H. M. S. Ulysses (40 page)

‘Pray,' Turner said succinctly.

‘And sleep,' Brooks added. ‘Why don't you have half an hour, sir?'

‘Sleep!' Vallery seemed genuinely amused. ‘We'll have all the time in the world to sleep, just by and by.'

‘You have a point,' Brooks conceded. ‘You are very possibly right.'

1.
PQ17, a large mixed convoy—it included over 30 British, American and Panamanian ships—left Iceland for Russia under the escort of half a dozen destroyers and perhaps a dozen smaller craft, with a mixed Anglo-American cruiser and destroyer squadron in immediate support. A shadow covering force—again Anglo-American—comprising one aircraft carrier, two battleships, three cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers, lay to the north. As with FR77, they formed the spring of the trap that closed too late. The time was midsummer, 1942, a suicidal season for the attempt, for in June and July, in these high latitudes, there is no night. About longitude 20° east, the convoy was heavily attacked by U-boats and aircraft. On the same day as the attack began— 4th July—the covering cruiser squadron was radioed that the
Tirpitz
had just sailed from Alta Fjord. (This was not the case: The
Tirpitz
did make a brief, abortive sortie on the afternoon of the 5th, but turned back the same evening: rumour had it that she had been damaged by torpedoes from a Russian submarine.) The support squadron and convoy escorts immediately withdrew to the west at high speed, leaving PQ17 to their fate, leaving them to scatter and make their unescorted way to Russia as best they could. The feelings of the crews of the merchant ships at this save-their-own-skins desertion and betrayal by the Royal Navy can be readily imagined. Their fears, too, can be readily imagined, but even their darkest forebodings never conceived the dreadful reality: 23 merchant ships were sent to the bottom—by U-boats and aircraft. The
Tirpitz
was not seen, never came anywhere near the convoy, but even the threat had driven the naval squadrons to flight. The author does not know all the facts concerning PQ17, nor does he seek to interpret those he does know: still less does he seek to assign blame. Curiously enough, the only definite conclusion is that no blame can be attached to the commander of the squadron, Admiral Hamilton. He had no part of the decision to withdraw—the order came from the Admiralty, and was imperative. But one does not envy him. It was a melancholy and bitter incident, all the more unpalatable in that it ran so directly counter to the traditions of a great Service; one wonders what Sir Philip Sydney would have thought, or, in more modern times, Kennedy of the
Rawalpindi
or Fegen of the
Jervis Bay
. But there was no doubt what the Merchant Navy thought. What they still think. From most of the few survivors, there can be no hope of forgiveness. They will, probably, always remember: the Royal Navy would desperately like to forget. It is difficult to blame either.

FIFTEEN
Saturday Evening II

Messages were pouring in to the bridge now, messages from the merchant ships, messages of dismayed unbelief asking for confirmation of the
Tirpitz
breakout: from the
Stirling
, replying that the superstructure fire was now under control and that the engine-room watertight bulkheads were holding; and one from Orr of the
Sirrus
, saying that his ship was making water to the capacity of the pumps—he had been in heavy collision with the sinking merchantman—that they had taken off forty-four survivors, that the
Sirrus
had already done her share and couldn't she go home? The signal had arrived after the
Sirrus
's receipt of the bad news. Turner grinned to himself: no inducement on earth, he knew, could have persuaded Orr to leave now.

The messages kept pouring in, by visual signal or WT. There was no point in maintaining radio silence to outwit enemy monitor positions; the enemy knew where they were to a mile. Nor was there any need to prohibit light signalling—not with the
Stirling
still burning furiously enough to illuminate the sea for a mile around. And so the messages kept on coming—messages of fear and dismay and anxiety. But, for Turner, the most disquieting message came neither by lamp nor by radio.

Fully quarter of an hour had elapsed since the end of the attack and the
Ulysses
was rearing and pitching through the head seas on her new course of 350°, when the gate of the bridge crashed open and a panting, exhausted man stumbled on to the compass platform. Turner, back on the bridge again, peered closely at him in the red glare from the
Stirling
, recognized him as a stoker. His face was masked in sweat, the sweat already caking to ice in the intense cold. And in spite of that cold, he was hatless, coatless, clad only in a pair of thin dungarees. He was shivering violently, shivering from excitement and not because of the icy wind—he was oblivious to such things.

Turner seized him by the shoulder.

‘What is it, man?' he demanded anxiously. The stoker was still too breathless to speak. ‘What's wrong? Quickly!'

‘The TS, sir!' The breathing was so quick, so agonized, that the words blurred into a gasping exhalation. ‘It's full of water!'

‘The TS!' Turner was incredulous. ‘Flooded! When did this happen?'

‘I'm not sure, sir.' He was still gasping for breath. ‘But there was a bloody awful explosion, sir, just about amid—'

‘I know! I know!' Turner interrupted impatiently. ‘Bomber carried away the for'ard funnel, exploded in the water, port side. But that was fifteen minutes ago, man! Fifteen minutes! Good God, they would have—'

‘TS switchboard's gone, sir.' The stoker was beginning to recover, to huddle against the wind, but frantic at the Commander's deliberation and delay, he straightened up and grasped Turner's duffel without realizing what he was doing. The note of the urgency deepened still further. ‘All the power's gone, sir. And the hatch is jammed! The men can't get out!'

‘The hatch-cover jammed!' Turner's eyes narrowed in concern. ‘What happened?' he rapped out. ‘Buckled?'

‘The counter-weight's broken off, sir. It's on top of the hatch. We can only get it open an inch. You see, sir—' ‘Number One!' Turner shouted.

‘Here, sir.' Carrington was standing just behind him. ‘I heard . . . Why can't you open it?'

‘It's the
TS
hatch!' the stoker cried desperately. ‘A quarter of a bloody ton if it's an ounce, sir. You know—the one below the ladder outside the wheelhouse. Only two men can get at it at the same time. We've tried . . . Hurry, sir.
Please
.'

‘Just a minute.' Carrington was calm, unruffled, infuriatingly so. ‘Hartley? No, still fire-fighting. Evans, MacIntosh—dead.' He was obviously thinking aloud. ‘Bellamy, perhaps?'

‘What is it, Number One?' Turner burst out. He himself had caught up the anxiety, the impatience of the stoker. ‘What are you trying—?'

‘Hatch-cover plus pulley—1,000 lbs.,' Carrington murmured. ‘A special man for a special job.'

‘Petersen, sir!' The stoker had understood immediately. ‘Petersen!'

‘Of course!' Carrington clapped gloved hands together. ‘We're on our way, sir. Acetylene? No time! Stoker—crow-bars, sledges . . . Perhaps if you would ring the engine-room, sir?'

But Turner already had the phone in his hand.

Aft on the poop-deck, the fire was under control, all but in a few odd corners where the flames were fed by a fierce through draught. In the mess-decks, bulkheads, ladders, mess partitions, lockers had been twisted and buckled into strange shapes by the intense heat: on deck, the gasoline-fed flames, incinerating the two and three-quarter inch deck plating and melting the caulking as by some gigantic blow-torch, had cleanly stripped all covering and exposed the steel deck-plates, plates dull red and glowing evilly, plates that hissed and spat as heavy snowflakes drifted down to sibilant extinction.

On and below decks, Hartley and his crews, freezing one moment, reeling in the blast of heat the next, toiled like men insane. Where their wasted, exhausted bodies found the strength God only knew. From the turrets, from the Master-At-Arms's office, from mess-decks and emergency steering position, they pulled out man after man who had been there when the Condor had crashed: pulled them out, looked at them, swore, wept and plunged back into the aftermath of that holocaust, oblivious of pain and danger, tearing aside wreckage, wreckage still burning, still red-hot, with charred and broken gloves: and when the gloves fell off, they used their naked hands.

As the dead were ranged in the starboard alleyway, Leading Seaman Doyle was waiting for them. Less than half an hour previously, Doyle had been in the for'ard galley passage, rolling in silent agony as frozen body and clothes thawed out after the drenching of his pom-pom. Five minutes later, he had been back on his gun, rock-like, unflinching, as he pumped shell after shell over open sights into the torpedo bombers. And now, steady and enduring as ever, he was on the poop. A man of iron, and a face of iron, too, that night, the bearded leonine head still and impassive as he picked up one dead man after the other, walked to the guard-rail and dropped his burden gently over the side. How many times he repeated that brief journey that night, Doyle never knew: he had lost count after the first twenty or so. He had no right to do this, of course: the navy was very strong on decent burial, and this was not decent burial. But the sailmakers were dead and no man would or could have sewn up these ghastly charred heaps in the weighted and sheeted canvas. The dead don't care, Doyle thought dispassionately—let them look after themselves. So, too, thought Carrington and Hartley, and they made no move to stop him.

Beneath their feet, the smouldering mess-decks rang with hollow reverberating clangs as Nicholls and Leading Telegraphist Brown, still weirdly garbed in their white asbestos suits, swung heavy sledges against the securing clips of ‘Y' magazine hatch. In the smoke and gloom and their desperate haste, they could hardly see each other, much less the clips: as often as not they missed their strokes and the hammers went spinning out of numbed hands into the waiting darkness.

Time yet, Nicholls thought desperately, perhaps there is time. The main flooding valve had been turned off five minutes ago: it was possible, barely possible, that the two trapped men inside were clinging to the ladder, above water level.

One clip, one clip only was holding the hatch-cover now. With alternate strokes of their sledges, they struck it with vicious strength. Suddenly, unexpectedly, it sheared off at its base and the hatch-cover crashed open under the explosive up-surge of the compressed air beneath. Brown screamed in agony, a single coughing shout of pain, as the bone-crashing momentum of the swinging hatch crashed into his right hip, then fell to the deck where he lay moaning quietly.

Nicholls did not even spare him a glance. He leant far through the hatch, the powerful beam of his torch stabbing downwards into the gloom. And he could see nothing, nothing at all—not what he wanted to see. All he saw was the water, dark and viscous and evil, water rising and falling, water flooding and ebbing in the eerie oil-bound silence as the
Ulysses
plunged and lifted in the heavy seas.

‘Below!' Nicholls called loudly. The voice, a voice, he noted impersonally, cracked and shaken with strain, boomed and echoed terrifyingly down the iron tunnel. ‘Below!' he shouted again. ‘Is there anybody there?' He strained his ears for the least sound, for the faintest whisper of an answer, but none came.

‘McQuater!' He shouted a third time. ‘Williamson! Can you hear me?' Again he looked, again he listened, but there was only the darkness and the muffled whisper of the oil-slicked water swishing smoothly from side to side. He stared again down the light from the torch, marvelled that any surface could so quickly dissipate and engulf the brilliance of that beam. And beneath that surface . . . He shivered. The water—even the water seemed to be dead, old and evil and infinitely horrible. In sudden anger, he shook his head to clear it of these stupid, primitive fears: his imagination—he'd have to watch it. He stepped back, straightened up. Gently, carefully, he closed the swinging hatch. The mess-deck echoed as his sledge swung down on the clips, again and again and again.

Engineer-Commander Dodson stirred and moaned. He struggled to open his eyes but his eyelids refused to function. At least, he thought that they did for the blackness around remained as it was, absolute, impenetrable, almost palpable.

He wondered dully what had happened, how long he had been there, what had happened. And the side of his head—just below the ear—that hurt abominably. Slowly, with clumsy deliberation, he peeled off his glove, reached up an exploratory hand. It came away wet and sticky: his hair, he realized with mild surprise, was thickly matted with blood. It must be blood—he could feel it trickling slowly, heavily down the side of his cheek.

And that deep, powerful vibration, a vibration overlain with an indefinable note of strain that set his engineer's teeth on edge—he could hear it, almost feel it, immediately in front of him. His bare hand reached out, recoiled in instant reflex as it touched something smooth and revolving—and burning hot.

The shaft tunnel! Of course. That's where he was—the shaft tunnel. They'd discovered fractured lubricating pipes on the port shafts too, and he'd decided to keep this engine turning. He knew they'd been attacked. Down here in the hidden bowels of the ship, sound did not penetrate: he had heard nothing of the aircraft engines: he hadn't even heard their own guns firing—but there had been no mistaking the jarring shock of the 5.25s surging back on their hydraulic recoils. And then —a torpedo perhaps, or a near miss by a bomb. Thank God he'd been sitting facing inboard when the
Ulysses
had lurched. The other way round and it would have been curtains for sure when he'd been flung across the shaft coupling and wrapped round . . .