Go In and Sink! Read Free Page B

slipped out of Malta? That they had shared drinks together in a bar the night before?
    He had almost decided to order the taxi back to Portsmouth and forget the whole idea. He need not have bothered. The house where he had spent many hours in the past had been occupied by total strangers. She had moved away. No, they did not know where. Nor care, by the sound of the voices.
    Perhaps she had gone back to her parents. Or maybe she had just immersed herself in some sort of war-work to keep her hurt from familiar faces and voices from the past.
    Either way, he had returned to Fort Blockhouse feeling tired and depressed. When he had passed the pier he had stared with something like disbelief.
Tristram
had already gone, her berth taken by another boat. For the first time in so many months he felt at a loss. It was unreal, disconcerting. He was being flown to Scotland in the morning, but nobody could or would tell him where or why. His command had been spirited away as were her company, and he was completely alone.
    He had gone to his room, avoiding familiar faces in the wardroom bar, open stares from the new intake of sub-lieutenants like a man with some terrible disfigurement or guilt. It was ridiculous, and destructive, and he told himself so again and again.
    The old naval pensioner who tended over his needs required no explanation. He had seen too many like Marshall come and go. He brought him a bottle of gin, watched him sign the chit, and left the room without a word. Not even about the weather, which was surprising in England.
    The flight north to Scotland was a bumpy one. The February skies were thick with cloud, and the aircraft sounded as if it had known better days. The journey too seemed like a dream sequence. Even the handful of passengers were unusual. A pale-faced seaman handcuffed to an escort being taken back to his ship to face charges of desertion. A young Wren officer who fell asleep immediately on take-off and did not stir until the plane touched down outside Rosyth. A lieutenant with a terrible twitch who looked as if he was on the extreme brink of a breakdown, and a sergeant of marines who repeatedly massaged one ankle as if it was hurting him. In fact, he was trying to see up the Wren officer’s leg.
    The bottle of gin had not helped Marshall to face the uncomfortable flight. His mouth was like raw flesh, and he was grateful for the coffee and sandwiches brought by one of the aircraft’s crew.
    At the airfield a harassed R.N.V.R. lieutenant ushered him to yet another plane. A small, single-engined job with a pilot who seemed too young to be out of school.
    North and still further north. On their shouted conversations over the intercom Marshall was able to glean a little more of his destination.
    The pilot bellowed, ‘Just south of Cape Wrath, sir!’
    It was far enough. Much more and they would drop into the Atlantic.
    Despite the base captain’s caution, Marshall had still expected to be going to the Holy Loch. Submarines did a lot of working-up there, as well as sailing on operational patrols. But Cape Wrath was the north-westerly tip of the British Isles. He could not imagine what they could have up there.
    Occasionally he caught sight of humped hills and rain-washed roads through gaps in the cloud. The Mediterranean was drawing farther and farther away with each turn of the prop, and not merely in distance.
    Eventually the pilot shouted, ‘Coming into the field now, sir!’
    The
field
proved to be little more than a strip of tarmac surrounded by mud, a couple of dismal looking Nissen huts and a wind-sock. If the flight had been overtaken by darkness, Marshall doubted that either the plane or its occupants would have survived.
    Some oilskinned figures emerged reluctantly from one of the huts and ran towards the plane, their bodies bowed to a steady drizzle which looked as if it had come to stay.
    As they gathered up Marshall’s luggage, a burly marine provost sergeant squelched across to meet him and