Alexander Fullerton - Surface!

“Aye aye, sir.”

They were all staring at the Captain, willing him to alter course. He looked at nobody except at Saunders.

Each minute took an hour to pass. Saunders raised his head, opened his mouth. The Captain’s eyes brightened, and his face asked the question. Saunders closed his mouth again, twiddled his wheel a little bit this way and that. The Navigator looked at his pencil: the point was broken, so he put it down and picked up another one. That was broken, too. That seemed terribly funny: it took an effort not to laugh aloud.

Featherstone, watching the Captain and Saunders, felt like giggling himself. He didn’t know why.

Saunders said, “Red six-oh, sir. Second contact right ahead, still. And – green five-four.”

The Captain jerked his eyes to the man at the wheel. He snapped:

“Port ten.” He had coloured slightly, as though he was embarrassed. His were not the only eyes that watched the helmsman’s indicator as it showed the submarine’s swing from the old course. The relief was plain on many faces.

Saunders spoke again,

“Mine, right ahead…”

In the wardroom, in utter silence, the Major and his three officers were reading books. They must have been books of considerable interest, for each of them seemed completely absorbed. Elbows on the table, heads in their hands, they presented a picture of static concentration that would have been an easy target for a sculptor.

The Major turned over a page too quickly, and they were all aware of the sound it made. They had grown used to the small sounds from the Control Room, the occasional report, the low orders. They could hear the tension.

Suddenly they heard the Captain’s voice.

“Number One. Go to Watch Diving. Open up from depth-charging.”

Before the import of the order had broken through the taut minds all around him, the Captain was in the wardroom.

“We’re through, Major,” he announced, quietly. “Just in time for lunch.”

For the rest of that day, Seahound kept steadily on down the Straits. Amongst the ship’s company, plain in every face and in the voices of the men as they went about their work or chatted during the off-watch spell, was a sense of elation, almost of victory. It came partly from relief, a reaction to the tense feelings of the morning, and partly from pride in having been the first ship to carry her flag so far down the dangerous passage. They had opened the door, and now, with their track clearly marked and inked on the chart, they knew that by following the same route exactly they or any other ship could do it again. The lock that had held for three years had been picked. There were other difficulties ahead, of course, but that only started tomorrow, and today, as Rogers put it, they had “flippin’ well done it.”

“Fair took me back, it did,” he mused. “Back to the day me old man caught Ma with the chimney-sweep. Dead quiet, it was, all flippin’ day. Me Dad didn’t say nothin’, nobody did. Come six o’clock he flipped off dahn the flippin’ road to the local. Come back fair screechin’, ’e did, an’ laid into old Ma with a broom ’andle. She didn’t ’alf carry on.”

Shadwell gazed at him, interest in his leathery face.

“Well!” he murmured. “Never would ’a known you ’ad soot in y’ blood.”

In the wardroom there was a similar tendency towards high spirits, but it was tempered with new purpose. The successful passage of the minefield galvanised the Major into violent activity: he knew now that there was no doubt about his operation taking place, and at once the charts, maps and photographs reappeared on the wardroom table. He and the Captain checked and rechecked distances and positions, drew up a timetable, tore it up and started on a new one. The Army officers went for’ard, and, with their sergeants, checked over their weapons and equipment. They were now the central figures in the operation: the submariners had played their part, or at any rate the hardest part of it; they had only to follow the thing through, keep their ship hidden, carry out the drill, land the soldiers and be in the right place to pick them up. That was all, but the Captain knew how easily everything could go wrong, and how suddenly.

The Major and his men were to be landed on the Malayan coast, South of Malacca. The spot chosen was the nearest point to Singapore at which it was considered possible to make a landing and get away unseen. It seemed logical to suppose that the soldiers were going into Singapore: but nobody knew, except for the Major, and neither the Captain nor any of the men who manned Seahound would ever know.

The Major sipped thoughtfully at his cup of dark brown tea. Once again his mind travelled over every detail, went back over each stage of the planning. No, he didn’t think there could have been any leakage of information. If there had been – but that sort of thinking didn’t get you anywhere. It only reminded him of a trip out of Haifa, a few years ago, a time when there had been a leakage. It reminded him of the cost that a leakage carried. Part of it had been his brother. The Major pulled himself together.

He asked, “D’you think I could have another cup?” Sub reached up and pressed the buzzer.

That evening they surfaced for the last night’s dash. So close to the enemy, the Captain spent most of the night on the bridge with the Officers of the Watch, not because he had any lack of faith in their ability but because the responsibility was heavy on his shoulders and he found himself physically incapable of sitting down below. The watches changed quietly, peacefully, no incident of any sort while the enemy coast was plain in sight to starboard and to port, and just before dawn the Captain sent the Lookout and the Officer of the Watch down into the Control Room. He took a final look round, and dropped into the hatch, and shouted “Dive, dive, dive!” so as not to make a noise by using the klaxon. He heard the roar of escaping air as the vents slammed down, and spray was falling on his head before he shut the hatch. He jammed on the clips, climbed down into the Control Room. They had arrived, on schedule.

The day was spent making a periscope reconnaissance of the beach and its surroundings. The Captain and the Major spent most of the time in the Control Room. It was a strange sensation, this proximity to the enemy for whom they felt such a personal loathing. Meals in the wardroom were haphazard, social intercourse was disorganised by constant interruptions, by the necessity for searching through a heap of maps for the butter, or removing the chart to fix the position of a knife and fork. The soldiers were restless, more so after each had been given a long look at their landing-place: Captain Selby had lost his glasses, but he seemed perfectly at home without them.

The soldiers were a source of great interest to the submarine officers, who watched them and talked to them rather as prison warders might behave towards men condemned to the gallows. Nothing was too much trouble. The objects of their sympathetic interest, though obviously anxious for the dark hours to come, appeared unaffected by the imminence of what seemed at any rate to Chief to be a certain death. Chief made himself particularly helpful to the guests, continually making suggestions and offering friendly advice as to the best manner of handling canoes. He was a yachtsman himself, he explained, and he knew quite a bit about handling small craft. He left little doubt, in the course of his suggestions, that it would only be a one-way journey.

After tea they put the maps away, and the Captain, after a final talk with the Major, said, “Right, Number One. We’ll surface at nine-thirty. All canoes will be away by nine-fifty at the latest, and we’ll dive again at about eleven. You can tell the hands.”