In the Mid North Atlantic the sea was turning angry, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream running up against a cold Arctic front. It was a mixed blessing for Convoy R-1, for on the one hand, it meant that enemy subs’ sonar would have a harder time separating ships’ engines from the turmoil of the air-sea interface, where hollows had become deeper, troughs more frequent. It was, however, also more difficult for the convoy escorts, or rather those that were left, to detect the noise of submarine props in the turbulence as increasingly heavy seas crashed against the ships, distorting the noise patterns even further. It wasn’t impossible for the operators to work, but it made them much more tense than usual, conscious of how false echoes, or blips wrongly interpreted, could cause the launching of a SUBROC missile from the convoy’s escorts into its own Sea King helo screen, as happened earlier.
An equal possibility, HMS Peregrine’s captain realized, was to mistake one of your screen subs as an enemy sub, or to throw it into the suspicious “unknown” category. Accordingly, at 2200 hours he ordered mirror semaphore to signal all destroyers and frigates to be especially alert to this danger lest they prematurely launch a torpedo or depth charge attack. “The situation’s complicated, Number One,” the captain added, “because none of our sub screen will, of course, come up and radio their position to us for fear of revealing themselves to Ivan.”
For this reason the captain reminded all those on the bridge and in the combat control room that they had to be particularly cautious if one of their own Trafalgar subs from R-1’s screen picked up an enemy sub. The Trafalgar’s skipper’s plan of attack would more likely than not mean he’d have to take the Trafalgar out of the fan-shaped sub screen and, in order not to reveal its position to the enemy, would be unable to notify the convoy. This could result in electronic misidentification of the kind that had caused a USS guided missile cruiser, Vincennes, to shoot down a commercial air bus in 1988.
Further down the line, in HMS Peregrine’s mess, William Spence was witnessing one of the strangest sights of R-1 ‘s voyage so far, indeed one of the strangest sights in the whole British navy. Leading Seaman Carswell, with a full cup of coffee placed carefully atop a small silver salver, proceeded to carry out the first steps in the dance that had won him fame throughout the fleet as the only steward in the fleet who, leaving the galley with a full cup of coffee, could deliver it to the bridge unspilled, no matter how rough the weather. In the worst storms, with the litheness of a prima ballerina, fighting gravity against impossible angles, he was a sight to behold, as he began his trip toward the stairwells, his legs seemingly made of rubber, sometimes walking back, giving a few paces, then recovering the lost distance the next second with a short, fast run, the cup held aloft as if he himself were in a gimbals mounting. More than once, new lieutenants had lost a day’s pay by having an unofficial wager with another officer, waiting impatiently upon the news that Carswell had left the galley and was now on his way up, expecting the seaman would trip at least once on the way. But so far it had not happened, leaving Carswell with what the ship’s company called an unbroken number of “FCDs”—full cups delivered. Several crew had already written inquiring whether Carswell’s feat qualified for mention in the Guiness Book of Records. They hoped a reply would be waiting for them when they returned to their home base at Plymouth.
The Peregrine leaned hard aport as a starboard wave struck her, the well deck awash athwartships, the bursting white cloud of spray enveloping the bridge with a sound like hail. It would soon be a force eight, the bollards already covered in foam, water rushing down the decks like a spring runoff, spilling out through the stern scuppers and swirling about the aft twin Sea Dart launcher, the flow broken but not stopped by the Limbo mortar before pouring back into the sea.
Visibility was now down to two miles, more whitecaps evident as R-1 continued to plow ahead.
“Only time I’d like being in a submarine,” Johnson said in the galley, he and Spence having left spreading the Marmite sandwiches till last. “All this bloody rockin’ and rollin’ is for the—”
“Action stations!” came the voice over the “Tannoy,” the PA system, and before Johnson could pick up another slice of bread, he, Spence, and the cook could hear the sound of running feet in the passageway outside the crew’s mess. Spence had expected a lot of shouting from petty officers and the like, but what struck him was the lack of any harshly shouted orders, the ship’s crew reacting more like a well-trained sports team than men at war.
On the bridge, the sonar operator calmly reported, “Contact, bearing two oh five degrees.”
“Half speed,” ordered the Peregrine’s captain, reducing the noise of his own ship’s prop.
To help avoid giving away Peregrine’s position, her sonar was on passive, and so no range could be registered. But the captain knew that a good operator, knowing his own set and ship, often developed a reasonably good guesstimate. “Can you give me a distance, Sonar?”
“I’d say five thousand yards, sir.”
Quickly Peregrine’s captain looked up at the computer board, comparing the vector plot of R-1’s course and his present position. It put the noise about two miles away, at a wide angle from where the convoy’s screen subs should be.
“Contact gone, sir.”
“Completely?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Odd,” the captain said, turning to his number one. “Damned odd. Any thoughts?” He looked about the bridge-it was no time for pride. “Anyone?”
“Wreck, sir — old oil drum or something moving? I mean, sir,” he continued, “something hitting it — you know, rock slide or something—”
“Could be, Chief.
“Contact bearing two six one.”
“Go active,” commanded the captain. “All round sweep.”
“Aye, sir. On active. All around sweep.” Now the inside of the Peregrine’s bow began to twang as its hull-seated transducer, in effect two metal plates buckling under electric charge, sent the distinctive sonar pinging noise into the ocean’s depths, the operator turning the echo onto the bridge’s Tannoy, the sonar sweeping from zero degrees to 360 every two minutes.
“Contact. Bearing two six one. Range eight hundred yards. Moving fast… Contact. Bearing two six oh. Range seven six oh yards. No props noise, sir. I’d say a mine.”
“Torpedo motor?”
“No, sir. No beat count.”
Without taking his eyes from the sonar screen, the captain waited for the two seconds as the computer digitized all incoming information, telling him that whatever it was, was coming at them at forty miles per hour. Impact in 4.71 minutes — on the starboard side — and countermeasures giving him the IAVS— impact avoidance vector and speed.
“Notify all ships. Steering by IAV.” Unhappily he knew that none of the merchantmen had IAV capability. “By voice to transports. Plain language.”
“Aye, sir. To transports in plain.”
“Follow the ship in front of them.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The computer IAVs were entered into the Peregrine’s memory and she swung hard aport, her type eight steam/gas-combination-driven prop driving her at twenty-four knots, her decks now constantly awash as she heeled sharply to avoid impact.
“Same contact. One one seven degrees. One thousand yards.”
“Identify?”
“Negative. But different from the other.”
By the time the new IAVs had been spat out by the computer, it was too late for the Peregrine, the captain realizing it was not an isolated mine coming for them but a series, probably combination pressure/noise, triggered by the active pulse the Peregrine had just sent out. Like a man trapped in an ever-shrinking room, the IAVs were now seemingly accessories to the fact, for wherever the ship moved, there was another ping. Carswell had just placed the coffee in the captain’s special gimbals-mounting cup holder when Peregrine was hit. The second mine she had picked up on sonar was the first to explode as she turned into its path, the mine homing in on the keel at the forward end of the engine room, the second blast cleaving her well below her waterline at the stern and buckling the prop, lifting the destroyer’s stern completely out of the water. As her bow rose high, then fell, a breaker came rolling down under her like a leaden gray wall. All main fuses gone, the ship was in total darkness for several seconds before the auxiliary battery lights kicked in. In the galley the plastic crates of sandwiches slid en masse, but none were lost, as the three men were thrown against the cold ovens and one of the huge, shining mixing bowls. As part of a standby fire team, William Spence and, more reluctantly, Johnson moved to their station aft by the hangar door, where the battery charge lights had ruptured in the stern explosion. They heard a noise coming from outside — an enormous gushing sound like so many fire hydrants turned on, crashing in a sustained crescendo against the bulkhead — and felt the ship jerking starboard, then port, and back to starboard, her motion so violent, it seemed nothing less in the dim passageway than the enraged effort of some great leviathan caught in an iron trap thrashing to be free.
“What the bloody hell—?” began Johnson.
“Shut your face!” ordered a CPO sternly.
Young William Spence, already putting on his asbestos suit and helmet with breathing apparatus, looked up at the CPO, a man he’d never seen before, and in that second the unfamiliarity of the man’s face and the noise were so disorientating that for Spence it momentarily took on the aspect of a nightmare.
“Get on your ‘casper’s’ pack like Spence here,” the CPO said to Johnson. “And follow me.” Spence was surprised the man knew his name until he remembered they all had their names on their shirts. “Come on, Johnson — between Spence and me. Move!”
“All right, all right,” moaned Johnson, pulling on the fire-retardant suit and tightening his head gear.
As the chief petty officer opened the hatch leading down to the engine room, they were enveloped in clouds of steam that instantly fogged their masks. They could hear men screaming and the rushing, bubbling sound of the water.
“We should abandon ship!” shouted Johnson, his voice nasal in his suit. “Bucket’s going to sink!”
“Shine your light over there!” the CPO ordered Spence. “Port side.”
One of the big gas turbines was still going, despite the captain ringing the telegraph to stop all engines, the torque on the prop enough to keep it turning, but jerking the ship, pushing and pulling it like an animal still moving though brain-dead. They couldn’t hear any more screaming, Johnson urging them to get out of it while they could. Then, just as suddenly as the explosion, the turbine stopped, telling the CPO that someone in the engine room had managed to reach the controls of the manual override after the automatic controls had been severed. Or perhaps the turbine had cut out of its own accord? Spence thought he heard a faint cry above the rushing water and the now creaking sound of the ship — but it was difficult to be certain when one wanted so much to help. Spence saw a subby, or junior lieutenant, walking up the incline of the slanting passageway, blowing high and low on his whistle, telling everyone to report to their boat stations immediately.
“See, I bloody told you,” began Johnson.
Spence had never been so petrified in all his life, but he could hear a voice. “Here, Chief,” he said to the petty officer, his voice dry, with an almost squeaky quality to it in his fear. “I’ll have a gander.”
“All right, lad. Here, loop this about you. I’ll take up the slack.” The CPO started feeding out the yellow nylon rope, taking a turn around one of the ladder’s rungs.
“Too short tugs from you,” he called out to Spence, “and I’ll haul. Make it snappy as you can.”
“Righto, Chief.”
“Righto, my arse,” said Johnson.
Spence was now up to his chest in surprisingly warm water, the ice-cold Atlantic momentarily heated by the dying gas steam turbines.
“Listen, mate,” yelled Johnson, “you want to play bloody hero, you go ahead, but I think—”
There was another explosion; this time the ship pushed hard aport fifteen degrees, its whole structure shuddering. Spence was off the last rung, underwater, the CPO and Johnson sucked off the ladder as well, the CPO barely managing to hold on to the rung around which he’d taken a turn with the nylon rope. In the thick fog that now filled the rapidly flooding engine room, Spence glimpsed Johnson’s fire-red air tank going past him, Johnson screaming. Spence made a grab, felt a boot, and hung on with his right arm, his left groping for a hold, any hold, as he felt his air supply cease, his mouth full of salt water and oil. He felt a violent wrenching, his shoulder driven so hard into a stanchion that, putting his left arm out to grab it before he was swept away again, he felt his hold on Johnson weakening, the seaman not helping by panicking and thrashing about. But with all his will Spence held fast to his shipmate. His left boot touched something and he let it take all his weight. It was one of the upper rungs on a stairway thirty feet farther down the engine room from where they’d entered. As he hauled himself up, not yet realizing he had been driven so far down the engine room, thinking he had somehow been hauled back to the first ladder entrance, Spence, straining to hold Johnson’s head above, looked about in the fog for the CPO.
He was gone, the yellow nylon rope floating now about him and Johnson like some great water snake in a lake that had only minutes before been Peregrine’s engine room. The petty officer’s single turn about the rung on the first stairwell had saved Spence, who in turn had saved Johnson from being sucked out like the CPO through the gash in the engine room’s side.
Johnson already had his helmet and air tank off as he lumbered up the last dozen rungs to the top, water rising quickly behind them. He swore violently at the inner tie of the asbestos trousers, which his fingers were plucking at frantically, his words a torrent of frenzied invective. Spence was now out of his suit but was still looking back to see if there was any sign of the CPO. A body washed past them, its face puffy, purple, and badly lacerated — an engineering officer, by his arm stripes, the facial wounds remarkably clean.
“My Gawd!” said Johnson, taking the last steps in twos, spinning open the ring lock door, stumbling out as the ship leaned farther to port, the door slamming shut, opening on the rebound, revealing a new hissing surge of water rising in the engine room. Spence, still inside, tripped on the second to top rung, a foot from the door’s sill, and instead of catching hold of the ring handle at the door’s center, his fall meant that he just managed to grab the sill. “Hang on!” he called to Johnson. Johnson paused for a second, heard the hiss of more water, slammed the hatch shut, spun the wheel, and bolted, knocking down an artificer on the now sharply inclined passageway.
Dazed, lifting himself up, the artificer saw the door of the engine room move, its high, mouselike squeal audible amid the deeper rumble of the ship that was now sinking, as millions of gallons sought to fill every possible space, ironically bringing the ship back to a stable position before it began listing again, this time to starboard. The artificer saw the wheel move again and was about to reach for it when the door flew open on the downward incline and a seaman came tumbling out, slamming against the opposite bulkhead. For a moment as the artificer leaned on the door, pushing it shut and spinning the wheel, water bubbling out about his feet like an overflowing toilet, he thought the seaman was wearing red Day-Glo gloves.
Coming up, splashing behind them, was a CPO from the combat control center. “Come on, you two. Topside. Old girl’s had—” He saw Spence collapse onto the deck, and now the artificer saw what he had thought were red gloves.
On the deck they laid William Spence down on a net stretcher, the roaring light above him so bright, it seemed he was entering the sun. A sick bay attendant struggled for several minutes beneath the down-blast of the helicopter’s blades and in the spray it was whipping up about them before he managed to give Spence a shot of morphine.
The OOD, his face bleeding, the cuts superficial, looking more serious than they were, cast a glance down at Spence. He thought he’d seen him in the galley once. He saw the seaman’s eyes open briefly, then shut. All about him there were men calling for help, some quietly moaning as the fury of the sea continued unabatedly, indifferently, to batter the dying ship.
The OOD was trying to decide the priority cases for the chopper’s first run. Amid the noise of the chopper, shouts of men dying around him, some washed overboard and lost already, the other ships unable to stop, the sick bay attendant realized that the officer’s glance at Spence was a silent question, but the attendant’s grimace was one of agonized indecision as he shouted above the roar of the helo, “Wouldn’t put money on it, sir. Then again—”
The officer looked helplessly around, but there was no one to help him decide. He knelt down in the wind that was whistling wildly through sheared metal and over the bodies littered all around, and placed his hand on the boy’s forehead, making the sign of the cross, trying to remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer, trying to decide whether the boy should be a priority case or not.
“I can’t move my legs, sir. I can’t feel nothin’, sir, nothin’ at all.” It was Johnson, lying on a stretcher near a starboard davit. “I can’t.”
“It’s all right, old chap,” said the gunnery officer. “You just lie there. We’ll get you off on the next chopper.” Nearby, a bosun, overhearing the conversation, turned to his mate. “Don’t see much wrong with ‘im.”
“Shock, I expect,” said his mate. “Poor bugger’s spine probably crushed, paralyzed from the waist down. That’s why he don’t feel anything.”
“Thought I saw him walking out on deck,” said the bosun. A wave smacked the starboard side of the Peregrine, a black wave suddenly incandescent, angelic in the cone of the chopper’s belly light, water streaming frothily through the scuppers, the ship rolling very slowly now, the water sloshing back and forth, gurgling through buckled decking. “Least I thought it was him,” said the bosun, still looking at Johnson.
“Nah,” said his mate. “Must have been another bloke. Christ, I ‘ope they send more helos. I don’t fancy this lot.”
Next to him the bosun was zipping up the body bag in which they’d laid the cook.