Decoy (37 page)

Keeler stood to one side and beckoned the figure behind him. The Croupier had materialized from somewhere and with a brief, ‘Leave him to me, Ned,’ started questioning the man, who kept on nodding.

‘Keeler’s right: the chap guessed we must have some leaks and is offering to help sort things out. Says he knows all the valves – yes, and where the spare glasses are for the broken sight valves and gauges.’

‘Very well, Keeler,’ Ned said. ‘You did perfectly right: we’ll keep him with us.’

Keeler grinned contentedly as he returned to his prisoners. At that moment the third and fourth depth-charges exploded, but, compared with the first two, much less violently.

‘Two deep and two shallow settings,’ Jemmy said to Ned. ‘Hello, what’s old Helmut want?’

The Croupier explained in English, and Jemmy gave a short laugh. ‘Can you beat it?’ he asked Ned. ‘Trying to keep any engineer away from his engines is bad enough, but keeping a German engineer away from his toys at a time like this! Yon! Your mate is back!’

‘Thank gawd for that. Tell him to get replacement glasses for these bloody gauges. We’re finding the shut-off valves.’

The Croupier translated and the German happily hurried round, opening little lockers no one had noticed, and setting up the glasses like a barman expecting a rush of customers.

Jemmy nodded his head at Ned, indicating the wardroom, and when the two were inside, Jemmy said: ‘I don’t believe in forecasting the result on the day of the race, Ned, but I think we’re nicely parked under a very thick cold layer. We’re probably about as deep as Herbert up there has ever chased anyone, and right now I doubt if he has the slightest idea where we are –’

‘But the first two of those last four!’ protested Ned.

‘He was just trying his luck: two set very deep – four hundred feet, I reckon, and that’s an absurd depth setting by normal standards – and the last two much shallower. Still deep, probably a hundred and fifty feet. Believe me, when you’re using only four charges instead of six, and at such settings, you’re groping.’

‘Steady on,’ Ned said cautiously. ‘Talk like that and you’ll get the bloody thing bouncing off the periscopes!’

Jemmy shook his head cheerfully. ‘No, Herbert thinks he’s sunk us and is looking for oil and wreckage, or else he thinks this cold layer stretches for miles and knows he can’t cover the whole area to stop us sneaking away. So now we repair the bloody dials and things, tighten up the propshaft packing glands, get the cook to work providing grub – serve our chaps first – and as soon as it’s nightfall we’ll surface and begin our run for home in earnest. Sorry I let that sod catch me. In the Med the Teds didn’t have radar worth a damn. I was crazy to go up like that: the destroyer’s radar operator must have nearly died laughing when he saw our blip come up!’

‘That slurping of water,’ Ned said cautiously.

‘Just bilge water. All these gauges and dials peeing away – doesn’t amount to much, but you notice it sloshing about in the bilge. We’ll pump out in an hour or so, but we’ll give Hazell plenty of time with his hydrophone. He’s good at it, too.’

‘Wish we could get that bloody transmitter working.’

‘Don’t be crazy, Ned: like this we can choose where we go to. If their Lordships knew we had the boat, the cash register and the cookery book, they’d dream up some nonsense like making a rendezvous with a Sunderland and paddling the goodies over in a canoe, which sinks on the way. Let’s keep the ball in our court,’ Jemmy said firmly. ‘You’re the boss, but I’d sooner see you, the Croupier and me turn up at the Citadel in a taxi, the cash register in a suitcase – it’s already fitted in its own wooden box – and the cookery book in your hot little hands. No, it’s our bird; don’t let any of the other bastards claim it!’

Ned carefully pencilled the lines on the German version of the North Atlantic chart, eastern section, used the dividers to measure off the latitude and longitude, and then wrote the figures on the chart.

With nothing else to do, having taken three hurried star sights using the last of the horizon when an unexpected break in the clouds revealed them, he checked over his calculations. No, he had not made any silly error like adding seven and three and writing down nine.

So now they were outside the Black Pit. Beyond it and on the British side of it, in fact. From now on their main enemy was Coastal Command – a Sunderland, a Liberator, a tiny Hudson or even a Catalina diving on them out of a night sky using its radar. The U-boat had neither radar nor radar detector: the German Second Officer had described to Ned U-boat Command’s experiments with two different sorts of detector and how both had been given up when sinkings continued. It seemed that the British, realizing the U-boats began diving as soon as the radar detected them, had guessed that the Germans had devised some sort of detecting device, worked out what it was likely to be, and discovered it gave out some sort of oscillation. The cunning Tommies, according to the German Second Officer, then fitted their planes with a special receiver which picked up the oscillations and then flew round listening and with their radar switched off. The U-boats happily cruised along on the surface with their radar detectors switched on and, they thought, acting as some magic talisman. Suddenly they would have about a minute in which to realize that the Tommies had somehow detected them – obviously without using radar – and were dropping enough depth-charges to sink or damage them.

Listening to the Second Officer’s story, Ned wanted to say, ‘I know the feeling,’ but thought better of it. They were in fact gradually approaching home – only it was an enemy coast! No one – ASIU, BP or the Admiralty – had anticipated that a U-boat’s wireless transmitter might not work; no one could imagine the lifeboat set being lost. It was inconceivable that Ned would have no way of warning anyone that he was approaching. For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost… And, he realized with a cold bitterness, for the want of a transmitter, Britain could lose the war: this U-boat now thundering along on the surface in the darkness of an ocean night had the key (how literally a key) to the Battle of the Atlantic, but no way of preventing her friends destroying her.

Yet…yet…yet: he saw, like the faint glimmer of a distant fleck of phosphorescence, that there was a slight chance of passing the word without having a whole ship’s company watching and later gossiping. A
slight
chance and a
massive
risk. Would it work? He stood up from the chart table, jerked upright by the tension. The Croupier was asleep in his bunk after a tedious watch as they ran submerged, which for both Ned and the Croupier was a far greater strain than running on the surface. On the surface with the U-boat crashing along at near full speed, slamming into waves, slicing great swells in a welter of spray that flew up with the force of flying concrete, they could call on the experience of thousands of hours spent in destroyers and, in Ned’s case, MTBs in the Channel during the time immediately after Dunkirk.

Yon probably carried most of the strain: in addition to the responsibility for the entire mechanical workings of this steel box of tricks he, as a result of the German Navy’s way of running their U-boats, was second-in-command and responsible for diving and surfacing. In addition, though, he had to make up for the fact that neither Ned nor the Croupier had submarine experience: their wartime lives up to now had been devoted to dodging or sinking them. Yon was at this moment asleep on a mattress spread just beside the chart table, occupying the only six feet in the control room where no one would accidentally tread on him.

Jemmy was on the bridge. Ironically, back at the Citadel in London, when Captain Watts had discussed who Ned should take, Watts had had doubts about Jemmy. Not about his courage or his brains, but because in Jemmy’s case both had been stretched to breaking point: no man with any imagination could become the great submarine ace of the Mediterranean without eventually paying an exorbitant price in nervous strain. Finally Ned had insisted on taking Jemmy. All right, he had a terrible twitch, nightmares several times a week, hands that trembled like tuning forks, but Ned knew instinctively that Jemmy had not lost his nerve. He had been under a terrible strain, but the trip in the
City of Norwich
, the week in the lifeboat, and now command of a U-boat had, in a curious and quite inexplicable way, removed the strain. Yes, the twitch which had vanished for a while had now come back, though far less violently, and Jemmy was, instead of being wound up and taut like an overtuned violin, relaxed, jocular and obviously enjoying himself. Both Ned and the Croupier had recognized that Jemmy’s apparently casual behaviour during the destroyer attack was the real Jemmy in action, not an act to keep up the morale of the ship’s company. Joan, Ned thought to himself as he climbed the ladder into the conning tower, is in for a surprise, and it will also do her complexion the world of good.

He looked up the hatchway. ‘Permission to come up on the bridge?’

‘Ah, granted sir,’ Jemmy called down. ‘Turning into a decent sort of night. Wind’s chilly. What did the sights produce?’

Ned gave him the latitude and longitude.

‘We’re well inside the range of the Brylcreem boys,’ Jemmy commented. ‘A Liberator with radar, a Leigh light and a basketful of depth-charges could do for us!’

‘What does a Leigh light look like from down here?’

‘Damned if I really know.’ He turned to the four lookouts. ‘Any of you seen a Leigh light?’

‘Caught winkles at Leigh-on-Sea, sir,’ one of them muttered.

‘Yes, and had to borrow a bent pin to get ’em out: that’s the trouble with you Essex people,’ Jemmy growled.

‘Well, I’ve seen one fitted on the wing of a Liberator on the ground,’ Ned said. ‘As far as I know it’s a fantastically bright searchlight designed by a chap called Leigh, though whether he’s a sailor or an airman, I don’t know. Quite a bright idea – excuse the pun. Leigh realized the only time U-boats ran surfaced outside the Black Pit was at night, so even if Coastal Command picked them up on the radar, it was dam’ difficult to aim depth-charges from the air and drop them on to a radar blip. So with this powerful spotlight the planes work like a poacher with a torch lashed to his shotgun. Very unsporting – you ever done any of it?’

‘No,’ Jemmy said. ‘Snares and ferrets, but never torches. How does it work?’

‘Well, with the torch lashed to the barrel but switched off, you creep along in the darkness to a place where you know there’ll be plenty of rabbits – they come out at night to dance and play, you know, and hey-nonny-nonny. As soon as you’re sure there are one or two there, you aim and switch on the torch. The light hypnotizes them and they sit up and stare back. You can either aim using your sights – that’s difficult because the light dazzles you too. Or, you have to have the torch lined up with the barrel so that if the target is lit you just squeeze the trigger and you’re bound to hit.’

‘I don’t see what’s unsporting about
that
,’ Jemmy said, snuggling his head down into the collar of his oilskin. ‘If you’re a poacher, your livelihood depends on knocking off a few bunnies. And with meat rationing the way it is, they fetch a good price, not being rationed.’

‘Well, I think it’s unsporting,’ Ned said. ‘Like shooting a sitting bird!’

‘That’s the only time I can hit the bastards, when they’re sitting still!’ Jemmy protested. ‘But this Leigh light –
that’s
bloody unsporting.’ All Jemmy’s submarine loyalties bubbled up. ‘Doesn’t give a sub a chance. A bloody great aeroplane screaming down out of the night and switching on a spotlight – why, dammit, the commander might be having a pee over the lee rail just at that moment!’

‘You have the vulgar and limited view of a submariner,’ Ned said. ‘So have I, until we’re safely berthed!’

He watched the U-boat’s long wedge-shaped bow slicing through the quartering seas and listened to the snoring of the diesel exhaust and sucking of the air vents. Strange to think that at this very moment up there in that blackness a British aircraft might have this boat showing as a blip on the radar, and be arming the depth-charges and getting ready to switch on the Leigh light.

‘Yes, well,’ he said to Jemmy, making sure none of the lookouts could hear. He then described the idea which had occurred to him at the chart table.

‘Bloody risky,’ Jemmy commented. ‘Might work if we’re quick enough. We don’t get a second chance, that’s for sure. All of us had better do some dummy runs.’

As memories of the depth-charging faded, both Ned and the Croupier settled down to submarine existence. For both of them the watch system had been a way of life for as long as they could remember, except for the brief time at ASIU and, for Ned, the long time in hospital as doctors fought to save his arm.

Now well inside the area covered by Coastal Command’s searching planes, the boat was being driven hard on the surface at night but moving submerged by day, surfacing a couple of times so that Ned could get some sun sights because, for several evenings, clouds had built up with the last of the light to hide the stars, even though the horizon was clear.

Ned was keeping his balance against the pitching by holding the forward side of the bridge with the lookouts to one side and behind him, each responsible for a ninety-degree sector of the sea and sky, and going through the routine of lifting binoculars, searching the horizon, dropping the binoculars on their strap, rubbing their eyes and looking again.

The wind was from the west, gusting occasionally to fifteen knots, so that the U-boat thundered along eastward in a cloud of her own diesel exhaust, giving the men on the bridge a headache and a metallic taste in their mouths. The long, narrow boat, most of it like the proverbial iceberg, with only its conning tower and upperworks above water, pitched heavily as long swell waves swept under, lifting first the stern, seesawing the hull as the crest passed beneath, and then lifting the bow and burying the stern just in time for the next wave to repeat the sequence.

With the after side of the conning tower open and leading on to a flat gun platform on which the two 20 mm cannon were mounted, with another climb down to the heavier gun, a large following sea was the most dangerous. A rogue sea rushing up astern before the boat had time to start lifting could swamp the bridge and, although in bad weather everyone wore a safety harness securely clipped to rings in the conning tower, Ned had long since noted that the harness only stopped you being washed away; there was nothing to stop a heavy sea smashing you against the steel plating, staving in ribs, breaking arms and legs, or cracking skulls. In a heavy following sea, Ned reckoned, the boat would momentarily submerge, a proposal which shocked Jemmy, who suddenly found himself in a minority.