The man said hoarsely, “She moves — she shuts!”
There was a curious sound from the others; like hounds on the scent and eager for the kill, they were giving tongue. They were all grinning now, the immediate fear of death flowing away to be replaced by tension of a subtly different kind, an exultant tension.
If only that great door could move faster…
The hand, which would move right round the clock-face in precisely sixty seconds would, when it came again to twelve o’clock, indicate that its master the door had shut, that the fissure was finally sealed, that the main firing-lever could be eased over, circuits made, button pressed. Then the whole lot would go up and the British cruiser could do its worst. There would be glory in dying for the Soviet then, but there would be none if they were unsuccessful.
Utter silence now in the control-room as the hand clicked slowly, slowly round the dial in response to the impulses from below. The men could see in their imaginations the progress of that twenty-foot-thick slab as it edged across the fissure’s mouth, ready to be slotted back into the opening. The Chief Controller’s hand was fidgety, damp and sticky with sweat. Slowly, as his eyes watched the clock-face, his hand went out towards a red-painted lever at the side of a metal box in front of him.
Fifty seconds to go now. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. Forty-seven…
“Red two-oh, guard ship moving in.”
Both Wilson and Shaw had had their full attention on the shore batteries at that moment, watching to see if they would go into action, and they had temporarily forgotten the guard-ship. Now they swung round on to the bearing and saw the destroyer coming in and aiming apparently right amidships, evidently meaning to slice into them before they could reach the tower… or was she heading a little farther up?
Wilson shouted, “She’s going to come across our bows and take the impact herself!”
“Yes, I believe you’re right.” Shaw bent to the azimuth circle and watched the bearing of the racing destroyer as the Lord Cochrane thundered on. Trembling with impatience and anxiety now, he kept the sights on the Russian, saw that the bearing was remaining perfectly steady and was not going to alter. The intention was undoubtedly for a collision and they probably wouldn’t open fire. Shaw estimated that the destroyer would either hit them on the port bow and deflect them inshore, or, as Wilson had said, she would go a fraction ahead so that they would hit her. That would mean the end of the destroyer, but it would also mean the end of Shaw’s plan and, unless Carleton could get off his signal for the Vulcans to release their Skybolts mighty fast, it would mean the end of a good deal more besides. They were judging it very nicely aboard the guard ship, very nicely indeed. Shaw sweated, saw Wilson staring at him. They were going to hit, sure as fate they were, if Shaw didn’t alter course away. Unless he could hold on until almost the last second, and risk the kink in his wake that would tell the Russian ship unmistakably that his helm hadn’t jammed at all…
He watched, eyes narrowed to slits, everything in him concentrating on trying to judge the exact second when he had to take action, the moment when a small alteration, the smallest he could make, would be of the most use. His lips were close to the voice-pipe when he roared suddenly, “Steer one degree to port!”
“Steer one degree to port, sir.” Then, “Course 182, sir.”
They surely wouldn’t see that fractional alteration mirrored in his wake. Shaw came upright. There was nothing more he could do now; the game was lost or won already. If they hit that destroyer it would be up to the Admiral. Whatever happened after that none of them in any of the ships would get out of Moltsk. They would be caught like rats in a trap, with everything that floated or flew or marched or fired coming at them from all points of the compass.
Nearer and nearer…
Shaw had a curious impression that he had moved into another dimension, that he was watching all this detachedly from above, just as if the two ships were models approaching one another in an instructional tank ashore — and with precisely the same degree of absolute certainty as to the outcome. But the Lord Cochrane was racing on beneath him, 10,000 tons of steel very much alive and on the move, with her men waiting tensely about her after decks, trusting in his judgment, braced against the shattering impact that would come at any moment now, whether it was another ship’s steel or the tower’s concrete that they hit. Tearing inward, faster and faster each second it seemed, the wind raised by her passing screaming wickedly aft along her decks. Faces white, expectant, apprehensive, exultant — a mixture of all the emotions…
“Shaw, she’s going to hit!” Wilson’s voice, high, shrill.
“It’s going to be close, but… hold tight, sir!”
Shaw gripped the gyro-standard in front of him. He fancied the Russian had altered very slightly to compensate for his own alteration, but he couldn’t be sure of that. The ships were flying towards each other now, meeting at a combined speed of something over seventy miles an hour and… they were going to hit now…
Shaw’s eyes took in the destroyer’s fo’c’sle tearing towards him, then her bridge superstructure rushing down upon the cruiser’s bows, passing beneath them now. He
waited for the impact with his eyes shut, all feeling drained out of him.
And then he heard a roar from Wilson.
“She’s passed clear… God in heaven… well done, Shaw!”
Shaw opened his eyes. Wilson was almost dancing in front of him. Then he saw the destroyer’s counter sliding out to starboard, slicing across the Lord Cochrane’s heavy forefoot. It was the world’s closest thing… the two ships couldn’t have cleared by more than inches. The Russian, fooled by Shaw’s late alteration, had been put off her stroke just enough to ball it up. She had simply torn through the narrowing gap between cruiser and boom and now she was hurtling on into the shallows that Shaw had seen earlier on Carleton’s chart. Her engines were thrashing astern now but it was too late to check her headway; as Shaw watched the Russian flew on and then, very suddenly and with a scream of tearing steel, she stopped. She had hit bottom inshore of the tower and she was a shambles on deck and settling fast enough to indicate that her bottom-plating had been ripped away. And then, just a fraction of a second after, several things happened almost together and Shaw forgot about the destroyer. The shoreside rocket-batteries opened up and the close-range weapons, the Kalashnikovs, started up simultaneously from the tower’s roof, the terrified troops firing down blindly on the Lord Cochrane over open sights, each of them pumping out a hundred rounds a minute. Bullets snicked into steel screens and bulkheads, sprayed over the bridge, but you might as well try, Shaw thought, to stop a charging rhinoceros with a pea-shooter… then there was a spine-chilling whoosh as the rockets flashed overhead. Shaw and Wilson ducked — and as they ducked the cruiser took the boom.
The old ship’s stem crashed through, biting hard and biting deep; as Shaw had promised the Admiral, it was as if the heavy steel mesh and the supports were made of paper. Her starboard side crashed along one of the concrete support piers and it toppled, almost powdered by the glancing impact of the Lord Cochrane's armour plate. There was just a slight bump and that was all; and the cruiser was tearing on unchecked, her engines still racing ahead for the thirty-foot projection of the tower. It seemed to hang over the bows for an instant and then they were in the middle of an apparent earthquake. At thirty-two knots and a little more, ten thousand tons of flinging steel took the tower full and square, right on the point of the bow, plunging right on and in until the tortured stem twisted and ripped back right to the foot of the bridge trunking itself, the decks gaping wide and ugly, A and B turrets slewed sideways with their useless, broken guns twisted up like hair-curlers. The bows had gone straight through into the control-room itself, smashing connexions, killing men, bringing the concrete roof down on what was left. Then in deeper, so that the concrete began to crumble and split lower down, the beams and girders twisting and fracturing and falling down onto the cruiser’s gaping deck. The Lord Cochrane reared up like a stallion, riding high, riding up onto the crumbling framework, driving in, the angle sending her quarterdeck right under to vanish beneath a boiling sea as the screws thundered on; thundered on until the shafts, fracturing, buckling as the ship began to break her back, jangled and juddered to a stop. Men everywhere were flung about like dolls, into the sea, into bulkheads and guardrails and stanchions and into the half-submerged after turrets. There were screams from aft as some of them went overboard to die horribly in the flailing screw-blades, before the shafts had stopped. Ahead of Shaw, Wilson, unthinkingly standing braced with his arms pushed out ahead of him like steel rods against the for’ard screen of the bridge, had hit the structure violently. Both his arms had crumpled and his rib-cage had smashed against the screen. The bridge itself was a shambles, was leaning over drunkenly to port. The chief yeoman was in a pool of blood in the port wing, under a smashed signalling projector, a big thirty-inch which had come clean off its moorings. At the last moment Shaw had turned his back and hung on to the rail above the chart-table in rear of the compass-platform, and though his arms felt as if they had been almost torn from their sockets he had, so far as he knew, suffered nothing worse than a dislocated shoulder and a full quota of nasty bruises.