Corporal Cotton's Little War Read Online Free PDF Page A

with radio equipment. Beyond that, still under the wheelhouse deckhead, was the engine room containing the two huge Packard engines. From this a door opened on to a large well-deck, part of which had been built over just forward of the after hatch and mounted with the captured 20 mm Italian cannon. On either side of the wheelhouse, almost jamming up the gangway, was a Lewis gun on a stand, and at the rear end of the well there was a canister containing chloro-sulphonic acid for making smoke, below it the tanks containing the 100-octane petrol that gave the boat a range of around one hundred and forty miles at a speed of twenty-five knots.
    Cotton fingered the wheel. The boat had originally been fitted with hydraulic steering for fingertip control so that her millionaire owner would not have to exert himself too much when he wished to turn to port or starboard, but this had been replaced by the navy with a direct wire system. The deck seemed to be unbelievably cluttered up with drums of petrol and oil, ropes, water casks, guns, fenders, Carley float and crash nets. Lashed along the starboard side, where a small rubber-covered hand line was threaded through low lightweight stanchions, were planks. Heavier timbers were stuffed underneath the cannon platform and below deck were two rifles, a tommy-gun, and a large wooden box with two handles containing a closed-circuit re-breather diving equipment consisting of a flexible breathing bag, tube and canister of CO2 absorbent, a helmet vaguely like a gas-mask with goggles and mouthpiece, gas cylinders, weights and boots to which lead had been attached. It looked remarkably old-fashioned and well worn and Cotton wondered where in God’s name it had been dug up.
    There was a thump of feet on the black wooden piles of the jetty as Patullo appeared with Lieutenant Shaw, a thin-faced dedicated-looking officer who didn’t seem to be relishing the job he’d been given. Like Cotton, like everybody else, he wore a white submarine sweater.
    Patullo introduced Cotton with a smile. ‘This is our Ulysses,’ he said. ‘Corporal Cotton, Michael Anthony, Royal Marines. He speaks Greek as well as I do. Perhaps better. He ought to prove useful.’
    Shaw’s eyes were bleak. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. ‘I gather the Germans have already reached Rhodes, which’ll make this place rotten uncomfortable if they use it for their Stukas. And I gather this bloody boat’s already had her share of bad luck. Old Panyioti’s brother-in-law was shot dead aboard her by his wife a couple of years back when she found him in bed with her maid. Panyioti’s money fixed the law, of course, but there was another bit of shooting, too, before they left the mainland. Several members of the family, who thought they ought to have a chance to leave as well, put their point a bit forcibly, and a man was killed and another wounded.’
    He sounded disgusted and disillusioned by the whole business, and Cotton frowned. Like all seafaring men he was intensely superstitious. Women on boats, like death and sailing on a Friday, were bad, and this boat had seen more than its fair share of women and death, it seemed.
    As the two officers disappeared into the wheelhouse, Cotton began to loosen the bow rope. One of the RASC men waited quietly by the stem.
    There was a dull explosion as the engines leapt to life one after the other and Claudia began to surge forward for a second at the creep of the propellers. Lieutenant Shaw reappeared, his head through the starboard hatch, his cap on the back of his head. He glanced round him and nodded.
    ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let go springs.’
    As the springs were taken in, he spoke to Patullo inside the cabin, then turned to the soldier on the stern.
    ‘Let go aft!’
    ‘All gone aft, sir!’
    ‘Let go forrard!’
    ‘All gone forrard.’
    Standing alongside the winch, Cotton thrust gently at the wharf with his foot and Claudia edged away and began to glide slowly across the basin