The ships were all labouring badly now in the mounting seas as they headed south for the dreaded Horn. Those seas took off some of their speed. MacKail remained on the bridge, cold and tired but seemingly possessed of some force that kept him up there hour after hour. Shaw stayed with him for most of the time, glanced sideways now and then at the American’s set face, listened to that explosive oompah. MacKail’s forehead was beaded with sweat despite the filthy cold fug in the enclosed bridge, his eyes were hard as they stared ahead through the whirling glass of the clear-view screen. A hand tapped and tapped again on a steel ledge in front of him. All eyes were watching ahead from the navigating bridges of the squadron that night, and the lookouts were on the alert as never before in all the ships, straining ahead through the blinding spindrift, searching ceaselessly for the Moehne, adding human vision to the invisibly probing fingers of the radar. MacKail had said they all knew they had to get the Moehne, and he’d been right.
But nothing was seen.
No ship moved in all these waters down here at the bottom of all the world, not even the odd fishing-boat out of Tierra del Fuego. The gale was too much for the small craft and they would all have run for shelter long before.
Shortly after dawn, by which time Shaw had snatched a welcome hour or two of sleep, a signal was received from the Admiraclass="underline" north dakota will proceed ahead around horn into pacific and search north to magellan strait. remainder of squadron will cruise to eastward and guard route into atlantic.
MacKail acknowledged.
Altering a little to starboard, he passed close to the flagship and went ahead of her, heading on and down for Cape Horn, steaming right into the gathering storm and the murk of a lowering day, right into the great rolling greybeards of those desolate, deserted waters. In the early afternoon, off the pitch off the Horn, with the 1,390 feet of the cape almost invisible beneath a semi-permanent cap of spray, the full impact of the westerlies met them and almost laid the cruiser over on to her beam-ends before MacKail could get her round on to her westerly course for the passage of the great, angry cape, the arbiter of two oceans. Everything movable that had not been secured, moved. Crashes came from below as heavy objects shot across decks; glass shattered; pencils shot from the chart-table in rear of the bridge, rolled back and forth across the deck until a man bent and picked them up. Those winds were the worst Shaw had ever experienced; they met the body like a wall if a man ventured out from the enclosed bridge. It was virtually impossible to walk against them, even to retain one’s foothold upon the deck. Shaw wondered how the windjammers had ever beaten into such winds, how their crews had ever managed to climb a hundred feet of swaying, ice-covered ratlines and then lie out along the high yards, arcing across the sky and supported only on the thin footropes, which swayed beneath the yards themselves, to take in the thousands upon thousands of square feet of almost rigidly frozen canvas, canvas that fought back at them in their midget-like attempts to subdue it. They’d done it somehow, of course; but they hadn’t done it lightly. They had done it and the price was frost-bite or the loss of an entire set of fingernails ripped from their sockets by the wicked, iron-hard canvas. Often the price was a limb, and sometimes it was death.
This time too the price was death.
A million deaths, two, three, four million deaths… if they failed to catch up with the Moehne.
The long, long seas raced and curled down upon them, one crashing weight of water after another, which dropped sickeningly upon their bows to break and fling the spray to masthead height and beyond. The North Dakota, wallowing and labouring onward with her screws lifting clear of the water now and again to race madly and fill the cruiser’s plates with a terrible vibration, went ahead almost blindly now. She began to resemble a huge submarine, awash from bow to fantail. From that time on, few men spoke at all. They were too busy with their own thoughts, with their own realization of the sheer size of their task in this great area of sea. And at shortly after 1800 hours a serious mishap occurred: the North Dakota’s radio transmitting aerials were blown clear away, parting from the masthead with a crack that could be heard, even above the gale, and falling away into the racing seas. They could not from now on establish contact with the outside world, though the radio-room confirmed that they were still able to receive inward messages.
When MacKail heard that he couldn’t send messages he used a couple of choice four-letter words and left it at that. There wasn’t anything else he could do. Even if the radio-men carried the spares, no one could have manhandled a heavy, awkward, long-range aerial up to the masthead in this kind of weather. Not even the old-time sailormen. They wouldn’t have lasted a minute.
It was at 2000 hours, with sixteen hours to go for the newest deadline, and the North Dakota round the Horn and coming up past some of the small inlets and channels which abounded north of the cape, that a rating watching the radar scan made the first action report.
The man’s voice cracked with excitement, and routine reporting procedure was thrown to the winds as he yelled, ‘Say, Captain… there’s a contact bearing one eight zero… it must be the goddam German, it’s gotta be!’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Check distance!’
There was a pause. Then, ‘26,600 yards, sir.’
‘Fifteen miles, near enough…’ MacKail swung round heavily. He snapped, ‘Keep right on her, son, keep right on her and report any change in the bearing. I guess we’ll see goddam nothing back there…’ Nevertheless he moved to the murk. Seeing nothing he snapped, ‘Fifteen miles means she must be right down by the Horn.’ He wheeled round, went over to the man at the radar. ‘Sure it’s a ship, son, not a rock?’
‘Yes, sir, I’m sure all right. Certain sure.’ The young seaman chewed gum, watching the scan intently. ‘It’s a vessel all right, sir.’
MacKail, over his shoulder, studied the contact, which was little more than a kink in the brilliant green flicker. It was drawing very slightly across the North Dakota’s stern towards the eastward. The Captain went back quickly to his customary position in the fore part of the bridge. He said, with an undercurrent of excitement in his voice, ‘Left full rudder. Steady her on course 183 degrees. Tell the engine-room, I’ll want all she’s got and a bit over. Warn all guns’ crews to stand by for combat.’ He slewed his body and picked up the intercom to the radio-room. He’d said, ‘Call up the Admiral…’ before he remembered, and then he said bitterly, ‘No goddam aerial. Okay, forget it.’ He slammed down the phone. ‘It would go and happen,’ he growled to no one in particular, ‘at a time like this! We’re still going to get her, though, all on our own.’
Orders were snapped down voice-pipes and into telephones and the North Dakota heeled sharply to the swinging turn. MacKail said, ‘Looks like she made a diversionary move for the Pacific, just a kind of blind. Picked us up on her radar, which must be a lot more modern than ours, and took cover till she thought we were far enough north, and then took her chance fast. I wonder if she’s giving up and beating it for home?’
‘I doubt it,’ Shaw said. ‘Anyway, if she is, she’ll run into your Admiral — that’s if we lose her.’