‘Ship, sir! Port quarter.’ His voice was excited, urgent. ‘Warship, I think.’
‘Relax,’ Kennet said. ‘I doubt whether it’s the Tirpitz.’ Less than half a dozen people aboard knew that the Andover had accompanied them during the night. He stepped out on to the wing and returned almost immediately. ‘The good shepherd,’ he said. ‘Three miles.’
‘It’s almost half-light now,’ Captain Bowen said. ‘We could be wrong, Mr Kennet.’
The radio room hatchway panel banged open and Spenser’s face appeared.
‘Andover, sir. Bandit, bandit, one bandit … 045 … ten miles … five thousand.’
‘There now,’ Kennet said. ‘I knew we weren’t wrong. Full power, sir?’ Bowen nodded and Kennet gave the necessary instructions to the engine-room.
‘Evasive action?’ Bowen was half-smiling; knowledge, however unwelcome that knowledge, always comes as a relief after uncertainty. ‘A Condor, you would guess?’
‘No guess, sir. In those waters, only the Condor flies alone.’ Kennet slid back the port wing door and gazed skywards. ‘Cloud cover’s pretty thin now. We should be able to see our friend coming up – he should be practically dead astern. Shall we go out on the wing, sir?’
‘In a minute, Mr Kennet. Two minutes. Gather flowers while we may – or, at least, keep warm as long as possible. If fate has abandoned us we shall be freezing to death all too soon. Tell me, Mr Kennet, has any profound thought occurred to you?’
‘A lot of thoughts have occurred to me but I wouldn’t say any of them are profound.’
‘How on earth do you think that Condor located us?’
‘Submarine? It could have surfaced and radioed Alta Fjord.’
‘No submarine. The Andover’s sonar would have picked him up. No plane, no surface ships, that’s a certainty.’
Kennet frowned for a few seconds, then smiled. ‘Flannel-foot,’ he said with certainty. ‘A radio.’
‘Not necessarily even that. A small electrical device, probably powered by our own mains system, that transmits a continuous homing signal.’
‘So if we survive this lot it’s out with the fine-tooth comb?’
‘Indeed. It’s out with –’
‘Andover, sir.’ It was Spenser again. ‘Four bandits, repeat four bandits … 310 … eight miles … three thousand.’
‘I wonder what we’ve done to deserve this?’ Kennet sounded almost mournful. ‘We were even more right than we thought, sir. Torpedo-bombers or glider-bombers, that’s for sure, attacking out of the darkness to the north-west and us silhouetted against the dawn.’
The two men moved out on the port wing. The Andover was still on the port quarter but had closed in until it was less than two miles distant. A low bank of cloud, at about the same distance, obscured the view aft.
‘Hear anything, Mr Kennet? See anything?’
‘Nothing, nothing. Damn that cloud. Yes, I do. I hear it. It’s a Condor.’
‘It’s a Condor.’ Once heard, the desynchronized clamour of a Focke-Wulf 200’s engine is not readily forgotten. ‘And I’m afraid, Mr Kennet, that you’ll have to postpone your evasive action practice for another time. This lad sounds as if he is coming in very low.’
‘Yes, he’s coming in low. And I know why.’ Most unusually for Kennet, he sounded very bitter. ‘He intends to do some pinpoint precision bombing. He’s under orders to stop us or cripple us but not sink us. I’ll bet that bastard Flannelfoot feels as safe as houses.’
‘You have it to rights, Mr Kennet. He could stop us by bombing the engine-room, but doing that is a practical guarantee that we go to the bottom. There he comes, now.’ The Focke-Wulf Condor had broken through the cloud and was heading directly for the stern of the San Andreas. Every gun on the Andover that could be brought to bear had opened up as soon as the Focke-Wulf had cleared the cloud-bank and within seconds the starboard side of the Andover was wreathed in smoke. For a frigate, its anti-aircraft fire-power was formidable: low-angle main armament, pom-poms, Oerlikons and the equally deadly Boulton-Paul Defiant turrets which loosed off a devastating 960 rounds a minute. The Focke-Wulf must have been hit many times but the big Condor’s capacity to absorb punishment was legendary. Still it came on, now no more than two hundred feet above the waves. The sound of the engines had risen from the clamorous to the thunderous.
‘This is no place for a couple of honest seamen to be, Mr Kennet.’ Captain Bowen had to shout to make himself heard. ‘But I think it’s too late now.’
‘I rather think it is, sir.’
Two bombs, just two, arced lazily down from the now smoking Condor.
Had the Americans retained the original British design concept for accommodation aboard the Liberty Ships, the tragedy, while still remaining such, would at least have been minimized. The original Sunderland plans had the accommodation both fore and aft: Henry Kaiser’s designers, in their wisdom – blind folly as it turned out – had all their accommodation, for both officers and men, including also the navigating bridge, grouped in a single superstructure surrounding the funnel.
The Bo’sun, Dr Sinclair by his side, had reached the upper deck before the Condor reached the San Andreas; they were almost immediately joined by Patterson for whom the Andover’s barrage had sounded like a series of heavy metallic blows on the side of his engine-room.
‘Down!’ the Bo’sun shouted. Two powerful arms around their shoulders bore them to the deck, for the Focke-Wulf had reached the San Andreas before the bombs did and the Bo’sun was well aware that the Focke-Wulf carried a fairly lethal array of machine guns which it did not hesitate to use when the occasion demanded. On this occasion, however, the guns remained silent, possibly because the gunners were under instructions not to fire, more probably because the gunners were already dead, for it was plain that the Condor, trailing a huge plume of black smoke, whether from fuselage or engines it was impossible to say, and veering sharply to starboard, was itself about to die.
The two bombs, contact and not armour-piercing, struck fore and aft of the funnel, exploded simultaneously and just immediately after passing through the unprotected deck-heads of the living quarters, blowing the shattered bulkheads outwards and filling the air with screaming shards of metal and broken glass, none of which reached the three prone men. The Bo’sun cautiously lifted his head and stared in disbelief as the funnel, seemingly intact but sheared off at its base toppled slowly over the port side and into the sea. Any sound of a splash that there may have been was drowned out by the swelling roar of more aero engines.
‘Stay down, stay down!’ Flat on the deck, the Bo’sun twisted his head to the right. There were four of them in line abreast formation, Heinkel torpedo-bombers, half a mile away, no more than twenty feet above the water and headed directly for the starboard side of the San Andreas. Ten
