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

wary.
    ‘Jimmy Bisset,’ he’d introduced himself. ‘LAG/WOp, RAF. Sounds like a chemical formula, doesn’t it?’
    Apart from the officers, Cotton had found them all living in an aeroplane packing case on the wooden wharf where Claudia lay. They’d made themselves comfortable with a stolen stove to which they’d attached as a chimney an old cast-iron drain-pipe from God alone knew where, and Cotton didn’t expect any problems with any of them save Stoker Docherty.
    In all ships, merchant service or Royal Navy, the black gang were considered to be tough guys and troublemakers, and it seemed Docherty’s ambition was to be the toughest and most troublesome of them all. Cotton suspected he’d been chivvied into the job because the ML flotilla he’d come from had had enough of him, but that he wasn’t half as tough as he liked to pretend, and was more than a little mad, with his slicked-down, greasy hair, crazy eyes, permanent grin and twisted sense of humour. His head was full of thoughts of women, singing and dancing, in that order, and he was irresponsible, uproarious, rebellious and noisy.. His arms tattooed with a tombstone bearing the legend ‘Mother’, clasped hands, and ‘Home Sweet Home’ on a length of ribbon, his reputation had arrived ahead of him through Chief ERA Duff, who knew him well.
    ‘Nickname’s “Rammer”,’ he said. ‘For obvious reasons. Only one bloody thought in his mind. He can’t keep it in his trousers. He’s supposed to have taken a diving course for inspecting underwater gear.’ He didn’t seem very impressed by Docherty.
    The stoker had spent his first day aboard Claudia pinning up the most salacious set of pin-up pictures Cotton had seen -- and in the navy Cotton had seen a few - all button-hard nipples and thrust-out rumps.
    ‘You sex-mad?’ Cotton asked.
    ‘Yeh.’ Docherty’s grin was unabashed. ‘It’s dead smashing. I’m a connoisseur of tits, legs and bums.’
    He stacked up a row of what he called his ‘dirt books’, white-jacketed paperbacks each bearing a picture of an undressed girl in the last stages of torture or rape. Cooped up with him in a small boat seventy-three feet long, with a forecastle no more than fifteen feet across at its widest point, smelling of dust and old fag-ends, and shared with everybody else on board, Cotton wasn’t sure how they’d cope.
    They had taken on the extra drums of petrol that afternoon so they could fill up before entering Xiloparissia Bay and be able to leave -- in a hurry if they had to -- with full tanks. Other odds and ends -- including a couple of unhappy-looking pigeons -- had also been loaded on board, together with extra ammunition for the 303s and the2O mm.
    ‘Which,’ Docherty said gaily, ‘will probably tear itself out of the fucking mounting when we fire it.’
    Altogether, Cotton decided, Operation Long John Silver, which was the fancy code-name Ponsonby had thought up for the affair, looked like being a pretty dicey do. Although the navy was watching out towards the north, the Germans already seemed to hold almost everything in that direction and there was the possibility that the Italian fleet, despite the pounding it had suffered at Taranto, might also rouse itself sufficiently to join in.
    Cotton climbed on to the gangway alongside the wheelhouse to remove the covers from the Lewises. Since he was supposed to be an expert on weaponry, it was his job to maintain them in sufficiently good order that the two pongos - who, being RASC, couldn’t be expected to know anything about guns - would only have to press the trigger and point them in the right direction if they were attacked. In action, it would be Cotton’s job to fire the 20 mm, with Stoker Docherty standing by with the full drums of ammunition.
    As they edged along the coast of Crete and began to turn north past Canea, Cotton could see small vineyards, olive groves, paddocks and half-acre plots for oats, barley, lentils and broad beans.