“Yuri!” Beauchene called. “Do you have a distance?”
“Impossible to be exact, sir.”
“Then don’t be exact, just give me your best estimate.”
A silence followed, during which the Russian must have been either listening or calculating. “I’d say…six hundred, seven hundred meters. That’s my best.”
“Straight ahead?”
“Yes, sir.”
Beauchene said to Michael, “Take the wheel.” When Michael had it, Beauchene rang up the command to the engine room: All Ahead Flank.
Sofia drove forward, her torpedo thrust out like an iron fist.
“Move aside,” the captain told Michael as he returned to the helm.
But before the transfer could be made there was a shout toward the stern. Another voice rose up, unintelligible but urgent. Beauchene peered into the fog along the torpedo’s path, his eyes narrowed. Michael kept the wheel steady. The thrum of laboring engines pulsed along Sofia’s length. Down on the portside deck, someone shouted: “Ship! Dead ahead!”
They were upon it before Michael could pull in another breath.
It was not there and then suddenly it was. Beauchene gave a strangled cry of alarm. Javelin was crossing their bow at a slight angle toward them. Michael saw some of the enemy crewmen at a rail amidships, pointing at Sofia. The deck guns, which must have been constantly manned, began to swivel toward the freighter.
But it was going to be too late.
One of the guns got off a shot that blistered paint along the port side of the wheelhouse. And then Beauchene was standing beside Michael and wrenching the wheel to starboard before Javelin could slide past. Michael saw the torpedo strike Javelin just forward of amidships on the starboard side.
A deadly pair of seconds passed.
Then came the blast.
The forge of Vulcan blazed along Javelin’s hull. A huge geyser of white water rose up and spread out, and with it the ear-splitting noise of rending steel, multiple thunders and runaway locomotives smashing together. The shockwave came back upon Sofia and hit her against her prow like Neptune’s gigantic shoulder. The entire ship was shoved backward, waves smacking against the hull with the hollow booms of heavy artillery. Beauchene went to the floorboards as Michael clung to the wheel. Sofia rose up and pitched downward. Part of the geyser fell upon her deck with enough power to knock men senseless but make them think they were drowning first. Water slammed down on the wheelhouse’s roof. The whipsaw motion of the wheel nearly broke Michael’s wrists as he hung tight, but Sofia’s next rise and fall and pitch to starboard jarred him loose and he staggered back and fell as the wheel spun to its own direction.
There was a secondary explosion from Javelin. A hot wind shredded the fog. Burning things flew through the air and landed on Sofia’s deck. Michael struggled up in time to see Javelin’s length crash against Sofia, starboard to port, in what might have been a dance of death.
For then all Hell opened.
A white-hot fireball exploded seemingly from beneath Javelin’s forward deck. Funnels, flaming rope, parts of bodies and a cannon barrel were blown into the sky. The planking blazed with a violet glow as if from a gas flame. Suddenly the entire forward part of the ship convulsed with a shriek of steel. Bright red and purple objects trailing wakes of sizzling fire began to burst upward through the deck, throwing flame to all sides. They hissed upward into the red-lit fog.
Michael knew. “A spark’s hit the ammo! The incendiary shells are cooking off!”
Beauchene leaped to the engine telegraph and frantically rang for Back Emergency.
As the fireballs shot upward from the doomed Javelin and spread voracious flames over the wheelhouse and deck, a massive wall of gray smoke erupted from the warship and rolled across Sofia. In it, burning men desperately scrambled over the gunwales from one ship to the other. Some of them had guns, were firing and were quickly shot by Sofia’s armed crewmen, but others vanished into the murk. Huge flames were shooting up from Javelin. There were screams and pleas for mercy. As Sofia’s engines began to back the ship off from the conflagration, the gap between the vessels widened and more burning men threw themselves into the sea.
Michael watched, his face drawn and tired. The reflection of flame writhed in his eyes.
He thought, grimly, that the sharks today would not have to search very long for good pieces of meat.
Javelin was leaning over on the starboard side. She was afire from stem to stern.
Almost out of sheer damned spite, she shot three more incendiaries at Sofia that sizzled over the ship and hit the choppy sea, and then the freighter backed off into the fog.
Thirteen
A Good Day’s Work
Nearing nightfall, Sofia was a hospital ship without a doctor.
Beauchene had guided his girl back into the smoke and fire to rescue survivors. They’d pulled from the sea fourteen badly burned men and six more who could at least walk. The sharks were indeed already returning to the sea what had walked on land. There was no sign of Manson Konnig’s body. It was going to be a long trip, the rest of the way to England, and there would surely be more canvas shrouds lowered over the side. For some of those burned scarecrows, it would be the merciful thing.
Eight Javelin crewmen were found hiding aboard Sofia, one of them in the closet of the second of V. Vivian’s unused staterooms. Another was hiding down a ventilation funnel. A third had to be shot because he attacked Olaf Thorgrimsen with a pocketknife.
Sofia was a mess. With the crumpled bow that had crossed her eyes, she could barely make four knots. Multiple leaks forward had been contained and the pumps were at work, but she was badly injured. Rough weather, Beauchene told Michael at a meeting in the mess hall, could bring the sea rushing in through the patches and now they had not a single lifeboat. Javelin’s heat had scorched the portside of Sofia’s superstructure and blackened her gunwales. The torpedo’s detonation had burst the eardrums and the resultant shockwave had broken the bones of more than one man. Every porthole on the ship had been either blown inward or cracked.
One thing could be said for Paul Wesshauser, in Beauchene’s opinion. The skinny bastard knew how to pack a long dick.
Michael suggested the fans ought to be turned on in the fertilizer hold.
Beauchene and Michael took a walk around the singed deck near seven o’clock. The captain carried his Thompson and Michael his revolver, because two hours ago another Javelin crewman had been found curled up under a tarpaulin. Most of Sofia’s lamps that still worked had been turned on. The crew was being fed and food was being prepared for the wounded prisoners, who’d been put into one of the forward holds. A dependable Pole had been named first mate and was manning the helm. A radio SOS had gone out and received a reply, and Sofia was meeting with the British freighter Arthurian for medical help and supplies around ten. Then the Russian, a good day’s work done, went to eat his dinner and get some sleep.
Sofia’s smashed nose headed west. Above the sea, stars filled the sky.