Marine L SBS Read online

  Broakes looked up, took off his glasses and wiped them, then looked down at the book again. A moment later he shut it and said to Keyes: ‘No intruders were reported in the deck log. I also checked this myself with the officers of the watch this morning before I left the ship.’

  ‘I see. And could he have come and gone without your guards knowing?’

  ‘Impossible, sir. Except during the raid, when all hands were needed at action stations, there were guards the length of the ship and a roving one as well.’

  Keyes sighed. It seemed a disappointing end to a creditable idea. ‘Let’s ask Lieutenant Pountney what happened to him,’ he said, and nodded to the Marine standing by the door to open it.

  Pountney entered and saluted smartly, and was told to stand at ease. No one noticed that he was carrying a small kitbag, which he placed unobtrusively behind him.

  ‘How did it go, Pountney?’ asked the Director of Combined Operations.

  ‘Very well, thank you, sir.’

  ‘A success, then?’

  ‘I would judge it a total success, sir.’

  There was a murmur of surprise around the table. Keyes cleared his throat. He obviously found the situation highly amusing.

  ‘But Captain Broakes says there was no intrusion. His deck log does not record one, and therefore it couldn’t have happened.’

  ‘If Captain Broakes would care to send someone over the starboard side of his ship, sir, they will find two chalked crosses on the hull. One near the bows, the other where the engine-rooms are.’

  ‘We found those,’ admitted Broakes. ‘But how do we know it was Lieutenant Pountney who put them there?’

  ‘Well, Pountney?’

  ‘I wrote this word near one of the crosses, sir.’

  Pountney handed Keyes a piece of paper.

  The Admiral unfolded it and smiled. ‘Very appropriate, I’m sure. There was a word by one of the crosses, Dick?’

  ‘There was, sir.’

  ‘And what was it?’

  ‘"Bang".’

  A ripple of laughter went round the table.

  ‘Well, that seems to settle that point,’ said Keyes. ‘But you told us, young man, that you would get aboard the Glengyle unseen and unheard, and that was the crucial part of the raid. I assume that Captain Broakes is correct in saying that no one boarded his ship last night?’

  Pountney stiffened. ‘No, sir. He is not.’

  Again, there was a murmur of surprise.

  ‘He is not correct?’

  ‘No, sir. I climbed up the mooring chain and went aboard over the bows.’

  Captain Broakes leant forward. ‘At what time was this?’

  ‘Immediately the air raid started, sir.’

  ‘You used the air raid as cover?’ Keyes said sharply.

  Pountney nodded. ‘If the weather’s clear Jerry comes every night around that time. He’s very punctual.’

  ‘Good,’ said Keyes, ‘very good.’

  Broakes’s smile softened his severe features. ‘Quite an accomplishment under the circumstances. I congratulate you, Lieutenant.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  There was a pause before Broakes added: ‘But how do we know? If no one aboard saw you, what proof have we?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Keyes said. ‘Did you use your chalk on board?’

  Pountney shook his head.

  ‘Pity,’ said Keyes. ‘No absolute proof then.’

  ‘Was nothing reported missing aboard the Glengyle, sir?’ Pountney asked.

  Keyes looked enquiringly at Broakes, who shook his head.

  ‘It should have been,’ said Pountney. He bent and shook open the bag he had brought with him.

  ‘May I, sir?’

  Keyes nodded and Pountney placed a large, sleeve-shaped canvas cover on the table. Keyes turned it over and exposed the word ‘Glengyle’ stamped along one side of it.

  ‘An Oerlikon muzzle cover?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Keyes passed the canvas cover down the table to Broakes, who looked at it and turned it over, then shook his head in disbelief.

  Keyes stood up and extended his hand. ‘Congratulations. How many men do you want?’

  ‘A dozen to start with, sir.’

  ‘You shall have them. I’m seconding you immediately to No. 8 Commando, which is now training on the Isle of Arran. Good luck.’

  3

  ‘Periscope depth, Number One.’

  David Woods’s two wavy gold stripes on his sleeves showed he was an officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the ‘wavy navy’. Inevitably, he was known to his many friends as ‘Timber’ and he sported a luxurious beard and moustache, both of which were, like his hair, tinged with red. They hid the youthfulness of his face, but his eyes were no longer young; they had a strained, alert look which conveyed, better than any words, the burden of responsibility which lay upon him as the submarine’s captain, and his constant proximity to death.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  The First Lieutenant of the two-hundred-foot S-class submarine Sentinel turned to the two coxswains who controlled the vessel’s external planes. ‘Take her to thirty feet,’ he ordered.

  The planesmen sat on the port side of the submarine’s control room in front of two large depth gauges. They watched these as they swung the wheels which altered the angle of the planes. The gauges’ needles, which had been rock-steady on eighty feet since the submarine had dived at dawn that morning, began to rise steadily, though all those in the control room could feel was a slight tilt of the floor beneath them.

  No one and nothing broke the silence until the First Lieutenant said sharply: ‘Thirty feet, sir.’

  ‘Up main periscope.’

  The engine-room artificer sitting at the control room’s vent-and-blow panel moved a lever and the larger of the two bronze columns which ran through the control room and up through the submarine’s pressure hull began to rise smoothly and silently. As soon as the end of the periscope, with its two rubber eyepieces, emerged from its well in the bottom of the hull, Woods moved towards it. While it was still moving he crouched down and snapped open the periscope’s two control handles, and by the time the column came to rest at shoulder height he already had his eyes glued to the eyepieces. Bending slightly, he moved the periscope expertly through a complete circle, his body moving with it.

  ‘Where should we be, Pilot?’

  The navigator, a chubby-faced sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, looked up from the chart spread out on the chart table in front of him. ‘Four miles south-south-east of the port of Rhodes, sir. We should be two miles offshore. The chart shows a windmill a mile inland.’

  There was a pause as Woods scanned the shoreline: ‘More like three miles.’

  He gave the right handle of the periscope half a turn away from him, as if he was changing gear on a motorcycle. It was now in high magnification, which gave a narrower but more powerful picture.

  ‘Yes, I see it. Good. Well done. Down periscope.’

  The end of the bronze column slid silently back into its well. He turned to the elder of the two men watching him. ‘We’ve got you here, Jumbo. What next?’

  ‘We must find the best beach to land on, Timber. The nearest to Maritsa,’ said Pountney without hesitation, ‘and then tonight we land.’

  Together they bent over the chart table with the navigator. Pountney pointed out Maritsa airfield in the north-west of the island.

  ‘I can see only three possible landing places,’ Woods said, pointing them out, ‘and one of those looks rather close to an inhabited area to be of much use.’

  Pountney studied the chart. Most of the coastline of Rhodes was rocky. Isolated beaches in the area where they wanted to land were not going to be easy to find.

  ‘Perhaps. Let’s have a look at it anyway. You agree, Phil?’

  Ayton nodded immediately. Where they landed was Pountney’s decision, not his. He had learnt from their training in Scotland that the older man’s knack in find
ing the right place to land in a canoe – or ‘folbot’ as their precarious, fragile means of transport was now officially called – was uncanny. Ayton’s area of expertise was making up the various explosive charges he had been trained to use and laying them to make sure they did maximum damage.

  Having worked together on Arran for the past nine months, the two men knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, understood every expression, every innuendo. They could anticipate each other’s moves with uncanny accuracy and a flick of the fingers or the movement of the head was instantly and correctly interpreted.

  After acclimatization and further training on the Bitter Lakes at Kabrit, Pountney, now a captain, and his men had been attached to the First Submarine Flotilla at Alexandria and renamed No. 1 Special Boat Section. But, apart from a beach reconnaissance on another part of Rhodes which Pountney had made with a friend of his, Lieutenant commander Tony Eden, this was their first operation since the Section had been shipped to Egypt as part of a commando force, called Layforce after its commander, Major-General Bob Laycock.

  Much to Pountney’s delight, the Section’s unofficial secondment to the Royal Navy had put it outside direct Army control and out of the grasp of the empire-building General Headquarters staffs in Cairo. This suited everyone – except the empire builders. The unit’s new name sounded suitably anonymous, but Laycock warned Pountney to guard his independence ‘like a virgin guards her virtue’ as the ‘desk wallahs’ in Cairo and Whitehall hated the newly formed independent special forces.

  ‘They’re trained to think for themselves and they pinch all the best men. Both are unforgivable crimes in the mind of any Army bureaucrat.’

  Enemy airfields were the SBS’s top-priority targets, for Malta was already under siege from the air. Destroying aircraft on the ground would help lessen the increasingly heavy odds against the convoys dispatched from Gibraltar and Alexandria being sent to sustain the island.

  ‘We’ll take her back down to eighty feet, Number One.’

  The First Lieutenant, or Jimmy as he was always known by the crew, repeated the order to the planesmen. The planesmen spun their wheels to adjust the submarine’s two sets of planes and the Sentinel slipped quietly back into the depths.

  ‘Eighty feet, sir.’

  ‘Group down,’ Woods said into the voice pipe which connected him to the engine-room.

  ‘Course, Pilot?’

  ‘Three-five-five degrees, sir, up to the cape,’ the navigator answered unhesitatingly. ‘Then one-eight-five degrees once we’ve rounded it.’

  ‘Very good. Three-five-five it is.’

  ‘Steer three-five-five, sir,’ the helmsman repeated from his corner of the control room. He pronounced the numbers ‘three . . . fife . . . fife’ and did so clearly and distinctly to make quite certain he had heard them correctly. He eased his wheel, watching the gyro compass spinning slowly in front of him.

  ‘Distance to the first beach, Pilot?’

  ‘About twenty-five miles, sir.’

  ‘Three hours’ running. Very good. Let me know when we get there, Number One.’

  The submarine arrived off the first beach just before noon and Woods ordered it to periscope depth. Now the full heat of the spring day made the air shimmer in the lens of the periscope, distorting distances and blurring landmarks. The water was glassy calm, but Woods brought the submarine as close to the shore as he dared. After making sure there were no ships in the area, he handed over the periscope to Pountney.

  ‘A steep shingle beach,’ Pountney told Ayton, who was standing beside him. Ayton was close enough to Pountney to notice how the prisms in the periscope were concentrating the light into a pinpoint which pierced the pupils of Pountney’s eyes. ‘There’s a road behind. And a building . . . Looks like a hotel. Very grand. Oy, oy, what have we here? Krauts. Lots of them. Must be an officers’ mess of some sort. Have a look.’

  He unbent and stood back, allowing Ayton to take his position. Ayton had never looked through a periscope before, though Woods had taught them both how to alter the magnification and angle of the lens. He was surprised how wide the angle of vision was. He changed the magnification to high and the figures on the hotel lawn sprang at him, astonishingly close. He could even make out some of the details of their uniforms. Most of them looked like Luftwaffe officers, probably off-duty pilots from Maritsa airfield.

  He turned the left handle half a turn away from him to change the angle of the lens. Now he was looking at the hills that lay blue-grey in the distance, then at the sky directly above the submarine.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Ayton’s eyes were still glued to this fascinating toy. He swivelled the periscope back until it was again focusing on the hotel’s crowded lawn.

  ‘Bit close to those Krauts,’ he said doubtfully. He stepped back and Woods ordered the periscope to be housed back in its well.

  ‘That’s what I like about it,’ growled Pountney. ‘They won’t be expecting anybody to come through their back door. We might even have some explosive left over to leave them a welcoming early-morning call.’

  ‘If you think it’s OK, let’s do it,’ said Ayton immediately. It seemed an unnecessary risk to him, but Pountney appeared to positively enjoy taking unnecessary risks.

  Pountney rubbed his chin. He knew what Ayton was thinking. He said to Woods: ‘We’ll have a dekko at the others before we finally decide.’

  Once more the submarine dived back to eighty feet. This was the minimum depth for safety in the clear blue of the Aegean Sea. Any less and the submarine might not avoid detection from the air, even though it was painted the cobalt colour of the surrounding water.

  The electric motors hummed quietly. The air in the pressurized hull was heavy now from the lack of oxygen and Ayton could feel beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

  After twenty minutes Woods ordered the submarine back to periscope depth. They were now much closer to Maritsa airfield, and the danger of being spotted from low-flying aircraft made him particularly cautious. He scanned the sky above the horizon intently, before turning to peer at the shoreline.

  Pountney concealed his impatience by pretending to study the chart, but Ayton could feel that he was bursting to get going.

  Eventually Woods straightened up and called Pountney over to the periscope. Eagerly, Pountney clasped the handles and adjusted the height until he could stand easily on the circumference of the periscope well.

  After a moment he stepped back. ‘No bloody good at all,’ he said with disgust. ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’

  The young navigator looked reproachful. ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘See what you think, Phil.’

  Ayton adjusted the periscope height and looked into the eyepieces. He saw at once that what the chart had shown as a beach was not one at all. It was a rocky outcrop over which the waves were breaking and swirling with a force that would have made landing in the fragile folbot impossible.

  ‘Hopeless,’ he agreed.

  Then, reluctant to lose touch with the outside world, he swung the periscope round to the north before racking the lens angle upwards with the handle to look above the headland.

  Beyond the curve of the land, just above the horizon, he saw three indistinct dots. At first his brain did not register what they were, as they seemed not to be moving. But when he changed the periscope to high magnification they leapt out at him. He stumbled back and felt Woods brush past.

  ‘Aircraft,’ he said as the latter seized the handles. ‘Three, I think.’

  ‘I’ve got them,’ said Woods. ‘Impossible to tell at this distance, but they’re probably Capronis. Well spotted.’

  He snapped the handles closed. ‘Down periscope. One hundred feet, Number One. But don’t take her down too fast. We don’t want any disturbance on the surface.’

  The First Lieutenant issued his orders. The planesmen spun their wheels. All was quiet, but there was a tension in the control room that hadn’t been there before. Every
one knew that the Italian Caproni bomber was also used as an anti-submarine patrol aircraft, and that in this role it carried depth-charges as well as bombs.

  The moments ticked by.

  ‘One hundred feet, sir,’ the First Lieutenant said quietly.

  ‘Turn on the echo-sounder, Pilot,’ Woods ordered the navigator. ‘What depth have we under us?’

  ‘Fifty feet, sir.’

  ‘Take her down to the seabed, Number One. We’ll lie there for a while.’

  Again the planesmen spun their wheels. Woods cut the speed back further until they all felt the hull bump and jar on the sea bottom. Then he said quietly: ‘Stop engines.’

  Neither Pountney nor Ayton knew what to expect and Woods, busy issuing his orders, was far too occupied to tell them. But the navigator, seeing Ayton’s expression, said cheerfully: ‘They won’t see us this deep. Especially as we’re lying doggo.’

  Pountney glanced at his watch. Woods caught the movement and said: ‘I know. Time’s short. Can’t be helped.’

  The minutes passed and the air seemed to get thicker and hotter, making any movement tiring. Ayton felt a trickle of sweat on his face. Pountney fidgeted with his watch, but forced himself not to look at its dial. He knew Woods would surface when he thought it was safe and not before. He was beginning to learn that, as in all areas of combat, there was a lot of hanging around in submarine operations. It didn’t suit Pountney. One thing he hated was hanging around.

  After half an hour Woods ordered the submarine to ‘group down’ and steer for the third beach. ‘Let’s hope it’s going to be suitable,’ he said to the SBS officers. ‘Thanks to those Wop bombers there’s not going to be time to recce any others. Remember, we’re going to have to recharge our battery before we land you.’

  Pountney didn’t argue with that. The SBS men hadn’t been aboard the Sentinel long, but it had been long enough for them to have learnt the vital necessity of conserving the power of the submarine’s fifty-ton battery, which drove the electric engines when the submarine was submerged, and of ensuring that it remained as fully charged as possible. They knew that the order ‘group down’ meant that the battery cells were put in series instead of parallel, to save precious juice, and that the battery could only be charged by the submarine’s diesel engines, which could only be used on the surface. At full speed on the electric motors, the battery lasted only an hour. In that time the submarine could cover about eight miles. At slow speed, say two knots, the battery could last a day or more. A dead battery meant a dead crew; it was as simple as that.