H. M. S. Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘How far to go, exactly, sir?’

  ‘Young Carpenter makes it 170 miles, more or less.’

  ‘One hundred and seventy.’ Vallery looked at his watch. ‘Twenty hours to go—in this weather. We must make it!’

  Tyndall nodded heavily. ‘Eighteen ships sitting out there— nineteen, counting the sweeper from Hvalfjord—not to mention old Starr’s blood pressure . . .’

  He broke off as a hand rapped on the door and a head looked in.

  ‘Two signals, Captain, sir.’

  ‘Just read them out, Bentley, will you?’

  ‘First is from the Portpatrick: “Sprung bow-plates: making water fast: pumps coming: fear further damage: please advise.”’

  Tyndall swore. Vallery said calmly: ‘And the other?’

  ‘From the Gannet, sir. “Breaking up.”’

  ‘Yes, yes. And the rest of the message?’

  ‘Just that, sir. “Breaking up.”’

  ‘Ha! One of these taciturn characters,’ Tyndall growled. ‘Wait a minute, Chief, will you?’ He sank back in his chair, hand rasping his chin, gazing at his feet, forcing his tired mind to think.

  Vallery murmured something in a low voice, and Tyndall looked up, his eyebrows arched.

  ‘Troubled waters, sir. Perhaps the carriers—’

  Tyndall slapped his knee. ‘Two minds with but a single thought. Bentley, make two signals. One to all screen vessels—tell ’em to take position—astern—close astern—of the carriers. Other to the carriers. Oil hose, one each through port and starboard loading ports, about—ah—how much would you say, Captain?’

  ‘Twenty gallons a minute, sir?’

  ‘Twenty gallons it is. Understand, Chief? Right-o, get ’em off at once. And Chief—tell the Navigator to bring his chart here.’ Bentley left, and he turned to Vallery. ‘We’ve got to fuel later on, and we can’t do it here. Looks as if this might be the last chance of shelter this side of Murmansk . . . And if the next twenty-four hours are going to be as bad as Carrington forecasts, I doubt whether some of the little ships could live through it anyway . . . Ah! Here you are, Pilot. Let’s see where we are. How’s the wind, by the way?’

  ‘Force 10, sir.’ Bracing himself against the wild lurching of the Ulysses, the Kapok Kid smoothed out the chart on the Captain’s bunk. ‘Backing slightly.’

  ‘North-west, would you say, Pilot?’ Tyndall rubbed his hands. ‘Excellent. Now, my boy, our position?’

  ‘12.40 west. 66.15 north,’ said the Kapok Kid precisely. He didn’t even trouble to consult the chart. Tyndall lifted his eyebrows but made no comment.

  ‘Course?’

  ‘310, sir.’

  ‘Now, if it were necessary for us to seek shelter for fuelling—’

  ‘Course exactly 290, sir. I’ve pencilled it in—there. Four and a half hours’ steaming, approximately.’

  ‘How the devil—’ Tyndall exploded. ‘Who told you to—to—’ He spluttered into a wrathful silence.

  ‘I worked it out five minutes ago, sir. It—er—seemed inevitable. 290 would take us a few miles inside the Langanes peninsula. There should be plenty shelter there.’ Carpenter was grave, unsmiling.

  ‘Seemed inevitable!’ Tyndall roared. ‘Would you listen to him, Captain Vallery? Inevitable! And it’s only just occurred to me! Of all the . . . Get out! Take yourself and that damned comic-opera fancy dress elsewhere!’

  The Kapok Kid said nothing. With an air of injured innocence he gathered up his charts and left. Tyndall’s voice halted him at the door.

  ‘Pilot!’

  ‘Sir?’ The Kapok Kid’s eyes were fixed on a point above Tyndall’s head.

  ‘As soon as the screen vessels have taken up position, tell Bentley to send them the new course.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Certainly.’ He hesitated, and Tyndall chuckled. ‘All right, all right,’ he said resignedly. ‘I’ll say it again—I’m just a crusty old curmudgeon . . . and shut that damned door! We’re freezing in here.’

  The wind was rising more quickly now and long ribbons of white were beginning to streak the water. Wave troughs were deepening rapidly, their sides steepening, their tops blown off and flattened by the wind. Gradually, but perceptibly to the ear now, the thin, lonely whining in the rigging was climbing steadily up the register. From time to time, large chunks of ice, shaken loose by the increasing vibration, broke off from the masts and stays and spattered on the deck below.

  The effect of the long oil-slicks trailing behind the carriers was almost miraculous. The destroyers, curiously mottled with oil now, were still plunging astern, but the surface tension of the fuel held the water and spray from breaking aboard. Tyndall, justifiably, was feeling more than pleased with himself.

  Towards half-past four in the afternoon, with shelter still a good fifteen miles away, the elation had completely worn off. There was a whole gale blowing now and Tyndall had been compelled to signal for a reduction in speed.

  From deck level, the seas now were more than impressive. They were gigantic, frightening. Nicholls stood with the Kapok Kid, off watch now, on the main deck, under the port whaler, sheltering in the lee of the fo’c’sle deck. Nicholls, clinging to a davit to steady himself, and leaping back now and then to avoid a deluge of spray, looked over to where the Defender, the Vultra and Viking tailing behind, were pitching madly, grotesquely, under that serene blue sky. The blue sky above, the tremendous seas below. There was something almost evil, something literally spine-chilling, in that macabre contrast.

  ‘They never told me anything about this in the Medical School,’ Nicholls observed at last. ‘My God, Andy,’ he added in awe, ‘have you ever seen anything like this?’

  ‘Once, just once. We were caught in a typhoon off the Nicobars. I don’t think it was as bad as this. And Number One says this is damn all compared to what’s coming tonight—and he knows. God, I wish I was back in Henley!’

  Nicholls looked at him curiously.

  ‘Can’t say I know the First Lieutenant well. Not a very—ah— approachable customer, is he? But everyone—old Giles, the skipper, the Commander, yourself—they all talk about him with bated breath. What’s so extra special about him? I respect him, mind you—everyone seems to—but dammit to hell, he’s no superman.’

  ‘Sea’s beginning to break up,’ the Kapok Kid murmured absently. ‘Notice how every now and again we’re beginning to get a wave half as big again as the others? Every seventh wave, the old sailors say. No, Johnny, he’s not a superman. Just the greatest seaman you’ll ever see. Holds two master’s-tickets—square-rigged and steam. He was going round the Horn in Finnish barques when we were still in our prams. Commander could tell you enough stories about him to fill a book.’ He paused then went on quietly.

  ‘He really is one of the few great seamen of today. Old Blackbeard Turner is no slouch himself, but he’ll tell anyone that he can’t hold a candle to Jimmy . . . I’m no hero-worshipper, Johnny. You know that. But you can say about Carrington what they used to say about Shackleton—when there’s nothing left and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for him. Believe me, Johnny, I’m damned glad he’s here.’

  Nicholls said nothing. Surprise held him silent. For the Kapok Kid, flippancy was a creed, derogation second nature: seriousness was a crime and anything that smacked of adulation bordered on blasphemy. Nicholls wondered what manner of man Carrington must be.

  The cold was vicious. The wind was tearing great gouts of water off the wave-tops, driving the atomized spray at bullet speed against fo’c’sle and sides. It was impossible to breathe without turning one’s back, without wrapping layers of wool round mouth and nose. Faces blue and white, shaking violently with the cold, neither suggested, neither even thought of going below. Men hypnotized, men fascinated by the tremendous seas, the towering waves, 1,000, 2,000 feet in length, long, sloping on the lee side, steep-walled and terrifying on the other, pushed up by a sixty knot wind and by some mighty force lying far to the north-west. In these gigantic t
roughs, a church steeple would be lost for ever.

  Both men turned round as they heard the screen door crashing behind them. A duffel-coated figure, cursing fluently, fought to shut the heavy door against the pitching of the Ulysses, finally succeeded in heaving the clips home. It was Leading Seaman Doyle, and even though his beard hid three-quarters of what could be seen of his face, he still looked thoroughly disgusted with life.

  Carpenter grinned at him. He and Doyle had served a commission together on the China Station. Doyle was a very privileged person.

  ‘Well, well, the Ancient Mariner himself! How are things down below, Doyle?’

  ‘Bloody desperate, sir!’ His voice was as lugubrious as his face. ‘Cold as charity, sir, and everything all over the bloody place. Cups, saucers, plates in smithereens. Half the crew—’

  He broke off suddenly, eyes slowly widening in blank disbelief. He was staring out to sea between Nicholls and Carpenter.

  ‘Well, what about half the crew? . . . What’s the matter, Doyle?’

  ‘Christ Almighty!’ Doyle’s voice was slow, stunned: it was almost a prayer. ‘Oh, Christ Almighty!’ The voice rose sharply on the last two syllables.

  The two officers twisted quickly round. The Defender was climbing—all 500 feet of her was literally climbing—up the lee side of a wave that staggered the imagination, whose immensity completely defied immediate comprehension. Even as they watched, before shocked minds could grasp the significance of it all, the Defender reached the crest, hesitated, crazily tilted up her stern till screw and rudder were entirely clear of the water, then crashed down, down, down . . .

  Even at two cable-lengths’ distance in that high wind the explosive smash of the plummeting bows came like a thunder-clap. An aeon ticked by, and still the Defender seemed to keep on going under, completely buried now, right back to the bridge island, in a sea of foaming white. How long she remained like that, arrowed down into the depths of the Arctic, no one could afterwards say: then slowly, agonizingly, incredibly, great rivers of water cascaded off her bows, she broke surface again. Broke surface, to present to frankly disbelieving eyes a spectacle entirely without precedent, anywhere, at any time. The tremendous, instantaneous, upthrusting pressure of unknown thousands of tons of water had torn the flight-deck completely off its mountings and bent it backwards, in a great, sweeping ‘U’, almost as far as the bridge. It was a sight to make men doubt their sanity, to leave them stupefied, to leave them speechless—all, that is, except the Kapok Kid. He rose magnificently to the occasion.

  ‘My word!’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘That is unusual.’

  Another such wave, another such shattering impact, and it would have been the end for the Defender. The finest ships, the stoutest, most powerful vessels, are made only of thin, incredibly thin, sheets of metal, and metal, twisted and tortured as was the Defender’s, could never have withstood another such impact.

  But there were no more such waves, no more such impacts. It had been a freak wave, one of these massive, inexplicable contortions of the sea which have occurred, with blessed infrequency, from time immemorial, in all the great seas of the world whenever Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is . . . There were no more such waves and, by five o’clock, although land was still some eight to ten miles away, the squadron had moved into comparative shelter behind the tip of the Langanes peninsula.

  From time to time, the captain of the Defender, who seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, sent reassuring messages to the Admiral. He was making a good deal of water, but he was managing nicely, thank you. He thought the latest shape in flight-decks very fashionable, and a vast improvement on the old type; straight flight-decks lacked imagination, he thought, and didn’t the Admiral think so too. The vertical type, he stated, provided excellent protection against wind and weather, and would make a splendid sail with the wind in the right quarter. With his last message, to the effect that he thought that it would be rather difficult to fly off planes, a badly-worried Tyndall lost his temper and sent back such a blistering signal that all communications abruptly ceased.

  Shortly before six o’clock, the squadron hove-to under the shelter of Langanes, less than two miles offshore. Langanes is low-lying, and the wind, still climbing the scale, swept over it and into the bay beyond, without a break; but the sea, compared to an hour ago, was mercifully calm, although the ships still rolled heavily. At once the cruisers and the screen vessels—except the Portpatrick and the Gannet—moved alongside the carriers, took oil hoses aboard. Tyndall relucantly and after much heart-searching, had decided that the Portpatrick and Gannet were suspect, a potential liability: they were to escort the crippled carrier back to Scapa.

  Exhaustion, an exhaustion almost physical, almost tangible, lay heavily over the mess-decks and the wardroom of the Ulysses. Behind lay another sleepless night, another twenty-four hours with peace unknown and rest impossible. With dull, tired minds, men heard the broadcast that the Defender, the Portpatrick and the Gannet were to return to Scapa when the weather moderated. Six gone now, only eight left—half the carrier force gone. Little wonder that men felt sick at heart, felt as if they were being deserted, as if, in Riley’s phrase, they were being thrown to the wolves.

  But there was remarkably little bitterness, a puzzling lack of resentment which, perhaps, sprung only from the sheer passive acceptance. Brooks was aware of it, this inaction of feeling, this unnatural extinction of response, and was lost for a reason to account for it. Perhaps, he thought, this was the nadir, the last extremity when sick men and sick minds cease altogether to function, the last slow-down of all vital processes, both human and animal. Perhaps this was just the final apathy. His intellect told him that was reasonable, more, it was inevitable . . . And all the time some fugitive intuition, some evanescent insight, was thrusting upon him an awareness, a dim shadowy awareness of something altogether different; but his mind was too tired to grasp it.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t apathy. For a brief moment that evening, a white-hot anger ran through the ship like a flame, then resentment of the injustice which had provoked it. That there had been cause for anger even Vallery admitted; but his hand had been forced.

  It had all happened simply enough. During routine evening tests, it had been discovered that the fighting lights on the lower yardarm were not working. Ice was at once suspected as being the cause.

  The lower yardarm, on this evening dazzling white and heavily coated with snow and ice, paralleled the deck, sixty feet above it, eighty feet above the waterline. The fighting lights were suspended below the outer tip: to work on these, a man had either to sit on the yardarm—a most uncomfortable position as the heavy steel WT transmission aerial was bolted to its upper length—or in a bosun’s chair suspended from the yardarm. It was a difficult enough task at any time: tonight, it had to be done with the maximum speed, because the repairs would interrupt radio transmission—the 3,000-volt steel ‘Safe-to-Transmit’ boards (which broke the electrical circuits) had to be withdrawn and left in the keeping of the Officer of the Watch during the repair: it had to be done—very precise, finicky work had to be done—in that sub-zero temperature: it had to be done on that slippery, glasssmooth yardarm, with the Ulysses rolling regularly through a thirty-degree arc: the job was more than ordinarily difficult—it was highly dangerous.

  Marshall did not feel justified in detailing the duty LTO for the job, especially as that rating was a middle-aged and very much overweight reservist, long past his climbing prime. He asked for volunteers. It was inevitable that he should have picked Ralston, for that was the kind of man Ralston was.

  The task took half an hour—twenty minutes to climb the mast, edge out to the yardarm tip, fit the bosun’s chair and lifeline, and ten minutes for the actual repair. Long before he was finished, a hundred, two hundred tired men, robbing themselves of sleep and supper, had come on deck and huddled there in the bitter wind, wat
ching in fascination.

  Ralston swung in a great arc across the darkening sky, the gale plucking viciously at his duffel and hood. Twice, wind and wave flung him out, still in his chair, parallel to the yardarm, forcing him to wrap both arms around the yardarm and hang on for his life. On the second occasion he seemed to strike his face against the aerial, for he held his head for a few seconds afterwards, as if he were dazed. It was then that he lost his gauntlets—he must have had them in his lap, while making some delicate adjustment: they dropped down together, disappeared over the side.

  A few minutes later, while Vallery and Turner were standing amidships examining the damage the motorboat had suffered in Scapa Flow, a short, stocky figure came hurriedly out of the after screen door, made for the fo’c’sle at an awkward stumbling run. He pulled up abruptly at the sight of the Captain and the Commander: they saw it was Hastings, the Master-at-Arms.

  ‘What’s the matter, Hastings?’ Vallery asked curtly. He always found it difficult to conceal his dislike for the Master-at-Arms, his dislike for his harshness, his uncalled-for severity.

  ‘Trouble on the bridge, sir,’ Hastings jerked out breathlessly. Vallery could have sworn to a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. ‘Don’t know exactly what—could hardly hear a thing but the wind on the phone . . . I think you’d better come, sir.’

  They found only three people on the bridge: Etherton, the Gunnery Officer, one hand still clutching a phone, worried, unhappy: Ralston, his hands hanging loosely by his sides, the palms raw and torn, the face ghastly, the chin with the dead pallor of frostbite, the forehead masked in furrowed, frozen blood: and, lying in a corner, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake, moaning in agony, only the whites of his eyes showing, stupidly fingering his smashed mouth, the torn, bleeding gaps in his prominent upper teeth.

  ‘Good God!’ Vallery ejaculated. ‘Good God above!’ He stood there, his hand on the gate, trying to grasp the significance of the scene before him. Then his mouth clamped shut and he swung round on the Gunnery Officer.