"Bull's-eye, Dave! A perfect bull's-eye! But I thought for fair you were going to ram us straight into the cruiser's fighting top. Look at her! Look at her! Goodbye, you dirty brown rats! I only wish your big-toothed Emperor was with you. Make war on decent people, will you, you rotten beggars!"
"Hey! What gives?" Dave cried, as his still slightly benumbed brain refused to grasp the true meaning of Freddy Farmer's half screamed words. "What in thunder are you raving about?"
"What's that?" Freddy cried, and peered at him in dumbfounded amazement. "You don't—"
The English youth choked himself off, and the amazement in his eyes changed to a look of alarm. At almost the same instant Dave began to feel a dull ache on the left side of his head. He impulsively reached up his hand and touched strips of his torn helmet. The strips were wet and sticky, and when he lowered his hand it was to see his fingers stained with his own blood.
"Well, knock me for a loop!" he gulped foolishly. "Somebody, or something, must have slugged me!"
"I'll say!" Freddy cried. "A piece of shrapnel, I guess. A lot of it hit us. But are you all right, Dave? Does it hurt much? Had I better take over the controls? The other cruiser is—"
"Cruiser?" Dave boomed. And then like a curtain snapping up to flood his brain with light, he suddenly remembered where he was, why, and what had happened. He had actually fired the torpedo at the cruiser.
Ignoring another question that spilled off Freddy's lips, he twisted in the seat, automatically shoved the Devastator down onto even keel and stared down over the side. What he saw made his breath catch in his throat, and his heart stand still in awe and gruesome horror.
One of the cruisers was way over on its side and well down by the stern—that is, what little he could see of her. Mostly it was a boiling patch of red flame in the water that fountained upward and outward to hurl licking tongues of fire out in all directions. In a crazy sort of way he knew that the cruiser's powder magazine had probably exploded. At any rate, the craft was being ripped to shreds as though her steel plates were so much paper.
Then, suddenly, as he moved his gaze across the water, he saw a sight that made him cry out in terror, and shudder violently. He saw two tiny spots of orange almost directly in the path of the keeled over cruiser. And then he didn't see them any more. A tongue of boiling flame, perhaps an oil drum or something on fire, came slashing straight out of the smoke-filled air and down on that spot. The flames splashed out like drops of molten metal, and white spray rose up like a cloud. The two spots of orange that were the life jackets worn by the two spies disappeared from view as though by magic. When the flames and the spray melted away, the two spots of orange weren't there any more. There was nothing but a smoking slick of oil.