H.M.S. Ulysses Part 7

"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 d.a.m.n' 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 c.o.c.ked 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-wmi 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 umbrella------"

"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 tiling you know, there'll be a rash of male suffragettes chaining themselves to the guard rails I" The gate clanged shut behind him.

Vallery turned to the Admiral, his face grave.

"Looks as, if you were right about that comstack, sir."

Tyndall grunted, non-committally.

"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 pa.s.sing thoughts, sir. As Spencer f.a.ggot would have said, things have come to a pretty pa.s.s... Things are bad indeed, when only the enemy can save us."

CHAPTER 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 mainmast, 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 cotton-wool, 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 pa.s.sages, it sifted soundlessly down hatches. It sought out the tiniest unprotected c.h.i.n.k 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 m.u.f.fled 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, rea.s.suring 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 Curayoa, 4,200 tons of c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s 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 slighfly 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 Ill.u.s.trious-but 15-20,000 ton auxiliary carriers, irreverently known as banana boats. They were converted merchantmen, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s now, lacking in speed and fire-power, but tough and durable. The Baliol was a diminutive Hunt cla.s.s 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 tune, 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 "cla.s.s 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 a.s.signed 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 arm-chairs 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, R.N., 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 facade lay, besides a first-cla.s.s 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-p.r.i.c.ks 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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-cla.s.s 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 buzzard blowing. Just what you were born for, Andy, boy I"

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-----"