All the Drowning Seas by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911591559
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2018-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

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With Bizerta thirty miles to starboard, the convoy had altered course to enter the Skerki Channel. Ahead, destroyers streamed minesweeping gear, and astern the heavy escort of battleships and carriers had turned back westward.

There was a sense of total commitment at this point. In fact the convoy had been committed to its purpose from the moment it had left the Clyde, and more deeply so again when, passing through the Gibraltar Strait into the Mediterranean, it had been joined by its heavy naval escort. But now, with only three cruisers and a dozen destroyers remaining, it was actually pushing its head into the noose – the Sicilian Narrows, where there’d be U-boats and E-boats to contend with as well as German air bases on Sicily and Italian torpedo aircraft from Pantellaria.

For the moment, things were quiet, and Paul went aft to get something to eat. The guns were to be manned all night, but the DEMS men would have stand-off periods with their number twos – Short and McNaught, for instance – taking over. Paul, unconvinced of his own value to the community on the foc’sl-head, didn’t think his absence was likely to upset anyone.

The atmosphere in the saloon was cheerful, laced with tension, awareness of the crucial stage they’d reached. There was satisfaction, too, in the fact that losses so far had been light. To have eleven ships still in convoy at this point was better than anyone had expected.

Brill, the doctor, offered, ‘Beer?’

‘I think a large Scotch might fit the occasion better.’

‘Oh, you do, do you!’

‘So would you, if you poked your nose out into the cold. It’s freezing, up on that damn—’

The ship trembled to the deep crump of an explosion.

He thought first, Mine? Because with the sweeping gear out ahead you were conscious of the danger of them, now the convoy was in narrow waters. A second thought was that it might be the Santa Eulalia, her fire reaching the ammunition in her for’ard holds.

Matt Harrison, the Montgovern ’s second engineer, began, ‘Best get up top, boys, or—’

A second explosion was closer, much louder. Movement towards the door became a rush. Up till now most of them had been listening and wondering, waiting for an explanation and not keen to leave their food and drink. Paul was on his way up to the boat deck when the third bang went off. He and Brill and John Pratt, the third mate: they’d been the last out of the saloon. The ship was under helm. He’d thought about the Santa Eulalia because although it had looked from the outside as if her fire had been put out, it could still have been alive inside her; but at the second crash he’d thought, Torpedoes… And the third seemed to confirm it.

Then suddenly he was up on deck, in the open, and off to starboard the Caracas Moon was a sheet of flame. To port of the Montgovern, as she swung under helm to starboard, the AA cruiser

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