'He's hove to, bridge! Range, three-five-double-oh!'
This might be our chance. With Bungo concentrating on trying to raise his several hours' dead consort, his lookouts might just happen to be less alert than they should, especially in the storm. 'All ahead standard What's the course to head for him!'
'Zero-zero-eight!'
'Steer zero-zero-eight!' I yelled to Scott through the hatch.
Again the pounding, battering. Our bow would rise to one sea, smash down on the next, and go completely under water, allowing the wave to roll aft, unimpeded, till it broke in fury over the bridge. Cascades of cold ocean rolled off me. The lookouts were likewise drenched and miserable. I sent my binoculars below-they were soaked and useless anyway-and used the built-in pressure-proof TBT binoculars. Mounted on gimbals and fitted with handles, they also gave me some measure of support, though because of their stiffness it was a bit awkward to use them for ordinary purposes.
'Range, three thousands The starboard lookout lurched against me. His binoculars were in worse shape than mine had been, I saw, and he was giving full time merely to hanging on anyway. In the shape he was in, he was more hazard than benefit.
'Lookouts below!' I said. That left Al Dugan and me the only ones on the bridge, and I called him up forward from the station he had been occupying on the after part.
'Range, two-five-double-oh! Still hove to, and we can still hear him pinging!'
There was a new note to the wind. A higher shriek; louder, too. Three seas in succession came over the bridge front, left us gasping. 'Range, two thousand No change-we're opening outer doors!'
'What speed we making?' I yelled into the bridge mike.
'Ten knots!'
Ten knots. It should be fourteen under ordinary conditions.
About right for firing torpedoes in this kind of sea, however.
'How does he bear now!'
'Dead ahead-still dead in the water!'
Less than a mile away. I couldn't see a thing. Nervously, I rubbed the front lens of the binoculars with lens paper. Al silently handed me a fresh sheet when I threw my sodden one away.
'Fifteen hundred yards! Shall I shoot on radar bearings?'
'No!' A subconscious need to see him. 'Wait!' Work like hell to get into position, then take your time! Don't waste time, but don't throw your one chance away, either! First Blunt and later poor Jerry Watson, long gone with the old Octopus, had sung the same song to me. And I had repeated the same words to Jim Bledsoe in my turn.
Fiercely I searched the horizon. 'Range one-three-five-oh!' came on the speaker, and that was just the moment I saw him at last. It was an Akikaze-class destroyer, all right, broadside on.
Two fairly short stacks, medium close together, small bridge but rather high for its length, turtle-back forecastle with a gun on it, and a deep well between forecastle and bridge. He was making heavy weather of it, I instantly saw. The canvas over, the well deck had been blown away, and part of the bridge canopy also. Water was streaming in sheets off his decks, pouring in great torrents off the forecastle down into the well deck. I was taking all this in as I shouted into the bridge mike: 'Target! Starboard ninety! TBT bearing!' I pressed the marker plunger down with my right thumb.
'Set!'
'Shoot!' The way the command 'Fire!' came out almost before I finished saying 'Shoot!' was the measure of the crew I had with me. Keith was holding the bridge speaker button down on purpose.
Four times more the command 'Fire!' came on the speaker, and all five torpedoes we had remaining forward went on their way. I couldn't see their wakes, for they were electric, nor could I feel the familiar jerk to the hull of the ship because of. the motion and noise already going on. But I did see one torpedo broach the surface momentarily, then dive back under- and continue on its way, with a flick of instantly extinguished. spray. It had come up exactly on a line between me and the destroyer's bridge.
But this was not the time to play the spectator. 'Left full rudder!' I yelled down the hatch. Akikaze's lookouts would see us in a moment, if they had not already, and Bungo would certainly get some kind of a salvo off at us. That we could depend on. Heedless, too, I gave the order I had held back all this time because of the weather: 'All ahead flank!'
Before the Eel could feel the effect of the increased power, and before she had turned more than a few degrees, there was a flash from Bungo, and the brief scream of a shell overhead, immediately swallowed up in the storm. Then another flash- no scream this time. You certainly had to hand it to him, under the circumstances, for even getting the guns going at all.
But those were all the shots he got a chance to pump out at us, for about this time the torpedoes got there. Two certainly hit; maybe more, but two were enough. I saw the spout of water forward, and Akikaze's bow disappeared, broken short right at the well. The other hit under the stacks, breaking his back, lifting the center of the ship for a moment and then dropping it, like a broken toy.
We really began to take it over the bridge then, but neither Al nor I would have cared if the waves had been periscope high. We slowed after a few minutes of it upon Keith's report that the Q-ship, the only one left by now on the radar, was not chasing us, but had instead gone over to the spot where Akikaze had last registered an echo on our radar scope, and hove to.
The radar had also some other pips, three tiny ones, which came in and out on the scope and which clustered around the Q-ship when it got there. Lifeboats, without question.
It would take a feat of seamanship for Bungo's consort to pick them up, though probably no more than Bungo himself had showed in getting them launched in the first place. I didn't doubt that he could do it, all right. A wave of hopelessness swept over me when I realized that barring his own demise, hardly to be planned on, Bungo would return to port, get another Akikaze, and go blithely back to the same old business as though nothing had happened.
If we could sink the Q-ship, but how? We had four torpedoes, all aft. None at all left forward. And he was loaded with cellulose or something else equally floatable.
I don't remember making any conscious decision about it.
There didn't seem to be any decision to make. A red haze flooded my mind, and I ordered Scott to put the rudder over once more.
'Keith,' I gritted, 'come on up here I'
For several minutes we talked out our tactics of how to get the stern tubes to bear. The wind was howling and the sea were pounding and the water poured in buckets off us, streamed off Keith's face, off his nose, into his mouth every time he opened it. The same with me, but neither of us took any heed.
We ducked those we could, turned our backs to those we saw coming, ignored the rest.
We decided the Q-ship would not expect us to come back.
Doubtless he would realize that making a reload was virtually an impossibility unless we dived for it, which would take extra time, and he would hardly expect us to come back otherwise, He would think, at least, that he had time, and his attentions would be entirely taken up with the problem of getting Bungo, aboard. If we could hit him with all four fish, fairly high up on his side, the weather might well finish for us what we had started.
'Three thousand yards!' said Quin's voice on the conning- tower speaker. Keith swung his dripping form to the ladder, slipped for an instant on the slick hand rail, caught himself, and disappeared.
'He's not under way, bridge! Target speed is zero!' Keith was back in charge down below, on the speaker again.
I pressed the button on my mike, let the insane howl of elements make the acknowledgment for me. We were coming in at standard speed again, with our four engines on the line just in case. As the stern heaved up to a wave I could see the tip ends of four big pipes pouring out their hydrantlike exhaust. Then a smother of angry water would cover everything, and the four mufflers would be drowned, spluttering feebly, sending up little splashes which the wind instantly whipped away. On this course, chosen to bring us in to windward, presumably the skipper of the Q-ship would elect to pick up the boats to leeward-we were coasting downwind. The bow lifted as a huge sea ran under us, dropping our stern precipitantly and then racing on out beyond our bullnose; black water, streaked with white, capped with a boiling, dirty-white crest.
