Sam Llewellyn - Storm Force from Navarone

‘So,’ he said. ‘Any of you gentlemen speak French?’

Mallory frowned. ‘German,’ he said. ‘Greek.’

Andrea yawned and covered his mouth with a gigantic hand, still covered in bandages from the abrasions he had sustained holding onto the iron rungs of a ladder under the flume of water from the bursting Zenitsa dam.

‘I do,’ said Dusty Miller.

‘Fluent?’

‘I had a job in Montreal once,’ said Miller, his eyes blue and innocent. ‘Doorman in a cathouse.’

‘Thank you, Corporal,’ said Jensen.

‘Il n’y a pas de quoi,’ said Miller, with old-world courtesy.

‘We’ve found you some interpreters,’ said Jensen.

Mallory sighed inwardly. He knew Jensen. When Jensen wanted you aboard, you were aboard, and the only thing to do was to check the location of the life jackets provided, and settle in for the ride. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why do we need to speak French?’

Jensen grinned a grin that would have looked impressive on a hungry shark. He walked across the bronze carpet to the huge ormolu desk, bare except for two telephones, one red, one black. He said, ‘There is someone I want you to meet.’ He picked up the black telephone. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Please send in the gentlemen in the waiting room.’

Mallory gazed at the veining on a marble pillar. Aircraft were droning overhead, flying air support for the troops advancing north from the wreckage of the Gustav Line. He lit another cigarette, the taste of the last one still bitter in his mouth. He wanted to sleep for a week. Make that a month -

The door opened, and two men came in. One of them was a tall major with a Guards moustache. The other was shorter, stocky and bull-necked, with three pips on his epaulettes.

‘Major Dyas. Intelligence,’ said Jensen. ‘And Captain Killigrew. SAS.’

Major Dyas nodded. Captain Killigrew fixed each man in turn with a searching glare. His face was brick-red from the sun, and something that Mallory decided was anger. Mallory returned his salute. Andrea nodded and, being a foreigner, got away with it. Dusty Miller remained horizontal in his chair, acknowledging Killigrew by opening one eye and raising a bony hand.

Killigrew swelled like a toad. Jensen’s ice-blue eyes flicked between the two men. He said quickly, ‘Take a seat, Captain. Major, do your stuff.’

Killigrew lowered himself stiffly onto a hard chair, on which he sat bolt upright, not touching the backrest.

‘Yah,’ said Dyas. ‘You may smoke.’ Mallory and Miller were already smoking. Dyas ran his hand over his high, intellectual forehead. He could have been a doctor, or a professor of philosophy.

Jensen said, ‘Major Dyas has kindly agreed to brief you on the background to this … little job.’ Mallory leaned back in his chair. He was still tired, but soon there would be something to override the tiredness. The same something he remembered from huts in the Southern Alps, after a gruelling approach march, two hours’ sleep, and waking in the dark chill before dawn. Soon there would be no way to go but up and over. Climbing and fighting: plan your campaign, grit your teeth, do the job or die in the attempt. There were similarities.

‘Now then,’ said Dyas. ‘To start with. What you are about to hear is known to only seven men in the world, now ten, including you. Other people have the individual bits and pieces, but what counts is the … totality.’ He paused to stuff tobacco into a blackened pipe, and applied an oil well-sized Zippo. ‘June is going to be an important month of this war,’ he said from inside a rolling cloud of smoke. ‘Probably the most important yet.’ Miller’s eyes had opened. Andrea was sitting forward in his chair, massive forearms on his stained khaki knees. ‘We are going to take a gamble,’ said Dyas. ‘A big gamble. And we want you to adjust the odds for us.’

Miller said, ‘Trust Captain Jensen to run a crooked game.’

‘Sorry?’ said Dyas.

Mallory said, ‘The Corporal was expressing his enthusiasm.’

‘Ah.’ Another cloud of smoke.

Mallory could feel that jump of excitement in his stomach. ‘This gamble,’ he said. ‘A new front?’

Dyas said, ‘Put it like this. What we are going to need is complete control of the seas. We’re good in the air, we’re fine on the surface. But there’s a hitch.’ Killigrew’s face was darkening. Looks as if he’ll burst a blood vessel, thought Mallory. Wonder what he’s got to do with this.

‘Submarines,’ said Dyas. ‘U-boats. There has been an idea current that between airborne radar and asdic and huff-duff radio direction finding, we had ‘em licked.’ Another cloud of smoke. ‘An idea we all had. Until a couple of months ago.

‘In March we had a bit of trouble with some Atlantic convoys, and their escorts too. Basically, ships started to sink in a way we hadn’t seen ships sink for two years now.’ The professorial face was grim and hard. ‘And it was odd. You’d get a series of explosions in say a two-hundred-mile circle, and you’d think, same old thing, U-boats moving together, wolf pack. But it wasn’t a wolf pack, because there was no radio traffic, and the sinkings were too far apart. So then they thought it was possibly mines. But it didn’t seem to be mines either, because one day in late March HMS Frantic, an escort destroyer, picked up an echo seven hundred miles off Cape Finisterre. There had been two sinkings in the convoy. The destroyer went in pursuit, but lost it.’ He returned to his pipe.

‘Nothing unusual about that,’ said Mallory.

Dyas nodded, mildly. ‘Except that the destroyer was steaming full speed ahead at the time, and the submarine just sailed away from her.’

‘Sorry?’ said Miller.

‘The destroyer was steaming at thirty-five knots,’ said Dyas. The U-boat was doing easily five knots better than that.’

Miller said, ‘Why is this guy telling us all this stuff?’

Mallory said, ‘I think Corporal Miller would like to know the significance of this fact.’

Jensen said, ‘Excuse me, Major Dyas.’ His face wore an expression of strained patience. ‘For your information, U-boats have to spend most of their time on the surface, running their diesels to make passage and charge their batteries. Submerged, their best speed has so far been under ten knots, and they can’t keep it up for long because of the limitations of their batteries.’ His face was cold and grim, its deep creases as if carved from stone. ‘So what we’re faced with is this: the English Channel full of the biggest fleet of ships ever assembled, and these U-boats - big U-boats - carrying a hundred torpedoes each, God knows they’re big enough - travelling at forty knots, under water. We know Jerry’s got at least three of them. That could mean three hundred ships sunk, and Lord knows how many men lost.’

Miller said, ‘So you get one quick echo. Not much of a basis for total panic stations. How fast do whales swim?’

Jensen snapped, ‘Try keeping your ears open and your mouth shut.’

It was only then that Mallory saw the strain the man was under. The Jensen he knew was relaxed, with that naval quarterdeck sang-froid. Piratical, yes; aggressive, yes. Those were his stock in trade. But always calm. As long as Mallory had known Jensen, he had never known him lose his temper - not even with Dusty Miller, who did not hold with officers. But this was a Jensen balanced on a razor-honed knife’s edge.

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and frowned. Then he said, ‘Corporal Miller’s got a point, sir.’

‘Whales,’ said Dyas. ‘Actually, we thought of that. But one has been … adding up two and two.’ His mild voice was balm to the frazzled nerves under the frescoed ceiling. ‘Another escort reported ramming a large submarine. Then a Liberator got shot up bombing two U-boats escorting a third that bore signs of having been rammed. They were huge, these boats, steaming at thirty-odd knots on the surface. The Liberator reported them as damaged. But when we sent more aircraft out to search for them, they had vanished.

‘They were reckoned to be in no state to dive, so they were presumed sunk. Then there was a message picked up - doesn’t matter what sort of message, doesn’t matter where, but take it from me, it was a reliable message - to say that the Werwolf pack was refitting after damage caused by enemy action. Said refit to be complete by noon Wednesday of the second week in May.’

It was now Sunday of the second week in May.

The painted vaults of the ceiling filled with silence. Mallory said, ‘So these submarines. What are they?’

‘Hard to say,’ said Dyas, with an academic scrupulousness that would have irritated Mallory, if he had been the sort of man who got irritated about things. ‘The Kriegsmarine have maintained pretty good security, but we’ve been able to patch a couple of ideas together. We know they’ve got a new battery system for underwater running, which stores a lot of power. A lot of power. But there’ve been rumours about something else. We think it’s more likely to be something new. Development of an idea by a chap called Walter. They’ve been working on it since the thirties. An internal combustion engine that runs under water. Burns fuel oil.’

Miller’s eyes had opened now, and he was sitting in a position that for him was almost upright. He said, ‘What in?’

‘In?’ Dyas frowned.

‘You can’t burn fuel oil under water. You need oxygen.’

‘Ah. Yes. Quite. Good question.’ Miller did not look flattered. Engines were his business. He knew how to make them run. He knew even more about destroying them. ‘Nothing definite. But they think it’s probably something like hydrogen peroxide. On the surface, you’d aspirate your engine with air, of course. As you submerged, you’d have an automatic changeover, a float switch perhaps, that would close the air intake and start up a disintegrator that would get you oxygen out of something like hydrogen peroxide. So you’d get a carbon dioxide exhaust, which would dissolve in sea water. Or so the theory goes.’

Jensen stood up. ‘Theory or no theory,’ he said, ‘they’re refitting. They must be destroyed before they can go to sea again. And you’re going to do the destroying.’

Mallory said, ‘Where are they?’

Dyas unrolled a map that hung on the wall behind him. It showed France and Northern Spain, the brown corrugations of the Pyrenees marching from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and snaking down the spine of the mountains the scarlet track of the border. He said, They were bombed off Cabo Ortegal. They couldn’t dive, so they wouldn’t have gone north. We believe that they are here.’ He picked up a billiard cue and tapped the long, straight stretch of coast that ran from Bordeaux south through Biarritz and St-Jean-de-Luz to the Spanish border.

Mallory looked at the pointer. There were three ports: Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. Otherwise, the coast was a straight line that looked as if it probably meant a beach. He said, ‘Where?’

Dyas avoided his eye and fumbled at his moustache. Since he had been in the room, he had found himself increasingly unnerved by the stillness of these men, the wary relaxation of their deep-eyed faces. The big one with the black moustache was silent and dangerous, with a horrible sort of power about him. Of the other two, one seemed slovenly and the other insubordinate. They looked like, well, gangsters. Dashed unmilitary, thought Dyas. But Jensen knew what he was doing. Famous for it. Still, Mallory’s question was not a question he much liked.

He said, ‘Well, Spain’s a neutral country.’ He forced himself not to laugh nervously. ‘And we’ve got good intelligence from Bordeaux, so we know they’re not there.’ He coughed, more nervously than he had intended. ‘In fact, we don’t know where they are.’