“Sea duty men to harbour stations!”
Men began to clamber up towards the hatch, each man shrouded in cold weather gear and waterproofs.
“One-six-zero feet!”
The depths reeled off hurriedly as HMS Dreadnought rushed to the surface like a three-and-a-half thousand ton cork.
“One-three-zero!”
“One hundred…”
All depths were keel depths so sixty-five feet equalled periscope — just barely submerged — depth.
“Seven-zero!
“Five-zero! Breaching!”
The boat porpoised like a giant whale and settled leadenly for a moment in the trough of a long Atlantic swell. Dreadnought rolled, pitched into the next wave catching men not clinging onto something solid by surprise.
“Break the control room hatch!”
Men were scampering up the ladder.”
Commander Simon Collingwood held his breath for the first report from the cockpit at the top of Dreadnought’s tall fin-like sail. He’d been conning the boat blind ever since the attack. The first of the homing torpedoes had reached the end of its run and detonated about three hundred yards astern of the boat. The second had gone off practically alongside the port stern planes. Running at maximum revolutions the packing around the propeller drive shaft had started letting in water, worse — by far — the shock of the nearby explosion had cracked machinery mounts, caused short circuits across the whole vessel and completely disabled Dreadnought’s sonar suite. Several men had sustained minor injuries stopping the flooding, from being thrown around and from being too close to electrical motors and boards when they shorted out. With no way of knowing if the hunters were still in the vicinity he had opted to stay as deep as possible and to creep, very slowly away to the north west. Half-an-hour ago he’d reluctantly accepted that he’d have to surface. So many systems were failing or just broken that surfacing was a thing best done while the boat was, nominally, still under control.
“NO SURFACE CONTACTS IN SIGHT!”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
Reaching into his breast pocket he withdrew the signal he’d composed in the minutes after he’d concluded that surfacing was the only realistic way of making sure that at least some of his crew survived.
He handed the signal sheet to the communications yeoman who’d been waiting by his shoulder.
Dreadnought was wallowing horribly in the seas, her low, bulbous mass rolling and starting to pitch sickeningly.
“Increase to six-zero revs please!”
Simon Collingwood staggered across to the plot table.
“It feels like the seas are coming from a point or two south of west,” he observed, grabbing a hand hold.
Max Forton, his bearded Executive Officer nodded.
“The old girl will ride a lot easier if she’s taking the seas from abaft, sir.”
“Helm!” Collingwood called softly. “Make your course one_four_zero degrees!”
“Engineering report we’re taking on water again, sir!”
“Reduce revs to three zero!” Collingwood had felt the vibration through the soles of his feet so the report from the machine spaces hadn’t come as a surprise. He’d row back on the revs. If that didn’t do the trick the boat could stay afloat indefinitely without steerage way providing nothing else broke. Marvellously clean, cold salty air was being sucked down the sail into the control room.
“Surfacing signal has been acknowledged by friendly forces, sir.”
“What about Fleet HQ?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Collingwood had ordered his abbreviated after action report to be transmitted in the clear the moment Dreadnought’s sail broke the surface. The transmission would be repeated at ten minute intervals until further notice.
He glanced thoughtfully at the radiation monitor on the rear control room bulkhead. It read ‘negative’.
“Ventilate the boat, Number One,” he declared. “I’ll be in my cabin for a few minutes.”
Simon Collingwood slumped onto his bunk, resisting the urge to bury his head in his hands. Dreadnought had been idling when the first two homing fish destroyed the Scorpion. The lightweight Mark 44 13-inch torpedo had a maximum speed of up to thirty-five knots but a relatively short range of just over three miles. The second S-2 Tracker had had to manoeuvre so as to clear the disturbance area caused by the Scorpion’s death before she could drop her torpedoes. In this short respite Dreadnought had accelerated to almost fifteen knots. He’d poured on the power knowing that Dreadnought would still be working up to flank speed when the fish arrived. Dreadnought’s maximum speed was several knots slower than the homing fish. The mathematics of the situation — well, more correctly, the trigonometry — were against Dreadnought and there was nothing he could do about it. There were no miraculous angles to be bisected, no escape. He’d thought he was going to die. He’d fought the urge to attempt to turn to one side or the other, knowing he couldn’t shake off the racing acoustic harbingers of doom. He’d done the only thing he could do, guessed the collision angle of the incoming Mark 44s and steered a directly reciprocal course and ordered his engineering officer to red-line everything. He’d sat unmoving in his command chair, worn a confident mask and held Dreadnought arrow straight. Any deviation meant a loss of speed, and feet and inches might make all the difference between life and death. There had been the momentary hope and relief of the first fish detonating astern; and then the last fish had kept on coming, and coming…
There was a knock at the door.
“Fleet HQ have acknowledged our transmission, sir.”
Simon Collingwood puffed out his chest, smiled.
“Thank you.”
Chapter 46
Joanne Brenckmann was a little bit unnerved and then hugely relieved to hear her husband’s voice on the other end of the line. It was nearly two months since they’d spoken — over a dreadfully noisy line from England for barely two minutes before the connection went down — and she had not expected to speak to him again for at least another two months, when he was due to be rotated home for a month’s leave. She hated the separation but accepted it as part of the exigencies of the Service. If the Navy wanted Walter in England he had to go and there was nothing either of them could do about it.
In her husband’s long absence she’d got on with putting the house in order. It was only a month since the final repairs had been carried out to the roof and the last of the windows had been repaired. Walter had said they ought to have taken advantage of the Government’s interest-free reconstruction loans; she’d hated the idea of being in debt to Uncle Sam and besides, some people had already been waiting six months for the paperwork to go through the system, so they’d dug into their dwindling savings. If they’d waited for the Government to sort out its own bureaucratic muddle they’d have had to spend another winter with a tarpaulin over the roof in a house that was liable to blow away in a stiff breeze. While Walter might be a shrewd litigator and a safe pair of hands commanding one of the Navy’s destroyers, she’d always been the one who balanced the family’s accounts and managed the home. For a lawyer Walter had never been focused on money or very practical around it unless he was fighting a case in court. At home he’d always left that sort of thing to Joanne. They’d always had one of those marriages where each partner had well-established and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They’d kept things simple and it had worked out just fine. Walter was the breadwinner; Joanne was the mother of their children and the homemaker. They’d had a huge fight about something once, although it was so long ago neither of them could remember what. They’d never done that again because they’d both felt so ashamed afterwards, as if they’d let each other and the kids down in some terrible, unfathomably way. They’d become true soul mates without whom neither could be the person they aspired to be, and so when Joanne heard the timbre of her husband’s voice she knew something was wrong. Horribly wrong.