‘What the devil’s happened here, Etherton?’ he demanded harshly. ‘What is all this? Has Carslake—’
‘Ralston hit him, sir.’ Etherton broke in.
‘Don’t be so bloody silly, Guns!’ Turner grunted.
‘Exactly!’ Vallery’s voice was impatient. ‘We can see that. Why?’
‘A WT messenger came up for the “Safe-to-Transmit” boards. Carslake gave them to him—about ten minutes ago, I—I think.’
‘You think! Where were you, Etherton, and why did you permit it? You know very well . . . ’ Vallery broke off short, remembering the presence of Ralston and the MAA.
Etherton muttered something. His words were inaudible in the gale.
Vallery bent forward. ‘What did you say, Etherton?’
‘I was down below, sir.’ Etherton was looking at the deck. ‘Just— just for a moment, sir.’
‘I see. You were down below.’ Vallery’s voice was controlled now, quiet and even; his eyes held an expression that promised ill for Etherton. He looked round at Turner. ‘Is he badly hurt, Commander?’
‘He’ll survive,’ said Turner briefly. He had Carslake on his feet now, still moaning, his hand covering his smashed mouth.
For the first time, the Captain seemed to notice Ralston. He looked at him for a few seconds—an eternity on that bitter, storm-lashed bridge—then spoke, monosyllabic, ominous, thirty years of command behind the word.
‘Well?’
Ralston’s face was frozen, expressionless. His eyes never left Carslake.
‘Yes, sir. I did it. I hit him—the treacherous, murdering bastard!’
‘Ralston!’ The MAA’s voice was a whiplash.
Suddenly Ralston’s shoulders sagged. With an effort, he looked away from Carslake, looked wearily at Vallery.
‘I’m sorry. I forgot. He’s got a stripe on his arm—only ratings are bastards.’ Vallery winced at the bitterness. ‘But he—’
‘You’ve got frostbite.’
‘Rub your chin, man!’ Turner interrupted sharply.
Slowly, mechanically, Ralston did as he was told. He used the back of his hand. Vallery winced again as he saw the palm of the hand, raw and mutilated, skin and flesh hanging in strips. The agony of that bare-handed descent from the yardarm . . .
‘He tried to murder me, sir. It was deliberate.’ Ralston sounded tired.
‘Do you realize what you are saying?’ Vallery’s voice was as icy as the wind that swept over Langanes. But he felt the first, faint chill of fear.
‘He tried to murder me, sir,’ Ralston repeated tonelessly. ‘He returned the boards five minutes before I left the yardarm. WT must have started transmitting just as soon as I reached the mast, coming down.’
‘Nonsense, Ralston. How dare you—’
‘He’s right, sir.’ It was Etherton speaking. He was replacing the receiver carefully, his voice unhappy. ‘I’ve just checked.’
The chill of fear settled deeper on Vallery’s mind. Almost desperately he said, ‘Anyone can make a mistake. Ignorance may be culpable, but—’
‘Ignorance!’ The weariness had vanished from Ralston as if it had never been. He took two quick steps forward. ‘Ignorance! I gave him these boards, sir, when I came to the bridge. I asked for the Officer of the Watch and he said he was—I didn’t know the Gunnery Officer was on duty, sir. When I told him that the boards were to be returned only to me, he said: “I don’t want any of your damned insolence, Ralston. I know my job—you stick to yours. Just you get up there and perform your heroics.” He knew, sir.’
Carslake burst from the Commander’s supporting arm, turned and appealed wildly to the Captain. The eyes were white and staring, the whole face working.
‘That’s a lie, sir! It’s a damned, filthy lie!’ He mouthed the words, slurred them through smashed lips. ‘I never said . . . ’
The words crescendoed into a coughing, choking scream as Ralston’s fist smashed viciously, terribly into the torn, bubbling mouth. He staggered drunkenly through the port gate, crashed into the chart house, slid down to lie on the deck, huddled and white and still. Both Turner and the MAA had at once leapt forward to pinion the LTO’s arms, but he made no attempt to move.
Above and beyond the howl of the wind, the bridge seemed strangely silent. When Vallery spoke, his voice was quite expressionless.
‘Commander, you might phone for a couple of our marines. Have Carslake taken down to his cabin and ask Brooks to have a look at him. Master-at-Arms?’
‘Sir?’
‘Take this rating to the Sick Bay, let him have any necessary treatment. Then put him in cells. With an armed guard. Understand?’
‘I understand, sir.’ There was no mistaking the satisfaction in Hastings’s voice.
Vallery, Turner and the Gunnery Officer stood in silence as Ralston and the MAA left, in silence as two burly marines carried Carslake, still senseless, off the bridge and below. Vallery moved after them, broke step at Etherton’s voice behind him.
‘Sir?’
Vallery did not even turn round. ‘I’ll see you later, Etherton.’
‘No, sir. Please. This is important.’
Something in the Gunnery Officer’s voice held Vallery. He turned back, impatiently.
‘I’m not concerned with excusing myself, sir. There’s no excuse.’ The eyes were fixed steadily on Vallery. ‘I was standing at the Asdic door when Ralston handed the boards to Carslake. I overheard them—every word they said.’
Vallery’s face became very still. He glanced at Turner, saw that he, too, was waiting intently.
‘And Ralston’s version of the conversation?’ In spite of himself, Vallery’s voice was rough, edged with suspense.
‘Completely accurate, sir.’ The words were hardly audible. ‘In every detail. Ralston told the exact truth.’
Vallery closed his eyes for a moment, turned slowly, heavily away. He made no protest as he felt Turner’s hand under his arm, helping him down the steep ladder. Old Socrates had told him a hundred times that he carried the ship on his back. He could feel the weight of it now, the crushing burden of every last ounce of it.
Vallery was at dinner with Tyndall, in the Admiral’s day cabin, when the message arrived. Sunk in private thought, he gazed down at his untouched food as Tyndall smoothed out the signal.
The Admiral cleared his throat.
‘On course. On time. Sea moderate, wind freshening. Expect rendezvous as planned. Commodore 77.’
He laid the signal down. ‘Good God! Seas moderate, fresh wind! Do you reckon he’s in the same damned ocean as us?’
Vallery smiled faintly.
‘This is it, sir.’
‘This is it,’ Tyndall echoed. He turned to the messenger.
‘Make a signal. “You are running into severe storm. Rendezvous unchanged. You may be delayed. Will remain at rendezvous until your arrival.” That clear enough, Captain?’
‘Should be, sir. Radio silence?’
‘Oh, yes. Add “Radio silence. Admiral, 14th ACS.” Get it off at once, will you? Then tell WT to shut down themselves.’
The door shut softly. Tyndall poured himself some coffee, looked across at Vallery.
‘That boy still on your mind, Dick?’
Vallery smiled non-committally, lit a cigarette. At once he began to cough harshly.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he apologized. There was silence for some time, then he looked up quizzically.
‘What mad ambition drove me to become a cruiser captain?’ he asked sadly.
Tyndall grinned. ‘I don’t envy you . . . I seem to have heard this conversation before. What are you going to do about Ralston, Dick?’
‘What would you do, sir?’ Vallery countered.
‘Keep him locked up till we return from Russia. On a bread-and-water diet, in irons if you like.’
Vallery smiled.
‘You never were a very good liar, John.’
Tyndall laughed. ‘Touché!’ He was warmed, secretly pleased. Rarely d
id Richard Vallery break through his self-imposed code of formality. ‘A heinous offence, we all know, to clout one of HM commissioned officers, but if Etherton’s story is true, my only regret is that Ralston didn’t give Brooks a really large-scale job of replanning that young swine’s face.’
‘It’s true, all right, I’m afraid,’ said Vallery soberly. ‘What it amounts to is that naval discipline—oh, how old Starr would love this—compels me to punish a would-be murderer’s victim!’ He broke off in a fresh paroxysm of coughing, and Tyndall looked away: he hoped the distress wasn’t showing in his face, the pity and anger he felt that Vallery—that very perfect, gentle knight, the finest gentleman and friend he had ever known—should be coughing his heart out, visibly dying on his feet, because of the blind inhumanity of an SNO in London, two thousand miles away. ‘A Victim,’ Vallery went on at last, ‘who has already lost his mother, brother and three sisters . . . I believe he has a father at sea somewhere.’
‘And Carslake?’
‘I shall see him tomorrow. I should like you to be there, sir. I will tell him that he will remain an officer of this ship till we return to Scapa, then resign his commission . . . I don’t think he’d care to appear at a court-martial, even as a witness,’ he finished dryly.
‘Not if he’s sane, which I doubt,’ Tyndall agreed. A sudden thought struck him. ‘Do you think he is sane?’ He frowned.
‘Carslake,’ Vallery hesitated. ‘Yes, I think so, sir. At least, he was. Brooks isn’t so sure. Says he didn’t like the look of him tonight— something queer about him, he thinks, and in these abnormal conditions small provocations are magnified out of all proportion.’ Vallery smiled briefly. ‘Not that Carslake is liable to regard the twin assaults on pride and person as a small provocation.’
Tyndall nodded agreement. ‘He’ll bear watching . . . Oh, damn! I wish the ship would stay still. Half my coffee on the tablecloth. Young Spicer’—he looked towards the pantry—‘will be as mad as hell. Nineteen years old and a regular tyrant . . . I thought these would be sheltered waters, Dick?’
‘So they are, compared to what’s waiting for us. Listen!’ He cocked his head to the howling of the wind outside. ‘Let’s see what the weather man has to say about it.’
He reached for the desk phone, asked for the transmitting station. After a brief conversation he replaced the receiver.
‘TS says the anemometer is going crazy. Gusting up to eighty knots. Still north-west. Temperature steady at ten below.’ He shivered. ‘Ten below!’ Then looked consideringly at Tyndall. ‘Barometer almost steady at 27.8.’
‘What!’
‘27.8. That’s what they say. It’s impossible, but that’s what they say.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Forty-five minutes, sir . . . This is a very complicated way of committing suicide.’
They were silent for a minute, then Tyndall spoke for both of them, answering the question in both their minds.
‘We must go, Dick. We must. And by the way, our fire-eating young Captain (D), the doughty Orr, wants to accompany us in the Sirrus . . . We’ll let him tag along a while. He has things to learn, that young man.’
At 2020 all ships had completed oiling. Hove to, they had had the utmost difficulty in keeping position in that great wind; but they were infinitely safer than in the open sea. They were given orders to proceed when the weather moderated, the Defender and escorts to Scapa, the squadron to a position 100 miles ENE of rendezvous. Radio silence was to be strictly observed.
At 2030 the Ulysses and Sirrus got under way to the East. Lights winked after them, messages of good luck. Fluently, Tyndall cursed the squadron for the breach of darken-ship regulations, realized that, barring themselves, there was no one on God’s earth to see the signals anyway, and ordered a courteous acknowledgement.
At 2045, still two miles short of Langanes point, the Sirrus was plunging desperately in mountainous seas, shipping great masses of water over her entire fo’c’sle and main deck, and, in the darkness, looking far less like a destroyer than a porpoising submarine.
At 2050, at reduced speed, she was observed to be moving in close to such slight shelter as the land afforded there. At the same time, her six-inch Aldis flashed her signal: ‘Screen doors stove in: “A” turret not tracking: flooding port boiler-room intake fans.’ And on the Sirrus’s bridge Commander Orr swore in chagrin as he received the Ulysses’s final message: ‘Lesson without words, No 1. Rejoin squadron at once. You can’t come out to play with the big boys.’ But he swallowed his disappointment, signalled: ‘Wilco. Just you wait till I grow up,’ pulled the Sirrus round in a madly swinging half-circle and headed thankfully back for shelter. Aboard the flagship, it was lost to sight almost immediately.
At 2100, the Ulysses moved out into the Denmark Strait.
SIX
Tuesday Night
It was the worst storm of the war. Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began. Living memory aboard the Ulysses that night, a vast accumulation of experience in every corner of the globe, could certainly recall nothing even remotely like it, nothing that would even begin to bear comparison as a parallel or precedent.
At ten o’clock, with all doors and hatches battened shut, with all traffic prohibited on the upper deck, with all crews withdrawn from gun-turrets and magazines and all normal deck watchkeeping stopped for the first time since her commissioning, even the taciturn Carrington admitted that the Caribbean hurricanes of the autumns of ’34 and ’37—when he’d run out of sea-room, been forced to heave-to in the dangerous right-hand quadrant of both these murderous cyclones—had been no worse than this. But the two ships he had taken through these—a 3,000-ton tramp and a superannuated tanker on the New York asphalt run—had not been in the same class for seaworthiness as the Ulysses. He had little doubt as to her ability to survive. But what the First Lieutenant did not know, what nobody had any means of guessing, was that this howling gale was still only the deadly overture. Like some mindless and dreadful beast from an ancient and other world, the Polar monster crouched on its own doorstep, waiting. At 2230, the Ulysses crossed the Arctic Circle. The monster struck.
It struck with a feral ferocity, with an appalling savagery that smashed minds and bodies into a stunned unknowingness. Its claws were hurtling rapiers of ice that slashed across a man’s face and left it welling red: its teeth were that sub-zero wind, gusting over 120 knots, that ripped and tore through the tissue paper of Arctic clothing and sank home to the bone: its voice was the devil’s orchestra, the roar of a great wind mingled with the banshee shrieking of tortured rigging, a requiem for fiends: its weight was the crushing power of the hurricane wind that pinned a man helplessly to a bulkhead, fighting for breath, or flung him off his feet to crash in some distant corner, broken-limbed and senseless. Baulked of prey in its 500-mile sweep across the frozen wastes of the Greenland ice-cap, it goaded the cruel sea into homicidal alliance and flung itself, titanic in its energy, ravenous in its howling upon the cockleshell that was the Ulysses.
The Ulysses should have died then. Nothing built by man could ever have hoped to survive. She should just have been pressed under to destruction, or turned turtle, or had her back broken, or disintegrated under these mighty hammerblows of wind and sea. But she did none of these things.
How she ever survived the insensate fury of that first attack, God only knew. The great wind caught her on the bow and flung her round in a 45° arc and pressed her far over on her side as she fell—literally fell—forty heart-stopping feet over and down the precipitous walls of a giant trough. She crashed into the valley with a tremendous concussion that jarred every plate, every Clyde-built rivet in her hull. The vibration lasted an eternity as overstressed metal fought to re-adjust itself, as steel compressed and stretched far beyond specified breaking loads. Miraculously she held, but the sands were running out. She lay far over on h
er starboard side, the gunwales dipping: half a mile away, towering high above the mast-top, a great wall of water was roaring down on the helpless ship.
The ‘Dude’ saved the day. The ‘Dude’, alternatively known as ‘Persil’, but officially as Engineer-Commander Dodson, immaculately clad as usual in overalls of the most dazzling white, had been at his control position in the engine-room when that tremendous gust had struck. He had no means of knowing what had happened. He had no means of knowing that the ship was not under command, that no one on the bridge had as yet recovered from that first shattering impact: he had no means of knowing that the quartermaster had been thrown unconscious into a corner of the wheelhouse, that his mate, almost a child in years, was too panic-stricken to dive for the madlyspinning wheel. But he did know that the Ulysses was listing crazily, almost broadside on, and he suspected the cause.
His shouts on the bridge tube brought no reply. He pointed to the port controls, roared ‘Slow’ in the ear of the Engineer WO—then leapt quickly for the starboard wheel.
Fifteen seconds later and it would have been too late. As it was, the accelerating starboard screw brought her round just far enough to take that roaring mountain of water under her bows, to dig her stern in to the level of the depth-charge rails, till forty feet of her airborne keel lay poised above the abyss below. When she plunged down, again that same shuddering vibration enveloped the entire hull. The fo’c’sle disappeared far below the surface, the sea flowing over and past the armoured side of ‘A’ turret. But she was bows on again. At once the ‘Dude’ signalled his WO for more revolutions, cut back the starboard engine.
Below decks, everything was an unspeakable shambles. On the mess-decks, steel lockers in their scores had broken adrift, been thrown in a dozen different directions, bursting hasps, and locks, spilling their contents everywhere. Hammocks had been catapulted from their racks, smashed crockery littered the decks: tables were twisted and smashed, broken stools stuck up at crazy angles, books, papers, teapots, kettles and crockery were scattered in insane profusion. And amidst this jumbled, sliding wreckage, hundreds of shouting, cursing, frightened and exhausted men struggled to their feet, or knelt, or sat, or just lay still.
H. M. S. Ulysses Page 10