Shout at the Devil - Smith Wilbur - Страница 69

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sculptured and scooped with the pattern of the swells. The two ships were starkly and crisply lit, steaming on converging courses, already so close to each other that the mile-long, solid white beams of their battle lights jumped out to join, fumbling together like the hands of hesitant lovers.

In almost the same second both ships opened fire, but the banging of Bloodhound's little 4.7-inch guns was lost in the bellow of the cruiser's broadside.

Blitcher was firing over open sights with her guns depressed until the long barrels were horizontal to the surface of the sea. Her first salvo was aimed a fraction high, and the huge shells howled over

Bloodhound's open bridge.

The wind of their passage, the fierce draught of disrupted air they threw out, caught Charles Little and sent him reeling against the compass pinnacle. He felt the ribs below his armpit crack.

The command he shouted at the helm was hoarse with pain.

"Turn four points to port! Steer for the enemy!" and Bloodhound spun like a ballet dancer, and charged straight at Blitcher.

The cruiser's next broadside was high again but now her secondary armament had joined in, and a four-pound shell from one of the quick-firing pom-poms burst on the director tower above Bloodhound's bridge. It swept the exposed area with a buzzing hailstorm of shrapnel, It killed the navigating lieutenant instantly, cutting away the top of his head as though it were the shell of a soft boiled egg.

He fell on the deck and splattered the foot plates with the warm custard of his brains.

A piece of the red-hot shell casing, the size of a thumbnail,

entered the point of Herbert Cryer's right elbow and shattered the bone to splinters. He gasped at the shock and sprawled against the wheel.

"Hold her. Hold her true!" The order from Commander Little was blurred as the speech of a spastic. Herbert Cryer pulled himself up and with his left hand spun the wheel to meet Bloodhound's wild swing,

but with his right arm hanging useless, his steering was clumsy and awkward.

"Steady her, man. Hold her steady!" Again that thick slurring voice, and Cryer was aware of Charles Little beside him, his hands on the helm, helping to hold Bloodhound's frantic head.

"Aye, aye, sir." Cryer glanced at his commander and gasped again.

This time in horror. Razor-sharp steel had sliced off Charles Little's ear, then gone on to cut his cheek away, and expose the bone of his jaw and the white teeth that lined it. A flap of tattered flesh hung down on to his chest, and from a dozen severed blood vessels dark blood dripped and spurted and dribbled.

The two of them crouched wounded over the wheel, with the dead men at their feet, and aimed Bloodhound at the long low bulk of the German cruiser.

Now in the daylight glare of the star shells, the sea around them was thrashed and whipped into seething life by the cacophony of

Blitcher's guns. Tall towers of white water rose briefly and majestically about them, then dropped back to leave the surface troubled and restless with foam.

And Bloodhound drove on until suddenly it seemed she had run into a cliff of solid granite. Beneath their feet, she jarred and bucked violently. A nine-inch shell had taken her full in the bows.

"Port full rudder." Charles Little's voice was sloshy sounding,

wet with the blood that filled his mouth, and together they spun the wheel to full left lock.

But Bloodhound was dying. The shell had split her bows wide open,

torn her plating and fanned it open like the petals of a macabre orchid. The black night sea rushed through her. Already her bows were sinking, slumping wearily, lifting her stern so the rudder no longer had full purchase. But even in death she was trying desperately to obey.

Slowly she swung, inchingly, achingly, she swung.

Charles Little left the helm and tottered towards the starboard rail. His legs were numb and heavy under him, and the weakness of his lost blood drummed in his ears. He reached the rail and clung there, peering down on the torpedo tubes that stood on the deck below him.

The tubes looked like a rack of fat cigars, and with weary jubilation Charles saw that there were men still tending them, crouching behind the sheet of armour plate, waiting for Bloodhound to turn and bring Blucher on to her starboard Irish beam.

"Turn, old girl. Come on! That's it! Turn!" Charles croaked through the blood.

Another shell struck Bloodhound, and she heaved in mortal agony. Perhaps this movement, combined with a chance push of the sea swell, was enough to swing her those last few degrees.

There, full in the track of the torpedo tubes, lit by her scant own star shells and the gun-fire from her turrets, a thousand yards across the black water, lay the German cruiser. Charles heard the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, of the tubes as they fired. He saw the long sharklike shapes of the torpedoes leap out from the deck and strike the water, saw the four white wakes arrowing away in formation, and behind him he heard the torpedo officer's triumphant shout, distorted by the voice-pipe.

"All four fired, and running true!" Charles never saw his torpedoes strike, for one of Blitcher's nine-inch shells hit the bridgework three feet below him. For one brief unholy instant, he stood in the centre of a furnace as hot as the flames of the sun.

von Kleine watched the English destroyer explode. Towering orange flames erupted from her, and a solid ball of black smoke spun upon itself, blooming on the dark ocean like a flower from the gardens of hell. The surface of the sea around her was dimpled by the fall of thrown debris and the cruiser's shells for all of Blucher's guns were still blazing.

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