Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) (19 page)

‘Wreck buoy, green four-five, sir.’ That was Signalman Chitty, in his other role with the machine-guns.

Bass eased the spokes and said, ‘The old
Latchmere
. Was mined a year back, and then sank in a few fathoms. Full of scrap iron, she was.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Still is. They’ll never bother to shift the old girl now!’

Foley let the glasses drop to his chest. What he said was true. Like folklore; Bass had not even been in the Channel when it had happened. The wreck had become a feature, something on which you could obtain a running fix at low water if you had gone off course. Ships large or lucky enough to be fitted with radar could use the wreck’s rusty upperworks and rely on their instruments. You never questioned it.

He reached out and gripped the voicepipes to steady himself as the hull dipped into another trough. Like an ice-cold hand on the skin. The breath of someone invisible, right beside you.

You never questioned it.

‘All engines
stop
!’ It seemed to take an eternity before the sound and vibration died away. It probably took three seconds.

Foley pushed across the bridge, wiping his face again, as if to clear his vision. There was nothing. It must be worse than he had imagined.
Nothing.
And all the while Tony Brock was forging ahead with the others. Oblivious. He would be merciless.

Not even a dismal bell this time. Too well known. Too permanent.

Allison was pressed beside him. Wanting to know, but perhaps still smarting from the unfair outburst.

Foley said, ‘The channel widens here. The last chance for a surprise attack. If the shore radar gets a fix, it will only show a faint blip. The old
Latchmere.
’ He hurried on, afraid to stop, but unable to convince himself. ‘I was doing a mine-laying run on the other side, a year or so ago. Watching for a kraut convoy, thinking we were to seaward of it. Like Dick Claridge is doing right now. I think there’s one of them waiting to cut across our stern.’ He gripped his glasses until his fingers throbbed. The sea was clearer now, hardly a swell to ruffle the surface. Another blurred patch of green: the wreck buoy. Nothing.

Chitty said, ‘Oil on the surface, sir.’ Calm, matter-of-fact.

Another commented, ‘From the wreck, mate.’

Bass snapped, ‘She was coal-fired,
mate
!’

Foley took two strides and saw the three-pounder gun crew peering up at him. He made a chopping motion with his fist, and saw the gunlayer swing back to his sights.

The air was even colder on his skin. At any moment the fog would begin to move, if not lift.

‘Stand by!’
He did not even think of Shannon down there with his engines and dials. He would be ready. He had to be.

He could see the whole of the forecastle now, the guardrails laid flat to allow the gun full movement.

Still no sign of the other vessels. Brock or one of the others must soon realize that Tailend Charlie had vanished astern.

Allison thought the same. ‘One of them’s pulling back, sir.’

Foley stiffened. ‘No, Toby.
Listen.
’

Bass cleared his throat, and swore as Chitty tugged the cocking lever of his twin Brownings. It seemed loud enough to rouse the old freighter’s crew.

First it was no more than a frothing sound, then with an ever-mounting roar of power the other vessel’s engines shattered the stillness.

The bow wave, mounting even as they watched, was a great moustache of spray against the sea and fog, a sharp-edged wave rolling across the water as the hull heeled over in response.

Allison had heard it only twice before, when he had been serving as a midshipman in an old destroyer, and
the last time, when they had stopped in this boat to pick up the dead airman.

The enemy had already increased speed, the three big Daimler-Benz engines joining as one, drowning out all thought as the E-Boat smashed through the sea.

Any second now, and the guns would open fire. At this range . . . Foley slammed his fist on the voicepipes. ‘Full ahead! Port fifteen!’ He jabbed at the button by his hip. ‘Follow him round!’

It was impossible. A madness. But the E-Boat had not seen them. So intent on a kill, her commander had overlooked the possibility of an extra escort. Foley tried to empty his mind of everything else, but the thought persisted. Why should an experienced E-Boat commander wait on the mere offchance of catching this or any other small group of ships?

The gunfire had started. Green and scarlet tracer lifting and ripping down, interwoven and deadly. The heavier bark of the enemy’s cannon, the staccato rattle of lighter weapons, while the fog lifted and writhed in a wild panorama of battle. Here and there a hull would show itself in exploding shellfire, or a patch of sea open up as a fast-moving bow wave fanned out to reveal the speed and fury of the attack.

‘Open fire!’

The three-pounder responded immediately, the shells tracking and following the E-Boat’s rising wash. Hits, damage, impossible to tell. Brock’s ML was heading through the scattered formation, loud-hailer blaring, signal lamp flashing, men frantically reloading magazines and ammunition belts, ready for another attack.

Brock’s boat was slowing down, the sea lifting and surging over the bows.

‘Close shave, Chris! Good thing you were on the ball! Cheeky bastard, eh?’ Suddenly formal again. ‘Keep closed up! Report damage and casualties, if any! Dick’s taken a few bricks, by the look of it!’ The wash mounted again; Brock was on the move.

‘If not us, then what was that E-Boat doing there?’

He did not realize he had spoken aloud. Allison said, ‘Waiting for something bigger, sir? The LCT would avoid a torpedo, even at minimum setting.’ He faltered. ‘I think.’

Foley touched his arm and felt him jump. ‘Or something smaller. Maybe you’ve got something.’

The E-Boat did not return, and at first light three Spitfires droned over the little convoy for the final approach to the inlet. One of the motor minesweepers had been raked by cannon fire, but nobody had been touched. Dick Claridge’s ML401 eventually worked alongside the pier, with four canvas-covered bodies laid out on her deck.

Brock wasted no time when he came aboard.

‘Good thing you had your wits about you, Chris. But mostly just luck, I suspect!’ He was grinning, so that some of the sailors turned to watch, to share it.
Like old comrades.
But Brock left nothing in doubt. ‘Otherwise, old son, even your famous luck wouldn’t save you!’

After Brock had departed to make his report Foley walked slowly through the boat, greeted with nods and smiles and the usual thumbs-up from someone he had known longer than most. The Chief, Ian Shannon, came
up to shake his hand, regardless of the oil which bonded them together.

Luck, but how could it last? Had he not stopped, the E-Boat would have raked them when it had passed astern at full speed. With the German’s heavier armament and some forty-two knots to back it up, these decks would have been a bloody shambles.

He thought of the letter again.
I was afraid.
Something he had always managed to control, which any ship’s company should be able to take for granted in their skipper.

Afraid, then. Perhaps because he had found something which was outside this perilous, overcrowded existence.

Bass called, ‘The Boss is comin’ aboard by the look of it, sir!’ He waited, gauging the moment exactly. ‘We’re all in one piece. I’ll bet Jerry wondered wot th’ ’ell ’ad caught ’im with ’is pants down!’

He hurried away to make certain that the gangway was manned for visitors.

It was as well that he did not look back, Foley thought. Luck was never enough.

She lay very still on the bed, listening to the wind sighing around the old house, rattling the window of her room. Outside it would be pitch dark, the road deserted. She could faintly hear voices, even at this hour: the waiting room, where a few patients would still be sitting and exchanging conversation about their ailments, or managing to remain apart in their thoughts. She had been born in this house, had grown up with it.

There was only a table light switched on beside the bed. The familiar picture over the empty fireplace had been slightly tipped at an angle when she had arrived. She moved the sheet across her body. She had been here for five days. It was still hard to accept.

A door banged and she heard someone leaving, coughing as he or she departed. When he was finished in his surgery her father would come and see her. Even that was strange.
How’s my girl coming along?
As he might to any patient, but not to a daughter. Maybe that was his strength.

She moved to one elbow and looked around the room; it seemed so small, not as she remembered it when she was back with the navy. Three weeks’ leave . . . She felt guilty whenever she found herself counting the days before she would be going back to duty.

She glanced at the little drawer in the bedside table. His letter was inside, and she wondered why she had not told her parents about it. It had been delivered by a sailor on a motor cycle, according to one of the nurses. She had wanted to meet and talk to him, to try and discover . . .

She had read the letter several times. His concern for her health, the treatment she was getting. How long it might take. How she was missed. Nothing about himself at all. Maybe that said everything.

She thought of the moment she had been preparing to leave the second hospital, one of those which had only been partly taken over by the armed services. Unable to dress in the uniform a Wren had brought for her, she had held herself upright against a chair and stared at
herself in a long wall mirror. She was lucky to be alive. Black and blue, dirty yellow where the bruises were beginning to fade. Her father had remarked on it when he had examined her that first time, when she had lain here listening to the car pulling away from the house.

‘Plenty of rest, my girl. I wish we could do so much more for you. But at least I’m in charge, and can make sure nothing goes wrong.’

Her mother had been there, the nurse again. Calm and contained while her daughter had been lying naked. All the lights had been on then, revealing the bruises, the livid scar where she had felt the glass gouging into her thigh and groin. The pain, and the terrible fear that she would lose consciousness, and die without fighting back.

‘He was just in time, inexperienced or not.’ Her father had sounded almost detached.

She thought of the letter. The things he had not written, the things she had seen on his face when he had come to visit her. To find her.
Inexperienced.
It angered her more than she would have believed possible.

She touched her body; there was only a loose dressing now to protect the scar. Her inability to recall the crash, the sequence of events which had followed, was almost the worst part. She knew that piece of road very well, but could remember nothing of the impact, only a sensation of falling, losing consciousness. Then the awareness that she was unable to move, of pain, and a terrible sense of danger. And silence. Then the hands, his hands, firm, insistent, holding her, opening her clothing, pausing on her breast; he might even
have been talking to her, willing her to hold on. She had imagined that his hands were warm, until she had realized the warmth was her own blood. Mostly she remembered the strength of his grip, hard into her groin, the sense of shock which had persisted even then. Of her arrival at the hospital she recalled little but vague shapes and looming faces, pain and the inability to move. She touched the dressing. The skin was smooth, shaved, and she had felt nothing.
A necessary precaution
, her father had said. Was that all it meant?

She heard the buzzer sound; the next patient was being summoned. She lowered her legs over the side of the bed and carefully put on her dressing gown. Soreness, like the bruises, remained, but the real pain was gone. She caught her expression in the mirror. Almost . . .

Across the landing was her brother’s old room. That had been the most brutal reminder of how things had changed in this house since Graham’s death in the submarine
Tornado
. As if time had stopped, but could somehow be restarted at any given moment. She had gone into look for something and had been shocked to see it exactly as he must have left it, as he would find it if he suddenly walked through the door. The photographs of his cricket team, and another of him with his two best friends at college. Graham had loved listening to jazz, and his gramophone and its piles of records were all arranged as before. She had found herself touching the record sleeves; his old favourites, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and the top one, Fats Waller’s ‘Ain’t
Misbehavin’’, had all been carefully dusted. Even his dressing gown was hanging on the door.

The room at least was still alive.

A door banged, and she heard Mrs. Warren, Lucy, calling out something to the departing patient.

Lucy had been here as long as she could remember. Receptionist, assistant, housekeeper and friend, she knew everybody, and newcomers often consulted her before making an appointment. Her husband – she only ever referred to him as ‘Mr. Warren’ – was retired, but was seen about with his helmet and gas mask in his role as air raid warden.

She walked to the fireplace and straightened the offending picture. Lucy at least had been aware of her uncertainty, the lingering shock of the accident, the close encounter with death. She could make a joke out of almost anything without offence; she was just being Lucy.

She had helped Margot to bathe and wash her hair, and had almost laughed out loud when she stood naked in the bath, confused and embarrassed.

‘If Mr. Warren could just see you, Miss Margot! Like one of his pin-ups out of
Men Only
, you are!’

Her spare uniform was lying carefully folded on a couch. That was the next battle. It was not the thought of going back; it was the idea of remaining here, in her own home, for three long weeks. It was so unfair to her parents, to Lucy, to the few other people she had seen since arriving, that she wanted to weep.