Alistair MacLean Sea Thrillers 4-Book Collection: San Andreas, The Golden Rendezvous, Seawitch, Santorini

The medical staff, Bowen had maintained, were a different kind of civilian. Dr Singh had pointed out to him that ninety per cent of the medical staff of the armed forces were civilians, only they wore different kinds of uniforms: the staff on board the San Andreas wore different kinds of uniforms too, which happened to be white. Captain Bowen had then fallen back on his last defence: he was not, he said, going to take women through a war zone – he was referring to the six nursing staff aboard. A by now thoroughly irritated escort commander forcefully made three points that had forcefully been made to him by the Admiralty: thousands of women and children had been in war zones while being transported as refugees to the United States and Canada: in the current year, as compared to the previous two years, U-boat losses had quadrupled while Mercantile Marine losses had been cut by eighty per cent: and the Russians had requested, or rather insisted, that as many wounded Allied personnel as possible be removed from their overcrowded Archangel hospitals. Captain Bowen, as he should have done at the beginning, had capitulated and the Ocean Belle, still painted in its wartime grey but carrying adequate supplies of white, red and green paint, had sailed with the convoy.

As convoys to Northern Russia went, it had been an exceptionally uneventful one. Not one merchant ship and not one escort vessel had been lost. Only two incidents had occurred and both had involved the Ocean Belle. Some way south of Jan Mayen Island they had come across a venerable V and W class destroyer, stopped in the water with an engine breakdown. This destroyer had been a unit of the destroyer screen escorting a previous convoy and had stopped to pick up survivors from a sinking cargo vessel, which had been heavily on fire. The time had been about 2.30 p.m., well after sunset, and the rescue operation had been interrupted by a brief air attack. The attacker had not been seen but had obviously no difficulty in seeing the destroyer, silhouetted as it was against the blazing cargo ship. It had been assumed that the attacker was a reconnaissance Condor, for it had dropped no bombs and contented itself with raking the bridge with machine gun fire, which had effectively destroyed the radio office. Thus, when the engines had broken down some hours later – the breakdown had nothing to do with the Condor, the V and Ws were superannuated, overworked and much plagued by mechanical troubles – they had been unable to contact the vanished convoy.

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The wounded survivors were taken aboard the Ocean Belle. The destroyer itself, together with its crew and unwounded survivors, was taken in tow by an S-class destroyer. It was later learnt that both vessels had reached Scapa Flow intact.

Three days afterwards, somewhere off North Cape, they had come across an equally ancient ‘Kingfisher’ corvette, which had no business whatever in those distant waters. It, too, was stopped, and so deep in the water astern that its poop was already awash. It, too, had survivors aboard – the survivors of the crew of a Russian submarine that had been picked up from a burning oil-covered sea.

(#ulink_b31132b4-7d86-5054-be3f-ec96a213f927) The Russians, for the most part badly burned, had been transferred, inevitably, to the Ocean Belle, the crew being transferred to an escort destroyer. The corvette was sunk by gunfire. It was during this transfer that the Ocean Belle had been holed twice, just below the water line, on the port side, in the paint store and ballast room. The reason for the damage had never been established.

The convoy had gone to Archangel but the Ocean Belle had put in to Murmansk – neither Captain Bowen nor the escort commander had thought it wise that the Ocean Belle should proceed any further than necessary in its then present condition – slightly down by the head and with a list to port. There were no dry dock facilities available but the Russians were masters of improvisation – the rigours of war had forced them to be. They topped up the after tanks, drained the for’ard tanks and removed the for’ard slabs of concrete ballast until the holes in the paint store and ballast room were just clear of the water, after which it had taken them only a few hours to weld plates in position over the holes. The equalization of the tanks and the replacement of ballast had then brought the Ocean Belle back to an even keel.

While those repairs were being effected a small army of Russian carpenters had worked, three shifts in every twenty-four hours, in the hospital section of the ship, fitting out the wards, recovery room, messes, galley and medical store. Captain Bowen was astonished beyond measure. On his previous visits to the two Russian ports he had encountered from his allies, blood brothers who should have been in tears of gratitude for the dearly-bought and vital supplies being ferried to their stricken country, nothing but sullenness, indifference, a marked lack of cooperation and, not occasionally, downright hostility. The baffling sea-change he could only attribute to the fact that the Russians were only showing their heartfelt appreciation for the Ocean Belle having brought their wounded submariners back home.

When they sailed it was as a hospital ship – Bowen’s crew, paintbrushes in hands, had worked with a will during their brief stay in Murmansk. They did not, as everyone had expected, proceed through the White Sea to pick up the wounded servicemen in Archangel. The Admiralty’s orders had been explicit: they were to proceed, and at all speed, to the port of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Jamieson replaced the cover of the small electrical junction box, having effectively isolated the ballast room from the main power system. He tapped the watertight door. ‘Short in there – could have been caused by the blast or sea-water, it doesn’t matter – should have blown a fuse somewhere. It didn’t. Somewhere or other there’s a fuse, that’s been tampered with – fuse-wire replaced by a nail or some such. That doesn’t matter either. I’m not going to look for it. McCrimmon, go ask the engine-room to try the generator.’

McKinnon tapped the same door. ‘And what do we do here?’

‘What, indeed?’ Jamieson sat on a paint drum and thought. ‘Three choices, I would say. We can get an air compressor down here, drill a hole through the bulkhead at about shoulder level and force the water out which would be fine if we knew where the level of the hole in the hull is. We don’t. Besides, the chances are that the compressed air in the ballast room would escape before we could get the nozzle of the compressed air hose into the hole we drilled which could only mean that more water would pour into the ballast room. Or we could reinforce the bulkhead. The third choice is to do nothing. I’m for the third choice. It’s a pretty solid bulkhead. We’d have to reduce speed, of course. No bulkhead is going to stand up to the pressure at full speed if there’s a hole the size of a barn door in the hull.’

‘A barn door would not be convenient,’ McKinnon said, ‘I think I’ll go and have a look.’

It was a very cold and rather bruised McKinnon who half-climbed and was half-pulled up to the foredeck of the San Andreas, which, engines stopped, was wallowing heavily in quartering seas. In the pale half-light given by the again functioning deck arc lamps they presented a strange quartet, Jamieson, Ferguson and McCrimmon, wraithlike figures completely shrouded in snow, McKinnon a weirdly-gleaming creature, the sea water on his rubber suit, aqualung and waterproof torch already, in that 35° below temperature, beginning to harden into ice. At a gesture from Jamieson, McCrimmon left for the engine-room while Ferguson pulled in the rope-ladder: Jamieson took McKinnon’s arm and led him, the newly-formed ice on the rubber suit crackling as he stumbled along, towards the shelter of the superstructure where McKinnon pulled off his aqualung. His teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

‘Pretty bad down there, Bo’sun?’

‘Not that, sir. This damned rubber suit.’ He fingered a waist-high gash in the material. ‘Tore it on a jagged piece of metal. From here down the suit is filled with water.’

‘Good God! You’ll freeze to death, man. Hurry, hurrry!’ In what was left of his cabin McKinnon began to strip off his rubber suit. ‘You located the damage?’

‘No problem – and no barn door. Just a ragged hole about the size of my fist.’

Jamieson smiled. ‘Worth risking pneumonia to find that out. I’m going to the bridge. See you in the Captain’s cabin.’

When McKinnon, in dry clothing but still shivering violently, joined Jamieson and Naseby in the Captain’s cabin, the San Andreas was back on course and steadily picking up speed. Jamieson pushed a glass of Scotch across to him.

‘I’m afraid the Captain’s supplies are taking a fearful beating, Bo’sun. This shouldn’t increase the risk of pneumonia – I’ve left the water out. I’ve been speaking to Mr Patterson and the Captain – we’ve got a line through to the hospital now. When I told him you’d been over the side in this weather, he didn’t say thank-you or anything like that, just said to tell you that you’re mad.’

‘Captain Bowen is not often wrong and that’s a fact.’ McKinnon’s hands were shaking so badly that he spilt liquid from his admittedly brimming glass. ‘Any instructions from the Captain or Mr Patterson?’

‘None. Both say they’re quite happy to leave the topside to you.’

‘That’s kind of them. What they really mean is that they have no option – there’s only George and myself.’

‘George?’

‘Sorry, sir. Naseby, here. He’s a bo’sun, too. We’ve been shipmates on and off, friends for twenty years.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Jamieson looked thoughtfully at Naseby. ‘I can see it now. You’ve made arrangements for up here, Bo’sun?’

‘About to, sir. George and I will take turns here, looking after the family jewels, so to speak. I’ll have Trent, Ferguson and Curran spell one another on the wheel. I’ll tell them to give me a shake – if I’m asleep – when or if the weather clears.’

‘Cue for Lieutenant Ulbricht?’

‘Indeed. I would like to make a suggestion, sir, if I may. I would like to have some people keeping watch at the fore and aft exits of the hospital, just to make absolutely certain that nobody’s going to start sleepwalking during the night.’

‘Who’s going to watch the watchers?’

‘A point, sir. The watchers I would suggest are Jones, McGuigan, McCrimmon and Stephen. Unless they’re wonderful actors, the first two are too young and innocent to be criminals. McCrimmon may, indeed, have a criminal bent, but I think he’s an honest criminal. And Stephen strikes me as being a fairly trustworthy lad. More important, he’s not likely to forget that it was a naval minesweeper that picked him up out of the North Sea.’

‘I didn’t know that, either. You seem to be better informed about my own department than I am. I’ll arrange for Stephen and McCrimmon, you look after the others. Our resident saboteur is not about to give up all that easily?’

‘I would be surprised if he did. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Very much. I wonder what form of sabotage his next attempt to nobble us will take?’

‘I just have no idea. But another thought occurs, sir. The person you have keeping an eye on the aft exit from the hospital might also keep an eye on the entrance to A Ward.’

‘A Ward? That bunch of crooks? Whatever for?’

‘The person or persons who are trying to slow us and are doing their best to get us lost might think it a rather good idea to nobble Lieutenant Ulbricht.’

‘Indeed they might. I’ll stay in the ward myself tonight. There’s a spare bed. If I do drop off, the duty nurse can always give me a shake if anyone comes in who shouldn’t be coming in.’ Jamieson was silent for a few moments. ‘What’s behind it all, Bo’sun?’

‘I think you know as well as I do, sir. Somebody, somewhere, wants to take over the San Andreas, although why anyone should want to take over a hospital ship I can’t even begin to imagine.’

‘No more can I. A U-boat, you think?’

‘It would have to be, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can’t capture a ship from the air and they’re hardly likely to send the Tirpitz after us.’ McKinnon shook his head. ‘A U-boat? Any fishing boat, with a few armed and determined men, could take us over whenever they felt like it.’

(#ulink_21e8c062-4288-57ad-8804-2ff4749b8cb3)Throughout the wartime convoy sailings to Murmansk and Archangel the use of rescue ships remained a bone of contention between the Royal Navy at sea and the Royal Navy on land – the latter being the London-based Admiralty which acquitted itself with something less than distinction during the long years of the Russian convoys. In the earlier days, the use of rescue ships was the rule, not the exception. After the loss of the Zafaaran and the Stockport, which was lost with all hands including the many survivors that had been picked up from other sunken vessels, the Admiralty forbade the further use of rescue ships.

This was a rule that was observed in the breach. In certain convoys a self-selected member of the escort group, usually a destroyer or smaller, would assign to itself the role of rescue ship, an assignment in which the force commander would acquiesce or to which he turned a blind eye. The task of the rescue ships was a hazardous one indeed. There was never any question of a convoy stopping or of their escorts leaving the convoy, so that, almost invariably the rescue ship was left alone and unprotected. The sight of a Royal Naval vessel stopped in the water alongside a sinking vessel was an irresistible target for many U-boat commanders.

(#ulink_a3b0d3e4-e685-50fc-ac63-88a84e141aa8)It was neither appreciated nor reported that the Russians had a few submarines operational in the area at that time. One of them almost certainly damaged the Tirpitz sufficiently to make it return to its moorings in Alta Fjord.

Chapter Five (#ulink_6103553e-d90c-515d-921a-c27d8b30a442)

McKinnon, deep in sleep though he was, was instantly awake at Naseby’s shake and swung his legs over the edge of Captain Bowen’s bunk.

‘What’s the time, George?’

‘Six a.m. Curran’s just been down from the bridge. Says the blizzard has blown itself out.’

‘Stars?’