"Another hit!" he heard a shout go up an instant later. "We've got the Idaho folks lashed to the mast. They missed the first target."
But even as the cry reverberated along the decks there came another sound that struck terror to the heart of the Dreadnought Boy.
It was a heavy, smothered explosion that seemed to come from within the turret itself. At the same instant great clouds of yellow-colored smoke began to roll from the top ventilators.
"It's a flareback!" Herc heard old Tom shout. "Heaven help the poor souls in there!"
A flareback!
What the words meant Herc knew only too well. In the poisonous fumes of the burning Chaosite, vomited backward from the big gun's breech, there was quick, sure death.
Suddenly the small door in the barbette of the turret opened, and four half-crazed, reeling men staggered out, bearing a limp form of a fifth. It was Jim Cooper, the gun-pointer, they carried. Blackened and almost unrecognizable as the men were, the look of blank horror on their faces burned itself into Herc's mind.
"Where's the lieutenant and Mr. Varian? Where's Ned Strong?" the jackies shouted, as they crowded round the staggering men. The survivors could only wave their limp arms back toward the inferno from which they had emerged.
"B-b-blown to b-b-blazes!" gasped one in a choked voice.
All at once, and before Captain Dunham and the officers could reach the scene, a red-headed figure ripped off its blouse, and, wrapping it about its head, plunged on all fours into the small door from which the smoke-blackened five had emerged.