The range was opening. “Port four points!” Smith set to closing it again. The enemy was edging away, trying to open the range and make it a big gun battle. Thunder had only one big gun now.
Minutes later Kondor opened the range again, and again Smith ordered a closing course. The message he sent was clear: If Kondor edged away he would follow her until she ran aground. But he knew the Captain of Kondor would not just accept that.
When Wakely shrieked, “Torpedo! Red-four-oh!” Smith leapt to his side and peered at the tell-tale track.
“Hard aport!” Thunder turned towards the enemy and the torpedo. The alternative was to turn away but Smith would not open the range, would not show Thunder’s stern with her after-turret incapable of firing, still smoking. The torpedo ran down Thunder’s side, well clear of her and clear away. Smith stared at Kondor as Thunder held the turn. Kondor was already turning, intent on running back along her wake and then clawing out to sea where she could dictate the course of the fight. Smith held the turn, then: “Midships!”
So they were running again on parallel courses five thousand yards apart and Thunder a steel door between Kondor and the open sea. Kondor hammered at the door; the nerve-battering, brutal slogging match went on.
In the conning-tower, thrown about, deafened, bruised, Smith took the reports as they came in. They came baldly, without lurid description that would only have understated the horror of a ship and a crew being torn apart.
The twin after six-inch casemate on the port side took a direct hit from an 8.2-inch shell that wrecked the main-deckgun, the upper-deck gun above and decimated the crew of the latter. Only Daddy Horsfall walked out of it and clear around the splinter-swept chaos of the upper-deck before consciousness crept in slowly from his body to his mind. He felt for the carefully sock-wrapped bottle that held his illegally hoarded tots and found that as miraculously intact as himself. He drank as if it was water then looked for a way off that exposed upper-deck and for work for his hands. He ducked below and headed forward. Behind him, a minute later the after starboard casemate was mangled beyond recognition.
The port forward casemate took a freak hit on the muzzle of the gun that left its crew tossed about like dolls but still alive. That was Nobby Clark’s gun. He bellowed at them, dazed and deaf, “All right! Don’t lie there idling an’ scratching your arses!” He started to shove them out of the smoking wreckage like a dog herding sheep. His intention was to aid any short-handed gun; there would be gaps from casualties now. Before he got them out another shattering hit sent them all flying again. But once more he rounded them up. One of the port side midship casemates had ceased to exist, blasted clear out of the ship into the sea, leaving a smoking hole.
The upper-deck was an obstacle course from a nightmare, unrecognisable, a strange place of ripped, curled plates, jagged-edged; piled wreckage and tangled rigging; sprouting fires fought by ghosts that came hoarse-voiced, haggard and filthy out of the smoke, trailing hoses, and were lost in it again; over all rolled the smoke, from the fires, the clanging guns, and Thunder’s belching funnels. Clark fought his way through and hauled and herded his crew along by willpower and discipline. He lost his layer to a hit somewhere forward that filled the flaming hell with screaming splinters and threw them all to the deck. Clark would mourn for the layer as a friend but later. He led the rest below to a starboard six-inch with a dead crew they dragged aside.
They manned the gun moving like automata. The shell and the charge came up after Clark talked on the voice-pipe with Sergeant Burton who now seemed to be running some of the magazines. It was a miracle that repeated itself while they laboured unaware that fighting had run the magazines low and some were lost and locked under water in flooded compartments. The ammunition that came up the hoist, which was worked manually because the power had failed, had travelled half the length of the ship from a port side magazine. The few men of the ammunition parties that were left carried those shells and charges along narrow ammunition passages. These were in almost total darkness, smoke-filled, blocked in places by wreckage they had to climb around or over and the projectile a huge deadweight.
Elsewhere in the ’tweendecks men toiled in the smoke and frying heat, hauling at canvas hoses as they choked, with weeping eyes but fighting the fires. They saw the horror around them, the littered dead in the bloody, smoking wreck that Thunder had become but they kept on. Duty was something to hold on to in a world gone mad and being blasted apart around them.
Clark in the layer’s seat squeezed the trigger and the gun slammed into action.
Down in the forward 9.2 magazine Benks continued the praying he had begun before the action, with only a break for the catch of his breath. He knew nothing of the progress of the battle, down there below the waterline in his hushed little monk’s cell with the charges. He only knew the turret still fired rapidly and he was kept hard at it filling the demanding hoist. And that Thunder had been hit and hit again more times than he could count but he had felt them all, shuddered to them. He had commended his soul to God and now prayed for the men in the turret above him. He had not expected they would all live this long.
In the conning-tower the reports came in. “Hit forward, sir! Torpedo flat and prison flat flooded!”
Smith acknowledged the report, it was just one more blow, and altered course again in that continual erratic weave trying to out-guess the enemy guns. Occasionally he saw Kondor through the drifting smoke that surrounded her and saw she was badly mauled. As a raider she was finished; she needed a dockyard and that meant internment. Wolf was in at least as bad a case and probably worse, lying crippled, miles away.
But as Thunder fired her remaining guns, there were only three now, and as Smith strove to evade the salvoes that rained down in reply, it was evident that Kondor had the whip hand. She was firing more guns, four or five, in regular salvoes, the flashes rippling down her side.
The beating went on. An explosion right over the conningtower sent them sprawling for the twentieth time, there was a rending crash and as Smith dragged to his feet with blood running from his nose he saw that the mast had gone, fallen back along the length of Thunder’s deck, thrusting the tilted, riddled funnels to an even crazier angle.
Garrick’s voice, hoarse and urgent, no longer echoed down the voice-pipe because the fore-top was now just part of the wreckage heaped in the waist.
The beating went on.
Thunder swerved under Smith’s orders and twice salvoes fell alongside, while he saw that Kondor was hit and that she had fires of her own, flames licking yellow through the smoke, but her firing did not falter.
Thunder had only one six-inch gun still in action besides the forward-turret. She took a direct hit on the turret. The orange flash split the smoke-filled drum of the conning-tower. As the flame blinded them, the blast rattled them around the drum but Smith held on and kept his feet as did the Coxswain at the wheel. As Wakely rolled to his knees Smith grabbed at him and hauled him upright, croaked, “Get a fire party on that turret!” And thrust him, staggering, on his way. That was the most Smith could do. The turret and the men in it he must now forget. He looked again for the enemy.