Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to listen. And a full commander; even now, after four years of war, it was still rare to meet up with an R.N.V.R. officer in a brass hat.
Really Not Very Reliable
, they had scoffed in those early days. It was different now: the amateurs had become the true professionals. The regulars who had not kept up or refused to change had become very thin on the ground.
    Foley could recall the moment exactly. The morning after the farewell party for Harry Bryant. The hangover. Trying to discover what had happened, seeing the face and remembering the man. The legend . . .
    And the date. He could remember tearing it off the calendar in 366’s tiny hutchlike wardroom. September third. Four years exactly from the Sunday when war had been declared. Men had grown from boys in that time. An equal number had died. Commander John Critchley . . . He sighed and said, ‘We’d better move ourselves, ’Swain. The new boss is coming today.’
    He walked towards the bridge, past the storage space for the ground mines they sometimes carried. It was not the time to worry about a change of leadership. That was vague enough anyway, with more than a dozen departments working in countermeasures. It had been something new for them, or maybe Critchley had made it seem that way.
    And if he thought about it, Foley knew he had been lucky. He had seen and done more than most, right from the beginning when as a young subbie, newly appointed from the Supplementary Reserve, he had found himselfin charge of a motor launch and on his way to Dunkirk. His total experience had been evening or sometimes weekend training, learning the mysteries of pilotage and navigation on well-worn charts, squatting around tables at the local reserve unit. Trying to read semaphore while somebody flagged signals from the church tower, or wondering what use it was discovering how to fix and unfix bayonets.
    Dunkirk had changed all that. It was not fear he remembered, nor even the sense of helplessness and enormity. It was anger, and sometimes he could still feel it, even after all this time, when the actual scenes and events had become blurred, confused, like fragments of an old movie. The ceaseless attacks by enemy aircraft, while they had stared at the sky and prayed for the R.A.F. The unmoving queues of khaki on the beaches, if you could get near enough. Dying, broken ships everywhere; the navy had lost twenty-seven destroyers alone during the evacuation. The miracle, some had called it. But the little ships of Dunkirk were the true heroes. Pleasure launches like Foley’s, which had probably never been out of sight of land before, tugs and fishing boats, and the proud blue and white hulls of the lifeboat service, old pros and yachtsmen in anything that could stay afloat. There had even been a paddle-steamer, one of the many which had taken families on trips to Southend and Brighton in those impossible days of peace. Foley paused at the hatch coaming above the ladder. Familiar smells: the galley, the ever-lingering stench of petrol. They had been together so long they did not need to be reminded of the brutal difference betweenthis and other boats that were diesel-powered. Here you could brew up in seconds: the notice
No Smoking Abaft the Bridge
was only for visitors.
    But, for a moment, the picture returned. The paddle-steamer, stopped and slewing round in the current, only one paddle thrashing at the water until it, too, fell motionless.
    It had been attacked, raked by enemy aircraft; even as they had drawn near Foley had seen one of them through his borrowed binoculars, climbing so effortlessly, and sharply defined against a patch of blue sky.
    The stricken paddle-steamer had to be taken in tow, and he felt the same frustration as on that day. Hazy memories of heaving-lines, and rigging some kind of tow-line. The launch was not powerful, and his small crew of sailors had been snatched from the training intake at Portsmouth. They were willing enough, but looking to their officer