He ordered, “Full ahead both.” And: “Signalman! Get on the searchlight and start signalling westward as soon as I give the word. Anything you like as long as that battlecruiser can see it when she comes up.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” The signalman swung himself up on to the searchlight platform at the back of the bridge and trained the searchlight around to starboard.
Smith called up to him. “But keep a sharp look-out as well! If you see any ship I want to know!” There was always the chance of a miracle, that a British force was already at sea and closing them.
He told Gow, “Keep her head on that smoke now.”
Gow answered patiently, “Aye, aye, sir.”
Smith shut his mouth. That had been an unnecessary order.
From twenty knots Sparrow was steadily working up to her full speed of twenty-six. She trembled and racketed along with the pounding thrust of her engines. The bridge vibrated under their feet and the kettle that had held the tea for the twelve pounder’s crew danced across the gun-platform until the killick grabbed it, swearing, and jammed it in a corner of the screen. Smith looked back at the smoke pouring from the three funnels, then up at the ensigns that streamed spread flat on the wind with now and again a crack! like a pistol shot. There were two of them because early in the war the white ensign had been mistaken for the German so ships were ordered to hoist two to avoid a mistake but there could be no mistake today. Sparrow flew two because they were all she had. Smith would have flown a dozen if Sparrow had them.
He faced forward. Now they were counting the time in flying seconds. The sun was sucking up the haze and the ships came on out of it, for an instant only vague phantoms, but then clear and hard. There were two destroyers a mile apart leading the force then one by one the others came up, still hull-down over the horizon but their upperworks clear enough. Two more destroyers. And two more still just smoke and masts. And in the centre of the group of six destroyers that was her escort, the tripod mast of a battlecruiser…
In his mind he flicked through the pages of the silhouette book, comparing the remembered shapes with the dancing image in the lenses of the glasses until he found a match.
Sanders ventured, “I think, sir, she might be Siegfried.”
She might be any one of four German battlecruisers, seen at that distance and coming out of the haze, but — “That’s right.” Smith was certain. Eight twelve-inch guns and twelve 5.9-inch. Twenty-seven or — eight knots and twenty-seven thousand tons with a belt of armour a foot thick and more than a thousand men aboard.
Sanders said with reluctant admiration, “Got to admit it, sir, she’s a beauty.”
She was. Steaming at full speed, big, swift and powerful, yet graceful. Smith let the glasses hang on his chest and peered about him at the battered Sparrow. Less than four hundred tons, one twelve-pounder gun and fifty-odd dog-tired men. He lifted the glasses again and so saw the water-spouts rise out of the sea and to seaward of the battlecruiser.
Sanders yelled, “Marshall Marmont’s ranging on her!”
The shells had fallen four or five hundred yards over but that would be little consolation to Siegfried’s commander. Her guns were trained around to meet the distant threat but they did not fire. She was out of range. He would know the firing came from inshore because the salvo had roared over his head and maybe some eagle-eyed look-out in the control-top had picked up the tell-tale spurt of smoke and flame of the monitor’s firing, but he would be hard put to it, straining his eyes against that low sun. And Marshall Marmont was trailing no banner of smoke to lead the eye on.
But now Smith lowered the glasses fractionally, seeking and finding the leading destroyers. They were scouting a good mile or more ahead of Siegfried, the one to port turning towards the shore, a signal flying, obviously being sent to investigate the ship that was firing. He saw the one to starboard turning until she was head-on and pointing at Sparrow. He could guess her orders. He saw the smoke and flame from the four-inch on her foredeck and ordered, “Port five!”
“Port five, sir.”
“Midships!”
He shouted up at the signalman on the searchlight platform: “Now!” The light on its mounting was only feet from his head but he could barely hear the clacking of its shutter above the engines’ din and the roaring fans. He saw it blinking rapidly, longs and shorts and wondered briefly what obscenities or prayers the signalman was flashing at an unresponsive horizon.
He faced forward to see the shell fall to starboard and ordered, “Starboard five!..Midships!”
He saw the intercepting destroyer charging out at them and beyond her, Siegfried. Who must be able to see Sparrow signalling frantically to the west, wondering whether she was bluffing or was there really a supporting fleet out there that Sparrow could see but was beyond Siegfried’s horizon? And the little destroyer was attacking. Would she attack without a supporting fleet?
The bluff seemed to be working. Siegfried and the rest of her escort maintained their course, preferring the devil they knew to the devil they did not, arid not trying to haul out to seaward to get away from the big gun threat. That threat was emphasised as another salvo from Marshall Marmont plunged into the sea, short of Siegfried by three or four hundred yards. Still she did not fire, but soon she would be in range and Marshall Marmont and Garrick would feel the weight of those twelve-inch guns. They knew what they had to do. They would carry out his orders and he would answer for it. If he answered for anything.
All of it thought in a second.
That was Marshall Marmont’s fight.
This was Sparrow’s.
He took one final glance around from the twelve-pounder and its clustering crew, along the dented iron deck where Lorimer was shrieking orders at the crews of the six-pounders, right aft to the six-pounder on the juddering stern that bounced on a cushion of foam spreading into the boiling wake astern. He saw Buckley by that six-pounder, standing easily, patient. And McGraw on the other six-pounder aft on the starboard side. Then he turned to face the first of his enemies.
The German destroyer was a big boat and closing them at a combined speed of sixty knots because she was capable of thirtyfive and making it with a big white bow-wave. She carried fourinch guns with a range of ten thousand yards or more but headon like this she could only use the one in her bow that jetted flame now.
“Port five!”
“Port five, sir!”
“Meet her…steady!”
Sparrow swerved, deck heeling, all of them holding on, then steadied on the new course with the enemy boat fine on the starboard bow.
“All guns commence!”
The twelve-pounder slammed, shaking the already shuddering bridge and the starboard six-pounder barked right under the bridge. Smoke swirled and the cartridge case bounced on the deck as the breech was opened. A shell came down off the starboard bow and Smith turned Sparrow to starboard towards it. So Sparrow weaved erratically along the main course that still pointed her at the battlecruiser and the closing destroyer, that fired and fired again as the range closed and she came up bigger and bigger. Her firing was regular and rapid and accurate, only Sparrow’s jinking taking her clear as shell after shell plunged into the sea, sometimes close and sometimes near-misses and once a near-miss that burst right by the bridge and swept them with spray on top of the spray that Sparrow made as she charged down on the Squadron. Sparrow scored a hit on the destroyer’s bow and took one aft on an already mangled torpedo-tube.