H. M. S. Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  It was Turner who finally broke the heavy silence on the bridge. He turned away and in the light of the flare his face was not pleasant to see.

  ‘Au revoir,’ he muttered to no one in particular. ‘Au revoir. That’s what he said, the lying . . . ’ He shook his head angrily, touched the Kapok Kid on the arm. ‘Get through to WT,’ he said sharply. ‘Tell the Viking to sit over the top of that sub till we get clear.’

  ‘Where’s it all going to end?’ Brooks’s face was still and heavy in the twilight.

  ‘God knows! How I hate those murdering bastards!’ Turner ground out. ‘Oh, I know, I know, we do the same—but give me something I can see, something I can fight, something—’

  ‘You’ll be able to see the Tirpitz all right,’ Carrington interrupted dryly. ‘By all accounts, she’s big enough.’

  Turner looked at him, suddenly smiled. He clapped his arm, then craned his head back, staring up at the shimmering loveliness of the sky. He wondered when the next flare would drop.

  ‘Have you a minute to spare, Johnny?’ The Kapok Kid’s voice was low. ‘I’d like to speak to you.’

  ‘Sure.’ Nicholls looked at him in surprise. ‘Sure, I’ve a minute, ten minutes—until the Sirrus comes up. What’s wrong, Andy?’

  ‘Just a second.’ The Kapok Kid crossed to the Commander. ‘Permission to go to the charthouse, sir?’

  ‘Sure you’ve got your matches?’ Turner smiled. ‘OK. Off you go.’

  The Kapok Kid smiled faintly, said nothing. He took Nicholls by the arm, led him into the charthouse, flicked on the lights and produced his cigarettes. He looked steadily at Nicholls as he dipped his cigarette into the flickering pool of flame.

  ‘Know something, Johnny?’ he said abruptly. ‘I reckon I must have Scotch blood in me.’

  ‘Scots,’ Nicholls corrected. ‘And perish the very thought.’

  ‘I’m feeling—what’s the word?—fey, isn’t it? I’m feeling fey tonight, Johnny.’ The Kapok Kid hadn’t even heard the interruption. He shivered. ‘I don’t know why—I’ve never felt this way before.’

  ‘Ah, nonsense! Indigestion, my boy,’ Nicholls said briskly. But he felt strangely uncomfortable.

  ‘Won’t wash this time.’ Carpenter shook his head, half-smiling. ‘Besides, I haven’t eaten a thing for two days. I’m, on the level, Johnny.’ In spite of himself, Nicholls was impressed. Emotion, gravity, earnestness—these were utterly alien to the Kapok Kid.

  ‘I won’t be seeing you again,’ the Kapok Kid continued softly. ‘Will you do me a favour, Johnny?’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Nicholls said angrily. ‘How the hell do you—?’

  ‘Take this with you.’ The Kapok Kid pulled out a slip of paper, thrust it into Nicholls’s hands. ‘Can you read it?’

  ‘I can read it.’ Nicholls had stilled his anger. ‘Yes, I can read it.’ There was a name and address on the sheet of paper, a girl’s name and a Surrey address. ‘So that’s her name,’ he said softly. ‘Juanita . . . Juanita.’ He pronounced it carefully, accurately, in the Spanish fashion. ‘My favourite song and my favourite name,’ he murmured.

  ‘Is it?’ the Kapok Kid asked eagerly. ‘Is it indeed? And mine, Johnny.’ He paused. ‘If, perhaps—well, if I don’t—well, you’ll go to see her, Johnny?’

  ‘What are you talking about, man?’ Nicholls felt embarrassed. Half-impatiently, half-playfully, he tapped him on the chest. ‘Why, with that suit on, you could swim from here to Murmansk. You’ve said so yourself, a hundred times.’

  The Kapok Kid grinned up at him. The grin was a little crooked.

  ‘Sure, sure, I know, I know—will you go, Johnny?’

  ‘Dammit to hell, yes!’ Nicholls snapped. ‘I’ll go—and it’s high time I was going somewhere else. Come on!’ He snapped off the lights, pulled back the door, stopped with his foot halfway over the sill. Slowly, he stepped back inside the charthouse, closed the door and flicked on the light. The Kapok Kid hadn’t moved, was gazing quietly at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ Nicholls said sincerely. ‘I don’t know what made me—’

  ‘Bad temper,’ said the Kapok Kid cheerfully. ‘You always did hate to think that I was right and you were wrong!’

  Nicholls caught his breath, closed his eyes for a second. Then he stretched out his hand.

  ‘All the best, Vasco.’ It was an effort to smile. ‘And don’t worry. I’ll see her if—well, I’ll see her, I promise you. Juanita . . . But if I find you there,’ he went on threateningly, ‘I’ll—’

  ‘Thanks, Johnny. Thanks a lot.’ The Kapok Kid was almost happy. ‘Good luck, boy . . . Vaya con Dios. That’s what she always said to me, what she said before I came away. “Vaya con Dios.”’

  Thirty minutes later, Nicholls was operating aboard the Sirrus.

  The time was 0445. It was bitterly cold, with a light wind blowing steadily from the north. The seas were heavier than ever, longer between the crests, deeper in their gloomy troughs, and the damaged Sirrus, labouring under a mountain of ice, was making heavy weather of it. The sky was still clear, a sky of breath-taking purity, and the stars were out again, for the Northern Lights were fading. The fifth successive flare was drifting steadily seawards.

  It was at 0445 that they heard it—the distant rumble of gunfire far to the south—perhaps a minute after they had seen the incandescent brilliance of a burning flare on the rim of the far horizon. There could be no doubt as to what was happening. The Viking, still in contact with the U-boat, although powerless to do anything about it, was being heavily attacked. And the attack must have been short, sharp and deadly, for the firing ceased soon after it had begun. Ominously, nothing came through on the WT. No one ever knew what had happened to the Viking, for there were no survivors.

  The last echo of the Viking’s guns had barely died away before they heard the roar of the engines of the Condor, at maximum throttle in a shallow dive. For five, perhaps ten seconds—it seemed longer than that, but not long enough for any gun in the convoy to begin tracking him accurately—the great Focke-Wulf actually flew beneath his own flare, and then was gone. Behind him, the sky opened up in a blinding coruscation of flame, more dazzling, more hurtful, than the light of the noonday sun. So intense, so extraordinary the power of those flares, so much did pupils contract and eyelids narrow in instinctive self-protection, that the enemy bombers were through the circle of light and upon them before anyone fully realized what was happening. The timing, the split-second co-operation between marker planes and bombers were magnificent.

  There were twelve planes in the first wave. There was no concentration on one target, as before: not more than two attacked any ship. Turner, watching from the bridge, watching them swoop down steeply and level out before even the first gun in the Ulysses had opened up, caught his breath in sudden dismay. There was something terribly familiar about the speed, the approach, the silhouette of these planes. Suddenly he had it—Heinkels, by God! Heinkel 111s. And the Heinkel 111, Turner knew, carried that weapon he dreaded above all others—the glider bomb.

  And then, as if he had touched a master switch, every gun on the Ulysses opened up. The air filled with smoke, the pungent smell of burning cordite: the din was indescribable. And all at once, Turner felt fiercely, strangely happy . . . To hell with them and their glider bombs, he thought. This was war as he liked to fight it: not the cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek frustration of trying to outguess the hidden wolf-packs, but war out in the open, where he could see the enemy and hate him and love him for fighting as honest men should and do his damnedest to destroy him. And, Turner knew, if they could at all, the crew of the Ulysses would destroy him. It needed no great sensitivity to direct the sea-change that had overtaken his men—yes, his men now: they no longer cared for themselves: they had crossed the frontier of fear and found that nothing lay beyond it and they would keep on feeding their guns and squeezing their triggers until the enemy overwhelmed them.

  The leading Heinkel was blown out of the sky, a
nd fitting enough it was ‘X’ turret that destroyed it—‘X’ turret, the turret of dead marines, the turret that had destroyed the Condor, and was now manned by a scratch marine crew. The Heinkel behind lifted sharply to avoid the hurtling fragments of fuselage and engines, dipped, flashed past the cruiser’s bows less than a boat-length away, banked steeply to port under maximum power, and swung back in on the Ulysses. Every gun on the ship was caught on the wrong foot, and seconds passed before the first one was brought to bear—time and to spare for the Heinkel to angle in at 60°, drop his bomb and slew frantically away as the concentrated fire of the Oerlikons and pom-poms closed in on him. Miraculously, he escaped.

  The winged bomb was high, but not high enough. It wavered, steadied, dipped, then glided forwards and downwards through the drifting smoke of the guns to strike home with a tremendous, deafening explosion that shook the Ulysses to her keel and almost shattered the eardrums of those on deck.

  To Turner, looking aft from the bridge, it seemed that the Ulysses could never survive this last assault. An ex-torpedo officer and explosives expert himself, he was skilled in assessing the disruptive power of high explosive: never before had he been so close to so powerful, so devastating an explosion. He had dreaded these glider bombs, but even so he had under-estimated their power: the concussion had been double, treble what he had been expecting.

  What Turner did not know was that what he had heard had been not one explosion but two, but so nearly simultaneous as to be indistinguishable. The glider bomb, by a freakish chance, had crashed directly into the port torpedo tubes. There had been only one torpedo left there—the other two had sent the Vytura to the bottom— and normally Amatol, the warhead explosive, is extremely stable and inert, even when subjected to violent shock: but the bursting bomb had been too close, too powerful: sympathetic detonation had been inevitable.

  Damage was extensive and spectacular: it was severe, but not fatal. The side of the Ulysses had been ripped open, as by a giant can-opener, almost to the water’s edge: the tubes had vanished: the decks were holed and splintered: the funnel casing was a shambles, the funnel itself tilting over to port almost to fifteen degrees; but the greatest energy of the explosion had been directed aft, most of the blast expending itself over the open sea, while the galley and canteen, severely damaged already, were no more than a devil’s scrapyard.

  Almost before the dust and debris of the explosion had settled, the last of the Heinkels was disappearing, skimming the waves, weaving and twisting madly in evasive action, pursued and harried by a hundred glowing streams of tracer. Then, magically, they were gone, and there was only the sudden deafening silence and the flares, drooping slowly to extinction, lighting up the pall above the Ulysses, the dark clouds of smoke rolling up from the shattered Stirling and a tanker with its after superstructure almost gone. But not one of the ships in FR77 had faltered or stopped; and they had destroyed five Heinkels. A costly victory, Turner mused, if it could be called a victory; but he knew the Heinkels would be back. It was not difficult to imagine the fury, the hurt pride of the High Command in Norway: as far as Turner knew, no Russian Convoy had ever sailed so far south before.

  Riley eased a cramped leg, stretched it gently so as to avoid the great spinning shaft. Carefully he poured some oil on to the bearing, carefully, so as not to disturb the Engineer Commander, propped in sleep between the tunnel wall and Riley’s shoulder. Even as Riley drew back, Dodson stirred, opened heavy, gummed lids.

  ‘Good God above!’ he said wearily. ‘You still here, Riley?’ It was the first time either of them had spoken for hours.

  ‘It’s a—good job I am here,’ Riley growled. He nodded towards the bearing. ‘Bloody difficult to get a firehose down to this place, I should think!’ That was unfair, Riley knew: he and Dodson had been taking it in half-hour turns to doze and feed the bearing. But he felt he had to say something: he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep on being truculent to the Engineer Commander.

  Dodson grinned to himself, said nothing. Finally, he cleared his throat, murmured casually: The Tirpitz is taking its time about making its appearance, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Riley was uncomfortable. ‘Should ‘a’ been here long ago, damn her!’

  ‘Him,’ Dodson corrected absently. ‘Admiral von Tirpitz, you know . . . Why don’t you give up this foolishness, Riley?’

  Riley grunted, said nothing. Dodson sighed, then brightened.

  ‘Go and get some more coffee, Riley. I’m parched!’

  ‘No.’ Riley was blunt. ‘You get it.’

  ‘As a favour, Riley.’ Dodson was very gentle. ‘I’m damed thirsty!’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ The big stoker swore, climbed painfully to his feet. ‘Where’ll I get it?’

  ‘Plenty in the engine-room. If it’s not iced water they’re swigging, it’s coffee. But no iced water for me.’ Dodson shivered.

  Riley gathered up the Thermos, stumbled along the passage. He had only gone a few feet when they felt the Ulysses shudder under the recoil of the heavy armament. Although they did not know it, it was the beginning of the air attack.

  Dodson braced himself against the wall, saw Riley do the same, pause a second then hurry away in an awkward, stumbling run. There was something grotesquely familiar in that awkward run, Dodson thought. The guns surged back again and the figure scuttled even faster, like a giant crab in a panic . . . Panic, Dodson thought: that’s it, panic-stricken. Don’t blame the poor bastard—I’m beginning to imagine things myself down here. Again the whole tunnel vibrated, more heavily this time—that must be ‘X’ turret, almost directly above. No, I don’t blame him. Thank God he’s gone. He smiled quietly to himself. I won’t be seeing friend Riley again—he isn’t all that of a reformed character. Tiredly, Dodson settled back against the wall. On my own at last, he murmured to himself, and waited for the feeling of relief. But it never came. Instead, there was only a vexation and loneliness, a sense of desertion and a strangely empty disappointment.

  Riley was back inside a minute. He came back with that same awkward crab-like run, carrying a three-pint Thermos jug and two cups, cursing fluently and often as he slipped against the wall. Panting, wordlessly, he sat down beside Dodson, poured out a cup of steaming coffee.

  Why the hell did you have to come back?’ Dodson demanded harshly. ‘I don’t want you and—’ ‘You wanted coffee,’ Riley interrupted rudely. ‘You’ve got the bloody stuff. Drink it.’

  At that instant the explosion and the vibration from the explosion in the port tubes echoed weirdly down the dark tunnel, the shock flinging the two men heavily against each other. His whole cup of coffee splashed over Dodson’s leg: his mind was so tired, his reactions so slow, that his first realization was of how damnably cold he was, how chill that dripping tunnel. The scalding coffee had gone right through his clothes, but he could feel neither warmth nor wetness: his legs were numbed, dead below the knees. Then he shook his head, looked up at Riley.

  ‘What in God’s name was that? What’s happening? Did you—?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Didn’t stop to ask.’ Riley stretched himself luxuriously, blew on his steaming coffee. Then a happy thought struck him, and a broad cheerful grin came as near to transforming that face as would ever be possible.

  ‘It’s probably the Tirpitz,’ he said hopefully.

  Three times more during that terrible night, the German squadrons took off from the airfield at Alta Fjord, throbbed their way nor’-nor’-west through the bitter Arctic night, over the heaving Arctic sea, in search of the shattered remnants of FR77. Not that the search was difficult—the Focke-Wulf Condor stayed with them all night, defied their best attempts to shake him off. He seemed to have an endless supply of these deadly flares, and might very well have been—in fact, almost certainly was—carrying nothing else. And the bombers had only to steer for the flares.

  The first assault—about 0545—was an orthodox bombing attack, made from about 3,000 feet. The planes seemed to be D
orniers, but it was difficult to be sure, because they flew high above a trio of flares sinking close to the water level. As an attack, it was almost but not quite abortive, and was pressed home with no great enthusiasm. This was understandable: the barrage was intense. But there were two direct hits—one on a merchantman, blowing away most of the fo’c’sle, the other on the Ulysses. It sheered through the flag deck and the Admiral’s day cabin, and exploded in the heart of the Sick Bay. The Sick Bay was crowded with the sick and dying, and, for many, that bomb must have come as a God-sent release, for the Ulysses had long since run out of anaesthetics. There were no survivors. Among the dead was Marshall, the Torpedo Officer, Johnson, the Leading SBA, the Master-At-Arms who had been lightly wounded an hour before by a splinter from the torpedo tubes, Burgess, strapped helplessly in a strait-jacket—he had suffered concussion on the night of the great storm and gone insane. Brown, whose hip had been smashed by the hatch-cover of ‘Y’ magazine, and Brierley, who was dying anyway, his lungs saturated and rotted away with fuel oil. Brooks had not been there.

  The same explosion had also shattered the telephone exchange: barring only the bridgegun phones, and the bridge-engine phones and speaking-tubes, all communication lines in the Ulysses were gone.

  The second attack at 7 a.m., was made by only six bombers— Heinkels again, carrying glider-bombs. Obviously flying strictly under orders, they ignored the merchantmen and concentrated their attack solely on the cruisers. It was an expensive attack: the enemy lost all but two of their force in exchange for a single hit aft on the Stirling, a hit which, tragically, put both after guns out of action.

  Turner, red-eyed and silent, bareheaded in that sub-zero wind, and pacing the shattered bridge of the Ulysses, marvelled that the Stirling still floated, still fought back with everything she had. And then he looked at his own ship, less a ship, he thought wearily, than a floating shambles of twisted steel still scything impossibly through those heavy seas, and marvelled all the more. Broken, burning cruisers, cruisers ravaged and devastated to the point of destruction, were nothing new for Turner: he had seen the Trinidad and the Edinburgh being literally battered to death on these same Russian convoys. But he had never seen any ship, at any time, take such inhuman murderous punishment as the Ulysses and the obsolete Stirling and still live. He would not have believed it possible.