(1974) The Destroyers by Douglas Reeman

Author:Douglas Reeman [Reeman, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780099116103
Google: nZtKPgAACAAJ
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 1974-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

"Come along, Mid! The upper deck is still in a filthy state!"

Wingate smiled gently. "What about you then, Sub? Got bloody paint all over your trousers. Fine one to talk about filth!"

He watched Tyson and the midshipman leave the bridge quiet and empty again. How he liked it. Tyson, all red-faced and fuming. As usual. The boy, glowing with a sort of aura in his new happiness. He glanced at the empty chart table. Poor little sod. He'd better make the most of it, he thought.

10

Touch and Go

IT was five more days before Lomond and her two accompanying destroyers entered Seydisfjord and reunited the flotilla. For Drummond, as for most of the others, it had been a time of tension and concentration. Even the least experienced member of the ship's company was now aware of the growing prospect of action, although no announcement had yet been released.

From Admiral Brooks's deep bunker in Whitehall to the monitoring stations in England and Iceland, a constant watch was being kept for any sign of undue excitement in the enemy's arrangements in Norway. Whenever possible the R.A.F. maintained a careful patrol over harbours and coastal waters, seeking any sign that a familiar ship was missing, or that a new one had arrived. But as hours dragged into days, even the unexpected reports about the Moltke faded into the background. She had not been sighted again, and so the earlier references to her movements were now open to doubt.

The real enemy was the weather. The clock came a very close second.

Captain Kimber had sent a brief top-secret signal to the effect that the German training base for midget submarines of the type captured by Warlock was showing signs of closing down. The base was still there, and the little submarines, or "Negroes," as they were apparently called by their creators, had been reported as before, and in the same impressive numbers. But there had been less activity, and the local Norwegian underground had signalled other information which left little doubt that the whole organisation was preparing to move south.

At night, as he lay staring up at the darkness, Drummond had often thought about those nameless agents in occupied Norway, and any other land under the German heel. Hourly they must be risking discovery. The torture and agony which would follow capture, the punishment and destruction even of their families as a frightening example to others, it must all lurk in each man's mind as he drew his sketches of installations and railway sidings with their loads of military stores and troop trains. Whenever he switched on his little transmitter and tried to reach London, or flashed his torch from a fishing boat to some invisible submarine off the coast, he must have held his breath. Waiting for the sharp challenge. The arrest. The beginning of unrelenting, unceasing pain.

But the weather knew of no such problems. As the destroyers lay at their moorings in the great gash of a fjord hacked into Iceland's east coast, they

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