Convoy (3 page)

‘I was married. I’m a widow now.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He had been clumsy but there had been no warning; no rings. Was Exton her married name?

‘He was a pilot,’ she said. ‘Killed in an accident. It was a long time ago.’

She spoke in a curiously flat, unemotional voice. If she was my widow, Yorke thought, I would have liked her to have continued wearing my wedding ring, even if on the other hand. ‘…A long time ago.’ And obviously the memory still hurt. She was still in love with – well, a ghost. No living man could compete with that; the Rupert Brookes always stayed gilded youths, never to be supplanted, never ageing, or becoming unpleasant, their personalities never changing; flies in amber.

‘I’m afraid this is a gloomy conversation, even for a bus,’ he said.

‘You’d prefer soft lights and sweet music and the air thick with tobacco smoke and night-club prices?’ she asked.

‘Or sitting on a five-barred gate along a country lane. Or on a rock watching the waves breaking on a shingle beach.’

‘Why shingle?’ she asked. ‘Why a five-barred gate?’

‘There are lanes and gates around Willesborough. I like the sound of water rolling the pebbles, and the nearest beach is shingle. At Hythe,’ he added. ‘Probably with barbed wire on it now, and land mines, but…’

Sister Scotland looked round and Clare caught her eye and got up. ‘You know Willesborough?’

‘Yes, fairly well. Fine old windmill, one of the best in the country.’

As Clare walked away he did not say that Ashford, into which Willesborough merged, was the railway centre of Kent and one of the Luftwaffe’s main targets, and the windmill was white and enormous and the sort of thing a bolting German bomber pilot was likely to aim at, just for the hell of it.

He saw down to the right, through trees now bare of leaves, Leeds Castle sitting four-square like a fairy-tale fortress in a great oval moat. A castle had stood there for more than a thousand years – the first made of wood and built, if his memory served him, at the time of William the Conqueror, and the present one, now a mellow stone, creamy and smoothed by the centuries. Another potential target for a bolting German pilot; a thousand-pounder in the middle of that should kill the gardener and his wife who served as housekeeper, and a dozen ducks; a victory Goering’s boys could hardly afford to miss. From up here on the main road the water in the moat seemed calm and a faint blueish-green as though distilled by age.

It was just three months ago; exactly twelve weeks the day after tomorrow. August, long days and short nights, not the time of year for destroyers to be steaming close to the Bay of Biscay, not with Junkers and Dorniers using those French airfields around Brest.They were reckoned to have a range of 1200 miles – five hundred out, two hundred to play with and five hundred back.

Death passed by so smoothly, just as Leeds Castle had slid into sight through the trees. You did not always have to see it; if you were reading a book or had been asleep it could pass unnoticed and touch someone else. The signalman had come up to the bridge and handed the page from the signal pad to the captain who read it and walked over to the chart.

Yorke had seen him glancing at the latitude and longitude scales and then putting an index finger on the chart – on a position well into the Bay of Biscay.

‘Number One – here a moment. We have some trouble with the Teds.’

‘The Teds’ – a relic of the
Aztec
’s recent time in the Mediterranean and her association with the Italians, mainly ferrying them as prisoners. The Italians had no love for their allies, and their word for Germans,
Tedeschi
, provided the Royal Navy with an obvious abbreviation; a change from the usual ‘Jerry’.

The captain smoothed out the signal for him to read. It was from the Admiralty and came ten minutes after the
Aztec
had herself picked up garbled signals from a ship being attacked in the Bay.

The captain, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe, was a deceptive man: at first glance he seemed a ruddy and chubby-faced prosperous farmer dressed up in naval uniform. He smoked a foul pipe (originally, before the charring really got to grips with it, a distinctive Peterson of Dublin) and was given to using seagulls as targets when he felt the need to exercise one of the pair of 12-bore hammer guns he kept cased under his bunk. He did it less frequently since Yorke asked him, with well-simulated innocence, if he had ever used one of the pump guns that were becoming popular with American sportsmen. But, seagulls or not, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe had been a fine shot.

His orders once he read the signal had been quiet and complete: warn the engine room that they would soon be going on to full speed, alter course now to east, get the navigator up on the bridge, and make sure that all the small-arms ready-use ammunition lockers were full, and have the galley make enough bully beef sandwiches to provide everyone with three – there was no telling when they would have time for a proper meal.

So the
Aztec
, a Tribal class destroyer on passage from Gibraltar to the Clyde on a sunny day in the late summer and with orders to stay at least four hundred miles from the French coast once abreast of Ferrol, increased to thirty knots and steered for a little pencilled X the navigator had put on the chart.

Bascombe was thorough; he had ordered another lieutenant to decipher the signal again; he had no wish to have the
Aztec
dashing off to the wrong position. And Yorke guessed that in the Operations Room at the Admiralty the little disc, or whatever they used to mark ships on the big plotting board, and which represented the
Aztec
, would be moved towards this other ship.

The
Aztec
– this one was a mighty warrior, despite the peaceful origin of the name: four U-boats sunk so far, thanks to Henry Bascombe’s quite uncanny knack of seeing into a Ted submariner’s mind. Or was it the farmer’s instinct for outwitting a weasel, or even knowing over which holes to drape the nets before putting the ferret into a rabbit warren? But using a Tribal to hunt U-boats: it was an awful waste of a Fleet destroyer.

The first of the Ju 88s had picked up the
Aztec
some fifty miles from the position given by the Admiralty, and Bascombe had given the sequence of helm orders for evasive action as though he was at the local market bidding for a few ewes in which he was not really interested but knew the seller needed the money for some particular purpose, like paying a doctor’s bill. Bascombe would have been that sort of a farmer. Prosperous, cheerful – and thoughtful. Squire Bascombe – that was the nickname he had picked up at Dartmouth many years ago.

The twin-engined Ted had let down its dive brakes – the first time Yorke had ever seen them used on a Ju 88 and they looked like latticed trapdoors opening downwards on the underside of each wing – and tried to line up on the
Aztec
as she jinked below at high speed, probably appearing as a grey dolphin leaving a wide white ribbon of wake.

‘Port fifteen, quartermaster,’ Henry had said, ‘that should do it this time… And now starboard twenty, that’ll break some china in the galley…’

But it had turned the
Aztec
into the last of a stick of five bombs which the despairing German pilot had dropped across the destroyer’s mean course. The mean course: Henry had been so keen to go to the other ship’s help that he had not deviated more than thirty degrees either side of the course at a time when a few circles and figures of eight might have helped to confuse the bomber.

They were small bombs, no more than 250-pounders, but this one had hit B turret, landing on the breech of a gun and just in front of the bridge, blasting up thousands of metal splinters that riddled it like a pepper dredge. The captain, navigator, lookouts, signalmen – every man on the bridge had been killed or badly wounded, and the word had been passed that Mr Yorke was in command – and a fire had started under B turret.

The next four hours had been a nightmare: Yorke could remember nothing beyond standing – crouching, rather – in the wreckage of the bridge smelling burning paint and shouting helm orders down the bent and battered voicepipe, calling engine-room orders to a rating who had managed to rig up a telephone, and leaving the men at the guns to fight as best they could under whichever warrant and petty officers survived while he tried to keep the ship afloat, which meant twisting and weaving like a wounded fox being attacked by eagles.

He had managed to dodge the next two Ju 88s and a Do 217, each of which, after dropping six bombs, had tried to rake the ship with machine-guns, but the
Aztec
’s own light armament had driven them off, a raucous barking of cordite which cheered up the ship’s company. The clatter of empty cartridge cases rattling across the deck with every roll was music; the gunners’ brass band.

But the only surviving officers were himself and the lieutenant ‘E’, who was busy down in the engine room trying to deal with blast damage, keep some pressure on the hoses for fire-fighting, and making sure Yorke had speed in hand.

Soon, as the fire was doused under B turret and casualties were carried below, Yorke retrieved the chart and brought the plot up to date more by guesswork than anything else. The soccer fans among the ratings had the score: twenty-two misses for the
Aztec
– bombs she had managed to dodge – and one hit for the Teds. They were arguing how many points should be scored for a miss and for a hit when lookouts sighted the ship they were supposed to be rescuing – an old Polish destroyer. God knew what she was doing in this corner of Biscay, but enemy bombers were circling her like a swarm of gnats, either ignoring the
Aztec
or because they had not sighted her.

And so he had steered for the Pole; steer for the sound of guns, the fighting instructions said, though presumably Their Lordships in their wisdom had meant ‘sight’ not ‘sound’.

There was no need for radio silence now: that was one of the few advantages of being in direct contact with the enemy. A sighting report to the Admiralty on Fleet wave full power, giving their position, and reporting in cipher the damage and casualties, brought an order in cipher that the civilian passengers on board the other ship must be rescued at all costs. It did not matter that the Ted direction-finding stations could pick up the transmissions and plot the
Aztec
’s position; the bombers knew well enough and must be sending back a running commentary.

The engineer had turned up the wick in a bid for every knot of speed and Yorke was thankful that the stokers, or whichever of the survivors were down there handling the sprayers, were a bit heavy-handed because for a few moments they let in more fuel oil than the furnaces could burn, so that a stream of black smoke poured out of the funnels.

Smoke. He had not thought of it. There was not much wind – a breeze of perhaps ten knots, but every little helped. He took the telephone from the rating and talked to the engineer, and as he spoke he saw two gnats leave the Polish destroyer and head for the
Aztec
.

At the same moment he realized that the Polish destroyer was now stopped, fought to a standstill, and one of the lookouts with binoculars confirmed that she seemed low in the water, although not listing.

‘May have low freeboard, sir.’

There was no time to look her up again in the identification books – even if they could be found in this tangle of bent metal. Grab the boys and girls and bolt, said Their Lordships; thank goodness there was no question of taking the Pole in tow.

And here was the first of a new wave of Teds diving down from ahead. Ju 88s, silvery in the sunlight despite camouflage on the upper surfaces, the black crosses easy to see, the reflection of sun glinting from the flat pieces of Perspex forming the cockpit canopy. Was the pilot right-handed or left? That had been Bascombe’s last mistake; Yorke was sure that for some reason the commander had guessed the pilot was right-handed, but he had been left.

The plane, dive brakes down, was now beginning a shallow dive towards the
Aztec
, which for the moment was steering a straight course. The Ted pilot did not know before he began his bombing run whether the destroyer would jink to his left, his right – or carry straight on. If she turned to port (to his right) and he was right-handed, the plane’s alteration of course to aim his bombs would be easy to make, an instinctive move. Was it any harder to the left? What did their bomb sights look like, anyway? Was it like a car driver pulling out to pass?

‘Now!’ he shouted at the rating holding the engine room telephone and saw the man’s mouth twist into the word ‘Smoke!’; then he called, ‘Starboard thirty!’ into the voicepipe and held on as the
Aztec
heeled violently in response to full effective rudder applied at full speed. He glanced aft through the splinter holes and saw a gush of black smoke streaming up from the funnel; just enough (he hoped) to divert that Ted pilot’s attention for a few seconds when he should be concentrating on his bombing run. From aloft, the
Aztec
might look for a moment as if she had been hit by a bomb not yet dropped.

The score went up to thirty misses, though the engineer complained that two of the six had been close enough to start some rivets below the waterline and there were a few trickles of water round skin fittings. And, he grumbled, all this high-speed steaming was raising the engine-room temperatures…

The next was a Dornier 217, and the score rose to thirty-six; the third and fourth were Ju 88s, which dropped only two bombs each and then tried to spray the
Aztec
with machine-guns.

‘Only forty – they must have used the rest of the sticks on that bloody Pole,’ grumbled the starboard lookout, who had appointed himself scorekeeper.

At that point a petty officer scrambling across the wrecked bridge came up to Yorke, who recognized him despite a grubby and bloodstained bandage round his head.

‘The torpedoes, sir: is there any chance…?’

Yorke thought of all that explosive and compressed air sitting amidships – as well as the depth charges aft. The Admiralty seemed very concerned about whomever was on board the Polish destroyer. Were the torpedoes so much extra weight? Would there be a chance to use them? Perhaps to make sure the Pole sank – the Teds might send out tugs, or even a destroyer.