On the Edge of Darkness (Special Force Orca Book 1) (18 page)

Barr paused,
“Now I come to the second of our three tasks. The whole force will harass enemy shipping along the entire length of the Norwegian coastline, wherever and whenever it is encountered… Now this is pretty much what we were doing, before we were rudely interrupted, by a spot of leave. I hope, by now, those of you who were not with us last trip have been given copies of the operational reports that we submitted at the time. You should be able to get some idea of the sort of work we were engaged in and how we went about it from them. It’s basic stuff… As Nelson put it, you can’t go far wrong if you put your ship alongside one of the enemy’s. Or as I hear Petty Officer Stone puts it. ‘When you’re in a fight, be first… be fast… and be furious.”

When the burst of laughter had died down Barr continued
, “Third, and final task, is that of ‘Supply’. Jerry has complete air superiority over Norway. This means it would be unrealistic to rely on slow merchant ships to supply our troops; it’s a job for fast warships capable of completing the crossing in one night. For these ‘shopping trips’ we will be using the ‘Nishga’. Those of you brave enough to venture out onto the upper deck this morning will have noticed we are already busy loading stores. This is equipment urgently needed by a company of the 24
th
Guards Brigade at a place called, “he glanced at his sheet of paper, “Mosjoen.”

He eased the clip and the chart fell back into place.
“A battalion of the 24
th
landed at Mosjoen, a little over two hundred miles from Narvik on the 10
th
of May. Now, by coincidence, Jerry put men ashore at Hamnesberget… here… to the south, more or less at the same time. This has cut off our men from their mates and severed their supply line. That’s where the ‘Nishga’ comes in. After we’ve delivered the groceries we will be playing things very much by ear… the situation ashore is, to say the least, fluid. “Our side may need some help from our four point sevens or they may need more supplies; we’ll find out from them once we get there…That’s about it gentlemen… Questions please!”

Chapter 11

Mosjoen

It was Sunday the 12
th
of May before the flotilla was fully ready and the ‘Nishga’ was able to lead the line of warships north, her boiling wake making a straight foam channel for her consorts to follow.

The passage through the Irish Sea was uneventful and Barr took the opportunity to put
‘Orca’ through their paces. It was the first time they had all been at sea together. The set of drills and manoeuvres he had first worked on, using his son’s toys now had their first airing. He had run through them, but this was their first chance at full sea trials. On the whole Barr was pleased with Orca’s’ performance and said as much to the flotilla before the force split up, south of the Shetland Isles. The M.T.B.s hurried on towards the Shetlands, the E-boat’s turned east towards Olaf’s Inlet, and the ‘Nishga’ headed north east to commence her ‘grocery run’.

The destroyer entered harbour at first light after a very fast passage. They anchored off Bodo after receiving re-r
outing orders from Scapa Flow, events, ashore, were changing rapidly. Now the whole of the 24
th
Guard’s brigade could only be reached from the sea.

The Germans, with their air superiority and use of
‘Blitz’ tactics were sweeping north and already threatening Mo to the south.

To add to an already chaotic situation the Commanding Officer Major General Mackesy had been replaced.
The newly appointed CO ordered Mo to be held as long as it could be supplied by road and for Bodo to be held at all costs. The ‘Nishga’s’ cargo was quickly unloaded into barges and by late afternoon she was ready to sail.

The bombers arrived at a little after four. The crew were already at their action steaming stations, already
closed up on full alert. All guns were brought to bear and opened up on the Heinkels as they swooped into the attack. Light anti-aircraft artillery, ashore, added their fire to the barrage.

The captain
of ‘A’ turret took two men and ran for’ard to raise the anchor. In the lulls between blasts from the four point sevens, it could be heard clanking and clanging its way slowly inboard.

As soon as the men had signalled
‘clear anchor’ the destroyer got under way and quickly began to pick up speed, turning through the wind in a tight circle, making a run for the open sea. Astern, the sky above the docks, to the south of the town, blossomed with deadly black flower-heads criss-crossed with the tracer from pom-poms and heavy machine guns. Somehow the flight of Heinkels emerged unscathed from the barrage, seemingly immune from a terrifying display of firepower. Other aircraft followed in waves, like migratory birds, they swept in, wave after wave, dropping their bombs into the smoke that soon enveloped the docks.

As the last group of bombers came onto their target one peeled off in a graceful lazy dive to port and headed in towards the
‘Nishga’. She came in low, rapidly overhauling the speeding destroyer from astern, volleys of fire from the ship’s close range weaponry stabbed at her, tracer whipped and lashed across her nose bucking her from her line, but still she came on. She started to return the fire, her own tracer joining in a deadly dance with the destroyer’s, ripping through the sky astern of the racing warship in white-hot bursts of light.

The pilot was good, he had positioned his aircraft for a
textbook attack, one that could not possibly fail, he opened the bomb doors.

*     *     *

HMS Edward, Olaf’s Inlet.

Lieutenant Grant edged the pointed bow of the ‘Eddy’ cautiously into the rock boom. Wilson leapt across the gap. Wyatt quickly passed a basketwork fender across to him before leaping down himself. They clambered across the uneven surface of rocks and untied the mooring wire. With the ‘Eddy’ inching ahead and the bulky fender in place, to protect her vulnerable hull, the boom was slowly, gently, pushed to one side. The two seamen held the raft in place while the ‘Ethel’ too slid quietly into the inlet.

The rest of the forenoon
was spent unloading stores at the newly constructed stone jetty, deep in the womb-like cave.

Shortly after sunset Grant and Bushel
climbed up the tunnel and set off on skis for Kristiansand’s house where, over piping hot coffee, the Norwegian supplied them with some very interesting information.

The Germans were amassing a convoy of small boats in a bay only an hour along the coast. It was thought that
they were loading supplies possibly for a large party of German infantry who had landed from the sea at Hamnesberget a hundred and seventy miles to the north. Coincidentally these were the very men threatening the 24
th
at Mo. The very same people the ‘Nishga’ had been dispatched to help.

*     *     *

HMS Nishga, Bodo Harbour.

Commander Barr stood feet astride, watching the Heinkel as she sped in seventy feet above the ‘Nishga’s’ bubbling wake. He waited quietly, one hand on the array of voice pipes.

He
lifted the lid on one, “Ready ‘Guns’? You know the drill?”

“
Yes, sir.”

He flipped the cover closed and bent over another.
“Ready Coxswain, just as we practised!”

“
Aye, Aye, sir.”

All the while his eyes had not left the approaching aircraft, close enough now to see
the bomb doors opening, he fancied he could see the pilot’s faces…Whites of their eyes…Time… “Hard astarboard!”

“
Hard astarboard….thirty five degrees of starboard wheel on, sir.”

At thirty knots the destroyer leant over to a
seemingly impossible angle as she cut to starboard, taking the corner in a racing-horse-turn throwing a wave of green water tumbling away to port.

With deadly accuracy the stick of bombs fell from the screaming aircraft, black dots, diving like cormorants. They dropped right on target. Right w
here the destroyer should have been, right where, with any other captain, she probably would have been. Broadside on to the turning destroyer and at point blank range the Heinkel took the full blast from the stern mounted Pom Pom. She was quite literally torn to shreds. She flew into the stream of rapid fire intact; the madly jerking barrels of the gun spewed the forty millimetre shells casings out like popcorn, viciously ripping into her frail frame. She flew out the other side in bits, great chunks of metal fell into the churning sea. When her fuel tanks flew into the line of fire an explosion ripped through the remains of the aircraft. In seconds she was no longer an aircraft, just a mass of blazing debris plummeting into the quenching sea.

The warship continued her turn, completing the full circle
she sped out of the harbour entrance.

*     *     *

0200 hrs, Tuesday, 14
th
May, 1940. Vikjord, Norway.

The two E-boats lay offshore of their target bobbing and dancing in the long westerly swell. The sea reflected black and silver, as clouds tumbled across the white face of the moon.

Inshore the darkness hung heavy with fog, its skirts moving slowly to a fitful
breeze. It had been seven hours since Kristiansand and the marines had been put ashore, bobbing into the night in their rubber dinghy.

The weather forecast had predicted a westerly wind,
increasing to force five by dawn. Ideal conditions for what Grant had in mind.

A little after two the inflatable was spotted returning with part of the reconnaissance party. By a quarter past,
Kristiansand and Blake were onboard and being debriefed. Their news was good. Nothing had changed ashore all was exactly as Kristiansand’s spies had reported. At the southern end of the fjord the Germans had moored some fifteen assorted barges and coasters, along with their escorts. To the west, near the entrance to the fjord and a half- mile from the convoy, there was an oil storage facility. It was close to here that the ‘Nishga’s’ landing party had left Bushel and Stilson lying up, awaiting zero hour.

Grant paused,
looking from face to face. “So that, in a nutshell, is the plan. This will be no picnic. We will need to go in bloody fast and out… even faster. Jerry has chosen the site well. In fact he couldn’t have chosen a better place to assemble a convoy. Steep sided, well concealed, impossible to spot from the sea and difficult to bomb from the air. The passage in is narrow, made even narrower by German minelayers a week before they began assembling the convoy. We can only pray the wind does what it is supposed to do and holds steady, otherwise our ace in the hole could prove to be a joker.” He rose to his feet, “Now if there are no more questions…. Good, then we’ve time for a few hours rest before the off…” He held out a hand towards the door, “Gentlemen.”

*     *     *

Grant lay on his bunk unable to sleep, thinking of the coming operation, going over and over the plan in his mind. If one thing worried him above all others it was the minefield, probably because of his experiences on the Belfast. He tried to tell himself it would not be like that. He’d read somewhere that it was difficult to find a hero at two in the morning. Whoever wrote that could well have added that the same went for optimists.

He told himself that he should be one of them
. Thank God for the ‘Network’. It had managed to provide him with a pretty good idea of where the swept channel through the mines was. While the German minelayer had been busy placing its deadly cargo, the ‘Network’ had been just as busy mapping it from the mountains above. Grant delved into the spinning depths of an already tired mind. If he remembered correctly from his training days on the ‘Alfred’ it took seven pounds of pressure on a mine’s horns to detonate it. He could remember his instructor, Chief Poppem, holding up a sledgehammer and saying all it took was to rest this on the horn and…

It was go
ing to be a nerve- racking few hours for them all.

*     *     *

A bitter cold night had splintered into an icy morning. It was still dark, a few minutes to five: Zero hour. Grant and Hogg stood side by side on the tiny bridge peering into the dark. They spotted the flash of light at the same time.

“
There, sir!” cried the midshipman, “There’s Bushel’s signal.”

“
He saw us easily enough,” said Grant, “Let’s hope Jerry isn’t as alert.” They were still half a mile from target. “Signalman!… Make ‘Execute’.”

*     *     *

Bushel lowered his hooded lamp, concentrating on the light as he read the reply. He could feel, rather than see, Stilson coiled just behind him, ready for the off. The man’s blood lust was almost tangible. As he turned, to give Stilson the nod, he felt like a handler releasing an attack dog. The marine showed his yellow teeth in a fierce grin and loped off towards the oil dump. Bushel followed, at a slower pace, weighed down as he was, by the heaviest of the equipment. He saw ‘Snake’ drop to the ground at the crest, remove his skis and start his slow careful approach to target.

Two min
utes later Bushel stopped; easing the heavy pack from his back he dropped to his belly and inched carefully forward until he could see over the crest.

Below was the camouflaged compound
. It was piled high with the twenty-gallon oil drums. The moon abruptly appeared from behind its cloud cover and revealed the helmeted sentry blowing into his hands, his machine pistol slung over one shoulder.

With difficulty h
e picked out ‘Snake’ below him, he was moving slowly around the back of the compound, keeping it between him and the German guard. Bushel would have been the first to admit, he was watching a master at work, it was classic stuff all right. When ‘Snake’ reached the corner of the compound he disappeared, as if by magic, into the thin blue shadow cast by the wooden end post. Unless you knew he was there…and even then. Bushel shook his head in wonder. He did not like the man, but his admiration had nothing to do with like or dislike…Stilson was making no attempt to get nearer. They had watched this particular sentry from a distance. He was a creature of habit, not a good characteristic in a sentry. He rubbed his hands together, pulled at his belt. Bushel almost said aloud ‘Now straighten your helmet’…There he goes… yeah a creature of habit all right. The corporal of marines felt almost sorry for him. He was looking at a dead man; there was a morbid fascination in watching him. He swung about on one jackbooted heel and trudged slowly back through the snow towards the concealed ‘Snake’. He turned once more, paused momentarily, as usual, and died.