Wreckers Must Breathe (24 page)

At any moment I expected to be crushed to death. But after bucking up and down for a moment, grating sickeningly against the sides of the dock, the submarine settled down again, this time afloat. Through my singing ears I heard the water running out through the damaged flood gates of the dock. I scrambled to my feet. The place was as dark as pitch and I could hear shouts and cries. ‘Are you all right, Mr Craig?' someone called out from the direction of the gun.

‘Yes,' I replied. ‘Are you?' And without waiting for his reply I hurried down the conning tower ladder. I paused at the bottom in order to accustom my eyes to the dark. There was a faint luminosity at the end of the dock. Presumably not all the lights of the base had been extinguished by the explosion. Around me everything was black with darkness, but where the dock ran out into the main cave there was a half-circle of indefinite light. Against this I could just make out the dark bulk of the gun and figures moving about it.

I suddenly remembered my torch. I pulled it out of my pocket and switched it on. The faces of the three miners looked white as they faced the light. But they seemed all right. Fortunately the water had not swept over the deck, so that, though they were all soaked with the water that had slopped up between the submarine and the dock walls, the machine-gun, rifles and ammunition were still beside the gun.

Armed with automatic rifles we went aft. The forge was still in position over the after hatch, but the water had swept right over the stern of the submarine and our barricades of packing cases had been swept away. The deck seemed strewn with tins and lumps of rock, and the dockside, which was still awash, was dotted with packing cases.

One of the machine-guns had fetched up against the deck stanchions. We retrieved this. The other was missing. The magazines were where we had left them and we were able to retrieve one of the automatic rifles from the dockside. Hastily we rebuilt our barricade of packing cases. This was not an easy task as both gangways had been smashed to pieces and most of the cases had to be passed up from the dockside and dragged up the sloping sides of the submarine by rope.

However, ten minutes' work saw our barricade complete again. All the grenades appeared to have rolled overboard, so I paid another visit to the magazine of the submarine. It was whilst I was getting the grenades from their racks that I noticed the crew's escape apparatus. It was much the same as the Davis equipment used in British submarines and they were stacked in a large rack of their own. I picked up one of them. It had a face mask and a large air bag which strapped round the waist. A small cylinder of oxygen completed the equipment. It was in fact just what I required.

I hurried on deck with the grenades to find the main cave brilliantly lit. The submarine in No. 6 dock had switched on its searchlight. Then I understood the reason for the cries and shouts. On the black oily surface of the water that was still slopping about in the main cave bobbed three collapsible rubber boats, two of them floating upside down.

‘They were just going to launch an attack when we fired that gun,' I said, nodding in the direction of the boats, as I put the grenades down on the deck behind the packing cases.

Kevan said: ‘Ar, we'll be able to hawld this place faw sawm tame naw.'

‘How do you mean?' I asked.

‘They'll nawt be able to get the bawts awt naw. Dawn't ye feel us grainding on the bottom of the dawck?'

He was right. I had been too busy to notice it. Though the water had flooded the dock, the tide had receded sufficiently for the hull of the submarine to be just touching the bottom.

‘Thank God for that!' I said. They had lost their chance. Our worst danger had been postponed. We had ten hours' grace so far as attack from another submarine went. Then and there I decided that, if the worst came to the worst and my own scheme failed, we would try to get our own boat out before the others and go down fighting rather than face a firing squad. It seemed easy to face death now that we were in action. I wondered what had happened to Logan.

Having completed our barricade, I left Davies and Trevors to hold the end of the dock and took Kevan down on to the dockside. The water had receded now. By the wall we found picks and shovels that had been used the previous day for erecting the derrick. We took these to the end of the dock, where the gallery had been blocked, and set to work to clear a space in the midst of the debris. We kept our automatic rifles handy in case the open end of the dock should be attacked.

Mostly we did the work with our hands, advancing steadily into the debris and piling the rocks behind us. It was a gigantic task and I was thankful that the work I had had to do in the fortnight I had been at the base had hardened my muscles. Even so, I found that Kevan, despite the fact that he had been unemployed for a considerable time, worked just about twice as fast as I was able to.

Half an hour passed and the basin I was trying to hollow out in the debris was beginning to take shape. We worked in silence and without pause. The constant stooping to throw out great lumps of limestone soon made my back ache abominably. We had climbed high on to the pile of fallen rock and were tossing the broken lumps out behind us so that the rim of the basin behind gradually rose. It was slow and hard work. Not only did my back and arms ache, but we were both constantly coughing with the rock dust.

At the end of half an hour, as though by common consent, we straightened our backs, and took a breather. I looked at my watch. It was just past three. I was standing now behind a huge circular rampart of rock. The roof, all jagged and looking very unsafe, was about ten feet above my head. On three sides of us the broken limestone was piled right to the roof. Only in the direction of the docks did the rock fall away, and here we were piling it up in order to make a kind of rock tank. This rampart had grown by now practically as tall as ourselves. I looked over it and along to the open end of the dock. The searchlight was still flooding the main cave and the light from it glistened on the wet walls of the dock and threw the conning tower of the submarine into black silhouette. The great dark shape of the boat seemed to fill the whole cave, and at the far end I could see our barricade of packing cases. I could see no sign of Davies and Trevors, however, for they lay in the shadow cast by the cases.

As I bent to resume my work, I saw Kevan standing tense at my side, listening. There was the sound of slipping rock, and then voices. It came from behind the fall that blocked the gallery between ourselves and No. 5 dock. Then came the unmistakable ring of metal on stone. ‘They're trying to clear the fall,' said Kevan.

‘How long will it take?' I asked.

He looked at the fall. The whole gallery had been blocked. ‘Depends on the depth,' he said. ‘I reckon it'll take them all of a good hour.'

‘Good!' I said. ‘By then we'll have finished this. Then we'll wait for them to come through. The draught will help.'

We resumed our work. But about ten minutes later the whole place suddenly resounded to the clatter of machine-gun fire. It came from the open end of the dock. In an instant we were over the rampart of stone we had been piling up, had collected our automatic rifles and were running as hard as we could along the dockside.

There was a muffled explosion and a column of water shot up just abaft the stern of the submarine. We clambered on to the deck of the submarine and as I ran down it, I saw a figure half-rise from behind the barricade of packing cases and an instant later there was a loud roar and lumps of rock fell from the roof of the main cave into the water. At the same instant the searchlight was switched off.

We threw ourselves down behind the packing cases, our rifles ready. ‘What's happened?' I panted.

‘They had rigged up a raft,' replied Davies. ‘There were several of them protected by packing cases. They had automatic rifles and one of them was flinging grenades. But Trevors got them with one of his grenades. Blew the whole raft apart.'

‘Good work!' I said. ‘Do you think you could hold them off for another half-hour, Trevors?' I asked.

There was no reply.

I put out my hand to where he lay behind his machine-gun. My hand touched his face. It was resting against one of the packing cases and it was warm and sticky. I screened my torch with my hands and switched it on. His muscular little body was crumpled up beside his gun, the back of his head resting on the protruding corner of a packing case. His blue unshaven jaw hung open, and his jacket was sodden with blood. A bullet had caught him in the throat.

I felt a sudden sickening sensation inside me. One out of four. There were only three of us now. Trevors had stood up in order to make sure of his aim. At the sacrifice of his own life he had demolished the raft. But there would be another raft and another. I said: ‘We've got to get on with that job quickly. Can you finish off that basin, Kevan? It wants to be at least three feet deeper. I'll stay here with Davies and hold the fort.'

I heard him scramble to his feet. ‘Give me a shout,' I said, ‘when it's complete.' I gave him my torch and saw his big figure outlined against its light hurry back down the deck of the submarine.

Then Davies and I and the dead Trevors settled down to wait for the next attack. The searchlight had been switched on again and in its light I saw a German rating dive into the oily waters of the main cave and rescue a man who was injured and drowning. He was the sole survivor of the crew of the raft. Swimming steadily on his back and holding the injured man's head between his hands, the German disappeared into the neighbouring dock. Then the searchlight was switched off again. Three pools of light marked the entrances to docks 5, 6 and 7. Then one by one these were extinguished. To the left of our own dock everything was in complete darkness. To the right, however, docks 1, 2 and 3 still showed a faint glow of light.

Suddenly a voice shouted in German: ‘Put those lights out over there.' The order was repeated several times. Then one by one the lights of these three docks were switched off. We were plunged into total darkness. It seemed to press down on us like a curtain. We could see nothing, not even the cases in front of us.

‘They are going to try attacking in the dark,' whispered Davies.

‘We'll just have to listen for them,' I said.

‘Why wait for Kevan to deepen the basin?' he asked. ‘Why not get on with your scheme right away?'

‘It's no use doing it by halves,' I said. ‘Once we get it going there's no possibility of feeding the fire.'

So we lay there in the dark and the minutes slipped slowly by. Gradually my ears accustomed themselves to all the various sounds in the docks. It was difficult to distinguish them, for they merged into each other to form a peculiar bustling murmuring sound. But occasionally I could pick out words of command and the sound of boots on rock, and from No. 5 dock came the persistent sound of tumbling rock as they worked to clear the fall and get through into our own dock.

It was an eerie business, lying there waiting for heaven knew what. I kept on mistaking the movement of the water for the sound of a raft being paddled towards us. I found myself praying desperately that Kevan would finish the work before the attack was launched. But I knew it must take him a full half-hour working on his own, and as I lay watching the luminous dial of my wrist-watch the minutes seemed to tick by incredibly slowly. A quarter of an hour passed by. Once I raised my rifle and was on the point of firing. But it was nothing. The darkness was absolutely impenetrable. Twenty minutes. Then we heard a new sound, a sound of hammering.

‘They're making another raft,' whispered Davies.

At that moment my eyes were attracted by the flickering of a torch from the far end of our own dock. Kevan wanted me. ‘I shan't be long,' I said to Davies, and screening a torch, which I had removed from Trevors, I hurried along the deck of the submarine. As soon as I could, I jumped down on to the dock and began to run.

Kevan met me by the oil tank. He said: ‘They're almost through the fall.' I could hear the sound of shifting rocks quite clearly.

‘Okay,' I said, ‘let's pump the oil in.'

There was no time to see whether the basin in the limestone was sufficiently deep. We took hold of the oil tank and dragged it on its trolley to the edge of the debris. Then, while Kevan took the canvas pipe across the debris and laid it over the rampart of rocks so that the nozzle hung down into the basin, I ran back for the smaller petrol tank. Each tank was fitted with a hand pump, and Kevan was already pumping the oil into the basin by the time I had got the pipe of the petrol tank into position. In the light of my torch I could see the black crude oil pouring down amongst the rocks. At the same time I was uncomfortably aware of the sound of voices and falling rocks in the direction of No. 5 dock. At any moment I expected the Germans to break through.

I scrambled back to the petrol tank and began pumping, thankful to have my automatic rifle beside me. When the gauge told me I had half-emptied the tank, I went over to help Kevan. The oil tank was still nearly three-quarters full.

I found that Kevan had no need of my assistance, so I looked around and found a length of iron piping and some rags. I tied the rags round one end of the piping and then dipped them first in oil and then petrol. The resultant torch I put down on top of the oil tank. By this time the sound of the Germans coming through the fall was becoming much louder, until by the murmur of their voices I was quite certain that they had broached it.

Kevan straightened his back. The oil tank was empty. I played my torch over the rampart of rock. It seemed to be holding the oil quite satisfactorily. Then, quite distinctly, I heard an exclam-ation in German. Evidently they had seen the light. Kevan had started the pump of the petrol tank. I could hear the liquid pouring out into the basin. I raised my automatic rifle to cover the spot where the Germans would emerge.