Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) (11 page)

It all took time. Police arrived, military, and one local constable on his bicycle. A breakdown crew came to drag away the smashed car, and an ambulance from an army hospital.

Foley stood in the road, the girl’s cap in one hand.

Brayshaw signalled to his driver. ‘I’ll go with the ambulance. You’d better take the Old Man’s car. You are on operational stand-by, remember?’

‘I’ll not forget. If you’re there when she comes out of it, tell her . . .’

Brayshaw smiled.

‘I’ll tell her.’

The marine waited for Foley to settle into the seat beside him. He had not even noticed the blood on his uniform, the cuts on his hand.

‘I expect you could do with a wet, sir?’

Foley looked at him. ‘I’ll buy one for you, too. Thanks.’ He wanted to thump his arm, but his hand did not move. It was still gripping her skin, with her fingers in his.

The marine grinned to himself. Not so dusty after all. They could pick up the lieutenant’s missing tiffy at the same time; even Pusser Chavasse couldn’t moan about that.

It was late when Foley eventually arrived back at the inlet, the lengthening shadows hiding the scars and giving back some of its original memories. The wardroom was a village school again, the operations section only three small cottages huddled together facing the sea. You could even imagine bathing suits hanging out there to dry for another day.

They had found Petty Officer Shannon in the pub and he had downed his drink without comment or protest. The marine must have warned him in some way to say nothing about Foley’s bloodstained uniform.

Brayshaw’s chief writer had been waiting for them. Captain Chavasse had been told about the car’s errand of mercy but not, he suspected, its other mission to the pub outside Lulworth.

ML366 was strangely quiet, considering that her full company was aboard. Pitching gently at her moorings, with just a hint of music coming from the crew’s messdeck, and the occasional stammer of morse from the W/T office opposite their tiny wardroom.

Foley entered his cabin and examined the girl’s cap, which he had brought with him, unwilling to leave it, or let it go, as if it were a kind of talisman. He held it to the light; one of her dark hairs was caught in the H.M.S. cap tally, and a small piece of glass. He held it between finger and thumb. Brayshaw had even found time to pass a message to his chief writer, who had written it meticulously on the back of an old Request Form.

She will be OK. Don’t worry. Keep your head down.

Foley laid the cap on his bunk and looked down at the
stains on his jacket. In the pub nobody had mentioned it.
Careless talk costs lives.

He wondered what Brayshaw had left unsaid. Was she badly hurt? So much blood . . .

He opened his locker and took out a bottle of gin. He would have to watch it, be on top line tomorrow. He felt the deck quiver. The Chief was down there now with his machinery. They trusted him . . .
Our Skipper.

Someone shouted, ‘Pipe down! Remember the watchkeepers, can’t you!’

But there were no watchkeepers, apart from a sentry on the bridge. A small company, brought together by something nobody ever bothered to explain.

He looked at the Wren’s cap again. She had been afraid. But more of what he was doing to her, exposing her body, than for her safety.
My father’s a doctor, you see?

Where was it leading, anyway? He looked at the empty glass, but could not recall filling it, let alone drinking the neat gin.

In Coastal Forces, the ‘little ships’, each operation might be the last. They all knew that, or should by now.

He wondered what Allison was doing. Avoiding his skipper, most likely. Or worrying about tomorrow. Foley glanced at the bottle.
Like the rest of us.

He thought of the wrecked car, and the girl holding her cap. This cap.
For all of them.

A crooner’s voice drifted aft from the messdeck.
‘I’ll see you again . . .’

It was drowned out instantly by, ‘Turn that bloody row off!’ And there was laughter as well.

He picked up the cap, and after a slight hesitation put it into his drawer and locked it.

He wanted to smile, laugh at himself. But all he said was, ‘Margot.’

Petty Officer Bert Coker lifted the reefer jacket from its hanger and eyed it critically in the filtered sunshine.

‘Best I can do, sir.’ He picked an invisible hair from one lapel. ‘But you did give it a rough time, if I may say so.’

David Masters leaned one elbow on the desk and tried to remember the name of an officer he had spoken to earlier. It seemed impossible that things could have moved so fast since that moment when he had left Rear-Admiral Fawcett at Portland.

After the ‘incident’ he had returned here to learn of the unexpected operation which required the removal of Foley’s ML and two others from the special countermeasures team. Temporarily, he had been assured, but the boats were needed elsewhere for their normal duties, the staff officer had explained: normal duties meant just about everything.

Like the incident, perhaps Bumper was keeping
apart from it until he could issue further directions. Or apportion the blame.

He had thought several times of Foley and the dead airman. Fate or luck? Something had made him hesitate, and avoid acting too hastily. An ML was no match for a couple of E-Boats, even if one was damaged; Foley would know that better than most.

At Bridport he had found the army sappers, and a local render-mines-safe officer with his team who had answered the call from Plymouth. The device was in shallow water near an unused slipway, and had been discovered because its parachute had tangled around some old mooring piles. The lieutenant in charge of the Plymouth team had been impatient to act, clearly irritated by the presence of so many
‘gawping squaddies’.

It was so often something simple that brought disaster. Masters had never forgotten one particular house where a magnetic mine had been reported, again betrayed by the parachute caught around a chimney stack. Somewhere in south London, not all that far from Clapham Junction, the ever-busy and, in wartime, vital span of track and sidings. It had been his third ‘beast’.

The area was completely cleared, dead. Only a wireless blaring somewhere, abandoned when police and wardens had sounded the alarm.

But there had been a small cellar, which nobody had remembered or found time to search. Used as an extra air raid shelter, someone recalled afterwards.

The critical moment . . . the safety callipers closing around the fuse. Holding his breath. Then the first pressure.

He had felt someone move behind him, and in a mirror above a dust-covered sideboard he had seen what looked like an apparition rising out of the very floor, not five feet from the suspended mine.

Old, ragged, wild-eyed, he too had been covered in dust and fallen plaster.

Masters had spoken loudly enough for his rating to hear him from the other side of the jammed doorway.

‘Run for it! Warn the others!’

The apparition had spoken for the first time. ‘I was in the Royal Engineers in the last dust-up, y’know. Worked on these things when I was on the Menin Road. Not so big, of course.’

The callipers had taken hold. He would never forget. The vagrant with the cultured voice, and the fuse which he had been too eager to make safe.

Like Bridport. There had been an old fishing drifter moored by the slipway, so dilapidated that even the naval shipwrights could find no use for her. When Masters had told him to have the drifter warped closer to the sodden parachute the lieutenant had almost forgotten himself.

‘Take too long, sir. I’ve got divers who can go down right now and deal with it!’

He had seen the lieutenant’s expression alter when he had said quietly, ‘
Do it.
I’m not here to argue with you.’

From the size of the parachute it was obvious that it was a small bomb of some kind, similar to the one Downie had sketched, and Sewell had dislodged from its rack in the Junkers before it had killed him. Not large
enough to destroy a vessel of any size, too powerful to waste on an isolated target.

Something in his manner and tone had warned the lieutenant, or maybe they had already formed their own views on Commander Critchley’s successor. A long warp had been rigged, and all the spectators ordered to retire from the moorings. Some of the men had been openly amused at the precautions.
A sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The drifter was cast off, and from behind the nearest buildings more men took the strain on the line.

The youth, Downie, had exclaimed suddenly, ‘Magnetic, sir!’ No question of doubt. How it must have been with Sewell.

Masters had watched the old hull swinging on the warp, felt his hand on Downie’s shoulder even as he was shouting, ‘
Down
, all of you!’

Even then a few faces had turned to stare, or humiliate the new boss. The explosion, muffled though it was by a few feet of water, was loud and violent. Gulls had risen screaming from the other vessels nearby, and when the spray had settled the drifter was awash, and two boats beyond the slipway punctured by flying fragments. Perhaps their first real evidence. The experts would know.
Might
know. And nobody had died for it.

He had left the lieutenant in charge until a recovery team arrived; a shamefaced officer, but one with a previously successful record. Masters had told him, ‘Always look for the unlikely. That will be it!’

He had eventually arrived back at the base to hear about the change of orders. The first thing he had seen
had been the wrecked Wolseley piled onto the back of an army pick-up truck inside the gates.

He had seen Captain Chavasse immediately. He had been almost affable.

‘Seems my secretary took it upon himself to take charge of things. Wouldn’t have thought it of him. A paybob after all, eh?’

The girl was in hospital. Out of danger, they said, but it seemed a near thing.

He stared at the telephone. The hospital, when he had finally got through, had been less than helpful. ‘Your officer was dealing with it. I’m afraid that’s all I’m permitted to say.’

Your officer
was Brayshaw, and he had been sent to Portland with some additional information for Fawcett.

And now this. He glanced around the room, and through an open door at the rumpled bed where he had tried to sleep. Nothing had changed, except Critchley’s spare uniform had disappeared.

His suitcase was on the bed, still open and, he guessed, perfectly packed. Coker was good at his job, and never seemed surprised or ruffled by anything.

Masters looked at the signal pad beside the telephone. Today he was going to London. Just like that . . . He contained the anger, realizing that it was because he was tired. He wanted to wait and hear if any useful information had been gleaned at Bridport, and why it had been considered necessary to take the three MLs away from his control at this very moment.

Coker was saying, ‘I’ve got all the details here, sir. The car will take you to the station and the Rail
Transport Office will be ready to look after you.’ He was ticking the points off in his mind, his smooth, pink cheeks slightly puffed out in concentration. ‘The R.T.O. will be expectin’ you in London too, sir, no matter what time the train gets in. Hotel room, ration card, travel warrant, all taken care of. Might make a nice break, sir.’ He gauged the moment. ‘All the lads think you’ve earned it.’

He walked to a window and readjusted the limp curtains. He had served over twenty years in the navy, with only one year’s break when he had been discharged, in 1938, before the Germans had marched into Poland. He had joined up during the depression, when the streets had still been full of men from the Great War, selling matches, wearing their medals in the hope of some sympathy, or simply begging. He was an orphan, raised by an uncle in the East End of London who had been more than eager to rid himself of the responsibility.

Chatham Barracks had been his first encounter with the peacetime navy. Overcrowded, noisy, and sometimes violent, it had been a harsh initiation. Coker had never been particularly strong, and had almost failed his medical examination.
Never make a seaman. But you can always apply to be a cook or a steward.
As if they were the bottom rung of the fleet’s ladder.

Coker had never looked back. He could shrug off the messdeck jibes about nursing the officers,
the pigs down aft
as they were often dubbed, and discovered a new strength by watching and studying his charges in the wardroom, something denied him in Mile End and the Hackney Road.

He had met and served all kinds of officers. Good, arrogant, and downright useless. Others stood out, but not always the ones you might expect. When he had been promoted to leading steward, he had served in a battlecruiser where the captain had been a baronet. In a destroyer, the commanding officer had worn the Victoria Cross, a true hero in every sense, yet a man who never forgot your birthday or some other special date, when he would offer you a glass of his own Scotch.

He regarded Masters thoughtfully. Never seemed to sleep, never appeared to rest when he was up and about, not bothered about food either. Always at it. And yet he’d found time to ring the army hospital about the Wren who had been driving him since he had joined the base from
Vernon
. Coker gave a small smile. No wonder the hospital didn’t want to chat. Most of the inmates were ATS girls who’d got themselves knocked up by the local Romeos in uniform.

He glanced around the room. A dump, he thought. It had been a vicarage in the old days when the farms had all depended on this one village, then a boarding house, but who would come here, he had often wondered. The war must have been a bloody godsend to the landlords, whoever they were. He nodded to himself.
But it’ll do for me.
It was no use thinking about after the war; it would go on for ever at this rate. North Africa, the Atlantic, Sicily, now Italy.
After that it’ll be across the Channel for the real push. And there’ll always be the Japs at the end of it.