H.M.S. Ulysses Part 8

"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 j.a.panese 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 att.i.tude, 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 haemoptysis. 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 c.o.c.kney-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 pa.s.sed Riley by.

Every man is what environment and heredity makes 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 metier. He had been in prison six times, the last time for two years.

His induction into the Navy was a mystery which bafHed 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 strangly 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 that 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 m.u.f.fled roar of the great boiler-room intake fans and the hum of a hundred electric motors. Tension lay heavy over the s.h.i.+p, 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, Fm 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 tune, G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps are carrying tanks, planes, aviation spirit and oil-nothing else.

"I will not attempt to minimise 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, m.u.f.fled coughing into a handkerchief echoed weirdly through the silent s.h.i.+p. He went on slowly. "There are enough fighter planes and petrol in this convoy to alter the whole character of the Russian war.

The n.a.z.is 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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."

[Rescue s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+ps.]

"Thirdly, two, possibly three, U-boat packs are known to be strung out along lat.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+p'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 G.o.d bless you. Good night."

The loudspeakers clicked off, but the silence lingered on. n.o.body spoke and n.o.body 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 b.u.t.ts 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 Be 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 surpa.s.sing 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."