See You at the Bar Page 7

  ‘Sir,’ said Reynolds, a bit puffed from the climb in all his kit. ‘Corporal Hibbert’s been sent back with a message from the local partisan commander. For you, sir. The captain.’

  The two lookouts kept their eyes on the darkness around them.

  Harry frowned, ‘Well, Sergeant, let me see it.’

  ‘It’s verbal, sir. Nothing in writing in case Jerry…’

  ‘Yes, yes. I understand. So what is it, Sergeant? We’re wasting time.’

  ‘The partisan commander, he wants to meet up, sir. He wants you to help him kick Jerry off the island.’

  ‘With a submarine? And anyway, my intel says the island’s occupying force is Eyetie…’ Harry stopped abruptly. What in God’s name was he doing discussing his boat’s operation with a bloody pongo sergeant, nice enough chap though he was. And why would a bloody partisan want to speak to him? About what?

  Harry looked over Reynolds’ shoulder, out to sea. He wanted to just get back there again. But gazing into the opaque darkness, he saw in his mind’s eye the petrol dump fireball and the disintegrating Ju 52s on that desert airstrip he’d bombarded, and he knew what the partisan wanted.

  ‘It’s your gun he’s after, sir,’ said Reynolds. Obviously, it was the gun. ‘He wants you to come ashore so as he can explain his plan,’ he added, at last betraying some of the uneasiness he too obviously felt at this strange conversation.

  ‘He wants me to leave my boat… in the face of the enemy?’ Harry let the question hang, more from astonishment than for any dramatic effect. He then went to the hatch and called down, ‘Number One, come up and take the bridge, please!’ Then he went the bridge front and leaned over, ‘On the casing there, stand down and stand by! Mr Harding and Corporal Hibbert. In the wardroom now, please!’ And turning to Reynolds, he said, ‘After you, Sergeant. Down you go.’

  It was one of the things that radio operator Reynolds – never, ever a professional soldier – had found himself liking about this young Gilmour chap; the way he always used to say things like ‘please’ and ‘after you’ to everyone. Even though the way he spoke the words, no one was ever in any doubt what he actually meant. But at least he said it, which was nice for an officer and worth remarking on, and likely vital to his mission too. Because Willy Reynolds, a technical man rather than a soldier – just signed up for the duration – had never really liked officers and knew he never would, but here was one you might actually get some sense out of. Which was going to be important because Sgt Reynolds’s briefings had all stressed how touchy these Yugoslav partisans could be, and that meant he needed someone sensible on the sub to ensure everything ran smoothly.

  *

  And now, here they were, the water still sluicing from Scourge’s conning tower and off her casing; just surfaced into the cocooning warmth of the sudden Adriatic night. Harry had let the lookouts go up first, never really trusting his dodgy night vision, but there was a surprising amount of light still left in the ragged end of this dying moon, and it was already quite high in the sky.

  Not surprisingly, Hooper and his little mob of gunners, indistinct in their dark blue work shirts and overalls, were already fussing round the three-inch gun, a round already up the spout. And there ahead, fine on the bow, was the little elbow of a promontory, the pale strata of the cliff glowing dully and the little clutch of buildings atop, their tiled roofs – which Harry knew to be red terracotta from his afternoon look through the periscope – now standing out as black outlines.

  And Scourge, hanging there in the limpid night, barely more than five hundred yards off, hove-to with over thirty metres of depth beneath her keel, according to the surprisingly detailed local chart Major Drobnjac’s industriously serious staff had presented to them. Her silhouette masked from the shore by the shadow of the rising cliff face astern of them that formed the opposite wall of the inlet.

  Now all they had to do was wait.

  ‘Thirty of them. That’s what we know. We counted them in the days when they liked to stroll our little streets because they thought they owned them,’ was what Major Drobnjac had told him when they’d finally met. German army engineers, on the island to refit the harbour so as it could take proper supply ships – ships capable of landing field artillery and anti-aircraft batteries for German defences, not Italian.

  That had been two days ago, after a tedious exchange of polite messages, carried out courtesy of Hibbert in his folbot, paddling back and forward. Major Drobnjac had agreed to step aboard Scourge if Harry didn’t mind bringing Scourge to meet him. And to that end, the major had a plan, which Hibbert had eventually delivered after a final paddle through the night.

  A local fishing caique would sail out that day and wait for Scourge to surface. Harry had been very dubious about surfacing in broad daylight. But Reynolds, wearing his most serious expression, had assured him, and Harry had learned by then that Sgt Reynolds was a most serious man. ‘Jerry has precious few aircraft of any type in this theatre, sir,’ Reynolds said. ‘And the ones he has are all busy chasing Marshal Tito’s main force over on the mainland.’

  So Harry had surfaced, and a nondescript little woman in a uniform that was too big for her had leapt aboard. The caique had then stood off, its crew and the Scourge’s eyeing each other with a sort of detached curiosity – sort of, ‘So this is what communist guerrillas look like,’ and ‘Well, well, so these are the capitalist lackeys,’ but still waving, friendly, since both sides knew fine well it was Jerry they both were fighting.

  Watching the transfer, Harry’s heart had been in his mouth, fearing that at any moment, the bloody wallowing tub, which must’ve have weighed in at over thirty tons, might crash into his starboard saddle tanks and do more than just dent them. And after listening to the little woman-in-a-uniform, he hadn’t become any calmer. A local chart had been produced to demonstrate the simplicity of the plan. The man in charge on the island, Major Drobnjac wished the man in charge at sea, Captain Gilmour, to con Scourge into the main harbour and secure to one of the stone jetties in broad daylight so that said Major Drobnjac could step aboard over a gangway. Not even the august Royal Navy could expect the regional commander of the Unitary National Liberation Front to absent himself so far from his troops, or indeed risk his neck in a folbot, upon an element with which he was not familiar.

  So Harry had conned Scourge into the little harbour, tied up alongside the stone jetty – festooned with raffia fenders, which Harry, jealous of his ballast tanks’ integrity, had thought a nice gesture – and the major had stepped aboard over his gangplank and then they’d all sat round the wardroom table for their discussion. Even with all the hatches open, the air had been a fug of cigarette smoke.

  Major Rado Drobnjac, a tall, spare young man in the same roughly tailored mud-brown uniform every one of his partisan comrades wore – except his had his rank flashes, albeit very subdued ones – had thinning mousey hair and sported wire-rimmed spectacles for reading. He spoke a rather archaic, Victorian English very well, and the accent wasn’t too off-putting. It certainly didn’t mask his seriousness. Not a jokey fellow, thought Harry. But then how frivolous would Harry have felt if foreign troops were disporting themselves in loud, arrogant fashion around the streets and by-ways of Argyll? Harry tried that thought on and didn’t like it. After that, the attitudes displayed by all the partisans he’d then encountered from Vis became completely understandable.

  Major Drobnjac had set out a map and explained how his men had secured all of Vis and had the surviving Italians – which was nearly all of them – secured in two compounds in the main town. That left the thirty Germans holding out.

  ‘Here,’ he had jabbed his finger at the promontory on the map. ‘This is an old fort. They have water from a well in their courtyard and sufficient food for a long siege,’ the major had explained. ‘The buildings used to house a mounted police detachment, so they make quite a formidable fortress. The road up to it is over rising, scrubby land. A most effective killing field.’ A pause, as he point
ed out the route any assaulting force would have to take. ‘As well as personal weapons, they have a total of eight new MG 42 machine guns.’ He swept the palm of his hand over the blank expanse on the map that was the approach. ‘That means a total rate of fire of nine thousand six hundred rounds per minute.’ Another pause. ‘Not survivable.’

  Harry didn’t doubt him for a moment.

  ‘If they can hold out long enough, on the mainland, soon the Germans will be able to pull together sufficient shipping and E-boats to bring support in. We know they are already assembling shipping,’ the major had said. ‘When they can free up the necessary aircraft, they will come. The Germans will use mostly Croatian Home Guard. Collaborators, with Nazi hearts. Murderers of children. Using the Luftwaffe for air cover, they will disembark their heavy guns at the stone jetty below the cliff and over the beaches here for their infantry. We have no heavy guns, and we do not have enough men to cover all the landing grounds. We will lose, and the Croats will be let loose to kill us all. But if we can wipe out this foothold… their coming becomes much more problematic for them.’ A phlegmatic shrug. ‘Maybe too problematic.’

  Major Drobnjac had then shut up and confined himself to considering his cigarette between puffing on it. He let it all sink in for Harry – the plan, its necessity, the consequences of failure. He hadn’t bothered to ask for help. No point. It was obvious what was needed, and Harry had it, on Scourge’s fore-casing.

  Harry thought maybe he really should deliberate before he answered. There could be implications, political and diplomatic, for a Royal Navy warship placing itself under the operational control of Tito’s partisans. But how was he to know, here, up at the fag-end of the Adriatic, with not a friendly Allied face for over six hundred miles?

  Serious deliberation was probably called for. Instead, he said, ‘When do we go?’

  Major Drobnjac had fixed him with his pale, pellucid eyes for a moment before bending down to his knapsack. He placed a large clear bottle of what turned out to be the most throat-scarring slivovitz on the table with one hand, followed by a clutch of chipped tumblers with the other – ones for Harding and Farrar as well.

  Harding and Farrar had sat silent through the whole concise, totally unembroidered briefing, mesmerised enough for even Farrar to forget his customary fastidiousness when forced to share his mess space with disreputable-looking foreigners.

  When Harry had looked up from the major’s gift, he saw an unexpected – stunning, even – boyish grin on the man’s face, one that had brought him back with a thump as to how young the major really was.*

  A whooshing sound echoing back from the cliffs startled Harry back to the here and now; a rocket had gone up from behind the German position. He watched its rapid arc until it was almost overhead the little cluster of buildings, and then a flash dazzled him, and when his eyes refocused, a searing chemical blob was guttering and dangling below the occasional reflection of a tiny parachute as a flare pirouetted slowly to earth.

  The light gently bathed the shallow bay, turning it into some magical snow scene, and the first tiny chasing sparkles of light began rising up from inland, startling at first and a little magical, until the sound finally caught up with the image; the chatter of a machine gun. Tracer. It was the signal; the battle had started.

  Harry was aware of a shuffling below him, down the conning tower hatch. When he peered over, he could see faces staring up, attracted by the sudden reflected glow from the flare – Scourge’s machine gunners, waiting in the conning tower space.

  Harry gave them a smile, not sure whether they could see it or not in the gloom, ‘Stand easy down there, there’s nothing to pop off at yet.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ a disembodied voice came up.

  When Scourge had limped back to Gibraltar to get her bent nose straightened after her inadvertent encounter with the seabed off Cagliari, they’d welded a gun mount to the aft end of the conning tower and presented the boat with twin Browning .303 all-purpose machine guns. ‘For air defence,’ Harry had been told, although whoever imagined he’d allow his boat to be on the surface long enough to fire that pop-gun if there were aircraft about was never mentioned. Anyway, there it was; they might need it depending on how this fight unfolded, but being able to get the boat down fast if needed was more important. And having to un-ship and stow below two 30lb lumps of gun in a hurry would only get in the way. So, there the two gunners could wait, pending events.

  Meanwhile, the rate of fire from onshore was gathering pace. From this angle, the slope of the killing ground in front of the buildings was now being cross-hatched with tracer, and the noise was like Chinese New Year. ‘Stand-by,’ Harry called down to the casing. He saw Hooper’s pale face turn up to him.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he said.

  Not yet. They were waiting for all eight of the Jerry MG 42s to be turned on the slope, for Jerry’s attention to be fully concentrated down the promontory, then the other flare would go up and Scourge would commence firing.

  As ‘guns as well as torps’, McCready was on the bridge beside Harry, up there to observe Hooper’s fall of shot. He had his night glasses stuck to his face when he whispered back at Harry, ‘There they are, sir. I can definitely see a folbot and a couple of those coracle thingies.’

  He was looking at a platoon of Major Drobnjac’s finest cut-throats, embarked on local boats of their own, and now led led by Cpl Hibbert, which Harry had thought a shocking risk. They were paddling furiously from the shadows out across open water, heading for a jumble of large boulders that erupted from a sheerer, smoother cliff that was overhung by the back wall of one of the Jerry buildings. This rubble rose twelve to fifteen feet from a tiny shingle beach and was in full view of Scourge. According to the major’s plan, it would be Hibbert’s job to lead a party of a dozen or so partisan sappers, sneaking in under the cover of the all firing, onto that beach, up the slope and through the breach in the wall that Hooper was going to open up for them with his three-incher. But only after he’d started demolishing the front walls of the whole position. Major Drobnjac had been very specific about that; he didn’t want the first shells landing at the back of the Jerry position, thus alerting the enemy to someone trying to come in the back door as well.

  Between the flare, still tumbling, and the sliver of moonlight, Harry could actually see the little dark smudges on the dark water, stretching out for the beach, if you could call a tiny strip of shingle no larger than his parents’ sitting room a beach. He also saw in that moment, the skylight on the building above them rise and a bobbing head, then two, poke out.

  Harry turned instantly and shouted down the hatch, ‘Biddle! Cross! Up here now! Ship the machine guns!’

  The gunners were his main Asdic operator and favourite second helmsman. Up they came, guns and ammo boxes propelled by others unseen up onto the bridge behind them.

  The plan was buggered now, Harry knew that instantly, the moment he saw the Jerries stick their heads out the skylight. And all the timings were just as out the window. No question anymore; Jerry knew the partisans were trying to come in the back door. Waiting for the second flare was a luxury they no longer had. He could hear Biddle and Cross mounting and loading the Brownings behind him as he leaned over the bridge front.

  ‘Hooper!’ he barked in his most commanding tone. ‘Target… the front walls of the enemy position! Commence firing!’

  The last syllable had barely left his mouth than the first round was on the way and then the second flying before the first had hit.

  Behind him, Biddle called, ‘Three-oh-three mount ready, sir!’

  Harry spun round, his right arm outstretched back towards the enemy buildings, ‘Biddle! Onshore, off the starboard bow… red ten… the building above the rockfall. Do you see it?’

  ‘Yessir!’ said Biddle, traversing the Brownings now, looking down the sights.

  ‘The skylight in the roof?’

  ‘…yessir!’

  ‘Smother it in fire, now. And keep smothe
ring it!’

  Before Biddle could respond, Harry, looking out towards the beach, saw a tiny line of white spouts ripple along the waterline. Then another line of spouts, then a flash. Two, three flashes, then the rip of automatic weapons followed by the crack! crack! of grenades drifted over to them from the beach. The Germans firing down on the landing party, still in their flimsy boats, battling towards the shingle and the safety of the lower boulders.

  Burrp! Burrp! Then, Burrrrrrp! Burrrrrrrrp!

  Right in Harry’s ear.

  The smell of cartridge smoke as the .303 rounds arced out. But no tracer, no dancing lights to show the bullets on the way. Harry was going to ask about the tracer but then decided not to interrupt a man at his work. Yet, when he put his own binoculars to his eyes and looked, chunks of the building’s roof, and then the skylight frame itself, began disappearing in a welter of splinters.

  You could see now, in plain view, the small landing force scrabbling ashore. No one was shooting at them anymore, courtesy of Biddle’s steady fire on the skylight. It was time to blow the back of the building out. Harry gave the order, and Hooper obliged with two rounds of high explosives.

  Harry watched as a couple of huge lumps of masonry leapt, tumbling into the air, higher and higher than it seemed they should; there was a flash below his line of sight, subliminal but there, and then when Harry’s eyes began to follow the masonry’s trajectory down, they vanished into a powdery billowing smoke rising up to meet each lump. He couldn’t work out what had happened. The increasing racket of machine guns and mortar thumps made concentrating difficult.

  Figures from the landing party could be seen against the white of the cliffs and the silhouette contours of the boulders beneath the building, spidering upwards. But what Harry on Scourge could see, and they couldn’t, was the lick of flames now curling from inside the remains of the building. By the time the first climbers were at the base of the shell-shattered wall, they were facing a continuous sheet of fire.