H. M. S. Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  Hendry stirred uncomfortably.

  ‘He did it off his own bat, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Vallery said sincerely. ‘Forgive me, Riley. Thank you very much.’ He stared after him in puzzled wonder, looked again at Hendry, eyebrows lifted in interrogation.

  Hendry shook his head.

  ‘Search me, sir. I’ve no idea. He’s a queer fish. Does things like that. He’d bend a lead pipe over your skull without batting an eyelid—and he’s got a mania for looking after kittens and lame dogs. Or if you get a bird with a broken wing—Riley’s your man. But he’s got a low opinion of his fellowmen, sir.’

  Vallery nodded slowly, without speaking, leaned against the canvas back and closed his eyes in exhaustion. Nicholls bent over him.

  ‘Look, sir,’ he urged quietly, ‘why not give it up? Frankly, sir, you’re killing yourself. Can’t we finish this some other time?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, my boy.’ Vallery was very patient. ‘You don’t understand. “Some other time” will be too late.’ He turned to Hendry. ‘So you think you’ll manage all right, Chief?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about us, sir.’ The soft Devon voice was grim and gentle at the same time. ‘Just you look after yourself. The stokers won’t let you down, sir.’

  Vallery rose painfully to his feet, touched him lightly on the arm. ‘Do you know, Chief, I never thought you would . . . Ready, Hartley?’ He stopped short, seeing a giant duffel-coated figure waiting at the foot of the ladder, the face below the hood dark and sombre. ‘Who’s that? Oh, I know. Never thought stokers got so cold,’ he smiled.

  ‘Yes, sir, it’s Petersen,’ Hartley said softly. ‘He’s coming with us.’

  ‘Who said so? And—and Petersen? Wasn’t that—?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Riley’s—er—lieutenant in the Scapa business . . . Surgeon Commander’s orders, sir. Petersen’s going to give us a hand.’

  ‘Us? Me, you mean.’ There was no resentment, no bitterness in Vallery’s voice. ‘Hartley, take my advice—never let yourself get into the hands of the doctors . . . You think he’s safe?’ he added half-humorously.

  ‘He’d probably kill the man who looked sideways at you,’ Hartley stated matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a good man, sir. Simple, easily led—but good.’

  At the foot of the ladder, Petersen stepped aside to let them pass, but Vallery stopped, looked up at the giant towering six inches above him, into the grave, blue eyes below the flaxen hair.

  ‘Hallo, Petersen. Hartley tells me you’re coming with us. Do you really want to? You don’t have to, you know.’

  ‘Please, Captain.’ The speech was slow and precise, the face curiously dignified in unhappiness. ‘I am very sorry for what has happened—’

  ‘No, no!’ Vallery was instantly contrite. ‘You misunderstand. It’s a bitter night up top. But I would like it very much if you would come. Will you?’

  Petersen stared at him, then began slowly to smile, his face darkening with pleasure. As the Captain set foot on the first step, the giant arm came round him. The sensation, as Vallery described it later, was very much like going up in a lift.

  From there they visited Engineer Commander Dodson in his engine-room, a cheerful, encouraging, immensely competent Dodson, an engineer to his finger-tips in his single-minded devotion to the great engines under his care. Then aft to the Engineers’ Flat, up the companionway between the wrecked Canteen and the Police Office, out on to the upper deck. After the heat of the boiler-room, the 100° drop in temperature, a drop that strangled breath with the involuntary constriction of the throat and made a skin-crawling mockery of ‘Arctic clothing,’ was almost literally paralysing.

  The starboard torpedo tubes—the only ones at the standby—were only four paces away. The crew, huddled in the lee of the wrecked bosun’s store—the one destroyed by the Blue Ranger’s shells—were easily located by the stamping of frozen feet, the uncontrollable chattering of teeth.

  Vallery peered into the gloom. ‘LTO there?’

  ‘Captain, sir?’ Surprise, doubt in the voice.

  ‘Yes. How are things going?’

  ‘All right, sir.’ He was still off-balance, hesitant. ‘I think young Smith’s left foot is gone, sir—frostbite.’

  ‘Take him below—at once. And organize your crew into ten-minute watches: one to keep a telephone watch here, the other four in the Engineers’ Flat. From now on. You understand?’ He hurried away, as if to avoid the embarrassment of thanks, the murmurs of smiling gladness.

  They passed the torpedo shop, where the spare torpedoes and compressed air cylinders were stored, climbed the ladder to the boat-deck. Vallery paused a moment, one hand on the boat-winch, the other holding the bloody scarf, already frozen almost solid, to mouth and nose. He could just distinguish the shadowy bulkiness of merchantmen on either side: their masts, though, were oddly visible, swinging lazily, gently against the stars as the ships rolled to a slight swell, just beginning. He shuddered, pulled his scarf higher round his neck. God, it was cold! He moved for’ard, leaning heavily on Petersen’s arm. The snow, three to four inches deep, cushioned his footsteps as he came up behind an Oerlikon gun. Quietly, he laid a hand on the shoulder of the hooded gunner hunched forward in his cockpit.

  ‘Things all right, gunner?’

  No reply. The man appeared to stir, moved forward, then fell still again.

  ‘I said, “Are you all right?”’ Vallery’s voice had hardened. He shook the gunner by the shoulder, turned impatiently to Hartley.

  ‘Asleep, Chief! At Action Stations! We’re all dead from lack of sleep, I know—but his mates below are depending on him. There’s no excuse. Take his name!’

  ‘Take his name!’ Nicholls echoed softly, bent over the cockpit. He shouldn’t speak like this, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Take his name,’ he repeated. ‘What for? His next of kin? This man is dead.’

  The snow was beginning to fall again, cold and wet and feathery, the wind lifting a perceptible fraction. Vallery felt the first icy flakes, unseen in the darkness, brushing his cheeks, heard the distant moan of the wind in the rigging, lonely and forlorn. He shivered.

  ‘His heater’s gone.’ Hartley withdrew an exploratory hand, straightened up. He seemed tired. ‘These Oerlikons have black heaters bolted to the side of the cockpit. The gunners lean against them, sir, for hours at a time . . . I’m afraid the fuses must have blown. They’ve been warned against this, sir, a thousand times.’

  ‘Good God! Good God!’ Vallery shook his head slowly. He felt old, terribly tired. ‘What a useless, futile way to die . . . Have him taken to the Canteen, Hartley.’

  ‘No good, sir.’ Nicholls straightened up also. ‘It’ll have to wait. What with the cold and the quick onset of rigor mortis—well, it’ll have to wait.’

  Vallery nodded assent, turned heavily away. All at once, the deck speaker aft of the winch blared into raucous life, a rude desecration that shattered the chilled hush of the evening.

  ‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Captain, or notify Captain, to contact bridge immediately, please.’ Three times the message was repeated, then the speaker clicked off.

  Quickly Vallery turned to Hartley.

  ‘Where’s the nearest phone, Chief?’

  ‘Right here, sir.’ Hartley turned back to the Oerlikon, stripped earphones and chest mouthpiece from the dead man. ‘That is, if the AA tower is still manned?’

  ‘What’s left of it is.’

  ‘Tower? Captain to speak to bridge. Put me through.’ He handed the receiver to Vallery. ‘Here you are, sir.’

  ‘Thank you. Bridge? Yes, speaking . . . Yes, yes . . . Very good. Detail the Sirrus . . . No, Commander, nothing I can do anyway— just maintain position, that’s all.’ He took the handset off, handed it back to Hartley.

  ‘Asdic contact from Viking,’ he said briefly. ‘Red 90.’ He turned, looked out over the dark sea, realized the futility of his instinctive action, and shrugged. ‘We’ve sent the Sirrus after him. Come on
.’

  Their tour of the boat-deck gun-sites completed with a visit to the midships’ pom-pom crew, bonechilled and shaking with cold, under the command of the bearded Doyle, respectfully sulphurous in his outspoken comments on the weather, they dropped down to the main deck again. By this time Vallery was making no protest at all, not even of the most token kind, against Petersen’s help and support. He was too glad of them. He blessed Brooks for his foresight and thoughfulness, and was touched by the rare delicacy and consideration that prompted the big Norwegian to withdraw his supporting arm whenever they spoke to or passed an isolated group of men.

  Inside the port screen door and just for’ard of the galley, Vallery and Nicholls, waiting as the others knocked the clamps off the hatch leading down to the stokers’ mess, heard the muffled roar of distant depth-charges—there were four in all—felt the pressure waves strike the hull of the Ulysses. At the first report Vallery had stiffened, head cocked in attention, eyes fixed on infinity, in the immemorial manner of a man whose ears are doing the work for all the sense. Hesitated a moment, shrugged, bent his arm to hook a leg over the hatch coaming. There was nothing he could do.

  In the centre of the stokers’ mess was another, heavier hatch. This, too, was opened. The ladder led down to the steering position, which, as in most modern warships, was far removed from the bridge, deep in the heart of the ship below the armour-plating. Here, for a couple of minutes, Vallery talked quietly to the quartermaster, while Petersen, working in the confined space just outside, opened the massive hatch—450 lbs of steel, actuated by a counter-balancing pulley weight—which gave access to the hold, to the very bottom of the Ulysses, to the Transmitting Station and No. 2 Low Power Room.

  Amazing, confusing mystery of a place, this Low Power Room, confusing to the eye and ear. Round every bulkhead, interspersed with scores of switches, breakers and rheostats, were ranged tiered banks of literally hundreds of fuses, baffling to the untrained eye in their myriad complexity. Baffling, too, was the function of a score or more of low-power generators, nerve-drilling in the frenetic dissonance of their high-pitched hums. Nicholls straightened up at the foot of the ladder and shuddered involuntarily. A bad place, this. How easily could mind and nerves slide over the edge of insanity under the pounding, insistent clamour of the desynchronized cacophony!

  Just then there were only two men there—an Electric Artificer and his assistant, bent over the big Sperry master gyro, making some latitude adjustment to the highly complex machinery of the compass. They looked up quickly, tired surprise melting into tired pleasure. Vallery had a few words with them—speech was difficult in that bedlam of sound—then moved over to the door of the TS.

  He had his glove on the door handle when he froze to complete stillness. Another pattern had exploded, much closer this time, two cable lengths distant, at most. Depth-charges, they knew, but only because reason and experience told them: deep down in the heart of an armour-plated ship there is no sense of explosion, no roar of eruption from a detonating depth-charge. Instead, there is a tremendous, metallic clang, peculiarly tinny in calibre, as if some giant with a giant sledge had struck the ship’s side and found the armour loose.

  The pattern was followed almost immediately by another two explosions, and the Ulysses was still shuddering under the impact of the second when Vallery turned the handle and walked in. The others filed in after the Captain, Petersen closing the door softly behind him. At once the clamour of the electric motors died gratefully away in the hushed silence of the TS

  The TS, fighting heart of the ship, lined like the Low Power Room though it was by banks of fuses, was completely dominated by the two huge electronic computing tables occupying almost half the floor space. These, the vital links between the Fire Control Towers and the turrets, were generally the scene of intense, controlled activity: but the almost total destruction of the towers that morning had made them all but useless, and the undermanned TS was strangely quiet. Altogether, there were only eight ratings and an officer manning the tables.

  The air in the TS, a TS prominently behung with ‘No Smoking’ notices, was blue with tobacco smoke hanging in a flat, lazily drifting cloud near the deckhead—a cloud which spiralled thinly down to smouldering cigarette ends. For Nicholls there was something oddly reassuring in these burning cigarettes: in the unnatural bow-taut stillness, in the inhuman immobility of the men, it was the only guarantee of life.

  He looked, in a kind of detached curiosity, at the rating nearest him. A thin, dark-haired man, he was sitting hunched forward, his elbow on the table, the cigarette clipped between his fingers a bare inch from his half-open mouth. The smoke was curling up, lacing its smarting path across vacant, sightless eyes oblivious to the irritation, the ash on the cigarette, itself almost two inches in length, drooping slightly. Vaguely, Nicholls wondered how long he had been sitting there motionless, utterly motionless . . . and why?

  Expectancy, of course. That was it—expectancy. It was too obvious. Waiting, just waiting. Waiting for what? For the first time it struck Nicholls, struck him with blinding clarity, what it was to wait, to wait with the bowstring of the nerves strung down at inhuman tension, strung down far beyond quivering to the taughtened immobility of snapping point, to wait for the torpedo that would send them crashing into oblivion. For the first time he realized why it was that men who could, invariably it seemed, find something complainingly humorous in any place and every place never joked about the TS. A death trap is not funny. The TS was twenty feet below water level: for’ard of it was ‘B’ magazine, aft of it ‘A’ boiler-room, on either side of it were fuel tanks, and below it was the unprotected bottom, prime target for acoustic mines and torpedoes. They were ringed, surrounded, by the elements, the threat of death, and it needed only a flash, a wandering spark, to trigger off the annihilating reality . . . And above them, in the one in a thousand chance of survival, was a series of hatches which could all too easily warp and lock, solid under the metal-twisting shock of an explosion. Besides, the primary idea was that the hatches, deliberately heavy in construction, should stay shut in the event of damage, to seal off the flooded compartments below. The men in the TS knew this.

  ‘Good evening. Everything all right down here?’ Vallery’s voice, quiet and calm as ever, sounded unnaturally loud. Startled faces, white and strained, twisted round, eyes opening in astonishment: the depth-charging, Nicholls realized, had masked their approach.

  ‘Wouldn’t worry too much about the racket outside,’ Vallery went on reassuringly. ‘A wandering U-boat, and the Sirrus is after him. You can thank your stars you’re here and not in that sub.’

  No one else had spoken. Nicholls, watching them, saw their eyes flickering back from Vallery’s face to the forbidden cigarettes, understood their discomfort, their embarrassment at being caught red-handed by the Captain.

  ‘Any reports from the main tower, Brierley?’ he asked the officer in charge. He seemed unaware of the strain.

  ‘No, sir. Nothing at all. All quiet above.’

  ‘Fine!’ Vallery sounded positively cheerful. ‘No news is good news.’ He brought his hand out from his pocket, proffered his cigarette case to Brierley. ‘Smoke? And you, Nicholls?’ He took one himself, replaced the case, absently picked up a box of matches lying in front of the nearest gunner and if he noticed the gunner’s startled disbelief, the slow beginnings of a smile, the tired shoulders slumping fractionally in a long, soundless sigh of relief, he gave no sign.

  The thunderous clanging of more depth-charges drowned the rasping of the hatch, drowned Vallery’s harsh, convulsive coughing as the smoke reached his lungs. Only the reddening of the sodden hand-towel betrayed him. As the last vibration died away, he looked up, concern in his eyes.

  ‘Good God! Does it always sound like that down here?’

  Brierley smiled faintly. ‘More or less, sir. Usually more.’

  Vallery looked slowly round the men in the TS, nodded for’ard.

  ‘“B” magazine there, isn
’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And nice big fuel tanks all round you?’

  Brierley nodded. Every eye was on the captain.

  ‘I see. Frankly, I’d rather have my own job—wouldn’t have yours for a pension . . . Nicholls, I think we’ll spend a few minutes down here, have our smoke in peace. Besides’—he grinned—‘think of the increased fervour with which we’ll count our blessings when we get out of here!’

  He stayed five minutes, talking quietly to Brierley and his men. Finally, he stubbed out his cigarette, took his leave and started for the door.

  ‘Sir.’ The voice stopped him on the threshold, the voice of the thin dark gunner whose matches he had borrowed.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘I thought you might like this.’ He held out a clean, white towel. ‘That one you’ve got is—well, sir, I mean it’s—’

  ‘Thank you.’ Vallery took the towel without any hesitation. ‘Thank you very much.’

  Despite Petersen’s assistance, the long climb up to the upper deck left Vallery very weak. His feet were dragging heavily.

  ‘Look, sir, this is madness!’ Nicholls was desperately anxious. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t mean that, but—well, come and see Commander Brooks. Please!’

  ‘Certainly.’ The reply was a husky whisper. ‘Our next port of call anyway.’

  Half a dozen paces took them to the door of the Sick Bay. Vallery insisted on seeing Brooks alone. When he came out of the surgery after some time, he seemed curiously refreshed, his step lighter. He was smiling, and so was Brooks. Nicholls lagged behind as the Captain left.

  ‘Give him anything, sir?’ he asked. ‘Honest to God, he’s killing himself!’

  ‘He took something, not much.’ Brooks smiled softly. ‘I know he’s killing himself, so does he. But he knows why, and I know why, and he knows I know why. Anyway, he feels better. Not to worry, Johnny!’

  Nicholls waited at the top of the ladder outside the Sick Bay, waited for the Captain and others to come up from the telephone exchange and No. I Low Power Room. He stood aside as they climbed the coaming, but Vallery took his arm, walked him slowly for’ard past the Torpedo Office, nodding curtly to Carslake, in nominal charge of a Damage Control party. Carslake, face still swathed in white, looked back with eyes wild and staring and strange, his gaze almost devoid of recognition. Vallery hesitated, shook his head, then turned to Nicholls, smiling.