H.M.S. Ulysses Part 28

"You put things so nicely," Vallery murmured. "Very well. Against my better judgment..."

He paused, the bottle to his mouth.

"And you give me an idea, Commander. Have the bosun break out the rum. Pipe 'Up spirits.' Double ration to each man. They, too, are going to need it." He swallowed, pulled the bottle away, and the grimace was not for the rum.

"Especially," he added soberly, "the burial party."

CHAPTER TEN.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON.

THE SWITCH clicked on and the harsh fluorescent light flooded the darkening surgery. Nicholls woke with a start, one hand coming up automatically to shield exhausted eyes. The light hurt. He screwed his eyes to slits, peered painfully at the hands of his wrist-watch. Four o'clock! Had he been asleep that long? G.o.d, it was bitterly cold!

He hoisted himself stiffly forward in the dentist's chair, twisted his head round. Brooks was standing with his back to the door, snow-covered hood framing his silver hair, numbed fingers fumbling with a packet of cigarettes. Finally he managed to pull one out. He looked up quizzically over a flaring match-head.

"Hallo, there, Johnny! Sorry to waken you, but the skipper wants you. Plenty of time, though." He dipped the cigarette into the dying flame, looked up again. Nicholls, he thought with sudden compa.s.sion, looked ill, desperately tired and overstrained; but no point in telling him so. "How are you? On second thoughts, don't tell me! I'm a d.a.m.ned sight worse myself. Have you any of that poison left?"

"Poison, sir?" The levity was almost automatic, part of their relationship with each other. "Just because you make one wrong diagnosis? The Admiral will be all right-----"

"Gad! The intolerance of the very young-especially on the providentially few occasions that they happen to be right... I was referring to that bottle of bootleg hooch from the Isle of Mull."

"Coll," Nicholls corrected. "Not that it matters, you've drunk it all, anyway," he added unkindly. He grinned tiredly at the Commander's crestfallen face, then relented. "But we do have a bottle of Talisker left." He crossed over to the poison cupboard, unscrewed the top of a bottle marked "Lysol." He heard, rather than saw, the clatter of gla.s.s against gla.s.s, wondered vaguely, with a kind of clinical detachment, why his hands were shaking so badly.

Brooks drained his gla.s.s, sighed in bliss as he felt the grateful warmth sinking down inside him.

"Thank you, my boy. Thank you. You have the makings of a first-cla.s.s doctor."

"You think so, sir? I don't. Not any longer. Not after today." He winced, remembering. "Forty-four of them, sir, over the side in ten minutes, one after the other, like-like so many sacks of rubbish."

"Forty-four?" Brooks looked up. "So many, Johnny?"

"Not really, sir. That was the number of missing. About thirty, rather, and G.o.d only knows how many bits and pieces.... It was a brush and shovel job in the F.D.R." He smiled, mirthlessly. "I had no dinner, today. I don't think anybody else in the burial party had either....

I'd better screen that porthole."

He turned away quickly, walked across the surgery. Low on the horizon, through the thinly-falling snow, he caught intermittent sight of an evening star. That meant that the fog was gone-the fog that had saved the convoy, had hidden them from the U-boats when it had turned so sharply to the north. He could see the Vectra, her depth-charge racks empty and nothing to show for it. He could see the Vytura, the damaged tanker, close by, almost awash in the water, hanging grimly on to the convoy. He could see four of the Victory ships, big, powerful, rea.s.suring, so pitifully deceptive in their indestructible permanence.... He slammed the scuttle, screwed home the last b.u.t.terfly nut, then swung round abruptly.

"Why the h.e.l.l don't we turn back?" he burst out. "Who does the old man think he's kidding-us or the Germans? No air cover, no radar, not the faintest chance of helpl The Germans have us pinned down to an inch now-and it'll be easier still for them as we go on. And there's a thousand miles to go!" His voice rose. "And every b.l.o.o.d.y enemy ship, U-boat and plane in the Arctic smacking thek lips and waiting to pick us off at thek leisure." He shook his head in despair. "I'll take my chance with anybody else, sir. You know that. But this is just murder-or suicide. Take your pick, sir. It's all the same when you're dead."

"Now, Johnny, you're not------"

"Why doesn't he turn back?" Nicholls hadn't even heard the interruption. "He's only got to give the order. What does he want?

Death or glory? What's he after? Immortality at my expense, at our expense?" He swore, bitterly. "Maybe Riley was right. Wonderful headlines.' Captain Richard Vallery, D.S.O., has been posthumously award"Shut up!" Brooks's eye was as chill as the Arctic ice itself, his voice a biting lash.

"You dare to talk of Captain Vallery like that!" he said softly. "You dare to besmkch the name of the most honourable..." He broke off, shook his head in wrathful wonder. He paused to pick his words carefully, his eyes never leaving the other's white, strained face.

"He is a good officer, Lieutenant Nicholls, maybe even a great officer: and that just doesn't matter a d.a.m.n. What does matter is that he is the finest gentleman, I say gentleman, I've ever known, that ever walked the face of this graceless, G.o.d-forsaken earth. He is not like you or me. He is not like anybody at all. He walks alone, but he is never lonely, for he has company all the way... men like Peter, like Bede, like St. Francis of a.s.sisi." He laughed shortly. "Funny, isn't it, to hear an old reprobate like myself talk like this? Blasphemy, even, you might call it, except that the truth can never be blasphemy. And I know."

Nicholls said nothing. His face was like a stone.

"Death, glory, immortality," Brooks went on relentlessly. "These were your words, weren't they? Death?" He smiled and Shook his head again. "For Richard Vallery, death doesn't exist. Glory? Sure, he wants glory, we all want glory, but all the London Gazettes and Buckingham Palaces in the world can't give him the kind of glory he wants: Captain Vallery is no longer a child, and only children play with toys... As for immortality." He laughed, without a trace of rancour now, laid a hand on Nicholls's shoulder. "I ask you, Johnny-wouldn't it be d.a.m.ned stupid to ask for what he has already?"

Nicholls said nothing. The silence lengthened and deepened, the rush of the air from the ventilation louvre became oppressively loud. Finally, Brooks coughed, looked meaningfully at the "Lysol" bottle.

Nicholls filled the gla.s.ses, brought them back. Brooks caught his eyes, held them, and was filled with sudden pity. What was that cla.s.sical understatement of Cunningham's during the German invasion of Crete," It is inadvisable to drive men beyond a certain point." Trite but true.

True even for men like Nicholls. Brooks wondered what particular private kind of h.e.l.l that boy had gone through that morning, digging out the shattered, torn bodies of What had once been men. And, as the doctor in charge, he would have had to examine them all-or all the pieces he could find...

"Next step up and I'll be in the gutter." Nicholls's voice was very low. "I don't know what to say, sir. I don't know what made me say it.... I'm sorry."

"Me too," Brooks said sincerely. "Shooting off my mouth like that! And I mean it." He lifted his gla.s.s, inspected the contents lovingly. "To our enemies, Johnny: their downfall and confusion, and don't forget Admiral Starr." He drained the gla.s.s at a gulp, set it down, looked at Nicholls for a long moment.

"I think you should hear the rest, too, Johnny. You know, why Vallery doesn't turn back." He smiled wryly. "It's not because there are as many of these d.a.m.ned U-boats behind us as there are in front-which there undoubtedly are." He lit a fresh cigarette, went on quietly:

"The Captain radioed London this morning. Gave it as his considered opinion that FR77 would be a goner-' annihilated' was the word he used and, as a word, they don't come any stronger-long before it reached the North Cape. He asked at least to be allowed to go north about, instead of east for the Cape... Pity there was no sunset tonight, Johnny," he added half-humourously. "I would have liked to see it."

"Yes, yes," Nicholls was impatient. "And the answer?"

"Eh! Oh, the answer. Vallery expected it immediately." Brooks shrugged.

"It took four hours to come through." He smiled, but there was no laughter in the eyes. "There's something big, something on a huge scale brewing up somewhere. It can only be some major invasion-this under your hat, Johnny?"

"Of course, sir!"

"What it is I haven't a clue. Maybe even the long-awaited Second Front.

Anyway, the support of the Home Fleet seems to be regarded as vital to success. But the Home Fleet is tied up, by the Tirpitz, And so the orders have gone out, get the Tirpitz. Get it at all costs." Brooks smiled, and his face was very cold. "We're big fish, Johnny, we're important people. We're the biggest, juiciest bait ever offered up the biggest, juiciest prize in the world today-although I'm afraid the trap's a trifle rusty at the hinges... The signal came from the First Sea Lord-and Starr. The decision was taken at Cabinet level. We go on. We go east."

"We are the 'all costs,'" said Nicholls flatly. "We are expendable."

"We are expendable," Brooks agreed. The speaker above his head clicked on, and he groaned. "h.e.l.l's bells, here we go again!"

He waited until the clamour of the Dusk Action Stations' bugle had died away, stretched out a hand as Nicholls hurried for the door.

"Not you, Johnny. Not yet. I told you, the skipper wants you. On the bridge, ten minutes after Stations begin."

"What? On the bridge? What the h.e.l.l for?"

"Your language is unbecoming to a junior officer," said j Brooks solemnly. "How did the men strike you today?" he went on inconsequently. "You were working with them all morning. Their usual selves?"

Nicholls blinked, then recovered.

"I suppose so." He hesitated. "Funny, they seemed a lot better a couple of days ago, but-well, now they're back to the Scapa stage.

Walking zombies. Only more so-they can hardly walk now." He shook his head. "Five, six men to a stretcher. Kept tripping and falling over things. Asleep on their feet-eyes not focusing, too d.a.m.ned tired to look where they're going."