Eagle at Taranto (Commander Cochrane Smith series) Read online

  Eagle at Taranto

  Alan Evans

  © Alan Evans 1987

  Alan Evans has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1987 by Hodder and Stoughton

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Overture

  BOOK ONE - The Innocents

  1 Ward

  2 Katy

  BOOK TWO - The Schooling

  1 Action off Calabria

  2 Skirmish

  3 Tobruk

  4 The Desert

  5 Bomba

  6 “Fighters!”

  7 Invasion

  Intermission

  BOOK THREE - Judgment

  1 “You’re a Hard Man.”

  2 A Walk in the Rain

  3 Countdown: Then There Were...

  4 Taranto

  5 The Tunnel

  6 Homecoming

  Curtain

  Extract from Seek Out and Destroy by Alan Evans

  Overture

  Sarah woke to the murmuring of the radio alarm, a soft burst of music and a cheerful voice: “This is Capital Radio...” Her fumbling hand found the switch and pressed it. Silence. Morning sunlight gleamed through the curtains swaying to the breeze from the open window, that also let in the distant rumble of London’s traffic. Rob lay still beside her, breathing evenly but awake. He always woke at the slightest unusual noise, instantly alert like a cat. She knew he was a soldier but he had told her little more of his profession. She had a strong suspicion about what kind of soldier he was although she had never seen him in uniform and his red hair grew down to his collar.

  He was not wearing a collar now, nor anything else. He reached for her but let her push away his hand. She pushed away temptation, too. “Oh no you don’t,” she told him, slid naked from the bed and stretched, tall and slender. “This is a busy day for me.”

  She padded away to the bathroom, and standing under the shower, she thought of the day ahead, planning. Articles and interviews were her business and she was good at them. She believed in hard work and preparation, had no use for the slipshod, hope-for-inspiration approach of some other journalists she could name. She thought now, nervous, that ordinary showbiz interviews were one thing — she found most stars willing to talk, though maybe some had made an exception on account of her eyelashes or whatever — but Mark Ward was different. He was a giant. He had written the scores for a succession of block-busting musicals and he never gave interviews.

  Sarah had told Rob: “I’ve tried and so have plenty of people, big in the business. He always sends a polite letter saying he thinks he has answered all the questions already, and no, thank you.”

  Rob had grinned down at her, “Mark Ward? No problem. He’s a relative of mine — umpteen times removed, but just the same I think I can fix it.”

  And so, incredibly, she was going to see him. Out of the bathroom now, wrapped in a towel and passing the kitchen where Rob was cooking breakfast, she called, “Will you be here tonight?” Sometimes he went away for weeks on end.

  “I’ll be here, and waiting. You can tell me all about it.” Rob’s voice carried across the passage to the bedroom where Sarah was dressing quickly: “I go back to regimental duty soon. Life will be a little more stable.”

  Sarah stood still for a moment then and said from her heart, “Good.” She selected a pair of shoes from the row at the bottom of the wardrobe and slipped them on. Her notes were already in the shoulder-bag hanging by the door of the flat. She had done her homework and was ready.

  She sat down at the breakfast-bar opposite Rob. He had washed but not shaved. A tee-shirt was pulled on over his solid shoulders and stuffed into faded blue jeans. He poured orange juice and coffee, then stretched a long arm to fetch scrambled eggs from the grill. He buttered toast and said, “This’ll be your first introduction to my family — or one distant branch of it.”

  Sarah had been based in Paris for the last year, and had met Rob Dunbar there. Over the year he had visited her frequently, sometimes when he was on official business. He said vaguely that he was “a sort of adviser and odd-job man”. Whenever she returned to England he was away on duty so they had neither of them met the other’s family, but a week ago she had come home for good. Sarah was wary of his relations, knew his father was a lieutenant-colonel (retired) and his grandfather another. Starched shirts and formal dinners, horsy women. God!

  Sarah said, “This will be a professional visit.” Anyway, Ward was only a distant relative, hardly family at all.

  “You’ll have to meet them all sooner or later,” Rob pointed out. “You can hardly stop on our walk down the aisle and say: ‘Pleased to meet you,’ to mother and the old man.”

  Sarah knew she could not. And that walk down the aisle might not be far away. She wanted this man, was sure about him, would have to bear with his family as every bride must, but she also wanted to put off the moment as long as she could. She put it off now, kissed Rob hard, grabbed the shoulder-bag and left the flat.

  In the Mini she sped quickly through the streets of London and out onto the motorway. She had no doubts about her own family in Northumberland, was sure her truck-driving father would welcome Rob as his kind of man, and her mother would dote on him. Mother who had worked hard through the lean years to help bring up her kids, who suspected Sarah was living with a man and disapproved, but accepted she had to move with the times.

  The Ward house was deep in the country and Sarah had to map-read her way to it, but she had allowed time for that. The last stretch of narrow road wound between high hedges so that she came upon the open farm gate suddenly but was able to read the name on the post as the Mini rolled past. She stopped at a track a furlong further on and reversed into it then looked at her watch. She had timed it exactly: was ten minutes early. She spent five of those minutes skimming through her notes once again then drove back down the road and in at the open gate.

  A gravel drive ran up to the house; built of old, red brick it looked warm, wide and solid. As she let the Mini drift gently in, muttering softly under its breath, she remembered to turn off the stereo. The cassette was music from “Tiger!” the first of Mark Ward’s big successes, and if she turned up playing that he might think she was creeping.

  He came around the corner of the house and strode to meet her, a man of seventy but walking briskly, thick iron-grey hair above black brows. A labrador, lean and golden, trotted at his side and stood, tail wagging, through the handshake and greetings. Sarah thought Ward was taller than Rob and better-looking than his photographs. He pushed open the front door, sat down on a bench inside and pointed: “My study — last door on the left. Please make yourself comfortable. I’ve been walking the dog so I’ll just change my shoes first.” He stooped to tug at muddied laces.

  Sarah walked along the slate-floored hall, her footfalls muffled on a thick carpet down its centre, and into a room at the back of the house. A chesterfield and two deep chairs were spaced around a fireplace laid with logs, unlit in the summer’s heat. A desk stood in the window, beyond it a view of distant hills and a nearby meadow with brown cattle moving lazily in the green. The dog followed her and sprawled by one of the chairs. Sarah guessed why that chair was chosen: it was Ward’s. A tall clock stood like a sentry against a wall, a long, slow-chunking pendulum swaying in its glass-fronted case.

  There were two photographs on the desk and Sarah stooped over them. They were old monochrome prints in worn leather frames. One showed a young woman standing beside a small pick-up truck. She wo
re a shirt and trousers, both baggy, and was smiling at the camera. The other photograph was of an aircraft in flight, a big biplane. A registration number was painted on the side: E- ? Sarah leaned closer to read it.

  “Looking at Ethel?”

  Sarah started, “Yes.” Mark Ward had been standing at the door. And as he crossed to her side she pointed at the girl: “She’s very pretty.”

  Ward grinned, “Ethel is the other one, the Swordfish.”

  “Oh?”

  “However...” That meant: down to business. And he had not mentioned Rob. Sarah asked herself if, since Ward had probably been heavily persuaded to give this interview, he was now regretting it. She sat down opposite him where he lounged with one long arm reaching down to stroke the dog. She marshalled her thoughts, wished that bloody clock wouldn’t join in making Ward seem so silent and withdrawn.

  Then he used his other hand to pull a magazine clipping from the pocket of his shirt. He flipped it open and read aloud, his tone neutral: “‘There is a raw energy to the music, a drive and a passion, but at other times a haunting loneliness. There are passages that leave the listener feeling suspended between heaven and earth, lost and remote. What fashions a man that he should write such music?’” Ward’s eyes lifted and looked across at her.

  Sarah was caught off guard, had not expected this, but claimed, “Yes, I wrote that.” A year ago, when she had asked to talk to him and been refused. So she had worked up the article on the man’s musical career using what she could learn from others — and from listening to his work.

  Ward asked, “That’s what you want to know?”

  “Yes, I —”

  “Um.” He frowned now as he tucked the clipping away, the black brows lowering, coming together.

  Sarah thought, Not encouraging, but keep plugging, girl; Begin with “Tiger!”. She said, “It all started for you in the early sixties with that first big musical —”

  “No.” Ward’s head moved in a slow negative.

  So he had changed his mind now he had heard what she was after, and wanted to back out. Sarah persisted, “Mr. Ward, I will let you see the completed article and if there is any —”

  He was looking beyond her, remembering: “It started for me twenty years before that, when I was about your age.”

  BOOK ONE

  The Innocents

  1 Ward

  Katy Sandford was twenty-one years old in that fine summer of 1940 and Mark Ward was her senior by a year. To each other they were strangers, and to the bad business of war, reluctant apprentices. That war, after a bitter winter of subdued rumbling, had erupted in the spring. German tanks crashed through to the coast of France; the wreck of the British Expeditionary Force was salvaged from Dunkirk; and German armies were close to Paris. Then on the tenth of June Italy joined the battle on Hitler’s side, dragged in by her own dictator, Mussolini, greedy for his share of the spoils.

  Sub-Lieutenant Mark Ward of the Fleet Air Arm had a hollow feeling at the pit of his stomach. He was tall like all the Ward men, folded now into the open cockpit of the Swordfish. He wore khaki flying overalls and despite the rush of the slipstream was warm enough under the Mediterranean sun. The leather flying-helmet, earflaps clipped together under his jaw, hid the black hair that lay thick and close on his head. His dark eyes were masked behind the goggles. What showed of his face was sun-browned, the jaw clamped shut and mouth set in a straight, determined line.

  He did not feel determined. He looked down over the side of the cockpit at the wrinkled surface of the sea below as the hiccuping Pegasus engine faltered and died then coughed and caught again. The big, slow, old-fashioned biplane, a torpedo-bomber-reconnaissance aircraft, was usually reliable, but when the engine of a single-engined aircraft gives up then you go only one way. He spoke into the Gosport tube, the rubber pipe that ran back inside the fuselage and was his intercommunication with the two other cockpits: “I think you two had better jump. I’ll try to land her on.”

  Tim Rogers’ voice squawked. back at him, “Right!” Ward wondered what Tim, the observer, and Campbell, the telegraphist airgunner, were making of things. This was their first flight together and it was ending abruptly, maybe disastrously, only ten minutes after take-off. Mark and Tim had joined the aircraft-carrier only weeks before. They had flown separately with more experienced men and only today, the tenth of June, had been deemed fit to be teamed in this operational Swordfish.

  In fact Leading Airman Doug Campbell was mouthing curses as he reached for his parachute. In the airgunner’s cockpit that looked back over the tail, his words were torn away on the wind. “A real good old ship, a carrier full o’ regular officers, and I have to wind up with two bloody amateurs.” Campbell was a regular. “I was a boy seaman when these two were still farting around at their private schools. A flaming piano-player for a pilot and an observer who’s supposed to navigate for us but he can’t even find his own Stringbag on the flight-deck!”

  Tim Rogers had come out onto the flight-deck from the briefing for this, his first patrol on active service, his mind juggling with details of courses and speeds. Unthinkingly he had gone to the wrong Swordfish of the two ranged aft, waiting to fly off on the patrol, and had had to be pointed to the right one. His embarrassment over that error was forgotten in his present terror.

  Campbell glowered at Rogers and saw him swallow nervously, Adam’s apple bobbing below the leather straps of the helmet. But at least he’d got his parachute from the stowage at the front of the cockpit and clipped it onto his harness. He’s ready, or thinks he is, Campbell thought, glancing down at the sea. Wish I was. Don’t fancy this, but here goes.

  Mark watched them fall away, one after the other, and winced as he saw their parachutes jerk open. He did not want to make the terrifying jump but wished he was out of this mess somehow. People who thought of him as a pianist were not correct. Though he’d had to demonstrate some competence on that instrument when gaining entrance to the Royal College of Music, he didn’t really think of himself as a musician at all. He’d studied composition because his mother’s half of the Ward family were artists or musicians (the other half made money, like his father) and she thought he had some of her talent. And because there was nothing else he wanted to do. He had London, music, girls and was happy. But now, instead, he was trying to fly a Swordfish that had gone bad on him. He thought, I should have stayed with the music. Nobody ever crashed in a piano.

  The Pegasus engine hiccuped once more, cut out for a second then stuttered into uncertain life again. Mark looked to his left over the side of the cockpit. He was flying in a gently banking circle down the port side of Eagle, where she cut a white furrow in the sea below. He surveyed the long, fearfully narrow-looking rectangle of the flight-deck, with the two funnels and the towering island structure housing the bridge out on the starboard side. She was out of Malta, bound for a rendezvous off Alexandria to join the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet now based there, under Admiral Cunningham who had taken his ships to sea on this first day of the war with Italy to hunt the Italian Fleet. Cunningham needed to destroy or cripple the Duce’s ships because so long as they existed intact they posed a threat to Britain’s control of this eastern end of the Mediterranean. This first patrol of Mark’s had been intended to search for the Italian Fleet — if it was at sea.

  Eagle was sliding astern of Mark now, but turning into the wind for him to land on. He could see the steam jet in her bow trailing a fine, white straight line down the six-hundred-foot length of her flight-deck that ended at the round-down of the stern. He held Ethel in the gentle, banking turn to bring her round above Eagle’s wake. He had called his Swordfish after an elderly, amiable aunt of fond memory. Ethel had never let him down before, but as he straightened her on course astern of Eagle and steadily losing height, the engine spluttered yet again.

  Mark swore, but mildly, “Hold up, blast you.” He had been an awkward adolescent, rebellious, quick-tempered, no sooner the word than the blow and often seeming surl
y with his heavy black brows. But that glower had been only shyness, and now he was a grown man, a good. pilot. He knew Ethel’s trouble had to be a blockage in the fuel supply. There was plenty of fuel, too much. The hiccuping had started soon after flying off from Eagle, and Mark wondered how big a fire you would get with a hundred and fifty-odd gallons of aviation fuel aboard. By ducking his head he could look under the cockpit cowling and through the cut-out in the instrument panel to the fuel gauge two feet ahead of him on the engine. It showed close to full.

  He was sliding in towards Eagle’s stern and now the engine was coughing more than running. He was losing height as he should but his airspeed was down below seventy knots and still falling. He had seen a crash during training: the aircraft had burned and the fire-fighting team was too late to save the pilot. The only way it might have been in time was by trundling along beside the aircraft when it struck — and even that was doubtful.

  There’d been the smash and then the explosion of blazing fuel, following as quickly as the flash-bang! of a gun. Mark and his brother officers had carried the coffin on a bitterly cold winter day. It was his first experience of the solemn ritual of a military funeral with the flag-draped coffin, bugle sounding the “last post” and the rifles firing a volley over the grave. The young pilot’s widow stood at the graveside. Mark had seen the body, now in the coffin, but she had not. Identification of the charred corpse was only possible because the pilot had been the only man in the aircraft.

  There would not be any doubt in identifying Mark either, and for the same reason. He saw one of Eagle’s escorting destroyers had raced in to pick Tim and Campbell out of the sea. He thought they would be all right, barring accidents, though they were neither of them expert or enthusiastic parachutists. What a bloody shambles.

  He wanted desperately to bring Ethel home. She was wobbling in towards the round-down now. He had just enough height to clear it and he eased the stick forward to sacrifice a little of that precious height for airspeed. The batsman stood out on Eagle’s port quarter by the first arrester wire strung across the deck, his round, white bats held up at arm’s length like the hands of a clock at ten to two — so the approach looked all right to him. But he wasn’t sitting up here in this bloody thing and sweating it out.