Free Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) by Douglas Reeman

into the house, with Coker fussing around all the time; she sensed that he wanted to be alone. She tried to think of her brother, the dream she had often had, the submarine lying in perpetual darkness. How could she have misunderstood? Being alone was the one thing he had feared.
    ‘I’ll be here, sir.’
    She reversed carefully and edged out onto the road. Somehow she knew he had not moved.
    She belonged.

4
Brought Together
    Leading Seaman Dougie Bass, ML366’s killick coxswain, eased the spokes half a turn, this way and that, his glance dropping to the faintly lit compass. West-by-south. For some, the compass card might be difficult to read; to others, newcomers, it seemed a glaring invitation to be attacked.
    Like the even, steady motion, he was used to it. He half listened to the sounds around and beneath him, his trained ear seeking anything unusual.
    His salt-encrusted lips smiled. In the early days some people had asked him how he had become so accustomed to the changing moods of a small, fast vessel.
After being a civvie?
He had never bothered to explain. Now he did not need to. But anybody who could serve soup when the old
Bournemouth Belle
was racing across points at sixty miles an hour soon learned to keep his balance. Or pouring a dry sherry for some first class passenger when you were shooting through a tunnel, tothe exact level and without spilling a drop. He either got it right, or found himself on the dole.
    Now he could imagine being and doing nothing else. Even his hands, resting almost loosely on the spokes, were as hard as any true seaman’s. And his hair, longer than regulation requirement, was the mark of a veteran. Big ships were different. Here, in Harry Tate’s Navy as they called it, it was something else. But if any outsider tossed an unfriendly remark, it would usually end in a brawl.
    Neither moon nor stars defined the line between sea and sky. They had been to Portsmouth, as part of the escort for two landing craft, something to do with forthcoming exercises. He was glad to be rid of them. He could not imagine what they must be like to steer and handle in any kind of a sea.
    Dark, and yet he knew where every man was, or should be at this time. Gun crews fore and aft, Bob Chitty the signalman a few feet away on the starboard side of the low bridge, night glasses at the ready. If the boat moved too heavily into a sudden trough he might hear the faint clink of metal from the twin machine-guns, which Chitty would swap for his lamp and flags at the drop of a hat. Worked in a fairground at one time, on and off, as he had put it, when he had worked at all. But show him a blinking signal, or put him behind the two Brownings, and he was another man.
    Like the Oerlikon gunner just abaft the bridge, his tuneless whistle drowned out by the muted growl of the motors: Titch Kelly, not much between the ears, and one who had been in trouble more times than that, until366. But of course he was from Liverpool. In the navy it was always the same, as it was if you’d sprung from Birmingham, for some reason. Scouse or Brummie, and it would be, ‘I’ll be watching you, my lad!’ He had even heard the Jaunty down at their makeshift base say something of the sort.
    He heard someone clear his throat and smiled. Allison, the new Jimmy the One. The smile broadened to a grin.
Tobias.
    Seemed nice enough, but you never could tell so soon. Anyway, the lads would have their little jokes. The smile faded. Until it got out of hand. ‘Killick’ coxswain carried its own responsibility. And trust went both ways. There had been some talk of possible promotion, a petty officer’s course. What would the old-timers on the
Bournemouth Belle
say if he turned up in fore-and-aft rig, gold badges and all?
    He felt the same sense of uncertainty, but it went far deeper than that. Like being here in the Channel . . . He had started in Coastal Forces on the east coast, Grimsby, Lowestoft, Hull, places that smelled of fish. Small