Then he was up on his feet, running for the rail with the shell pulled well into his stomach. ‘Get out of my bloody way, Mate!’ and the wiry young body was past me and hurling the thing over the taffrail. It exploded as it hit the water and yellow sea cascaded back over the rail as I stood stunned with the shock of it. And he’d had it buried in his guts two seconds before…?
The first one-pounder cannon shell from the U-boat burst squarely against the ten-inch port docking bollard five feet behind me just one and a half seconds later.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I was lying stupidly on my back under the long grey barrel of the gun. Yet I distinctly remembered being behind the breech of it a moment before. Then I stared vacantly down at the empty space where my left foot had been, and started to laugh when I saw the stump of bone and sinew protruding flesh below the brown knee… Snap, Charlie Shell! Now I’m getting cut down to your size.
Poor bloody Royal Naval Reserve Officer Curtis. I wonder how many spare parts you’re going to need after that hit? But now you’re dead and I’ll never…
I found I’d even been wrong about that when the muzzle flash from Phyllis licked down at me and I felt the hair on my floating head singe in the heat. I turned just in time to see our shell land smack at the base of the U-boat’s conning tower and watched with intense interest as White Cap shot up out of his perch like a human cannon-ball on the end of a jet of smoke. Just at the top of his arc the cap fell off as he hung, momentarily suspended, above his beautifully trained crew, then fell, a perfectly ordinary little corpse, back to join Evans and McKenzie and Conway and the rest of Cyclops’s crowd as they bobbed obscenely in the Quintanilha Polka.
And the Third Mate’s smoke-blackened face, with a deep cut above the eye pouring blood all down his right cheek, hovered above me for a moment, frowning at the embarrassingly untidy stump of my severed shin bone, then his voice said tightly, ‘Hang on, for God’s sake, Sir! I’ll be with you in a sec…’
Then I started to scream with the pain from a foot that wasn’t even there, while the gaping muzzle above me flashed and smashed thunderously God knows how many times, with the high-explosive fumes belching down on me and charring my skin. All around the tanks of the now burning, listing U-boat, men were jumping into the water as the shells from Phyllis searched out the vital spot in her forward torpedo room.
Until one found the first sleek warhead in her tubes and she started to blow up as ton after ton of Amatol fused into one long, brain-bursting roar, and Cyclops was snubbing at her cable in terror for the second time while Curtis clawed at the slime on the deck beside me and said over and over again, ‘Jesus, that was awkward. The trigger position’s different to the one in the manual…’
And I finally passed out, thinking what a funny thing to say when you’ve just killed a hundred men.
I remember coming round again and seeing Curtis through a haze of pain, framed against the gun barrel that still slashed across the scope of my vision. It was pretty dark now and, above and behind him, the clear violet sky sparkled with a myriad of tiny, twinkling stars. White teeth gleamed reassuringly in the shadow of his face as he smiled softly, holding up a strip from his torn shirt.
‘Tourniquet, Sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and rake up some morphine once I’ve got you fixed up. Anything else you want?’
There was, but I didn’t think even the admirable Curtis could manage that.
I wanted my leg back.
I remember the way the bile choked me as Curtis applied the torniquet. Then more floating in a morass of delirium. It seemed an expensive way to go about shearing a bloke’s limb from his body. I mean, two million pounds’ worth of ships on the bottom? My damned leg was worth more than Betty Grable’s… I started to laugh, then cry, then laugh and cry all at the same time, until Curtis gave the stricture one last, gentle twist which wasn’t quite gentle enough, and I toppled yet again into the blackness of a billion slimy horrors…
When I next opened my eyes it was to find myself propped against the pedestal of the gunlayer’s chair with the warm gleam of the brass firing lever just above me. I tried to move my leg and couldn’t. In fact I could hardly move anything at all, not from the waist down, yet at the same time I didn’t feel much pain — more a sort of numbness, an impression of drifting just beyond the fringe of a terrible, threatening agony.
A clang behind me made me twist slightly to see the Third Mate slamming shut the cordite-stained breech mechanism. He glanced down and smiled nervously, ‘Thought I’d leave one up the spout. Just in case…’
In case of what? There were only corpses out there now, Curtis… sundered, life-jacketed shells of men and, maybe, a few ghosts out of all the dead sailormen. He knelt down on one knee beside me and shivered. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘It gets surprisingly cold out here at night, doesn’t it?’
I tried to grin painfully back at him because I knew he was looking for comfort too, but he held up a cautionary finger. ‘Don’t try to talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you a shot of morphine from the emergency pack. Your leg… I’ve tied it off as best I can. Maybe if we can get you forr’ad to the…?’
He stopped talking then — rather abruptly — and his eyes grew wide and surprised for a few seconds. Almost hurt, if you know what I mean. There was something else slightly different about his face, too, but it took me much the same time to realise what it was.
He’d now got three eyes!
As Third Officer Curtis keeled forward into the space where my leg used to be, I noticed something else that struck me as odd — he didn’t have any back to his skull. And then I found out why.
…because the little hole in his forehead was precisely the same diameter as the one in the end of Larabee’s gun.
Larabee — it must have been Larabee, though you couldn’t have told from the grotesquely deformed mask of a face above the radio operator’s epaulettes on the smashed shoulder— Larabee heaved himself laboriously over the break of the ladder and sort of half-rolled towards me with a muffled sob of agony. He was still pretty well in control of the pistol, though.
I slumped there, staring stupidly into the back door in Curtis’s head, as the Second Sparks climbed painfully to his feet, stood swaying against the backdrop of the stars, and said, ‘Heroic bastards!’
I felt the closing agony very near. Suddenly I didn’t care any more, so I put my arms around poor, misunderstood Curtis and whispered, ‘For Christ’s sake, get it over with, Larabee…’
Through the twilight I could still detect flecks of spittle clinging to the corners of the slashed mouth as he shook his head deliberately. ‘Get up, Kent. I want to see you take it on your feet.’
Which was bloody ironic, really.
I felt the tears wash into my sandpaper eyes as I lay there under the gun feeling very lonely. Larabee started to shake uncontrollably and I knew he, too, was near the end of his tether. He dragged in a shuddering gout of agony-laden breath and stumbled forward a couple of paces. I thought he was going to pass out right then but he recovered and, clinging weakly to the depressed muzzle of Phyllis, jerked the automatic savagely in line with my belly again.
‘Get up, Kent,’ he muttered, ‘’cause if you don’t, I’ll make damn sure it’s only the last shot that kills you… an’ I’ve still got five left.’