Convoy (13 page)

‘I’m here. Sorry, a visitor seemed to be coming.’

‘You’re all right?’

‘Yes, in fact it was a long way off.’

‘I love you, Ned.’

‘Takes a bomb to get you to admit it.’

‘Takes a bomb for you to appreciate it.’

They paused for a moment, each considering the other’s remark, then she said: ‘The pips will be going in a few moments. Let’s say goodbye now, before the operator interferes.’

‘Until tomorrow, then. Your room is ready.’

‘A bed in the attic is all I need.’

He thought a moment. ‘You have a large room next to mine.’

‘Your mother’s choice?’

‘Yes. There’s an attic if you prefer it.’

‘No, I’ll trust your mother’s judgement.’

As the first pip sounded she said, ‘Good night, my darling,’ and hung up.

Ned walked out of the station and down the slight slope of the forecourt quite unaware of the crackling barrage of anti-aircraft fire and the occasional distant whistle of falling bombs. He could hear only her voice, slightly distorted by the telephone line, and his feet hardly touched the ground.

Both Jemmy and the Croupier were in the Citadel next morning with such bad hangovers that Jemmy yelped every time a twitch jerked his head. Ned, who had walked home down Whitehall and Victoria Street after telephoning Clare, had spent a couple of hours in front of a fire which flickered with all the ferocity of two lumps of coal and one of slate, alternately glancing at the four pages which comprised the evening newspaper and trying to think of U-boats.

Here he sat within half a mile of Parliament and Downing Street in his own home, inconvenienced only by the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns outside. But out in the Atlantic on this November night, between 300 and 3000 miles to the west, there were many convoys under way, some heading south towards the sun, some steaming north from the Tropics, but the majority steering east or west, bringing arms and supplies to Britain from the New World, or returning for more. How many of those convoys had sufficient escorts, and how many were being decimated nightly by U-boats attacking without warning from inside the convoy? Decimate was the right word; one in ten was about the proportion. A thirty-ship convoy losing three ships a night was being decimated. In ten such nights it would be destroyed.

A piece of coal cracked and then fizzed as a pocket of gas ignited. It gave little heat but in common with most Britons on a winter’s night, Ned wore warm clothes and regarded a small coal fire as a spiritual rather than a physical comfort.

He had slept fitfully, a night when the sudden drum-rolls of an anti-aircraft barrage interrupted thoughts of Clare which in turn merged into sleep. Camp coffee and scrambled dried eggs on burnt and dry toast (they were hoarding the butter and margarine ration for the weekend) made a depressing breakfast and he thought he would go in to the Admiralty and read another docket, although Uncle had made it clear that no one was expected to work on Saturday mornings: with a decent night’s sleep impossible and his staff recovering from various unusual experiences, he wanted five good days’ work from each man; the weekends, he said, were for charging batteries and picking up the ideas that tended to float in through the French windows or, he said with a lewd wink, emerge from between a lissome tart’s bosoms.

‘That gin,’ Jemmy whispered. ‘It was the first step on the road to Sodom, or Gomorrah. When you deserted us we went along and met Uncle’s Wren at the point of no return – in this case the number nine bus stop at the end of Piccadilly, whence she had travelled from her Wrennery in Earl’s Court, and, in response to an urgent phone message from me, she had brought company for my loyal shipmate the Croupier.’

At that the Croupier groaned. ‘Soaks up booze like a cruiser’s main suction line, makes love with the thrust of a 16-inch gun’s recoil, laughs the whole time, and is called Sandra.’

‘Are you complaining or boasting?’ Ned inquired.

‘I’m not sure,’ the Croupier said shakily. ‘I’ll tell you later. What doesn’t ache is sore; what isn’t sore is trembling.’

‘When do you see her again?’

‘This afternoon. And with a bit of luck we’ll go straight to bed and stay there for the weekend and I’ll be here making the same complaints on Monday morning.’

‘If you keep off the booze you might conceive some ideas by then,’ Ned said unsympathetically, unlocking the safe and taking out his next docket.

‘If it’s only ideas,’ the Croupier said. ‘I think Jemmy has died. A corpse with a twitch. Ought to be preserved in formalin.’

‘Don’t think so loud,’ Jemmy said. ‘I was just watching Ned taking that docket from the safe. The second convoy, eh Ned? And there’s another of Doenitz’s boys in the middle of it like Neptune’s jack-in-the-box, ready to jump up as soon as it’s dark and shout, “Booo”.’

At that moment Captain Watts’ Wren secretary, Joan, walked in with four cups of coffee on a battered tray. ‘No sugar left and yesterday’s milk has gone sour,’ she said, putting the tray down on Jemmy’s desk. ‘Here, this may help.’ She took a cup herself, sat down at one of the nearby desks, and groaned.

Yorke then noticed that she was pale, with dark rings under her eyes, and remembered Jemmy’s comment a few days earlier, ‘She’s mine.’

‘Poor Joan,’ the Croupier murmured sympathetically. ‘Do you want some aspirins?’

‘I’ve had three already. I ache all over and I feel sick.’

‘Never dive with a submariner,’ the Croupier said. ‘I warned you. They’ve six hands and a rampant periscope.’

‘I know all about that,’ Joan said crossly. ‘And he has all the subtlety of a German sausage seller.’

‘Don’t listen to her,’ Jemmy said quickly, knowing there was no stopping her once she began grumbling.

‘This – this desiccated Neptune’s idea of being romantic is to shout “Up periscope” as he begins to make love. It’s funny the first time, if you like a joke in bed, but not
every
time.’

‘You can always shout “Down periscope” at the appropriate moment and see what happens,’ Ned said.

Jemmy sipped his coffee. ‘I don’t know what she’s grumbling about. Six sightings in one night.’

‘Six?’ Joan was outraged. ‘One and he falls sound asleep. He dreams the rest.’

‘It is not the custom of the service,’ Jemmy said, ‘to discuss one’s sex life with one’s brother officers.’

‘Joan’s a sister officer,’ the Croupier pointed out. ‘The Wrens work under a different set of KRs and AIs.’

‘They bloody well don’t,’ Jemmy said. ‘The King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions apply to everyone. Like the Bible. Everyone in naval uniform, I mean.’

‘I imagine that neither officer was in uniform at the time,’ Ned said dryly.

‘Not unless you count socks,’ Joan said. ‘He complained his feet were cold.’

Ned coughed and Joan said: ‘We’ve shocked the lieutenant. It’s an old Yorke family tradition that a gentleman takes off his socks.’

‘It is,’ Yorke acknowledged, ‘but this particular lieutenant finds it hard to study dockets in an atmosphere thick with concupiscence.’

‘Thick with the stale memory of concupiscence,’ Jemmy corrected. ‘But you’re right. To work. Joan, is there more coffee?’

An hour later Yorke had read the details of yet another convoy attack. Thirty-seven ships sailed and eleven were sunk in seven days; two of them each hit with two torpedoes. The convoy had started with an escort of four corvettes but once the attacks started they had been reinforced by two frigates, whose presence made no difference: sinkings went on at the same rate. Thirteen torpedoes. Although no other tracks had been sighted, the U-boat had probably missed with one and begun the attack with a full outfit of fourteen. Then the U-boat had presumably left the convoy, transmitted a brief score-board report in cipher, and headed for home, which most likely would be Lorient. British direction-finders would have picked up the transmission, plotted the position and perhaps broken the ciphered message, but none of that helped; the U-boat’s route home didn’t matter a damn – as far as Ned’s problem was concerned – and the number of ships she had sunk was hardly a secret…

Six hundred and sixty men had died in those eleven merchant ships. The lucky ones were killed by blast from torpedoes. The rest were drowned as their ships sank, died suspended in the water by their lifejackets, or died of exposure in lifeboats. Ten masters had died – and they were the most irreplaceable part of a convoy. More than ninety DEMS gunners, men of the Maritime Regiment of Royal Artillery or seamen from the Royal Navy, all volunteers, had died. And all of them, ships, cargoes and men, recorded only by a few dozen pages in a manilla folder.

He glanced at the cargoes lost and totalled some of the figures: 1595 lorries, 550 tanks, 66 fighters, 24 bombers, 44 thousand tons of mixed cargo… All sunk by one U-boat in a convoy which included British, American, Norwegian, Dutch and French ships belonging to the Allies, and a neutral, a Swedish dry cargo ship. It must be nerve-wracking to be in a neutral ship sailing in an Allied convoy. Still, quite a few did; it was better than taking the risk of sailing alone and being sunk by a U-boat captain who did not believe that navigation and accommodation lights by night or a neutral ensign by day were anything but a trap.

Once again he drew a convoy plan, marking in the positions of the thirty-seven ships and the names of those sunk. Once again none of the victims was in the two outside columns, nor among the leaders or the last in the columns.

A pattern? Not really. On a night when two ships were sunk, they were usually in adjoining columns, but in two cases on the next night the third ship in a particular column had been hit, followed by the fourth, and the U-boat had obviously waited after the first hit and fired at the next ship to pass.

The coffee and Nature’s own resources had restored Jemmy, and Yorke walked over to him with the convoy diagram. ‘Another picture – can you tell me a story to go with it?’

Jemmy examined it for several minutes.

‘The victims are more concentrated than those in the last convoy you showed me.’

‘Which means the U-boat didn’t move around so much.’

‘You’re learning, Ned. You’re not sure what the lesson is, but you know you’re learning something!’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘Handwriting, Ned; everyone writes differently. Driving a car – everyone has some mannerism which might be difficult to spot but is there all right. Taking soup: everyone slurps it up differently. Understand?’

Yorke nodded. ‘Two different Ted skippers. This one is cautious, doesn’t move far from his first victim to his second, probably because he fears detection by Asdic. Seems not to have missed, although the previous chap missed at least once. And he seems content to shut the shop for the night once he’s sunk two ships.’

‘Exactly,’ Jemmy said, mustering a grin. ‘Now bear that in mind when you plot the other convoys.’

‘But I can’t expect to find two different convoys attacked by the same skipper.’

‘Of course not. You might over a long period, but it wouldn’t help much even if you did because he’d show the same style. Now, what you should be doing – if you haven’t a fearful hangover like mine – is getting into the minds of several U-boat skippers. Eleven, in fact, and discovering eleven different ways of torpedoing a number of ships from inside a convoy. I don’t know the total number of ships sunk in all those convoys but say one hundred. One hundred attacks by eleven boats. Shake that up inside your skull and then you should be better able to dream up ways of stopping it.’

‘Poachers and gamekeepers.’

‘Exactly. Brother Doenitz and his gipsy orchestra have thought up a way of penetrating a convoy with a single U-boat; now Brother Watts and his string septet have to find out how they got in and mend the fence. In fact Brother Ned has the job, and I don’t envy him.’

‘Do you think they’ve worked it out, or just that in the beginning one boat did it more or less accidentally, and U-boat Command have put it in the drillbook?’

‘Worked it out, I’m sure. Worked it out at a desk in U-boat Headquarters in Lorient or the
Seekriegsleitung
in Berlin.’

‘Why not discovered it accidentally?’

Jemmy looked up at Ned, his eyes narrowing as he held out the convoy diagram to return it. ‘Ned, my old chum, do you feel strong enough to hear Jemmy’s Epistle to the Heathens?’

Ned nodded. ‘As long as you’re strong enough to preach it.’

‘Well, Ned, you don’t seem to realize it, but Uncle has given you ASIU’s toughest problem to solve. Not just ASIU’s, but the Navy’s.’

Ned laughed, misled by Jemmy’s tone, but the lieutenant gave a spasmodic twitch and held up a warning finger. ‘I’m serious, Ned: let me explain. The Battle of the Atlantic is simply the battle between our convoys and Doenitz’s U-boats. We’ll win it in the end because we’ve got to – we’re within months, if not weeks, of starving. The Teds are sinking more ships than we’re building and that quite simply means we’re losing. You can draw graphs, juggle statistics, make speeches in secret sessions of the House of Commons, puff a Woodbine or wave a cigar, but the Teds are bound to win the war if they can go on sinking more ships than we build.’

‘Don’t forget the Americans.’

‘I’m not. They’ve been in the war only a few months, and up to now their Navy is not affecting convoy losses: even when you toss in their shipbuilding capacity – not very impressive at the moment – the Teds are still sinking more than we and the Yanks are building. So we’re losing. It’s like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.’

‘What about the pack attacks?’ Ned asked. ‘They’re sinking scores of ships but my “insider” Teds are only sinking dozens. What’s the importance of these inside-the-convoy boys compared with the packs attacking from the outside?’

‘That’s easy to answer. Beating the pack attacks means quite simply having more and bigger escorts and maybe – once we have enough – letting loose packs of frigates or destroyers to hunt down the Ted boats. Unless Doenitz has some surprises in store, we’ll beat the packs once we have more escorts. That’s oversimplifying, but basically we and the Yanks just have to build more.