HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean

Author:Alistair MacLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9780006135128
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1955-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Friday Afternoon

The switch clicked on and the harsh fluorescent light flooded the darkening surgery. Nicholls woke with a start, one hand coming up automatically to shield exhausted eyes. The light hurt. He screwed his eyes to slits, peered painfully at the hands of his wrist-watch. Four o’clock! Had he been asleep that long? God, it was bitterly cold!

He hoisted himself stiffly forward in the dentist’s chair, twisted his head round. Brooks was standing with his back to the door, snow-covered hood framing his silver hair, numbed fingers fumbling with a packet of cigarettes. Finally he managed to pull one out. He looked up quizzically over a flaring match-head.

‘Hallo, there, Johnny! Sorry to waken you, but the skipper wants you. Plenty of time, though.’ He dipped the cigarette into the dying flame, looked up again. Nicholls, he thought with sudden compassion, looked ill, desperately tired and overstrained; but no point in telling him so. ‘How are you? On second thoughts, don’t tell me! I’m a damned sight worse myself. Have you any of that poison left?’

‘Poison, sir?’ The levity was almost automatic, part of their relationship with each other. ‘Just because you make one wrong diagnosis? The Admiral will be all right—’

‘Gad! The intolerance of the very young—especially on the providentially few occasions that they happen to be right . . . I was referring to that bottle of bootleg hooch from the Isle of Mull.’

‘Coll,’ Nicholls corrected. ‘Not that it matters—you’ve drunk it all, anyway,’ he added unkindly. He grinned tiredly at the Commander’s crestfallen face, then relented. ‘But we do have a bottle of Talisker left.’ He crossed over to the posion cupboard, unscrewed the top of a bottle marked ‘Lysol’. He heard, rather than saw, the clatter of glass against glass, wondered vaguely, with a kind of clinical detachment, why his hands were shaking so badly.

Brooks drained his glass, sighed in bliss as he felt the grateful warmth sinking down inside him.

‘Thank you, my boy. Thank you. You have the makings of a first-class doctor.’

‘You think so, sir? I don’t. Not any longer. Not after today.’ He winced, remembering. ‘Forty-four of them, sir, over the side in ten minutes, one after the other, like—like so many sacks of rubbish.’

‘Forty-four?’ Brooks looked up. ‘So many, Johnny?’

‘Not really, sir. That was the number of missing. About thirty, rather, and God only knows how many bits and pieces . . . It was a brush and shovel job in the FDR’ He smiled, mirthlessly. ‘I had no dinner, today. I don’t think anybody else in the burial party had either . . . I’d better screen that porthole.’

He turned away quickly, walked across the surgery. Low on the horizon, through the thinlyfalling snow, he caught intermittent sight of an evening star. That meant that the fog was gone—the fog that had saved the convoy, had hidden them from the U-boats when it had turned so sharply to the north. He could see the Vectra, her depth-charge racks empty and nothing to show for it.

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