The Mystery Ship 4

The Mystery Ship 4

CHAPTER III

 

SUNK IN ACTION

 

 

A BLINDING flash and a deafening roar, followed by a sickening lurch

of the little patrol boat as the lightly built hull reeled to the

recoil, announced that the action had commenced. Almost immediately

the breech-block of the six-pounder was jerked back and the still

smoking metal cylinder clattered noisily on the deck. The air reeked

of burnt cordite as the excited gun's crew, who had never before been

in action, loaded and fired like men possessed.

 

With the first shot Kenneth's sense of nervousness fell from him like

a cast garment. Up to the present the foe had not replied to the

M.L.'s fire, but it was not to be supposed that she would decline the

combat. Glowing steel messages of death would presently be hurtling

through the air with the avowed object of wiping out the little M.L.

and her crew. Kenneth fully realised this, but beyond a curious

feeling of elation the Sub was as cool as if bringing No. 1071

alongside her parent ship.

 

Her antagonist's reply was not long delayed. With a lurid red flash

that completely eclipsed the wan moonlight, her after quick-firer let

rip. A shrill whine as the projectile passed overhead caused every

man on the M.L.'s deck to duck his head.

 

"If she can't do better than that it's time she packed up!" shouted

Wakefield. "Keep it up, men! Let her have it properly in the neck!"

 

A provoking wreath of vapour drifting down hid the misty outlines of

her opponent from the M.L.'s crew. Only the constant flashes of the

former's guns gave the six-pounder's gun-layer an inkling of her

direction. Whether five hundred or a thousand yards separated the

combatants remained a matter for speculation, and whether the foe was

"legging it" or closing upon Wakefield's command was equally a

speculative proposition.

 

"That's a near one," thought Meredith, as a shell literally scraped

the searchlight mounted on the roof of the wheel-house.

 

Hitherto the opposing craft had been firing with too much elevation.

Apparently realising her mistake, her gunner was lowering the sights.

 

Kenneth's thought was also shared by his skipper. Wakefield decided

first to increase the distance in order to baffle the enemy

gun-layers, and then make a dash for his opponent and thus bring the

depth-charges into action.

 

Grasping the telegraph levers, he intended to signal full ahead on

the starboard and full astern on the port engine in order to spin the

M.L. on her heel in the shortest possible time. But at the critical

moment the mechanism failed badly: both levers became interlocked.

 

Savagely Wakefield wrenched at the refractory indicator. Manoeuvring

under engines alone was out of the question. The use of the helm was

the sole solution of the difficulty.

 

"Cease fire!" shouted the skipper, judging that the absence of

flashes from the puny six-pounder would mystify the hostile craft,

and give the M.L. a better chance to close and use her depth-charges.

"Stand by aft, Meredith, and give an eye to things. If those fellows

get jumpy and fool about with the firing key, we're in the soup."

 

Promptly the Sub obeyed, yet as he did so he almost involuntarily

crouched under the lee side of the "tin" dinghy that was hanging

inboard from the davits. Then he laughed at what he had done. The

idea of imagining that the thin galvanised steel plates of the dinghy

would stop a 4.7-inch shell struck him as the height of absurdity.

 

Yet even as he sidled past the dinghy a concussion shook the M.L.

from stem to stern. It was a far different concussion from that

caused by her own quick-firer. This time her opponent had got one

home.

 

M.L. 1071 stopped dead, like a man who receives a knock-out blow

between the eyes. Pungent smoke enveloped her, as she rolled sullenly

on the long swell. Then the pall of smoke was rent by a furious blast

of red flame. An unlucky shot had struck her amidships, playing havoc

in the engine-room and igniting one of the petrol-tanks.

 

Nor was that the worst of the business. A fire could be subdued with

little difficulty by means of patent extinguishers; but the

projectile, luckily without exploding, had passed completely through

both sides of the wooden hull of the M.L., tearing jagged holes that

were admitting volumes of the North Sea into her engine-room.

 

Valiantly the artificers, directly they recovered from the

disconcerting effects of the projectile, strove to quench the flames

until, knee-deep in water on which floated patches of blazing petrol,

they were compelled to evacuate their untenable posts. Scorched and

almost suffocated by the fumes from the chemicals, they gained the

deck and collapsed.

 

"Fall in aft!" roared Wakefield. "Swing out the boat! Look lively

there, men!"

 

The crew needed no second bidding. Every man on board, save the two

unconscious engine-room ratings, who were unceremoniously dragged aft

by their messmates, knew that M.L. 1071 was doomed. It was a question

whether she would blow up or founder, for the flames were momentarily

increasing in violence and threatening to explode the magazine, while

already the waves were lapping over her foredeck.

 

Quickly, yet without a vestige of panic, the men swung out the dinghy

and lowered her from the davits. The two casualties were then lifted

in, and the rest of the crew followed--Meredith and Wakefield being

the last to leave.

 

"She's going down with flying colours at all events," exclaimed the

skipper. "Give way, lads!"

 

The men pulled with a will. There is a powerful incentive to do so

when in the vicinity of a couple of depth-charges that might at any

moment be detonated with disastrous results.

 

"What's Fritz doing?" inquired one of the rowers, when at length the

order was given to "Lay on your oars."

 

No one knew. The enemy had ceased fire, but when he did so none of

the late M.L.'s crew could say. In the excitement of abandoning ship,

the fact that they were under shell-fire hardly concerned them.

 

"Pushing off at the rate of knots, he is," hazarded another. "Unless

we've given him gyp. P'raps he's been knocked out, same as us."

 

"Shouldn't be surprised," remarked Clarkson, the gun-layer. "I'll

swear I got half a dozen home in his hide before the fog came on

again. Otherwise he'd be sniffing around and giving us a dose of

machine-gun fire. That's Fritz's little joke when a fellow can't hit

back. If----"

 

A terrific roar caused the man to break off suddenly. Somewhere

within the radius of a mile, although the now increasing fog gave no

indication of direction, an explosion of no slight magnitude had

occurred. For nearly a minute came the sound of falling debris, and

then deep silence.

 

"Is that Fritz or us?" inquired one of the men, as the rowers resumed

their task.

 

"How far is it to Auldhaig?" asked another. "Lucky for us we aren't

in the ditch. 'Twould be a longish swim."

 

Wakefield let the men talk. It helped to keep up their spirits,

although they were not apt to be down-hearted. For his part, he was

kept busily employed in steering the boat by means of a small compass

that was little better than a toy. By a fortunate chance, he had

found it with a miscellaneous assortment of small articles in the

inside pocket of his monkey-jacket. A fortnight previously he had

been induced by an attractive damsel at a bazaar in aid of the

Auldhaig Seamen and Fishermen's Society to buy what then occurred to

him to be an utterly useless article, but now he found himself

trusting implicitly to the doubtless highly erratic magnetised

needle. It was a sorry substitute for the boat-compass that ought to

have been in the boat, but wasn't; but even in the baffling fog

Wakefield knew that he was provided with a means of direction. With

reasonable luck, the boat ought to hit the Scottish coast somewhere,

if the survivors were not picked up by one of the other patrol-boats

known to be cruising in the vicinity.

 

At frequent intervals Wakefield bade the men rest on their oars,

taking advantage of the silence to listen for sounds indicating the

presence of other craft; but beyond the lap of the water against the

metal sides of the boat the stillness was unbroken.

 

It was an eerie experience, climbing the slope of the long rollers

and sliding down into the trough beyond, the while encompassed by a

fog now so dense that at twenty yards sea and air blended into

nothingness. Fortunately there was little or no wind, and the boat

rode the swell without shipping as much as a pailful of water, but

both Wakefield and Meredith knew full well that those sullen rollers

portended a storm at no distant date. The while the pale rays of the

moon penetrated with little difficulty the relatively thin stratum of

fog overhead, the ghostly light adding to the weirdness of the scene.

 

"Prop.!" exclaimed Kenneth laconically.

 

A tense silence fell upon the boat's crew. Through the mists came the

unmistakable thud of a vessel's propellers, but whether from north,

south, east or west the baffling atmospheric conditions gave no clue.

 

Then the subdued sound ceased abruptly.

 

"Give a hail, lads!" exclaimed Wakefield; but before the bowman could

stand and give vent to a bellowing "Ahoy!" the skipper countermanded

the order.

 

"We'll put a stopper on the hailing business," he remarked, without

giving any further explanation. "Ah, there it is again!"

 

"Nearer this time," announced Meredith. "Voices, too."

 

"Too jolly guttural for my liking," added Wakefield. "It's a Fritz

surface cruising. We'll lie doggo."

 

"Wish they'd push along out of it," said the stroke in a low tone.

"We want to get another move on."

 

These sentiments were shared by the rest of the boat's crew. Every

man knew what detection meant. A machine-gun turned upon the boat, or

perhaps a bomb thrown with the whole-hearted generosity that Fritz

was wont to display towards a boat-load of helpless seamen.

 

"Silence!" hissed Wakefield, holding up his hand to impress upon the

men the necessity for absolute noiselessness.

 

A minute passed in breathless suspense. Although the unseen craft had

again switched off the ignition, the plash of water against her bows

was distinctly audible.

 

"Stand by to give way, men," whispered the skipper. "If she spots us

we may be able to give her the slip in the fog."

 

Even as he spoke a sudden gust of wind swept over the boat. As if by

magic the hitherto enfolding pall of mist was torn relentlessly

aside, revealing in the full light of the moon the outlines of a

U-boat at less than fifty yards from the survivors of M.L. 1071.