He clambered across the catwalk and returned the trol sentry’s salute. A small group of men were mustered by the Temeraire’s ensign staff, and an officer watched the depot ship’s yard, waiting for the official Sunset to be sounded and the flag lowered.

  Wolfe swung round and found his hand gripped firmly by another.

  Jermain said quietly, ‘Good to have you aboard, Ian. The Pig will go like blazes now!’

  Overhead from the depot ship’s rail a bugle blared the Alert. But Wolfe did not hear it, nor did he trust himself to speak. He looked at Jermain’s grave face and knew that he too was glad to be here. Not only that, he needed to be here.

  *  *  *

  Jermain paused in the forward torpedo space and watched as Wolfe ran his hand over one of the polished breeches. He had taken Wolfe on a quick conducted tour of the boat, down through the three decks, the crew spaces and storerooms, the galley and the control room. Approximately in the centre of the submarine was a massive bulkhead which separated the living and storage quarters from the vessel’s driving power and the secret reactor room. The watertight door in the bulkhead was known jokingly as Checkpoint Charlie, and no unauthorised persons were ever allowed access to the engineer’s private world beyond.

  Now, in the very stem of the hull, behind the six torpedo tubes, he awaited Wolfe’s first reactions.

  Wolfe said suddenly, ‘There’s still a lot to get used to.’

  Jermain studied him thoughtfully. His friend was changed even more than he had expected. It was nothing you could lay a name to. He seemed as alert as ever, and his keen interest was obvious. But there was something lacking. He Seemed without his old dry humour, as if it had been forcibly removed.

  He said, ‘You’ll soon catch on. It’ll be a good chance to put your hard work into practice.’

  They climbed up past the sick bay, where an attendant was polishing glass beakers, and back up another ladder towards the wardroom. Jermain glanced into each compartment as he passed and tried to gauge the reactions of his men to the sailing orders. It was always difficult to tell with men like these. An individual who was nursing some grievance or fear might be slow to display it before the rest.

  The coxswain, a thickset giant of a man, padded from the chief petty officers’ mess and called, ‘All the men are off shore now, sir. Except for the postman, an’ he’s just taken the mail to the dock office.’ He stared at Wolfe with a pair of bright, clear eyes. ‘I hope you’ll be happy aboard, sir.’

  Jermain grinned. ‘No doubt you’ll look after him!’

  The coxswain rocked back on his heels. ‘That’s right, sir. Twine’s the name. Any time you want anything done aboard, just drop me the wink!’

  They passed on, leaving the massive C.P.O. standing by his mess.

  Wolfe remarked, ‘They seem a happy lot.’

  ‘They’ll need to be, Ian. Cooped up aboard on trials is bad enough, but a further long cruise without even surfacing will test their will to survive!’

  They entered the wardroom, where Baldwin, the petty officer steward, was busy refilling glasses for the assembled officers.

  Jermain said quietly, ‘If you want to drink, Ian, now’s the time.’ He did not see the quick hardness appear in the other’s eyes. ‘The ratings are all right for their rum when we’re at sea, but for us it’s almost a teetotal cruise. We’re kept on the hop too much for a bout of mess life!’

  Wolfe relaxed slightly and forced his mouth to smile as he was introduced to the other officers. They appeared to be a good bunch, he thought. The engineer officer looked a bit of a binder, and the navigating officer, Mayo, might well prove an irritating companion with his gloomy face and deep, husky voice.

  Jermain took a glass and raised it to the light. ‘A toast, gentlemen. To Singapore, and whatever lies beyond!’

  They drank in silence, and then Colquhoun’s voice broke into the pause, as if he was unable to control it. ‘Sir, I understand we’re sailing tomorrow morning?’

  Lieutenant Oxley, the sonar officer, grinned. ‘God, has the penny dropped?’

  Colquhoun ignored him and kept his eyes fixed on the cap tain. His face was quite white, and Jermain could see the muscles twitching at the corners of his mouth. ‘Could I ask for a transfer, sir?’

  Jermain lifted his hand as several of the others started to speak. ‘What’s the matter, Sub? I’d have thought you’d have liked the idea, your father being the vice-admiral there?’

  Colquhoun dropped his eyes and seemed to go limp. ‘I—I’m sorry, sir. I just thought…’

  Mayo banged down his glass. ‘God Almighty! You should be proud of the chance to sail on this trip, Sub! I-don’t know what’s got into you!’

  Jermain stared at the sub-lieutenant. ‘I’m afraid it’s too late for second thoughts now, Sub. The mail is posted, the shore telephone disconnected.’ He glanced at the bulkhead clock. ‘And in four hours the Chief here will be pulling the first control rods in the reactor to start it “cooking”. And then at 0600 we slip and proceed as ordered.’ He picked up his cap. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to the depot ship to pay my respects to Captain S/M.’

  Colquhoun looked at Jermain’s broad shoulders, then with the others still staring at him gave a short gulp and ran from the wardroom.

  Lieutenant-Commander Ross peered at his glass. ‘I have a feeling that this trip’ll separate the men from the boys,’ he said dreamily.

  2

  An Ugly Word

  Jennain stepped into the control room and glanced briefly at the clock. Ten minutes to go.

  The brightly lit compartment seemed full of intent figures, each man busy with his own private checks and double checks as orders were passed back and forth through the boat’s maze of telephones and radio handsets.

  Jennain acknowledged the formal greetings and walked through into the chart-room where Mayo was stooping over the glass-topped table, a pair of dividers in his thick hand. He looked up and said, ‘Wind’s freshened during th: night, Captain. Gone round to the south too.’

  Jermain nodded and flicked over the pages of the log. He could feel the tension rising within him like a flood, his heart pounding in time to the relayed orders and muffled clatter of machinery. He never got used to it. Never felt quite sure that all would go exactly as the last time.

  It was nor just holding command, with all that it could mean to a man’s nerves, it went far deeper. The power and meaning of the Temeraire, her stupendous cost and value, her very presence was always hanging over him like some untamed beast. Jennain often had the nagging feeling that if he once relaxed or turned his back, like the over-confident lion tamer in the cage, he would never get a second chance.

  He looked at Mayo’s bearded face and wondered if he ever had the same qualms.

  A messenger peered in at them. ‘Five minutes, sir!’

  Jermain had already been right round the boat. There was nothing more he could da Lieutenant-Commander Ross had reported that the sealed reactor had gone ‘critical’ and there was power to respond to all orders. On the deck above, Lieutenant Drew was supervising the wires which still held the boat to her parent ship, and was no doubt cursing the rain and cold in his rich Queensland vocabulary.

  Jermain buttoned his oilskin around his throat and checked his glasses before slinging them on his chest. Through the door he could see the coxswain sitting by his wheel beside the planes-man, the pair of them looking more like pilot and co-pilot of some weird aircraft than seamen.

  Behind them, his face masklike in the overhead lights, Wolfe stood with his arms folded, his eyes fixed on some point above the helmsman’s head. At his elbow, a messenger waited foe any sudden change of orders or swift emergency.

  Jermain took a last look round. Nothing had been overlooked, as far as he could tell. They were all trained men. They must be treated as such.

  He walked to the foot of the long, shining ladder and began to climb. In passing he tried to catch Wolfe’s eye, but the man seemed absorbed in his duties and did not turn his head.

  Up and up. Through the surface navigation bridge, where a messenger and a communications rating stood shivering below the open hatch and the angry-looking sky above.

  Jermain stepped from the ladder and into the tiny cockpit at the tip of the fin, the highest point in the boat. He waited a few seconds for his eyes to get accustomed to the gloom, and then he peered over the screen towards the forecasing where seamen moved restlessly around the wires, their caps making bright splashes of white against their shining oilskins and the black hull below them.

  It was a bad morning, he thought. The low scudding clouds and steady drizzle seemed to try to prevent the daylight from reaching the water, and only across the distant, craggy hills could he see any sort of detail.

  The fin swayed lazily in the swell, and the starboard side squeaked against the depot ship’s fenders. Jermain could see the usual duster of figures atop the big ship’s rail, including the white cap and gold leaf of Captain S/M, who was no doubt watching everything like an anxious mother.

  Lieutenant Victor, the assistant torpedo anti-submarine officer, stood at his side, shifting from one foot to the other. Unlike any of the others, Victor found his rank and appointment hard to carry. He had come up the hard way from the lower deck only three years earlier, and at thirty-two was already deeply lined, and his hair was thin and greying. He had been happy as a rating, and had accepted each small promotion with satisfaction, if not actual surprise. Then with the growing technical requirements of the Service he had been recommended for a commission. At first he had been flattered, and his wife had been quick to urge him onwards, to take the one irrevocable step.

  Gone was die coarse but good-humoured life of the petty officers’ mess, the ‘middle of the road’ which had always seemed so clear and safe. The wardroom cult was harder to understand, the social divisions more difficult to overcome.

  Victor was a good technical man, but his lack of imagination was a tremendous handicap for his new role. As a rating he had always understood that once a man was an officer he was in a world apart, a world so tight and unified that it faced outwards with calm dignity and constant self-control. Yet, in spite of similar uniforms and ranks, the officers were as unlike each other as chalk and cheese. At the top of the tree were the professional, Dartmouth-trained executive types, men like Jermain and Wolfe, and Oxley, the sonar expert. Then there were the indestructible and essential branch officers, engineers like Ross, and Griffin, the doctor. At the bottom of the ladder were the others. Victor knew he had over-simplified it all, but he could find no other explanation. Why else was it, for instance, that even now he was inwardly sweating as he stared at the captain’s shoulders? As if expecting a reprimand, or some patronising comment. He knew he was being unfair to Jermain, but at the same time he did not want another letdown.

  Once, when he had been first commissioned, Victor had been serving in a small patrol submarine at Gosport. He had just begun to feel at home, settled at last in his new uniform. The boat’s captain had been a young lieutenant, a casual, self-assured officer who had apparently done all he could to make Victor welcome. Then one night there had been a wardroom party ashore and Victor had got very drunk. Happily he had stood on a table singing one old song after another while the other officers and their wives had watched him spellbound.

  They had applauded him, and clapped his shoulder. For Victor the sun was truly at its zenith. When he had sailed on trials the following morning he had heard the captain speaking to the first lieutenant about the incident.

  The latter had remarked casually, ‘Our new Fourth Hand seems to have a fund of songs, sir.’

  The captain’s reply had been icy and irritable. ‘All the same, these bloody rankers! Give ’em an inch and they soon revert to type!’

  Victor awoke from his brooding thoughts with a jerk as Jermain said, ‘Let go springs!’

  The wires grated across the steel hull, and from aft Petty Officer Jeffers, the second coxswain, yelled, ‘Grab’ old of that wire, Archer! Stone me! You’re like a bleedin’ tart in a trance this momin’!’

  Jermain smiled briefly. ‘Stand by!’

  He lifted his glasses and swung them over the anchorage. Two dark frigates, still undisturbed at their moorings, and a small coastal minesweeper waiting to guide them down the channel.

  There was a momentary break in the clouds, and a shaft of silver light played across the choppy water and lit up the Temeraire’s white number, S-191, on the side of her fin.

  A few gulls circled overhead, and Jermain saw a scruffy drifter pushing down-channel towards Helensburgh.

  He cupped his hands. ‘Slack off the headrope!’

  He saw Drew goading his small party in the bows, and watched as the dripping wire went slack and allowed the bows to swing slowly with the wind away from the depot ship’s side.

  Unlike older submarines, Temeraire had only one screw. It made her control and speed more silent at depth, but handling her on the surface was another matter.

  The Captain S/M’s voice floated from above. ‘Good luck, David! Have one for me when you touch land again!’

  Jermain lifted his hand but did not take his eyes from the widening gap of sloshing water. ‘Slow ahead! Let go aft!’

  The plating beneath his boots trembled only slightly, and he found that he was holding his breath. ‘Port ten!’

  With a gentle slop of spray around her bows the submarine began to circle away from the protection of the depot ship’s side. Once clear, the wind and rain splattered into the small cockpit and rattled against the glass screen.

  Jermain squinted at the gyro repeater, watching the minesweeper turn obediently as if on a string. ‘Midships. Steer one five zero.’ He half listened to his orders being repeated into the handset and wondered how Wolfe was coping below. He seemed collected enough. This trip, unwanted or not, might be the making of him.

  The mooring wires had been lashed and stowed, and Drew clattered up the ladder and said breathlessly, ‘All secure for sea, Skipper!’ He peered across at his assistant. ‘Christ, Jeff, you look like death this fine morin’!’ He grinned at Jermain. ‘Still, he’s not a bad bloke!’

  Victor’s thin mouth twisted into a smile. He wanted to reply with some cutting remark, something to whittle Drew down to size. Victor hated his brash familiarity before the captain, his earthy behaviour with the men.

  Jermain said calmly, ‘Take over the con. I’m going to the control room.’

  Drew rubbed his gloved hands. ‘Aye, aye, Skipper. One five zero an’ follow me leader!’ He waited until Jermain had lowered himself through the hatch and then yelled down to Petty Officer Jeffers, ‘Get those men fell in for leavin’ harbour! This’ll be the last fresh air they get for a bit!’ To Victor he added, ‘This is more like it, eh?’

  The other man ducked as a curtain of spray lifted over the fin and soaked his face. ‘If you say so.’

  Drew winked at the signalman who swayed nearby with a small hand-lamp. ‘That’s what I like to hear, man! A real spirit of adventure! No wonder we’ve lost the bloody empire!’

  Without either pipes or bugles to pay her respect the Temeraire passed quietly down-channel, a black silhouette like some child’s drawing, her wash hardly disturbing the moored yachts and still-sleeping warships.

  *  *  *

  Four hours had passed since the Temeraire had slipped her moorings, and with a stiffening wind pushing to meet her she thrust her rounded snout into each successive roller with something like anger.

  Thirty feet above the deck in the open cockpit Jermain felt the spray and rain stinging his cheeks like wet sand; and he sensed the old exultation slowly replacing the strain, as alcohol will unwind a man’s taut nerves.

  Wedged by his side Wolfe stared into the weather and wiped the lenses of his glasses before training them across the screen. As the submarine pushed steadily down the Firth of Clyde he could see the unbroken line of the coast some four miles to port, whilst looming out of the spray like a grey smudge on the opposite beam he could just make out the lonely rock cluster of Ailsa Craig. A mile ahead of the yawing submarine the little minesweeper still manfully led the way, her frail wooden hull shining like glass as she rolled from one sickening arc to another.

  Jermain shouted, ‘When we dive it’ll be as peaceful as a vault! You can pour a cup of coffee and hardly see a ripple!’

  Wolfe nodded and swallowed a momentary pang of nausea. Too long in a classroom, he thought bitterly. Too long with memories and tortured hopes for company.

  Jermain glanced sideways at his friend. ‘How does it feel to be back?’

  Wolfe considered the question. After the first tensions of getting under way, the unfamiliar feel of the control room, and the strange, alien faces of the men around him, he had slowly managed to find himself once more.

  Once clear of the loch and butting into the open water he had handed over to the O.O.W. and joined the rest of the officers at a hasty breakfast. Hasty because the Temeraire was heading to sea, and there would be enough time later for looking inwards, Now the officers and men not required for immediate duty, squeezed into the small surface navigation bridge below the cockpit, taking that last look at the land. By the ladder, smoking; and hardly speaking, the next batch of men would wait their turn.

  Wolfe replied, ‘Good. It feels good.’

  Jermain squinted over the bows, watching the dark-sided waves with their angry, curling crests. Submerged it would be peaceful, and there would be time to start work again. In her natural element the submarine looked clean and different, her rounded hull gleaming like the skin of a whale, with the surging water creaming back and over her sloping foredeck in an inverted horseshoe of frothing foam and spray.

  He said, ‘Increase revs for fifteen knots. Inform the escort, Bunts.’

  The rating with the signal lamp nodded and cradled it in the crook of his arm. As the lamp clicked busily Jermain saw an answering stab of light from the minesweeper’s swaying bridge. He said, ‘I think if I had to go back to general service I’d spew my guts out!’