sprang to Turner's mind the famous line of Chaucer, 'In goon the spears full sadly in arrest.' In the closing of that hand there was the same heart-stopping decision, the same irrevocable finality.
Suddenly, so suddenly that Turner started in spite of himself, the hand jerked convulsively back. He heard the click of the tripping lever, the muffled roar in the explosion chamber, the hiss of compressed air, and the torpedo was gone, its evil sleekness gleaming fractionally in the light of the flames before it crashed below the surface of the sea. It was hardly gone before the tubes shuddered again and the second torpedo was on its way.
For five, ten seconds Turner stared out, fascinated, watching the arrowing wakes of bubbles vanish in the distance. A total of 1,500 Ibs. of Amatol in these warheads-God help the poor bastards aboard the Vytura... The deck 'speaker clicked on.
'Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Take cover immediately! Take cover immediately!' Turner stirred, tore his eyes away from the sea, looked up, saw that Ralston was still crouched in his seat.
'Come down out of there, you young fool!' he shouted. 'Want to be riddled when the Vytura goes up? Do you hear me?'
Silence. No word, no movement, only the roaring of the flames.
'Ralston!'
'I'm all right, sir.' Ralston's voice was muffled: he did not even trouble to turn his head.
Turner swore, leapt up on the tubes, dragged Ralston from hiis seat, pulled him down to the deck and into shelter. Ralston offered no resistance: he seemed sunk in a vast apathy, an uncaring indifference.
Both torpedoes struck home. The end was swift, curiously unspectacular.
Listeners-there were no watchers-on the Ulysses tensed themselves for the shattering detonation, but the detonation never came. Broken-backed and tired of fighting, the Vytura simply collapsed in on her stricken mid- ships, lay gradually, wearily over on her side and was gone.
Three minutes later, Turner opened the door of the Captain's shelter, pushed Ralston in before him.
'Here you are, sir,' he said grimly. 'Thought you might like to see what a conscientious objecter looks like!'
'I certainly do!' Vallery laid down the log-book, turned a cold eye on the torpedoman, looked him slowly up and down. 'A fine job, Ralston, but it doesn't excuse your conduct. Just a minute, Commander.'
He turned back to the Kapok Kid. 'Yes, that seems all right, Pilot.
It'll make good reading for their lordships,' he added bitterly. 'The ones the Germans don't get, we finish off for them... Remember to signal the Hatteras in the morning, ask for the name of the master of the Vytura.'
'He's dead... You needn't trouble yourself!' said Ralston bitterly, then staggered as the Commander's open hand smashed across his face.
Turner was breathing heavily, his eyes dark with anger.
'You insolent young devil!' he said softly. 'That was just a little too much from you.'
Ralston's hand came up slowly, fingering the reddening weal on his cheek.
'You misunderstand me, sir.' There was no anger, the voice was a fading murmur, they had to strain to catch his words. 'The master of the Vytura, I can tell you his name. It's Ralston. Captain Michael Ralston. He was my father.'
CHAPTER TWELVE
SATURDAY
TO ALL things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn. And so it came for FR77, as grey, as bitter, as hopeless as the night had been long. But it came.
It came to find the convoy some 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle, steaming due east along the 72nd parallel of latitude, half-way between Jan Mayen and the North Cape. 8ш 45' east, the Kapok Kid reckoned, but he couldn't be sure. In heavy snow and with ten-tenth cloud, he was relying on dead reckoning: he had to, for the shell that had destroyed the F.D.R. had wrecked the Automatic Pilot. But roughly 600 nautical miles to go. 600 miles, 40 hours, and the convoy-or what would be left of it by that time, would be in the Kola Inlet, steaming up- river to Polyarnoe and Murmansk... 40 hours.
It came to find the convoy, 14 ships left in all-scattered over three square miles of sea and rolling heavily in the deepening swell from the NNE.: 14 ships, for another had gone in the deepest part of the night.
Mine, torpedo? Nobody knew, nobody ever would know. The Sirrus had stopped, searched the area for an hour with hooded ten-inch signalling lamps. There had been no survivors. Not that Commander Orr had expected to find any-not with the air temperature 6ш below zero.
It came after a sleepless night of never-ending alarms, of continual Asdic contacts, of constant depth- charging that achieved nothing.
Nothing, that is, from the escorts' point of view: but for the enemy, it achieved a double-edged victory. It kept exhausted men at Action Stations all night long, blunting, irreparably perhaps, the last vestiges of the knife- edged vigilance on which the only hope, it was never more, of survival in the Arctic depended. More deadly still, it had emptied the last depth-charge rack in the convoy.... It was a measure of the intensity of the attack, of the relent-lessness of the persecution, that this had never happened before. But it had happened now. There was not a single depth-charge left-not one. The fangs were drawn, the defences were down. It was only a matter of time before the wolf-packs discovered that they could strike at will...
And with the dawn, of course, came dawn Action Stations, or what would have been dawn stations had the men not already been closed up for fifteen hours, fifteen endless hours of intense cold and suffering, fifteen hours during which the crew of the Ulysses had been sustained by cocoa and one bully-beef sandwich, thin, sliced and stale, for there had been no time to bake the previous day. But dawn stations were profoundly significant in themselves: they prolonged the waiting another interminable two hours-and to a man rocking on his feet from unimaginable fatigue, literally holding convulsively jerking eyelids apart with finger and thumb while a starving brain, which is less a brain than a well of fine-drawn agony, begs him to let go, let go just for a second, just this once and never again, even a minute is brutal eternity: and they were still more important in that they were recognised as the Ithuriel hour of the Russian Convoys, the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was. And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could nor would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame. Not all, of course, they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.
For some men, neither precipice nor valley ever existed. Men like Carrington, for instance. Eighteen consecutive hours on the bridge now, he was still his own indestructible self, alert with that relaxed watchfulness that never flagged, a man of infinite endurance, a man who could never crack, who you knew could never crack, for the imagination baulked at the very idea. Why he was what he was, no man could tell.
Such, too, were men like Chief Petty Officer Hartley, like Chief Stoker Hendry, like Colour-Sergeant Evans and Sergeant Macintosh; four men strangely alike, big, tough, kindly, no longer young, steeped in the traditions of the Service.
Taciturn, never heard to speak of themselves, they were under no illusions as to their importance: they knew, as any Naval officer would be the first to admit-that, as the senior N.C.O.s, they, and not any officer, were the backbone of the Royal Navy; and it was from their heavy sense of responsibility that sprung their rock-like stability. And then of course, there were men-a handful only-like Turner and the Kapok Kid and Dodson, whom dawn found as men above themselves, men revelling in danger and exhaustion, for only thus could they realise themselves, for only this had they been born. And finally, men like Vallery, who had collapsed just after midnight, and was still asleep in the shelter, and Surgeon Commander Brooks: wisdom was their sheet anchor, a clear appreciation of the relative insignificance both of themselves and the fate of FR77, a coldly intellectual appraisal of, married to an infinite compassion for, the follies and suffering of mankind.
