The four six-inch guns were moving very slightly now, the smoke from their opening shots still fanning abeam like hot breath.
‘Sights moving, sir! Sights set!’
Whoosh . . . crash! The raider’s shells exploded close alongside like twin thunder-claps. The hull shook and reeled to the force of the detonations, and splinters clashed against steel or whined away over the glittering water. Two more heavy shells arrived seconds later, bracketing the cruiser in shining waterspouts and filling the air with the shriek and crash of white-hot metal.
Blair’s voice came through the din. ‘Shoot!’
The four guns recoiled together, and Blake saw the shell-bursts to the right of the target, the white columns seeming to stand like pillars for ages before they cascaded into the sea.
Walker yelled ‘X turret is jammed, sir! Seven marines wounded!’
A boatswain’s mate stood back from his voice-pipe, his eyes wild. ‘Two pumps have carried away, sir! Damage control need more men aft!’
Blake snatched up a handset, his ears cringing to the crash of gunfire as the two ships continued to close the range. Andromeda had been badly hit and it was too soon after her punishment in the Mediterranean.
A frightened voice called, ‘D-damage control, sir!’
‘Get me the first lieutenant, quickly!’
The voice broke off in a sob. ‘He’s dead, sir! He’s here, looking at me! All cut about!’ He was close to hysteria.
Blake asked, ‘Who is that?’
‘Thorne, sir.’
A face swam through the smoke and despair. A replacement midshipman. Straight from the training school. A boy.
‘Well, listen, Mr Thorne. Send a petty officer and some stokers aft to help your party there. Can you do that?’
There was a long pause, and in his mind Blake could see it all. The splinter holes, the blood and upended switchboard and damage control panel. Scovell, who had wanted his own command so much, lying dead with his men, staring at a terrified midshipman.
Thorne said in a whisper, ‘Yes, sir. I’ll do it now.’
Blake ducked his head as a great explosion smashed against the bridge, buckling steel plate and hurling broken glass and fittings amongst the crouching figures like missiles.
Two men were down, kicking out their life-blood, and Commodore Stagg was gripping his shoulder and staring at the spreading stain which ran down his side and on to the gratings at his feet.
Blake yelled, ‘Starboard twenty!’
He strode past the bodies and a signalman who was dabbing his cheek with a bloodied flag.
‘Midships! Steady!’
More steel hammered into the ship, and for an instant Blake imagined she was already going down. But Andromeda had dipped her stem deep into a breaking crest so that the sea surged aft along the forecastle before spilling over the sides as the bows began to rise again.
‘Shoot!’
The four forward guns, their muzzles stained black from firing without a break, recoiled together, but through the distant bank of haze the raider continued to draw nearer, apparently unmarked.
The ragged clouds, impartial spectators to the savagery below, lit up suddenly to reflected tracer, neat lines of fiery balls, as the raider’s short-range weapons opened up. A solitary star seemed to detach itself from the other bursts and fall slowly towards the sea. Just before it touched the water it exploded to leave a dirty smudge against the sky.
Blake watched the wind drive it away. Masters had got too close and had paid with his life.
Several of Andromeda’s company who were working on the exposed upper decks saw the Seafox fall like a comet. One of them was Ordinary Seaman Digby who, with a handful of assorted ratings, was rushing to hack some blazing canvas from a search-light mounting and throw it overboard before it spread to something more vital.
He paused, sobbing for breath, his mouth hanging open while he stared at the sea as it rushed below the guard-rail. Occasionally it would surge over the deck, sweeping broken fragments of boats and rafts away like litter, and once Digby saw a seaman he had spoken to several times being rolled bodily over the side. Before the next wave sluiced across the wet metal he saw the man’s blood.
A petty officer bellowed, ‘Over here, lads! Lively now, there’s two blokes trapped under this lot!’
One seaman raised an axe, another took a firm grip on some twisted metal.
Digby saw it all like a still life or an old photograph. Then the shell burst somewhere below, probably on one of the messdecks, and the world seemed to erupt in smoke and flying metal.
The seamen were hurled down and scattered like butchered meat, and the petty officer who had been calling to some men pinned beneath the collapsed flag deck dropped to his knees and remained there.
Digby vomited helplessly, stricken and unable to take his eyes from the horror. The petty officer, kneeling to listen for sounds of life, had no head.
A voice rasped through the smoke, “Ere, lend a ’and, someone!’
It was Leading Seaman Musgrave. He was badly cut about the face and there was more blood shining beneath his life-jacket.
The sight of Musgrave seemed to give Digby a kind of strength, and wheezing like an old man he seized his arm and began to drag him beneath the shelter of the trunked funnel.
Musgrave took his hand gratefully and asked, “O’s that then?’
He was moving his head from side to side, and it was then Digby realized he was blind.
‘It’s me, Hookey! Diggers!’
He could barely stop himself from weeping. At their frailty and their loneliness. Most of all at seeing the man he had come to admire so much cut down and so utterly dependent.
‘Diggers?’ Musgrave grimaced as the pain grew worse. ‘Good lad. ‘Ow bad is it?’
Men were shouting, and smoke billowed through a gaping hole by the boat tier as if the whole ship was ablaze.
Digby said, ‘I’ll get help. You’ll be all right.’
Musgrave gripped his wrist, but was so weak that Digby could easily have prized his hand away.
The bearded leading seaman whispered, ‘No, Diggers. You stay along of me. Just for a bit, eh? Feel dicky. Real rough.’
Digby sat down beside him, oblivious to the sprawled corpses of men he had scarcely known and conscious only of the one he now knew was dying.
‘I’m here.’
Musgrave tried to touch his eyes and said, ‘You’ll make a good officer, Diggers. Just remember wot I said. . . .’ His head lolled and he was dead.
Some sick-berth attendants, their steel helmets awry, the heavy red cross bouncing against them as they ran, paused and looked at the solitary, crouching seaman.
‘You all right, mate?’
Digby stood up slowly. ‘Yes, thank you.’
One SBA said, ‘Right then. Up to the bridge. Chop, chop!’
Digby walked after them. He did not even duck as a splinter slammed through the funnel and ricocheted over his head.
He might be going mad, but he was no longer afraid. It was as if the strength of that coarse, violent seaman had somehow drained itself into him.
Blake felt someone tugging at his arm. It was Sub-Lieutenant Walker, his hat gone, and some tiny flecks of blood on his forehead. He was tying a crude dressing round Blake’s arm.
‘Might help, sir!’
Blake looked past him, seeing the smoke pouring from the ship’s wounds. He had not even felt the blow on his arm.
Stagg was roaring like a bull, and Blake turned towards him, almost afraid of what he would see.
Stagg shouted, ‘The bugger’s turning away! He’s going to fire a full broadside at us!’
Blake levelled his glasses, his teeth grating on the dust and chipped paint which seemed to fill the air.
There was the raider, angled away across the starboard bow, smoking from several hits now, but moving as firmly as before.
The sea was rising more and more, and the smoke seemed to mix with the blown spray as i
f trying to save the ships from mutual destruction.
But Blake could see the flashing guns, the rectangular openings in the raider’s side where the massive shutters had been dropped.
Two more shells exploded off the port beam, and he guessed the German gunnery officer was preparing for a final straddle before he closed in to use his torpedoes.
It would not take much longer. Andromeda was barely answering the helm as with her pumps unable to cope against the racing screws she was listing more and more to starboard.
Blake looked at the angry sea and knew there would be few left who would be able to tell of their fight and their sacrifice.
Forward of the bridge, and sitting on his little steel seat at the rear of B turret, his eyes glued to the sights, Lieutenant Blair, who came from Queensland, studied the blurred target with something like despair.
He knew that forward of his turret the other two guns were silent, most of their crew killed by a direct hit. Down aft, X turret was still jammed solid, and Y was unable to train on the enemy.
Blair heard the hissing sounds of the shells being guided into the smoking breeches, the hoarse bark of orders and then the slamming click of the locking mechanism.
‘Both guns loaded, sir!’
Blair adjusted his sights with elaborate care. The enemy was moving on a different angle now, but what was more interesting was that she was heeling over steeply whenever her stern lifted above the crested rollers.
Sweat ran down the side of his nose, and he tried not to flinch as the sea boiled to the impact of another big shell from the raider. He felt the little steel seat shiver but, like the rest of the fight, it was remote, sealed off by the inch-thick armourplate. Only when it burst in on you did it have real meaning.
He watched the magnified picture of the raider’s bridge, a tiny pale sliver as it rolled once again towards him.
‘Sights moving! Sights set!’ He held his breath. ‘Shoot!’
Blake had been knocked aside as a seaman fell from a voice-pipe clutching at his chest and screwing his uniform into a bright red ball. As he lurched to his feet he saw a single explosion directly on top of the enemy’s bridge.
It was a brief orange flash, and then as the armour-piercing shell plunged down through the decks, aided by the Salamander’s steep turn, it exploded against one of the magazines.
Two more vivid flashes cut through the drifting spray, and then as some of Andromeda’s men jumped up from behind their gun-shields the sky seemed to dim to one tremendous explosion.
Stagg shouted hoarsely, ‘What’s that, for Christ’s sake?’
He was streaming blood, and had twice punched a sick-berth attendant who had tried to fix a dressing.
Blake stared, mesmerized, at the pale line beyond the ship which was reeling to more internal destruction which must be leaping from point to point like one giant fuse.
The line was a bank of rollers, built up into a single, massive force over hundreds of miles of ocean with nothing in its path but the stricken raider.
Blake shouted, ‘The fringe of the storm!’ He tore his eyes from the oncoming mass and shouted down a voice-pipe, ‘Slow ahead together! Wheel amidships!’
He swung round, trying to keep his mind from the fact that he had destroyed Rietz and his ship and deal with the safety of his own.
‘Pilot, have it piped round the ship!’
He stared at Villar’s body below the compass platform, the small red stain just below his heart.
Lieutenant Trevett said, ‘I’ve taken the con, sir.’ He glanced at the dead South African. ‘Reckon I had a good teacher.’
Blake nodded. ‘Warn all hands.’
The unending bank of water seemed to roll against the Salamander’s side without any sort of urgency. As if it was almost spent.
Then, as the ship began to turn turtle, the pressure mounted against her bilge keel, thrusting her over and down, and making a lie of the deceptive slowness.
One final explosion blasted the Salamander’s hull wide open, and as the sea surged over her shattered plates the side of the wave was lit up from within so that it looked like a solid sheet of bloody glass.
Blake heard the raider breaking up, machinery tearing loose to add to the destruction within the hull. Exploding ammunition and fuel and, as she took the last plunge, the booming roar of her boilers. Then nothing.
Perhaps the fringe of the storm had really spent its fury, or maybe it had done enough even for the ocean’s greed. But as it reached the Andromeda’s stem and lifted her effortlessly towards the smoky sunlight it was already passing astern before anyone could really accept that it was over.
Sub-Lieutenant Walker had a telephone in his hand and said huskily, ‘It’s the Chief, sir.’
Blake took it but kept his eyes on his ship, the men around him and the tattered flag which had remained overhead throughout both actions.
Weir sounded tired. ‘Thought you should know. I can give you more revs now.’ He gave what might have been a chuckle. ‘The old girl was playing me up, nothing worse.’
‘Thank you, Chief.’
Blake handed the telephone to Walker and rejoined Stagg by the broken screen.
‘Fall out action stations. Post extra lookouts in case there are any survivors in the water.’
Stagg was staring at the sea where his old enemy had been just moments earlier.
He said dully, ‘I thought it would mean something.’ He sighed and allowed the Toby Jug to fold a shell-dressing over his torn shoulder. ‘But Rietz was nothing special after all. Just a man.’ He looked at Blake. ‘Like the rest of us.’
He pulled a silver flask from his hip pocket and took a long swallow. Then he wiped it on his sleeve and passed it to Blake.
Blake drank without knowing if it was brandy or champagne. A lot of good men had died, and much had to be done for the ship before they reached safety again.
But he needed this moment. Just for himself. To accept he had survived one more time.
Stagg eyed him thoughtfully. ‘After this I’ll be needing an assistant in Melbourne. How would it suit you?’ He grinned suddenly. ‘I can see it would!’
Blake thought of what he would say when he saw Claire again. What words he could use to tell her how much he needed her.
Stagg watched Moon’s doleful features as he crept nervously on to the bridge with a flask and some sandwiches.
‘Of course, the new commanding officer will take over from you soon, so that’s no real problem.’
‘You already know who it will be, sir?’
Stagg picked up a sandwich. It looked like a postage stamp in his great fist.
‘Fairfax, of course. If he’s still in one piece, that is.’
Blake stared at him. ‘I thought you said . . . .’
Stagg grunted. ‘Never mind what I said. It doesn’t do to tell people too much, y’know.’ He seemed uncomfortable in his new role. ‘You’d better make a signal. Tell the people in Melbourne that we did it.’ He gave a quick grin. ‘Together, eh?’
The Toby Jug had his pencil poised. ‘I’ll tell W/T, sir.’
Blake looked at Villar’s face, screwed up at the moment of impact. He thought of the others he could not see, the disdainful Scovell, a frightened youth named Thorne, the ordinary seaman who was bringing more bandages to the bridge, Digby.
Andromeda had been made to leave so many behind over the months and years of combat.
And now I am leaving her.
Blake thought of Fairfax and was suddenly glad for him, and for the ship.
He said quietly, ‘Make this signal to the Navy Office, repeated Admiralty. Two German raiders destroyed. With help from on high, HMS Andromeda is returning to harbour.’
Quintin would see that and show it to Claire. She would know that he was safe.
There were no survivors from the German raiders, and with her own wounded to be considered, Andromeda turned slowly and headed towards the eastern horizon. Once again she had the ocean to herself.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448150786
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First published by Arrow Books in 1980
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© Bolitho Maritime Productions Ltd 1979
Douglas Reeman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in the United Kingdom in 1979
by Hutchinson
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A Ship Must Die (1981) Page 29