“Signal from Marshall Marmont, sir!”
Smith saw the light blinking urgently from her bridge as Sparrow came up level with her.
The signalman read, “Wireless from Gipsy: ‘Enemy battlecruiser in sight. Course north-east. My position 51° 15’ N 2° 15’ E.’”
Gipsy was another old thirty-knotter. He thought she must have been very close to the battlecruiser to have seen her, lucky to have survived to send her message, but the night would help her.
He tried to take it in with all its implications, saw the signalman waiting, excited. He said thickly, “Acknowledge.”
His interrupted train of thought lurched on — a monstrous threat to the cross-Channel traffic and Dunkerque. For that the enemy would want a ship of force, big, fast and heavily armed. A real ship of force slipping swiftly down the Dutch coast in the night to be on station in the Straits as the lighters ran in to the shore, ready to use her big guns to blast any ship in the Straits and to support the landing…
Boots hammered on the iron deck and Sanders hurled himself panting on to the bridge. “Gipsy’s just to the west of the Bergues Bank, sir.” He had run to check the position on the chart.
Smith nodded. But the planned landing was now still-born. The battlecruiser knew and she had turned back — due northeast, because that was her course for home. He turned to stare into the night astern, to where she was somewhere over the rim of the world. He did not need to look at the compass to know he faced south-west. She was heading straight for him and his little flotilla.
There was a greyness to the night now. The day was coming.
Sparrow was nearly up with Lively Lady as the tug butted steadily onwards. Smith saw the signalman shaking the crew of the twelve-pounder into life, heard the killick’s startled: “battlecruiser! Suffering Je —” Garrick would be looking across at him from the monitor’s bridge, looking to him for orders while Garrick’s ship was an inert mass dragged along by a tug under the command of an old woman and the battlecruiser was running down on them. Orders?
He said, “Make to both: Turn sixteen points to port. Course Two-three-oh!” And to Gow at the wheeclass="underline" “Port ten.”
“Port ten, sir.”
Sparrow started to turn.
The battlecruiser would be racing; running for home she would work up to close on thirty knots. Sparrow could not make that but it would be forty-five minutes or so before the battlecruiser was in sight and that was time enough for Smith and Sparrow to scurry out to sea and out of the way. It was not time enough for the tug and Garrick and Marshall Marmont. The battlecruiser would hammer them to pieces. And then? North lay the crossing between the Hook of Holland and England and on that crossing was the ‘beef’ convoy. Trist had told him that the two thirtyknotters that should have been Smith’s had been sent to help escort it. The convoy was assembling a couple of hours after first light and would sail at the speed of the slowest ship, eight knots if they were lucky but it might be less. Smith had bitter experience of that. The convoy would be strung out over twenty miles of sea and the escort would be a few thirty-knotters and armed yachts, one or two newer destroyers and, barely possibly, a light cruiser. They, too, would be spread over twenty miles of sea. The battlecruiser would come on them when they were an hour or so out and they couldn’t scuttle back into Dutch waters. She would steam down the line of the convoy and through it and leave a trail of shattered and sunken ships.
Pakenham with the British battlecruiser force was in the Firth of Forth. But even if, by coincidence and a huge stroke of luck they received Gipsy’s signal and were ready to slip immediately they would never arrive in time. The Harwich force was closer but still not close enough. Both had the North Sea to cross. If Smith had forced a reconnaissance, got into the woods and discovered the lighters twenty-four hours earlier and thought the plan through, the Navy would have had a battleship force steaming this way…
If? That kind of speculation was useless, a waste of time. Again he tried to put himself in the enemy’s place. Did the enemy know that his attack on the lighters had been a spur-of-themoment decision forced on him? No. They would be thinking more reasonably that he knew they were there and his attack was planned, and Sparrow was only one part of a larger force…
Sparrow was on course now and so was the tug and Marshall Marmont but they had fallen astern as they had taken the wider turn and more slowly. He said rapidly, trying to keep pace with his racing thoughts, “Slow ahead both. Make to Marshall Marmont and Lively Lady: Cast off tow. Marshall Marmont will anchor and prepare for action.” And to Gow: “Starboard five. Lay us alongside the tug.”
As her speed fell away Sparrow sidled in alongside the oncoming tug until she ran along a dozen feet away. The tug was also slowing, tow drooping, two men working in the stern of her where the tow was secured. Smith stepped to the port wing of the bridge and made a funnel of his hands. “Lively Lady!” In that first grey light he could only see that the wheelhouse held a blur of faces but then its door opened, out came Victoria Baines and…He still held his hands cupped before his face and stared over them at Eleanor Hurst. On that warm morning she wore only a white blouse and a long skirt that the breeze of the tug’s passage pressed against her legs. She held a hand to her hair. He stared until Victoria Baines called deeply, “What’s the matter?”
He did not look at her but spoke to Eleanor Hurst, voicing his disbelief. “What are you doing aboard this tug?”
Victoria Baines snapped tartly, “Don’t get on your high horse with me, young man! There’s nothing wrong with this tug. I took the gel to a hotel so she got a bath. But then she was so wore-out she couldn’t travel home so I found her a berth and just as well I did. She’d took a chill and spent most o’ yesterday in her bunk. A sight better and safer than in a hotel full o’ Frenchmen. And last night I told her where we were going but she wouldn’t go ashore. Can’t say as I blame her, either.”
Eleanor said, “I spoke to you last night when you came alongside in the sailing boat.” She sounded amused.
Smith accepted the situation because he had to. The girl looked pale and tired in that grey light but she was still smiling, watching him.
He looked away to Victoria Baines. “Cast off the tow and steer north-east. There’s an enemy battlecruiser coming up and you’ll be as well out of the way. Run into the Schelde if necessary.” In the estuary of that Dutch, neutral river the tug would be safe from attack.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just keep an eye on things.”
Victoria warned him, “Mind you don’t get in the way of that battlecruiser. It looks as if you’ve been in enough trouble already.”
“I’m not taking unnecessary risks. I don’t believe in them.” But anything that might save the convoy was necessary.