Convoy Homeward (John Mason Kemp Thriller Book 6) Page 4

  Pumphrey-Hatton lifted a hand to his uniform cap, a hand that shook badly, and eased the leather band on his head: it was giving him a headache and he didn’t feel at all well after a sleepless night during which he had got up to pursue what he had believed to be a fly, one bearing disease. He had not found it, and had rung for his steward. A nightwatchman had answered and had clattered in heavy boots about the cabin, without success. The man had been polite enough but had seemed to treat Pumphrey-Hatton as though he were not a brigadier who had been OC Troops aboard a transport but as a child who had had a bad dream. Pumphrey-Hatton was still thinking angrily about this when he spotted something. A movement in the ranks of riflemen, a black man picking his nose. Pumphrey-Hatton saw red, a sudden blinding light of fury at everything in sight.

  ‘That man,’ he roared out in his parade-ground voice. ‘Number Four, front rank, B Company. Hand to his blasted nose. Stop it instantly!’ As he finished shouting there was a dead silence all around. The RSM looked startled but quickly recovered his composure. The Colonel looked up at the liner’s deck, opened his mouth, shut it again when he saw the red tabs. But he looked extremely angry. Into the silence Pumphrey-Hatton was heard to say something about blasted black beetles then, as though suddenly becoming aware of an unforgivable faux pas, he put his hands over his face for a moment, recovered himself, and marched stiffly below and out of sight.

  *

  ‘Not my affair or yours,’ Kemp said to Maconochie. ‘We leave this to the military. It was damned embarrassing,’ he added. ‘He’d never have done it if he’d been in his right mind. It’s all very unfortunate and it could lead to a lot of friction if he ever gives a repeat performance. But I say again — it’s not our affair. We can’t interfere.’

  ‘You could, if necessary. As Commodore —’

  ‘I have a responsibility to maintain the peace — if necessary, as you said. But only if it’s represented to me by the Colonel of the rifles, who’ll be OC Troops as far as the Cape.’

  ‘The brigadier permitting,’ Maconochie said with a grin. Kemp nodded; the remark had been tongue-in-cheek but there was a serious side to it. Pumphrey-Hatton was just the sort to pull rank and make things awkward, notwithstanding the fact that he was on the sick list for home. As to the Colonel, now seeing his troops aboard, all Kemp knew about him was that his name was Carter and that, from Kemp’s brief sight of him from the bridge, he looked a reasonable sort, young for his rank and thus — or so Kemp hoped — not verging on blimpishness like Pumphrey-Hatton. With luck, Colonel Carter would have come up against senior officers like Pumphrey-Hatton before now, and would know how to deal with them. Tactfully.

  For a while longer Kemp and Maconochie watched the native troops streaming up the embarkation gangway to the gunport door, then went below to meet the various port officials and deal with yet more bumph, the inevitable accompaniment to any ship’s arrival in any of the world’s ports.

  One of the visitors from the shore was the Naval Officer in Charge, Captain Oliphant, wearing on the shoulder-straps of his white uniform the four straight gold stripes and curl of a captain RN. After a formal conversation with the ship’s Master and the Convoy Commodore he offered a silver cigarette-case to Kemp and Maconochie and accepted a light from Kemp. Blowing smoke he asked, ‘How is your memory for things past, Commodore? Or should I say, persons from the past?’

  ‘Fair,’ Kemp said. ‘Who have you in mind?’

  ‘The name’s Holmes. Colonel Holmes.’

  Kemp shook his head slowly. ‘Can’t say I recall anyone of that name.’

  ‘Another clue, then: Ardara, Colombo home … several years ago.’

  Again Kemp shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Captain. The penny fails to drop.’

  ‘Well, do have a good think — and don’t let on you don’t remember him. He’s embarking here with his wife, for UK. He’s a decent old stick. They both are. Pretty far gone in years, and the old lady’s apprehensive about the voyage. I told them I’d put in a word.’

  Kemp said, ‘I’ll look out for them. But they’ll have to accept that this is no peacetime liner. No question of being necessarily allocated the Captain’s table in the saloon, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll realize that.’ Oliphant added, ‘It was at your table — Staff Captain’s table — in the saloon that they met you. See if that aids the remembering process, Commodore.’

  Kemp would do his best. But there had been so many Staff Captain’s and Captain’s tables over so many years, outward and homeward bound, so many dozens of faces of which only a very few were really memorable. What was much more on Kemp’s mind was the content of a W/T signal from the Admiralty passed to him by Oliphant when he had come down from the bridge. This signal was addressed to Commander-in-Chief, Far Eastern Fleet, repeated NOIC Kilindini and Commodore Convoy SW03. It indicated that survivors from a merchant vessel sunk by gunfire confirmed the presence of the German raider Stuttgart two hundred miles east of the port of Durban in Natal.

  Not so far off the track of the south-bound convoy.

  *

  Petty Officer Ramm’s face was sour as the decks of the Aurelian Star filled with the native troops, now being chivvied by their corporals and sergeants, none of whom seemed able to find their way below. There was a lot of eyeball rolling and a lot of unintelligible chatter.

  ‘Don’t know if they’re on their arse or their elbow,’ Ramm said to no one in particular. He was responded to by the ship’s bosun, a grizzled seaman who had done time in sail, in the old windjammers that had battled their way through the everlasting storms off Cape Horn, from Liverpool to Australia the long way, the hard way.

  ‘Not surprising, is it? Never been aboard a ship before, and they don’t know what to expect, none of ’em.’

  Ramm sniffed. ‘Puke their guts up, soon as we put our nose into the ’oggin outside, that’s what I reckon. And run amok if we meet a Jerry.’

  Bosun Barnes disagreed. ‘They’re soldiers, never mind if they’ve got black skins, mate. Me, I’ve known blacks before. We had ’em from time to time in the windjammers —’

  ‘Well, bully for you,’ Ramm said sarcastically. ‘Any use, were they?’

  ‘When they’d learned their trade, mate, they made bloody good seamen, and strong with it. Talk about muscle. A lot of ’em came from Sierra Leone — Kroos. Fishermen, used to boats from the start, they were.’ Barnes paused and rolled a cigarette with a flick of his fingers. ‘Mind, there was always the odd black sheep that got shanghai-ed aboard in places like Iquique or Valparaiso, you can’t —’

  ‘Black sheep, eh? That a joke, bose?’

  Barnes gave him a hard look. ‘Not meant to be, no. I reckon you got black on the brain, Mister Ramm. Prejudice, that is. Know that bloke Kipling, what wrote poems? “For all ’is dirty ’ide, ’e was white, clear white inside, when ’e went to tend the wounded under fire.” Gunga Din, that was. North-West Frontier of India.’

  ‘My, my,’ Ramm said, eyebrows lifted. ‘Walking bloody encyclopaedia, you are, mate.’ He stepped backwards suddenly as some of the natives came past and he almost got a kitbag in his gut. ‘Watch it, you lot,’ he said in a harsh voice, and gave the offending kitbag a shove. The native stumbled and fell heavily against the guardrail of a hatch down which a steel ladder led into the bowels of the ship. He let go of the kitbag in trying to right himself, and the bag went down the hatch, making a lot of noise in its descent. The soldier seemed distraught; there was fear in the rolling eyeballs. Ramm laughed coarsely.

  ‘Be on a charge, you will,’ he said. ‘Up before the Colonel an’ all, just you see.’

  *

  The transports, the embarkation completed, moved off the pierhead and re-joined the rest of the convoy and the warship escort. The ships formed up again in their allotted stations and when Kemp had reported by flag to the Resolution there was immediate activity on the flagship’s signal bridge, her chief yeoman of signals personally using the all-round masthead
lamp to send the general message to all ships from the Commander-in-Chief informing them of the Admiralty’s wireless signal. On the admiral’s bridge of the flagship, Sir Geoffrey Layton, a short, very thick-set officer, had conferred with his Flag Captain, the Fleet Gunnery Officer, the Fleet Signal Officer and the Master of the Fleet, a specialist navigating officer.

  ‘Not much change,’ he’d said. ‘We knew the raider was out, though we didn’t expect him here. I’m not unduly worried. But I shall bear in mind that we may have to alter nearer to the coast and farther from the bugger’s track.’ He moved up and down on the balls of his feet, like a policeman in a shop doorway, resting from his beat. ‘I’m not running from a fight, gentlemen. I trust you know me better than that. But my first responsibility is the safety of the troops and the convoy as a whole. In the meantime, we’re ready for anything that may happen, and if we fall in with the Stuttgart my fifteen-inch batteries will blow the bugger out of the water. Understood, Fleet Gunnery Officer?’

  ‘Understood, sir.’

  ‘Good!’ The Admiral rubbed his hands together and grinned, a somewhat impish grin. ‘It’s getting dark, Flag Captain. I suggest a further signal to all ships: good night, sleep tight, mind the bedbugs don’t bite. I’ll be in my sea cabin if I’m wanted.’ He turned away and was saluted down the ladder.

  When Kemp was informed of the last signal from the Flag, he said, ‘For bedbugs read U-boats.’

  The convoy steamed on into the gathering night, all ports and deadlights clamped down hard, no lights showing anywhere except right aft where the shaded blue stern-lights enabled the convoy to maintain station. But there was plenty of light all around, too much light for the safety and the peace of mind of any convoy commodore or any shipmaster in time of war: as the night wore on the stars shone out like beacons, glittering with an intensity that made them look so close that a hand could reach them. Thousand upon thousand of them covering the arch of heaven, and with them the moon, hanging low and large, a lantern to silhouette the ships and bring them to the immediate attention of any U-boat’s captain, watching through his periscope beneath the flat calm of the Indian Ocean’s surface.

  Half asleep in the stifling heat of the seamen’s messdeck deep down in the ship, Ordinary Seaman Featherstonehaugh sweated like a pig into his pyjamas and listened to the irregular snore coming from the wide open mouth of Able Seaman Sissons who, like himself, had been drafted to the Commodore’s staff back in Colombo to replace casualties caused to the guns’-crews aboard the ill-fated Orlando when under attack in the Arabian Sea. Able Seaman Sissons was a three-badgeman — three good conduct chevrons on the left sleeve, gained, as it was popularly said, for thirteen years’ undetected crime — and was thus by tradition known as Stripey. Stripey, an RFR man recalled for service in 1939, was well on the wrong side of forty and, like virtually all lower deck men, was accustomed to sleep either in the bare buff or in his vest and pants. Featherstonehaugh’s pyjamas had been the cause of a good deal of mirth on the part of Stripey Sissons, who thought them pansy and had said so. Real men, he said, wouldn’t be found dead in such. Only officers wore them, and officers were pigs. Saying this, Stripey had addressed Featherstonehaugh by his name, as spelled.

  Featherstonehaugh had at once put both feet in it. ‘Festonhaugh, actually. That’s how it’s pronounced. And my father’s — my father was an officer.’

  ‘Was ’e — actually? Was. Got disrated, did ’e?’

  The young OD had flushed at that. ‘He was Commander (E) in the Barham.’

  ‘Oh. Lorst, was ’e?’ Sissons changed his tone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry, lad.’ Stripey put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Didn’t mean no offence. But do I take it you’re one of them WCs?’

  ‘If you like to put it that way, yes.’

  ‘I do like. So don’t get uppity with me, lad o’ your age. And if I want to call you — whatever your Weedin’ name is, in full, well, that’s what I shall do. An’ for Gawd’s sake chuck them Weedin’ pyjamas in the ’oggin.’

  Featherstonehaugh had not done so. Back in his training establishment and in RNB Portsmouth most of the others in the new entries’ mess had also worn pyjamas, having only recently left their civilian status behind them. Now, in the Indian Ocean night punctuated by Stripey Sissons’ snores, he came fully awake. He listened to the steady beat of the engines, the slight swish of the sea against the ship’s plates, and he thought of the Mediterranean and of the horrific end of the old battleship Barham. The Barham had gone up, like the battle-cruiser Hood, in a split second, there one minute, gone the next, in a shattering explosion, a sheet of flame and clouds of thick, heavy smoke, the guts blown out of her. He thought of what the end must have been like for his father, caught on the starting-platform below in the engine-room, caught in the fires, the escaping steam under immense pressure that could strip the flesh from a human body in seconds, the total dark as the ring main went, the tangle of steel ladders that would have been twisted into unrecognizable shapes, the inrush of water from gaping plates that would douse the fires but drown anyone still left alive.

  To think of his father in that context was shattering; but the image kept recurring, and with it the memories of past days in their home in Southsea, memories of his father coming back from foreign commissions — two years with the Mediterranean Fleet, three years China-side in the light cruiser squadron — opening up wooden chests to bring out presents for the family, exotic things to Paul Featherstonehaugh as a child, things of jade and pressed Chinese silk, ornate daggers from North Africa, opium pipes … and overridingly of his father himself, smiling, happy to be home again, making them once more into a complete family unit until, inevitably, his leave was over and another ship was waiting to snatch him away. Paul had determined to follow his father into the Navy, either as an engineer or executive officer; but his maths had not been up to the standard required and he had failed to get a naval cadetship. But by this time the war had started and on his eighteenth birthday he had volunteered for the Navy as a hostilities-only ordinary seaman. Shortly after joining HMS Royal Arthur, the ‘stone frigate’ that had in pre-war days been Butlin’s holiday camp, Skegness, he had been recommended by his Divisional Officer as suitable for training for a commission. His father had known that before his appointment to the Barham.

  Paul Featherstonehaugh knew by now that the path of the CW rating was not an easy one. To attain a commission you had to stand out, to know your job better than your contemporaries, and to keep your nose clean. The fact that your father was an officer and you spoke the King’s English and had been to a certain kind of school was a help in getting the first recommendation, but after that it was up to you.

  Stripey Sissons’ snores continued but despite them sleep came as the past images faded. He was woken again by the torch beams of the ship’s master-at-arms making night rounds, then again drifted off to sleep. His next awakening came when the urgent sound of the action alarm broke the peace.

  Chapter Four

  The first alarm had come from the Aurelian Star herself, a report to the bridge by telephone from the masthead lookout. The senior second officer, Officer of the Watch, immediately called the Captain.

  ‘Masthead lookout, sir, reports a feather of spray two points on the port bow. I’ve not picked it up myself yet.’

  ‘I’ll be right up,’ Maconochie said. ‘Call the Commodore at once.’

  Maconochie was on the bridge inside thirty seconds, his uniform jacket over his pyjamas. Bringing up his binoculars he scanned the area around the given bearing. He found nothing. As Kemp joined him he called the masthead lookout.

  ‘Captain here. And you sure of your report, Jones?’

  ‘Dead sure, sir, but I’ve lost it again.’

  ‘Right.’ Maconochie swung round on the Commodore. ‘Evidently no contact by the asdic screen. Could be imagination.’

  ‘Or could be that she’d been lying low and had only just come to periscope depth. We’ll g
o to action stations just in case, Captain.’ Kemp added, ‘We’d better report by lamp to the Flag — shaded lamp. If there’s a U-boat there, we’ll obviously have been seen already so nothing’s lost.’ The signalman of the watch was already at his side with his signal pad; Kemp passed the message for the Flag; even as the signalman was passing it, a blue lamp was seen flashing from Captain (D) in the flotilla leader. This was read off by Yeoman of Signals Lambert as he reached the bridge.

  ‘Contact bearing red four five, sir, distant ten cables. Am attacking.’

  ‘Thank you, Yeoman. Finnegan?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Inform the guns’-crews. Use the Tannoy.’

  Finnegan went into the wheelhouse at the double. Kemp, watching through his binoculars, saw the destroyers altering course to port and increasing speed. They were clearly visible in the moonlight; and the kerfuffle of their streaming wakes stood out in bright green phosphorescence as they hurtled towards the given bearing. As the reports came in from Petty Officer Ramm that the guns’-crews were closed up at action stations and had swung onto the bearing, the series of splashes on the convoy’s port flank indicated that already the destroyer screen was attacking with depth charges from the chutes and throwers; and shortly after that the ocean seemed to rip apart as the charges exploded, great spouts of water flinging up astern of the racing destroyers. The hull of the Aurelian Star shuddered to the shock waves; and below decks cork insulation showered down from the deckhead of Brigadier Pumphrey-Hatton’s cabin. Having slept through the stridency of the alarm rattlers, he had been woken by the racket from the depth charges and had sat up in his bunk with a jerk.