Convoy (30 page)

‘Do you think that’s it for the night?’ Hobson asked conversationally.

‘Your guess is as good as mine, Captain. I’d guess it is.’

‘Me too; that German lad has plenty more nights left. Any road, there’s time for some cocoa. Can you spare our lookout? No, don’t worry, young Reynolds can get it. Here, lad, now listen. Find another jug down there in the galley and see how far you can stretch it all with hot water. Don’t drown it, though. And if you hear any more torpedoes out there leave it and come straight back to the bridge.’

Yorke walked across to the radio cabin, banged on the door to warn that he was going to open it and put the cabin in darkness until he had closed it again, and went in. Watkins was sitting at the chair in front of his sets, concentrating on a paperback book which had been read by so many people that the picture of a long-haired blonde girl with heaving bosoms (barely covered by a black lace brassiere being subjected to strains undreamt of by bridge builders and constructors of harbour breakwaters) was nearly worn off. The second signalman appeared to be asleep on the mattress, his head cradled on a Merchant Navy lifejacket, although his own RN one was beside him, with his steel helmet. The chief radio officer was on watch, too, and listening in on the call and distress frequency.

Watkins jumped up when he recognized the muffled figure as Yorke. ‘Bit noisy out there, sir!’

‘It’s quietening down now. Anything else interesting being said?’

‘“Lancaster”’s just checked with “Charlie” (that’s “Tail End Charlie,” the tug, sir) to ask if he’s got the chaps off the flamer.’

‘Has he?’

‘Five women passengers, sir. The crew put ropes round ’em and lowered ’em down into the tug, cutting the ropes as soon as the tug chaps signalled they could catch each woman. Saved all five…’

Yorke knew what Watkins was going to add, and was thankful the
Marynal
had no passengers at all.

‘…But it took time, and the last eleven had to jump into the sea, else the flames would have got them. Five women and twelve men saved.’

‘And the other two ships?’

‘One of the corvettes is being sent back later to help, but in the meantime the tug will do what she can, sir.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yes, sir; quiet night apart from that,’ Watkins said without any conscious irony. ‘One thing about these insiders – they give the escorts much less rushing about than a pack…’

Yorke nodded and thought to himself:
they sink damn nearly as many ships in each attack, though
. He looked at the second signalman, who was still fast asleep. The capacity of a British seaman to snatch a zizz, as he called it – a word derived from the ‘zzzz’ used in the speech balloons of strip cartoons – was phenomenal. Here was a ship at action stations and only minutes past a fairly savage U-boat attack, but Telegraphist ‘Stripey’ Bennett could be put in peril of his life by a zealous officer. It was a very fine point indeed whether Bennett was off watch (since he was doing watch and watch about with Watkins) or at action stations, like every other man in the ship. If he was off watch, then certainly he could sleep. If he was at action stations, then his present doze made him guilty of one of the most heinous crimes in the naval calendar, sleeping at action stations.

Ordinary Seaman Bennett, however, had already achieved some fame serving with the commodore in a merchant ship which had a Chinese crew. He had fallen out with the Chinese boatswain. Going to sleep on deck in the Tropics one day wearing only a pair of shorts, he had woken to find that while he slept the Chinese had painted him in narrow red, white and blue stripes and in the process given him a nickname he would never lose for the rest of the time he served before retiring with a pension after twenty-one years’ service.

Yorke left the radio cabin and stood outside for a few minutes waiting for his night vision to return. Gradually the
Marynal
took shape round him; soon he could see the ship in the next column to starboard. He walked forward and then climbed the ladder to the monkey island. Jenkins, who had obviously been watching him, was waiting at the top. ‘Jerry’s gone home for the night, eh sir?’

‘Looks like it,’ Yorke said, sniffing suspiciously.

‘Cold night,’ Jenkins said quickly. ‘Cup o’ kai would be welcome, I expect, sir.’

So that was it: the gunners on the monkey island were sipping at mugs of steaming hot cocoa, but the only thing was that they were all at action stations, and the only way they could have obtained steaming hot cocoa was for one of the men to leave his post and dash down to the galley. Well, the DEMS gunners were not his responsibility and it was a cold night, and…one could always find excuses. ‘No, thanks,’ he said, ‘mine will be ready on the bridge. Did you sight anything?’

‘No tracks or anything, sir. I’d have reported if we had.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ Yorke said, hearing the hurt note in Jenkins’ voice. ‘I’d be interested if anyone saw anything different from the usual routine. On board the Swede, for instance.’

‘No, sir. The only thing was we didn’t see anyone moving about. Usually they’re careless with cigarettes at night. Light up in the wheelhouse and then go out on the wing of the bridge for a few puffs, and we can see a glow. Not tonight, though, even before the first ship was hit. George commented on it, didn’t you, George?’

George removed the cocoa mug from his lips and tried to stifle a belch. ‘S’right, sir.’

Back on the bridge Yorke found Cadet Reynolds holding two mugs of cocoa and doing his best not to spill them as the ship rolled. He gave one to Yorke, and Captain Hobson said: ‘Another fifteen minutes and we’ll stand down. No point in keeping the lads at action stations all night.’

‘None,’ Yorke said. He felt like adding bitterly that despite the night’s destruction the ASIU knew no more now than it did before Lt Yorke left the Citadel. This convoy was likely to end up being another docket. The twelfth convoy docket giving inconclusive details of an insider attack. So far a Swedish ship had broken down, it was blowing hard, three ships had been torpedoed, and the cocoa was too sweet. No doubt Uncle would tell the Second Sea Lord’s department that Lt Yorke was now available for sea service and, depending on Uncle’s report, he would find himself back in destroyers if good or, if Uncle considered he had made an even worse mess of the ASIU job than expected, then Yorke would find himself NOIC in some improbable small port in the Tropics where the humidity was about 98%, the temperature around 100° and his neighbours would be Somerset Maugham characters peering blearily over their whisky which was poured straight from the bottle into greasy chipped glasses.

‘Where’s Yorke?’ they would ask in the clubs in London. ‘Oh, he’s Naval Officer in Charge at some place on the Red Sea.’ ‘Indeed?’ Raised eyebrows would show that the inquirer was far too polite to ask what Yorke had ballsed up to warrant such a posting…

Next morning Yorke spent only fifteen minutes writing an account of the previous night’s attack on the convoy. He had a convoy diagram and it took no time to work out where the U-boat had been lying: she had been at right angles to the convoy course between the commodore’s fourth column and the
Marynal
’s fifth. The German had definitely fired a bow tube at the second ship in the commodore’s column, and the single torpedo from his stern tube had hit the ship ahead of the Swede. Then the
Florida Star
, third ship in the commodore’s column, had come into his sights. And, with three ships hit, the U-boat must then have dived clear.

The German would have guessed that he was safe until he heard the fifth merchant ship in a column pass overhead: then he would expect the frigate or corvette crossing back and forth across the stern of the convoy and know her Asdic might pick him up. So he would have gone deep and then stopped, probably knowing exactly where there was a cold layer of water.

The
Penta
had behaved perfectly. Apart from the breakdown and an earlier tendency to be careless with glowing cigarette ends, the ship had done exactly the right thing. She had not used her radio transmitter, she could not have signalled to any U-boat, she had done nothing that could be criticized or arouse the slightest suspicions in a bloodhound with a persecution mania.

Yorke put down his pen impatiently. It had taken one night, one attack by an insider, to show his theory about Swedish ships was nonsense; it was all one of those enormous coincidences (circumstantial evidence was probably the phrase) that at first arouses suspicion but which logical examination by a clear brain eventually shows up as just coincidences. Even if Yorke’s brain had been a little muddled, there had been the clear brains of Jemmy, the Croupier and Uncle… All right, so they too were mistaken.

He walked over to the handbasin to shave, and as he lathered his face he knew that what was annoying him at the moment was not so much that the Swede theory had fallen down with a crash but that he personally was going to have to stay in the
Marynal
until the convoy arrived in Freetown. Admittedly it would become a nice cruise once the convoy began to turn south towards the Tropics, leaving astern the grey seas and grey skies of winter in the North Atlantic and replacing them with the blueish-purple of the deep ocean, the startling blue skies, and the night never really dark because of the millions of stars and the Milky Way like an artist’s wash across the sky. Providing, of course, the
Marynal
stayed afloat that long.

He seemed to surface to find he had showered, shaved and dressed without conscious effort, and went down to the saloon for breakfast. A weary chief officer and a cadet had just come off watch and were eating fried eggs and bacon and grumbling that the toast was hard. The coffee was hot and strong. In fact the good food, Yorke reflected, was one of the compensations of Merchant Navy life: the wise chief steward bought plenty of whatever was available in a foreign port: a year’s supply of currants and raisins, sugar, ham and bacon, chocolate, butter, cheese…all were stored on board, so that wherever the
Marynal
happened to be, alongside the Queen’s Dock at Liverpool unloading a cargo or steaming in a convoy heading for Freetown with supplies for the Eighth Army which would be ferried across the Sahara, the men on board at least ate well: last night, just before the attack, Yorke had eaten a large wedge of currant pie, an inch or more deep, and containing more currants than he had seen for a year or two.

After breakfast, and after a quizzing by the chief officer, who seemed to assume that Yorke had in some mysterious way solved the insider problem by watching three ships sink, he collected his thick duffel coat and went up to the bridge. It was a cold, grey day with low cloud, but the wind had veered and although he had seen neither barometer nor barograph he guessed the depression was passing north. Unless it was trailing secondaries or there was another depression close behind, the weather would certainly get no worse for the next couple of days and might even improve.

The third officer and Cadet Reynolds were on watch, their binoculars searching the horizon all round. A periscope, a drifting lifeboat or a raft – a wooden crate built round empty oil drums and which floated a foot or so out of the water, giving survivors something in which to sit, and containing food and water – were the only manmade objects they were likely to see. Occasionally there would be planks and baulks of timber spread over many hundreds of square yards; either wreckage from some sunken ship, or dunnage thrown over the side to get the deck clear. Dunnage – a curious word and probably an old one, and particularly suitable to describe timber used to wedge or protect cargo in the hold. Usually there would be a few gulls balancing delicately on the planks like old ladies paddling on a pebble beach. Many a distant ship had gone to action stations because the sun reflecting from the white of gulls’ feathers in the distance made them look like a long metallic object.

Yorke nodded to Reynolds and stood at the forward side of the bridge. Always he felt this curious sensation that the ship was standing still and the ocean rushing past, the same impression a fisherman had standing in a fast-flowing mill stream. All the other ships in the convoy seemed stationary, too, because they stayed in the same position relative to the
Marynal
.

Now there were the gaps. Always after a night attack one waited until daybreak and looked for the gaps. It did not identify the ships that were hit but merely showed how many had been lost, because the gaps had usually been shifted astern: a ship would move up into a gap ahead and her next-astern would move up too, like the ripple of thuds made by the wagons when a goods train started. There were only three ships remaining in the commodore’s column to port this morning; the last ship was now abreast the
Marynal
, although the rescue tug was still following and abeam of the
Flintshire
.

As he had done almost every morning since the first day of the war, because he had served continuously at sea until he was sent to hospital after the
Aztec
sinking, Yorke looked slowly round the horizon the moment he reached the bridge. Out there, probably watching the convoy through its periscope, was a German submarine. Hunter and hunted. Which was which? The U-boat was the wolf that raced into the flock and killed a few victims before running off. The convoy steamed along slowly, the ships as much a flock as the goats being herded by wandering Arabs across a desert, but it was a herd protected by wolfhounds: the frigates and corvettes that were hunting the U-boat. A wag in the ASIU (he could imagine Jemmy saying it) might accurately describe the situation as an insider being hunted by a pack of outsiders.

The
Marynal
’s third mate was a plump and spotty young man who had obviously worked hard on his diction to lose his Newcastle accent and who had made it clear from the beginning that he was not going to be impressed by a Royal Navy lieutenant, even if he was wearing the ribbon of the DSO. The youth’s attitude was unnecessary and boring, and Yorke kept out of his way. As the third mate traditionally kept to the port side of the bridge, leaving the starboard side to the cadet, it was interesting to see that the captain seemed to prefer the starboard side too; clearly he found the third mate’s fawning manner was too much, particularly since it was often interrupted to bully young Reynolds, most frequently when a senior officer could hear.