The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  It must have been well after midnight when be was roused from his deep slumber. Mr. Parker was standing over him with a look of concern on his face.

  “She’s gone crazy again, sir,” he reported, “and we can’t do a thing with her—”

  “Don’t try,” directed the captain. “What’s she doing?”

  “Turned sharp to the left about fifteen minutes ago and is turning up about twelve revolutions more than her proper speed. The helmsman can’t do anything about it. Neither can the engineer. She won’t obey her wheel or throttle. What do we do—fold up and call it a day?”

  Captain Tolliver sat up in his bunk.

  “Oh, no. By no means. You’ll be awfully busy shortly. Turn out all hands at once. Man your lifeboats and have them ready for lowering? Shut all water-tight doors below and see that there is plenty of shoring handy in case the peak gets stove in. Have the collision mat ready. That’s all.”

  “But the steering?”

  “Just let the wheel go. She’ll steer herself. She knows where she wants to go. I don’t.”

  The mate left and the old man dragged himself to his mismated feet and began the laborious journey to the bridge. Once he was up there he made sure that the searchlight was ready to turn on in case he needed it. After that he could only wait.

  The wait was not long. Fifteen minutes later there was a shock, a grinding, bumping of something under the fore-foot and along the keel. The ship’s engines stopped abruptly, then began backing. Captain Tolliver reached for the engine room telegraph and rang it to “Stop.”

  The ship stopped.

  “Collision forward?” shouted the lookout in the bow. “We just ran down a small ship of some sort.”

  Tolliver could hear the boatswain and his gang dropping into the fore hold to see whether the damage was serious. Then he spoke quietly to the mate who was on the bridge beside him.

  “You may put your boats in the water now, Mister. I have a hunch we just ran down a Nazi sub. I’ll put on the light as soon as you are lowered.” The mate left on the run, more mystified than ever. A man came up from forward and reported the peak was full up to the waterline but the bulkhead abaft it was holding and the ship seemed to be in no danger.

  “Turn on that searchlight,” ordered Captain Tolliver, “and sweep aft.” There was a chorus of gasps as the light stabbed out into the murk and almost instantly lit on a large black object rearing up above the waves. It was the bow of a submarine, and even as they sighted it it slid backwards into the deep. But in that brief glimpse they saw several men plunge overboard, and as the light swept to right and left the bobbing heads of a dozen or more men could be seen in the water.

  “Pick up those men and be smart about it,” yelled Tolliver through his megaphones to the boats. Then he watched as they draped the survivors into the boats and rowed back to the ship. He watched as they hoisted the boats in and housed them at their davits.

  “Put those men under guard,” he directed, “and get back on your course. Things will be all right now.” And with that he went below to pick up his nights sleep where it had left off.

  The arrival of the Sadie Saxon at Bermuda caused quite a stir. Many were the congratulations upon the ship’s luck in blundering across a U-boat and ramming it in the dark. The two officers and eleven men rescued from the crash were most welcome to the British Intelligence officers. Hasty arrangements were made for quick repairs to the ship’s damaged bow. She had missed the convoy for which she was intended, but there would be other convoys and the little delay was well paid for by the bag of the undersea wolf. Captain Tolliver took his praise modestly.

  “It’s not all luck,” he said. “It is a habit of the Sadie Saxon. If you will look up her record in the last war you will see she has done that sort of thing before.”

  By the time the ship was ready for sea again the hubbub had died down. Captain Tolliver took the position assigned him with entire calm and confidence. It was a big convoy and made up of three columns of ships. The Sadie Saxon was given the post of danger and honor as the lead ship of the right-hand column. But destroyers frolicked about ahead and on the flanks. It would be costly for any submarine to tackle that well-guarded flotilla.

  For three nights they went eastward, steaming without lights and in formation. There was no alarm other than the appearance overhead one day of a trio of scout bombers marked with the black and white crosses of Germany. The anti-aircraft guns of the escorting warships kept them at too great a height to do any damage, and so drove them away. But after their appearance old Captain Tolliver knew anything might happen. The Sadie Saxon had behaved most peculiarly all the while they were in sight, vibrating almost as if she had dropped a screw.

  “Steady, old girl,” whispered the skipper into the binnacle, “you’ll have to get used to those. They’re an innovation.”

  It was the night after that that the big attack occurred. The long triple column of ships was plowing along through a dark and misty night and thirty officers on as many bridges were staring anxiously into the murk striving not to lose sight of the tiny blue stern light of the ship ahead. Under the circumstances mutual collision was much more likely than a hostile attack. The orders were strict—maintain radio silence at all costs, never show a light under any circumstances, and above all, keep station.

  But the Sadie Saxon cared next to nothing about commodore’s orders. At ten minutes past four in the morning she balked, her engines churning violently at full speed astern, to the consternation of the black gang who had had no bells to that effect and were caught off guard. Captain Tolliver was on the bridge when it happened and called sharply to the forward lookouts:

  “Look sharply close aboard! What do you see?”

  The ship was turning rapidly to starboard, her rudder jammed hard over, while the helmsman strove wildly to bring the wheel back the other way.

  “The wakes of two torpedoes, sir—no, four—five—nine! Coming from starboard, sir.”

  The streaks of phosphorescent light were visible now from the bridge. The Sadie Saxon was turning straight into them; she would pass safely between a pair of them.

  The aged skipper acted with an alacrity that surprised even him. He yelled for the searchlight and with his own hand pulled the whistle into a strident blast of warning. The searchlight came on and threw its beam straight ahead. There, in a line, were three gray conning towers—three submarines on the surface and in fairly close formation. The nearest destroyer saw them too and at once plunged towards them with its guns blazing. Geysers of white water shot up about the nearest one. A couple of seconds later a bright flash told of a six-inch hit squarely at the base of a conning tower. The other two subs were diving hard, but the one that was hit did not dive. Or did not dive the regular way. It rolled slowly over toward the Sadie Saxon, spilling frantic men from its torn superstructure, then settled to its grave.

  The leading freighter of the middle column suddenly blew up with a bang, lighting up the sea like day. A moment later the second ship of the left-hand column burst into flames. At least two of the nine torpedoes fired had found a mark. But the subs that fired them had no opportunity to fire more. They had been ambushed in their own ambush, and already three destroyers were racing back and forth over the spots where they had last been seen and dropping depth-charges by the score. Similar activities were going on on the other side. Apparently there had been other subs waiting there as well.

  The Sadie Saxon lay still where she was until the survivors of the two ships destroyed had been brought on board. Then she unaccountably turned due south and ran for an hour at full speed. There she stopped and refused to budge another yard. It was well past the dawn then and a destroyer could be seen on the horizon behind still searching for vestiges of their attackers.

  “Signal that destroyer,” the captain said, “and tell him to come over here. We’ve got one spotted.”

  The destroyer came up within hail, and its captain delivered a blistering message through what must have
been an asbestos-lined megaphone. “Will the second on that ship kindly relieve that blithering idiot in command and put him under arrest? The—”

  “The sub’s right under me,” Tolliver yelled back, “playing possum a hundred feet or so down.” The ship started moving ahead. “Come in and drop your eggs. Then lock me up if you want.”

  He turned to Parker who was in a quandary as to what to do. The performances of the ship had shaken his nerve. He had begun to wonder whether he was the crazy man. Tolliver ignored him. Instead he walked out to the wing of the bridge and watched the destroyer do its work.

  Huge seething hummocks of water rose as the ash-cans exploded under the surface. Four of them had gone off and the destroyer was coming back for a second run across the same spot. But there was no need. A half mile away a black nose appeared for a moment on the surface, stuck its beak up into the air, then with a loud hissing of escaping air fell back weakly into the water. Where it had been were three bobbing heads. There had been a sub under there!

  “Thanks,” flashed the destroyer, “well done. Rejoin convoy.”

  They went past Gib without stopping and made the hazardous trip to Alexandria without incident other than a few sporadic and ineffectual raids by enemy aircraft. At Alexandria Captain Tolliver found this message waiting for him; it was from ONI.

  “You are a better guesser than some of our experts. The three men you tipped us off to are in jail. They planned to seize the ship and divert it to a Norwegian port. Congratulations.”

  The skipper gave a brief snort and then crammed the message into a pocket with his one good hand. Then he learned that on the voyage home he was to carry the convoy’s commodore. The “commodore,” a retired Navy captain, came aboard and looked around.

  He did not say much until they were out of the Mediterranean and well to the west of Portugal. By then they had been joined by many other ships and were steaming in a formation much like the one before, with the difference that this time, being flagship, they were more nearly in the middle of the flotilla.

  “You seem to have a remarkable ability to spot submarines, Captain,” he remarked. “What is your secret?”

  “Me?” said the skipper indignantly. “Hell, I can’t see a submarine in the dark or under water any farther than the next man. All the credit is due to Sadie. She smells ’em. She hates ’em, too.”

  “Yes, I know. She rammed several in the last war, didn’t she? And didn’t they make her into a Q-ship?”

  “She did. She was. If you’ll look down there on the pedestal of the binnacle stand you’ll see some file marks. There are fourteen of ’em now. Each one stands for a U-boat. Or raider. I tell you, she don’t like Germans. She was a German herself, you know, but they didn’t treat her right. She has a grievance.”

  “Now, Captain,” laughed the commodore, “don’t you think you are carrying your little joke too far? After all…”

  “Do you know the story of this ship?” asked Tolliver fiercely, “well, listen.”

  It was close to midnight then and a bright moon was shining. The silhouettes of the ships about were distinct as black masses against the glittering white-kissed sea. The two officers went on talking, but their eyes were steadfastly kept ahead. This was a night when anything might happen.

  “In 1914 this ship was spanking new. She was the Koenigen von Sachsen or something of the sort, freshly turned out of the Vulcan Works at Stettin. The outbreak of the war caught her at Hoboken and they tied her up for the duration. But when we joined the war in ’17 and took her over, her innards were something pitiful to see. Her crew had dry-fired her boilers and they were a mass of sagging tubes. The vandals cracked her cylinders with sledges, threw the valve gear and cylinder heads overboard, and messed up all the auxiliaries. They fixed the wiring so it would short the moment juice was put on it, and they took down steam leads and inserted steel blanks between the flanged joints. In other places they drove out rivets and replaced them with ones of putty. I tell you she was dynamite, even after they fixed up the boilers and main machinery.

  “Naturally, having a thing like that done to you would make you sore especially if you were young and proud and the toast of the Imperial German merchant marine. But that was not all. On her first trip across—I was mate then—a sub slammed a torp into her off the north of Ireland and it took her stern away. Luckily she didn’t sink and another ship put a hawser on us and worried us into Grennock where they fixed her up. That would have been bad enough, but on the trip home she smacks into a submarine-laid mine off the Delaware Capes and blows in her bow. We had to beach her near Cape May.

  “They rebuilt her again and we set out. But her hard-luck—or mistreatment rather—wasn’t at an end. In those days our Secret Service wasn’t as good as it is now and a saboteur got aboard. He gummed up things pretty bad. So bad that we caught afire and almost sank in mid-ocean. It took some doggoned hard work to save that ship, but help came and we stayed afloat. Well, that was the end of her patience. She went hog-wild. After that, no matter whether she was in convoy or not, whenever, anything that was German was around—sub, torpedo, raider or what not—she went after it, and never mind engine room bells or rudder. Her whimsies cost me a hand and a leg before we were through, but I didn’t mind. I figured I could take it if she could.

  “She broke the hearts of three captains. A lot of captains, you ought to know, object to having the ship take charge. They said she was unmanageable and chucked their jobs. That left me in command, though at the time I didn’t rate the job. Knowing something of her history, I knew better than to interfere. Her hunches are the best thing I know. No matter what she does…”

  “Hey?” yelled the commodore, thoroughly alarmed, “watch what you’re doing.”

  The Sadie Saxon had sheered sharply from her course and was heading directly across the bows of a ship in the column to one side of them. It was too late then, even if the Sadie had been tractable, to do anything about it. A collision was inevitable. The commodore reached for the whistle pull, but Tolliver grabbed his arm and held it.

  “Wait,” he urged, “this means something. I know her.”

  An angry, guttural shout came from the bridge of the ship whose path they were about to cross. Then came the rending crash as steel bit into steel—thousands of tons of it at twelve knots speed. The other ship had rammed the Sadie Saxon just abreast the mainmast and she heeled over sharply, spilling deck gear over the off rail. At once pandemonium reigned in the convoy as ships behind sheered out to avoid compounding the already serious collision.

  At once fresh confusion succeeded. The ship that was the victim of the Sadie’s caprice suddenly dropped her false bulwarks and the moonlight glinted off the barrels of big guns both fore and aft. Harsh orders sounded in German and the guns began spitting fire. Shells began bursting against ships on all sides as the raider that had insinuated itself into the midst of the convoy began its work. Escort ships began dashing toward the scene, worming their way through the scattering freighters so as to get to a spot where they could open fire.

  “I told you,” said Captain Tolliver, serenely. “You can always trust her.”

  But she was sinking, and the crew were lowering what boats they could. The commodore was one of the first to leave, since he was in charge of the entire expedition and must transfer his flag to a surviving ship. Tolliver stayed behind. There was not room enough in the boats for one thing, and his faith in the durability of the Sadie Saxon was unlimited. He had seen her in worse plight many times before.

  The raider had succeeded in backing away, but it, too, was in a perilous condition. Her bows were torn wide open and she was fast going down by the head. She continued to fire viciously at everything within reach, paying especial attention to the crippled Sadie Saxon. A shell struck her funnel and threw fragments and splinters onto the bridge. One fragment struck Captain Tolliver in the right thigh and he went down with a brief curse. Another pair of projectiles burst aft among the rest of the crew who were e
ngaged in freeing a life raft from the mainmast shrouds. It must have killed them all, for when shortly afterward a destroyer ranged alongside and hailed, there was no answering cry.

  Toiliver battled himself to the wing of the bridge and managed to cut an opening in the weather screen. He looked out just in time to see the flaming remnants of the raider sink under the moon-tipped waves. The freighters had all gone and the destroyers were charging off in a new direction. Apparently submarines, working in conjunction with the camouflaged raider, had made their appearance. Tolliver watched a moment, then was aware of a growing faintness. His leg must be bleeding more than he thought. In a moment everything turned black.

  It was broad daylight when he came to again. Another peep showed him an empty ocean. The convoy must have gone on, as it was proper and correct it should. And then he heard the burr and roar of airplanes overhead. They swooped low, machine-gunning the decks systematically on the assumption men were still aboard. One, more daring than the rest, swooped in between the masts. Sadie Saxon was trembling in every plate and rivet.

  “Steady, girl,” murmured the now delirious captain, laying his cheek against the bridge deck and patting it gently with his one hand. “you can’t handle those, I know. But we’ve done enough, you and I. We can’t keep afloat forever.”

  Her answer was typical. He had no way of knowing how deep she was in the water, or what her trim, but she heeled violently to port—hung there a moment, then turned quietly over on her side. The instant she to chose do it was just as the daring raider plane was diving beneath her radio antennae, ready to drop its final bomb. Captain Tolliver heard its wings snap off and its body crash as the whipping, heeling mast struck it. There was a final burst of flame, and the rest was cool, green water. The old sea-dog felt the waves close over him, but he was smiling and content.