The Gatecrashers: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 6 Read online

  “Anyone know where Godfrey might be?”

  “Ja.” Dan Vicary jerked a thumb. “Over in Titania, man. Was, anyway … Hear anything yet, Don?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “We were … speculating. Suppose the buggers have shifted to some other fjord—some new place could’ve been got ready for them?”

  “Wouldn’t think it’s likely.” Cameron paused. “But I did get one buzz. Seems there’s a Russian convoy operation in progress. That character from London mentioned it. The plan is we tie in with it, in a way. They’re expecting that by the time the home-run gets under way we’ll have nobbled the opposition. How’s that for supreme confidence in us?”

  “So it’s still on, anyway.”

  “Of course it is, you silly bastard!”

  “Glad to hear it.” Vicary shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Just the timing seemed so bad. As if the Bosch knew —”

  “Forget it.” Cameron shook his head. “It’ll be the convoy that’s drawn them out, and in a day or two they’ll be tucked up in that fjord again. Meanwhile I’m told crew lists will be going up today, and X-11 and 12 will be getting their side-cargoes tomorrow forenoon—right, Paul?” Paul nodded. Cameron put a hand on Vicary’s shoulder. “Any other reassurance you want?”

  “Well. I take it someone’s told the bloody Germans to be back there in time to welcome us?”

  Cameron turned away. “Anyone wants to know, I’ll be over in Titania. If I can get a boat over.” Titania, first in service in 1915 and still going strong, was the depot ship for the towing submarines—for Thrasher, Truculent, Syrtis, Sea Nymph, Stubborn, Sceptre, Scourge and Setter. Cameron asked from the doorway, “Towing exercise satisfactory, Louis?”

  “Except I’m not wild about the Manilla tow-ropes.” Gimber frowned. “I had balsa-wood floats on mine today, and even then the damn thing’s far too heavy. Care to swap?”

  “Likely …”

  He’d gone. Don Cameron had one of the three existing nylon tows. Not, of course, that he’d be passage-crew. He was operational CO of X-6, just as Godfrey Place, the man he was looking for now, had X-7. Place was the only RN officer in the seagoing X-craft force; he was twenty-two, an experienced submariner, and he was married to a Second Officer in the Wrens. During the months in which he’d helped Cameron in training the other crews, Place had lived through some nasty moments. He’d lost one diver, a sub-lieutenant, during a net-cutting exercise, and had another man washed off the casing and drowned. On that occasion the fore hatch had been open and the wave that swept the lad away had also flooded the W and D compartment, leaving the boat bobbing vertically with her artificer isolated in the fore end and Place himself shut in the engine-room. Houdini himself might have been proud to have got out of that one.

  “You’ve a heap of ideas for swaps, Louis. Girls, jobs, ropes …” McKie said it. He was Dan Vicary’s first lieutenant in X-11, almost certainly her operational crew. Vicary muttered facetiously, “Give him enough rope, he’ll hang himself.” He pushed his chair back. “Don’t know about you bums, I’ve work to do.”

  Setter, last of the eight towing ships, entered the loch soon after noon and secured alongside Titania with the others. Cameron told Paul at lunch in Bonaventure, “Setter’ll be your towing ship, I gather.”

  Paul knew Setter’s officers reasonably well. She’d made several training visits to the loch at earlier stages, joining temporarily for exercises of one kind and another. The dress-rehearsal exercise had involved the midgets attacking the battleship Malaya: with a submerged tow first, then a solo approach, a long, fjord-like loch to negotiate and nets to cut through, and finally success, surfacing right alongside the old battleship inside her box of nets, having simulated a drop of side-cargoes on the sea-bed under her. The side-cargoes were the X-craft’s only weapon, carried like contoured blisters on the sides and fitting from bow to stern. Each had two tons of Torpex high-explosive in it, and could be released from inside the boat after timefuses had been set.

  Paul asked Cameron, “Crews been detailed yet?”

  A nod … “Lists will be up any minute now.” The Scotsman added, “Can’t be any doubt you’ll have X-12 for the attack.”

  “I’m hoping, Don.”

  “You can count on it.”

  Finishing lunch, he got his coffee from the urn and went through to the anteroom. He was about to sit down beside Brazier when Claverhouse, Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander RNVR, touched his elbow and asked whether he could spare a few minutes.

  “Brief chat? Would you mind, Everard?”

  Cursing inwardly, Paul allowed himself to be led aside. In recent weeks he’d managed to steer clear of this character.

  “Let’s sit here. I shan’t keep you long. A matter of completing the final records, you know. I’m supposed to—er—take soundings, from time to time?” He sipped at his coffee. “Well. How’s life?”

  “Not bad, sir.” The “sir” acknowledged that extra half-stripe, but one use of it would now have to see the conversation through. Claverhouse was a psychiatrist, and a comparative newcomer to the medical staff. The others were all right, but there was something leech-like about this one. Paul added, “Except our birds have flown.”

  “Ah. Yes … And I suppose you’d be very disappointed if the operation had to be cancelled?”

  “Of course. We all would.”

  “But—why, Everard?”

  This was really silly. At such a late stage, and with nerves already on edge through the disappearance of the targets. It would have to be Claverhouse’s private initiative—none of the other medicoes would have been so hamfisted. Paul told him, patiently but with effort, “We’ve been training for a long time. We’re ready for it.”

  “Do you look forward to the attack itself? To the—er—action?”

  “Yes.” He did, too. Despite natural qualms.

  “I find that curious.”

  Paul stared at him. The only thing that seemed curious, to him, was to have to put up with this nonsense. He explained patiently again, “We’re ready, we know we can do it, and it happens to be a job well worth doing. I can’t understand your even questioning it, frankly.”

  “You aren’t worried—at all?”

  “If you mean do I get butterflies in the stomach at times—yes, of course I do. You’d have to be bone-headed not to. But as I said—we know we can do it, we’re trained right up to the eyeballs, so why shouldn’t—”

  “Rather begging the question, surely.” The smile was irritatingly donnish. “You’re trained because you offered to be so trained. Eh?”

  In a much earlier session, part of the selection process down in the south, another head-shrinker had tried to suggest that Paul’s motivation might be a desire to emulate his distinguished father. It wasn’t so—except in so far as any leader set a standard, and Nick Everard was no exception to that generality. Paul had come to the conclusion since then that it wouldn’t have mattered a damn if this had been his motivation

  “I only wondered”—Claverhouse’s tone was ingratiating, now— “entirely for my own interest as a psychologist, how you’d feel about it now, as it were on the eve.”

  “It’s only the eve if those bloody ships reappear.”

  McKie, passing, had just winked at him. Claverhouse was frowning, brushing that off as an irrelevance.

  “They’ll have to reappear somewhere … But a point of interest in your case, Everard, is you surely have nothing to prove. I’m aware of your background, naturally, and as I recall it you were in a destroyer that was sunk at Narvik? Ordinary Seaman at that time, and a Mention in Despatches for saving lives? Then more latterly you won a DSC,” he nodded at the ribbon on Paul’s battledress jacket, “in the Malta submarine flotilla?”

  “Place has a DSC, too. D’you hold that against him?”

  “By no means against him or you—I only …”

  “I’ve never tried to prove anything at all. At sea in wartime you can find yourself in certain kinds of situati
on, and—” he heard his own voice rising—“well, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Everard—please …” Claverhouse embarrassed now … “You seem to be—if I may say this without further offending you—well, wound up, rather. Under some degree of stress?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “You’re conscious of stress?”

  “If I am, it’s because our targets have vanished. That makes me anxious, sure. But …”

  “What about dreams?”

  He’d been reaching to put down his coffee cup. A muscle tensed: he’d fumbled, cup and saucer rattling as he just managed to lodge them on the table. Claverhouse’s interest was sharp: “You have been worried by bad dreams, have you?”

  There’d been nightmares, all right. And he had been worried by them, was worried by them. They were none of this clown’s business, though. They were his, Paul Everard’s, to live with, deal with as best he could. He had an urge to use one short, four-letter word, then get up and walk away: then out of the blue—or desperation—a better way out of this occurred to him. He told the psychiatrist confidentially, “Wet dreams.” The man’s expression changed dramatically: he was blinking, stupid-looking, like a parrot being poked off its perch. Shocked? Could a trick-cyclist be a prude? Paul added in that same confiding tone, “If you call wet dreams bad ones?”

  Actually he did quite often dream about Jane. Deliberately, sometimes: in the process of dropping off to sleep he’d concentrate his mind on her, try to dream about her instead of about being suffocated or falling over cliffs, crushed under heavy rocks …

  But something was happening, beyond the double doorway. Crew lists?

  He asked Claverhouse, “Excuse me now, please?”

  “Well, if we could just …”

  “I’m sorry. There’s really no point, you know.”

  It was a stir of movement, a general flocking towards the notice board. Crew lists, for sure … He remembered, as he went to join the gathering crowd, briefings they’d been given on how to cope with German interrogation techniques, and wondered if this might have played a part, helped him to block that dream question despite its having thrown him for a moment. Then he forgot Claverhouse. He was edging into the scrum, getting close enough to the board to see it was a list of X-craft crews. Then reading it—over Louis Gimber’s shoulder …

  His eyes skimmed down to the lower section of the type.

  X-11, towing ship Scourge (Commanding Officer Lt M. S. Vallance) Passage:

  Commanding Officer

  Crew

  Operation:

  Commanding Officer

  Crew

  T. E Messinger

  J. W. Hillcrest

  C. E. J. Amor

  D. V.Vicary

  J. McKie

  T. N. P. Maguire

  T. Brind

  X-12, towing ship Setter (Commanding Officer Lt E. A. MacGregor) Passage:

  Commanding Oficer

  Crew

  Operation:

  Commanding Officer

  Crew R

  L. W. Gimber

  O. T. Steep

  A. L. Towne

  P. H. Everard

  R. S. Eaton

  H. A. J. Brazier

  J. Lanchberry

  Louis Gimber swung round, tight-lipped with disappointment; although he must have known this was how it would be. He brought up short, finding Paul—of all people—right there in front of him. Paul said, quite genuinely sympathetic and knowing how he’d have felt, “Sorry, Louis. We couldn’t both have got it.” His eyes went back to the list. It had been inevitable, anyway; it was only because he’d wanted the job so much that he’d had any doubts of getting it, whereas Gimber had been trained primarily as a passage CO.

  Gimber smiled. “You know the saying, old boy. Lucky in war, unlucky in the only thing that really matters?”

  “Well,” emerging together from the throng, “perhaps you have a point.”

  And perhaps I’m a bastard …

  But not necessarily. Wasn’t it more that Louis had the wrong end of the stick, about Jane?

  “Louis, the passage command’s the toughest. The fact they picked you for it shouldn’t make you feel done-down.”

  “Balls.”

  “We don’t know how they decided, do we. Maybe they spun coins. But now look—we have work to do. Quite a lot, and not too much time. For starters, since she has to be hoisted out at sparrow-fart …”

  “Lighten ship, etcetera.” Gimber nodded wearily. “Ozzie has the preliminaries in hand.”

  X-12’s tanks had to be pumped out, every moveable weight taken out of her, so that the depot ship’s crane could swing her up on to the welldeck for side-cargoes to be fitted. The other six boats had already been fixed up; there wouldn’t have been space for the two late-comers on that deck as well, and in any case their side-cargoes hadn’t arrived on the fifth, when the others had had theirs fitted. But there were other things to see to as well, and this afternoon there was to be a briefing on the subject of an overland escape route, then a COs’ meeting to recapitulate on the alternative target-area plans, those for Narvik and Trondheim.

  Dan Vicary, who was one of two South African X-craft COs, slammed a meaty hand down on Paul’s shoulder. “Just the job, man, ay?”

  Gimber, throwing the Springbok a frigid look as he departed, clearly disagreed. Then Dick Eaton joined them—diffident, as always, but more cheerful, like everyone else who’d had his billet in an operational crew confirmed. Brazier too—looming like a man-mountain through the thinning crowd … “Arf, arf!”

  It was a Popeye expression, which he used to express pleasure or enthusiasm. He added, “But we’ve lost the sods, haven’t we?”

  “They’ll turn up, Bomber.”

  “Hope you’re right.” Brazier snapped his fingers. “Had a message for you, skipper. SDO sent it down, while ago. RPC drinks on board Setter, eighteen hundred, operational and passage crew—OK?”

  “Fine.” Paul nodded. “Tell the others, Louis’s gone down to the boat and Steep’s down there too, I think.”

  “Right. Poor old Louis, eh?”

  “Yes. We’re lucky.”

  To an outsider it might have sounded crazy—and it would to Claverhouse—to think of yourselves as lucky, in being picked to transport four tons of high-explosive through miles of narrow, defended waters— and minefields—and get it through nets designed to be impenetrable, then deposit it precisely under the belly of the most vital naval target in the world; and to do it in some expectation—hope, anyway—of remaining alive, even getting home again!

  The overland escape briefing was at 1430 in the recreation hall down aft.

  The briefing officer, a Norwegian expert sent up from London, told the assembled submariners, “An overland trek might prove to be the only escape route available to you. I say might … Obviously it’s hoped you’ll do the job successfully and then get out to sea, make the planned rendezvous with your parent submarine and come home in triumph. Or say, in comfort … But since many factors are not predictable, we can’t count on it. So this overland exit is just an extra string to your bow, and despite the very limited stowage space in your X-craft you’ll be taking certain escape gear with you. But first, before we discuss the equipment—here, on this map, bare as it is, what you see is as much as anyone can tell you about the terrain you’d be crossing.”

  A blackboard easel supported a map that was, indeed, unusually featureless.

  “First, right from the shore of Altenfjord, you’d have these mountains to climb. Definitely a climb, not a steep walk. Then if you made it that far, you’d find you were facing several hundred miles of plateau—which I can’t describe in any detail because it’s never been properly mapped. The simple fact is that to reach the Swedish border, which would have to be your destination, you’d have no option but to cross this expanse of—nothing … And you see—well, we’re in autumn now, early autumn; but that area might with a little poetic licence be called the roof
of the world, and it won’t be long before it’s deep in snow. There’ll be snow up on the tops there already. Once the winter sets in, it’ll become more desolate, more hostile, than ever. In fact—I’m being straight with you fellows—it’ll get to be bloody horrible.

  “There are some features, and some of them are shown on the maps we’re giving you—maps printed on parachute silk, very pretty, your girls’ll love ’em and I dare say that could be the best use for them, because I wouldn’t swear they’re accurate or show enough to be worth having. Once the land’s under snow, mark you, this won’t matter in the least—you wouldn’t find any of those topographical features anyway. Even without snow covering them, you’ll find it very difficult to identify any one—er—landmark positively. The features, those that exist, tend to be repetitive and very much alike. The only people capable of navigating by them, effectively, are the Lapps. And this, please note, is very important to you—by far your best chance would be to make contact with Lapps and have them guide you. They’re nomads, as you may know, and they know this territory like you know Piccadilly. They migrate right across it twice a year, driving bloody great herds of reindeer, so they have to know it pretty well; and they’d be perfectly capable of steering you over the Swedish border—which otherwise you probably wouldn’t see even if you were standing on it. Just a stone marker here and there—buried in snow, of course … Yes?”

  “Excuse me, sir.” The questioner was Toby Maguire, X-11’s diver. “Would the Lapps be likely to co-operate?”

  “I was coming to that. And—well, you’ll find them reasonably welldisposed. Not hostile, anyway. But in any event you’ll have the wherewithall, in your kit, to bribe them. No—let’s say reward them. You’ll have Norwegian and Swedish cash, and blocks of chewing tobacco—most Lapps’d sell their mothers for it … Apart from that, you’ll have to rely on your natural diplomacy, charm and bullshit.”

  Maguire muttered, “I’ll be all right, then.”

  He got a laugh. The lecturer warned, “Don’t be too sure of it. I’m giving you a rough idea of the terrain, but remember there’s a hell of a lot of it—and it tends to be swept by snowstorms, sometimes for weeks without a break. All right, so you’d be starting around September twenty-first, twenty-second—and you’re thinking that’s early in the year, you’d make it before the really heavy snows? But listen—you won’t climb those mountains and then get yourselves over hundreds of miles of the hardest going in the world in just a week or two. You’ll be into winter, sure as eggs. I have to emphasize this—you’d be crossing a frozen wilderness, temperatures way below zero, storms that last weeks and snow continuous for days. You’d have to contend with frostbite, snow-blindness, hunger, crevasses to fall into and sheer cliffs you won’t have the strength to climb, nights when you daren’t sleep because if you do you can’t be sure of waking up again … Now, why am I painting this in somewhat stark colours?” He pointed. “Let me check your agile brain. Sub-lieutenant … ?”