He half-turned, almost as if he were listening for something outside again, then the dispassionate eyes switched bleakly back to me. ‘I’m sorry, Kent,’ he muttered, ‘but you really died before you passed the Formby Light. The Kent Star message, those fairy lights that shepherded you south — all put out by our U-boat flotilla out there. Though like I say: the 'whys' and 'wherefores' are all somewhat academic now…’
The gun in his hand started to twist slightly along the axis of its barrel as he increased the trigger pressure — until I could see was that little black hole that got bigger and bigger by the milli-second.
‘Christ, man, there’s a Geneva CONVENTION!’ I screamed, ‘I’m a prisoner of war…’
His face was as bloodless as his trigger finger. Maybe even a fanatic finds it hard to kill a man in cold blood from a few feet away. But he was having a good try at overcoming his distaste. The last few ounces of trigger pressure were being used up as a nervous tic dragged the corner of his thin mouth down in a wry grimace.
‘Mallard had the same problem, Mate,’ he muttered. ‘Her orders said “No survivors” too…’
The shot sounded very loud in such a confined space.
I still don’t really know what happened during my allocated seconds of killing time, largely because I'd screwed my eyes up tight and just launched towards him in a sort of airborne foetal position. I felt the white-hot smash of the round sear my shoulder, then we went down together in a welter of flailing limbs and curses.
The tough, bucko mate inside me grinned savagely as I saw the gun skitter across the compo deck towards the door — then something hard hit me in the face and my eyes stung from the ductile tears that prevented me from seeing anything at all.
Larabee’s foot came up into my unprotected groin and I heard myself shriek in agony while the bucko mate image disintegrated in an oblivion of pain. I felt my already-abused finger nails split as I scrabbled at the edge of the operator’s table, trying to haul myself erect while Larabee mouthed unfamiliar, guttural imprecations as he swung the heavy chair at my head.
Frantically I ducked and felt shards of splintered glass dials lodge in my hair as the front of the gleaming grey transmitter caved in and the blue flashes of abruptly shorted H.T. circuits gave place to the sickly stench of crisping insulation.
Any last ideas I had about actually hitting Larabee disappeared when his deck shoe caught me under the chin. I went down on my knees thinking what a bloody splendid job the Nazis did in training their agents for every contingency, then I was being sick and watching dully as Larabee snatched up the vagrant gun and backed towards the door.
This time I just closed my eyes and waited. I couldn’t even tense my stomach muscles in anticipation…
On reflection it was probably the curious choking noise Larabee was making that finally dragged my eyelids open again — only to freeze wide in an uncomprehending idiot’s stare at the sight of the Second Wireless Operator pinned to the wooden door frame by an evilly curved and very rusty cargo billy-hook that someone had driven cleanly through his shoulder blade and muscles.
And at a white-faced Third Officer Curtis, who was gazing with a look of almost frightened anticipation for my immediate reaction to this most curious phenomenon.
‘I heard Sparks yelling in German, Sir,’ he explained apprehensively: almost apologetically. ‘so I thought I’d better help.’
Then Larabee started to scream in a thin, high-pitched key like an animal caught in a trap, while all the time he was fluttering on the hook the way a butterfly does when a kid sticks a pin through it. Considerately Curtis slammed him across the face with a length of four by three and I heard his nose and cheekbones disintegrate along with his consciousness.
I groaned, ‘Thank you, Mister Curtis,’ with feeling, and watched while the Third Mate was being sick in the scuppers, which showed that he was just like me really, and that I’d been as wrong about him as I had about Larabee.
…until the silence of Quintanilha de Almeida was shattered by the sickening rattle of the U-boat’s Spandau machine-gun opening up, followed immediately by the measured pom… pom… POM of her twin-cannons, supported by the intermittent crackle of small-arms fire.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For perhaps three million years I stood there, frozen in horror while I waited for the shells to come pumping and ripping through the wireless room bulkheads, cremating and smearing us all to an unrecognisable pulp.
Then, gradually, I realised the shells weren’t going to arrive and, with a different kind of appalled fear, I knew what was happening out there on the sunlit water. I forgot the still suspended Larabee and clawed my way brutally past him, stumbling on the low coaming.
Curtis’s eyes were huge with shock. ‘Jesus!’ he screamed. ‘The boats! They’re shooting up the bloody boats.’
And suddenly I was outside on the boat deck with the still warm rays of the setting sun blinding me after the darkness of the radio room, and we were crawling on our hands and knees for the cover of the holed wooden hull of number two starboard lifeboat as it hung forlornly outboard under its swung-out davits.
I hardly felt the web of pain encasing my body as the beating Larabee had given me signalled itself: too sickened and numb with the impact of the scene that opened out before me in the narrow space between the two ships. The killing machine was in gear again, working as smoothly and as efficiently as before, with the U-boat crew silhouetted against the glittering backdrop of the anchorage waters and the whole length of her black casing sparkling with the muzzle flashes of various calibre weapons.
I had time to notice the hungry, predatory shape of her 4.1, abandoned and pointing idly over her bows, then the figure of the one-pounder gunner hanging well back in his straps as he traversed the bell-mouthed barrels across the water, spitting a constant stream of light shells as he swung and — towering above them all — the man in the white peaked cap high in his conning tower, leaning casually, almost disinterestedly, over the rail beside the jolting Spandau mounting.
Then my tear-blurred eyes switched involuntarily to the Cyclops’s boats.
All that was left of number three — which should have been my boat — was already down to the gunnels, kept afloat only by the last bubbles of air trapped in its riddled buoyancy tanks below the thwarts while, all the time, bits of shattered oars and canvas and men kept on leaping and up-ending in the foam-whipped pink water as the Spandau lashed the area into a boiling foam. I saw young Breedie’s torn corpse still erect at the tiller, then a one-pounder cannon shell exploded just where his chest should have been and the kid vanished in a fine spray of bright red blood and flesh and flying condensed-milk cans from the after stores locker.
Lying beside me Curtis suddenly drew his knees to his chin and dragged in great gouts of retching, uncontrollable air while I had one more indelible vision of a slowly-spreading ring of men face down in kapok-protruding lifejackets, including two in the floating tatters of bright silk pyjamas. Then the line of bullet-lashed foam extended to one side, towards the Captain’s boat, reaching and at the same time contracting at its rear like some monstrous, hideous caterpillar creeping over the water until, suddenly, they were all screaming and jerking as the concentrated fire turned on the virgin target.