You've said so yourself, a hundred times."
The Kapok Kid grinned up at him.
The grin was a little crooked.
"Sure, sure, I know, I know-will you go, Johnny?"
"Dammit to hell, yes!" Nicholls snapped. "I'll go-and it's high time I was going somewhere else.
Come on!"
He snapped off the lights, pulled back the door, stopped with his foot half-way over the sill.
Slowly, he stepped back inside the charthouse, closed the door and nicked on the light.
The Kapok Kid hadn't moved, was gazing quietly at him.
"I'm sorry, Andy," Nicholls said sincerely. "I don't know what made me------"
"Bad temper," said the Kapok Kid cheerfully. "You always did hate to think that I was right and you were wrong!"
Nicholls caught his breath, closed his eyes for a second.
Then he stretched out his hand.
"All the best, Vasco." It was an effort to smile. "And don't worry.
I'll see her if-well, I'll see her, I promise you.
Juanita... But if I find you there," he went on threateningly, "I'll------"
"Thanks, Johnny.
Thanks a lot." The Kapok Kid was almost happy. "Good luck, boy... Vaya con Dios.
That's what she always said to me, what she said before I came away.' Vaya con Dios.'"
Thirty minutes later, Nicholls was operating aboard the Sirrus.
The time was 0445.
It was bitterly cold, with a light wind blowing steadily from the north.
The seas were heavier than ever, longer between the crests, deeper in their gloomy troughs, and the damaged Sirrus, labouring under a mountain of ice, was making heavy weather of it.
The sky was still clear, a sky of breath-taking purity, and the stars were out again, for the Northern Lights were fading.
The fifth successive flare was drifting steadily seawards.
It was at 0445 that they heard it, the distant rumble of gunfire far to the south, perhaps a minute after they had seen the incandescent brilliance of a burning flare on the run of the far horizon.
There could be no doubt as to what was happening.
The Viking, still in contact with the U-boat, although powerless to do anything about it, was being heavily attacked.
And the attack must have been short, sharp and deadly, for the firing ceased soon after it had begun.
Ominously, nothing came through on the W.T.
No one ever knew what had happened to the Viking, for there were no survivors.
The last echo of the Viking's guns had barely died away before they heard the roar of the engines of the Condor, at maximum throttle in a shallow dive.
For five, perhaps ten seconds-it seemed longer than that, but not long enough for any gun in the convoy to begin tracking him accurately-the great Focke-Wulf actually flew beneath his own flare, and then was gone.
Behind him, the sky opened up in a blinding coruscation of flame, more dazzling, more hurtful, than the light of the noonday sun.
So intense, so extraordinary the power of those flares, so much did pupils contract and eyelids narrow in instinctive self-protection, that the enemy bombers were through the circle of light and upon them before anyone fully realised what was happening The timing, the split-second co-operation between marker planes and bombers were magnificent.
There were twelve planes in the first wave.
There was no concentration on one target, as before: not more than two attacked any ship.
Turner, watching from the bridge, watching them swoop down steeply and level out before even the first gun in the Ulysses had opened up, caught his breath in sudden dismay.
There was something terribly familiar about the speed, the approach, the silhouette of these planes.
Suddenly he had it, Heinkels, by God!
Heinkel 111's.
And the Heinkel 111, Turner knew, carried that weapon he dreaded above all others, the glider bomb.
And then, as if he had touched a master switch, every gun on the Ulysses opened up.
The air filled with smoke, the pungent smell of burning cordite: the din was indescribable.
And all at once, Turner felt fiercely, strangely happy.... To hell with them and their glider bombs, he thought.
This was war as he liked to fight it: not the cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek frustration of trying to outguess the hidden wolf-packs, but war out in the open, where he could see the enemy and hate him and love him for fighting as honest men should and do his damnedest to destroy him.
And, Turner knew, if they could at all, the crew of the Ulysses would destroy him.
It needed no great sensitivity to direct the sea-change that had overtaken his men-yes, his men now: they no longer cared for themselves: they had crossed the frontier of fear and found that nothing lay beyond it and they would keep on feeding their guns and squeezing their triggers until the enemy overwhelmed them.
The leading Heinkel was blown out of the sky, and fitting enough it was 'X' turret that destroyed it, 'X' turret, the turret of dead marines, the turret that had destroyed the Condor, and was now manned by a scratch marine crew.
The Heinkel behind lifted sharply to avoid the hurtling fragments of fuselage and engines, dipped, flashed past the cruiser's bows less than a boat-length away, banked steeply to port under maximum power, and swung back in on the Ulysses.