and all down the African west coast, the Middle East convoy route round the Cape. Middle and Far East route. Which, for personal reasons, was something Nick Everard would have preferred not to think about.

  Because Kate, whom he’d married in Australia at the end of March, had decided about a month ago to come to England. She was pregnant, and she’d told him in her letter, I want to be near you when I have it. I hadn’t thought about this when I promised I’d stay out here …

  He’d wanted her to stay with her family, where she’d be safe and where in any case she’d have plenty to do, since she was an Army nurse and the battle for the South Pacific would be keeping all the Australian military hospitals busy. But Kate’s father, old Ted Farquharson, had written soon after she had, saying: There’s no checking her, I’m afraid. Remember I told you you were marrying a headstrong female? And you certainly didn’t improve matters in this area when you changed her from Kate Farquharson to Lady Everard. I warned you about that in the vestry, didn’t I? But someone over there, High Commissioner or similar, has promised her employment in her own line of work, and she’s bending other ears in one place and another, and the end result is I gather she may be on her bicycle pretty soon now. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk her out of it—I’ve tried, believe me …

  In a lot of ways it would be marvellous—fantastic, really a daydream just to contemplate it—to have her within reach, to go home to for occasional short leaves. But the idea now of Kate afloat anywhere on this ocean was enough to scare him awake at night … Marriage to Kate was the foot of the rainbow: she was so right, so perfect for him, so complete and miraculous an answer to a personal life which had not, up to that point, been at all satisfying or successful. Captain Sir Nicholas Everard Bart., DSO, DSC, RN might to some people look like a man who had everything, but since he’d had Kate for a wife he’d come to realise how little he’d ever had before.

  Remembering that line of Kipling’s: I’d rather fight with the bachelor, and be nursed by the married man …

  Radio telephone noisy suddenly: it was Goshawk calling. It woke him—or at least switched his mind back into the present … But he did feel he’d been dozing, or half-dozing … Which, on the gale-battered bridge of a ship that was throwing herself about as violently as this one was, might have been deemed impossible but was in fact a necessary accomplishment, since catnaps, being as much as you could hope to get over considerable stretches of time on this job, were necessary as compensation for a lack of real sleep.

  Contact on bearing oh-seven-one. Investigating. Out.

  Nick looked round towards where he knew Graves would be. “Here we go again.”

  “I thought they couldn’t ’ve all gone home yet.”

  One thirty-five. A lot of dark hours yet to come.

  “Kye, sir?”

  “Thank you, Wragge.” He accepted the mug of cocoa. Wragge was a bridge messenger, trained in the art of kye-making by bosun’s mates who believed in only the highest standards of excellence. Nick was enjoying his first scalding sip when the sound of a torpedo-hit came as a hard thump in his left ear: then a shout from the asdic cabinet like an echo of it, “Someone got fished, sir!”

  Sound and percussion had been all. No flames, and no alarm rockets. By convoy law a torpedoed ship was supposed to send up two white rockets, but it was probably the last thing you’d think of … A call on TBS now: Aquilegia, second corvette on the convoy’s port side, reporting number thirteen torpedoed and falling back. The number thirteen meant it was the third ship in the first—left-hand—column; and the attack could have come from bow, beam or quarter … Aquilegia came up again, confirming that the torpedoed number thirteen was the Verumi, a Polish freighter, and that she was stopp
ed and sinking by the stern. Nick told the corvette to stand by her, and Bruce to carry out an A/S sweep to the north of them. He told Chubb, “Port fifteen. Come to oh-four-oh.”

  Moving over towards the centre of the convoy’s rear, to make up for Bruce being absent for a while. He ordered a few knots extra speed to cater for the diversion. Bruce wasn’t likely to locate the U-boat responsible for that attack, but her activity out there would help to screen Aquilegia when she stopped to pick up the Pole’s survivors. The radio telephone started up again: it was Goshawk announcing, “Close surface contact, attacking …”

  Might be the one that hit the Verumi? But just as easily it might not be. And he still did want to have Bruce out there covering the rescue operation.

  “Course oh-four-oh, sir!”

  Wind and sea on the quarter now: Harbinger giving a demonstration of her corkscrew motion, the combined pitch and roll that was guaranteed to induce nausea in anyone who hadn’t been thoroughly Atlantic-hardened. It wouldn’t have been an easy job reloading the depth-charge throwers, back aft. The 750 lb cannisters had to be hoisted on tackles slung from the derricks, and a swinging weight of that size, controlled in pitch darkness by men working up to their knees or even waists in water, was a dangerous beast indeed. Nick could imagine the kind of language that would have been flowing out of Mr Timberlake and his torpedo-men … The radio squawked again: Gilliflower, the corvette in the centre-van position, was reporting a surface contact on bearing 105. As that message cut off, Watchful came up with another: contact on 089, attacking …

  “Tell Gilliflower to remain in station.”

  It would be the same target, the bearings different only because the ships were widely separated. And it meant there were two U-boats ahead of the convoy now, because Goshawk was already chasing out after one on the other bow.

  “Sub—where’s Viola?”

  Carlish bent to the viewing slot … “Oh-nine-eight, three thousand two hundred yards, sir.” “And Aquilegia?”

  “Two-six-oh, five thousand three hundred—”

  “Come to mean course oh-nine-oh, zigzag thirty degrees each side.”

  Aquilegia was on TBS now: her report, delivered in a Scottish accent, was that the Polish ship had sunk and she was picking up survivors. Underwater concussions from some distance ahead could only be depthcharges: the sound seemed to come from the southeast, and Nick guessed it would be Watchful plastering her target. Goshawk spoke up then: she’d lost the contact and was resuming station. On the heels of that, which had come in a tone of flat disappointment, there was a suddenly loud and excited call from Gilliflower: U-boat surfaced astern of Watchful, attacking!

  So those had been Watchful’s charges, and they’d brought results … Aquilegia reported that she had forty-seven survivors inboard and was returning to her station.

  Nick thought of recalling Bruce, now the rescue had been completed. But Goshawk had lost contact with a U-boat out on the port bow, and if that one should come up again for a snap shot from the beam it might be handy to have a destroyer out there and off the leash. For the moment, therefore, he’d leave Bruce to sniff around.

  More depthcharges: a long rumble of them from roughly the same direction. It could be the attack Gilliflower had promised, if that one had got down under again. But the TBS call coming in now was from Daphne, front-runner of the two starboard-side corvettes: she had a surface contact bearing one-three-seven, range five miles. Then Gilliflower was calling and Nick recognised her captain’s voice, the north-country accent of Lieutenant-Commander Dick Horsman RNR, informing him, U-boat attacked with shallow pattern as he went down, and I reckon we got him. He pushed up again stern-first, went near vertical and slid under with a lot of bubbles. Look for survivors and stuff, may I?

  “Reply negative, maintain station. Then tell Watchful to investigate Daphne’s contact southeastward.”

  It would be satisfactory to have confirmation of a kill, but not satisfactory enough to risk exposing the convoy to unnecessary danger by removing Gilliflower from her close-screen position in the van. It could have led to confusion anyway, since the convoy’s front rank was very close on the corvette’s heels. If that had been a kill, which it probably had, it would be a bird shared between Watchful, who’d put in the first attack, and Gilliflower who’d completed the job: and since it was unlikely there’d be two attackers approaching from the same quarter within minutes of each other it should be safe enough, he thought, to send Watchful out to starboard now. It was what the destroyers were for, anyway, in Nick’s intentions and in the way he disposed his ships: every escort commander had his own ideas, and these were his and they seemed to answer the problems as well as any other schemes he’d heard of. The two really basic requisites were to have enough ships and to have them trained, used to working as a team and remaining together as one permanent and increasingly efficient unit … A “snowflake”—the illuminatory rocket that ships in convoy were equipped with—had burst high over the starboard columns: he saw black hulls, swaying masts, then Harbinger was pretending to be a submarine again, diving with stunning impact into another trough, leaving only the encircling wave tops visible, and way up, the edge of that weird brilliance seeping over. Someone may have suspected the presence of a U-boat between the columns, or become suddenly scared of collision: with big ships densely packed as they were in this convoy, and on a night as dark as this, masters and officers of the watch needed cool nerves as well as brains and judgement. Harbinger was standing on her nose as she swung under helm, Chubb at the binnacle and CPO Elphick, the coxswain, down in the wheelhouse, maintaining an irregular zigzag to and fro across the convoy’s stern. A huge, white-topped mound of sea rose swelling across her stubby bow, rolling back clear over the top of A gun-mounting and swirling around the feet of B gun’s crew before cascading over her sides … Shaking herself free now, steadying on a new course, a mountainous slope of sea looming ahead and the bow coming up slowly, too damn slowly: you found yourself leaning forward, urging her with your own puny movements, as if encouraging a horse with a steep jump ahead … A bell rang from the W/T office: the messenger, Wragge, clawed his way to that voice-pipe and bawled, “Bridge!” He was listening with his ear down to it: then straightening, yelling “Signal from the commodore, sir—ships in starboard column report passing through wreckage and floating bodies!”

  “Very good.”

  In fact it was very, very good. It could, of course, have been coincidental, wreckage from another sinking, but on the whole it seemed reasonable to accept it at face value. He told Bearcroft to call Gilliflower and Watchful and confirm the kill. Then Bruce, in order to send her back to her station. Chubb didn’t need telling to take Harbinger over to starboard, to let Bruce in. Time now—two-forty. So there were still some hours to go, to be passed through, to try to keep ships afloat and men alive through … He heard Chubb telling Elphick down the voice-pipe in that strongly-accented Aussie voice of his, “Watchful and Gilliflower just got one of the bastards, cox’n!” It was warming news on a cold, black and dangerous night: the old slogan about the only good ones being dead ones was indisputably correct, here in mid-Atlantic in 1942.

  And young Chubb, irrepressibly optimistic, was the sort of man to latch on to good news when he saw any around.

  Thick darkness again, up ahead. Harbinger ploughing over to starboard, her port-side gun’ls under water as she rolled … He wondered where Kate might be at this moment. He’d heard nothing since that letter, and then her father’s …

  He’d said goodbye to her the last time in Sydney, New South Wales, in May, when he’d been leaving for Panama in command of Defiant, the light cruiser he’d brought out of the Java Sea under the snouts of the all-conquering Japanese earlier in the year. He would have taken Defiant to the Battle of the Coral Sea, in company with two Australian cruisers attached to the American Rear-Admiral Fletcher’s striking force, if the old ship hadn’t chosen that moment to develop yet another spasm of engine breakdowns. Defiant wa
s not only old, she’d been worked half to death through three solid years in which there’d never been enough cruisers for the work that needed doing. They’d docked her in Sydney for temporary repairs, and he’d missed taking part in that Coral Sea battle which on paper had been a draw but effectively had put an end to Japanese expansion. He’d taken her over to the States for a complete refit, left her and travelled to St Johns, Newfoundland, to take command of an eastbound convoy escort: which was how he’d landed back in small ships, no longer a cruiser captain, and with nothing to show for that Java Sea fracas except a scar from cheekbone to mouth on the left side of his face.

  Which he could have done without. Not that he’d ever been exactly a thing of beauty.

  He was sorry, in many ways, to have left Defiant. To command a cruiser wasn’t far from being the ideal job, from several points of view, and it was a sought-after appointment. On the other hand, he was a destroyer man at heart; and this Atlantic convoy work was as crucial as anything could be. If the U-boats won, Britain would starve: and equally, if the Royal Navy did not defeat the U-boats, then the huge build-up of forces and material that was essential for an invasion of the European mainland couldn’t possibly be achieved.

  He’d dozed again: woke leaning dangerously hard a-port as his ship flung over. But it was the bell from the HF/DF office that had woken him. Checking the time—getting towards three-thirty … He answered the huffduff voice-pipe himself, and through the cigarette stink in the tube Gritten told him, “Two U-boats transmitting, sir, bearings one-oh-oh and one-one-oh, eight to nine miles.”

  Gritten sounded as if he’d been asleep too; he’d have been alerted by the junior telegraphist on watch with him. In that fug-hole, anyone would drop off—anyone who was in it nearly twenty-four hours a day … The convoy’s course was now 106 degrees: so those Germans were right on its line of advance, even though they might not know it yet. Gritten added, “These are two new ones, sir.”