And so it proved. Six hours later they had turned downwind again and increased speed. As they resumed their passage, the officers reverted to their watches, though the weather remained thick and squally. In the icy drizzle that alternated with snow Clark was almost constantly on the bridge. Sheba was still in loose ice as he sought to drive her north-eastwards towards the South Cape of Spitsbergen along the limit of the ice pack. Jan Mayen was already many miles astern while far ahead on the starboard bow lay Bear Island.
They were not to know then, but they had been lucky. One of the other whalers, the Shera, while catching up with the convoy from Iceland, had accrued so much ice that she had capsized in the bad weather. Only three of her crew were rescued by their sister ship, the Svega. The convoy had suffered too. Apart from the disruptive influence of the ice, which caused problems in station-keeping for the columns of merchant ships, several of them straggled, while the destroyer Oribi had had her bows badly damaged and two men swept from her iron deck.
That was not the end of the affair, upon which the Sheba was a peripheral bit-player. On the following evening the shout of the wireless Aerator alerted Frobisher, the officer of the watch, to a plain-language distress message. It was transmitted in English, though the idiom suggested a foreign operator, for the desperate plea spoke of being ‘gunned’.
Called to the bridge, Clark could only guess at the cause of the problem.
‘I got a bearing, sir,’ the wireless-telegraphist, a man named Hills, called out.
‘Going to his assistance, sir?’ Frobisher asked, half way to the chart table to lay off a course.
‘No,’ Clark said. He could hear Gifford’s injunction not, under any circumstances, to be diverted. ‘No, that is not what we are here for.’
A moment’s silence followed this and then they buried their awkwardness in wild speculation. From now on intermittent radio intercepts suggested convoy PQ12 was under attack.
This was inaccurate. PQ12 had come close to disaster, but she had avoided being intercepted. Although the Tirpitz and her attending destroyers were indeed at sea and it was one of the latter that had gunned the straggling freighter Ijora, this Russian ship had not been part of PQ12. In fact she had been part of the west-bound return convoy of empty ships codenamed QP8.
A deadly game of almost-blind man’s bluff was going on, an inconclusive action in which both of the convoys evaded the Tirpitz and she in turn escaped the Home Fleet. Later, Hills heard part of a transmission from Admiral Tovey, who, as the weather frustrated his operations, had broken radio silence.
‘I think,’ said Hills as Clark hung in the doorway of his cuddy, ‘the C-in-C’s having trouble with his communications. I get the impression that he’s asking the Admiralty to take direct operational control of something…’
‘Good God!’
Whatever the source of Hills’ speculation, Clark was to recall those words years later. In fact, far to the south-west a tense drama was being played out as, between the two convoys drawing apart on their respective passages, Tovey sought to nail the Tirpitz with torpedo bombers from his carrier, HMS Victorious. But so slow were the Albacore aircraft, flying into an easterly wind, and so fast was the retreating Tirpitz and her single escorting destroyer, that the latters’ advantage in speed was a mere 30 knots! Despite gallantly pressing their attack, the Albacores failed to score any hits and several were lost. The German capital ship vanished into the Vestfjord, heading for Narvik.
Clark’s orders were now to take him and his ship out of the immediate theatre of these operations. Having made his passage, he was now to await the news that would initiate the secret British counter-stroke to Berlin’s own critical operation.
That night, however, following his abrupt order not to go to the assistance of the Ijora, he called all his officers up to the wheelhouse at 2000 at the change of watch. As he waited for them, standing at the forward windows alongside Frobisher, they heard Pearson’s voice. Frobisher sighed audibly.
‘It’s a bloody outrage!’ Pearson was protesting as he led Storheill and Olsen into the wheelhouse.
‘What is, Derek?’ Clark asked wearily.
‘I heard on the BBC Home Service, sir, an announcement that a large and valuable convoy – a large and valuable convoy, mark you, sir – was on its way to Russia! I think that’s a bloody outrage.’
Clark looked at Frobisher, who shrugged. ‘C’est la guerre, sir,’ he said obscurely.
Clark coughed and called out to the wireless-telegraphists, just then changing watch themselves, that they too should come and listen to what he was going to say. He would be repeating it shortly to the ratings below. ‘I shall only detain you a few moments, gentlemen, but you may have heard that we have not diverted to the assistance of a merchant ship when she was under attack. It is time to tell you the objective of the special service upon which we are engaged. We are to seek out and destroy a large, super U-boat – a submarine cruiser, in fact – which will shortly arrive in the Arctic with a view to attacking our Russian convoys from the north.
‘Accordingly we shall be making some adjustments to the ship and carrying out exercises designed to simulate various scenarios in the next few days. That is all.’
* * *
He looked round the faces. Only Frobisher still stared forward as Sheba steamed east through the loose pack.
‘Starboard twenty,’ the first lieutenant said, dodging a large growler which lay wallowing almost awash athwart their passage.
Then Pearson came forward to relieve Frobisher as Storheill, remarking on the news to Olsen in Norwegian, went below to his bunk, leaving his fellow countryman to inspect his boilers and engine.
Clark turned forward. Beyond the Sheba’s high bow, with the four-inch gun on its platform, the Barents Sea was dark grey-blue, dotted with grey-white ice floes and bergy bits until it faded into the mist. With an almost biblical suddenness the visibility lifted, transforming the vista. The horizon, from being a milky obscurity three or four miles ahead, was now a sharp line perhaps thirty miles away. Above it a mirage lifted and distorted the fantastic shapes of distant icebergs. Closer to, the bergy bits sparkled, their odd shapes iridescent in the brilliant sunshine, the shadowed surfaces cobalt blue and emerald green in an astonishing transformation that drew an exclamation from Frobisher.
‘Good grief.’
Clark smiled as Frobisher turned to Pearson, standing ready to relieve him of the watch. White glaucous gulls wheeled about and a dark cluster of little auks dotted a passing floe of old and hummocked ice. ‘That’s even shut you up, Derek.’
‘Thank you, Number One,’ Pearson said in a low voice, adding wistfully, ‘What a pity we have to be at war…’
‘Yes,’ said Frobisher as awed as his more impressionable younger colleague, ‘but then I don’t suppose we’d be here otherwise.’
‘No, that’s true,’ Pearson responded.
‘How pleasant to hear you two agreeing,’ Clark said pointedly. It was the first time Clark had heard the two men in accord.
Frobisher quickly changed the subject. ‘The adjustments to the ship, sir. I presume you mean to paint her white?’
‘Yes, that’s quite right.’
‘That means we could be up here some time.’
Clark shrugged. ‘It’s possible, certainly; but it would be foolish to bank on it. Hand over to Derek and let’s have a look at the chart.’ Clark left Frobisher to pass over the details of course and speed to Pearson and, going to the chart table, drew out Admiralty chart No2751. It showed the Svalbard Archipelago, better – though incorrectly – known as Spitsbergen, of which Vest Spitsbergen was but the largest and most accessible island. Drawing a sheet of folded foolscap from his breast pocket, Clark began to manipulate parallel rules, dividers and a soft-leaded pencil. He had been working for only a few moments when Frobisher joined him.
Clark stopped what he was doing and drew back so that the first lieutenant could see the chart. Just above its southern margin lay Be
ar Island, Bjønøya; 120 miles further north lay the South Cape of Vest Spitsbergen, actually an offshoot of the main island. Along the west coast, which trended northwards, lay the deep indentations of Horn Sound, Bell Sound and Icefjord. Running to the north-north-eastwards from the South Cape, the east coast of Vest Spitsbergen had no such inlets and off it lay two large islands named after early navigators in these remote waters, the Englishman, Edge, and the Dutchman, Barents. The strait between them was called the Storfjord; to the north of Barents Island the coast swung north-north-west, bordering the Hindlopen Strait, on the far side of which lay North East Land, an island under permafrost and from which fell the largest glacier in Europe. All round the coasts of the two large and two smaller islands, scores of lesser isles and smaller archipelagos were dotted. Clark laid his right index finger on the largest and most isolated of these, which lay to the south-east of Edge Island and on roughly the same parallel of latitude as the South Cape.
‘Hopen,’ he said, ‘or Hope Island to you, Number One; or even Sea Horse Island, for that’s what Worsley used to call it, though I understand it was named by a whaling master from Hull called Marmaduke, after his ship, the Hopewell. Anyway, that is where we shall make for and from where we will start our search. We are unlikely to get anywhere near the place, though if we are up here for three or four months the ice will retreat…’
‘Three or four months!’ Frobisher exclaimed with such astonishment that both Pearson and the man at the wheel turned and regarded them. ‘I beg pardon…’ he mumbled, embarrassed.
‘Number One,’ Clark said in a low voice, ‘I have absolutely no idea how long we will be here. We may be in action tomorrow… It may be many, many weeks… I simply don’t know. The point is that we must be on station before this super U-boat gets here.’
‘I understand, sir.’ Frobisher was contrite; the serious, professional naval officer again. For a few moments the two of them regarded Hope Island, a narrow strip of table land about one thousand feet high. Next to its name was the parenthetic abbreviation: PA – position approximate. Frobisher sighed. Clark might have been happy in this never-never land, but it made him uneasy and he sensed Clark knew it and it amused him. Frobisher looked up and stared out of the wheelhouse windows at the broken ice that strewed the sea about them as far as the eye could see. It was warm in the wheelhouse, almost too warm, and Frobisher wondered for an irrational moment if the windows were not a cinema screen and what he thought he could see beyond merely an illusion. Perhaps he felt touched by a presentiment, but Clark recalled him shuddering. Even as Frobisher drew Clark’s gaze from the representational chart, with its clearly defined lines, to the bleak beauty of the reality of high latitudes, Pearson dropped Sheba’s, speed and altered course to pass clear of a huge, slowly wheeling ice floe. The deck canted slightly as the handy little ship heeled to her helm.
‘Got to keep the Asdic dome in mind, sir,’ Pearson said, seeing the ship’s two senior officers looking up from the chart table as if reproaching him for the disturbance to their equilibrium.
‘Absolutely imperative, Derek,’ Clark said approvingly. ‘Knock that off and we’re wasting our time.’
‘We’re not going to do much ice-breaking then,’ Frobisher remarked.
‘No, but tomorrow, when we have made enough easting, we will drive north into the pack as far as we can. I’ll take over from you at 0800. You can then start painting the ship. The sooner that’s done the better.’
‘That should be fun.’
Clark gave a short laugh. ‘Perhaps. Anyway, let’s make it so. Divide the ship into quarters, everything except the masts and funnel. Each watch to have one quarter with the officers doing the fourth.’ Seeing Frobisher’s eyes widen at his suggested impropriety, Clark added, ‘It will be good for all of us.’
‘Well, who’ll keep watch, sir?’
‘I will, but I want a pot of paint and a ladder.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ll do the funnel.’
‘We haven’t a ladder long enough, we’ll have to rig a bosun’s chair…’
‘No, we only want the lower part painted. The upper parts of the ship should remain grey. Something called interchange, Number One. Think about it.’ Clark gave Frobisher a knowing smile. ‘All right then. Now, be a good chap and let me get on with this.’ He indicated the chart. ‘You go and have a word with Mr Cook.’
Clark bent to resume his interrupted task. Over the cartographic image he began to draw in a grid, based on the list of latitudes and longitudes extracted from his secret orders. The squares thus constructed were each identified by two letters and these were to be used by the Admiralty or by Clark to indicate position, should it become necessary. Such a position would be transmitted at the end of any message to which its relevance would be obvious, Clark had read. As he worked, he wondered if he would ever send the single word that meant ‘success’ as encoded from the estimable Dr Ruddick’s dissertation upon the Holy Trinity. The word’s equivalent was ‘forbearance’. Clark wondered whether that was sheer coincidence, or official irony.
In Limbo
March–June 1942
Clark entered the wheelhouse and, having wiped his hands on a wad of cotton waste and jammed it back into the pocket of his boiler suit, picked up a heavy pair of Barr and Stroud binoculars. Clicking the medium-grade shades down, he went out on to the bridge wing and carefully scanned the horizon to the south. The sun sparkled on ice and water alike, though a bank of cloud was building in the west and would, he judged, have spread over most of the sky by the evening. There was not another thing in sight, at least nothing hostile, for just then, in one of the long leads of open water to the south he saw the faint blur of a whale spouting, followed by a glimpse of black back as it sounded.
‘Bowhead or minke?’ he queried to himself. Then it was gone and, with a tingle of private exhilaration, he began a systematic search of the circle of the visible horizon. To the north the ice stretched away as far as he could see, packed closer and closer, until it formed an unbroken field, unfractured by any leads. He walked back into the wheelhouse, put the glasses back in the plywood box provided for their stowage and was about to resume painting, when a figure loomed in the door to the wireless office.
‘Nothing at the last transmission time, sir,’ reported Barrington, the senior operator. He was a serious, bespectacled young man, whose hair was neatly plastered down on either side of a centre parting.
Clark looked briefly at his watch. Barrington had had to break off his duties with a paintbrush to monitor the frequency allotted to them by the Admiralty. At six-hourly intervals, Sheba’s operators listened for fifteen minutes for any vital message from London.
If Clark had thought the code derived from Dr Ruddick’s Dissertation smacked of Bulldog Drummond or the pages of John Buchan, his secret instructions dispelled any notion of amateurishness. Along with the list of positions from which Clark had earlier constructed the graticule of his locational grid had come other appended documents. One tabulated all wireless transmission and listening times, the frequencies to be guarded and those to be used for messages, along with several coded call signs which implemented the odd but secure device of utilising the theological meanderings of an eccentric, eighteenth-century cleric. It was these that translated into the routines for Barrington and his colleagues.
‘We’ll hear soon enough,’ Clark said, sensing Barrington’s reluctance to take off his headphones and resume the unfamiliar task of painting.
‘Yes, I expect so, sir.’
‘What were you doing before the war, Barrington?’ Clark asked, certain that such practical tasks as he was now compelled to undertake were rather outside Barrington’s experience.
‘I was, er, teaching at a girls’ school, sir.’
‘Oh!’ Clark raised his eyebrows. ‘This’ll be rather a contrast then,’ he said with a smile, vaguely gesturing about the wheelhouse.
‘It is, rather,’ said Barrington.
; ‘And before that?’
‘Oh, Cambridge, sir…’
‘Reading what?’
‘Classics, sir.’
‘And you graduated?’
Barrington nodded. ‘A first, sir.’
‘My congratulations. You know you’ve been recommended for a commission, don’t you?’
‘I do, but do you know I’ve turned it down, sir?’ There was a hint of hesitation before the monosyllable of subservient, if traditional, respect.
‘I didn’t, but may I ask why?’
‘I have no desire to be an officer.’
‘Why? Are you afraid of the responsibility, or do you have a political motive?’
‘Would it matter either way?’
‘No,’ Clark replied, ‘not to me. But I’d be interested to know – personally, that is.’
Barrington lowered his eyes and cleared his throat. ‘May I ask what you did before the war, sir? I know you’re not a regular officer,’ he added.
‘I was the chief officer in cargo liners hauling what we called general cargo from Britain and Europe to the Far East and back.’
‘Ah, I had heard you’d been in the Arctic before, sir. I thought you might have been a scientific officer engaged in research, or something similar, given the special nature of this mission of ours.’
‘I’ve been in high latitudes before, yes, but not since I was younger than you are. Do you not consider it a suitable employment?’ Clark asked, with a hint of irritation at the superior attitude of the younger man.
‘Not at all. Good deal more useful than cramming the heads of young women with the works of Tacitus and Homer.’
‘So, why don’t you want to become an officer?’
‘It’s not political, sir. Not in the sense that you mean. It’s just that I really have no feeling for other people. I don’t want to be set above the men. I mean, I don’t want to be responsible for them or their actions. I don’t mind being responsible for procedures and so on…’
Dead Man Talking Page 21