A Share of Honour by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911591566
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2019-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

As soon as they surfaced that evening Creagh went down on to the casing to do a maintenance routine on the gun. It was mostly a matter of greasing it, with the grey grease called ‘non-floaters’, a special submarine lubricant that left no oily trail in the sea. Creagh did the job fast, at least as keenly aware as Paul was in her bridge that if an enemy showed up suddenly Ultra would have to dive and leave her gunlayer to swim around until she could surface again and try to find him. He sponged out the bore, and coated the breech mechanism and other moving parts with the heavy grease; then shells were brought up and passed down to him, and he refilled the ready-use lockers and screwed their lids down tight. He was below now, on watch as helmsman, patched grey with non-floaters and noticeably cheerful. Ruck had summoned him and his team to the control room earlier, to congratulate them on their first gun action and its success. It wasn’t every 3-inch gun, he’d pointed out, that opened its career by bagging a 4000-ton ship and a full cargo of ammunition – ammunition that would not, now, be used against the Eighth Army in the desert.

Ultra had been clear of the Zera Spit and its sandbanks by noon, and she’d paddled eastward all day at periscope depth without seeing anything except a few passing aircraft. Some of which, probably, would have been scouting for her… The course now was 100 degrees, to bring her back to the billet northwest of Tripoli. With seventy miles to cover and all night in which to do it she was using only one diesel to push her along, while the other put new life into the battery.

Moon streaked the sea. Before long it would be hidden behind cloud, but at its present low altitude it would be silhouetting the submarine to any observer astern or on the quarter. It gave one an unpleasantly vulnerable feeling to know it – particularly with Ruck’s fresh warnings in mind, his lecture on the subject of the U-boat threat. According to Intelligence reports, there were twenty-one German U-boats here in the Mediterranean. One had also to keep in mind, he’d pointed out this evening in the wardroom before they’d surfaced, that Ultra had sunk one ship last night not more than fifteen miles south of her present track, and blasted another into scrap-iron a few hours ago in the Zera shallows. The enemy would hardly be unaware of the presence of a submarine on this stretch of coast: and they wouldn’t be well-disposed towards it, either.

‘Port look-out relieved, sir.’

That was the second one. Paul asked, without interrupting his own looking-out, ‘Who’s taken over?’

‘Stapleton, sir.’

Baldy Stapleton…

‘Need to be on our toes tonight, Stapleton. They’re likely to be looking for us.’

‘Aye, sir. I was just thinking it’s a bit lit-up, like.’

Searching: swivelling slowly, probing the peculiar areas of light, half-light and blackness. Hating that low-slung moon – at which, elsewhere, lovers might be gazing.

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