Killing Ground Read online

  Ayres felt the gin burning his empty stomach. What had happened on that convoy, he wondered? He glanced round the cabin, so still, apart from an occasional movement when another ship churned past. It seemed so wrong to put a beautiful destroyer like Gladiator on escort work. His gaze fastened on the ship’s crest, which hung above the desk. An uplifted, stabbing sword gripped by an armoured fist, the motto Manu Forti painted below it. Ayres had struggled through enough Latin at school to know it meant With a Strong Hand. Right for the destroyer, but not for the deadly boredom of convoy work.

  Howard saw it clearly on the young officer’s open features and said, “In this ship we have no passengers, Sub. I’m telling you that right now so you can use every opportunity to learn from the more experienced members of the team. Pilot, with whom you’ll be sharing watches, the first lieutenant, and men like the cox’n, Bob Sweeney, and Mr Pym the Gunner (T)—they’re all old destroyer hands who can teach you more in a dogwatch than six months in a classroom. If you have any problems, put them to Number One. He may seem a bit severe, but he was a barrister before he volunteered.” He forced a smile. He was getting nowhere. What did they teach them at the training depot? To die bravely? To be a bomb-happy survivor like the other subbie? “He’s a marvel with defaulters!” He put down his pipe and glanced at his empty glass. “You’ll feel new and awkward to begin with—everyone does. But remember this. You wear an officer’s uniform now, and to all the other new hands you are just that. Someone to turn to, to hate if you like—but sometimes you have to come down on people like a ton of bricks. It’s not enough to be popular.”

  Ayres nodded. “I wanted to be in destroyers, sir.”

  Howard almost relented, but said, “Keenness and courage go with the job—I have to take that for granted. But endurance and survival are what count in the end. Otherwise we are going to lose this war. Do you understand?”

  Ayres swallowed hard. Nobody had ever said things like that to him. Lose? He felt confused, even betrayed, by the captain’s blunt manner.

  Howard watched his words hitting home. There might be no time later on. There never was.

  He added, “For the first time since the balloon went up, the enemy are sinking more ships than we can build.” He paused, counting seconds, trying not to remember Ayres’s predecessor, his pathetic eagerness when he had stood on this same stained carpet. “And the enemy are also building more submarines than we can sink, at present anyway. It is a brutal equation, but there it is.”

  There was a shout from the deck above, the chugging vibration of a boat coming alongside. Marrack would deal with it. He could manage just about anything now.

  Ayres said in a small voice, “I’ll not let you down, sir.”

  “I hear you were in the Sanderling?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Howard looked at him, his eyes in shadow from the hard sunlight. “You’ll find out anyway, later on when their lordships feel moved to announce it. She was sunk last night. A mine.”

  Ayres was on his feet without realising it, the faces swimming back like pictures in his mind. The sailor who had helped him after the air attack. The elderly captain on his open bridge, an unlit pipe always in his mouth.

  “Any survivors, sir?”

  Howard shook his head. “She was apparently in pretty poor shape. No match for a mine.” He stood up and added angrily, “It’s murder, nothing less.”

  He held out his hand, “Sorry, Sub. But this is the only place I’m allowed to let off steam.” He grasped Ayres’s hand. “If you get really rattled, talk to me if you like.”

  There was a tap at the door and the first lieutenant peered into the cabin, his sharp eyes flitting between them.

  “I thought you should know, sir. The guard-boat has just delivered the pouch.” He stepped over the coaming, his neat, shining hair almost touching the deckhead. “Otherwise I’d not have troubled you.” He laid the worn leather pouch on the deck and studied it thoughtfully. “Our orders.”

  The door closed and Howard realised that the sub-lieutenant had gone. He sat down heavily and said, “You’d better assemble the wardroom at stand-easy this afternoon.”

  Marrack waited, watching Howard opening the packet and breaking the seal. He added, “Just us, sir. Our chums alongside haven’t drawn a ticket this time.” He saw the captain’s hands hesitate on the open packet. He doesn’t want to know. He’s like the rest of us.

  To break the spell he asked casually, “What do you think of Ayres, sir?”

  Howard looked at his hands. Still steady enough. “He’ll shape up, with a bit of help.”

  He drew the papers into the light and felt his mouth go suddenly dry.

  Marrack remarked, “I hope they give us a rest from the Atlantic.”

  Howard did not answer directly but stood up again, moving to a scuttle. There was cloud about. It came suddenly here.

  He answered slowly, “No, not the Western Ocean, Number One.”

  He turned away from the mocking glass and faced him. Afterwards Marrack remembered his dark eyes as being quite still, like a man already dead. “It’s North Russia, I’m afraid.”

  Marrack said, “I see. Dicey.”

  Howard wanted to cry out or laugh. Dicey. The understatement for all time.

  Marrack had his hand on the door clip. “When, sir?”

  “Last mail ashore tomorrow forenoon. We get underway at thirteen-hundred. I’ll tell you the rest when I’ve read through this lot.”

  As the tall lieutenant turned to leave Howard said, “Thanks, Number One. If I ever murder the admiral, which I may well do, I’d certainly like to have you on my side.”

  Marrack shrugged. “It’s a living.” He almost smiled. “Like this one.” Then he was gone.

  Howard opened the cupboard and rummaged about for something stronger than gin.

  He could already sense the change around him. It was not merely leaving these quarters and returning to the bridge, the stage of battle. Not this time. Secret orders or not, the whole ship knew, or soon would. It was the Navy’s way. Like a family.

  He swallowed some neat brandy and thought of Ayres. What a way to begin.

  Petty Officer Vallance entered the cabin and began to lay the table for his captain’s lunch.

  He only looked up once from his plates and cutlery.

  He said, “We’ll need all our warm gear then, sir?”

  The rest was over.

  2 | Open Boat

  LIEUTENANT Gordon Treherne, Royal Naval Reserve, Gladiator’s navigating officer, wiped his binoculars with a piece of tissue and slung them inside his duffle coat. Beneath the well-used coat he wore a sheepskin-lined jacket and a heavy roll-necked sweater which had once been white. But even without the layers of clothing Treherne made an imposing figure, one that would not have been out of place facing the Armada, or the French at Trafalgar. Beneath his blue, folded balaclava his hair was as black as his beard, his eyes, with deep crowsfeet on either side, as blue as any ocean. He licked his lips and tasted the raw salt and tugged the towel tighter around his neck. He had taken over the forenoon watch only minutes earlier, and the towel was already sodden.

  He glanced around the swaying upper bridge, open to the elements, a place so familiar at any time of the day or night that he would instantly notice if anything was wrong or different. Lookouts, equally muffled against the cold, their glasses moving to cover their allotted arcs; the yeoman of signals, always an early bird, crouched with two of his young assistants, stabbing the air with a gloved hand to emphasise this or that as the steel deck rolled drunkenly as if to hurl them all down. A glance over one bridge wing, and he saw the nearest Oerlikon gunner standing by his weapon, trying to stamp his booted feet quietly so as not to annoy anyone. Treherne’s own new assistant, Sub-Lieutenant Ayres, was bending over the chart table, his legs straddled while he peered at their course and checked the pencilled figures beneath the shaded light.

  Treherne smiled grimly. Eight-ten a.m., another forenoon watch,
and the sea was only just beginning to show itself. Great sliding banks of grey glass patterned with salt and angry, breaking crests. It had been like that ever since Gladiator had left the shelter of the land to head northwest leaving the Orkneys abeam in the darkness and pressing on for the Shetlands. And on, and on, all three-and-a-half days of it in this savage, turbulent ocean. It might have been barely bearable but for their two small consorts, Flower Class corvettes, Cynara and Physalis, which, like their numberless sisters, had been flung together to fight in that separate conflict becoming known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Tiny single-screwed warships which were said to roll on a heavy dew. So Gladiator had had to reduce speed to the corvettes’ most comfortable cruising rate of eleven knots. Destroyers were designed for the cut and dash of attacking with torpedoes, and retiring under a smokescreen. But their role now seemed only to get convoys home and away again, and to kill the hated U-Boats whenever they had the chance. As for the convoys, the only rule concerned the speed. It shall be that of the slowest ship in it. So it was often the case that new, fast freighters had to crawl along with some ancient, dragging tramp-steamer which looked like something from the Great War, and probably was.

  The two corvettes were placed out on either beam, smashing their way over the same impressive waves as Gladiator. With a quarter sea and a wind to make your gums ache, there would not be much to choose between them, Treherne thought.

  Ayres approached him where he stood in his heavy leather sea-boots, one arm around a stanchion near a gyro-repeater. The sub-lieutenant seemed to rise up and then drop away as if in some weird dance, and when he eventually found a handhold he sounded breathless.

  Treherne regarded him thoughtfully. Was he learning anything? He had asked him on their first watch together if he had had any maritime experience other than his sea-time in Sanderling. Ayres had screwed up his face as if to conjure up something useful but had replied lamely, “I was in the sea-scouts, sir.”

  Treherne had made a joke of it, if only to take his mind off the ship which hit a mine in the North Sea.

  But it was no joke really. At thirty-three Treherne was the oldest officer in the ship, apart from Evan Price, the Chief, and Pym the Gunner (T), but there was nobody in the whole Navy as old as him. He wondered what the grumpy gunner thought of Ayres; they shared duties on the quarterdeck when entering or leaving harbour. The veteran and the innocent amateur. Treherne was a Cornishman, a professional seaman to his fingertips, who had spent his pre-war time in the merchant service, in one of the clean, fast banana ships which ran regularly from the sunny Windward Islands to Liverpool and Cardiff. Gladiator was often in Liverpool, the nerve centre of Western Approaches. It always reminded him of those far-off, impossible days: peaceful trips with only a handful of passengers to irritate you.

  Ayres gasped, “We shall be sighting Iceland today.” He hesitated and would have flushed but for the bitter spray. “Er, Pilot.”

  Treherne grinned and showed his strong teeth. “Sure will, Sub. All lava-dust and people who hate our guts.”

  “But I thought they were on our side.”

  Treherne studied him sadly. So naïve. “We occupied the place, otherwise the krauts would have got there first. It’s not much of a prize, but it does have one of the biggest airstrips in the world—something which appealed to the Germans quite a lot. Anyone who holds Iceland commands the convoy routes to North Russia.”

  He leaned over a voicepipe and snapped, “Watch her head, quartermaster!”

  “Sorry, sir.” The voice echoed tinnily from the wheelhouse beneath their feet. “Steady on three-three-zero, sir.”

  Treherne’s eyes crinkled as they followed the ticking gyro-repeater. To himself he murmured, “You too, mate!” Because he knew what the quartermaster was thinking.

  Ayres wiped his wet face and blinked through the glass screen. The waves were enormous, but not too dangerous, or so Treherne had explained. When they broke across the main deck he had known the bridge to be cut off completely from the wardroom; there was no way forward or aft along the iron deck except out in the open, and even lifelines couldn’t save a man under those conditions. It had meant that the captain and the luckless officer-of-the-watch had been isolated, and forced to stand watch-and-watch until the sea moderated, and praying all the while that they would not be called to action stations.

  “Is it pretty safe now, sir?”

  Treherne looked at the captain who was sitting on his tall chair, which in turn was bolted to the deck. He was lying with his head on his arms below the screen, his body pitching with the violent movement, his duffle coat and hood black with spray and flying spindrift. “Safe?” He considered it. “With two corvettes in company and all our combined Asdic going, we should be. Mind you,” he looked astern, past the wildly shaking signal halliards and the funnel smoke which seemed to point directly abeam, level with the surging wavecrests, “when we got close to the Rosegarden I did have a twinge or two.”

  He saw the utter bewilderment. “The Germans call that three-hundred-mile stretch of the sea between Iceland and the Faeroes the Rosegarden. In the early part of the war every U-Boat, surface warships too, had to creep through that strip. We put down deep-level mines to make the U-Boats stay on the surface or at periscope depth so the RAF could have a go at ’em, but they still managed, in spite of that.” He added with unusual bitterness, “Now the Germans don’t have to bother going through the Rosegarden, unless Tirpitz comes out looking for trouble. When France chucked in the towel and our other allies went down like a pack of cards, they presented Mister Hitler with an unbroken coastline all the way from Norway’s North Cape down to the Bay of Biscay.” He saw it in his mind’s eye like a chart. “That’s about two-and-a-half thousand miles. Makes it nice and easy for them, eh?”

  Someone groaned, “Daylight, at long last!”

  Ayres was thinking about his rare encounters with the destroyer’s second sub-lieutenant, Lionel Bizley. He was only a few months older than Ayres but seemed like a veteran by comparison. They shared the same cabin because the new addition to the wardroom at Leith had been Surgeon-Lieutenant Jocelyn Lawford, a doctor so young that he must have only just completed his time in medical school. Prior to that, like many smaller warships, Gladiator had had to be content with a PO sickberth attendant. Had they any choice, most of the company would have preferred it to remain that way.

  And yet Ayres had barely spoken a dozen words to his cabin-mate and they had met only when passing one another to go on or off watch, or to exercise action stations. His experience must have scarred him deeply, Ayres thought; and felt a certain respect.

  The yeoman of signals snatched up his telescope, which he preferred to any binoculars, and stared across the grey water as a light blinked through the drifting spray like a bright diamond.

  “From Cynara, sir. Good morning.”

  Treherne smiled. Things were moving again. Somehow he had known Ayres had been preparing to ask him about the convoy, or worse, what the North Russian run was like. “I’ll call the captain.”

  “No need, Pilot.” Howard levered himself from the tall chair and banged his boots on the wet, wooden gratings. “God, I’m stiff. Any char about?”

  A boatswain’s mate spoke into a voicepipe and called, “Told the galley, sir.”

  Several of the tired-looking faces responded with grins. Tea from the galley would at least be hot when it got here. From the wardroom it would be full of salt-water by the time a steward had negotiated the deck and the unprotected ladders to the bridge.

  Howard crossed to the chart table and rested his elbows on the stained paper.

  About forty miles to go. He recalled their expressions in the wardroom when he had told them. A convoy to Russia. The new ones looking at the others for explanation or hope. Number One grim-faced; the Chief, Price, probably thinking about the extra stress on his engines; Arthur Pym working his thin mouth in and out as he often did when he was troubled. Only Treherne had been his usual unperturbed
self.

  Howard straightened up even as a young seaman in a streaming oilskin tumbled into the bridge with a steaming fanny of tea. Dirty enamel mugs were produced as if by magic, and Ayres found time to notice that the char-wallah was the young sailor called Nobby, the motor boat’s bowman.

  Despite his misgivings, Ayres told himself he was finding his way. Faces had names, or some of them did; Pym the old Gunner (T) hated his guts; the first lieutenant no longer noticed him at all.

  He heard the captain say, “Call up Physalis, Yeoman. Tell her to take station on Cynara as ordered for entering harbour.” He swallowed the sickly, sweet tea and said, “Good morning indeed! All right for some!” More grins, as he knew there might be.

  Howard stared abeam and thought he could see the other corvette as the lights blinked over the water.

  He saw Treherne explaining something to Ayres. Like a rock. A corvette could be Treherne’s for the asking. He had earned his own command. The true professional.

  He loosened the clinging towel around his throat. A good, hot wash—no shave, just a wash in the reeling sea cabin abaft the bridge. Another dream.

  He said, “Warn all the lookouts. We may sight a local patrol or some fisherman selling his catch to a U-Boat.” That was not so flippant as it sounded. To Treherne he added, “Begin the turn to the next leg in thirty minutes. I shall—”