The corpses of the hated Soviet advisers and political officers who had foolishly failed to avail themselves of the opportunity to jump overboard at the beginning of the mutiny; now lay in bloody heaps on the deck or swung lifelessly from nooses strung from the foremast and main mast cross beams and were clearly visible in the crosshairs of HMS Alliance’s attack periscope.
The commanding officer of the submarine knew the name of his foe because he could clearly read the big D351 pennant number of his quarry painted on the hull beneath her bridge.
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington signalled for his second-in-command to come and take a look for himself. Mainly, because he did not actually believe the evidence of his eyes. Or rather, he did not believe what he thought he was seeing, which was even worse.
Lieutenant Michael Philpott arched an eyebrow conspiratorially — albeit cautiously because his commanding officer had only joined the boat at Gibraltar three weeks ago and although he gave every appearance of being a decent and competent skipper with a dry sense of humour one never took these things for granted — as he crouched to peer through the eyepieces of the barely raised attack periscope.
HMS Alliance had been submerged eight hours and the atmosphere was already thickening. Not for her crew the five-star luxuries of life on the Navy’s newest and most expensive toy, HMS Dreadnought, or the new Oberon and Porpoise class advanced diesel-electric boats; Alliance was a good old-fashioned boat built just after the German war allegedly incorporating lessons learned in that war. Consequently, life onboard could be and sometimes still was, a dirty, smelly business and most of the men in the control room sported full ‘sets’ — beards of various maturities — and the predominant odour was one of mingled perspiration and lubrication oil.
The boat had been in transit from Malta to replace HMS Artful in the picket line currently a hundred miles east of the archipelago when it had intercepted the ‘MALTA IS UNDER ATTACK BY SEA AND AIRBORNE FORCES OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION’ alert transmitted in the clear from the Headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet.
Philpott peered at the destroyer filling the lens of the attack periscope as it periodically bobbed above and below the waves.
The destroyer was dead in the water less than five hundred yards away.
The periscope brought the details into sharp near focus.
The bodies swinging on long ropes from the yardarms.
The three main battery turrets were trained fore and aft.
And there were huge white sheets flying from every available halyard…
HMS Alliance’s twenty-four year old second-in-command stepped away from the periscope.
“Down scope,” Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington said quietly. He was the old man in every sense in the submarine’s wardroom. At forty-two he had been a reservist for fourteen years by the time of the October War and had only belatedly been called back to the colours last autumn. The last time he had been in these waters it had been as a terrified sub-lieutenant on an old U-class boat — the Unbroken — but at least he had known who was trying to kill him in those days. These days, who knew? Red Dawn? The old Soviet Union? The Turks? The Americans?
He stepped across to the chart table where a rudimentary plot of what might be happening in the general vicinity — between the Alliance and Malta — and where his recently re-fitted but still old command probably fitted into the big picture. He doubted anybody knew where the Alliance was, or cared. Fleet headquarters in Malta probably had other more pressing things to worry about than the whereabouts of an old Amphion class boat like the Alliance; and in any event nobody in Malta would know that she had had to spend most of the night bobbing around on the surface with her starboard diesel in pieces on the engine room floor. Alliance had been crawling towards the sound of distant explosions when she had run across the Turkish destroyer lying dead in the water streaming — by the look of it — every piece of linen in the Wardroom cupboard.
Barrington sighed.
It had been impossible to recharge the boat’s depleted batteries last night. Sometime in the next hour or so he would have had to have surfaced anyway. Notwithstanding, necessity was hardly any kind of virtue in an ocean which had suddenly become horribly dangerous.
He met the eye of the Engineering Officer, whom he had summoned to the control room ten minutes before.
“Well, Chief,” he grimaced. “What do you think?”
The other man shrugged.
“The port diesel will fire up, sir,” he declared defensively. “After that,” another shrug, “I can’t promise she’ll stay running…”
The dockyard at Gibraltar had botched the rebuild of the starboard diesel and now it seemed as if they had taken onboard a bad batch of diesel, or one of the bunkers had somehow got contaminated with sea water. It never rained but it poured. A fellow could take it to heart or he could make the best of a bad deal and get on with it!
Barrington chuckled and shook his head.
Sometimes that was all you could do!
Around him the mood lightened.
“The boat will clear for action, if you please, Number One.”
HMS Alliance was already braced for battle and within a little over a minute Michael Philpott reported the boat as being “ready for action, sir.”
“Thank you, Number One.”
There was time for a last consideration; one more trawl through the evidence at Francis Barrington’s fingertips and the obvious pitfalls of the action he was about to take. It went against the grain to torpedo an enemy who was so completely at one’s mercy but nobody would offer so much as a breath of criticism, let alone censure, if he simply put two Mark VIII heavyweight fish into the side of the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak. However, that would hardly have been in either the best traditions of the Service, or in any way sporting. Moreover, given the number of bodies hanging from the destroyer’s yardarms Francis Barrington thought it was extremely unlikely that the men onboard the Turkish warship would relish falling again into Soviet hands. Which made the idea of surrender if not axiomatic, then at least pragmatic while not ruling out the possibility that the moment Alliance broke surface the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak might still open fire on her with everything she had.
“Hands to surfacing stations,” he declared. A thing that must be done was best done swiftly.
He took a final deep breath.
“Surface! Surface! Surface!”
Compressed air blasted into the huge saddle ballast tanks.
Within seconds the one thousand five hundred ton two hundred and eighty feet long diesel-electric submarine broke the oily grey surface of the Mediterranean like a cork. Francis Barrington followed the first two ratings up the ladder to the conning tower. Alliance’s deck-mounted 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon had been removed in 1960, part of a ‘streamlining’ refit designed to improve the boat’s underwater handling characteristics. The boat had had a temporary mount for a deck gun while she was in the Far East, but this had been removed at Devonport long before Barrington had taken command. However, this was of little consequence because Alliance had surfaced only a quarter-of-a-mile off the Turkish destroyer’s port side with her open bow torpedo tube doors pointing directly at her bridge.
The doors of all six of the Alliance’s 21-inch torpedo tubes were open; and each tube was loaded with a Mark VIII fish. If the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak so much as twitched in a threatening way Francis Barrington planned to blow her out of the water.