And MacKail said nothing. He hadn’t spoken at all for some minutes. It was as though he had to remain poised, ready to give the order to open fire, as though he mustn’t start to speak in case he missed one vital second in passing that order when the moment came.
And now it wasn’t to be long.
The next report came within seconds. ‘Missile in flight. Perfectly controlled launching. All well.’
MacKail moved his head a fraction and then reached out very deliberately for a telephone. In silence he lifted it from its hook. The click as it came away was like a bomb. There was a dead silence everywhere now except for the creaking of the ship’s frames and the hollow sigh of the declining westerlies and a tick-tick-tick from the gyro as the cruiser rolled. No human sounds at all. Each man in his mind’s eye was seeing the swelling jets of flame at that Canaveral launching-pad, the tremendous fiery thrust that was sending Warmaster up and up, into the stratosphere.
Shaw’s tongue came out to moisten his lips. This was going to be it. For Fleck and Schillenhorst it was, literally, now or never. For so many millions of unsuspecting people, it was now or never.
MacKail was once again still as a statue — except for his cheeks and his eyes. He was holding the telephone cradled in his collar and his eyes were watching that loudspeaker. Shaw had never seen eyes like them. They were haunted. He remembered that MacKail had a wife and three children in Norfolk, Virginia, and that one of Warmaster’s smaller missiles carried the labeclass="underline" Norfolk, Virginia.
Nothing happened.
Had Fleck chucked his hand in after all, had the threat been enough? Was it possible?
Startlingly into the silence the man at the radar reported, ‘Captain, sir, range is increasing again. Looks like she’s cramming on speed.’
MacKail nodded, glanced briefly at Shaw. That was all. And then it came… Shatteringly from the loudspeaker, ‘Moehne is transmitting single letters and numbers.’
MacKail said steadily, ‘Commence firing. Left ten degrees rudder, steady on course one-seven-zero. Warn all gun positions, am turning left so that aft guns can bear.’
Then he slammed down the phone. Before he’d finished speaking the North Dakota’s forward turrets had answered him, had sent their shells flinging across the turbulent cold seas towards the Moehne.
Fleck was flat on the deck now, sheltering but unhurt as the metal screamed overhead. He snapped, ‘Tell the control room to keep on with the transmissions. No one is to leave his post or he will be shot.’ When Lindrath had passed the message he said, ‘Captain, you will increase speed right up to full and start zig-zagging.’
Lindrath bent to the engine-room voice-pipe. His voice was steel-hard, determined — and oddly exultant now. He said, ‘Chief. Emergency full ahead.’
With their quick acceleration the Moehne’s powerful engines beat strongly and vigorously into fresh life and sent her flinging through the seas. The cruiser no longer closed the gap, but shells still dropped around the German ship. There was a heavy concussion aft and she shuddered throughout her length, like a duck shaking its tail. Then another, amidships. Debris flew up abaft the bridge and one of the funnels lurched sideways like a drunken man. Screams reached the bridge, the terrible screams of men in torment. At once the engine-room reported that so far the engines were intact. Then Fleck, who was standing now, was on the phone again, this time to the control room.
‘Schillenhorst… you are all right?’
‘I am all right,’ came the scientist’s ugly voice. ‘The transmission itself goes well technically, but there is a little delay due to the shake-up of my instruments. I need another forty-five seconds… they must settle down a little, you understand?’
Fleck snapped, ‘Be as quick as you can.’ He put the phone down, his eyes gleaming. He walked past Lindrath towards the after part of the bridge, where he could get a clear view of the cruiser and the gunsmoke that swirled over her decks, mingling with the spray kicked up by her speed. He looked also at the Moehne’s own creaming wake and a look of puzzlement and then of fury, showed in his eyes. He swung round.
‘Lindrath… Lindrath!’
‘Herr Fleck?’
‘Why are you not zig-zagging? Why do you not obey my order?’ As Lindrath walked across towards him Fleck turned away again, pointing with a shaking finger at the wake. ‘It is dead straight, the wake! Why is this, why—’
Lindrath’s voice was calm and collected. ‘Please turn around, Herr Fleck.’
‘What…’ Despite the calmness, there was something peculiar in Lindrath’s tone, and Fleck swung round sharply, his face tight with anger. He looked right into the mouth of a Luger.
Lindrath, his eyes cold now, said, ‘You will order Schillenhorst to cease transmitting or I shall shoot you. You are a madman, Fleck. I should have acted long, long before… it is my regret that I did not. This goes beyond anything for which I agreed to serve as Master of this ship. And let me remind you that I am the Master. Under God, I am the Master of the Moehne!’
Fleck’s face was twisted with sheer rage but he was still in control of himself. He sneered into Lindrath’s eyes. ‘Shoot,’ he said calmly. ‘I shall give no such order, and in a moment it will be too late anyway. And you will not shoot — you are too—’
He broke off as the vessel gave a heavy lurch, seeming to slide sideways through the seas, pushed bodily to one side. Lindrath moved quickly, crouched behind the wheel. A moment later there were two big explosions far down in the ship and a sheet of flame and thick smoke surged up from just before the bridge. The Moehne’s foredecks opened upward and outward like the petals of a flower in the sun and fragments of red-hot metal flew like a sudden shower, metal that scored deep furrows across Fleck’s face and body as it ripped through the bridge. There was a crash as the foremast carried away and came down in a tangle of aerials to hang grotesquely over the broken rails.
Fleck’s face was a mass of blood, the eyes staring vacantly through. A hand groped vaguely for his back, where a steel splinter had sliced into him and laid his flesh open to the spine. A look of puzzlement came into that bloodied face and he moved, jerkily, not knowing where he was going. Reaching the space where a ladder should have led downward, he staggered and fell headlong to the deck below, a bloody foam surging from his lips. He lay quite still, face down on the deck. His back was broken, the lower half lying at a curiously unnatural angle to the upper half and the jagged ends of bone sticking out from the flesh and torn muscle. All along the decks men were jumping over the side. Hanson, the man with the bulbous nose, was one of them. Below in the control room everything was a fiery shambles, all the equipment gone and Hans Schillenhorst no more than fragments of flesh and bone and sinew.
The bridge was a shambles too. Only Captain Lindrath was relatively unhurt. Formally he passed the order by megaphone to abandon ship, and then he bent and dragged the dead helmsman away from the wheel and himself took the spokes. Holding the Moehne on her southerly course, he stood there — tall, straight, white-haired, staring ahead. A tired old man with exultancy and a new-found freedom in his eyes, an old man alone as what was left of his crew scrambled over the side and waited to be picked up by the American cruiser’s boats and nets.
‘Transmissions ceased!’
This report from the radio room was delivered in a high, almost hysterical voice and it was followed by: ‘Whoopee! Jeez, we got the bastard!’