“Just wanted a squint at these eyes of yours, laddie,” he smiled. “We owe them a lot. Thank you very much-we will not forget.” He looked a long time into the young face, forgot his own exhaustion and swore softly in sudden compassion as he saw the red-rimmed eyes, the white, maculated cheeks stained with embarrassed pleasure.
“How old are you, Chrysler?” he asked abruptly.
“Eighteen, sir… in two days’ time.” The soft West Country voice was almost defiant.
“He’ll be eighteen-in two days’ time!” Tyndall repeated slowly to himself. “Good God! Good God above!” He dropped his hand, walked wearily aft to the shelter, entered, closed the door behind him.
“He’ll be eighteen-in two days’ time,” he repeated, like a man in a daze.
Vallery propped himself up on the settee. “Who? Young Chrysler?”
Tyndall nodded unhappily.
“I know.” Vallery was very quiet. “I know how it is… He did a fine job today.”
Tyndall sagged down in a chair. His mouth twisted in bitterness.
“The only one… Dear God, what a mess!” He drew heavily on a cigarette, stared down at the floor. “Ten green bottles, hanging on a wall,” he murmured absently.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Fourteen ships left Scapa, eighteen St. John-the two components of FR77,” Tyndall said softly. “Thirty-two ships in all. And now “-he paused-” now there are seventeen, and three of these damaged. I’m counting the Tennessee Adventurer as a dead duck.” He swore savagely.
“Hell’s teeth, how I hate,leaving ships like that, sitting targets for any murdering …” He stopped short, drew on his cigarette again, deeply. “Doing wonderfully, amn’t I?”
“Ah, nonsense, sir!” Vallery interrupted, impatient, almost angry.
“It wasn’t any fault of yours that the carriers had to return.”
“Meaning that the rest was my fault?” Tyndall smiled faintly, lifted a hand to silence the automatic protest. “Sorry, Dick, I know you didn’t meant that-but it’s true, it’s true. Six merchant boys gone in ten minutes-six! And we shouldn’t have lost one of them.” Head bent, elbows on knees, he screwed the heels of his palms into exhausted eyes.
“Rear-Admiral Tyndall, master strategist,” he went on softly. “Alters convoy course to run smack into a heavy cruiser, alters it again to run straight into the biggest wolf-pack I’ve ever known-and just where the Admiralty said they would be. … No matter what old Starr does to me when I get back, I’ve no kick coming. Not now, not after this.”
He rose heavily to his feet. The light of the single lamp caught his face. Vallery was shocked at the change.
“Where to, now, sir?” he asked.
“The bridge. No, no, stay where you are, Dick.” He tried to smile, but the smile was a grimace that flickered only to die. “Leave me in peace while I ponder my next miscalculation.”
He opened the door, stopped dead as he heard the unmistakable whistling of shells close above, heard the E.A.S. Signal screaming urgently through the fog. Tyndall turned his head slowly, looked back into the shelter.
“It looks,” he said bitterly, “as if I’ve already made it.”
CHAPTER NINE
FRIDAY MORNING
THE FOG, Tyndall saw, was all around them now. Since that last heavy snowfall during the night, the temperature had risen steadily, quickly.
But it had beguiled only to deceive: the clammy, icy feathers of the swirling mist now struck doubly chill.
He hurried through the gate, Vallery close behind him. Turner, steel helmet trailing, was just leaving for the After Tower. Tyndall stretched out his hand, stopped him.
“What is it, Commander?” he demanded. “Who fired? Where? Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know, sir. Shells came from astern, more or less. But I’ve a damned good idea who it is.” His eyes rested on the Admiral a long, speculative moment. “Our friend of last night is back again.” He turned abruptly, hurried off the bridge.
Tyndall looked after him, perplexed, uncomprehending. Then he swore, softly, savagely, and jumped for the radar handset.
“Bridge. Admiral speaking. Lieutenant Bowden at once!” The loudspeaker crackled into immediate life.
“Bowden speaking, sir.”
“What the devil are you doing down there?” Tyndall’s voice was low, vicious. “Asleep, or what? We are being attacked, Lieutenant Bowden. By a surface craft. This may be news to you.” He broke off, ducked low as another salvo screamed overhead and crashed into the water less than half a mile ahead: the spray cascaded over the decks of a merchantman, glimpsed momentarily in a clear lane between two rolling fog-banks.
Tyndall straightened up quickly, snarled into the mouth-piece. “He’s got our range, and got it accurately. In God’s name, Bowden, where is he?”
“Sorry, sir.” Bowden was cool, unruffled. “We can’t seem to pick him up. We still have the Adventurer on our screens, and there appears to be a very slight distortion on his bearing, sir, approximately 300… I suggest the enemy ship is still screened by the Adventurer or, if she’s closer, is on the Adventurer’s direct bearing.”
“How near?” Tyndall barked.
“Not near, sir. Very close to the Adventurer. We can’t distinguish either by size or distance.”
Tyndall dangled the transmitter from his hand. He turned to Vallery.
“Does Bowden really expect me to believe that yarn?” he asked angrily.
“A million to one coincidence like that, an enemy ship accidentally chose and holds the only possible course to screen her from our radar. Fantastic!”
Vallery looked at him, his face without expression.
“Well?” Tyndall was impatient. “Isn’t it?”
“No, sir,” Vallery answered quietly. “It’s not. Not really. And it wasn’t accidental. The U-pack would have radioed her, given our bearing and course. The rest was easy.”
Tyndall gazed at him through a long moment of comprehension, screwed his eyes shut and shook his head in short fierce jerks. It was a gesture compounded of self-criticism, the death of disbelief, the attempt to clear a woolly, exhausted mind. Hell, a six-year-old could have seen that… A shell whistled into the sea a bare fifty yards to port.
Tyndall didn’t flinch, might never have seen or heard it.
“Bowden?” He had the transmitter to his mouth again.
“Sir?”
“Any change in the screen?”
“No, sir. None.”
“And are you still of the same opinion?”
“Yes, sir! Can’t be anything else.”
“And close to the Adventurer, you say?”
“Very close, I would say.”
“But, good God, man, the Adventurer must be ten miles astern by now!”
“Yes, sir. I know. So is the bandit.”
“What! Ten miles! But, but—–”
“He’s firing by radar, sir,” Bowden interrupted. Suddenly the metallic voice sounded tired. “He must be. He’s also tracking by radar, which is why he’s keeping himself in line with our bearing on the Adventurer. And he’s extremely accurate … I’m afraid, Admiral, that his radar is at least as good as ours.”
The speaker clicked off. In the sudden strained silence on the bridge, the crash of breaking ebonite sounded unnaturally loud as the transmitter slipped from TyndalFs hand, fractured in a hundred pieces.
The hand groped forward, he clutched at a steam pipe as if to steady himself. Vallery stepped towards him, arms outstretched in concern, but Tyndall brushed by unseeingly. Like an old spent man, like a man from whose ancient bones and muscles all the pith has long since drained, he shuffled slowly across the bridge, oblivious of a dozen mystified eyes, dragged himself up on to his high stool.
You fool, he told himself bitterly, savagely, oh, you bloody old fool!
He would never forgive himself, never, never, never! All along the line he had been out-thought, outguessed and out-manceuvred by the enemy.
They had taken him for a ride, made an even bigger bloody fool out of him than his good Maker had ever intended. Radar! Of course, that was it! The blind assumption that German radar had remained the limited, elementary thing that Admiralty and Air Force Intelligence had reported it to be last year I Radar, and as good as the British. As good as the Ulysses’s, and everybody had believed that the Ulysses was incomparably the most efficient, indeed the only efficient, radar ship in the world. As good as our own-probably a damned sight better. But had the thought ever occurred to him? Tyndall writhed in sheer chagrin, in agony of spirit, and knew the bitter taste of self-loathing. And so, this morning, the payoff: six ships, three hundred men gone to the bottom. May God forgive you, Tyndall, he thought dully, may God forgive you. You sent them there… Radar!
Last night, for instance. When the Ulysses had been laying a false trail to the east, the German cruiser had obligingly tagged behind, the perfect foil to his, Tyndall’s genius. Tyndall groaned in mortification.
Had tagged behind, firing wildly, erratically each time the Ulysses had disappeared behind a smoke-screen. Had done so to conceal the efficiency of her radar, to conceal the fact that, during the first half-hour at least, she must have been tracking the escaping convoy as it disappeared to the NNW., a process made all the easier by the fact that he, Tyndall, had expressly forbidden the use of the zig-zag!