Knowles leaned over his voice tube and rang the bell to the radio booth.
“Cobb, run up our wireless mast. When the U-38 starts sending, get on his wave length and jam the air! Don’t let him get anything through!”
In the periscope shears the creaking of hoisting gears broke out. Their own mast, a thin metal tube with a short yard at its top, rose above the submarine; the antennae wires stretched taut over the bridge. From below, ear close to the tube, Tom caught faintly the crackling of the spark. Cobb had started sending.
Eagerly he listened, between the ear-splitting reports of his gun, for news from Cobb. It was not long in coming.
“Hello, captain!” called Cobb through the tube.
Tom leaned over.
“Yes, Cobb.”
“I’m afraid he’s getting his message through, sir. I’m making all the interference I can but his set’s too powerful for me to drown out. He’s raised some receiving station already and started in code. I’ll do the best I can to jam it.”
Tom bit his lip. The Telefunken sets the U-boats carried were undoubtedly high-powered for long-range transmission. And if Erhardt managed to get his message through, the game was up for the decoy ships.
He looked at his gun, futilely shelling a target it could not hit. If only they could bring that radio mast down! Hopeless. They were not gaining; probably when Erhardt was through talking, he would submerge immediately, not waiting for the destroyer to close, and take his chances on losing them till night fell. And probably do it too, leaving him baffled once more, his decoy sunk, his secret divulged, himself a laughing stock for the man whom he had so casually let slip from the firing squad he richly deserved. And Erhardt and his fellow U-boat captains, warned now, would resume their campaign of frightfulness with their old vigour.
Knowles gritted his teeth. It must not happen. He would take a wild chance himself. Pressing his lips to the voice tube, he viciously punched the bell to the torpedo room.
“Below there! Set all your torpedoes for ten feet! Stand by to fire all four tubes!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Tom looked over the rail.
“At the gun, there! Keep up a rapid fire, especially if they yaw again!” He glanced aft. The destroyer hull was barely visible. Still too far off. Dropping through the conning tower he took his firing station, ran up his periscope, set the wires for dead ahead. From forward he caught, through the pounding of the diesels, the metallic clatter of chainfalls, the banging of the torpedo tube doors.
A bell rang, a far-away voice floated out of the voice tube.
“All set for ten feet, cap’n! All the tubes flooded now!”
“Stand by, torpedo room, to fire in pairs, starboard tubes first!”
Tom pressed his eye to the periscope, looked out. Ahead was the fleeing U-38, a small black spot in his high-powered field. At short intervals bursts of foam rose around her; he could clearly see the smoke curling from her mufflers, her radio mast swaying as she rolled, the figure of Lieutenant Erhardt leaning over her rail, scanning them through his glasses.
And from aft in the control room, he caught the steady crackle of dots and dashes flashing from Cobb’s key, trying to jam the ether.
Tom stiffened abruptly. The blue smoke at the stern of the plunging U-boat swung slowly to the left, her conning tower seemed to widen out. The U-38 was yawing again.
Fascinated he watched her, his fingers gripping the firing pistol. The muzzle of her gun came into view, a space opened between it and her conning tower.
“Right a little!”
The helmsman turned his wheel. Again the crosswires bore on the U-38’s mast. Tom pressed his key.
“Fire starboard!”
A cloud of spray burst from his bow, he saw the glint of metal as the upper torpedo, with propellers whirling, leaped through its shutter, buried itself in the waves ahead.
A flash of red, a puff of white smoke, the U-38 was firing at them again. A loud report. Tom heard the first shell burst outside.
“Left a little!”
The wheel swung back, his crosswires moved slowly over the hull ahead, came fair with the stubmast on the stern. Again his fingers closed.
“Fire port!”
More spray, the two port torpedoes streaked away at forty knots. On the surface now, leaping ahead of the L-20, were four lines of bubbles, diverging slightly, racing onward toward the U~38, which, lying diagonally across their course, was pumping shells at them as fast as the German gunners could load.
Peering through his eye piece, Tom saw the muzzle of the gun pointing at him train hastily forward, saw Erhardt’s figure vanish from his rail, the German gun crew hurriedly abandon their gun and start to drop through the deck hatch, watched the radio mast house. And as he watched, the hull of the U-38 began to sink, her decks to go awash.
Erhardt had spotted the torpedoes coming towards him; not waiting to get his message through, he was submerging to get under them.
But it would take the torpedoes only sixty seconds to overhaul him. And with four torpedoes spreading like a fan over his course he could not manoeuvre sideways. How fast could he get down? Tom watched breathlessly, while his torpedoes tore along, and his three-inch shells continued to burst around the spot where the U-38’s chariot bridge was just sinking from sight.
A vast pillar of flame and water heaved suddenly up; the bridge he was watching jerked out of sight; the dripping bow of the U-38 rose vertically from the sea. A dull rumble like far-off thunder filled the L-20, then she quivered violently as the concussion traveling through the water struck her sides. Tom’s periscope whipped like a reed; through it the torn bow of the U-38 seemed to dance crazily among the waves, then lean gracefully over and slide smoothly down through the surface, wreathed in a brilliant rainbow shining in the mist behind. One torpedo had hit!
A fierce satisfaction surged over Tom, his heart pounded furiously. The U~38’s torpedo room was ripped wide open by the explosion. Erhardt would never get away from him now!
He scurried up the ladder, looked hastily out. A wide patch of foaming water right ahead marked where his torpedo had exploded. Beyond it he could see three trails of bubbles still lengthening out, the remainder of his volley.
The L-20 speeded into the slick where her enemy had disappeared. On deck and on the bridge, eager sailors, bloodstained, powderstained, drenched in salt spray, leaned over the low rails, looking for wreckage, for bodies blown out through the shattered sides. But, except for blotches of black oil welling up through the white froth and spreading smoothly out, nothing showed of the
But he dared take no chances. What seemed like miracles had happened before; some terribly damaged U-boats had worked their way back to German bases. Erhardt must not!
“Keep that gun manned, boys, if she comes up again,” warned Tom as he descended to the control room. He swung the engine telegraphs to “Stop” and called out to Ingram:
“Stop all the blowers! Dead silence!”
The clatter of the diesels ceased; the whir of the fans died away; a strange quiet gripped the boat.
Lieutenant Knowles squeezed by the compass and pushed into the sound-proof booth alongside Cobb, who was still listening on the radio.
“Never mind that. Cut in the M V tubes!” ordered Tom, slipping on the microphone headset.
The high-pitched note of whirling propellers rang clearly in his ears, stopped briefly, then commenced again. A heavy rumbling noise broke in, mingled with the sharper note of the screws. The U-38 was scraping her hull along the bottom, struggling to rise. The propellers stopped; the scraping stopped. A groaning echoed in the micro-phones. The men trapped below were trying to pump. Tom leaned forward, listened intently, then leaned out the door.
“Quartermaster!”
The helmsman left the wheel, came aft, saluted.
“Step off ten miles east by north from the last fix on our chart. How deep is it there?”
The quartermaster worked a moment over the chart wit
h parallel rulers and dividers, then called out.
“Forty-five fathoms, sir!”
Forty-five fathoms, two hundred and seventy feet. The U-38 was on the bottom, a crippled hulk, creeping along, trying to pump tanks and slip away. Well, she would never rise now. When that destroyer raced up, a few ashcans over the spot so plainly marked by the noise from her pumps, and it would be over. The U-38 would lie still forever then.
He turned to Cobb.
“What ship is coming up?”
Cobb slipped on his radio receiver, threw his switch, started sending, then reversed the switch and listened. A pause.
“The Walton, sir.”
“The Walton!” So the Walton’s ashcans were to give the coup de grace to the U-boat whose torpedo had once blown her in two! Tom laughed grimly, listened again on the microphones.
From below came once more the rumbling, the bumping along the ocean floor of the wounded U-38, striving desperately to crawl away; the groaning of her pumps struggling against high pressure to lighten her up.
The whirring or her propellers rose and fell irregularly, died away altogether; the scraping and bumping of the hull on the ocean floor ceased. Only the noise of the pumps came from the bottom to the microphones, and soon that faded out, getting lower and lower as the pump pistons slowed down, finally stopped completely. Erhardt’s worn out batteries could no longer supply current for anything. The U-38, torpedo room flooded, machinery dead, lights gone, came quietly to rest. No further sound rose to the tense listeners, crouching over microphones, straining their ears to follow the struggle inside the U-38.
The minutes dragged on. Silence from below. Then gradually a new note crept into the microphones, rose to a shrill shriek. Tom listened as it swelled, the high-pitched scream of a destroyer’s propellers. Well he knew that sound. How many hours had he listened to it beating against his hull as the hunted L-20 swam through the seas off Helgoland, a helpless prey for the searching destroyers overhead?
The noise rose in volume, the Walton must be close now. Without doubt that terrible sound was beating down against the hull of the U-38; Erhardt and his men trapped in their shattered boat were listening to it as he had listened once, waiting for the crash of the ashcans, the hammer blows that would crush them out.
Knowles saw Cobb’s face go pale as he heard that noise. He remembered too. They looked at each other. Tom’s head drooped. Only Cobb and he of that crew of the L-20 which fought and suffered off Helgoland were left to hear that roar of reckoning. Of the five who had escaped that horror, Arnold had died in the hospital; Biff and Pete, fighting to save their shipmates, to save the boat, swept to their deaths a short hour before when he had plunged beneath the waves to escape Erhardt’s torpedo. Biff and Pete! They were the last in the long trail of death for which he could thank Erhardt since that night in Manila long ago. Well, now it was Erhardt’s turn. Tom wondered whether he would remember the C-3 as he lay there in his darkened boat, facing death himself.
The quartermaster stood outside the door, knocked.
“Captain Knowles!”
Tom looked up, came suddenly back to his own boat.
“The Walton’s close aboard, sir. She’s wigwagged that she’s gotta good fix on that sub on the bottom, an’ if you’ll please steam clear, she’ll start droppin’ the ashcans, sir.”
Tom’s head sank wearily down on the table. So this was the end. If only Pete, if only Biff were back again with him, he could almost feel sorry for Erhardt down in the ooze, the slime of the deep, waiting — waiting as he had waited once for the crash of the depth bombs.
Slowly he raised his shoulders and turned to the quartermaster.
“Tell ’em to stand by in the control room. I’ll be out in a minute.”
He pressed the receivers to his ears. The Walton had stopped nearby. Her propellers were silent. He could hear faintly the washing of the seas along his sides, the dull knocking of the feed pumps on the destroyer. No more noise from below. Apparently they were no longer able to turn over anything.
A clear note came to his ears, echoed like a bell in the earphones. The ring of a hammer against the metal hull of the U-38. Silence again. Then the irregular banging of metal against metal for several seconds and another pause.
And then, in dots and dashes in the Morse code, the hammer started to beat out a message — dash dot dash dot pause, dash dash dash pause, dash dot —
Cobb seized a pencil, started to jot it down. Tom did the same, followed letter by letter as the message echoed up from the bottom of the sea:
CONGRATULATIONS LIEUTENANT KNOWLTON DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES
The hammering ceased. Tom clenched his pencil, stared at the message.
So Erhardt had remembered!
A sharp crack rattled in the earphones. Knowles sprang up, the cord to his headset tightened with a jerk. Only one thing on earth made that piercing noise — a revolver shot!
At brief intervals came others; his fingers trembled as he marked them down. Twenty-seven. The silence of the tomb settled over the U-38.
Lieutenant Knowles tore the earphones from his head, staggered unsteadily up the ladder to the bridge.
A hundred feet on his port quarter lay the bow of the Walton. Leaning over her bridge he could see a three striper waving to him. A voice floated to him from a megaphone,
“We got that message here and what came after, but I’ll drop a few anyway to make sure. Get clear!”
Tom, cupping his hands, shouted:
“Aye, aye, sir!” Grasping the telegraphs he rang up half speed and circled away. The Walton backed off, swung a little, and, steaming slowly over the spot where the U-38 had sunk, dropped six bombs, set to burst on the bottom.
The surface heaved slightly, the L-20 shook as the bombs went off, but the customary pillars of spray were absent. These explosions were so far down they hardly ruffled the waves.
But the effect below was terrific. Vast quantities of oil rushed to' the surface, spread everywhere. The U-38, shattered and torn, lay in pieces in the mud.
CHAPTER XXVIII
In the little wardroom of the L-20, Commander Barber, lately aide to Admiral Sims, now captain of the rebuilt Walton, gazed curiously at the lieutenant facing him, read once more the final message from Lieutenant Erhardt.
“I told my radio officer he’d got it wrong, the word was Knowles, not Knowlton, but he stuck by his guns. He got it that way, and he won’t change the log. So you’re Lieutenant Knowlton, eh? We all remember the C-3 case, all right. I thought you were dead.”
“Yes, I’m Knowlton,” replied Tom bitterly. “Nobody on earth knew it but that skipper of the U-38. And it was on his account I lost the C-3. Well, we’re square. He’s dead now, even if I’m not. What are you going to do about it?”
Commander Barber did not answer immediately, then commented irrelevantly:
“That explains a lot. I’m skipper of the Walton now, and I’ve heard plenty from the gobs on her about how you backed her all the way to Queenstown when she’d been torpedoed. And I was with Admiral Sims when he rushed off to Harwich on the report that an American sub had come in from Helgoland with practically her whole crew dead. We both wondered all that day how it came that a chief quartermaster had the brains to get her off the bottom when her skipper’d flopped on the job. So you were skipper of the C-3? How’d you escape from her?”
“I never escaped, commander!” exclaimed Tom sadly, “I never went out with her! And that’s why she was lost. My fault all right, and, now I’ve settled with Erhardt for that, I can go back and take my medicine, I suppose. You’ll report that message?”
“As a matter of duty, yes. It’s in the log. I’m bound to tell the admiral all the circumstances. It’ll be up to him after that.”
“All right, let’s go. Shall I call your boat alongside again, sir?”
“Yes, we’d better get underway for Queenstown. I’ve got the survivors from the Galway’s boats aboard; I only stopped long enough to pick them up befor
e chasing you and the U-38.”
“You didn’t find any men in the water, did you?” asked Tom eagerly.
Commander Barber shook his head, rose and started out. Tom followed him from the wardroom, climbed up to the bridge, dropped down where the little deck widened out abreast the three-inch gun.
Barber took a deep breath as he came into the open again, trying to dear his lungs of the oily vapours he had breathed inside the submarine. He glanced around at the narrow deck, the bloodstained planking abaft the gun, the spreading flood of oil still welling up from the bottom, drifting down the wind toward the Walton. His dory shot alongside. Clinging tightly to the L-20’s rail, he waited till the boat rose high on the crest of a wave, then leaped aboard.
“These pigboats are plain hell, on the top or on the bottom. You can have ’em, Knowlton.”
Tom looked aft along his deck, thought of the men who had fought and died inside and outside that submarine.
“Maybe you’re right, there’s easier boats in the fleet than the pigs, but they suit the men that man ’em anyway. Do you think if I get a court, commander, they’ll let me keep my boat till the war’s over?”
“If I know Admiral Sims, there won’t be any court, and he’ll recommend the man that laid away Lieutenant Erhardt and the U-38, for promotion to Commander in the Regular Navy, and everything else in the way of honours he can think of! And he won’t wait till the war’s over to do it, either! My congratulations to Lieutenant Knowlton, along with Erhardt’s!” He waved his hand at Tom. “Shove off, coxswain!”
The little dory chugged away toward the Walton.
Tom gazed a moment after it. Erhardt was gone, the U-38 sunk at last. And he would go back into the Regular Service. And as a Commander. How he would have thrilled at that once, raced away to Queenstown to bring the news to Mary. But now?
With a heavy heart, Lieutenant Thomas Knowlton climbed slowly back to his chariot bridge, shoved the engine telegraphs over to full speed and headed westward toward the setting sun, westward toward the spot where his shipmates had been flung into the sea, hoping against hope that somewhere he might pick them up, still adrift among the waves, clinging perhaps to some bit of wreckage.
Pigboats Page 26
