Shivering, he pulled himself to his feet, swept his glasses over FR77.
Code H was being obeyed. The ships were scattered over the sea apparently at random, broken out from the two lines ahead which would have made things far too simple for bomb-aimers in aircraft attacking from astern. They would have to aim now for individual targets.
Scattered, but not too scattered-close enough together to derive mutual benefit from the convoy’s concerted barrage. Vallery nodded to himself in satisfaction and twisted round, his glasses swivelling to the west.
There was no mistaking them now, he thought-they were Condors, all right. Almost dead astern now, massive wing-tips dipping, the big four-engined planes banked slowly, ponderously to starboard, then straightened on a 180° overtaking course. And they were climbing, steadily climbing.
Two things were suddenly clear to Vallery, two things the enemy obviously knew. They had known where to find FR77, the Luftwaffe was not given to sending heavy bombers out over the Arctic on random hazard: they hadn’t even bothered to send Charlie on reconnaissance. For a certainty, some submarine had located them earlier on, given their position and course: at any distance at all, their chance of seeing a periscope in that heavy sea had been remote. Further, the Germans knew that the Ulysses’s radar was gone. The Focke-Wulfs were climbing to gain the low cloud, would break cover only seconds before it was time to bomb.
Against radar-controlled fire, at such close range, it would have been near suicide. But they knew it was safe.
Even as he watched, the last of the labouring Condors climbed through the low, heavy ceiling, was completely lost to sight. Vallery shrugged wearily, lowered his binoculars.
“Bentley?”
“Sir?”
“Code R. Immediate.”
The flags fluttered up. For fifteen, twenty seconds, it seemed ten times as long as that to the impatient Captain, nothing happened. And then, like rolling toy marionettes under the hand of a master puppeteer, the bows of every ship in the convoy began to swing round-those to the port of the Ulysses to the north, those to the starboard to the south. When the Condors broke through-two minutes, at the most, Vallery reckoned, they would find beneath them only the empty sea. Empty, that is, except for the Ulysses and the Stirling, ships admirably equipped to take care of themselves. And then the Condors would find themselves under heavy cross-fire from the merchant ships and destroyers, and too late-at that low altitude, much too late-to alter course for fore-and-aft bombing runs on the freighters. Vallery smiled wryly to himself. As a defensive tactic, it was little enough, but the best he could do in the circumstances… He could hear Turner barking orders through the loudspeaker, was more than content to leave the defence of the ship in the Commander’s competent hands. If only he himself didn’t feel so tired…
Ninety seconds passed, a hundred, two minutes, and still no sign of the Condors. A hundred eyes stared out into the cloud-wrack astern: it remained obstinately, tantalisingly grey and featureless.
Two and a half minutes passed. Still there was nothing.
“Anybody seen anything?” Vallery asked anxiously. His eyes never left that patch of cloud astern. “Nothing? Nothing at all?” The silence remained, oppressive, unbroken.
Three minutes. Three and a half. Four. Vallery looked away to rest his straining eyes, caught Turner looking at him, caught the growing apprehension, the slow dawn and strengthening of surmise in the lean face. Wordlessly, at the same instant, they swung round, staring out into the sky ahead.
“That’s it!” Vallery said quickly. “You’re right, Commander, you must be!” He was aware that everyone had turned now, was peering ahead as intently as himself. “They’ve by-passed us, they’re going to take us from ahead. Warn the guns! Dear God, they almost had us!” he whispered softly.
“Eyes skinned, everyone!” Turner boomed. The apprehension was gone, the irrepressible joviality, the gratifying anticipation of action was back again. “And I mean everyone! We’re all in the same boat together. No joke intended. Fourteen days’ leave to the first man to sight a Condor!”
“Effective as from when?” the Kapok Kid asked dryly.
Turner grinned at him. Then the smile died, the head lifted sharply in sudden attention.
“Can you hear ’em?” he asked. His voice was soft, almost as if he feared the enemy might be listening. “They’re up there, somewhere, damned if I can tell where, though. If only that wind—–”
The vicious, urgent thudding of the boat-deck Oerlikons stopped him dead in mid-sentence, had him whirling round and plunging for the broadcast transmitter in one galvanic, concerted movement. But even then he was too late-he would have been too late anyway. The Condors-the first three in line ahead, were already visible-were already through the cloud, 500 feet up and barely half a mile away, dead astern. Astern. The bombers must have circled back to the west as soon as they had reached the clouds, completely fooled them as to their intentions… Six seconds, six seconds is time and to spare for even a heavy bomber to come less than half a mile in a shallow dive. There was barely time for realisation, for the first bitter welling of mortification and chagrin when the Condors were on them.
It was almost dusk, now, the weird half-light of the Arctic twilight.
Tracers, glowing hot pinpoints of light streaking out through the darkening sky, were clearly seen, at first swinging erratically, fading away to extinction in the far distance, then steadying, miraculously dying in the instant of birth as they sank home into the fuselages of the swooping Condors. But time was too short-the guns were on target for a maximum of two seconds-and these giant Focke-Wulfs had a tremendous capacity for absorbing punishment. The leading Condor levelled out about three hundred feet, its medium 250-kilo bombs momentarily parallelling its line of flight, then arching down lazily towards the Ulysses. At once the Condor pulled its nose up in maximum climb, the four great engines labouring in desynchronised clamour, as it sought the protection of the clouds.
The bombs missed. They missed by about thirty feet, exploding on contact with the water just abaft the bridge. For the men in the T.S., engine-and boiler-rooms, the crash and concussion must have been frightful-literally ear-shattering. Waterspouts, twenty feet in diameter at their turbulent bases, streaked up whitely into the twilight, high above the truncated masts, hung there momentarily, then collapsed in drenching cascades on the bridge and boat-deck aft, soaking, saturating, every gunner on the pom-pom and in the open Oerlikon cockpits. The temperature stood at 2° above zero-30° of frost.
More dangerously, the blinding sheets of water completely unsighted the gunners. Apart from a lone Oerlikon on a sponson below the starboard side of the bridge, the next Condor pressed home its attack against a minimum of resistance. The approach was perfect, dead fore-and-aft on the centre line; but the pilot overshot, probably in his anxiety to hold course. Three bombs this time: for a second, it seemed that they must miss, but the first smashed into the fo’c’sle between the breakwater and the capstan, exploding in the flat below, heaving up the deck in a tangled wreckage of broken steel. Even as the explosion died, the men on the bridge could hear a curious clanking rattle: the explosion must have shattered the fo’c’sle capstan and Blake stopper simultaneously, and sheared the retaining shackle on the anchor cable, and the starboard anchor, completely out of control, was plummeting down to the depths of the Arctic.
The other bombs fell into the sea directly ahead, and from the Stirling, a mile ahead, it seemed that the Ulysses disappeared under the great column of water. But the water subsided, and the Ulysses steamed on, apparently unharmed. From dead ahead, the sweeping lift of the bows hid all damage, and there was neither flame nor smoke-hundreds of gallons of water, falling from the sky and pouring in through the great jagged holes in the deck, had killed any fire there was. The Ulysses was still a lucky ship… And then, at last, after twenty months of the fantastic escapes, the fabulous good fortune that had made her a legend, a byword for immunity throughout all the north, the luck of the Ulysses ran out.
Ironically, the Ulysses brought disaster on herself. The main armament, the 5.25s aft, had opened up now, was pumping its 100-lb.
shells at the diving bombers, at point-blank range and over equivalent of open sights. The very first shell from ‘X’ turret sheared away the starboard wing of the third Condor between the engines, tore it completely away to spin slowly like a fluttering leaf into the darkly-rolling sea. For a fraction of a second the Folke-Wulf held on course, then abruptly the nose tipped over and the giant plane screamed down in an almost vertical dive, her remaining engines inexplicably accelerating to a deafening crescendo as she hurtled arrow-straight for the deck of the Ulysses.