H. M. S. Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Independent targets, independent fire all AA guns? Agreed? And the turrets?

  ‘Couldn’t say yet . . . Chrysler, can you make out—’

  ‘Condors, sir,’ Chrysler anticipated him.

  ‘Condors!’ Turner stared in disbelief. ‘A dozen Condors! Are you sure that . . . Oh, all right, all right!’ he broke off hastily. ‘Condors they are.’ He shook his head in wonderment, turned to Vallery. ‘Where’s my bloody tin hat? Condors, he says!’

  ‘So Condors they are,’ Vallery repeated, smiling. Turner marvelled at the repose, the unruffled calm.

  ‘Bridge targets, independent fire control for all turrets?’ Vallery went on.

  ‘I think so, sir.’ Turner looked at the two communication ratings just aft of the compass platform—one each on the group phones to the for’ard and after turrets. ‘Ears pinned back, you two. And hop to it when you get the word.’

  Vallery beckoned to Nicholls.

  ‘Better get below, young man,’ he advised. ‘Sorry your little trip’s been postponed.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Nicholls said bluntly.

  ‘No?’ Vallery was smiling. ‘Scared?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Nicholls smiled back. ‘Not scared. And you know I wasn’t.’

  ‘I know you weren’t,’ Vallery agreed quietly. ‘I know—and thank you.’

  He watched Nicholls walk off the bridge, beckoned to the WT messenger, then turned to the Kapok Kid.

  ‘When was our last signal to the Admiralty, Pilot? Have a squint at the log.’

  ‘Noon yesterday,’ said the Kapok Kid readily.

  ‘Don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ Vallery murmured. ‘Present position?’

  ‘72.20 north, 13.40 east.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He looked at Turner. ‘No point in radio silence now, Commander?’

  Turner shook his head.

  ‘Take this message,’ Vallery said quickly. ‘To DNO, London . . . How are our friends doing, Commander?’

  ‘Circling well to the west, sir. Usual high altitude, gambit from the stern, I suppose,’ he added morosely. ‘Still,’ he brightened, ‘cloud level’s barely a thousand feet.’

  Vallery nodded. ‘“FR77. 1600. 72.20, 13.40. Steady on 090. Force 9, north, heavy swell: Situation desperate. Deeply regret Admiral Tyndall died 1200 today. Tanker Vytura torpedoed last night, sunk by self. Washington State sunk 0145 to-day. Vectra sunk 1515, collision U-boat. Electra sunk 1530. Am being heavily attacked by twelve, minimum twelve, Focke-Wulf 200s.” A reasonable assumption, I think, Commander,’ he said wryly, ‘and it’ll shake their Lordships. They’re of the opinion there aren’t so many Condors in the whole of Norway. “Imperative send help. Air cover essential. Advise immediately.” Get that off at once, will you?’

  ‘Your nose, sir!’ Turner said sharply.

  ‘Thank you.’ Vallery rubbed the frostbite, dead white in the haggard grey and blue of his face, gave up after a few seconds: the effort was more trouble than it was worth, drained away too much of his tiny reserves of strength.

  Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet, swept his glasses over FR77. Code H was being obeyed. The ships were scattered over the sea apparently at random, broken out from the two lines ahead which would have made things far too simple for bomb-aimers in aircraft attacking from astern. They would have to aim now for individual targets. Scattered, but not too scattered—close enough together to derive mutual benefit from the convoy’s concerted barrage. Vallery nodded to himself in satisfaction and twisted round, his glasses swivelling to the west.

  There was no mistaking them now, he thought—they were Condors, all right. Almost dead astern now, massive wingtips dipping, the big four-engined planes banked slowly, ponderously to starboard, then straightened on a 180° overtaking course. And they were climbing, steadily climbing.

  Two things were suddenly clear to Vallery, two things the enemy obviously knew. They had known where to find FR77— the Luftwaffe was not given to sending heavy bombers out over the Arctic on random hazard: they hadn’t even bothered to send Charlie on reconnaissance. For a certainty, some submarine had located them earlier on, given their position and course: at any distance at all, their chance of seeing a periscope in that heavy sea had been remote. Further, the German knew that the Ulysses’s radar was gone. The Focke-Wulfs were climbing to gain the low cloud, would break cover only seconds before it was time to bomb. Against radar-controlled fire, at such close range, it would have been near suicide. But they knew it was safe.

  Even as he watched, the last of the labouring Condors climbed through the low, heavy ceiling, was completely lost to sight. Vallery shrugged wearily, lowered his binoculars.

  ‘Bentley?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Code R. Immediate.’

  The flags fluttered up. For fifteen, twenty seconds—it seemed ten times as long as that to the impatient Captain—nothing happened. And then, like rolling toy marionettes under the hand of a master puppeteer, the bows of every ship in the convoy began to swing round—those to the port of the Ulysses to the north, those to the starboard to the south. When the Condors broke through—two minutes, at the most, Vallery reckoned, they would find beneath them only the empty sea. Empty, that is, except for the Ulysses and the Stirling, ships admirably equipped to take care of themselves. And then the Condors would find themselves under heavy cross-fire from the merchant ships and destroyers, and too late—at that low altitude, much too late—to alter course for fore-and-aft bombing runs on the freighters. Vallery smiled wryly to himself. As a defensive tactic, it was little enough, but the best he could do in the circumstances . . . He could hear Turner barking orders through the loudspeaker, was more than content to leave the defence of the ship in the Commander’s competent hands. If only he himself didn’t feel so tired . . .

  Ninety seconds passed, a hundred, two minutes—and still no sign of the Condors. A hundred eyes stared out into the cloud-wrack astern: it remained obstinately, tantalizingly grey and featureless.

  Two and a half minutes passed. Still there was nothing.

  ‘Anybody seen anything?’ Vallery asked anxiously. His eyes never left that patch of cloud astern. ‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’ The silence remained oppressive, unbroken.

  Three minutes. Three and a half. Four. Vallery looked away to rest his straining eyes, caught Turner looking at him, caught the growing apprehension, the slow dawn and strengthening of surmise in the lean face. Wordlessly, at the same instant, they swung round, staring out into the sky ahead.

  ‘That’s it!’ Vallery said quickly. ‘You’re right, Commander, you must be!’ He was aware that everyone had turned now, was peering ahead as intently as himself. ‘They’ve by-passed us, they’re going to take us from ahead. Warn the guns! Dear God, they almost had us!’ he whispered softly.

  ‘Eyes skinned, everyone!’ Turner boomed. The apprehension was gone, the irrepressible joviality, the gratifying anticipation of action was back again. ‘And I mean everyone! We’re all in the same boat together. No joke intended. Fourteen days’ leave to the first man to sight a Condor!’

  ‘Effective as from when?’ the Kapok Kid asked dryly.

  Turner grinned at him. Then the smile died, the head lifted sharply in sudden attention.

  ‘Can you hear ’em?’ he asked. His voice was soft, almost as if he feared the enemy might be listening. ‘They’re up there, somewhere—damned if I can tell where, though. If only that wind—’

  The vicious, urgent thudding of the boat-deck Oerlikons stopped him dead in mid-sentence, had him whirling round and plunging for the broadcast transmitter in one galvanic, concerted movement. But even then he was too late—he would have been too late anyway. The Condors—the first three in line ahead, were already visible— were already through the cloud, 500 feet up and barely half a mile away—dead astern. Astern. The bombers must have circled back to the west as soon as they had reached the clouds, completely fooled them as to their intentions . . . Six
seconds—six seconds is time and to spare for even a heavy bomber to come less than half a mile in a shallow dive. There was barely time for realization, for the first bitter welling of mortification and chagrin when the Condors were on them.

  It was almost dusk, now, the weird half-light of the Arctic twilight. Tracers, glowing hot pinpoints of light streaking out through the darkening sky, were clearly seen, at first swinging erratically, fading away to extinction in the far distance, then steadying, miraculously dying in the instant of birth as they sank home into the fuselages of the swooping Condors. But time was too short—the guns were on target for a maximum of two seconds—and these giant Focke-Wulfs had a tremendous capacity for absorbing punishment. The leading Condor levelled out about three hundred feet, its medium 250-kilo bombs momentarily paralleling its line of flight, then arching down lazily towards the Ulysses. At once the Condor pulled its nose up in maximum climb, the four great engines labouring in desynchronized clamour, as it sought the protection of the clouds.

  The bombs missed. They missed by about thirty feet, exploding on contact with the water just abaft the bridge. For the men in the TS, engine- and boiler-rooms, the crash and concussion must have been frightful—literally ear-shattering. Waterspouts, twenty feet in diameter at their turbulent bases, streaked up whitely into the twilight, high above the truncated masts, hung there momentarily, then collapsed in drenching cascades on the bridge and boat-deck aft, soaking, saturating, every gunner on the pom-pom and in the open Oerlikon cockpits. The temperature stood at 2° above zero— 30° of frost.

  More dangerously, the blinding sheets of water completely unsighted the gunners. Apart from a lone Oerlikon on a sponson below the starboard side of the bridge, the next Condor pressed home its attack against a minimum of resistance. The approach was perfect, dead fore-and-aft on the centre line; but the pilot overshot, probably in his anxiety to hold course. Three bombs this time: for a second, it seemed that they must miss, but the first smashed into the fo’c’sle between the breakwater and the capstan, exploding in the flat below, heaving up the deck in a tangled wreckage of broken steel. Even as the explosion died, the men on the bridge could hear a curious clanking rattle: the explosion must have shattered the fo’c’sle capstan and Blake stopper simultaneously, and sheared the retaining shackle on the anchor cable, and the starboard anchor, completely out of control, was plummeting down to the depths of the Arctic.

  The other bombs fell into the sea directly ahead, and from the Stirling, a mile ahead, it seemed that the Ulysses disappeared under the great column of water. But the water subsided, and the Ulysses steamed on, apparently unharmed. From dead ahead, the sweeping lift of the bows hid all damage, and there was neither flame nor smoke—hundreds of gallons of water, falling from the sky and pouring in through the great jagged holes in the deck, had killed any fire there was. The Ulysses was still a lucky ship . . . And then, at last, after twenty months of the fantastic escapes, the fabulous good fortune that had made her a legend, a byword for immunity throughout all the north, the luck of the Ulysses ran out.

  Ironically, the Ulysses brought disaster on herself. The main armament, the 5.25s aft, had opened up now, was pumping its 100-lb shells at the diving bombers, at point-blank range and over equivalent of open sights. The very first shell from ‘X’ turret sheared away the starboard wing of the third Condor between the engines, tore it completely away to spin slowly like a fluttering leaf into the darkly-rolling sea. For a fraction of a second the Folke-Wulf held on course, then abruptly the nose tipped over and the giant plane screamed down in an almost vertical dive, her remaining engines inexplicably accelerating to a deafening crescendo as she hurtled arrowstraight for the deck of the Ulysses.

  There was no time to take any avoiding action, no time to think, no time even to hope. A cluster of jettisoned bombs crashed in to the boiling wake—the Ulysses was already doing upwards of thirty knots—and two more crashed through the poop-deck, the first exploding in the after seamen’s mess-deck, the other in the marines’ mess-deck. One second later, with a tremendous roar and in a blinding sheet of gasoline flame, the Condor itself, at a speed of upwards of three hundred mph, crashed squarely into the front of ‘Y’ turret.

  Incredibly, that was the last attack on the Ulysses—incredibly, because the Ulysses was defenceless now, wide open to any air attack from astern. ‘Y’ turret was gone, ‘X’ turret, still magically undamaged, was half-buried under the splintered wreckage of the Condor, blinded by the smoke and leaping flame. The boat-deck Oerlikons, too, had fallen silent. The gunners, half-drowned under the deluge of less than a minute ago, were being frantically dragged from their cockpits: a difficult enough task at any time, it was almost impossible with their clothes already frozen solid, their duffels cracking and crackling like splintering matchwood as the men were dragged over the side of their cockpits. With all speed, they were rushed below, thrust into the galley passage to thaw, literally to thaw: agony, excruciating agony, but the only alternative to the quick and certain death which would have come to them in their ice-bound cockpits.

  The remaining Condors had pulled away in a slow climbing turn to starboard. They were surrounded, bracketed fore and aft and on either side, by scores of woolly, expanding puffs of exploding AA shells, but they flew straight through these, charmed, unhurt. Already, they were beginning to disappear into the clouds, to settle down on a south-east course for home. Strange, Vallery thought vaguely, one would have expected them to hammer home their initial advantage of surprise, to concentrate on the crippled Ulysses: certainly, thus far the Condor crews had shown no lack of courage . . . He gave it up, turned his attention to more immediate worries. And there was plenty to worry about.

  The Ulysses was heavily on fire aft—a deck and mess-deck fire, admittedly, but potentially fatal for all that—‘X’ and ‘Y’ magazines were directly below. Already, dozens of men from the damage control parties were running aft, stumbling and falling on the rolling ice-covered deck, unwinding the hose drums behind them, occasionally falling flat on their faces as two ice-bound coils locked together, the abruptly tightening hose jerking them off their feet. Others stumbled past them, carrying the big, red foam-extinguishers on their shoulders or under their arms. One unfortunate seaman—A.B. Ferry who had left the Sick Bay in defiance of strict orders—running down the port alley past the shattered Canteen, slipped and fell abreast ‘X’ turret: the port wing of the Condor, even as it had sheared off and plunged into the sea, had torn away the guard-rails here, and Ferry, hands and feet scrabbling frantically at the smooth ice of the deck, his broken arm clawing uselessly at one of the remaining stanchions, slid slowly, inevitably over the side and was gone. For a second, the high-pitched, fear-stricken shriek rose thin and clear above the roaring of the flames, died abruptly as the water closed over him. The propellers were almost immediately below.

  The men with the extinguishers were the first into action, as, indeed, they had to be when fighting a petrol fire—water would only have made matters worse, have increased the area of the fire by washing the petrol in all directions, and the petrol, being lighter than water, immiscible and so floating to the top, would have burned as furiously as ever. But the foam-extinguishers were of only limited efficiency, not so much because several release valves had jammed solid in the intense cold as because of the intense white heat which made close approach almost impossible, while the smaller carbon-tet extinguishers, directed against electrical fires below, were shockingly ineffective: these extinguishers had never been in action before and the crew of the Ulysses had known for a long time of the almost magical properties of the extinguisher liquid for removing the most obstinate stains and marks in clothes. You may convince a WT rating of the lethal nature of 2,000 volts: you may convince a gunner of the madness of matches in a magazine: you may convince a torpedoman of the insanity of juggling with fulminate of mercury: but you will never convince any of them of the criminal folly of draining off just a few drops of carbon-tetrachloride . . .
Despite stringent periodical checks, most of the extinguishers were only half-full. Some were completely empty.

  The hoses were little more effective. Two were coupled up to the starboard mains and the valves turned: the hoses remained lifeless, empty. The starboard salt-water line had frozen solid—common enough with fresh-water systems, this, but not with salt. A third hose on the port side was coupled up, but the release valve refused to turn: attacked with hammers and crowbars, it sheered off at the base—at extremely low temperatures, molecular changes occur in metals, cut tensile strength to a fraction—the high-pressure water drenching everyone in the vicinity. Spicer, the dead Admiral’s pantry-boy, a stricken-eyed shadow of his former cheerful self, flung away his hammer and wept in anger and frustration. The other port valve worked, but it took an eternity for the water to force its way through the flattened frozen hose.

  Gradually, the deck fire was brought under control—less through the efforts of the firefighters than the fact that there was little inflammable material left after the petrol had burnt off. Hoses and extinguishers were then directed through the great jagged rents on the poop to the figures roaring in the mess-deck below, while two asbestos-suited figures clambered over and struggled through the red-hot, jangled mass of smoking wreckage on the poop. Nicholls had one of the suits, Leading Telegraphist Brown, a specialist in rescue work, the other.

  Brown was the first on the scene. Picking his way gingerly, he climbed up to the entrance of ‘Y’ turret. Watchers in the port and starboard alleyways saw him pause there, fighting to tie back the heavy steel door—it had been crashing monotonously backwards and forwards with the rolling of the cruiser. Then they saw him step inside. Less than ten seconds later they saw him appear at the door again, on his knees and clutching desperately at the side for support. His entire body was arching convulsively and he was being violently sick into his oxygen mask.

  Nicholls saw this, wasted time neither on ‘Y’ turret nor on the charred skeletons still trapped in the incinerated fuselage of the Condor. He climbed quickly up the vertical steel ladders to ‘X’ gun-deck, moved round to the back and tried to open the door. The clips were jammed, immovable—whether from cold or metal distortion he did not know. He looked round for some lever, stepped aside as he saw Doyle, duffel coat smouldering, haggard face set and purposeful under the beard, approaching with a sledge in his hand. A dozen heavy, well-directed blows—the clanging, Nicholls thought, must be almost intolerable inside the hollow amplifier of the turret—and the door was open. Doyle secured it, stepped aside to let Nicholls enter.