Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) (3 page)

Were a submariner.
Only words, and casually spoken. Or were they?

The memory was as sharp as yesterday.

There is no other moment like it. Any submarine commander knows it.

His first command. Putting to sea without the dockyard people and the staff officers watching and making criticisms and suggestions. And later, after the commanding officer’s final course, ‘the perisher’ as it was aptly termed, with the new boat and company.
Tornado
, a T-Class boat, had left harbour on a morning not unlike this, grey sky, the sea like heaving pewter, to most other craft just another submarine leaving port. Going to war.

But on that day nothing else had mattered. He knew Fawcett was talking to the leading signalman, bridging the gap. He always made a point of it.

He tried to push the memory away. But the moment remained. The first time . . .

A glance around the open bridge. Feeling the excitement, sharing it with the two lookouts.

Then, as if prompted,
‘Clear the bridge!’
He could see the last lookout’s face as he jumped down through the oval hatch. Their eyes had met, just for a second, but Masters remembered it. He had been only a boy.

Still clear, incisive. Lowering his face to the voicepipe, picturing the features and the minds of the men beneath his feet.

‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’
The scream of the klaxon.

Instant and vital, the craft and the man as one. Just once he had stared over the grey steel screen, had held his breath as the sea had boiled up over the stem and along the casing to surge around the four-inch gun as
Tornado
went into her dive.

And there it was. Like a flaw in a photograph, a brief gleam as it twisted in the glare before it vanished under the hull, and exploded.

He had heard nothing, nor had he remembered what had happened. Only the aftermath. The pain. The sympathy. The inquiry. He had never heard the announcement; there were enough of them in those days, anyway.

The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce the loss of His Majesty’s Submarine
Tornado
. Next of kin have been informed.

There were no survivors. They lay with the shattered hull, all fifty-eight of them, including the lookout with the excited grin.

He was coming out of it slowly.
Were a submariner.

His first command. And his last.

He stared at the mirror again, imagining for a moment that Fawcett had asked him something and was expecting an answer. The admiral had not got up this early just to pass the time of day.

But it was not that. The leading signalman had gone, and the Wren Sally was covering the telephone with her fingers as she always did.

Fawcett was shaking his head. ‘I distinctly
told
them!’ It must have upset what he had been about to say.

She did not give in. ‘Classified, sir.’

Fawcett snapped,
‘Bloody hell!’
and almost snatched the receiver from her. ‘I left instructions. Orders . . .’ He broke off and stepped away from the desk.
‘Where? When?’
He reached down, removing the telephone flex from around the teapot; he did it with great care. Then he said quietly, ‘Took you long enough.’

Masters waited. He could sense Fawcett’s uncertainty, irresolution. Like discovering a secret about somebody you thought you knew as well as he would ever let you.

‘You’re certain, then? Critchley?’ He nodded once. ‘Keep me posted.’ He handed the telephone to the Wren officer without expression.

Masters turned. Critchley . . . Commander John Critchley. This same room. The smile. Persuasive, encouraging. His charm.

Fawcett walked to the window and stooped to peer out at the sky.

‘Use the other office, will you, Sally?’

The door closed, and Fawcett turned to face him.

‘You knew him, of course? A good officer. A leader, and an example, especially to all the green young types straight out of civvy street. He could charm anybody.’

It was as if Fawcett had read his thoughts.

‘How did it happen, sir?’

‘When I know
that
. . .’ He looked up, angry and impatient. ‘I was at the Admiralty. People listened, for once.’ He walked across the room, but Masters knew he was unaware of the movement. It was like seeing a complete stranger. ‘He was the man for the job. My choice.’ He lowered his voice and said, almost
offhandedly, ‘A mine. Type Charlie, apparently. Army Bomb Disposal were involved. When I discover . . .’ He broke off again and stared at the telephones. ‘He must have been out of his bloody mind! Should never even have been there, for God’s sake!’ He paused by the other desk and patted his pockets. ‘Don’t have a cigarette on you, I suppose?’ He glanced at the Wren’s handbag hanging from the chair. ‘I forgot, you’re a pipe man. Now, a good cigar . . .’

Masters waited, watching him trying to come to terms with it. Like watching a hurricane, and trying to predict its course.

Fawcett said, ‘At first I thought we’d never get along together. Not my style. Part-time sailor, R.N.V.R., plenty of money, he had no need to be in the service at all.’ He stared at the neat lines of signals. ‘Electronics, that was his business. I’ll lay odds that half the equipment which ends up here began life in one of his factories.’ He swung round and looked at him directly. ‘Yet he was an
adventurer
, enjoyed taking risks. Used to race that bloody great Bentley of his, Monte Carlo, right? A fair yachtsman too, I believe.’

The pale blue eyes wandered, then settled on Masters again. The storm was passing.

‘Taught
you
a lot, eh?’

‘Everything, sir.’ He had often thought about it, driving himself or being driven by something he could not contain. Because of
Tornado
, because of guilt, or a need for revenge. It was madness, and yet he had forced himself to do it. From an open bridge to the confined world of fuses and intricate mechanisms, theirs or ours;
it all had to be studied, and learned by heart. There were rarely second chances.

In his heart, he had not expected to succeed. Perhaps he had even come to terms with it. Until that first incident, the mine which had fallen in Southampton Docks, and had been recognized as something quite new and different. His first ‘beast’.

He said, ‘He had the touch with people. Civilians especially, the ones who had to take it day after day, and nights as well in some places. That was his strength, and they loved him for it.’

Fawcett nodded. ‘I agree. It’s different for us in the Andrew. We obey orders, we do as we’re told, we live, we die. It’s what we are, what we do.’ He gazed at the girl on the mirror. ‘The civilians get another war entirely. Somehow they go off to work each day, worrying about the family, the bloody rations, not even knowing if the office or the factory will be standing when they arrive. More to the point, not knowing if their homes and families will still be there when they come back.’ He pounded one fist into his palm without making a sound. ‘Without that sort of strength, faith if you like, all our efforts would be a waste of time, and I mean that!’

Somewhere in another world, a telephone jangled noisily. Fawcett looked at the door, obviously restraining another impulse.

‘The mine is a deadly weapon, and it is cheap to produce. It’s effective because even the hint or the sighting of one can cause costly delays. The channels have to be swept, each fairway rechecked even if
sweepers have carried out that thankless job only hours earlier. Mines, no matter what kind, don’t just go away. They have to be tackled by individuals with the courage and the will to do it. When I was in Sicily I saw some of the defences Jerry had been preparing when he realized the Afrika Korps was on the run. The Italians were good at it. The Germans will be better, next time.’

Masters heard voices in the passageway, and could imagine the decision being reached.

Fawcett looked at the office clock. ‘And I don’t just mean Italy. The mine has no discrimination. It lies there. It kills and it maims, and cares nothing for the uniforms of those who laid it. If the final invasion – dare I speak the word after all we’ve seen – is to succeed, we must be ready to act
before
the first landing craft drops her ramp.’

What Critchley had been doing. Should have been doing.
My choice
, Fawcett had said. Was that only minutes ago? It was as if time had stopped.

Were a submariner . . .

On that same morning, the channel had already been swept. Ex-trawlers, and a lot of ex-fishermen too in the minesweeping service. And many of them had died.

It could have been one of their own, a solitary drifter, perhaps, from a local field. And he had seen it, for a split second.

He came back to the present as Fawcett said abruptly, ‘He was married, of course. I suppose I’ll have to say something.’

The admiral was almost himself again. He raised his voice slightly. ‘Come in, and stop muttering!’

It was
Vernon
’s Chief Yeoman of Signals, a squat, solidly built man who over the years had grown immune to the ways of flag officers. As a boy signalman, he had stood on the bridge of Jellicoe’s
Iron Duke
at the Battle of Jutland.

‘Signal from
Tango Charlie
, sir.’ He held out his pad. ‘An’ one on the scrambler from F.O.I.C.’

The blue eyes moved briskly along the lines of round, schoolboy handwriting, and he grunted, ‘About time, too.’

The Wren officer was just outside the door, and Masters could hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of another class heading to its next instruction.
We obey orders, we do as we’re told, we live, we die.
He saw, too, that the Wren’s eyes were red, something he had never known before.

The admiral folded the signal and said quietly, ‘I want you to take his place. The way back, remember?’

Masters straightened his back; always the reminder of being smashed into the conning tower. But there was no pain.

Faces stood out, the Wren openly crying now, the Chief Yeoman beaming, wanting to share it.

And the rear-admiral. Composed, and quite alone.

He scarcely heard his own reply but saw Fawcett give a brief smile.

‘I shall make the necessary signal.’ He lifted the gleaming cap and adjusted it to the expected rakish angle. ‘Now, it’s up to you.’

It was anything but just another day.

The Dorset village of Chaldon St Mary, like countless towns and communities throughout the country which had been occupied by the armed services, would not be recognized by those who might have known it in peacetime.

On the fringe of Weymouth Bay, and more to the point as the Admiralty had noted from the outset, only five miles from the naval base and anti-submarine establishment at Portland Bill, the village had served a rural area of scattered but prosperous farms, and the road which had skirted it to head further west to Devon and Cornwall. It consisted of one street, a church, one pub, a school, and small houses which looked as if they had been here for ever. In those other times people had paused here, perhaps to fish or to sail. The more adventurous had pressed onto the West Country, leaving Chaldon St Mary in peace.

If you turned your back on the sea it might appear
little changed, if you had known it before, amid the great sweeping beauty of the Dorset countryside, the hills, and even now the cattle dotted about in groups, or making their unhurried way to milking.

Only a trained eye would detect the massive posts mounted in every field, the only defence against troop-carrying gliders in those early days when invasion had seemed inevitable, or the gun emplacements beneath their camouflaged netting. Now the narrow lanes shook to the rumble of army trucks and armoured vehicles, and the snarl of despatch riders’ motor cycles, scaring chickens and bringing shouts from servicemen on foot. The school was empty of children; all had been evacuated after the fall of France. The pub was busier than ever but always filled with uniforms, the older, local people a small minority. Only the fine church remained the same, with its well-kept memorial to the previous generation of plough boys and thatchers who had fallen at Passchendaele and Ypres. Now they had been joined by a neatly written list, more local names, and perhaps
El Alamein
.

But Chaldon St Mary had an inlet and faced the English Channel, and it was only sixty miles from the Cherbourg peninsula, German-occupied France, a few hours away by E-Boat or fast minelayer, much less by bomber or fighter.

As the old hands often remarked, ‘They’ll be back in bed with some French tart while we’re still reloading!’

The inlet itself had experienced the biggest and ugliest change. It was wired off from the main road, with armed sentries at gates which were rarely left open. There was
even a small regulating office for the master-at-arms, the Jaunty, and his staff, which had once been the school’s bicycle shed. The school had become the wardroom, and the playground where local children had run and dreamed had been labelled
Quarterdeck
, where the White Ensign flew from its own mast. If you walked across the playground without saluting, you could expect no mercy.

The inlet was filled with various small craft, with what appeared to be a scrapyard at one end near the entrance, rusting hulls which had been cannibalized to refit others, a half burned-out landing vessel regularly used for experiments both above and below water, barbed wire running down and into the sea itself, where a long spit of stony sand was only visible at low water. There were deadly reminders, also, little boards with the skull and crossbones to warn of the minefield laid here at the outset, and a solitary cross, its identifying name long since washed away, where a sapper had put his boot in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was a fine and surprisingly clear day, the Channel blue-grey in the distance but an almost smoky green in deeper waters and the approaches to the bay. There were plenty of people about, loading and unloading stores, being inspected or receiving orders for some new exercise, and two dogs were chasing one another along the waterside, local or unofficially owned by some of the sailors; nobody questioned it. It was that sort of place.