HMS Ulysses

by Alistair MacLean

  "This is it, sir."

  "This is it," Tyndall echoed. He turned to the messenger.

  "Make a signal. 'You are running into severe storm. Rendezvous unchanged. You may be delayed. Will remain at rendezvous until your arrival.' That clear enough, Captain?"

  "Should be, sir. Radio silence?"

  "Oh, yes. Add 'Radio silence. Admiral, 14th A.C.S.' Get it off at once, will you? Then tell W.T. to shut down themselves."

  The door shut softly. Tyndall poured himself some coffee, looked across at Vallery.

  "That boy still on your mind, Dick?"

  Vallery smiled non-committally, lit a cigarette. At once he began to cough harshly.

  "Sorry, sir," he apologised. There was silence for some time, then he looked up quizzically.

  "What mad ambition drove me to become a cruiser captain?" he asked sadly.

  Tyndall grinned. "I don't envy you... I seem to have heard this conversation before. What are you going to do about Ralston, Dick?"

  "What would you do, sir?" Vallery countered.

  "Keep him locked up till we return from Russia. On a bread-and-water diet, in irons if you like."

  Vallery smiled.

  "You never were a very good liar, John."

  Tyndall laughed. "Touche!" He was warmed, secretly pleased. Rarely did Richard Vallery break through his self-imposed code of formality.

  "A heinous offence, we all know, to clout one of H.M. commissioned officers, but if Ether-ton's story is true, my only regret is that Ralston didn't give Brooks a really large-scale job of replanning that young swine's face."

  "It's true, all right, I'm afraid," said Vallery soberly. "What it amounts to is that naval discipline, oh, how old Starr would love this, compels me to punish a would, be murderer's victim I" He broke off in a fresh paroxysm of coughing, and Tyndall looked away: he hoped the distress wasn't showing in his face, the pity and anger he felt that Vallery, that very perfect, gentle knight, the finest gentleman and friend he had ever known, should be coughing his heart out, visibly dying on his feet, because of the blind inhumanity of an S.N.O. in London, two thousand miles away. "A victim," Vallery went on at last, "who has already lost his mother, brother and three sisters... I believe he has a father at sea somewhere."

  "And Carslake?"

  "I shall see him tomorrow. I should like you to be there, sir. I will tell him that he will remain an officer of this ship till we return to Scapa, then resign his commission... I don't think he'd care to appear at a court martial, even as a witness," he finished dryly.

  "Not if he's sane, which I doubt," Tyndall agreed. A sudden thought struck him. "Do you think he is sane?" he frowned.

  "Carslake," Vallery hesitated. "Yes, I think so, sir. At least, he was. Brooks isn't so sure. Says he didn't like the look of him tonight, something queer about him, he thinks, and in these abnormal conditions small provocations are magnified out of all proportion."

  Vallery smiled briefly. "Not that Carslake is liable to regard the twin assaults on pride and person as a small provocation."

  Tyndall nodded agreement. "He'll bear watching... Oh, damn! I wish the ship would stay still. Half my coffee on the tablecloth. Young Spicer", he looked towards the pantry," will be as mad as hell. Nineteen years old and a regular tyrant... I thought these would be sheltered waters, Dick?"

  "So they are, compared to what's waiting for us. Listen!" He cocked his head to the howling of the wind outside. "Let's see what the weather man has to say about it."

  He reached for the desk phone, asked for the transmitting station. After a brief conversation he replaced the receiver.

  "T.S. says the anemometer is going crazy. Ousting up to eighty knots. Still north-west. Temperature steady at ten below." He shivered. "Ten below!" Then looked consideringly at Tyndall. "Barometer almost steady at 27.8."

  "What!"

  "27.8. That's what they say. It's impossible, but that's what they say."

  He glanced at his wrist-watch. "Forty-five minutes, sir... This is a very complicated way of committing suicide."

  They were silent for a minute, then Tyndall spoke for both of them, answering the question in both their minds.

  "We must go, Dick. We must. And by the way, our fire-eating young Captain CD, the doughty Orr, wants to accompany us in the Sirrus... We'll let him tag along a while. He has things to learn, that young man."

  At 2020 all ships had completed oiling. Hove to, they had had the utmost difficulty in keeping position in that great wind; but they were infinitely safer than in the open sea. They were given orders to proceed when the weather moderated, the Defender and escorts to Scapa, the squadron to a position 100 miles ENE. of rendezvous. Radio silence was to be strictly observed.

  At 2030 the Ulysses and Sirrus got under way to the East. Lights winked after them, messages of good luck. Fluently, Tyndall cursed the squadron for the breach of darken-ship regulations, realised that, barring themselves there was no one on God's earth to see the signals anyway, and ordered a courteous acknowledgment.

  At 2045, still two miles short of Langanes point, the Sirrus was plunging desperately in mountainous seas, shipping great masses of water over her entire fo'c'sle and main deck, and, in the darkness, looking far less like a destroyer than a porpoising submarine.

  At 2050, at reduced speed, she was observed to be moving in close to such slight shelter as the land afforded there. At the same time, her six-inch Aldis flashed her signal: "Screen doors stove in: 'A' turret not tracking: flooding port boiler-room intake fans." And on the Sirrus's bridge Commander Orr swore in chagrin as he received the Ulysses's final message: "Lesson without words, No. 1. Rejoin squadron at once. You can't come out to play with the big boys." But he swallowed his disappointment, signalled: "Wilco. Just you wait till I grow up," pulled the Sirrus round in a madly swinging half-circle and headed thankfully back for shelter. Aboard the flagship, it was lost to sight almost immediately.

  At 2100, the Ulysses moved out into the Denmark Strait.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TUESDAY NIGHT

  IT WAS the worst storm of the war. Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began. Living memory aboard the Ulysses that night, a vast accumulation of experience in every corner of the globe, could certainly recall nothing even remotely like it, nothing that would even begin to bear comparison as a parallel or precedent.

  At ten o'clock, with all doors and hatches battened shut, with all traffic prohibited on the upper deck, with all crews withdrawn from gun-turrets and magazines and all normal deck watchkeeping stopped for the first time since her commissioning, even the taciturn Carrington admitted that the Caribbean hurricanes of the autumns of '34 and '37-when he'd run out of sea-room, been forced to heave-to in the dangerous right-hand quadrant of both these murderous cyclones-had been no worse than this. But the two ships he had taken through these-a 3,000-ton tramp and a superannuated tanker on the New York asphalt run-had not been in the same class for seaworthiness as the Ulysses.

  He had little doubt as to her ability to survive. But what the First Lieutenant did not know, what nobody had any means of guessing, was that this howling gale was still only the deadly overture. Like some mindless and dreadful beast from an ancient and other world, the Polar monster crouched on its own doorstep, waiting. At 2230, the Ulysses crossed the Arctic Circle. The monster struck.

  It struck with a feral ferocity, with an appalling savagery that smashed minds and bodies into a stunned unknowingness. Its claws were hurtling rapiers of ice that slashed across a man's face and left it welling red: its teeth were that subzero wind, gusting over 120 knots, that ripped and tore through the tissue paper of Arctic clothing and sunk home to the bone: its voice was the devil's orchestra, the roar of a great wind mingled with the banshee shrieking of tortured rigging, a requiem for fiends: its weight was the crushing power of the hurricane wind t
hat pinned a man helplessly to a bulkhead, fighting for breath, or flung him off his feet to crash in some distant corner, broken-limbed and senseless. Baulked of prey in its 500-mile sweep across the frozen wastes of the Greenland ice-cap, it goaded the cruel sea into homicidal alliance and flung itself, titanic in its energy, ravenous in its howling, upon the cockleshell that was the Ulysses.

  The Ulysses should have died then. Nothing built by man could ever have hoped to survive. She should just have been pressed under to destruction, or turned turtle, or had her back broken, or disintegrated under these mighty hammer-blows of wind and sea. But she did none of these things.

  How she ever survived the insensate fury of that first attack, God only knew. The great wind caught her on the bow and flung her round in a 45ø arc and pressed her far over on her side as she fell-literally fell-forty heart-stopping feet over and down the precipitous walls of a giant trough. She crashed into the valley with a tremendous concussion that jarred every plate, every Clyde-built rivet in her hull. The vibration lasted an eternity as overstressed metal fought to re-adjust itself, as steel compressed and stretched far beyond specified breaking loads. Miraculously she held, but the sands were running out. She lay far over on her starboard side, the gunwales dipping: half a mile away, towering high above the mast-top, a great wall of water was roaring down on the helpless ship.

  The "Dude" saved the day. The "Dude," alternatively known as "Persil," but officially as Engineer-Commander Dodson, immaculately clad as usual in overalls of the most dazzling white, had been at his control position in the engine-room when that tremendous gust had struck. He had no means of knowing what had happened. He had no means of knowing that the ship was not under command, that no one on the bridge had as yet recovered from that first shattering impact: he had no means of knowing that the quarter-master had been thrown unconscious into a corner of the wheel-house, that his mate, almost a child in years, was too panic-stricken to dive for the madly-spinning wheel. But he did know that the Ulysses was listing crazily, almost broadside on, and he suspected the cause.

  His shouts on the bridge tube brought no reply. He pointed to the port controls, roared "Slow "in the ear of the Engineer W.O., then leapt quickly for the starboard wheel. Fifteen seconds later and it would have been too late. As it was, the accelerating starboard screw brought her round just far enough to take that roaring mountain of water under her bows, to dig her stern in to the level of the depth-charge rails, till forty feet of her airborne keel lay poised above the abyss below. When she plunged down, again tnat same shuddering vibration enveloped the entire hull. The fo'c'sle disappeared far below the surface, the sea flowing over and past the armoured side of 'A'turret. But she was bows on again. At once the "Dude" signalled his W.O. for more revolutions, cut back the starboard engine.

  Below decks, everything was an unspeakable shambles. On the mess decks, steel lockers in their scores had broken adrift, been thrown in a dozen different directions, bursting hasps, and locks, spilling their contents everywhere. Hammocks had been catapulted from their racks, smashed crockery littered the decks: tables were twisted and smashed, broken stools stuck up at crazy angles, books, papers, teapots, kettles and crockery were scattered in insane profusion. And amidst this jumbled, sliding wreckage, hundreds of shouting, cursing, frightened and exhausted men struggled to their feet, or knelt, or sat, or just lay still.

  Surgeon-Commander Brooks and Lieutenant Nicholls, with an inspired, untiring padre as good as a third doctor, were worked off their feet.

  The veteran Leading S.B.A. Johnson, oddly enough, was almost useless-he was violently sick much of the time, seemed to have lost all heart: no one knew why, it was just one of these things and he had taken all he could.

  Men were brought in to the Sick Bay in their dozens, in their scores, a constant trek that continued all night long as the Ulysses fought for her life, a trek that soon overcrowded the meagre space available and turned the wardroom into an emergency hospital. Bruises, cuts, dislocations, concussions, fractures-the exhausted doctors experienced everything that night. Serious injuries were fortunately rare, and inside three hours there were only nine bed-patients in the Sick Bay, including A.B. Ferry, his already mangled arm smashed in two places-a bitterly protesting Riley and his fellow-mutineers had been unceremoniously turfed out to make room for the more seriously injured.

  About 2330, Nicholls was called to treat the Kapok Kid. Lurching, falling and staggering in the wildly gyrating ship, he finally found the Navigator in his cabin. He looked very unhappy.

  Nicholls eyed him speculatively, saw the deep, ugly gash on his forehead, the swollen ankle peeping out below the Kapok Kid's Martian survival suit. Bad enough, but hardly a borderline case, although one wouldn't have thought so from the miserable, worried expression.

  Nicholls grinned inwardly.

  "Well, Horatio," he said unkindly, "what's supposed to be the matter with you? Been drinking again?"

  "It's my back, Johnny," he muttered. He turned facedown on the bunk.

  "Have a look at it, will you?"

  Nicholl's expression changed. He moved forward, then stopped short.

  "How the hell can I," he demanded irritably, "when you're wearing that damned ugly suit of yours?"

  "That what I mean," said the Kapok Kid anxiously. "I was thrown against the searchlight controls, all knobs and nasty, sharp projections.

  Is it torn? Is it ripped, cut in any way? Are the seams------"

  "Well, for God's sake! Do you mean to tell me------?"

  Nicholls sank back incredulously on a locker.

  The Kapok Kid looked at him hopefully.

  "Does that mean it's all right?"

  "Of course it's all right! If it's a blasted tailor you want, why the hell------"

  "Enough!" The Kapok Kid swung briskly on to the side of his bunk, lifting an admonitory hand. "There is work for you, sawbones." He touched his bleeding forehead. "Stitch this up and waste no time about it. A man of my calibre is urgently needed on the bridge... I'm the only man on this ship who has the faintest idea where we are."

  Busy with a swab, Nicholls grinned. "And where are we?" "I don't know," said the Kapok Kid frankly. "That's what's so urgent about it... But I do know where I was back in Henley. Did I ever tell you...?"

  The Ulysses did not die. Time and again that night, hove to with the wind fine of her starboard bow, as her bows crashed into and under the far shoulder of a trough, it seemed that she could never shake free from the great press of water. But time and again she did just that, shuddering, I quivering under the fantastic strain. A thousand times before dawn officers and men blessed the genius of the Clyde ship-yard that had made her: a thousand times they cursed the blind malevolence of that great storm that put the Ulysses on the rack.

  Perhaps "blind" was not the right word. The storm wielded its wild hate with an almost human cunning. Shortly after the first onslaught, the wind had veered quickly, incredibly so and in defiance of all the laws, back almost to the north again. The Ulysses was on a lee shore, forced to keep pounding into gigantic seas.

  Gigantic, and cunning also. Roaring by the Ulysses, a huge comber would suddenly whip round and crash on deck, smashing a boat to smithereens.

  Inside an hour, the barge, motor boat and two whalers were gone, their shattered timbers swept away in the boiling cauldron. Carley rafts were broken off by the sudden hammer-blows of the same cunning waves, swept over the side and gone for ever: four of the Balsa floats went the same way.

  But the most cunning attack of all was made right aft on the poop-deck.

  At the height of the storm a series of heavy explosions, half a dozen in as many seconds, almost lifted the stern out of the water. Panic spread like wildfire in the after mess-decks: practically every light abaft the after engine-room smashed or failed. In the darkness of the mess-decks, above the clamour, high-pitched cries of "Torpedoed!" "Mined!"

  "She's breaking up!" galvanised exhausted, injured men, even those-more than half
-in various degrees of prostration from seasickness, into frantic stampeding towards doors and hatches, only to find doors and hatches jammed solidly by the intense cold. Here and there, the automatic battery lamps had clicked on when the lighting circuits failed: glowing little pin-points, they played on isolated groups of white, contorted faces, sunken-eyed and straining, as they struggled through the yellow pools of light. Conditions were ripe for disaster when a voice, harsh, mocking, cut cleanly through the bedlam. The voice was Ralston's: he had been released before nine o'clock, on the Captain's orders: the cells were in the very forepeak of the ship, and conditions there were impossible in a head sea: even so, Hastings had freed him only with the worst possible grace.

  "It's our own depth charges! Do you hear me, you bloody fools, it's our own depth charges!" It was not so much the words as the biting mockery, that stopped short the panic, halted dazed, unthinking men in their tracks. "They're our depth charges, I tell you! They must have been washed over the side!"

  He was right. The entire contents of a rack had broken adrift, lifted from their cradles by some freak wave, and tumbled over the side.

  Through some oversight, they had been left set at their shallow setting, those put on for the midget submarine in Scapa, and had gone off almost directly under the ship. The damage, it seemed, was only minor.

  Up in 'A' mess deck, right for'ard, conditions were even worse. There was more wreckage on the decks and far more seasickness-not the green-faced, slightly ludicrous malaise of the cross-channel steamer, but tearing rendering conversions, dark and heavy with blood-for the bows had been rearing and plunging, rearing and plunging, thirty, forty, fifty feet at a time for endless, hopeless hours; but there was an even more sinister agent at work, rapidly making the mess-deck untenable.

  At the for'ard end of the capstan flat, which adjoined the mess-deck, was the battery-room. In here were stored, or on charge a hundred and one different batteries, ranging from the heavy lead-acid batteries weighing over a hundred pounds to the tiny nickel-calmium cells for the emergency lighting. Here, too, were stored earthenware jars of prepared acid and big, glass carboys of undiluted sulphuric. These last were permanently stored: in heavy weather, the big batteries were lashed down.