Up To His Neck

The crew of HMS Seagull are bemused when they come across an uninhabited, uncharted Pacific island with the White Ensign flying! On making land, the small exploration party is absolutely astonished to find Able Seaman Jack Carter being treated as king by a group of natives: he'd been left there a decade ago by his captain, tasked with minding a store of contingency supplies, and hasn't heard from civilisation since. He is, at least, relieved and delighted to discover the war is over and we won it!

Much to his disappointment, Carter is ordered to return to the ship with the men, where he finds the Seagull's captain, Lieutenant Commander Sterning, very accommodating, believing him to have gone mad through the years of isolation. The rest of the crew - especially those who formed the expedition party and saw the reality of his island life - are thus deeply jealous and riled by his cushy, preferential treatment. And the C.P.O., Brazier, happens to have come across Carter in home port at the start of the war and has some unfinished hate to dole out!

Life for Carter looks promising, if not odd, until the ship receives communication that it is not to return with him to England, but divert to another run of East Asian islands on a secret mission. A group of underground rebels, believed to originate in China, has captured a submarine from one of Britain's allies and they are tasked with retrieving or destroying it.

Believing Carter to have amassed more than the requisite knowledge for survival in the brutal, hot jungles over the past ten years, Sterning leaves him in charge of training a group of men to go ashore and make the dangerous raid. It quickly proves quite the challenge, and a further communique from the Admiralty makes Jack's task even more difficult than he'd ever imagined!