Breakthrough (The Red Gambit Series) (7 page)

‘
Perfect.
’

Rybin
manou
e
vred
his boat gently on steerage power only, turning her gently into the correct angle.

The excitement in the boat was tangible, the atmosphere heavy with expectation and fear, the ever-present companions of the submariner.

The German contractors
,
hijacked when they had left
Danzig
,
still
remained onboard
,
but were not now permitted to be at the controls during attacks.

Starshina 2nd Class
Mutin
,
overseeing the plane
s
crew
,
was as exc
i
ted as everyone else, but became distracted by it
all
, watching his captain formulate
the
attack rather than his
own station. One of his planes
men, a young Matrose, sneezed, his eyes watering and his body gathering itself for a repeat. In the act of
sneezing,
the plane angle altered imperceptibly.

Rybin ordered the scope up for one last check.

A swift look told him that something was wrong and he screamed at the Starshina, the
man’s
horrified silence quickly giving way to rapped out orders, bringing the vessel back down to its attack depth again.

Incandescent with rage
,
but sufficiently in control to proceed, Rybin checked bearings and shot, six torpedoes fired and running in short order.

The Starshina was relieved and placed in the custody of the Senior Rating for a later court-martial.

Twenty seconds after B-29 attacked
,
Kalinin
had his own fish in the water, two torpedoes targeted on each of the prime vessels.

Immediately after their release
,
he had gone deeper and turned west, intending to slip through to Glenlara and the supplies he desperately needed. Maybe another captain might have reloaded his last two torpedoes and gone after the group again
,
but
Kalinin
had survived thus far on his judgement, and he judged that he might need them before the coast of
Eire
offered up its comforts and
promise of
safe haven.

In the control room
,
he went into his routin
e as the stopwatch counted down. H
is
rendition of
Tchaikovsky
grew in volume, heading unerringly to its intended
climax.

The crew of Shch-307 were not disappointed and it seemed all four torpedoes found their mark.

Onboard B-29
,
things were more subdued. The young Starshina was popular
,
but no one could deny his guilt and that he had placed the whole crew at risk.

The senior midshipman had the stopwatch and looked confused when explosions started to hammer through the water.

“The other boat, young Alexandrov, the other boat.”

Nodding his understanding
,
the midshipman returned to his task, using his fingers to bring the count down from five to impact.

His countdown came to naught
.

Repeating the
process,
he was again unrewarded.

Rybin remained poker-faced but inwardly seething.

Third time lucky, and the midshipman
’s effort
was rewarded with a deep rumble, which sound filled the boat and eased the tense situation.

Two more followed in quick succession
,
but the final fish failed to hit home.

None the
less,
three hard hits had been achieved and reloading was already underway. B-29 could be back in the attack very soon.

Rybin went to the chart table and looked again at the scenario, trying to find out what went wrong with
the attack and the waste of three valuable fish.

The
scared
sonar operator’s
shouted
warning
rose above
the
hubbub in the control room
,
and immediately the submarine was thrown about by a
pair of
explosion
s
close by.

‘Aircraft dropped depth charges
,
’ stated the clinical part of Rybin’s mind, which also
knew the
answer
as
to how they had spotted B-29.

‘
That idiot Mutin.
’

After the
attack,
the XXI had gone deep
er
and
manoeuvred
back around to head east, trying to stay in an attack position.

Quickly mapping out the scenario
,
Rybin ordered a
further
dive and turn to port, heading in towards the escorts and his previous targets.

More explosions followed as the attacking
Sunderland
put
the rest of
its depth bombs on the money. It
could not
really miss
,
seeing as the enemy sub was dragging a
large
white
fender
with it wherever it went.

Actually, it wasn’t Mutin’s fault at all.
Fate had dealt
badly with B-29
, conspiring to
catch
a floating
fender’s
line with the periscope and
causing the submarine to
pull it along
, leaving a very obvious mark on the sea for the
Sunderland
crew to follow.

Bulbs shattered and joints burst as the vessel was engulfed in the
pressure waves
.
Shaken from stem to stern,
the vessel screamed in indignation as German engineering was tested to its fullest degree. L
imbs were broken and flesh was torn
,
as men were
dashed
against unforgiving surfaces.

However,
the XXI refused to die, and its crew rushed to their damage control duties
,
intent of keeping the sea at bay.

The young
Starshina Mutin
was saved from his courts martial, his neck broken when he was dashed against
a
watertight door.

Elsewhere in the boat, two other
s
had been crushed
to death
when a torpedo was shaken loose
during the reloading;
others
were
injured in the desperate fight to stabilise the
weapon.

A fire in the engine room had been quickly extinguished, partially by
the
prompt action
of
the
2nd
Engineering officer
,
and partially by the inrush of
seawater
, which leak was serious and already being attacked by the engine room staff. Willing hands removed the
badly burnt
and screaming Starshina to the sick bay where he died
,
even as his engine room crew triumphed over the leaks.

The sole
serious
casualty in the Control room was Rybin. The unconscious commander
was
on the deck
,
flopping about with the movement of his craft, a very visible crescent of blood on his forehead where he had im
pacted a control valve at speed, the shape precisely mirrored in the wound
,
down to the serrated finger grips on the outer edge.

Grimacing from the pain of a broken finger,
Senior Lieutenant
Chriakin
took command and dived, also turning back
180°. Unknown to him
,
the manoeuvre
also dragged the fender below sea level, removing the
marker that
the now toothless
Sunderland
was using to call down the vengeful destroyers.

B-29 would live to fight another day.

Kalinin
, as per his usual practice,
manoeuvred
away
rather than inspected
,
and only raised the periscope when he felt secure.

A swift rotation of the scope
yielded
the unforgettable image of dying leviathans, the
Aquitania
ablaze and attended by smaller vessels
,
seemingly
intent on saving life. T
he
USS
Ranger
was
low in the water, so low that her flight deck seemed almost a continuation of
the
water
that
was about to claim her.

Intent on leaving the area as safely as possible,
Kalinin
ordered
a
course to northwest, removing
ShC
h
307 from the scene at best speed.

Who hit what would actually not become clear until the end of hostilities, but
Kalinin
felt sure he had a piece of both vessels, in which
h
e was absolutely correct, none of his torpedoes having been fired in vain.

His first two had struck the
Aquitania
on her port side, one amidships, the second fifty feet before her stern. Either
might
have been fatal to the venerable liner
,
but in tandem
,
they
ensured
her end, the resultant fires
inhibiting the evacuation of her crew and passengers.

His last two
torpedoes
had struck the USS Ranger
forty
feet short of her bow and amidships, the former being right on a bulkhead division
,
causing the loss of the bow section
to
flooding. Damage to the next bulkhead meant that the vessel then hastened her own end as
momentum
drove her forward, causing weight of water to rupture the damaged bulkhead, flooding a further compartment and giving the aircraft carrier a pronounced nose-down aspect.

The latter
strike
failed to explode
, but still penetrated the skin of the warship, permitting the sea to make more steady inroads.

B-29’s torpedoes had condemned the carrier to the depths, flooding her engine spaces and denying the power to drive the
fire fighting
mains. When
Kalinin
had looked
,
he saw
little smoke coming from
her, but had not realised that below decks
the blazes were running out of control.

B-29’s third torpedo, the first one
to detonate, had struck a RCN C
orvette fussing round its charges, which corvette had vanished beneath the waves
in less than
a minut
e,
taking
every soul on board
with her
.

As both submarines now moved
away,
the sonar operators became the only point of contact with the battle they left behind them.

Sounds of a large vessel sinking beneath the surface were interpreted as the carrier, and both crews claimed her as their own.

It was USS
Ranger that
succumbed first, the Capt
ain abandoning ship reluctantly, the delay in abandoning ship cost
ing
more men
their lives
as she rolled over and nosedived to the
bottom,
three hundred and fifty-six
of he
r crew
still
entombed in the hull. The sinking vessel took an
important cargo
down with her;
one hundred and twenty-one
replacement aircraft for the European War.

Around
Aquitania
,
the efforts
of
fire fighting
an
d rescue went on for many hours. T
he big liner resisted,
and
all the time more lives
were
being saved as she remained stubbornly afloat. Her passengers consisted mainly of US and Canadian
air force personnel
returning to the ETO from their mother countries
,
and many had been lost in the explosions and fires.
But t
hanks to the Herculean efforts of the
escorts,
and the reluctance of the old ship to die,
many were saved to fight another day.