Gold From Crete (5 page)

‘Shell touched off a mine,’ said Crowe to Nickleby. ‘Interesting, that.’

Extremely interesting, for the mine must have been near the surface for the shell to have exploded it - near enough to the surface to damage a shallow-draft destroyer as well as a deep-draft battleship. Crowe had suspected that possibility.

They were through the labyrinth of mines now and the
Apache
’s pulses were beating quicker as Rowles called for full speed to take them out of danger. The bursting of a shell in their wake close astern told them how the sudden acceleration had saved them once again. And then it happened, the shell that struck right between the aftermost pair of guns and burst there. The wounded
Apache
reeled at the rending crash of the explosion, so that Crowe retained his footing with difficulty.

He walked to the end of the bridge and looked aft, but the funnels were between him and the point where the shell had struck, and there was no obvious damage to be seen; only the first-aid and emergency parties doubling aft, the hoses being unrolled and the trail of heavy black smoke which the
Apache
was now leaving behind her. But the beat of the screws had not changed, so that the ship’s motive power was uninjured.

He felt the
Apache
heel as Hammett began zigzagging to throw off the aim of the Italian gunlayers. A whole cluster of jets of water sprang up from the point they had just left - some of the spray even splashed round him on the bridge - and the
Apache
heeled again under full helm on a fresh zigzag; it was nervous work waiting for the next salvo, and the next, and the next, while the reports were coming to the bridge of the damage - the aftermost guns completely out of action, the ammunition hoist wrecked, along with the after fire-control station.

It was the price of victory, and a cheap enough price at that. It was not merely the damage done to the Italians - the blazing oil whose thick smoke was making a wide smudge over the now-distant shore, or the shattered MAS, or the wrecked wireless station. The success of the raid meant that in hundreds of little places up and down their coast the Italians would have to re-double their precautions, mount guns and sow minefields, station troops and maintain a constant guard, everything draining fresh strength from an already exhausted country.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ said Crowe, as his staff turned to him when the last salvo had fallen far astern. They were a good lot of fellows who knew their jobs thoroughly. A little academic, perhaps, but that was a fault on the right side. Perhaps in the end they would master the finer points of their profession and acquire the art of putting themselves in the enemy’s position and thinking like him.

At that appalling moment when they had found themselves some ten miles from where they expected to be, they had only thought about the enemy academically. They had not realized that surprise was likely to last for many minutes after the initial shock; that the lofty shore which they perceived had been something they were expecting, whereas a sleepy Italian lookout on land had no expectation at all, when he rubbed his eyes and peered through the dawn, of seeing a British flotilla on the horizon, nor had his officers put themselves in the position of the astonished Italians watching the flotilla steam through the minefield, knowing every turn and twist of the channel. In other words, his staff had yet to develop a sympathetic outlook.

Crowe’s thought began to stray. Today it was the turn for a letter to Susan. A dear girl was Susan; it was a pity he would have to confine himself in his letter to inanities and not be able to give the interesting details of today’s work. Susan was of the type that would have appreciated and understood them.

What Crowe did not realize was that it was the same telepathic sympathy, the same instinctive estimate of the other’s feelings, which made him a success with women and a success in war at the same time.

Captain George Crowe, CB, DSO, RN, stood on the bridge of HMS
Apache
experiencing his first New York heat wave and looking at the skyline of New York from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The skyline was amazing, just as amazing as the fact that here he stood on the bridge of a British destroyer which was about to be repaired by the United States Government. Commander Hammett came across and stood beside him.

‘It’s every bit as good as the pictures, isn’t it, Hammett?’ said Crowe.

‘It’s the first scenery I’ve ever seen that was,’ said Hammett.

Side by side they surveyed the landscape. Across the East River was downtown New York, while all round them the United States was preparing a navy for war. The din of automatic riveters echoed in their ears, and only a short way off a colossal crane was swinging a huge naval gun into the ship that was to bear it. The
Apache
- had made her first contact with American soil; the British ropes were hitched round American bollards and close astern of her towered the bows of the USS
Coulterville
, a cruiser. Eight thousand tons she was, brand-new, with her fresh paint in striking contrast to the battered and dingy little British destroyer whose white ensign almost brushed her cutwater. On the destroyer’s deck little groups of British seamen stared curiously at this fresh country and this fresh navy.

‘Well, we’re here,’ said Crowe. It was a banal sort of thing to say, but there had been times when he had thought he would never be able to say it; when the poor battered
Apache
had struggled with Atlantic storms and had fought against raiding cruisers.

It had been a long, long journey, and one in which incessant vigilance had been demanded. Even when they had come beyond the radius of action of the Condors, anti-aircraft lookouts had had to be maintained, lest some surface raider with a catapult plane should be on the high seas; all through the thousands of miles there had been the continual antisubmarine watch.

‘Well, our troubles are over for a time, at any rate,’ said Hammett.

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Crowe. He remembered the very serious talks which he had given to officers and ratings of the
Apache
on the necessity for their good behaviour in America. They were ambassadors of good relations, and they were expected to behave as such.

At the gangway stood a very elegant gentleman. He was wearing a beautifully pressed white suit and a Panama hat; he carried a pair of yellow gloves, and he bore himself, in the studied lack of hurry of his movements, like a typical Englishman in a hot country. It was this deliberation of movement, combined with the perfection of the cut of his clothes, which gave him the advantage of appearing lean instead of merely lanky, and his straight back and erect carriage belied the whiteness of his moustache and hair. Crowe looked down at this morsel of coolness in the sweltering heat.

‘I fancy that means trouble, all the same,’ he said.

Crowe was right. The visitor introduced himself as Mr Cockburn-Crossley, from the Embassy.

‘I have made arrangements for you to pay your formal call upon the admiral commanding,’ explained Mr Cockburn-Crossley. ‘Can you be ready in half an hour, Captain?’

The watch that Mr Cockburn-Crossley consulted was just like Mr Cockburn-Crossley, very slim and very elegant and very polished.

‘I can,’ said Crowe, conscious of the fleeting glance which Mr Cockburn-Crossley had passed over his slightly grubby whites. It was still hardly more than two hours since he had been in the open Atlantic, with the possibility every second of being torpedoed.

‘I will expect you, then, in half an hour, Captain Crowe,’ said Mr Cockburn-Crossley.

Ever since the heat of New York struck him, Crowe had been thinking about a cold bath, and he retired gratefully into this one; he had yet to learn that in a heat wave in New York one emerges from one cold bath thinking longingly about the next. He dressed himself carefully in his blues. In wartime the glories of full dress and cocked hat and lightning-conductor trousers were discarded. There was not even a sword on board - what they would do if ever a court-martial became necessary, Crowe could not imagine. The mere effort of dressing made him sweat afresh; the tiny cabin under the naked iron deck in the blazing sun was like a furnace, and yet there seemed to be no relief when he stepped out into the open air.

Exactly coincident with his arrival on deck there was a loud splash from astern, an unusual enough noise to attract his attention. What he saw aft, when he directed his gaze there, shocked him inexpressibly. That infernal monkey whom he had detested throughout the long and arduous campaign was standing there gibbering triumphantly and waving in his paw a small glittering object. Crowe raced up to him, but he arrived there no sooner than did Hammett and a perspiring chief petty officer and a couple of ratings.

‘Little beggar,’ said the chief petty officer. ‘ ‘E’s done it proper this time.’

What the monkey had done was to release one of the depth charges that lay ready on the deck for action against submarines.

‘Look at ‘im wiv the key in ‘is ‘and,’ said one of the ratings.

‘ ‘E’s only done what ‘e’s seen us do often enough,’ said the other.

It was withdrawal of the key that actuated the detonating mechanism of the depth charge; the naval rating whose business it was to release the charge would always produce the key to show that he had not forgotten the most important detail of the operation.

‘What are those things set for?’ demanded Crowe of Hammett.

‘Two hundred feet. It’s twenty-seven here; and the safety device won’t allow the detonator to operate before thirty feet,’ replied Hammett, and then, as another series of thoughts struck him, ‘But it’s a soft bottom. The thing will go on sinking. And the tide’s rising.’

‘And not just that,’ said Crowe, delving back in his mind to recover the memory of the mechanism of a depth-charge detonator. There was a little hole through which water was admitted; regulating the size of the hole regulated the speed at which the water entered, and that controlled the depth at which the charge, slowly sinking from the surface, eventually exploded. But even if, as it soon would be in the present case, the charge lay at thirty feet, the water would still slowly penetrate, and when the detonator was full it would explode, whatever the depth was.

Crowe looked up at the towering bows of the
Coulterville
; the depth charge was under those bows as well as under the
Apache
’s stern, and when the thing should go off, it would do terrible damage to the American ship as well as to the British ship. He did not expect that the
Coulterville
had any steam up to enable her to move; he doubted if even the
Apache
had now. And the explanations which would have to be made before he could get the
Coulterville
to move from her dangerous berth would consume certainly several minutes. He knew that if he were captain of a new cruiser and an apparently insane foreign officer came rushing up to him in port and asked him to move, he would ask a good many questions before he decided to consent. And what would happen to Anglo-American relations if the first British destroyer to visit Brooklyn were to signalize her arrival by blowing the bows off a brand-new American cruiser was something he did not like to think about.

The seconds were ticking by, although even now probably not more than ten had elapsed since the splash.

‘We’ll have to send a diver down,’ said Crowe. As he uttered the words he visualized the job that had to- be done. If that depth charge were to go off while the diver was in the water, the man would be blown to pieces.

‘Jones was killed at Crotona,’ said Hammett, ‘and we left Higgs at Alex. They were the only two divers we had.’

‘I’ll go myself,’ said Crowe. He knew a momentary relief as he said it; the hardest task a leader can ever have is to order some other man into a danger he does not himself share.

‘Let me go, sir,’ said Hammett.

‘No,’ said Crowe. ‘I took the course myself once; I’m the best qualified. Get the pump and suit out quick, and have some slings rigged over the stem.’

It was twenty years since he had last worn a diving suit and since he had made the three dives which comprised the sketchy course taken by a fair sprinkling of naval officers. He felt the heavy shoes clank over the steel deck as he made his difficult way to the side of the ship. Through the little glass window he could still see the skyline of New York across the East River. The speed with which the gear had been got out and made ready was a credit to Hammett and his first lieutenant; the intense orderliness of a ship of war - even a poor battered old thing like the
Apache
- was justified by this event. No one could ever know when any piece of equipment would be desperately needed immediately. Who ever would have guessed, when they made fast to the shore, that in ten minutes the diving suit would be called for in such a frantic hurry?

The air pump whispered steadily in his ear as he trailed pipe and lines behind him. Everything was satisfactory as far as he could see, except that in this appalling climate the sweat was already running in rivers down him and making him itch in a most unpleasant fashion at the same time as the suit prevented him from scratching. He felt his way down the short ladder and then let himself drop down through the muddy, turbulent water. The light faded rapidly from his glass window as he sank, and it was entirely dark by the time he felt his feet sinking into the soft ooze of the bottom. He felt a momentary distaste as he found himself thigh-deep in the filthy stuff. He took a few difficult steps to his left, and then a few forward, and he felt nothing solid. He knew a brief panic, and he swallowed hard. The swallowing seemed to clear his ears and his brain at the same time. He turned to his right and fumbled forward in the darkness with laboured six-inch strides. Then his heavy boot felt and struck it, jarring against something solid, and as he ascertained its shape with his feet he confirmed his first hope. That barrel-shaped thing could only be a depth charge.

He spoke into the telephone. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Send the slings down.’