The lifeboat, dimly visible through the thickening snow, had slipped her falls while the Vytura was still under way.
Crammed with men, she was dropping quickly astern under the great twisting column of flame-dropping far too quickly astern as the First Lieutenant suddenly realised.
He turned round, found Vallery's eyes, bleak and tired and old, on his own.
Carrington nodded slowly.
"She's picking up, sir.
Under way, under command... What are you going to do, sir?"
"God help me, I've no choice.
Nothing from the Viking, nothing from the Sirrus, nothing from our Asdic-and that U-boat's still out there.... Tell Turner what's happened.
Bentley!"
"Sir?"
"Signal the Vytura." The mouth, whitely compressed, belied the eyes-eyes dark and filled with pain. "' Abandon ship.
Torpedoing you in three minutes.
Last signal.'
Port 20, Pilot!"
"Port 20 it is, sir."
The Vytura was breaking off tangentially, heading north.
Slowly, the Ulysses came round, almost paralleling her course, now a little astern of her.
"Half-ahead, Pilot!" "Half-ahead it is, sir."
"Pilot!"
"Sir?"
"What's Admiral Tyndall saying?
Can you make it out?"
Carpenter bent forward, listened, shook his head.
Little flurries of snow fell off his fur helmet.
"Sorry, sir. Can't make him out, too much noise from the Vytura... I think he's humming, sir."
"Oh, God!" Vallery bent his head, looked up again, slowly, painfully.
Even so slight an effort was labour intolerable.
He looked across to the Vytura, stiffened to attention.
The red Aldis was winking again.
He tried to read it, but it was too fast: or perhaps his eyes were just too old, or tired: or perhaps he just couldn't think any more... There was something weirdly hypnotic about that tiny crimson light flickering between these fantastic curtains of flame, curtains sweeping slowly, ominously together, majestic in their inevitability.
And then the little red light had died, so unexpectedly, so abruptly, that Bentley's voice reached him before the realisation.
"Signal from the Vytura, sir."
Vallery tightened his grip on the binnacle.
Bentley guessed the nod, rather than saw it.
"Message reads:' Why don't you------off.
Nuts to the Senior Service.
Tell him I send all my love.'" The voice died softly away, and there was only the roaring of the flames, the lost pinging of the Asdic.
"All my love." Vallery shook his head in silent wonderment. "All my love!
He's crazy!
He must be.
'All my love,' and I'm going to destroy him... Number One!"
"Sir?"
"Tell the Commander to stand by!"
Turner repeated the message from the bridge, turned to Ralston.
"Stand by, L.T.O.!"
He looked out over the side, saw that the Vytura was slightly ahead now, that the Ulysses was still angling in on an interception course.
"About two minutes now, I should say."
He felt the vibration beneath his feet dying away, knew the Ulysses was slowing down.
Any second now, and she'd start slewing away to starboard.
The receiver crackled again in his ear, the sound barely audible above the roaring of the flames.