To Risks Unknown Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Reeman

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  1 For Special Service

  2 A Mixed Bunch

  3 Briefed to Attack

  4 The Raid

  5 Run Ashore

  6 Scarlett’s Circus

  7 Better to be Hated

  8 The Welcome

  9 Sailing Orders Again

  10 A Man Called Soskic

  11 Rescue and Revenge

  12 Crespin’s Promise

  13 Expendable

  14 Watch them Burn

  15 The Letter

  16 A Face in the Past

  17 The Name of Action

  18 ‘Just as if she knew!’

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The year: 1943. Now there was to be no more retreat for Britain and her Allies. At last the war was to be carried into enemy territory.

  And, from captured bases and makeshift harbours in North Africa, The Royal Navy’s Special Force was to be the probe and the spearhead of the advance.

  To this unorthodox war came the corvette H.M.S. Thistle and her commanding officer, John Crespin. Both were veterans, she from the Atlantic, he from the trauma of seeing his last command and her company brutally destroyed.

  Soon they would be fighting amongst remote Adriatic islands, helping the partisans and guerrillas with whom they had little in common, except an overwhelming common hatred of the enemy who had attacked and destroyed their countries.

  Ship and crew had to be welded into a single fighting unit. And it had to be done, not in training, but on active duty.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Douglas Reeman did convoy duty in the navy in the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the North Sea. He has written over thirty novels under his own name and more than twenty bestselling historical novels featuring Richard Bolitho under the pseudonym Alexander Kent.

  Also by

  DOUGLAS REEMAN

  *

  A PRAYER FOR THE SHIP

  HIGH WATER

  SEND A GUNBOAT

  DIVE IN THE SUN

  THE HOSTILE SHORE

  THE LAST RAIDER

  WITH BLOOD AND IRON

  H.M.S. SARACEN

  PATH OF THE STORM

  THE DEEP SILENCE

  THE PRIDE AND THE ANGUISH

  For Benbow

  with love

  When duty calls to risks unknown,

  Where help must come from thee alone,

  Protect her from the hidden rock,

  From War’s dread engines’ fatal shock:

  Naval Prayer Book

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN 1943 BRITAIN and her Allies had reached a turning point. There was to be no more retreat, no more pride in mere survival, but an all-out effort to carry the war to the enemy’s territory, to seek and destroy him on his own ground.

  From captured bases and makeshift harbours in North Africa the men of the Navy’s Special Force were to be the probes of each major attack. They were an odd collection and as varied as their ships in which they carried the war far beyond the enemy’s defences. But theirs was a strange war where stealth and individual cunning took precedence over tradition, where almost overnight the amateurs had become the professionals.

  The whole panorama of war—and especially of war at that time—was made up of individual episodes. No one can tell how much difference each made to the whole, or indeed if some were necessary at all. This is the story of one such episode of a ship and of the eighty men of her company.

  1. For Special Service

  REAR-ADMIRAL PERCIVAL OLDENSHAW stood with his arms folded and stared pensively through his office window at the rambling expanse of Portsmouth Dockyard. It was a very grey day, and although it was well into May it could have been mid-winter. The sky was hidden by low, dark bellied clouds, and the roofs of dockyard sheds and the crowded steel hulls of moored warships shone dully in a steady and persistent drizzle.

  The admiral was a small, nuggety man with a face like tooled leather. He was bald but for a few wisps of grey hair, and the bright rectangle of decorations on the left breast of his impeccable uniform showed that he had seen the best part of his service long before most of the ships below him had been built, and before their companies had been born. In fact, he had retired from the Navy soon after the First World War and was well past seventy, and but for his stubborn and dogged persistence, his constant visits to the Admiralty and letters to all and sundry, it was likely that he would still be fretting in retirement.

  In his heart he knew well enough that their lordships had allowed him to take over his office more to keep him quiet than with any hope of adding much to the war effort. On the sign outside his door it stated, ‘Flag Officer-in-Charge, Special Operations.’

  In 1940 when that sign had first appeared it had been something of a sad joke, and as months dragged into years it was all but forgotten. But the admiral was not a man prepared to rest behind a title or a desk. If his active service had ceased with the memories of Jutland and the Dardanelles, his mind and keen brain were as exact and as demanding as ever.

  With Britain wilting under defeats and reverses on every front, and the Battle of the Atlantic rising to a peak of new savagery, he had set about making his small command into a real and important force. The country was on the defensive in those early days, and any raid on the enemy’s coast, any sort of pinprick against his far-flung lines of communications, was needed desperately to maintain morale, to give the British public the belief that somehow, somewhere, they were hitting back.

  Now it was 1943, and the admiral sensed that a turning point had been reached. It was more of a feeling than anything he could put into words, but it was there. The catastrophes of Dunkirk and Norway, of Greece and Singapore, were behind them. Defensive war was out. The time had come to hit back, and hit hard.

  He swung round impulsively and stared at the room’s two other occupants. Seated at a wide desk his Operations Officer, a fat, heavy-jowled commander, was leaning on one elbow and leafing idly through a file of incoming signals. The admiral suspected that Commander Hallum was still suffering from the effects of a heavy lunch at the naval barracks, and was merely going through the motions to cover up his discomfort.

  At another desk a plain-faced Wren officer was studying a folio very intently, her eyes moving back and forth along each line, missing nothing, remembering even the smallest detail.

  The admiral’s eyes softened slightly. Second Officer Frost was like his right arm, he thought. She was always there, always ready to do what she could no matter how late or how long it took. He wished he could get rid of Hallum and replace him with another Wren like Miss Frost. It was not that the admiral saw himself as a ladies’ man, but having Wrens around him made him feel both young and fatherly at the same time. Also, unlike Hallum, they had enthusiasm, and that was a quality which rated very high with the admiral.

  He cleared his throat crisply and both pairs of eyes lifted towards him. ‘It is now fourteen-thirty precisely. In half an hour I will go to the north-west corner of the dockyard.’ He glanced briefly at Second Officer Frost. ‘Have I forgotten anything?’

  She played with one corner of the folio on her desk. It was a new one, and on the cover was printed, ‘H.M.S. Thistle. For Special Operations, Eastern Mediterranean’. Then she looked up at the large coloured chart which covered one complete wall of the office. The Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to the Lebanon, every mile marked by battles lost and won, with names like Malta and Tobruk, Alamein and Crete, which needed nothing more to fire the imag
ination.

  She said slowly, ‘H.M.S. Thistle is still in her basin, sir. The new guns are fitted now, and the radar people will be finishing their work tomorrow forenoon.’

  Hallum said sourly, ‘It’s Sunday tomorrow.’

  The admiral spared him a wintry glance. ‘I don’t give a bugger if it’s bloody Christmas! I want that ship ready for sea within three days!’ He calmed himself and added, ‘Please continue.’

  The Wren officer nodded. She no longer blushed at the admiral’s expressions. They were part of him. Like his medals, and his rudeness to unwilling staff officers. And his offhand kindness and humanity which he tried hard to conceal.

  She said, ‘The new commanding officer should be aboard now, sir. He came through the dockyard gates forty-five minutes ago.’

  The admiral nodded, satisfied. He never asked where or how she got her information. But somehow she managed to keep him informed of everything, sometimes before the Commander-in-Chief, and usually with more detail.

  He walked to the big chart and stared at it for several minutes. Then he said, ‘Ninety per cent of the Navy’s role in this war has been purely defensive. Protecting convoys and shipping routes. Defending the Army, and defending itself.’ He reached up and touched the southern tip of Italy with one wizened hand. ‘Well, we know that in a matter of weeks we’ll be changing all that. We’ve got ’em out of North Africa now. The next step is Sicily and then Italy, and on and up into the enemy’s under-belly!’ Without realizing it he had raised his voice. ‘At the moment we’ve got all our people scattered over the ground. Combined Operations, Commando, the Special Boat Squadron, Long Range Desert Group, and all the rest. Too many, doing too varied tasks. We must have unity of effort, a fluidity of purpose.’ He nodded, ‘And we will have it.’

  Commander Hallum watched the admiral’s narrow shoulders with weary resignation. It was quite obviously not going to be a quiet afternoon. The admiral was showing unusual excitement. For the past weeks signals had been flashing back and forth at an unprecedented rate. From the admiral to his senior officer in the Mediterranean. From Commander-in-Chief to Commander-in-Chief. From the sunshine of Alexandria to the grey bleakness of Liverpool, and back to the passageways of Admiralty in London. It was quite beyond Hallum, especially as the only outcome of all these signals and demands had at last arrived in Portsmouth in the shape of the small corvette Thistle.

  The Thistle was a Flower Class corvette, and from the moment her keel had tasted salt water at a Belfast shipyard in 1940 had been thrown into the Battle of the Atlantic as a convoy escort. She was in fact just another corvette. There were dozens of them. Small, hastily constructed ships built to an emergency programme, with little thought of comfort for the men who manned them.

  Hallum had seen her enter Portsmouth harbour just two weeks earlier. She seemed so small as she passed down the lines of sleek destroyers and lordly cruisers, and from bow to stern carried the marks of hard use, the scars of the hardest battle of all. Her crude dazzle paint was stripped away by wind and sea, her chubby hull streaked with rust and marked by dents and scrapes, souvenirs from mooring in pitch darkness or going alongside a sinking merchantman to snatch a handful of survivors from the grip of death itself.

  But the admiral had seemed as pleased as Punch. If the Admiralty had placed the Rodney or the Howe under his personal command he could not have shown more excitement. To the rest of the world the battered little Thistle might be just one more survivor from the Atlantic, but to Rear-Admiral Oldenshaw she was exactly what he wanted.

  Hallum realized with a start that the admiral had moved back to the window. He said hastily, ‘What about her new captain, sir? From what I’ve read in the folio he seems a bit of a has-been.’ There was no reply, so he hurried on, ‘He’s a regular officer, and yet all he’s been offered is this clapped-out corvette.’

  The admiral said distantly, ‘I arranged that appointment, Hallum.’

  He let his eyes move slowly across the dockyard and rest on the towering outline of Nelson’s flagship Victory. Against the dullness and the grey steel the old three-decker’s black and buff hull made a fine patch of colour, her tall side shining in the rain like polished glass. Nelson, he thought. There was a man. But even he had fools like Hallum to contend with.

  ‘Lieutenant-Commander Crespin has an excellent record. Up to the time of his last command being sunk he was on constant active duty. Most of that service was in the Mediterranean, with an independent command. He is a man who can think for himself, Hallum.’ He did not hide the contempt in his tone. ‘I know his record. I feel almost as if I had met him. The man who commands the Thistle for me has to be one like Crespin, and they are not easy to come by.’

  Hallum saw Second Officer Frost’s brief smile and said angrily, ‘Well, I suppose both the ship and her captain will be expendable, sir!’

  The admiral ignored him. ‘I don’t want some complacent career officer, nor do I require a hare-brained amateur strategist. I need a man who cares. One who gets things done.’ He frowned, irritated with himself for rising to Hallum’s anger.

  ‘Ring for my car. It is time to go aboard.’

  Lieutenant-Commander John Crespin stood quite still on the edge of the dock and stared down at the ship below him. He did not remember how long he had been there, nor did he recall getting out of the car which had carried him from the harbour station. Behind him on the puddled road his abandoned suitcase marked where he had left the car and walked the last few yards to the dock.

  No ship looked at her best when suffering the indignities of a dry dock, and the Thistle was even worse than he had expected. Resting on chocks at the bottom of the high-sided basin, supported on either beam by massive spars, she looked the picture of dejection. A few dockyard workers were sloshing through the remaining inches of oily water below her rounded hull, and others were slapping on paint from various precarious perches, indifferent both to their accuracy and the rain which pelted into the dock with increasing vigour.

  Although Crespin was used to small ships the corvette Thistle seemed minute against the wet concrete and towering gantries around her, and he was conscious of a growing despair which even the prospect of getting away from the land could not dispel. She was two hundred feet long from her chunky bows to her rounded, businesslike stern which would not have looked out of place on a deep-sea whaler. The upper deck was a tangle of welding gear, nameless pipes and abandoned packing cases, and power lines snaked ashore from every hatch to add to the general confusion of a hasty refit. There was not much in the way of superstructure. Just a square, boxlike bridge, a squat funnel and one stumpy mast, the latter forward of the bridge which was most unusual practice in naval vessels. On the forecastle the Thistle’s main armament, a four-inch gun, was trained haphazardly to starboard with somebody’s boiler suit hanging from the muzzle, and from amidships Crespin saw a sudden flare of welding torches where some workmen were putting finishing touches to the additional gunpower.

  This was in the shape of two sets of twin Oerlikons, one on either beam. There was already a two-pounder pom-pom above the small quarterdeck and the ship’s original Oerlikon just abaft the funnel.

  Crespin bit his lip and then started to walk towards the steep brow, at the inboard end of which he could see an oilskinned sentry watching his approach with neither emotion nor interest.

  He reached the top of the brow and faltered, feeling slightly sick. After everything which had happened, because of, or in spite of it, he had arrived here. This was to be his new command. Perhaps the last thing left for him to do.

  He forced the growing despair to the back of his mind and rested his hands on the wooden rails of the brow. It was nearly six months since he had set foot in a ship. Six months of waiting and hoping. Of rising hope and overwhelming uncertainty. As if to jar his thoughts alive he felt the pain in his right leg. At first he had believed that once the wound had healed he would be the same as before. He had been wrong. He was not the same, nor could he rem
ember what sort of a person he had been up to the time his last command had been shot from under him. The memory of the sleek motor torpedo boat, the creaming bow wave, the very excitement of even the most normal manoeuvre made him starkly conscious of the comparison made by the ship at the foot of the brow. Like a racehorse and a bedraggled mule, he thought vaguely.

  The gangway sentry waited until Crespin reached the deck and then levered himself away from the guardrail to salute. It was a tired gesture.

  Crespin said quietly, ‘Where is the first lieutenant?’

  The seaman ran his eyes over the newcomer before replying. Crespin was wearing his raincoat and displayed no badges or rank. Only his rain-soaked cap proclaimed him to be an officer, and in the dockyard they were two a penny.

  He said at length, ‘’E’s in the wardroom, sir. ’Oo shall I say’ as called?’

  Crespin eyed him coldly. ‘Just fetch my case from the dockside. I’ll find him myself.’

  The mention of a suitcase and the coldness in Crespin’s tone seemed to transmit a small warning. There was a ring of permanence about it, and with one more quick salute the man scampered up the brow and vanished.

  Crespin found an open hatch and lowered himself down a steel ladder to the deck below. He almost collided with a cheerful-looking man in a blue suit and bowler hat. He was carrying a sheaf of papers in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. He eyed Crespin and grinned.

  ‘If you’re one of the new officers you’d better get yer gear stowed.’ He winked. ‘I hear the Old Man’s coming aboard shortly, so you’d better get cracking!’

  He was still chuckling as Crespin groped his way down a small passageway past a cabin labelled ‘Captain’ and towards another marked ‘Wardroom’.

  Old Man was right, he thought. Crespin was twenty-seven years of age, but he certainly felt old.

  He pushed open the door and met the gaze of another officer who was standing on the far side of the wardroom by an open scuttle. He was a veritable giant of a man. Tall and broad, with his thick dark hair almost brushing one of the motionless deckhead fans. He had a heavy but competent face, and Crespin saw that on the sleeves of his unbuttoned jacket he wore the interwoven gold lace of a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve.