Decoy (26 page)

Ned waited for the pain: obviously, from the whiplashing and ricocheting bullets round the inside of the bridge, he had not pushed the gun far enough away, and he clutched his stomach with his left hand as he pulled the knife from the collapsing body with his right. But no blood, no pain, no holes. His left hand revealed it was just imagination.

And there was Keeler’s head coming up over the far side of the conning tower, bellowing (Ned could see the man’s mouth opening and closing, but the earplugs kept out the words) and in a second sitting astride, aiming his Sten at another lieutenant and a seaman. Ned suddenly realized that the U-boat Captain, riddled by the Schmeisser, was sprawled on the deck: it was his blood that was running in broad zigzags across the steel plating as the U-boat rolled and pitched.

‘Keep them covered but ready with your grenades!’ Ned yelled as he tugged the pin from his last black banger, lifted the hatch, dropped it down and shut the hatch again.

As Ned waited for the explosion Jemmy appeared at the after side of the bridge, obviously having scrambled up on to the gun platform, followed by the Croupier and Yon. Marines followed, elbowing them aside to get to Sergeant Keeler, who announced in a sudden silence: ‘If these buggers dive, we’re going to get wet feet.’

Before Ned could give any orders, Keeler had pressed the Sten into his hands, flung open the hatch, threw in yet another black banger to one side and started off down the ladder, bellowing: ‘Last man down is a sissy!’

The grenade exploded below inside the conning tower as Ned reached the ladder and followed Keeler down into the gloom, his nose tingling and his throat protesting from the reek of the exploded grenades. Someone above was in such a hurry that Ned found his right hand nipped by a shoe, and he looked up to see Jemmy.

‘Hold it!’ he yelled, but Jemmy, oblivious with earplugs in place, took no notice, forcing Ned to step down faster. He glanced down to see that Keeler had jumped down the next hatch into the control room itself and was now crouched, knife in one hand, grenade in the other, threatening the group of Germans standing rigidly at the foot of the ladder and surrounded by a bewildering number of gauges, wheels and valves.

Ned took one look at them and saw they too were all stupefied by the grenades: they were still on their feet but their eyes were vacant, like a knocked-out boxer in the moment before he hits the canvas.

‘Hold ’em, Ned,’ Jemmy yelled as he jumped down the last few steps. ‘Yon and I will secure the engine room mob!’

He turned and ran aft, obviously quite at home in the pipe-lined tube of the U-boat’s hull.

‘Shall I read ’em the riot act, Ned?’

As Ned pulled out his earplugs he turned to find the Croupier was the last person down the ladder, which was now crowded with commandos and seamen holding Sten guns and obviously feeling cheated.

‘What about the two in the conning tower?’

‘Jemmy and I knocked ’em cold: they won’t be wasting our time. We’ve got them down here now. Who shot the Captain? I didn’t think you had a Sten, and anyway I heard a Schmeisser.’

‘That German sailor waiting to knock off you lot!’

‘But he’s been knifed!’

‘Yes, but get on and tell these Teds they’re prisoners – the ones that aren’t too deafened!’

Jemmy’s bellows from aft brought Corporal Davis and six commandos racing to join him, crouching with Stens and grenades at the ready.

That leaves the forward part of the ship, Ned thought – and the wireless cabin with the Enigma machine. Damnation! The reek of explosives had slowed him down, yet the whole purpose of this operation was to get into the wireless cabin! In the time he had been standing there the wireless officer or operator could have fired a destruction charge and destroyed the Enigma and cipher manuals.

Realizing that he still held the bloodstained commando knife in one hand and a Sten in the other, he ran into the cabin, thankful that the hours spent on board the prize U-boat had made him familiar with the layout.

The curtain was drawn and he ripped it aside. The cabin was in darkness and he felt for the switch and turned it. There it was: a tiny desk to the left had an Enigma machine on it, and to the right was a built-in table with a Morse key in front and a big radio transmitter, its front studded with dials.

He bent over the Enigma. That curious
Ersatz
smell of German synthetics or oil. He lifted up the lid. Yes, it had the four rotors fitted in place: it was a new Mark III German Navy Enigma. All he needed now was the manual giving the daily settings.

He jerked at the drawers in the metal desk but all were locked, and the shelves above the Enigma contained what were obviously only routine reference books.

Steady now, he told himself: we’ve got the Enigma. The manual giving the setting will be locked up, and the Second Lieutenant will have the key. So – a Marine in here guarding the equipment and another on the doorway.

By now seamen and Marines of the boarding party were rounding up Germans in the forward part of the ship and, following orders, keeping them in groups where they had been found.

There were a dozen Germans in the control room, all sitting on the deck with their hands on their heads and facing the Croupier, who was seated comfortably in a chair facing them, holding a Sten gun. Round them all were control wheels ranging in diameter from bicycle wheels to saucers; gauges as big as grandfather clocks and as small as travelling alarm clocks. At least one – Ned recognized it as the very precise depth gauge – was a vertical glass tube marked with graduations, like an enormous clinical thermometer. The Papenberg meter, or some such name. Every wheel had its label; many of the dials had red sectors. Several valves went directly to pipes – obviously the ones that were closed off rapidly as depth-charges caused damage.

‘All the key men here,’ the Croupier reported. ‘Jemmy just brought in the Ted Engineer and tossed him into the pool. He’s gone back to make sure Yon and his ERAs and electrician’s mate know which wicks to trim.’

‘You’ve got the Second Officer?’

‘The wireless wallah? Yes, he’s that wanked-out specimen there, fourth from the left. Except for the Engineer, they’re still too deafened and stunned to hear anything or talk sense. What happened, did you drop a banger down here?’

‘Yes, it landed in the middle of them.’

‘The poor sods will never hear Wagner again! When do we start this cruise?’

‘As soon as Jemmy and Yon are ready.’

‘Jemmy said all the batteries are topped up, the boat’s fairly low on fuel, and everything is working. Want me to question the Engineer?’ the Croupier asked.

‘Yes, but first I’m going to look around on deck. I keep seeing a Tribal steaming straight for us at full speed.’

‘Mind the corpses. Pity it was the Captain.’

‘He’d just ordered the seaman with the Schmeisser to kill all of you in the boat,’ Ned said quietly.

‘Then belay that last pipe and don’t invite me to the funeral.’

Funeral…committing bodies to the deep…a prayer or two and a volley in salute. No, Ned decided; no prayers and no salutes: that Captain had just ordered the cold-blooded murder of more than twenty men in an open boat, and Ned could still see the seaman’s evil, expectant grin as he cocked the Schmeisser. Two murderers. No, there was going to be no funeral for them; no volley fired in salute.

He climbed the ladder into the conning tower and then up to the bridge. The dead men seemed smaller; death had shrivelled them. He picked up the Schmeisser and examined it, setting the safety as he did so. It was a well-balanced gun.

And the lifeboat was still nearly alongside: Leading Seaman Jarvis had remembered his orders to secure the lifeboat’s painter. With the U-boat still lying beam-on to the seas, the lifeboat had drifted to the full extent of the painter, thirty feet to leeward.

The sky was still a patchwork of clouds and weak blue sky; the wind waves were not above three feet on top of the longer swell waves, which were the ones making the U-boat roll.

It was then he noticed the stench coming up from below: an unpleasant mixture of diesel fumes, boiled cabbage,
Ersatz
materials, the sickly warm smell of hot engines and oil, damp clothing, and the reek of too many men crowded together for too long in too small a space.

He looked aft over the gun platform with its guard rails angled outward like the beginnings of a magpie’s crude nest of sticks and mud. Nearest were the twin 20 mm cannons. They had a good field of fire, providing the U-boat was steering away from attacking aircraft. The bigger gun with its square armoured shield was also well placed, although the gunners would be deafened by muzzle blast if the 20 mm cannons fired over their heads.

He took several deep breaths, holding each lung full for as long as he could. Up here it was fresh – he found it easy to ignore the two bodies which were symbols of the depraved side of U-boat warfare. Defenders tried to sink attackers, and vice versa, but until recent times it was accepted that once a ship was sunk the survivors were left alone to save themselves if they could. Hitler’s Navy had now changed the rules – just as the Kaiser’s Army had been the first to use poison gas – and that crumpled body there still wearing a cap with a white cap cover represented a U-boat Captain who was quite willing to take an enemy ship’s captain prisoner and kill other survivors, and the seaman was just a pervert, sexually aroused by killing. Ned realized that this was the example of the way the new Germany went to war. Chivalry to these Swastika-studded thugs was just a joke. He counted the Swastika badges and emblems he could see on the dead Captain’s uniform. Five. And another on his cap.

Yes, the first time he had seen the new warfare had been at Kingsnorth in Kent, during the Battle of Britain. Two hundred or more German fighters and bombers coming in high over Romney Marsh had been attacked by three RAF squadrons. For a few minutes there had been the spasmodic howling of planes diving and climbing and the brief stutter of machine guns and cannons; then had come the faint screams, rapidly getting louder and shriller, of crippled planes diving into the ground, the pilots either killed or trapped.

But some of the crippled planes came down in shallow dives, so that the pilots could bale out, and five parachutes floated, as innocent-looking as dandelion balls. Three of the parachutes had come from German planes, two from RAF, and some time after the German air armada had disappeared to the north-westward, towards London, a German Me 109 with a red-painted propeller boss flew in and methodically fired long bursts into the two RAF parachutes. One of them began to burn, the silk crinkling until instead of being hemispherical it was a bundle of cloth falling at an ever-increasing speed, landing close by on a road, where the impact left the shape of a body on the tarmac. The other parachute seemed undamaged, but through binoculars Ned could see the pilot’s body hanging inert, slowly spinning, like a lynch victim hanging by the neck from a tree branch. These two examples of the new warfare he had seen himself; the third he had heard on the German radio propaganda broadcasts – Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’. This really was a direct order by Hitler: the German broadcasters were proud of that. It seemed that Hitler (alarmed or angered by the Allied commando raids on the Channel coast) had ordered that in future any captured commandos would be executed at once. He claimed their activities came outside the scope of the Geneva Convention.

Ned exhaled in what was almost a sigh. Down below Yon would be ready to handle the diesels and Jemmy would have allocated his own chosen submariners to the various valves and levers. The Croupier and the commandos would have the prisoners under guard.

Fifty Germans (less two, of course), but only twenty-three in the British boarding party. The ten seamen and four officers in his party would be doing watch and watch about, handling the submarine, and that left only nine Marines to keep a guard over the Germans. But…but…there was nowhere in the submarine that fifty prisoners could be kept together. Now beginning to feel a chill he knew was not entirely caused by his duffel coat being left in the lifeboat, he had at last fully realized that a couple of determined Germans could lead the rest into retaking the submarine. They might lose a couple of men, but a few fanatics could be persuasive. Indeed, he thought soberly, reverse the roles – a German boarding party of twenty-three trying to hold fifty British submariners…

He turned and went down the ladder, arriving in the control room just as Jemmy came forward from the engine room.

‘Ah, Ned! We’ve trimmed the wicks, checked the gauges and muttered the magic spell known only to us denizens of the deep. In other words, sir, the engine room reports it is ready for you to get under way, on or below the briny waves.’

‘Very well. But we have too many passengers.’

The Croupier sniffed and commented: ‘I was going to mention that.’

‘Very well,’ Ned said crisply, seeing quite clearly what he had to do. ‘Fetch Yon, and I want you and him to select which German engine room staff you might need.’ He thought quickly and decided that for Enigma he needed only the Second Lieutenant, who was responsible for the wireless and Enigma machine, and the wireless operator, who actually transmitted the signals, tapping away at the Morse key.

‘I know who we want,’ Jemmy said. ‘I’ll go aft and sort ’em out; then we can dump the rest.’

Ned turned to the Croupier. ‘You can be the compère. Start by introducing the officers to me – just point ’em out.’

‘Well, that red-headed bugger at the end –’

‘Wait,’ Ned interrupted, ‘we might as well start the dumping. Sergeant Keeler, take Corporal Davis and four men to the forward torpedo room, and made sure that all of them have Stens. We’ll use that compartment as the main cell. Don’t let them crowd you. And Keeler, although there’s no need to be trigger-happy, make sure Davis takes no risks. And have a man get the Schmeisser – I left it on the bridge.’

Ned turned back to the Croupier, who went on: ‘As I was saying, that red-headed bugger at the end is the First Lieutenant and a troublemaker. He’s already threatening me with what will happen to me personally when
Der Führer
invades England.’