“Surface contact bearing zero-six-zero degrees. Many screws but very distant.”
Here in the Libyan Sea the water was over ten thousand feet deep. There were no underwater mountains, no shoaling shores, reefs or sandbanks to clutter and distort, bend or refract sound waves. Big ships advertised their presence many, many miles away. The only things that stopped sound travelling tens, perhaps, scores or hundreds of miles were minor fluctuations in temperature and salinity levels in the water column. The Mediterranean was a notoriously ‘salty’ sea, one of the few things going for a submariner in its relatively narrow, congested confines.
Simon Collingwood checked the depth reading.
“Bring the boat up to one-seven-five feet if you please, Number One.”
At the new depth they would run silent, listen again and establish if the source of the sound was approaching, or moving away. If the listening conditions were better at the lesser depth they would hold at that level, otherwise they’d drop back down again into the blackness of the deep. Dreadnought could play this game for weeks on end; the Amphions picketing along their tripwire in the West had no such option. They had to spend several hours surfaced every day or day-and-a-half, or their crews would suffocate and their batteries would run flat.
The surface contact was louder, nearer at a depth of one hundred and seventy-five feet but still relatively distant; at least ten miles away. The problem was that the background noise of many propellers could easily be masking the presence of vessels steaming between Dreadnought’s ultra-sensitive hydrophones and the main concentration of whatever group or convoy of ships was slowly passing from the south-east to the north-west.
A dull, faraway thunder peeled through the depths.
“Periscope depth!” Simon Collingwood wanted to have a look at what was going on before he contemplated his tactical options. There was nothing quite like the human eye for quickly, accurately, viscerally assessing a situation. “Would somebody please ask our passengers to be very, very quiet until further notice!”
This would be a less than straightforward business; hardly any of the ‘passengers’ spoke English. Thus far most of the interrogation — actually very gentle interviewing over mugs of hot chocolate, biscuits, dried fruits, and sweets for the kids that members of the crew had eagerly donated from their personal stashes — had been conducted in halting conversational French, pigeon Cypriot, snatches of demotic Greek that a couple of the officers recollected from their prep school days, and literally, by drawing cartoons and by the liberal employment of sign language. The resourcefulness and patience of the average Royal Navy officer and rating was practically limitless when confronted by frightened women and children whose safety had been entrusted to their tender mercies.
The small, dirty tramp steamer was trailing a plume of black smoke from her single, overly high, stack. A blunt stem, a raised fo’c’sle and transom deck, pole masts fore and aft of the low, blocky amidships bridge superstructure, rust streaked and relatively high in the water, the merchantman wallowed in the short five to six feet high waves piled up by the gusting westerly winds. Now and then white spume rose over her forepeak and she was hidden from sight as either the periscope or her hull fell into a trough in the seas.
The steamer was less than a mile away.
“Down periscope! Make our depth one hundred feet!” He reported what he had seen to the control room. “Two to three thousand ton tramp steamer. No flags. Heading north, making a lot of smoke but not exactly pouring it on. She couldn’t have been making more than seven or eight knots. The sea state is deteriorating. No other surface contacts in sight.”
Max Forton pursed his lips.
They had all felt the boat’s smooth, undisturbed progress though the water alter as she’d hovered at periscope depth, her motion mildly perturbed by the rising seas above.
“The last forecast we received from Malta warned that a gale was going to blow up sometime in the next couple of days, Skipper.”
Simon Collingwood nodded.
North-westerly force six building to force eight. By Atlantic standards a short-lived minor blow that would be over in two or three days. A little unseasonal for this time of year. The seasons and the weather had been messed up since the war. In any event, winter in the Eastern Mediterranean was a pussy cat in comparison with the beast it often was in less temperate zones.
“What are the other contacts doing?” He demanded.
“Speed and course unchanged, sir. Range twenty miles plus!”
The commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought frowned in concentration.
If the surface contacts were the Admiral Kutuzov and her escorts; why were their movements so apparently random?
If that was the Kutuzov group on the plot why had they let a slow, helpless tramp steamer go about her business unmolested?
Why was the Kutuzov leading her screen towards the shelter of Crete on account of the sort of stormy weather any Royal Navy destroyer captain would regard as moderately invigorating but nothing remotely worthy of more than a brief passing note in his log?
The galling thing was that he was as sure as he could be — it wasn’t as if any other task forces had sailed over or around him in the last couple of days — that the distant surface contacts had to be the Kutuzov group; and he had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Again the faraway drum roll of detonations kissed Dreadnought’s cold steel sides. Had the killers on the Kutuzov stumbled across another hapless victim somewhere over the horizon? If so, how had the lumbering merchantman steaming only a few miles away escaped a similar fate?
Was this what it was going to be like from now on?
Fighting an enemy who obeyed none of the normal rites and practices of twentieth century war?
Chapter 43
Marija Calleja felt groggy, her head hurt and she was utterly humiliated. Her ‘sister’, Rosa, had tried to comfort her, and Margo was clucking at her like her Mama used to when she was a teenager.
“How many fingers?” The Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women asked. Again!
“Two!” Marija retorted churlishly. “The same number as before.”
Rosa Calleja, her brother’s widow squeezed her hand. Yesterday they had unwrapped the bandages around Rosa’s head. Most of her hair had been shaved and her healing wounds, mostly superficial, and sutures were crusty and ugly looking. Her injured right eye was still half closed but that she retained vision in the eye, — blurred still — was a minor miracle and the specialist from the clinic at Msida had sounded confident when he declared she would gradually recover ‘more or less full function’, eventually. Of the curvaceous, twinkle-eyed bride in the pictures of her wedding day three years ago there was little sign. Her dislocated left shoulder was only now regaining movement, and her right foot and lower leg was encased in a big, clunking cast. Moving from one chair to another, just standing up was an exercise fraught with perils.
Yesterday afternoon Marija had been helping her sister to her feet when Rosa had happened to glance out of first floor window of the treatment room.
‘That’s him!’ Rosa had declaimed hoarsely.
Marija, worried that what she’d actually heard was a cry of pain didn’t immediately register Rosa’s meaning, or her urgency. She was focused on supporting her sister in case she stumbled; nothing else really registered for a moment. It was only when she was confident that Rosa was steady, safe, that she asked: ‘Who?’