“Oh, aye. The magazine.” In the intervals between the racked bouts of coughing, the voice was strangely composed. “The shells up top are just aboot meltin’. Worse than ever, sir.”
“I see.” Vallery could think of nothing else to say. His eyes were closed and he knew he was swaying on his feet. With an effort, he spoke again. “How’s Williamson?” It was all he could think of.
“Near gone. Up to his neck and hangin’ on to the racks.” McQuater coughed again. “Says he’s a message for the Commander and Carslake.”
“A-a message?”
“Uh-huh! Tell old Blackbeard to take a turn to himself and lay off the bottle,” he said with relish. The message for Carslake was unprintable.
Vallery didn’t even feel shocked.
“And yourself, McQuater?” he said. “No message, nothing you would like …” He stopped, conscious of the grotesque inadequacy, the futility of what he was saying.
“Me? Ach, there’s naething Ah’d like … Well, maybe a “transfer to the Spartiate, but Ah’m thinking maybe it’s a wee bit ower late for that. “Williamson!” The voice had risen to a sudden urgent shout.
“Williamson! Hang on, boy, Ah’m coming!” They heard the booming clatter in the speaker as McQuater’s phone crashed against metal, and then there was only the silence.
“McQuater!” Vallery shouted into the phone. “McQuater! Answer me, man. Can you hear me? McQuater!”
H.M.S. Spartiate was a shore establishment. Naval H.Q. for the West of Scotland, It was at St. Enoch’s Hotel, Glasgow.
But the speaker above him remained dead, finally, irrevocably dead.
Vallery shivered in the icy wind. That magazine, that flooded magazine … less than twenty-four hours since he had been there. He could see it now, see it as clearly as he had seen it last night. Only now he saw it dark, cavernous with only the pin-points of emergency lighting, the water welling darkly, slowly up the sides, saw that little, pitifully wasted Scots boy with the thin shoulders and pain-filled eyes, struggling desperately to keep his mate’s head above that icy water, exhausting his tiny reserves of strength with the passing of every second. Even now, the tune must be running out and Vallery knew hope was gone. With a sudden clear certainty he knew that when those two went down, they would go down together. McQuater would never let go. Eighteen years old, just eighteen years old. Vallery turned away, stumbling blindly through the gate on to the shattered compass platform. It was beginning to snow again and the darkness was falling all around them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SATURDAY EVENING I
THE Ulysses rolled on through the Arctic twilight. She rolled heavily, awkwardly, in seas of the wrong critical length, a strange and stricken sight with both masts gone, with all boats and rafts gone, with shattered fore-and-aft superstructure, with a crazily tilted bridge and broken, mangled after turret, half-buried in the skeleton of the Condor’s fuselage. But despite all that, despite, too, the great garish patches of red lead and gaping black holes in fo’c’sle and poop-the latter welling with dark smoke laced with flickering lances of flame-she still remained uncannily ghost-like and graceful, a creature of her own element, inevitably at home in the Arctic. Ghost-like, graceful, and infinitely enduring … and still deadly. She still had her guns-and her engines. Above all, she had these great engines, engines strangely blessed with endless immunity. So, at least, it seemed …
Five minutes dragged themselves interminably by, five minutes during which the sky grew steadily darker, during which reports from the poop showed that the firefighters were barely holding their own, five minutes during which Vallery recovered something of his normal composure. But he was now terribly weak.
A bell shrilled, cutting sharply through the silence and the gloom.
Chrysler answered it, turned to the bridge.
“Captain, sir. After engine-room would like to speak to you.”
Turner looked at the Captain, said quickly: “Shall I take it, sir?”
“Thank you.” Vallery nodded his head gratefully. Turner nodded in turn, crossed to the phone.
“Commander speaking. Who is it? … Lieutenant Grier-son. What is it, Grierson? Couldn’t be good news for a change?”
For almost a minute Turner remained silent. The others on the bridge could hear the faint crackling of the earpiece, sensed rather than saw the taut attention, the tightening of the mouth.
“Will it hold?” Turner asked abruptly. “Yes, yes, of course… Tell him we’ll do our best up here… Do that. Half-hourly, if you please.”
“It never rains, et cetera,” Turner growled, replacing the phone.
“Engine running rough, temperature hotting up. Distortion in inner starboard shaft. Dodson himself is in the shaft tunnel right now. Bent like a banana, he says.”
Vallery smiled faintly. “Knowing Dodson, I suppose that means a couple of thou out of alignment.”
“Maybe.” Turner was serious. “What does matter is that the main shaft bearing’s damaged and the lubricating line fractured.”
“As bad as that?” Vallery asked softly.
“Dodson is pretty unhappy. Says the damage isn’t recent, thinks it began the night we lost our depth-charges.” Turner shook his head. “Lord knows what stresses that shaft’s undergone since. … I suppose tonight’s performance brought it to a head… The bearing will have to be lubricated by hand. Wants engine revs, at a minimum or engine shut off altogether. They’ll keep us posted.”
“And no possibility of repair?” Vallery asked wryly.
“No, sir. None.”
“Very well, then. Convoy speed. And Commander?”
“Sir?”
“Hands to stations all night. You needn’t tell ’em so-but, well, I think it would be wise. I have a feeling——”
“What’s that!” Turner shouted. “Look! What the hell’s she doing?” His finger was stabbing towards the last freighter in the starboard line: her guns were blazing away at some unseen target, the tracers lancing whitely through the twilight sky. Even as he dived for the broadcaster, he caught sight of the Viking’s main armament belching smoke and jagged flame.
“All guns! Green 1101 Aircraft! Independent fire, independent targets!
Independent fire, independent targets!” He heard Vallery ordering starboard helm, knew he was going to bring the for’ard turrets to bear.
They were too late. Even as the Ulysses began to answer her helm, the enemy planes were pulling out of their approach dives. Great, clumsy shapes, these planes, forlorn and insubstantial in the murky gloom, but identifiable in a sickening flash by the clamour of suddenly racing engines. Condors, without a shadow of doubt. Condors that had outguessed them again, that gliding approach, throttles cut right back, muted roar of the engines drifting downwind, away from the convoy. Their timing, their judgment of distance, had been superb.
The freighter was bracketed twice, directly hit by at least seven bombs:
in the near-darkness, it was impossible to see the bombs going home, but the explosions were unmistakable. And as each plane passed over, the decks were raked by savage bursts of machine-gun fire. Every gun position on the freighter was wide open, lacking all but the most elementary frontal protection: the Dems, Naval Ratings on the L.A. guns, Royal Marine Artillerymen on the H.A. weapons, were under no illusions as to their life expectancy when they joined the merchant ships on the Russian run… For such few gunners as survived the bombing, the vicious stuttering of these machine-guns was almost certainly their last sound on earth.
As the bombs plummeted down on the next ship in line, the first freighter was already a broken-backed mass of licking, twisting flames.
Almost certainly, too, her bottom had been torn out: she had listed heavily, and now slowly and smoothly broke apart just aft of the bridge as if both parts were hinged below the water-line, and was gone before the clamour of the last aero engine had died away in the distance.
Tactical surprise had been complete. One ship gone, a second slewing wildly to an uncontrolled stop, deep in the water by the head, and strangely disquieting and ominous in the entire absence of smoke, flame or any movement at all, a third heavily damaged but still under command. Not one Condor had been lost.
Turner ordered the cease-fire-some of the gunners were still firing blindly into the darkness: trigger-happy, perhaps, or just that the imagination plays weird tricks on woolly minds and sunken blood-red eyes that had known no rest for more hours and days than Turner could remember. And then, as the last Oerlikon fell silent, he heard it again-the drone of the heavy aero engines, the sound welling then ebbing again like breakers on a distant shore, as the wind gusted and died.
There was nothing anyone could do about it. The Focke-Wulf, although lost in the low cloud, was making no attempt to conceal its presence: the ominous drone was never lost for long. Clearly, it was circling almost directly above.
“What do you make of it, sir?” Turner asked.
“I don’t know,” Vallery said slowly. “I just don’t know at all. No more visits from the Condors, I’m sure of that. It’s just that little bit too dark-and they know they won’t catch us again. Tailing us, like as not.”