A Dawn Like Thunder (2 page)

He found his mind drifting to that last attack in the fjord near Trondheim. Cold to the point of cruel pain, hampered by one obstacle after another, when air reconnaissance and the local Norwegian Resistance had reported the way clear to the target, a brand-new floating dock which had been intended for the German fleet base at Kiel. It had been their last chance. Once into the Baltic with all available air cover and patrol vessels close at hand, that opportunity would have been lost . . .

He jumped as the commander touched his arm. He had not even seen him move.

‘All right?'

Ross said, ‘Of course.' It came out too sharply. Then he smiled. ‘Sorry. What is it?'

The other man looked at the clock. ‘I'm going up in ten minutes. Need anything else? I'll be a bit busy shortly, but if you want . . .'

Ross shook his head and winced as the rubber tore at his ears. ‘I just want to get started.'

Their eyes met. ‘I've sent word to your Number Two. He was playing cards with one of my sick ratings. He must be a pretty cool one.'

Ross looked away. He had been there on that terrible day in the fjord. Completely dependable: brave was not the description. It went far beyond that.

He said, ‘Like a rock.'

They both looked at the figures in the control-room, the coxswain on the wheel; the men working the hydroplanes, ever watchful, their eyes gleaming in the reflected dials; the stoker by the periscope wells, who looked about twelve years old in the subdued glow; the navigator and the first lieutenant. The team, the heart of any submarine.

The commander murmured, ‘I wonder if anyone at home really knows what it's like.' The mood left him and he said curtly, ‘Five minutes, Number One. Good listening watch,
right
?'

Routine maybe, but the essential link between him and the men throughout the boat, who had to trust his every decision, and depend on his skill to keep them alive.

The Intelligence folio had vanished from the chart table; it was already in the skipper's safe. The waiting was over. It was just another target, a small shallow-draught coaster named
Galatea
, commandeered by the Italian Navy for the duration. She had come from the big fleet base at Taranto, moving mostly at night to avoid detection. Her deadly cargo had changed her role and her value. Ross saw one of
his helpers moving his breathing apparatus into an open space. Automatically he felt for his diver's knife.

He saw it all in a solitary flash, like a badly-taken photo-graph: water suddenly changing from green to red, the man's eyes like marbles as he had driven the blade through his diving-suit and felt it jar against flesh and bone. Easy. Just as the instructors had described and demonstrated. Not even a whimper.

He had not heard the commander speak again, but he felt the air roaring into the saddle-tanks, the man in question crouching down to his knees even as the thin attack-periscope came hissing out of its well.

‘Thirty feet, sir!'

‘All quiet, sir.'

The skipper was creeping round in his oil-stained boots, his forehead pressed to the periscope pad. He said, ‘Nothing. Still black as a boot.' Then, ‘Stand by to surface.' He slung his binoculars around his neck. ‘Open the lower lid. Gun's crew and deck handling party in position.'

He strode to the men waiting by the conning tower ladder, touching Ross's shoulder briefly as he passed. The wit and the bravado had been lost somewhere in those four years of war, but to Ross, sweating in the uncomfortable rubber suit, that simple gesture meant everything.
The team.

‘Blow all main ballast!
Surface!
'

Further forward from the control-room, and separated from it by sealed watertight doors, was the petty officers' and leading hands' mess. Like the rest of the submarine, it was functional and cramped. Wires, pipes and dials, the arteries of every boat, filled most of the space, but here and there a full-breasted pin-up or some newly-darned seaboot stockings showed that men lived here, too.

Leading Seaman Mike Tucker was making his own last preparations before he was finally clamped firmly into his suit. He glanced around at the crowded world he had come to know so well, even before he had volunteered for Special Operations. Large nets containing cans of Spam and bully-beef were slung in any small remaining space, and he wondered how men could live in such conditions, just as he knew they would never willingly change them. He smiled slightly as he remembered the youthful and enthusiastic lieutenant at the submarine base before the war: Portsmouth, that sailors' city, flattened now in many parts by persistent bombing. The lieutenant had been warming to his theme that submariners were not unlike the men of Nelson's Navy: men who lived, slept and ate their crude meals between the very guns they would be required to serve, to fight without question until the enemy's flag came down. Tucker had not seen the point at the time, but now he could. The submarine was a weapon first and foremost, but from the cramped discomfort was born a strength, a reliance on your mates that was hard to match elsewhere. Dangerous, demanding, it nevertheless produced a special kind of man for this Navy within a Navy.

He prepared himself unhurriedly: he had even managed to shave, and paused now to regard himself in someone's metal mirror. An open, homely face with eyes the colour of a clear blue sky. Tucker was twenty-five, or would be next month with any luck, and a regular with seven years' service behind him. All that time back, how they had pulled his leg about it at home. He had been born and raised in Winstanley Road in Battersea, South London, and home was a crowded house shared with three brothers and three sisters, not far from Clapham Junction where his father worked as an engine-driver on one of those funny little tank-engines that were used for shunting goods wagons,
back and forth, day and night,
clink clink clink,
pushing the trucks into formation, long trains which would eventually head off into the smoke. His father was a firm man, but quiet with it. After a day shunting wagons, he would stroll down to the pub with his fireman on the way home, and once a week he would visit the British Legion. Like so many round there, he was a veteran of that other war,
a survivor
he had called it once when he had had a pint too many. Otherwise he said little about it, hoarded the memories and shared them only with a few, and certainly not with the kids.

Tucker had had a few days' leave before joining the submarine at Portsmouth. Nothing had changed. The house was shabbier, with a few slates missing, like the blind windows in other houses in the street where bomb-blast had damaged them. But the kettle was always on, and there was plenty to eat despite the rationing.

His mother, now seemingly old and tired, had asked him, ‘Do you still miss her, Mike? Not found another girl yet?'

His father had been sitting at the kitchen table, his driver's cap with the oilskin top and Southern Railway badge still on his head. ‘Leave it, Mother. So long as
he's
safe, that's the main thing.'

They had exchanged glances: understanding, gratitude; many would describe it as love.

The house had seemed empty, somehow. His brothers, willingly or otherwise, were in the Army although Terry, the youngest, was in the Andrew. Two of his sisters had married and were doing war-work and Madge, the baby of the family, was working in a club in the West End which had been opened for the American forces in London. She was breaking her mother's heart with all that make-up and the silk stockings, the late hours and nights when she did not come home at all. He could imagine what she was up to.

His father, of course, had said, ‘Don't worry so much, Mother. She's young, and there's a war on.' They had both laughed at the absurd comment.

Tucker thought of the officer he would be joining shortly: Lieutenant James Ross. At first he had told himself he could never work with an officer, and a regular one at that, but now they were on a first-name basis and had slowly developed a closeness that would have been unthinkable in any other section of the Navy.

Tucker had worked with Ross for almost two years, and trusted him completely. But know him? He knew he never would.

Now, he glanced at the inert shape of the sick rating with whom he had been attempting to play cards. Poor little bugger: his first ever operational cruise in this or any other submarine. Days out from Portsmouth on passage for the Med, they had been on the surface running the diesel engines to charge batteries. It was supposed to be a safe area, and the boat's skipper would have had strict orders not to forget his mission just to give chase to a juicy target. It should have been all right. The skipper and two lookouts had been up on the open bridge, swaying about like drunken seals in their streaming oilskins, when two aircraft had appeared. Out there, it did not matter much if they were ‘theirs' or ‘ours'. The klaxon had shrilled,
Dive! Dive! Dive!
and the water had thundered into the saddle-tanks to force her down. One of the lookouts had been this young, green seaman, no doubt up until then feeling like part of a wartime film.

Tucker had learned the hard way. When the klaxon sounded, you had fifteen seconds to clear the bridge and get below, pausing only to slam and lock upper and lower ‘lids' as you went. By then, the hull would be diving fast, the sea already surging into the confined place where you had been standing.

The kid had fallen, breaking his ankle and fracturing a wrist; it had been no help that the others had landed on top of him. A submarine did not carry a doctor, and first aid was simple and basic: the powers that be obviously thought that anything more was needless luxury. In a submarine it was accepted that either everyone lived or everybody died.

Tucker watched the youth's face, drugged, pinched with pain. He would not receive proper attention until the boat returned to base, or to wherever else they might be ordered.

He recalled talking quietly with him before he had slipped again into a drugged sleep. The boy had asked, ‘What's he like, Tommy?' Even that had made him smile. So young, and yet already trying to play the Old Jack. If you were a Tucker in this regiment, you were always a Tommy, no matter what your paybook said.

He thought of the lieutenant again. Grey eyes that assessed, calculated, took nothing for granted. He could remember exactly when he had been told he was to be paired off with Ross after his previous partner had been put ashore sick. Bomb-happy, more likely. The captain had said cheerfully, ‘You'll get along like a house on fire, Tucker. He's bloody good.'

Tucker had already known that: Ross would not have lasted otherwise. When the kid had asked him, he had heard himself reply, quite simply, ‘He's a hero.' But he had already dropped off to sleep.

And then there had been that terrible raid in the Norwegian fjord. Two chariots had been involved, the other one commanded by Ross's best friend, some said his only friend.

The floating dock had been the target, but at the last moment the unexpected had changed everything. A German cruiser, damaged by a mine in the North Sea, had entered the fjord and without delay prepared to use the
dock, offering them a double target which they could not ignore.

They could not delay either, for as the dock was flooded to receive the damaged cruiser, the narrowing space between the dock's bottom and the bed of the fjord made the attack even more hazardous. Both chariots had been half surfaced between some Norwegian fishing boats. Tucker had seen Ross gripping his friend's wrist, forcing home a point, and the other officer's apparent reluctance. Time was short: as an instructor had once said wryly, ‘With six hundred pounds of high explosive between your legs, you could do yourself a real injury!'

The attack had gone like a drill. After dodging past a small launch they had dived to some thirty-five feet below the dock and fastened their charges to it without difficulty.

Right on time, while they had hidden amongst the fishing boats, both charges had exploded in one deafening thunderclap. The dock had seemed to fold like cardboard, while the damaged cruiser had rolled over, scattering trestles and wires alike, until both hulls were half submerged. Neither Ross's friend nor his rating were ever seen again. They were probably caught in the mud beneath the dock, and had gone up when the fuse ran out.

For that, Ross had been awarded the Victoria Cross. Tucker was still not sure how he felt about it.

He heard men gathering beneath the forward hatch. This was a submarine's most perilous moment: on the surface with the hatch open. It was time.

He felt very calm, and turned to leave. But before he was sealed completely in his suit he pulled out his wallet in its oilskin pouch and, after the smallest hesitation, opened it and looked hard at her photograph.
Do you still miss her?
his mother had asked.

He held the picture in the dimmed lights. Eve.
Evie.
So
pert and pretty in her bus conductorette's uniform, the huge double-decker towering behind her.

It had begun in the middle of an air-raid, just as the bus returned to the Lambeth garage for the night.

‘I'll see you home, love . . .'

And the quick, searching glance he had come to know and love.

She had answered, ‘All right, sailor, no tricks now!' They had both laughed: her family lived just around the corner in Livingstone Road. He had seen her give as good as she got from boozy passengers when the pubs turned out, or amorous Yanks who thought that every English girl was fair game.

It had ended, too, in an air-raid, although he had been at sea and had not been told about it until much later. They said it had been the worst bombing in London's dockland since the outbreak of war: fifty-seven consecutive nights, until the warehouses, docks and ships, and eventually the Thames itself, were ablaze. The double-decker bus was completely destroyed. She was never found. Was that why he had volunteered for Special Operations? Because he had nothing to live for?