Читать книгу HMS Ulysses - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 10

All day long the wind blew steadily out of the nor’nor’-west. A strong wind, and blowing stronger. A cold wind, a sharp wind full of little knives, it carried with it snow and ice and the strange dead smell born of the forgotten ice-caps that lie beyond the Barrier. It wasn’t a gusty, blowy wind. It was a settled, steady kind of wind, and it stayed fine on the starboard bow from dawn to dusk. Slowly, stealthily, it was lifting a swell. Men like Carrington, who knew every sea and port in the world, like Vallery and Hartley, looked at it and were troubled and said nothing.

The mercury crept down and the snow lay where it fell. The tripods and yardarms were great, glistening Xmas trees, festooned with woolly stays and halliards. On the main mast, a brown smear appeared now and then, daubed on by a wisp of smoke from the after funnel, felt rather than seen: in a moment, it would vanish. The snow lay on the deck and drifted. It softened the anchor-cables on the fo’c’sle deck into great, fluffy ropes of cottonwool, and drifted high against the breakwater before ‘A’ turret. It piled up against the turrets and superstructure, swished silently into the bridge and lay there slushily underfoot. It blocked the great eyes of the Director’s range-finder, it crept unseen along passages, it sifted soundlessly down hatches. It sought out the tiniest unprotected chink in metal and wood, and made the mess-decks dank and clammy and uncomfortable: it defied gravity and slid effortlessly up trouser legs, up under the skirts of coats and oilskins, up under duffel hoods, and made men thoroughly miserable. A miserable world, a wet world, but always and predominately a white world of softness and beauty and strangely muffled sound. All day long it fell, this snow, fell steadily and persistently, and the Ulysses slid on silently through the swell, a ghost ship in a ghost world.

But not alone in her world. She never was, these days. She had companionship, a welcome, reassuring companionship, the company of the 14th Aircraft Squadron, a tough, experienced and battle-hardened escort group, almost as legendary now as that fabulous Force 8, which had lately moved South to take over that other suicide run, the Malta convoys.

Like the Ulysses, the squadron steamed NNW all day long. There were no dog-legs, no standard course alterations. Tyndall abhorred the zig-zag, and, except on actual convoy and then only in known U-boat waters, rarely used it. He believed—as many captains did—that the zig-zag was a greater potential source of danger than the enemy. He had seen the Curaçoa, 4,200 tons of cockle-shell cruiser, swinging on a routine zig-zag, being trampled into the grey depths of the Atlantic under the mighty forefoot of the Queen Mary. He never spoke of it, but the memory stayed with him.

The Ulysses was in her usual position—the position dictated by her role of Squadron flagship—as nearly as possible in the centre of the thirteen warships.

Dead ahead steamed the cruiser Stirling. An old Cardiff class cruiser, she was a solid, reliable ship, many years older and many knots slower than the Ulysses, adequately armed with five single six-inch guns, but hardly built to hammer her way through the Arctic gales: in heavy seas, her wetness was proverbial. Her primary role was squadron defence: her secondary, to take over the squadron if the flagship were crippled or sunk.

The carriers—Defender, Invader, Wrestler and Blue Ranger—were in position to port and starboard, the Defender and Wrestler slightly ahead of the Ulysses, the others slightly astern. It seemed de rigeur for these escort carriers to have names ending in—er and the fact that the Navy already had a Wrestler—a Force 8 destroyer (and a Defender, which had been sunk some time previously off Tobruk)—was blithely ignored. These were not the 35,000-ton giants of the regular fleet—ships like the Indefatigable and the Illustrious—but 1520,000 ton auxiliary carriers, irreverently known as banana boats. They were converted merchant-men, American-built: these had been fitted out at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and sailed across the Atlantic by mixed British-American crews.

They were capable of eighteen knots, a relatively high speed for a single-screw ship—the Wrestler had two screws—but some of them had as many as four Busch-Sulzer Diesels geared to the one shaft. Their painfully rectangular flight-decks, 450 feet in length, were built up above the open fo’c’sle—one could see right under the flight-deck for’ard of the bridge—and flew off about thirty fighters—Grummans, Seafires or, most often, Corsairs—or twenty light bombers. They were odd craft, awkward, ungainly and singularly unwarlike; but over the months they had done a magnificent job of providing umbrella cover against air attack, of locating and destroying enemy ships and submarines: their record of kills, above, on and below the water was impressive and frequently disbelieved by the Admiralty.

Nor was the destroyer screen calculated to inspire confidence among the naval strategists at Whitehall. It was a weird hodge-podge, and the term ‘destroyer’ was a purely courtesy one.

One, the Nairn, was a River class frigate of 1,500 tons: another, the Eager, was a Fleet Minesweeper, and a third, the Gannet, better known as Huntley and Palmer, was a rather elderly and very tired Kingfisher corvette, supposedly restricted to coastal duties only. There was no esoteric mystery as to the origin of her nickname—a glance at her silhouette against the sunset was enough. Doubtless her designer had worked within Admiralty specifications: even so, he must have had an off day.

The Vectra and the Viking were twin-screwed, modified ‘V’ and ‘W’ destroyers, in the superannuated class now, lacking in speed and firepower, but tough and durable. The Baliol was a diminutive Hunt class destroyer which had no business in the great waters of the north. The Portpatrick, a skeleton-lean four stacker, was one of the fifty lend-lease World War I destroyers from the United States. No one even dared guess at her age. An intriguing ship at any time, she became the focus of all eyes in the fleet and a source of intense interest whenever the weather broke down. Rumour had it that two of her sister ships had overturned in the Atlantic during a gale; human nature being what it is, everyone wanted a grandstand view whenever weather conditions deteriorated to an extent likely to afford early confirmation of these rumours. What the crew of the Portpatrick thought about it all was difficult to say.

These seven escorts, blurred and softened by the snow, kept their screening stations all day—the frigate and minesweeper ahead, the destroyers at the sides, and the corvette astern. The eighth escort, a fast, modern ‘S’ class destroyer, under the command of the Captain (Destroyers), Commander Orr, prowled restlessly around the fleet. Every ship commander in the squadron envied Orr his roving commission, a duty which Tyndall had assigned him in self-defence against Orr’s continual pestering. But no one objected, no one grudged him his privilege: the Sirrus had an uncanny nose for trouble, an almost magnetic affinity for U-boats lying in ambush.

From the warmth of the Ulysses’s wardroom—long, incongruously comfortable, running fifty feet along the starboard side of the fo’c’sle deck—Johnny Nicholls gazed out through the troubled grey and white of the sky. Even the kindly snow, he reflected, blanketing a thousand sins, could do little for these queer craft, so angular, so graceless, so obviously out-dated.

He supposed he ought to feel bitter at My Lords of the Admiralty, with their limousines and armchairs and elevenses, with their big wall-maps and pretty little flags, sending out this raggle-taggle of a squadron to cope with the pick of the U-boat packs, while they sat comfortably, luxuriously at home. But the thought died at birth: it was he knew, grotesquely unjust. The Admiralty would have given them a dozen brand-new destroyers—if they had them. Things, he knew were pretty bad, and the demands of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean had first priority.

He supposed, too, he ought to feel cynical, ironic, at the sight of these old and worn-out ships. Strangely, he couldn’t. He knew what they could do, what they had done. If he felt anything at all towards them, it was something uncommonly close to admiration—perhaps even pride. Nicholls stirred uncomfortably and turned away from the porthole. His gaze fell on the somnolent form of the Kapok Kid, flat on his back in an arm-chair, an enormous pair of fur-lined flying-boots perched above the electric fire.

The Kapok Kid, Lieutenant the Honourable Andrew Carpenter, RN, Navigator of the Ulysses and his best friend—he was the one to feel proud, Nicholls thought wryly. The most glorious extrovert Nicholls had ever known, the Kapok Kid was equally at home anywhere—on a dance floor or in the cockpit of a racing yacht at Cowes, at a garden party, on a tennis court or at the wheel of his big crimson Bugatti, windscreen down and the loose ends of a seven-foot scarf streaming out behind him. But appearances were never more deceptive. For the Kapok Kid, the Royal Navy was his whole life, and he lived for that alone. Behind that slightly inane façade lay, besides a first-class brain, a deeply romantic streak, an almost Elizabethan love for sea and ships which he sought, successfully, he imagined, to conceal from all his fellow-officers. It was so patently obvious that no one ever thought it worth the mentioning.

Theirs was a curious friendship, Nicholls mused. An attraction of opposites, if ever there was one. For Carpenter’s hail-fellow ebullience, his natural reserve and reticence were the perfect foil: over against his friend’s near-idolatry of all things naval stood his own thorough-going detestation of all that the Kapok Kid so warmly admired. Perhaps because of that over-developed sense of individuality and independence, that bane of so many highland Scots, Nicholls objected strongly to the thousand and one pin-pricks of discipline, authority and bureaucratic naval stupidity which were a constant affront to his intelligence and self-respect. Even three years ago, when the war had snatched him from the wards of a great Glasgow hospital, his first year’s internship barely completed, he had had his dark suspicions that the degree of compatibility between himself and the Senior Service would prove to be singularly low. And so it had proved. But, in spite of this antipathy—or perhaps because of it and the curse of a Calvinistic conscience—Nicholls had become a first-class officer. But it still disturbed him vaguely to discover in himself something akin to pride in the ships of his squadron.

He sighed. The loudspeaker in the corner of the wardroom had just crackled into life. From bitter experience, he knew that broadcast announcements seldom presaged anything good.

‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there?’ The voice was metallic, impersonal: the Kapok Kid slept on in magnificent oblivion. ‘The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. Repeat. The Captain will broadcast to the ship’s company at 1730 tonight. That is all.’

Nicholls prodded the Kapok Kid with a heavy toe. ‘On your feet, Vasco. Now’s the time if you want a cuppa char before getting up there and navigating.’ Carpenter stirred, opened a red-rimmed eye: Nicholls smiled down encouragingly. ‘Besides, it’s lovely up top now—sea rising, temperature falling and a young blizzard blowing. Just what you were born for, Andy, boy!’

The Kapok Kid groaned his way back to consciousness, struggled to a sitting position and remained hunched forward, his straight flaxen hair falling over his hands.

‘What’s the matter now?’ His voice was querulous, still slurred with sleep. Then he grinned faintly. ‘Know where I was, Johnny?’ he asked reminiscently. ‘Back on the Thames, at the Grey Goose, just up from Henley. It was summer, Johnny, late in summer, warm and very still. Dressed all in green, she was—’

‘Indigestion,’ Nicholls cut in briskly. ‘Too much easy living…It’s four-thirty, and the old man’s speaking in an hour’s time. Dusk stations at any time—we’d better eat.’

Carpenter shook his head mournfully. ‘The man has no soul, no finer feelings.’ He stood up and stretched himself. As always, he was dressed from head to foot in a one-piece overall of heavy, quilted kapok—the silk fibres encasing the seeds of the Japanese and Malayan silk-cotton tree: there was a great, golden ‘J’ embroidered on the right breast pocket: what it stood for was anyone’s guess. He glanced out through the porthole and shuddered.

‘Wonder what’s the topic for tonight, Johnny?’

‘No idea. I’m curious to see what his attitude, his tone is going to be, how he’s going to handle it. The situation, to say the least, is somewhat—ah—delicate.’ Nicholls grinned, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. ‘Not to mention the fact that the crew don’t know that they’re off to Murmansk again—although they must have a pretty good idea.’

‘Mmm.’ The Kapok Kid nodded absently. ‘Don’t suppose the old man’ll try to play it down—the hazards of the trip, I mean, or to excuse himself—you know, put the blame where it belongs.’

‘Never.’ Nicholls shook his head decisively. ‘Not the skipper. Just not in his nature. Never excuses himself—and never spares himself.’ He stared into the fire for a long time, then looked up quietly at the Kapok Kid. ‘The skipper’s a very sick man, Andy—very sick indeed.’

‘What!’ The Kapok Kid was genuinely startled. ‘A very sick…Good lord, you’re joking! You must be. Why—’

‘I’m not,’ Nicholls interrupted flatly, his voice very low. Winthrop, the padre, an intense, enthusiastic, very young man with an immense zest for life and granitic convictions on every subject under the sun, was in the far corner of the wardroom. The zest was temporarily in abeyance—he was sunk in exhausted slumber. Nicholls liked him, but preferred that he should not hear—the padre would talk. Winthrop, Nicholls had often thought, would never have made a successful priest—confessional reticence would have been impossible for him.

‘Old Socrates says he’s pretty far through—and he knows,’ Nicholls continued. ‘Old man phoned him to come to his cabin last night. Place was covered in blood and he was coughing his lungs up. Acute attack of hæmoptysis. Brooks has suspected it for a long time, but the Captain would never let him examine him. Brooks says a few more days of this will kill him.’ He broke off, glanced briefly at Winthrop. ‘I talk too much,’ he said abruptly. ‘Getting as bad as the old padre there. Shouldn’t have told you, I suppose—violation of professional confidence and all that. All this under your hat, Andy.’

‘Of course, of course.’ There was a long pause. ‘What you mean is, Johnny—he’s dying?’

‘Just that. Come on, Andy—char.’

Twenty minutes later, Nicholls made his way down to the Sick Bay. The light was beginning to fail and the Ulysses was pitching heavily. Brooks was in the surgery.

‘Evening, sir. Dusk stations any minute now. Mind if I stay in the bay tonight?’

Brooks eyed him speculatively.

‘Regulations,’ he intoned, ‘say that the Action Stations position of the Junior Medical Officer is aft in the Engineer’s Flat. Far be it from me—’

‘Please.’

‘Why? Lonely, lazy or just plain tired?’ The quirk of the eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.

‘No. Curious. I want to observe the reactions of Stoker Riley and his—ah—confederates to the skipper’s speech. Might be most instructive.’

‘Sherlock Nicholls, eh? Right-o, Johnny. Phone the Damage Control Officer aft. Tell him you’re tied up. Major operation, anything you like. Our gullible public and how easily fooled. Shame.’

Nicholls grinned and reached for the phone.

When the bugle blared for dusk Action Stations, Nicholls was sitting in the dispensary. The lights were out, the curtains almost drawn. He could see into every corner of the brightly lit Sick Bay. Five of the men were asleep. Two of the others—Petersen, the giant, slow-spoken stoker, half Norwegian, half Scots, and Burgess, the dark little cockney—were sitting up in bed, talking softly, their eyes turned towards the swarthy, heavily-built patient lying between them. Stoker Riley was holding court.

Alfred O’Hara Riley had, at a very early age indeed, decided upon a career of crime, and beset, though he subsequently was, by innumerable vicissitudes, he had clung to this resolve with an unswerving determination: directed towards almost any other sphere of activity, his resolution would have been praiseworthy, possibly even profitable. But praise and profit had passed Riley by.

Every man is what environment and heredity make him. Riley was no exception, and Nicholls, who knew something of his upbringing, appreciated that life had never really given the big stoker a chance. Born of a drunken, illiterate mother in a filthy, overcrowded and fever-ridden Liverpool slum, he was an outcast from the beginning: allied to that, his hairy, ape-like figure, the heavy prognathous jaw, the twisted mouth, the wide flaring nose, the cunning black eyes squinting out beneath the negligible clearance between hairline and eyebrows that so accurately reflected the mental capacity within, were all admirably adapted to what was to become his chosen vocation. Nicholls looked at him and disapproved without condemning; for a moment, he had an inkling of the tragedy of the inevitable.

Riley was never at any time a very successful criminal—his intelligence barely cleared the moron level. He dimly appreciated his limitations, and had left the higher, more subtle forms of crime severely alone. Robbery—preferably robbery with violence—was his métier. He had been in prison six times, the last time for two years.

His induction into the Navy was a mystery which baffled both Riley and the authorities responsible for his being there. But Riley had accepted this latest misfortune with equanimity, and gone through the bomb-shattered ‘G’ and ‘H’ blocks in the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth, like a high wind through a field of corn, leaving behind him a trail of slashed suitcases and empty wallets. He had been apprehended without much difficulty, done sixty days’ cells, then been drafted to the Ulysses as a stoker.

His career of crime aboard the Ulysses had been brief and painful. His first attempted robbery had been his last—a clumsy and incredibly foolish rifling of a locker in the marine sergeants’ mess. He had been caught red-handed by Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant MacIntosh. They had preferred no charges against him and Riley had spent the next three days in the Sick Bay. He claimed to have tripped on the rung of a ladder and fallen twenty feet to the boiler-room floor. But the actual facts of the case were common knowledge, and Turner had recommended his discharge. To everyone’s astonishment, not least that of Stoker Riley, Dodson, the Engineer Commander, had insisted he be given a last chance, and Riley had been reprieved.

Since that date, four months previously, he had confined his activities to stirring up trouble. Illogically but understandably, his brief encounter with the marines had swept away his apathetic tolerance of the Navy: a smouldering hatred took its place. As an agitator, he had achieved a degree of success denied him as a criminal. Admittedly, he had a fertile field for operations; but credit—if that is the word—was due also to his shrewdness, his animal craft and cunning, his hold over his crew-mates. The husky, intense voice, his earnestness, his deep-set eyes, lent Riley a strangely elemental power—a power he had used to its maximum effect a few days previously when he had precipitated the mutiny which had led to the death of Ralston, the stoker, and the marine—mysteriously dead from a broken neck. Beyond any possible doubt, their deaths lay at Riley’s door; equally beyond doubt, that could never be proved. Nicholls wondered what new devilment was hatching behind these lowering, corrugated brows, wondered how on earth it was that the same Riley was continually in trouble for bringing aboard the Ulysses and devotedly tending every stray kitten, every broken-winged bird he found.

The loudspeaker crackled, cutting through his thoughts, stilling the low voices in the Sick Bay. And not only there, but throughout the ship, in turrets and magazines, in engine-rooms and boiler-rooms, above and below deck everywhere, all conversation ceased. Then there was only the wind, the regular smash of the bows into the deepening troughs, the muffled roar of the great boiler-room intake fans and the hum of a hundred electric motors. Tension lay heavy over the ship, over 730 officers and men, tangible, almost, in its oppression.

‘This is the Captain speaking. Good evening.’ The voice was calm, well modulated, without a sign of strain or exhaustion. ‘As you all know, it is my custom at the beginning of every voyage to inform you as soon as possible of what lies in store for you. I feel that you have a right to know, and that it is my duty. It’s not always a pleasant duty—it never has been during recent months. This time, however, I’m almost glad.’ He paused, and the words came, slow and measured. ‘This is our last operation as a unit of the Home Fleet. In a month’s time, God willing, we will be in the Med.’

Good for you, thought Nicholls. Sweeten the pill, lay it on, thick and heavy. But the Captain had other ideas.

‘But first, gentlemen, the job on hand. It’s the mixture as before—Murmansk again. We rendezvous at 1030 Wednesday, north of Iceland, with a convoy from Halifax. There are eighteen ships in this convoy—big and fast—all fifteen knots and above. Our third Fast Russian convoy, gentlemen—FR77, in case you want to tell your grandchildren about it,’ he added dryly. ‘These ships are carrying tanks, planes, aviation spirit and oil—nothing else.

‘I will not attempt to minimize the dangers. You know how desperate is the state of Russia today, how terribly badly she needs these weapons and fuel. You can also be sure that the Germans know too—and that her Intelligence agents will already have reported the nature of this convoy and the date of sailing.’ He broke off short, and the sound of his harsh, muffled coughing into a handkerchief echoed weirdly through the silent ship. He went on slowly. ‘There are enough fighter planes and petrol in this convoy to alter the whole character of the Russian war. The Nazis will stop at nothing —I repeat, nothing—to stop this convoy from going through to Russia.

‘I have never tried to mislead or deceive you. I will not now. The signs are not good. In our favour we have, firstly, our speed, and secondly—I hope—the element of surprise. We shall try to break through direct for the North Cape.

‘There are four major factors against us. You will all have noticed the steady worsening of the weather. We are, I’m afraid, running into abnormal weather conditions—abnormal even for the Arctic. It may—I repeat “may”—prevent U-boat attacks: on the other hand it may mean losing some of the smaller units of our screen—we have no time to heave to or run before bad weather. FR77 is going straight through…And it almost certainly means that the carriers will be unable to fly off fighter cover.’

Good God, has the skipper lost his senses, Nicholls wondered. He’ll wreck any morale that’s left. Not that there is any left. What in the world—

‘Secondly,’ the voice went on, calm, inexorable, ‘we are taking no rescue ships on this convoy. There will be no time to stop. Besides, you all know what happened to the Stockport and the Zafaaran. You’re safer where you are.¹

‘Thirdly, two—possibly three—U-boat packs are known to be strung out along latitude seventy degrees and our Northern Norway agents report a heavy mustering of German bombers of all types in their area.

‘Finally, we have reason to believe that the Tirpitz is preparing to move out.’ Again he paused, for an interminable time, it seemed. It was as if he knew the tremendous shock carried in these few words, and wanted to give it time to register. ‘I need not tell you what that means. The Germans may risk her to stop the convoy. The Admiralty hope they will. During the latter part of the voyage, capital units of the Home Fleet, including possibly the aircraft-carriers Victorious and Furious, and three cruisers, will parallel our course at twelve hours’ steaming distance. They have been waiting a long time, and we are the bait to spring the trap…

‘It is possible that things may go wrong. The best-laid plans…or the trap may be late in springing shut. This convoy must still get through. If the carriers cannot fly off cover, the Ulysses must cover the withdrawal of FR77. You will know what that means. I hope this is all perfectly clear.’

There was another long bout of coughing, another long pause, and when he spoke again the tone had completely changed. He was very quiet.

‘I know what I am asking of you. I know how tired, how hopeless, how sick at heart you all feel. I know—no one knows better—what you have been through, how much you need, how much you deserve a rest. Rest you shall have. The entire ship’s company goes on ten days’ leave from Portsmouth on the eighteenth, then for refit in Alexandria.’ The words were casual, as if they carried no significance for him. ‘But before that—well, I know it seems cruel, inhuman—it must seem so to you—to ask you to go through it all again, perhaps worse than you’ve ever gone through before. But I can’t help it—no one can help it.’ Every sentence, now, was punctuated by long silences: it was difficult to catch his words, so low and far away.

‘No one has any right to ask you to do it, I least of all…least of all. I know you will do it. I know you will not let me down. I know you will take the Ulysses through. Good luck. Good luck and God bless you. Good night.’

The loudspeakers clicked off, but the silence lingered on. Nobody spoke and nobody moved. Not even the eyes moved. Those who had been looking at the speakers still gazed on, unseeingly; or stared down at their hands; or down into the glowing butts of forbidden cigarettes, oblivious to the acrid smoke that laced exhausted eyes. It was strangely as if each man wanted to be alone, to look into his own mind, follow his thoughts out for himself, and knew that if his eyes caught another’s he would no longer be alone. A strange hush, a supernatural silence, the wordless understanding that so rarely touches mankind: the veil lifts and drops again and a man can never remember what he has seen but knows that he has seen something and that nothing will ever be quite the same again. Seldom, all too seldom it comes: a sunset of surpassing loveliness, a fragment from some great symphony, the terrible stillness which falls over the huge rings of Madrid and Barcelona as the sword of the greatest of the matadors sinks inevitably home. And the Spaniards have the word for it—‘the moment of truth’.

The Sick Bay clock, unnaturally loud, ticked away one minute, maybe two. With a heavy sigh—it seemed ages since he had breathed last—Nicholls softly pulled to the sliding door behind the curtains and switched on the light. He looked round at Brooks, looked away again.

‘Well, Johnny?’ The voice was soft, almost bantering.

‘I just don’t know, sir, I don’t know at all.’ Nicholls shook his head. ‘At first I thought he was going to—well, make a hash of it. You know, scare the lights out of ’em. And good God!’ he went on wonderingly, ‘that’s exactly what he did do. Piled it on—gales, Tirpitz, hordes of subs—and yet…’ His voice trailed off.

‘And yet?’ Brooks echoed mockingly. ‘That’s just it. Too much intelligence—that’s the trouble with the young doctors today. I saw you—sitting there like a bogus psychiatrist, analysing away for all you were worth at the probable effect of the speech on the minds of the wounded warriors without, and never giving it a chance to let it register on yourself.’ He paused and went on quietly.

‘It was beautifully done, Johnny. No, that’s the wrong word—there was nothing premeditated about it. But don’t you see? As black a picture as man could paint: points out that this is just a complicated way of committing suicide: no silver lining, no promises, even Alex thrown in as a casual afterthought. Builds ’em up, then lets ’em down. No inducements, no hope, no appeal—and yet the appeal was tremendous…What was it, Johnny?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nicholls was troubled. He lifted his head abruptly, then smiled faintly. ‘Maybe there was no appeal. Listen.’ Noiselessly, he slid the door back, flicked off the lights. The rumble of Riley’s harsh voice, low and intense, was unmistakable.

‘—just a lot of bloody clap-trap. Alex? The Med? Not on your—life, mate. You’ll never see it. You’ll never even see Scapa again. Captain Richard Vallery, DSO! Know what the old bastard wants, boys? Another bar to his DSO. Maybe even a VC. Well, by Christ’s, he’s not going to have it! Not at my expense. Not if I can—well help it. “I know you won’t let me down,”’ he mimicked, his voice high-pitched. ‘Whining old bastard!’ He paused a moment, then rushed on.

‘The Tirpitz! Christ Almighty! The Tirpitz! We’re going to stop it—us! This bloody toy ship! Bait, he says, bait!’ His voice rose. ‘I tell you, mates, nobody gives a damn about us. Direct for the North Cape! They’re throwing us to the bloody wolves! And that old bastard up to—’

‘Shaddap!’ It was Petersen who spoke, his voice a whisper, low and fierce. His hand stretched out, and Brooks and Nicholls in the surgery winced as they heard Riley’s wristbones crack under the tremendous pressure of the giant’s hand. ‘Often I wonder about you, Riley,’ Petersen went on slowly. ‘But not now, not any more. You make me sick!’ He flung Riley’s hand down and turned away.

Riley rubbed his wrist in agony, and turned to Burgess.

‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter with him? What the hell…’ He broke off abruptly. Burgess was looking at him steadily, kept looking for a long time. Slowly, deliberately, he eased himself down in bed, pulled the blankets up to his neck and turned his back on Riley.

Brooks rose quickly to his feet, closed the door and pressed the light switch.

‘Act I, Scene I. Cut! Lights!’ he murmured. ‘See what I mean, Johnny?’

Yes, sir,’ Nicholls nodded slowly. ‘At least, I think so.’

‘Mind you, my boy, it won’t last. At least, not at that intensity.’ He grinned. But maybe it’ll take us the length of Murmansk. You never know.’

‘I hope so, sir. Thanks for the show.’ Nicholls reached up for his duffel-coat. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better make my way aft.’

‘Off you go, then. And, oh—Johnny—’

‘Sir?’

‘That scarlet-fever notice-board of yours. On your way aft you might consign it to the deep. I don’t think we’ll be needing it any more.’ Nicholls grinned and closed the door softly behind him.

1. Rescue ships, whose duties were solely what their name implies, were a feature of many of the earlier convoys. The Zafaaran was lost in one of the war’s worst convoys. The Stockport was torpedoed. She was lost with all hands, including all those survivors rescued from other sunken ships.