‘Sounds uncommon like our friends here.’ Tyndall jerked his head in the direction of the Kapok Kid, then looked up in surprise. ‘Courtney? Did you say “Courtney”? Where’s Guns?’
‘In his cabin, as far as I know. Collapsed on the poop. Anyway, he’s in no fit state to do his job . . . Thank God I’m not in that boy’s shoes. I can imagine . . . ’
The Ulysses shuddered, and the whip-like crash of ‘X’ turret drowned Vallery’s voice as the 5.25 shells screamed away into the twilight. Seconds later, the ship shook again as the guns of ‘Y’ turret joined in. Thereafter the guns fired alternately, one shell at a time, every half-minute: there was no point in wasting ammunition when the fall of shot could not be observed; but it was probably the bare minimum necessary to infuriate the enemy and distract his attention from everything except the ship ahead.
The snow had thinned away now to a filmy curtain of gauze that blurred, rather than obscured the horizon. To the west, the clouds were lifting, the sky lightening in sunset. Vallery ordered ‘X’ turret to cease fire, to load with star-shell.
Abruptly, the snow was gone and the enemy was there, big and menacing, a black featureless silhouette with the sudden flush of sunset striking incongruous golden gleams from the water creaming high at her bows.
‘Starboard 30!’ Vallery snapped. ‘Full ahead. Smokescreen!’ Tyndall nodded compliance. It was no part of his plan to become embroiled with a German heavy cruiser or pocket battleship . . . especially at an almost point-blank range of four miles.
On the bridge, half a dozen pairs of binoculars peered aft, trying to identify the enemy. But the fore-and-aft silhouette against the reddening sky was difficult to analyse, exasperatingly vague and ambiguous. Suddenly, as they watched, white gouts of flame lanced out from the heart of the silhouette: simultaneously, the starshell burst high up in the air, directly above the enemy, bathing him in an intense, merciless white glare, so that he appeared strangely naked and defenceless.
An illusory appearance. Everyone ducked low, in reflex instinct, as the shells whistled just over their heads and plunged into the sea ahead. Everyone, that is, except the Kapok Kid. He bent an impassive eye on the Admiral as the latter slowly straightened up.
‘Hipper Class, sir,’ he announced. ‘10,000 tons, 8-inch guns, carries aircraft.’
Tyndall looked at his unsmiling face in long suspicion. He cast around in his mind for a suitably crushing reply, caught sight of the German cruiser’s turrets belching smoke in the sinking glare of the starshell.
‘My oath!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not wasting much time, are they? And damned good shooting!’ he added in professional admiration as the shells hissed into the sea through the Ulysses’s boiling wake, about 150 feet astern. ‘Bracketed in the first two salvoes. They’ll straddle us next time.’
The Ulysses was still heeling round, the black smoke beginning to pour from the after funnel, when Vallery straightened, clapped his binoculars to his eyes. Heavy clouds of smoke were mushrooming from the enemy’s starboard deck, just for’ard of the bridge.
‘Oh, well done, young Courtney!’ he burst out. ‘Well done indeed!’
‘Well done indeed!’ Tyndall echoed. ‘A beauty! Still, I don’t think we’ll stop to argue the point with me . . . Ah! Just in time, gentlemen! Gad, that was close!’ The stern of the Ulysses, swinging round now almost to the north, disappeared from sight as a salvo crashed into the sea, dead astern, one of the shells exploding in a great eruption of water.
The next salvo—obviously the hit on the enemy cruiser hadn’t affected her fire-power—fell a cable length’s astern. The German was now firing blind. Engineer Commander Dodson was making smoke with a vengeance, the oily, black smoke flattening down on the surface of the sea, rolling, thick, impenetrable. Vallery doubled back on course, then headed east at high speed.
For the next two hours, in the dusk and darkness, they played cat and mouse with the ‘Hipper’ class cruiser, firing occasionally, appearing briefly, tantalizingly, then disappearing behind a smokescreen, hardly needed now in the coming night. All the time, radar was their eyes and their ears and never played them false. Finally, satisfied that all danger to the convoy was gone, Tyndall laid a double screen in a great curving ‘U’, and vanished to the southwest, firing a few final shells, not so much in token of farewell as to indicate direction of depature.
Ninety minutes later, at the end of a giant halfcircle to port, the Ulysses was sitting far to the north, while Bowden and his men tracked the progress of the enemy. He was reported as moving steadily east, then, just before contact was lost, as altering course to the south-east.
Tyndall climbed down from his chair, numbed and stiff. He stretched himself luxuriantly.
‘Not a bad night’s work, Captain, not bad at all. What do you bet our friend spends the night circling to the south and east at high speed, hoping to come up ahead of the convoy in the morning?’ Tyndall felt almost jubilant, in spite of his exhaustion. ‘And by that time FR77 should be 200 miles to the north of him . . . I suppose, Pilot, you have worked out intersection courses for rejoining the convoy at all speeds up to a hundred knots?’
‘I think we should be able to regain contact without much difficulty,’ said the Kapok Kid politely.
‘It’s when he is at his most modest,’ Tyndall announced, ‘that he sickens me most . . . Heavens above, I’m froze to death . . . Oh, damn! Not more trouble, I hope?’
The communication rating behind the compass platform picked up the jangling phone, listened briefly.
‘For you, sir,’ he said to Vallery. ‘The Surgeon Lieutenant.’
‘Just take the message, Chrysler.’
‘Sorry, sir. Insists on speaking to you himself.’ Chrysler handed the receiver into the bridge. Vallery smothered an exclamation of annoyance, lifted the receiver to his ear.
‘Captain, here. Yes, what is it? . . . What? . . . What? Oh, God, no! . . . Why wasn’t I told? . . . Oh, I see. Thank you, thank you.’
Vallery handed the receiver back, turned heavily to Tyndall. In the darkness, the Admiral felt, rather than saw the sudden weariness; the hunched defeat of the shoulders.
‘That was Nicholls.’ Vallery’s voice was flat, colourless. ‘Lieutenant Etherton shot himself in his cabin, five minutes ago.’
At four o’clock in the morning, in heavy snow, but in a calm sea, the Ulysses rejoined the convoy.
By mid-morning of that next day, a bare six hours later Admiral Tyndall had become an old weary man, haggard, haunted by remorse and bitter self-criticism, close, very close, to despair. Miraculously, in a matter of hours, the chubby cheeks had collapsed in shrunken flaccidity, draining blood had left the florid cheeks a parchment grey, the sunken eyes had dulled in blood and exhaustion. The extent and speed of the change wrought in that tough and jovial sailor, a sailor seemingly impervious to the most deadly vicissitudes of war, was incredible: incredible and disturbing in itself, but infinitely more so in its wholly demoralising effect on the men. To every arch there is but one keystone . . . or so any man must inevitably think.
Any impartial court of judgment would have cleared Tyndall of all guilt, would have acquitted him without a trial. He had done what he thought right, what any commander would have done in his place. But Tyndall sat before the merciless court of his own conscience. He could not forget that it was he who had re-routed the convoy so far to the north, that it was he who had ignored official orders to break straight for the North Cape, that it was exactly on latitude 70 N—where their Lordships had told him they would be— that FR77 had, on that cold, clear windless dawn, blundered straight into the heart of the heaviest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war.
The wolf-pack had struck at its favourite hour—the dawn— and from its favourite position—the north-east, with the dawn in its eyes. It struck cruelly, skilfully and with a calculated ferocity. Admittedly, the era of Kapitan Leutnant Prien—his U-boat long ago sent to the bottom wit
h all hands by the destroyer Wolverine— and his illustrious contemporaries, the hey-day of the great U-boat Commanders, the high noon of individual brilliance and great personal gallantry, was gone. But in its place—and generally acknowledged to be even more dangerous, more deadly—were the concerted, highly integrated mass attacks of the wolf-packs, methodical, machine-like, almost reduced to a formula, under a single directing command.
The Cochella, third vessel in the port line, was the first to go. Sister ship to the Vytura and the Varella, also accompanying her in FR77, the Cochella carried over 3,000,000 gallons of 100-octane petrol. She was hit by at least three torpedoes: the first two broke her almost in half, the third triggered off a stupendous detonation that literally blew her out of existence. One moment she was there, sailing serenely through the limpid twilight of sunrise: the next moment she was gone. Gone, completely, utterly gone, with only a seething ocean, convulsed in boiling white, to show where she had been: gone, while stunned eardrums and stupefied minds struggled vainly to grasp the significance of what had happened: gone, while blind reflex instinct hurled men into whatever shelter offered as a storm of lethal metal swept over the fleet.
Two ships took the full force of the explosion. A huge mass of metal—it might have been a winch—passed clear through the superstructure of the Sirrus, a cable-length away on the starboard: it completely wrecked the radar office. What happened to the other ship immediately astern, the impossibly-named Tennessee Adventurer, was not clear, but almost certainly her wheelhouse and bridge had been severely damaged: she had lost steering control, was not under command.
Tragically, this was not at first understood, simply because it was not apparent. Tyndall, recovering fast from the sheer physical shock of the explosion, broke out the signal for an emergency turn to port. The wolf-pack, obviously, lay on the port hand, and the only action to take to minimize further losses, to counter the enemy strategy, was to head straight towards them. He was reasonably sure that the U-boats would be bunched—generally, they strung out only for the slow convoys. Besides, he had adopted this tactic several times in the past with a high degree of success. Finally, it cut the U-boats’ target to an impossible tenth, forcing on them the alternative of diving or the risk of being trampled under.
With an immaculate precision and co-ordination of Olympic equestrians, the convoy heeled steadily over to starboard, slewed majestically round, trailing curved, white wakes phosphorescently alive in the near-darkness that still clung to the surface of the sea. Too late, it was seen that the Tennessee Adventurer was not under command. Slowly, then with dismaying speed, she came round to the east, angling directly for another merchantman, the Tobacco Planter. There was barely time to think, to appreciate the inevitable: frantically, the Planter’s helm went hard over in an attempt to clear the other astern, but the wildly swinging Adventurer, obviously completely out of control, matched the Planter’s tightening circle, foot by inexorable foot, blind malice at the helm.
She struck the Planter with sickening violence just for’ard of the bridge. The Adventurer’s bows, crumpling as they went, bit deeply into her side, fifteen, twenty feet in a chaos of tearing, rending metal: the stopping power of 10,000 tons deadweight travelling at 15 knots is fantastic. The wound was mortal, and the Planter’s own momentum, carrying her past, wrenched her free from the lethal bows, opening the wound to the hungry sea and hastened her own end. Almost at once she began to fill, to list heavily to starboard. Aboard the Adventurer, someone must have taken over command: her engine stopped, she lay almost motionless alongside the sinking ship, slightly down by the head.
The rest of the convoy cleared the drifting vessels, steadied west by north. Far out on the starboard hand, Commander Orr, in the Sirrus, clawed his damaged destroyer round in a violent turn, headed back towards the crippled freighters. He had gone less than half a mile when he was recalled by a vicious signal from the flagship. Tyndall was under no illusions. The Adventurer, he knew, might remain there all day, unharmed—it was obvious that the Planter would be gone in a matter of minutes—but that would be a guarantee neither of the absence of U-boats nor of the sudden access of misguided enemy chivalry: the enemy would be there, would wait to the last possible second before dark in the hope that some rescue destroyer would heave to alongside the Adventurer.
In that respect, Tyndall was right. The Adventurer was torpedoed just before sunset. Threequarters of the ship’s company escaped in lifeboats, along with twenty survivors picked up from the Planter. A month later the frigate Esher found them, in three lifeboats tied line ahead, off the bitter, iron coast of Bear Island, heading steadily north. The Captain alert and upright, was still sitting in the stern-sheets, empty eye-sockets searching for some lost horizon, a withered claw locked to the tiller. The rest were sitting or lying about the boats, one actually standing, his arm cradled around the mast, and all with shrunken sun-blackened lips drawn back in hideous mirth. The log-book lay beside the Captain, empty: all had frozen to death on that first night. The young frigate commander had cast them adrift, watched them disappear over the northern rim of the world, steering for the Barrier. And the Barrier is the region of the great silence, the seas of incredible peace, so peaceful, so calm, so cold that they may be there yet, the dead who cannot rest. A mean and shabby end for the temple of the spirit . . . It is not known whether the Admiralty approved the action of the captain of the frigate.
But in the major respect, that of anticipating enemy disposition, the Admiral was utterly wrong. The wolf-pack commander had outguessed him and it was arguable that Tyndall should have foreseen this. His tactic of swinging an entire convoy into the face of a torpedo attack was well known to the enemy: it was also well known that his ship was the Ulysses, and the Ulysses, the only one of her kind, was familiar, by sight or picture silhouette, to every U-boat commander in the German Navy: and it had been reported, of course, that it was the Ulysses that was leading FR77 through to Murmansk. Tyndall should have expected, expected and forestalled the long overdue counter.
For the submarine that had torpedoed the Cochella had been the last, not the first, of the pack. The others had lain to the south of the U-boat that had sprung the trap, and well to the west of the track of FR77—clear beyond the reach of Asdic. And when the convoy wheeled to the west, the U-boats lined up leisurely firing tracks as the ships steamed up to cross their bows at right angles. The sea was calm, calm as a millpond, an extraordinary deep, Mediterranean blue. The snow-squalls of the night had passed away. Far to the south-east a brilliant sun was shouldering itself clear of the horizon, its level rays striking a great band of silver across the Arctic, highlighting the ships, shrouded white in snow, against the darker sea and sky beyond. The conditions were ideal, if one may use the word ‘ideal’ to describe the prologue to a massacre.
Massacre, an almost total destruction there must inevitably have been but for the warning that came almost too late. A warning given neither by radar nor Asdic, nor by any of the magically efficient instruments of modern detection, but simply by the keen eyes of an eighteen-year-old Ordinary Seaman—and the God-sent rays of the rising sun.
‘Captain, sir! Captain, sir!’ It was young Chrysler who shouted. His voice broke in wild excitement, his eyes were glued to the powerful binoculars clamped on the port searchlight control position. ‘There’s something flashing to the south, sir! It flashed twice—there it goes again!’
‘Where, boy?’ Tyndall shouted. ‘Come on, where, where?’ In his agitation, Chrysler had forgotten the golden rule of the reporting look-out—bearing must come first.
‘Port 50, sir—no, port 60 . . . I’ve lost sight of it now, sir.’
Every pair of glasses on the bridge swung round on the given bearing. There was nothing to be seen, just nothing at all. Tyndall shut his telescope slowly, shrugged his shoulders eloquent in disbelief.
‘Maybe there is something,’ said the Kapok Kid doubtfully. ‘How about the sea catching a periscope making a quick circle sweep?’
Tyndall looked at him, silent, expressionless, looked away, stared straight ahead. To the Kapok Kid he seemed strange, different. His face was set, stonily impassive, the face of a man with twenty ships and 5,000 lives in his keeping, the face of a man who has already made one wrong decision too many.
‘There they go again!’ Chrysler screamed. ‘Two flashes—no, three flashes!’ He was almost beside himself with excitement, literally dancing in an agony of frustration. ‘I did see them, sir, I did. I did. Oh, please, sir, please!’
Tyndall had swung round again. Ten long seconds he gazed at Chrysler, who had left his binoculars, and was gripping the gate in gauntleted hands, shaking it in anguished appeal. Abruptly, Tyndall made up his mind.
‘Hard aport, Captain. Bentley—the signal!’
Slowly, on the unsupported word of an eighteen-year-old, FR77 came round to the south, slowly, just too slowly. Suddenly, the sea was alive with running torpedoes—three, five, ten—Vallery counted thirty in as many seconds. They were running shallow and their bubbling trails, evil, ever-lengthening, rose swiftly to the surface and lay there milkily on the glassy sea, delicately evanescent shafts for arrowheads so lethal. Parallel in the centre, they fanned out to the east and west to embrace the entire convoy. It was a fantastic sight: no man in that convoy had ever seen anything remotely like it.
In a moment the confusion was complete. There was no time for signals. It was every ship for itself in an attempt to avoid wholesale destruction: and confusion was worse confounded by the ships in the centre and outer lines, that had not yet seen the wakes of the streaking torpedoes.
Escape for all was impossible: the torpedoes were far too closely bunched. The cruiser Stirling was the first casualty. Just when she seemed to have cleared all danger—she was far ahead where the torpedoes were thickest—she lurched under some unseen hammer-blow, slewed round crazily and steamed away back to the east, smoke hanging heavily over her poop. The Ulysses, brilliantly handled, heeled over on maximum rudder and under the counter-thrusting of her great screws, slid down an impossibly narrow lane between four torpedoes, two of them racing by a bare boat’s length from either side: she was still a lucky ship. The destroyers, fast, highly manoeuvrable, impeccably handled, bobbed and weaved their way to safety with almost contemptuous ease, straightened up and headed south under maximum power.