In The Dark And The Deep - Steve Vernon's Sea Tales Book #1 Read online



  IN

  THE

  DARK,

  IN THE DEEP

  By

  Steve Vernon

  Steve Vernon Sea Tales Book #1

  STARK RAVEN PRESS

  In The Dark, In The Deep

  Steve Vernon Sea Tales Book #1

  Author: Steve Vernon

  Cover Art: Humble Nations

  ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-08-1

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  To the sea that swims

  in

  all of us...

  Introduction

  I am a storyteller, first and foremost.

  My natural habitat is close to the campfire and I breathe words the way that some men smoke.

  I have lived by the ocean for nearly four decades. I have listened to the waves talking to the shoreline. I have heard the old ghost stories told around a thousand campfires. I have listened to the sea gulls complaining about the fishing.

  This is the first of what will be a series of stories based around the sea.

  You don’t have to read every one, any more than you have to count every wave that rolls up to slap itself upon the beach.

  Come here and give a listen.

  I’ve got a tale for the telling.

  Yours in storytelling,

  Steve Vernon

  In The Dark and the Deep

  It happened that fast.

  A torpedo track, furrowing the water, passed straight abaft of our corvette, the Thistle. There was a muffled crump of impact. A mere seventy-five yards away from us, the tanker Cassandra settled and tilted, taking on water fast.

  “Man the depth charges,” our captain sang out.

  The order was instinctive and unnecessary. Men already stood by, ready to roll the fat deadly barrels from the stern rail. The crews of the port and starboard throwers launched another pair of depth charges into their high carved arcs. We spread the charges out as widely as possible, knowing that the U-boat would already be on the move, trying to evade our certain retaliation.

  The depth charges were a blind luck measure. They sank slowly, giving the U-boat a lot of time to escape. It was almost impossible to aim them, and the hulls of the U-boats were so solid that only a near-direct hit would have any effect, but they panicked the U-boat crew, and more importantly, they gave our crew the much-needed feeling of accomplishment.

  The asdic crew hunkered beneath their headsets, knowing full well that the rough water and the impact from the depth charges’ undersea explosions rendered their listening gear nearly useless.

  We were aiming blind, as usual.

  Fumes of petrol coiled up from the tanker like slow blue snakes curling hypnotically through the air. I saw the captain frozen at the helm for less than half of a second, his mind warring between trying to save the crew of the Cassandra or else hunting the U-boat.

  A fragment of a second.

  That’s how long a war can last, sometimes.

  The Cassandra went up in a ball of fire. Men screamed in the flames, their lungs filling with oil, flame and sea water. The tanker - gutted and twisted into a dozen strange angles, slowly slid a little farther beneath the calm gulp of the cold gray Atlantic water.

  Silhouetted by the lantern of the rising flames of the sinking tanker we saw the the U-boat, its deck crew frantically training their gun towards us.

  He might have surfaced to finish the tanker off, or perhaps our depth charges had driven him up to the surface. We didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. We hit them with everything we had. We pounded them with our 4-inch cannon, the steady 2-pounder pom-pom, the 40mm Oerlikons, and the big .50 caliber machine guns. Those who had pistols and rifles stood at the deck railing firing away like we had come to a pigeon shoot.

  The gods of war smiled on the U-boat gun crew. They got off a single lucky round that neatly snapped our radio mast. That was their last good shot. We closed in on them, raking their deck mercilessly. A point-blank blast of our 4-inch cannon demolished the U-boat’s conning tower.

  The U-boat was helpless. We could have ordered their surrender, but we weren’t in the mood for any kind of mercy.

  War will do that to you.

  At this point of the game it was nothing but simple retaliation. They had hurt us and now it was our turn to hurt them.

  We moved in closer and began banging away in earnest.

  And then the flames reached the Cassandra’s secondary tanks and the resulting explosion blasted the U-boat to the lowest region of hell. The blast rocked the Thistle, charring the port side of our vessel and damned near sinking us.

  We cheered like a boatload of blood-crazed barbarians. Hurrah, blood had been spilt.

  Hurrah, victory was ours.

  It was our third day at sea, and we had suffered our first casualties.

  Our luck was beginning to turn.

  ***

  I volunteered for duty during the first year of the war.

  I had originally wanted to fly for the RCAF, but my reflexes refused to test quite fast enough.

  “Well,” I said, “if I am not good enough for the Air Force, then the Navy can have me.”

  As far as I was concerned, it was the RCAF’s loss and the RCN’s gain.

  I served my first day at sea on the twentieth anniversary of my birth. There were younger men on board than I. In fact, most of our crew was youngsters. The oldest sailor on the deck crew was barely thirty years of age, and we called him Pappy.

  We had shipped out of Halifax, escorting an HX class convoy, bound from Halifax and headed towards Britain. It looked easy on the map, just a happy two-week jaunt from here to there.

  Or rather a two-week jaunt through U-boat-infested waters. And as we got closer to the English Channel, we’d have the Luftwaffe Condors and the dive-bombing Stukas and patrols of German E-boats to watch out for.

  It was as easy as falling overboard, and a little more dangerous.

  Still, we made out fine.

  We had a good crew.

  Our captain was in his late forties, I would guess. We called him the old man when he wasn’t listening. He had the lean weathered look of a man who had spent most of his life upon the open sea and the rest of it impatiently waiting for his next mission.

  Just as soon as I laid eyes on him, I decided that he was a man that I could trust with my life, yet there was one other whom I would come to rely upon in a far deeper fashion than mere trust.

  ***

  I met Big Jimmy Noonan the first day I boarded, bumping into him as I stepped off of the gangplank. It was a little like banging face first i
nto a solid brick wall, only not half as gentle.

  “Well, I take it that ‘Grace’ is not your middle name,” he rumbled.

  I stepped back. Big Jimmy Noonan was one of the biggest men I’d ever seen, his shoulders bowed like bow staves, his arms the thickness of hawser cable, with fists that could easily serve double duty as caulking mallets.

  He fixed me with a once-over sweep of a stare, like a captain might eye an uncharted shoal that he was trying hard to fathom. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked to see a rank, but the fold of his sleeve seemed to obscure any sign of insignia or station. I didn’t know it yet, but that air of mystery was a style that Big Jimmy Noonan wore as easily as some men wear a hat.

  “Don’t you dare ‘sir’ me, boy. I work for a living, and you would do well to remember that. What’s your name?”

  “William, sir. I mean—just William. William McTavish.”

  “McTavish, is it?” he asked. “Well, you’re ‘Taffy’ from here on out, d’ya understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Keep a weather eye forward and the bean farts abaft of you, and you’ll make out just fine.”

  He grinned and slapped me on the shoulder. I felt as if I had been issued a temporary stay of execution.

  ***

  Two days had passed since the sinking of the Cassandra.

  The sky was clear and the sea was calm and you scarcely would have known that there was a war going on.

  “Look at that sun up there, shining away as blissful and blithe as care-you-not