Convoy (17 page)

‘We’d hear her starting her turbines and there’d be a slowish swishing noise as her propellers started turning. Then maybe we’d hear a single splash, a double and then a single… Which would mean, Ned my old chum, that the escort has dropped a diamond pattern of four depth charges.

‘If they explode too near us the boat will groan as though someone is twisting the hull like a dry cigar. There’ll be some noisy banging overhead as the pressure waves make deck plates jump. Inevitably the glass of some dials will break – hardly surprising; the jerk you feel from the explosions will loosen your teeth, too – and the inevitable leaks will be reported: propeller shaft packing leaking, valve seats and gaskets letting water trickle in… The main thing is that if there isn’t too much water we don’t pump it because pumps mean noise and, like the mouse, we know the cat is up there waiting and listening.

‘That’s about all there is to an attack on the boat. One gets to know the noises well enough – the pounding of the cylinders of a triple-expansion steam engine, the fast drumming of diesels, the singing of steam turbines. They make noise; so do you. The chap with the best ears wins! But the skipper’s morale – if he’s anything like me – is likely to be more affected if he’s been through a long spell of bad weather – North Atlantic winter sort of stuff, when every time the hatch is opened half a ton of beastly cold water crashes down and drains into the bilge, every man comes off watch soaking wet and frozen, trying to dry his clothes, and the humidity down below gets so high it is nearly precipitating into rain in the wardroom. There’s condensation streaming down the bulkheads, the damned charts get soggy like blotting paper and when you move the parallel rules across them, the rollers stick and the edges take bites out of the paper, and if they’re the sliding sort they won’t slide. Everyone’s snappy, everybody seems to be farting, and the atmosphere gets vile. The weather’s far too bad to keep the hatch wide open…it’s the sort of time when you pray for the ammeters and voltmeters to hurry up and show the batteries are charged so you can dive to get out of the rolling and pitching – but diving won’t reduce the humidity…’

Yorke smiled as he said: ‘I’m sorry when it happens to you, Jemmy, but I’m glad it’s hell down there for those Teds! Anyway, I get the picture. Let’s say we’ve attacked and sunk some ships. What do we do now?’

‘Well, assuming we’ve no more fish, we surface at night and transmit a ciphered report to Lorient – something brief like Convoy Grid Square CD 32 Course 090 Six Knots Sunk Three Ships 18000 Tons All Torpodoes Expended Returning Base. That would go off to Lorient, Doenitz would rub his hands, and any other U-boats in the area who didn’t pick up the original report on the convoy position would turn up the wick and hurry to grid square CD 32.’

‘This would be in U-boat cipher?’ Ned asked.

‘Yes. Pretty simple stuff because of course as far as the Germans are concerned the Allies know how many ships they’ve lost in that convoy, they know where it is, and they know U-boats are round the convoy so using direction- finders on the transmission doesn’t help much. The route our boat takes back to Lorient can vary by 500 miles north or south of a rhumb line.’

Jemmy waited until Ned had finished writing. ‘Any questions? I don’t seem to have told you much. You’ve chased enough U-boats in that destroyer of yours. In fact as far as I am concerned, destroyers are the enemy, no matter whose they are!’

Ned thanked him and went back to his desk, picking up the next docket. The sixth convoy had been attacked five weeks after the fifth, thirty-seven ships bound from Halifax to the Clyde. Five sunk and one more damaged but taken in tow, although finally sunk by the escorts. Five had each been hit with two torpedoes, while the sixth had been hit by one but had seen another miss ahead. Twelve torpedoes definitely fired for a score of six merchant ships, probably two other misses.

He looked at the list of ships and their positions. Fourteen American, sixteen British, three Norwegian, one Dutch, one French, one Swedish and one Greek. All those sunk had been in the centre columns. Weather reasonably good, the attack lasting only four days. No further attacks after the sixth ship was hit, and no pack attacked, although the Submarine Tracking Room report in the docket said there had been a pack passing to the south which subsequently attacked another convoy. He drew the convoy diagram more out of habit than anything else and glanced up to find Joan standing at the side of his desk. ‘Uncle would like to see you,’ she said. ‘Nothing alarming – he just wants to hear how the detective work is going.’

Ned grunted and Joan, glancing at her watch, misunderstood and said: ‘Are you meeting her for lunch? It won’t take more than fifteen minutes – unless you talk a lot.’

‘Thanks for the kind thought, but we said goodbye this morning.’

‘Did you have a nice weekend?’

‘Yes,’ Ned said and without thinking added: ‘You look as if you did, too.’

Joan smiled and said, ‘Yes, it does wonders for the complexion.’

And, Ned thought to himself, realizing that although Jemmy still had a king among twitches, he seemed much more relaxed in the last few days, it must be good for overworked submariners, too.

Uncle was relaxed like a tiger in the shade after a good meal: comfortable, tractable and cheerful, but ready to spring at a moment’s warning.

‘How is it going, Yorke? Anything interesting turned up?’

‘No, sir. They’re all alike. The ships are sunk in the middle of the convoy. From the fourth convoy onwards it seems Doenitz ordered them to fire two torpedoes at every target.’ He thought for a moment. Did Uncle want to chat about it all, to throw ideas back and forth, or was he interested only in specifics? Well, there was no harm in mentioning it. ‘I’ve been totalling up the number of torpedoes fired against each convoy, and it seems that every U-boat had a full outfit of fourteen torpedoes on board when he began his attack, or certainly never less than a dozen.’

‘Have you mentioned it to Jemmy?’

‘Yes, sir: he thinks it is a hell of a coincidence, particularly in cases where the attacks began a day or two out of Halifax, or Freetown. And a hell of a long way to go with a full barrow of fish.’

Uncle picked up a pencil and balanced it across the index finger of his left hand. ‘A hell of a long way unless your orders were to attack that particular convoy and no other…’

‘That’s what Jemmy and I thought. But being ordered to attack a particular convoy implies the Ted knew it was due to sail. Which means spies – or else they’ve broken some of our ciphers.’

‘Local spies, most probably. Once ships began to collect it’s difficult to keep it secret that a convoy is about to sail. Someone watching in Liverpool or the Clyde, Halifax or Freetown… An agent familiar with ships and even half sober should, from his own observation, be able to estimate the time of sailing within twenty-four hours, probably less. All he needs is a decent pair of binoculars. Or even grandad’s old telescope.’

Just how much did one contradict Uncle? He would soon know. ‘Yes, sir, but would even forty-eight hours’ notice be enough for a U-boat? Supposing the agent could get the warning to Lorient, for example. It means that a U-boat with all its torpedoes would have to be within forty-eight hours’ steaming of the port, or the convoy’s track, which it would have to know. The later ones can make nineteen knots on the surface, but 450 miles in twenty-four hours isn’t…’

Uncle nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, a fully-equipped U-boat waiting off each of the major ports from here to the New World and to West Africa. Well, that rules out agents with binoculars and mathematical wizards breaking our ciphers. Which seems to leave us ouija boards, black magic, voodoo, telepathy or politicians’ promises.’

‘I’ve only gone through five of the eleven convoys so far, sir.’

Uncle shook his head gloomily. ‘Unless there are eleven coincidences, there must be a pattern, and that pattern must be in the first five as well as the last six.’

‘If there’s a pattern it must be like marriage, sir; if you take fifty couples who seem ideally suited to each other, you’ll be lucky if you find twenty-five of them are really happy after a year of marriage.’

‘You mean there was a pattern for the fifty but it broke down?’

‘Not exactly. There
seemed
to be a pattern for fifty but in fact it was valid for only twenty-five, so we have to be careful we don’t grab at some pattern just because it
is
a pattern.’

‘My dear Yorke, how right you are – about marriage anyway. I’ve been divorced twice and my third marriage goes through the divorce court mincer next month.’

‘I – er, I’m sorry, sir, I–’

‘Don’t be, my dear fellow; I only mentioned it as proof of your pattern theory. My first wife was quiet, very county, mad on horses; my second was half French, very chic, very animated and loathed the country and all but the most obvious form of sport; my third is a very shrewd businesswoman, runs the estate very well, was a very good rally driver until the war put a stop to all that…no pattern except that for me the path of marriage leads to the divorce court.’

Yorke thought to himself that there was indeed the beginning of a pattern – a county wife mad on horses sounded as though she might be frigid, as did the ‘very shrewd business woman’, and the pattern was broken by the half-French woman who loathed all but the most obvious form of sport but who didn’t stay the marriage course either…

Uncle looked at him from under bushy eyebrows, his eyes twinkling. ‘That’s the way, Yorke; I want you looking for patterns in everything. And by the way,’ he added casually, ‘I have to report on our work to the Boss this afternoon.’

‘The First Lord, sir?’

‘No, I have to go round to Number Ten.’

‘’Fraid my contribution doesn’t amount to anything.’

‘Can’t be helped, but it’s these inside-the-convoy attacks that are troubling him. He says – and he’s quite right – that we’ll beat the packs as soon as we get enough escorts because it’s simply a question of enough dogs to chase the foxes. But we could beat the packs and still lose an enormous number of ships unless we find out how these insiders operate.’

Yorke suddenly had a mental picture of that chubby pink face with the hooded but sharp eyes looking across at the Citadel from Downing Street as he listened to Uncle’s report. Surely he would expect half a dozen men working in watches trying to solve the problem.

‘Does the Prime Minister – er, know that…’

‘Know that Lt Edward Yorke, DSO, RN, is the only person working on the problem?’

‘Well, yes sir,’ Yorke said lamely.

‘An honest question which deserves an honest answer, but don’t let it scare you. Yes, he does; in fact it was his idea. You realize this isn’t a new problem: it began eleven convoys ago. It’s just that only recently did they spot the “insider” aspect. That’s when the Boss started getting angry.’

‘He must be raving by now, sir,’ Yorke said bitterly, wishing he was back at sea.

‘No. From what I know of him and the little experience I have of his methods, he’s a queer bird. You know he writes books, histories. Well, it seems he does an enormous amount of research, and then does nothing for ages: he says after the research his mind is like a muddy pool, and he has to wait for the mud to settle. Once the water is clear the ideas come swimming to the surface.’

‘Where do I come in, sir?’

‘Well, the Boss’s idea is that when you have a problem you swot up all the facts without any previous prejudices or ideas – you start off with an open mind, in other words, which in this case the previous chaps who are supposed to study every convoy attack didn’t have because they were all anti-submarine specialists with their own prejudices. One of them used to beat a drum for Asdic, another had an idea for faster-sinking depth charges, another wanted faster escorts, and so on. So the Boss quite rightly set up ASIU to deal with the
whole
anti-U-boat question. Just after that, the “insider” was spotted. Finally the Boss told me to look around for one person whose brain he was proposing I should muddy up on the insider problem, with the proviso that when the water cleared some ideas surfaced.’

‘And I was that one person?’ Yorke asked incredulously.

‘Yep. I told you when you arrived that you’d been selected. Don’t think you were chosen from the whole Navy List, though. You were available and have seen service. “Smelled powder”, as the Boss calls it.’

‘So I ought to be living like a monk in a cell, just reading dockets and thinking hard.’

‘Not bloody likely. I want seven or eight hours of your time during the day. The rest you can spend as you wish, providing you’re creating the state of mind in which, once the water clears, the ideas pop up. The Boss seems to keep going on brandy, cigars and cat naps, late nights and a patient wife. Have you got a girlfriend?’

When Yorke nodded, Uncle asked: ‘Where is she? What does she do?’

‘Nurse at a hospital down in Kent.’

‘Met her while you were having that arm fixed?’

When Yorke nodded, Uncle said, ‘Does that mother of yours approve of her?’

‘Yes – apparently her family are old friends. I didn’t know them, though. I didn’t know you knew my mother, sir.’

‘I don’t really. Met her at various cocktail parties though. If she approves, you must have found yourself a fine girl. What’s her name?’

‘Clare Exton.’

‘Oh yes,’ Uncle said, picking up a pen and writing on a pad. ‘Must be old Bunko Exton’s daughter. And where’s the hospital?’

‘At Willesborough in Kent, beyond Ashford. An annexe of St Stephen’s. But why…?’

‘Don’t you wish she was up here at St Stephen’s, rather than the other side of Kent?’

‘Why, of course, sir, but perhaps she…’

‘As far as winning the war is concerned, my lad, it’s far better that she’s up here holding your hand, or whatever, than being in the Weald of Kent. However, you’ll register suitable surprise when she tells you of her transfer back to town. Now, anything more to report?’ When Yorke shook his head, Uncle stood up and said: ‘I estimate we have a month to six weeks left. By then we’ll have to see our way to getting enough escorts to break the packs, and we’ll have to know the secret of the insiders. Otherwise we’ll have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and we’ll face starvation and maybe not surrender but – well, that’s when I switch off thinking.’