Gunnar smiled and glanced up at the remaining flag. ‘I think not. What would be the point anyway?’
He leaned on the boy’s shoulder and levelled the glasses once more. In the powerful lenses he could see the high stem, the black gun muzzles and the bridge beyond. With surprise he saw that there was a scar across her raked hull and realised that at least one of the Hibiscus’s small shells had gone home.
It was over. Hibiscus could neither move nor manœuvre, and he could feel her deck dragging heavily in each small swell. Another shell exploded near the bows, and Gunnar’s heart sank even more as the little gun fell silent.
He turned away as Tasker dropped his handset and reported: ‘That’s it, sir. Gun’s out of action,’ he faltered, ‘an’ I’m afraid the gunnery officer is dead!’
Gunnar pressed his head against the warm steel. Poor Regan. He gritted his teeth in his misery. Poor Hibiscus.
There was a far-off rattle of machine-gun fire and he dragged his eyes unwillingly towards the sea once again. The destroyer was slewing round, her stem biting hard into the water as she heeled over in her racing turn. All of her fifty thousand horsepower seemed to be tugging at her superstructure, so that her guns fell silent as she swung off course and away from the Hibiscus.
Maddox ran out on to the open wing his glasses already following the change of tactics. Perhaps the torpedoes would come now? He thought of Mary, of his brother, and Lea Burgess, the memories and faces crowding his mind even as the destroyer turned on a course parallel to the listing submarine chaser and headed again towards the waiting landing craft. Something was wrong, but what?
He heard Tasker yell, ‘One of the L.C.s is poopin’ off at them!’ He sounded as if he no longer believed what he saw.
Gunnar watched the strange drama like a man who follows a silent film for the first time. He could see the tiny, puny pinpoints of fire from the landing craft’s machine gun, and the frantic efforts of the destroyer’s gunners to depress their weapons to reply. But the racing ship was already too close, and when one of her guns did fire the shell struck the water astern of the little box-like craft and ricocheted across the surface like a whirling comet.
Maddox was screaming at the top of his voice: ‘Jesus! It’s Burgess!’
Other men crowded the listing wheelhouse, pointing and shouting like madmen. One yelled, ‘An’ there’s ole Pirelli!’ And another: ‘Holy cow! He’s committin’ suicide just like us!’
Gunnar heard the words without bitterness. It was all true. Burgess had turned the destroyer’s charge with the precision and coolness of a matador with a maddened bull. How he had got hold of the craft and where he had come from did not seem to matter. He had come to help, and although his gesture would be as fruitless as that of his own ship, Gunnar found that he was shaking with silent emotion.
The destroyer tore in for the kill, and through his glasses Gunnar saw Burgess sitting bolt upright beside Pirelli, who appeared to be pounding the machine gun with a bottle.
Gunnar dropped his eyes as the destroyer’s tall stem rose above the slow-moving craft and then seemed to fall on it like a giant axe. He could hear the splintering of woodwork and the scream of its thin plating.
Then Maddox yelled, ‘Hey, that’s the L.C.I. I found before I——’
He never finished the sentence. As Gunnar looked again and saw the victorious destroyer slicing through a few pieces of bobbing flotsam, the seven depth-charges from the sunken landing craft exploded as one.
Directly amidships, and at a minimum depth setting, the explosion could be compared with that of a mammoth bomb.
Gunnar fell back as the searing shock-wave thundered across the mile and a half of smooth water, and flinched again as a second detonation filled the sky with a thousand flying fragments. The explosions went on and on until the handful of unwounded men on the Hibiscus’s battered decks felt cowed and dazed, beaten down with each successive blast.
When Gunnar looked again there was nothing between him and Payenhau. Only a widening patch of oil and a few specks of floating driftwood remained to mark the finality of Burgess’s last deed.
Gunnar did not know how long he stood staring at the oil slick, nor what anyone else said. It was as if from a drugged sleep that he heard a man report: ‘Ship, sir! Bearing one four five!’
Then a few seconds later, as the diamond-bright light stabbed across the water, ‘It’s the British destroyer Bosworth, sir!’
Maddox reeled against the wheel and mopped his face. ‘I never thought I’d be pleased to see him again!’
The Hibiscus’s last remaining signalman read the flickering light. ‘Have doctor aboard and will come alongside to render all assistance.’
Maddox said quickly, ‘Tell him we’d be glad of his help!’
He moved to Gunnar’s side and helped his brother to support him as the light began to reply from the other ship.
The signalman read, ‘It will be an honour!’
Maddox was grinning like a schoolboy. ‘I guess this’ll mean another trip to the yard and another refit before we pay off?’
Gunnar looked round at the silent, smoking ship and pressed his hand against the pain in his side. It was like sharing her pain, he thought.
‘I’ll be sorry to lose the Hibiscus,’ he said at length, and this time he knew that he meant it.
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First published by Arrow in 1967
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Copyright © Douglas Reeman 1966
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1966 by Hutchinson
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Path of the Storm Page 39