“What in the name of-Ralston! What on earth are you doing here?” he shouted.
Ralston smiled. Even through the thick plate glass it wasn’t a pleasant smile and it never touched the blue eyes. He gestured to the barred grille, indicating that he could not hear.
Impatiently, Vallery twisted the grille handle.
“What are you doing here, Ralston?” he demanded. The brows were drawn down heavily over blazing eyes. “In the cells-and at this time! Speak up, man! Tell me!” Nicholls looked at Vallery in slow surprise. The old man-angry! It was unheard of! Shrewdly, Nicholls decided that he’d rather not be the object of Vallery’s fury.
“I was locked up here, sir.” The words were innocuous enough, but their tone said, “What a damned silly question.” Vallery flushed faintly.
“When?”
“At 1030 this morning, sir.”
“And by whom, may I inquire?”
“By the Master-At-Arms, sir.”
“On what authority?” Vallery demanded furiously.
Ralston looked at him a long moment without speaking. His face was expressionless. “On yours, sir.”
“Mine!” Vallery was incredulous. “I didn’t tell him to lock you up!”
“You never told him not to,” said Ralston evenly. Vallery winced: the oversight, the lack of consideration was his, and that hurt badly.
“Where’s your night Action Station?” he asked sharply.
“Port tubes, sir.” That, Vallery realised, explained why only the starboard crew had been closed up.
“And why-why have you been left here during Action Stations? Don’t you know it’s forbidden, against all regulations?”
“Yes, sir.” Again the hint of the wintry smile. “I know. But does the Master-At-Arms know?” He paused a second, smiled again. “Or maybe he just forgot,” he suggested.
“Hartley!” Vallery was on balance again, his tone level and grim. “The Master-At-Arms here, immediately: see that he brings his keys!” He broke into a harsh bout of coughing, spat some blood into the towel, looked at Ralston again.
“I’m sorry about this, my boy,” he said slowly. “Genuinely sorry.”
“How’s the tanker?” Ralston asked softly.
“What? What did you say?” Vallery was unprepared for the sudden switch.
“What tanker?”
“The one that was damaged this morning, sir.”
“Still with us.” Vallery was puzzled. “Still with us, but low in the water. Any special reason for asking?”
“Just interested, sir.” The smile was wry, but this time it was a smile. “You see——”
He stopped abruptly as a deep, muffled roar crashed through the silent night, the pressure blast listing the Ulysses sharply to starboard.
Vallery lurched, staggered and would have fallen but for Petersen’s sudden arm. He braced himself against the righting roll, looked at Nicholls in sudden dismay. The sound was all too familiar.
Nicholls gazed back at him, sorry to his heart for this fresh burden for a dying man, and nodded slowly, in reluctant agreement with the unspoken thought in Vallery’s eyes.
“Afraid you’re right, sir. Torpedo. Somebody’s stopped a packet.”
“Do you hear there!” The capstan flat speaker was hurried, intense, unnaturally loud in the aftermath of silence. “Do you hear there!
Captain on the bridge: urgent. Captain on the bridge: urgent. Captain on the bridge: urgent.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FRIDAY EVENING
BENT ALMOST double, Captain Vallery clutched the handrail of the port ladder leading up to the fo’c’sle deck. Desperately, he tried to look out over the darkened water, but he could see nothing. A mist, a dark and swirling and roaring mist flecked with blood, a mist shot through with dazzling light swam before his eyes and he was blind. His breath came in great whoopings gasps that racked his tortured lungs: his lower ribs were clamped in giant pincers, pincers that were surely crushing him. That stumbling, lurching run from the forepeak, he dimly realised, had all but killed him. Close, too damn’ close, he thought. I must be more careful In future. …
Slowly his vision cleared, but the brilliant light remained. Heavens above, Vallery thought, a blind man could have seen all there was to see here. For there was nothing to be seen but the tenebrous silhouette, so faint as to be almost imagined, of a tanker deep, deep in the water-and a great column of flame, hundreds of feet in height, streaking upwards from the heart of the dense mushroom of smoke that obscured the bows of the torpedoed ship. Even at the distance of half a mile, the roaring of the flames was almost intolerable. Vallery watched appalled. Behind him he could hear Nicholls swearing, softly, bitterly, continuously.
Vallery felt Petersen’s hand on his arm. “Does the Captain wish to go up to the bridge?”
“In a moment, Petersen, in a moment. Just hang on.” His mind was functioning again, his eyes, conditioned by forty years’ training, automatically sweeping the horizon. Funny, he thought, you can hardly see the tanker-the Vytura, it must be-she’s shielded by that thick pall of smoke, probably; but the other ships in the convoy, white, ghost-like, sharply etched against the indigo blue of the sky, were bathed in that deadly glare. Even the stars had died.
He became aware that Nicholls was no longer swearing in repetitious monotony, that he was talking to him.
“A tanker, isn’t it, sir? Hadn’t we better take shelter? Remember what happened to that other one!”
“What one?” Vallery was hardly listening.
“The Cochella. A few days ago, I think it was. Good God, no! It was only this morning!”
“When tankers go up, they go up, Nicholls.” Vallery seemed curiously far away. “If they just burn, they may last long enough. Tankers die hard, terribly hard, my boy: they live where any other ship would sink.”
“But-but she must have a hole the size of a house in her side!”
Nicholls protested.
“No odds,” Vallery replied. He seemed to be waiting, watching for something. “Tremendous reserve buoyancy in these ships. Maybe 27 sealed tanks, not to mention cofferdams, pump-rooms, engine-rooms… Never heard of the Nelson device for pumping compressed air into a tanker’s oil tanks to give it buoyancy, to keep it afloat? Never heard of Captain Dudley Mason and the Ohiot Never heard of …” He broke off suddenly, and when he spoke again, the dreaming lethargy of the voice was gone.
“I thought so!” he exclaimed, his voice sharp with excitement. “I thought so! The Vytura’s still under way, still under command! Good God, she must still be doing almost 15 knots! The bridge, quick!”
Vallery’s feet left the deck, barely touched it again till Petersen set him down carefully on the duckboards in front of the startled Commander.
Vallery grinned faintly at Turner’s astonishment, at the bushy eyebrows lifting over the dark, lean buccaneer’s face, leaner, more recklessly chiselled than ever in the glare of the blazing tanker. If ever a man was born 400 years too late, Vallery thought inconsequentially ; but what a man to have around!
“It’s all right, Commander.” He laughed shortly. “Brooks thought I needed a Man Friday. That’s Stoker Petersen. Over-enthusiastic, maybe a trifle apt to take orders too literally… But he was a Godsend to me tonight… But never mind me.” He jerked his thumb towards the tanker, blazing even more whitely now, difficult to look at, almost, as the noonday sun. “How about him?”
“Makes a bloody fine lighthouse for any German ship or plane that happens to be looking for us,” Turner growled. “Might as well send a signal to Trondheim giving our lat. and long.”
“Exactly,” Vallery nodded. “Besides setting up some beautiful targets for the sub that got the Vytura just now. A dangerous fellow, Commander. That was a brilliant piece of work-in almost total darkness, too.”
“Probably a scuttle somebody forgot to shut. We haven’t the ships to keep checking them all the time. And it wasn’t so damned brilliant, at least not for him. The Viking’s in contact right now, sitting over the top of him. … I sent her right away.”
“Good man!” Vallery said warmly. He turned to look at the burning tanker, looked back at Turner, his face set. “She’ll have to go, Commander.”
Turner nodded slowly. “She’ll have to go,” he echoed.
“It is the Vytura, isn’t it?”
“That’s her. Same one that caught it this morning.”
“Who’s the master?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” Turner confessed. “Number One, Pilot? Any idea where the sailing list is?”
“No, sir.” The Kapok Kid was hesitant, oddly unsure of himself.
“Admiral had them, I know. Probably gone, now.”
“What makes you think that?” Vallery asked sharply.
“Spicer, his pantry steward, was almost choked with smoke this afternoon, found him making a whacking great fire in his bath,” the Kapok Kid said miserably. “Said he was burning vital documents that must not fall into enemy hands. Old newspapers, mostly, but I think the list must have been among them. It’s nowhere else.”
“Poor old …” Turner remembered just in time that he was speaking of the Admiral, broke off, shook bis head in compassionate wonder. “Shall I send a signal to Fletcher on the Cape Hatterasl”
“Never mind.” Vallery was impatient. “There’s no time. Bentley-to the master, Vytura:’ Please abandon ship immediately : we are going to sink you.'”