H. M. S. Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Ask Electra if she’s carrying any explosives as cargo.’

  Bentley’s Aldis chattered, fell silent. After half a minute, it was clear that there was going to be no reply.

  ‘Power gone, perhaps, or his Aldis smashed,’ the Kapok Kid ventured. ‘How about one flag for explosive, two for none?’

  Vallery nodded in satisfaction. ‘You heard, Bentley?’

  He looked over the starboard quarter as the message went out. The Vectra was almost a mile distant, rolling one minute, pitching the next as she came round in a tight circle. She had found the killer—and her depth-charge racks were empty.

  Vallery swung back, looked across to the Electra. Still no reply, nothing . . . Then he saw two flags fluttering up to the yardarm.

  ‘Signal the Sirrus,’ he ordered. ‘“Go ahead: exercise extreme care.”’

  Suddenly he felt Turner’s hand on his arm.

  ‘Can you hear ’em?’ Turner asked.

  ‘Hear what?’ Vallery demanded.

  ‘Lord only knows. It’s the Vectra. Look!’

  Vallery followed the pointing finger. At first, he could see nothing, then all at once he saw little geysers of water leaping up in the Vectra’s wake, geysers swiftly extinguished by the heavy seas. Then, faintly, his straining ear caught the faraway murmur of underwater explosions, all but inaudible against the wind.

  ‘What the devil’s the Vectra doing?’ Vallery demanded. ‘And what’s she using?’

  ‘Looks like fireworks to me,’ Turner grunted. ‘What do you think, Number One?’

  ‘Scuttling charges—25-pounders,’ Carrington said briefly.

  ‘He’s right, sir,’ Turner admitted. ‘Of course that’s what they are. Mind you, he might as well be using fireworks,’ he added disparagingly.

  But the Commander was wrong. A scuttling charge has less than a tenth part of the disruptive power of a depth-charge—but one lodged snugly in the conning-tower or exploding alongside a steering plane could be almost as lethal. Turner had hardly finished speaking when a U-boat—the first the Ulysses had seen above water for almost six months—porpoised high above the surface of the sea, hung there for two or three seconds, then crashed down on even keel, wallowing wickedly in the troughs between the waves.

  The dramatic abruptness of her appearance—one moment the empty sea, the next a U-boat rolling in full view of the entire convoy—took every ship by surprise—including the Vectra. She was caught on the wrong foot, moving away on the outer leg of a figure-of-eight turn. Her pom-pom opened up immediately, but the pompom, a notoriously inaccurate gun in the best of circumstances, is a hopeless proposition on the rolling, heeling deck of a destroyer making a fast turn in heavy weather: the Oerlikons registered a couple of hits on the conning-tower, twin Lewises peppered the hull with as much effect as a horde of angry hornets; but by the time the Vectra was round, her main armament coming to bear, the U-boat had disappeared slowly under the surface.

  In spite of this, the Vectra’s 4.7s opened up, firing into the sea where the U-boat had submerged, but stopping almost immediately when two shells in succession had ricocheted off the water and whistled dangerously through the convoy. She steadied on course, raced over the position of the submerged U-boat: watchers on the Ulysses, binoculars to their eyes, could just distinguish duffel-coated figures on the Vectra’s poop-deck hurling more scuttling charges over the side. Almost at once, the Vectra’s helm went hard over and she clawed her way back south again, guns at maximum depression pointing down over her starboard side.

  The U-boat must have been damaged, more severely this time, by either the shells or the last charges. Again she surfaced, even more violently than before, in a seething welter of foam, and again the Vectra was caught on the wrong foot, for the submarine had surfaced off her port bow, three cable-lengths away.

  And this time, the U-boat was up to stay. Whatever Captain and crew lacked, it wasn’t courage. The hatch was open, and men were swarming over the side of the conning-tower to man the gun, in a token gesture of defiance against crushing odds.

  The first two men over the side never reached the gun—breaking, sweeping waves, waves that towered high above the submarine’s deck, washed them over the side and they were gone. But others flung themselves forward to take their place, frantically training their gun through a 90° arc to bear on the onrushing bows of the Vectra. Incredibly—for the seas were washing over the decks, seas which kept tearing the men from their posts, and the submarine was rolling with impossible speed and violence—their first shell, fired over open sights, smashed squarely into the bridge of the Vectra. The first shell and the last shell, for the crew suddenly crumpled and died, sinking down by the gun or pitching convulsively over the side.

  It was a massacre. The Vectra had two Bolton-Paul Defiant night-fighter turrets, quadruple hydraulic turrets complete with astrodome, bolted to her fo’c’sle, and these had opened up simultaneously, firing, between them, something like a fantastic total of 300 shells every ten seconds. That often misused cliché ‘hail of lead’ was completely accurate here. It was impossible for a man to live two seconds on the exposed deck of that U-boat, to hope to escape that lethal storm. Man after man kept flinging himself over the coaming in suicidal gallantry, but none reached the gun.

  Afterwards, no one aboard the Ulysses could say when they first realized that the Vectra, pitching steeply through the heavy seas, was going to ram the U-boat. Perhaps her Captain had never intended to do so. Perhaps he had expected the U-boat to submerge, had intended to carry away conning-tower and periscope standard, to make sure that she could not escape again. Perhaps he had been killed when that shell struck the bridge. Or perhaps he had changed his mind at the last second, for the Vectra, which had been arrowing in on the conning-tower, suddenly slewed sharply to starboard.

  For an instant, it seemed that she might just clear the U-boat’s bows, but the hope died the second it was born. Plunging heavily down the sheering side of a gaping trough, the Vectra’s forefoot smashed down and through the hull of the submarine, some thirty feet aft of the bows, slicing through the toughened steel of the pressure hull as if it were cardboard. She was still plunging, still driving down, when two shattering explosions, so close together as to be blurred into one giant blast, completely buried both vessels under a skyrocketing mushroom of boiling water and twisted steel. The why of the explosion was pure conjecture; but what had happened was plain enough. Some freak of chance must have triggered off the TNT—normally an extremely stable and inert disruptive—in a warhead in one of the U-boat’s tubes: and then the torpedoes in the storage racks behind and possibly, probably even, the for’ard magazine of the Vectra had gone up in sympathetic detonation.

  Slowly, deliberately almost, the great clouds of water fell back into the sea, and the Vectra and the U-boat—or what little was left of them—came abruptly into view. To the watchers on the Ulysses, it was inconceivable that either of them should still be afloat. The U-boat was very deep in the water, seemed to end abruptly just for’ards of the gun platform: the Vectra looked as if some great knife had sheared her athwartships, just for’ard of the bridge. The rest was gone, utterly gone. And throughout the convoy unbelieving minds were still wildly rejecting the evidence of their eyes when the shattered hull of the Vectra lurched into the same trough as the U-boat, rolled heavily, wearily, over on top of her, bridge and mast cradling the conning-tower of the submarine. And then the water closed over them and they were gone, locked together to the bottom of the sea.

  The last ships in the convoy were two miles away now, and in the broken seas, at that distance, it was impossible to see whether there were any survivors. It did not seem likely. And if there were, if there were men over there, struggling, swimming, shouting for help in the murderous cold of that glacial sea, they would be dying already. And they would have been dead long before any rescue ship could even have turned round. The convoy streamed on, beating steadily east. All but two, that is—the Electra and the Sirrus.<
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  The Electra lay beam on to the seas, rolling slowly, sluggishly, dead in the water. She had now a list of almost 15° to port. Her decks, fore and aft of the bridge, were lined with waiting men. They had given up their attempt to abandon ship by lifeboat when they had seen the Sirrus rolling up behind them, fine on the port quarter. A boat had been swung out on its davits, and with the listing of the Electra and the rolling of the sea it had proved impossible to recover it. It hung now far out from the ship’s side, swinging wildly at the end of its davits about twenty feet above the sea. On his approach, Orr had twice sent angry signals, asking the falls to be cut. But the lifeboat remained there, a menacing pendulum in the track of the Sirrus: panic, possibly, but more likely winch brakes jammed solid with ice. In either event, there was no time to be lost: another ten minutes and the Electra would be gone.

  The Sirrus made two runs past in all—Orr had no intention of stopping alongside, of being trampled under by the 15,000-ton deadweight of a toppling freighter. On his first run he steamed slowly by at five knots, at a distance of twenty feet—the nearest he dared go with the set of the sea rolling both ships towards each other at the same instant.

  As the Sirrus’s swinging bows slid up past the bridge of the Electra, the waiting men began to jump. They jumped as the Sirrus’s fo’c’sle reared up level with their deck, they jumped as it plunged down fifteen, twenty feet below. One man carrying a suitcase and Burberry stepped nonchalantly across both sets of guard-rails during the split second that they were relatively motionless to each other: others crashed sickeningly onto the ice-coated steel deck far below, twisting ankles, fracturing legs and thighs, dislocating hip-joints. And two men jumped and missed; above the bedlam of noise, men heard the blood-chilling, bubbling scream of one as the swinging hulls crushed the life out of him, the desperate, terror-stricken cries of the other as the great, iron wall of the Electra guided him into the screws of the Sirrus.

  It was just then that it happened and there could be no possible reflection on Commander Orr’s seamanship: he had handled the Sirrus brilliantly. But even his skill was helpless against these two successive freak waves, twice the size of the others. The first flung the Sirrus close in to the Electra, then passing under the Electra, lurched her steeply to port as the second wave heeled the Sirrus far over to starboard. There was a grinding, screeching crash. The Sirrus’s guard-rails and upper side plates buckled and tore along a 150-foot length: simultaneously, the lifeboat smashed endwise into the front of the bridge, shattering into a thousand pieces. Immediately, the telegraphs jangled, the water boiled whitely at the Sirrus’s stern— shocked realization of its imminence and death itself must have been only a merciful hair’s-breadth apart for the unfortunate man in the water—and then the destroyer was clear, sheering sharply away from the Electra.

  In five minutes the Sirrus was round again. It was typical of Orr’s ice-cold, calculating nerve and of the luck that never deserted him that he should this time choose to rub the Sirrus’s shattered starboard side along the length of the Electra—she was too low in the water now to fall on him—and that he should do so in a momentary spell of slack water. Willing hands caught men as they jumped, cushioned their fall. Thirty seconds and the destroyer was gone again and the decks of the Electra were deserted. Two minutes later and a muffled roar shook the sinking ship—her boilers going. And then she toppled slowly over on her side: masts and smokestack lay along the surface of the sea, dipped and vanished: the straight-back of bottom and keel gleamed fractionally, blackly, against the grey of sea and sky, and was gone. For a minute, great gouts of air rushed turbulently to the surface. By and by the bubbles grew smaller and smaller and then there were no more.

  The Sirrus steadied on course, crowded decks throbbing as she began to pick up speed, to overtake the convoy. Convoy No FR77. The convoy the Royal Navy would always want to forget. Thirty-six ships had left Scapa and St John’s. Now there were only twelve, only twelve. And still almost thirty-two hours to the Kola Inlet . . .

  Moodily, even his tremendous vitality and zest temporarily subdued, Turner watched the Sirrus rolling up astern. Abruptly he turned away, looked furtively, pityingly at Captain Vallery, no more now than a living skeleton driven by God only knew what mysterious force to wrest hour after impossible hour from death. And for Vallery now, death, even the hope of it, Turner suddenly realized, must be infinitely sweet. He looked, and saw the shock and sorrow in that grey mask, and he cursed, bitterly, silently. And then these tired, dull eyes were on him and Turner hurriedly cleared his throat.

  ‘How many survivors does that make in the Sirrus now?’ he asked.

  Vallery lifted weary shoulders in the ghost of a shrug.

  ‘No idea, Commander. A hundred, possibly more. Why?’

  ‘A hundred,’ Turner mused. ‘And no-survivors-will-be-picked-up. I’m just wondering what old Orr’s going to say when he dumps that little lot in Admiral Starr’s lap when we get back to Scapa Flow!’

  THIRTEEN

  Saturday Afternoon

  The Sirrus was still a mile astern when her Aldis started flickering. Bentley took the message, turned to Vallery.

  ‘Signal, sir. “Have 25-30 injured men aboard. Three very serious cases, perhaps dying. Urgently require doctor.”’

  ‘Acknowledge,’ Vallery said. He hesitated a moment, then: ‘My compliments to Surgeon-Lieutenant Nicholls. Ask him to come to the bridge.’ He turned to the Commander, grinned faintly. ‘I somehow don’t see Brooks at his athletic best in a breeches buoy on a day like this. It’s going to be quite a crossing.’

  Turner looked again at the Sirrus, occasionally swinging through a 40° arc as she rolled and crashed her way up from the west.

  ‘It’ll be no picnic,’ he agreed. ‘Besides, breeches buoys aren’t made to accommodate the likes of our venerable chief surgeon.’ Funny, Turner thought, how matter-of-fact and offhand everyone was: nobody had as much as mentioned the Vectra since she’d rammed the U-boat.

  The gate creaked. Vallery turned round slowly, acknowledged Nicholls’s sketchy salute.

  ‘The Sirrus needs a doctor,’ he said without preamble. ‘How do you fancy it?’

  Nicholls steadied himself against the canted bridge and the rolling of the cruiser. Leave the Ulysses—suddenly, he hated the thought, was amazed at himself for his reaction. He, Johnny Nicholls, unique, among the officers anyway, in his thorough-going detestation and intolerance of all things naval—to feel like that! Must be going soft in the head. And just as suddenly he knew that his mind wasn’t slipping, knew why he wanted to stay. It was not a matter of pride or principle or sentiment: it was just that—well, just that he belonged. The feeling of belonging—even to himself he couldn’t put it more accurately, more clearly than that, but it affected him strangely, powerfully. Suddenly he became aware that curious eyes were on him, looked out in confusion over the rolling sea.

  ‘Well?’ Vallery’s voice was edged with impatience.

  ‘I don’t fancy it at all,’ Nicholls said frankly. ‘But of course I’ll go, sir. Right now?’

  ‘As soon as you can get your stuff together,’ Vallery nodded.

  ‘That’s now. We have an emergency kit packed all the time.’ He cast a jaundiced eye over the heavy sea again. ‘What am I supposed to do, sir—jump?’

  ‘Perish the thought!’ Turner clamped him on the back with a large and jovial hand. ‘You haven’t a thing to worry about,’ he boomed cheerfully, ‘you positively won’t feel a thing—these, if I recall rightly, were your exact words to me when you extracted that old molar of mine two-three weeks back.’ He winced in painful recollection. ‘Breeches buoy, laddie, breeches buoy!’

  ‘Breeches buoy!’ Nicholls protested. ‘Haven’t noticed the weather, have you? I’ll be going up and down like a blasted yo-yo!’

  ‘The ignorance of youth.’ Turner shook his head sadly. ‘We’ll be turning into the sea, of course. It’ll be like a ride in a Rolls, my boy! We’re going to rig it now.’ He tur
ned away. ‘Chrysler—get on to Chief Petty Officer Hartley. Ask him to come up to the bridge.’

  Chrysler gave no sign of having heard. He was in his usual favourite position these days—gloved hands on the steam pipes, the top half of his face crushed into the rubber eyepiece of the powerful binoculars on the starboard searchlight control. Every few seconds a hand would drop, revolve the milled training rack a fraction. Then again the complete immobility.

  ‘Chrysler!’ Turner roared. ‘Are you deaf?’

  Three, four, five more seconds passed in silence. Every eye was on Chrysler when he suddenly jerked back, glanced down at the bearing indicator, then swung round. His face was alive with excitement.

  ‘Green one-double-oh!’ he shouted. ‘Green onedouble-oh! Aircraft. Just on the horizon!’ He fairly flung himself back at his binoculars. ‘Four, seven—no, ten! Ten aircraft!’ he yelled.

  ‘Green one-double-oh?’ Turner had his glasses to his eyes. ‘Can’t see a thing! Are you sure, boy?’ he called anxiously.

  ‘Still the same, sir.’ There was no mistaking the agitated conviction in the young voice.

  Turner was through the gate and beside him in four swift steps. ‘Let me have a look,’ he ordered. He gazed through the glasses, twisted the training rack once or twice, then stepped back slowly, heavy eyebrows lowering in anger.

  ‘There’s something bloody funny here, young man!’ he growled. ‘Either your eyesight or your imagination? And if you ask me—’

  ‘He’s right,’ Carrington interrupted calmly. ‘I’ve got ’em, too.’

  ‘So have I, sir!’ Bentley shouted.

  Turner wheeled back to the mounted glasses, looked through them briefly, stiffened, looked round at Chrysler.

  ‘Remind me to apologize some day!’ he smiled, and was back on the compass platform before he had finished speaking.

  ‘Signal to convoy,’ Vallery was saying rapidly. ‘Code H. Full ahead. Number One. Bosun’s mate? Broadcaster: stand by all guns. Commander?’