San Andreas Read online

  ‘Yes, sir. Was that Jamieson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should be hearing from Ralson any time now.’

  ‘Jamieson has already heard from him. Seamen’s toilet this time, port side.’

  For once, Kennet had no observation to make and for almost a minute there was silence on the bridge for the sufficient reason that there didn’t seem to be any comment worth making. When the silence was broken it was, inevitably, by Kennet.

  ‘A few more minutes and our worthy engineers might as well cease and desist. Or am I the only person who has noticed that the dawn is in the sky?’

  The dawn, indeed, was in the sky. Already, to the south-east, off the port beam, the sky had changed from black, or as black as it ever becomes in northern waters, to a dark grey and was steadily lightening. The snow had completely stopped now, the wind had dropped to twenty knots and the San Andreas was pitching, not heavily, in the head seas coming up from the northwest.

  Kennet said, ‘Shall I post a couple of extra lookouts, sir? One on either wing?’

  ‘And what can those look-outs do? Make faces at the enemy?’

  ‘They can’t do a great deal more, and that’s a fact. But if anyone is going to have a go at us, it’s going to be now. A high-flying Condor, for instance, you can almost see the bombs leaving the bay and there’s an even chance in evasive action.’ Kennet didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic or convinced.

  ‘And if it’s a submarine, dive-bomber, glider-bomber or torpedo-bomber?’

  ‘They can still give us warning and time for a prayer. Mind you, probably a very short prayer, but still a prayer.’

  ‘As you wish, Mr Kennet.’

  Kennet made a call and within three minutes his look-outs arrived on the bridge, duffel-coated and scarfed to the eyebrows as Kennet had instructed. McGuigan and Jones, a Southern Irishman and a Welshman, they were boys only, neither of them a day over eighteen. Kennet issued them with binoculars and posted them on the bridge wings, Jones to port, McGuigan to starboard. Seconds only after closing the port door, Jones opened it again.

  ‘Ship, sir! Port quarter.’ His voice was excited, urgent. ‘Warship, I think.’

  ‘Relax,’ Kennet said. ‘I doubt whether it’s the Tirpitz.’ Less than half a dozen people aboard knew that the Andover had accompanied them during the night. He stepped out on to the wing and returned almost immediately. ‘The good shepherd,’ he said. ‘Three miles.’

  ‘It’s almost half-light now,’ Captain Bowen said. ‘We could be wrong, Mr Kennet.’

  The radio room hatchway panel banged open and Spenser’s face appeared.

  ‘Andover, sir. Bandit, bandit, one bandit…045…ten miles…five thousand.’

  ‘There now,’ Kennet said. ‘I knew we weren’t wrong. Full power, sir?’ Bowen nodded and Kennet gave the necessary instructions to the engine-room.

  ‘Evasive action?’ Bowen was half-smiling; knowledge, however unwelcome that knowledge, always comes as a relief after uncertainty. ‘A Condor, you would guess?’

  ‘No guess, sir. In those waters, only the Condor flies alone.’ Kennet slid back the port wing door and gazed skywards. ‘Cloud cover’s pretty thin now. We should be able to see our friend coming up—he should be practically dead astern. Shall we go out on the wing, sir?’

  ‘In a minute, Mr Kennet. Two minutes. Gather flowers while we may—or, at least, keep warm as long as possible. If fate has abandoned us we shall be freezing to death all too soon. Tell me, Mr Kennet, has any profound thought occurred to you?’

  ‘A lot of thoughts have occurred to me but I wouldn’t say any of them are profound.’

  ‘How on earth do you think that Condor located us?’

  ‘Submarine? It could have surfaced and radioed Alta Fjord.’

  ‘No submarine. The Andover’s sonar would have picked him up. No plane, no surface ships, that’s a certainty.’

  Kennet frowned for a few seconds, then smiled. ‘Flannel-foot,’ he said with certainty. ‘A radio.’

  ‘Not necessarily even that. A small electrical device, probably powered by our own mains system, that transmits a continuous homing signal.’

  ‘So if we survive this lot it’s out with the fine-tooth comb?’

  ‘Indeed. It’s out with—’

  ‘Andover, sir.’ It was Spenser again. ‘Four bandits, repeat four bandits…310…eight miles…three thousand.’

  ‘I wonder what we’ve done to deserve this?’ Kennet sounded almost mournful. ‘We were even more right than we thought, sir. Torpedo-bombers or glider-bombers, that’s for sure, attacking out of the darkness to the north-west and us silhouetted against the dawn.’

  The two men moved out on the port wing. The Andover was still on the port quarter but had closed in until it was less than two miles distant. A low bank of cloud, at about the same distance, obscured the view aft.

  ‘Hear anything, Mr Kennet? See anything?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing. Damn that cloud. Yes, I do. I hear it. It’s a Condor.’

  ‘It’s a Condor.’ Once heard, the desynchronized clamour of a Focke-Wulf 200’s engine is not readily forgotten. ‘And I’m afraid, Mr Kennet, that you’ll have to postpone your evasive action practice for another time. This lad sounds as if he is coming in very low.’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming in low. And I know why.’ Most unusually for Kennet, he sounded very bitter. ‘He intends to do some pinpoint precision bombing. He’s under orders to stop us or cripple us but not sink us. I’ll bet that bastard Flannelfoot feels as safe as houses.’

  ‘You have it to rights, Mr Kennet. He could stop us by bombing the engine-room, but doing that is a practical guarantee that we go to the bottom. There he comes, now.’ The Focke-Wulf Condor had broken through the cloud and was heading directly for the stern of the San Andreas. Every gun on the Andover that could be brought to bear had opened up as soon as the Focke-Wulf had cleared the cloud-bank and within seconds the starboard side of the Andover was wreathed in smoke. For a frigate, its anti-aircraft fire-power was formidable: low-angle main armament, pom-poms, Oerlikons and the equally deadly Boulton-Paul Defiant turrets which loosed off a devastating 960 rounds a minute. The Focke-Wulf must have been hit many times but the big Condor’s capacity to absorb punishment was legendary. Still it came on, now no more than two hundred feet above the waves. The sound of the engines had risen from the clamorous to the thunderous.

  ‘This is no place for a couple of honest seamen to be, Mr Kennet.’ Captain Bowen had to shout to make himself heard. ‘But I think it’s too late now.’

  ‘I rather think it is, sir.’

  Two bombs, just two, arced lazily down from the now smoking Condor.

  TWO

  Had the Americans retained the original British design concept for accommodation aboard the Liberty Ships, the tragedy, while still remaining such, would at least have been minimized. The original Sunderland plans had the accommodation both fore and aft: Henry Kaiser’s designers, in their wisdom—blind folly as it turned out—had all their accommodation, for both officers and men, including also the navigating bridge, grouped in a single superstructure surrounding the funnel.

  The Bo’sun, Dr Sinclair by his side, had reached the upper deck before the Condor reached the San Andreas; they were almost immediately joined by Patterson for whom the Andover’s barrage had sounded like a series of heavy metallic blows on the side of his engine-room.

  ‘Down!’ the Bo’sun shouted. Two powerful arms around their shoulders bore them to the deck, for the Focke-Wulf had reached the San Andreas before the bombs did and the Bo’sun was well aware that the Focke-Wulf carried a fairly lethal array of machine guns which it did not hesitate to use when the occasion demanded. On this occasion, however, the guns remained silent, possibly because the gunners were under instructions not to fire, more probably because the gunners were already dead, for it was plain that the Condor, trailing a huge plume of black smoke, whether from fuselage or engines it was impossible to say,
and veering sharply to starboard, was itself about to die.

  The two bombs, contact and not armour-piercing, struck fore and aft of the funnel, exploded simultaneously and just immediately after passing through the unprotected deck-heads of the living quarters, blowing the shattered bulkheads outwards and filling the air with screaming shards of metal and broken glass, none of which reached the three prone men. The Bo’sun cautiously lifted his head and stared in disbelief as the funnel, seemingly intact but sheared off at its base toppled slowly over the port side and into the sea. Any sound of a splash that there may have been was drowned out by the swelling roar of more aero engines.

  ‘Stay down, stay down!’ Flat on the deck, the Bo’sun twisted his head to the right. There were four of them in line abreast formation, Heinkel torpedo-bombers, half a mile away, no more than twenty feet above the water and headed directly for the starboard side of the San Andreas. Ten seconds, he thought, twelve at the most and the dead men in the charnel house of that shattered superstructure would have company and to spare. Why had the guns of the Andover fallen silent? He twisted his head to the left to look at the frigate and immediately realized why. It was impossible that the gunners on the Andover could not hear the sound of the approaching Heinkels but it was equally impossible that they could see them. The San Andreas was directly in line between the frigate and the approaching bombers which were flying below the height of their upper deck.

  He twisted his head to the right again and to his momentary astonishment saw that this was no longer the case. The Heinkels were lifting clear of the water with the intention of flying over the San Andreas, which they did seconds later, not much more than ten feet above the deck, two on each side of the twisted superstructure. The San Andreas had not been the target, only the shield for the Heinkels: the frigate was the target and the bombers were half way between the San Andreas and the frigate before the bemused defenders aboard the Andover understood what was happening.

  When they did understand their reaction was sharp and violent. The main armament was virtually useless. It takes time to train and elevate a gun of any size and against a close-in and fast-moving target there just isn’t time. The anti-aircraft guns, the two-pounders, the Oerlikons and the Defiants did indeed mount a heavy barrage but torpedo-bombers were notoriously difficult targets, not least because the gunners were acutely aware that death was only seconds away, a realization that made for less than a controlled degree of accuracy.

  The bombers were less than three hundred yards away when the plane on the left-hand side of the formation pulled up and banked to its left to clear the stern of the Andover: almost certainly neither the plane nor the pilot had been damaged: as was not unknown, the torpedo release mechanism had iced up, freezing the torpedo in place. At about the same instant the plane on the right descended in a shallow dive until it touched the water—almost certainly the pilot had been shot. A victory but a Pyrrhic one. The other two Heinkels released their torpedoes and lifted clear of the Andover.

  Three torpedoes hit the Andover almost simultaneously, the two that had been cleanly released and the one that was still attached to the plane that had crashed into the water. All three torpedoes detonated but there was little enough in the way of thunderclaps of sound or shock waves: water always has this same muffling effect on an underwater explosion. What they did produce, however, was a great sheet of water and spray which rose to two hundred feet into the sky and then slowly subsided. When it finally disappeared the Andover was on its beam ends and deep in the water. Within twenty seconds, with only a faint hissing as the water flooded the engine-room and with curiously little in the way of bubbles, the Andover slid beneath the surface of the sea.

  ‘My God, my God, my God!’ Dr Sinclair, swaying slightly, was on his feet. As a doctor, he was acquainted with death, but not in this shocking form: he was still dazed, not quite aware of what was going on around him. ‘Good God, that big plane is coming back again!’

  The big plane, the Condor, was indeed coming back again, but it offered no threat to them. Dense smoke pouring from all four engines, it completed a half circle and was approaching the San Andreas. Less than half a mile away it touched the surface of the sea, momentarily dipped beneath it, then came into sight again. There was no more smoke.

  ‘God rest them,’ Patterson said. He was almost abnormally calm. ‘Damage control party first, see if we’re making water, although I shouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The Bo’sun looked at what was left of the superstructure. ‘Perhaps a fire-control party. Lots of blankets, mattresses, clothes, papers in there—God only knows what’s smouldering away already.’

  ‘Do you think there will be any survivors in there?’

  ‘I wouldn’t even guess, sir. If there are, thank heavens we’re a hospital ship.’

  Patterson turned to Dr Sinclair and shook him gently. ‘Doctor, we need your help.’ He nodded towards the superstructure. ‘You and Dr Singh—and the ward orderlies. I’ll send some men with sledges and crowbars.’

  ‘An oxy-acetylene torch?’ said the Bo’sun.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ve got enough medical equipment and stores aboard to equip a small town hospital,’ Sinclair said. ‘If there are any survivors all we’ll require is a few hypodermic syringes.’ He seemed back on balance again. ‘We don’t take in the nurses?’

  ‘Good God, no.’ Patterson shook his head vehemently. ‘I tell you, I wouldn’t like to go in there. If there are any survivors they’ll have their share of horrors later.’

  McKinnon said: ‘Permission to take away the lifeboat, sir?’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘There could be survivors from the Andover.’

  ‘Survivors! She went down in thirty seconds.’

  ‘The Hood blew apart in one second. There were three survivors.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I’m not a seaman, Bo’sun. You don’t need permission from me.’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir.’ The Bo’sun gestured towards the superstructure. ‘All the deck officers are there. You’re in command.’

  ‘Good God!’ The thought, the realization had never struck Patterson. ‘What a way to assume command!’

  ‘And speaking of command, sir, the San Andreas is no longer under command. She’s slewing rapidly to port. Steering mechanism on the bridge must have been wrecked.’

  ‘Steering can wait. I’ll stop the engines.’

  Three minutes later the Bo’sun eased the throttle and edged the lifeboat towards an inflatable life raft which was roller-coasting heavily near the spot where the now vanished Condor had been. There were only two men in the raft—the rest of the aircrew, the Bo’sun assumed, had gone to the bottom with the Focke-Wulf. They had probably been dead anyway. One of the men, no more than a youngster, very seasick and looking highly apprehensive—he had every right, the Bo’sun thought, to be apprehensive—was sitting upright and clinging to a lifeline. The other lay on his back in the bottom of the raft: in the regions of his left upper chest, left upper arm and right thigh his flying overalls were saturated with blood. His eyes were closed.

  ‘Jesus’ sake!’ Able Seaman Ferguson, who had a powerful Liverpool accent and whose scarred face spoke eloquently of battles lost and won, mainly in bar-rooms, looked at the Bo’sun with a mixture of disbelief and outrage. ‘Jesus, Bo’sun, you’re not going to pick those bastards up? They just tried to send us to the bottom. Us! A hospital ship!’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know why they bombed a hospital ship?’

  ‘There’s that, there’s that.’ Ferguson reached out with a boathook and brought the raft alongside.

  ‘Either of you speak English?’

  The wounded man opened his eyes: they, too, seemed to be filled with blood. ‘I do.’

  ‘You look badly hurt. I want to know where before we try to bring you aboard.’

  ‘Left arm, left shoulder, I think, right thigh. And I believe there’s something wrong with my right
foot.’ His English was completely fluent and if there was any accent at all it was a hint of southern standard English, not German.

  ‘You’re the Condor Captain, of course.’

  ‘Yes. Still want to bring me aboard?’

  The Bo’sun nodded to Ferguson and the two other seamen he had along with him. The three men brought the injured pilot aboard as carefully as they could but with both lifeboat and raft rolling heavily in the beam seas it was impossible to be too careful. They laid him in the thwarts close to where the Bo’sun was sitting by the controls. The other survivor huddled miserably amidships. The Bo’sun opened the throttle and headed for the position where he estimated the Andover had gone down.

  Ferguson looked down at the injured man who was lying motionless on his back, arms spread-eagled. The red stains were spreading. It could have been that he was still bleeding quite heavily: but it could have been the effect of sea-water.

  ‘Reckon he’s a goner, Bo’sun?’

  McKinnon reached down and touched the side of the pilot’s neck and after a few seconds he located the pulse, fast, faint and erratic, but still a pulse.

  ‘Unconscious. Fainted. Couldn’t have been an easy passage for him.’

  Ferguson regarded the pilot with a certain grudging respect. ‘He may be a bloody murderer, but he’s a bloody tough bloody murderer. Must have been in agony, but never a squawk. Shouldn’t we take him back to the ship first? Give him a chance, like?’

  ‘I thought of it. No. There just may be survivors from the Andover and if there are they won’t last long. Sea temperature is about freezing or just below it. A man’s usually dead inside a minute. If there’s anyone at all, a minute’s delay may be a minute too late. We owe them that chance. Besides it’s going to be a very quick trip back to the ship.’

  The San Andreas, slewing to port, had come around in a full half-circle and, under reverse thrust, was slowing to a stop. Patterson had almost certainly done this so as to manoeuvre the temporarily rudderless ship as near as possible to the spot where the Andover had been torpedoed.