Read Online Sunset by Douglas Reeman - Free Book Online

his.
    Brooke answered quietly, ‘It would be a massacre.’
    â€˜Why us, sir?’
    â€˜
Serpent
’s fast, and will have no difficulty in keeping up with converted liners or whatever they are. There will be others with us.’ He held a match to his pipe and was surprised that his hand was so steady. Perhaps he should have told Kerr the truth about the choice. Somehow the word
expendable
seemed to linger at the back of his mind.
    He looked around the quiet cabin with sudden resentment. When he had been taken back into the navy in spite of his earlier discharge for ill-health and personal injury, one thing had haunted him: that in the two and a half years since he had been put on the beach, he would have been left behind both in experience and strategy. He need not have worried. The greatest navy in the world had still been controlled by minds obsessed with the line of battle, and most senior officers had been originally in the gunnery branch. As his father had scornfully commented when they had discussed it, ‘All mouth and gaiters!’
    Battleships and cruisers had taken precedence over carriers while the aircraft and the torpedo were considered something not quite decent. Little destroyers like this one had been well built, and had they been properly maintained, held in reserve even when the first rumbles of aggression had come from Germany, the navy would never have been so desperate for convoy escorts when they were most needed.
    Instead they had taken over fifty lease-lend destroyers from the U.S. navy, elderly vessels which were totally unsuitable for anything but calm seas. Because of their four funnels they were nicknamed ‘Uncle Sam’s four-pipers’, and were notorious for rolling so much they could do it on wet grass. The fleet was certainly paying for it now, and with U-boat sinkings outstripping every shipbuilding programme, Brooke had sometimes wondered how they had managed to survive so long.
    Calvert looked up from his pile of papers and the list of new charts he would be needing.
    â€˜I think the Japs will attack Singapore, sir. They have nothing to lose and they’re hell-bent on controlling the whole of the Far East while we’re occupied everywhere else.’
    Kerr said incredulously, ‘They were our allies in the last war!’
    Calvert went back to his work. ‘So were the Italians.’
    Brooke smiled. ‘At least it would bring the Yanks in . . . maybe.’
    He glanced at the framed photograph his father had given him.
Tell me how she looks, eh?
Almost the last words he had spoken to him, and he could still hear them clearly.
    Brooke had always been close to his father, especially when they had kicked him out of the service. His father had shared a similar fate in the twenties when lieutenant-commanders had been two-a-penny, and discharged officers, lost without their naval environment, had wandered from one job to another, becoming secretaries of golf clubs, publicans, chicken farmers – the list had been endless. Brooke could barely remember his mother: she had died immediately after the Great War in one of the sweeping ’flu epidemics. But unlike many service wives she had always had money, quite a lot of it. Brooke’s father had held on to the old house on the Thames and had turned it into acountry hotel for the sort of people who wanted to fish and shoot, and, remarkably, in a time of recession and unemployment with discharged soldiers and sailors filling the dole and soup queues, it had worked. Soon after the outbreak of war the buildings and grounds had been taken over by the army, and an anti-aircraft battery and other personnel had transformed the place into a military camp. It had broken the old man. No more boats to offer river trips for fishing and sightseeing; no petrol either. The world had turned its back on leisure and hope.
    Clogged lungs and a bad heart had done what the Zeebrugge raid in 1918 could not.
    Brooke