"It is only a fishing trawler making for home," Max Hilliger declared with a shiver. "Let us submerge and get out of the cold and wet."
"Not yet, not yet," returned Körner. "They will surely come. We are in their track. They cannot have turned back. Our own battleships could weather a worse storm than this, and so could they. Whatever else the cowardly English are afraid of, they are not afraid of the sea. I believe the blood in their veins is made of salt water. If you are cold, my friend, go below and warm yourself. Already it is a long time since you had supper."
Max crept below like a dog into its kennel and took some food and a drink of hot coffee in the warmth of the engine-room. The warmth made him sleepy, and he did not return to the conning-tower until he was called.
Körner and the quarter-master were at their posts. From their point of observation they had seen the black shapes of an advancing squadron of battleships, light cruisers, and torpedo-boat destroyers. They could be British only, since no German warship larger than a destroyer was permitted to put to sea. No lights were displayed, but a reflected glow from the furnaces mingled with the smoke rising from the blackness of the funnels, and the wash of spray as the vessels cut through the water showed whiter than the whiteness of the breaking waves.
The German seamen were at their quarters, the officers at the control stations, the engineers at work with the petrol motors, the gunners at the air-compressors for charging the torpedo tubes. All was quiet but for the ceaseless rattle of cranks and pistons and the whining of well-oiled wheels. The submarine was manoeuvred round as if to cross the bows of the British ships.
A couple of the destroyers went past, then a light cruiser. Next came the towering bulk of a Dreadnought, looming out of the darkness. Sparks of fire floated amid the thick volume of coal smoke from her foremost funnel; a shaft of light came through an open doorway on her high bridge.
"I believe it's the Triumphant!" said Max Hilliger, at the lieutenant's elbow.
It was at a point forward of the bridge, on the starboard side, that the torpedo was aimed. There was no possibility of its missing so huge a target. But to make certain of hitting a vital part well below the armoured belt a second torpedo was to be fired, and then the submarine would submerge and make good her escape.
On board the Triumphant the larger number of her officers and crew of nearly eight hundred men were below asleep when the fearful crash came. Hammocks and bunks were jerked up by the shock. The torpedo had missed the magazine by a few feet, but it burst through the stout plates, entering the dynamo-room, and all electricity, both for lighting and for wireless instruments, was shut off. The great ship at once listed over, and the order was given: "All hands on the upper deck."
Two minutes after the first alarm, word was sent up from the engine-room to the captain on the bridge that flooding had begun in the boiler-room, and that no more steam could be got up. There could be no hope of running her towards land and beaching her. It was seen from the first that she could not be saved.