Storm Force to Narvik: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 1 by Fullerton Alexander

Author:Fullerton, Alexander [Fullerton, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2004-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Rowan, the skipper, was dead. Everyone on the bridge and in the director tower had been killed. Hardy had run ashore, five or six miles east of here, and Hunter had sunk out in the deep water. The other ships of the Second Flotilla had withdrawn westward now, and Mr Stuart had said he didn’t think the Huns had followed up very far. The Huns had their own problems, he’d said; he reckoned they’d lost three destroyers sunk and at least another three badly damaged, as well as half a dozen store-ships sunk inside the harbour.

So it was a victory, after all. Paul, looking round at the waiting wounded and the discarded dead, had thought of the Duke of Wellington’s much-quoted words about battles lost and won. Here was vivid proof of it. Hoste sinking, while Stuart, Mathieson, and Peters chatted to the men, keeping spirits up. And they had been up: there’d been singing, jokes, leg-pulling.

The loaded Carley float was clear of the ship’s side, being paddled slowly shorewards.

“Right then. You lot with webbed feet—over the side, and we’ll get these lads down to you.” He remembered stripping off his greatcoat and sweaters and the tennis shoes. A scrambling-net had been rigged over the side, for men to climb down. Paul and about a dozen others who reckoned they were better-than-average swimmers were going to shepherd a whole crowd of poorer swimmers and lightly wounded men to the shore. He was going to take one man, a torpedoman with a broken arm, on his back.

Now this was his third trip. Third and a half, really. He’d got his first man ashore and then swum out again about a third of the way to help with stragglers from the group. Two had given up, and drowned; several others had died on the beach. The cold was unimaginable: in the first minutes of the first swim he’d thought he’d die of it, then he’d become used to it and stuck it out more easily, and now it was right inside him, killing … Don’t think about it. He’d told himself more than once that the sole survivor of two guns’ crews didn’t have much to complain about. On his second trip he’d been out to the ship and brought back that fellow Cringle, the man he’d had the barney with. Cringle had a head wound and some cracked ribs, and he hadn’t seemed to know who or where he was, what was happening. Third trip now. Hoste was slanted steeply in the water, stern right down. She’d be gone soon. Lieutenant Mathieson and Mr Stuart had still been on board, making a final search for anyone left alive, last time he’d been out to her. They’d be able to look after themselves, he guessed, but there’d been men in the water here and there, two or three who’d dropped out, or rescuers who’d gone out again and not come back.

This bloody cold. The other thing that was slowing him was the pain in his back—where whatever-it-was had hit him before he’d fallen into the hatch.

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