…then the terrible columns of atomised water hung in the air again in the wake of the racing, worrying little bulldog of an escort, and the blast from the charges beat on our eardrums, and I started to feel the same as Evans.
I felt an almost sexual blood lust with the excitement of it all. I wanted to see the signs of victory in bloated, sundered corpses bobbing in the skin of oil and debris from the shattered hull of the U-boat. I wanted to see it so bad I could almost taste it. I wanted to see it because I knew that those men — even though they were maybe fathers of little fair-haired girls themselves — were of the same kind as the animals who had sunk Hesperia without even giving her the chance to cry for help. These were the men who had killed big Eric Clint in the prime of his life and career… and had just tried to kill me, and Curtis, and the Old Man, and thin, nervous, first trip away from home Conway.
Brannigan came pounding up the ladder as Mallard skittered round in another of her sliding turns under full helm. I envied Commander Braid the exhilaration of handling a thoroughbred ship that could almost skim round in her own length like one of those funny little waterbug things you see on stagnant ponds back home. There came a brief flash of golden light from her foredeck and I realised it came from the brass shell casing held by one of her gun crew, stood-to and waiting for the first signs of a break in the now subsiding water. That made me think of our own museum piece aft — I’d been forgetting a hell of a lot of things in my panic — and I dropped my eyes to our poop.
Yes! There she was, pointing hungrily over to where the U-boat lay. Phyllis! What a bloody silly name for a bloody silly gun. I noticed the glint of a white cap cover amongst the khaki-clad figures of Bombardier Allen and his comrades-in-arms and grinned to myself through the tension pulling at the corner of my mouth. Charlie Shell was still unable to keep away from his pride and joy, even though he’d had his nose pushed in by the army. He’d never fired it, not once, but to listen to him you’d have thought that he and that obsolete cannon were the only things keeping the Bismarck cowering in port.
And so we waited…
We waited with the sun beating down on our shoulders, and the sea burning almost yellow with the heat from it. No one moved and no one spoke, while the ship throbbed excitedly under our feet and the exhaust gases from the giant funnel above roared like some monstrous dragon into the burnished sky. The Amatol-fouled cloud on the sea was very calm again, broken only by the splaying arrow of Mallard’s wake as she hovered hungrily, gun silently alert.
We waited, staring tensely at the stain on the water. My eyes ached with the strain of peering through the binoculars, but I couldn’t look away. The knot was back in my stomach again, but this time it was a sadistic anticipation that was causing it, a glorious hope of being able to hit back, with the cards stacked on our side for a change: a sense of appeasement after our constant fear, and our running eternally south. The sheep were now the wolves and, by God, we were getting our money’s worth.
And then — like a brain that suddenly snaps — it was all savagery, and noise, and violence, and hate.
At my shoulder I heard the hiss of indrawn breath as Evans watched the yellow patch on the water slowly darkening. My hands holding the binoculars started to shake uncontrollably, so that I had to lean with my elbows on the teak rail to steady them. I knew that, for the first time, we were about to see the fear that had stalked us.
The dark stain grew blacker and started to bubble like a witches’ cauldon as oil seeped and rose from ruptured fuel tanks. German oil. Vulture’s blood. Christ, how I wanted to see it turn into rich, red, satisfying plasma.
Then an obscene boil on the water. A bulge of whipped white foam and a belch of liberated air throwing great gouts of black liquid in high slashes against the burnt-yellow sky. Someone was shouting behind me and I realised it was Brannigan trying to tell the duty-trapped quartermaster at the wheel what was happening. ‘Yes! She’s coming up… She’s coming. Oh, the bastards, the beautiful bastards… There they come, right out of the bloody water… Aw, Jeeeeeesus!’
For a fleeting moment I was back five years to a big room in Port Said where I’d sheepishly paid a tin of fifty Gold Flake to watch two gigantic, sweat-shining bucks doing unspeakable things to a slim, blonde White Russian kid with enormous breasts… She’d screamed just like the Fourth as she’d writhed in the supreme eroticism.
Then I forgot about everything as the long, streaming hull rose nearly vertically from the deep. We heard the screech of desperately venting air tanks as she hung, almost motionless, on her tail like some old sailor’s nightmare dream of the terrible white whale. But she wasn’t white, she was black. Death black. The black of oil-burnt lungs, with little red and pink scars where the rust showed through. Black like the colour of Eric Clint’s drowned, suffocated face.
And, even in the milli-seconds while she was still suspended, a little man — a black little man — fell from her conning tower. A little man like the star figure that had spiralled into the air from the Commandant Joffre’s funnel. And the guns opened up on her from Mallard as she slowly tilted, then came crashing faster and faster into the waiting sea.
I heard a throaty boom from our own poop and felt the deck shiver. Phyllis was firing. by God but she was firing! Even above the smash of the shells I could hear the fat little bombardier screaming his fire orders in a high-pitched but surprisingly controlled voice. ‘LOAD! On…! On… On… FIRE!', then Phyllis boomed again and the shell sounded like a Fifth of November rocket as it screeched, supersonic, through the heavy air. Then, ‘LOAD…! On…! On…!’
The U-boat was lying low in the water by now, angled well over to port with her conning tower and gun platform almost brushing the water. I couldn’t see the surface around her for the white-whipped foam as Mallard opened up with light weapons while, on the little warship’s fore-deck, her gun crew moved like well-lubricated machines and empty brass cartridge cases sparkled in the sunlight.
The submarine’s ratings were leaving her fast now. Half-naked men, some of them enormously distended under inflated life preservers, all terror stricken… except for those who were already dead, ripped to bloody tatters before they even hit the water. I felt the shock-wave snap at my eardrums as our gun boomed again, then a tremendous explosion in the after part of the U-boat’s conning tower sent her light ack-ack gun spiralling high into the air.
I saw a man run with the hopelessness of death along the bloated buoyancy tanks, tiny matchstick legs jerking desperately towards the comparative safety of the smoother water at her bow… then the funny little Swan Vestas figure seemed to disintegrate as the sparking ricochets chased him along the black casing and overtook him. I watched an arm come off and still the legs kept on running for the impossible sanctuary ahead, then one of the legs came off too and the running corpse just fell apart, still travelling forward.
And suddenly I didn’t want to see any more blood, and I didn’t hate the Germans for what they did to Eric, and I wanted it all to stop… Please God, make it STOP!
And the Old Man was still gripping his Barr and Strouds and saying over and over again, ‘Oh, the bastards…! The bastards…!’, and I really wasn’t sure, this time, whether he meant Them or Us.