have seen the old dear's photo know that the very idea's a shocking libel on either of them ladies, I still wouldn't send her even a bleedin' postcard. You gotta draw a line somewhere. Me, for my scratcher.' Whereupon he had dragged his hammock from the rack, slung it with millimetric accuracy beneath a hot-air louvre, seniority carries its privileges, and was asleep in two minutes. To a man, the port watch did likewise: the mail bag had gone ashore almost empty...
At 0600, exactly to the minute, the Ulysses slipped her moorings and steamed slowly towards the boom. In the grey half-light, under leaden, lowering clouds, she slid across the anchorage like an insubstantial ghost, more often than not half-hidden from view under sudden, heavy flurries of snow.
Even in the relatively clear spells, she was difficult to locate. She lacked solidity, substance, definition of outline. She had a curious air of impennanence, of volatility. An illusion, of course, but an illusion that accorded well with a legend, for a legend the Ulysses had become in her own brief lifetime. She was known and cherished by merchant seamen, by the men who sailed the bitter seas of the North, from St.
John's to Archangel, from the Shetlands to Jan Mayen, from Greenland to far reaches of Spitsbergen, remote on the edge of the world. Where there was danger, where there was death, there you might look to find the Ulysses, materialising wraith-like from a fog-bank, or just miraculously, being there when the bleak twilight of an Arctic dawn brought with it only the threat, at times almost the certainty, of never seeing the next.
A ghost-ship, almost, a legend. The Ulysses was also a young ship, but she had grown old in the Russian Convoys H.U.33B and on the Arctic patrols. She had been there from the beginning, and had known no other life. At first she had operated alone, escorting single ships or groups of two or three: later, she had operated with corvettes and frigates, and now she never moved without her squadron, the 14th Escort Carrier group.
But the Ulysses had never really sailed alone. Death had been, still was, her constant companion. He laid his ringer on a tanker, and there was the erupting hell of a high-octane detonation; on a cargo liner, and she went to the bottom with her load of war supplies, her back broken by a German torpedo; on a destroyer, and she knifed her way into the grey-black depths of the Barents Sea, her still racing engines her own executioners; on a U-boat, and she surfaced violently to be destroyed by gunfire, or slid down gently to the bottom of the sea, the dazed, shocked crew hoping for a cracked pressure hull and merciful instant extinction, dreading the endless gasping agony of suffocation in their iron tomb on the ocean floor. Where the Ulysses went, there also went death. But death never touched her. She was a lucky ship. A lucky ship and a ghost ship and the Arctic was her home.
Illusion, of course, this ghostliness, but a calculated illusion. The Ulysses was designed specifically for one task, for one ocean, and the camouflage experts had done a marvellous job. The special Arctic camouflage, the broken, slanting diagonals of grey and white and washed out blues merged beautifully, imperceptibly into the infinite shades of grey and white, the cold, bleak grimness of the barren northern seas.
And the camouflage was only the outward, the superficial indication of her fitness for the north.
Technically, the Ulysses was a light cruiser. She was the only one of her kind, a 5,500 ton modification of the famous Dido type, a forerunner of the Black Prince class. Five hundred and ten feet long, narrow in her fifty- foot beam with a raked stem, square cruiser stern and long fo'c'sle deck extending well abaft the bridge, a distance of over two hundred feet, she looked and was a lean, fast and compact warship, dangerous and durable.
'Locate: engage: destroy.' These are the classic requirements of a naval ship in wartime, and to do each, and to do it with maximum speed and efficiency, the Ulysses was superbly equipped.
Location, for instance. The human element, of course, was indispensable, and Vallery was far too experienced and battlewise a captain to underestimate the value of the unceasing vigil of look-outs and signalmen. The human eye was not subject to blackouts, technical hitches or mechanical breakdowns. Radio reports, too, had their place and Asdic, of course, was the only defence against submarines.
But the Ulysses's greatest strength in location lay elsewhere. She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world. Night and day, the radar scanners atop the fore and main tripod masts swept ceaselessly in a 360ш arc, combing the far horizons, searching, searching. Below, in the radar rooms, eight in all, and in the Fighter Direction rooms, trained eyes, alive to the slightest abnormality, never left the glowing screens. The radar's efficiency and range were alike fantastic. The makers, optimistically, as they had thought, had claimed a 40-45 mile operating range for their equipment. On the Ulysses's first trials after her refit for its installation, the radar had located a Condor, subsequently destroyed by a Blenheim, at a range of eighty-five miles.
Engage that was the next step. Sometimes the enemy came to you, more often you had to go after him. And then, one thing alone mattered speed.
The Ulysses was tremendously fast. Quadruple screws powered by four great Parsons single-reduction geared turbines two in the for'ard, two in the after engine-room, developed an unbelievable horse-power that many a battleship, by no means obsolete, could not match. Officially, she was rated at 33.5 knots. Off Arraa, in her full-power trials, bows lifting out of the water, stern dug in like a hydroplane, vibrating in every Clyde-built rivet, and with the tortured, seething water boiling whitely ten feet above the level of the poop-deck, she had covered the measured mile at an incredible 39.2 knots, the nautical equivalent of 45 m.p.h. And the 'Dude '-Engineer- Commander Dobson had smiled knowingly, said he wasn't half trying and just wait till the Abdiel or the Manxman came along, and he'd show them something. But as these famous mine-laying cruisers were widely believed to be capable of 44 knots, the wardroom had merely sniffed 'Professional jealousy 'and ignored him.
Secretly, they were as proud of the great engines as Dobson himself.
Locate, engage and destroy. Destruction. That was the be all, the end all. Lay the enemy along the sights and destroy him. The Ulysses was well equipped for that also.
She had four twin gun-turrets, two for'ard, two aft, 5.25 quick-firing and dual-purpose equally effective against surface targets and aircraft. These were controlled from the Director Towers, the main one for'ard, just above and abaft of the bridge, the auxiliary aft. From these towers, all essential data about bearing, wind-speed, drift, range, own speed, enemy speed, respective angles of course were fed to the giant electronic computing tables in the Transmitting Station, the fighting heart of the ship, situated, curiously enough, in the very bowels of the Ulysses, deep below the water-line, and thence automatically to the turrets as two simple factors, elevation and training. The turrets, of course, could also fight independently.
These were the main armament. The remaining guns were purely AA, the batteries of multiple pom-poms, firing two-pounders in rapid succession, not particularly accurate but producing a blanket curtain sufficient to daunt any enemy pilot, and isolated clusters of twin Oerlikons, high-precision, high-velocity weapons, vicious and deadly in trained hands.
Finally, the Ulysses carried her depth-charges and torpedoes, 36 charges only, a negligible number compared to that carried by many corvettes and destroyers, and the maximum number that could be dropped in one pattern was six. But one depth-charge carries 450 lethal pounds of Amatol, and the Ulysses had destroyed two U-boats during the preceding winter. The 21-inch torpedoes, each with its 750-pound warhead of T.N.T., lay sleek and menacing, in the triple tubes on the main deck, one set on either side of the after funnel. These had not yet been blooded.
This, then, was the Ulysses. The complete, the perfect fighting machine, man's ultimate, so far, in his attempt to weld science and savagery into an instrument of destruction. The perfect fighting machine, but only so long as it was manned and serviced by a perfectly integrating, smoothly functioning team. A ship, any ship, can never be better than its crew. And the crew of the Ulysses was disintegrating, breaking up: the lid was clamped on the volcano, but the rumblings never ceased.
The first signs of further trouble came within three hours of clearing harbour. As always, minesweepers swept the channel ahead of them, but, as always, Vallery left nothing to chance. It was one of the reasons why he, and the Ulysses, had survived thus far. At 0620 he streamed paravanes, the slender, torpedo-shaped bodies which angled out from the bows, one on either side, on special paravane wire. In theory, the wires connecting mines to their moorings on the floor of the sea were deflected away from the ship, guided out to the paravanes themselves and severed by cutters: the mines would then float to the top to be exploded or sunk by small arms.
At 0900, Vallery ordered the paravanes to be recovered. The Ulysses slowed down. The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant-Commander Carrington, went to the fo'c'sle to supervise operations: seamen, winch drivers, and the Subs, in charge of either side closed up to their respective stations.
Quickly, the recovery booms were freed from their angled crutches, just abaft the port and starboard lights, swung out and rigged with recovery wires. Immediately, the three-ton winches on 'B' gun-deck took the strain, smoothly, powerfully; the paravanes cleared the water.
