Douglas Reeman - In Danger's Hour

But Rob Roy and the remainder of her flotilla played no part in the Italian invasion. With her consorts she returned to the nerve-racking job of sweeping the channels and approaches around Malta, to make it safe even for the heaviest warships and transports once more.

Several minesweeping trawlers had been lost, but Rob Roy’s depleted flotilla seemed to recover the luck which had failed them when Scythe and Dunlin had gone down.

The orders to return to England had come unexpectedly. Even Bliss, who had dashed on ahead of the convoy in Bedworth , had seemed at a loss. The Mediterranean war was by no means over, and even now there were reports of the Allied armies being bogged down both by bad weather and reinforced German divisions, with little hope of an early victory. The flotilla had paused at Gibraltar to effect brief repairs before joining a small homebound convoy in the role of additional escorts, and Ransome had walked around his ship, sharing her tiredness as well as her pride in the part they had all played.

He glanced at Hargrave, his features deeply tanned against the dull backdrop of mist and drizzle, and the white scarf which showed above his oilskin. When he spoke to Morgan or one of the watchkeepers, his breath streamed from his mouth like smoke. The change in their circumstances was all around them, to the senses as well as the mind.

The convoy had dispersed northwards towards the Irish Sea. Just to think of it made Ransome’s heart miss a beat. All those miles; the air-attacks, the frantic alarm bells in the night, the roar of mine and bomb, and now they were here at the gateway of the English Channel. Some five miles abeam was the ageless Wolf Rock lighthouse, which meant that the mainland of Cornwall was only about twelve miles distant.

He could feel it in the heavy rise and fall of the hull, the drifting spray and drizzle across the glass screen. Cold, chilling right to the marrow. The English Channel in winter.

He thought of Tony, remembering yet again that terrible moment of uncertainty and fear when he had turned down the blanket and had clutched his body against his own. Tony would be safely in hospital now. It had been a close thing; the wound in his side had been from a jagged shell splinter and was infected despite all that his rescuers could do. He had existed with the partisans in a small cave and had lived mostly on goat’s milk and fish. It was all they had, and they had given it freely.

As far as Ransome had been able to discover, his brother was the M.T.B.’s only survivor. Perhaps one day Tony would be able to tell him what had happened.

Ransome climbed into his bridge chair and thrust his numbed fingers into his pockets.

After losing the convoy they had slowed down while Firebrand had carried out makeshift repairs to a stern-gland. Creeping along in the darkness there had been few who had not cursed the elderly minesweeper and her defects. For whatever was happening in Italy, the Germans were very active in the Atlantic, and on passage by their slow roundabout route they had sighted several abandoned wrecks and large patterns of flotsam. Convoys, or a Military ship caught in a U-boat’s crosswires: an insect in the web.

Ransome tried to ignore the spray and rain which ran down his face to soak into the towel. Coming back to another war, or to the one which they had left just months ago? Little was changed at home, he thought, except for one vital factor. Midget submarines, X-craft as they were called, had managed to penetrate deep into a Norwegian fjord where they had found and attacked the Last great German battleship Tirpitz. The most powerful warship in the world, sister to the ill-fated Bismarck, she had remained t he one real threat to the British fleet. While she lay in her heavily defended lair, protected by booms and nets, she was a menace to every convoy on the open sea. Heavy units of the Home Fleet were tied down in harbour or at Scapa Flow, just in case she broke out to ravage the supply lines with her massive armament.

A few midget submarines had achieved what others had attempted, and had laid their charges beneath her while she lay at anchor. Nobody knew for certain the full extent of the damage, because several of the tiny X-craft had been lost, and the surviving crews had been captured. But she might never move again. David and Goliath, with the odds somewhat worse, Ransome decided.

He thought of his orders for Rob Roy, to proceed to Devonport dockyard in company with Ranger to carry out a refit and overhaul. The others were being scattered to different yards where there was room for their needs.

Ransome considered his ship’s company and how they had all been changed in some ways. Perhaps being far away from home, most of them for the first time, fighting alongside the real fleet, the big ships with their towering superstructures and battle ensigns. Strange and new. Their world had been grey seas and small ships, stubby trawlers and lean destroyers, tramp steamers and the Glory Boys of Light Coastal Forces. England under attack, shabby, rundown, defiant. A few Mediterranean skies and hot suns would work miracles here, he thought.

Plymouth. Where he had last seen her. Would she still feel the same? Was it wrong of him even to hope she would need him as much as he did her?

He had written to her whenever he had found the time, but had received no more letters from her. He was certain she would have put her thoughts on paper as he had tried to do in his own letters to her. They were probably following Rob Roy around the Mediterranean, to Malta and Alexandria and to North Africa. Minesweepers stood pretty low on the Fleet Mail Office’s priorities.

‘Char, sir?’ The boatswain’s mate handed him a heavy mug. Thick and sweet, the way only sailors could make it.

And how had it affected him , he wondered? Had he risen above the strain, the constant decisions, the need to exercise authority when his heart had directed otherwise? Would she see that in him too?

And he thought of the ones who would not be bothered either way. He had written to Midshipman Davenport’s parents, and to the other men’s families. Would it ever help? They might even blame him in some way for their lost ones.

Dunlin had been luckier than many, and had had just seven men killed. When Ransome pictured the final explosion that had blasted out her^guts, it seemed like another miracle. Her young captain, Allfrey, from the Isle of Wight, had not been one of the survivors.

He heard feet on the deck below and knew that some of the men off watch were at the guardrails, looking for the land, seeing it as it would be, each to his own.

He thought of Sherwood’s story, how he had demonstrated his chilling skills yet again with the booby-trapped German, of the cheerful Canadians enjoying their pipes once more, perhaps still unaware of what they had done for him. The lieutenant-colonel sitting on his shooting-stick, and the mad piper in one of the landing-craft; the lines of wounded waiting to be lifted from the beaches, suddenly so young and frail without their weapons and helmets.

The one extraordinary feature was the enemy. As in the war at sea, they had not seen the Germans at all. Always at a distance, ringed by fire, or laying down barrages of utter destruction.

He heard Morgan speaking into a voicepipe and knew he was talking to the plot below their feet. The youngster Boyes doing Davenport’s job.

Ii was some beacon picked up .on the radar, to be marked and compared on the chart. A link with home.

Ransome slid from the chair, aware of the stillness, the mist and drizzle. Shipboard noises, muted but for the creak of wet steel, the regular bleep from the Asdic compartment.