He broke off, looked incredulously to the north. Up there in the snow and gloom, stilettos of white flame had lanced out briefly, vanished again. Carrington by his side now, he stared unwinkingly north, saw sh.e.l.ls splashing whitely in the water under the bows of the Commodore"s ship, the Cape Hatteras: then he saw the flashes again, stronger, brighter this time, flashes that lit up for a fleeting second the bows and superstructure of the ship that was firing.
He turned slowly, to find that Carrington, too, had turned, was gazing at him with set face and bitter eyes. Turner, grey and haggard with exhaustion and the sour foretaste of ultimate defeat, looked in turn at his First Lieutenant in a long moment of silence.
"The answer to many questions," he said softly. "That"s why they"ve been softening up the Stirling and ourselves for the past couple of days. The fox is in among the chickens. It"s our old pal the Hipper cruiser come to pay us a social call."
"It is."
"So near and yet..." Turner shrugged. "We deserved better than this..." He grinned crookedly. "How would you like to die a hero"s death?"
"The very idea appals me!" boomed a voice behind him. Brooks had just arrived on the bridge.
"Me, too," Turner admitted. He smiled: he was almost happy again. "Have we any option, gentlemen?"
"Alas, no," Brooks said sadly.
"Full ahead both!" Carrington called down the speaking-tube: it was by way of his answer.
"No, no," Turner chided gently. "Full power, Number One. Tell them we"re in a hurry: remind them of the boasts they used to make about the Abdiel and the Manxman... Preston! General emergency signal: "Scatter: proceed independently to Russian ports.""
The upper deck was thick with freshly fallen snow, and the snow was still falling. The wind was rising again and, after the warmth of the canteen where he had been operating, it struck at Johnny Nicholls"s lungs with sudden, searing pain: the temperature, he guessed, must be about zero. He buried his face in his duffel coat, climbed laboriously, haltingly up the ladders to the bridge. He was tired, deadly weary, and he winced in agony every time his foot touched the deck: his splinted left leg was shattered just above the ankle-shrapnel from the bomb in the after mess-deck.
Peter Orr, commander of the Sirrus, was waiting for him at the gate of the tiny bridge.
"I thought you might like to see this, Doc." The voice was strangely high-pitched for so big a man. "Rather I thought you would want to see this," he corrected himself. "Look at her go!" he breathed. "Just look at her go!"
Nicholls looked out over the port side. Half a mile away on the beam, the Cape Hatteras was blazing furiously, slowing to a stop. Some miles to the north, through the falling snow, he could barely distinguish the vague shape of the German cruiser, a shape pinpointed by the flaming guns still mercilessly pumping sh.e.l.ls into the sinking ship. Every shot went home: the accuracy of their gunnery was fantastic.
Half a mile astern on the port quarter, the Ulysses was coming up. She was sheeted in foam and spray, the bows leaping almost clear of the water, then crashing down with a pistol-shot impact easily heard, even against the wind, on the bridge of the Sirrus, as the great engines thrust her through the water, faster, faster, with the pa.s.sing of every second.
Nicholls gazed, fascinated. This was the first time he"d seen the Ulysses since he"d left her and he was appalled. The entire upperworks, fore and aft, were a twisted, unbelievable shambles of broken steel: both masts were gone, the smokestacks broken and bent, the Director Tower shattered and grotesquely askew: smoke was still pluming up from the great holes in fo"c"sle and p.o.o.p, the after turrets, wrenched from their mountings, pitched crazily on the deck. The skeleton of the Condor still lay athwart "Y" turret, a Stuka was buried to the wings in the fo"c"sle deck, and she was, he knew, split right down to the water level abreast the torpedo tubes. The Ulysses was something out of a nightmare.
Steadying himself against the violent pitching of the destroyer, Nicholls stared and stared, numbed with horror and disbelief. Orr looked at him, looked away as a messenger came to the bridge.
"Rendezvous 1015," he read. "1015! Good lord, 25 minutes" time! Do you hear that, Doc? 25 minutes" time!"
"Yes, sir," Nicholls said absently: he hadn"t heard him.
Orr looked at him, touched his arm, pointed to the Ulysses.
"b.l.o.o.d.y well incredible, isn"t it?" he murmured.
"I wish to G.o.d I was aboard her," Nicholls muttered miserably. "Why did they send me------? Look! What"s that?"
A huge flag, a flag twenty feet in length, was streaming out below the yardarm of the Ulysses, stretched taut in the wind of its pa.s.sing.
Nicholls had never seen anything remotely like it: the flag was enormous, red and blue and whiter than the driving snow.
"The battle ensign," Orr murmured. "Bill Turner"s broken out the battle ensign." He shook his head in wonder. "To take time off to do that now-well, Doc., only Turner would do that. You know him well?"
Nicholls nodded silently.
"Me, too," Orr said simply. "We are both lucky men."
The Sirus was still doing fifteen knots, still headed for the enemy, when the Ulysses pa.s.sed them by a cable-length away as if they were stopped in the water.
Long afterwards, Nicholls could never describe it all accurately. He had a hazy memory of the Ulysses no longer plunging and lifting, but battering through waves and troughs on a steady even keel, the deck angling back sharply from a rearing forefoot to the counter buried deep in the water, fifteen feet below the great boiling tortured sea of white that arched up in seething magnificence above the shattered p.o.o.p-deck.
He could recall, too, that "B" turret was firing continuously, sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l screaming away through the blinding snow, to burst in brilliant splendour over and on the German cruiser: for "B" turret had only starsh.e.l.ls left. He carried, too, a vague mental picture of Turner waving ironically from the bridge, of the great ensign streaming stiffly astern, already torn and tattered at the edges. But what he could never forget, what he would hear in his heart and mind as long as he lived, was the tremendous, frightening roar of the great boiler-room intake fans as they sucked in mighty draughts of air for the starving engines.
For the Ulysses was driving through the heavy seas under maximum power, at a speed that should have broken her shuddering back, should have burnt out the great engines. There was no doubt as to Turner"s intentions: he was going to ram the enemy, to destroy him and take him with him, at a speed of just on or over forty incredible knots.
Nicholls gazed and gazed and did not know what to think: he felt sick at heart, for that ship was part of him now, his good friends, especially the Kapok Kid-for he did not know that the Kid was already dead-they, too, were part of him, and it is always terrible to see the end of a legend, to see it die, to see it going into the gulfs. But he felt, too, a strange exultation; she was dying but what a way to die! And if ships had hearts, had souls, as the old sailing men declared, surely the Ulysses would want it this way too.
She was still doing forty knots when, as if by magic, a great gaping hole appeared in her bows just above the water-line. Sh.e.l.l-fire, possibly, but unlikely at that angle. It must have been a torpedo from the U-boat, not yet located: a sudden dip of the bows could have coincided with the up-thrust of a heavy sea forcing a torpedo to the surface. Such things had happened before: rarely, but they happened... The Ulysses brushed aside the torpedo, ignored the grievous wound, ignored the heavy sh.e.l.ls crashing into her and kept on going.
She was still doing forty knots, driving in under the guns of the enemy, guns at maximum depression, when "A" magazine blew up, blasted off the entire bows in one shattering detonation. For a second, the lightened fo"c"sle reared high into the air: then it plunged down, deep down, into the shoulder of a rolling sea. She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thundering engines her own executioner.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
EPILOGUE.
THE AIR was warm and kind and still. The sky was blue, a deep and wonderful blue, with little puffs of cotton-wool cloud drifting lazily to the far horizon. The street-gardens, the hanging birdcage flower-baskets, spilled over with blue and yellow and red and gold, all the delicate pastel shades and tints he had almost forgotten had ever existed: every now and then an old man or a hurrying housewife or a young man with a laughing girl on his arm would stop to admire them, then walk on again, the better for having seen them.
The nesting birds were singing, clear and sweet above the distant roar of the traffic, and Big Ben was booming the hour as Johnny Nicholls climbed awkwardly out of the taxi, paid off the driver and hobbled slowly up the marble steps.
His face carefully expressionless, the sentry saluted, opened the heavy swing door. Nicholls pa.s.sed inside, looked around the huge hall, saw that both sides were lined with heavy, imposing doors: at the far end, beneath the great curve of the stairs and overhanging the widely convex counter of the type usually found in banks, hung a sign: "Typist Pool: Inquiries."
The tip-tap of the crutches sounded unnaturally loud on the marble floor as he limped over to the counter. Very touching and melodramatic, Nicholls, he thought dispa.s.sionately: trust the audience are having their money"s worth. Half a dozen typists had stopped work as if by command, were staring at him in open curiosity, hands resting limply on their machines. A trim young Wren, red-haired an3 shirt-sleeved, came to the counter.
"Can I help you, sir?" The quiet voice, the blue eyes were soft with concern. Nicholls, catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind her, a glimpse of a scuffed uniform jacket over a grey fisherman"s jersey, of blurred, sunken eyes and gaunt, pale cheeks, admitted wryly to himself that he couldn"t blame her. He didn"t have to be a doctor to know that he was in pretty poor shape.
"My name is Nicholls, Surgeon-Lieutenant Nicholls. I have an appointment------"
"Lieutenant Nicholls... H.M.S. Ulysses" The girl drew in her breath sharply. "Of course, sir. They"re expecting you." Nicholls looked at her, looked at the Wrens sitting motionless in their chairs, caught the intense, wondering expression in their eyes, the awed gaze with which one would regard beings from another planet. It made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.
"Upstairs, I suppose?" He hadn"t meant to sound so brusque.
"No, sir." The Wren came quietly round the counter. "They-well, they heard you"d been wounded, sir," she murmured apologetically. "Just across the hall here, please." She smiled at him, slowed her step to match his halting walk.
She knocked, held open the door, announced him to someone he couldn"t see, and closed the door softly behind him when he had pa.s.sed through.
There were three men in the room. The one man he recognised, Vice-Admiral Starr, came forward to meet him. He looked older, far older, far more tired than when Nicholls had last seen him-hardly a fortnight previously.
"How are you, Nicholls?" he asked. "Not walking so well, I see." Under the a.s.surance, the thin joviality so flat and misplaced, the harsh edge of strain burred unmistakably. "Come and sit down."