Once secured, Kapitan Falkenrath looked nervously at his watch. The sun was now well up, lightening the pale grey skies as the refueling operation began. They would need several hours to take on any significant amount of fuel, but anything that came to him now was most welcome. At one point, a rogue wave nearly threatened to sever the line, coming very close to snapping it from the fuel mount as the hose tightened. Yet it was not the sea itself that would be their undoing, but an enemy lurking in the silent depths below the turbulent waves above.
HMS Trident had been dutifully following in the wake of Ermland, hanging on all through the night, though Captain Sladen did not believe they would ever catch up to the ship again. As dawn rose, his boat batted about by the heavy seas, he was about to submerge and run in the relative quiet below when the last watch shouted down the sighting—Ships ahead!
That prompted an immediate dive order, and Trident slipped beneath the swells, soon finding that it was difficult to even maintain periscope depth. Sometimes the up-swells would swamp the periscope, and at other times the sub’s conning section would be dangerously exposed in the trough of a wave.
Trident was a T Class Submarine, and had been operating off Norway with the Tigris, the very same boat that had ferried Admiral Volsky to the UK. She could make 15 knots on the surface, but no more than 12 in the heavy seas, and 9 knots submerged, which was barely enough to stay close, until the two ships altered their formation and heading and he saw they were approaching his position. A powerful boat, Trident had six internal forward facing torpedo tubes, and four more external tubes, which was a very severe bite as submarines went. Now this silent shark had what looked to be the perfect target ahead, a carrier and tanker.
Elated, Sladen moved off axis hoping to position himself to get a good spread of torpedoes into the water. Twenty minutes later, the hydrophone operator on the Goeben thought he heard something, and called out a warning.
“Kapitan! I think I am hearing high rev motors in the water. Torpedoes sir!”
“Damn!” Falkenrath swore and immediately passed an order for the watchmen to be on lookout. The refueling operation had to be immediately terminated, and crews that had labored so long and hard to secure that line, now rushed forward onto the heaving bow to release the hose clamps and set the fuel line loose. Unfortunately, the word was slow to reach the Ermland, and they did so before the flow of diesel pumps had been shut off at their end, which sent a wash of black fuel oil all throughout the narrow interval between the two ships.
“Torpedo off the starboard side!” The shrill alarm sent men to the gunwales with fearful eyes looking seaward. One man pointed, aghast to see the sleek wake of a torpedo slice right through the dark oil between the two ships. Seconds later there was a loud explosion forward, and they saw the Ermland struck full amidships by a torpedo. Then a second explosion tore into the front of the tanker, and the forward fuel tanks erupted in a terrible explosion that was so fierce that it rocked the Goeben, well astern now as the carrier fell off and turned away to port.
Out on the far horizon to the northwest, Captain Sanford saw the thick smoke climbing up into the sky, like an ominous dark thunderhead.
“My, my, have a look at that Mister Laurence. That’s not weather to my eye.”
“No sir, must be a ship on fire. Possibly that tanker we were told to look after. Remember, HMS Trident is out here. That Admiralty order mentioned that boat as having made the original sighting.”
They had turned in the pre-dawn hours, gone to 30 knots, and had been racing southwest ever since. Now it was nearing 11:00, and the stain of windy dark smoke was giving them a clear indication of where their prey was at that moment.
“That’s a good deal of smoke, sir. It looks to be a very bad hit.”
“Well, they might have left something for us to nibble on. Have the gunners ready in any case, and keep the lookouts handy for that carrier.”
The Goeben would not be seen by the lookouts for some time, but the radar operator on Sir Lancelot soon called out a contact report bearing 15 degrees from their starboard side, which immediately prompted Captain Sanford to order his cruisers to make a swift coordinated turn in pursuit. Now he was bringing those twelve 10-inch guns he had forward between his two ships to bear on the point of contact, and the flight of the Goeben was about to become a very complicated and dangerous affair.
“Contact sir! Two ships off the starboard aft quarter. They should be on our horizon any minute.”
Kapitan Falkenrath rushed to the weather deck to squint through the telescope, cursing under his breath. Damn the British and their constant meddling, and damn every cruiser Captain they ever put to sea. These have to be the ships Kaiser Wilhelm warned us about, and they followed that smoke like sharks swimming to the scent of blood in the water.
After breaking off from Ermland, he had gone to 18 knots, and came round due north. The thought that he had to now abandon the stricken tanker ate at him, but he had cargo aboard that simply had to be protected, more valuable than the lives of every man aboard that doomed ship. Ermland would not survive such a hit, he knew, and now, with the coming of those two cruisers, the crews on that ship were busy destroying coding equipment, charts, rendezvous books, ship’s logs, and preparing to scuttle the ship as per their orders. That was going to eliminate the only tanker now operating in the mid Atlantic, and put an end to German surface raider operations there for the foreseeable future.
I had hoped to fill up and get well away from the convoy routes, he thought. Then, once I deliver that infernal rocket below, I could get out to sea and do some real hunting again with Kaiser Wilhelm. That is looking very chancy now. I could go to 36 knots and probably break off here, but that would burn up everything we’ve taken on in the last two hours in as little as twenty minutes time. I could probably run for another two or three hours at that speed if these cruisers give chase, and then I would have used up so much fuel that I would be lucky to get anywhere near our bases on the African coast at 12 knots after that.
While I do run, those damn enemy ships will probably take pot shots at me, and I’ve no guns aft to answer them. This ship was meant to chase and kill the enemy, not to run. The only sting we have to bother those cruisers in a situation like this is our aircraft, but look at that flight deck pitching about now. That will be worse if we put on more speed.
It was then that Marco Ritter strode grimly onto the bridge, his greatcoat wet with sea spray. “I’ve been down on the flight deck,” he said. “I think we should try to spot a few planes and attempt a launch.”
“In these seas? The planes would careen right off the deck if you try to spot anything now.”
“We can keep them cabled to the deck while I run up my engine full out, then release just as we start our takeoff. There are still intervals in these wave sets. If we time it right….”
“Assuming you do get off in one piece, you’ll never get back. A landing would be impossible in these conditions.”
“Possibly. If need be we could ditch in the sea, or run for the coast.”
Falkenrath shook his head in the negative. “Have a look here,” he said, striding over to the chart table. “We’re 780 air miles from our nearest field at El Aaiun.”