The Aldis clacked sharply and I saw the white cap on the U-boat nod, then the boat surged forward towards us leaving a trail of bubbles astern while the big foredeck gun traversed on an unwavering line dead centre with our bridge. She was about half a mile from us when Evans suddenly grabbed the rail and pointed out past her to the now distant Athenian.
‘Look, Mister! She’s got the other Hun right under her bow…!’
Then everything was sick, hysterical excitement on the bridge again as we forgot about the closing menace to ourselves and watched the last act in the mammoth tragedy. Even through binoculars it was difficult to see for the pall of oily, dead smoke blanketing the far end of the anchorage, but I could just make out the blazing bulk of our sister as she fast approached the entrance through which we had so carefully manoeuvred. Then someone hit me on the shoulder and screamed in my ear, ‘The OTHER U-boat…! Jesus, but she’s broadside on in the channel. Bert’s goin’ to stamp right over her…’
I peered desperately through the smoke. Yes — there she was… the second submarine! They’d been waiting to cover the entrance as Athenian began her suicidal rush but then, when they saw the great ship running amok, the German commander had tried to turn his boat too late and too hurriedly. Now she was stuck fast with her bows dug into that underwater shelf and her whole length exposed to the approaching knife of Athenian’s cutwater, after nearly two miles of a run working up to maybe fifteen knots and still relentlessly increasing as her engineers remained grimly below, responsive only to the telegraphed commands that would never come from what must have been a blind skeleton of a bridge.
Evans was sobbing as he gripped his Barr and Strouds so that the knuckles stood out bleached white against the brown skin of his hands. So was I; so was Brannigan. Maybe even Larabee was at that moment because he'd fallen strangely quiet after his earlier shout.
Then the Old Man whispered, ‘I’ll give Sheila your love, Bert. You bloody-minded, mad old bugger!’
…and Athenian was climbing up and up, over the black hull below, driving on into the slender conning tower and forcing the whole length of the U-boat ahead of her like a mad dog with a bone in its teeth, unable to stop running to inevitable death.
I saw the cigar hull rolling over and over as it was hurled beam on through the water by Athenian’s weight while the two ships, locked inextricably together now in a Herculean embrace, drove monstrously towards the beach at the far end of the inland sea. That beach all beautiful and golden, which I’d noticed as we first entered.
Someone was screaming a flood of epithets from our after decks but I couldn’t take my eyes from the two convulsing ships as Athenian, driving under full power, finally pulverised her enemy into the shallows and kept on going up and over and on to the sparkling sand: blazing from end to end… driving and tearing with the unholy shriek of tortured metal filling the whole island lake as she ripped the bottom right out of herself. Her mast toppled forward into the conflagration yet even then she kept on rearing unbelievably out of the blood-red water until we glimpsed the flashing, spinning discs of her great phosphor-bronze propellers carving twin canyons deep into the once pretty beach.
Even the cold white cap in the remaining U-boat’s conning tower was turned to watch in fascinated horror as the deformity that had been our sister ship came finally to rest. The sounds of her breaking died away to a muted roar from the white-hot flames eating lower and lower into her holds while the black smoke stopped streaming aft and, instead, rose vertically sullen into the clear blue of the evening sky.
And I knew for sure that Bill was dead, like Eric, and Bert Samson and all the rest of Athenian’s crowd. All fast cremating in a twelve-thousand ton oven.
…and that was the moment when she blew up.
The first explosion, forward of what had been her bridge structure, threw debris and giant pieces of ship high into the air; then a chain reaction followed as, hold by hold, Athenian disintegrated into a million flying, whirling fragments while detonation after detonation fused into one long, ear-smashing roar.
I watched with curiously detached, almost clinical interest, as the whole of the midships centrecastle rose slowly two hundred feet into the air and fell back into the holocaust, breaking into great slabs of twisted steel. The surface of the lake rose in boiling splurges of foam for a mile towards us as hissing fragments ripped into it like semi-molten meteors.
And then the blast.
Cyclops heeled twenty degrees to port as the first shock waves hit us, fanning out across the anchorage with supersonic speed. I felt her snub at the anchor cable before the invisible pressure, then we were swinging crazily with something booming against our exposed sides time and time again and the blast catching every unwary man to hurl him backwards, away from the rails, with contemptuous arrogance. High above the wheelhouse I glimpsed the teak-wood sides of the monkey island buckle, then whirl away to port, carrying Charlie Shell’s little white-painted submarine with them. Then I was lying flat on my back on the deck watching stupidly as our once irrepressible Fourth Mate took off over the prostrate forms of the Captain and Larabee and, screaming horribly, crashed head first through the plate-glass windows of the wheelhouse in a glittering cascade of razor-edged shards, still attached to the umbilical cord of the Aldis lead.
I lay there whimpering hysterically and trying to dig with broken finger nails into the wooden decking, feeling the ship straining in agony against her cable while the continuing rumblings from the eviscerated Athenian kept on beating and beating at us with brain numbing force, until — suddenly — it was over.
The last detonation passed, echoing round the black, overhanging cliffs, and we lay for a moment like dead men. Then Brannigan started screaming dreadfully from his bed of scalpels inside the caved-in wheelhouse while we climbed numbly to our feet, still reeling with the shock of it. I wanted to go straight to Brannigan, to try and stop him screaming like that, but I couldn’t — not till I’d looked to see if both U-boats had died along with Athenian. To discover if her suicide had meant something after all.
God, but how I yearned to see that bloody white peaked cap floating in the oil-fouled water…
But no. She was still there, still cruising off our beam, slightly headed away from us now but with that big, black gun already being manned again by her dazed sailors. They must have taken a beating too, though, and I could see a rope being thrown down over the bulge of her tanks to a man struggling in the water. One more minute, however, and she’d be on an attack course again, with us as helpless as before despite all the bloodshed and agony.
Larabee said ‘Jesus Christ!’ in a shocked voice from inside the wheelhouse, and Evans bellowed ‘Mister KENT!’ above the crackling of ground glass. I turned unthinkingly, sick with despair, and stepped through the shattered door, then froze abruptly. I retained one brief image of a gleaming white skull from which nearly every shred of flesh had been stripped but in which the black hole of a mouth still opened and bubbled, then I was back outside again on the wing, retching into the still agitated water far below.