"Gunnery officer. Report your target." A moment's delay, and then the reply. "Bearing mark, green oh-oh. Range, one-five-oh-five-oh.
Speed, seventeen knots." It was true. Blucher was under full power again, with all her guns still operable. Orion had died in vain.
Charles wiped his mouth with the open palm of his hand, and felt the brittle stubble of his new beard rasp under his fingers. Beneath the tan, his face was sickly pale with strain and fatigue. There were smears of dark blue beneath his eyes, and in their corners were tiny lumps of yellow mucus. His eyes were bloodshot, and the wisp of hair that escaped from under the brim of his cap was matted on to his forehead by the salt spray, as he peered into the gathering dusk.
The fighting madness which had threatened all that day to overwhelm him, rose slowly from the depth of his belly and his loins.
He no longer struggled to suppress it.
"Turn two points to starboard, pilot. All engines full ahead together." The engine telegraph clanged, and Bloodhound pivoted like a polo pony. It would take her thirty minutes to work up to full speed,
and by that time it would be dark.
"Sound action stations." Charles wanted to attack in the hour of darkness before the moon came up. Through the ship the alarm bells thrilled, and without taking his eyes from the dark dot on the darkening horizon, Charles listened to the reports coming into the bridge, until the one for which he waited, "Torpedo party closed up,
sir!" Now he turned and went to the voice-tube. "Tarps," he said,
"I
hope to give you a chance at Blucher with both port and starboard tubes. I am going to take you in as close as possible." The men grouped around Charles on the bridge listened to him say "as close as possible, and knew that he had Pronounced sentence of death upon them.
Henry Sargent, the navigating lieutenant, was afraid.
Stealthily he groped in the pocket of his overcoat until he found the little silver crucifix that Lynette had given him.
It was warm from his own body heat. He held it tightly.
He remembered it hanging between her breasts on its silver chain,
and the way she had lifted both hands to The chain had the back of her neck as she unclasped it.
caught in the shiny cascade of hair as she had tried to free it,
kneeling on the bed facing him. He had leaned forward to help her, and she had clung to him, pressing the warm smooth bulge of her pregnant stomach against him.
"God protect you, my darling husband," she had whispered. "Please
God bring you back safely to us." And now he was afraid for her and the daughter he had never seen
"Hold your course, damn you!" he snapped at Herbert Cryer, the helmsman.
"Aye, aye, sir," Herbert Cryer replied with just a trace of injured innocence in his tone. No man could hold Bloodhound true when she hurled herself from swell to swell with such abandoned violence,
she must yaw and throw her head that fraction before the helm could correct her. The reprimand was unjustified, Littered in fear and tension.
"Give it a flipping break, mate," Herbert retorted silently.
"You're not the only one who is going to catch it. Tighten up the old arse hole like a bloody officer and a ruddy gentleman." In these wordless exchanges of repartee with his officers, Herbert Cryer was never bested. They were wonderful release for resentments and pent-up emotion, and now because he was also afraid, he became silently lyrical.
"Climb-aboard-Romeo's one-way express to flipping glory."
Commander Little's reputation with the ladies had resulted in him being irreverently but affectionately baptized by his crew. "Come along with us. We're off to shout at the devil, while Charlie kisses his daughter." Herbert glanced sideways at his commander and grinned.
Fear made the grin wolfish, and Charles Little saw it and misinterpreted it. He read it as a tri ark of the same berserk fury that possessed him. The two of them grinned at each other for an instant in complete misunderstanding, before Herbert refocused his attention on Bloodhound's next wild crabbing lunge.
Charles was afraid as well. He was afraid of finding a weakness in himself but this was the fear that had walked at his right hand all his life, close beside him, whispering to him. You must do it you must do it quicker, or bigger than they do, or they'll laugh at you.
You mustn't fail not in one thing, not for one moment, you mustn't fail. You mustn't fail! "This fear was the eternal companion and partner in every venture on which he embarked.
It had stood beside the thirteen-year-old Charles in a duck blind,
while he fired a twelve-gauge shotgun, and wept slow fat tears of agony every time the recoil smashed. into his bruised bicep and shoulder.
It had stooped over him as he lay in the mud hugging a broken collar bone. "Get up!" it hissed at him. "Get up!" It had forced him to his feet and led him back to the unbroken colt to mount again, and again, and again.
So conditioned was he to respond to its voice that when it crouched beside him now, twisted and misshapen on the foot plates of the bridge, its presence almost tangible, and croaked so Charles alone could hear it, "Prove it!" Prove it!"
there was only one course open to Charles Little; a peregrine stooping at a golden eagle, he took his ship in against, the Blitcher.
his turn to starboard was a feint." Otto von Kleine spoke with certainty, staring out to where the dusk had obliterated the frail silhouette of the English destroyer. "Even now he is turning again to cross our stern.
He will attack on our port side."
"Captain, it could be the double bluff," Kyller answered dubiously.
"No." Von Kleine shook his golden beard. "He must try to outline us against the last of the light from the sunset.
He will attack from the east. "A moment longer he frowned in thought, as he anticipated his opponent's moves across the chessboard of the ocean. Kyller, plot me his course, assuming a speed of twenty-five knots, a turn fOUr points to port three minutes after our last sighting, a run of fifteen miles across our stern, and then a turn of four points to starboard. If we hold our present course and speed,
where will he be in relation to us, in ninety minutes" time? Working quickly, Kyller completed the problem. Von Kleine had been mentally checking every step of the calculation. "Yes," he agreed with Kyller's solution, and already he had formulated the orders for change Of Course and speed to place Bloodhound in ambush.
Under full power, Bbloodhound threw a bow -wave ten feet high, and a wake that boiled out for a quarter of a mile behind her, a long,
faintly phosphorescent smear in the darkness.
Aboard Blitcher a hundred pairs of eyes were straining out in to the night, watching for that phosphorescence.
Behind the battle lights on her upper works men waited, in the dimly-lit turrets men waited, on the open bridge, at the masthead, deep in her belly, the crew of Blitcher waited.