up in the knowledge that this could be the last day of it for thousands of them. Then they had been outnumbered and outgunned and knew Napoleon was massed on the shores of France.
Now they faced the kaiser, and the might of Germany and Austria. France was driven to the wall and England desperate again.
He tightened his grip and pulled himself up onto the level of the bridge. Ragland was in the signal house, surveying a calm, slightly hazy sea.
“Looks as if you’re going to have more than you bargained for, Matthews,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s all hands on deck.”
“Are we going to be in time?” Matthew asked.
Ragland smiled. “Of course we are. But at least you’ve got your man. If you want to ask him anything, you’d better do it now. By midday you may not have the chance. We’ll probably catch up with the main fleet about then.”
Matthew considered it, but what could he ask? What was there that he didn’t know already? He did not want to face Hannassey, but perhaps he must, even if there was nothing to learn.
He accepted the advice and went back down into the bowels of the ship and along the narrow, steel-enclosed passages. He could feel the entire hull vibrate with the racing of the engines. The stokers must be shoveling coal till their backs ached and their muscles felt as if they were tearing off the bones.
Hannassey was in the brig, guarded by armed men. They knew who Matthew was and let him in, but with a warning to be careful.
Hannassey was sitting on a wooden bench. Stripped of his assumed naval uniform he was a lean man, hard muscled with a flat stomach and broad, supple hands. But it was his face that held Matthew’s attention. He was no longer pretending to be ordinary, and the cold, brilliant intelligence in him was undisguised. His features were powerful, his eyes bright blue-green. He looked at Matthew with amusement. “Well, I never thought I’d go down in the belly of some damn English ship!” he said wryly.
Matthew searched to see if he could recognize anything of Detta in the man in front of him. His coloring was utterly different—pale, washed out, where she was dark and vivid with life. He was cold where she was warm. He was all angles; she was fire, soft lines, and grace.
Hannassey smiled. “Looking for a resemblance, are you? You won’t see much. Detta’s like her mother. But she’s mine, all right, heart and soul of her. She had the measure of you, boy.”
Funnily enough, it was his smile that was like hers, the set of his teeth. The memory of her tore inside him. “Did she?” he responded.
“Oh, yes,” Hannassey’s smile widened, colder than the wind over the sea. “You were desperate to trick her into confirming what you guessed about the sabotage of your munition ships. You hoped that if she believed you knew it all anyway, she’d tell you the rest. She gave you nothing! But she learned from you what she needed.”
“Oh? And what was that?” Matthew heard the quiver in his own voice.
“That you’re desperate,” Hannassey replied wolfishly. “You know nothing, you’re guessing and fishing around for proof of anything at all.”
So Detta had told him what Matthew had wanted her to. She had believed the code intact. Then he felt an ice-cold fear for her. Without meaning to, he looked at Hannassey.
Hannassey saw the fear and understood it in a flash of revelation. “You did break it!” he said, his face bleached white. His voice choked in his throat as if he were gagging blood. He lurched forward, hands stretched out to grasp and crush, but the chain on his ankles held him. “Mother of God, do you know what they’ll do to her?” he cried. “They’ll break her knees! My beautiful Detta . . .” He stopped, looking up at Matthew, his eyes burning with hate.
Matthew froze. He knew she would be punished for failure, when at last they found out. He had thought it would be later, a long time, when there was so much lost one more person would not matter.
“She’ll be alive.” He whispered the words, emotion choking him. “My parents are dead, and God knows how many others. You too now, whether this ship goes down or not.” He had nothing more to say. He was sick with the thought of Detta mutilated, never to walk with that easy grace again.
He turned and left without looking back at Hannassey and his pain-twisted face. He heard the guards lock the brig door, but he said nothing to them.
Up in the signal house again he found himself jobs to do, anything to keep his mind busy. He went down to the transmitting station where the fire-control table was continuously recording the data for the range and bearing of whatever enemy ship was targeted. All around the walls were different electrical instruments for sending the information up to the guns, voice pipes and telephones. There were about twenty men there, each with his own job to do.
Up on the deck again he took the glasses and scanned the horizon, trying to force Detta from his mind.
The weather was calm, the swell slight. There was a haze over the water, the wind from the south too little to dispel it completely.
Everyone was looking for something to do to take their thoughts from the mounting tension. All the watertight doors were thoroughly examined, every piece of apparatus was tested and spare parts broken out to be handy if needed in an emergency. Was this going to be it, the big one at last? Perhaps by this time tomorrow it would be over. Trench warfare went on and on, a battle of slow wearing down, death month by month, a matter of who could survive the longest.
Here at sea the war could be lost in a day because without naval supremacy, Britain was finished.
The afternoon passed slowly, minute by minute. Matthew obeyed his occasional orders and waited, watching Ragland’s face, his self-controlled calm. What was he thinking? Did his stomach churn with fear, too, imagination of physical pain, of not being good enough, clever enough, quick enough, above all brave enough?
What about Archie on the bridge? In the final count it all depended on him. A hundred and twenty-seven men. Would he make the right decisions?
It was just short of four o’clock in the afternoon when they saw the smoke of gunfire on the horizon and after that, sighted the rest of the fleet spread across the sea to the east. Bugles and drums sounded the general march to call all hands to battle stations. Within minutes every station reported to the bridge that they were ready for action.
After that Matthew was occupied with signals, messages flashing back and forth. The whole High Seas Fleet was engaged.
He saw smoke on the starboard bow, and a few long, dragged-out minutes later he could hear the gunfire. There appeared to be at least two light cruiser squadrons coming across their bows. The roar of gunfire was now almost incessant, and great plumes of water shot into the air, up to two hundred feet high where the shells exploded upon hitting the surface.
Matthew found himself shivering uncontrollably, but there was a strange kind of excitement inside him as well, a mixture of fear and a driving hunger to be involved, part of the action striking back.
They were plowing through the water at tremendous speed. There was gunfire, heavy and continuous, somewhere to the rear, but through the clouds of smoke and the towers of water in all directions, it was hard to have any clear idea what was happening.
Twice he saw torpedo tracks racing toward them, and the ship swung hard, screws thrashing, hull juddering under the strain as infinitely slowly they turned in the tightest circle possible. He heard a shout and saw through a break in the chaos the vast shape of a battle cruiser, bow high, stern wallowing. He was unaware of crying out. The thing was sinking, belching smoke, forward guns still blazing. It was struck again and the bow lifted higher, steam roaring, flame yellow as the magazine caught. He was sick with the horror of it, vomit bitter in his mouth.
Shot fell only six hundred yards short of the
“Bloody close!” Ragland said tersely.
The next instant Matthew felt the lurch and jolt as a shell hit the upper deck and exploded. He swung around, instinct driving him to do something, anything. He felt Ragland’s hand on his arm hard enough to hurt.
“Not yet!” he shouted in the noise of returning gunfire from their own turrets. “Sounds like the boys’ mess deck, or the after dressing station. Others will attend to it. There’ll be enough here for you to do if the signals get hit.”
Matthew made an intense effort to control himself. His brain told him he had his own job to do and people
