DAZZLESHIPS
The thermometer has been stuck on zero for two hours but you know it's much colder, the pain in your nostrils as you breathe in the frozen air tells you that much. Below and as far as the eye scans to the dim horizon, are endless grey ocean swells, jagged white by an icy Baltic wind.
You drag your wind collar up over your ears, rubbing your neck into the fur lining as you wait for your watch to end. The sea stretches before you mysterious and threatening in its anonymous rolling. No sign of ship or periscope as you strain your eyes over every inch of murky water. Only three months out from dock. Three months since the sleek destroyer slid down the slip rails, a graceful metal dagger of a ship, freshly painted in its new camouflage. "Dazzleship" someone had shouted from the dockside as it spliced the oily calm of the harbour and brought a surge of cheers from the crowd that drowned the furious playing of the naval band. Truly it was dazzling in its shades of icy blue and green with slashes of white against the dark grey hull. Colours outlandish against the harbour backdrop but once at sea in the frozen northern waters the bizarre pattern hides you from the eyes of far off binoculars and periscopes below. Darkness looms and surrounds the destroyer's path as you wait, scanning in the hope something might break the continuum of sea and sky.