H. M. S. Ulysses (8 page)

Theirs was a curious friendship, Nicholls mused. An attraction of opposites, if ever there was one. For Carpenter's hail-fellow ebullience, his natural reserve and reticence were the perfect foil: over against his friend's near-idolatry of all things naval stood his own thorough-going detestation of all that the Kapok Kid so warmly admired. Perhaps because of that over-developed sense of individuality and independence, that bane of so many highland Scots, Nicholls objected strongly to the thousand and one pin-pricks of discipline, authority and bureaucratic naval stupidity which were a constant affront to his intelligence and self-respect. Even three years ago, when the war had snatched him from the wards of a great Glasgow hospital, his first year's internship barely completed, he had had his dark suspicions that the degree of compatibility between himself and the Senior Service would prove to be singularly low. And so it had proved. But, in spite of this antipathy—or perhaps because of it and the curse of a Calvinistic conscience— Nicholls had become a first-class officer. But it still disturbed him vaguely to discover in himself something akin to pride in the ships of his squadron.

He sighed. The loudspeaker in the corner of the wardroom had just crackled into life. From bitter experience, he knew that broadcast announcements seldom presaged anything good.

‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there?' The voice was metallic, impersonal: the Kapok Kid slept on in magnificent oblivion. ‘The Captain will broadcast to the ship's company at 1730 tonight. Repeat. The Captain will broadcast to the ship's company at 1730 tonight. That is all.'

Nicholls prodded the Kapok Kid with a heavy toe. ‘On your feet, Vasco. Now's the time if you want a cuppa char before getting up there and navigating.' Carpenter stirred, opened a red-rimmed eye: Nicholls smiled down encouragingly. ‘Besides, it's lovely up top now—sea rising, temperature falling and a young blizzard blowing. Just what you were born for, Andy, boy!'

The Kapok Kid groaned his way back to consciousness, struggled to a sitting position and remained hunched forward, his straight flaxen hair falling over his hands.

‘What's the matter now?' His voice was querulous, still slurred with sleep. Then he grinned faintly. ‘Know where I was, Johnny?' he asked reminiscently. ‘Back on the Thames, at the Grey Goose, just up from Henley. It was summer, Johnny, late in summer, warm and very still. Dressed all in green, she was—'

‘Indigestion,' Nicholls cut in briskly. ‘Too much easy living . . . It's four-thirty, and the old man's speaking in an hour's time. Dusk stations at any time—we'd better eat.'

Carpenter shook his head mournfully. ‘The man has no soul, no finer feelings.' He stood up and stretched himself. As always, he was dressed from head to foot in a one-piece overall of heavy, quilted kapok—the silk fibres encasing the seeds of the Japanese and Malayan silk-cotton tree: there was a great, golden ‘J' embroidered on the right breast pocket: what it stood for was anyone's guess. He glanced out through the porthole and shuddered.

‘Wonder what's the topic for tonight, Johnny?'

‘No idea. I'm curious to see what his attitude, his tone is going to be, how he's going to handle it. The situation, to say the least, is somewhat—ah—delicate.' Nicholls grinned, but the smile didn't touch his eyes. ‘Not to mention the fact that the crew don't know that they're off to Murmansk again—although they must have a pretty good idea.'

‘Mmm.' The Kapok Kid nodded absently. ‘Don't suppose the old man'll try to play it down—the hazards of the trip, I mean, or to excuse himself—you know, put the blame where it belongs.'

‘Never.' Nicholls shook his head decisively. ‘Not the skipper. Just not in his nature. Never excuses himself—and never spares himself.' He stared into the fire for a long time, then looked up quietly at the Kapok Kid. ‘The skipper's a very sick man, Andy—very sick indeed.'

‘What!' The Kapok Kid was genuinely startled. ‘A very sick . . . Good lord, you're joking! You must be. Why—'

‘I'm not,' Nicholls interrupted flatly, his voice very low. Winthrop, the padre, an intense, enthusiastic, very young man with an immense zest for life and granitic convictions on every subject under the sun, was in the far corner of the wardroom. The zest was temporarily in abeyance—he was sunk in exhausted slumber. Nicholls liked him, but preferred that he should not hear—the padre would talk. Winthrop, Nicholls had often thought, would never have made a successful priest—confessional reticence would have been impossible for him.

‘Old Socrates says he's pretty far through—and he knows,' Nicholls continued. ‘Old man phoned him to come to his cabin last night. Place was covered in blood and he was coughing his lungs up. Acute attack of hæmoptysis. Brooks has suspected it for a long time, but the Captain would never let him examine him. Brooks says a few more days of this will kill him.' He broke off, glanced briefly at Winthrop. ‘I talk too much,' he said abruptly. ‘Getting as bad as the old padre there. Shouldn't have told you, I suppose—violation of professional confidence and all that. All this under your hat, Andy.'

‘Of course, of course.' There was a long pause. ‘What you mean is, Johnny—he's dying?'

‘Just that. Come on, Andy—char.'

Twenty minutes later, Nicholls made his way down to the Sick Bay. The light was beginning to fail and the
Ulysses
was pitching heavily. Brooks was in the surgery.

‘Evening, sir. Dusk stations any minute now. Mind if I stay in the bay tonight?'

Brooks eyed him speculatively.

‘Regulations,' he intoned, ‘say that the Action Stations position of the Junior Medical Officer is aft in the Engineer's Flat. Far be it from me—'

‘Please.'

‘Why? Lonely, lazy or just plain tired?' The quirk of the eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.

‘No. Curious. I want to observe the reactions of Stoker Riley and his—ah—confederates to the skipper's speech. Might be most instructive.'

‘Sherlock Nicholls, eh? Right-o, Johnny. Phone the Damage Control Officer aft. Tell him you're tied up. Major operation, anything you like. Our gullible public and how easily fooled. Shame.'

Nicholls grinned and reached for the phone.

When the bugle blared for dusk Action Stations, Nicholls was sitting in the dispensary. The lights were out, the curtains almost drawn. He could see into every corner of the brightly lit Sick Bay. Five of the men were asleep. Two of the others—Petersen, the giant, slow-spoken stoker, half Norwegian, half Scots, and Burgess, the dark little cockney—were sitting up in bed, talking softly, their eyes turned towards the swarthy, heavily-built patient lying between them. Stoker Riley was holding court.

Alfred O'Hara Riley had, at a very early age indeed, decided upon a career of crime, and beset, though he subsequently was, by innumerable vicissitudes, he had clung to this resolve with an unswerving determination: directed towards almost any other sphere of activity, his resolution would have been praiseworthy, possibly even profitable. But praise and profit had passed Riley by.

Every man is what environment and heredity make him. Riley was no exception, and Nicholls, who knew something of his upbringing, appreciated that life had never really given the big stoker a chance. Born of a drunken, illiterate mother in a filthy, overcrowded and fever-ridden Liverpool slum, he was an outcast from the beginning: allied to that, his hairy, ape-like figure, the heavy prognathous jaw, the twisted mouth, the wide flaring nose, the cunning black eyes squinting out beneath the negligible clearance between hairline and eyebrows that so accurately reflected the mental capacity within, were all admirably adapted to what was to become his chosen vocation. Nicholls looked at him and disapproved without condemning; for a moment, he had an inkling of the tragedy of the inevitable.

Riley was never at any time a very successful criminal—his intelligence barely cleared the moron level. He dimly appreciated his limitations, and had left the higher, more subtle forms of crime severely alone. Robbery—preferably robbery with violence—was his
métier
. He had been in prison six times, the last time for two years.

His induction into the Navy was a mystery which baffled both Riley and the authorities responsible for his being there. But Riley had accepted this latest misfortune with equanimity, and gone through the bomb-shattered ‘G' and ‘H' blocks in the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth, like a high wind through a field of corn, leaving behind him a trail of slashed suitcases and empty wallets. He had been apprehended without much difficulty, done sixty days' cells, then been drafted to the
Ulysses
as a stoker.

His career of crime aboard the
Ulysses
had been brief and painful. His first attempted robbery had been his last—a clumsy and incredibly foolish rifling of a locker in the marine sergeants' mess. He had been caught red-handed by Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant MacIntosh. They had preferred no charges against him and Riley had spent the next three days in the Sick Bay. He claimed to have tripped on the rung of a ladder and fallen twenty feet to the boiler-room floor. But the actual facts of the case were common knowledge, and Turner had recommended his discharge. To everyone's astonishment, not least that of Stoker Riley, Dodson, the Engineer Commander, had insisted he be given a last chance, and Riley had been reprieved.

Since that date, four months previously, he had confined his activities to stirring up trouble. Illogically but understandably, his brief encounter with the marines had swept away his apathetic tolerance of the Navy: a smouldering hatred took its place. As an agitator, he had achieved a degree of success denied him as a criminal. Admittedly, he had a fertile field for operations; but credit—if that is the word— was due also to his shrewdness, his animal craft and cunning, his hold over his crew-mates. The husky, intense voice, his earnestness, his deep-set eyes, lent Riley a strangely elemental power—a power he had used to its maximum effect a few days previously when he had precipitated the mutiny which had led to the death of Ralston, the stoker, and the marine—mysteriously dead from a broken neck. Beyond any possible doubt, their deaths lay at Riley's door; equally beyond doubt, that could never be proved. Nicholls wondered what new devilment was hatching behind these lowering, corrugated brows, wondered how on earth it was that the same Riley was continually in trouble for bringing aboard the
Ulysses
and devotedly tending every stray kitten, every broken-winged bird he found.

The loudspeaker crackled, cutting through his thoughts, stilling the low voices in the Sick Bay. And not only there, but throughout the ship, in turrets and magazines, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, above and below deck everywhere, all conversation ceased. Then there was only the wind, the regular smash of the bows into the deepening troughs, the muffled roar of the great boiler-room intake fans and the hum of a hundred electric motors. Tension lay heavy over the ship, over 730 officers and men, tangible, almost, in its oppression.

‘This is the Captain speaking. Good evening.' The voice was calm, well modulated, without a sign of strain or exhaustion. ‘As you all know, it is my custom at the beginning of every voyage to inform you as soon as possible of what lies in store for you. I feel that you have a right to know, and that it is my duty. It's not always a pleasant duty—it never has been during recent months. This time, however, I'm almost glad.' He paused, and the words came, slow and measured. ‘This is our last operation as a unit of the Home Fleet. In a month's time, God willing, we will be in the Med.'

Good for you, thought Nicholls. Sweeten the pill, lay it on, thick and heavy. But the Captain had other ideas.

‘But first, gentlemen, the job on hand. It's the mixture as before—Murmansk again. We rendezvous at 1030 Wednesday, north of Iceland, with a convoy from Halifax. There are eighteen ships in this convoy—big and fast—all fifteen knots and above. Our third Fast Russian convoy, gentlemen—FR77, in case you want to tell your grandchildren about it,' he added dryly. ‘These ships are carrying tanks, planes, aviation spirit and oil—nothing else.

‘I will not attempt to minimize the dangers. You know how desperate is the state of Russia today, how terribly badly she needs these weapons and fuel. You can also be sure that the Germans know too—and that her Intelligence agents will already have reported the nature of this convoy and the date of sailing.' He broke off short, and the sound of his harsh, muffled coughing into a handkerchief echoed weirdly through the silent ship. He went on slowly. ‘There are enough fighter planes and petrol in this convoy to alter the whole character of the Russian war. The Nazis will stop at nothing— I repeat, nothing—to stop this convoy from going through to Russia.

‘I have never tried to mislead or deceive you. I will not now. The signs are not good. In our favour we have, firstly, our speed, and secondly—I hope—the element of surprise. We shall try to break through direct for the North Cape.

‘There are four major factors against us. You will all have noticed the steady worsening of the weather. We are, I'm afraid, running into abnormal weather conditions—abnormal even for the Arctic. It may—I repeat “may”—prevent U-boat attacks: on the other hand it may mean losing some of the smaller units of our screen—we have no time to heave to or run before bad weather. FR77 is going straight through . . . And it almost certainly means that the carriers will be unable to fly off fighter cover.'