In a few minutes he was alongside, and had caught hold of some tackle hanging from a spar. Hauling himself up, he managed to get astride the spar, and then realised that the vessel had a heavy list to port. Too dazed to draw any significant deductions from this, he worked his way along the spar till he found himself looking down upon a slanting deck, littered with wreckage and apparently deserted. Then, and not till then, he realised where he was.
He had unwittingly climbed aboard the German cruiser, which was sinking and had been abandoned by her crew. Obviously, therefore, his last torpedo had found its billet, and the cruiser had been hit at the moment when victory seemed hers—it was a great consolation.
The Lieutenant's first thought was to dive back into the sea, and he was about to do this when a noise above his head made him look up. A Zeppelin, no doubt the same one which had been piloting the cruiser, was hovering above, evidently with the object of ascertaining what had happened to the combatants.
"Lord, if I could only bring that thing down," reflected Lawless, forgetting his own peril for the moment.
His eye wandered over the deserted decks, and then he gave a sudden whoop of joy. Not twenty yards from where he stood were a couple of anti-aircraft guns, and, without stopping to weigh the consequences, he crossed to one of them, found it was loaded, and at once trained the muzzle on the ponderous mass hovering overhead. Then he fired.
A shell went whistling up, and passing through or over the gondola—he could not be sure which—exploded immediately beneath the gas envelope. There was a flash of flame and the sound of an explosion, but before the smoke had cleared away Lawless had trained the second gun on the airship and fired again. Then, without waiting to ascertain the result of his shots, he took a header into the sea and, on reaching the surface, swam as hard as he could towards a piece of floating wreckage. He threw an arm over this and, thus supported, turned round to see what was happening.
The sight which met his astonished gaze was tragic and terrible in the extreme. Piled upon the tilting side of the German cruiser was a great flaming mass sending up a cloud of smoke and sparks—all that remained of the great airship. Only for a second or two was Lawless able to gaze at this fearful spectacle of calamity heaped upon calamity to which sea and air had each contributed a quota, for, with a quivering lurch, the cruiser rolled completely over and disappeared beneath the waters, dragging the burning remains of the Zeppelin with it.
"Congratulations! You'll be able to stand me a dinner at the Savoy now."
Lawless turned his head and saw Trent a few yards away clinging to an empty water beaker and looking quite abnormally cheerful. But the Lieutenant was still oppressed by the tragedy he had witnessed, and the junior's flippant remark jarred upon him.
"Shut up," he growled.