‘At your disposal, Bo’sun.’ If the Lieutenant harboured any ill will towards the Bo’sun for the deaths of his fellow countrymen, he was at pains to conceal it. ‘Any time. I suggest just on noon.’
Patterson said: ‘You finished through in the recovery room, Bo’sun?’ McKinnon nodded. ‘Well, one gets tired of keeping on saying thank-you so I’ll spare you that. When do we bury them?’
‘Your decision, sir.’
‘Early afternoon, before it starts to get dark.’ Patterson laughed without humour. ‘My decision. Chief Engineer Patterson is your man when it comes to making decisions on matters that are of no importance. I don’t recall making the decision to attack that submarine.’
‘I did consult with Captain Bowen, sir.’
‘Ah!’ It was Margaret Morrison. ‘So that was what that two-minute conference was about.’
‘Of course. He approved.’
Janet said: ‘And if he hadn’t? Would you still have rammed that U-boat?’
McKinnon said patiently: ‘He not only approved, he was enthusiastic. Very enthusiastic. With all respect to Lieutenant Ulbricht here, the Captain wasn’t feeling too kindly disposed towards the Germans. Not at that moment of time, anyway.’
‘You’re being evasive, Archie McKinnon. Answer my question. If he had disapproved would you still have attacked?’
‘Yes. No need to mention that to the Captain, though.’
‘Nurse Magnusson.’ Patterson smiled at Janet to rob his words of any offence. ‘I hardly think Mr McKinnon deserves either interrogation or disapproval. I think he deserves congratulations for a magnificent job well done.’ He rose, went to the cupboard where Dr Singh had kept his private supplies and returned with a bottle of Scotch and some glasses, poured a measure for McKinnon and set it before him. ‘I think Dr Singh would have approved of this.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ McKinnon looked down at the glass on the table. ‘He won’t be needing this any more.’
There was silence round the table. Predictably, it was broken by Janet.
‘I think, Archie, that that was less than a gracious remark.’
‘You think so now. Maybe, Maybe not.’ There was no hint of apology in his voice. He raised his glass and sipped from it. ‘Knew his Scotch, did Dr Singh.’
The silence was longer this time, longer and strained. It was Sinclair, embarrassed by the silence, who broke it.
‘I’m sure we all echo Mr Patterson’s sentiments, Mr McKinnon. A splendid job. But – to quote yourself, I’m not questioning your professional competence – you did take a bit of a chance, didn’t you?’
‘You mean I endangered the lives of all aboard?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ His look of discomfiture made it evident that he had thought it, if not said it.
‘It was a calculated risk,’ McKinnon said, ‘but not all that calculated. The odds were on my side, quite heavily, I believe. I am quite certain that the U-boat was under orders that we were to be seized, not sunk, which is why I am equally certain that the gun crew fired into the San Andreas without orders.
‘The U-boat captain, Oberleutnant Klaussen, was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was tired or immature or inexperienced or incompetent or over-confident – he may have been all those things at the same time. What is certain is that an experienced U-boat commander would never have put himself in a position where he was running parallel to us and less than a half a mile away. He should have stayed at a couple of miles’ distance – which in an emergency would have given him plenty of time to crash dive – ordered us to send across a boat, loaded it up with a half-dozen men with machine pistols and sent them back to take over the San Andreas. We could have done nothing to stop them. Even better, he should have closed up from astern, a position that would have made ramming impossible, then eased up alongside the gangway.
‘And of course, he was too confident, too sure of himself, too relaxed by half. When he saw us lowering the gangway, he was convinced the game was over. It never even occurred to him that a hospital ship could be used as a man-o’-war. And he was either so blind or so stupid that he never even noticed that we were steadily closing in on him all the time we were in contact. In short, he made every mistake in the book. It would have been difficult to pick a worse man for the job.’
There was a long and rather uncomfortable silence. Mario, unobtrusive and efficient as ever, had filled all the glasses on the table but no one, with the exception of the Bo’sun, had as yet touched theirs.
Sinclair said: ‘On the basis of what you say, the U-boat captain was indeed the wrong man for the job. And, of course, you wholly out-manoeuvred him. But surely the danger still existed. In the actual collision, I mean. The U-boat could have sunk us and not vice versa. We are only made of thin sheet plating: the hull of the submarine is immensely strong.’
‘I would not presume to lecture you on medical matters, Dr Sinclair.’
Sinclair smiled. ‘Meaning I should not presume to advise you on matters maritime. But, Mr McKinnon, you’re a bo’sun on a merchant vessel.’
‘Today, yes. Before that I spent twelve years in the submarine service.’
‘Oh no.’ Sinclair shook his head. ‘Too much, just too much. This is definitely not Dr Sinclair’s day,’
‘I’ve known a good number of cases of collisions between merchant vessels and submarines. In nearly all cases those collisions were between friend and friend or, in peacetime, between a submarine and a harmless foreign vessel. The results were always the same. The surface vessel came off best.
‘It doesn’t seem logical but it does make sense. Take a hollow glass sphere with walls, say, of a third of an inch in diameter, submerge it to a very considerable depth – I’m talking of hundreds of feet – and it still won’t implode. Bring it to the surface, give it a light tap with a hammer and it will shatter into a hundred pieces. Same with the pressure hull of a submarine. It can resist pressure at great depths but on the surface a short sharp blow, as from the bows of a merchant ship, will cause it to rupture. Admittedly, the chances of the submarine are not improved by the fact that the merchant ship may displace many thousands of tons and be travelling at a fair speed. On the other hand, even a vessel as small as a trawler can sink a submarine. Point is, Dr Sinclair, it wasn’t all that dangerous: I hadn’t much doubt as to what the outcome would be.’
‘Point taken, Mr McKinnon. You see before you a rueful cobbler who will stick to his last from now on.’
Patterson said: ‘This ever happen to you?’
‘No. If it had, the chances are very high that I wouldn’t be here now. I know plenty of instances. When I was in the service, the trade as we called it, we had a maxim which said, in effect, never mind the enemy, just watch out for your friends. Back in the Twenties, a British submarine – the MI it was – was accidentally struck by a merchant ship off the Devon coast. All died. Not long afterwards the American SI was overrun by the Italian passenger liner City of Rome. All died. Some time later, another American submarine was overrun by a coastguard destroyer off Cape Cod. All died. The Poseidon, British, was sent to the bottom by a Japanese ship. Accident. It was off the north China coast. A good number of survivors, but some died from the diver’s bends. In the early years of the war, the Surcouf, crewed by the Free French and the biggest submarine in the world – so big that it was called a submarine cruiser – was sunk in the Caribbean by a ship in a convoy she was escorting. The Surcouf had a crew of a hundred and fifty: all died.’ McKinnon passed a hand across his eyes. ‘There were others. I forgot most of them. Ah, yes, there was the Umpire. Forty-one, I think. It took only a trawler, and not a very big one, to destroy her.’
Patterson said: ‘You’ve made your point, as Dr Sinclair says, you’ve more than made your point. I accept that the element of risk was not high. You’ll just have to bear with us, Mr McKinnon. Amateurs all. We didn’t know. You did. The fact that the U-boat is at the bottom of the sea is testimony enough to that.’ He paused. ‘I have to say, Bo’sun, that your achievement doesn’t appear to have given you any great satisfaction.’
‘It hasn’t.’
Patterson nodded. ‘I understand. To have been responsible for the deaths of so many men – well, it’s hardly a cheerful thought.’