"Mind you, my boy, it won't last.
At least, not at that intensity." He grinned. "But maybe it'll take us the length of Murmansk.
You never know."
"I hope so, sir.
Thanks for the show." Nicholls reached up for his duffel-coat. "Well, I suppose I'd better make my way aft."
"Off you go, then.
And, oh-Johnny------"
"Sir?"
"That scarlet-fever notice-board of yours. On your way aft you might consign it to the deep.
I don't think we'll be needing it any more."
Nicholls grinned and closed the door softly behind him.
CHAPTER FOUR
MONDAY NIGHT
DUSK ACTION STATIONS dragged out its interminable hour and was gone.
That night, as on a hundred other nights, it was just another nagging irritation, a pointless precaution that did not even justify its existence, far less its meticulous thoroughness.
Or so it seemed.
For although at dawn enemy attacks were routine, at sunset they were all but unknown. It was not always so with other ships, indeed it was rarely so, but then, the Ulysses was a lucky ship.
Everyone knew that.
Even Vallery knew it, but he also knew why.
Vigilance was the first article of his sailor's creed.
Soon after the Captain's broadcast, radar had reported a contact, closing.
That it was an enemy plane was certain: Commander Westcliffe, Senior Air Arm Officer, had before him in the Fighter Direction Room a wall map showing the operational routes of all Coastal and Ferry Command planes, and this was a clear area.
But no one paid the slightest attention to the report, other than Tyndall's order for a 45
"Charlie", usually a four-engine Focke-Wulf Condor, was an institution on the Russian Convoys.
He had become to the seamen on the Murmansk run very much what the albatross had been the previous century to sailing men, far south in the Roaring Forties: a bird of ill-omen, half feared but almost amicably accepted, and immune from destruction, though with Charlie, for a different reason.
In the early days, before the advent of cam-ships and escort carriers, Charlie frequently spent the entire day, from first light to last, circling a convoy and radioing to base pin-point reports of its position.
'Exchanges of signals between British ships and German' reconnaissance planes were not unknown, and apocryphal stories were legion.
An exchange of pleasantries about the weather was almost commonplace.
On several occasions Charlie had plaintively asked for his position and been given highly-detailed latitude and longitude bearings which usually placed him somewhere in the South Pacific; and, of course, dozen ships claimed the authorship of the story wherein the convoy Commodore sent the signal,"
Please fly the other way a round.
You are making us dizzy," and Charlie had courteously acknowledged and turned in his tracks.
Latterly, however, amiability had been markedly absent, and Charlie, grown circumspect with the passing of the months and the appearance of ship-borne fighters, rarely appeared except at dusk.
His usual practice was to make a single circle of the convoy at a prudent distance and then disappear into the darkness.
That night was no exception.
Men caught only fleeting glimpses of the Condor in the driving snow, then quickly lost it in the gathering gloom.
Charlie would report the strength, nature and course of the Squadron, although Tyndall had; little hope that the German Intelligence would be deceived as to their course.
A naval squadron, near the sixty-second degree of latitude, just east of the Faroes, and heading NNE., Cam-ships were merchant ships with specially strengthened fo'c'sles. On these were fitted fore-and-aft angled ramps from which fighter planes, such as modified Hurricanes, were catapulted for convoy defence. After breaking off action, the pilot had either to bale out or land in the sea. "Hazardous" is rather an inadequate word to describe the duties of this handful of very gallant pilots: the chances of survival were not high. It wouldn't make sense to use them, especially as they almost certainly knew of the departure of the convoy from Halifax.
Two and two, far too obviously totted up to four.
No attempt was made to fly off Seafires-the only plane with a chance to overhaul the Condor before it disappeared into the night.
To locate the carrier again in almost total darkness, even on a radio beam, was difficult: to land at night, extremely dangerous; and to land, by guess and by God, in the snow and blackness on a pitching, heaving deck, a suicidal impossibility.
The least miscalculation, the slightest error of judgment and you had not only a lost plane but a drowned pilot.
A ditched Seafire, with its slender, torpedo-shaped fuselage and the tremendous weight of the great Rolls-Royce Merlin in its nose, was a literal death-trap. When it went down into the sea, it just kept on going.
Back on to course again, the Ulysses pushed blindly into the gathering storm.
Hands fell out from Action Stations, and resumed normal Defence Stations-watch and watch, four on, four off.
Not a killing routine, one would think: twelve hours on, twelve hours off a day-a man could stand that.
And so he could, were that all.
But the crew also spent three hours a day at routine Action Stations, every second morning-the forenoon watch-at work (this when they were off-watch) and God only knew how many hours at Action Stations.
Beyond all this, all meals-when there were meals, were eaten in their off-duty time.
A total of three to four hours' sleep a day was reckoned unusual: forty-eight hours without sleep hardly called for comment.
Step by step, fraction by menacing fraction, mercury and barograph crept down in a deadly dualism.