H. M. S. Ulysses by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online

was clamped on the volcano, but the rumblings never ceased.
    The first signs of further trouble came within three hours of clearing harbour. As always, minesweepers swept the channel ahead of them, but, as always, Vallery left nothing to chance. It was one of the reasons why he—and the Ulysses —had survived thus far. At 0620 he streamed paravanes—the slender, torpedo-shaped bodies which angled out from the bows, one on either side, on special paravane wire. In theory the wires connecting mines to their moorings on the floor of the sea were deflected away from the ship, guided out to the paravanes themselves and severed by cutters: the mines would then float to the top to be exploded or sunk by small arms.
    At 0900, Vallery ordered the paravanes to be recovered. The Ulysses slowed down. The First Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Carrington, went to the fo’c’sle to supervise operations: seamen, winch drivers, and the Subs in charge of either side closed up to their respective stations.
    Quickly the recovery booms were freed from their angled crutches, just abaft the port and starboard lights, swung out and rigged with recovery wires. Immediately, the three ton winches on ‘B’ gun-deck took the strain, smoothly, powerfully; the paravanes cleared the water.
    Then it happened. It was A.B. Ferry’s fault that it happened. And it was just ill-luck that the port winch was suspect, operating on a power circuit with a defective breaker, just ill-luck that Ralston was the winch-driver, a taciturn, bitter-mouthed Ralston to whom, just then, nothing mattered a damn, least of all what he said and did. But it was Carslake’s responsibility that the affair developed into what it did.
    Sub-Lieutenant Carslake’s presence there, on top of the Carley floats, directing the handling of the port wire, represented the culmination of a series of mistakes. A mistake on the part of his father, Rear-Admiral, Rtd, who had seen in his son a man of his own calibre, had dragged him out of Cambridge in 1939 at the advanced age of twenty-six and practically forced him into the Navy: a weakness on the part of his first CO, a corvette captain who had known his father and recommended him as a candidate for a commission: a rare error of judgment on the part of the selection board of the King Alfred , who had granted him his commission; and a temporary lapse on the part of the Commander, who had assigned him to this duty, in spite of Carslake’s known incompetence and inability to handle men.
    He had the face of an overbred racehorse, long, lean and narrow, with prominent pale-blue eyes and protruding upper teeth. Below his scanty fair hair, his eyebrows were arched in a perpetual question mark: beneath the long, pointed nose, the supercilious curl of the upper lip formed the perfect complement to the eyebrows. His speech was a shocking caricature of the King’s English: his short vowels were long, his long ones interminable: his grammar was frequently execrable. He resented the Navy, he resented his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant, he resented the way the men resented him. In brief, Sub-Lieutenant Carslake was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system. Vain, superior, uncouth and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.
    He was making an ass of himself now. Striving to maintain balance on the rafts, feet dramatically braced at a wide angle, he shouted unceasing, unnecessary commands at his men. CPO Hartley groaned aloud, but kept otherwise silent in the interests of discipline. But AB Ferry felt himself under no such restraints.
    â€˜â€™Ark at his Lordship,’ he murmured to Ralston. ‘All for the Skipper’s benefit.’ He nodded at where Vallery was leaning over the bridge, twenty feet above Carslake’s head. ‘Impresses him no end, so his nibs reckons.’
    â€˜Just you forget about Carslake and keep your eyes on that wire,’ Ralston