In the Line of Fire (A Donald Cameron Naval Thriller) Read online

  Cameron laughed. ‘Six trips out and we’ve never seen ‘em yet! Why should we this time?’

  ‘There’s always a first time,’ Lavington said. There was a whine in his voice now. ‘God, how I wish this bloody war was over!’

  Once again Cameron laughed and softly sang under his breath: ‘When this bloody war is over, Oh, How happy I shall be… no more bullshit from the wardroom, no more draft chits off to sea…’

  ‘Shut yer muckin’ mouth!’ an angry voice said.

  Cameron said obligingly, ‘All right, Mr Tomkins. Sorry.’

  ‘One more muckin’ word and you’ll get filled in.’

  Alongside Cameron, Lavington said disconsolately, ‘They’re all so awfully coarse, these men.’ He hadn’t intended anyone but Cameron to hear this, but Stripey Tomkins did. The fat AB levered himself to his feet, his eyes red with lack of sleep and now with anger, and bent threateningly over Lavington.

  ‘On your feet, sonny.’

  Lavington stared back glassily, looking like a ghost in the blue light on the bulkhead. ‘What for?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to give you a lesson in bleedin’ politeness,’ Tomkins said, and reached for Lavington’s duffel-coat. Gathering the material in his fist, he heaved the sick-looking ordinary seaman to his feet and then drew back his other fist. Cameron got quickly to his feet and grabbed the fat man’s arm.

  He said, ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you, Mr Tomkins, even though he asked for it.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody cheeky!’ Tomkins, still baffled as to how to react to the ‘Mr Tomkins’ but well knowing it was said sardonically, glared at Cameron. ‘What if I do, eh?’

  ‘Then I’ll send your false teeth through the back of your throat, Mr Tomkins.’

  ‘You an’else?’

  Cameron smiled. ‘Just me.’ He towered, head bent away from the deckhead. He extended his two hands, big hands now bunched into fists. ‘This one,’ he said calmly, indicating his right, ‘is hospital. The other’s sudden death. There was a trawlerman once… thought he could take liberties with a green youth. He never tried again. Go back to sleep, Mr Tomkins.’

  ‘You ‘it me and you’ll be up before Jimmy. Then you can kiss your bleedin’ commission goodbye.’

  ‘I’ll chance that,’ Cameron said quietly.

  Tomkins let go of the duffel-coat and Lavington almost collapsed back to the deck of the galley flat. Tomkins, eyes furious, said in a thick voice, ‘Sod you, Cameron. I’ll get you one day, see if I muckin’ don’t.’ He turned away and flopped back into his billet. Cameron also got down on the deck and once again tried to sleep. He couldn’t; Lavington seemed to be talking to himself or something, a low dirge of self-pity that grated badly. Tomkins’ reaction hadn’t been all that surprising, but Tomkins had all the instincts of a bully and Cameron didn’t like bullies, however justified they might be on occasions.

  Meanwhile, Lavington worried him: he was no advertisement for CW ratings, already much unloved by their lower-deck shipmates, and he sounded now as though he might well be about to crack up. He had a sensitive face, much too sensitive for the war at sea; he was over-careful of his hands, never bent his full weight to the falls, for instance, when the pipe came for the lower deck to be cleared for hoisting the whaler in port. Cameron’s own hands had not been fully toughened up when he had his first experience of Up Whaler and afterwards he had found them badly blistered, but they had soon got their hardness. Minds had to be as hard as hands in the fo’c’sle of one of His Majesty’s destroyers on war service. It was perhaps the toughest assignment in the Navy. Sleep came at last as Cameron drifted off into a nightmare jumble of thoughts and fancies in which Mary Anstey was at one moment about to jump from the after deck of a blazing oil-tanker and the next was on the pier at Lyness in Scapa, welcoming him back from sea, now wearing on her left sleeve the blue fouled anchor of a Leading Wren and thus his superior officer. He was holding Mary in his arms when the shattering sound of the alarm rattlers broke into what was after all only a surface sleep and he came fully awake on the instant.

  Already dressed and lifebelted as all hands always were at sea, he joined the mad scramble for the iron-deck and doubled up the ladder to the compass platform just as the three-inch gun amidships blasted off starshell. There was a tremendous crack and seconds later the shell burst off the starboard bow, cascading brilliance to illuminate the seas in the vicinity. In this brilliance could be seen the surfacing U-boat, long and low and menacing as the water foamed from her casing and men scrambled from the conning tower and fore hatch, running for the gun-mounting on the casing. This went immediately into action, belching smoke and flame and sending its projectiles screaming towards the helpless destroyer.

  Chapter Four

  More starshell went up; the Lewis gunners were in action now, sweeping the U-boat’s conning tower and casing. So were the pom-poms and the machine-gun’s crew. From the U-boat a man went over the side of the conning tower, plummeted screaming down to the casing, then bounced off. On the whole the German seemed to be getting the worst of it, at least until a shell from her 3.5-inch gun took Carmarthen’s aftermost 4.7-inch fair and square, burst on the gun-shield and almost took the mounting out of the lifted deck. The gun itself vanished as though it had never existed and the casualties were heavy: strips of flesh and entrails lay with shattered dismembered limbs among the wreckage or flew, in the starshells’ light, like bloody pennants, from the standing rigging aft and amidships. Number Three gun’s crew, just for’ard of the gaping hole that had been Number Four gun, had been caught by the lethal spread of the explosion and the flying metal and all were dead except for the gun-layer who, miraculously, had survived without a scratch.

  Then, as Carmarthen’s close-range weapons kept up their stuttering fire, there was a swirl in the heavy sea and the U-boat had gone back into the uneasy depths.

  Seymour said savagely, ‘We haven’t heard the last of the bugger. Go aft and have a look… let me know the casualties and damage, Sub. I’ll keep the ship closed up at action stations for a while yet.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Humphries went down the starboard ladder at the rush. When he returned, his story was a mixed one: the only further structural damage was to Number Four gun and its mounting and once the hole in the deck had been plugged and covered the ship would be little less seaworthy, if such was the word, than before — except that, as Seymour had already noted, the removal of Number Four gun’s weight from aft had put her a little farther down by the head. The really bad news was that ten more men had died and the Surgeon-Lieutenant had four more wounded to attend to, three of them unlikely to survive into Belfast Lough. Carmarthen drifted on, lone and stricken; and during the next forenoon watch the dead were sewn into canvas shrouds and committed to the sea. This was in fact the second committal, for those killed in the initial attack on the convoy had been disposed of as soon as Carmarthen had been well clear of the area. Seymour once again read the short, simple service in a voice that rang defiance out over the heaving Atlantic wastes, his face grey with strain, tiredness and sorrow for the men he had sailed with for many months. As each shrouded figure was laid upon the plank beneath the folds of the White Ensign, and the plank was tilted, the Captain’s voice followed it:

  ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live… in the midst of life we are in death… our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep…’

  It was soon all over and the hands were fallen out. Normal routine was resumed; rum was issued, three-water grog for junior ratings, neat spirit for the chief and petty officers who were presumed to obey the Admiralty’s instruction that it should not be bottled for subsequent over-indulgence, but who in fact seldom took any notice of that, preferring to chance their arms. Birthdays cropped up now and again, and needed to be properly celebrated. On the compass platform Seymour brooded, thought again about that U-boat: he would not have expected her to surface in such foul weather, weather that was scarcely co
nducive to good gunnery — the shot that had taken out Number Four gun was sheer luck — but then of course all submarines needed to charge batteries and no doubt that was what the U-boat had been doing.

  When that day’s noon sight was taken, using a false horizon — the visibility had come down a little further before noon and the horizons were too close — it showed bad news. The destroyer had in fact made some unwelcome and unexpected northing and although she was somewhat closer to home, she was being taken by the drifting action of the wind and sea into the area where the Germans might be expected to operate the Focke-Wulf 200s. Seymour’s hope of making a little south had died with the flooding of the for’ard decks and the consequent lifting of the twin screws out of the water…

  *

  It was no time before the buzz had reached the lower deck: they were not making a good heading.

  ‘It’ll be bloody cold if we head up too far,’ Stripey Tomkins said. ‘Know what?’

  ‘What?’ Lavington asked, blue with cold already.

  ‘Freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Know something else, do you, eh?’ Tomkins scratched under his right armpit. ‘I was off Greenland once, up the Denmark Strait. Fishery protection, back in 1934 it wos. Skipper, ‘e’d made a cock-up and we wos right off course like. Just before Christmas. Talk about cold! One o’ me mates, ‘e lost ‘is wherewithal.’

  ‘Wherewithal?’

  ‘Wherewithal to enjoy life. Got frostbite in it, see. Quack ‘ad to amputate it.’ Tomkins gave a coarse laugh. ‘Bloody fine officer you’ll make, without a pr—’

  ‘All right, skip it, Stripey.’ This was Leading-Seaman Farrow, a gloomy man with a long, horse-like face. ‘We all know your yarns. We don’t have to believe ‘em, but don’t try to make things worse, it don’t ‘elp at a time like this.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I said, put a sock in it, Stripey. That’s an order.’ Farrow’s voice held the snap of authority and Tomkins subsided, muttering about jumped-up killicks, killick being the sobriquet for leading hands, deriving from the rank-badge of the fouled anchor. Farrow turned his head. ‘You there, Cameron?’

  ‘Yes, Killick?’

  ‘You’ve done time in your old man’s trawlers, right?’

  Cameron nodded. ‘Right.’

  ‘Denmark Strait?’

  ‘No, not that far up. Off the Shetlands… well north of Shetland as a matter of fact.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Cold but bearable,’ Cameron said, and added, ‘Just. That’s if you’re kept busy on deck and warm below.’

  ‘Which we aren’t bloody goin’ to be,’ Tomkins said, and said with truth: there was no warmth below at all, other than maybe in the silent engine-room and boiler-rooms where steam was being maintained throughout, and watchkeeping duties on deck were never exactly active physically. You stood about and stamped your feet behind the gun-shields or at the tubes or on lookout, and prayed you wouldn’t freeze to a statue. When it snowed, you became a temporary snowman, and the wind turned you blue. Of course, they all had their cold-weather issue gear: knitted balaclavas, thick socks, duffel-coats and long johns extending from waist to ankles which protected wherewithals but could all too soon get soaked through with seawater or driving rain that could penetrate any amount of oilskin. Life at sea in the world’s extremities both north and south was a cold hell and that fact couldn’t be denied, Farrow or no Farrow. Stripey Tomkins said so, and was again told to put a sock in it.

  ‘All right, all right, Bleedin’-Seaman Farrow.’ Tomkins scowled. ‘Me, I’ll put two pairs of woolly socks on it,’ he said. ‘Me old woman, she wouldn’t expect less… nor would a couple of popsies in Pompey, come to that.’

  Cameron glanced across at Lavington: the former medical student looked almost on the verge of tears. He’d been, Cameron understood, at Cambridge and hoping to go on to Barts in London. Life as an undergraduate at Cambridge must have been a lovely soft billet and a privileged one too. Set of rooms, servant, good food, soft bed and all that went with all that. A very far cry from the fo’c’sle of a destroyer, even a destroyer that wasn’t in a half-sinking condition in heavy seas and under constant and increasing danger of attack. At Cambridge, there wouldn’t have been any Stripey Tomkinses, and the lascivious talk wouldn’t have been so bald, probably. Cameron was mighty glad his father had made him sail in the trawlers: at least he’d had some sort of preparation for what he was now facing. Like Kipling’s soldiers, trawlermen at sea didn’t grow into plaster saints. But Lavington had had no preparation at all; he was certainly not alone in that, but there was a softness, a basic softness about him that was making it far, far worse to bear. When Leading-Seaman Farrow left the galley flat to go aft, Stripey Tomkins resumed the baiting of Lavington. This time, Cameron didn’t interfere, and wouldn’t do so short of physical threat. He couldn’t be nanny all the time, and it wouldn’t help Lavington if he was. The baiting would only become worse.

  *

  Three days before Carmarthen had left Scapa to pick up her convoy, Mary Anstey had been suddenly drafted from Portsmouth, where she had worked in the office of the Captain’s secretary at HMS Vernon, the anti-submarine and torpedo school. She had been given a draft chit and a railway warrant, third class, from Portsmouth to Rosyth on the Firth of Forth in Scotland, to serve on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Rosyth, whose dockyard frequently contained some of the Home Fleet battleships — the mighty Nelson and Rodney, and the battle-cruiser Hood. Never for too long, for Hitler and Goering were in the habit of despatching aircraft to bomb the Forth Bridge, and if they ever happened to bring its great network of spans and girders and railway tracks down, then an important part of Britain’s battlefleet might well be hemmed in for the duration. They hadn’t got it yet, and Rosyth was in good heart, and able to laugh heartily over the story of the American destroyer captain, dangerously entering the war zone even though his country was not yet at war, who was given by signal an anchorage ‘beyond the Forth Bridge’. When he had hit some rocks fair and square he had complained bitterly that, gee, he’d only passed one goddam bridge… Apochryphal the story might be, but the Navy in Rosyth enjoyed it as they watched the great ships proceed in safety back to Scapa with their destroyer escorts. Mary Anstey, when she had a moment to spare, thought of writing to Donald Cameron to tell him she was somewhat closer to him, but she didn’t; she really didn’t know why, though she had a confused sort of idea that to let him know she was closer might disturb him and deflect his concentration on the all-important target of his commission, which meant a lot to him. He had talked in Portsmouth about possibly seeking to transfer to RN after the war, if there was an after. She felt there might not be, despite a popular song of the moment that drooled stickily about after and said, There’s a land of begin again, On the other side of the hill, Where we’ll learn to love and live again, When the world is quiet and still. If Donald wanted to transfer to RN, than an RNVR commission was a first essential; and in any case he would get no leave till — if he got his recommend — he went back to Portsmouth for his commission board, so why bother him now?

  Donald Cameron was much on Mary’s mind and it showed in pensiveness; she opened her heart a little way to a buxom, motherly Leading Wren almost twice her age when the latter gave her the opening on her first day in Rosyth.

  ‘Boyfriend trouble, love?’

  Mary smiled. ‘Not trouble exactly.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. Absence! Down in Portsmouth, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s at sea.’

  ‘Well, I hope he loves you in return, love, that’s all. They don’t all, not by a long chalk. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s the motto of some.’ The tone had suddenly become a shade bitter and subsequent conversation revealed that back in 1914 the buxom lady had loved — too well — an able-seaman who had deserted her for another just before he had sailed under Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock in the armoured cruiser Good Hope, to be sunk at the battle of Coronel. There had been issue, fathered
by a hero, which was something; and the lady had subsequently married a grocer’s assistant from Clapham who had been willing to accept the child, a girl. ‘Don’t go and get caught like that, love.’

  ‘I don’t think Donald would do that.’

  ‘No. Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t, love, but there’s them as do, that’s all I can say. What’s the young man’s ship or shouldn’t I ask?’

  Mary told her.

  ‘Carmarthen, eh. First Destroyer Escort Group, out of Scapa.’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know?’

  The motherly woman laughed. ‘My job to know, and yours too from now on.’ Leading Wren Davis was in Operations, for which Mary also had been detailed. ‘You’ll see. It’s interesting, I’ll say that for it, but there’s times when it gets you down terribly, love. The sinkings and that.’ She added, ‘You feel responsible in a kind of way. Not personal exactly… but you’re one of the team that sends them out and gives them their routeing orders.’

  Mary did find it interesting, the more so as Carmarthen was involved from the word go. She saw the ship indicated on the plot, watched its progress as estimated across the Atlantic with the slow west-bound convoy, day by day. Saw, too, the likely positions of the hunting packs of U-boats out from the Fatherland to attack and sink British ships and seamen to the greater glory of the Reich. She found her nails digging hard into her palms: along with everyone else in Britain she hated Hitler, but now more so because she had that personal stake and was where she could watch by proxy of the Staff Officer (Operations) the progress of the convoy and its escort. If only they could have air cover, she heard SO(O), a Commander, say through set teeth — but the aircraft-carriers were all too few and could not be spared from other war theatres; and the aircraft of the RAF’S Coastal Command hadn’t the fuel capacity to extend far enough from their bases and then return.