See You at the Bar Read online

  Harry remembered he’d been feeling left out. Over the previous days, he’d watched a daisy chain of Tenth Flotilla officers traipse off down to Lascaris for their briefings, so where was his look at the big wall map with all the marker pen scribbles and all the folders full of call signs and radio frequencies and challenge-and-response codes? But he hadn’t said anything.

  But his call to action had come, at last.

  Capt Philips must have noticed the look on Harry’s face. ‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘It’s last minute.’ And he’d slipped a signal flimsy across the desk to Harry. It was marked ‘Western Naval Task Force, Staff of Vice Adm H.K. Hewitt USN, Naval Commander’, and it was from ‘RN Submarine LO’, which Harry recognised as being the Royal Navy submarine liaison officer. In other words, one of ours, attached to one of theirs.

  Apparently, according to the typed document, Vice Adm Hewitt had wanted an additional tripwire pushed out a bit further on his left flank. Everybody had agreed; they’d feel more comfortable. However, the boat that got assigned the position wouldn’t actually be the task force’s western boundary marker, more a sort of back-up boundary marker, in case anybody wandered over the real one by accident. Or at least that was what the signal was suggesting. Oh, and they were to act as an outer picket too – in case any nasties tried to creep down the coast and get in among the landing craft. In which case they were to shout, ‘Help!’ and there were a couple of US Navy destroyer flotillas on hand to rush out and clean up. And maybe the boat could act as ‘plane guard’ too and be on standby to pick up any fliers who ended up in the drink. Underneath the main blurb had been a handwritten scrawl, ‘Request Scourge. She’s worked with 12 Flott. covering boats.’ It was signed off, ‘SLO’ – the submarine liaison officer. In other words, based on Scourge’s short, temporary, deployment to Twelfth Flotilla – the Bonny Boy’s bloody mob – she was going to be ‘it’.

  Marvellous.

  Harry had felt a cold chill in his belly just reading the innocuous little scrap.

  They would be right out at the sharp end of the entire landing force. Right at the point of the threat. Which meant they would not only be the first ones to meet any oncoming enemy, they would also be surrounded by their own side’s trigger-happy warship gunners and aircraft, all of them looking for targets, especially U-boats which in the dark, could look uncomfortably like Scourge. And they were a last-minute add-on to the main plan.

  ‘Who is the SLO attached to this Hewitt chap’s staff, sir?’ asked Harry, not sure if he really wanted to hear the answer.

  ‘Can’t tell you,’ Philips had said, looking even more disgruntled.

  ‘That’s a secret, sir?’ asked Harry.

  ‘No,’ sighed Philips. ‘That’s an “I-don’t-know”.’

  Philips obviously wasn’t enjoying being kept in the dark either. Eventually, he said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t worry. Now that ABC’s turned up here on Malta, and he’s running the whole naval end now, I’m sure everything will have been sorted out.’

  ‘ABC’, the fleet’s nickname for Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham. The former C-in-C Mediterranean, now back again for the next big show. Of course he was.

  And if anyone was going to have to do any sorting out, he was the boy to do it.

  The news had made Harry feel a lot better.

  Meanwhile, Harding had collected the co-ordinates for Scourge’s patrol box and Farrar had begun shuffling through all the call signs and radio frequencies to make sure everything was there. There had even been a couple of ship recognition silhouettes, for the USS Biscayne and the USS Monrovia. He’d shown them to Harry. Biscayne Harry had recognised as one of those late-1930s small seaplane tenders the US Navy had – no more than 2,500 tons and now being converted into a command and control ship. But Monrovia had looked like one of their big assault transports, except with the landing craft davits replaced by a regular forest of radio masts, another one of these new amphibious warfare command ships the Yanks were turning out.

  ‘Monrovia is Admiral Hewitt’s flagship and command ship for the whole western task force,’ Philips had explained. ‘This is so you’ll recognise her if you see her. Her call sign and frequency are all in your orders. Biscayne is the command ship for JOSS beach, which is the westernmost and so will be nearest to you. All the timings are there… for when you light up your guide beacons and when you switch on the radio beacon. But from what I understand, be prepared to never see a soul. All the assault ships will be lining up on the boat, acting as main guide submarine. She will be Tobermory, and she’ll be in a lot closer to the beach. You’ve just to be there like the faithful sheepdog, making sure anyone who wanders off gets swept back again and pointed in the right direction.’

  ‘What could possibly go wrong,’ Harry had said, with his old laconic, lop-sided grin, which neither Farrar nor Harding had seen for a while.

  ‘Indeed, Mr Gilmour,’ Philips had said, returning his grin. ‘What could?’

  And now, they were here, on station and watching the clock for it all to begin.

  *

  Captain Charles Bonalleck RN was now working out of that big villa just back from the Algiers Corniche where Ike once had his headquarters. But Ike wasn’t there anymore; he was with all the other brass on Malta for the duration of Husky, chumming it up with Monty and Patton and Mountbatten and Cunningham and all the other truckloads of generals, admirals and air marshals that followed them around, winning the war with their maps and timetables and lines-of-communication schedules. And there too, just for Ike, that knowing little piece of posh Anglo-Irish skirt, Kay Summersby, his British Army driver.

  Captain Bonalleck didn’t approve of any of them. However, having them somewhere else, halfway down the Med, didn’t just suit his easily offended sensibilities, it played so well into his plan.

  And right now, his plan was about to unfold.

  He was sitting in his office in the big villa, in the dark. Outside, through the wide-open shuttered windows was a garden noisy with crickets and the sounds of vehicles drifting over the high walls. It wasn’t long after moonset, and if he swivelled his chair, he could look out at a framed riot of stars. He could feel the caressing warmth of the night seeping into his old bones. A gulp from the brandy balloon and a different heat spread out from his belly. On the table behind him was a flimsy, single sheet of paper, and written on it was the order that would finally fix that jumped up, little wavy-navy wonderboy.

  All thanks to the Yanks. It had been so easy to win their confidence. All he’d had to do was flash them his rank and his maroon Victoria Cross medal ribbon, and they’d assumed they were dealing with a big shot. Not just any old flotilla CO. After that, all he’d had to do was always be on hand with the offer of sage advice and a few pertinent suggestions, and suddenly, he was their go-to guy. So that when the SLO billet needed filling, he was the guy they’d gone to. The rest had just been shuffling the paperwork.

  He’d never have got away with it though if there had been an actual centralised command for Husky. Yes, they called their command structure ‘centralised’, but in reality, the actual staffs were dotted all over the Med. The main operation HQ might be in that hole on Malta, but there were subsidiary HQs in all the embarkation ports from Bizerte to here, in Algiers.

  And for his purposes, here was the place to be because here was where that spiky little Lt Gen Carl Spaatz had his tent, from where he ran all the USAAF fighters and bombers that would be covering the Western Task Force. And just down the road in Tunis was where that task force had finally to set sail from.

  So, HQs here, HQs there, and anyone who knew anything about staff work would know a lot of paperwork could get lost between here and there and the hole on Malta.

  He remembered thinking that, while all of this had still been just a notion coalescing, while his own plan was just a germ of an idea.

  The other thing he knew about planning: it was such an unforgiving mistress.

  For an amphibious operation like Husky, i
t was all about getting your ducks in a row. One long list after another long list, lined up, all in sequence. And break that sequence and the whole lot falls apart.

  Just imagine all those tanks and trucks and shells and ration packs they all had to get loaded onto the transports in the right order. First on, last off. Then all the ships carrying all the different arms had to get lined up so they arrived off the beach in the right order. And before they even got there, all the minesweepers that had to have gone ahead, clearing their paths to the disembarkation areas, and the ships from the shore bombardment groups that would have to be escorted up to their gun lines.

  And even before all that, there were the submarines. His job, to see they went in first, there to act as navigation beacons, there to guide the guides, to point the way to each designated beach so that the right battalions went ashore in the right places, and all their follow-on ammunition and k-ration packs and their supporting tanks and artillery too, all having to arrive in the right order on the right beach.

  Without the submarines, nobody would know where they were supposed to go.

  And if he shut his eyes, he could imagine the beaches as the sun came up and the Air Force arriving overhead. All they’d see was fire and confusion, which, of course, was why they’d have been in on the plan from the start, all those pilots, screaming in at over 200mph, needing to have some idea where they were supposed to be dropping their bombs and where to point their guns and when to pull the triggers.

  All those recognition codes that would have to be agreed, the codes tapped out in morse, broadcast in voice, the flares and coloured smoke, all so that when the planes came over, the poor bastards on the ground and on the ships could tell them, ‘We’re friendlies!’ and, ‘Don’t shoot!’ And the pilots, all of them having studied all the codes beforehand for weeks on end, would stay their fire. And, of course, they would all already know their ship recognition charts off by heart, having studied them also, for months on end – pages and pages of silhouettes, our ships and their ships. Or at least, that was how it was supposed to unfold.

  Except, someone with Captain Bonalleck’s experience knew that it never did, something he was counting on to help his own little scheme along.

  But he never said so, when he was touting himself for the job. He’d just let it be known that he understood what it took to make a plan come together. And his ploy had worked.

  He got the job as SLO, one of the team, there to make sure everybody got the right codes and knew who everyone was and where they were supposed to be. And he had been meticulous. The quality of his staff work had been obvious from the word go. All his new American buddies said so. This was one campaign he wasn’t going to lose because of bad paperwork, he told them.

  So that even in the confusion of the final days and hours, in the frenzy of all the last-minute updates and corrections and supplementary orders, he made sure every scrap of paper that passed across his desk got the right stamp, had the right heading and went into the right inbox. All except the one sitting on his desk behind him, that when he finished his brandy, he was going to set light to with the burning end of his cigarette.

  ‘Hey Chuck!’ a beery American accent echoed in from the corridor behind him. ‘C’mon, man. We’re all in the map room. Curtain’s about to go up. You wouldn’t want to miss it now.’ Which, of course, he would not. He reached back and picked up the piece of paper and holding it in one hand, he blew on the lit end of his Lucky Strike, courtesy of the local PX. And then he touched the cigarette to the paper’s corner. He watched the flame take hold and creep across, consuming all the words, one by one, until it reached the word Scourge, and then he crushed it in the ashtray and strode purposefully to the door. As he closed it behind him, his face met the little name plaque nailed there: ‘Capt C. Bonalleck RN… Senior Submarine Liaison Officer, Western Task Force’.

  *

  At 0030 hours, Grieve called from the wireless cubby, ‘That’s the radio nets up, sir!’

  Until then, radio silence had enfolded the entire task force – the one last exercise in trying to cloak the approach from a prying enemy. Now all the wireless sets in all the ships were turned on, the call signs announced their presence and the airwaves filled with morse and chatter.

  At shortly before 0040 hours, Farrar called down to say that he’d sighted Tobermory’s beacon lights inshore. Harry sent Scourge to diving stations, then announced to nobody in particular, ‘Rightly ho! Let’s switch on the Blackpool illuminations.’

  The temporary trips in the control room were closed, and Scourge’s beacon lights on the aft end of the conning tower lit up. Farrar confirmed it down the voicepipe.

  Harry walked back to the wireless cubby and asked Grieve what was happening.

  ‘Biscayne and Monrovia have both challenged, and I have confirmed we are on station, sir. Even exchanged a quick “good morning” with Warbler, sir. Do you want to say hello?’

  Harry frowned, ‘Warbler…? Ah. Tobermory’s call sign. And we’re Atlas. Um. No, it’s all right, Grieve. Don’t want to jam things up with too much chat.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Will let you know immediately if there’s any traffic for us,’ said Grieve, smiling and looking the very epitome of relaxed, with one earphone off his ear and the other on, signal pads and pencils all laid out before him and the big set and all its dials glowing and humming away on the desk. It was as if he was sitting down to challenge some mechanical quiz machine or some wall-mounted bagatelle in a fairground booth. Not a hint of all those ships and men out there, beyond, in the dark, getting ready to fling themselves at the enemy. Harry smiled back, wondering why the chap wasn’t a gibbering wreck, indeed, why he wasn’t one. He decided it was time he went upstairs, but not before he’d got Windass to fill him two flasks of that coffee, that brew from heaven they’d bagged in Algiers.

  Clutching the flasks in one hand, he climbed up onto the bridge into the warm, humid air and smelled the land in one huge fecund draught. He presented Farrar with his coffee and gazed around him, soaking up the clearing sky. The night was full of the distant thrum of aero engines. With Scourge’s diesels just burbling along, pushing her at a stately two knots while topping up the charge, it was easy to hear them. Harry put his face to the wind. It was no more than force three now, which would make it less of a torment for the troops sardined into their landing craft, rolling across a beam sea for the beaches. A long way down the coast, a couple of searchlights onshore were dancing around like wands in the hands of someone having a slow-motion fit.

  ‘The moon’s just set, sir,’ said Farrar. ‘You missed it. It was quite a sight. Just one continuous overlapping silhouette of ships, right along the horizon.’

  ‘A bloke in a pub told me there are apparently seventeen hundred of them in the western group alone if you count all the landing craft,’ said Harry, cupping the mug he’d decanted his coffee into, and sipping.

  Farrar couldn’t help a little smile, ‘Well, of course the bloke in the pub’s bound to know. But not quite accurate, sir, if you ask me. Seventeen hundred and one to be right on the button, if you’re counting us, which the bloke in the bloke in the pub wouldn’t be, since even we only heard yesterday, and you wouldn’t have told him, on account of security. Loose lips sink ships.’

  Harry smiled back. Christ, was Number One developing a sense of humour?

  Even though the beacon lights on the back of the conning tower were closely shaded, you could still see the beam of them dancing on the rolling waves. But with the wind down now, the white tops had all but disappeared; there were no more foaming crests to reflect the light and cause it to glitter. Scourge was bow-on to the shore now, and it was a sudden ripple of flashes from the starboard beam that swung everyone round to look. A wave of rolling thunder followed. The naval gunnery had opened up.

  They watched the shells go home in the distance, landing in the huge, featureless shadowy mass that was the land – clumps of blossoming smoke and debris, clustering round their targets in w
hat looked like great vertical spills of black paint on grey-black canvas, and the cracks and booms that followed, and the sudden pressure in the air from the concussions, even at this range. The sight was mesmerising and unreal in the dark, without any contour or the shape of a hill or town or village hiding in the blackness to give it any context. Harry watched for what seemed an age. When he dragged his eyes away and looked further to the east, he could see a band of light now, creeping over the inky line of the horizon. Sunrise was on its way.

  Harry turned and dropped down the conning tower hatch. When he hit the deck plates, Harding was at the chart table, minding the plot, making sure Scourge kept inside her patrol box. The control room was still in red light, and the smile Harding gave Harry looked like a maniac’s rictus.

  ‘Sounds like they’re getting busy upstairs, sir,’ Harding said. But Harry, as if unable to process what he’d just been witnessing, found himself speechless. He just blew out air and shook his head before taking the handful of steps through the aft door and into the wireless cubby.

  A telegraphist, whose name Harry couldn’t quite remember, was sitting hunched in the far corner with a headset scrunched over his ears and a pencil in hand. Sitting next to him was Grieve, his headset still had one ear covered and the other clear. He had one hand on the channel knob of the big set, and the other gripped a pencil. He’d obviously been covering a big pad with notes.

  ‘What’s happening Grieve? How are we doing?’ said Harry, slipping onto a seat beside him.

  Grieve turned, a sort of half incredulous grin on his face which Harry found suddenly very funny and at the same time disconcerting, seeing as he’d never seen a grin of any sort on Grieve’s face before.

  ‘Nothing for us, sir,’ said Grieve. ‘Not since the initial challenge from Monrovia and we confirmed, “on station”. Morton’s monitoring the morse frequencies, sir,’ he said, nodding to the tensed-up figure at his shoulder, ‘and I’ve been following all the voice traffic, sir. Keeping a note for the log,’ jabbing at the pad. ‘It’s been… well… hectic… incredible, sir. It’s been hard to credit that I’m actually here and listening to it all as it happens. Look,’ and he pushed the pad across the desk so as Harry could read.