Читать книгу Storm Below - Hugh Garner - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

The dawn of March 9, 1943, rose above the spinning earth. For the many it was without significance, except to herald the coming day, but to the few it was epochal, and filled with meaning. It was the first dawn for those who were born the night before, and the last for those who had to die.

They were to die in many ways on that fateful, yet un-different day: In the gas chambers of Osweicim, on the spittle-caking roads of North Africa, in a birth bed in the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital in Sheffield, before a Ustachi firing squad outside Sarajevo, of prostatic cancer in a hotel for indigent men near the corner of the Bowery and Houston streets in New York City, at the wheel of a 1940 Buick at a level crossing near Buenos Aires, in the tail turret of a Halifax bomber over the German Ruhr, of pulmonary embolism in a sheepherder’s hut in Queensland, Australia….

The Canadian Flower class corvette HMCS Riverford was proceeding west-southwest at ten knots, part of the escort force of a merchant convoy, eleven days out of Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She was adhering to an admiralty-specified zigzag on the port, forward anti-submarine sweep, abreast of the leading file of fifty-six assorted merchantmen returning to North America in ballast. They had rendezvoused in the Clyde from such scattered points as Tilbury, Murmansk, Birkenhead, Loch Ewe, South Shields, Bristol, Oran, Queenstown, Lisbon, and Hull for the break across the North Atlantic. They ran the gamut of sea transportation from a twenty-two-thousand-ton Norwegian whaling factory through Liberty Ships, an Australian refrigerator ship, a Canadian lower laker, to a decrepit Greek coaster which trailed the others like a dirty-faced young brother on a hike. Also escorting them were a Canadian four-stacker destroyer, four more Canadian corvettes, and an English trawler on its way to the West Indies to take up minesweeping duties outside the port of Kingston, Jamaica.

The pre-dawn air was chill with the wind which swept off the blue-glass ice shelf of Greenland a few hundred miles to the northwest, and the cold black sea was raised into sullen, turgid ridges, its fringe of white petit point blown away with each gust of wind.

Ordinary Seaman Clark, nineteen years old, Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, stepped quickly through the sliding door of the wheelhouse, shutting it behind him, and stood in the darkness on the narrow platform staring out at the noisy, heaving sea. He looked up into the darkened sky, catching a glimpse now and again of a patch of star-studded heaven as it dipped and curtsied behind and between the wider ceiling of scudding clouds. The whole cosmos revolved around an axis formed by the jutting bow and fo’castlehead of the small ship, and the whistle of the wind through the struts and halyards accompanied the pirouette of the fading night.

As he stood still, fastening the top toggle of his woollen duffle coat against the wind, he became aware of the dark, dreadful loneliness of the sea. He was suddenly afraid, and he tuned his ears to the more familiar sounds of the ship and his fellows. From below him came the clatter of pans in the galley as the assistant cook, who had been baking his nightly batch of bread, cleaned up before his mate arrived to prepare breakfast. Up ahead the four-inch gun strained at its lashings with every rise and fall of the gun deck, and the shells clanked mournfully in their racks. There was the sound of feet being stamped on the boards above his head as the port lookout changed his position on the wing of the bridge. The noises from aft were swept away with the wind.

The sounds of the ship only accentuated the noisy quietude of the limitless expanse of the sea, so that the boy shivered, and his hands gripped the railing beside him. Suddenly he was afraid of losing his grip on this heaving thing which was his only connection with security, and he feared to be cast away into the sea which hissed and foamed as it reached with white-nailed fingers upon the freeboard below.

Standing there he realized that the sea cannot be loved; it is an enemy upon which men sail their puny craft — an alien thing armed with a multitude of claws ready to pull them beneath it with scarcely a ripple or a trace. It is too vast and too black and too uncomprehending to be loved. It gives neither succour nor hope nor life to those who must depend upon it. It is beautiful and terrifying, and gigantic and insatiable; a desert of water over which men travel through necessity.

He no longer thought of submarines and torpedoes, for now his fears were those which have followed men from the dawn of time; the primeval fears of the elements: of wind, of lightning, of the sea.

He strained his eyes aft to try to catch a glimpse of the lookout on the ack-ack platform; to find another human being with whom to share his terror; but the man could not be seen; he was alone. He fought with himself against the dread which rose through his fibres like a scream. With a desperate urgency he stumbled down the steep steps of the ladder, his heavy coat buckling around his thighs and his hands sliding down the wet railings, not allowing himself to look at the water, his eyes fixed on the swiftly falling stern of the ship. Halfway to the bottom his rubber sea-boot slipped from the serrated step, and his hands lost their grip upon the rails. With a soft thud, and an imperceptible swoosh of clothing, he fell the remainder of the way to the steel deck, and lay there, one arm doubled behind him, and his terrified eyes hidden behind their curtained lids. To his unhearing ears came the slap of the stoical sea as the tips of its tentacles caressed him through the drains along the scuppers.