‘I’d say you ‘ad about five seconds to spare, sir,’ said the torpedo gunner, squinting with a calculating eye at the amount of water that had entered; ‘maybe ten.’
‘A miss is as good as a mile,’ said Crowe. It was a cliché, but he did not feel capable of producing any original thought at that moment. Behind him the monkey suddenly chattered from his perch on the ruins of the after gunhouse.
‘Damn that monkey!’ said Crowe.
‘That’s the last mischief he’ll get up to in this ship,’ said Hammett.
‘I’ll wring the little beggar’s neck, shall I, sir?’ said the torpedo gunner eagerly. ’Oh, let the little devil live,’ replied Crowe wearily. It was not easy to condemn even a monkey to death in cold blood.
‘Wonder if they’ve got a zoo here?’ said the torpedo gunner. ‘P’raps they’d take him.’
‘Maybe so,’ said Crowe. Then he suddenly remembered his appointment with Mr Cockburn-Crossley. ‘Here, get these things off me!’
Even the best clothes that Gieve’s can supply look rumpled after being compressed into a diving suit. Crowe went below and shouted for fresh clothes to be got out for him; he took another bath and dressed himself as rapidly as the heat permitted, and with all the care the occasion demanded. Then he slung his gold-peaked cap onto his head and hurried over the brow into the clattering din of the navy yard. Mr Cockburn-Crossley was waiting with every sign of impatience consistent with his customary elegant nonchalance. He was putting his watch back into his pocket as Crowe hurried up.
‘You’re late, Captain Crowe,’ he said. ‘It is most unfortunate. I wish you could have been more punctual; punctuality is a virtue anyone can cultivate, and it is most important that you should be punctual at this time when we have Anglo-American relations to consider.’
Crowe looked at Mr Cockburn-Crossley for a second or two before he replied, and he swallowed hard too.
Tm sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I was detained by business in the ship that could not possibly wait.’
He felt there was nothing else he could say to Mr Cockburn-Crossley.
Night Stalk
‘There aren’t any whales in the Mediterranean,’ said Nickleby, the flotilla gunnery officer, in tones of deep satisfaction.
‘There are big tunny fish, though, that go in shoals,’ said Rowles, the navigating officer.
‘What about cold currents?’ asked Captain Crowe. This discussion dealt with the sort of technical point the solution of which was the task of those highly trained staff officers specifically assigned to him for the purpose; but he knew enough of the subject to take part-in the argument.
‘Nothing here worth mentioning, sir,’ said Rowles. ‘Of course, there may be a casual freak.’
‘Wrecks?’ asked Holby.
‘Plenty of those,’ admitted Rowles.
The flotilla was creeping through the night, guided by the most minute physical influences imaginable - too minute really for the human imagination to grasp, thought Crowe; the merest echoes of something already beyond human senses. They were trailing a submarine. Somewhere inside HMS Apache a skilled rating was sending out sound waves into the sea with an apparatus that had never been thought of before Crowe became captain. It was all very difficult, for these sound waves were not the sort that one could hear; they were too high-pitched for that. Crowe could remember being shown a dog whistle once which blew a note too high for the human ear, but which yet could be heard by a dog. The sounds being sent out through the water were the same kind of noiseless sounds - what an absurd expression! - but even higher in pitch.
The principle was that when these radiating waves struck a solid body in the water, a minute proportion of them bounced back and could be picked up in the ship by an apparatus even more novel than the one which sent them out.
The fantastic sensitiveness of the whole affair could lead sometimes to curious results - shoals of pilchards off the Cornish coast had been depth-charged more than once; and the dividing wall between a cold current and a warm current could reflect enough of the waves as well as refracting the rest to produce a positive indication in the receiver, so that the ship might find itself launching an attack upon nothing at all, like a blindfolded fighter assaulting a whiff of cigarette smoke.
It was like some deadly game of blindman’s buff, or like two men stalking each other with revolvers in a completely dark room, for the submarine was by no means helpless; as she crept about underwater her own instruments could tell her, roughly, the bearing of her enemy, and when she was pressed too hard she could endeavour to relieve herself of her enemy’s attentions by a salvo of torpedoes loosed off in the general direction of the pursuing ship.
The little chartroom was hot with the heat of the Mediterranean summer night and the stuffiness which comes with the inevitable interference with ventilation caused by the complete darkening of the ship. Rowles was bent over a large sheet of squared paper on which, with the aid of protractor and dividers, he was plotting the moves of the deadly game.
‘Cheyenne signals, “Three-four-O”,’ came the voice of the chief yeoman of signals down the voice pipe from the bridge.
‘Three-forty degrees!’ exclaimed Rowles eagerly. ‘That gives us a fix.’
Cheyenne was in the second division of destroyers out to port and she was giving the bearing of the unseen submarine as deduced from her instruments. Crowe could picture the transmission of the signal, the tiny flashes of the signalling lamp, screened and hooded, so that only the Apache, and no possible enemy, could pick them up. Rowles drew another line on his squared paper and made a cabalistic sign at the end of it. ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘Don’t think it can be a cold current. And it seems to have moved, so it’s not a wreck. Too many propellers going for the hydrophones to help us out.’
Twenty years ago the hydrophone had been the only instrument which could be used for tracking a submarine; it actually listened to the beat of the submarine’s propeller, and all the efforts of all the scientists had not yet succeeded in improving it to the point where it could pick up and follow the sound of a submarine’s propeller through the noise of those of a whole flotilla.
The message tube buzzed, and Holby snatched the little brass cylinder from it, took out the message and tossed it across to Rowles, who read it eagerly. He ruled another line on his squared paper; the diagram he was drawing there was beginning to take some kind of shape, for the lines all had a general trend, and the little ringed numbers made a series which, though wavering, still had definition.
‘I’d like to alter course, sir, if you please,’ said Rowles, and Crowe nodded.
Rowles spoke first into one voice tube and then into another. It was only an alteration of five degrees, but, with the flotilla fanned out on a wide front in pitch-darkness and with signals restricted to the barest minimum, it was not such a simple matter to wheel the line round as might at first be supposed. A moment later Rowles asked for an increase in speed, and the officers sitting in the silent little cabin were conscious for a brief space of a change in the tempo of the throbbing of the propellers; at the end of that time they were accustomed to the new rhythm and the throbbing passed unnoticed again. Then came fresh information, messages from the sonic apparatus below and from other destroyers in the flotilla.
‘He’s altered course,’ said Rowles.
The captain of the hunted submarine was receiving indications as well, and was turning his boat in a desperate effort to get out of the path of his enemies. But submerged as he was he could only creep along at six knots, while the destroyers were charging down on him at twenty-five. If only they could maintain contact with him, his end was certain. Rowles wheeled the flotilla farther round to intercept him. Another voice tube in the little chartroom squeaked a warning, and Holby answered it.
‘Torpedoes fired,’ he announced. The hydrophone apparatus had picked up the heavy underwater concussion. The Italian was trying to rid himself of pursuit by launching his torpedoes into the midst of his pursuers. Firi
ng under water and aiming only on the strength of the data supplied him by his sound apparatus, he could not hope for very accurate aim; the deployed destroyers made a wide target, but one with a good many gaps in it.
‘One hundred and sixty seconds, I should say,’ said Holby, and all eyes turned involuntarily on the stopwatch ticking away on the chartroom table. With torpedoes and destroyers approaching one another at eighty knots, each little jump of the hand brought potential death forty yards nearer. Crowe took his attention from the watch and turned it upon Rowles’ diagram. The destroyers were headed straight for the submarine, meeting the torpedoes head-on, therefore. That was the best way to receive a torpedo attack - a destroyer is ten times as long as she is wide, and, consequently the chances of a blind shot missing were ten times as great. There was nothing to be done except wait.
The messages were still coming in, even during that two and a half minutes.
‘Gone to ground,’ said Rowles, ‘on the bottom. It’s his best chance, I suppose.’
Lying absolutely silent and still on the bottom, the submarine would give no indication of its position to the hydrophone listeners and precious little to the sonic apparatus. And the Italian captain had taken this action while there was still plenty of time, while the English still were not absolutely sure of his position, and while there was a chance that the arrival of his torpedoes might distract his enemies, throw them off their course and upset their calculations. If he pinned much hope on this, however, he did not know the grim little group that was sitting round the chartroom table plotting his doom. The stopwatch hand was creeping inexorably round. Suddenly the Apache stopped as if she had run into a brick wall, throwing them all across the chartroom, and then she reared and then she plunged, standing almost up on her stern and then crashing down again, with the lights flickering spasmodically, while the memory of a tremendous crash of sound echoed in their ears. Crowe had been flung against the bulkhead and the breath driven from his body; it was pure instinct that carried him out onto the bridge; as his eyes were accustoming themselves to the darkness he could feel the Apache heeling and turning sharply. A black ghost of a ship whisked past their stern, missing them by a hairsbreadth - that was Navaho, which had been following them. The officers and ratings on the bridge, flung down by the explosion, were only now picking themselves up.
‘Hard-a-starboard there!’ roared Hammett
‘She won’t answer, sir!’ came the helmsman’s reply. ‘Wheel’s right over!’
The Apache was turning sharply in defiance of her helm.
‘Bow’s a bit twisted, I should say,’ said Crowe, peering forward into the darkness, alongside Hammett: he could feel now that the bows were canted sharply downward as well, but in the utter darkness he could form no estimate at all of the amount of damage. The only thing that was certain was that the Apache was not on fire; a destroyer full of oil fuel, hit by a torpedo, can sometimes in a few seconds be changed into a blazing volcano.
‘Midships!’ said Hammett to the quartermaster, and then busied himself with the engine-room telegraph before explaining to Crowe, ‘I thought I’d let her complete the turn, sir.’
‘Go astern with the starboard engine as she comes round,’ said Crowe, and was promptly annoyed with himself for interfering with Hammett when the latter was doing perfectly well.
There were voices to be heard forward now as the stunned members of the crew picked themselves up and the emergency party reached the seat of the damage. The Apache was completing her turn, having lost a good deal of her way.
‘Hard-a-starboard!’ said Hammett again to the helmsman, and the ship trembled with the vibration of the starboard propeller going astern.
From forward there came a tremendous cracking as rivets sheared; the bows of the ship rose perceptibly, she lost her list and drifted on her original course as Hammett stopped the engines.
‘We’ve broken something off,’ said Crowe, and a moment later the reports began to come in from for’ard, confirming his suggestion. The torpedo seemed to have hit almost squarely on the bows of the ship and had blown the first ten feet of the ship round at right angles to the rest. It was that which had forced the ship into the turn and which had now broken off. Number 1 bulkhead was holding, however, and the water, which was pouring in was no more than the pumps could deal with adequately.
‘Get that bulkhead shored up, Mr Garland,’ said Hammett.
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said a voice from the darkness.
‘Go ahead with all the speed that the bulkhead will stand,’ said Crowe, before he went back into the chartroom.
His staff was still at the table planning the attack on the submarine; Rowles was a little white, and conscious of a stabbing pain every time he breathed, but it was not till sometime later that Crowe knew that his navigating officer had broken a couple of ribs when the explosion flung him against the table.
‘We’ll stay afloat for some time yet,’ announced Crowe, ‘and we’ll make three or four knots, I hope.’
‘Splendid, sir,’ said Rowles, addressing himself to his squared paper. ‘I didn’t want the little beggar to get away.’
It is even harder to pick up the trail of a hostile submarine than it is to dispose of her, once she is detected: nothing must be allowed to interfere with the hunt when it is in full cry. While the emergency party faced sudden death shoring up the bulkhead, another signal winked from the battered flagship to the rest of the flotilla gathering in for the kill. Out on the bridge again, Crowe looked forward through the darkness. He could not see them, but he knew that his other destroyers were arranging themselves in a neat pattern while the poor old Apache was panting up after them.
A fresh signal flashed from the Apache’s masthead, and it was answered by a sound like a roll of thunder as the depth charges exploded. Only that signal was necessary; Crowe knew that his well-drilled flotilla was weaving round in the darkness as though taking part in an elaborate dance, and every few seconds a fresh roll of thunder announced the completion of a new figure as they systematically depth-charged every possible spot where a submarine might be lying. The sonic apparatus had given them the submarine’s position within half a mile; a depth charge bursting within a hundred yards would do grave damage, and it was the business of the flotilla to see that at least one charge burst within a hundred yards. The Apache crept slowly over the sea towards the distant thunder; soon she was pitching and tossing perceptibly as the tremendous ripples of the explosions met her. They continued long after the explosions had ceased.
‘We ought to be coming up to them now, sir,’ said Hammett, gazing into the darkness.
‘What’s that?’ exclaimed Crowe, pointing suddenly.
It was a ghostly white triangle sticking out above the surface of the sea, thirty feet of it or so.
The words were hardly out of Crowe’s mouth when one of the forward guns went off with a crash and a blinding flash. That triangle was the bows of a submarine protruding above the surface as she hung nearly vertically between wind and water, helpless and shattered; but a gun’s crew, tense and eager for a target, will fire at the first sight of an enemy, and a submarine, once seen, must always be destroyed beyond all chance of escape and repair. The firing ceased, leaving everyone temporarily helpless in the darkness, but, blink their dazzled eyes as they might, Crowe and Hammett could see nothing of that pale triangle.
‘She’s gone,’ said Hammett.
Crowe sniffed the night air, trying to sort out the various smells which reached his nostrils. ‘That’s her oil I can smell, isn’t it?’ he said.
Hammett sniffed as well. ‘Must be,’ he agreed, ‘there was no smell of our own oil before this happened.’
The pungent, bitter smell was unmistakable; as they leaned over the rail at the end of the bridge it rose more penetratingly to their nostrils; they could picture the enormous pool of oil which was spreading round them, invisible in the night. And, as they leaned and looked, a vast bubble burst close alongside of the Apache as
some fresh bulkhead gave way in the rent hull of the submarine sinking down to the bottom, and the enclosed air came bursting upward. They heard the sound and, faint in the darkness, they saw a white fragment whirl on the sea’s surface.
‘There’s a bit of wreckage,’ said Crowe to Hammett. ‘Better get it for identification.’
Wreckage indeed it was, for it was the dead body of a man. They carried it into the captain’s day cabin as the nearest lighted place and laid it on the deck. Water ran from the soiled overalls which it wore, forming a little pool, which washed backwards and forwards with the motion of the ship. The stars of gold on the shoulder straps indicated lieutenant-commander’s rank; the distorted face was young for a man of that seniority. The arms were clasped across his breast, and there was what looked like a red stain beneath them. Blood? Crowe stooped closer and then took hold of the cold hands and tried to pry the rigid arms upwards; they were clasping to the lieutenant-commander’s breast a flat red book, and it was only with difficulty that they worked it loose, so fierce was the grip the corpse was maintaining upon it.
‘Send for Mortimer!’ snapped Crowe. ‘He speaks Italian!’
Most of the Italian that Lord Edward had spoken had been pretty little sentences asking, ‘When can we meet again?’ and things like that. But he had a good academic knowledge of the language and it took no more than a glance for him to see the importance of what he was looking at.
‘It’s his orders, sir,’ he said, turning the wet pages with care and peering at the smudged handwriting and the typewritten orders that were clipped to the wet sheets.
‘What does all this mean?’ demanded Crowe. ‘Here a latitude and longitude - I can see that for myself. Translate the Italian.’
‘He’s three days out from Taranto, sir,’ said Mortimer, ‘and - by George, sir, this looks like a rendezvous! It is, by jingo! And here’s the recognition signal.’