Butcher and Bolt Page 22
The reason for his care was that the Oerlikon was a new gun, and this gunboat was testing it. Lord Mountbatten himself had supervised the fitting of the weapon to the gunboat only the day before, referring to plans he said had been smuggled out of Switzerland shortly before the French capitulated.
Ensign Vanger’s job was to test the guns, against enemy ships and aircraft if the opportunity arose. Their first live test-firing, conducted that afternoon, had not gone well. The left-hand gun had jammed after firing only a dozen rounds, and Vanger had been diligently greasing cartridges for spare magazines ever since. Now they were cruising over the far side of the Channel only a few miles off the coast of France, and, in the words of the captain “looking for trouble”.
He strapped himself into the waist belt, settled himself in the curved stocks and, peering through the ring sight into the darkness, pulled both triggers. With the magazines removed, the bolts clicked forward silently. He reset them and clicked the magazines back into place. Now the guns were as ready to fire as they ever would be. He unclipped himself and locked the guns back into their neutral position. As he made his way back along the deck to the steering house the boat pitched awkwardly and a wave gushed over the deck, knocking him over and drenching him from the chest down in freezing water. Vanger ignored it, he had been drenched worse than that more times than he could remember in the last year.
~ ~ ~
The little trawler growled steadily on through the waves. Joe sat right forward in front of the main hatchway, staring ahead into the gloom. When the moon came out he felt he could see the chalk cliffs of England, but he knew that was an illusion, merely the reflection of moonlight off the water at the horizon. England was still thirty or forty miles away, and at this speed it would take them all night to get there. Besides, Francois hadn’t agreed to take him all the way there, only as far as he dared and not too far from his usual fishing ground. From there, Joe would have to row the rest of the way.
It had sounded like a reasonable idea on land, but now he was out in the vast immensity of the ocean he was less confident. The tiny rowing boat that had got them aboard seemed barely sea-worthy in a pond, let alone the Channel, and he was considering asking Francois to take him all the way. He’d force him to if necessary: this mission was more important than the desire of a French fisherman to sit out the war in his home town, even if he had lost a son to the Germans. Surely he could convince him of that? Joe noticed that the moon had disappeared behind low cloud, and, as if on cue, a freezing rain started pelting in from the south, heavy drops pockmarking the surface of the ocean.
Suddenly the tone of the engine changed. The continuous low drone of the past hour was replaced by a high-pitched whine. Francois came racing forward and started down the hatch.
‘What is it?’ cried Joe.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never had a problem with this engine before!’ called Francois as he descended the ladder. The way had come off the trawler and it was wallowing in the swell now, rolling and pitching in a sickening corkscrew motion that made Joe’s stomach lurch.
As he came up to the hatchway, he heard a muffled thump and a curse in German, then Richter’s head popped out of the hatch. Joe stood momentarily dumbfounded as Richter swarmed up the ladder, a long wrench clutched in his right hand, which Joe noticed as if in slow motion, was covered in blood and some shiny grey substance.
Richter swung wildly at his legs with the wrench and Joe jumped back just in time to avoid having both shins broken. He stumbled over an air vent protruding from the deck and went down on his back, scoring his shoulder on the corner of a locker on the way down. Richter was out of the hatch and onto him in seconds. The wrench slammed down and Joe spun wildly to get away, kicking out with his legs as the heavy tool crashed into the deck beside him. He connected with one of Richter’s knees and heard the man howl in pain as the joint bent backwards unnaturally. As Joe scrambled to his feet, Richter hobbled forward and took another wild swing with the wrench. Joe saw it coming and danced backwards, coming up short against the railing. The wrench connected with an agonising blow, and Joe felt a couple of ribs crack in his left torso. As Richter raised the wrench for another blow, Joe pushed forward from the railing and launched himself at the German, who was now laughing maniacally, the rain streaming off his face. The two men smashed onto the deck.
Joe found himself on his back, with Richter sprawled across him, reaching for the wrench which had fallen from his hands and slid across the deck. Joe clenched his right fist and slammed it into the side of Richter’s head. The man howled with pain, but his hand grasped the wrench and he swung it with a vicious back-hand that would have cracked Joe’s skull had it not glanced off a wire that rose from the deck to support the net crane.
Joe grabbed Richter’s hand and bit as hard as he could into the flesh of the exposed wrist. Richter screamed and the wrench clattered to the deck, but he rolled sideways and clamped his left hand around Joe’s neck. Stars exploded in Joe’s head as his air pipe was crushed and he twisted and turned while still biting savagely into Richter’s arm. He latched onto the man’s right arm and pulled, but nothing could dislodge him. He put both feet on the deck and thrust violently upwards, but he couldn’t dislodge the German.
He was choking now. He had no air in his lungs, no breath, he was losing strength, losing the impetus to keep fighting, his arms and legs seemed not to obey him. His teeth released Richter’s arm of their own accord, and that was when the German made a mistake: he shifted his balance and leaned over to pick up the wrench.
Joe made one last desperate lunge and succeeded in throwing the German off. He gasped desperately for air and rolled sideways, coming up against the railing again, where the anchor and its chain lay coiled, waiting to be cast into the sea.
As Richter charged at him with the wrench, Joe seized the anchor in both hands and hurled it bodily at the man. The anchor struck Richter in the chest, propelling him backwards into the railing and straight over into the sea.
Joe looked around him and saw the expected life belt hanging on the side of the wheelhouse. Groaning with the pain of his cracked ribs, he pulled himself over to the wheelhouse and threw the life belt over the side.
~ ~ ~
On board Sting, Vanger was checking the depth charge launchers when he heard the captain calling him from the deckhouse. He ran forward into the small shelter that housed the wheel. The captain of the boat was only a lieutenant, but he was still all-powerful on board. This particular captain, one Lieutenant Hunt, was a no-nonsense young man, desperate for action and the promotion to a destroyer that it might bring.
‘Vanger, what do you make of that?’ gestured Hunt, pointing off to port where a small white light was flashing rhythmically. Vanger watched for a few seconds.
‘Doesn’t appear to be Morse code sir,’ he said, ‘not a buoy is it?’
‘Not this far out, surely?’ replied Hunt, ‘and nothing on the chart, we’d better have a look.’ He leant on the dual throttles and the small boat leapt forward with a surge of power, the prow rising suddenly on an impressive bow wave.
‘Get back on the cannon,’ yelled Hunt over the rising engine noise, ‘just in case.’
Vanger nodded, clambered back to the gun platform and strapped himself in. He unlocked the twin 20mm guns, cocked them and stared ahead to where the light continued to wink.
~ ~ ~
In Saint-Valery-en-Caux, E-Boat S41 of 2. S-Bootsflotille slid out of its temporary berth and out into the Channel. The rest of the flotilla had returned to Ostend the day before, but an oil leak had forced the torpedo boat to dock at this little fishing port after their last mission, attacking a convoy steaming for the mouth of the Thames. The attack had been a success, with three ships torpedoed, but the convoy had scattered and the British destroyers had blown one torpedo boat completely out of the water.
Now, Captain Lothar Brecken pushed his three Daimler-Benz engines up to cruising speed and headed nort
h-east at 25 knots. His orders were to cruise the Channel looking for stragglers trying to reach port under cover of darkness. The moon was half-full, and cloud cover obscured it for much of the time, but there was enough light to detect a transport or a tanker if they were close enough. Brecken picked up his binoculars and started scanning the horizon.
~ ~ ~
The light turned out to be the winking of a torch. As the gunboat drew closer, Vanger made out the distinctive shape of a French fishing trawler, the kind from which they bought fresh fish and occasionally fresh information. The gunboat surged alongside and the engines died to a low throb. The voice of Lieutenant Hunt came through a loudhailer.
‘Attention, this is His Majesty’s Motor Gun Boat Sting, what vessel is that?’
‘A bloody fishing smack,’ came back the answer in a broad Australian accent, ‘carrying an important prisoner of war.’
‘Stand by to receive boarders!’ hailed the lieutenant, and gave a curt nod to three crewmen standing by with rifles at the ready.
Minutes later, they were back, carrying an unconscious and soaking wet man in his underwear, and accompanied by a tall man in tattered and bloody civilian clothes, clearly injured from the way he walked. The man climbed over the railing and saluted.
‘Lieutenant Joseph Dean, 1st Staffordshire Rifles, on secondment to the Commandos sir,’ said the man, ‘and you’ve no idea how glad I am to see you.’
‘Well get below man and get some rum into you,’ order Hunt, ‘and what about this fellow?’ he said pointing at Richter.
‘He’s a Nazi war criminal,’ said Joe, ‘chain him up good and tight, but make sure he doesn’t die on me. There’s also a body in the hold. He was the owner of the boat, a brave Frenchman.’
Ten minutes later, Joe was in dry clothes, his cracked ribs bandaged, and he was nursing a cup of black tea generously laced with Navy rum and condensed milk. His hands were still trembling and occasionally a violent twinge would flick the scalding liquid over his knuckle. He barely noticed it.
‘So lieutenant,’ said Hunt, ‘tell me how you come to be floating in the middle of the Channel in a broken-down trawler with a dead skipper and a half-drowned man you tell me is a German officer.’
Joe sighed and took a deep gulp of the tea.
‘It’s a long story sir,’ began Joe in a low voice, but he was interrupted by a cry from the deck.
‘Ahoy there! Vessel approaching fast on the starboard bow, from the bow wave looks like it could be an E-boat!’
Hunt raced up the ladder to the wheelhouse and seconds later the engines roared and the gunboat start to accelerate rapidly. Joe crawled painfully up to the deck and looked around. The indeterminate grey of a wet and cloudy dawn was infiltrating the sky now, and about a mile away Joe could see the sleek form of a powerful boat racing towards them. As he watched, the British gunboat turned away and piled on speed. Joe pulled himself along the gangway to the wheelhouse.
‘That’s a German S-Class E-boat,’ said Lieutenant Hunt. ‘If there were two of us we’d take him on, but this boat is on an experimental mission today, and I’d rather have a bit of support from the boys closer to home if possible.’
Joe said nothing, just stared aft, to where the E-boat appeared to be gaining on them perceptibly.
‘Is it my imagination, or is he going faster than us?’ asked Joe.
‘Oh yes,’ said Hunt, ‘this girl can achieve maybe 30 knots at full speed, they can manage over 40. The question is, can we get close enough to Blighty for the Fleet Air Arm or one of our screening fleet to notice us before they blow us out of the water?’
‘Jesus, you’re a cool customer,’ said Joe. He thought he’d only murmured it to himself, but the response came immediately.
‘Part of being in the navy old boy,’ said Hunt, ‘you learn to accept that there are some things you can’t control. Imagine what it must have been like in HMS Victory at Trafalgar, sailing straight into the guns of the French and Spanish at little better than a walking pace? It took them an hour to get close enough to fire a shot themselves you know, and they were being fired at the whole time. Horrible.’
On the E-boat, a puff of smoke emerged and was ripped away by the wind. The sea fifty yards behind the gunboat was suddenly rent with fountains of white water.
‘Vanger!’ called the lieutenant, ‘let’s see what you can do with those Oerlikons.’
Three men raced aft and Joe watched as one strapped himself to the dual cannons mounted there while the other two opened cabinets and started lifting out round ammunition canisters.
The cannons opened up with a steady fire of five rounds per second, the flat detonations being swept aft by the speed of the gunboat. Every fifth shell was a tracer round, and Joe could see they were falling well short of the E-Boat.
‘Cease firing!’ called Hunt through his loudhailer, ‘wait until they’re in range.’
The two boats sped on across the iron ocean, as rain once again came pelting down from a lowering sky. Five minutes of jolting and bouncing later, the gun on the E-Boat began firing, and this time the shells rained down all over and around the gunboat. A series of shells ripped through the port depth charge rack, tearing it free. One of the loaders looked in horror at the remains of his left leg before being abruptly flung overboard as the gunboat leapt over a wave. Joe raised his head from behind a sheet of metal plate just in time to see Vanger and his remaining loader peppered with shells as the gunboat climbed a wave. The angle of the boat meant that the salvo cleared the armour plate protecting the gunners, and both men were torn to bloody shreds by the rending shells.
‘Christ!’ yelled Hunt, ‘Lieutenant, do you know how to fire those things?’
Joe looked down the deck, to where streams of blood and sea water were running in crazy directions. The deck was pitching and tossing wildly and he swallowed hard and closed his eyes.
‘I’ll have a go,’ he said, and began crawling slowly down the deck towards the gun position, clinging to whatever hand-holds he could find.
He nearly followed the loader into the ocean as the gunboat rolled violently, but managed to grasp a piece of twisted and distorted metal even as his legs went over the side. With his broken ribs screaming at him, and his feet being dragged under by the wash, he heaved and hauled himself back on board and made it to the limb-strewn gun platform, his lungs on fire.
Kicking a leg and several unidentifiable chunks of bloodied flesh out of the way, he pulled the lifeless torso of Vanger out of the gun straps. The man had been blown in half and his intestines were writhing around on the deck like swollen worms. Choking on vomit, Joe strapped himself in, pulled the cocking levers and peered through the gunsight.
Not only was his own boat leaping about, but the target was also moving violently. The E-Boat appeared in the sight only fleetingly every few seconds. Unsure as to how to hit a target like that, Joe pulled the triggers and sent a continuous burst aft, in the hope that something would hit. After four seconds of this, the left gun jammed with a click. Joe cursed and tugged at the magazine. As he wrestled with it, a hail of shells swept the boat again. Joe instinctively fell to the deck for cover, but the gun-straps held him upright as the cannon shells smashed into the boat all around him, careering off the armour plate just inches in front of his nose like a rain of hammers.
The shells stopped abruptly, and he willed himself to stand still. He pulled the magazine off the jammed gun, reached into the exposed breach and removed the cartridge that had failed to eject. Grabbing a fresh magazine from the rack, he slotted it into position and took aim at the E-Boat again.
Now it was much closer. Joe could see the German gunner looking at him through his own sights. Joe snarled and pressed the triggers, allowing his body to sway with the movement of the boat in an attempt to maintain his aim. Firing in short bursts he went through four magazines, but the German kept firing. All around him the gunboat was being torn to pieces by the supersonic lead shells. Th
e wooden deck had been ripped to splinters, and every metal fitting he could see was a colander. Only the armoured gun-shield was still whole and, incredibly, the wheelhouse. He noticed that the gunboat was moving more slowly now, had an engine been hit? He had no way of knowing. He loaded another magazine and pulled the trigger. Twenty rounds later the bolts of both guns clicked on empty breaches. Joe looked around, but the closest magazines were in an ammo locker three feet way.
He undid the strap and lunged for the locker. As he pulled out two fresh magazines, another burst from the E-boat sent shards of white-hot steel flying around his position. One of these slashed into his right leg below the knee, while another pierced his left thigh sending a stabbing pain up his spine. He collapsed to the deck and lay there with the rain falling on his face, blood dripping onto the ruined boards.
‘Lieutenant Dean,’ came the voice of Hunt over the loud hailer, ‘England expects every man to do his duty! Strap yourself to that gun and keep firing, that’s an order!’
Joe saw the strap dangling from the cannon. All he wanted to do was lie here and enjoy the patter of the raindrops. So cool. So refreshing.
‘Dean!’ came the voice again, ‘get up man, get up and start firing!’
Joe shook himself. He grabbed the strap and hauled himself up into a half-standing position, the best he could manage. Then slowly, agonisingly, he wrapped the strap around his waist and locked it in place, stifling a groan at the stabbing pain in his ribs. Then he realised he’d left the magazines on the deck.
Undoing the strap he knelt, grabbed the magazines, pulled himself back up and slotted them into position as another ferocious burst of fire swept over his head. In a daze, he strapped himself in once again, leant back, aimed in the general direction of the E-boat, closed his eyes and held down the triggers.
When the magazines had emptied themselves, he opened his eyes. Expecting to be staring into the twin barrels of the E-Boat’s cannon, he was astonished to find that the German boat had turned broadside on and was surging away northwards at top speed.