‘God protect you, my darling husband,’ she had whispered. ‘Please God bring you back safely to us.’
And now he was afraid for her and the daughter he had never seen.
‘Hold your course, damn you!’ he snapped at Herbert Cryer, the helmsman.
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Herbert Cryer replied with just a trace of injured innocence in his tone. No man could hold Bloodhound true when she hurled herself from swell to swell with such abandoned violence, she must yaw and throw her head that fraction before the helm could correct her. The reprimand was unjustified, uttered in fear and tension. ‘Give it a flipping break, mate,’ Herbert retorted silently. ‘You’re not the only one who is going to catch it. Tighten up the old arsehole like a bloody officer and a ruddy gentleman.’
In these wordless exchanges of repartee with his officers, Herbert Cryer was never bested. They were wonderful release for resentments and pent-up emotion, and now because he was also afraid, he became silently lyrical.
‘Climb-aboard-Romeo’s one-way express to flipping glory.’ Commander Little’s reputation with the ladies had resulted in him being irreverently but affectionately baptized by his crew. ‘Come along with us. We’re off to shout at the devil, while Charlie kisses his daughter.’
Herbert glanced sideways at his commander and grinned. Fear made the grin wolfish, and Charles Little saw it and misinterpreted it. He read it as a mark of the same berserk fury that possessed him. The two of them grinned at each other for an instant in complete misunderstanding, before Herbert refocused his attention on Bloodhound’s next wild crabbing lunge.
Charles was afraid as well. He was afraid of finding a weakness in himself – but this was the fear that had walked at his right hand all his life, close beside him, whispering to him, ‘Harder, try harder. You must do it better, you must do it quicker, or bigger than they do, or they’ll laugh at you. You mustn’t fail – not in one thing, not for one moment, you mustn’t fail. You mustn’t fail!’ This fear was the eternal companion and partner in every venture on which he embarked.
It had stood beside the thirteen-year-old Charles in a duck blind, while he fired a twelve-gauge shotgun, and wept slow fat tears of agony every time the recoil smashed into his bruised bicep and shoulder.
It had stooped over him as he lay in the mud hugging a broken collar bone. ‘Get up!’ it hissed at him. ‘Get up!’ It had forced him to his feet and led him back to the unbroken colt to mount again, and again, and again.
So conditioned was he to respond to its voice that when it crouched beside him now, twisted and misshapen on the footplates of the bridge, its presence almost tangible, and croaked so Charles alone could hear it, ‘Prove it!’ Prove it!’ there was only one course open to Charles Little; a peregrine stooping at a golden eagle, he took his ship in against the Blücher.
– 47 –
‘The turn to starboard was a feint.’ Otto von Kleine spoke with certainty, staring out to where the dusk had obliterated the frail silhouette of the English destroyer. ‘Even now he is turning again to cross our stern. He will attack on our port side.’
‘Captain, it could be the double bluff,’ Kyller answered dubiously.
‘No.’ Von Kleine shook his golden beard. ‘He must try to outline us against the last of the light from the sunset. He will attack from the east.’ A moment longer he frowned in thought, as he anticipated his opponent’s moves across the chessboard of the ocean. ‘Kyller, plot me his course, assuming a speed of twenty-five knots, a turn four points to port three minutes after our last sighting, a run of fifteen miles across our stern, and then a turn of four points to starboard. If we hold our present course and speed, where will he be in relation to us, in ninety minutes’ timer?’
Working quickly, Kyller completed the problem. Von Kleine had been mentally checking every step of the calculation. ‘Yes,’ he agreed with Kyller’s solution, and already he had formulated the orders for change of course and speed to place Bloodhound in ambush.
– 48 –
Under full power, Bloodhound threw a bow-wave ten feet high, and a wake that boiled out for a quarter of a mile behind her, a long, faintly phosphorescent smear in the darkness.
Aboard Blücher a hundred pairs of eyes were straining out into the night, watching for that phosphorescence. Behind the battle lights on her upperworks men waited, in the dimly-lit turrets men waited, on the open bridge, at the masthead, deep in her belly, the crew of Blücher waited.
Von Kleine had reduced speed to lessen his own wake, and turned away from the land at an angle of forty-five degrees. He wanted to catch the Englishman on his starboard beam, out of torpedo range.
He stood peering out across the dark sea, with the furlined collar of his overcoat drawn up to his ears. The night was cool. The sea was a black immensity, vast as the sky that was lined in glowing ivory by the whorls and smears of the star patterns.
A dozen men saw it at the same instant; pale, ethereal, seeming to float upon the darkness of the sea like a plume of iridescent mist – the wake of the Englishman.
‘Star shell!’ Von Kleine snapped the order to the waiting guns. He was alarmed by the English destroyer’s proximity. He had hoped to spot her at greater range.
High above the ocean, the star shells burst blue-white, so intensely bright as to sear the retina of the eye that looked directly at them. Beneath them the surface of the sea was polished ebony, sculptured and scooped with the pattern of the swells. The two ships were starkly and crisply lit, steaming on converging courses, already so close to each other that the mile-long, solid white beams of their battle lights jumped out to join, fumbling together like the hands of hesitant lovers.
In almost the same second both ships opened fire, but the banging of Bloodhound’s little 4.7-inch guns was lost in the bellow of the cruiser’s broadside.
Blücher was firing over open sights with her guns depressed until the long barrels were horizontal to the surface of the sea. Her first salvo was aimed a fraction high, and the huge shells howled over Bloodhound’s open bridge.
The wind of their passage, the fierce draught of disrupted air they threw out, caught Charles Little and sent him reeling against the compass pinnacle. He felt the ribs below his armpit crack.
The command he shouted at the helm was hoarse with pain.
Turn four points to port! Steer for the enemy!’ and Bloodhound spun like a ballet dancer, and charged straight at Blücher.
The cruiser’s next broadside was high again but now her secondary armament had joined in, and a four-pound shell from one of the quick-firing pom-poms burst on the director tower above Bloodhound’s bridge. It swept the exposed area with a buzzing hailstorm of shrapnel.
It killed the navigating lieutenant instantly, cutting away the top of his head as though it were the shell of a softboiled egg. He fell on the deck and splattered the footplates with the warm custard of his brains.
A piece of the red-hot shell casing, the size of a thumb-nail, entered the point of Herbert Cryer’s right elbow and shattered the bone to splinters. He gasped at the shock and sprawled against the wheel.
‘Hold her. Hold her true!’ The order from Commander Little was blurred as the speech of a spastic. Herbert Cryer pulled himself up and with his left hand spun the wheel to meet Bloodhound’s wild swing, but with his right arm hanging useless, his steering was clumsy and awkward.
‘Steady her, man. Hold her steady!’ Again that thick slurring voice, and Cryer was aware of Charles Little beside him, his hands on the helm, helping to hold Bloodhound’s frantic head.
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Cryer glanced at his commander and gasped again. This time in horror. Razor-sharp steel had sliced off Charles Little’s ear, then gone on to cut his cheek away, and expose the bone of his jaw and the white teeth that lined it. A flap of tattered flesh hung down on to his chest, and from a dozen severed blood vessels dark blood dripped and spurted and dribbled.
The two of them crouched wounded over the wheel, with the dead men at
their feet, and aimed Bloodhound at the long low bulk of the German cruiser.
Now in the daylight glare of the star shells, the sea around them was thrashed and whipped into seething life by the cacophony of Blücher’s guns. Tall towers of white water rose briefly and majestically about them, then dropped back to leave the surface troubled and restless with foam.
And Bloodhound drove on until suddenly it seemed she had run into a cliff of solid granite. Beneath their feet, she jarred and bucked violently. A nine-inch shell had taken her full in the bows.
‘Port full rudder.’ Charles Little’s voice was sloshy sounding, wet with the blood that filled his mouth, and together they spun the wheel to full left lock.
But Bloodhound was dying. The shell had split her bows wide open, torn her plating and fanned it open like the petals of a macabre orchid. The black night sea rushed through her. Already her bows were sinking, slumping wearily, lifting her stern so the rudder no longer had full purchase. But even in death she was trying desperately to obey. Slowly she swung, inchingly, achingly, she swung.
Charles Little left the helm and tottered towards the starboard rail. His legs were numb and heavy under him, and the weakness of his lost blood drummed in his ears. He reached the rail and clung there, peering down on the torpedo tubes that stood on the deck below him.
The tubes looked like a rack of fat cigars, and with weary jubilation Charles saw that there were men still tending them, crouching behind the sheet of armour plate, waiting for Bloodhound to turn and bring Blücher on to her starboard beam.
‘Turn, old girl. Come on! That’s it! Turn!’ Charles croaked through the blood.
Another shell struck Bloodhound, and she heaved in mortal agony. Perhaps this movement, combined with a chance push of the sea swell, was enough to swing her those last few degrees.
There, full in the track of the torpedo tubes, lit by her own star shells and the gun-fire from her turrets, a scant thousand yards across the black water, lay the German cruiser.
Charles heard the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, of the tubes as they fired. He saw the long sharklike shapes of the torpedoes leap out from the deck and strike the water, saw the four white wakes arrowing away in formation, and behind him he heard the torpedo officer’s triumphant shout, distorted by the voice-pipe.
‘All four fired, and running true!’
Charles never saw his torpedoes strike, for one of Blücher’s nine-inch shells hit the bridgework three feet below him. For one brief unholy instant, he stood in the centre of a furnace as hot as the flames of the sun.
– 49 –
Otto von Kleine watched the English destroyer explode. Towering orange flames erupted from her, and a solid ball of black smoke spun upon itself, blooming on the dark ocean like a flower from the gardens of hell. The surface of the sea around her was dimpled by the fall of thrown debris and the cruiser’s shells – for all of Blücher’s guns were still blazing.
‘Cease fire,’ he said, without taking his eyes from the awesome pageant of destruction that he had created.
Another salvo of star shell burst above, and von Kleine lifted his hand to his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the closed lids, shielding them from the stabbing brilliance of the light. It was finished, and he was tired.
He was tired, drained of nervous and physical energy, overwhelmed by the backwash of fatigue that followed these last two days and nights of ceaseless strain. And he was sad – sad for the brave men he had killed, and the terrible destruction he had wrought.
Still holding his eyes, he opened his mouth to give the order that would send Blücher once more thrashing southward, but before the words reached his lips, a wild shout from the look-out interrupted him.
‘Torpedoes! Close on the starboard beam!’
Long seconds von Kleine hesitated. He had let his brain relax, let the numbness wash over it. The battle was over, and he had dropped back from the high pinnacle of alertness on which he had balanced these last desperate hours. It needed a conscious physical effort to call up his reserves, and during those seconds, the torpedoes fired by Bloodhound in her death throes were knifing in to revenge her.
At last von Kleine snapped the bonds of inertia that bound his mind. He leaped to the starboard rail of the bridge, and saw in the light of the star shells the pale phosphorescent trails of the four torpedoes. Against the dark water they looked like the tails of meteors on a night sky.
‘Full port rudder. All engines full astern together!’ he shouted, his voice pitched high with consternation.
He felt his ship swerve beneath him, thrown violently over as the great propellers clawed at the sea to hold her from crossing the path of the torpedoes.
Hopelessly he stood and reviled himself. I should have anticipated this. I should have known the destroyer had fired.
Helplessly he stood and watched the four white lines drawn swiftly across the surface towards him.
In the last moments he felt a fierce upward surge of hope. Three of the English torpedoes would miss. That was certain. They would cross Blücher’s bows as she side-stepped. And the fourth torpedo it was just possible would miss also.
His fingers upon the bridge rail clenched, until it felt as though they must press into the metal. His breath jammed in his throat and choked him.
Ponderously, Blücher swung her bows away. If he had given the order for the turn only five seconds earlier …
The torpedo struck Blücher five feet below the surface, on the very tip of her curved keel.
The explosion shot a mountain of white water one hundred and fifty feet into the air. It slammed Blücher back onto her haunches with such violence that Otto von Kleine and his officers were thrown heavily to the steel deck.
Von Kleine scrabbled to his knees and looked forward. A fine veil of spray, like pearl dust in the light of the star shells, hung over Blücher. As he watched, it subsided slowly.
All that night they struggled to keep Blücher afloat.
They sealed off her bows with the five-inch steel doors in the watertight bulkhead, and behind those doors they locked thirty German seamen whose battle stations were in the bows. At intervals during the frenzied activity of the night, von Kleine had visions of those men floating facedown in the flooded compartments.
While the pumps clanged throughout the ship to free her of the hundreds of tons of sea-water that washed through her, von Kleine left the bridge and, with his engineer commander and damage control officer, they listed the injuries that Blücher had received.
In the dawn they assembled grimly in the chart-room behind the bridge, and assessed their plight.
‘What power can you give me, Lochtkamper?’ von Kleine demanded of his engineer.
‘I can give you as much as you ask.’ A reddish-purple bruise covered half the engineer’s face where he had been thrown against a steam cock-valve when the torpedo struck. ‘But anything over five knots will carry away the watertight bulkheads forward. They will take the full brunt of the sea.’
Von Kleine swivelled his stool, and looked at the damage control officer. ‘What repairs can you effect at sear
‘None, sir. We have braced and propped the watertight bulkhead. We have patched and jammed the holes made by the British cruiser’s guns. But I can do nothing about the underwater damage without a dry dock – or calm water where I can put divers over the side. We must enter a port.’
Von Kleine leaned back on his stool and closed his eyes to think.
The only friendly port within six thousand miles was Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa, but he knew the British were blockading it. He discarded it from his list of possible refuges.
An island? Zanzibar? – The Seychelles? – Mauritius? – All hostile territories with no anchorage safe from bombardment by a British squadron.
A river mouth? The Zambezi? No, that was in Portuguese territory, navigable for only the first few miles of its length.
Suddenly he opened his eyes. There was one
ideal haven situated in German territory, navigable even by a ship of Blücher’s tonnage for twenty miles: It was guarded from overland approach by formidable terrain, yet he could call upon the German Commissioner for stores and labour and protection.
‘Kyller,’ he said. ‘Plot me a course for the Kikunya mouth of the Rufiji delta.’
Five days later the Blücher crawled painfully as a crippled centipede into the northemmost channel of the Rufiji delta. She was blackened with battle smoke, her rigging hung in tatters, and at a thousand places shell splinters had pierced her upperworks. Her bows. were swollen and distorted, and the sea washed through her forward compartments and then boiled and spilled out of the ghastly rents in her plating.
As she passed between the forests of mangroves that lined the channel, they seemed to enfold her like welcoming arms.
Overside she lowered two picket boats and these darted ahead of her like busy little water beetles as they sounded the channel, and searched for a secure anchorage. Gradually Blücher wriggled and twisted her way deeper and deeper into the wilderness of the delta. At a place where the flood waters of the Rufiji had cut a deep bay between two islands, and formed a natural jetty on both sides, the Blücher came to rest.
– 50 –
Herman Fleischer wiped his face and neck with a hand towel and then looked at the sodden material. God, how he hated the Rufiji basin. As soon as he entered its humid and malodorous heat, a thousand tiny taps opened under his skin and out gushed the juices of his body.
The prospect of an extended stay aroused in him a dark resentment for all things, but especially to this young snob who stood beside him on the foredeck of the steam launch. Herman darted a glance at him now. Cool he looked, as though he were sauntering down Unter den Linden in June. The shimmering white of his tropical uniform was unwrinkled and dry, not like the thick corduroy that bunched damply at Herman’s armpits and crotch. Mother of a dog, it would start the rash again; he could feel it beginning to itch and he scratched at it moodily, then checked his hand as he saw the lieutenant smile.