H.M.S. Ulysses Part 22

"Five miles," the loudspeaker cut in. "Repeat, five miles. Course, speed, constant."

"Five miles," Tyndall repeated in relief. Intangibles bothered him.

"Time to trail our coats a little, Captain. We'll soon be in what Bowden reckons is his radar range. Due east, I think, it'll look as if we're covering the tail of the convoy and heading for the North Cape."

"Starboard 10," Vallery ordered. The cruiser came gradually round, met, settled on her new course: engine revolutions were cut down till the Ulysses was cruising along at 26 knots.

One minute, five pa.s.sed, then the loudspeaker blared again.

"Radar-bridge. Constant distance, altering on interception course."

"Excellent! Really excellent!" The Admiral was almost purring. "We have him, gentlemen. He's missed the convoy... Commence firing by radar!"

Vallery reached for the Director handset.

"Director? Ah, it's you, Courtney... good, good... you just do that."

Vallery replaced the set, looked across at Tyndall.

"Smart as a whip, that boy. He's had' X' and' Y' lined up, tracking for the past ten minutes. Just a matter of pressing a b.u.t.ton, he says."

"Sounds uncommon like our friends here." Tyndall jerked his head in the direction of the Kapok Kid, then looked up in surprise.

"Courtney? Did you say 'Courtney'? Where's Guns?"

"In his cabin, as far as I know. Collapsed on the p.o.o.p. Anyway, he's in no fit state to do his job... Thank G.o.d I'm not in that boy's shoes. I can imagine..."

The Ulysses shuddered, and the whip-like crash of 'X' turret drowned Vallery's voice as the 5.25 sh.e.l.ls screamed away into the twilight.

Seconds later, the ship shook again as the guns of 'Y' turret joined in.

Thereafter the guns fired alternately, one sh.e.l.l at a time, every half-minute: there was no point in wasting ammunition when the fall of shot could not be observed; but it was probably the bare minimum necessary to infuriate the enemy and distract his attention from everything except the ship ahead.

The snow had thinned away now to a filmy curtain of gauze that blurred, rather than obscured the horizon. To the west, the clouds were lifting, the sky lightening in sunset. Vallery ordered 'X' turret to cease fire, to load with star-sh.e.l.l.

Abruptly, the snow was gone and the enemy was there, big and menacing, a black featureless silhouette with the sudden flush of sunset striking incongruous golden gleams from the water creaming high at her bows.

"Starboard 30!" Vallery snapped. "Full ahead. Smokescreen!" Tyndall nodded compliance. It was no part of his plan to become embroiled with a German heavy cruiser or pocket battleship... especially at an almost point-blank range of four miles.

On the bridge, half a dozen pairs of binoculars peered aft, trying to identify the enemy. But the fore-and-aft silhouette against the reddening sky was difficult to a.n.a.lyse, exasperatingly vague and ambiguous. Suddenly, as they watched, white gouts of flame lanced out from the heart of the silhouette: simultaneously, the starsh.e.l.l burst high up in the air, directly above the enemy, bathing him in an intense, merciless white glare, so that he appeared strangely naked and defenceless.

An illusory appearance. Everyone ducked low, in reflex instinct, as the sh.e.l.ls whistled just over their heads and plunged into the sea ahead.

Everyone, that is, except the Kapok Kid. He bent an impa.s.sive eye on the Admiral as the latter slowly straightened up.

"Hipper Cla.s.s, sir," he announced. "10,000 tons, 8-inch guns, carries aircraft."

Tyndall looked at his unsmiling face in long suspicion. He cast around in his mind for a suitably crushing reply, caught sight of the German cruiser's turrets belching smoke in the sinking glare of the starsh.e.l.l.

"My oath!" he exclaimed. "Not wasting much time, are they? And d.a.m.ned good shooting!" he added in professional admiration as the sh.e.l.ls hissed into the sea through the Ulysses's boiling wake, about 150 feet astern. "Bracketed in the first two salvoes. They'll straddle us next time."

The Ulysses was still heeling round, the black smoke beginning to pour from the after funnel, when Vallery straightened, clapped his binoculars to his eyes. Heavy clouds of smoke were mushrooming from the enemy's starboard deck, just for'ard of the bridge.

"Oh, well done, young Courtney!" he burst out. "Well done indeed!"

"Well done indeed!" Tyndall echoed. "A beauty! Still, I don't think we'll stop to argue the point with them... Ah! Just in time, gentlemen! Gad, that was close!" The stern of the Ulysses, swinging round now almost to the north, disappeared from sight as a salvo crashed into the sea, dead astern, one of the sh.e.l.ls exploding in a great eruption of water.

The next salvo-obviously the hit on the enemy cruiser hadn't affected her fire-power, fell a cable length's astern. The German was now firing blind. Engineer Commander Dodson was making smoke with a vengeance, the oily, black smoke flattening down on the surface of the sea, rolling, thick, impenetrable. Vallery doubled back on course, then headed east at high speed.

For the next two hours, in the dusk and darkness, they played cat and mouse with the "Hipper "cla.s.s cruiser, firing occasionally, appearing briefly, tantalisingly, then disappearing behind a smoke-screen, hardly needed now in the coming night. All the time, radar was their eyes and their ears and never played them false. Finally, satisfied that all danger to the convoy was gone, Tyndall laid a double screen in a great curving "U," and vanished to the south-west, firing a few final sh.e.l.ls, not so much in token of farewell as to indicate direction of departure.

Ninety minutes later, at the end of a giant half-circle to port, the Ulysses was sitting far to the north, while Bowden and his men tracked the progress of the enemy. He was reported as moving steadily east, then, just before contact was lost, as altering course to the south-east.

Tyndall climbed down from his chair, numbed and stiff. He stretched himself luxuriantly.

"Not a bad night's work, Captain, not bad at all. What do you bet our friend spends the night circling to the south and east at high speed, hoping to come up ahead of the convoy in the morning?" Tyndall felt almost jubilant, in spite of his exhaustion. "And by that time FR77 should be 200 miles to the north of him... I suppose, Pilot, you have worked out intersection courses for rejoining the convoy at all speeds up to a hundred knots?"

"I think we should be able to regain contact without much difficulty," said the Kapok Kid politely.

"It's when he is at his most modest," Tyndall announced, "that he sickens me most... Heavens above, I'm froze to death... Oh, d.a.m.n! Not more trouble, I hope?"

The communication rating behind the compa.s.s platform picked up the jangling phone, listened briefly.

"For you, sir," he said to Vallery. "The Surgeon Lieutenant."

"Just take the message, Chrysler."

"Sorry, sir. Insists on speaking to you himself." Chrysler handed the receiver into the bridge. Vallery smothered an exclamation of annoyance, lifted the receiver to his ear.

"Captain, here. Yes, what is it?... What?... What I Oh, G.o.d, no!... Why wasn't I told?... Oh, I see. Thank you, thank you."

Vallery handed the receiver back, turned heavily to Tyndall. In the darkness, the Admiral felt, rather than saw the sudden weariness, the hunched defeat of the shoulders.

"That was Nicholls." Vallery's voice was flat, colourless.

"Lieutenant Etherton shot himself in his cabin, five minutes ago."

At four o'clock in the morning, in heavy snow, but in a calm sea, the Ulysses rejoined the convoy.

By mid-morning of that next day, a bare six hours later Admiral Tyndall had become an old weary man, haggard, haunted by remorse and bitter self-criticism, close, very close, to despair. Miraculously, in a matter of hours, the chubby cheeks had collapsed in shrunken flaccidity, draining blood had left the florid cheeks a parchment grey, the sunken eyes had dulled in blood and exhaustion. The extent and speed of the change wrought in that tough and jovial sailor, a sailor seemingly impervious to the most deadly vicissitudes of war, was incredible: incredible and disturbing in itself, but infinitely more so in its wholly demoralising effect on the men. To every arch there is but one keystone... or so any man must inevitably think.

Any impartial court of judgment would have cleared Tyndall of all guilt, would have acquitted him without a trial. He had done what he thought right, what any commander would have done in his place. But Tyndall sat before the merciless court of his own conscience. He could not forget that it was he who had re-routed the convoy so far to the north, that it was he who had ignored official orders to break straight for the North Cape, that it was exactly on lat.i.tude 70 N., where their Lordships had told him they would be, that FR77 had, on that cold, clear windless dawn, blundered straight into the heart of the heaviest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war.

The wolf-pack had struck at its favourite hour-the dawn, and from its favourite position, the north-east, with the dawn in its eyes. It struck cruelly, skilfully and with a calculated ferocity. Admittedly, the era of Kapitan Leutnant Prien-his U-boat long ago sent to the bottom with all hands by the destroyer Wolverine, and his ill.u.s.trious contemporaries, the hey-day of the great U-boat Commanders, the high noon of individual brilliance and great personal gallantry, was gone.

But in its place-and generally acknowledged to be even more dangerous, more deadly, were the concerted, highly integrated ma.s.s attacks of the wolf-packs, methodical, machine-like, almost reduced to a formula, under a single directing command.

The Coch.e.l.la, third vessel in the port line, was the first to go. Sister ship to the Vytura and the Varella, also accompanying her in FR77, the Coch.e.l.la carried over 3,000,000 gallons of 100-octane petrol. She was. .h.i.t by at least three torpedoes: the first two broke her almost in half, the third triggered off a stupendous detonation that literally blew her out of existence. One moment she was there, sailing serenely through the limpid twilight of sunrise: the next moment she was gone. Gone, completely, utterly gone, with only a seething ocean, convulsed in boiling white, to show where she had been: gone, while stunned eardrums and stupefied minds struggled vainly to grasp the significance of what had happened: gone, while blind reflex instinct hurled men into whatever shelter offered as a storm of lethal metal swept over the fleet.