At that moment Clark remembered the Orca would have stern torpedo tubes, just like a conventional U-boat, and as quickly dismissed the thought. If the enemy commander did use stern torpedo tubes, the chances of them passing clean through the broken ice were slim, while he himself could probably comb their tracks. The imperative was for Clark to close the distance and hope that he could hit Orca before she swung and used her heavy guns on Sheba. If he could force her out of the ice into the clear water to the south, then his own torpedo tubes might be brought to bear faster than his enemy’s.
He had no idea what speed Sheba was now doing, but judging by the opening bearing of a medium-sized and oddly shaped berg that must have taken several years to migrate down from the far north, and by the broken the ice floes streaking past her, she must be topping sixteen or seventeen knots, far faster than she had managed on trials. He ducked out of the wheelhouse and stared up at the funnel cowling. Olsen was doing his job to perfection, the boilers were producing hardly any smoke, only the unavoidable, sulphurously yellow exhaust fumes that rose in a pall above and behind the racing Sheba. Sooner or later the enemy must see them…
‘She’s turning, sir!’
Clark swung round, almost bumping into Ordinary Seaman Oliphant, who, as starboard lookout, was watching the Orca through his binoculars. For a moment Clark could not see the white-painted conning tower amid the floes, but then, as Oliphant called out unnecessarily loudly in his excitement, ‘She’s going to starboard, sir!’ Clark saw the elongation of the huge submarine.
His heart was hammering as he scanned the ice to starboard. He had to get Sheba out of the ice as quickly as possible. As the Orca turned under what looked like full helm, she slowed down, so that with every passing second the range was closing. Then Clark spotted his opportunity, a narrow lead four points on the starboard bow.
‘Starboard easy!’ he ordered.
The measured response came from the man on the wheel. Clark headed the racing whaler for the slender polynya, steadied her and called out ‘Brace yourselves!’
‘Shall I phone the engine room?’ Oliphant asked.
‘Too late!’ Clark snapped as Sheba shuddered and the ice squealed on the steel hull as the little ship forced her passage. The Sheba faltered, her bow rose and she shook as the racing screw thrashed. She was buffeted as she slowly rotated the floes and then they gave way and she blundered through, the displaced ice grinding and rumbling in protest as the floes were thrust outwards, one or two riding up and over their neighbours, the rotten, half-melted edges giving way under the impact.
‘Lookouts, man your guns!’ Clark called as Oliphant dropped the glasses on their strap and moved behind the bridge-wing Hotchkiss.
‘I think I can hit her, sir!’ Pearson’s voice came from the four-inch gun platform forward and Clark spared a quick glance over the bridge dodger. He held up his hand.
‘Hold your fire, Sub, just a little longer.’ He hoped his voice sounded cool. His heart pounded in his chest with such violence that he thought it could not stand its own action, while the adrenaline poured into his bloodstream. Clark had to force Sheba out of the loose pack, into clearer water. He raised his glasses and studied the enemy. The Orca had almost completed her turn, but her guns remained trained fore and aft! Clark could scarcely believe their luck, for it was clear the Germans had not yet seen them. A quick look astern showed why, for they were almost in transit with the fantastically castellated berg they had rushed past a moment or two before, and now ran down the line of bearing between it and the enemy. Against the berg they would be difficult to see unless that treacherous pall of rising exhaust gasses…
‘They’ve seen us, sir!’
Even without glasses Clark could see what Oliphant had spotted. The heavy gun turret was foreshortening as Orca completed her turn. She was clear of the ice field, though a few loose floes lay around her. The Sheba had yet to break out of the mass of ice into the relatively clear water to the south.
‘Open fire!’ Clark bellowed. As the four-inch barked, Clark went back into the wheelhouse and bent over the azimuth ring. The gun smoke whipped back over the wheelhouse windows and then the target came in sight again.
‘Steer one four three!’ he snapped.
‘Steer one four three, sir!’
They headed directly for the Orca and, as Clark saw the orange flashes of her heavy-calibre guns, he straightened up, leant over the dodger and shouted at Frobisher: ‘All yours, Number One!’
Pearson’s gun barked again but the noise of the discharge was somehow lost in the enormous splash and detonation of the enemy shell close to the starboard quarter. At least Clark thought it had detonated, for the whole ship shook as though in the furious grasp of a gigantic hand and the cold splash of water cascaded down on the afterdeck. Clark had no idea what had happened to its twin, though afterwards someone said they had been straddled on the port quarter.
Clark never heard Frobisher’s call that the torpedoes were running, though he caught a glimpse of the sunlight upon one of them as it left the starboard tube. Immediately, he called for full port helm to confuse Orca’s gunnery and to tuck themselves inside her turning circle to avoid a counter-attacking torpedo, for the big German submarine was swinging again, her image foreshortening.
A weird zinging sound filled the air and he saw the streak of tracers: the Orca’s light-calibre armament was now strafing them. Clark steadied on their course again and Pearson’s gun fired another shell.
‘We’ve got a hit, sir!’ Oliphant shouted and a thin cheer seemed to come up from the foredeck, but Clark did not share their triumphalism. Hit or not, the German guns would destroy the little Sheba in a matter of seconds, for the range was under two miles. He could press on and risk utter destruction before getting in close enough for the kill, or he could withdraw. He had to destroy Orca, not wound her.
He grabbed the engine-room telephone and, as soon as he heard Olsen’s voice, ordered: ‘Make smoke!’ Then, turning to the helmsman he said, ‘Hard a-port!’
As the ship heeled under the influence of her spade rudder, the Orca’s second salvo plunged into the sea alongside her. Had Clark not put the helm over, his ship would have been destroyed. As Sheba swung round, the barrel of the four-inch traversed fast, then struck the stop with a thud. Behind the wheelhouse the Oerlikon burst briefly into life and fell silent as the thick black cloud of smoke settled astern of them.
Back in the wheelhouse, clinging to the gyro-repeater, Clark knew immediately that he had done the wrong thing. He had thrown away the advantage of surprise and, now his presence was known to his adversary, he might never get another opportunity. He felt a sudden clammy sweat pour out of him, physical evidence of the enormity of his tactical error. A sudden terror, not of the enemy but of ignominy, overwhelmed him and at that moment the man at the wheel called out, ‘Helm’s still hard a-port, sir!’
The reminder was fortuitous. Under Clark’s nose the gyrocompass card ticked round as the lubber’s line moved to the west. For a moment he stared at it and then he had his moment of inspiration. If only…
‘Hard a-starboard!’
‘Hard a-starboard, sir!’
He glanced down on to the foredeck. If only…
From the starboard bridge wing he roared at Pearson as Sheba heeled violently to port, canting to the outside of the turn: ‘Train twenty to starboard! I’m breaking out again!’
Pearson’s hail of ‘Aye, aye, sir’ was followed by Frobisher’s.
‘Starboard tube reloaded!’ Half an apple was better than no apple, Clark thought as his misgivings faded.
‘Midships! Steady!’
Clark had executed a Williamson turn and brought his ship back on as close a reciprocal course as he could. Orca, if she had continued on her course, would have shifted her bearing further right, hence his order to Pearson to train on the starboard bow. The Sheba now headed back towards her own smoke, trailing a veil behind her. He prayed that Pearson might quickly find the exact range and bearing as they emerged south of the smokescreen. Astern of them two columns of water showed the fall of the Orca’s third salvo: it was guesswork. The shells threw great shards of ice upwards where, tumbling in the air, it briefly caught the sunshine in a thousand splintering flashes before the smokescreen obscured it.
Then they were engulfed in the oily black, stinking cloud, choking on the foul stuff before they burst again into the sunshine, the ship juddering from a glancing collision with a loose floe.
For a moment Clark thought he had lost his mind, for the sea was empty, then Oliphant spotted the white conning tower, no higher than a small berg, but betrayed by the array of periscopes protruding from it: Orca was diving.
‘Starboard!’ Clark swore as Sheba again answered her helm and the four-inch gun barked. But it was too late to loose a torpedo, for by the time the Sheba was heading for where they thought the enemy might be, all that could be seen was a swirl of water.
‘Asdic!’ Clark called out, cursing the fact that they were reduced to passive mode.
‘Possibly moving to the right, sir.’ Carter’s voice lacked conviction.
Clark swore again. Was he now being stalked? Or was Orca retreating under the ice? Apart from that solitary old berg, it was mostly flatfish pack and Orca’s commander could dive deep. It all depended upon why he had submerged: to escape, or to resume the hunt?
He could only be escaping if they had in fact hit him. Had one of Pearson’s puny shells hit him? He asked Oliphant what he had seen.
‘A flash at the base of the conning tower, sir.’
It had not been enough to inhibit the submarine’s heavy gunfire. ‘Starboard easy,’ Clark said, phoning the engine room and cancelling the order for smoke. Then he concentrated on taking Sheba back into the relative protection of the ice.
Sticking his head into the Asdic compartment Clark caught Carter’s eye. ‘Well?’
‘Well what, sir?’
Clark ignored the insolence. Carter had not forgiven him for wrecking his precious Asdic.
‘Well, what do you think he’s doing?’ Clark responded, a warning edge in his voice.
Carter looked at the gyro-repeater. ‘He’s going north, sir, back into the ice. I’ll lose him there in a few minutes: there’s too much noise from the ice field and there are some whales about, I think.’
‘Whales?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what species though, sir.’ The sarcasm was mutinous and Clark stared at Carter who quickly quailed under the scrutiny. ‘I beg pardon, sir,’ he apologised, flushing.
‘Very well,’ Clark said, withdrawing.
Twenty minutes later, as Sheba was once again surrounded by increasingly dense pack ice, he reduced speed and stood the ship’s company down to defence stations. On the bridge he was joined by the officers. Their mood was almost as brittle as Clark’s own. Frobisher’s eyes were defiant with indignation. It was not difficult to judge that he considered Clark had mismanaged the encounter. Pearson, hardly able to keep his mouth shut, clearly sought recognition for his gun crew’s achievement while Storheill, black from the smokescreen, came up from the afterdeck reluctantly, assuming that his depth charges would yet be required.
Clark took the bull by the horns; he had little choice. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t give your torpedoes a better chance, Number One,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, then, before Frobisher could respond, asked him, ‘Do you think we scored a hit?’
‘I didn’t see, sir…’
‘We did, sir!’ Pearson broke in.
‘Derek’s correct, sir,’ Storheill said and, as Clark turned to regard him, added, ‘I happened to be looking forrard, sir.’
‘Are you certain?’
Storheill shrugged, ‘As certain as I can be, sir. But I think we have driven him underwater…’
‘And he too is heading into the ice,’ Clark added reflectively.
‘I think we must have hit him,’ Frobisher said. ‘Not badly, but badly enough to have done some damage. It is otherwise inconceivable that he did not hit us at that range. It’s my guess that we may have hit his gun-laying apparatus…’
‘I suppose that’s possible,’ Clark agreed half-heartedly.
‘But we’ve no Asdic and not a clue where he has gone,’ Frobisher said, his tone accusatory.
‘Not that the Asdic would be much good in the ice, though,’ put in Pearson.
‘If we have hit him and his task is to strike the next Russian convoy, he will want to repair his damages,’ Storheill said. ‘I don’t think he would have seen us return from our smoke, so he will think he has driven us off and made us frightened.’
‘Well, he can’t repair damage underwater and there are no dark hours to take advantage of on the surface,’ Frobisher said somewhat dismissively.
‘So he’s got to surface in the ice,’ Clark said as Olsen came into the wheelhouse. ‘He could do that a few miles from us and we’d never know.’
‘But we found him before and he will think we have radar, so he may not risk it,’ said Pearson.
‘Are you all right, Fridtjof?’ Clark asked Olsen.
‘A bit bruised from all your ice-breaking, Captain, but otherwise yes. Can you tell a poor engineer what is happening?’
Clark smiled and explained. As he concluded, Frobisher added, ‘And the bugger escaped us, Frid.’
‘I think he’s going to come back into clear water, or nearly clear water along the edge of the ice limit,’ Clark said. ‘I think he’ll go west to get nearer the convoy and then surface to effect repairs.’
‘It’s still risky, sir. Suppose there’s clear water to the north,’ said Storheill. ‘This lot’s sweeping down from Erik Erikson’s Strait and there could well be large expanses of open water to the north.’
‘That’s true,’ Clark mused, casting his mind back to his time in these latitudes years earlier.
‘Yes, but he’d have to know there was clear water to the north. He couldn’t gamble on it.’ Frobisher was dismissive.
‘Perhaps he’s just come from it,’ said Pearson, receiving a withering glance from the first lieutenant as a consequence of this contradictory opinion. ‘And it might no longer be there,’ Pearson added with a kind of dogged courage.
‘Perhaps,’ said Storheill, clicking his fingers with inspiration, ‘he’s been told there is clear water there!’ His glowing eyes caught Clark’s. ‘The Condor, sir…’
‘It flew off to the north-west, towards the Storfjord!’ Clark said, catching on. ‘By God, Pilot, you have a point! It’s worth a gamble, for I confess, I don’t know what else we can do.’
Frobisher grunted but Clark ignored the impropriety. He moved across to stare a moment at the chart. Storheill moved beside him and a moment later Sheba steadied on a course of north-west at a speed of eight knots.
‘I suppose you are going to go bumping about in the ice again, Captain?’ Olsen asked with a wan smile.
‘I suppose I am, Fridtjof.’
Long afterwards, when he had time to reflect upon the affair, Clark wondered if he would have followed the hunch had it been his own. That it originated with Storheill seemed at the time to give it a validity that was entirely imaginary; Clark had come to admire the Norwegian officer and to rely upon him and his navigational skill. Storheill had proved himself a seaman par excellence, a man utterly without pretension who was simply very, very good at his job. So when Storheill deduced his solution to the problem of the Orca’s disappearance, Clark saw no good reason to doubt the assertion. Furthermore, the logic of Storheill’s argument chimed in with some instinctive feeling of his own. The two of them possessed a pool of knowledge about the Arctic, and Clark was only too aware that Storheill’s experience was not only more recent and extensive than his own, but Storheill had acquired it as a mature sea officer. Besides, Storheill’s was the only working hypothesis they had to go on.
Thus, while Frobisher went off shaking his head, Clark adopted an almost defiant conviction that they must head north. In his recollection of this confidence, Clark was assisted by another fact. It was their fourth piece of luck, if one took the sudden encounter, the failure of the Germans to see them as they approached and Pearson’s hit as the first three. As they blundered north-west through increasingly thick pack ice, Carter emerged into the wheelhouse asking for the captain. Pearson, who had the watch, summoned Clark, who had been dozing in his cabin.
‘Well, what is it?’ asked Clark, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He was not pleased to see Carter, whose manner had irritated him earlier.
‘I think we’ve got the Asdic working again, sir.’
‘What?’ Clark stared at the rating, shaking his head.
‘I think we’ve got the Asdic…’
‘Yes, yes, I understand what you are saying, but how…?’
‘Well sir, the collision destroyed some of the circuitry. Baker managed to get to grips with the problem and after a bit of repair work and the replacement of a couple of valves…’
‘Well done, Carter! Well done!’
Carter smiled shyly and dropped his eyes. ‘Didn’t want to let you down, sir.’
Clark regarded the younger man for a moment and wondered if he and Baker would have exerted themselves had Carter not overstepped the mark. Nevertheless it was gratifying that Carter dispensed credit where it was due. Carter might be apologetic, but he was not abjectly so; he eschewed taking the credit himself and refused to be obsequious.
‘I’d better look after it a bit better then,’ Clark joked.
‘Well, it would help, sir.’ They smiled at each other.
‘Right, well, I think we’ll leave it passive for the time being. I’d rather not advertise our presence…’
‘I’d like a few practice pings, sir, perhaps astern or close to a berg.’
Clark nodded. ‘Very well.’
He felt very tired now, and wanted to go below and turn in, but he felt compelled to hang about on the bridge. When he did go below, it was to sit and doze in his chair, unsatisfactorily trying to rest, but all the time with one ear cocked for the summons to the bridge. And so, in a state of heightened vigilance, they drove north.
Before long the pack ice assumed the character it had in the vicinity of Hope Island, stretching away to the horizon, broken only by the seams of narrow polynyas. The horizontal planes of sea ice were thrown up at shallow angles as successive years of rafting and overriding created a landscape of haphazard regularity, for the pilings were whimsical, while the fractured sheets of ice often possessed an almost geometric regularity. This young ice was in contrast to the worn hummocks and rounded shapes of older ice. Some of the impacted sheets were turned almost on end in small irregular ice hills by the inexorable pressures. Such formations were called, in Russian, toroses. As they pressed deeper into this wilderness the ice blink grew more intense and, as the hours passed, the weather deteriorated and the sky clouded over with a light veil of altocumulus cloud. This decreased the distance to the horizon but proportionately increased the white glare. They now had to crease up their faces and squint, the issued sunglasses proving ineffective, and they developed headaches in the process. Then it began to sleet, a thin, chilling precipitation that was part rain, part melting snow, slushy enough to make the decks lethal underfoot.
In the wheelhouse warmth prevailed, supported by a seemingly endless supply of cocoa, but around the guns the men huddled in a damp and freezing misery in which even the hottest kye soon lost its warming properties. Once again the Sheba was forcing her way through the thinnest ice her officers could find. It took twelve hours to make forty miles and Frobisher was increasingly dubious as to the wisdom of Clark’s course of action. To him the increasing disorder of the ice meant only that conditions were worsening, a logic that seemed incontrovertible in the face of the evidence of ever-slowing progress. Twice he called Clark to the bridge, protesting that they were at a standstill, and twice he roused Clark’s own dogged perversity. Taking the con, Clark withdrew, turned the ship and made a detour a mile to the east, then pushed Sheba north again. He seemed able, Frobisher thought as Clark handed the con back over to him, to ‘read’ the ice, a knack Frobisher himself despaired of developing.
On the second occasion Frobisher had the grace to apologise for troubling Clark. Clark shrugged it off. ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said.
‘But how are you so damned certain that it’s going to clear further north?’ Frobisher persisted.
‘I don’t know for certain,’ Clark explained, ‘but this impacting of the ice may well be evidence that the current is pushing down from the north-east and this ice is, so to speak, trying to overtake the mass of floes in front of it. That’s why one can usually find a way through at this time of the year…’
‘I see,’ said Frobisher, not at all sure that he could.
But Clark, or perhaps one should record that it was really Storheill, proved correct. At 1100 the next morning, with the visibility down to about 300 yards, they suddenly found themselves in almost completely open water, a dark, swirling sea containing small fragments of rotten ice and decaying growlers, over which the glaucous gulls shrieked, for the bloody remains of a seal sailed past on one small bergy bit, evidence of a polar bear disturbed by the approach of the ship. Slowly, the ice field disappeared into the murk astern of them.
Informed of this dramatic breakthrough, Clark clambered wearily back up to the bridge. In the incessant daylight that robbed ‘day’ and ‘night’ of all meaning, he had just dropped off into a deep slumber occasioned by the sudden end to their buffeting through the ice. Now he stood bleary-eyed at the wheelhouse windows as a curtain of wet snow fell in white swathes out of a grey-white sky. Close by a solitary floe of pancake ice drifted past, dotted with the huddled shapes of little auks. It seemed to him that, anthropomorphically, they exuded a quality of sympathetic discontent.
‘Stop engines,’ he commanded, too weary to bother to adjust the telegraph himself. Pearson did as he was bid and the Sheba lost way and glided to a stop amid the white whirling of the snow.
‘Asdic!’ he called. ‘Hear anything?’
‘Not a thing, sir.’
‘Hmmm.’ Clark stirred and looked over his shoulder. ‘That’ll do the wheel for a while,’ he said drowsily, jamming himself between the radiator and the gyro-repeater. ‘Go and make us all some cocoa.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
They drifted on. Under his elbows the gyro-repeater ticked as Sheba, finally stopping dead in the water, fell broadside to the wind. He wondered where exactly they were, then decided he could not care less. The wheelhouse was warm and the low visibility cocooned them from the outside world, where, even in these remote waters, the horrors of war awaited them. His mind began to wander; he was on the verge of sleep, or hallucination. He could not remember when he had last slept properly, and the endless daylight made the passage of time unreckonable. When the sun shone it did not matter, for one seemed invigorated by it, able to go without sleep at no physical cost, inspirited by the vastness of the Arctic vista, dwarfed yet exhilarated by its remoteness. In contrast, this damp cold, with its circumscribed and indefinable horizon, drove one into the soporific warmth of the wheelhouse where it lulled one to sleep. Clark felt like Odysseus under the spell of Calypso, safe in her spacious cave. Somewhere behind him he was vaguely aware of Pearson handing over to Storheill. The matter need not trouble him; nor did he want to be troublesome to them. They could get on with it. Just let it continue snowing, as long as hot water streamed through the radiator on the forward bulkhead…
‘Sir?’ The voice was uncertain and a long way off. Clark roused himself with an effort. ‘Kye, sir – and Asdic are asking if you’d mind stepping in there, sir.’
‘Oh, oh thanks.’ Clark took the hot mug of cocoa and went through into the Asdic office. Carter was on duty and he motioned Clark to listen. Clark picked up the second headset and put it on. He had none of Carter’s ability to discriminate the many strange noises that seemed to fill the sea and make of it a vast acoustic soup, but he tried to identify some of them. There was a background rumble, like the blood one hears in the ears when lying awake on a quiet night; that, he presumed, was the working of the pack ice. Then there was an odd squealing that he could make nothing of, unless it was something grinding against something else, perhaps another distinctive ice noise.
He could see Carter’s mouth working and he took off the headset. ‘Pardon?’
‘Can you hear it, sir?’
‘I can hear a rumble which I presume is the distant pack, and a squealing that sounds like more ice…’
‘That’s some sort of whale or porpoise – no, the hammering, a mid-tone, regular hammering. It’s a diesel engine.’
‘A diesel?’ Clark clapped the headset over his ears again. Was he imagining it? They could not both be imagining it, but he could certainly hear it now, now that it was pointed out to him.
‘Any idea of direction?’ he asked Carter.
Carter nodded. ‘Due west.’
‘Very well.’ Clark dodged back to the wheelhouse, summoned the helmsman and rang half ahead. ‘Steer two seven zero.’
If that was a diesel engine aboard Orca, was she lying stopped on the surface repairing damage, charging batteries, or both? Or was she under way? And how far away was she? A mile? Ten miles? Twenty? Sounds carried vast distances in water, but how much was that modified by ice? But was there any ice, or much ice, on the rhumb line between Sheba and Orca?
‘How the hell do I know?’ he blurted out loud in answer to his own thoughts.
‘How do you know what, sir?’ Storheill asked.
‘Oh, er, nothing Pilot, nothing. I’m, er, thinking aloud.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Nothing woke a man up quicker, Clark thought savagely, than making a fool of himself. He went through to consult Carter again. Carter lifted one earphone of his headset.
‘Are we getting nearer, d’you think?’ Clark asked.
Carter shook his head. ‘Noise level pretty much constant; still quite a long way off. Bearing’s about the same though. I reckon we’ve got the direction right, sir.’
Clark nodded. ‘I hope so. Very well. Thanks.’
‘My pleasure,’ Carter mouthed after Clark’s retreating back, snapping the lifted earphone back over his ear and turning again to his dials.
It stopped snowing just before the end of Storheill’s watch. Clark, again ensconced between radiator and gyro-repeater, had resumed his trance-like state, but he stirred when he saw the relief watch emerge on the foredeck and climb up to the four-inch gun platform. The men coming off duty stomped circulation into their frozen limbs, flogging their arms about their bodies, grinning at their wretched shipmates who would have to freeze for the next four hours. Clark suddenly realised that he could see the gun platform more clearly and that not only had the snow stopped, but the visibility was improving rapidly by the minute. The shock of the change woke him.
‘Call the hands to action stations on the tannoy,’ he ordered and heard Frobisher’s voice summon the men. The handful of men by the four-inch gun looked round expectantly. Clark was already on the starboard bridge wing, his glasses level as he carefully quartered the horizon.
‘Sir!’ The voice came from the other side of the wheelhouse. Clark skidded on slush, caught his balance, bumped into Frobisher as he dodged the gyro-repeater and emerged on the port bridge wing. He focused his binoculars out on the port quarter in the direction the lookout was pointing. The enemy submarine lay stopped amid the ice.
‘We’ve waltzed past the bastard,’ Frobisher said facetiously behind him.
‘Shouldn’t you be on the foredeck?’ Clark snapped. Frobisher recollected himself and was gone.
‘Hard a-port, half ahead.’ Clark looked round for Pearson, caught sight of him climbing up to the gun and waved in the direction of the enemy submarine. Sheba trembled slightly as she turned and increased speed. A watery sun broke out, throwing faint shadows. Clark wondered whether Storheill had yet left the bridge, but then the Norwegian officer was beside him, his sextant cradled in his right arm, a pencil held like a long cigarette in his mouth.
Clark turned to the wheelhouse and steadied the helm. ‘Can you see the enemy?’ he asked the man at the wheel.
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Steady on her!’
‘Can I…?’ Pearson was shouting as his crew rapidly traversed the four-inch gun.
‘Shoot!’ Clark shouted.
The roar of the gun’s discharge was followed by the rattle of the discarded charge and the frantic activity of reloading.
‘When you bear, Number One!’ Clark bellowed, but his voice was lost in the crash as the first of Orca’s shells hit them. It passed right through the forward paint locker and Clark actually saw it as, emerging through the starboard bow, it went spinning away into the sea.
Then all was confusion. An instant afterwards, Orca’s second shell hit the Sheba’s boat deck, passed through the wooden boat in the port davits and burst against the engine-room skylight, tearing a great hole in the fiddley and the lower part of the funnel. This swayed for a moment, held up by the two forward guys. Forward, Frobisher fired both torpedoes, then a third shell struck them and the whole ship forward of the bridge seemed to disappear in the flash of the explosion. The detonation of the shell countermined the warheads of the remaining torpedoes, so that a series of almost instantaneous blasts tore through the vessel. Clark recalled rough-edged but otherwise indistinguishable chunks of steel flying through the air, and myriad noises, none of which amounted to an explosion. All he sensed aurally was something akin to a deep sigh, which came with a tremendous tightening about his chest. Only the brilliance of the flashing lights attested to an actual explosion, and even this was so bright that his eyes instinctively closed. He felt his body lifted and he was flung backwards on to the deck. A second later the lookout fell on top of him. The wretched man’s fall had been delayed by his first hitting the Hotchkiss mounting before being spun round upon Clark. He was already dead.
As he opened his eyes, gasping for breath, Clark could see the funnel as it tottered before it fell overboard behind the wheelhouse. Again, there seemed to be no noise and Clark’s deafness seemed to confer upon the world about him the qualities of a dream. None of it was real; he would wake in a moment and find himself the victim of a brief nightmare, induced by the excessive heat of the wheelhouse radiator and his anxiety.
But the weight on his chest oppressed him, and was impeding his breathing. Suddenly he was stirred by an even more primitive instinct. Heaving the lookout’s deadweight off him, he rose to his feet and staggered to what remained of the rail. The fore part of the ship had ceased to exist and was ablaze; by some quirk of the blast, the front of the wheelhouse had been forced backwards; where the wheelhouse door had been there was now a roughly diamond-shaped aperture. Ducking down, Clark went inside without difficulty. Storheill was alive and, amid the dust and distortion, he was already gathering up the confidential books and stuffing them into the weighted bag provided for the purpose of jettisoning them. Clark picked up the chart as Storheill tossed the bag overboard. He was saying something, but Clark could not hear him. Carter was there and so was the wireless operator, but the man at the wheel was dead, something having come in through the wheelhouse windows and killed him, for he was unrecognisable.
‘Abandon ship!’ Clark shouted, but he could only just hear himself. He went to the main alarms and rang them. It was all he could think of to do. He knew there were other things to attend to, but he experienced difficulty ordering his mind. Then he felt the deck under him move, and realised the Sheba was settling in the water. Somehow he reached his cabin and grabbed the blankets off his bunk. He was already wearing his duffel coat and a heavy, white submariner’s sweater. He could think of nothing else and stood stupidly for a second or two until the ship gave another lurch. Something made him turn to his desk and he recalled Dr Ruddick. Carefully he took the ancient leather binding and ripped out the sheets; then he tore them in half and scattered them round the cabin. Lastly he drew open the drawer of his desk and removed his secret orders. These he stuffed inside his duffel coat with the chart.
Taking a last look round he went out into the flat. The after door to the boat deck through which he had, weeks earlier, conducted Gifford, hung half-open upon broken hinges. He stepped through it on to what was left of the boat deck. Below lay a chasm that had once been the engine room. Steam and smoke rose out of this and far below he could see the licking of flames which grew in extent and intensity even as he watched. He later recalled being disappointed that he could not see the Norwegian flag, then he remembered that he needed his lifejacket. He had forgotten all about it and turned back to his cabin. Grabbing the thing he put it on and, while doing so, it struck him as odd that no one else was about. Where had Storeheill and Carter got to? And the wireless operator? Barrington, he thought it had been. He wondered how best to proceed and decided that he must return to the bridge and recover command of the ship.
He was never quite certain how he got from the bridge to the narrow strip of boat deck that remained alongside the starboard bridge housing, but he recalled that it was from here that he looked down into the water and saw that it was much closer than it should have been. He did not want to leave the ship and jump into the sea. He turned: great gouts of steam were now rising out of the engine room as the inrush of seawater extinguished the boiler fires. Beyond, he thought he could see what might have been the Oerlikon platform, above which flew the white ensign. That was something, he supposed.
‘Sir! Here, sir!’
‘Captain, over here!’
Men were shouting at him and he was ridiculously happy to hear other human voices. They seemed a long way off, however, and he began to sob. Then, with a tremendous effort, he mastered himself and began to think clearly again. With the sound of the men’s voices came other noises: the steady screaming hiss of steam escaping from the boilers, rising from the engine room, the erratic roaring of the fire forward and the popping of small-arms ammunition exploding.
‘Captain, sir!’
Now he could see them, three of them in a Carley float, about twenty yards out from the ship’s side, two of them wielding paddles. He began to climb up on the rail.
‘Hold on, sir, don’t jump!’ It was Storheill. No, he must not get wet. It was better to keep dry. Much better.
The Carley float bumped alongside. It was only four feet below him. Clark heard Storheill say something about ‘paddling like fuck’ and then he went over the rail and fell on top of them. After a moment’s grunting confusion the two paddlers resumed their work with a frantic urgency and then stopped. Clark looked round as they watched Sheba sink.
She was unrecognisable, an angled and jagged grey shape, her whole forepart underwater, her stern slightly elevated, so that her depth-charge racks stood out against the grey pall. Further forward the Oerlikon platform was silhouetted, the ensign a drooping rag, half-shrouded in the clouds of steam as the wreckage of the wheelhouse slipped below the dark surface of the sea. A sudden boom convulsed the sinking hull and sent a shockwave through the frail Carley float as seawater found the whaler’s boilers. Then, in a crescendo of roaring and hissing, the depth-charge rails swung vertical, the spade rudder, screw and curve of the cruiser stern stood up stark for a moment, hung, and disappeared as Sheba plunged into the deep. A cloud of slowly dissipating steam hung over the swirling disturbance in the water.
Then they were alone on the dark surface of the Barents Sea.