"Never mind..." Vallery checked himself, aghast at what he had been about to say.
If McQuater fell off, he'd drown like a rat in that flooded magazine.
"Oh, aye.
The magazine." In the intervals between the racked bouts of coughing, the voice was strangely composed. "The shells up top are just aboot meltin'.
Worse than ever, sir."
"I see." Vallery could think of nothing else to say.
His eyes were closed and he knew he was swaying on his feet.
With an effort, he spoke again. "How's Williamson?" It was all he could think of.
"Near gone.
Up to his neck and hangin' on to the racks." McQuater coughed again. "Says he's a message for the Commander and Carslake."
"A-a message?"
"Uh-huh!
Tell old Blackbeard to take a turn to himself and lay off the bottle," he said with relish.
The message for Carslake was unprintable.
Vallery didn't even feel shocked.
"And yourself, McQuater?" he said. "No message, nothing you would like..." He stopped, conscious of the grotesque inadequacy, the futility of what he was saying.
"Me?
Ach, there's naething Ah'd like... Well, maybe a "transfer to the Spartiate, but Ah'm thinking maybe it's a wee bit ower late for that.
"Williamson!" The voice had risen to a sudden urgent shout.
"Williamson! Hang on, boy, Ah'm coming!"
They heard the booming clatter in the speaker as McQuater's phone crashed against metal, and then there was only the silence.
"McQuater!" Vallery shouted into the phone. "McQuater! Answer me, man.
Can you hear me? McQuater!" H.M.S. Spartiate was a shore establishment. Naval H.Q. for the West of Scotland, It was at St. Enoch's Hotel, Glasgow.
But the speaker above him remained dead, finally, irrevocably dead.
Vallery shivered in the icy wind. That magazine, that flooded magazine... less than twenty-four hours since he had been there.
He could see it now, see it as clearly as he had seen it last night.
Only now he saw it dark, cavernous with only the pin-points of emergency lighting, the water welling darkly, slowly up the sides, saw that little, pitifully wasted Scots boy with the thin shoulders and pain-filled eyes, struggling desperately to keep his mate's head above that icy water, exhausting his tiny reserves of strength with the passing of every second.
Even now, the tune must be running out and Vallery knew hope was gone.
With a sudden clear certainty he knew that when those two went down, they would go down together. McQuater would never let go.
Eighteen years old, just eighteen years old. Vallery turned away, stumbling blindly through the gate on to the shattered compass platform.
It was beginning to snow again and the darkness was falling all around them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SATURDAY EVENING I
THE Ulysses rolled on through the Arctic twilight.
She rolled heavily, awkwardly, in seas of the wrong critical length, a strange and stricken sight with both masts gone, with all boats and rafts gone, with shattered fore-and-aft superstructure, with a crazily tilted bridge and broken, mangled after turret, half-buried in the skeleton of the Condor's fuselage.
But despite all that, despite, too, the great garish patches of red lead and gaping black holes in fo'c'sle and poop-the latter welling with dark smoke laced with flickering lances of flame-she still remained uncannily ghost-like and graceful, a creature of her own element, inevitably at home in the Arctic.
Ghost-like, graceful, and infinitely enduring... and still deadly.
She still had her guns-and her engines.
Above all, she had these great engines, engines strangely blessed with endless immunity.
So, at least, it seemed...
Five minutes dragged themselves interminably by, five minutes during which the sky grew steadily darker, during which reports from the poop showed that the firefighters were barely holding their own, five minutes during which Vallery recovered something of his normal composure.
But he was now terribly weak.
A bell shrilled, cutting sharply through the silence and the gloom.
Chrysler answered it, turned to the bridge.
"Captain, sir.
After engine-room would like to speak to you."
Turner looked at the Captain, said quickly:
"Shall I take it, sir?"
"Thank you." Vallery nodded his head gratefully.
Turner nodded in turn, crossed to the phone.