HMS Ulysses
Alistair Maclean

Dedication

To Gisela

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1955

Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1955

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006135128

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007289318

Version: 2018-07-05

Epigraph

Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

One Prelude: Sunday Afternoon

Two Monday Morning

Three Monday Afternoon

Four Monday Night

Five Tuesday

Six Tuesday Night

Seven Wednesday Night

Eight Thursday Night

Nine Friday Morning

Ten Friday Afternoon

Eleven Friday Evening

Twelve Saturday

Thirteen Saturday Afternoon

Fourteen Saturday Evening I

Fifteen Saturday Evening II

Sixteen Saturday Night

Seventeen Sunday Morning

Eighteen Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Maps

ONE Prelude: Sunday Afternoon

Slowly, deliberately, Starr crushed out the butt of his cigarette. The gesture, Captain Vallery thought, held a curious air of decision and finality. He knew what was coming next, and, just for a moment, the sharp bitterness of defeat cut through that dull ache that never left his forehead nowadays. But it was only for a moment—he was too tired really, far too tired to care.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, genuinely sorry.’ Starr smiled thinly. ‘Not for the orders, I assure you—the Admiralty decision, I am personally convinced, is the only correct and justifiable one in the circumstances. But I do regret your—ah—inability to see our point of view.’

He paused, proffered his platinum cigarette case to the four men sitting with him round the table in the Rear-Admiral’s day cabin. At the four mute headshakes the smile flickered again. He selected a cigarette, slid the case back into the breast pocket of his double-breasted grey suit. Then he sat back in his chair, the smile quite gone. It was not difficult to visualize, beneath that pin-stripe sleeve, the more accustomed broad band and golden stripes of Vice-Admiral Vincent Starr, Assistant Director of Naval Operations.

‘When I flew north from London this morning,’ he continued evenly, ‘I was annoyed. I was very annoyed. I am—well, I am a fairly busy man. The First Sea Lord, I thought, was wasting my time as well as his own. When I return, I must apologize. Sir Humphrey was right. He usually is…’

His voice trailed off to a murmur, and the flintwheel of his lighter rasped through the strained silence. He leaned forward on the table and went on softly.

‘Let us be perfectly frank, gentlemen. I expected—I surely had a right to expect—every support and full co-operation from you in settling this unpleasant business with all speed. Unpleasant business?’ He smiled wryly. ‘Mincing words won’t help. Mutiny, gentlemen, is the generally accepted term for it—a capital offence, I need hardly remind you. And yet what do I find?’ His glance travelled slowly round the table.

‘Commissioned officers in His Majesty’s Navy, including a Flag-Officer, sympathising with—if not actually condoning—a lower-deck mutiny!’

He’s overstating it, Vallery thought dully. He’s provoking us. The words, the tone, were a question, a challenge inviting reply.

There was no reply. The four men seemed apathetic, indifferent. Four men, each an individual, each secure in his own personality—yet, at that moment, so strangely alike, their faces heavy and still and deeply lined, their eyes so quiet, so tired, so very old.

‘You are not convinced, gentlemen?’ he went on softly. ‘You find my choice of words a trifle—ah—disagreeable?’ He leaned back. ‘Hm…“mutiny”.’ He savoured the word slowly, compressed his lips, looked round the table again. ‘No, it doesn’t sound too good, does it, gentlemen? You would call it something else again, perhaps?’ He shook his head, bent forward, smoothed out a signal sheet below his fingers.

‘“Returned from strike on Lofotens,”’ he read out: ‘“1545—boom passed: 1610—finished with engines: 1630—provisions, stores lighters alongside, mixed seaman-stoker party detailed unload lubricating drums: 1650—reported to Captain stokers refused to obey CPO Hartley, then successively Chief Stoker Hendry, Lieutenant (E.) Grierson and Commander (E.): ringleaders apparently Stokers Riley and Petersen: 1705—refused to obey Captain: 1715—Master at Arms and Regulating PO assaulted in performance of duties.”’He looked up. ‘What duties? Trying to arrest the ringleaders?’

Vallery nodded silently.

‘“1715—seaman branch stopped work, apparently in sympathy: no violence offered: 1725—broadcast by Captain, warned of consequences: ordered to return to work: order disobeyed: 1730 —signal to C-in-C Duke of Cumberland, for assistance.”’

Starr lifted his head again, looked coldly across at Vallery.

‘Why, incidentally, the signal to the Admiral? Surely your own marines—’

‘My orders,’ Tyndall interrupted bluntly. ‘Turn our own marines against men they’ve sailed with for two and half years? Out of the question! There’s no matelot—boot-neck antipathy on this ship, Admiral Starr: they’ve been through far too much together…Anyway,’ he added dryly, ‘it’s wholly possible that the marines would have refused. And don’t forget that if we had used our own men, and they had quelled this—ah—mutiny, the Ulysses would have been finished as a fighting ship.’

Starr looked at him steadily, dropped his eyes to the signal again.

‘“1830—Marine boarding party from Cumberland: no resistance offered to boarding: attempted to arrest, six, eight suspected ringleaders: strong resistance by stokers and seamen, heavy fighting poop-deck, stokers’ mess-deck and engineers’ flat till 1900: no firearms used, but 2 dead, 6 seriously injured, 35-40 minor casualties.”’ Starr finished reading, crumpled the paper in an almost savage gesture. ‘You know, gentlemen, I believe you have a point after all.’ The voice was heavy with irony. ‘“Mutiny” is hardly the term. Fifty dead and injured: “pitched battle” would be much nearer the mark.’

The words, the tone, the lashing bite of the voice provoked no reaction whatsoever. The four men still sat motionless, expressionless, unheeding in a vast indifference.

Admiral Starr’s face hardened.

‘I’m afraid you have things just a little out of focus, gentlemen. You’ve been up here a long time and isolation distorts perspective. Must I remind senior officers that, in wartime, individual feelings, trials and sufferings are of no moment at all? The Navy, the country—they come first, last and all the time.’ He pounded the table softly, the gesture insistent in its restrained urgency. ‘Good God, gentlemen,’ he ground out, ‘the future of the world is at stake—and you, with your selfish, your inexcusable absorption in your own petty affairs, have the colossal effrontery to endanger it!’

Commander Turner smiled sardonically to himself. A pretty speech, Vincent boy, very pretty indeed—although perhaps a touch reminiscent of Victorian melodrama: the clenched teeth act was definitely overdone. Pity he didn’t stand for Parliament—he’d be a terrific asset to any Government Front Bench. Suppose the old boy’s really too honest for that, he thought in vague surprise.

‘The ringleaders will be caught and punished—heavily punished.’ The voice was harsh now, with a biting edge to it. ‘Meantime the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron will rendezvous at Denmark Strait as arranged, at 1030 Wednesday instead of Tuesday—we radioed Halifax and held up the sailing. You will proceed to sea at 0600 tomorrow.’ He looked across at Rear-Admiral Tyndall. ‘You will please advise all ships under your command at once, Admiral.’

Tyndall—universally known throughout the Fleet as Farmer Giles—said nothing. His ruddy features, usually so cheerful and crinkling, were set and grim: his gaze, heavy-lidded and troubled, rested on Captain Vallery and he wondered just what kind of private hell that kindly and sensitive man was suffering right then. But Vallery’s face, haggard with fatigue, told him nothing: that lean and withdrawn asceticism was the complete foil. Tyndall swore bitterly to himself.

‘I don’t really think there’s more to say, gentlemen,’ Starr went on smoothly. ‘I won’t pretend you’re in for an easy trip—you know yourselves what happened to the last three major convoys—PQ 17, FR 71 and 74. I’m afraid we haven’t yet found the answer to acoustic torpedoes and glider bombs. Further, our intelligence in Bremen and Kiel—and this is substantiated by recent experience in the Atlantic—report that the latest U-boat policy is to get the escorts first…Maybe the weather will save you.’

You vindictive old devil, Tyndall thought dispassionately. Go on, damn you—enjoy yourself.

‘At the risk of seeming rather Victorian and melodramatic’—impatiently Starr waited for Turner to stifle his sudden fit of coughing—‘we may say that the Ulysses is being given the opportunity of—ah—redeeming herself.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘After that, gentlemen, the Med. But first—FR 77 to Murmansk, come hell or high water!’ His voice broke on the last word and lifted into stridency, the anger burring through the thin veneer of suavity. ‘The Ulysses must be made to realize that the Navy will never tolerate disobedience of orders, dereliction of duty, organized revolt and sedition!’

‘Rubbish!’

Starr jerked back in his chair, knuckles whitening on the arm-rest. His glance whipped round and settled on Surgeon-Commander Brooks, on the unusually vivid blue eyes so strangely hostile now under that magnificent silver mane.

Tyndall, too, saw the angry eyes. He saw, also, the deepening colour in Brooks’s face, and moaned softly to himself. He knew the signs too well—old Socrates was about to blow his Irish top. Tyndall made to speak, then slumped back at a sharp gesture from Starr.

‘What did you say, Commander?’ The Admiral’s voice was very soft and quite toneless.

‘Rubbish,’ repeated Brooks distinctly. ‘Rubbish. That’s what I said. “Let’s be perfectly frank,” you say. Well, sir, I’m being frank. “Dereliction of duty, organized revolt and sedition” my foot! But I suppose you have to call it something, preferably something well within your own field of experience. But God only knows by what strange association and slight-of-hand mental transfer, you equate yesterday’s trouble aboard the Ulysses with the only clearly-cut code of behaviour thoroughly familiar to yourself.’ Brooks paused for a second: in the silence they heard the thin, high wail of a bosun’s pipe—a passing ship, perhaps. ‘Tell me, Admiral Starr,’ he went on quietly, ‘are we to drive out the devils of madness by whipping—a quaint old medieval custom—or maybe, sir, by drowning—remember the Gadarene swine? Or perhaps a month or two in cells, you think, is the best cure for tuberculosis?’

‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Brooks?’ Starr demanded angrily. ‘Gadarene swine, tuberculosis—what are you getting at, man? Go on—explain.’ He drummed his fingers impatiently on the table, eyebrows arched high into his furrowed brow. ‘I hope, Brooks,’ he went on silkily, ‘that you can justify this—ah—insolence of yours.’

‘I’m quite sure that Commander Brooks intended no insolence, sir.’ It was Captain Vallery speaking for the first time. ‘He’s only expressing—’

‘Please, Captain Vallery,’ Starr interrupted. ‘I am quite capable of judging these things for myself, I think.’ His smile was very tight. ‘Well, go on, Brooks.’

Commander Brooks looked at him soberly, speculatively.

‘Justify myself?’ He smiled wearily. ‘No, sir, I don’t think I can.’ The slight inflection of tone, the implications, were not lost on Starr, and he flushed slightly. ‘But I’ll try to explain,’ continued Brooks. ‘It may do some good.’

He sat in silence for a few seconds, elbow on the table, his hand running through the heavy silver hair—a favourite mannerism of his. Then he looked up abruptly.

‘When were you last at sea, Admiral Starr?’ he inquired.

‘Last at sea?’ Starr frowned heavily. ‘What the devil has that got to do with you, Brooks—or with the subject under discussion?’ he asked harshly.

‘A very great deal,’ Brooks retorted. ‘Would you please answer my question, Admiral?’

‘I think you know quite well, Brooks,’ Starr replied evenly, ‘that I’ve been at Naval Operations HQ in London since the outbreak of war. What are you implying, sir?’

‘Nothing. Your personal integrity and courage are not open to question. We all know that. I was merely establishing a fact.’ Brooks hitched himself forward in his chair.

‘I’m a naval doctor, Admiral Starr—I’ve been a doctor for over thirty years now.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Maybe I’m not a very good doctor, perhaps I don’t keep quite so abreast of the latest medical developments as I might, but I believe I can claim to know a great deal about human nature—this is no time for modesty—about how the mind works, about the wonderfully intricate interaction of mind and body.

‘“Isolation distorts perspective”—these were your words, Admiral Starr. “Isolation” implies a cutting off, a detachment from the world, and your implication was partly true. But—and this, sir, is the point—there are more worlds than one. The Northern Seas, the Arctic, the black-out route to Russia—these are another world, a world utterly distinct from yours. It is a world, sir, of which you cannot possibly have any conception. In effect, you are completely isolated from our world.’

Starr grunted, whether in anger or derision it was difficult to say, and cleared his throat to speak, but Brooks went on swiftly.

‘Conditions obtain there without either precedent or parallel in the history of war. The Russian Convoys, sir, are something entirely new and quite unique in the experience of mankind.’

He broke off suddenly, and gazed out through the thick glass of the scuttle at the sleet slanting heavily across the grey waters and dun hills of the Scapa anchorage. No one spoke. The Surgeon-Commander was not finished yet: a tired man takes time to marshal his thoughts.

‘Mankind, of course, can and does adapt itself to new conditions.’ Brooks spoke quietly, almost to himself. ‘Biologically and physically, they have had to do so down the ages, in order to survive. But it takes time, gentlemen, a great deal of time. You can’t compress the natural changes of twenty centuries into a couple of years: neither mind nor body can stand it. You can try, of course, and such is the fantastic resilience and toughness of man that he can tolerate it—for extremely short periods. But the limit, the saturation capacity for adaption is soon reached. Push men beyond that limit and anything can happen. I say “anything” advisedly, because we don’t yet know the precise form the crack-up will take—but crack-up there always is. It may be physical, mental, spiritual—I don’t know. But this I do know, Admiral Starr—the crew of the Ulysses has been pushed to the limit—and clear beyond.’

‘Very interesting, Commander.’ Starr’s voice was dry, sceptical. ‘Very interesting indeed—and most instructive. Unfortunately, your theory—and it’s only that, of course—is quite untenable.’

Brooks eyed him steadily.

‘That, sir, is not even a matter of opinion.’

‘Nonsense, man, nonsense!’ Starr’s face was hard in anger. ‘It’s a matter of fact. Your premises are completely false.’ Starr leaned forward, his forefinger punctuating every word. ‘This vast gulf you claim to lie between the convoys to Russia and normal operational work at sea—it just doesn’t exist. Can you point out any one factor or condition present in these Northern waters which is not to be found somewhere else in the world? Can you, Commander Brooks?’

‘No, sir.’ Brooks was quite unruffled. ‘But I can point out a frequently overlooked fact—that differences of degree and association can be much greater and have far more far-reaching effects than differences in kind. Let me explain what I mean.

‘Fear can destroy a man. Let’s admit it—fear is a natural thing. You get it in every theatre of war—but nowhere, I suggest, so intense, so continual as in the Arctic convoys.

‘Suspense, tension can break a man—any man. I’ve seen it happen too often, far, far too often. And when you’re keyed up to snapping point, sometimes for seventeen days on end, when you have constant daily reminders of what may happen to you in the shape of broken, sinking ships and broken, drowning bodies—well, we’re men, not machines. Something has to go—and does. The Admiral will not be unaware that after the last two trips we shipped nineteen officers and men to sanatoria—mental sanatoria?’

Brooks was on his feet now, his broad, strong fingers splayed over the polished table surface, his eyes boring into Starr’s.

‘Hunger burns out a man’s vitality, Admiral Starr. It saps his strength, slows his reactions, destroys the will to fight, even the will to survive. You are surprised, Admiral Starr? Hunger, you think—surely that’s impossible in the wellprovided ships of today? But it’s not impossible, Admiral Starr. It’s inevitable. You keep on sending us out when the Russian season’s over, when the nights are barely longer than the days, when twenty hours out of the twenty-four are spent on watch or at action stations, and you expect us to feed well!’ He smashed the flat of his hand on the table. ‘How the hell can we, when the cooks spend nearly all their time in the magazines, serving the turrets, or in damage control parties? Only the baker and butcher are excused—and so we live on corned-beef sandwiches. For weeks on end! Corned-beef sandwiches!’ Surgeon-Commander Brooks almost spat in disgust.

Good old Socrates, thought Turner happily, give him hell. Tyndall, too, was nodding his ponderous approval. Only Vallery was uncomfortable—not because of what Brooks was saying, but because Brooks was saying it. He, Vallery, was the captain: the coals of fire were being heaped on the wrong head.

‘Fear, suspense, hunger.’ Brooks’s voice was very low now. ‘These are the things that break a man, that destroy him as surely as fire or steel or pestilence could. These are the killers.

‘But they are nothing, Admiral Starr, just nothing at all. They are only the henchmen, the outriders, you might call them, of the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse—cold, lack of sleep, exhaustion.

‘Do you know what it’s like up there, between Jan Mayen and Bear Island on a February night, Admiral Starr? Of course you don’t. Do you know what it’s like when there’s sixty degrees of frost in the Arctic—and it still doesn’t freeze? Do you know what it’s like when the wind, twenty degrees below zero, comes screaming off the Polar and Greenland ice-caps and slices through the thickest clothing like a scalpel? When there’s five hundred tons of ice on the deck, where five minutes’ direct exposure means frostbite, where the bows crash down into a trough and the spray hits you as solid ice, where even a torch battery dies out in the intense cold? Do you, Admiral Starr, do you?’ Brooks flung the words at him, hammered them at him.

‘And do you know what it’s like to go for days on end without sleep, for weeks with only two or three hours out of the twenty-four? Do you know the sensation, Admiral Starr? That fine-drawn feeling with every nerve in your body and cell in your brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness. Do you know it, Admiral Starr? It’s the most exquisite agony in the world, and you’d sell your friends, your family, your hopes of immortality for the blessed privilege of closing your eyes and just letting go.

‘And then there’s the tiredness, Admiral Starr, the desperate weariness that never leaves you. Partly it’s the debilitating effect of the cold, partly lack of sleep, partly the result of incessantly bad weather. You know yourself how exhausting it can be to brace yourself even for a few hours on a rolling, pitching deck: our boys have been doing it for months—gales are routine on the Arctic run. I can show you a dozen, two dozen old men, not one of them a day over twenty.’

Brooks pushed back his chair and paced restlessly across the cabin. Tyndall and Turner glanced at each other, then over at Vallery, who sat with head and shoulders bowed, eyes resting vacantly on his clasped hands on the table. For the moment, Starr might not have existed.

‘It’s a vicious, murderous circle,’ Brooks went on quickly. He was leaning against the bulkhead now, hands deep in his pockets, gazing out sightlessly through the misted scuttle. ‘The less sleep you have, the tireder you are: the more tired you become, the more you feel cold. And so it goes on. And then, all the time, there’s the hunger and the terrific tension. Everything interacts with everything else: each single factor conspires with the others to crush a man, break him physically and mentally, and lay him wide open to disease. Yes, Admiral—disease.’ He smiled into Starr’s face, and there was no laughter in his smile. ‘Pack men together like herring in a barrel, deprive ’em of every last ounce of resistance, batten ’em below decks for days at a time, and what do you get? TB It’s inevitable.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, I’ve only isolated a few cases so far—but I know that active pulmonary TB is rife in the lower deck.

‘I saw the break-up coming months ago.’ He lifted his shoulders wearily. ‘I warned the Fleet Surgeon several times. I wrote the Admiralty twice. They were sympathetic—and that’s all. Shortage of ships, shortage of men…

‘The last hundred days did it, sir—on top of the previous months. A hundred days of pure bloody hell and not a single hour’s shore leave. In port only twice—for ammunitioning: all oil and provisions from the carriers at sea. And every day an eternity of cold and hunger and danger and suffering. In the name of God,’ Brooks cried, ‘we’re not machines!’

He levered himself off the wall and walked over to Starr, hands still thrust deep in his pockets.

‘I hate to say this in front of the Captain, but every officer in the ship—except Captain Vallery—knows that the men would have mutinied, as you call it, long ago, but for one thing—Captain Vallery. The intense personal loyalty of the crew to the Captain, the devotion almost to the other side of idolatry is something quite unique in my experience, Admiral Starr.’

Tyndall and Turner both murmured approval. Vallery still sat motionless.

‘But there was a limit even to that. It had to come. And now you talk of punishing, imprisoning these men. Good God above, you might as well hang a man for having leprosy, or send him to penal servitude for developing ulcers!’ Brooks shook his head in despair. ‘Our crew are equally guiltless. They just couldn’t help it. They can’t see right from wrong any more. They can’t think straight. They just want a rest, they just want peace, a few days’ blessed quiet. They’ll give anything in the world for these things and they can’t see beyond them. Can’t you see that Admiral Starr? Can’t you? Can’t you?’

For perhaps thirty seconds there was silence, complete, utter silence, in the Admiral’s cabin. The high, thin whine of the wind, the swish of the hail seemed unnaturally loud. Then Starr was on his feet, his hands stretching out for his gloves: Vallery looked up, for the first time, and he knew that Brooks had failed.

‘Have my barge alongside, Captain Vallery. At once, please.’ Starr was detached, quite emotionless. ‘Complete oiling, provisioning and ammunitioning as soon as possible. Admiral Tyndall, I wish you and your squadron a successful voyage. As for you, Commander Brooks, I quite see the point of your argument—at least, as far as you are concerned.’ His lips parted in a bleak, wintry smile. ‘You are quite obviously overwrought, badly in need of some leave. Your relief will be aboard before midnight. If you will come with me, Captain…’

He turned to the door and had taken only two steps when Vallery’s voice stopped him dead, poised on one foot.

‘One moment, sir, if you please.’

Starr swung round. Captain Vallery had made no move to rise. He sat still, smiling. It was a smile compounded of deference, of understanding—and of a curious inflexibility. It made Starr feel vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Surgeon-Commander Brooks,’ Vallery said precisely, ‘is a quite exceptional officer. He is invaluable, virtually irreplaceable and the Ulysses needs him badly. I wish to retain his services.’

‘I’ve made my decision, Captain,’ Starr snapped. ‘And it’s final. You know, I think, the powers invested in me by the Admiralty for this investigation.’

‘Quite, sir.’ Vallery was quiet, unmoved. ‘I repeat, however, that we cannot afford to lose an officer of Brooks’s calibre.’

The words, the tone, were polite, respectful; but their significance was unmistakable. Brooks stepped forward, distress in his face, but before he could speak, Turner cut in smoothly, urbanely.

‘I assume I wasn’t invited to this conference for purely decorative purposes.’ He tilted back in his chair, his eyes fixed dreamily on the deckhead. ‘I feel it’s time I said something. I unreservedly endorse old Brooks’s remarks—every word of them.’

Starr, white-mouthed and motionless, looked at Tyndall. ‘And you, Admiral?’

Tyndall looked up quizzically, all the tenseness and worry gone from his face. He looked more like a West Country Farmer Giles than ever. He supposed wryly, that his career was at stake; funny, he thought how suddenly unimportant a career could become.

‘As Officer Commanding, maximum squadron efficiency is my sole concern. Some people are irreplaceable. Captain Vallery suggests Brooks is one of these. I agree.’

‘I see, gentlemen, I see,’ Starr said heavily. Two spots of colour burned high up on his cheekbones. ‘The convoy has sailed from Halifax, and my hands are tied. But you make a great mistake, gentlemen, a great mistake, in pointing pistols at the head of the Admiralty. We have long memories in Whitehall. We shall—ah—discuss the matter at length on your return. Good day, gentlemen, good day.’

Shivering in the sudden chill, Brooks clumped down the ladder to the upper deck and turned for’ard past the galley into the Sick Bay. Johnson, the Leading Sick Bay Attendant, looked out from the dispensary.

‘How are our sick and suffering, Johnson?’ Brooks inquired. ‘Bearing up manfully?’

Johnson surveyed the eight beds and their occupants morosely.

‘Just a lot of bloody chancers, sir. Half of them are a damned sight fitter than I am. Look at Stoker Riley there—him with the broken finger and whacking great pile of Reader’s Digests. Going through all the medical articles, he is, and roaring out for sulph., penicillin and all the latest antibiotics. Can’t pronounce half of them. Thinks he’s dying.’

‘A grievous loss,’ the Surgeon-Commander murmured. He shook his head. ‘What Commander Dodson sees in him I don’t know…What’s the latest from hospital?’

The expression drained out of Johnson’s face.

‘They’re just off the blower, sir,’ he said woodenly. ‘Five minutes ago. Ordinary Seaman Ralston died at three o’clock.’

Brooks nodded heavily. Sending that broken boy to hospital had only been a gesture anyway. Just for a moment he felt tired, beaten. ‘Old Socrates’ they called him, and he was beginning to feel his age these days—and a bit more besides. Maybe a good night’s sleep would help, but he doubted it. He sighed.

‘Don’t feel too good about all this, Johnson, do you?’

‘Eighteen, sir. Exactly eighteen.’ Johnson’s voice was low, bitter. ‘I’ve just been talking to Burgess—that’s him in the next bed. Says Ralston steps out across the bathroom coaming, a towel over his arm. A mob rushes past, then this bloody great ape of a bootneck comes tearing up and bashes him over the skull with his rifle. Never knew what hit him, sir—and he never knew why.’

Brooks smiled faintly.

‘That’s what they call—ah—seditious talk, Johnson,’ he said mildy.

‘Sorry, sir. Suppose I shouldn’t—it’s just that I—’

‘Never mind, Johnson. I asked for it. Can’t stop anyone from thinking. Only, don’t think out loud. It’s—it’s prejudicial to naval discipline…I think your friend Riley wants you. Better get him a dictionary.’

He turned and pushed his way through the surgery curtains. A dark head—all that could be seen behind the dentist’s chair—twisted round. Johnny Nicholls, Acting Surgeon Lieutenant, rose quickly to his feet, a pile of report cards dangling from his left hand.

‘Hallo, sir. Have a pew.’

Brooks grinned.

‘An excellent thing, Lieutenant Nicholls, truly gratifying, to meet these days a junior officer who knows his place. Thank you, thank you.’

He climbed into the chair and sank back with a groan, fiddling with the neck-rest.

‘If you’ll just adjust the foot-rest, my boy…so. Ah—thank you.’ He leaned back luxuriously, eyes closed, head far back on the rest, and groaned again. ‘I’m an old man, Johnny, my boy, just an ancient has-been.’

‘Nonsense, sir,’ Nicholls said briskly. ‘Just a slight malaise. Now, if you’ll let me prescribe a suitable tonic…’

He turned to a cupboard, fished out two toothglasses and a dark-green, ribbed bottle marked ‘Poison’. He filled the glasses and handed one to Brooks. ‘My personal recommendation. Good health, sir!’

Brooks looked at the amber liquid, then at Nicholls.

‘Heathenish practice they taught you at these Scottish Universities, my boy…Admirable fellers, some of these old heathens. What is it this time, Johnny?’

‘First-class stuff,’ Nicholls grinned. ‘Produce of the Island of Coll.’

The old surgeon looked at him suspiciously.

‘Didn’t know they had any distilleries up there.’

‘They haven’t. I only said it was made in Coll…How did things go up top, sir?’

‘Bloody awful. His nibs threatened to string us all from the yardarm. Took a special dislike to me—said I was to be booted off the ship instanter. Meant it, too.’

‘You!’ Nicholls’s brown eyes, deep-sunk just now and red-rimmed from sleeplessness, opened wide. ‘You’re joking, sir, of course.’

‘I’m not. But it’s all right—I’m not going. Old Giles, the skipper and Turner—the crazy idiots—virtually told Starr that if I went he’d better start looking around for another Admiral, Captain and Commander as well. They shouldn’t have done it, of course—but it shook old Vincent to the core. Departed in high dudgeon, muttering veiled threats…not so veiled, either, come to think of it.’

‘Damned old fool!’ said Nicholls feelingly.

‘He’s not really, Johnny. Actually, he’s a brilliant bloke. You don’t become a DNO for nothing. Master strategist and tactician, Giles tells me, and he’s not really as bad as we’re apt to paint him; to a certain extent we can’t blame old Vincent for sending us out again. Bloke’s up against an insoluble problem. Limited resources at his disposal, terrific demands for ships and men in half a dozen other theatres. Impossible to meet half the claims made on him; half the time he’s operating on little better than a shoe-string. But he’s still an inhuman, impersonal sort of cuss—doesn’t understand men.’

‘And the upshot of it all?’

‘Murmansk again. Sailing at 0600 tomorrow.’

‘What! Again? This bunch of walking zombies?’ Nicholls was openly incredulous. ‘Why, they can’t do that, sir! They—they just can’t!’

‘They’re doing it anyway, my boy. The Ulysses must—ah—redeem itself.’ Brooks opened his eyes. ‘Gad the very thought appals me. If there’s any of that poison left, my boy…’

Nicholls shoved the depleted bottle back into the cupboard, and jerked a resentful thumb in the direction of the massive battleship clearly visible through the porthole, swinging round her anchor three or four cable-lengths away.

‘Why always us, sir? It’s always us. Why don’t they send that useless floating barracks out once in a while? Swinging round that bloody great anchor, month in, month out—’

‘Just the point,’ Brooks interrupted solemnly. ‘According to the Kapok Kid, the tremendous weight of empty condensed-milk cans and herring-in-tomato-sauce tins accumulated on the ocean bed over the past twelve months completely defeats all attempts to weigh anchor.’

Nicholls didn’t seem to hear him.

‘Week in, week out, months and months on end, they send the Ulysses out. They change the carriers, they rest the screen destroyers—but never the Ulysses. There’s no let-up. Never, not once. But the Duke of Cumberland—all it’s fit for is sending hulking great brutes of marines on board here to massacre sick men, crippled men, men who’ve done more in a week than—’

‘Easy, boy, easy,’ the Commander chided. ‘You can’t call three dead men and the bunch of wounded heroes lying outside there a massacre. The marines were only doing their job. As for the Cumberland—well, you’ve got to face it. We’re the only ship in the Home Fleet equipped for carrier command.’

Nicholls drained his glass and regarded his superior officer moodily.

‘There are times, sir, when I positively love the Germans.’

‘You and Johnson should get together sometime,’ Brooks advised. ‘Old Starr would have you both clapped in irons for spreading alarm and…Hallo, hallo!’ He straightened up in his chair and leaned forward. ‘Observe the old Duke there, Johnny! Yards of washing going up from the flagdeck and matelots running—actually running—up to the fo’c’sle head. Unmistakable signs of activity. By Gad, this is uncommon surprising! What d’ye make of it, boy?’

‘Probably learned that they’re going on leave,’ Nicholls growled. ‘Nothing else could possibly make that bunch move so fast. And who are we to grudge them the just rewards for their labours? After so long, so arduous, so dangerous a spell of duty in Northern waters…’

The first shrill blast of a bugle killed the rest of the sentence. Instinctively, their eyes swung round on the crackling, humming loudspeaker, then on each other in sheer, shocked disbelief. And then they were on their feet, tense, expectant: the heart-stopping urgency of the bugle-call to action stations never grows dim.

‘Oh, my God, no!’ Brooks moaned. ‘Oh, no, no! Not again! Not in Scapa Flow!’

‘Oh, God, no! Not again—not in Scapa Flow!’

These were the words in the mouths, the minds, the hearts of 727 exhausted, sleep-haunted, bitter men that bleak winter evening in Scapa Flow. That they thought of, and that only could they think of as the scream of the bugle stopped dead all work on decks and below decks, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, on ammunition lighters and fuel tenders, in the galleys and in the offices. And that only could the watch below think of—and that with an even more poignant despair—as the strident blare seared through the bliss of oblivion and brought them back, sick at heart, dazed in mind and stumbling on their feet, to the iron harshness of reality.

It was, in a strangely indefinite way, a moment of decision. It was the moment that could have broken the Ulysses, as a fighting ship, for ever. It was the moment that bitter, exhausted men, relaxed in the comparative safety of a landlocked anchorage, could have chosen to make the inevitable stand against authority, against that wordless, mindless compulsion and merciless insistence which was surely destroying them. If ever there was such a moment, this was it.

The moment came—and passed. It was no more than a fleeting shadow, a shadow that flitted lightly across men’s minds and was gone, lost in the rush of feet pounding to action stations. Perhaps self-preservation was the reason. But that was unlikely—the Ulysses had long since ceased to care. Perhaps it was just naval discipline, or loyalty to the captain, or what the psychologists call conditioned reflex—you hear the scream of brakes and you immediately jump for your life. Or perhaps it was something else again.

Whatever it was, the ship—all except the port watch anchor party—was closed up in two minutes. Unanimous in their disbelief that this could be happening to them in Scapa Flow, men went to their stations silently or vociferously, according to their nature. They went reluctantly, sullenly, resentfully, despairingly. But they went.

Rear-Admiral Tyndall went also. He was not one of those who went silently. He climbed blasphemously up to the bridge, pushed his way through the port gate and clambered into his high-legged armchair in the for’ard port corner of the compass platform. He looked at Vallery.

‘What’s the flap, in heaven’s name, Captain?’ he demanded testily. ‘Everything seems singularly peaceful to me.’

‘Don’t know yet, sir.’ Vallery swept worried eyes over the anchorage. ‘Alarm signal from C-in-C, with orders to get under way immediately.’

‘Get under way! But why, man, why?’

Vallery shook his head.

Tyndall groaned. ‘It’s all a conspiracy, designed to rob old men like myself of their afternoon sleep,’ he declared.

‘More likely a brainwave of Starr’s to shake us up a bit,’ Turner grunted.

‘No.’ Tyndall was decisive. ‘He wouldn’t try that—wouldn’t dare. Besides, by his lights, he’s not a vindictive man.’

Silence fell, a silence broken only by the patter of sleet and hail, and the weird haunting pinging of the Asdic. Vallery suddenly lifted his binoculars.

‘Good lord, sir, look at that! The Duke’s slipped her anchor!’

There was no doubt about it. The shackle-pin had been knocked out and the bows of the great ship were swinging slowly round as it got under way.

‘What in the world—?’ Tyndall broke off and scanned the sky. ‘Not a plane, not a paratrooper in sight, no radar reports, no Asdic contacts, no sign of the German Grand Fleet steaming through the boom—’

‘She’s signalling us, sir!’ It was Bentley speaking, Bentley the Chief Yeoman of Signals. He paused and went on slowly: ‘Proceed to our anchorage at once. Make fast to north buoy.’

‘Ask them to confirm,’ Vallery snapped. He took the fo’c’sle phone from the communication rating.

‘Captain here, Number One. How is she? Up and down? Good.’ He turned to the officer of the watch. ‘Slow ahead both: Starboard 10.’ He looked over at Tyndall’s corner, brows wrinkled in question.

‘Search me,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Could be the latest in parlour games—a sort of nautical musical chairs, you know…Wait a minute, though! Look! The Cumberland—all her 5.25’s are at maximum depression!’

Vallery’s eyes met his.

‘No, it can’t be! Good God, do you think—?’

The blare of the Asdic loudspeaker, from the cabinet immediately abaft of the bridge, gave him his answer. The voice of Leading Asdic Operation Chrysler was clear, unhurried.

‘Asdic—bridge. Asdic—bridge. Echo, Red 30. Repeat, Red 30. Strengthening. Closing.’

The captain’s incredulity leapt and died in the same second.

‘Alert Director Control! Red 30. All AA guns maximum depression. Underwater target. Torps’—this to Lieutenant Marshall, the Canadian Torpedo Officer—“depth charge stations”.’

He turned back to Tyndall.

‘It can’t be, sir—it just can’t! A U-boat—I presume it is—in Scapa Flow. Impossible!’

‘Prien didn’t think so,’ Tyndall grunted.

‘Prien?’

‘Kapitan-Leutnant Prien—gent who scuppered the Royal Oak.’

‘It couldn’t happen again. The new boom defences—’

‘Would keep out any normal submarines,’ Tyndall finished. His voice dropped to a murmur. ‘Remember what we were told last month about our midget two-man subs—the chariots? The ones to be taken over to Norway by Norwegian fishing-boats operating from the Shetlands. Could be that the Germans have hit on the same idea.’

‘Could be,’ Vallery agreed. He nodded sardonically. ‘Just look at the Cumberland go—straight for the boom.’ He paused for a few seconds, his eyes speculative, then looked back at Tyndall. ‘How do you like it, sir?’

‘Like what, Captain?’

‘Playing Aunt Sally at the fair.’ Vallery grinned crookedly. ‘Can’t afford to lose umpteen million pounds worth of capital ship. So the old Duke hares out to sea and safety, while we moor near her anchor berth. You can bet German Naval Intelligence has the bearing of her anchorage down to a couple of inches. These midget subs carry detachable warheads and if there’s going to be any fitted, they’re going to be fitted to us.’

Tyndall looked at him. His face was expressionless. Asdic reports were continuous, reporting steady bearing to port and closing distances.

‘Of course, of course,’ the Admiral murmured. ‘We’re the whipping boy. Gad, it makes me feel bad!’ His mouth twisted and he laughed mirthlessly. ‘Me? This is the final straw for the crew. That hellish last trip, the mutiny, the marine boarding party from the Cumberland, action stations in harbour—and now this! Risking our necks for that—that…’ He broke off, spluttering, swore in anger, then resumed quietly:

‘What are you going to tell the men, Captain? Good God, it’s fantastic! I feel like mutiny myself…’ He stopped short, looked inquiringly past Vallery’s shoulder.

The Captain turned round.

‘Yes, Marshall?’

‘Excuse me, sir. This—er—echo.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘A sub, sir—possibly a pretty small one?’ The transatlantic accent was very heavy.

‘Likely enough, Marshall. Why?’

‘Just how Ralston and I figured it, sir.’ He grinned. ‘We have an idea for dealing with it.’

Vallery looked out through the driving sleet, gave helm and engine orders, then turned back to the Torpedo Officer. He was coughing heavily, painfully, as he pointed to the glassed-in anchorage chart.

‘If you’re thinking of depth-charging our stern off in these shallow waters—’

‘No, sir. Doubt whether we could get a shallow enough setting anyway. My idea—Ralston’s to be correct—is that we take out the motor-boat and a few 25-lb. scuttling charges, 18-second fuses and chemical igniters. Not much of a kick from these, I know, but a miniature sub ain’t likely to have helluva—er—very thick hulls. And if the crews are sitting on top of the ruddy things instead of inside—well, it’s curtains for sure. It’ll kipper ‘em.’

Vallery smiled.

‘Not bad at all, Marshall. I think you’ve got the answer there. What do you think, sir?’

‘Worth trying anyway,’ Tyndall agreed. ‘Better than waiting around like a sitting duck.’

‘Go ahead then, Torps.’ Vallery looked at him quizzically. ‘Who are your explosives experts?’

‘I figured on taking Ralston—’

‘Just what I thought. You’re taking nobody, laddie,’ said Vallery firmly. ‘Can’t afford to lose my torpedo officer.’

Marshall looked pained, then shrugged resignedly.

‘The chief TGM and Ralston—he’s the senior LTO. Good men both.’

‘Right. Bentley—detail a man to accompany them in the boat. We’ll signal Asdic bearings from here. Have him take a portable Aldis with him.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Marshall?’

‘Sir?’

‘Ralston’s young brother died in hospital this afternoon.’ He looked across at the Leading Torpedo Operator, a tall, blond, unsmiling figure dressed in faded blue overalls beneath his duffel. ‘Does he know yet?’

The Torpedo Officer stared at Vallery, then looked round slowly at the LTO. He swore, softly, bitterly, fluently.

‘Marshall!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, imperative, but Marshall ignored him, his face a mask, oblivious alike to the reprimand in the Captain’s voice and the lashing bite of the sleet.

‘No, sir,’ he stated at length, ‘he doesn’t know. But he did receive some news this morning. Croydon was pasted last week. His mother and three sisters live there—lived there. It was a land-mine, sir—there was nothing left.’ He turned abruptly and left the bridge.

Fifteen minutes later it was all over. The starboard whaler and the motor-boat on the port side hit the water with the Ulysses still moving up to the mooring. The whaler, buoy-jumper aboard, made for the buoy, while the motor-boat slid off at a tangent.

Four hundred yards away from the ship, in obedience to the flickering instructions from the bridge, Ralston fished out a pair of pliers from his overalls and crimped the chemical fuse. The Gunner’s Mate stared fixedly at his stop-watch. On the count of twelve the scuttling charge went over the side.

Three more, at different settings, followed it in close succession, while the motor-boat cruised in a tight circle. The first three explosions lifted the stern and jarred the entire length of the boat, viciously—and that was all. But with the fourth, a great gout of air came gushing to the surface, followed by a long stream of viscous bubbles. As the turbulence subsided, a thin slick of oil spread over a hundred square yards of sea…

Men, fallen out from Action Stations, watched with expressionless faces as the motor-boat made it back to the Ulysses and hooked on to the falls just in time: the Hotchkiss steering-gear was badly twisted and she was taking in water fast under the counter.

The Duke of Cumberland was a smudge of smoke over a far headland.

Cap in hand, Ralston sat down opposite the Captain. Vallery looked at him for a long time in silence. He wondered what to say, how best to say it. He hated to have to do this.

Richard Vallery also hated war. He always had hated it and he cursed the day it had dragged him out of his comfortable retirement. At least, ‘dragged’ was how he put it; only Tyndall knew that he had volunteered his services to the Admiralty on 1st September, 1939, and had had them gladly accepted.

But he hated war. Not because it interfered with his lifelong passion for music and literature, on both of which he was a considerable authority, not even because it was a perpetual affront to his aestheticism, to his sense of rightness and fitness. He hated it because he was a deeply religious man, because it grieved him to see in mankind the wild beasts of the primeval jungle, because he thought the cross of life was already burden enough without the gratuitous infliction of the mental and physical agony of war, and, above all, because he saw war all too clearly as the wild and insensate folly it was, as a madness of the mind that settled nothing, proved nothing—except the old, old truth that God was on the side of the big battalions.

But some things he had to do, and Vallery had clearly seen that this war had to be his also. And so he had come back to the service, and had grown older as the bitter years passed, older and frailer, and more kindly and tolerant and understanding. Among Naval Captains, indeed among men, he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone. It was a measure of the man’s greatness that this thought never occurred to him.

He sighed. All that troubled him just now was what he ought to say to Ralston. But it was Ralston who spoke first.

‘It’s all right, sir.’ The voice was a level monotone, the face very still. ‘I know. The Torpedo Officer told me.’

Vallery cleared his throat.

‘Words are useless, Ralston, quite useless. Your young brother—and your family at home. All gone. I’m sorry, my boy, terribly sorry about it all.’ He looked up into the expressionless face and smiled wryly. ‘Or maybe you think that these are all words—you know, something formal, just a meaningless formula.’

Suddenly, surprisingly, Ralston smiled briefly.

‘No, sir, I don’t. I can appreciate how you feel, sir. You see, my father—well, he’s a captain too. He tells me he feels the same way.’

Vallery looked at him in astonishment.

‘Your father, Ralston? Did you say—’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vallery could have sworn to a flicker of amusement in the blue eyes, so quiet, so self possessed, across the table. ‘In the Merchant Navy, sir—a tanker captain—16,000 tons.’

Vallery said nothing. Ralston went on quietly:

‘And about Billy, sir—my young brother. It’s—it’s just one of these things. It’s nobody’s fault but mine—I asked to have him aboard here. I’m to blame, sir—only me.’ His lean brown hands were round the brim of his hat, twisting it, crushing it. How much worse will it be when the shattering impact of the double blow wears off, Vallery wondered, when the poor kid begins to think straight again?

‘Look, my boy, I think you need a few days’ rest, time to think things over.’ God, Vallery thought, what an inadequate, what a futile thing to say. ‘PRO is making out your travelling warrant just now. You will start fourteen days’ leave as from tonight.’

‘Where is the warrant made out for, sir?’ The hat was crushed now, crumpled between the hands. ‘Croydon?’

‘Of course. Where else—’ Vallery stopped dead; the enormity of the blunder had just hit him.

‘Forgive me, my boy. What a damnably stupid thing to say!’

‘Don’t send me away, sir,’ Ralston pleaded quietly. ‘I know it sounds—well, it sounds corny, self-pitying, but the truth is I’ve nowhere to go, I belong here—on the Ulysses. I can do things all the time—I’m busy—working, sleeping—I don’t have to talk about things—I can do things…’ The self-possession was only the thinnest veneer, taut and frangible, with the quiet desperation immediately below.

‘I can get a chance to help pay ‘em back,’ Ralston hurried on. ‘Like crimping these fuses today—it—well, it was a privilege. It was more than that—it was—oh, I don’t know. I can’t find the words, sir.’

Vallery knew. He felt sad, tired, defenceless. What could he offer this boy in place of this hate, this very human, consuming flame of revenge? Nothing, he knew, nothing that Ralston wouldn’t despise, wouldn’t laugh at. This was not the time for pious platitudes. He sighed again, more heavily this time.

‘Of course you shall remain, Ralston. Go down to the Police Office and tell them to tear up your warrant. If I can be of any help to you at any time—’

‘I understand, sir. Thank you very much. Good night, sir.’

‘Good night, my boy.’

The door closed softly behind him.

TWO Monday Morning

‘Close all water-tight doors and scuttles. Hands to stations for leaving harbour.’ Impersonally, inexorably, the metallic voice of the broadcast system reached into every farthest corner of the ship.

And from every corner of the ship men came in answer to the call. They were cold men, shivering involuntarily in the icy north wind, sweating pungently as the heavy falling snow drifted under collars and cuffs, as numbed hands stuck to frozen ropes and metal. They were tired men, for fuelling, provisioning and ammunitioning had gone on far into the middle watch: few had had more than three hours’ sleep.

And they were still angry, hostile men. Orders were obeyed, to be sure, with the mechanical efficiency of a highly-trained ship’s company; but obedience was surly, acquiescence resentful, and insolence lay ever close beneath the surface. But Divisional officers and NCOs handled the men with velvet gloves: Vallery had been emphatic about that.

Illogically enough, the highest pitch of resentment had not been caused by the Cumberland’s prudent withdrawal. It had been produced the previous evening by the routine broadcast. ‘Mail will close at 2000 tonight.’ Mail! Those who weren’t working non-stop round the clock were sleeping like the dead with neither the heart nor the will even to think of writing. Leading Seaman Doyle, the doyen of ‘B’ mess-deck and a venerable three-badger (thirteen years’ undiscovered crime, as he modestly explained his good-conduct stripes) had summed up the matter succinctly: ‘If my old Missus was Helen of Troy and Jane Russell rolled into one—and all you blokes wot have seen the old dear’s photo know that the very idea’s a shocking libel on either of them ladies—I still wouldn’t send her even a bleedin’ postcard. You gotta draw a line somewhere. Me, for my scratcher.’ Whereupon he had dragged his hammock from the rack, slung it with millimetric accuracy beneath a hot-air louvre—seniority carries its privileges—and was asleep in two minutes. To a man, the port watch did likewise: the mail bag had gone ashore almost empty…

At 0600, exactly to the minute, the Ulysses slipped her moorings and steamed slowly towards the boom. In the grey half-light, under leaden, lowering clouds, she slid across the anchorage like an insubstantial ghost, more often than not half-hidden from view under sudden, heavy flurries of snow.

Even in the relatively clear spells, she was difficult to locate. She lacked solidity, substance, definition of outline. She had a curious air of impermanence, of volatility. An illusion, of course, but an illusion that accorded well with a legend—for a legend the Ulysses had become in her own brief lifetime. She was known and cherished by merchant seamen, by the men who sailed the bitter seas of the North, from St John’s to Archangel, from the Shetlands to Jan Mayen, from Greenland to far reaches of Spitzbergen, remote on the edge of the world. Where there was danger, where there was death, there you might look to find the Ulysses, materializing wraith-like from a fog-bank, or just miraculously being there when the bleak twilight of an Arctic dawn brought with it only the threat, at times almost the certainty, of never seeing the next.

A ghost-ship, almost, a legend. The Ulysses was also a young ship, but she had grown old in the Russian Convoys and on the Arctic patrols. She had been there from the beginning, and had known no other life. At first she had operated alone, escorting single ships or groups of two or three: later, she had operated without her squadron, the 14th Escort Carrier group.

But the Ulysses had never really sailed alone. Death had been, still was, her constant companion. He laid his finger on a tanker, and there was the erupting hell of a high-octane detonation; on a cargo liner, and she went to the bottom with her load of war supplies, her back broken by a German torpedo; on a destroyer, and she knifed her way into the grey-black depths of the Barents Sea, her still-racing engines her own executioners; on a U-boat, and she surfaced violently to be destroyed by gunfire, or slid down gently to the bottom of the sea, the dazed, shocked crew hoping for a cracked pressure hull and merciful instant extinction, dreading the endless gasping agony of suffocation in their iron tomb on the ocean floor. Where the Ulysses went, there also went death. But death never touched her. She was a lucky ship. A lucky ship and a ghost ship and the Arctic was her home.

Illusion, of course, this ghostliness, but a calculated illusion. The Ulysses was designed specifically for one task, for one ocean, and the camouflage experts had done a marvellous job. The special Arctic camouflage, the broken, slanting diagonals of grey and white and washed-out blues merged beautifully, imperceptibly into the infinite shades of grey and white, the cold, bleak grimness of the barren northern seas.

And the camouflage was only the outward, the superficial indication of her fitness for the north.

Technically, the Ulysses was a light cruiser. She was the only one of her kind, a 5,500-ton modification of the famous Dido type, a forerunner of the Black Prince class. Five hundred and ten feet long, narrow in her fifty-foot beam with a raked stem, square cruiser stern and long fo’c’sle deck extending well abaft the bridge—a distance of over two hundred feet, she looked and was a lean, fast and compact warship, dangerous and durable.

‘Locate: engage: destroy.’ These are the classic requirements of a naval ship in wartime, and to do each, and to do it with maximum speed and efficiency, the Ulysses was superbly equipped.

Location, for instance. The human element, of course, was indispensable, and Vallery was far too experienced and battlewise a captain to underestimate the value of the unceasing vigil of look-outs and signalmen. The human eye was not subject to blackouts, technical hitches or mechanical breakdowns. Radio reports, too, had their place and Asdic, of course, was the only defence against submarines.

But the Ulysses’s greatest strength in location lay elsewhere. She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world. Night and day, the radar scanners atop the fore and main tripod masts swept ceaselessly in a 360° arc, combing the far horizons, searching, searching. Below, in the radar rooms—eight in all—and in the Fighter Direction rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar’s efficiency and range were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses’s first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a range of eighty-five miles.

Engage—that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered—speed.

The Ulysses was tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons single reduction geared turbines—two in the for’ard, two in the after engine-room—developed an unbelievable horse-power that many a battleship, by no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots. Off Arran, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots—the nautical equivalent of 45 mph. And the ‘Dude’—Engineer-Commander Dobson—had smiled knowingly, said he wasn’t half trying and just wait till the Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he’d show them something. But as these famous mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the wardroom had merely sniffed ‘Professional jealousy’ and ignored him. Secretly, they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.

Locate, engage—and destroy. Destruction. That was the be-all, the end-all. Lay the enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that also.

She had four twin gun-turrets, two for’ard, two aft, 5.25 quick-firing and dual-purpose—equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for’ard, just above and abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the very bowels of the Ulysses, deep below the water-line, and thence automatically to the turrets as two simple factors—elevation and training. The turrets, of course, could also fight independently.

These were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA—the batteries of multiple pompoms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot, and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, high-velocity weapons, vicious and deadly in trained hands.

Finally, the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes—36 charges only, a negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers, and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depth-charge carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound warhead of TNT, lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been blooded.

This, then, was the Ulysses. The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man’s ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine—but only so long as it was manned and serviced by a perfectly-integrating, smoothly functioning team. A ship—any ship—can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid was clamped on the volcano, but the rumblings never ceased.

The first signs of further trouble came within three hours of clearing harbour. As always, mine-sweepers swept the channel ahead of them, but, as always, Vallery left nothing to chance. It was one of the reasons why he—and the Ulysses—had survived thus far. At 0620 he streamed paravanes—the slender, torpedo-shaped bodies which angled out from the bows, one on either side, on special paravane wire. In theory the wires connecting mines to their moorings on the floor of the sea were deflected away from the ship, guided out to the paravanes themselves and severed by cutters: the mines would then float to the top to be exploded or sunk by small arms.

At 0900, Vallery ordered the paravanes to be recovered. The Ulysses slowed down. The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Carrington, went to the fo’c’sle to supervise operations: seamen, winch drivers, and the Subs in charge of either side closed up to their respective stations.

Quickly the recovery booms were freed from their angled crutches, just abaft the port and starboard lights, swung out and rigged with recovery wires. Immediately, the three ton winches on ‘B’ gun-deck took the strain, smoothly, powerfully; the paravanes cleared the water.

Then it happened. It was A.B. Ferry’s fault that it happened. And it was just ill-luck that the port winch was suspect, operating on a power circuit with a defective breaker, just ill-luck that Ralston was the winch-driver, a taciturn, bitter-mouthed Ralston to whom, just then, nothing mattered a damn, least of all what he said and did. But it was Carslake’s responsibility that the affair developed into what it did.

Sub-Lieutenant Carslake’s presence there, on top of the Carley floats, directing the handling of the port wire, represented the culmination of a series of mistakes. A mistake on the part of his father, Rear-Admiral, Rtd, who had seen in his son a man of his own calibre, had dragged him out of Cambridge in 1939 at the advanced age of twenty-six and practically forced him into the Navy: a weakness on the part of his first CO, a corvette captain who had known his father and recommended him as a candidate for a commission: a rare error of judgment on the part of the selection board of the King Alfred, who had granted him his commission; and a temporary lapse on the part of the Commander, who had assigned him to this duty, in spite of Carslake’s known incompetence and inability to handle men.

He had the face of an overbred racehorse, long, lean and narrow, with prominent pale-blue eyes and protruding upper teeth. Below his scanty fair hair, his eyebrows were arched in a perpetual question mark: beneath the long, pointed nose, the supercilious curl of the upper lip formed the perfect complement to the eyebrows. His speech was a shocking caricature of the King’s English: his short vowels were long, his long ones interminable: his grammar was frequently execrable. He resented the Navy, he resented his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant, he resented the way the men resented him. In brief, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system. Vain, superior, uncouth and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.

He was making an ass of himself now. Striving to maintain balance on the rafts, feet dramatically braced at a wide angle, he shouted unceasing, unnecessary commands at his men. CPO Hartley groaned aloud, but kept otherwise silent in the interests of discipline. But AB Ferry felt himself under no such restraints.

‘’Ark at his Lordship,’ he murmured to Ralston. ‘All for the Skipper’s benefit.’ He nodded at where Vallery was leaning over the bridge, twenty feet above Carslake’s head. ‘Impresses him no end, so his nibs reckons.’

‘Just you forget about Carslake and keep your eyes on that wire,’ Ralston advised. ‘And take these damned great gloves off. One of these days—’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Ferry jeered. ‘The wire’s going to snag ‘em and wrap me round the drum.’ He fed in the hawser expertly. ‘Don’t you worry, chum, it’s never going to happen to me.’

But it did. It happened just then. Ralston, watching the swinging paravane closely, flicked a glance inboard. He saw the broken strand inches from Ferry, saw it hook viciously into the gloved hand and drag him towards the spinning drum before Ferry had a chance to cry out.

Ralston’s reaction was immediate. The footbrake was only six inches away—but that was too far. Savagely he spun the control wheel, full ahead to full reverse in a split second. Simultaneoulsy with Ferry’s cry of pain as his forearm crushed against the lip of the drum came a muffled explosion and clouds of acrid smoke from the winch as £500-worth of electric motor burnt out in a searing flash.

Immediately the wire began to run out again, accelerating momentarily under the dead weight of the lunging paravane. Ferry went with it. Twenty feet from the winch the wire passed through a snatch-block on the deck: if Ferry was lucky, he might lose only his hand.

He was less than four feet away when Ralston’s foot stamped viciously on the brake. The racing drum screamed to a shuddering stop, the paravane crashed down into the sea and the wire, weightless now, swung idly to the rolling of the ship.

Carslake scrambled down off the Carley, his sallow face suffused with anger. He strode up to Ralston.

‘You bloody fool!’ he mouthed furiously. ‘You’ve lost us that paravane. By God, LTO, you’d better explain yourself! Who the hell gave you orders to do anything?’

Ralston’s mouth tightened, but he spoke civilly enough.

‘Sorry, sir. Couldn’t help it—it had to be done. Ferry’s arm—’

‘To hell with Ferry’s arm!’ Carslake was almost screaming with rage. ‘I’m in charge here—and I give the orders. Look! Look!’ He pointed to the swinging wire. ‘Your work, Ralston, you—you blundering idiot! It’s gone, gone, do you understand, gone?’

Ralston looked over the side with an air of large surprise.

‘Well, now, so it is.’ The eyes were bleak, the tone provocative, as he looked back at Carslake and patted the winch. ‘And don’t forget this—it’s gone too, and it costs a ruddy sight more than any paravane.’

‘I don’t want any of your damned impertinence!’ Carslake shouted. His mouth was working, his voice shaking with passion. ‘What you need is to have some discipline knocked into you and, by God, I’m going to see you get it, you insolent young bastard!’

Ralston flushed darkly. He took one quick step forward, his fist balled, then relaxed heavily as the powerful hands of CPO Hartley caught his swinging arm. But the damage was done now. There was nothing for it but the bridge.

Vallery listened calmly, patiently, as Carslake made his outraged report. He felt far from patient. God only knew, he thought wearily, he had more than enough to cope with already. But the unruffled professional mask of detachment gave no hint of his feelings.

‘Is this true, Ralston?’ he asked quietly, as Carslake finished his tirade. ‘You disobeyed orders, swore at the Lieutenant and insulted him?’

‘No, sir.’ Ralston sounded as weary as the Captain felt. ‘It’s not true.’ He looked at Carslake, his face expressionless, then turned back to the Captain. ‘I didn’t disobey orders—there were none. Chief Petty Officer Hartley knows that.’ He nodded at the burly impassive figure who had accompanied them to the bridge. ‘I didn’t swear at him. I hate to sound like a sea-lawyer, sir, but there are plenty of witnesses that Sub-Lieutenant Carslake swore at me—several times. And if I insulted him’—he smiled faintly—‘it was pure self-defence.’

‘This is no place for levity, Ralston.’ Vallery’s voice was cold. He was puzzled—the boy baffled him. The bitterness, the brittle composure—he could understand these; but not the flickering humour. ‘As it happens, I saw the entire incident. Your promptness, your resource, saved the rating’s arm, possibly even his life—and against that a lost paravane and wrecked winch are nothing.’ Carslake whitened at the implied rebuke. ‘I’m grateful for that—thank you. As for the rest, Commander’s Defaulters tomorrow morning. Carry on, Ralston.’

Ralston compressed his lips, looked at Vallery for a long moment, then saluted abruptly and left the bridge.

Carslake turned round appealingly.

‘Captain, sir…’ He stopped at the sight of Vallery’s upraised hand.

‘Not now, Carslake. We’ll discuss it later.’ He made no attempt to conceal the dislike in his voice. ‘You may carry on, Lieutenant. Hartley—a word with you.’

Hartley stepped forward. Forty-four years old, CPO Hartley was the Royal Navy at its best. Very tough, very kindly and very competent, he enjoyed the admiration of all, ranging from the vast awe of the youngest Ordinary Seaman to the warm respect of the Captain himself. They had been together from the beginning.

‘Well, Chief, let’s have it. Between ourselves.’

‘Nothing to it really, sir.’ Hartley shrugged. ‘Ralston did a fine job. Sub-Lieutenant Carslake lost his head. Maybe Ralston was a bit sassy, but he was provoked. He’s only a kid, but he’s a professional—and he doesn’t like being pushed around by amateurs.’ Hartley paused and looked up at the sky. ‘Especially bungling amateurs.’

Vallery smothered a smile.

‘Could that be interpreted as—er—a criticism, Chief?’

‘I suppose so, sir.’ He nodded forward. ‘A few ruffled feathers down there, sir. Men are pretty sore about this. Shall I—?’

‘Thanks, Chief. Play it down as much as possible.’

When Hartley had gone, Vallery turned to Tyndall.

‘Well, you heard it, sir? Another straw in the wind.’

‘A straw?’ Tyndall was acid. ‘Hundreds of straws. More like a bloody great cornstack…Find out who was outside my door last night?’

During the middle watch, Tyndall had heard an unusual scraping noise outside the wardroom entry to his day cabin, had gone to investigate himself: in his hurry to reach the door, he’d knocked a chair over, and seconds later he had heard a clatter and the patter of running feet in the passage outside; but, when he had thrown the door open, the passage had been empty. Nothing there, nothing at all—except a file on the deck, below the case of Navy Colt .445s; the chain on the trigger guards was almost through.

Vallery shook his head.

‘No idea at all, sir.’ His face was heavy with worry. ‘Bad, really bad.’

Tyndall shivered in an ice flurry. He grinned crookedly.

‘Real Captain Teach stuff, eh? Pistols and cutlasses and black eye-patches, storming the bridge…’

Vallery shook his head impatiently.

‘No, not that. You know it, sir. Defiance, maybe, but—well, no more. The point is, a marine is on guard at the keyboard—just round the corner of that passage. Night and day. Bound to have seen him. He denies—’

‘The rot has gone that far?’ Tyndall whistled softly. ‘A black day, Captain. What does our fire-eating young Captain of Marines say to that?’

‘Foster? Pooh-poohs the very idea—and just about twists the ends of his moustache off. Worried to hell. So’s Evans, his Colour-Seargeant.’

‘So am I!’ said Tyndall feelingly. He glared into space. The Officer of the Watch, who happened to be in his direct line of vision, shifted uncomfortably. ‘Wonder what old Socrates thinks of it all, now? Maybe only a pill-roller, but the wisest head we’ve got…Well, speak of the devil!’

The gate had just swung open, and a burly, unhappy-looking figure, duffel-coated, oilskinned and wearing a Russian beaverskin helmet—the total effect was of an elderly grizzly bear caught in a thunderstorm—shuffled across the duckboards of the bridge. He brought up facing the Kent screen—an inset, circular sheet of glass which revolved at high speed and offered a clear view in all weather conditions—rain, hail, snow. For half a minute he peered miserably through this and obviously didn’t like what he saw.

He sniffed loudly and turned away, beating his arms against the cold.

‘Ha! A deck officer on the bridge of HM Cruisers. The romance, the glamour! Ha!’ He hunched his oilskinned shoulders, and looked more miserable than ever. ‘No place this for a civilized man like myself. But you know how it is, gentlemen—the clarion call of duty…’

Tyndall chuckled.

‘Give him plenty of time, Captain. Slow starters, these medics, you know, but—’

Brooks cut in, voice and face suddenly serious.

‘Some more trouble, Captain. Couldn’t tell it over the phone. Don’t know how much it’s worth.’

‘Trouble?’ Vallery broke off, coughed harshly into his handkerchief. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘Trouble? There’s nothing else, old chap. Just had some ourselves.’

‘That bumptious young fool, Carslake? Oh, I know all right. My spies are everywhere. Bloke’s a bloody menace…However, my story.

‘Young Nicholls was doing some path. work late last night in the dispensary—on TB specimens. Two, three hours in there. Lights out in the bay, and the patients either didn’t know or had forgotten he was there. Heard Stoker Riley—a real trouble-maker, that Riley—and the others planning a locked-door, sit-down strike in the boiler-room when they return to duty. A sit-down strike in a boiler-room. Good lord, it’s fantastic! Anyway, Nicholls let it slide—pretended he hadn’t heard.’

‘What!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, edged with anger. ‘And Nicholls ignored it, didn’t report it to me! Happened last night, you say. Why wasn’t I told—immediately? Get Nicholls up here—now. No, never mind.’ He reached out to pick up the bridge phone. ‘I’ll get him myself.’

Brooks laid a gauntleted hand on Vallery’s arm.

‘I wouldn’t do that, sir. Nicholls is a smart boy—very smart indeed. He knew that if he let the men know they had been overheard, they would know that he must report it to you. And then you’d have been bound to take action—and open provocation of trouble is the last thing you want. You said so yourself in the wardroom last night.’

Vallery hesitated. ‘Yes, yes, of course I said that, but—well, Doc, this is different. It could be a focal point for spreading the idea to—’

‘I told you, sir,’ Brooks interrupted softly. ‘Johnny Nicholls is a very smart boy. He’s got a big notice, in huge red letters, outside the Sick Bay door: “Keep clear: Suspected scarlet fever infection.” Kills me to watch ‘em. Everybody avoids the place like the plague. Not a hope of communicating with their pals in the Stokers’ Mess.’

Tyndall guffawed at him, and even Vallery smiled slightly.

‘Sounds fine, Doc. Still, I should have been told last night.’

‘Why should you be woken up and told every little thing in the middle of the night?’ Brooks’s voice was brusque. ‘Sheer selfishness on my part, but what of it? When things get bad, you damn well carry this ship on your back—and when we’ve all got to depend on you, we can’t afford to have you anything less than as fit as possible. Agreed, Admiral?’

Tyndall nodded solemnly. ‘Agreed, O Socrates. A very complicated way of saying that you wish the Captain to have a good night’s sleep. But agreed.’

Brooks grinned amiably. ‘Well, that’s all, gentlemen. See you all at the court-martial—I hope.’ He cocked a jaundiced eye over a shoulder, into the thickening snow. ‘Won’t the Med be wonderful, gentlemen?’ He sighed and slid effortlessly into his native Galway brogue. ‘Malta in the spring. The beach at Sliema—with the white houses behind—where we picnicked, a hundred years ago. The soft winds, me darlin’ boys, the warm winds, the blue skies and Chianti under a striped umbrealla—’

‘Off!’ Tyndall roared. ‘Get off this bridge, Brooks, or I’ll—’

‘I’m gone already,’ said Brooks. ‘A sit-down strike in the boiler-room! Ha! First thing you know, there’ll be a rash of male suffragettes chaining themselves to the guardrails!’ The gate clanged shut behind him.

Vallery turned to the Admiral, his face grave.

‘Looks as if you were right about that cornstack, sir.’

Tyndall grunted, non-commitally.

‘Maybe. Trouble is, the men have nothing to do right now except brood and curse and feel bitter about everything. Later on it’ll be all right—perhaps.’

‘When we get—ah—busier, you mean?’

‘Mmm. When you’re fighting for your life, to keep the ship afloat—well, you haven’t much time for plots and pondering over the injustices of fate. Self-preservation is still the first law of nature…Speaking to the men tonight. Captain?’

‘Usual routine broadcast, yes. In the first dog, when we’re all closed up to dusk action stations.’ Vallery smiled briefly. ‘Make sure that they’re all awake.’

‘Good. Lay it on thick and heavy. Give ’em plenty to think about—and, if I’m any judge of Vincent Starr’s hints, we’re going to have plenty to think about this trip. It’ll keep ’em occupied.’

Vallery laughed. The laugh transformed his thin sensitive face. He seemed genuinely amused.

Tyndall lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. Vallery smiled back at him.

‘Just passing thoughts, sir. As Spencer Faggot would have said, things have come to a pretty pass…Things are bad indeed, when only the enemy can save us.’

THREE Monday Afternoon

All day long the wind blew steadily out of the nor’nor’-west. A strong wind, and blowing stronger. A cold wind, a sharp wind full of little knives, it carried with it snow and ice and the strange dead smell born of the forgotten ice-caps that lie beyond the Barrier. It wasn’t a gusty, blowy wind. It was a settled, steady kind of wind, and it stayed fine on the starboard bow from dawn to dusk. Slowly, stealthily, it was lifting a swell. Men like Carrington, who knew every sea and port in the world, like Vallery and Hartley, looked at it and were troubled and said nothing.

The mercury crept down and the snow lay where it fell. The tripods and yardarms were great, glistening Xmas trees, festooned with woolly stays and halliards. On the main mast, a brown smear appeared now and then, daubed on by a wisp of smoke from the after funnel, felt rather than seen: in a moment, it would vanish. The snow lay on the deck and drifted. It softened the anchor-cables on the fo’c’sle deck into great, fluffy ropes of cottonwool, and drifted high against the breakwater before ‘A’ turret. It piled up against the turrets and superstructure, swished silently into the bridge and lay there slushily underfoot. It blocked the great eyes of the Director’s range-finder, it crept unseen along passages, it sifted soundlessly down hatches. It sought out the tiniest unprotected chink in metal and wood, and made the mess-decks dank and clammy and uncomfortable: it defied gravity and slid effortlessly up trouser legs, up under the skirts of coats and oilskins, up under duffel hoods, and made men thoroughly miserable. A miserable world, a wet world, but always and predominately a white world of softness and beauty and strangely muffled sound. All day long it fell, this snow, fell steadily and persistently, and the Ulysses slid on silently through the swell, a ghost ship in a ghost world.

But not alone in her world. She never was, these days. She had companionship, a welcome, reassuring companionship, the company of the 14th Aircraft Squadron, a tough, experienced and battle-hardened escort group, almost as legendary now as that fabulous Force 8, which had lately moved South to take over that other suicide run, the Malta convoys.

Like the Ulysses, the squadron steamed NNW all day long. There were no dog-legs, no standard course alterations. Tyndall abhorred the zig-zag, and, except on actual convoy and then only in known U-boat waters, rarely used it. He believed—as many captains did—that the zig-zag was a greater potential source of danger than the enemy. He had seen the Curaçoa, 4,200 tons of cockle-shell cruiser, swinging on a routine zig-zag, being trampled into the grey depths of the Atlantic under the mighty forefoot of the Queen Mary. He never spoke of it, but the memory stayed with him.

The Ulysses was in her usual position—the position dictated by her role of Squadron flagship—as nearly as possible in the centre of the thirteen warships.

Dead ahead steamed the cruiser Stirling. An old Cardiff class cruiser, she was a solid, reliable ship, many years older and many knots slower than the Ulysses, adequately armed with five single six-inch guns, but hardly built to hammer her way through the Arctic gales: in heavy seas, her wetness was proverbial. Her primary role was squadron defence: her secondary, to take over the squadron if the flagship were crippled or sunk.

The carriers—Defender, Invader, Wrestler and Blue Ranger—were in position to port and starboard, the Defender and Wrestler slightly ahead of the Ulysses, the others slightly astern. It seemed de rigeur for these escort carriers to have names ending in—er and the fact that the Navy already had a Wrestler—a Force 8 destroyer (and a Defender, which had been sunk some time previously off Tobruk)—was blithely ignored. These were not the 35,000-ton giants of the regular fleet—ships like the Indefatigable and the Illustrious—but 1520,000 ton auxiliary carriers, irreverently known as banana boats. They were converted merchant-men, American-built: these had been fitted out at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and sailed across the Atlantic by mixed British-American crews.

They were capable of eighteen knots, a relatively high speed for a single-screw ship—the Wrestler had two screws—but some of them had as many as four Busch-Sulzer Diesels geared to the one shaft. Their painfully rectangular flight-decks, 450 feet in length, were built up above the open fo’c’sle—one could see right under the flight-deck for’ard of the bridge—and flew off about thirty fighters—Grummans, Seafires or, most often, Corsairs—or twenty light bombers. They were odd craft, awkward, ungainly and singularly unwarlike; but over the months they had done a magnificent job of providing umbrella cover against air attack, of locating and destroying enemy ships and submarines: their record of kills, above, on and below the water was impressive and frequently disbelieved by the Admiralty.

Nor was the destroyer screen calculated to inspire confidence among the naval strategists at Whitehall. It was a weird hodge-podge, and the term ‘destroyer’ was a purely courtesy one.

One, the Nairn, was a River class frigate of 1,500 tons: another, the Eager, was a Fleet Minesweeper, and a third, the Gannet, better known as Huntley and Palmer, was a rather elderly and very tired Kingfisher corvette, supposedly restricted to coastal duties only. There was no esoteric mystery as to the origin of her nickname—a glance at her silhouette against the sunset was enough. Doubtless her designer had worked within Admiralty specifications: even so, he must have had an off day.

The Vectra and the Viking were twin-screwed, modified ‘V’ and ‘W’ destroyers, in the superannuated class now, lacking in speed and firepower, but tough and durable. The Baliol was a diminutive Hunt class destroyer which had no business in the great waters of the north. The Portpatrick, a skeleton-lean four stacker, was one of the fifty lend-lease World War I destroyers from the United States. No one even dared guess at her age. An intriguing ship at any time, she became the focus of all eyes in the fleet and a source of intense interest whenever the weather broke down. Rumour had it that two of her sister ships had overturned in the Atlantic during a gale; human nature being what it is, everyone wanted a grandstand view whenever weather conditions deteriorated to an extent likely to afford early confirmation of these rumours. What the crew of the Portpatrick thought about it all was difficult to say.

These seven escorts, blurred and softened by the snow, kept their screening stations all day—the frigate and minesweeper ahead, the destroyers at the sides, and the corvette astern. The eighth escort, a fast, modern ‘S’ class destroyer, under the command of the Captain (Destroyers), Commander Orr, prowled restlessly around the fleet. Every ship commander in the squadron envied Orr his roving commission, a duty which Tyndall had assigned him in self-defence against Orr’s continual pestering. But no one objected, no one grudged him his privilege: the Sirrus had an uncanny nose for trouble, an almost magnetic affinity for U-boats lying in ambush.

From the warmth of the Ulysses’s wardroom—long, incongruously comfortable, running fifty feet along the starboard side of the fo’c’sle deck—Johnny Nicholls gazed out through the troubled grey and white of the sky. Even the kindly snow, he reflected, blanketing a thousand sins, could do little for these queer craft, so angular, so graceless, so obviously out-dated.

He supposed he ought to feel bitter at My Lords of the Admiralty, with their limousines and armchairs and elevenses, with their big wall-maps and pretty little flags, sending out this raggle-taggle of a squadron to cope with the pick of the U-boat packs, while they sat comfortably, luxuriously at home. But the thought died at birth: it was he knew, grotesquely unjust. The Admiralty would have given them a dozen brand-new destroyers—if they had them. Things, he knew were pretty bad, and the demands of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean had first priority.

He supposed, too, he ought to feel cynical, ironic, at the sight of these old and worn-out ships. Strangely, he couldn’t. He knew what they could do, what they had done. If he felt anything at all towards them, it was something uncommonly close to admiration—perhaps even pride. Nicholls stirred uncomfortably and turned away from the porthole. His gaze fell on the somnolent form of the Kapok Kid, flat on his back in an arm-chair, an enormous pair of fur-lined flying-boots perched above the electric fire.

The Kapok Kid, Lieutenant the Honourable Andrew Carpenter, RN, Navigator of the Ulysses and his best friend—he was the one to feel proud, Nicholls thought wryly. The most glorious extrovert Nicholls had ever known, the Kapok Kid was equally at home anywhere—on a dance floor or in the cockpit of a racing yacht at Cowes, at a garden party, on a tennis court or at the wheel of his big crimson Bugatti, windscreen down and the loose ends of a seven-foot scarf streaming out behind him. But appearances were never more deceptive. For the Kapok Kid, the Royal Navy was his whole life, and he lived for that alone. Behind that slightly inane façade lay, besides a first-class brain, a deeply romantic streak, an almost Elizabethan love for sea and ships which he sought, successfully, he imagined, to conceal from all his fellow-officers. It was so patently obvious that no one ever thought it worth the mentioning.

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.’

Good God, has the skipper lost his senses, Nicholls wondered. He’ll wreck any morale that’s left. Not that there is any left. What in the world—

‘Secondly,’ the voice went on, calm, inexorable, ‘we are taking no rescue ships on this convoy. There will be no time to stop. Besides, you all know what happened to the Stockport and the Zafaaran. You’re safer where you are.¹

‘Thirdly, two—possibly three—U-boat packs are known to be strung out along latitude seventy degrees and our Northern Norway agents report a heavy mustering of German bombers of all types in their area.

‘Finally, we have reason to believe that the Tirpitz is preparing to move out.’ Again he paused, for an interminable time, it seemed. It was as if he knew the tremendous shock carried in these few words, and wanted to give it time to register. ‘I need not tell you what that means. The Germans may risk her to stop the convoy. The Admiralty hope they will. During the latter part of the voyage, capital units of the Home Fleet, including possibly the aircraft-carriers Victorious and Furious, and three cruisers, will parallel our course at twelve hours’ steaming distance. They have been waiting a long time, and we are the bait to spring the trap…

‘It is possible that things may go wrong. The best-laid plans…or the trap may be late in springing shut. This convoy must still get through. If the carriers cannot fly off cover, the Ulysses must cover the withdrawal of FR77. You will know what that means. I hope this is all perfectly clear.’

There was another long bout of coughing, another long pause, and when he spoke again the tone had completely changed. He was very quiet.

‘I know what I am asking of you. I know how tired, how hopeless, how sick at heart you all feel. I know—no one knows better—what you have been through, how much you need, how much you deserve a rest. Rest you shall have. The entire ship’s company goes on ten days’ leave from Portsmouth on the eighteenth, then for refit in Alexandria.’ The words were casual, as if they carried no significance for him. ‘But before that—well, I know it seems cruel, inhuman—it must seem so to you—to ask you to go through it all again, perhaps worse than you’ve ever gone through before. But I can’t help it—no one can help it.’ Every sentence, now, was punctuated by long silences: it was difficult to catch his words, so low and far away.

‘No one has any right to ask you to do it, I least of all…least of all. I know you will do it. I know you will not let me down. I know you will take the Ulysses through. Good luck. Good luck and God bless you. Good night.’

The loudspeakers clicked off, but the silence lingered on. Nobody spoke and nobody moved. Not even the eyes moved. Those who had been looking at the speakers still gazed on, unseeingly; or stared down at their hands; or down into the glowing butts of forbidden cigarettes, oblivious to the acrid smoke that laced exhausted eyes. It was strangely as if each man wanted to be alone, to look into his own mind, follow his thoughts out for himself, and knew that if his eyes caught another’s he would no longer be alone. A strange hush, a supernatural silence, the wordless understanding that so rarely touches mankind: the veil lifts and drops again and a man can never remember what he has seen but knows that he has seen something and that nothing will ever be quite the same again. Seldom, all too seldom it comes: a sunset of surpassing loveliness, a fragment from some great symphony, the terrible stillness which falls over the huge rings of Madrid and Barcelona as the sword of the greatest of the matadors sinks inevitably home. And the Spaniards have the word for it—‘the moment of truth’.

The Sick Bay clock, unnaturally loud, ticked away one minute, maybe two. With a heavy sigh—it seemed ages since he had breathed last—Nicholls softly pulled to the sliding door behind the curtains and switched on the light. He looked round at Brooks, looked away again.

‘Well, Johnny?’ The voice was soft, almost bantering.

‘I just don’t know, sir, I don’t know at all.’ Nicholls shook his head. ‘At first I thought he was going to—well, make a hash of it. You know, scare the lights out of ’em. And good God!’ he went on wonderingly, ‘that’s exactly what he did do. Piled it on—gales, Tirpitz, hordes of subs—and yet…’ His voice trailed off.

‘And yet?’ Brooks echoed mockingly. ‘That’s just it. Too much intelligence—that’s the trouble with the young doctors today. I saw you—sitting there like a bogus psychiatrist, analysing away for all you were worth at the probable effect of the speech on the minds of the wounded warriors without, and never giving it a chance to let it register on yourself.’ He paused and went on quietly.

‘It was beautifully done, Johnny. No, that’s the wrong word—there was nothing premeditated about it. But don’t you see? As black a picture as man could paint: points out that this is just a complicated way of committing suicide: no silver lining, no promises, even Alex thrown in as a casual afterthought. Builds ’em up, then lets ’em down. No inducements, no hope, no appeal—and yet the appeal was tremendous…What was it, Johnny?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nicholls was troubled. He lifted his head abruptly, then smiled faintly. ‘Maybe there was no appeal. Listen.’ Noiselessly, he slid the door back, flicked off the lights. The rumble of Riley’s harsh voice, low and intense, was unmistakable.

‘—just a lot of bloody clap-trap. Alex? The Med? Not on your—life, mate. You’ll never see it. You’ll never even see Scapa again. Captain Richard Vallery, DSO! Know what the old bastard wants, boys? Another bar to his DSO. Maybe even a VC. Well, by Christ’s, he’s not going to have it! Not at my expense. Not if I can—well help it. “I know you won’t let me down,”’ he mimicked, his voice high-pitched. ‘Whining old bastard!’ He paused a moment, then rushed on.

‘The Tirpitz! Christ Almighty! The Tirpitz! We’re going to stop it—us! This bloody toy ship! Bait, he says, bait!’ His voice rose. ‘I tell you, mates, nobody gives a damn about us. Direct for the North Cape! They’re throwing us to the bloody wolves! And that old bastard up to—’

‘Shaddap!’ It was Petersen who spoke, his voice a whisper, low and fierce. His hand stretched out, and Brooks and Nicholls in the surgery winced as they heard Riley’s wristbones crack under the tremendous pressure of the giant’s hand. ‘Often I wonder about you, Riley,’ Petersen went on slowly. ‘But not now, not any more. You make me sick!’ He flung Riley’s hand down and turned away.

Riley rubbed his wrist in agony, and turned to Burgess.

‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter with him? What the hell…’ He broke off abruptly. Burgess was looking at him steadily, kept looking for a long time. Slowly, deliberately, he eased himself down in bed, pulled the blankets up to his neck and turned his back on Riley.

Brooks rose quickly to his feet, closed the door and pressed the light switch.

‘Act I, Scene I. Cut! Lights!’ he murmured. ‘See what I mean, Johnny?’

Yes, sir,’ Nicholls nodded slowly. ‘At least, I think so.’

‘Mind you, my boy, it won’t last. At least, not at that intensity.’ He grinned. But maybe it’ll take us the length of Murmansk. You never know.’

‘I hope so, sir. Thanks for the show.’ Nicholls reached up for his duffel-coat. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better make my way aft.’

‘Off you go, then. And, oh—Johnny—’

‘Sir?’

‘That scarlet-fever notice-board of yours. On your way aft you might consign it to the deep. I don’t think we’ll be needing it any more.’ Nicholls grinned and closed the door softly behind him.

1. Rescue ships, whose duties were solely what their name implies, were a feature of many of the earlier convoys. The Zafaaran was lost in one of the war’s worst convoys. The Stockport was torpedoed. She was lost with all hands, including all those survivors rescued from other sunken ships.

FOUR Monday Night

Dusk Action Stations dragged out its interminable hour and was gone. That night, as on a hundred other nights, it was just another nagging irritation, a pointless precaution that did not even justify its existence, far less its meticulous thoroughness. Or so it seemed. For although at dawn enemy attacks were routine, at sunset they were all but unknown. It was not always so with other ships, indeed it was rarely so, but then, the Ulysses was a lucky ship. Everyone knew that. Even Vallery knew it, but he also knew why. Vigilance was the first article of his sailor’s creed.

Soon after the Captain’s broadcast, radar had reported a contact, closing. That it was an enemy plane was certain: Commander Westcliffe, Senior Air Arm Officer, had before him in the Fighter Direction Room a wall map showing the operational routes of all Coastal and Ferry Command planes, and this was a clear area. But no one paid the slightest attention to the report, other than Tyndall’s order for a 45° course alteration. This was as routine as dusk Action Stations themselves. It was their old friend Charlie coming to pay his respects again.

‘Charlie’—usually a four-engine Focke-Wulf Condor—was an institution on the Russian Convoys. He had become to the seamen on the Murmansk run very much what the albatross had been the previous century to sailing men, far south in the Roaring Forties: a bird of ill-omen, half feared but almost amicably accepted, and immune from destruction—though with Charlie, for a different reason. In the early days, before the advent of cam-ships and escort carriers, Charlie frequently spent the entire day, from first light to last, circling a convoy and radioing to base pin-point reports of its position.¹

Exchanges of signals between British ships and German reconnaissance planes were not unknown, and apocryphal stories were legion. An exchange of pleasantries about the weather was almost commonplace. On several occasions Charlie had plaintively asked for his position and been given highly-detailed latitude and longitude bearings which usually placed him somewhere in the South Pacific; and, of course, a dozen ships claimed the authorship of the story wherein the convoy Commodore sent the signal, ‘Please fly the other way round. You are making us dizzy,’ and Charlie had courteously acknowledged and turned in his tracks.

Latterly, however, amiability had been markedly absent, and Charlie, grown circumspect with the passing of the months and the appearance of shipborne fighters, rarely appeared except at dusk. His usual practice was to make a single circle of the convoy at a prudent distance and then disappear into the darkness.

That night was no exception. Men caught only fleeting glimpses of the Condor in the driving snow, then quickly lost it in the gathering gloom. Charlie would report the strength, nature and course of the Squadron, although Tyndall had little hope that the German Intelligence would be deceived as to their course. A naval squadron, near the sixty-second degree of latitude, just east of the Faroes, and heading NNE, wouldn’t make sense to them—especially as they almost certainly knew of the departure of the convoy from Halifax. Two and two, far too obviously totted up to four.

No attempt was made to fly off Seafires—the only plane with a chance to overhaul the Condor before it disappeared into the night. To locate the carrier again in almost total darkness, even on a radio beam, was difficult: to land at night, extremely dangerous; and to land, by guess and by God, in the snow and blackness on a pitching, heaving deck, a suicidal impossibility. The least miscalculation, the slightest error of judgment and you had not only a lost plane but a drowned pilot. A ditched Seafire, with its slender, torpedo-shaped fuselage and the tremendous weight of the great Rolls-Royce Merlin in its nose, was a literal deathtrap. When it went down into the sea, it just kept on going.

Back on to course again, the Ulysses pushed blindly into the gathering storm. Hands fell out from Action Stations, and resumed normal Defence Stations—watch and watch, four on, four off. Not a killing routine, one would think: twelve hours on, twelve hours off a day—a man could stand that. And so he could, were that all. But the crew also spent three hours a day at routine Action Stations, every second morning—the forenoon watch—at work (this when they were off-watch) and God only knew how many hours at Action Stations. Beyond all this, all meals—when there were meals—were eaten in their off-duty time. A total of three to four hours’ sleep a day was reckoned unusual: forty-eight hours without sleep hardly called for comment.

Step by step, fraction by menacing fraction, mercury and barograph crept down in a deadly dualism. The waves were higher now, their troughs deeper, their shoulders steeper, and the bone-chilling wind lashed the snow into a blinding curtain. A bad night, a sleepless night, both above deck and below, on watch and off.

On the bridge, the First Lieutenant, the Kapok Kid, signalmen, the Searchlight LTO, look-outs and messengers peered out miserably into the white night and wondered what it would be like to be warm again. Jerseys, coats, overcoats, duffels, oilskins, scarves, balaclavas, helmets—they wore them all, completely muffled except for a narrow eye-slit in the woollen cocoon, and still they shivered. They wrapped arms and forearms round, and rested their feet on the steam pipes which circled the bridge, and froze. Pom-pom crews huddled miserably in the shelter of their multiple guns, stamped their feet, swung their arms and swore incessantly. And the lonely Oerlikon gunners, each jammed in his lonely cockpit, leaned against the built-in ‘black’ heaters and fought off the Oerlikon gunner’s most insidious enemy—sleep.

The starboard watch, in the mess-decks below, were little happier. There were no bunks for the crew of the Ulysses, only hammocks, and these were never slung except in harbour. There were good and sufficient reasons for this. Standards of hygiene on a naval warship are high, compared even to the average civilian home: the average matelot would never consider climbing into his hammock fully dressed—and no one in his senses would have dreamed of undressing on the Russian Convoys. Again, to an exhausted man, the prospect and the actual labour of slinging and then lashing a hammock were alike appalling. And the extra seconds it took to climb out of a hammock in an emergency could represent the margin between life and death, while the very existence of a slung hammock was a danger to all, in that it impeded quick movement. And finally, as on that night of a heavy head sea, there could be no more uncomfortable place than a hammock slung fore and aft.

And so the crew slept where it could, fully clothed even to duffel coats and gloves. On tables and under tables, on narrow nine-inch stools, on the floor, in hammock racks—anywhere. The most popular place on the ship was on the warm steel deck-plates in the alleyway outside the galley, at night-time a weird and spectral tunnel, lit only by a garish red light. A popular sleeping billet, made doubly so by the fact that only a screen separated it from the upper-deck, a scant ten feet away. The fear of being trapped below decks in a sinking ship was always there, always in the back of men’s minds.

Even below decks, it was bitterly cold. The hot-air systems operated efficiently only on ‘B’ and ‘C’ mess-decks, and even there the temperature barely cleared freezing point. Deckheads dripped constantly and the condensation on the bulkheads sent a thousand little rivulets to pool on the corticene floor. The atmosphere was dank and airless and terribly chill—the ideal breeding ground for the TB, so feared by Surgeon-Commander Brooks. Such conditions, allied with the constant pitching of the ship and the sudden jarring vibrations which were beginning to develop every time the bows crashed down, made sleep almost impossible, at best a fitful, restless unease.

Almost to a man, the crew slept—or tried to sleep—with heads pillowed on inflated lifebelts. Blown up, bent double then tied with tape, these lifebelts made very tolerable pillows. For this purpose, and for this alone, were these lifebelts employed, although standing orders stated explicitly that lifebelts were to be worn at all times during action and in known enemy waters. These orders were completely ignored, not least of all by those Divisional Officers whose duty it was to enforce them. There was enough air trapped in the voluminous and bulky garments worn in these latitudes to keep a man afloat for at least three minutes. If he wasn’t picked up in that time, he was dead anyway. It was shock that killed, the tremendous shock of a body at 96° F being suddenly plunged into a liquid temperature some 70° lower—for in the Arctic waters, the sea temperature often falls below normal freezing point. Worse still, the sub-zero wind lanced like a thousand stilettos through the saturated clothing of a man who had been submerged in the sea, and the heart, faced with an almost instantaneous 100° change in body temperature, just stopped beating. But it was a quick death, men said, quick and kind and merciful.

At ten minutes to midnight the Commander and Marshall made their way to the bridge. Even at this late hour and in the wicked weather, the Commander was his usual self, imperturbable and cheerful, lean and piratical, a throw-back to the Elizabethan buccaneers, if ever there was one. He had an unflagging zest for life. The duffel hood, as always, lay over his shoulders, the braided peak of this cap was tilted at a magnificent angle. He groped for the handle of the bridge gate, passed through, stood for a minute accustoming his eyes to the dark, located the First Lieutenant and thumped him resoundingly on the back.

‘Well, watchman, and what of the night?’ he boomed cheerfully. ‘Bracing, yes, decidely so. Situation completely out of control as usual, I suppose? Where are all our chickens this lovely evening?’ He peered out into the snow, scanned the horizon briefly, then gave up. ‘All gone to hell and beyond, I suppose.’

‘Not too bad,’ Carrington grinned. An RNR officer and an ex-Merchant Navy captain in whom Vallery reposed complete confidence, Lieutenant-Commander Carrington was normally a taciturn man, grave and unsmiling. But a particular bond lay between him and Turner, the professional bond of respect which two exceptional seamen have for each other. ‘We can see the carriers now and then. Anyway, Bowden and his backroom boys have ’em all pinned to an inch. At least, that’s what they say.’

‘Better not let old Bowden hear you say that,’ Marshall advised. ‘Thinks radar is the only step forward the human race has taken since the first man came down from the trees.’ He shivered uncontrollably and turned his back on the driving wind. ‘Anyway, I wish to God I had his job,’ he added feelingly. ‘This is worse than winter in Alberta!’

‘Nonsense, my boy, stuff and nonsense!’ the Commander roared. ‘Decadent, that’s the trouble with you youngsters nowadays. This is the only life for a self-respecting human being.’ He sniffed the icy air appreciatively and turned to Carrington. ‘Who’s on with you tonight, Number One?’

A dark figure detached itself from the binnacle and approached him.

‘Ah, there you are. Well, well, ’pon my soul, if it isn’t our navigating officer, the Honourable Carpenter, lost as usual and dressed to kill in his natty gent’s suiting. Do you know, Pilot, in that outfit you look like a cross between a deep-sea diver and that advert for Michelin tyres?’

‘Ha!’ said the Kapok Kid aggrievedly. ‘Sniff and scoff while you may, sir.’ He patted his quilted chest affectionately. ‘Just wait till we’re all down there in the drink together, everybody else dragged down or frozen to death, me drifting by warm and dry and comfortable, maybe smoking the odd cigarette—’

‘Enough. Be off. Course, Number One?’

‘Three-twenty, sir. Fifteen knots.’

‘And the Captain?’

‘In the shelter.’ Carrington jerked his head towards the reinforced steel circular casing at the after end of the bridge. This supported the Director Tower, the control circuits to which ran through a central shaft in the casing. A sea-bunk—a spartan, bare settee—was kept there for the Captain’s use. ‘Sleeping, I hope,’ he added, ‘but I very much doubt it. Gave orders to be called at midnight.’

‘Why?’ Turner demanded.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Routine, I suppose. Wants to see how things are.’

‘Cancel the order,’ Turner said briefly. ‘Captain’s got to learn to obey orders like anybody else—especially doctor’s orders. I’ll take full responsibility. Good night, Number One.’

The gate clanged shut and Marshall turned uncertainly towards the Commander.

‘The Captain, sir. Oh, I know it’s none of my business, but’—he hesitated—‘well, is he all right?’

Turner looked quickly around him. His voice was unusually quiet.

‘If Brooks had his way, the old man would be in hospital.’ He was silent for a moment, then added soberly, ‘Even then, it might be too late.’

Marshall said nothing. He moved restlessly around, then went aft to the port searchlight control position. For five minutes, an intermittent rumble of voices drifted up to the Commander. He glanced up curiously on Marshall’s return.

‘That’s Ralston, sir,’ the Torpedo Officer explained. ‘If he’d talk to anybody, I think he’d talk to me.’

‘And does he?’

‘Sure—but only what he wants to talk about. As for the rest, no dice. You can almost see the big notice round his neck—“Private—Keep off”. Very civil, very courteous and completely unapproachable. I don’t know what the hell to do about him.’

‘Leave him be,’ Turner advised. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’ He shook his head. ‘My God, what a lousy break life’s given that boy!’

Silence fell again. The snow was lifting now, but the wind still strengthening. It howled eerily through masts and rigging, blending with a wild and eldritch harmony into the haunting pinging of the Asdic. Weird sounds both, weird and elemental and foreboding, that rasped across the nerves and stirred up nameless, atavistic dreads of a thousand ages past, long buried under the press of civilization. An unholy orchestra, and, over years, men grew to hate it with a deadly hatred.

Half-past twelve came, one o’clock, then half-past one. Turner’s thought turned fondly towards coffee and cocoa. Coffee or cocoa? Cocoa, he decided, a steaming potent brew, thick with melted chocolate and sugar. He turned to Chrysler, the bridge messenger, young brother of the Leading Asdic Operator.

‘WT—Bridge. WT—Bridge.’ The loudspeaker above the Asdic cabinet crackled urgently, the voice hurried, insistent. Turner jumped for the hand transmitter, barked an acknowledgement.

‘Signal from Sirrus. Echoes, port bow, 300, strong, closing. Repeat, echoes, port bow, strong, closing.’

‘Echoes, WT? Did you say “echoes”?’

‘Echoes, sir. I repeat, echoes.’

Even as he spoke, Turner’s hand cut down on the gleaming phosphorescence of the Emergency Action Stations switch.

Of all sounds in this earth, there is none so likely to stay with a man to the end of his days as the EAS. There is no other sound even remotely like it. There is nothing noble or martial or bloodstirring about it. It is simply a whistle, pitched near the upper limit of audio-frequency, alternating, piercing, atonic, alive with a desperate urgency and sense of danger: knife-like, it sears through the most sleep-drugged brain and has a man—no matter how exhausted, how weak, how deeply sunk in oblivion—on his feet in seconds, the pulse-rate already accelerating to meet the latest unknown, the adrenalin already pumping into his blood-stream.

Inside two minutes, the Ulysses was closed up to Action Stations. The Commander had moved aft to the After Director Tower, Vallery and Tyndall were on the bridge.

The Sirrus, two miles away to port, remained in contact for half an hour. The Viking was detached to help her, and, below-deck in the Ulysses, the peculiar, tinny clanging of depth-charging was clearly heard at irregular intervals. Finally, the Sirrus reported. ‘No success: contact lost: trust you have not been disturbed.’ Tyndall ordered the recall of the two destroyers, and the bugle blew the stand-down.

Back on the bridge, again, the Commander sent for his long overdue cocoa. Chrysler departed to the seaman’s for’ard galley—the Commander would have no truck with the wishy-washy liquid concocted for the officers’ mess—and returned with a steaming jug and a string of heavy mugs, their handles threaded on a bent wire. Turner watched with approval the reluctance with which the heavy, viscous liquid poured glutinously over the lip of the jug, and nodded in satisfaction after a preliminary taste. He smacked his lips and sighed contentedly.

‘Excellent, young Chrysler, excellent! You have the gift. Torps, an eye on the ship, if you please. Must see where we are.’

He retired to the chart-room on the port side, just aft of the compass platform, and closed the black-out door. Relaxed in his chair, he put his mug on the chart-table and his feet beside it, drew the first deep inhalation of cigarette smoke into his lungs. Then he was on his feet, cursing: the crackle of the WT loudspeaker was unmistakable.

This time it was the Portpatrick. For one reason and another, her reports were generally treated with a good deal of reserve, but this time she was particularly emphatic. Commander Turner had no option; again he reached for the EAS switch.

Twenty minutes later the stand-down sounded again, but the Commander was to have no cocoa that night. Three times more during the hours of darkness all hands closed up to Action Stations, and only minutes, it seemed, after the last stand-down, the bugle went for dawn stations.

There was no dawn as we know it. There was a vague, imperceptible lightening in the sky, a bleak, chill greyness, as the men dragged themselves wearily back to their action stations. This, then, was war in the northern seas. No death and glory heroics, no roaring guns and spitting Oerlikons, no exaltation of the spirit, no glorious defiance of the enemy: just worn-out sleepless men, numbed with cold and sodden duffels, grey and drawn and stumbling on their feet with weakness and hunger and lack of rest, carrying with them the memories, the tensions, the cumulative physical exhaustion of a hundred such endless nights.

Vallery, as always, was on the bridge. Courteous, kind and considerate as ever, he looked ghastly. His face was haggard, the colour of putty, his bloodshot eyes deep-sunk in hollowed sockets, his lips bloodless. The severe hæmorrhage of the previous night and the sleepless night just gone had taken terrible toll of his slender strength.

In the half-light, the squadron came gradually into view. Miraculously, most of them were still in position. The frigate and minesweeper were together and far ahead of the fleet—during the night they had been understandably reluctant to have their tails tramped on by a heavy cruiser or a carrier. Tyndall appreciated this and said nothing. The Invader had lost position during the night, and lay outside the screen on the port quarter. She received a very testy signal indeed, and came steaming up to resume station, corkscrewing violently in the heavy cross seas.

Stand-down came at 0800. At 0810 the port watch was below, making tea, washing, queueing up at the galley for breakfast trays, when a muffled explosion shook the Ulysses. Towels, soap, cups, plates and trays went flying or were left where they were: blasphemous and bitter, the men were on their way before Vallery’s hand closed on the Emergency switch.

Less than half a mile away the Invader was slewing round in a violent half-circle, her flight-deck tilted over at a crazy angle. It was snowing heavily again now, but not heavily enough to obscure the great gouts of black oily smoke belching up for’ard of the Invader’s bridge. Even as the crew of the Ulysses watched, she came to rest, wallowing dangerously in the troughs between the great waves.

‘The fools, the crazy fools!’ Tyndall was terribly bitter, unreasonably so; even to Vallery, he would not admit how much he was now feeling the burden, the strain of command that sparked off his now almost chronic irritability. ‘This is what happens, Captain, when a ship loses station! And it’s as much my fault as theirs—should have sent a destroyer to escort her back.’ He peered through his binoculars, turned to Vallery. ‘Make a signal please: “Estimate of damage—please inform.”…That damned U-boat must have trailed her from first light, waiting for a line-up.’

Vallery said nothing. He knew how Tyndall must feel to see one of his ships heavily damaged, maybe sinking. The Invader was still lying over at the same unnatural angle, the smoke rising in a steady column now. There was no sign of flames.

‘Going to investigate, sir?’ Vallery inquired.

Tyndall bit his lip thoughtfully and hesitated.

‘Yes, I think we’d better do it ourselves. Order squadron to proceed, same speed, same course. Signal the Baliol and the Nairn to stand by the Invader.’

Vallery, watching the flags fluttering to the yardarm, was aware of someone at his elbow. He half-turned.

‘That was no U-boat, sir.’ The Kapok Kid was very sure of himself. ‘She can’t have been torpedoed.’

Tyndall overheard him. He swung round in his chair, glared at the unfortunate navigator.

‘What the devil do you know about it, sir?’ he growled. When the Admiral addressed his subordinates as ‘sir’, it was time to take to the boats. The Kapok Kid flushed to the roots of his blond hair, but he stood his ground.

‘Well, sir, in the first place the Sirrus is covering the Invader’s port side, though well ahead, ever since your recall signal. She’s been quartering that area for some time. I’m sure Commander Orr would have picked her up. Also, it’s far too rough for any sub to maintain periscope depth, far less line up a firing track. And if the U-boat did fire, it wouldn’t only fire one—six more likely, and, from that firing angle, the rest of the squadron must have been almost a solid wall behind the Invader. But no one else has been hit…I did three years in the trade, sir.’

‘I did ten,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Guesswork, Pilot, just guesswork.’

‘No, sir,’ Carpenter persisted. ‘It’s not. I can’t swear to it’—he had his binoculars to his eyes—‘but I’m almost sure the Invader is going astern. Could only be because her bows—below the waterline, that is—have been damaged or blown off. Must have been a mine, sir, probably acoustic.’

‘Ah, of course, of course!’ Tyndall was very acid. ‘Moored in 6,000 feet of water, no doubt?’

‘A drifting mine, sir,’ the Kapok Kid said patiently. ‘Or an old acoustic torpedo—spent German torpedoes don’t always sink. Probably a mine, though.’

‘Suppose you’ll be telling me next what mark it is and when it was laid,’ Tyndall growled. But he was impressed in spite of himself. And the Invader was going astern, although slowly, without enough speed to give her steerage way. She still wallowed helplessly in the great troughs.

An Aldis clacked acknowledgement to the winking light on the Invader. Bentley tore a sheet off a signal pad, handed it to Vallery.

‘“Invader to Admiral,”’ the Captain read. ‘“Am badly holed, starboard side for’ard, very deep. Suspect drifting mine. Am investigating extent of damage. Will report soon.”’

Tyndall took the signal from him and read it slowly. Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled faintly.

‘You were dead right, my boy, it seems. Please accept an old curmudgeon’s apologies.’

Carpenter murmured something and turned away, brick-red again with embarrassment. Tyndall grinned faintly at the Captain, then became thoughtful.

‘I think we’d better talk to him personally, Captain. Barlow, isn’t it? Make a signal.’

They climbed down two decks to the Fighter Direction room. Westcliffe vacated his chair for the Admiral.

‘Captain Barlow?’ Tyndall spoke into the handpiece.

‘Speaking.’ The sound came from the loudspeaker above his head.

‘Admiral here, Captain. How are things?’

‘We’ll manage, sir. Lost most of our bows, I’m afraid. Several casualties. Oil fires, but under control. WT doors all holding, and engineers and damage control parties are shorting up the crossbulkheads.’ ‘Can you go ahead at all, Captain?’

‘Could do, sir, but risky—in this, anyway.’

‘Think you could make it back to base?’

‘With this wind and sea behind us, yes. Still take three-four days.’

‘Right-o, then.’ Tyndall’s voice was gruff. ‘Off you go. You’re no good to us without bows! Damned hard luck, Captain Barlow. My commiserations. And oh! I’m giving you the Baliol and Nairn as escorts and radioing for an ocean-going tug to come out to meet you—just in case.’

‘Thank you, sir. We appreciate that. One last thing—permission to empty starboard squadron fuel tanks. We’ve taken a lot of water, can’t get rid of it all—only way to recover our trim.’

Tyndall sighed. ‘Yes, I was expecting that. Can’t be helped and we can’t take it off you in this weather. Good luck, Captain. Goodbye.’

‘Thank you very much, sir. Goodbye.’

Twenty minutes later, the Ulysses was back on station in the squadron. Shortly afterwards, they saw the Invader, not listing quite so heavily now, head slowly round to the southeast, the little Hunt class destroyer and the frigate, one on either side, rolling wickedly as they came round with her. In another ten minutes, watchers on the Ulysses had lost sight of them, buried in a flurrying snow squall. Three gone and eleven left behind; but it was the eleven who now felt so strangely alone.

1. Cam-ships were merchant ships with specially strengthened fo’c’sles. On these were fitted fore-and-aft angled ramps from which fighter planes, such as modified Hurricanes, were catapulted for convoy defence. After breaking off action, the pilot had either to bale out or land in the sea. ‘Hazardous’ is rather an inadequate word to describe the duties of this handful of very gallant pilots: the chances of survival were not high.

FIVE Tuesday

The Invader and her troubles were soon forgotten. All too soon, the 14th Aircraft Carrier Squadron had enough, and more than enough, to worry about on their own account. They had their own troubles to overcome, their own enemy to face—an enemy far more elemental and far more deadly than any mine or U-boat.

Tyndall braced himself more firmly against the pitching, rolling deck and looked over at Vallery. Vallery, he thought for the tenth time that morning, looked desperately ill.

‘What do you make of it, Captain? Prospects aren’t altogether healthy, are they?’

‘We’re for it, sir. It’s really piling up against us. Carrington has spent six years in the West Indies, has gone through a dozen hurricanes. Admits he’s seen a barometer lower, but never one so low with the pressure still falling so fast—not in these latitudes. This is only a curtain-raiser.’

‘This will do me nicely, meantime, thank you.’ Tyndall said dryly. ‘For a curtain-raiser, it’s doing not so badly.’

It was a masterly understatement. For a curtain-raiser, it was a magnificent performance. The wind was fairly steady, about Force 9 on the Beaufort scale, and the snow had stopped. A temporary cessation only, they all knew—far ahead to the north-west the sky was a peculiarly livid colour. It was a dull glaring purple, neither increasing nor fading, faintly luminous and vaguely menacing in its uniformity and permanence. Even to men who had seen everything the Arctic skies had to offer, from pitchy darkness on a summer’s noon, right through the magnificent displays of Northern Lights to that wonderfully washed-out blue that so often smiles down on the stupendous calms of the milk-white seas that lap edge of the Barrier, this was something quite unknown.

But the Admiral’s reference had been to the sea. It had been building up, steadily, inexorably, all during the morning. Now, at noon, it looked uncommonly like an eighteenth-century print of a barque in a storm—serried waves of greenish-grey, straight, regular and marching uniformly along, each decoratively topped with frothing caps of white. Only here, there were 500 feet between crest and crest, and the squadron, heading almost directly into it, was taking hearty punishment.

For the little ships, already burying their bows every fifteen seconds in a creaming smother of cascading white, this was bad enough, but another, a more dangerous and insidious enemy was at work—the cold. The temperature had long sunk below freezing point, and the mercury was still shrinking down, close towards the zero mark.

The cold was now intense: ice formed in cabins and mess-decks: fresh-water systems froze solid: metal contracted, hatch-covers jammed, door hinges locked in frozen immobility, the oil in the searchlight controls gummed up and made them useless. To keep a watch, especially a watch on the bridge was torture: the first shock of that bitter wind seared the lungs, left a man fighting for breath: if he had forgotten to don gloves—first the silk gloves, then the woollen mittens, then the sheepskin gauntlets—and touched a handrail, the palms of the hands seared off, the skin burnt as by white-hot metal: on the bridge; if he forgot to duck when the bows smashed down into a trough, the flying spray, solidified in a second into hurtling slivers of ice, lanced cheek and forehead open to the bone: hands froze, the very marrow of the bones numbed, the deadly chill crept upwards from feet to calves to thighs, nose and chin turned white with frostbite and demanded immediate attention: and then, by far the worst of all, the end of the watch, the return below deck, the writhing, excruciating agony of returning circulation. But, for all this, words are useless things, pale shadows of reality. Some things lie beyond the knowledge and the experience of the majority of mankind, and here imagination finds itself in a world unknown.

But all these things were relatively trifles, personal inconveniences to be shrugged aside. The real danger lay elsewhere. It lay in the fact of ice.

There were over three hundred tons of it already on the decks of the Ulysses, and more forming every minute. It lay in a thick, even coat over the main deck, the fo’c’sle, the gun-decks and the bridges: it hung in long, jagged icicles from coamings and turrets and rails: it trebled the diameter of every wire, stay and halliard, and turned slender masts into monstrous trees, ungainly and improbable. It lay everywhere, a deadly menace, and much of the danger lay in the slippery surface it presented—a problem much more easily overcome on a coalfired merchant ship with clinker and ashes from its boilers, than in the modern, oil-fired warships. On the Ulysses, they spread salt and sand and hoped for the best.

But the real danger of the ice lay in its weight. A ship, to use technical terms, can be either stiff or tender. If she’s stiff, she has a low centre of gravity, rolls easily, but whips back quickly and is extremely stable and safe. If she’s tender, with a high centre of gravity, she rolls reluctantly but comes back even more reluctantly, is unstable and unsafe. And if a ship were tender, and hundreds of tons of ice piled high on its decks, the centre of gravity rose to a dangerous height. It could rise to a fatal height…

The escort carriers and the destroyers, especially the Portpatrick, were vulnerable, terribly so. The carriers, already unstable with the great height and weight of their reinforced flight-decks, provided a huge, smooth, flat surface to the falling snow, ideal conditions for the formation of ice. Earlier on, it had been possible to keep the flight-decks relatively clear—working parties had toiled incessantly with brooms and sledges, salt and steam hoses. But the weather had deteriorated so badly now that to send out a man on that wildly pitching, staggering flight-deck, glassy and infinitely treacherous, would be to send him to his death. The Wrestler and Blue Ranger had modified heating systems under the flight-decks—modified, because, unlike the British ships, these Mississippi carriers had planked flight-decks: in such extreme conditions, they were hopelessly inefficient.

Conditions aboard the destroyers were even worse. They had to contend not only with the ice from the packed snow, but with ice from the sea itself. As regularly as clockwork, huge clouds of spray broke over the destroyers’ fo’c’sles as the bows crashed solidly, shockingly into the trough and rising shoulder of the next wave: the spray froze even as it touched the deck, even before it touched the deck, piling up the solid ice, in places over a foot thick, from the stem aft beyond the breakwater. The tremendous weight of the ice was pushing the little ships down by their heads; deeper, with each successive plunge ever deeper, they buried their noses in the sea, and each time, more and more sluggishly, more and more reluctantly, they staggered laboriously up from the depths. Like the carrier captains, the destroyer skippers could only look down from their bridges, helpless, hoping.

Two hours passed, two hours in which the temperature fell to zero, hesitated, then shrank steadily beyond it, two hours in which the barometer tumbled crazily after it. Curiously, strangely, the snow still held off, the livid sky to the north-west was as far away as ever, and the sky to the south and east had cleared completely. The squadron presented a fantastic picture now, little toy-boats of sugar-icing, dazzling white, gleaming and sparkling in the pale, winter sunshine, pitching crazily through the everlengthening, ever-deepening valleys of grey and green of the cold Norwegian Sea, pushing on towards that far horizon, far and weird and purply glowing, the horizon of another world. It was an incredibly lovely spectacle.

Rear-Admiral Tyndall saw nothing beautiful about it. A man who was wont to claim that he never worried, he was seriously troubled now. He was gruff, to those on the bridge, gruff to the point of discourtesy and the old geniality of the Farmer Giles of even two months ago was all but gone. Ceaselessly his gaze circled the fleet; constantly, uncomfortably, he twisted in his chair. Finally he climbed down, passed through the gate and went into the Captain’s shelter.

Vallery had no light on and the shelter was in semi-darkness. He lay there on his settee, a couple of blankets thrown over him. In the half-light, his face looked ghastly, corpse-like. His right hand clutched a balled handkerchief, spotted and stained: he made no attempt to hide it. With a painful effort, and before Tyndall could stop him, he had swung his legs over the edge of the settee and pulled forward a chair. Tyndall choked off his protest, sank gracefully into the seat.

‘I think your curtain’s just about to go up, Dick…What on earth ever induced me to become a squadron commander?’

Vallery grinned sympathetically. ‘I don’t particularly envy you, sir. What are you going to do now?’

‘What would you do?’ Tyndall countered dolefully.

Vallery laughed. For a moment his face was transformed, boyish almost, then the laugh broke down into a bout of harsh, dry coughing. The stain spread over his handkerchief. Then he looked up and smiled.

‘The penalty for laughing at a superior officer. What would I do? Heave to, sir. Better still, tuck my tail between my legs and run for it.’

Tyndall shook his head.

‘You never were a very convincing liar, Dick.’

Both men sat in silence for a moment, then Vallery looked up.

‘How far to go, exactly, sir?’

‘Young Carpenter makes it 170 miles, more or less.’

‘One hundred and seventy.’ Vallery looked at his watch. ‘Twenty hours to go—in this weather. We must make it!’

Tyndall nodded heavily. ‘Eighteen ships sitting out there—nineteen, counting the sweeper from Hvalfjord—not to mention old Starr’s blood pressure…’

He broke off as a hand rapped on the door and a head looked in.

‘Two signals, Captain, sir.’

‘Just read them out, Bentley, will you?’

‘First is from the Portpatrick: “Sprung bow-plates: making water fast: pumps coming: fear further damage: please advise.”’

Tyndall swore. Vallery said calmly: ‘And the other?’

‘From the Gannet, sir. “Breaking up.”’

‘Yes, yes. And the rest of the message?’

‘Just that, sir. “Breaking up.”’

‘Ha! One of these taciturn characters,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Wait a minute, Chief, will you?’ He sank back in his chair, hand rasping his chin, gazing at his feet, forcing his tired mind to think.

Vallery murmured something in a low voice, and Tyndall looked up, his eyebrows arched.

‘Troubled waters, sir. Perhaps the carriers—’

Tyndall slapped his knee. ‘Two minds with but a single thought. Bentley, make two signals. One to all screen vessels—tell ’em to take position—astern—close astern—of the carriers. Other to the carriers. Oil hose, one each through port and starboard loading ports, about—ah—how much would you say, Captain?’

‘Twenty gallons a minute, sir?’

‘Twenty gallons it is. Understand, Chief? Right-o, get ’em off at once. And Chief—tell the Navigator to bring his chart here.’ Bentley left, and he turned to Vallery. ‘We’ve got to fuel later on, and we can’t do it here. Looks as if this might be the last chance of shelter this side of Murmansk…And if the next twenty-four hours are going to be as bad as Carrington forecasts, I doubt whether some of the little ships could live through it anyway…Ah! Here you are, Pilot. Let’s see where we are. How’s the wind, by the way?’

‘Force 10, sir.’ Bracing himself against the wild lurching of the Ulysses, the Kapok Kid smoothed out the chart on the Captain’s bunk. ‘Backing slightly.’

‘North-west, would you say, Pilot?’ Tyndall rubbed his hands. ‘Excellent. Now, my boy, our position?’

‘12.40 west. 66.15 north,’ said the Kapok Kid precisely. He didn’t even trouble to consult the chart. Tyndall lifted his eyebrows but made no comment.

‘Course?’

‘310, sir.’

‘Now, if it were necessary for us to seek shelter for fuelling—’

‘Course exactly 290, sir. I’ve pencilled it in—there. Four and a half hours’ steaming, approximately.’

‘How the devil—’ Tyndall exploded. ‘Who told you to—to—’ He spluttered into a wrathful silence.

‘I worked it out five minutes ago, sir. It—er—seemed inevitable. 290 would take us a few miles inside the Langanes peninsula. There should be plenty shelter there.’ Carpenter was grave, unsmiling.

‘Seemed inevitable!’ Tyndall roared. ‘Would you listen to him, Captain Vallery? Inevitable! And it’s only just occurred to me! Of all the…Get out! Take yourself and that damned comic-opera fancy dress elsewhere!’

The Kapok Kid said nothing. With an air of injured innocence he gathered up his charts and left. Tyndall’s voice halted him at the door.

‘Pilot!’

‘Sir?’ The Kapok Kid’s eyes were fixed on a point above Tyndall’s head.

‘As soon as the screen vessels have taken up position, tell Bentley to send them the new course.’

‘Yes, sir. Certainly.’ He hesitated, and Tyndall chuckled. ‘All right, all right,’ he said resignedly. ‘I’ll say it again—I’m just a crusty old curmudgeon…and shut that damned door! We’re freezing in here.’

The wind was rising more quickly now and long ribbons of white were beginning to streak the water. Wave troughs were deepening rapidly, their sides steepening, their tops blown off and flattened by the wind. Gradually, but perceptibly to the ear now, the thin, lonely whining in the rigging was climbing steadily up the register. From time to time, large chunks of ice, shaken loose by the increasing vibration, broke off from the masts and stays and spattered on the deck below.

The effect of the long oil-slicks trailing behind the carriers was almost miraculous. The destroyers, curiously mottled with oil now, were still plunging astern, but the surface tension of the fuel held the water and spray from breaking aboard. Tyndall, justifiably, was feeling more than pleased with himself.

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