Marine L SBS Page 4

  Twenty minutes later they were off the third beach. Its pebbles, bleached white by the sun, glittered and sparkled in the periscope. It was long and narrow and shelved only gradually. It was perfect to land on, but when Pountney surveyed it he could not see any way off it.

  ‘Well?’ said Woods. There was a note of irritation in his voice.

  Pountney stood back and shook his head. ‘It’ll have to be the first beach or nothing.’

  ‘Then you’d better have another look at it,’ said Woods. ‘But it’ll be midnight before I can land you there.’

  ‘The Krauts in the hotel should all be tucked up in bed by that time,’ said Pountney. He exchanged glances with Ayton, who shrugged.

  Woods ordered the submarine to submerge to eighty feet. By the time they reached the first beach again and returned to periscope depth, the sun was setting behind them. The light was quite different now. It threw a yellowish, mellow glow over the beach and the hotel, and the flat surface of the sea had turned a fiery orange red.

  Several German officers were having a last bathe of the day. Ayton watched them with the main periscope on high magnification. They seemed so close he could almost touch them; they certainly appeared close enough to shoot, and he felt a tremor of cold hatred pass through him.

  Both SBS men scanned the beach again from end to end with meticulous care. Their lives were going to depend on reaching it, crossing it and moving off it without being detected. It was something they had practised time and again on Arran in all sorts of weather and against all kinds of simulated opposition. But no exercise, no training, however thorough, could fully prepare them for what they were about to do.

  The submarine turned seawards, and dived. Woods kept her at eighty feet and, five miles offshore, ordered: ‘Surfacing stations.’

  The order was repeated through the submarine, and brought more seamen into the control room. In one corner the hydrophone operator, his earphones on his head, listened intently for the sound of any surface ship. The minutes passed, then Woods ordered: ‘Darken ship.’

  The control room’s lights dimmed until only a glimmer illuminated the depth gauges and the steering compass.

  ‘It’s to get our eyes used to night vision,’ the navigator told Ayton. ‘Your eyes use an entirely different set of muscles to see in the dark. It takes fifteen minutes for them to dilate to maximum efficiency.’

  The hydrophone operator took off his earphones. ‘No HE, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Hydrophone effect,’ the navigator said when Ayton gave him a puzzled look. ‘It’s the noise the propellers of a surface ship make. The hydrophone can pick them up from a distance of some miles.’

  ‘Up periscope.’

  ‘The Captain won’t be able to see much,’ the navigator confided, ‘but at least he can check we’re not surfacing next to a Jerry patrol boat. They sometimes lie quiet on the surface waiting for a sub to surface. It’s one of their tricks.’

  ‘Stand by to surface.’

  In the dim light Ayton could see one of the crew step up to the conning tower’s lower hatch, slide aside its heavy metal clips and open it upwards until it clipped into the side of the tower.

  ‘Ready to surface, sir,’ the First Lieutenant reported.

  ‘Down periscope,’ ordered Woods. ‘Surface.’

  He began climbing the steel ladder up the interior of the conning tower, followed by the two surface lookouts.

  ‘Twenty-five feet, sir,’ the First Lieutenant called up to him; then: ‘Twenty feet.’

  Suddenly a roaring noise filled the control room. Ayton jumped. The navigator chuckled. ‘Just compressed air expelling water from the ballast tanks,’ he said reassuringly.

  ‘Fifteen feet,’ shouted the First Lieutenant.

  ‘Ten feet.’

  Woods opened the upper hatch and a gale of stale air swept up the conning tower as if someone had turned on a huge vacuum cleaner. The two lookouts mounted the ladder and disappeared from view. Ayton said he thought air would rush into the submarine, not out of it.

  ‘There are always small leaks in the system of compressed-air pipes,’ the navigator explained. ‘So air pressure builds up when we’ve been submerged for any length of time.’

  The roar of the compressed air stopped as suddenly as it had begun and now sweet, fresh air did flow down the conning tower into the control room. Ayton felt the submarine roll gently under his feet. They were on the surface.

  ‘We’ll keep going on our electric motors until the lookouts are sure Jerry’s not lurking somewhere,’ said the navigator.

  ‘When they’re certain everything’s all right, we’ll start the diesel motors, but not until then.’

  Ayton stepped forward from the chart table and looked up the conning tower. Way up at the other end of the steel tunnel he could see the night sky. A star swung to and fro across the opening of the top hatch.

  ‘Start main engines,’ Woods boomed into the voice pipe from the bridge. The engine telegraphs clanged as the order was transmitted to the engine-room aft. There was a pause, then the hum of the electric engines ceased and the heavier throb of the diesels started. These could drive the submarine on the surface at nearly fifteen knots. They were the only way the battery which powered the electric engines could be recharged at sea.

  ‘Captain says you can go on the bridge if you like,’ the First Lieutenant said to the SBS men. ‘Careful how you go. The ladder’s a bit slippery from condensation.’

  Woods greeted them with a cursory nod, then returned to scanning the black horizon with his night-glasses. Positioned back-to-back at the rear of the bridge, the two lookouts, dressed in the submarine service’s ubiquitous dress, white roll-neck jerseys, were doing the same. Above the bridge the radar aerial had been extended and was rotating slowly.

  The submarine surged through the flat-calm water, occasionally throwing up a white crest from its bow. To keep its profile as low as possible, Woods had ordered the internal trimming tanks to be filled just enough to keep the decks almost awash.

  Ayton glanced around him. Immediately behind the bridge was a bandstand with a single Oerlikon 20mm gun on it and in front of the bridge was the submarine’s main surface armament, a three-inch gun, its barrel glistening in the dark. Above the bridge, supported by the periscope standard, was the jumping wire, which stretched from stem to stern. This allowed the Sentinel to sneak under submarine nets without becoming entangled, though Woods had told Ayton that no submarine commander in his right mind ever went near submarine nets.

  Astern of the submarine, Rhodes had already been swallowed up in the night, but ahead Ayton could just make out, etched across the sky, the mountainous mainland of Greece.

  Woods stooped down to the voice pipe and ordered an alteration of course. Being low in the water, the submarine was slow to answer the helm, but eventually swung round so that the Greek mainland was now more to starboard.

  ‘We’ll run towards Simi for a while,’ Woods said without taking his eyes away from his binoculars.

  ‘How long will it take to charge the battery?’ Pountney asked.

  ‘Too long if we stay under way,’ said Woods. ‘But I’m going to stop. That way the engines will give the battery a stronger boost. We’ll have you ashore by midnight.’

  ‘The electric motors can be reversed and used as dynamos,’ the First Lieutenant explained to the baffled SBS men when they went below. ‘But the diesels aren’t powerful enough to drive the propellers and make the dynamos give a high charge to the battery. To do that you have to disengage the propellers.’

  ‘We’ll have to lay up during the day and make the attack tomorrow night,’ Pountney said to Ayton as they made their final preparations, ‘Timber wasn’t too pleased when I told him that meant a twenty-four-hour delay for him.’

  ‘The Navy’s job is to sink enemy ships,’ Ayton reasoned. ‘No submariner wants to hang around in risky waters like these just for the sake of a couple of cloak-and-dagger boys.’


  ‘Crap!’ said Pountney with his usual vehemence. ‘I know you bootnecks are part of the Navy and think the sun shines out of its arse. But if the Navy wants to stop its Malta convoys from being bombed it’s going to have to rely on the likes of us.’

  They rested while the Sentinel’s diesels throbbed gently, pushing power into the battery. They woke when they heard orders being given for the submarine to submerge and the navigator put his head round the dividing curtain. ‘The Captain says he will be in position to drop you in half an hour. He can take you to within half a mile of the beach as the seabed’s pretty steep-to there.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Pountney, brightening up. ‘Please thank him.’

  The navigator grinned. ‘Thank me, instead. I think he wanted to drop you here.’

  His head disappeared, to be replaced by that of one of the seamen carrying two steaming cups of cocoa. Pountney levered out his hip-flask from his trousers, and poured some rum into his.

  As they sipped the warm, sweet, gluey mixture – known as ‘ki’ in the Navy – they checked each item of equipment again. There were packets of plastic explosive, boxes of primers, detonators and time-fuses, sets of magnets, adhesive tape, cordtex, a dozen clam mines and six Gammon grenades. These were all carefully packed into one of the bergen rucksacks, ready to be primed – submarines were too valuable to risk doing this on board.

  The other bergen contained ‘K’ rations, spare ammunition clips, binoculars, first-aid equipment, morphine syringes, Benzedrine tablets, wire-cutters, a torch, a small stove and two ponchos in which they could wrap themselves for sleeping or use as a tent cover for shelter or to camouflage a hide-out. The two men wore black, oiled sweaters with sniper’s netting tied round their necks like scarves, black woollen hats and lace-up rope-soled shoes which would not slip on the submarine’s deck or on rocks. They each carried in a shoulder holster a Welrod pistol with a built-in silencer. This 22-calibre weapon had been developed for one of the British secret services and had proved very effective at close range. Both men also carried a Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife in a sheath strapped to their legs.

  They had debated whether to bring heavier weapons, such as tommy-guns, but had decided against it. ‘Speed is what matters,’ Pountney had said. ‘Don’t let’s clutter ourselves up with anything unnecessary.’

  But now he said: ‘I wish I’d brought my carbine. I feel bloody naked without it.’

  Ayton grinned. Without his favourite weapon – an American lightweight automatic .300 carbine with a folding stock – Pountney seemed like a blind man without his white stick.

  ‘You’ll survive,’ the younger man retorted. ‘If the alarm is raised while we’re still inside the perimeter we’d be hopelessly outgunned whatever we were armed with.’

  ‘Yeah, but I might shoot a few of the buggers before they plugged me,’ said Pountney, making Ayton think, not for the first time, how pugnacious a personality he was for the creator of a unit whose members depended on subterfuge and cunning for their survival.

  ‘I sometimes think you’re fighting the wrong war, Jumbo,’ he said. ‘"Up and at ‘em" must be your family motto.’

  ‘No, it’s “High living and low thinking",’ retorted Pountney, then drained the last drop of ki from his cup and chased it down with a final swig of rum from his flask. ‘And the trouble with you bloody bootnecks is that you’re constipated with tradition.’

  Pountney was always airing his jaundiced views about the Royal Marines, a corps he said was pickled in the aspic of centuries-old customs. By now it was an old joke between them, and caused no animosity.

  ‘Come on, we’d better black up,’ said Ayton, pulling out of his pocket a tin of camouflage cream. This he placed on the wardroom table and opened. As they began smearing their faces and hands, orders rang out in the control room as the submarine prepared to surface, and a few minutes later the two men felt the deck lurch slightly beneath their feet as the vessel rose from the depths.

  The First Lieutenant put his head round the curtain. ‘Five minutes to go, chaps. The Captain requests your presence on the bridge.’

  They handed the bergens to each other as they climbed up the conning tower’s ladder. Once on the bridge they saw that Woods was keeping the hull down until they were ready to disembark. He was, as ever, scanning the darkness intently with his binoculars. But this time he let them drop when the SBS men joined him, so that he could point out to them two leading marks. From these they could take compass bearings for a rendezvous with the submarine when they returned from the operation.

  ‘The hotel is an obvious one and over on your right is a very distinctive tower. Can you see it above the skyline?’

  Pountney nodded.

  ‘Right. We’re nine hundred yards off the beach. These are the reciprocal bearings of the hotel and the tower.’

  He handed Pountney a slip of paper. ‘This is the rendezvous. Agreed?’

  ‘Good,’ said Pountney. ‘Excellent, in fact. Couldn’t be better for us.’

  ‘I’m going to surface fully now. You’ll be as quick as you can, won’t you?’

  He shook the men’s hands with a warmth which was in marked contrast to his usual aloofness. ‘Good luck to you both. See you in forty-eight hours.’

  He turned away and said into the voice pipe: ‘Finish blowing numbers one and three ballast tanks.’

  The order, taken by the helmsman, echoed back at him: ‘Aye, aye, sir. Finish blowing numbers one and three ballast tanks.’

  Compressed air bubbled around the sides of the submarine as it expelled what water remained in the two tanks, and gradually the hull eased itself to the surface, water streaming off its forecasing. Followed by the two seamen who would help them launch the canoe, the two SBS men climbed down the outside of the bridge using the steps inset into it, and walked cautiously along the forecasing with their bergens slung over their shoulders. Every so often a wave slopped across the hull, for Woods was still keeping the Sentinel as low in the water as he could by not totally emptying the other ballast tanks.

  Ayton noted with approval that the two seamen wore thick socks over their feet to avoid slipping on the wet steel of the forecasing and that when they opened the torpedo hatch they loosened its butterfly nuts with a wooden mallet to deaden the noise. Any excessive sound on such a quiet night could easily carry to the shore. The seamen swung open the hatch, carefully hauled out the folbot, which had been handed up to them from below, and laid it on the forecasing before closing the hatch and resecuring the butterfly nuts with soft blows of the mallet.

  The eighteen-foot Cockle MkII**, its official designation, was a development of the civilian canoe the two men had used to raid the Glengyle the previous year. It had a wooden frame covered with a toughened, waterproof canvas skin painted a dull khaki. The canoe, which had proper buoyancy and a watertight cockpit for each of the paddlers to sit in, was designed to fit down an S-class submarine’s torpedo hatch. For this purpose, the lateral struts of its wooden frame amidships could be adjusted to narrow its beam by the required number of inches.

  Pountney and Ayton worked quickly and with practised ease. They straightened the lateral struts, put one of the bergens into the bows and the other into the stern, then checked that all the equipment was in place. The next manoeuvre, launching the canoe, they knew from experience was the trickiest part of the operation, for it would be easy to capsize the fragile craft while lowering it over the submarine’s bulbous ballast tanks, and even easier to capsize it when lowering themselves into the cockpits.

  But the two seamen helping them knew their job, and after the canoe had been put into the water, one held it by its bow rope while the other steadied the hull to allow each canoeist to slide slowly and cautiously into position. Once seated, the SBS men clipped the waterproof coverings around their waists and unfastened the double paddles from the canoe’s deck.

  ‘Ready, sir?’ asked the seaman holding the bow rope, peering down anxiously at them.

  �
��Ready,’ Pountney confirmed.

  The seaman undid the rope from the bow, tied it into a neat coil and handed it to him. Pountney put the coil into the bows and told the seaman holding the canoe amidships to let go. This man then gave the side of the folbot a firm shove to get it clear of the casing.

  The fragile craft swung away as both SBS men dug deep into the water with their double paddles, and moments later a thousand tons of submarine slipped back into the depths, leaving a widening circle of ripples. Operation Angelo was under way.

  4

  They aimed for the right-hand side of the beach, the opposite end from the blacked-out hotel. It was much darker at sea level than it had been on the Sentinel’s bridge, as if the starlight could not penetrate that close to the earth’s surface. They seemed to be paddling into a black abyss and if Pountney hadn’t checked the P8 compass fitted in front of him they could have been heading directly out to sea for all he knew.

  Slowly the land began to take shape ahead of them, and soon they heard the grinding roar of the waves breaking on the beach and then sucking the sand and pebbles back with them. The sound told Pountney immediately that, though the sea was calm, there was probably a strong lateral current which they would have to take into account when landing.

  All of a sudden the motion of the water became more turbulent and both paddlers worked hard to keep the folbot heading directly for the beach. A small wave slopped over the bows, then a bigger one hit the sides, pushing the craft sideways. They dug deep with their paddles to counter the spin. Spray flew into their faces. The sound of breaking waves became a roar as the folbot was swept towards land as if some invisible hand had picked it up and propelled it forwards.