The Waiting Game

3

3

OLSEN BENT TO THE RIM of the voicepipe and shouted, ‘Control Room!’ The helmsman’s voice answered him, and he yelled, ‘Open all L.P. master blows!’ The order was repeated back, and Olsen straightened, lifted the binoculars to his eyes and resumed the careful, all-round lookout. He was the officer of the watch in Setter’s lurching, rocking bridge; they were heading north, on the surface, the diesels churning the screws round at three hundred and eighty revolutions a minute, giving the submarine a speed of advance of about eleven knots. The sea was on the quarter, making it uncomfortable down below in the compartments but comparatively dry up top; plenty of spray, but no green water coming over.

The voicepipe called, ‘Bridge!... All L.P. master blows open!’ and Olsen shouted into the tube, ‘Start the blower!’ In rough weather, air leaked from the main ballast tanks through the open holes in the bottoms of them; some more air forced into them every few hours brought the submarine up to her normal draft and lessened the discomfort for the watchkeepers. It wasn’t only comfort, but the efficiency of the watch; the more spray, the more often a man had to pause in his looking-out to wipe the salt off the end glasses of his binoculars. Olsen let the blower run for five minutes, then had it stopped and the valves shut.

They’d sailed later than expected; topping-up the fresh water tanks and loading fresh stores had occupied most of the forenoon, and MacGregor had decided they’d lunch in harbor and sail after they’d had it. He’d lunched ashore with Commander Grierson, in Grierson’s house. Olsen had his in the submarine, with only the First Lieutenant for company; he was a young Englishman named Crawshaw, who’d been at Dartmouth. The other two officers, the navigator and the engineer, went ashore to the Base, both for their own relaxation and to give less work to Setter’s wardroom messman.

Crawshaw, the First Lieutenant, was tall, slim and fair; he was younger than the Norwegian, and his air of casual superiority was slightly irritating. He laughed a great deal after saying things that were not, to Olsen, at all funny. When the Norwegian failed to understand a remark, and this happened quite frequently, Crawshaw would repeat it more and more loudly but without any simplification of his vocabulary; and when Olsen still didn’t get the sense of the words, Crawshaw’d look cross and mutter, ‘Oh, hell, skip it!’ Then there’d be a silence until it started all over again. But they were all right talking shop, because Olsen knew the words.

The voicepipe called again. Olsen bent to it: ‘Bridge.’ The helmsman asked him, ‘Permission to relieve lookouts, Sir?’

That meant it was just on six, and the watch changing. They’d left harbor at about two, and the First Lieutenant had taken the watch until four-thirty (the officers changed over half a horn - after the rest of the watch) when Olsen had relieved him for the two hours of the First Dog. Now, about half an hour to go, and from now until they got back from this patrol, or whatever it was, it’d be two hours on and four hours off, all round the clock.

During the afternoon the captain, MacGregor, had been working at the chart table, and in the tiny wardroom Olsen spent the time getting to know the navigator, an R.N.V.R. Sub-Lieutenant called Soames, and the engineer, a Keyham lieutenant with the odd name of Massingbird and a jutting red beard. Soames told him that the beard looked red now, all right, but that long before the end of a patrol it was a dirty brown color from the oil which it gathered while its owner was peering into pieces of machinery.

‘Bridge!’ He answered again, stooping: ‘Bridge.’ A new voice reported ‘Helmsman relieved, Sir. Course oh-oh-five, three-eight-oh revolutions.’

‘Very good.’ Olsen pulled a wad of damp periscope paper out of the pocket of his waterproof Ursula suit (so called because this sort of protective clothing had been designed by a man who, at that time, was commanding a submarine named Ursula) and cleaned the glasses of his binoculars for about the fiftieth time in a hundred minutes. He glanced round at the lookouts: they were the reliefs, who’d just come up, but muffled in their protective clothing they looked exactly like the two who’d gone below: both of them had their glasses at their eyes, slowly turning as they swept the broken, heaving line of the horizon. The safety of the submarine and the lives of all the men in her depended entirely, at this moment, on those eyes, on theirs and his; on their seeing any enemy or sign of him before that enemy saw Setter. It meant continuous lookout, utter concentration, from each of them for the whole two hours of the watch. Braced between the sides of the bridge and the periscope standards, shiny-wet already from the flying spray, they seemed rooted to the ship itself as it pitched, rolled and staggered; only their heads and shoulders and arms moved as they pivoted slowly, searching the sea and sky.

A dozen feet above the top of the after-periscope standard, a solitary gull kept perfect station, floating, gliding, never moving its great, spread wings. Now and then it tilted to a changing gust of wind, and its head moved jerkily, suspiciously, as if it were keeping a close watch on the submarine and on her every movement. The gull had been there when he’d taken over the watch, and it hadn’t changed its station by an inch.

The diesels rumbled steadily into the spreading wake, driving Setter northwards, towards the circle of the midnight sun.

‘How’s the weather, Sub?’ MacGregor asked the question from his bunk as Olsen stopped in the gangway opposite the wardroom space, shedding his wet Ursula suit and making puddles on the deck as the water ran off it.

‘Better, Sir, I think. Wind dropping a little and I think the sea going down too.’

‘Thank God for that.’ The Captain rolled over onto his back and went on reading his thriller. The engineer was turned in, too; only Crawshaw sat at the wardroom table, entering figures from sheets of paper into some sort of ledger. Probably battery readings. Olsen hung the two parts of the waterproof suit on hooks behind the heavy bulkhead door (which was kept latched back and shut only in emergencies, Collision Stations and Depth Charging) and slid himself onto a bench at the table.

The wardroom was no more than a square alcove off the gangway that ran the length of the submarine; it could be shut off from it, when anyone wanted to, by a curtain which hung from a rail on the deckhead. It held five bunks: the Captain’s, by itself on the for’ard bulkhead, two against the curving starboard side of the pressure-hull, two more on the after bulkhead. Of the latter pair, the lower one belonged to the engineer, and the upper was his own.

Olsen hadn’t asked anyone, yet, what Setter was going north for, in the off-season. He’d hoped that someone might have volunteered the information. Since they hadn’t, he decided to ask.

‘Captain, Sir.’

‘Uh?’ MacGregor turned his head and looked at him.

‘This is a bad time for northern waters. Can I ask what we are going for?’

MacGregor grinned. He shoved the novel down the side of his bunk, swung his legs out and slid down to sit on the bench facing Olsen. It was something of a gymnastic feat, the way he did it.

‘You can ask, Olsen old chum, but I’m buggered if I can tell you.’

‘So.’ Olsen nodded. That was that!

‘But I’ll tell you one thing you don't know, and as everyone else knows it I dare say it’s time you did.’ Olsen watched his face, waiting, and the Captain went on. ‘You aren’t here by accident, and Henning, the chap we landed in Lerwick, hasn’t got a damn thing wrong with him. It’s a put-up job, you might say; and pretty bloody stupid, too, the way they complicated it.’

Olsen couldn’t think of any suitable comment. He waited; the Captain fished a tin of cigarettes out of a drawer behind him, under the bunk, and offered them round. Crawshaw shook his head, but Olsen took one and produced matches.

MacGregor blew a cloud of smoke at the overhead lamp, on which someone had pasted labels off gin and whisky bottles.

‘We were on patrol, you see, near Wilhelmshaven, and they recalled us suddenly to Dundee. We’d only been on the billet a day. When we got in, I was told we had to do some special job up this way; we had thirty-six hours in Dundee and shoved off again for Lerwick. If some stupid bastard in the Admiralty had realized, we were going back into Dundee you could have been sent to join us there. But they sent you up to Lerwick, a week ahead of us, instead ... ’

The Captain drew hard on his cigarette. ‘If they’ve half a chance to tie a thing up in knots, that’s what they do.’ Suddenly he looked round and shouted, ‘Ellis! Where’s our supper?’

The wardroom messman, a skinny seaman in overalls, stuck his head and shoulders round the bulkhead doorway. ‘Won’t be long now, Sir. Soup’ll be up in a couple o’ minutes.’

‘Soup?’ Crawshaw glanced up from his figures. ‘What sort of soup, Ellis?’

The messman shrugged. ‘I dunno what sort it is, Sir. But it smells somethin’ ’orrible.’ He withdrew, and MacGregor grinned at the First Lieutenant, who’d only raised his eyebrows and gone back to work.

‘Well, Olsen, I don’t know what this job is, but apparently we have to have a bloke that can talk Norwegian. For some other reason they didn’t want us to take an extra man: so the answer was to swap an officer. All that bull, pretending Henning was sick, was laid on by some cloak-and-dagger expert who reckoned that if we swapped you two over openly, in Lerwick, some fifth columnist or whatnot might hear of it and get an idea we were going to - well, do whatever we bloody well are going to do. Obviously, we’re going to get within at any rate hailing distance of someone who talks your language, so one might reasonably imagine that we’ll be going close inshore somewhere.’

Olsen hadn’t taken in every word, but he had the gist of it. MacGregor pointed at the chart table. ‘Give me the chart that’s under the top one, will you? ... That’s it. Now... ’ He spread it out on the table. ‘Look. We’ve got to hang around - here. It’s about three hundred miles from Lerwick, so we’ll be there tomorrow night. Not that there’ll be any night, in the true sense of the word.’

Olsen checked quickly. The place the Captain had marked with a small penciled cross was roughly latitude 65 north and longitude 5 east. His eye travelled to the familiar shape of the Norwegian coast, and he thought, about a hundred and fifty miles north west of Trondheim - which the Germans are using as a base for some of their U-boats ...

MacGregor was saying, ‘We’ve got to wait there and try not to get spotted until we get a signal giving us further orders.’ Olsen looked up from the chart thoughtfully, and the Captain added, ‘And that’s all I can tell you, because it’s all I bloody well know.’ He stubbed out his cigarette, and muttered, ‘How the hell we avoid getting spotted when there won’t be any dark hours, they didn’t try to explain.’

‘Supper’s about on, Sir.’ Ellis was back; he waited while Crawshaw collected his paperwork and Olsen removed the ashtray (which had the name of a Gibraltar hotel around its edges), then flipped a more-or-less white cloth across the table. When he’d smoothed it down, it was less white where his hands had touched it. MacGregor frowned.

‘Ellis. Before you do anything else, go and wash your hands.’ The messman seemed surprised. He said, ‘Conserving fresh water, Sir. First Lieutenant’s orders.’

‘Go and wash, Ellis.’

‘Aye aye, Sir.’

In a minute he was back, flipping down spoons, knives and forks as if they were cards he was dealing. Olsen looked at him, and Ellis said, ‘Nothin’ up me sleeves, Sir. It’s the quickness of the ’ands deceives the eye.’

Massingbird, the engineer, climbed wearily out of his bunk, and sat beside Olsen, yawning and scratching his beard. He peered through half-closed eyes at the table, and murmured, ‘I can’t understand why that man gives us forks for sardines, when he knows damn well we only spread ’em on bread.’ He stared morosely at the First Lieutenant, holding him responsible, and Crawshaw asked him, ‘How d’you know it’s sardines?’

‘Can’t you smell the bloody things?’

‘Soup, Sir.’ Ellis plonked down two cups in saucers, and went back to the galley for more. Crawshaw said, ‘It’s the soup you’re smelling, Chief. It’s made of bad fish.’

The Captain sniffed at his, and tasted it. ‘I think you’re right, Number One. Bad fish.’ But he went on sipping it, and Ellis brought in the other two cups. He asked the Captain, ‘All right, Sir?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘I reckon it’s several things, Sir. Kind of a mixture, like, as the Chef thought of. It smells ... ’

‘... ing awful. You were quite right.’ MacGregor had cut him short. ‘Ask Chef what it is.’

‘Aye aye, Sir.’ The messman went away, and they heard muttering in the galley, next door. Only the Captain and Olsen were drinking the soup; the other two had pushed their cups into the middle of the table, and Chief had his eyes shut.

Ellis came back, and coughed. ‘Chef says it’s Potage Maison, Sir. ’E says the recipe’s secret, like ... ’ The messman stared solemnly at Crawshaw. ‘It’s frightenin’, ain’t it, Sir?’

After supper (the rest of it was mutton and roast potatoes: they’d got the fresh meat in Lerwick), the Captain struggled into an Ursula suit and, muttering, ‘Get some fresh air before I turn in,’ left them. Olsen heard the helmsman call up to Soames, on watch, ‘Bridge! Captain coming up Sir!’ Anyone except the Captain needed the officer of the watch’s permission to go up; and usually, if the submarine was in an area where the enemy might be encountered, the O.O.W. would restrict such visitors to one at a time. If you had to dive in a hurry, you didn’t want a whole mass of people queueing to get down through the hatch. Two lookouts and one officer made quite enough of a crowd if you were going to submerge in twenty seconds flat; and twenty seconds could feel like as many minutes if there was an aircraft dropping on you from the clouds. (The aircraft didn’t even have to belong to the enemy: the friendly sort were just as dangerous. To most pilots, any submarine was a target to be bombed.)

Crawshaw muttered, ‘Anyone mad about fresh air, he can keep my watch for me.’ He was working at his record-book again, but he’d be on watch in forty minutes. When he came off, at ten-thirty, it’d be Olsen’s turn again.

Olsen considered the idea of trying to get a couple of hours’ sleep. But he wasn’t tired yet, and he knew he’d only lie there and think about this extraordinary trip, and wonder what they needed him for. It was no good theorizing: when the orders came, the answers wouldn’t fit any of the guesses. It’d be either disappointing, or just plain terrifying. And as to that, nobody with any imagination at all could feel exactly nonchalant about the plans as they were already known; to hang around, for considerable periods on the surface, in daylight, within long-range spitting distance of a busy U-boat base - well, that was enough to start with.

Olsen pulled some files and loose-leaf notes out of the drawer where they were kept by Henning, the man whose place he’d taken. He browsed slowly through them, stopping at points of interest to study the things he felt he should know about: the detailed orders for such evolutions as Gun Action or the dispatch of a Boarding Party - which would be his job. He checked through the Torpedo Log, which contained a record of the maintenance routines carried out regularly on each of the submarine’s torpedoes. She carried thirteen: six in the bow tubes, ready for firing, six reloads in their racks in the Fore Ends (which was where most of the crew lived), and one in the solitary stern tube - the sting in Setter’s tail. In the same book were the names and personal details of the torpedomen, starting with the T.I., a Chief Petty Officer named Rawlinson. (T.I. stood, oddly enough, for Torpedo Gunner’s Mate. A T.G.M. used to be called a Torpedo Instructor, and now the name had been changed but the old letters stuck, to baffle foreigners like Olsen.)

Olsen had talked things over with Rawlinson, before they’d sailed from Lerwick; he was a tall, rather silent man, with the best part of a lifetime of Naval service behind him. What the talk had boiled down to was that the department was secure in Rawlinson’s seasoned and very capable hands and that so far as he, the T.I., was concerned, it wouldn’t make much difference if the Torpedo Officer was a c******n with two heads. Rawlinson hadn’t said that, of course, or anything like it. It was simply there, and both of them knew it.

‘First Lieutenant, Sir.’ A messenger had come from the Control Room. ‘Ten minutes, Sir.’ Crawshaw glanced up at him, then at the clock on the bulkhead. He sighed.

‘All right, Baker. Thank you.’ As the messenger turned away, he bumped into the Captain, who’d just come down from the bridge.

‘Oh, sorry, Sir! I didn’t - ’

‘Think nothing of it.’ MacGregor grinned at the seaman. ‘How’s that redhead of yours, Baker?’

‘She’s all right, Sir, thank you.’ Baker left, chuckling to himself. MacGregor dragged his arms out of the Ursula jacket. ‘She certainly is all right.’ He waved his hands in the air, indicating the shape of an hourglass, and told Olsen, ‘She’s really something ... You’re on watch in a couple of hours, Sub. Better get your head down, hadn’t you?’

Olsen nodded. He’d been thinking of it. The Captain added, ‘Dare say we’ll be ducking up and down rather a lot, after tomorrow. I’d get all the zizz you can, if I were you.’

Olsen pulled off his rubber-soled, canvas shoes; he stood upon the bench he’d been sitting on and taking great care not to disturb the engineer who was asleep in the lower berth, he prepared his bunk for occupation. This wasn’t a long job. The bedding, neatly stacked, consisted of two blankets and a single pillow; he spread one of the blankets out, double, with the fold against the bulkhead and the open edges facing him along the side of the bunk, and pushed the pillow in between the two thicknesses at the head end. The other blanket went on top, doubled. Olsen folded back the three upper thicknesses, and climbed in. He took his shoes with him, and stowed them under the pillow, where he’d find them easily instead of having to grope about on the floor; turning-out in an emergency was a hellish enough business without having to grope around on the deckboards, banging your head on the legs of the table and against the heads of three other people doing the same thing. In small spaces, life was easier for the man who organized his movements in advance ...

The Captain was already turned-in, motionless, perhaps even asleep. Olsen stretched out to the lamp that hung over the table, and switched it off. Then he drew the curtains along the side of his bunk, lay back, and closed his eyes.

It was a strange feeling, to be shut out of your own country, to know it was full of Germans, and to be going, now, so close to its shores. Not that he had people there - not close ones - to think about. Most of his friends had been at sea when the balloon went up, and, like him, they’d stayed out. As for his family - well, there weren’t any, really. His father had died a year before the war began, and his mother’d been dead for five years before that. He’d no brothers, only a sister, and she was in Australia. Two aunts, and an uncle who was a retired whalerman, had been alive three years ago; but it was two years since he’d written to them, and there’s been no answer to any of those letters.

No girlfriends, either. Except - well, the one he sometimes thought of at moments like this, times when he wanted to think about his own people, stake a claim in memory if nothing else to a past which was fragmentary and which largely eluded him. He’d been abroad so much, even before the war. And tankers spend little time in their home ports.

He didn’t even know her name. She had a face, though it floated in his memory (or was it in his imagination, the result of his trying to see it?) somehow bright, always, as if when he thought of her there was a spotlight that caught the high, smooth forehead, the small, well-shaped nose and soft, wide mouth. Her hair, he knew, was blonde and fine - contrasting with his own, which was dark and very thick - and her eyes were...

Half asleep, he battled for the color of her eyes. They’d be blue, with that hair. But they weren’t blue. Grey? Brown? He was straining to see and to know as he sank into sleep, but the girl’s face was only a splash of light, an aura; to try to bring it into focus was like trying to close your hand on smoke.

Vaguely, at a distance, he heard Soames kicking off his sea boots, turning in, and he thought, reluctantly, It doesn’t matter. She’ll be someone else’s girl, by now ... Although, while he couldn’t get her face clear, couldn’t see her eyes at all, he could hear her voice so clearly that she might have been talking with her lips against his ear!

He fell asleep smiling, liking the things she said.