Clark dismissed the idea that the words had any reference to a convoy. Gifford had sought to distance him from any direct association with any convoy. Clark reminded himself that his only task was the location and destruction of Orca. But that very thought alerted him to Gifford’s probable thinking. There had been no wireless traffic up to that moment, so presumably there had been nothing to say specific to Clark’s task. Yes, that was better, more logical; he felt intuitively comfortable with the notion, so Gifford had omitted a direct reference to Orca, because, at the moment of despatch, there was none. On the other hand there was a concentration of heavy ships and that alone was evidence that something was at the very least on the cards. And Clark thought as, the polar bear forgotten, the logic kicked in and his assumptions crystallised into ‘facts’, it argued that the enemy were waiting for Orca to reach her station and then for a convoy to come through the constricted alleyway of the Barents Sea. Clark ran his finger down his list of ‘translated’ words. Orca was signified by the obscure word ‘trimorphism’.
‘God bless Dr Ruddick,’ Clark murmured, putting his papers away and locking them securely in his safe. Then he sat stock still, hardly crediting the fact that he had forgotten the Condor.
Of course! The appearance of the aeroplane had been the stimulus for his ‘intuition’! How could he be such a fool? The incident with the polar bear was hardly enough to warrant such a failure in his thought processes.
‘Never mind,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It is the independent emphasis that I need.’
Satisfied and with a score of considerations now crowding into his mind, Clark again ascended the steep companion ladder to the wheelhouse. Back on the bridge he summoned Frobisher, and the two men leaned, heads together, over the chart table.
‘We’ve had an alarm call from the Admiralty, Number One. Nothing much at the moment except that the Germans are concentrating heavy ships in north Norway. I think we can assume that means a sortie is being prepared.’
‘That bloody Condor seems to suggest that to be the case, yes…’
‘Exactly,’ Clark said wryly.
‘And our baby?’
Clark shook his head. ‘It’s my,’ he was about to say guess, but that would weaken his case and belie his inner conviction. ‘It’s my assessment that even now our baby is on passage north, crossing the Barents Sea.’ He looked up and raised his voice. ‘Humphries!’
‘Sir?’ The young man’s face peered at them from the wireless office. Tethered by his headphones, he lifted one to hear Clark.
‘I want you to monitor the convoy frequencies carefully,’ he said. ‘We’ve heard nothing for some time but I anticipate another convoy coming through very soon. I want to know the minute you are aware of anything, all right?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Captain?’ Olsen hauled himself wearily up the ladder and confronted Clark. He looked exhausted and his boiler suit was covered in oily grime.
‘Oh, Fridtjof,’ Clark said, then faltered, seeing the expression in Olsen’s eyes. ‘Are your engines still playing up?’
Olsen shook his head and managed a wan smile. ‘No, Captain, we are all ready for your orders.’
‘Oh, that’s good. What was the trouble?’
‘A blocked oil duct; a lot of shit, swarf and God knows what else. Bloody shipyard…’
‘Bloody British shipyard you mean, eh?’ Clark suggested with a sympathetic smile.
‘Maybe,’ Olsen conceded with a shrug. ‘Anyway we can move when you want. Did I hear a story about an isbjørn?’ he asked, one grey eyebrow raised.
‘Yup,’ Frobisher put in, ‘and the captain shot it.’
‘Have you got the skin?’ Olsen asked, visibly brightening.
‘No, sorry. Unfortunately the thing ran off. I don’t even know if I hit it.’
‘Oh, you hit it all right, sir. It nearly ate Leading Seaman Harding,’ Frobisher explained to Olsen.
Olsen nodded. ‘Pity about the skin,’ he said, turning to return to the engine room. ‘I’ll ring stand by when I get below again,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Gosh, I thought he was going to say we were stuck here for the bloody duration,’ Frobisher said as Olsen disappeared.
‘So did I,’ Clark said. ‘He looked at the end of his tether.’
‘I agree, he didn’t look good.’
‘He certainly didn’t look well… You don’t think he’s ill?’ Clark asked Frobisher and they exchanged glances.
‘I’ll have a word with Storheill.’
‘Try and keep it subtle, Number One.’
Frobisher smiled. ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’
‘Right, before we get under way, clear lower deck and muster the men on the foredeck.’
A moment later the telegraph jingled, the engine-room pointer stopped on ‘Stand by’. Clark answered it as Frobisher mustered the ship’s company on the tannoy. A few minutes later they all stood shivering on the foredeck and Clark addressed them.
‘Well, lads, we’ve just received a signal. I think we can assume things will be warming up from now on.’
‘That’s good news, sir,’ someone called out.
‘Quiet there,’ Frobisher snapped.
‘We’ll go to action stations every time we change watches as a precaution,’ Clark resumed. ‘I want you to do it in your sleep and without a lot of noise. Noise can carry in these latitudes, and if we’re hunting a U-boat on the surface I want us closed up very quickly. We’ll use the tannoy, not the alarms, is that understood? If you see anyone lingering in their hammock, turn them out! That’s all. Carry on, Number One.’
Later, on the bridge, Clark found himself yawning. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked Pearson, who had taken over the watch two hours earlier.
‘Ten, I mean 2200, sir,’ Pearson said, shaking his head. ‘I just can’t get used to this constant daylight.’
‘No, one just doesn’t feel like sleeping, even when one ought to.’ The sun rode above the horizon to the north, approaching the polar meridian.
‘I suppose it doesn’t help to be keeping the ship on GMT…’
‘I say, sir, I’m jolly miffed that I missed seeing the bear. Unfortunately I had my head down for an hour.’
‘So did I, Derek. I just happened to wake up and look out of my port. No idea why I did, but,’ he shrugged, ‘it was lucky for Harding.’
‘So I heard.’
‘Well, let’s work the ship off this floe,’ Clark said, reaching for the telegraph handle. ‘And Derek, instruct the lookouts to keep ears and eyes open, for submarines in the ice and Condors flying over the stuff.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Pearson cheerfully.
How easily young men went to war, Clark thought as he tugged the telegraph handle back and forth, setting it on ‘slow astern’.
The Assyrians
July 1942
Clark headed Sheba south-east, aiming to reach a position within the loose pack both east and slightly north of Orca’s assumed patrol line. This he would have to judge to a nicety, but he guessed his adversary would lay this patrol line just within the ice limit, hiding on the edge of the pack ice to conceal his submarine from Allied radar. He also guessed Oreo’s conning tower would be painted white.
The ice field was opening up rapidly, the conditions improving day by day, and it was important that the little whaler did not work her way too far south, for she was already returning to the latitude of Hope Island, which she had crossed days earlier. The Sheba shoved her way through the pack, shouldering aside the grey and white ice, occasionally having to back off astern and work her way round the more obdurate floes. Amid the relatively flat and hummocked rafts, bergy bits and the low, eroded growlers were an increasing number of large and distinctive bergs. These had been sculpted by erosion, melting and refreezing over a succession of summers and winters. They loomed fantastically out of the mist, assuming weird transformations as they slowly revolved or Sheba steamed past, so that it was possible to conceive
out of their silhouette first a crouching lion and, a few minutes later, a castle. But in bright sunshine they were sublime, assuming the most dazzling colours, amazing and delighting even the most impervious soul among Sheba’s hardbitten sailors.
During their weeks of pushing north, all three of the watchkeeping officers had become remarkably proficient at handling the ship in ice, developing a patience that was constantly mindful of their Asdic, disturbing only the voracious gulls that had discovered Sheba as a source of sustenance. Their constant presence troubled Clark, who saw his ship as he might have done a trawler, with a white cloud of birds hanging about her stern. There was little he could do about it, other than issue a standing order that permission must be granted by the bridge before gash was dumped and instructing his officers to ensure that no enemy was in sight at the time.
‘I thought we were always supposed to make sure of that?’ asked a puzzled Pearson as he steadied the Sheba’s course into a long lead of open water, giving the helmsman a course to steer down the dark polynya.
‘Just obey the last order,’ Frobisher growled. The first lieutenant was scenting the air for an enemy. Although off watch, he was on the bridge, sitting in the chair provided for the commanding officer, cleaning the Lee Enfield so spectacularly employed by Clark the previous day. To his disgust he had found it returned to the rack uncleaned; Frobisher reprobated such a lack of discipline, attributing it to Clark’s reservist, or merchant-service, sloppiness. He had, withal, an indecent affection for small arms, especially as he was in momentary anticipation of encountering their mysterious enemy. At the very least, Lieutenant D.I.R.K. Frobisher wanted a mention in despatches from the engagement he felt, in his water, to be inevitable.
Daydreaming of glory, Frobisher was nevertheless startled when the voice of one of the lookouts shouted out: ‘Aircraft, green zero six zero! Condor, sir!’
Frobisher’s feet hit the deck with a thump and he ran out on to the starboard bridge wing, still carrying the rifle, to where the muffled lookout was pointing to the south.
‘Stop the ship!’ he ordered, dashing back into the wheelhouse to call Clark, but Clark was already at the telegraph and staring ahead at the uninterrupted lead into which the ship had broken at this least auspicious of all moments.
‘Hard a-starboard!’ he ordered and Sheba heeled as she turned under full helm while Clark rang the telegraph. The clang of its orders could be heard coming up from the engine room by way of the skylight. A moment later the duty artificer answered and the way began to run off the ship, but the Sheba was heading for the ice.
All on the bridge realised the necessity of their not exposing themselves, for the longer the Sheba steamed down the open lead the longer and more conspicuous the white wake she trailed behind her. Such a wake would be highly visible from the air.
They could hear the roar of the Condor’s four 1000hp BMW engines, but there was little time to take much notice of the crescendo, for they were almost knocked off their feet as the Sheba ploughed into the ice flanking the polynya.
‘Shit!’
The next moment the Condor flew right across their bow, perhaps four miles away and about one hundred feet above the ice. Clark, Frobisher and Pearson, with the man-at-the-wheel behind them, followed its progress. As the noise of the aeroplane’s engines diminished they all sensed something was wrong. An instant later they turned at Carter’s shout: ‘The bloody Asdic’s knackered!’
‘What?’
‘We’ve damaged the Asdic in the ice, sir,’ Frobisher said.
Clark closed his eyes and, mastering his irritation, replied as coolly as possible, ‘The question was purely rhetorical, Number One. Keep your eyes on that Condor.’ Raising his voice, he called out to Carter, ‘Thank you, Carter.’ Then he picked up the glasses and stared after the dwindling dot. For a moment or two no one spoke, their attention devoted to watching the big aeroplane.
‘She’s banking!’ Frobisher called out and they strove to see whether he was right, and which way the aircraft would turn. If to port, towards the north, she would almost certainly pass over their heads, if to starboard and the south, they would be clear of danger.
‘She’s swinging north,’ Frobisher commented, his voice becoming harsh.
‘Oh, Christ…’ Pearson breathed beside Clark.
They watched the big plane as it turned, then it seemed that the swing was arrested. ‘He’s climbing,’ said Clark, uncertain as to what the enemy intended.
‘And steadying,’ added Frobisher. ‘He’s heading about north-west.’
Recalling both Gifford’s remark about German weather observers and the chart to his mind’s eye, Clark divined the German pilot’s flight plan. ‘I’ll bet he’s going to overfly Vest Spitsbergen from north to south and spy out the land… See if we’ve a tanker lying in the sounds, or even drop supplies to any weather station they may well have.’
‘Doesn’t really matter, sir, if it gets us off the hook,’ Pearson said, with renewed cheerfulness.
‘Could you try and think of something intelligent to say, Derek?’ Frobisher said with amiable contempt, lowering his glasses.
Clark rang half astern and with a reluctant trembling, Sheba drew herself off the submerged ice shelf. Ten minutes later she was again steaming at eleven knots down the polynya and Clark had handed over to Pearson. Then he went to see Carter.
‘It’s no good, sir, the transmissions have ceased. I can have a look, but I don’t think ramming the ice helped.’
Clark expelled his breath. ‘Don’t make your point with too heavy a hand, Carter,’ Clark said. ‘Tell me, are you able to hear anything… I mean, can we use it passively, as a hydrophone to listen for an enemy.’
‘I won’t know until I hear one, sir,’ Carter grumbled, ‘or I don’t hear, if you know what I mean.’
‘All right, all right,’ Clark responded sharply. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ and he left Carter muttering discontentedly. It was the nearest naval propriety came to allowing Carter to call Clark a stupid fool.
Clark had scarcely stepped foot back in the wheelhouse when Barrington announced that wireless traffic indicated the early passage of a convoy. ‘It’s a long way off,’ he said, ‘but there’s no doubt about it.’
There was much that they would not know about in the coming hours, but, while they were not certain of its sequential number, what they knew aboard HMS Sheba, was that a convoy was at sea bound for north Russia.
It was called PQ17.
* * *
Three hours later Wireless Operator Humphries shouted out: ‘Signal from Admiralty, sir!’
Storheill, the officer of the watch, strode across the wheelhouse and grabbed the voice pipe, whipped off the whistle and blew down it. At the other end he heard Clark’s voice.
‘Signal from Admiralty, sir,’ he repeated.
‘I’m on my way.’ The noise of Clark replacing the whistle at his end rung for a moment in Storheill’s ears. He had hardly replaced the flexible tubing before Clark was on the bridge. He was in his stockinged feet, Storheill noted, stripped to his shirt and minus collar or tie, an oddly youthful, dishevelled figure in his braces.
‘Humphries is just taking it now, sir.’
Clark nodded and went into the wireless office. Humphries was just completing the commanding officer’s copy and, sensing Clark’s presence, turned and held out the small sheet of paper.
Clark took it, saw the Sheba’s call sign for July and took it below. Out came the faithful Dr Ruddick. Clark felt a slight jar as Sheba nudged a floe and he heard the engine-room telegraph clang as Storheill adjusted speed and manoeuvred the ship. After a few moments he regarded his handiwork:
ADMIRALTY TO SHEBA 02/1300 GMT
IMMINENT TRIMORPHISM
ASSESSMENT E5
It was clear enough this time!
Clark ran up to the bridge and bent over the grid drawn on the chart of the Svalbard Archipelago, running his finger along to grid square E5. The grid was constru
cted from the 75th Parallel northwards and eastwards from the 19th Meridian. Each box was ten miles square and E5 was centred some ninety-odd miles to the north-north-east of Bear Island or about fifty miles south-west of Cape Thor, the southern extremity of Hope Island. Relative to Sheba’s present position, Orca lay 140 miles to the west-south-west. But that, Clark reflected, was when she had been reported – and that, he presumed with a degree of certainty, cannot have been by air reconnaissance, but must have been by radio-location, or perhaps by some method Kurt used. He had, of course, no idea of the Ultra decrypts available from Enigma-generated signals, but he guessed that Orca was heading north-east, just as Sheba had done weeks before, in search of a hiding place along the ice edge.
He straightened up from the chart table. There were only so many options, he thought, and matters were falling into place with a precision that was chilling. He stared ahead, through the wheelhouse windows. At the binnacle and telemotor the helmsman concentrated on steering the course, on either bridge wing the lookouts were alert, and up and down between them paced the officer of the watch.
Somewhere to the far south-west a convoy had set out from Iceland, and in the fjords of northern Norway, the heavy ships of the Kriegsmarine were raising steam. In distant Berlin Kurt would be consumed by anxiety while, Clark imagined, he played the part of a serious and devoted naval staff officer. In London Gifford and Pound would be watching the plot of the convoy’s passage; the Home Fleet would have left the Orkneys to provide cover to the convoy. Even if Admiral Tovey intercepted the German surface warships, the field would be left clear for the Luftwaffe’s Heinkel torpedo bombers and God knows what else besides; and all the time the U-boats would be tracking the convoy, ready to call in their brother wolves and make their attack in a pack. And then there was Orca, whose sudden appearance in the midst of the convoy with her torpedoes and heavy-calibre guns, would utterly overwhelm the convoy’s defences. It would be a repeat of Otto Kretschmer’s daring initiative of night-time surface attack inside a convoy’s defensive screen, only on a bolder, more brilliant scale. Moreover, Clark was convinced it would succeed. With all his experience as convoy escort, the plan was brilliant in its simplicity. If Germany had a hundred of such long-range, heavy super submarines, they would win the war in a month, but Germany had only one. Nevertheless, the success of that single boat might arrest the flow of supplies to the Red Army at a significant moment. Upon such a critical interdiction, the fate of the world might turn.
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