Strike from the Sea (1978) (3 page)

Ainslie could almost see it happening, as if it had already been. Some clapped-out old freighter eking out her days with any cargo she could get. Trying to avoid the war at all costs, yet unable to resist the temptation which with luck might lead them to the French submarine in her hiding place. Urgency, Melrose had mentioned. Perhaps the French commander had heard something, or expected the Japs to mop up this last tiny fragment of empire with
Soulrière
still at her moorings.

He knew so much about the
Soufrière
from his investigation and instruction that he even remembered the French captain’s name. Capitaine de Frégate Michel Poulain. A good officer to all accounts, and no traitor. But a sailor first and foremost, unwilling to destroy his boat or hand her to another power without protest. If he had wished to do so he would have acted earlier.

Critchley said, ‘I’m off ashore, Bob. Get things moving. The others had better be mustered tomorrow, just to be sure. The
admiral has been informed, and
he’s
going to add his weight.’

Ainslie gave a grim smile. The very mention of Winston Churchill’s interest in the operation could change higher minds than the admiral’s.

When Critchley and Melrose had departed Quinton said, ‘I’m glad it’s started. It was getting on my bloody nerves.’ He grinned. ‘The old firm, eh?’

Ainslie poured two glasses of whisky. There still seemed to be a plentiful supply out here. ‘Thank you for that.’ He looked at him. ‘You had a raw deal, and I’d not want you to think I’d blocked your command for selfish reasons.’

Quinton thrust out his legs and stared up at the deckhead. ‘Fact is, you couldn’t manage without me.’ He laughed. ‘True?’

Ainslie relaxed. ‘True.’

Quinton was serious again. ‘I wonder how the old
Tigress
is managing. After the last battering we took from those Eye-tie depth-charges, I reckon she needed a longer refit than a month, poor old girl.’

They lapsed into silence. Ainslie had often thought of the
Tigress.
A new company, her skipper with his first command. It was too much. They had all been very close in
Tigress.
They had endured attack from air and sea while they had fought to prevent enemy supplies crossing to North Africa.

There were plenty of music-hall jokes about the Italian lack of zeal when it came to fighting, but it had been hard to raise a laugh when their depth-charges had come thundering around the submarine’s hull.

Quinton remarked, ‘I think I’ll have a last run ashore. Make a real night of it.’ He chuckled. ‘Can you imagine all those stuffed shirts in the Long Bar at Raffles if I gave them a few verses of “Eskimo Nell”?’

Ainslie smiled. ‘No chance, John. You’re staying put. There’s a security blanket on this one.’

‘Careless talk costs lives.’ Quinton sighed. ‘I know.’

He raised another glass and nodded approvingly at it. ‘Watch out, guts, here comes the flood!’

Ainslie watched him. It was one of Quinton’s favourite expressions. Nothing had changed.

At the end of the week, true to his promise, the operations officer passed the word that everything was ready.

The night that Ainslie and his party left Singapore was perfect, no moon, good weather and as black as a boot. As the commander of the destroyer which was to carry the prize crew to the rendezvous point had said, ‘If we lose this one, my head will be on the block!’

It was a curious feeling, Ainslie thought. Watching his men hurrying up the destroyer’s brow like fugitives, to be guided below with a minimum of delay.

Critchley came to see them off. With just a few minutes to go he said simply, ‘No more risk than necessary, Bob. You’ve done enough for ten men. Wish to God I was coming with you. I’ll have to sit here, waiting for the reports to come in.’

A sub-lieutenant came out of the darkness. ‘Ready when you are, sir.’

Critchley touched Ainslie’s arm. ‘They’ve probably picked up some news aboard the destroyer already.’ He sounded at a loss. ‘I’d like you to hear it from me.’

‘What news?’

‘Your old command, the
Tigress.
She’s done for. I just heard it at HQ. Bombed returning to base. No survivors.’

Ainslie turned away. It happened every day. It was not even as if he knew her last company, and yet . . . Did submarines really have personality?

‘Thank you. I’m glad you told me. She was a good boat.’

He could picture it. Returning to base, the lookouts relaxed after the patrol, probably their first in earnest. Then out of the clouds, no warning, no chance.

Without thinking he said, ‘I’ll miss her.’

Then with a quick glance at the lights of the base he strode up the brow of the ship.

He met Quinton below the bridge and guessed that he also knew.

‘You heard?’

The Australian nodded slowly. ‘Makes this job that bit more important, Bob.’ He nodded again. ‘Too right.’

Like a grey ghost the destroyer backed clear of the jetty, her screws churning the darkness into white froth. In an hour she was out in the Strait, heading eastwards to the rendezvous.

Ainslie stood on the destroyer’s bridge and watched the land sliding away into a deeper darkness. They were all committed now. The hunt had begun.

2

The Team

LIEUTENANT (E) ANDREW HALLIDAY
sat in a corner of the destroyer’s wardroom and glanced at the other officers near him. He tried not to listen to the ship’s pounding screws and the steady whirr of fans, to calculate and consider what her performance was like. It only made him feel more out of things, a passenger.

Opposite him, leaning over a small table, his features set in a frown of concentration, was Lieutenant David Forster, who, if the operation proved to be successful, would be the submarine’s navigating officer. A typical Dartmouth product, Halliday thought. Usually ready with some witty comment at exactly the right moment, and nearly always right about something or other.

Halliday looked down at his hands. They rested in his lap like extensions of his brain, his tools. Strong, bony fingers, with a few scars as souvenirs of his trade.

He hated this kind of operation, although he kept his doubts to himself. It was not his sort of work. His was the world of machinery, he was used to it, as he was used to being depended upon. Unlike the debonair Forster, Halliday had come up through the ranks, the hard way. A Scot by birth, his home was in London, about ten minutes’ walk from Tower Bridge. He thought of the skipper, Robert Ainslie, how they had first met in the small, elite circle of submariners. Halliday had been the chief engineroom artificer of the little S-boat
Seamist,
and Ainslie, then a lieutenant, had been in command.

North Sea patrols, dodging dive bombers and seaplanes, E-boats and anti-submarine trawlers, feeling their way as the war exploded across Europe and Scandinavia in an unstoppable onslaught.

It had been rough going, relearning all the peacetime lessons, rewriting the rules and then breaking them, too. They had done well, better than several other boats which had failed to return
from their patrol areas. He had learned to work closely with Ainslie, skipper and chief thinking as one. Halliday was the first to admit that he was a withdrawn, self-sufficient person, and his feelings for Ainslie had remained professional rather than personal. Until that day off the Norwegian coast. Despite the humid, oily warmth of the destroyer’s crowded wardroom he felt a shiver on his spine.

They had been at sea for days, waiting and hoping for a chance to have a crack at a German heavy cruiser which had been reported nearby shelling a Norwegian town. The cruiser had not come, but two destroyers had arrived instead. For days they had played cat and mouse across the mouth of a fjord, twisting and turning to avoid a seemingly endless bombardment of depth-charges. Their sealed, dripping world had gone berserk around them. Lights shattered, the hull reeling to the thunder of explosions, each threatening to burst them open like a sardine tin. Sometimes they had been hard put to hold the boat at the right depth, other times she had gone mad as she had plunged through an outflow of fresh water from the great fjord.

The destroyers eventually gave up and left. Gingerly
Seamist
had surfaced, examined her wounds and turned tail for home.

In all those miles of sea, after all the hours of manoeuvring and changing course, they had hit a drifting mine. A small submarine and a tiny pinprick of a mine, somehow they had been drawn together. Halliday still could not remember much more. He had been going to the bridge to report to the skipper about leaks. It should have been safe enough. They had been well within range of fighter cover for the last miles. He could vaguely remember climbing through the conning tower, feeling the air pumping past him as the diesels sucked it down through the hatch. The unshaven lookouts, muffled to the eyes, their binoculars covering the grey sea. Ainslie turning towards the hatch to greet him even as a lookout yelled, ‘Mine, sir! Dead ahead!’ Then the bang, the excruciating pain in his ears as he had fallen half down the ladder. The boat going into a dive, men screaming, their cries smothered by the icy inrush of water.

Then, what seemed a long, long time later, coming to, half choked by salt and oil, and realizing that Ainslie was supporting him in that bitter, bloody sea. There had been seven of them, gasping and cursing, trying to help one another, but losing to the grip of freezing water.

Halliday had wanted to die, but Ainslie’s voice had refused him even that.

Eventually, a hundred years later, an RAF rescue launch had found them. Two officers and two seamen. The others had died.

After that, if Halliday felt anything for Ainslie it was as near to love as a man could feel for another.

When Ainslie had picked up his half-stripe and been given the
Tigress,
Halliday had asked to go with him. Ainslie had given him that quiet, grave smile which he knew so well and had said, ‘No, Chief. The next time you come with me I want to see some gold lace on your sleeve.’ He had known that in the larger submarine Halliday would have been under an engineer officer. He was the sort of man who thought about things like that.

Halliday looked down at his hands again. Well, he had two stripes now, and Ainslie had been promoted ahead of time, too. He smiled grimly. Two plants forced up by glass.

He thought about the
Soufrière
. It would make a change working with the French officers. But just let them make a mess of it and he would show them.

David Forster, the navigating officer, closed his notebook and leaned back in the chair. He was twenty-six years old, with all the confidence of youth honed by war. Forster had felt Halliday watching him and had made a point of not showing it. For despite his normal air of casual optimism, Forster was worried. On the face of it, and provided he could stay in one piece, he had the world at his feet. He came from a respected naval family with a pedigree which went back to the Armada. He was the oldest son, and heir to a considerable estate in Sussex, and he had already gained a DSC for bravery under fire.

He looked upon his appointment as navigation officer as the final stepping-stone to a command of his own. Then he would get out of submarines and use his experience and the considerable dash which being a submariner always gave to find something better. Forster planned well in advance and thought things out for himself. A good command, something which might offer him more chances of advancement ahead of the pack and with luck allow him some time for leisure. He was an all-round sportsman, as much at home on the rugger field as he was carrying a gun on the moors.

But he had one flaw, a real weakness which had given him a frown to cloud his good looks. Forster, above all else, enjoyed
the company of attractive women. Like the sports field, he went all out, as far as he could, then discarded them, being content to shelve them in memory like trophies.

At the submarine base in Hampshire, while they had been preparing for this operation without any real hope that it might come off, Forster had met Daphne. He had known her at a distance for a year or so, the wife of another submariner. It had started after a party, perhaps too many drinks. In wartime you cut corners, made the prospect of death a ready excuse for almost anything.

Forster had never gone to bed with a married woman before. It was not that he held any scruples on the matter, it was just that it had never happened. It had been like being reborn, driven mad in a frenzy of love so primitive that he could still not believe it. If only he had kept to his previous arrangements. If only Daphne’s husband had been at the base instead of the Mediterranean.

But whatever else had happened, he knew Daphne was not a liar. And when she had told him she was pregnant, just hours before he had been ordered to leave for Singapore, he had been stunned. He had not even been able to tell her. The secret orders left nothing to chance. Perhaps even then he had expected the operation to be called off, another false alarm. They were common in wartime.

He listened to the drumming engines, the swish of water along the destroyer’s hull. This was real enough. And she was back there, worried sick. She might do something stupid. He swallowed hard, wondering if he was thinking of her or himself. Maybe the job would soon be over. There was still time. He rubbed his chin desperately. So what? The problem was still there.

He looked at Halliday, his face deep in thought. He would have no such troubles. Set in his ways, the ‘little woman’ back in Blighty knitting balaclavas for sailors. A picture of dad on the mantelpiece.

Forster stood up, feeling sick.
Christ
.

Halliday watched him leave and relaxed in the chair. Soon now. Those fine engines and electric motors were out there, waiting for him and his assistant engineer, Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Deacon. He smiled gravely.
And
the Frenchies, of course.

Further along the hull, in the destroyer’s chief and petty
officers’ mess, Bill Gosling, a submarine torpedo coxswain of long standing, sighed with relief as the tannoy called the company to action stations. It was no clamouring, mind-stopping klaxon, just a mild request to stand to. They’d have to act a bit livelier if they were in Western Approaches, he thought grimly.