‘By the deep… eight.’
More depth under us. Good, maybe the book was wrong. Slow, very slow… Still nothing ahead. We were almost stopped now, have to give her a turn on the screws or we’ll lose steerage way completely, but Evans was being careful, very careful. I couldn’t even see the giant rock now, it must have slid well aft. Thank you for being good to…
‘Good God Almighty!’ Brannigan suddenly shouted, drawing back involuntarily.
Then I drew back too as I saw deep down into the water twenty feet from our already splintered forefoot. A great, black, evil wall of stone rising sheer to a point just below the surface… a solid, impenetrable barrier of nightmare outcrops, the whole mass seeming to weave gently under its obscene growth of marine plants.
I whirled round with frantically cupped hands, retaining a never-to-be-forgotten mental imprint of tiny, gaily coloured fish nosing in and out of the floating fronds. ‘Shelf dead AHEAD! The SHELF…!’
The Old Man’s hand raised in almost casual acknowledgement, then immediately I heard the telegraphs jangle from the wheelhouse. Through the open windows I could see the quartermaster bending over the spinning wheel as he gave her full helm, then the steel deck started to bounce and throb under the power of our twin screws. I knew right away what Evans was doing, the shaking judder under my feet told me. Slow ahead port engine, slow astern starboard. The shuddering grew more and more violent as, terribly slowly, we started to revolve around our own axis.
Was our stern clear aft, or would the flashing screws strike the tail end of the submarine hazards of the entrance and disintegrate into spinning shards of phosphor-bronze scrap?
‘By the mark… seven.’ Oh, that bloody, phlegmatic old Bosun.
It was all rock and blackness under us now… Christ, we were ON to it! The bow jumped under our feet and we braced ourselves for the shock. Almost stopped though. The already impacted plating below us screamed as our great bows ground into the weed-skirted stone, crushing and boring. I closed my eyes and listened to the ship’s agony, while Brannigan kept on thumping at the steel rail, on and on and on, as Evans had done that time we ran the corvette down.
The water round the bows was cloudy now, its crystal purity contaminated by tons of ground pumice as we slowly swung to starboard. I ventured a glance aft. Evans still stood out there on the wing, unmoving and unflustered. The swing increased and the submarine grinding and splintering faltered — then stopped.
Brannigan and I leaned well out. Yes! The flared steel below was broadsiding into clear, deep water. The Fourth Mate grinned idiotically at me in excited relief, while the sailors at the rail slapped each other on the back and swore as if they’d just unearthed some new lexicon of seagoing ribaldry. I forced myself to walk nonchalantly aft to the break of the foc’sle, feeling my legs tremble under me, and waved again to the solitary little figure above.
‘All clear forr’ad, Sir!’ I yelled, then, turning on the crowd, made like a bucko mate again. ‘Stop that bloody ROW there…! Chippie, stand by to let go starboard. All hands abaft the windlass.’
From the bridge came the jangle of the telegraphs again. ‘Stop starboard engine.’ The shuddering cut immediately, then the bells again, ‘Dead slow ahead both engines,’ and we steadied on a heading for the far end of the lake.
The Third Mate came out of the wheelhouse. I heard a soft cough and a red flare soared high into the royal blue sky to burst with a distant plop and a fuzzy puff of grey smoke. Then another went up to hang beside it.
And we’d arrived at Quintanilha de Almeida.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bill Henderson met me at the top of Athenian’s accommodation ladder as I ran up from the waiting motor lifeboat we’d lowered to act as a ship-to-ship tender for the next three days.
We shook hands, then simply gazed at each other for a few moments, grinning like idiots. He looked as sun-bronzed and fit as ever, did Bill; standing there in immaculate whites with his cap shoved jauntily on the back of his head and the three tarnished gold straps of his epaulettes sitting saltily on the broad shoulders.
Then he pretended to punch me and said, ‘Come over for a few lessons in ship-keeping then, John?’
I glanced round the spotless decks with an exaggerated expression of distaste. ‘Nope! Just thought maybe you’d have some problems you’d be too embarrassed to ask me to solve for you.’
We laughed and climbed the ladders, identical in every respect to those of Cyclops, to the boat deck and master’s quarters below the bridge. As we climbed I glanced around at the island of Quintanilha de Almeida again. Probably about four miles long by some two and a half wide it wasn’t really so much an island as a natural funk hole from our viewpoint, situated as we were at the extreme western end of the deep-water lake, well away from the entrance. Behind us black cliffs dropped sheer to the water, as they did on our adjacent sides but, almost two miles distant on the other side of the channel, the sun glinted on the warm sand of the beach which I’d noticed as we performed our gate-crashing pirouette. I’d rather fancied dropping the hook there but the Old Man had said ‘No.’ He wanted to stay as far from the shallow ground as possible in case the wind got up and backed farther to the left as is normal in the southern hemisphere.
We planned to land a lookout party the next morning to watch for any sign of seaward activity, enemy or otherwise — not that we could have done much about it, penned in as we were by the protective — or might that more properly be described as captive? — natural breakwaters around. The thought reinforced that uncomfortable sensation I'd felt earlier… that now we were doubly in affinity with the remote islanders of Tristan da Cunha: that this place was also the freak result of some long-forgotten underwater disturbance, and that we were actually anchored in the maw of an enormous submarine volcano thrust to the surface some millions of years before.
I hesitated a moment before the burnt-out carcase of the radio room, and Bill gestured to where our own gun's shell had penetrated; a great jagged gash in the thick steel plating. ‘Who in God’s name would want to do a hellish thing like that, John?’
I shook my head bitterly and told him as much as I knew. I could see he was as baffled as we were but he didn’t look disapproving as he might have done under the circumstances. Just glanced at the mess of tortured steel and incinerated wireless equipment and said softly, ‘Poor sods never knew what hit them.’
I bit my lip, imagining what it must have been like. One minute everything quiet and dark with the ship ploughing steadily on its track, then a banshee scream out of the blackness and a holocaust of super-heated steel shards exploding through jetting white flames and frying, disintegrating corpses.
‘What about the cadet who was killed, Bill? How come he was around this part of the ship at that time in the morning?’
‘Mike Simpson,’ Bill stubbed viciously at a blob of molten metal with the toe of his deck shoe, and I could see my question had shaken him badly. ‘He was in my watch, John. I thought he looked kind of peaky so I was a good bloke and sent him down to the half-deck for an extra smoke. The fuckin’ bastard shot took his bloody head clean off as he walked aft, past here.’
I gazed at the rusty smears on the charred wooden deck and felt sick. I’d tried to be decent like that to young Conway so I could imagine what Bill must be thinking. He moved away forward and I followed as he spoke over his shoulder. ‘It was Mike’s first trip. He was an only son. Doesn’t the name ring a bell with you?’