slender and beautiful, shining like white marble in the sun. Then slowly they dropped back.
'Short,'grunted the navigating lieutenant.
'Her guns are still cold,' Charles commented. 'Please God let old
Orion get within range.' Again shells fell short, and short again, but each time they were closer to the low bulk of Orion, and the next broadside dropped all around her, partially screening her with spray, and Orion started to zigzag.
'Another three minutes,' the navigating lieutenant spoke with tension making his voice husky.
At regular intervals of fifteen seconds the German salvos fell around Orion once within fifty feet of her bows so that as she tore into the standing columns of spray, they blew back over her and mingled with the black smoke of her funnels.
'Come on, old girl! Go in and get her. Go on! Go on.
Charles was gripping the rail in front of him and cheering like a maniac, all the dignity of his rank and his thirty-five years gone in the tense excitement of the battle. It had infected all of them on the bridge of the destroyer, and they capered and shouted with him.
There she blows! 'howled the lieutenant.
She's opened fire!'
'Go it, Orion, go it!' On Orion's forward turrets gun-fire sparkled, then again and again. The harsh roll of the broadsides carried to them against the light wind.
'Short,'groaned Charles. 'She's still out of range.' Its short again!'
'Still short.' Each time the call of shot was signalled by the chief yeoman at the Aldis lamp, and briefly acknowledged from Orion's bridge-works.
'Oh my God,' moaned Charles.
'She's hit! 'echoed his lieutenant.
A flat yellow glare, like sheet lightning on a summer's day, lit
Orion's afterdeck, and almost immediately a ball of yellowish grey smoke enveloped her. Through it Charles saw her after-funnel sag drunkenly and hang back at an unnatural angle.
'She's holding on!' Orion emerged from the shell smoke and dragged it after her like a funeral cloak, but her speed seemed unabated, and the regular salvos burned briefly and brightly on her forward turrets.
'Now she's hitting,' exulted the lieutenant, and Charles turned quickly to see shell-fire burst on Blucher, and his wide grin split his face.
'Kill her! Kill her!' he roared, knowing that though Blitcher was better armed yet she was as vulnerable as Orion.
Her plating was egg-shell thin and the six-inch shells that crashed through it would be doing her terrible damage.
Now the two cruisers were pounding each other. The range was closing so rapidly that soon they must hit with every broadside. This was a contest from which only one ship, or neither of them, would emerge.
Charles was trying to estimate the damage that had been inflicted uupon Blitcher during the last few minutes. She was on fire forward.
Sulphur-yellow flames poured from her, her upper works were riven into a grotesque sculpture of destruction, a pall of smoke enveloped her, so her profile was an shadowy and vague, yet every fifteen seconds her turrets lit with those deadly little flashes.
Charles turned to assess the relative damage that Orion had suffered. He found and held her with his binoculars and at that moment
Orion ceased to exist.
Her boilers, pierced by high explosive shell, burst and tore her in half. A cloud of white steam spurted five hundred feet into the air, completely blanketing her. The steam hung for thirty seconds,
then sagged wearily, and rolled aside. Orion was gone. A wide circle of oil slick and floating debris marked her grave. The speed of her charge had run her clean under.
On the bridge of Bloodhound, the cheering strangled into deathly silence. The silence was not spoiled but rather accentuated by the mournful note of the wind in her rigging and the muted throb of her engines.
For eight long hours Charles Little had ridden his anger and his hatred, using the curb to hold it on the right side of madness,
resisting the consuming and suicidal urge to hurl his ship at the
German cruiser and die 'as Orion had died.
Immediately after the sinking of Orion, the Blucher had reduced speed sharply and turned due south. With her fires still raging, she had limped along like a gun-shot lion. The battle ensigns at her masthead were tattered by shrapnel and blackened by smoke.
As soon as she had passed, Bloodhound altered course and cruised slowly over the area of water that was still rainbowed by floating oil and speckled with wreckage. There were no survivors from Orion; all of them had died with her.
Bloodhound turned and trailed after the crippled German cruiser and the hatred that emanated from the destroyer was of such strength that it should have reached out across the sea as a physical force and destroyed Blucher.
But as Charles Little stood at the rail of his bridge, he saw the smoke and flame upon Blucher's decks reduce perceptibly every minute as her damage control teams fought it to a standstill. The last wisp of smoke from her shrivelled.
'Fire's out,' said the pilot, and Charles made no answer.
He had hoped that the flames would eat their way into one of
Blitcher's magazines and blow her into the same oblivion into which she had sent Orion.
'But she isn't making more than six knots. Orion must have hit her in the engine room.' Hopefully the navigating lieutenant went on,
'My bet is that she's got major damage below. At this speed we can expect Pegasus and Renounce to catch up with us by midday tomorrow.
The Germans will stand no chance!'
'Yes,' agreed Charles softly.
Summoned by Bloodhound's frantic radio transmissions, Pegasus and
Renounce, the two heavy cruisers of the northern squadron, were racing down the East African coast, cutting through the five hundred miles of water that separated them.
Kyller. Ask the chief how he's making out.' Von Kleine was fretting beneath the calm set of his features. Night was Closing, and in the darkness, even the frail little English destroyer was a danger to him.
There was danger all around, danger must each minute be approaching from every quarter of the sea. He must have power on his port side engine before nightfall; it was a matter of survival; he must have speed to carry him south through the hunting packs of the British south to where Esther waited to give him succour, to replace the shells he had fired away, to replenish his coal bunkers which were now dangerously depleted. Then once more Blucher would be a force to reckon with. But first he must have speed.
'Captain.' Kyller was beside him again. 'Commander Lochtkamper reports they have cleared the oil line to the is main bearing. They have stripped the bearing and there is no damage to the shaft. He is fitting new half shells. The work is well advanced, sir.' The words conjured up for von Kleine a picture of half-naked men, smeared to the elbows with black grease, sweating in the confined heat of the drive shaft tunnel as they worked. 'How much longer?' he asked.
'He promised full power on both engines within two hours, sir.'
Von Kleine sighed with relief, and glanced over his stern at the
British destroyer that was shadowing him. He began to smile.
'I hope, my friend, that you are a brave man. I hope that when you see me increase speed, you will not be able to control your disappointment. I hope tonight you will try with your torpedoes, so that I can crush you, for your eyes always on me are a dangerous embarrassment.' He spoke so softly that his lips barely moved, then he turned back to Kyller. 'I want all the battle lights checked and reported.'
'Aye, aye, sir' Von Kleine crossed to the voice-tubes.
'Gunnery officer,' he said. 'I want 'X' turret guns loaded with star shell and trained to maximum elevation...' He went on listing his preparations for night action and then he ended, '... stand all Your gun crews down. Let them eat and rest. From dusk action stations onwards they will be held in the first degree of readiness.'
'commander, sir!' The urgent call startled Commander Charles
Little, and he spilled his mug of cocoa. This was the first period of rest he had allowed himself all day, and now it was interrupted within ten minutes. 'What is it?' He flung open the door of the chart room,
and ran out on to the bridge.
'Blucher is increasing speed rapidly.'
'It was too cruel a blow, and the exclamation of protest was wrung from Charles. He darted to the voice pipe
'Gunnery officer. Report your target.' A moment's delay, and then the reply. 'Bearing mark, green oh-oh. Range, one-five-oh-five-oh.
Speed, seventeen knots.' It was true. Blucher was under full power again, with all her guns still operable. Orion had died in vain.
Charles wiped his mouth with the open palm of his hand, and felt the brittle stubble of his new beard rasp under his fingers. Beneath the tan, his face was sickly pale
