Condors were on them.
It was almost dusk, now, the weird half-light of the Arctic twilight.
Tracers, glowing hot pinpoints of light streaking out through the darkening sky, were clearly seen, at first swinging erratically, fading away to extinction in the far distance, then steadying, miraculously dying in the instant of birth as they sank home into the fuselages of the swooping Condors. But time was too short-the guns were on target for a maximum of two seconds-and these giant Focke-Wulfs had a tremendous capacity for absorbing punishment. The leading Condor levelled out about three hundred feet, its medium 250-kilo bombs momentarily parallelling its line of flight, then arching down lazily towards the Ulysses. At once the Condor pulled its nose up in maximum climb, the four great engines labouring in desynchronised clamour, as it sought the protection of the clouds.
The bombs missed. They missed by about thirty feet, exploding on contact with the water just abaft the bridge. For the men in the T.S., engine-and boiler-rooms, the crash and concussion must have been frightful- literally ear-shattering. Waterspouts, twenty feet in diameter at their turbulent bases, streaked up whitely into the twilight, high above the truncated masts, hung there momentarily, then collapsed in drenching cascades on the bridge and boat-deck aft, soaking, saturating, every gunner on the pom-pom and in the open Oerlikon cockpits. The temperature stood at 2ш above zero-30ш of frost.
More dangerously, the blinding sheets of water completely unsighted the gunners. Apart from a lone Oerlikon on a sponson below the starboard side of the bridge, the next Condor pressed home its attack against a minimum of resistance. The approach was perfect, dead fore-and-aft on the centre line; but the pilot overshot, probably in his anxiety to hold course. Three bombs this time: for a second, it seemed that they must miss, but the first smashed into the fo'c'sle between the breakwater and the capstan, exploding in the flat below, heaving up the deck in a tangled wreckage of broken steel. Even as the explosion died, the men on the bridge could hear a curious clanking rattle: the explosion must have shattered the fo'c'sle capstan and Blake stopper simultaneously, and sheared the retaining shackle on the anchor cable, and the starboard anchor, completely out of control, was plummeting down to the depths of the Arctic.
The other bombs fell into the sea directly ahead, and from the Stirling, a mile ahead, it seemed that the Ulysses disappeared under the great column of water. But the water subsided, and the Ulysses steamed on, apparently unharmed. From dead ahead, the sweeping lift of the bows hid all damage, and there was neither flame nor smoke-hundreds of gallons of water, falling from the sky and pouring in through the great jagged holes in the deck, had killed any fire there was. The Ulysses was still a lucky ship... And then, at last, after twenty months of the fantastic escapes, the fabulous good fortune that had made her a legend, a byword for immunity throughout all the north, the luck of the Ulysses ran out.
Ironically, the Ulysses brought disaster on herself. The main armament, the 5.25s aft, had opened up now, was pumping its 100-lb. shells at the diving bombers, at point-blank range and over equivalent of open sights. The very first shell from 'X' turret sheared away the starboard wing of the third Condor between the engines, tore it completely away to spin slowly like a fluttering leaf into the darkly-rolling sea. For a fraction of a second the Folke-Wulf held on course, then abruptly the nose tipped over and the giant plane screamed down in an almost vertical dive, her remaining engines inexplicably accelerating to a deafening crescendo as she hurtled arrow- straight for the deck of the Ulysses.
There was no time to take any avoiding action, no time to think, no time even to hope. A cluster of jettisoned bombs crashed in to the boiling wake--the Ulysses was already doing upwards of thirty knots-and two more crashed through the poop-deck, the first exploding in the after seamen's mess-deck, the other in the marines' mess-deck. One second later, with a tremendous roar and in a blinding sheet of gasoline flame, the Condor itself, at a speed of upwards of three hundred m.p.h., crashed squarely into the front of 'Y' turret.
Incredibly, that was the last attack on the Ulysses-incredibly, because the Ulysses was defenceless now, wide open to any air attack from astern. 'Y' turret was gone, 'X' turret, still magically undamaged, was half-buried under the splintered wreckage of the Condor, blinded by the smoke and leaping flame. The boat-deck Oerlikons, too, had fallen silent. The gunners, half-drowned under the deluge of less than a minute ago, were being frantically dragged from their cockpits: a difficult enough task at any time, it was almost impossible with their clothes already frozen solid, their duffels cracking and crackling like splintering matchwood as the men were dragged over the side of their cockpits. With all speed, they were rushed below, thrust into the galley passage to thaw, literally to thaw: agony, excruciating agony, but the only alternative to the quick and certain death which would have come to them in their ice-bound cockpits.
The remaining Condors had pulled away in a slow climbing turn to starboard. They were surrounded, bracketed fore and aft and on either side, by scores of woolly, expanding puffs of exploding A.A. shells, but they flew straight through these, charmed, unhurt. Already, they were beginning to disappear into the clouds, to settle down on a south-east course for home. Strange, Vallery thought vaguely, one would have expected them to hammer home their initial advantage of surprise, to concentrate on the crippled Ulysses: certainly, thus far the Condor crews had shown no lack of courage... He gave it up, turned his attention to more immediate worries. And there was plenty to worry about.
The Ulysses was heavily on fire aft-a deck and mess-deck fire, admittedly, but potentially fatal for all that, 'X' nd 'Y' magazines were directly below. Already, dozens of men from the damage control parties were running aft, stumbling and falling on the rolling ice-covered deck, unwinding the hose drums behind them, occasionally falling flat on their faces as two ice-bound coils locked together, the abruptly tightening hose jerking them off their feet. Others stumbled past them, carrying the big, red foam-extinguishers on their shoulders or under their arms. One unfortunate seaman-A.B. Ferry, who had left the Sick Bay in defiance of strict orders--running down the port alley past the shattered Canteen, slipped and fell abreast 'X' turret: the port wing of the Condor, even as it had sheared off and plunged into the sea, had torn away the guard-rails here, and Ferry, hands and feet scrabbling frantically at the smooth ice of the deck, his broken arm clawing uselessly at one of the remaining stanchions, slid slowly, inevitably over the side and was gone. For a second, the high-pitched, fear-stricken shriek rose thin and clear above the roaring of the flames, died abruptly as the water closed over him. The propellers were almost immediately below.
The men with the extinguishers were the first into action, as, indeed, they had to be when fighting a petrol fire-water would only have made matters worse, have increased the area of the fire by washing the petrol in all directions, and the petrol, being lighter than water, immiscible and so floating to the top, would have burned as furiously as ever. But the foam-extinguishers were of only limited efficiency, not so much because several release valves had jammed solid in the intense cold as because of the intense white heat which made close approach almost impossible, while the smaller carbon-tet. extinguishers, directed against electrical fires below, were shockingly ineffective: these extinguishers had never been in action before and the crew of the Ulysses had known for a long time of the almost magical properties of the extinguisher liquid for removing the most obstinate stains and marks in clothes. You may convince a W.T. rating of the lethal nature of 2.000 volts: you may convince a gunner of the madness of matches in a magazine: you may convince a torpedoman of the insanity of juggling with fulminate of mercury: but you will never convince any of them of the criminal folly of draining off just a few drops of carbon-tetrachloride... Despite stringent periodical checks, most of the extinguishers were only half-full. Some were completely empty.
The hoses were little more effective. Two were coupled up to the starboard mains and the valves turned: the hoses remained lifeless, empty. The starboard salt-water line had frozen solid-common enough with fresh- water systems, this, but not with salt. A third hose on the port side was coupled up, but the release valve refused to turn: attacked with hammers and crowbars, it sheered off at the base-at extremely low temperatures, molecular changes occur in metals, cut tensile strength to a fraction-the high-pressure water drenching everyone in the vicinity.
Spicer, the dead Admiral's pantry-boy, a stricken-eyed shadow of his former cheerful self, flung away his hammer and wept in anger and frustration. The other port valve worked, but it took an eternity for the water to force its way through the flattened frozen hose.
Gradually, the deck fire was brought under control-less through the efforts of the firefighters than the fact that there was little inflammable material left after the petrol had burnt off. Hoses and extinguishers were then directed through the great jagged rents on the poop to the fires roaring in the mess-deck below, while two asbestos-suited figures clambered over and struggled through the red-hot, jangled mass of smoking wreckage on the poop. Nicholls had one of the suits, Leading Telegraphist Brown, a specialist in rescue work, the other.
