Gold From Crete (3 page)

The second plane’s nose was already down and pointing at them as the
Apache
swung to her single warp - Mortimer was busy replacing the broken one. Crowe forced himself again to look up, and he saw the thing that followed. A shell from one of the forward guns hit the plane straight on the nose; Crowe, almost directly behind the gun, saw - or afterwards thought he had seen - the tiny black streak of not a hundredth of a second’s duration, that marked the passage of the shell up to the target. One moment the plane was there, sharp and clear against the pale blue of sky; the next moment there was nothing at all. The huge bomb had exploded in its rack - at a height of two thousand feet the sound of the explosion was negligible, or else Crowe missed it in his excitement. The plane disappeared, and after that the eye became conscious of a wide circular smudge widening against the blue sky, fringed with tiny black fragments making a seemingly leisurely descent downward to the sea. And more than that; the third bomber had been affected by the explosion - the pilot must have been killed or the controls jammed. Crowe saw it wheel across his line of vision, skating through the air like a flipped playing card, the black crosses clearly visible. Nose first, it hit the sea close into the shore, vanished into a smother of foam, and then the tail reappeared, protruding above the surface while the nose remained fixed in the bottom.

It was a moment or two before Crowe was able to realize that the
Apache
was temporarily safe; one bomber had missed and the other two were destroyed. He became conscious that he was leaning back against the rail with a rigidity that was positively painful - his shoulder joints were hurting him. A little sheepishly he made himself relax; he grinned at his staff and took a turn or two along the bridge.

Down on the main deck Mortimer had made fast again. But somehow one of the containers of gold coins had broken in the excitement. The deck was running with gold; the scuppers were awash with sovereigns.

‘Leave that as it is for now!’ bellowed Hammett, standing shoulder to shoulder with Crowe as he leaned over the rail of the
Apache
. ‘Get the rest of the stuff on board!’

Crowe turned and met Hammett’s eye. ‘It looks to me,’ said Crowe, with a jerk of his thumb at the heaped gold on the
Apache
’s deck, ‘as if this would be the best time in the world to. ask the Admiralty for a rise in pay.’

‘Yes,’ said Hammett shortly, with so little appreciation of the neatness of the jest that Crowe made a mental note that money was apparently a sacred subject to Hammett and had better not in future be made a target for levity - presumably Hammett had an expensive family at home, or something. But Hammett was looking at him with a stranger expression than even that assumption warranted. Crowe raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘There’s mud on your face, sir,’ said Hammett. ‘Lots of it.’ Crowe suddenly remembered the black torrent that had drenched him when the bomb burst in the shallows. He looked down; his coat and his white trousers were thinly coated with grey mud, and it dawned upon him that his skin was wet inside his clothes. He put his hand to his face and felt the mud upon it; the damp handkerchief that he brought from his pocket came away smeared with the stuff; he must be a comic-looking sight. He tried to wipe his face clean, and found that his day- old beard hindered the process decidedly.

‘That’s the lot, sir!’ called the Greek officer.

‘Thank you,’ replied Hammett. ‘Cast off, Mortimer, if you please.’

Hammett strode hastily back to the engine-room voice tube, and Crowe was left still wiping vainly at the mud. He guessed it had probably got streaky by now. He must be a sight for the gods.

Those idiots on his staff had let him grin at them and walk up and down the bridge without telling him how he looked.

The
Apache
vibrated sharply with one propeller going astern and another forward, and she swung away from the pier.

‘Good luck, sir!’ called the Greek officer.

‘Same to you, and thank you, sir!’ shouted Crowe in return.

‘The poor devils’ll need all the luck that’s going if Jerry lays his hands on them,’ commented Nickleby. ‘Wish you could take ‘em with us.’

‘No orders for evacuation yet,’ said Holby.

The
Apache
had got up speed by now and was heading briskly out to sea, the long V of her wash breaking white upon the beaches. Hammett was as anxious as anyone to get where he had sea room to manoeuvre before the next inevitable attack should come. Soon she was trembling to her full thirty-six knots, and the green steep hills of Crete were beginning to lose their clarity.

‘Here they come!’ exclaimed Nickleby.

Out of the mountains of Crete they came, three of them once more, tearing after the
Apache
with nearly ten times her speed.

Hammett turned and watched them as the guns began to speak, and Crowe watched Hammett, ready to take over the command the instant he should feel it necessary. But Hammett was steady enough, looking up with puckered eyes, the grey stubble on his cheeks catching the light.

The bombers wasted no time in reconnoitring. Straight through the shell bursts they came, steadied on the
Apache’
s course, and then the leader put down its nose and screamed down in its dive.

‘Hard-a-starboard!’ said Hammett to the quartermaster.

The
Apache
heeled and groaned under extreme helm applied at full speed, and she swung sharply round. Once a dive bomber commits itself to its dive, it is hard for it to change its course along with its target’s. Crowe’s mathematical brain plunged into lightning calculations. The bomber started at about fifteen thousand feet or more - call it three miles; three hundred miles an hour. The hundredth of an hour; thirty-six seconds, but that’s not allowing for acceleration. Twenty-five seconds would be more like it - say twenty before the ship began to answer her helm. The
Apache
was doing thirty-six knots. In twenty seconds that would be - let’s see - almost exactly one-fifth of a mile, but that did not mean to say that she would be one-fifth of a mile off her course, because she would be following a curved path. A hundred and fifty yards, say, and the bomber would be able to compensate for some of that. A likely miss would be between fifty and a hundred yards.

Crowe’s quick brain did its job just in time. The bomber levelled off as it let go its bomb, the thing clearly silhouetted against the sky.

‘Midships!’ ordered Hammett to the quartermaster. The bomb hit the water and exploded seventy-five yards from the
Apache
’s port quarter, raising a vast fountain of grey water, far higher than the
Apache
’s stumpy mainmast.

‘Well done, Hammett!’ called Crowe, but softly, so as not to distract the man as he stood gauging the direction of the second bomber’s attack.

The
Apache
was coming out of her heel as she steadied on her new course.

‘Hard-a-port!’ said Hammett, and she began to snake round in the other direction.

The crescendo scream was repeated, but this time the pilot had tried to out-think the captain of the destroyer. The bomb fell directly in the
Apache
’s wake and not more than forty yards astern. She leaped madly at the blow, flinging everyone on the bridge against the rail. And the pilot, as he tore over the ship, turned loose his machine guns; Crowe heard the bullets flick past him, through all the din of the gunfire.

The
Apache
was coming round so fast that soon she would be crossing her own wake. The third bomber was evidently so confused that he lost his head, and the bomb fell farther away than the first one did. Now all three were heading northward again, pursued vainly for a second or two by the
Apache
’s fire.

So they were safe now. They had taken the gold and had paid nothing for it.

Crowe looked aft to where a sailor began to sweep the remaining gold coins into a little heap with a squeegee, and he wondered whether any destroyer’s scuppers had ever before run with gold.

Then he looked forward, and then down at the crew of the .50-calibre gun. It was with a shock that he saw that the red- haired sailor was dead; the limp corpse, capless, lay neglected, face in arms, on the steel plating, while the other two hands were still at work inserting a new belt He had been thinking that the
Apache
had escaped scot-free, and now he saw that she had paid in blood for that gold. A wave of reaction overtook him. Not all the gold in the world was worth a life. He felt a little sick.

The first-aid detachment had come up now, and were turning the body over. A heavy hand fell to the deck with a thump; Crowe saw the reddish hair on the wrist that he had noticed earlier. And then his sickness passed. Forty-two tons of gold; millions and millions sterling. Hitler was starving for gold. Gold would buy the allegiance of Arab tribesmen or neutral statesmen, might buy from Turkey the chrome that he needed so desperately, or from Spain the alliance for which he thirsted. That gold might have cost England a million other lives. Through his decision England had given one life for the gold. It was a bargain well worth it.

Captain George Crowe sat at the head of a crowded table in a cabin which it would be an understatement merely to call crowded. For the first time since his appointment as Captain D. commanding the Twentieth Destroyer Flotilla he had the opportunity of a personal conference with the greater part of his destroyer captains. Safely back in Alexandria from the fighting round Crete, he could look round at the grouped figures. There were one or two grey heads, of men older than himself, whom he had passed in the race for promotion, but mostly they were young, eager faces; men desperately proud of their commands and eagerly awaiting the opportunity of further distinction.

In Crowe’s hands was a chart, and copies of it were being studied by his subordinates - a chart with a curious history, as was only to be expected, seeing that it contained all the details of the harbour defences of the Italian port of Crotona. There was nothing romantic about the history of that chart; no beautiful woman spy had inveigled it out of the possession of an Italian officer, but it was the product of some weeks of patient work. Every reconnaissance plane which had flown over Crotona had taken photographs of the place and the approaches to it, and, naturally, in a high proportion of the photographs there had appeared pictures of vessels entering or leaving. Correlating these pictures, the naval staff had been able to map out the areas in which ships appeared and the areas in which ships never appeared, and thus had been able to make out a pretty clear picture of the extent of the minefields guarding the port; moreover, by joining on the map the successive positions of the ships photographed entering and leaving, the fairway between the minefields could be accurately plotted.

The photographs of the town itself, diligently compared one with the other, revealed the places of importance sufficient to merit the attention of the Twentieth Flotilla in the operation which Crowe had in mind. The British navy was hitting back; the Battle Fleet was going into the bombardment of Genoa while the Twentieth Flotilla was to take advantage of the protection it afforded to raid Crotona and clean up that pestilential nest of shallow-draft raiders.

Nickleby, the flotilla gunnery officer and the model of all staff virtues, was explaining the various targets to the destroyer captains.

‘I’ve marked the positions each ship is to assume,’ he said. ‘Also the various aiming points. The MAS depot is at the base of the white cliff at the east end of the town.
Potawatomi’ll
clean that up.
Shoshone’ll
have the wireless masts in clear view, so she’ll be able to deal with those. Now, the oil tanks are below a crest - you can see them marked in square G Nine.
Cheyenne
and
Navaho
, in the stations assigned to them, will be able to hit them. Nine degrees to starboard of the line connecting the church steeple and the factory chimney - that’s one of their bearings - and range four two double-o will do the business nicely.
Seminole
--

Nickleby droned on endlessly, outlining the perfect paper scheme in the stuffy heat of the cabin, while Crowe moved restlessly in his chair and studied the earnest serious faces. He felt suddenly incredibly wise and, by deduction from that, incredibly old. Nickleby seemed to him much like some young man describing to his grandfather the Utopian world that ought to be established. Something ideally enchanting, but which made no allowance for the inconsistencies of human nature or for unexpected contingencies. Operations of war never did go the way they were planned. Not even at Zeebrugge, one of the best-planned operations in history, had the attack been able to proceed mechanically; if it had, he would never have had the opportunity of winning the blue-and-red ribbon which he wore. And, of all operations of war, a surprise at dawn was the trickiest of the lot. When Nickleby brought his beautiful paper scheme to him for his approval, he had permitted himself to smile, and the smile had nettled Nickleby, just the way the grandfather’s smile of toleration would nettle the Utopian young man. But he had let him go on with it; it was just as well for his officers to familiarize themselves with the problems and the objectives of this particular operation, and this was as good a way as any other, as long as their minds remained flexible enough to deal with the inevitable emergencies when they arose.

Nickleby had finished his explanations now and everyone was looking to Crowe for further remarks. He fumbled for his pipe to give himself time to arrange in his mind what he was going to say, and he grinned benevolently at these young men as he filled it and lit it, and he punctuated his opening words with puffs of smoke, paying close attention to pressing down the burning tobacco. He could remember his own father making just the same gestures. It was queer being forty-two; when he was by himself he felt just the same as he did when he was twenty, but put him with all these young people who treated him as if he were sixty and for the life of him he could not prevent himself from acting like it. It was partly due to his rank, of course; this enforced senility was the penalty he had to pay for the four gold stripes on his arm.