However, this was not apparently how the modern French Navy comported itself.
“RANGE TO FIRST TARGET TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED YARDS. MARK THIS BEARING!”
The plot confirmed the angle on the bow and fed the information into the torpedo director.
“RANGE TO TARGET NUMBER TWO THREE THOUSAND YARDS. MARK THIS BEARING!”
The periscope slide down into its well.
Lieutenant Michael Philpott updated the plot.
“They’ve come up to fourteen knots, sir.”
Francis Barrington nodded.
The bastards wanted to cut a dash when they steamed into the Gulf of Ajaccio!
“UP PERISCOPE!”
Again Barrington took a range and bearing for each target and dipped the periscope head beneath the waves.
“Targets have steadied at fourteen knots, sir.”
“Very good. Open tubes one to four. I plan to ‘air’ the attack periscope again in,” he checked his watch, “thirty seconds. We’ll take final ranges and bearings and shoot as soon as the torpedo director calculates a firing solution. Your target will be the leading ship, Number One. Minimum spread.”
Once Alliance’s Mark VIIIs were on their way he would reverse course and bring the boat’s stern tubes to bear on the second destroyer. Hopefully, by the time the stern fish were away the crew in the forward torpedo room would have had time to reload one, perhaps two of the bow tubes.
Periscope up.
“RANGE!”
“BEARING!”
The targets’ course and speed was unchanged.
The firing solution was computed.
There was a short, breathless delay.
‘Firing solution confirmed, skipper,” Michael Philpott reported.
“FIRE ONE!”
“FIRE TWO!”
“FIRE THREE!”
“FIRE FOUR!”
“Helm. Ten degrees left rudder, if you please!
“ALL FISH ARE RUNNING TRUE, SIR!”
The Mark VIIIs were in the water; there was nothing more that Francis Barrington or anybody else on the Alliance could do about them, other than wait for the first detonations.
The control room talker was counting down the time to impact as the submarine turned to present her two loaded stern tubes to the still, as yet, unsuspecting targets.
“Steady on two-seven-zero degrees,” Barrington ordered the helmsman, his tone calmly conversational. “Wheel amidships.” Then quietly to Michael Philpott. “Tell me when were level at sixty feet please.”
As soon as the sound of underwater explosions rumbled across the mile of sea between the T-47s and the Alliance, Barrington planned to ‘air’ the attack periscope to take another periscope range and bearing to reset the torpedo director.
Francis Barrington waited patiently.
A Mark VIII torpedo was a beast of a weapon. Weighing in at over a ton-and-a-half, with a speed of over forty knots and tipped with an eight hundred pound Torpex warhead it was a proven ship-killer. Two of the four fish in the first salvo had been set to run at ten feet with contact detonators, two were set to run at twenty feet with magnetic exploders. The shallow running fish would hit a thin-skinned target like a destroyer like an express train, probably bursting into and exploding deep within the hull. The deeper running magnetic-fused fish would, if they exploded beneath a ship’s hull, break its back.
“Level at sixty feet, skipper!”
The sound of a single heavy explosion pulsed through the water.
Francis Barrington resisted the urge to punch the air with elation; he waited for a second detonation. When it did not come he stepped to the periscope.
“UP PERISCOPE!”
Chapter 62
Enoch John Powell, the Honourable Member for Wolverhampton South West was no more than a shadow of his former self. With his ruined face atop an emaciated, pain-wracked body he cut an increasingly sad, outcast figure. He had waited patiently, like a horribly mauled big cat gathering his strength to lash out one last time at his tormentors.
He had listened with disinterest to the leader of the Independent Labour Party’s excoriating condemnation of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s record. Michael Foot, the wild-haired, passionate, well-meaning and profoundly decent man around whom the disaffected rump of the old Labour Party and Co-operative Party had coalesced in the spring, was, in Powell’s view not so much an idealist and a putative national leader in waiting but a dangerously naive fool. An idealistic innocent who did not understand that the real danger to the UAUK and to Margaret Thatcher lay not on the opposition benches in the House of Commons, but from within the body of her own supporters. In years past he would have had a better feel for which of the Prime Ministers ‘loyal’ colleagues and key ‘parliamentary friends’ was — like Brutus — planning to strike the first blow.
“Mister Powell!” The Speaker called.
The chamber fell silent as the terribly wounded parliamentary beast slowly rose to his feet and his good eye fell upon the faces of men who had once been his friends and allies, who were watching him now with mistrust and no little despite. That was to be expected, even in times such as these the Conservative Party honestly believed it had a right to govern.
Why then would it forgive a turncoat such as he?
“Tributes,” Enoch Powell declared, his voice afflicted these days by a hoarseness that added a desperate gravitas to his words, “tributes have been paid to my old friend Iain Macleod. That he and I became adversaries will be a great sadness to me the rest of my days. Those days will be short, I am sure, but I sincerely grieve for my old friend nonetheless. This House has lost one of its greatest sons and I know not when we will see his like again.”
For the first time he fixed his stare on the prim, tight-lipped face of the Prime Minister. Enoch Powell had noted how tired and thin the lady seemed; unlike others on his side of the House he had not made the mistake of thinking, for a single moment, that the Angry Widow was in any way a spent force. However, it would have been unnatural had she not been reflecting upon the disasters of recent months.
“I shall not attend this House again,” Powell stated. “My time has come and gone, like that of other members of this House.”
Behind him men jeered at the government benches across the chamber.
Enoch Powell slowly rounded on the noisiest of the hecklers.
“Have you no pride?” He asked angrily, bitterly. His disdain was professorially scathing, his contempt for the dour men and women clustered around Michael Foot and his acolytes icy. “What manner of fool seeks to take Party advantage of a nation’s catastrophes?”
When there was a muttering of support from the government benches his manner was, if possible, even more contemptuous.
“In May 1940 this House met to debate the fiasco of the Norwegian Campaign. That debate, sometimes called the ‘Narvik Debate’, led to the fall of one Prime Minister and the elevation of the man who eventually led this nation out of the slough of despond to victory.”
In April 1940 the ‘Phoney War’ in Europe had ended and German troops had conquered Norway; the British government’s attempts to hold back the German tide had been — a particularly bloody naval victory at the port of Narvik apart — shambolic and ended in humiliating withdrawal. Two days after the ‘Narvik Debate’, Hitler had invaded France and the Low Countries, and within weeks only the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ had prevented the United Kingdom from losing the war. Every member of the House of Commons had lived through that war, and some had actually been in the House during the two days of that debate. The Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain had, in parliamentary terms, prevailed in the end with its majority of two hundred cut to eighty-one but thirty-nine Conservatives had voted against their own ministers. There had been no subsequent vote of confidence in the government; everybody had simply understood that things could not be allowed to go on the way they had been ‘going on’ since the outbreak of war in September 1939. Chamberlain, the man who had proclaimed ‘peace in our time’ less than two years before, had had to go.