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.
'Cease fire,' he said, without taking his eyes from the awesome pageant of destruction that he had created.
Another salvo of star shell burst above, and von Kleine lifted his hand to his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the closed lids, shielding them from the stabbing brilliance of the light. It was finished, and he was tired.
tired, drained of nervous and physical energy, He was overwhelmed by the backwash of fatigue that followed these last two days and nights of ceaseless strain. And he was sad sad for the brave men he had killed, and the terrible destruction he had wrought.
Still holding his eyes, he opened his mouth to give the order that would send Blucher once more thrashing southward, but before the words reached his lips, a wild shout from the look-out interrupted him.
'Torpedoes! Close on the starboard beam!' Long seconds von Kleine hesitated. He had let his brain relax, let the numbness wash over it. The battle was over, and he had dropped back from the high pinnacle of alertness on which he had balanced these last desperate hours. It needed a conscious physical effort to call up his reserves, and during those seconds, the torpedoes fired by Bloodhound in her death throes were knifing in to revenge her.
At last von Kleine snappe out of his o- inertia t at bound his mind. He leaped to the starboard rail of the bridge, and saw in the light of the star shells the pale phosphorescent trails of the four torpedoes. Against the dark water they looked like the tails of meteors on a night sky.
'Full port rudder. All engines full astern together!' he shouted, his voice pitched high with consternation.
He felt his ship swerve beneath him, thrown violently over as the great propellers clawed at the sea to hold her from crossing the path of the torpedoes.
Hopelessly he stood and reviled himself. I should have, anticipated this. I should have known the destroyer had fired.
Helplessly he stood and watched the four white lines drawn swiftly across the surface towards him.
In the last moments he felt a fierce upward surge of hope.
Three of the English torpedoes would miss. That was certain. They would cross Blitcher's bows as she side-stepped.
And the fourth torpedo it was just possible would miss also.
His fingers upon the bridge rail clenched, until it felt as though they must press into the metal. His breath jammed in his throat and choked him.
Ponderously Blucher swung her bows away. If he had given the order for the turn only five seconds earlier... The torpedo struck Blucher five feet below the surface, on the very tip of her curved keel.
The explosion shot a mountain of white water one hundred and fifty feet into the air. It slammed Blucher back onto her haunches with Such violence that Otto von Kleine and his officers were thrown heavily to the steel deck.
Von Kleine scrabbled to his knees and looked forward.
A fine veil of spray, like pearl dust in the light of the star shells, hung over Blucher. As he watched, it subsided slowllY.
All that night they struggled to keep Blucher afloat.
They sealed off her bows with the five-inch steel doors in the watertight bulkhead, and behind those doors they locked thirty German seamen whose battle stations were in the bows. At intervals during the frenzied activity of the night, von Kleine had visions of those men floating facedown in the flooded compartments.
While the pumps clanged throughout the ship to free her of the hundreds of tons of sea-water that washed through her, von Kleine left the bridge and, with his engineer commander and damage control officer, they listed the injuries that Blucher had received.
In the dawn they assembled grimly in the chartroom behind the bridge, and assessed their plight.
'What power can you give me, Lochtkamper?'von Kleine demanded of his engineer.
'I can give you as much as you ask.' A reddish-purple bruise covered half the engineer's face where he had been thrown against a steam cock-valve when the torpedo struck.
'But anything over five knots will carry away the watertight bulkheads forward. They will take the full brunt of the sea, Von Kleine swivelled his stool, and looked at the damage control officer. 'What repairs can you effect at sea?'
'None, sir. We have braced and propped the watertight bulkhead. We have patched and jammed the holes made by the British cruiser's guns. But I can do nothing about the underwater damage without a dry dock or calm water where I can put divers over the side. We must enter a port.' Von Kleine leaned back on his stool and closed his eyes to think.
The only friendly port within six thousand miles was Dares Salaam, the capital of German East Africa, but he knew the British were blockading it. He discarded it from his list of possible refuges.
An island? Zanzibar? The Seychelles? Mauritius?
All hostile territories with no
