The Third Mate was waiting for us at the top of the bridge ladder. The Captain made it one rung ahead of me, though I could have sworn I was first out of his cabin. Maybe I had a footprint on my back?
Curtis waved an excited hand and his eyes were very bright in the flushed face. ‘Torpedo, Sir! A bloody torpedo for Chrissake! I was jus’…’
Evans cut him savagely short. ‘Whereaway, man?’
The ship’s head was swinging really fast now. I glanced aft and saw our wake curving sharply round as the masts lay well over against the shimmering line of the horizon with the centrifugal pull of the turn. We were almost at right angles now to our original course. Curtis blinked vaguely at the Old Man for a moment, then swung to get his bearings on the fast changing heading. ‘It came from almost abeam, Sir. Port side. I swung her into it as I thought it would help kick our stern out of the way.’
‘We must be practically heading for the sub now then, Three Oh?’ I asked sharply.
His head bobbed violently. ‘Yessir. More or less.’
‘Good lad!’ I yelled, as I ran into the wheelhouse. I’d have preferred it if we had been pulling away from the spot instead of heading right for the bastards, but a narrow bow shot was a lot more difficult for them than if we carried on swinging through a hundred and eighty-degree arc to present them with yet another five-hundred-foot-long beam target.
The helmsman’s eyes were as big as saucers as he stared at me and I could see his hands white where he gripped the spokes of the big wheel. He must have been almost as scared as I was. ‘Midships the wheel!’ I shouted, grabbing for the engine room phone.
The spokes blurred under the release from the ‘hard’ position and, immediately, I felt the deck tilting back to the horizontal as the rudder pressure eased and our head steadied.
‘Wheel’s amidships, Sir.’
‘What was your zig-zag heading before the alteration?’ I snapped urgently.
‘168, Sir. We was on the port leg.’
‘And now? What’s your head now?’
He peered into the binnacle and I could see the glint of sweat on his brow as the sunlight struck through the open doorway. ‘Er… Comin’ up to 082, Sir, and still swingin’ to port.’
I stabbed at the phone buzzer and tried to force my mind to think. We’d already swung through nearly a right-angle. Curtis had reckoned the torpedo had come from broad on our port beam, which meant that the sub was bearing approximately, er… 078 degrees when it fired? Allow, say, another half point to compensate for our travelled distance from there and we should be just about right on the nose. Their nose! I heard the click as the phone came off the hook down below, but I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and jerked my chin at the helmsman.
‘Steady on 073, Quartermaster…’
I took my hand away from the receiver. ‘First Mate here.’
Someone, I don’t know who, answered tinnily from the oil-gleaming depths. ‘Aye, aye, Mister Kent?’
‘I want maximum emergency revolutions. Every turn you can give me.’
The voice sounded hurt. ‘Christ, Mate. We’re already goin’ like shit off a shovel. The Chief’ll have my guts with gravy if…’
My reply was hoarse with savagery. ‘The Chief’ll have a bastard TORPEDO up his backside if you don’t. Now you just get her opened up, Spanner Man. Right up!’
The pause was only fractional. ‘Aye, aye, Mister Kent. She’ll shake herself to bloody bits, though.’
‘I don’t give a monkey’s ass if we bloody FLY! Jus' do what you’re told…’
I slammed the phone back in its cradle, then started to look for Athenian and Mallard with a sudden sense of guilt. I’d clean forgotten them when I started giving the order for the Charge of the Light Brigade to the man at the wheel. With relief I saw Athenian steaming half a mile ahead, over on our starboard quarter, the while water kicking high under her rounded counter as she slid away from us, going fast and still on her original course. A light was bleeping from her bridge structure and I just caught the end of her message… UT WE WOULD PREFER NOT TO BE SEEN WITH YOU. Hah, hah! Bloody funny to you too, Chief Officer Henderson.
The vibration from our shafts crept up and up until I half expected the deckhead rivets to start popping. Whoever was below hadn’t been joking about shaking ourselves to bits. We must have been working up to twenty knots now, probably the fastest she’d steamed since her speed trials when she was still in the builder’s hands three years ago, in the palmy days of ’38. I wondered where Henry McKenzie, the Chief, was and felt mildly surprised that he hadn’t already presented himself on the bridge in irate, Celtic protest at the abuse of his beloved wee engines. Maybe, this time, Henry had just gone and had a stroke over the much abused carcase of his revered Company Fuel Log?
Or, on the other hand, maybe he’d just ignored the possibility of an agonising, oil-choked death in the velvety blackness of a torpedoed ship’s bowels and had swung down the long, shiny, deathtrap handrails of the engine room ladders to be with his boys and his engines, and to do his duty?
I started to feel ridiculously melodramatic and, instead, tried to wrestle with a time and distance problem called ‘Find the Submarine.’ Glancing at the bulkhead clock I guessed that we’d now been travelling down the track of the torpedo, or torpedoes for that matter, for approximately seven minutes. Which meant we were roughly two and a half sea miles from where the coffee pot had spilled on to the Old Man’s fancy carpet. I wished I knew how far a torpedo carried or what a U-boat’s attacking range was. One mile? Two? Surely no more than two miles? That meant, then, that the bloody sub was now astern of us, that we’d already passed over the area in which she was lying. Perhaps we’d even passed over the very spot where she was submerged?
A tremendous explosion from aft shocked me into realising I wasn’t the only bloke who could do sums in his head. I threw myself out on to the starboard wing just in time to stare down our wake and see the green ocean astern erupting into mushroom after mushroom of dirty, yellow-contaminated water less than ten cables off our quarter. Then I saw the little Mallard screaming round with canted decks, White Ensign board taut, as she positioned herself for another depth-charge run over the spot. I was watching the spiralling shock waves of the first explosions skimming across the otherwise sullen flat calm of the sea when Evans came up behind me and raised his binoculars.
‘Black flag up — the Grey Funnel Line signalling an Asdic contact, John,’ he said with a satisfied, frighteningly pleased expression on his red face. ‘I’d like fine to see one of those Nazi bastards with his guts spilling out in the bloody water, by God but I would.’
I stared at the Captain in shocked silence for a moment, still feeling Cyclops tremble like a fleeing animal beneath my feet. How could a professional seaman with a pretty, fairhaired daughter like he had — how could he possibly wish to see a fellow human being floating all splayed out in the silent water with his entrails waving around him, spewed from his gutted body by the terrifying force of those obscene weapons? A man who, only a few months ago, had pushed us at seventeen knots through some of the biggest seas I’d ever seen to go to the assistance of a small Arabian coaster which had screamed for help over its Heath Robinson radio through the howling frenzy of an Indian Ocean maelstrom. I hadn’t been surprised then. Just scared as the great, green water smashed over our bows and leaped and roared aft to crash, with the force of an express train, against the break of our superstructure.