"Twenty-four, sir," said the engineer lieutenant.
"Get her up to twenty-six," said the captain.
The engineer cried again through the voice tube. The wake of the vessel roared like a mill race, the white foam tumbling rosily in the setting sun.
Seventy feet below, Captain Bill was arranging the last little details with the second in command.
"In about five minutes we'll come up and take a look-see (stick up the periscope) and if we see the bird, and we're in a good position to send him a fish (torpedo) we'll let him have one. If there is something there, and we're not in a good position, we'll manoeuvre till we get into one, and then let him have it. If there isn't anything to be seen, we'll go under again and take another look-see in half an hour. Reilly has his instructions." Reilly was chief of the torpedo room.
"Something round here must have got it in the neck recently," said the destroyer captain, breaking a silence which had hung over the bridge. "Did not you think that wreckage a couple of miles back looked pretty fresh? Wonder if the boy we're after had anything to do with it. Keep an eye on that sun streak."
An order was given in the Z3. It was followed instantly by a kind of commotion, sailors opened valves, compressed air ran down pipes, the ratchets of the wheel clattered noisily. On the moon-faced depth gauge with its shining brazen rim, the recording arrow fled swiftly, counter clockwise, from seventy to twenty to fifteen feet.... Captain Bill stood crouching at the periscope, and when it broke the surface, a greenish light poured down it and focussed in his eyes. He gazed keenly for a few seconds, and then reached for the horizontal wheel which turns the periscope round the horizon. He turned ... gazed, jumped back, and pushed the button for a crash dive.
"She was almost on top of me," he explained afterwards. "Coming like H—l. I had to choose between being rammed or depth bombed."
There was another swift commotion, another opening and closing of valves, and the arrow on the depth gauge leaped forward. Captain Bill was sending her down as far as he could as fast as he dared. Fifty feet, seventy feet, ... ninety feet. Hoping to throw the destroyer off, the Z3 doubled on her track. A hundred feet.
Crash! Depth charge number one.