‘ Spread out! One of you to each major ship! Report any hostile activity to me instantly! We’ll trail with them until after sunset! Spread!’
The others obeyed, rising to position, ready. Not near enough to the surface so the sun could get at their flesh.
They waited. The hammer-hammer, chum-churn of ships folded and grew upon itself. The sea brimmed with its bellow going down to kick the sand and striking up in reflected quivers of sound. Hammer-hammer-churn!
Richard Jameson!
Alita dared raise her head above the water. The sun hit her like a dull hammer. Her eyes flicked, searching, and as she sank down again she cried, ‘Richard. It’s his ship. The first destroyer. I recognize the number. He’s here again!’
‘Alita, please,’ cautioned the old woman. ‘Control yourself. My boy too. He’s on one of the cargo ships. I know its propeller voice well. I recognize the sound. One of my boys is here, near me. And it feels so very good.’
The whole score of them swam to meet the convoy. Only Helene stayed behind. Swimming around and around the German U-boat, swimming swiftly and laughing her strange high laugh that wasn’t sane.
Alita felt something like elation rising in her. It was good, just to be this close to Richard, even if she couldn’t speak or show herself or kiss him ever again. She’d watch him every time he came by this way. Perhaps she’d swim all night, now, and part of the next day, until she couldn't keep up with him any longer, and
then she’d whisper goodbye and let him sail on alone.
The destroyer cut close to her. She saw its number on the prow in the sun. And the sea sprang aside as the destroyer cut it like a glittering knife.
There was a moment of exhilaration, and then Conda shouted it deep and loud and excited:
‘Submarine! Submarine coming from north, cutting across convoy! German!’
Richard!
Alita’s body twisted fearfully as she heard the under-water vibration that meant a submarine was coming in toward them, fast. A dark long shadow pulsed underwater.
There was nothing you could do to stop a moving submarine, unless you were lucky. You could try stopping it by jamming its propellers, but there wasn’t time for that.
Conda yelled, ‘Close in on the sub! Try to stop it somehow! Block the periscope. Do anything!’
But the German U-boat gnashed in like a mercurial monster. In three breaths it was lined up with the convoy, unseen, and squaring off to release its torpedoes.
Down below, like some dim-moving fantasy, Helene swam in eccentric circles, but as the sub shadow trailed over her she snapped her face up, her hot eyes pulled wide and she launched herself with terrific energy up at it, her face blazing with fury!
The ships of the convoy moved on, all unaware of the poisoned waters they churned. Their great valvular hearts pounding, their screws thrashing a wild water song.
‘Conda, do something! Conda!’ Alita shivered as her mind thrust the thoughts out at the red-bearded giant. Conda moved like a magnificent shark up toward the propellers of the U-boat, swift and angry.
Squirting, bubbling, jolting, the sub expelled a child of force, a streamlined torpedo that kicked out of its metal womb, trailed by a second, launched with terrific impetus - at the destroyer.
Alita kicked with her feet. She grasped at the veils of water with helpless fingers, blew all the water from her lungs in a stifled scream.
Things happened swiftly. She had to swim at incredible speed just to keep pace with submarine and convoy. And - spinning a bubbled trail of web - the torpedoes coursed at the destroyer as Alita swam her frantic way.
'It missed! Both torps missed!’ someone cried; it sounded like the old woman.
Oh, Richard, Richard, don’t you know the sub is near you. Don’t let it bring you down to. . . this, Richard! Drop the depth charges! Drop them now!
Nothing.
Conda clung to the conning tower of the U-boat, cursing with elemental rage, striving uselessly.
Two more torpedoes issued from the mouths of the sub and went surging on their trajectories. Maybe -
'Missed again!’
Alita was gaining. Gaining. Getting closer to the destroyer. If only she could leap from the waters, shouting. If only she were something else but this dead white flesh. . .
Another torpedo. The last one, probably, in the sub.
It was going to hit!
Alita knew that before she’d taken three strokes more. She swam exactly alongside the destroyer now, the submarine was many many yards ahead when it let loose its last explosive. She saw it come, shining like some new kind of fish, and she knew the range was correct this time.
In an instant she knew what there was to be done. In an instant she knew the whole purpose and destiny of her swimming and being only half-dead. It meant the end of swimming forever, now, the end of thinking about Richard and never having him for herself ever again. It meant -
She kicked her heels in the face of water, stroked ahead, clean, quick. The torpedo came directly at her with its blunt, ugly nose.’
Alita coasted, spread her arms wide, waited to embrace it, take it to her breast like a long-lost lover.
She shouted it out in her mind;
'Helene! Helene! From now on - from now on - take care of Richard for me! Watch over him for me! Take care of Richard -!’
‘Submarine off starboard!’
‘Ready depth-charges!’
‘Torpedo traces! Four of them! Missed us!’
‘Here comes another one! They’ve got our range this time, Jameson! Watch it!’
To the men on the bridge it was the last moment before hell. Richard Jameson stood there with his teeth clenched, yelling, ‘Hard over!’ but it was no use; that torp was coming on, not caring, not looking where it was going. It would hit them amidship! Jameson’s face went white all over and he breathed under his breath and clutched the rail.
The torpedo never reached the destroyer.
It exploded about one hundred feet from the destroyer’s hull. Jameson fell to the deck, swearing. He waited. He staggered up moments later, helped by his junior officer.
‘That was a close one, sir!’
‘What happened?’
‘That torp had our range, sir. But they must have put a faulty mechanism in her. She exploded short of her goal. Struck a submerged log or something.’
Jameson stood there with salt spraying his face. ‘I thought I saw something just before the explosion. It looked like a. . .log. Yeah. That was it. A log.’
‘Lucky for us, eh, sir?’
‘Yeah. Damn lucky.’
‘Depth-charge! Toss ’em!’
Depth-charges were dropped. Moments later a subwater explosion tore up the water. Oil bubbled up to colour the waves, with bits of wreckage mixed in it.
‘We got the sub,’ someone said.
‘Yeah. And the sub almost got us!’
The destroyer ran in the wave channels, in the free wind, under a darkening sky.
‘Full speed ahead!’
The ocean slept quiet as the convoy moved on in the twilight. There was little movement in its deep green silence. Except for some things that may have been a swarm of silver fish gathered below, just under the waters where the convoy had passed; pale things stirring, flashing a flash of white, and swimming off silently, strangely, into the deep green soundlessness of the undersea valleys. . .
The ocean slept again.
C. S. Forester
THE TURNING OF THE TIDE
It is perhaps only right after spending so much of this collection far out on the vastness of the oceans, to return to the shore for this final contribution. It is also most appropriately by the Twentieth Century's best-known writer of sea stories, C. S. Forester (1899-1966), creator of the immortal Horatio Homblower series which ran from 1937 to his death.