Sunset (10 page)

The Staff Operations Officer, a commander in rank who had obviously been brought back from retirement, gave a satisfied grunt as the fan began to revolve again.

‘The F.O.I.C. would normally want to see you, old chap, but you know how it is. Big flap on just now.'

Brooke felt his jacket sticking to the chair.
Isn't there always?

‘Fact is, orders have been changed. My secretary is fixing 'em right now. You're to go alongside an oiler without delay. I've arranged for you to have anything you need from the dockyard. Then you'll be off again. It's all in the orders.'

Brooke remained calm. ‘Can I be told, sir? Or is that a secret too?'

The commander eyed him doubtfully. ‘On to Simonstown and the Cape. You'll pick up the other ships there. Wish I was going with you!' He grinned and covertly glanced at his watch. ‘How are things in England?'

Brooke thought that if he had said that the King had signed a surrender with the Germans, not a word of it would be heard.

‘A bit bloody at times, sir.'

‘Good, good, that's the ticket!'

Brooke sighed inwardly. ‘I'll get things cracking, sir.'

The Ops officer looked relieved. ‘One thing. You've another subbie joining you. Be there by now, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘Oh? I haven't read anything about him.'

‘No? An oversight, I expect.' He glared at a lieutenant in the doorway. ‘Coming, James. Can't do every bloody thing.'

The lieutenant glanced at Brooke and winked.

Outside it was dusty and humid, and there were oil-slicked patches in the anchorage. Brooke shaded his eyes to stare at Spain. His leg and foot seemed to ache in response as if they, too, sensed where they were.

All those watching eyes, he thought again. Watching as they always had, even in Nelson's time when his ships entered and left this enclosed sea. Fast horsemen to carry the word. He grimaced. Now all it took was a phone call.

Kerr strode along the iron-deck and felt the heat through his shoes. The air rang with drills and hammers and the screech of saws, whilst above the dockyard the cranes and derricks dipped and rose like hungry monsters at a feast.

‘I don't want any dockyard maties on board without my knowing,' he said sharply.

Fox, the chief boatswain's mate, stood with his cap tilted over his eyes and nodded. ‘I know Gib, sir. If you don't screw everything down, it goes!'

Kerr looked around. Beneath the towering Rock and hemmed in by every sort of vessel, he felt trapped. After the passage from Scapa this was a nightmare, and some of the sights were uncomfortable, demoralising, to say the least. The huge piles of cheaply-made coffins on one landing-craft. The shell-damage and buckled plating which was evident everywhere. Where would they stop? When could they hold them back?

He thought of Brooke when he had ordered the whaler away to examine the wreckage. He had imagined him callous, even uncaring when he had brushed aside the idea of searching for the convoy straggler. Now he knew better, or hoped he did.

Fox coughed politely. ‘Beg pardon, sir, but I think Sub-Lieutenant Barrington-Purvis is gettin' embarked on some bother.'

Kerr frowned and strode towards the gangway.

Barrington-Purvis stood, hands on hips, lower lip protruding like a spoiled boy's, and glared at the newcomer who was strolling up the brow.

He was dressed in khaki shirt and slacks like a soldier, with a white cap cover and a tarnished badge to prove that he was not. The cap cover was none too clean. Barrington-Purvis's angry stare settled on the officer's shoulder straps, even more tarnished: the single, wavy stripe of an R.N.V.R. sub-lieutenant. A thin figure, untidy and sloppy.

He snapped, ‘Who the hell are you?'

The other man raised one foot and placed it very carefully on the ship's deck nameplate as he stepped on to the quarterdeck; then with equal care he touched his cap with his fingers.

He smiled. ‘Sub-Lieutenant Kipling, no relation I'm afraid. Come aboard to join.'

Barrington-Purvis was almost beside himself. ‘First I've heard of it!'

‘Well, now.' Kipling regarded him with quiet amusement. ‘What do you do around here, exactly?'

Barrington-Purvis flushed. This so-called officer had some kind of accent. He could not place it, but it sounded rather common.

He replied stiffly, ‘Gunnery officer.'

Kerr stepped between them. ‘I've just heard on the shore phone. You
are
expected.' He held out his hand. ‘Dick Kerr, I'm the first lieutenant
around here.
'

With Kerr present Barrington-Purvis had recovered slightly. He asked haughtily, ‘What's your line?'

The sub-lieutenant in the crumpled khaki looked along the narrow deck. ‘Nice little ship.' He seemed to recall the question and gave that same gentle smile. ‘Line?' He shrugged. ‘I blow up things. People too sometimes.'

Kerr hid a grin. ‘Come down with me. You'll have to share a cabin, I'm afraid.'

They paused beside the accommodation ladder and Kipling said, ‘Not with
him,
I hope.'

The P.O. steward was waiting watchfully, and Kerr wondered what Kingsmill would make of the new member of the wardroom.

Kerr himself knew only a little about him. Kipling was from the navy's Special Force in the Eastern Med, one of the cloak-and-dagger crowd who fought the war their own way and without rules. The Glory Boys, motor gunboats and schooners, anything that could carry the war into enemy-occupied territory.

He studied Kipling's gaunt features. He could sense it even in the slight, untidy figure.
Danger.

‘This way . . .' He shook himself. What the hell would they need an officer like Kipling for, where they were going?

He felt something like an icy hand on his spine. It was madness even to consider the possibilities, and he told himself not to be stupid. But when the captain returned on board the dread was still with him.

To most of the
Serpent
's company the two weeks that followed their departure from Gibraltar seemed unreal, an unexpected reward for their endurance in the real war, which they had left astern. Some of the old sweats like the coxswain and the Gunner (T) had served in the Gulf and even in the Far East, but for the most part the company was a young one, with a large percentage of junior rates who had been flung into the brutal realities of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean with little experience of the kinder face of war.

Southward along the coast of Africa with land only occasionally in sight, pausing at Freetown so that the Chief could top up his fuel bunkers before steering south-east towards the Cape of Good Hope.

At Freetown they had joined company with another destroyer named
Islip
. A much larger ship than
Serpent
and built in the late thirties, she was to be the senior escort of the troop convoy supposedly awaiting their arrival at Cape Town. In the meantime every day brought places, sights and experiences that made the younger sailors round-eyed with wonder. No screaming alarm bells in the middle of some freezing storm with wretched merchantmen burning and dying under torpedo attacks; no sense of helplessness and defeat when they saw the drifting remains of another slaughtered convoy, the corpses parting across the bows to offer their own sense of shame.

The
Islip
's captain, Commander Ralph Tufnell, whom Brooke
had met over drinks at Freetown, had been content to leave them to their own devices. A great bear of a man with a thick black beard, he had suggested, ‘Give 'em a break. If they're like my lads they deserve it!'

A man you could work with, Brooke thought, one who would be easy to respect.

Tufnell had revealed something that had taken him completely by surprise.

‘Be a bit strange for you, I suppose. Probably the last place you'd expect to be running into your own brother.'

Seeing Brooke's expression, he hastened to add, ‘Sorry, old chap – I thought you knew. Pretty hush-hush these days.'

That was not the only thing he had learned from Tufnell. His brother Jeremy, two years his junior but already advanced to commander, was attached to the staff in Hong Kong with other responsibilities to the admiral at Singapore. A staff job: and yet he had never mentioned it, not even to their father. He wondered if Sarah had known, if she was with him. They must have left England immediately after the funeral.

It should not matter any more. Brooke turned as Kerr, accompanied by the new subbie, Paul Kipling, came on to the bridge and Barrington-Purvis handed over the watch.

The two sub-lieutenants made an odd pair, Brooke thought: Barrington-Purvis, the admiral's son, every inch the naval officer, and Kipling who looked anything but. The former still sported the remains of a black eye, which he had gained at a rousing Crossing the Line ceremony when
Serpent
had crossed the Equator off the Gulf of Guinea. Pike, the coxswain, had been King Neptune, with Sister Twiss his lovely queen, and had put all the uninitiated hands through their paces. Foam beards and rough barbers had given everyone a rumbustious crossing, and it was only later that Barrington-Purvis's shiner had been revealed.

In all fairness to him he had not complained, although it had obviously been something very personal.

When Kerr had asked Kipling if he had ever crossed the line, he had admitted cheerfully that he had never been south of Ramsgate before he joined up.

It was difficult to know when Kipling was being serious, or even
if he was capable of it. He seemed to have no secrets or guile, no ‘side' as the Chief had described it.

He came from a large family in London. His father had been a regular soldier, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, and that he had remained until he had been reported missing, presumed killed, in France.

Kerr recalled with amusement Barrington-Purvis's expression of shocked horror when Kipling had remarked one night in the mess, ‘All the Old Man ever did was knock out another kid when he came on leave!' It was obvious that he had found Barrington-Purvis's weaknesses and thoroughly enjoyed getting under the skin of his supercilious opposite number.

Kipling had found his way into the navy by a roundabout route – as he seemed to have done with almost everything. He had left school at fourteen and talked himself into a job in a busy garage on London's North Circular Road: he made a point of calling it a
garridge
just to make Barrington-Purvis wince. He must have learned his trade well, and when he joined the navy (
I didn't much care for the idea of square-bashing in the army
) someone had seen his possibilities and selected him for the torpedo branch, where his knowledge of engineering and wiring soon made themselves apparent. When volunteers had been desperately needed for the bomb-disposal and render-mines-safe section, Kipling had put down his name without even a blink.

He had been put to work with a lieutenant, a man he was reluctant to speak about and probably the only officer he had ever really trusted, Brooke thought, and together they had made safe a large collection of mines during the first devastating raids on London and the south coast.

One night on the middle watch he had stood beside Brooke's tall chair on the open bridge, his lean profile framed against a ceiling of a million stars. Kerr had been checking something or other, and they were alone.

‘His luck ran out. I suppose we got a bit cocky, full of ourselves. It was just another mine.'

Brooke had been filling his pipe but had stopped to listen.

‘He came to the door of this house where the mine was through
the roof. He couldn't get through, but he could have run off an' saved himself.'

Brooke guessed he had gone over it many times. Like Calvert, like Onslow and some of the others.

‘He yelled, “The bloody thing's live! Run for it!” I never even heard it explode. I was dug out three days later.'

‘And he was killed?'

‘Never even found a bloody button!' He flinched. ‘Sorry, sir.'

‘I can understand how you felt.'

‘Feel, sir. Feel.'

Brooke had learned quite a lot that night while the ship had run south towards Sierra Leone. Kipling had been offered a temporary commission and in a few months had been crammed with the basic rudiments of navigation, gunnery and seamanship. He said in his matter-of-fact, detached manner, ‘O.L.Q.s, officer-like qualities as they called them at
King Alfred
– well, I never did get the hang of them.'

He had served in the Levant and amongst the Greek islands, in armed launches and schooners, preying on the enemy's coastal convoys, which chose the sea rather than face the merciless attacks by partisans on land. Kipling and his companions had soon become an even greater danger.

In just days he had settled down on board, even in the wardroom. A balance, like now with Kerr. Chalk and cheese.

Kipling's orders stated that he was to remain in
Serpent
and perform normal watchkeeping and divisional duties until instructions came to the contrary. He had brought some of his ‘toys' aboard with him, watched over anxiously by Barlow the Gunner (T) until they had been safely stowed to his own satisfaction. Kipling had admitted, ‘I don't know
why
, sir. If Hong Kong is attacked I might be ordered to blow up harbour installations.'

Brooke had not commented. It was possible but unlikely, according to those who knew best. The Japanese were busy fighting the Chinese Nationalists, as they had been for years. Their lines of communications were far too stretched to risk a war. And what would be the point? The C-in-C in the Far East would be better informed and better prepared than anyone.

Kerr said, ‘The troopers we're to escort, sir. Do we know how many?'

‘Not yet, Number One. Even
Islip
's skipper's in the dark.'