‘Perhaps, Sir, if I take the gunlayer’s seat, you could feed the ammo? Have another round ready to load?’
Even though I knew I owed him at least this fleeting extension to my life, I still couldn’t help glowering like a Chief Officer. ‘D'you know what the blazes you’re doing, Mister? We’ve maybe sixty seconds of a surprise factor over them and we’re running second favourite from then on. We don’t have time to read the Admiralty Manual of Gunnery.’
He looked lugubriously modest. ‘Actually I’m RN Reserve. Even went on a gunnery exercise once. Plan to transfer to regular RN service when we get back. Learn to shoot properly.’
I could only hope he'd get the bloody opportunity. I also wished he’d inspire a bit more confidence, more like Charlie Shell. But then, Charlie was dead. I snatched one more hurried glance at our proposed target and noted gratefully that she was virtually broadside on to us, with the wicked silhouette of her foredeck gun still unmanned and nosing well over to the other side of the anchorage. A movement abaft the conning tower caught my eye and I could see several men leaning over the rubber raft, sliding it down over the pregnant bulge of her buoyancy tanks.
I dug Curtis with my elbow, ‘They’re getting ready to send the boarding party. If we’re going, then for Christ’s sake, let’s go.’
…and suddenly, without really realising it, we were both on our feet and running desperately for the gun called Phyllis.
The next few seconds passed in a heart-pounding terror of fumbling with blood-slimed handles and catches and clips, then I'd wrenched the lid of the ready-use ammo locker open and was reaching in for the long, shiny brass cylinders of the shells. Hell! Fuses? Were they fused already? Yes, I remembered Allen had once said they were all set to explode on contact. One brief, shocking sight of an officer’s white deck shoe still with a stocking and something else projecting from it — there had only been one man up here with merchant navy officer’s rig when the last futile duel had taken place — then I was swinging round past other contorted shapes towards Curtis and our very last hope.
He was already in the stained gunlayer’s seat, spinning the traversing handle with surprisingly competent hands, head bent forward and mouth twisted in a half-open grimace as his right eye glued to the foam rubber cup of the gunsight while, twelve feet ahead of me, the slightly belled muzzle travelled agonisingly slowly along the submarine’s length. I heard myself whispering to it, whispering because my throat had gone all dry and constricted with the fear of what would happen if the gun across the water spoke first. ‘Get round faster, gun… Get round faster before…’
And then they’d SEEN us! A startled shout from the U-boat’s deck. ‘ACHTUNG!’ and instantly the lounging shapes were running forward towards their own weapon while a voice from her conning tower screamed ‘Raus! Raus!’ and the white cap was lunging for the butt of the Spandau still hanging dejectedly downwards in its mounting.
Then Curtis was yelling the same magical incantation that the incinerated Bombardier at our feet had intoned. ‘On…! On…! ON…!’ while I was screaming at the top of my fear-resurrected voice, ‘Oh, get round, you bitch — Please get round…’ and the Third Mate’s hand was blurring on the dull brass traverse wheel. Three cables away the long black gun had started to vector, too, while at the same time the Spandau muzzle was sweeping towards us…
I had my arms round the cold cylinder of cordite- and Amatol-packed metal, hugging it so tight that I could feel its raised base rim cutting into my groin, but all I could do was stare in horrified fascination at Phyllis’s snout as it actually passed the high conning tower and still kept on traversing, turning all too slowly on to the rapidly fore-shortening silhouette of the German gun.
‘Jus' FIRE, Curtis!’ I bellowed, hating him for being such a perfectionist, for frittering away that last chance of saving my life. ‘Fire for Chrissake, or do you bloody want to die?’
Then the brass wheel had stopped spinning and Curtis’s white arm was stretching for the firing lever and he was screaming, ‘Bugger you! I’m going to… shoot.’
And when the muzzle flash had expanded into a hot, cordite-tainted cloud, and the deck had stopped leaping under my feet, the gun on the U-boat’s casing had gone, and the only member of its crew still to be seen was stumbling round and round in shrieking circles trying to hold his face on with stumps of arms until the demented figure finally stepped blindly into space to roll, smoking and kicking, down the bulge of her ballast tanks and into the already occupied waters of Quintanilha.
I felt tears of hysteria streaming down my cheeks as I heard myself laughing and crying at the same time, and shouting, ‘Oh you beaut, Three Oh… You bloody lovely man!’
Then White Cap reappeared over the coaming of the blast-pocked conning tower and felt dedicatedly for the Spandau again while another two figures picked themselves from the U-boat’s after deck and started running for the still-unharmed one-pounder. Curtis clawed the breech open and yelled, ‘Shurrup an’ LOAD… Sir!’ as the empty brass case slid backwards in a cloud of evil-smelling fumes and clanged to the deck between us.
I barely felt the tips of my second and third fingers slice off when Curtis slammed the breech shut on them, then he was banging the locking bar with the heel of his hand and Phyllis started to traverse again, back along the length of the U-boat to where the conning tower gunners were going through their still machine-precision drill.
‘Get more shells,’ Curtis panted as his brow banged against the rubber cup again. ‘More, more, more!’
One brief glimpse of the Spandau finally spitting flickering gouts of flame in the near darkness, the flashes lighting up the water round the black shape of the submarine, and I was lying flat on the deck with my hands clasped over my head while the terrifying drum of heavy calibre rounds climbed the ship’s hull below us. Suddenly everything was clattering and spanging under that hail of supersonic metal. Above me Cyclops’s Red Ensign jerked and flapped grotesquely as crisply-edged brown holes appeared in it.
The racketing suddenly stopped as if a sound-proof door had been slammed and I lay for a second blinking stupidly into the strangely indifferent, placid features of one of the dead army gunners. Why had the Spandau suddenly stopped firing? The magazine… they must be having to change the magazine over there…
Curtis’s tight voice filtered through my numbed brain. God but he had guts to have stayed up there on that exposed seat at the gun. ‘Mister Kent! Where the bloody…?’ I raised my head and saw his wide, black eyes against the whiteness of his face…
‘MISFIRE!’ he screamed.
Misfire? Oh Jesus! I scrambled to my feet, skidding in the mess below me, ignored it and staggered to the gaping locker. Another round with the pain now shooting from my semi-amputated fingers and I was swivelling back towards the gun as the misfire ejected past its open breech-block and smashed alarmingly to the deck. Curtis dived for it and grappled for a hold on the slippery, verdigrised cylinder while I frantically pushed the new coned shape from my arms into the spiral rifled mouth.
I slammed the breech shut while bawling at the Third Mate again as he still struggled to lift the rolling misfire. We didn’t have time to be tidy. ‘Leave it, man. Leave it for Chrissake!’