If that was a diesel engine aboard Orca, was she lying stopped on the surface repairing damage, charging batteries, or both? Or was she under way? And how far away was she? A mile? Ten miles? Twenty? Sounds carried vast distances in water, but how much was that modified by ice? But was there any ice, or much ice, on the rhumb line between Sheba and Orca?
‘How the hell do I know?’ he blurted out loud in answer to his own thoughts.
‘How do you know what, sir?’ Storheill asked.
‘Oh, er, nothing Pilot, nothing. I’m, er, thinking aloud.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Nothing woke a man up quicker, Clark thought savagely, than making a fool of himself. He went through to consult Carter again. Carter lifted one earphone of his headset.
‘Are we getting nearer, d’you think?’ Clark asked.
Carter shook his head. ‘Noise level pretty much constant; still quite a long way off. Bearing’s about the same though. I reckon we’ve got the direction right, sir.’
Clark nodded. ‘I hope so. Very well. Thanks.’
‘My pleasure,’ Carter mouthed after Clark’s retreating back, snapping the lifted earphone back over his ear and turning again to his dials.
* * *
It stopped snowing just before the end of Storheill’s watch. Clark, again ensconced between radiator and gyro-repeater, had resumed his trance-like state, but he stirred when he saw the relief watch emerge on the foredeck and climb up to the four-inch gun platform. The men coming off duty stomped circulation into their frozen limbs, flogging their arms about their bodies, grinning at their wretched shipmates who would have to freeze for the next four hours. Clark suddenly realised that he could see the gun platform more clearly and that not only had the snow stopped, but the visibility was improving rapidly by the minute. The shock of the change woke him.
‘Call the hands to action stations on the tannoy,’ he ordered and heard Frobisher’s voice summon the men. The handful of men by the four-inch gun looked round expectantly. Clark was already on the starboard bridge wing, his glasses level as he carefully quartered the horizon.
‘Sir!’ The voice came from the other side of the wheelhouse. Clark skidded on slush, caught his balance, bumped into Frobisher as he dodged the gyro-repeater and emerged on the port bridge wing. He focused his binoculars out on the port quarter in the direction the lookout was pointing. The enemy submarine lay stopped amid the ice.
‘We’ve waltzed past the bastard,’ Frobisher said facetiously behind him.
‘Shouldn’t you be on the foredeck?’ Clark snapped. Frobisher recollected himself and was gone.
‘Hard a-port, half ahead.’ Clark looked round for Pearson, caught sight of him climbing up to the gun and waved in the direction of the enemy submarine. Sheba trembled slightly as she turned and increased speed. A watery sun broke out, throwing faint shadows. Clark wondered whether Storheill had yet left the bridge, but then the Norwegian officer was beside him, his sextant cradled in his right arm, a pencil held like a long cigarette in his mouth.
Clark turned to the wheelhouse and steadied the helm. ‘Can you see the enemy?’ he asked the man at the wheel.
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Steady on her!’
‘Can I…?’ Pearson was shouting as his crew rapidly traversed the four-inch gun.
‘Shoot!’ Clark shouted.
The roar of the gun’s discharge was followed by the rattle of the discarded charge and the frantic activity of reloading.
‘When you bear, Number One!’ Clark bellowed, but his voice was lost in the crash as the first of Orca’s shells hit them. It passed right through the forward paint locker and Clark actually saw it as, emerging through the starboard bow, it went spinning away into the sea.
Then all was confusion. An instant afterwards, Orca’s second shell hit the Sheba’s boat deck, passed through the wooden boat in the port davits and burst against the engine-room skylight, tearing a great hole in the fiddley and the lower part of the funnel. This swayed for a moment, held up by the two forward guys. Forward, Frobisher fired both torpedoes, then a third shell struck them and the whole ship forward of the bridge seemed to disappear in the flash of the explosion. The detonation of the shell countermined the warheads of the remaining torpedoes, so that a series of almost instantaneous blasts tore through the vessel. Clark recalled rough-edged but otherwise indistinguishable chunks of steel flying through the air, and myriad noises, none of which amounted to an explosion. All he sensed aurally was something akin to a deep sigh, which came with a tremendous tightening about his chest. Only the brilliance of the flashing lights attested to an actual explosion, and even this was so bright that his eyes instinctively closed. He felt his body lifted and he was flung backwards on to the deck. A second later the lookout fell on top of him. The wretched man’s fall had been delayed by his first hitting the Hotchkiss mounting before being spun round upon Clark. He was already dead.
As he opened his eyes, gasping for breath, Clark could see the funnel as it tottered before it fell overboard behind the wheelhouse. Again, there seemed to be no noise and Clark’s deafness seemed to confer upon the world about him the qualities of a dream. None of it was real; he would wake in a moment and find himself the victim of a brief nightmare, induced by the excessive heat of the wheelhouse radiator and his anxiety.
But the weight on his chest oppressed him, and was impeding his breathing. Suddenly he was stirred by an even more primitive instinct. Heaving the lookout’s deadweight off him, he rose to his feet and staggered to what remained of the rail. The fore part of the ship had ceased to exist and was ablaze; by some quirk of the blast, the front of the wheelhouse had been forced backwards; where the wheelhouse door had been there was now a roughly diamond-shaped aperture. Ducking down, Clark went inside without difficulty. Storheill was alive and, amid the dust and distortion, he was already gathering up the confidential books and stuffing them into the weighted bag provided for the purpose of jettisoning them. Clark picked up the chart as Storheill tossed the bag overboard. He was saying something, but Clark could not hear him. Carter was there and so was the wireless operator, but the man at the wheel was dead, something having come in through the wheelhouse windows and killed him, for he was unrecognisable.
‘Abandon ship!’ Clark shouted, but he could only just hear himself. He went to the main alarms and rang them. It was all he could think of to do. He knew there were other things to attend to, but he experienced difficulty ordering his mind. Then he felt the deck under him move, and realised the Sheba was settling in the water. Somehow he reached his cabin and grabbed the blankets off his bunk. He was already wearing his duffel coat and a heavy, white submariner’s sweater. He could think of nothing else and stood stupidly for a second or two until the ship gave another lurch. Something made him turn to his desk and he recalled Dr Ruddick. Carefully he took the ancient leather binding and ripped out the sheets; then he tore them in half and scattered them round the cabin. Lastly he drew open the drawer of his desk and removed his secret orders. These he stuffed inside his duffel coat with the chart.
Taking a last look round he went out into the flat. The after door to the boat deck through which he had, weeks earlier, conducted Gifford, hung half-open upon broken hinges. He stepped through it on to what was left of the boat deck. Below lay a chasm that had once been the engine room. Steam and smoke rose out of this and far below he could see the licking of flames which grew in extent and intensity even as he watched. He later recalled being disappointed that he could not see the Norwegian flag, then he remembered that he needed his lifejacket. He had forgotten all about it and turned back to his cabin. Grabbing the thing he put it on and, while doing so, it struck him as odd that no one else was about. Where had Storeheill and Carter got to? And the wireless operator? Barrington, he thought it had been. He wondered how best to proceed and decided that he must return to the bridge and recover command of the ship.
He was never quite certain how he got from the bridge
to the narrow strip of boat deck that remained alongside the starboard bridge housing, but he recalled that it was from here that he looked down into the water and saw that it was much closer than it should have been. He did not want to leave the ship and jump into the sea. He turned: great gouts of steam were now rising out of the engine room as the inrush of seawater extinguished the boiler fires. Beyond, he thought he could see what might have been the Oerlikon platform, above which flew the white ensign. That was something, he supposed.
‘Sir! Here, sir!’
‘Captain, over here!’
Men were shouting at him and he was ridiculously happy to hear other human voices. They seemed a long way off, however, and he began to sob. Then, with a tremendous effort, he mastered himself and began to think clearly again. With the sound of the men’s voices came other noises: the steady screaming hiss of steam escaping from the boilers, rising from the engine room, the erratic roaring of the fire forward and the popping of small-arms ammunition exploding.
‘Captain, sir!’
Now he could see them, three of them in a Carley float, about twenty yards out from the ship’s side, two of them wielding paddles. He began to climb up on the rail.
‘Hold on, sir, don’t jump!’ It was Storheill. No, he must not get wet. It was better to keep dry. Much better.
The Carley float bumped alongside. It was only four feet below him. Clark heard Storheill say something about ‘paddling like fuck’ and then he went over the rail and fell on top of them. After a moment’s grunting confusion the two paddlers resumed their work with a frantic urgency and then stopped. Clark looked round as they watched Sheba sink.
She was unrecognisable, an angled and jagged grey shape, her whole forepart underwater, her stern slightly elevated, so that her depth-charge racks stood out against the grey pall. Further forward the Oerlikon platform was silhouetted, the ensign a drooping rag, half-shrouded in the clouds of steam as the wreckage of the wheelhouse slipped below the dark surface of the sea. A sudden boom convulsed the sinking hull and sent a shockwave through the frail Carley float as seawater found the whaler’s boilers. Then, in a crescendo of roaring and hissing, the depth-charge rails swung vertical, the spade rudder, screw and curve of the cruiser stern stood up stark for a moment, hung, and disappeared as Sheba plunged into the deep. A cloud of slowly dissipating steam hung over the swirling disturbance in the water.
Then they were alone on the dark surface of the Barents Sea.
The Encounter
July 1942
For several minutes no one spoke, then Storheill said, ‘That was very bad. So quick…’
‘The poor bastards didn’t have a chance.’ The voice belonged to Able Seaman Harding and Clark nodded.
‘Where were you stationed, Harding?’ he asked.
‘Depth charges, sir.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course.’
‘He got this thing over the side, sir,’ Storheill patted the hard cork of the raft.
Clark nodded and caught the last man’s eye. ‘You all right, Carter?’
Carter nodded. ‘Think so, sir.’
‘Where’s Barrington?’
‘He jumped into the sea, sir. I think he banged himself. I didn’t see him come up.’
‘Oh…’
For a further moment they digested this news, then Clark stared about them. An ice floe loomed about fifty yards away. It was a large bergy bit, perhaps twenty-five feet high. He indicated that they should paddle towards it.
‘We may be able to find a way of climbing on to that berg. We’ll be able to see if anyone else is in the water from up there,’ he explained.
‘I’ve not heard anyone shouting, sir,’ Storheill said flatly, though he plied his paddle obediently.
‘An’ no whistles, neither, sir,’ Harding added.
‘There’s someone there!’ Clark said, pointing. The others stopped paddling and turned to stare. Beneath the pale orange curve of the lifejacket there was an expanse of neck, but the head was underwater and the motionless corpse was already attracting the notice of the glaucous gulls. Clark looked up at them, aware that he could hear better and better as the moments passed. ‘We’ll still have a look round from that berg,’ he insisted.
Clark began to feel the bite of the cold now. In his privileged position he had been too long cosseted by the warmth of Sheba’s wheelhouse and, as his hearing marked a return of his senses to normal, he began to be assailed by terror. They were as good as dead, for no one would come and seek them out. Sir Dudley Pound and Captain Gifford had given them a one-way ticket: ‘Go and sink the Orca, or don’t bother to come back’!
As their fearful predicament insinuated itself into Clark’s consciousness by degrees, he suddenly wanted to see Magda again… And Jenny and the child of his that she was carrying…
Or did he?
Was there not a savage satisfaction in dying up here in the remote and lonely cold of the pure Arctic? Damn Magda! And damn Jenny and her ill-begotten bastard! What was the purpose of it all anyway? Life was a futile gesture, a fart against thunder; what was the point of opposing death, since death was inevitable? To demonstrate courage? Ha! And who was there here to record it? Courage was a silly chimera about which great lies were told. Why, somewhere up here he had had his boyhood scandalised when, aboard the brigantine Island, he had heard the old hands talk of Captain Scott’s courage in the most contemptuous tones. It was all lies, they asserted, to maintain the image of the Empire.
For what remained of their pathetic lives they would have to seek moments of incremental advantage, like Scott. But unlike Scott they were not seeking kudos or prestige; they were on active service. There was no comparison and Clark shrugged off the oppressively distracting thought. His first consideration must be his duty to his men. He coughed and cleared his ears. Only a hissing remained to impair his hearing; a residual tinnitus, he thought, smiling wanly at Storheill.
They must take stock from the low eminence of the iceberg, and to this end they paddled closer. They found nowhere to land on the near side and worked round it in search of somewhere suitable. As they came clear of the berg and doubled its northern corner, they saw a sight of horror.
The noise Clark thought was tinnitus resolved itself into an updraught of flame that spewed from the conning tower of the German submarine. She lay on the water a mile and a half away, her bow a wreck and lying low in the water, her stern already lifting as, like her opponent, she settled. If Pearson’s gun had winged her, one of Frobisher’s torpedoes had struck her forward. God knew what carnage it had caused within the great steel tube, but the interior must be an inferno to vent with such horrendous vigour through the conning tower. The big guns were trained towards them, but the turret seemed unmoving and impotent, the gun barrels at different angles of elevation, abandoned or served by a crew already burnt to calcined and disintegrating skeletons. A handful of men gathered on the casing, where Clark could see two large rubber boats had been inflated and slipped into the water.
Storheill, Carter and Harding stopped paddling and stared at the enemy. ‘We wrecked her, sir,’ said Carter, a sudden brief brightness in his voice.
‘Or the other way round,’ Harding added sullenly. ‘An’ they sure fucking outnumber us.’
‘But she is sinking,’ said Storheill. ‘And that is what matters.’
‘Yes,’ said Clark, looking at each of them in turn, ‘that is what matters.’
‘I’m fucking glad to hear it, sir,’ said Harding. ‘And now what are you proposing we does, sir. Go over an’ take ’em all fucking prisoner?’
There was a silence in the raft and the three of them looked at Clark. The next incremental decision had to be taken.
‘I suggest that we go and make common cause with them. It is our best chance of survival. We’re not going to get very far in this thing and they might be picked up by aircraft. The choice is pretty simple: we can die here by retreating behind the berg, or we can paddle over and give ourselves up as prisoners
of war. You have a few minutes to make up your minds.’
‘Well, it’s one way of getting back to Norway,’ Storheill said.
‘I’m not too keen on the idea of dying, sir,’ Carter said.
They all looked at Harding. The big sailor stared back. His face was begrimed with soot and oil and he was beginning to shudder with the cold. ‘What’s the fucking Norsky beer like then, Lieutenant Storheill?’
‘Pretty good,’ Storheill responded with a lopsided grimace.
‘That’s settled then, sir.’
‘Right we had better start paddling again,’ Clark said. ‘And keep quiet when we meet up with them. I speak German quite well.’
They began paddling again. Clark suddenly recalled he had stuffed his orders into his duffel coat. With a beating heart he pulled them out and began to tear them up into tiny pieces which he dropped into the bitterly cold water. He was engaged in this when he heard shouts. Looking up he saw the giant U-boat’s stern rising up and the venting roar from her conning tower change its note as gasses now poured from the open hatch. A moment later the noise was snuffed out and, with a strange hiss, the tapering after part of the big submarine dived with accelerating speed into the abyss.
There was a silence and immobility as the three bobbing craft lay still with their remnant crews staring at the empty sea. One man rose uncertainly and flung up his arm.
‘Heil Hitler!’ he shouted and a few arms snapped out in salute. Then the farther inflatable swung round and someone saw, beyond their fellow survivors, the British Carley float. A shout went up and suddenly the occupants of the nearer inflatable turned and saw Clark and his men. The U-boat’s rubber boats began heading towards them. In all they bore twelve or fourteen men. In the nearer, one man wore a white-covered cap.
‘Hey, you British bastards!’ the voice came in heavily accented English.
‘Take care!’ Clark hailed back in German.
The German inflatable drew closer to the Carley float, her consort still a few yards astern. Clark could see at least three machine guns pointing towards them. ‘Keep paddling,’ he said to his own men in a low voice. ‘I’m going to raise my hands. Whatever happens, just remember we were a weather ship, up here gathering weather information.’
Dead Man Talking Page 27