Dive in the Sun (2 page)

‘Now, look here——’ began the other officer angrily, but the captain stopped him with a jerk of his head.

‘All right, so you’re capable. What does your skipper think about it? Does he think it’s a waste of time, too?’

‘Ralph Curtis? He’s different.’ A faraway look crept into his eyes. ‘He’s a natural, a born skipper. He can take a midget sub through the saloon bar of the “Royal George” an’ no one would spot him. I’ve been on every operation with him right from the start. I’d not go with another. In fact, we’ve always been a team, up to the last job, when we lost our diver. But me an’ the skipper, an’ old George Taylor, the E.R.A., we’ve hung together like dung on a blanket!’ He grinned broadly. ‘Still, we’ve got a new diver for this job.’ He looked at the captain cheerfully. ‘A brand new sub-lieutenant, and the only regular officer in the crew. Still, he doesn’t seem a bad cove for all that!’

There was a pregnant silence, and the shipboard noises seemed to move in on them. The clatter of a pump and the crackle of morse from the radio room, and in the far distance the sound of a plaintive mouth-organ.

A short, wiry petty officer, his body tightly encased in padded buoyant trousers and battledress blouse, with a pistol hanging from his hip, padded quietly down the control-room. He tried to side-step the three officers, but Duncan pulled him into the group with as little effort as a man picking up a dog.

‘Say, George,’ he said casually, ‘the captain here says we’re on to a real good thing! Isn’t he just a smart one?’

Petty Officer George Taylor sighed deeply. He had been through all this before, in a dozen ports, with a dozen different kinds of results. Always Duncan had dragged him into one argument after another, seemingly for the pleasure of seeing the displeasure on the other officers’ faces at having a ranker drawn into an intimate conversation.

Taylor was a Londoner, born and reared in Hackney, and
until
the war had called him had served happily, if not ambitiously, in a large garage and service station in Mare Street. Nothing had mattered much in those days, and the outside world had been something either to avoid or to ignore. He had contented himself with “nights out” with the boys, beer and chips at the old Hackney Empire, and a good scrap at the Fascist meetings over in Dalston on a Saturday night. If anyone had told him that one day he’d be sweating in an engine-room of a midget submarine, a space with less room to move about than the back of an Austin Seven, while it slid silently under a watchful German warship, or played tag among the minefields, he would have told him to “’ave ’is ’ead tested!” He was a quiet, unimaginative man, but like so many of his breed, completely fearless and difficult to shock.

‘I just bin with the blokes in the P.O’s Mess ’ere,’ he commented, as if he hadn’t heard Duncan’s remarks. ‘Real nice little place it is, too, when there ain’t so many blokes in it.’ He cocked his head on one side. ‘You called the skipper yet?’

‘Nope. I aim to let him get all the sleep he can.’ He turned to the submarine’s captain. ‘You ready to get rid of us yet?’

The man smiled. ‘More than I can tell you.’

At that moment the loose green curtain across the tiny wardroom entrance jerked to one side and a slim, dark-haired figure yawned and stretched hugely in the opening. In his new battledress and spotless white sweater, Sub-Lieutenant Ian Jervis looked little more than a boy, and at nineteen his round, youthful face and smooth pink cheeks gave the impression that he was merely playing at some new game and was obviously enjoying every minute of it.

‘Aha, our wayward diver!’ grated Duncan. ‘An’ about time, too! All ready to leave this palatial scow, Ian?’

Jervis smiled readily, although he always felt uneasy and slightly nervous with this great Australian. After his Dartmouth training, and coming from a family which had boasted several admirals, including his father, he had never quite been able to accept the atmosphere of unreality and casual indifference which seemed to pervade the men of the newest arm
of
the Service. He was, as Duncan had pointed out, the only regular in the crew, and he couldn’t help feeling that he didn’t quite belong. Whether it was as simple as that, or whether it was because he was only a new replacement for the other diver who had been killed, he couldn’t quite decide, but it was there all right. Then there was the skipper, Lieutenant Curtis. He remembered so vividly his first interview with him at Gibraltar when he had reported for duty.

The skipper had been sitting in his cabin on the submarine depot ship, apparently staring into space. Before Jervis could introduce himself, Curtis had sprung to his feet, his face white, his eyes suddenly alive and bright. He had stared for seconds at the startled Jervis, and then shaken him briefly by the hand and muttered something about being “in a daze”, and had been quite friendly. But several times since then, and especially on the towing trip in the submarine, he had caught Curtis staring at him bleakly, his eyes dark.

He had tried to tackle Duncan on the subject, but he had been unhelpful and had joked at his boyish fancies. Or had he just been evasive?

He had wanted to ask Taylor, who seemed to be a pretty level-headed sort of chap. But there was always the question of rank, and his own unwillingness to start something he couldn’t finish.

He wrote regularly to his mother, and occasionally to his father, who, much to his own annoyance, was in charge of a shore-establishment, and had tried to describe his job and his companions. Duncan was an easy character to put in a letter, with his peculiar sayings, which for the most part were quite above Jervis and seemed vaguely crude, and his rebellious attitude to the Service in general and regular officers in particular. But Curtis was different, and each time he tried to explain the man to his parents he realized that his words bordered on the most juvenile hero-worship that he would hardly have believed possible of himself.

He had heard about him when he had been under training as a diver for midget submarines. About the escapades in Norway, when he had won the Distinguished Service Cross,
and
about his daring and cool courage in pressing home his attacks to lay his two-ton explosive charges beneath the unsuspecting enemy. But it was more than the hearsay; it was the man himself. Tall and slim, his shoulders slightly stooped from the constant cramping confinement of the tiny hulls, he had a strange dedicated hardness in his otherwise calm face, which made him older than his twenty-six years. He had a friendly smile, and had always shown willingness to overlook Jervis’s early discomfort, but in his eyes he seemed to hold a reserve, a strange barrier, as if he was watching, waiting for something to happen. It was obviously something new, because he had heard Duncan asking Taylor, the E.R.A., if he thought “the skipper was goin’ round the bend?”

He ran his fingers through his short wavy hair and grinned. ‘I’m ready and willing!’

Duncan jabbed him in the ribs and leered. ‘Don’t talk like that in front of these two jokers; you know what they say about submariners!’

Jervis coloured and glanced anxiously at the captain. The latter had turned his back on them, however, and was staring at the chart.

‘Shall I call the skipper, Steve?’ Jervis asked hurriedly.

The captain suddenly stood up from the table. ‘Yes, call him,’ he said curtly. ‘Tell him I’m going to put over the rubber dinghy to take off the passage crew.’

‘Poor chaps,’ chuckled Duncan. ‘The towing crew have had the job of looking after the midget all the way here, an’ now we take over for the best part!’

The captain eyed him coldly, a glint in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘It’s a pity it’s all a waste of time then, isn’t it?’

Lieutenant Ralph Curtis lay fully clothed on a bunk in the submarine’s wardroom, his hands knitted behind his head, his eyes wide and sleepless, staring at the curved metal hull which rose over his body like the side of a tomb. The curtain which he had drawn along the length of the bunk allowed the harsh wardroom light to filter eerily across his tanned face and fair, sun-bleached hair, and beyond it he heard Duncan’s booming
laugh
and the subdued mutter of conversation. On the other side of the steel plating he imagined he could hear the swish of the Adriatic against the saddle tanks as the submarine forged her way through the night, her small charge wallowing behind her like a calf following its mother. He pressed his eyes shut for the hundredth time, but although sleep had eluded him for days, he felt the nervous tension running through him like an electric current, making his heart and body throb with something like pain.

What had happened? What had changed his life from a breath-taking adventure to a living nightmare?

He sighed deeply, and tried to stop himself from going over it all again.

He gingerly allowed his mind to explore the future, and felt himself pulling back, his stomach contracting violently. He touched his forehead dazedly, feeling the cold layer of sweat which chilled his face into a tight mask. He shuddered violently. Fear. Ice-cold fear. He could almost see his father’s steady, unwavering gaze across the wide, littered desk.

‘No guts, my lad! That’s what’s wrong with your generation!’ Then there would be a pause. ‘Now, look at me. A self-made man. Built up this business from nothing, just to give you the chance I never had!’ His father, even across the miles of invisible ocean, his words, his very soul reached out to taunt and torture him.

Curtis thought of his father, probably sitting behind that same desk, dealing with new orders for light machinery—or whatever he was making now—drumming into his employees how important it was to help the war effort, and, of course, to enlarge the business.

Beyond the curtain Duncan laughed again, and for a brief instant Curtis felt the tinge of jealousy. Duncan, with his indomitable spirit and unwavering strength. He had served with him long enough to know him better than anyone he had ever met, and he had pictured so often the huge Australian astride his pony on his vast farm, trotting through the dust, exchanging jests with his father or his three brothers, and planning, always planning some new improvement which in
itself
would entail fresh labour and sweat before anything would show on the shimmering, dust-blown wastes of his untamed country.

And Taylor, the E.R.A., did he envy him, too? He twisted his head on the coarse pillow as if to banish the nagging fears in his brain. Taylor, the personification of the British working class. Hard, shrewd, but gentle, and with a strange contentment which left Curtis baffled.

Before it hadn’t mattered. They had all been the closely-knit crew of a midget submarine, the most lonely and the most dangerous section of any navy in the world.

His mind ground remorselessly on. That had been before Roberts had been killed.

His lips framed the unspoken words. “Before
I
killed him!”

He opened his eyes suddenly, his whole body trembling, and stared hard at the shining deckhead. He remembered that day on the depot ship, only a month ago, when young Jervis had arrived to replace Roberts. It had seemed impossible at the time, the cruellest stroke which fate could possibly have played. As the boy had stepped into his cabin, with the bright sun behind him, it was as if Roberts had come back from the dead.

He had questioned Duncan casually about the frightening likeness, but he had shrugged indifferently and said that there might be some likeness, but not so that you’d notice.

Curtis clenched his jaw tightly, his eyes watering. Some likeness! Were they blind? Or was he going mad?

A bell clanged in the engine-room and the beat of the engines slackened. It would be soon now. Soon he and the other three would be sealed in their little craft, and it would be too late.

He rolled over on to his side, biting at the pillow. Fear, when did it come to him? When did he first notice that the blood of courage had begun to freeze within him?

Soon it would be too late. The words beat like tiny engines in his skull.

This was the most dangerous escapade that they had attempted, and the most useless.

Before, it had been a mad, hit-and-run game, with no time to think, and the wild ecstasy of success to follow. But now, a floating dock in the middle of a hostile coastline, with little chance of survival however the attack turned out, and in addition, he was afraid. Desperately afraid—from his shaking hands, to the dry, bitter taste in his throat. He would refuse to go, and tell himself it was for the others’ sakes and not for his own.

His father appeared again, mocking him with his smooth, shining face and well-clipped moustache. He knew what he would say all right. He remembered how he had fought desperately against the steady succession of planned moves which his father had called “your future with the company”. The good school, mixing with boys whose only right to any future had been their birth, while he had had his bought in hard-earned money. Boys like Jervis, he thought suddenly, quiet, confident, decent chaps, who never spoke of money or business.

The war had been a blessing for Curtis, and he had fled from the factory and the board meetings, and the hard, probing tongue of his father, with something like relief.

It was that compelling urge to escape from his past of frustration and lack of purpose which had made him volunteer for midget submarines, and which had led him eventually to his own command.

He had looked then to his father for some small sign of faith, if not actual pride, but he had only written to complain of the time Curtis was wasting in the Service, time which the factory could not forgive or overlook.

When he had been awarded the D.S.C. after the Norwegian operations his father merely observed, ‘Well, it might look all right on the company’s notepaper, I suppose!’

That had been the last straw. Curtis had driven himself unmercifully, taking each operation with cold, calculated calm, and drawing closer to Duncan and the others for the comfort which had been denied him elsewhere.

Then it had happened, without warning, and like a stab in the heart. At Taranto, whilst attempting to lay the deadly charges beneath an Italian supply ship, they had become
entangled
in an anti-submarine net of a new, unknown pattern, which wrapped itself around the little submarine like a shroud.