H.M.S. Ulysses Part 25

"Any change in the screen?"

"No, sir. None."

"And are you still of the same opinion?"

"Yes, sir! Can't be anything else."

"And close to the Adventurer, you say?"

"Very close, I would say."

"But, good G.o.d, man, the Adventurer must be ten miles astern by now!"

"Yes, sir. I know. So is the bandit."

"What! Ten miles! But, but-----"

"He's firing by radar, sir," Bowden interrupted. Suddenly the metallic voice sounded tired. "He must be. He's also tracking by radar, which is why he's keeping himself in line with our bearing on the Adventurer. And he's extremely accurate... I'm afraid, Admiral, that his radar is at least as good as ours."

The speaker clicked off. In the sudden strained silence on the bridge, the crash of breaking ebonite sounded unnaturally loud as the transmitter slipped from TyndalFs hand, fractured in a hundred pieces.

The hand groped forward, he clutched at a steam pipe as if to steady himself. Vallery stepped towards him, arms outstretched in concern, but Tyndall brushed by unseeingly. Like an old spent man, like a man from whose ancient bones and muscles all the pith has long since drained, he shuffled slowly across the bridge, oblivious of a dozen mystified eyes, dragged himself up on to his high stool.

You fool, he told himself bitterly, savagely, oh, you b.l.o.o.d.y old fool!

He would never forgive himself, never, never, never! All along the line he had been out-thought, outguessed and out-manceuvred by the enemy.

They had taken him for a ride, made an even bigger b.l.o.o.d.y fool out of him than his good Maker had ever intended. Radar! Of course, that was it! The blind a.s.sumption that German radar had remained the limited, elementary thing that Admiralty and Air Force Intelligence had reported it to be last year I Radar, and as good as the British. As good as the Ulysses's, and everybody had believed that the Ulysses was incomparably the most efficient, indeed the only efficient, radar ship in the world. As good as our own-probably a d.a.m.ned sight better. But had the thought ever occurred to him? Tyndall writhed in sheer chagrin, in agony of spirit, and knew the bitter taste of self-loathing. And so, this morning, the payoff: six ships, three hundred men gone to the bottom. May G.o.d forgive you, Tyndall, he thought dully, may G.o.d forgive you. You sent them there... Radar!

Last night, for instance. When the Ulysses had been laying a false trail to the east, the German cruiser had obligingly tagged behind, the perfect foil to his, Tyndall's genius. Tyndall groaned in mortification.

Had tagged behind, firing wildly, erratically each time the Ulysses had disappeared behind a smoke-screen. Had done so to conceal the efficiency of her radar, to conceal the fact that, during the first half-hour at least, she must have been tracking the escaping convoy as it disappeared to the NNW., a process made all the easier by the fact that he, Tyndall, had expressly forbidden the use of the zig-zag!

And then, when the Ulysses had so brilliantly circled, first to the south and then to the north again, the enemy must have had her on his screen-constantly. And later, the biter bit with a vengeance, the faked enemy withdrawal to the south-east. Almost certainly, he, too, had circled to the north again, picked up the disappearing British cruiser on the edge of his screen, worked out her intersection course as a cross check on the convoy's, and radioed ahead to the wolf-pack, positioning them almost to the foot.

And now, finally, the last galling blow to whatever shattered remnants of his pride were left him. The enemy had opened fire at extreme range, but with extreme accuracy, a dead give-away to the fact that the firing was radar-controlled. And the only reason for it must be the enemy's conviction that the Ulysses, by this time, must have come to the inevitable conclusion that the enemy was equipped with a highly sensitive radar transmitter. The inevitable conclusion! Tyndall had never even begun to suspect it. Slowly, oblivious to the pain, he pounded his fist on the edge of the windscreen. G.o.d, what a blind, crazily stupid fool he'd been! Six ships, three hundred men. hundreds of tanks and planes, millions of gallons of fuel lost to Russia; how many more thousands of dead Russians, soldiers and civilians, did that represent? And the broken, sorrowing families, he thought incoherently, families throughout the breadth of Britain: the telegram boys cycling to the little houses in the Welsh valleys, along the wooded lanes of Surrey, to the lonely reek of the peat-fire, remote in the Western Isles, to the lime-washed cottages of Donegal and Antrim: the empty homes across the great reaches of the New World, from Newfoundland and Maine to the-far slopes of the Pacific. These families would never know that it was he, Tyndall, who had so criminally squandered the lives of husbands, brothers, sons-and that was worse than no consolation at all.

"Captain Vallery?" Tyndall's voice was only a husky whisper. Vallery crossed over, stood beside him, coughing painfully as the swirling fog caught nose and throat, incinated inflamed lungs. It was a measure of Tyndall's distressed preoccupation that Vallery's obvious suffering quite failed to register.

"Ah, there you are. Captain, this enemy cruiser must be destroyed."

Vallery nodded heavily. "Yes, sir. How?"

"How?" Tyndall's face, framed in the moisture-beaded hood of his duffel, was haggard and grey: but he managed to raise a ghost of a smile. "As well hung for a sheep.... I propose to detach the escorts, including ourselves, and nail him." He stared out blindly into the fog, his mouth bitter. "A simple tactical exercise, maybe within even my limited compa.s.s." He broke off suddenly, stared over the side then ducked hurriedly: a sh.e.l.l had exploded in the water-a rare thing-only yards away, erupting spray showering down on the bridge.

"We, the Stirling and ourselves, will take him from the south," he continued, "soak up his fire and radar. Orr and his death-or-glory boys will approach from the north. In this fog, they'll get very close before releasing their torpedoes. Conditions are all against a single ship, he shouldn't have much chance."

"All the escorts," Vallery said blankly. "You propose to detach all the escorts?"

"That's exactly what I propose to do, Captain."

"But, but, perhaps that's exactly what he wants," Vallery protested.

"Suicide? A glorious death for the Fatherland? Don't you believe it!"

Tyndall scoffed. "That sort of thing went out with Langesdorff and Middelmann."

"No, sir!" Vallery was impatient. "He wants to pull us off, to leave the convoy uncovered."

"Well, what of it?" Tyndall demanded. "Who's going to find them in this lot?" He waved an arm at the rolling, twisting fog-banks. "Dammit, man, if it weren't for their fog-buoys, even our ships couldn't see each other. So I'm d.a.m.ned sure no one else could either."

"No?" Vallery countered swiftly. "How about another German cruiser fitted with radar? Or even another wolf-pack? Either could be in radio contact with our friend astern, and he's got our course to the nearest minute!"

"In radio contact? Surely to G.o.d our W.T. is monitoring all the time?"

"Yes, sir. They are. But I'm told it's not so easy on the V.H.F. ranges."

Tyndall grunted non-committally, said nothing. He felt desperately tired and confused; he had neither the will nor the ability to pursue the argument further. But Vallery broke in on the silence, the vertical lines between his eyebrows etched deep with worry.

"And why's our friend sitting steadily on our tails, pumping the odd sh.e.l.l among us, unless he's concentrating on driving us along a particular course? It reduces his chance of a hit by 90 per cent, and cuts out half his guns."

"Maybe he's expecting us to reason like that, to see the obvious."

Tyndall was forcing himself to think, to fight his way through a mental fog no less nebulous and confusing than the dank mist that swirled around him. "Perhaps he's hoping to panic us into altering course, to the north, of course, where a U-pack may very well be."

"Possible, possible," Vallery conceded. "On the other hand, he may have gone a step further. Maybe he wants us to be too clever for our own good. Perhaps he expects us to see the obvious, to avoid it, to continue on our present course, and so do exactly what he wants us to do... He's no fool, sir, we know that now."

What was it that Brooks had said to Starr back in Scapa, a lifetime ago?

"That fine-drawn feeling... that exquisite agony... every cell in the brain stretched taut to breaking point, pushing you over the screaming edge of madness." Tyndall wondered dully how Brooks could have known, could have been so d.a.m.nably accurate in his description. Anyway, he knew now, knew what it was to stand on the screaming edge...

Tyndall appreciated dimly that he was at the limit. That aching, muzzy forehead where to think was to be a blind man wading through a sea of mola.s.ses. Vaguely he realised that this must be the first, or was it the last?, symptom of a nervous breakdown... G.o.d only knew there had been plenty of them aboard the Ulysses during the past months...

But he was still the Admiral... He must do something, say something.

"It's no good guessing, d.i.c.k," he said heavily. Vallery looked at him sharply-never before had old Giles called him anything but "Captain" on the bridge. "And we've got to do something. We'll leave the Vectra as a sop to our consciences. No more." He smiled wanly. "We must have at least two destroyers for the dirty work. Bentley, take this signal for W.T. 'To all escort vessels and Commander Fletcher on the Cape Hatteras...'"

Within ten minutes, the four warships, boring south-east through the impenetrable wall of fog, had halved the distance that lay between them and the enemy. The Stirling, Viking and Sirrus were in constant radio communication with the Ulysses, they had to be, for they travelled as blind men in an invious world of grey and she was their eyes and their ears.

"Radar-bridge. Radar-bridge." Automatically, every eye swung round, riveted on the loundspeaker. "Enemy altering course to south: increasing speed."

"Too late!" Tyndall shouted hoa.r.s.ely. His fists were clenched, his eyes alight with triumph. "He's left it too late!"

Vallery said nothing. The seconds ticked by, the Ulysses knifed her way through cold fog and icy sea. Suddenly, the loudspeaker called again.

"Enemy 180 turn. Heading south-east. Speed 28 knots."

"28 knots? He's on the run!" Tyndall seemed to have gained a fresh lease on life. "Captain, I propose that the Sirrus and Ulysses proceed south-east at maximum speed, engage and slow the enemy. Ask W.T. to signal Orr. Ask Radar enemy's course."