In Danger's Hour by Douglas Reeman

Author:Douglas Reeman [Reeman, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, War & Military, Fiction
ISBN: 9780399133886
Google: iYp1QgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0399133887
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Published: 1988-04-15T06:00:00+00:00

One of Their Own

Sub-Lieutenant Tudor Morgan lifted his face from the wheelhouse voicepipe and squinted into the fierce glare. 'Steady on zero-four-five, sir!'

Ransome crossed to the opposite side of the bridge and grimaced as his bare arm touched the steel plating. It felt like an oven door.

He levelle^ his glasses above the screen and watched the flotilla taking station again for the next sweep, the hoisted black balls showing they were trailing their wires to port.

Their formation keeping was so good now that they could all have been connected by a cable, he thought. He moved the glasses along the echelon of dazzle-painted hulls, the occasional flash of colour from the little flags on their scurrying Oropesa floats. Then Ransome trained his glasses directly astern. How unreal it all looked. More like an ocean than the approaches to Malta. They had begun sweeping at dawn as they had the previous day; now it was halfway through the forenoon watch. There was no horizon, and the great expanse of water was like pale blue milk, rising only slowly in a shallow swell. The sky had no colour at all, and the sun, although covered by haze, shone brilliant white like a furnace bar.

The men working aft with the sweep wire or employed about the upper deck were almost naked, their bodies either brown or uncomfortably reddened in these unfamiliar surroundings. So different from the North Sea and the English Channel, Ransome thought.

It was almost impossible to believe that the purple blur barely visible astern was actually Malta, that these very waters had been fought over continuously since the retreat from Greece and the start of the real desert war against Rommel. The seabed was littered with wrecks, ships of every size, from carriers to tiny sloops, even China River gunboats which had been sent to bolster up the embattled fleet and had soon paid the price for it. Ships of Rudyard Kipling's navy against Stuka dive-bombers, E-boats, and crack Italian cruisers.

And now it was as if the war had never been. In the first dawn light they had headed past a vast fleet of minesweeping trawlers, of the kind which had kept the channels open around Britain since the beginning; many of them were veterans of that war, of Dunkirk and the ill-fated Norwegian campaign.

Ransome had been standing on the bridge, his first cup of tea in his hands as they had pounded through the scattered fleet of trawlers. It had reminded him of a picture his mother still treasured, of a Japanese fishing flotilla with Fujiyama in the background. The same unlikely sea and mist, the ships like models above their own seemingly unmoving images.

Rob Roy was steering north-east; the coast of Sicily lay about forty miles away. Just months ago this area had been dominated by the Luftwaffe, the killing-ground for any vessel which had dared to make for Malta with food and supplies. Overnight, or so it seemed now, all that had changed. Malta was relieved, new airstrips had been hastily laid there by the Americans so that daily fighter patrols could be maintained.

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