It hardly seemed to call for comment-in extremity, courage becomes routine-when the bearded Doyle abandoned his pom-pom, scrambled up to the fo'c'sle deck, and flung himself on top of the armed bomb rolling heavily in scuppers awash with 100 per cent octane petrol.
One tiny spark from Doyle's boot or from the twisted, broken steel of the Stuka rubbing and grinding against the superstructure would have been trigger enough: the contact fuse in the bomb was still undamaged, and as it slipped and skidded over the ice-bound deck, with "Doyle hanging desperately on, it seemed animistically determined to smash its delicate percussion nose against a bulkhead or stanchion.
If Doyle thought of these things, he did not care.
Coolly, almost carelessly, he kicked off the only retaining clip left on a broken section of the guard-rail, slid the bomb, fins first, over the edge, tipped the nose sharply to clear the detonator.
The bomb fell harmlessly into the sea.
It fell into the sea just as the first bomb sliced contemptuously through the useless one-inch deck armour of the Stirling and crashed into the engine-room.
Three, four, five, six other bombs buried themselves in the dying heart of the cruiser, the lightened Stukas lifting away sharply to port and starboard.
From the bridge of the Ulysses, there seemed to be a weird, unearthly absence of noise as the bombs went home.
They just vanished into the smoke and flame, engulfed by the inferno.
No one blow finished the Stirling, but a mounting accumulation of blows.
She had taken too much and she could take no more.
She was like a reeling boxer, a boxer overmatched against an unskilled but murderous opponent, sinking under an avalanche of blows.
Stony-faced, bitter beyond words at his powerlessness, Turner watched her die.
Funny, he thought tiredly, she's like all the rest.
Cruisers, he mused in a queerly detached abstraction, must be the toughest ships in the world.
He'd seen many go, but none easily, cleanly, spectacularly.
No sudden knock-out, no coup de grace for them-always, always, they had to be battered to death... Like the Stirling.
Turner's grip on the shattered windscreen tightened till his forearms ached.
To him, to all good sailors, a well-loved ship was a well-loved friend: for fifteen months, now, the old and valiant Stirling had been their faithful shadow, had shared the burden of the Ulysses in the worst convoys of the war: she was the last of the old guard, for only the Ulysses had been longer on the blackout run.
It was not good to watch a friend die: Turner looked away, stared down at the ice-covered duckboards between his feet, his head sunk between hunched shoulders.
He could close his eyes, but he could not close his ears.
He winced, hearing the monstrous, roaring hiss of boiling water and steam as the white-hot superstructure of the Stirling plunged deeply into the ice-chilled Artie.
For fifteen, twenty seconds that dreadful, agonised sibilation continued, then stopped in an dnstant, the sound sheared off as by a guillotine.
When Turner looked up, slowly, there was only the rolling, empty sea ahead, the big oil-slicked bubbles rising to the top, bubbles rising only to be punctured as they broke the surface by the fine rain falling back into the sea from the great clouds of steam already condensing in that bitter cold.
The Stirling was gone, and the battered remnants of FR77 pitched and plunged steadily onwards to the north.
There were seven ships left now-the four merchantmen, including the Commodore's ship, the tanker, the Sirrus and the Ulysses.
None of them was whole: all were damaged, heavily damaged, but none so desperately hurt as the Ulysses.
Seven ships, only seven: thirty-six had set out for Russia.
At 0800 Turner signalled the Sirrus:
"W.T. gone.
Signal C.-in-C. course, speed, position.
Confirm 0930 as rendezvous.
Code."
The reply came exactly an hour later.
"Delayed heavy seas.
Rendezvous approx 1030.
Impossible fly off air cover.
Keep coming.
C.-in-C."
"Keep coming!" Turner repeated savagely. "Would you listen to him!
'Keep coming,' he says!
What the hell does he expect us to do-scuttle ourselves?" He shook his head in angry despair. "I hate to repeat myself," he said bitterly. "But I must.
Too bloody late as usual!"[5]
Heavy grey clouds, formless and menacing, blotted out the sky from horizon to horizon.
They were snow clouds, and, please God, the snow would soon fall: that could save them now, that and that alone.
But the snow did not come-not then.
Once more, there came instead the Stukas, the roar of their engines rising and falling as they methodically quartered the empty sea in search of the convoy-Charlie had left at dawn.
But it was only a matter of time before the dive-bomber squadron found ffie tiny convoy; ten minutes from the time of the first warning of their approach, the leading Junkers 87 tipped over its wing and dropped out of the sky.
Ten minutes, but time for a council and plan of desperation.
When the Stukas came, they found the convoy stretched out in line abreast, the tanker Varella in the middle, two merchantmen in close line ahead on either side of it, the Sirrus and the Ulysses guarding the flanks.