Kleber's Convoy (13 page)

Slowly, painstakingly, he worked his way down past the crevasse until he reached the body. It lay sprawled on blood-spattered ice, broken skis around it. He bent down, felt the skier's heart and pulse. He couldn't have been there long. When Kleber removed the injured man's snow goggles he recognised him. It was the Englishman. They were staying at the same hotel. He'd been there for only a few days. Kleber and his sister Marianne had spoken to him once at the bar. A calm, taciturn man with brooding eyes and a firm mouth. Afterwards Marianne had said she thought him attractive. ‘I like these strong silent men.' She laughed mischievously. ‘You never know what they're thinking.'

‘I do, Marianne, when they look at you.'

‘Go on,' she said. ‘You've a nasty mind.'

‘I know human nature,' he protested.

‘Your own,' she said. ‘Not everybody's.'

Kleber worked on the Englishman, examining him with strong, gentle hands. There was an abrasion on the back of the skull. He was bleeding from nose and mouth, and a leg and wrist were broken.

‘
Mein
Gott,
' Kleber muttered. ‘
Mein
Freund,
Sie
machen
es
einen
schwer
… you are certainly a problem, my friend.' He shook the man gently but got no response. He slapped his face. The Englishman groaned. Later he opened his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Christ!'

Kleber smiled reassuringly. ‘Don't worry. It's all right. I'll get you out of here.'

The man turned his head, looked back up the glacier and
frowned. He could not comprehend what had happened. How he'd got there? The German explained. The Englishman shook his head. He remembered nothing of skiing down. But he did recognise the stranger. The tall fair German from the hotel. The man with the good-looking sister. He was appalled at the risks his rescuer must have taken to reach him on the glacier. How would he get out of it? He asked him.

The German said, ‘Save your strength You're going to need it all.' He looked round sizing up the glacier. ‘Wait,' he said. ‘I do first a reconnaissance. To find the route down.' He moved away. The Englishman dozed off. He was awakened by someone shaking him. It was the German again. ‘It is only another two hundred metres to the end of the glacier,' he said. ‘After that an easy slope with good snow.'

Kleber shed his skis and helped the Englishman to his feet, supporting him with an arm around his waist, the injured man's arm round his neck. But it didn't work. The broken leg baulked any carrying techniques, the Englishman groaning, cursing, apologising. At last Kleber decided there was nothing for it but to carry him on his back.

It was an arduous, precarious journey. The man was heavy and it had to be done in short spurts. Twenty yards at a time. Then a rest. After each stint the German would go back to fetch his skis and sticks. Then he would pick up his human bundle and struggle forward again. The surface of the glacier was treacherous; Kleber slipped at times and fell, and the Englishman would cry out with pain. It took two hours to reach the bottom of the slope. By then Kleber was near to exhaustion.

He found a comparatively sheltered place against the flank of a buttress, beneath a rock overhang. He propped the man in a corner, gave him slab chocolate and biscuits, and sat down next to him to rest. Later he said, ‘I go now for help. The weather is good. Don't worry. I will be back with men and a stretcher. But move the limbs as much as possible. To keep the circulation going. Yes?'

‘I'll try.' Redman looked at the German, shaking his head, his face lined with pain, ‘You shouldn't have risked your neck for me.'

‘You would have done the same. It is not so much.'

With sudden formality the Englishman said, ‘My name is
Francis Redman.'

The German bowed. ‘Mine is Hans Kleber.'

They shook hands as if to seal the introduction. Kleber said, ‘
Auf
wiedersehen.
I'll be back soon.'

He was as good as his word, but ‘soon' proved to be many hours later.

That night Redman found himself in a warm bed in a small hospital in the valley, leg and wrist in splints and plaster, head bandaged and a pretty Swiss nurse leaning over him. ‘How do you feel?' she asked.

‘Marvellous,' he said, and fell into a deep sleep.

About an hour after enemy destroyers had forced U-0117 to dive for the second time that morning, Kleber brought her to the surface and set off in pursuit of the convoy, driving down-wind at high speed.

The time was 1139.

Maintaining the last-known course of the convoy the submarine had made good four miles while submerged. In that time Kleber estimated the convoy to have travelled six or seven miles allowing for the westerly current. Before diving U-0117 had been keeping station upwind of JW 137, ten to twelve miles on its starboard quarter.

Not long after surfacing Ausfeld reported, ‘Faint radar impulses between red zero-one-zero and zero-two-five. Estimated range twenty-seven thousand metres.'

‘
Ausgezeichnet
… splendid, Ausfeld. Who is operating the search-receiver?' Kleber had to raise his voice and shout down the voice-pipe to make himself heard above the howl of the wind and the buffeting of the seas.

‘I am,
Herr
Kapitän.
Now we have found the convoy I hand over to Haben the watchkeeper.'

‘It should be called Ausfeld's convoy, not mine,' shouted Kleber.

‘You joke,
Herr
Kapitän.
I do only my best.'

‘A very good best.' Kleber turned to Rathfelder. ‘By heavens, it's freezing. My hands and feet are numb. Go
down and get some hot soup into your body. When you're back, I'll do the same.'

By noon Kleber had closed to within eleven miles of JW 137. Now he put U-0117 broad on the convoy's starboard quarter, maintaining the up-wind position. The U-boat was trimmed well down. A virtually impossible radar target for escorts at that range. The convoy was still steering the course it had been on when U-0117 was last forced to dive. For the time being there was no need for a further shadowing report.

The dock over the chart-table showed 1227.

At 1120, an hour after its first message to the Kola patrol line, the German High Command made a further signal. It was intercepted by the Admiralty and this time Whitehall found it to be a conventional operational signal ordering all U-boats of
Gruppe
Osten
to report their positions. In the next half-hour the Admiralty intercepted B-Bar signals from fourteen U-boats. The HF/DF equipped escorts to JW 137 had already picked these up and plotted the positions of the submarines.

In the operations-room in
Fidelix
and in the U-boat tracking-room in Whitehall, the movements of the Kola U-boats were being studied and analysed. In the time that had elapsed between their responses to the High Command's two signals, the ‘fourteen' submarines had steered courses between north and north-west, and had travelled distances varying from ten to fifteen miles.

Although the courses steered were not convergent, they indicated a general movement towards the north-western extremity of the Skolpen Bank.

The Vice-Admiral examined the plot closely before moving across to the chart of the Murman coast and the radar displays.

‘Well,' he said to his operations-officer, Rory McLeod. ‘At this stage I'd say their tactical plan is to concentrate to the north-west of the Skolpen Bank. They know the minefield's there and that's important for two reasons. One, they are aware that our present course takes us to the Bank. I imagine they assume – and it's a reasonable assumption – that we'll close it within the next six to seven hours. Then we
shall have to decide whether to pass north or south of the minefield. By concentrating on the north-western rim of the Bank they cover either route.'

From under bushy eyebrows the Vice-Admiral's sun-wrinkled eyes switched from Rory McLeod to Cockburn, the navigating officer. ‘Agree with that?'

‘Yes, sir,' they said in unison. McLeod added, ‘You said the enemy's knowledge of this minefield on the Skolpen Bank was important for two reasons. You mentioned the first. What was the second, sir?'

‘The second's pretty obvious. Look.' The Vice-Admiral pointed to the plot. ‘They've split into two groups. One, of six U-boats, is evidently steering to pass to the west of the minefield. The other eight are on courses to the east of it. If they didn't know there was a minefield there they'd be taking the shortest route. In other words they'd be steering convergent courses. I may be wrong. When the High Command next asks for their positions we'll know.'

‘And in the meantime, sir?' McLeod watched the Vice-Admiral closely.

‘We hold on. Allowing a surfaced U-boat eleven or twelve knots in this weather – and that's generous – I doubt if those with the least distance to go can get into position much before 1400. Those with farthest to go, before 1530. If we maintain this course, we'll be all of thirty miles west of the Skolpen Bank by 1530. Provided nothing crops up in the meantime, that will be the moment to make our decision. By then we'll have a pretty good idea where our friends are and what they're up to.'

He looked at the chart again. ‘You've done the staff course, McLeod. D'you go along with my rather potted appreciation of the situation?'

McLeod grinned. ‘Entirely, sir. Only sorry I can't produce folios of beautifully typed appreciations as we did at Greenwich. You know, sir:
Courses
of
action
open
to
the
enemy.
Enemy's
probable
course
of
action
…'

‘Etcetera,' interrupted the Vice-Admiral who was an ex-submariner. ‘Good mental discipline that, but I'm all for looking at the chart and the weather and asking what I'd do if I were the enemy.'

Cockburn then mumbled something under his breath.

‘What was that?' challenged the Vice-Admiral.

‘Nothing, sir. I was just thinking.'

‘H'm.' The Vice-Admiral looking at him speculatively. ‘If you always mumble when you think you should see a doctor.'

Rory McLeod saved the situation. ‘It's clear that we're being shadowed, sir.'

The Vice-Admiral swung round as if shifting guns to a new target. ‘Of course we are, my dear chap, and it's pretty obvious it's our friend
KLEBER,
the phony weather reporter. His so-called weather report has been the only B-Bar transmission this forenoon. It was retransmitted soon afterwards by the German High Command. Now we know that the Kola patrol line is concentrating ahead of us. So much for that weather report.' The Vice-Admiral snorted.

‘But the weather reports are remarkably accurate, sir,' said McLeod. ‘Nothing phony about them in that sense.'

‘They are and that's puzzling. But there's something odd about those signals. The
KLEBER
and the four Xs and those unbreakable cypher groups. They probably tie up with something else to make a sighting report. I'm pretty certain of that.' He blew his nose loudly, ‘Or have you gentlemen alternative suggestions?'

‘As you say, sir. If there's another shadower we'd have picked up his B-Bar sighting report,' said McLeod.

‘Good old staff course,' said the Vice-Admiral. ‘It gets you there in the end.' He drew in his lips, puffed out his cheeks and frowned. ‘This damned weather. If we could fly off aircraft there wouldn't be a surfaced U-boat within a hundred miles.'

‘Yes, sir,' said the navigating officer, anxious to make amends. ‘I couldn't agree more.'

The Vice-Admiral glared at him.

The U-boat tracking-room in Whitehall had reached much the same conclusions as the Vice-Admiral. There, too, it had been decided to await further information of U-boat movements before coming to explicit conclusions.

The timid knock repeated several times roused Redman from half sleep. ‘What is it?' he said.

‘Me, sir.' The curtain was pulled aside and Cupido stood
wedged in the doorway of the sea-cabin, his drawn face unnaturally red in the gleam of the cabin light. To Redman there was something Mephistophelean about the bony forehead, high cheek bones and sunken eyes. He did not know, nor for that matter did the steward, that Cupido was suffering from a gastric ulcer. Cupido had not taken his troubles to the doctor. To him it was just a gnawing pain, the turn of a knife in his bowels. Something he'd been getting on these journeys to Russia. Couldn't eat much without feeling sick afterwards. He'd put it down to indigestion. Meals were at irregular times because the ship's company was so often closed up at action stations. Mostly false alarms. He blamed no one. It was just a fact of life.

For several reasons Cupido evinced in Redman feelings of hostility. The young steward breathed garlic at him; the meals he brought to the sea-cabin which should have been hot were almost invariably cold; and he so often looked scruffy. He did now, standing in the doorway, a grey woollen balaclava over his head, a piece of spunyarn tied round the waist of his watch-coat from which buttons were missing, his seaboots several sizes too large. He dripped water like a dog fresh from a stream. Powdered snow on his eyebrows gave him the appearance of a bedraggled Father Christmas. One hand held the doorframe, steadying him against the movement of the ship, the other clutched the food-carrier.

‘Your lunch, sir,' said Cupido apologetically.

Redman looked at the cabin clock, got off the bunk, stood back to make room. Cupido came into the cabin, put the food-carrier on the deck, pulled the small folding table from the bulkhead.

‘Where's your picking-up harness, Cupido?'

‘Under me watch-coat, sir.'

Redman frowned at the food-carrier.

‘What is it today?' The hoarse, toneless voice was the measure of the captain's exhaustion.

‘Mutton, french beans and potatoes, sir. Steam pudding and treacle. And coffee, sir.' Cupido opened the carrier, took from it the plates of food, the cup, coffee pot and cutlery, and set them into the fiddles on the table.

Redman looked at the food doubtfully, felt it with the back of his hand. First the meat and vegetables, then the
steamed pudding and finally the coffee jug. He frowned at Cupido through red-rimmed eyes. ‘Lukewarm to cold as usual.'

‘Sorry, sir,' said Cupido, adding under his breath. ‘Do me best.'

Redman shook his head, tightened his lips, said nothing. Cupido feared him most when he was like that.

The steward sighed, gathered and steadied himself, took a last sad look at the captain and staggered into the wheel-house. There the combination of an exaggerated pitch and roll threw him against the man at the wheel. ‘Watch it, cock.' said the quartermaster. ‘You'll sink the bloody ship.'

The bows of U-0153 plunged into a head sea. A great wave leapt from the darkness, swept down the casing and broke against the conning-tower, its crest cascading on to the small bridge.

But for the steel belts which secured them to the superstructure, Willi Schluss, Emil Meyer the executive officer, and the bridge dutymen would have been swept over the side. The icy water drained away and Schluss, gripping the rail inside the bridge screen, gasped for breath. Through the voice-pipe he spoke to Brückner the navigating officer in the control-room. ‘
Wieviel
Fahrt
machen
wir
… what speed are we doing?'

‘
Zehn
Knoten,
Herr
Kapitän.
'

‘Ten knots! Too much for this weather. Reduce to revolutions for eight knots.'

‘Eight knots?' Brückner's incredulity travelled up the voice-pipe.

‘Yes. Conditions are impossible up here.'

But for the darkness Willi Schluss would have seen the near frozen face of the executive officer beside him crease into a painful smile. Emil Meyer knew that Hugo Kolb in the engine-room would reduce to the revolutions ordered but later, without the captain's authority, he would slowly increase them again. Brückner – like most of the officers, he was in league with Kolb – would, as he had just done, understate the speed by a couple of knots when the captain next complained. And he certainly would complain, reflected Meyer. He was a frightened little man.
Of
course
conditions on the bridge were impossible. What did he
expect them to be when a submarine drove hard into a force 7 Arctic gale. But this was war. Not a training exercise in the Baltic.

Emil Meyer knew that Schluss had set a course ten degrees farther to the southward than Brückner reported as necessary to reach
KLEBER
's position. Brückner had objected but Schluss reprimanded him, pointing out that
Plan
X
stressed the need to keep well to the southward in making the approach.

Brückner protested that the course he'd given already allowed for that. Schluss, with some sharpness, had reminded Brückner who was in command.

For his part Willi Schluss, though he suspected that his officers operated some sort of cabal against him, felt relieved though only temporarily. If he could delay the approach of the submarine sufficiently, they might not be able to reach Kleber's convoy by 1530, the time set by High Command for completion of the concentration. With luck U-0153 could still be too late for the battle.

Chief Petty Officer Barnes,
Vengeful's
coxswain and senior CPO, knocked on the open door of the first-lieutenant's cabin. The first-lieutenant looked up. ‘Come in, coxswain.'

The coxswain brandished the manilla file and book he was carrying. ‘
Defaulters and requestmen, sir.
'

‘Good – or rather bad. What have we got?'

‘Nothing much, sir. Mostly requestmen. A few defaulters.'

The first-lieutenant leant back in his chair and regarded the coxswain with a friendly smile. Barnes was a first-class chief-petty-officer, the most important cog in the upper deck's non-commissioned wheel, the smooth operation of which was so vital to the life of the ship.