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.