“Gad!” Brooks murmured. “The man’s a poet!”
“You’re right, Turner.” Vallery drained his glass, lay back exhausted.
“We don’t seem to have much option… What if we receive orders for a-ah-high-speed withdrawal?”
“You can’t read,” Turner said bluntly. “Remember, you just said your eyes are going back on you.”
“‘Souls that have toiled and wrought and fought With me,'” Vallery quoted softly. “Thank you, gentlemen. You make things very easy for me.” He propped himself on an elbow, his mind made up. He smiled at Turner, and his face was almost boyish again.
“Inform all merchant ships, all escorts. Tell them to break north.”
Turner stared at him.
“North? Did you say’ north’?” But the Admiralty—–”
“North, I said,” Vallery repeated quietly. “The Admiralty can do what they like about it. We’ve played along long enough. We’ve sprung the trap. What more can they want? This way there’s a chance, an almost hopeless chance, perhaps, but a fighting chance. To go east is suicide.”
He smiled again, almost dreamily. “The end is not all important,” he said softly. “I don’t think I’ll have to answer for this. Not now, not ever.”
Turner grinned at him, his face lit up. “North, you said.”
“Inform C.-in-C.,” Vallery went on. “Ask Pilot for an interception course. Tell the convoy we’ll tag along behind, give ’em as much cover as we can, as long as we can… As long as we can. Let us not delude ourselves. 1,000 to 1 at the outside… Nothing else we can do, Commander?”
“Pray,” Turner said succinctly.
“And sleep,” Brooks added. “Why don’t you have half an hour, sir?”
“Sleep!” Vallery seemed genuinely amused. “We’ll have all the time in the world to sleep, just by and by.”
“You have a point,” Brooks conceded. “You are very possibly right.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SATURDAY EVENING II
MESSAGES WERE pouring in to the bridge now, messages from the merchant ships, messages of dismayed unbelief asking for confirmation of the Tirpitz breakout: from the Stirling, replying that the superstructure fire was now under control and that the engine room watertight bulkheads were holding; and one from Orr of the Sirrus, saying that his ship was making water to the capacity of the pumps, he had been in heavy collision with the sinking merchantman, that they had taken off forty-four survivors, that the Sirrus had already done her share and couldn’t she go home? The signal had arrived after the Sirrus’s receipt of the bad news. Turner grinned to himself: no inducement on earth, he knew, could have persuaded Orr to leave now.
The messages kept pouring in, by visual signal or W.T. There was no point in maintaining radio silence to outwit enemy monitor positions;
the enemy knew Where they were to a mile. Nor was there any need to prohibit light signalling, not with the Stirling still burning furiously enough to illuminate the sea for a mile around. And so the messages kept on coming-messages of fear and dismay and anxiety. But, for Turner, the most disquieting message came neither by lamp nor by radio.
Fully quarter of an hour had elapsed since the end of the attack and the Ulysses was rearing and pitching through the head seas on her new course of 350°, When the gate of the bridge crashed open and a panting, exhausted man stumbled on to the compass platform. Turner, back on the bridge again, peered closely at him in the red glare from the Stirling, recognised him as a stoker. His face was masked in sweat, the sweat already caking to ice in the intense cold. And in spite of that cold, he was hatless, coatless, clad only in a pair of thin dungarees. He was shivering violently, shivering from excitement and not because of the icy wind-he was oblivious to such things.
Turner seized him by the shoulder.
“What is it, man?” he demanded anxiously. The stoker was still too breathless to speak. “What’s wrong? Quickly!”
“The T.S., sir!” The breathing was so quick, so agonised, that the words blurred into a gasping exhalation. “It’s full of water!”
“The T.S.!” Turner was incredulous. “Flooded! When did this happen?”
“I’m not sure, sir.” He was still gasping for breath. “But there was a bloody awful explosion, sir, just about amid——”
“I know! I know!” Turner interrupted impatiently. “Bomber carried away the for’ard funnel, exploded in the water, port side. But that was fifteen minutes ago, man! Fifteen minutes! Good God, they would have—–”
“T.S. switchboard’s gone, sir.” The stoker was beginning to recover, to huddle against the wind, but frantic at the Commander’s deliberation and delay, he straightened up and grasped Turner’s duffel without realising what he was doing. The note of urgency deepened still further. “All the power’s gone, sir. And the hatch is jammed! The men can’t get out!”‘
“The hatch cover jammed!” Turner’s eyes narrowed in concern. “What happened?” he rapped out. “Buckled?”
“The counter-weight’s broken off, sir. It’s on top of the hatch. We can only get it open an inch. You see, sir——”
“Number One!” Turner shouted.
“Here, sir.” Carrington was standing just behind him. “I heard… Why can’t you open it?”
“It’s the T.S. hatch!” the stoker cried desperately. “A quarter of a bloody ton if it’s an ounce, sir. You know, the one below the ladder outside the wheelhouse. Only two men can get at it at the same time. We’ve tried… Hurry, sir. Please.”
“Just a minute.” Carrrington was calm, unruffled, infuriatingly so.
“Hartley? No, still fire-fighting. Evans, Macintosh, dead.” He was obviously thinking aloud. “Bellamy, perhaps?”
“What is it, Number One?” Turner burst out. He himself had caught up the anxiety, the impatience of the stoker. “What are you trying——?”
“hatch cover plus pulley, 1,000 Ibs.,” Carrington murmured. “A special man for a special job.”
“Petersen, sir!” The stoker had understood immediately. “Petersen!”
“Of course!” Carrington clapped gloved hands together. “We’re on our way, sir. Acetylene? No time! Stoker, crow bars, sledges… Perhaps if you would ring the engine-room, sir?”
But Turner already had the phone in his hand.
Aft on the poop deck, the fire was under control, all but in a few odd corners where the flames were fed by a fierce through draught. In the mess decks, bulkheads, ladders, mess partitions, lockers had been twisted and buckled into strange shapes by the intense heat: on deck, the gasoline fed flames, incinerating the two and three quarter inch deck plating and melting the caulking as by some gigantic blow-torch, had cleanly stripped all covering and exposed the steel deck plates, plates dull red and glowing evilly, plates that hissed and spat as heavy snowflakes drifted down to sibilant extinction.
On and below decks, Hartley and his crews, freezing one moment, reeling in the blast of heat the next, toiled like men insane. Where their wasted, exhausted bodies found the strength God only knew. From the turrets, from the Master-At-Arms’s office, from mess decks and emergency steering position, they pulled out man after man who had been there when the Condor had crashed: pulled them out, looked at them, swore, wept and plunged back into the aftermath of that holocaust, oblivious of pain and danger, tearing aside wreckage, wreckage still burning, still red hot, with charred and broken gloves: and when the gloves fell off, they used their naked hands.
As the dead were ranged in the starboard alleyway, Leading Seaman Doyle was waiting for them. Less than half an hour previously, Doyle had been in the for’ard galley passage, rolling in silent agony as frozen body and clothes thawed out after the drenching of his pom-pom. Five minutes later, he had been back on his gun, rock like, unflinching, as he pumped shell after shell over open sights into the torpedo bombers. And now, steady and enduring as ever, he was on the poop. A man of iron, and a face of iron, too, that night, the bearded leonine head still and impassive as he picked up one dead man after the other, walked to the guard rail and dropped his burden gently over the side. How many times he repeated that brief journey that night, Doyle never knew: he had lost count after the first twenty or so. He had no right to do this, of course: the navy was very strong on decent burial, and this was not decent burial. But the sailmakers were dead and no man would or could have sewn up these ghastly charred heaps in the weighted and sheeted canvas. The dead don’t care, Doyle thought dispassionately, let them look after themselves. So, too, thought Carrington and Hartley, and they made no move to stop him.
Beneath their feet, the smouldering mess decks rang with hollow reverberating clangs as Nicholls and Leading Telegraphist Brown, still weirdly garbed in their white asbestos suits, swung heavy sledges against the securing clips of ‘Y’ magazine hatch. In the smoke and gloom and their desperate haste, they could hardly see each other, much less the clips: as often as not they missed their strokes and the hammers went spinning out of numbed hands into the waiting darkness.