Dive in the Sun Read Free

eyes dark.
    He had tried to tackle Duncan on the subject, but he had been unhelpful and had joked at his boyish fancies. Or had he just been evasive?
    He had wanted to ask Taylor, who seemed to be a pretty level-headed sort of chap. But there was always the question of rank, and his own unwillingness to start something he couldn’t finish.
    He wrote regularly to his mother, and occasionally to his father, who, much to his own annoyance, was in charge of a shore-establishment, and had tried to describe his job and his companions. Duncan was an easy character to put in a letter, with his peculiar sayings, which for the most part were quite above Jervis and seemed vaguely crude, and his rebellious attitude to the Service in general and regular officers in particular. But Curtis was different, and each time he tried to explain the man to his parents he realized that his words bordered on the most juvenile hero-worship that he would hardly have believed possible of himself.
    He had heard about him when he had been under training as a diver for midget submarines. About the escapades in Norway, when he had won the Distinguished Service Cross, and about his daring and cool courage in pressing home his attacks to lay his two-ton explosive charges beneath the unsuspecting enemy. But it was more than the hearsay; it was the man himself. Tall and slim, his shoulders slightly stooped from the constant cramping confinement of the tiny hulls, he had a strange dedicated hardness in his otherwise calm face, which made him older than his twenty-six years. He had a friendly smile, and had always shown willingness to overlook Jervis’s early discomfort, but in his eyes he seemed to hold a reserve, a strange barrier, as if he was watching, waiting for something to happen. It was obviously something new, because he had heard Duncan asking Taylor, the E.R.A., if he thought “the skipper was goin’ round the bend?”
    He ran his fingers through his short wavy hair and grinned. ‘I’m ready and willing!’
    Duncan jabbed him in the ribs and leered. ‘Don’t talk like that in front of these two jokers; you know what they say about submariners!’
    Jervis coloured and glanced anxiously at the captain. The latter had turned his back on them, however, and was staring at the chart.
    ‘Shall I call the skipper, Steve?’ Jervis asked hurriedly.
    The captain suddenly stood up from the table. ‘Yes, call him,’ he said curtly. ‘Tell him I’m going to put over the rubber dinghy to take off the passage crew.’
    ‘Poor chaps,’ chuckled Duncan. ‘The towing crew have had the job of looking after the midget all the way here, an’ now we take over for the best part!’
    The captain eyed him coldly, a glint in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘It’s a pity it’s all a waste of time then, isn’t it?’
    Lieutenant Ralph Curtis lay fully clothed on a bunk in the submarine’s wardroom, his hands knitted behind his head, his eyes wide and sleepless, staring at the curved metal hull which rose over his body like the side of a tomb. The curtain which he had drawn along the length of the bunk allowed the harsh wardroom light to filter eerily across his tanned face and fair, sun-bleached hair, and beyond it he heard Duncan’s booming laugh and the subdued mutter of conversation. On the other side of the steel plating he imagined he could hear the swish of the Adriatic against the saddle tanks as the submarine forged her way through the night, her small charge wallowing behind her like a calf following its mother. He pressed his eyes shut for the hundredth time, but although sleep had eluded him for days, he felt the nervous tension running through him like an electric current, making his heart and body throb with something like pain.
    What had happened? What had changed his life from a breath-taking adventure to a living nightmare?
    He sighed deeply, and tried to stop himself from going over it all again.
    He gingerly allowed his mind to explore the future,