Gold From Crete (7 page)

‘Midships!’ said Hammett to the quartermaster, and then busied himself with the engine-room telegraph before explaining to Crowe, ‘I thought I’d let her complete the turn, sir.’

‘Go astern with the starboard engine as she comes round,’ said Crowe, and was promptly annoyed with himself for interfering with Hammett when the latter was doing perfectly well.

There were voices to be heard forward now as the stunned members of the crew picked themselves up and the emergency party reached the seat of the damage. The
Apache
was completing her turn, having lost a good deal of her way.

‘Hard-a-starboard!’ said Hammett again to the helmsman, and the ship trembled with the vibration of the starboard propeller going astern.

From forward there came a tremendous cracking as rivets sheared; the bows of the ship rose perceptibly, she lost her list and drifted on her original course as Hammett stopped the engines.

‘We’ve broken something off,’ said Crowe, and a moment later the reports began to come in from for’ard, confirming his suggestion. The torpedo seemed to have hit almost squarely on the bows of the ship and had blown the first ten feet of the ship round at right angles to the rest. It was that which had forced the ship into the turn and which had now broken off. Number 1 bulkhead was holding, however, and the water, which was pouring in was no more than the pumps could deal with adequately.

‘Get that bulkhead shored up, Mr Garland,’ said Hammett.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said a voice from the darkness.

‘Go ahead with all the speed that the bulkhead will stand,’ said Crowe, before he went back into the chartroom.

His staff was still at the table planning the attack on the submarine; Rowles was a little white, and conscious of a stabbing pain every time he breathed, but it was not till sometime later that Crowe knew that his navigating officer had broken a couple of ribs when the explosion flung him against the table.

‘We’ll stay afloat for some time yet,’ announced Crowe, ‘and we’ll make three or four knots, I hope.’

‘Splendid, sir,’ said Rowles, addressing himself to his squared paper. ‘I didn’t want the little beggar to get away.’

It is even harder to pick up the trail of a hostile submarine than it is to dispose of her, once she is detected: nothing must be allowed to interfere with the hunt when it is in full cry. While the emergency party faced sudden death shoring up the bulkhead, another signal winked from the battered flagship to the rest of the flotilla gathering in for the kill. Out on the bridge again, Crowe looked forward through the darkness. He could not see them, but he knew that his other destroyers were arranging themselves in a neat pattern while the poor old
Apache
was panting up after them.

A fresh signal flashed from the
Apache
’s masthead, and it was answered by a sound like a roll of thunder as the depth charges exploded. Only that signal was necessary; Crowe knew that his well-drilled flotilla was weaving round in the darkness as though taking part in an elaborate dance, and every few seconds a fresh roll of thunder announced the completion of a new figure as they systematically depth-charged every possible spot where a submarine might be lying. The sonic apparatus had given them the submarine’s position within half a mile; a depth charge bursting within a hundred yards would do grave damage, and it was the business of the flotilla to see that at least one charge burst within a hundred yards. The
Apache
crept slowly over the sea towards the distant thunder; soon she was pitching and tossing perceptibly as the tremendous ripples of the explosions met her. They continued long after the explosions had ceased.

‘We ought to be coming up to them now, sir,’ said Hammett, gazing into the darkness.

‘What’s that?’ exclaimed Crowe, pointing suddenly.

It was a ghostly white triangle sticking out above the surface of the sea, thirty feet of it or so.

The words were hardly out of Crowe’s mouth when one of the forward guns went off with a crash and a blinding flash. That triangle was the bows of a submarine protruding above the surface as she hung nearly vertically between wind and water, helpless and shattered; but a gun’s crew, tense and eager for a target, will fire at the first sight of an enemy, and a submarine, once seen, must always be destroyed beyond all chance of escape and repair. The firing ceased, leaving everyone temporarily helpless in the darkness, but, blink their dazzled eyes as they might, Crowe and Hammett could see nothing of that pale triangle.

‘She’s gone,’ said Hammett.

Crowe sniffed the night air, trying to sort out the various smells which reached his nostrils. ‘That’s her oil I can smell, isn’t it?’ he said.

Hammett sniffed as well. ‘Must be,’ he agreed, ‘there was no smell of our own oil before this happened.’

The pungent, bitter smell was unmistakable; as they leaned over the rail at the end of the bridge it rose more penetratingly to their nostrils; they could picture the enormous pool of oil which was spreading round them, invisible in the night. And, as they leaned and looked, a vast bubble burst close alongside of the
Apache
as some fresh bulkhead gave way in the rent hull of the submarine sinking down to the bottom, and the enclosed air came bursting upward. They heard the sound and, faint in the darkness, they saw a white fragment whirl on the sea’s surface.

‘There’s a bit of wreckage,’ said Crowe to Hammett. ‘Better get it for identification.’

Wreckage indeed it was, for it was the dead body of a man. They carried it into the captain’s day cabin as the nearest lighted place and laid it on the deck. Water ran from the soiled overalls which it wore, forming a little pool, which washed backwards and forwards with the motion of the ship. The stars of gold on the shoulder straps indicated lieutenant-commander’s rank; the distorted face was young for a man of that seniority. The arms were clasped across his breast, and there was what looked like a red stain beneath them. Blood? Crowe stooped closer and then took hold of the cold hands and tried to pry the rigid arms upwards; they were clasping to the lieutenant-commander’s breast a flat red book, and it was only with difficulty that they worked it loose, so fierce was the grip the corpse was maintaining upon it.

‘Send for Mortimer!’ snapped Crowe. ‘He speaks Italian!’

Most of the Italian that Lord Edward had spoken had been pretty little sentences asking, ‘When can we meet again?’ and things like that. But he had a good academic knowledge of the language and it took no more than a glance for him to see the importance of what he was looking at.

‘It’s his orders, sir,’ he said, turning the wet pages with care and peering at the smudged handwriting and the typewritten orders that were clipped to the wet sheets.

‘What does all this mean?’ demanded Crowe. ‘Here a latitude and longitude - I can see that for myself. Translate the Italian.’

‘He’s three days out from Taranto, sir,’ said Mortimer, ‘and - by George, sir, this looks like a rendezvous! It is, by jingo! And here’s the recognition signal.’

As Mortimer translated the typewritten material Crowe looked back at the dead man lying in the puddle on the deck. He thought of the hunted submarine struggling desperately to throw off pursuit, and the final refuge taken at the bottom of the sea, of the rain of depth charges that had brought her up again, shattered and helpless; there would be the rush to destroy the secret documents, and before that could be effected came the shells from the
Apache
, blowing the shattered hull above and giving the captain his death-blow, even while the invading water whirled him to the surface.

‘It’s authentic all right,’ commented Nickleby, peering over Mortimer’s shoulder.

‘Yes,’ said Crowe; ‘let’s hear it over again ... Go on, Mortimer.’

The sunken submarine had an appointment with another, in two days’ time, so that the one newly come from port could exchange information with the one returning - there was a day, a time and a position. Above all, there was the underwater recognition signal, the sequence of dots and dashes which, sent out in sound waves through the water, would be picked up by the other vessel as a signal for them both to rise to the surface at dawn to effect the exchange.

‘I think somebody ought to keep that appointment,’ said Crowe, looking quizzically at his assistants.

‘There’s a bit of difference in pitch between the sound of our underwater signal and theirs,’ demurred Holby.

‘Not enough to matter,’ said Crowe. ‘If they get the signal they’re expecting, the right signal, at the right time and place, they won’t stop to think about a trifling difference in pitch. Put yourself in their place, man.’

The staff nodded. There was something fascinating and magnetic about their captain’s determination to do the enemy all possible harm. But it was their duty to look at all sides of a question.

‘What about surface propeller noises?’ said Rowles, but Crowe shook his head.

‘There won’t be any,’ he explained. ‘We’ll send one ship - there’s no sense in taking the whole flotilla - and she’ll get there early in the dark, so she can drift. Who’s got the steadiest nerves?’

‘Marion?’ suggested Nickleby, and as Crowe looked round at the others they nodded an agreement.

‘Right!’ said Crowe. ‘Get the orders out for him now.’

That was how HMS
Cheyenne
, Lieutenant-Commander Edward Marion, DSC, came to detach herself from the Twentieth Flotilla at the end of that day to undertake an independent operation while the rest of the flotilla shepherded the wounded
Apache
back to port. It explains how an Italian submarine happened to rise to the surface close alongside her to find herself, much to her astonishment, swept by a torrent of fire from the waiting guns. The official British communique, issued sometime later, describing the capture, whole, of an Italian submarine, puzzled most of the people who read it. And yet the explanation is not a very complex one.

Captain George Crowe, CB, DSO, RN, walked down three short steps into the blinding sunshine that made the big aeroplane’s wings seem to waver in reflected light. The heat of the Potomac Valley hit him in the face, a sweltering contrast to the air-cooled comfort of the plane. He was wearing a blue uniform more suitable for the bridge of a destroyer than for the damp heat of Washington, and that was not very surprising, because not a great many hours earlier he had been on the bridge of a destroyer, and most of the intervening hours he had spent in aeroplanes, sitting in miserable discomfort at first, breathing through his oxygen mask in the plane that had brought him across the Atlantic, and then reclining in cushioned ease in the passenger plane that had brought him from his point of landing here.

The United States naval officer who had been sent to meet him had no difficulty in picking him out - the four gold stripes on his sleeves and the ribbons on his chest marked him out, even if his bulk and his purposeful carriage had not done so.

‘Captain Crowe?’ asked the naval lieutenant.

‘Yes.’

‘Glad to see you, sir. My name’s Harley.’

The two shook hands.

‘I have a car waiting, sir,’ Harley went on. ‘They’re expecting you at the Navy Department, if you wouldn’t mind coming at once.’

The car swung out of the airport and headed for the bridge while Crowe blinked round him. It was a good deal of a contrast - two days before he had been with his flotilla, refuelling in a home port; then had come the summons to the Admiralty, a fleeting glimpse of wartime London, and now here he was in the District of Columbia, United States of America, with the chances of sudden death infinitely removed, shops plentifully stocked, motorcars still swarming, and the city of Washington spread out before him.

Crowe stirred a little uneasily. He hoped he had not been brought to this land of plenty unnecessarily; he regretted already having left his flotilla and the eternal hunt after U-boats.

The car stopped and Harley sprang out and held the door open for him. There were guards in naval uniform round the door, revolvers sagging at their thighs; a desk at which they paused for a space.

‘No exceptions,’ smiled Harley, apologizing for the fact that not even the uniform of a British naval captain would let them into the holy of holies for which they were headed. There were two men in the room to which Harley led him.

‘Good morning,’ said the admiral.

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Crowe.

‘Sorry to hurry you like this,’ the admiral said gruffly. ‘But it’s urgent. Meet Lieutenant Brand.’

Brand was in plain clothes - seedy plainclothes. Crowe puzzled over them. Those clothes were the sort of suit that a middle-class Frenchman, not too well off, and the father of a family, would wear. And Brand’s face was marked with weariness and anxiety.

‘Brand left Lisbon about the same time you left London,’ said the admiral. His eyes twinkled - no, ‘twinkled’ was too gentle a word - they glittered under thick black eyebrows. No man who looked into those eyes even for a moment would want to be the admiral’s enemy. Now he shot a direct glance at Crowe, twisted his thin lips and shot a question.

‘Supposing,’ he asked, ‘you had the chance to give orders to a U-boat captain, what orders would you give?’

Crowe kept his face expressionless. ‘That would depend,’ he said cautiously, ‘on who the U-boat captain was.’

‘In this case it is Korvettenkapitan Lothar Wolfgang von und zu Loewenstein.’

Captain Crowe repressed a start. ‘I know him,’ he said.

‘That’s why you’re here.’ The admiral grinned. ‘Didn’t they tell you in London? You’re here because few people on our side of the ocean know Loewenstein better than you.’

Crowe considered. Yes, he decided, the admiral’s statement was right. He knew Loewenstein. In the years before 1939, the German had made quite a reputation for himself by his bold handling of his yacht in English regattas - Loewenstein and his helmsman. Burke? Of course not. Bruch - Burch - something like that. Good man, that helmsman.

Crowe had met Loewenstein repeatedly on several formal occasions when the British navy had met detachments of the German navy while visiting. And since 1939 their paths had crossed more than once - Crowe on the surface in his destroyer, and Loewenstein two hundred feet below in his submarine.