shelter.
'It looks,' he said bitterly, 'as if I've already made it.'
CHAPTER NINE
FRIDAY MORNING
THE FOG, Tyndall saw, was all around them now. Since that last heavy snowfall during the night, the temperature had risen steadily, quickly.
But it had beguiled only to deceive: the clammy, icy feathers of the swirling mist now struck doubly chill.
He hurried through the gate, Vallery close behind him. Turner, steel helmet trailing, was just leaving for the After Tower. Tyndall stretched out his hand, stopped him.
'What is it, Commander?' he demanded. 'Who fired? Where? Where did it come from?'
'I don't know, sir. Shells came from astern, more or less. But I've a damned good idea who it is.' His eyes rested on the Admiral a long, speculative moment. 'Our friend of last night is back again.' He turned abruptly, hurried off the bridge.
Tyndall looked after him, perplexed, uncomprehending. Then he swore, softly, savagely, and jumped for the radar handset.
'Bridge. Admiral speaking. Lieutenant Bowden at once!' The loudspeaker crackled into immediate life.
'Bowden speaking, sir.'
'What the devil are you doing down there?' Tyndall's voice was low, vicious. 'Asleep, or what? We are being attacked, Lieutenant Bowden. By a surface craft. This may be news to you.' He broke off, ducked low as another salvo screamed overhead and crashed into the water less than half a mile ahead: the spray cascaded over the decks of a merchantman, glimpsed momentarily in a clear lane between two rolling fog-banks.
Tyndall straightened up quickly, snarled into the mouth-piece. 'He's got our range, and got it accurately. In God's name, Bowden, where is he?'
'Sorry, sir.' Bowden was cool, unruffled. 'We can't seem to pick him up. We still have the Adventurer on our screens, and there appears to be a very slight distortion on his bearing, sir, approximately 300... I suggest the enemy ship is still screened by the Adventurer or, if she's closer, is on the Adventurer's direct bearing.'
'How near?' Tyndall barked.
'Not near, sir. Very close to the Adventurer. We can't distinguish either by size or distance.'
Tyndall dangled the transmitter from his hand. He turned to Vallery.
'Does Bowden really expect me to believe that yarn?' he asked angrily.
'A million to one coincidence like that, an enemy ship accidentally chose and holds the only possible course to screen her from our radar. Fantastic!'
Vallery looked at him, his face without expression.
'Well?' Tyndall was impatient. 'Isn't it?'
'No, sir,' Vallery answered quietly. 'It's not. Not really. And it wasn't accidental. The U-pack would have radioed her, given our bearing and course. The rest was easy.'
Tyndall gazed at him through a long moment of comprehension, screwed his eyes shut and shook his head in short fierce jerks. It was a gesture compounded of self-criticism, the death of disbelief, the attempt to clear a woolly, exhausted mind. Hell, a six-year-old could have seen that... A shell whistled into the sea a bare fifty yards to port.
Tyndall didn't flinch, might never have seen or heard it.
'Bowden?' He had the transmitter to his mouth again.
'Sir?'
'Any change in the screen?'
'No, sir. None.'
'And are you still of the same opinion?'
'Yes, sir! Can't be anything else.'
'And close to the Adventurer, you say?'
'Very close, I would say.'
'But, good God, man, the Adventurer must be ten miles astern by now!'
'Yes, sir. I know. So is the bandit.'
'What! Ten miles! But, but-----'
'He's firing by radar, sir,' Bowden interrupted. Suddenly the metallic voice sounded tired. 'He must be. He's also tracking by radar, which is why he's keeping himself in line with our bearing on the Adventurer. And he's extremely accurate... I'm afraid, Admiral, that his radar is at least as good as ours.'
The speaker clicked off. In the sudden strained silence on the bridge, the crash of breaking ebonite sounded unnaturally loud as the transmitter slipped from TyndalFs hand, fractured in a hundred pieces.
The hand groped forward, he clutched at a steam pipe as if to steady himself. Vallery stepped towards him, arms outstretched in concern, but Tyndall brushed by unseeingly. Like an old spent man, like a man from whose ancient bones and muscles all the pith has long since drained, he shuffled slowly across the bridge, oblivious of a dozen mystified eyes, dragged himself up on to his high stool.
You fool, he told himself bitterly, savagely, oh, you bloody old fool!
He would never forgive himself, never, never, never! All along the line he had been out-thought, outguessed and out-manceuvred by the enemy.
They had taken him for a ride, made an even bigger bloody fool out of him than his good Maker had ever intended. Radar! Of course, that was it! The blind assumption that German radar had remained the limited, elementary thing that Admiralty and Air Force Intelligence had reported it to be last year I Radar, and as good as the British. As good as the Ulysses's, and everybody had believed that the Ulysses was incomparably the most efficient, indeed the only efficient, radar ship in the world. As good as our own-probably a damned sight better. But had the thought ever occurred to him? Tyndall writhed in sheer chagrin, in agony of spirit, and knew the bitter taste of self-loathing. And so, this morning, the payoff: six ships, three hundred men gone to the bottom. May God forgive you, Tyndall, he thought dully, may God forgive you. You sent them there... Radar!
Last night, for instance. When the Ulysses had been laying a false trail to the east, the German cruiser had obligingly tagged behind, the perfect foil to his, Tyndall's genius. Tyndall groaned in mortification.
Had tagged behind, firing wildly, erratically each time the Ulysses had disappeared behind a smoke-screen. Had done so to conceal the efficiency of her radar, to conceal the fact that, during the first half-hour at least, she must have been tracking the escaping convoy as it disappeared to the NNW., a process made all the easier by the fact that he, Tyndall, had expressly forbidden the use of the zig-zag!
And then, when the Ulysses had so brilliantly circled, first to the south and then to the north again, the enemy must have had her on his screen-constantly. And later, the biter bit with a vengeance, the faked enemy withdrawal to the south-east. Almost certainly, he, too, had circled to the north again, picked up the disappearing British cruiser on the edge of his screen, worked out her intersection course as a cross check on the convoy's, and radioed ahead to the wolf-pack, positioning them almost to the foot.
And now, finally, the last galling blow to whatever shattered remnants of his pride were left him. The enemy had opened fire at extreme range, but with extreme accuracy, a dead give-away to the fact that the firing was radar-controlled. And the only reason for it must be the enemy's conviction that the Ulysses, by this time, must have come to the inevitable conclusion that the enemy was equipped with a highly sensitive radar transmitter. The inevitable conclusion! Tyndall had never even begun to suspect it. Slowly, oblivious to the pain, he pounded his fist on the edge of the windscreen. God, what a blind, crazily stupid fool he'd been! Six ships, three hundred men. hundreds of tanks and planes, millions of gallons of fuel lost to Russia; how many more thousands of dead Russians, soldiers and civilians, did that represent? And the broken, sorrowing families, he thought incoherently, families throughout the breadth of Britain: the telegram boys cycling to the little houses in the Welsh valleys, along the wooded lanes of Surrey, to the lonely reek of the peat-fire, remote in the Western Isles, to the lime-washed cottages of Donegal and Antrim: the empty homes across the great reaches of the New World, from Newfoundland
