Dead Man Talking
Page 26
‘Hard a-starboard!’
‘Hard a-starboard, sir!’
He glanced down on to the foredeck. If only…
From the starboard bridge wing he roared at Pearson as Sheba heeled violently to port, canting to the outside of the turn: ‘Train twenty to starboard! I’m breaking out again!’
Pearson’s hail of ‘Aye, aye, sir’ was followed by Frobisher’s.
‘Starboard tube reloaded!’ Half an apple was better than no apple, Clark thought as his misgivings faded.
‘Midships! Steady!’
Clark had executed a Williamson turn and brought his ship back on as close a reciprocal course as he could. Orca, if she had continued on her course, would have shifted her bearing further right, hence his order to Pearson to train on the starboard bow. The Sheba now headed back towards her own smoke, trailing a veil behind her. He prayed that Pearson might quickly find the exact range and bearing as they emerged south of the smokescreen. Astern of them two columns of water showed the fall of the Orca’s third salvo: it was guesswork. The shells threw great shards of ice upwards where, tumbling in the air, it briefly caught the sunshine in a thousand splintering flashes before the smokescreen obscured it.
Then they were engulfed in the oily black, stinking cloud, choking on the foul stuff before they burst again into the sunshine, the ship juddering from a glancing collision with a loose floe.
For a moment Clark thought he had lost his mind, for the sea was empty, then Oliphant spotted the white conning tower, no higher than a small berg, but betrayed by the array of periscopes protruding from it: Orca was diving.
‘Starboard!’ Clark swore as Sheba again answered her helm and the four-inch gun barked. But it was too late to loose a torpedo, for by the time the Sheba was heading for where they thought the enemy might be, all that could be seen was a swirl of water.
‘Asdic!’ Clark called out, cursing the fact that they were reduced to passive mode.
‘Possibly moving to the right, sir.’ Carter’s voice lacked conviction.
Clark swore again. Was he now being stalked? Or was Orca retreating under the ice? Apart from that solitary old berg, it was mostly flatfish pack and Orca’s commander could dive deep. It all depended upon why he had submerged: to escape, or to resume the hunt?
He could only be escaping if they had in fact hit him. Had one of Pearson’s puny shells hit him? He asked Oliphant what he had seen.
‘A flash at the base of the conning tower, sir.’
It had not been enough to inhibit the submarine’s heavy gunfire. ‘Starboard easy,’ Clark said, phoning the engine room and cancelling the order for smoke. Then he concentrated on taking Sheba back into the relative protection of the ice.
Sticking his head into the Asdic compartment Clark caught Carter’s eye. ‘Well?’
‘Well what, sir?’
Clark ignored the insolence. Carter had not forgiven him for wrecking his precious Asdic.
‘Well, what do you think he’s doing?’ Clark responded, a warning edge in his voice.
Carter looked at the gyro-repeater. ‘He’s going north, sir, back into the ice. I’ll lose him there in a few minutes: there’s too much noise from the ice field and there are some whales about, I think.’
‘Whales?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what species though, sir.’ The sarcasm was mutinous and Clark stared at Carter who quickly quailed under the scrutiny. ‘I beg pardon, sir,’ he apologised, flushing.
‘Very well,’ Clark said, withdrawing.
Twenty minutes later, as Sheba was once again surrounded by increasingly dense pack ice, he reduced speed and stood the ship’s company down to defence stations. On the bridge he was joined by the officers. Their mood was almost as brittle as Clark’s own. Frobisher’s eyes were defiant with indignation. It was not difficult to judge that he considered Clark had mismanaged the encounter. Pearson, hardly able to keep his mouth shut, clearly sought recognition for his gun crew’s achievement while Storheill, black from the smokescreen, came up from the afterdeck reluctantly, assuming that his depth charges would yet be required.
Clark took the bull by the horns; he had little choice. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t give your torpedoes a better chance, Number One,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, then, before Frobisher could respond, asked him, ‘Do you think we scored a hit?’
‘I didn’t see, sir…’
‘We did, sir!’ Pearson broke in.
‘Derek’s correct, sir,’ Storheill said and, as Clark turned to regard him, added, ‘I happened to be looking forrard, sir.’
‘Are you certain?’
Storheill shrugged, ‘As certain as I can be, sir. But I think we have driven him underwater…’
‘And he too is heading into the ice,’ Clark added reflectively.
‘I think we must have hit him,’ Frobisher said. ‘Not badly, but badly enough to have done some damage. It is otherwise inconceivable that he did not hit us at that range. It’s my guess that we may have hit his gun-laying apparatus…’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ Clark agreed half-heartedly.
‘But we’ve no Asdic and not a clue where he has gone,’ Frobisher said, his tone accusatory.
‘Not that the Asdic would be much good in the ice, though,’ put in Pearson.
‘If we have hit him and his task is to strike the next Russian convoy, he will want to repair his damages,’ Storheill said. ‘I don’t think he would have seen us return from our smoke, so he will think he has driven us off and made us frightened.’
‘Well, he can’t repair damage underwater and there are no dark hours to take advantage of on the surface,’ Frobisher said somewhat dismissively.
‘So he’s got to surface in the ice,’ Clark said as Olsen came into the wheelhouse. ‘He could do that a few miles from us and we’d never know.’
‘But we found him before and he will think we have radar, so he may not risk it,’ said Pearson.
‘Are you all right, Fridtjof?’ Clark asked Olsen.
‘A bit bruised from all your ice-breaking, Captain, but otherwise yes. Can you tell a poor engineer what is happening?’
Clark smiled and explained. As he concluded, Frobisher added, ‘And the bugger escaped us, Frid.’
‘I think he’s going to come back into clear water, or nearly clear water along the edge of the ice limit,’ Clark said. ‘I think he’ll go west to get nearer the convoy and then surface to effect repairs.’
‘It’s still risky, sir. Suppose there’s clear water to the north,’ said Storheill. ‘This lot’s sweeping down from Erik Erikson’s Strait and there could well be large expanses of open water to the north.’
‘That’s true,’ Clark mused, casting his mind back to his time in these latitudes years earlier.
‘Yes, but he’d have to know there was clear water to the north. He couldn’t gamble on it.’ Frobisher was dismissive.
‘Perhaps he’s just come from it,’ said Pearson, receiving a withering glance from the first lieutenant as a consequence of this contradictory opinion. ‘And it might no longer be there,’ Pearson added with a kind of dogged courage.
‘Perhaps,’ said Storheill, clicking his fingers with inspiration, ‘he’s been told there is clear water there!’ His glowing eyes caught Clark’s. ‘The Condor, sir…’
‘It flew off to the north-west, towards the Storfjord!’ Clark said, catching on. ‘By God, Pilot, you have a point! It’s worth a gamble, for I confess, I don’t know what else we can do.’
Frobisher grunted but Clark ignored the impropriety. He moved across to stare a moment at the chart. Storheill moved beside him and a moment later Sheba steadied on a course of north-west at a speed of eight knots.
‘I suppose you are going to go bumping about in the ice again, Captain?’ Olsen asked with a wan smile.
‘I suppose I am, Fridtjof.’
* * *
Long afterwards, when he had time to reflect upon the affair, Clark wondered
if he would have followed the hunch had it been his own. That it originated with Storheill seemed at the time to give it a validity that was entirely imaginary; Clark had come to admire the Norwegian officer and to rely upon him and his navigational skill. Storheill had proved himself a seaman par excellence, a man utterly without pretension who was simply very, very good at his job. So when Storheill deduced his solution to the problem of the Orca’s disappearance, Clark saw no good reason to doubt the assertion. Furthermore, the logic of Storheill’s argument chimed in with some instinctive feeling of his own. The two of them possessed a pool of knowledge about the Arctic, and Clark was only too aware that Storheill’s experience was not only more recent and extensive than his own, but Storheill had acquired it as a mature sea officer. Besides, Storheill’s was the only working hypothesis they had to go on.
Thus, while Frobisher went off shaking his head, Clark adopted an almost defiant conviction that they must head north. In his recollection of this confidence, Clark was assisted by another fact. It was their fourth piece of luck, if one took the sudden encounter, the failure of the Germans to see them as they approached and Pearson’s hit as the first three. As they blundered north-west through increasingly thick pack ice, Carter emerged into the wheelhouse asking for the captain. Pearson, who had the watch, summoned Clark, who had been dozing in his cabin.
‘Well, what is it?’ asked Clark, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He was not pleased to see Carter, whose manner had irritated him earlier.
‘I think we’ve got the Asdic working again, sir.’
‘What?’ Clark stared at the rating, shaking his head.
‘I think we’ve got the Asdic…’
‘Yes, yes, I understand what you are saying, but how…?’
‘Well sir, the collision destroyed some of the circuitry. Baker managed to get to grips with the problem and after a bit of repair work and the replacement of a couple of valves…’
‘Well done, Carter! Well done!’
Carter smiled shyly and dropped his eyes. ‘Didn’t want to let you down, sir.’
Clark regarded the younger man for a moment and wondered if he and Baker would have exerted themselves had Carter not overstepped the mark. Nevertheless it was gratifying that Carter dispensed credit where it was due. Carter might be apologetic, but he was not abjectly so; he eschewed taking the credit himself and refused to be obsequious.
‘I’d better look after it a bit better then,’ Clark joked.
‘Well, it would help, sir.’ They smiled at each other.
‘Right, well, I think we’ll leave it passive for the time being. I’d rather not advertise our presence…’
‘I’d like a few practice pings, sir, perhaps astern or close to a berg.’
Clark nodded. ‘Very well.’
He felt very tired now, and wanted to go below and turn in, but he felt compelled to hang about on the bridge. When he did go below, it was to sit and doze in his chair, unsatisfactorily trying to rest, but all the time with one ear cocked for the summons to the bridge. And so, in a state of heightened vigilance, they drove north.
Before long the pack ice assumed the character it had in the vicinity of Hope Island, stretching away to the horizon, broken only by the seams of narrow polynyas. The horizontal planes of sea ice were thrown up at shallow angles as successive years of rafting and overriding created a landscape of haphazard regularity, for the pilings were whimsical, while the fractured sheets of ice often possessed an almost geometric regularity. This young ice was in contrast to the worn hummocks and rounded shapes of older ice. Some of the impacted sheets were turned almost on end in small irregular ice hills by the inexorable pressures. Such formations were called, in Russian, toroses. As they pressed deeper into this wilderness the ice blink grew more intense and, as the hours passed, the weather deteriorated and the sky clouded over with a light veil of altocumulus cloud. This decreased the distance to the horizon but proportionately increased the white glare. They now had to crease up their faces and squint, the issued sunglasses proving ineffective, and they developed headaches in the process. Then it began to sleet, a thin, chilling precipitation that was part rain, part melting snow, slushy enough to make the decks lethal underfoot.
In the wheelhouse warmth prevailed, supported by a seemingly endless supply of cocoa, but around the guns the men huddled in a damp and freezing misery in which even the hottest kye soon lost its warming properties. Once again the Sheba was forcing her way through the thinnest ice her officers could find. It took twelve hours to make forty miles and Frobisher was increasingly dubious as to the wisdom of Clark’s course of action. To him the increasing disorder of the ice meant only that conditions were worsening, a logic that seemed incontrovertible in the face of the evidence of ever-slowing progress. Twice he called Clark to the bridge, protesting that they were at a standstill, and twice he roused Clark’s own dogged perversity. Taking the con, Clark withdrew, turned the ship and made a detour a mile to the east, then pushed Sheba north again. He seemed able, Frobisher thought as Clark handed the con back over to him, to ‘read’ the ice, a knack Frobisher himself despaired of developing.
On the second occasion Frobisher had the grace to apologise for troubling Clark. Clark shrugged it off. ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said.
‘But how are you so damned certain that it’s going to clear further north?’ Frobisher persisted.
‘I don’t know for certain,’ Clark explained, ‘but this impacting of the ice may well be evidence that the current is pushing down from the north-east and this ice is, so to speak, trying to overtake the mass of floes in front of it. That’s why one can usually find a way through at this time of the year…’
‘I see,’ said Frobisher, not at all sure that he could.
But Clark, or perhaps one should record that it was really Storheill, proved correct. At 1100 the next morning, with the visibility down to about 300 yards, they suddenly found themselves in almost completely open water, a dark, swirling sea containing small fragments of rotten ice and decaying growlers, over which the glaucous gulls shrieked, for the bloody remains of a seal sailed past on one small bergy bit, evidence of a polar bear disturbed by the approach of the ship. Slowly, the ice field disappeared into the murk astern of them.
Informed of this dramatic breakthrough, Clark clambered wearily back up to the bridge. In the incessant daylight that robbed ‘day’ and ‘night’ of all meaning, he had just dropped off into a deep slumber occasioned by the sudden end to their buffeting through the ice. Now he stood bleary-eyed at the wheelhouse windows as a curtain of wet snow fell in white swathes out of a grey-white sky. Close by a solitary floe of pancake ice drifted past, dotted with the huddled shapes of little auks. It seemed to him that, anthropomorphically, they exuded a quality of sympathetic discontent.
‘Stop engines,’ he commanded, too weary to bother to adjust the telegraph himself. Pearson did as he was bid and the Sheba lost way and glided to a stop amid the white whirling of the snow.
‘Asdic!’ he called. ‘Hear anything?’
‘Not a thing, sir.’
‘Hmmm.’ Clark stirred and looked over his shoulder. ‘That’ll do the wheel for a while,’ he said drowsily, jamming himself between the radiator and the gyro-repeater. ‘Go and make us all some cocoa.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
They drifted on. Under his elbows the gyro-repeater ticked as Sheba, finally stopping dead in the water, fell broadside to the wind. He wondered where exactly they were, then decided he could not care less. The wheelhouse was warm and the low visibility cocooned them from the outside world, where, even in these remote waters, the horrors of war awaited them. His mind began to wander; he was on the verge of sleep, or hallucination. He could not remember when he had last slept properly, and the endless daylight made the passage of time unreckonable. When the sun shone it did not matter, for one seemed invigorated by it, able to go without sleep at no physical cost, inspirited by the vastness of the Arctic vista, dwarfed yet exhilar
ated by its remoteness. In contrast, this damp cold, with its circumscribed and indefinable horizon, drove one into the soporific warmth of the wheelhouse where it lulled one to sleep. Clark felt like Odysseus under the spell of Calypso, safe in her spacious cave. Somewhere behind him he was vaguely aware of Pearson handing over to Storheill. The matter need not trouble him; nor did he want to be troublesome to them. They could get on with it. Just let it continue snowing, as long as hot water streamed through the radiator on the forward bulkhead…
‘Sir?’ The voice was uncertain and a long way off. Clark roused himself with an effort. ‘Kye, sir – and Asdic are asking if you’d mind stepping in there, sir.’
‘Oh, oh thanks.’ Clark took the hot mug of cocoa and went through into the Asdic office. Carter was on duty and he motioned Clark to listen. Clark picked up the second headset and put it on. He had none of Carter’s ability to discriminate the many strange noises that seemed to fill the sea and make of it a vast acoustic soup, but he tried to identify some of them. There was a background rumble, like the blood one hears in the ears when lying awake on a quiet night; that, he presumed, was the working of the pack ice. Then there was an odd squealing that he could make nothing of, unless it was something grinding against something else, perhaps another distinctive ice noise.
He could see Carter’s mouth working and he took off the headset. ‘Pardon?’
‘Can you hear it, sir?’
‘I can hear a rumble which I presume is the distant pack, and a squealing that sounds like more ice…’
‘That’s some sort of whale or porpoise – no, the hammering, a mid-tone, regular hammering. It’s a diesel engine.’
‘A diesel?’ Clark clapped the headset over his ears again. Was he imagining it? They could not both be imagining it, but he could certainly hear it now, now that it was pointed out to him.
‘Any idea of direction?’ he asked Carter.
Carter nodded. ‘Due west.’
‘Very well.’ Clark dodged back to the wheelhouse, summoned the helmsman and rang half ahead. ‘Steer two seven zero.’