See You at the Bar Read online

  Harry leaned over the bridge front and yelled down to Hooper, still busy, back walking his shells across the front of the barracks now, ‘Hooper! What in God’s name did you fire at that building!?’

  Hooper paused, ‘’T’wasn’t us, sir! We’re just firing HE. I think we must’ve set off secondary blasts… white phosphorous, it looks like.’

  Chemical bombs, shells of the stuff, very efficient in setting buildings on fire and generating smokescreens. People caught in their chemical fire just melted.

  ‘Aw …!’ was the best Harry could think of to say. He could already see the heat from the blaze had driven the climbing figures back down the cliff to the beach.

  The plan had been for Hibbert to lead Major Drobnjac’s men up into the back of the buildings – a small stables-cum-barracks – while the Jerry engineers were busy defending the front and for the small team to fire the rest of the buildings behind the defenders, pinning them between the flames and the main assault force, and for Hooper to then continue dropping shells on them until they either surrendered or died. Yes, a fire had started, but it was too far back. There were places left for the Jerries to run. Not that Harry or anyone else from Scourge was ever going to see them through all the bloody smoke. Not even McCready with his owl’s night vision, all this time observing Hooper’s fall of shot for him.

  Harry suddenly felt powerless in the action. What in hell were they to do? Then, in the glow of the flames, Harry could see a line of figures, running out across the top of the cliff, crouching low to stay in the dead ground so no partisan advancing from inland would see them. Behind him, Biddle shouted. He’d seen them too.

  Harry raised his hand, ‘They’re running away, Biddle. It’s over.’ Even so, below, on the casing, there was sharp report as Hooper fired off another round into the now roiling mass of smoke. From across the water, the crackle of small arms fire was slackening. Then one, then another and another two of the running Germans paused and seemed to perform some inexplicable form of one-armed callisthenics. Harry was still frowning at the antics when below the Jerries, on the tiny scrap of beach, a series of silent flashes ripped through the shadows.

  Hand grenades. The Jerries had been lobbing hand grenades down on the landing party.

  ‘Biddle…!’ Harry yelled, but any further words were lost in Biddle opening up behind him, and the long, sustained burst of .303, the sheer, persistent length of it channelling all the anger and rage at what had just happened.

  Harry gazed slack-jawed at the mess on the beach. The Jerries had been running away, so he’d checked Biddle’s fire. If he hadn’t, if he’d just let Biddle continue his execution… there’d have been no grenades. They’d been running away, and Harry had been content to let them. And look what happened.

  But they were running away, he kept repeating it to himself, in his head. Running away.

  Another Bang! From down on the casing.

  And another.

  Then a flare went up from behind the barracks. He watched it soar. Major Drobnjac. Harry stepped to the bridge front and yelled too loudly, ‘Hooper! Check! Check! Check!’

  *

  They had to put Reynolds ashore, so with Jerry all mopped up, Harry decided they might as well do it from alongside the stone jetty in the town.

  It was a hot, cloudless day. The town was arrayed around the harbour in ancient torpor, with its folk going about their business as if no war had ever existed. Scourge glided in like a visitor from another planet, and although most folk turned to stare, Harry, on the bridge didn’t feel they were exactly causing a stir.

  Major Drobnjac and a flunky, another woman soldier with her hair bundled up into an oversized forage cap, were waiting on the jetty, along with a couple of partisans to throw Scourge some lines. The boat was secured and Reynolds went ashore where he briefly conversed with the major while his radio set and all his attendant gear was humped off by a couple of sailors who shook the staff sergeant’s hand warmly before they stepped back aboard over the plank gangway.

  Grieve, Scourge’s leading telegraphist, had got off with Reynolds too. Now he followed him up into the town with all the radio gear on a handcart, to help him set it up. Harry had told him to be quick; he didn’t want to have to send a bloody search party when it came time to go. And if the balloon went up, he was to run like hell. Or they’d have to leave him. And he was ‘too bloody important to leave’ – that’s what Harry had told him.

  Harry imagined the friendships that must have been cemented in the for’ard ends between the affable pongo and the Scourge, and between them and Cpl Hibbert too. Hibbert now dead. Because the captain had told Scourge’s machine gunners the Jerries were running away.

  Major Drobnjac had followed the sailors over the plank, clutching a knapsack with another bottle of slivovitz in it, and toasts were made round the wardroom table and the crew of Scourge thanked. Warmly. Farrar didn’t join them, busying himself instead as watch officer and overseeing the loading of fresh fruit and vegetables and local bread. And saving himself the bother of hiding all his disapproval.

  It was Harding, with a few slivovitzes in him, who was curious as to why the big boss back on the mainland, Marshal Tito, had made it one of his strategic priorities to grab an island. ‘Over there, when Jerry gets frisky, you lot can just disappear up some mountain range,’ he’d observed to the stony-faced Drobnjac. ‘Out here, there’s nowhere to run. They’ve got you pinned.’

  Drobnjac had considered him, as if deciding whether this half-drunk English parvenu merited an answer. It was the look of a man with a lot more moral bottom than you’d have thought someone like Drobnjac might possess.

  Which was why, in turn, Harry had begun considering him. It turned out to be an interesting exercise.

  The British had only lost Hibbert in the previous night’s action. Hibbert, the jolly little commando, who probably knew only too well how to do his fair share of killing, but one of theirs just the same. Hibbert, who Harry’d killed because he’d told Biddle that Jerry was, ‘just running away’, Hibbert, and the handful of partisans whom the grenades had taken too. But Drobnjac had lost far more men than just the ones Harry had helped kill, and been just as guilty. His ordering his men against a veritable battery of Jerry MG 42s before Hooper’s shells could drop in amongst them had been far more deadly.

  Drobnjac, Harry had learned from Sgt Reynolds, had been a history teacher in Ljubljana, middle school, fourteen to fifteen-year-olds. Not a natural anteroom to greatness. So Harry found himself wondering how Drobnjac was bearing up under the responsibility? What informed his decisions? If a twenty-something schoolteacher from a hick town in the Balkans could do what he did and live with himself, what were the lessons he could teach Harry?

  But sitting there, with the slivovitz warming his insides, suddenly all Harry could see was the death of Hibbert. All he knew was that at the time, he’d felt he was doing a good thing, sparing those Jerries. He hadn’t had the remotest inkling of what other consequences might follow from his cavalier gesture. They were, after all, just running away. How wrong he’d been. What a bloody awful thing this war business really was – the whole bloody pointlessness of it all. He wanted nothing more right then than to tell his father he understood now. Was this really the best human beings could do? Poor Hibbert, poor bloody bastard.

  But Drobnjac was saying something about Vis and why Tito wanted it. About how Jerry was using small coastal craft more and more to transport vital military stores to avoid all the partisan sabotage on the mainland.

  ‘Did you hear that, sir?’ Harding had asked him.

  Harry snapped out of his thoughts: ‘Is there much traffic…? What size of vessels do they use?’

  ‘Caiques, schooners, anything that can carry a cargo,’ Drobnjac said.

  All too small to warrant a torpedo, but… In other words, perfect gun fodder.

  Harry considered Harding again, sitting across the wardroom table savouring his slivovitz.

  ‘So the crew, Mr H
arding,’ said Harry. ‘You were saying last night, they all like being on bang duty?’

  ‘Like it…?’ Harding had said.

  Six

  Well, that wasn’t supposed to have happened. Harry shoved his watch cap to the back of his head and scratched. The converted caique Scourge had just surfaced to attack was puttering away down the channel on her own now, her entire crew in a daisy chain in the water behind her, all trying like hell to swim for an island foreshore about three hundred yards beyond. In the slight chop, it was obvious some of them were getting into difficulties, and that was before you took into account that the current that was sweeping them all off at angle, which from Scourge’s bridge, definitely looked like it was going to make them miss the land altogether.

  Harry leaned to the voicepipe, ‘Get the cox’n up here!’

  It was a beautiful morning, with the sweaty heat not yet on full blast, the air clear as gin and the sound of seagulls still loud above the croaky chuff-chuff-chuff of whatever it was that was passing for the caique’s engine as its wake traced its wobbly course away from them. Beneath him, Harry could feel and hear the burble of Scourge’s own diesels, but he hadn’t even had the chance to order them clutched in yet, never mind deciding what course he was intending the boat to navigate.

  Only moments before, he had been watching through the periscope as the little tub turned out of the channel between Korčula and these two islands ahead. Then he’d ordered the periscope down, the boat to surface and Hooper and his gang to gun action, and then he had immediately gone up the conning tower himself as it broke clear. But by the time he’d got to the bridge and stood upright, the target’s crew were already leaping over the side and floundering and splashing for the shore. Harry counted five of them. They hadn’t even waited to lower a lifeboat – assuming they had one.

  Suddenly, Ainsworth, the cox’n, was standing po-faced at his side.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, trying not to smirk as he took in the tableau.

  ‘Cox’n,’ said Harry. ‘Get a team onto the casing. Someone who can swim and a couple of bowlines. And issue a couple of Tommy guns just in case. We’d better pull those two older clowns out the water before they drown themselves. And on your way through the boat, grab as many demolition charges as you think you’ll need. Four should do it.’

  Ainsworth disappeared back down the hatch with his usual, ‘Aye, aye, sir!’ and Harry leaned over and rang the telegraph for dead slow ahead together, and ordered, green ten on the helm. The lookouts were all up on the bridge now, and Harry had to turn and give both of them the hard stare to stop them gawping at the pantomime in the water and attend to their duty – looking out for Jerries. He then called down to Hooper, ‘Secure! I don’t think I’ll be needing your services for the time being, Hooper, but hang about down there, just in case.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  Harry conned Scourge sedately towards the closest of their shipwrecked mariners, a balding, stocky figure, thrashing about and in increasing difficulty. As they came up on him, a skinny rating slipped off Scourge’s extended hydroplanes and wrestled a bowline over his shoulders so he could be hauled aboard. Within minutes, the second one, even older but with a mop of matted grey hair, was aboard too. Off the port quarter, Harry could see the remaining three floundering, treading water and looking back to see the fate of their shipmates. Harry waved his cap at them then he ordered Scourge to put on a bit more speed so as to catch up with the runaway caique.

  There was quite a party on the fore-casing now. A clutch of ratings in their skivvies and singlets, caps on all a-jaunty, standing around, grinning and gaping in the sunshine, to which they were most definitely unaccustomed. It was already starting to get pretty warm now, and they stood about admiring the rugged, scrubby coast and each other’s submariners’ tans which really did stand out comically pale compared to the two middle-aged survivors’ swarthiness. And the two with their Tommy guns, striking poses like they were seagoing Al Capones. Ainsworth was feeding tots to the two old fellows, squatting on the deck now and being offered a blanket each by another thoughtful Jack.

  Harry was smiling to himself, his mind going back to the wardroom after the Yugoslav partisan had left them.

  He’d talked to Farrar and Harding about their gun and the use they might make of it up and down this coast, now that they were free to go back on patrol. Farrar had been in favour, but it had been Harding who had rhapsodised about the crew and the morale-raising power of gun actions.

  ‘Lots of loud bangs!’ Harding had said. ‘Gets them every time. Nothing Jack loves more than blasting away with a big gun. Everybody’ll want in on it… there’ll be a queue just to pass up the shells. And there will be vice involved. Graft, sir. Venality. Hooper’s “sippers owing” tally will grow long enough to keep him drunk until Trafalgar Day.’

  Sippers. It was the offer to sip from another man’s tot, his daily rum ration, his inalienable right since Jonah beat the whale. And as only a British sailor could, in his infinite capacity for larceny and corruption, he had turned that custom into a tally to barter, pledge and bet with, until it had become an alternative currency.

  The notion of a lower deck bidding war going on beneath his feet made Harry smile even more, the notion of all that excitement among the crew and not bored despondency.

  Suddenly, Farrar was at his side. ‘I’ve assembled a boarding party, sir. The TGM and five ratings. Who would you like to lead it?’

  McCready led the party. Harry watched them scramble aboard the caique, lugging a gas mask bag crammed with the demolition charges and fuses. Two of their number had Tommy guns slung over their backs. Scourge had acquired the weapons back in Algiers, thanks to Harding. When they were kitting out for their jaunt to bump off Kesselring, he’d spotted them in the special forces’ armoury and nicked a nice round half dozen, plus extra clips. ‘Better to have to ask forgiveness, than permission,’ was his excuse when Harry had asked him if he thought he was going to get away with that. Number One had taken a very dim view.

  The party spread out over the deck, McCready going directly to the wheelhouse and shutting down the caique’s engine. Others went below. The caique was a remarkably smart little boat – wooden, about fifty feet long with a commodious beam, one main mast with a sturdy cargo-handling derrick and small wheelhouse aft. Her clinker hull was all fresh paintwork, white with a deep gunn’l, patterned with painted waves of blue and red. The Tommy guns weren’t needed; no one was left aboard. But McCready appeared, carrying three huge salamis and a rope bag with clinking bottles in it and then the TGM, Gooch, emerged from the hold and came to the side to call out to Harry.

  ‘Sir! The cargo looks like it’s all lube stuff. Engine oil mostly. In what looks like gallon tins…’

  Which explained why her crew had wasted no time in getting off her when a submarine started surfacing alongside.

  ‘…I’ve set the charges so she’s ready to blow when you give the order, sir.’

  And a right royal bang it was too. The caique had momentarily performed a lateral wriggle on the surface, like she was some discombobulated duck, then part of the hull on the waterline and another part of her deck had erupted in a welter of timber before the quick ripple of cracks had reached them over the water to where Harry had withdrawn Scourge. Harry had been about to comment on what had happened to all that lube oil when there was the most almighty whummmph! And the whole lot went up in a roiling mushroom of flame and greasy black smoke that felt like it was singeing your eyebrows despite the distance.

  Harry had let the crew on deck remain for the show. When he looked down from the bridge, they were grinning, transfixed, idiot-like. Glee was the word that sprang to his mind. He should’ve known himself and not needed Harding to tell him; there was nothing like a bit of good old wanton destruction to cheer a crew up. Any more like this and they’ll be refusing to leave patrol, he thought. Well, let’s see what we can do, said an equally grinning Harry to himself.

  When he looked b
ack aft, the little dory they’d liberated from atop the caique’s hold cover was being rowed back alongside Scourge’s stern. He watched the two ratings clamber onto the casing and cast it adrift. He’d sent them, with their two survivors, to pick up the rest of the caique’s crew from the water and deliver them ashore. He’d learned nothing from the two old crewmen they’d had aboard – no language in common, and anyway, both of them had looked like they thought they were going to be murdered at any moment, even after Ainsworth had plied them with rum. Civilians. He wondered what Jerry would’ve done with them.

  The smoke from the now disintegrated caique was bound to attract someone, so Scourge dived and headed into the channel north of the island of Mljet to look for more coastal traffic. Harry thought they would take their time throughout the rest of the day, hanging around between the other islands in the archipelago, Sipan and Lopud, to see if anything ventured in or out of the big port on this coast at Gruz, just behind Dubrovnik.

  The chop on the water continued, so Harry held her at periscope depth, not worrying whether any aircraft that might turn up could see them prowling just below the surface. They hadn’t long to wait. Harry caught the smoke coming down the channel behind them on his second all-round look. He ordered Scourge into a long loop out to sea to come back onto an attacking course and sent the boat to diving stations. The minutes passed. Biddle on the Asdic described the target as, ‘A bit of a wheezy old bugger.’

  Having been on the surface, breathing the warm Adriatic air, Harry, as he waited to do his next look couldn’t help but notice how whiffy the control room team were getting these days; it also occurred to him how the warmer season had brought about a change in the boat’s working dress code. Gone were the sweaters, in were working shirts and singlets and skivvies. With all that pasty flesh exposed, jammed up against each other in the sweatbox that was a submarine, you really couldn’t avoid each man’s reek. He breathed out, directing the air up his nostrils and muttered, ‘War is hell,’ to himself.