A Twist of Sand

There was no doubt at Gibraltar and at Freetown, where we fuelled, and again at Simonstown, Cape, that Trout was priority. Nothing was too much trouble, and no request was refused. The crew got on to it quickly. But, Navy-like, they forgot what danger must lurk behind these unusual gestures, and were content to live like lords. I overheard one of my ratings, half drunk, say at Simonstown: "Whisky, my boy; no piddling drinks for the Trout-men -- only the best is good enough for Trout."

At first I had not seen the softness, but the long weeks of solitary cruising up and down, down and up, through the vastness of the South Atlantic was robbing the crew of their super-sharp vigilance. That is the difference between life and death in a submarine. As the afternoon wore on, I was more and more jarred by the easy-going air of life aboard H.M.S. Trout. I had done the conventional thing. I had ruled the South Atlantic off into tight little squares. I had plotted the position where the Dunedin Star had first been rent under water; I had patrolled day and night, night and day. For weeks I had not even seen a ship. There was, in fact, nothing. Not a ship, not a sail.

John's remark jarred. I could not go on carrying out practice attacks, dives, dummy shelling and the rest of it day after day. Trout seemed to have reached a point of crisis, a crisis of deadly boredom. All war is boring, but this was boring beyond any war. My orders were explicit: to locate and sink NP I. Where in God's name, I thought desperately, gazing round the limitless sea about me, could she be ? Had she simply blown up and disappeared without trace? Would Trout continue her ceaseless patrolling until two men at the Admiralty became convinced that she no longer existed? Or would they recall me peremptorily, asking for an account of the failure of my mission ?

I cast a mental eye over the charts. There was nowhere where NP I could hide. I thought of every remote anchorage from Walvis Bay to Pointe Noire in Africa; the South American coast was too long to even consider in relation to this damn-fool square-search pattern. And I meant to go on doing it for months yet!

Through this mangrove tangle of conflicting thoughts the look-out's voice came like a bucket of cold water.

"Bridge, sir!  Tripod masts bearing red one-oh."

Heavens! The relief of spotting a ship! It surged over me even as I pressed the alarm. The Uckers men gazed at one another in disbelief. I really think they had forgotten what an emergency dive was like, I spoke into the voice-pipe.

"Eighty feet.   Course three-two-oh.   Clear the bridge."

My soft sailors clattered down the hatch like men possessed. It was good to see that danger had given them a shot in the arm. I closed the conning-tower hatch and clipped on the catches, not avoiding a few dollops of water as Trout went down steeply.

"H.E bearing green one-five," reported the hydrophone operator. He added tersely: "Warships. Big ones."

Trout swung on to an attacking course. The "fruit machine" fed by information from two officers, gave the course and speed of the warships.

"Twenty knots," said John.

"That's fine," I said. "I'll fire into the sun. Lovely silhouette. I'll go up and have a look. Stand by," I ordered. "Up periscope.  Thirty feet."

The dripping glass thrust its baleful eye out of the South Atlantic. I looked at the masts in disbelief. British warships! Two cruisers, with a nuzzle of four destroyers.

"Take a look at that, John," I said.

The tension ebbed at once in the submarine. An alert crew is extraordinarily sensitive to the smallest change of inflexion in the commander's voice.

"Jesus!" exclaimed John.  "Shall we . . .?"

"Yes, take her up," I snapped." But be bloody careful to get off the recognition signal pronto. Signalman! Send this------" and I prefaced it with the usual code and recognition signals -- "Use the shortwave," I added hastily, remembering the explicit radio ban. I felt I couldn't let a group of British warships go by without hailing them. Trout seemed a bit of a pariah on the seas, even if she was a pariah living in luxury.

The water wasn't off the plates before John and I were looking out at the cluster of warships.

The destroyers rippled as if a nerve had been touched.

John grinned: "Look at that, Geoffrey. They've certainly spotted us." His hand moved towards the recognition flare trigger.

"Don't fire that damned thing," I said shortly. "It could be seen twenty miles away."

Long patches of white creamed under the destroyers' bows. They fanned out. And, ghastly to see, the barrels of the six and eight-inch guns on the cruisers all moved, as if endowed with powers of thought, at Trout.

"Western Approaches stuff," grinned John, but a trifle nervously. "Those boys are really on the ball."

They well might be, I thought grimly, remembering NP I.