H. M. S. Ulysses (16 page)

‘But—'

‘But me no buts,' Westcliffe murmured.

‘Please,' Turner insisted. ‘You will do us a favour.'

Vallery looked at him. ‘As Captain of the
Ulysses . . .
' His voice tailed off. ‘I don't know what to say.'

‘I do,' said Turner briskly, his hand on Vallery's elbow. ‘Let's go below.'

‘Don't think I can manage by myself, eh?' Vallery smiled faintly.

‘I do. But I'm taking no chances. Come along, sir.'

‘All right, all right.' He sighed tiredly. ‘Anything for a quiet life . . . and a night's sleep!'

Reluctantly, with a great effort, Lieutenant Nicholls dragged himself up from the mist-fogged depths of exhausted sleep. Slowly, reluctantly, he opened his eyes. The
Ulysses
, he realized, was still rolling as heavily, plunging as sickeningly as ever. The Kapok Kid, forehead swathed in bandages, the rest of his face pocked with blood, was bending over him. He looked disgustingly cheerful.

‘Hark, hark, the lark, et cetera,' the Kapok Kid grinned. ‘And how are we this morning?' he mimicked unctuously. The Hon. Carpenter held the medical profession in low esteem.

Nicholls focused blurred eyes on him.

‘What's the matter, Andy? Anything wrong?'

‘With Messrs Carrington and Carpenter in charge,' said the Kapok Kid loftily, ‘nothing could be wrong. Want to come up top, see Carrington do his stuff? He's going to turn the ship round. In this little lot, it should be worth seeing!'

‘What! Dammit to hell! Have you woken me just—'

‘Brother, when this ship turns, you would wake up anyway— probably on the deck with a broken neck. But as it so happens, Jimmy requires your assistance. At least, he requires one of these heavy plate-glass squares which I happen to know you have in great numbers in the dispensary. But the dispensary's locked—I tried it,' he added shamelessly.

‘But what—I mean—plate glass—' ‘Come and see for yourself,' the Kapok Kid invited.

It was dawn now, a wild and terrible dawn, fit epilogue for a nightmare. Strange, trailing bands of misty-white vapour swept by barely at mast-top level, but high above the sky was clear. The seas, still gigantic, were shorter now, much shorter, and even steeper: the
Ulysses
was slowed right down, with barely enough steerage way to keep her head up—and even then, taking severe punishment in the precipitous head seas. The wind had dropped to a steady fifty knots—gale force: even at that, it seared like fire in Nicholls's lungs as he stepped out on the flap-deck, blinded him with ice and cold. Hastily he wrapped scarves over his entire face, clambered up to the bridge by touch and instinct. The Kapok Kid followed with the glass. As they climbed, they heard the loudspeakers crackling some unintelligible message.

Turner and Carrington were alone on the twilit bridge, swathed like mummies. Not even their eyes were visible—they wore goggles.

‘Morning, Nicholls,' boomed the Commander. ‘It
is
Nicholls, isn't it?' He pulled off his goggles, his back turned to the bitter wind, threw them away in disgust. ‘Can't see damn all through these bloody things . . . Ah, Number One, he's got the glass.'

Nicholls crouched in the for'ard lee of the compass platform. In a corner, the duckboards were littered with goggles, eye-shields and gas-masks. He jerked his head towards them.

‘What's this—a clearance sale?'

‘We're turning round, Doc.' It was Carrington who answered, his voice calm and precise as ever, without a trace of exhaustion. ‘But we've got to see where we're going, and as the Commander says, all these damn things there are useless—mist up immediately they're put on—it's too cold. If you'll just hold it—so—and if you would wipe it, Andy?'

Nicholls looked at the great seas. He shuddered.

‘Excuse my ignorance, but why turn round at all?'

‘Because it will be impossible very shortly,' Carrington answered briefly. Then he chuckled. ‘This is going to make me the most unpopular man in the ship. We've just broadcast a warning. Ready, sir?'

‘Stand by, engine-room: stand by, wheelhouse. Ready, Number One.'

For thirty seconds, forty-five, a whole minute, Carrington stared steadily, unblinkingly through the glass. Nicholls's hands froze. The Kapok Kid rubbed industriously. Then:

‘Half-ahead, port!'

‘Half-ahead, port!' Turner echoed.

‘Starboard 20!'

‘Starboard 20!'

Nicholls risked a glance over his shoulder. In the split second before his eyes blinded, filled with tears, he saw a huge wave bearing down on them, the bows already swinging diagonally away from it. Good God! Why hadn't Carrington waited until that was past?

The great wave flung the bows up, pushed the
Ulysses
far over to starboard, then passed under. The
Ulysses
staggered over the top, corkscrewed wickedly down the other side, her masts, great gleaming tree trunks thick and heavy with ice, swinging in a great arc as she rolled over, burying her port rails in the rising shoulder of the next sea.

‘Full ahead port!'

‘Full ahead port!'

‘Starboard 30!'

‘Starboard 30!'

The next sea, passing beneath, merely straightened the
Ulysses
up. And then, at last, Nicholls understood. Incredibly, because it had been impossible to see so far ahead, Carrington had known that two opposing wave systems were due to interlock in an area of comparative calm: how he had sensed it, no one knew, would ever know, not even Carrington himself: but he was a great seaman, and he had known. For fifteen, twenty seconds, the sea was a seething white mass of violently disturbed, conflicting waves—of the type usually found, on a small scale, in tidal races and overfalls—and the
Ulysses
curved gracefully through. And then another great sea, towering almost to bridge height, caught her on the far turn of the quarter circle. It struck the entire length of the
Ulysses
—for the first time that night—with tremendous weight. It threw her far over on her side, the lee rails vanishing. Nicholls was flung off his feet, crashed heavily into the side of the bridge, the glass shattering. He could have sworn he heard Carrington laughing. He clawed his way back to the middle of the compass platform.

And still the great wave had not passed. It towered high above the trough into which the
Ulysses
, now heeled far over to 40°, had been so contemptuously flung, bore down remorselessly from above and sought, in a lethal silence and with an almost animistic savagery, to press her under. The inclinometer swung relentlessly over—45°, 50°, 53°, and hung there an eternity, while men stood on the side of the ship, braced with their hands on the deck, numbed minds barely grasping the inevitable. This was the end. The
Ulysses
could never come back.

A lifetime ticked agonizingly by. Nicholls and Carpenter looked at each other, blank-faced, expressionless. Tilted at that crazy angle, the bridge was sheltered from the wind. Carrington's voice, calm, conversational, carried with amazing clarity.

‘She'd go to 65° and still come back,' he said matter-of-factly. ‘Hang on to your hats, gentlemen. This is going to be interesting.'

Just as he finished, the
Ulysses
shuddered, then imperceptibly, then slowly, then with vicious speed lurched back and whipped through an arc of 90°, then back again. Once more Nicholls found himself in the corner of the bridge. But the
Ulysses
was almost round.

The Kapok Kid, grinning with relief, picked himself up and tapped Carrington on the shoulder.

‘Don't look now, sir, but we have lost our mainmast.'

It was a slight exaggeration, but the top fifteen feet, which had carried the after radar scanner, were undoubtedly gone. That wicked, double whip-lash, with the weight of the ice, had been too much.

‘Slow ahead both! Midships!'

‘Slow ahead both! Midships!'

‘Steady as she goes!'

The
Ulysses
was round.

The Kapok Kid caught Nicholls's eye, nodded at the First Lieutenant.

‘See what I mean, Johnny?'

‘Yes,' Nicholls was very quiet. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.' Then he grinned suddenly. ‘Next time you make a statement, I'll just take your word for it, if you don't mind. These demonstrations of proof take too damn much out of a person!'

Running straight before the heavy stern sea, the
Ulysses
was amazingly steady. The wind, too, was dead astern now, the bridge in magical shelter. The scudding mist overhead had thinned out, was almost gone. Far away to the south-east a dazzling white sun climbed up above a cloudless horizon. The long night was over.

An hour later, with the wind down to thirty knots, radar reported contacts to the west. After another hour, with the wind almost gone and only a heavy swell running, smoke plumes tufted above the horizon. At 1030, in position, on time, the
Ulysses
rendezvoused with the convoy from Halifax.

SEVEN
Wednesday Night

The convoy came steadily up from the west, rolling heavily in cross seas, a rich argosy, a magnificent prize, for any German wolf-pack. Eighteen ships in this argosy, fifteen big, modern cargo ships, three 16,000-ton tankers, carrying a freight far more valuable, infinitely more vital, than any fleet of quinqueremes or galleons had ever known. Tanks, planes and petrol—what were gold and jewels, silks and the rarest of spices compared to these? £10,000,000, £20,000,000—the total worth of that convoy was difficult to estimate: in any event, its real value was not to be measured in terms of money.

Aboard the merchant ships, crews lined the decks as the
Ulysses
steamed up between the port and centre lines. Lined the decks and looked and wondered—and thanked their Maker they had been wide of the path of that great storm. The
Ulysses
, seen from another deck, was a strange sight: broken-masted, stripped of her rafts, with her boat falls hauled taut over empty cradles, she glistened like crystal in the morning light: the great wind had blown away all snow, had abraded and rubbed and polished the ice to a stain-smooth, transparent gloss: but on either side of the bows and before the bridge were huge patches of crimson, where the hurricane sandblaster of that long night had stripped off camouflage and base coats, exposing the red lead below.

The American escort was small—a heavy cruiser with a seaplane for spotting, two destroyers and two near-frigates of the coastguard type. Small, but sufficient: there was no need of escort carriers (although these frequently sailed with the Atlantic convoys) because the Luftwaffe could not operate so far west, and the wolf-packs, in recent months, had moved north and east of Iceland: there, they were not only nearer base—they could more easily lie astride the converging convoy routes to Murmansk.

ENE they sailed in company, freighters, American warships and the
Ulysses
until, late in the afternoon, the box-like silhouette of an escort carrier bulked high against the horizon. Half an hour later, at 1600, the American escorts slowed, dropped astern and turned, winking farewell messages of good luck. Aboard the
Ulysses
, men watched them depart with mixed feelings. They knew these ships had to go, that another convoy would already be mustering off the St Lawrence. There was none of the envy, the bitterness one might expect—and had indeed been common enough only a few weeks ago—among these exhausted men who carried the brunt of the war. There was instead a careless acceptance of things as they were, a quasi-cynical bravado, often a queer, high nameless pride that hid itself beneath twisted jests and endless grumbling.

The 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron—or what was left of it—was only two miles away now. Tyndall, coming to the bridge, swore fluently as he saw that a carrier and minesweeper were missing. An angry signal went out to Captain Jeffries of the
Stirling
, asking why orders had been disobeyed, where the missing ships were.

An Aldis flickered back its reply. Tyndall sat grim-faced and silent as Bentley read out the signal to him. The
Wrestler
's steering gear had broken down during the night. Even behind Langanes the weather position had been severe, had worsened about midnight when the wind had veered to the north. The
Wrestler
, even with two screws, had lost almost all steering command, and, in zero visibility and an effort to maintain position, had gone too far ahead and grounded on the Vejle bank. She had grounded on the top of the tide. She had still been there, with the minesweeper
Eager
in attendance, when the squadron had sailed shortly after dawn.

Tyndall sat in silence for some minutes. He dictated a WT signal to the
Wrestler
, hesitated about breaking radio silence, counter-manded the signal, and decided to go to see for himself. After all, it was only three hours' steaming distance. He signalled the
Stirling
: ‘Take over squadron command: will rejoin in the morning,' and ordered Vallery to take the
Ulysses
back to Langanes.

Vallery nodded unhappily, gave the necessary orders. He was worried, badly so, was trying hard not to show it. The least of his worries was himself, although he knew, but never admitted to anyone, that he was a very sick man. He thought wryly that he didn't have to admit it anyway—he was amused and touched by the elaborate casualness with which his officers sought to lighten his load, to show their concern for him.