Gold From Crete (6 page)

‘Aye aye, sir,’ replied a strained voice in the telephone.

He had to wait a second or two for the slings to come down, long enough to feel a gust of savage irritation at the delay, until he remembered that in the increased air pressure of a diving suit every emotion, whether of anger or exhilaration, was proportionately heightened. Then something rapped against his helmet and his eyes took hold of the reassuring slings. He squatted slowly down on his heels, holding the two loops of rope, for he knew the danger of bending forward while wearing a diving suit - at anything more than a slight inclination from the vertical, the protecting air would bubble out, the water rush in, and at that pressure he would be drowned in a flash. Still squatting, and working in the slime, he prepared to guide the loops of the slings over the ends of the depth charge. He had to keep his head clear and make quite sure that the slings were securely round the thing. The depth charge was not lying quite horizontal, and he put one loop round the lower end and called through the telephone for a pull to be taken on that sling. He felt the rope tighten and the depth charge lurch in the darkness and settle itself horizontally. That was better. He was able to complete his preparations; this was a plain seamanship job, a matter of ropes and weights, to make sure that the depth charge would hang securely in the slings as it was hoisted. If it came loose and dropped again, he could not answer for the consequences. Well, his education in seamanship had begun thirty years ago. His fumbling hands made their last precautionary exploration, then he stood up with a grunt.

‘Hoist away,’ he said into the telephone.

There was just enough light down here, despite the thickness of the water, to see a faint black shadow rise upward in front of his window. It was a shadow lifted in more than one sense, and he felt his spirits rise with every passing second. He wanted to sing now; he even felt like dancing in his leaden boots and breastplate, in the glutinous ooze - high atmospheric pressure certainly played strange tricks with one’s feelings.

The seconds passed and there was no sign of the depth charge redescending.

‘We’ve got it, sir,’ said an eager voice into the telephone. ‘You coming up, sir?’

‘Yes. Hoist away,’ said Crowe.

He realized now how deliciously cool it was down here in thirty feet of water, and he grinned to himself at the thought that the best way to get cool in a New York heat wave was to put on a diving suit and go down to the bottom of the East River.

His lines tightened and he was dragged out of the clinging mud, slowly upwards, while the light brightened before his window, increasing steadily until, blinding like a flash of lightning, the direct sunlight struck in through the glass. He felt the ladder in his grasp and started to climb to the deck with the assistance of a dozen willing hands. They busied themselves about him, whipping off his helmet, and he stood there blinking; even the humid New York air tasted much more pleasant when it had not previously been forced through an air pump. On the deck beside him lay the great barrel of the depth charge, filthy slime dripping off it onto the deck - that was the sort of stuff he had just been wallowing in. The torpedo gunner was hurriedly detaching the detonator.

‘I’d say you ‘ad about five seconds to spare, sir,’ said the torpedo gunner, squinting with a calculating eye at the amount of water that had entered; ‘maybe ten.’

‘A miss is as good as a mile,’ said Crowe. It was a cliché, but he did not feel capable of producing any original thought at that moment. Behind him the monkey suddenly chattered from his perch on the ruins of the after gunhouse.

‘Damn that monkey!’ said Crowe.

‘That’s the last mischief he’ll get up to in this ship,’ said Hammett.

‘I’ll wring the little beggar’s neck, shall I, sir?’ said the torpedo gunner eagerly. ’Oh, let the little devil live,’ replied Crowe wearily. It was not easy to condemn even a monkey to death in cold blood.

‘Wonder if they’ve got a zoo here?’ said the torpedo gunner. ‘P’raps they’d take him.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Crowe. Then he suddenly remembered his appointment with Mr Cockburn-Crossley. ‘Here, get these things off me!’

Even the best clothes that Gieve’s can supply look rumpled after being compressed into a diving suit. Crowe went below and shouted for fresh clothes to be got out for him; he took another bath and dressed himself as rapidly as the heat permitted, and with all the care the occasion demanded. Then he slung his gold-peaked cap onto his head and hurried over the brow into the clattering din of the navy yard. Mr Cockburn-Crossley was waiting with every sign of impatience consistent with his customary elegant nonchalance. He was putting his watch back into his pocket as Crowe hurried up.

‘You’re late, Captain Crowe,’ he said. ‘It is most unfortunate. I wish you could have been more punctual; punctuality is a virtue anyone can cultivate, and it is most important that you should be punctual at this time when we have Anglo-American relations to consider.’

Crowe looked at Mr Cockburn-Crossley for a second or two before he replied, and he swallowed hard too.

Tm sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I was detained by business in the ship that could not possibly wait.’

He felt there was nothing else he could say to Mr Cockburn-Crossley.

‘There aren’t any whales in the Mediterranean,’ said Nickleby, the flotilla gunnery officer, in tones of deep satisfaction.

‘There are big tunny fish, though, that go in shoals,’ said Rowles, the navigating officer.

‘What about cold currents?’ asked Captain Crowe. This discussion dealt with the sort of technical point the solution of which was the task of those highly trained staff officers specifically assigned to him for the purpose; but he knew enough of the subject to take part-in the argument.

‘Nothing here worth mentioning, sir,’ said Rowles. ‘Of course, there may be a casual freak.’

‘Wrecks?’ asked Holby.

‘Plenty of those,’ admitted Rowles.

The flotilla was creeping through the night, guided by the most minute physical influences imaginable - too minute really for the human imagination to grasp, thought Crowe; the merest echoes of something already beyond human senses. They were trailing a submarine. Somewhere inside HMS
Apache
a skilled rating was sending out sound waves into the sea with an apparatus that had never been thought of before Crowe became captain. It was all very difficult, for these sound waves were not the sort that one could hear; they were too high-pitched for that. Crowe could remember being shown a dog whistle once which blew a note too high for the human ear, but which yet could be heard by a dog. The sounds being sent out through the water were the same kind of noiseless sounds - what an absurd expression! - but even higher in pitch.

The principle was that when these radiating waves struck a solid body in the water, a minute proportion of them bounced back and could be picked up in the ship by an apparatus even more novel than the one which sent them out.

The fantastic sensitiveness of the whole affair could lead sometimes to curious results - shoals of pilchards off the Cornish coast had been depth-charged more than once; and the dividing wall between a cold current and a warm current could reflect enough of the waves as well as refracting the rest to produce a positive indication in the receiver, so that the ship might find itself launching an attack upon nothing at all, like a blindfolded fighter assaulting a whiff of cigarette smoke.

It was like some deadly game of blindman’s buff, or like two men stalking each other with revolvers in a completely dark room, for the submarine was by no means helpless; as she crept about underwater her own instruments could tell her, roughly, the bearing of her enemy, and when she was pressed too hard she could endeavour to relieve herself of her enemy’s attentions by a salvo of torpedoes loosed off in the general direction of the pursuing ship.

The little chartroom was hot with the heat of the Mediterranean summer night and the stuffiness which comes with the inevitable interference with ventilation caused by the complete darkening of the ship. Rowles was bent over a large sheet of squared paper on which, with the aid of protractor and dividers, he was plotting the moves of the deadly game.

‘
Cheyenne
signals, “Three-four-O”,’ came the voice of the chief yeoman of signals down the voice pipe from the bridge.

‘Three-forty degrees!’ exclaimed Rowles eagerly. ‘That gives us a fix.’

Cheyenne
was in the second division of destroyers out to port and she was giving the bearing of the unseen submarine as deduced from her instruments. Crowe could picture the transmission of the signal, the tiny flashes of the signalling lamp, screened and hooded, so that only the
Apache
, and no possible enemy, could pick them up. Rowles drew another line on his squared paper and made a cabalistic sign at the end of it. ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘Don’t think it can be a cold current. And it seems to have moved, so it’s not a wreck. Too many propellers going for the hydrophones to help us out.’

Twenty years ago the hydrophone had been the only instrument which could be used for tracking a submarine; it actually listened to the beat of the submarine’s propeller, and all the efforts of all the scientists had not yet succeeded in improving it to the point where it could pick up and follow the sound of a submarine’s propeller through the noise of those of a whole flotilla.

The message tube buzzed, and Holby snatched the little brass cylinder from it, took out the message and tossed it across to Rowles, who read it eagerly. He ruled another line on his squared paper; the diagram he was drawing there was beginning to take some kind of shape, for the lines all had a general trend, and the little ringed numbers made a series which, though wavering, still had definition.

‘I’d like to alter course, sir, if you please,’ said Rowles, and Crowe nodded.

Rowles spoke first into one voice tube and then into another. It was only an alteration of five degrees, but, with the flotilla fanned out on a wide front in pitch-darkness and with signals restricted to the barest minimum, it was not such a simple matter to wheel the line round as might at first be supposed. A moment later Rowles asked for an increase in speed, and the officers sitting in the silent little cabin were conscious for a brief space of a change in the tempo of the throbbing of the propellers; at the end of that time they were accustomed to the new rhythm and the throbbing passed unnoticed again. Then came fresh information, messages from the sonic apparatus below and from other destroyers in the flotilla.

‘He’s altered course,’ said Rowles.

The captain of the hunted submarine was receiving indications as well, and was turning his boat in a desperate effort to get out of the path of his enemies. But submerged as he was he could only creep along at six knots, while the destroyers were charging down on him at twenty-five. If only they could maintain contact with him, his end was certain. Rowles wheeled the flotilla farther round to intercept him. Another voice tube in the little chartroom squeaked a warning, and Holby answered it.

‘Torpedoes fired,’ he announced. The hydrophone apparatus had picked up the heavy underwater concussion. The Italian was trying to rid himself of pursuit by launching his torpedoes into the midst of his pursuers. Firing under water and aiming only on the strength of the data supplied him by his sound apparatus, he could not hope for very accurate aim; the deployed destroyers made a wide target, but one with a good many gaps in it.

‘One hundred and sixty seconds, I should say,’ said Holby, and all eyes turned involuntarily on the stopwatch ticking away on the chartroom table. With torpedoes and destroyers approaching one another at eighty knots, each little jump of the hand brought potential death forty yards nearer. Crowe took his attention from the watch and turned it upon Rowles’ diagram. The destroyers were headed straight for the submarine, meeting the torpedoes head-on, therefore. That was the best way to receive a torpedo attack - a destroyer is ten times as long as she is wide, and, consequently the chances of a blind shot missing were ten times as great. There was nothing to be done except wait.

The messages were still coming in, even during that two and a half minutes.

‘Gone to ground,’ said Rowles, ‘on the bottom. It’s his best chance, I suppose.’

Lying absolutely silent and still on the bottom, the submarine would give no indication of its position to the hydrophone listeners and precious little to the sonic apparatus. And the Italian captain had taken this action while there was still plenty of time, while the English still were not absolutely sure of his position, and while there was a chance that the arrival of his torpedoes might distract his enemies, throw them off their course and upset their calculations. If he pinned much hope on this, however, he did not know the grim little group that was sitting round the chartroom table plotting his doom. The stopwatch hand was creeping inexorably round. Suddenly the
Apache
stopped as if she had run into a brick wall, throwing them all across the chartroom, and then she reared and then she plunged, standing almost up on her stern and then crashing down again, with the lights flickering spasmodically, while the memory of a tremendous crash of sound echoed in their ears. Crowe had been flung against the bulkhead and the breath driven from his body; it was pure instinct that carried him out onto the bridge; as his eyes were accustoming themselves to the darkness he could feel the
Apache
heeling and turning sharply. A black ghost of a ship whisked past their stern, missing them by a hairsbreadth - that was
Navaho
, which had been following them. The officers and ratings on the bridge, flung down by the explosion, were only now picking themselves up.

‘Hard-a-starboard there!’ roared Hammett

‘She won’t answer, sir!’ came the helmsman’s reply. ‘Wheel’s right over!’

The
Apache
was turning sharply in defiance of her helm.

‘Bow’s a bit twisted, I should say,’ said Crowe, peering forward into the darkness, alongside Hammett: he could feel now that the bows were canted sharply downward as well, but in the utter darkness he could form no estimate at all of the amount of damage. The only thing that was certain was that the
Apache
was not on fire; a destroyer full of oil fuel, hit by a torpedo, can sometimes in a few seconds be changed into a blazing volcano.