Текст книги "Shout at the Devil"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Orion's shells more accurately and signal the corrections to her. But always Bloodhound tactfully kept outside the fifteen-mile radius which marked the length of Blucher's talons.

"We can expect Blucher to open fire at any moment now, sir the navigating lieutenant commented as he straightened up from the sextant,

over which he had been measuring the angle subtended by the two cruisers.

Charles nodded in agreement. "Yes. Von Kleine must try for a few lucky hits, even at that range."

"This isn't going to be very pretty to watch."

"We'll just have to sit tight, keep our fingers crossed, and hope old Orion can,-" He stopped abruptly, and then "Hello! Blucher's up to something!" He Jumped Up from his stool.

The silhouette of the German cruiser had altered drastically in the last few seconds. The gap between her funnels widened and now

Charles could see the humped menace of her forward turrets.

"By God, she's altering course! The bloody bastard is bringing all his turrets to bear!" Lieutenant Kyller studied his captain's face.

In sleep there was an air of serenity about the man. It reminded

Kyller of a painting he had seen in the cathedral at Mirriberg, a portrait of Saint Luke by Holbein. The same fine bone structure, the golden-blond beard and mustache that framed the mobile and sensitive lips. He pushed the idea aside and leaned forward. Gently he touched von Kleine's shoulder.

"Captain. My Captain," and von Kleine opened his eyes.

They were smoky blue with sleep but his voice was crisp.

"What is it, Kyller?"

"The gunnery officer reports the enemy will be within range in fifteen minutes." Von Kleine swivelled his stool and looked quickly about his ship. Above him the smoke poured from every funnel, and from the mouth of each stack a volcano of sparks and shimmering heat blew steadily. The paint had blistered and peeled from the metal of the funnels and they glowed red hot, even in the sunlight.

Blitcher was straining herself far beyond the limits her makers had set. God alone knew what injury this constant running at full speed was doing her, and von Kleine winced as he felt her tremble in protest beneath him.

He turned his eyes astern. The British cruiser was hull up on the horizon now. The difference in their speeds must be a small fraction of a knot, but Blucher's superiority in fire power was enormous.

For a moment he allowed himself to ponder the arrogance of a nation that constantly, almost by choice, matched their men and ships against unnatural odds.

Always they sent terriers to fight against wolfhounds. Then he smiled, you had to be English or mad, to understand the English.

He glanced out to starboard. The British destroyer had worked out on to his flank. It could do little harm from there.

"Very well, Kyller.. He stood as he spoke.

"Bridge Engine Room," the voice-tube squealed.

"Engine Room Bridge. "Kyller turned to it.

"Our port main bearing is running red hot. I must shut down our port engine!" The words struck von Kleine like a bucket of iced water thrown down his back. He leaped to the voice tube

"This is the Captain. I must have full power for another hour!"

"I can't do it, siR. Another fifteen minutes and the main drive shaft will seize up. God knows what damage it will do." For five seconds von

Kleine hunched silently over the voice-tube. His mind raced. On one engine Blucher would lose ten knots on her speed. The enemy would be able to manoeuvre about him freely possibly hold off until nightfall and then... He must attack immediately; turn on them and press his attack home with all his armament.

"Give me full power for as long as you can," he snapped, and then turning to the gunnery officer's tube, "This is the Captain. I am turning four points to starboard, and will keep the enemy directly on our starboard beam for the next fifteen minutes. After that I will be forced to reduce speed.

Open fire when you bear." Von Kleine snapped the cover closed and turned to his yeoman of signals. "Hoist the battle ensign!" He spoke softly, without heat, but there were lights in his eyes like those in a blue sapphire.

here she goes!" whispered Charles Little without lowering his glasses. Upon the black turrets of the– gun-fire gleamed and sparkled without sound. Quickly he traversed his glasses across the surface of the sea until he found Orion. She was plunging in eagerly,

narrowing the gap very rapidly between herself and Blucher.

In another seven minutes she would be able to return the German's fire.

Suddenly, a quarter of a mile ahead of her, there rose from the sea a series of tall columns, stately as the columns of a Greek temple,

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 with strain and fatigue. There were smears of dark blue beneath his eyes, and in their corners were tiny lumps of yellow mucus. His eyes were bloodshot, and the wisp of hair that escaped from under the brim of his cap was matted on to his forehead by the salt spray, as he peered into the gathering dusk.

The fighting madness which had threatened all that day to overwhelm him, rose slowly from the depth of his belly and his loins.

He no longer struggled to suppress it.

"Turn two points to starboard, pilot. All engines full ahead together." The engine telegraph clanged, and Bloodhound pivoted like a polo pony. It would take her thirty minutes to work up to full speed,

and by that time it would be dark.

"Sound action stations." Charles wanted to attack in the hour of darkness before the moon came up. Through the ship the alarm bells thrilled, and without taking his eyes from the dark dot on the darkening horizon, Charles listened to the reports coming into the bridge, until the one for which he waited, "Torpedo party closed up,

sir!" Now he turned and went to the voice-tube. "Tarps," he said,

"I

hope to give you a chance at Blucher with both port and starboard tubes. I am going to take you in as close as possible." The men grouped around Charles on the bridge listened to him say "as close as possible, and knew that he had Pronounced sentence of death upon them.

Henry Sargent, the navigating lieutenant, was afraid.

Stealthily he groped in the pocket of his overcoat until he found the little silver crucifix that Lynette had given him.

It was warm from his own body heat. He held it tightly.

He remembered it hanging between her breasts on its silver chain,

and the way she had lifted both hands to The chain had the back of her neck as she unclasped it.

caught in the shiny cascade of hair as she had tried to free it,

kneeling on the bed facing him. He had leaned forward to help her, and she had clung to him, pressing the warm smooth bulge of her pregnant stomach against him.

"God protect you, my darling husband," she had whispered. "Please

God bring you back safely to us." And now he was afraid for her and the daughter he had never seen

"Hold your course, damn you!" he snapped at Herbert Cryer, the helmsman.

"Aye, aye, sir," Herbert Cryer replied with just a trace of injured innocence in his tone. No man could hold Bloodhound true when she hurled herself from swell to swell with such abandoned violence,

she must yaw and throw her head that fraction before the helm could correct her. The reprimand was unjustified, Littered in fear and tension.

"Give it a flipping break, mate," Herbert retorted silently.

"You're not the only one who is going to catch it. Tighten up the old arse hole like a bloody officer and a ruddy gentleman." In these wordless exchanges of repartee with his officers, Herbert Cryer was never bested. They were wonderful release for resentments and pent-up emotion, and now because he was also afraid, he became silently lyrical.

"Climb-aboard-Romeo's one-way express to flipping glory."

Commander Little's reputation with the ladies had resulted in him being irreverently but affectionately baptized by his crew. "Come along with us. We're off to shout at the devil, while Charlie kisses his daughter." Herbert glanced sideways at his commander and grinned.

Fear made the grin wolfish, and Charles Little saw it and misinterpreted it. He read it as a tri ark of the same berserk fury that possessed him. The two of them grinned at each other for an instant in complete misunderstanding, before Herbert refocused his attention on Bloodhound's next wild crabbing lunge.

Charles was afraid as well. He was afraid of finding a weakness in himself but this was the fear that had walked at his right hand all his life, close beside him, whispering to him. You must do it you must do it quicker, or bigger than they do, or they'll laugh at you.

You mustn't fail not in one thing, not for one moment, you mustn't fail. You mustn't fail! "This fear was the eternal companion and partner in every venture on which he embarked.

It had stood beside the thirteen-year-old Charles in a duck blind,

while he fired a twelve-gauge shotgun, and wept slow fat tears of agony every time the recoil smashed. into his bruised bicep and shoulder.

It had stooped over him as he lay in the mud hugging a broken collar bone. "Get up!" it hissed at him. "Get up!" It had forced him to his feet and led him back to the unbroken colt to mount again, and again, and again.

So conditioned was he to respond to its voice that when it crouched beside him now, twisted and misshapen on the foot plates of the bridge, its presence almost tangible, and croaked so Charles alone could hear it, "Prove it!" Prove it!"

there was only one course open to Charles Little; a peregrine stooping at a golden eagle, he took his ship in against, the Blitcher.

his turn to starboard was a feint." Otto von Kleine spoke with certainty, staring out to where the dusk had obliterated the frail silhouette of the English destroyer. "Even now he is turning again to cross our stern.

He will attack on our port side."

"Captain, it could be the double bluff," Kyller answered dubiously.

"No." Von Kleine shook his golden beard. "He must try to outline us against the last of the light from the sunset.

He will attack from the east. "A moment longer he frowned in thought, as he anticipated his opponent's moves across the chessboard of the ocean. Kyller, plot me his course, assuming a speed of twenty-five knots, a turn fOUr points to port three minutes after our last sighting, a run of fifteen miles across our stern, and then a turn of four points to starboard. If we hold our present course and speed,

where will he be in relation to us, in ninety minutes" time? Working quickly, Kyller completed the problem. Von Kleine had been mentally checking every step of the calculation. "Yes," he agreed with Kyller's solution, and already he had formulated the orders for change Of Course and speed to place Bloodhound in ambush.

Under full power, Bbloodhound threw a bow -wave ten feet high, and a wake that boiled out for a quarter of a mile behind her, a long,

faintly phosphorescent smear in the darkness.

Aboard Blitcher a hundred pairs of eyes were straining out in to the night, watching for that phosphorescence.

Behind the battle lights on her upper works men waited, in the dimly-lit turrets men waited, on the open bridge, at the masthead, deep in her belly, the crew of Blitcher waited.

Von Kleine had reduced speed to lessen his own wake, and turned away from the land at an angle of forty-five degrees. He wanted to catch the Englishman on his starboard beam, out of torpedo range.

He stood peering out across the dark sea, with the fur lined collar of his overcoat drawn up to his ears. The night was cool. The sea was a black immensity, vast as the sky that was lined in glowing ivory by the whorls and smears of the star patterns.

A dozen men saw it at the same instant; pale, ethereal, seeming to float upon the darkness of the sea like a plume of iridescent mist the wake of the Englishman.

"Star shell!" Von Kleine snapped the order to the waiting guns.

He was alarmed by the English destroyer's proximity.

He had hoped to spot-her at greater range.

High above the ocean, the star shells burst white, so intensely bright as to sear the retina of the eye that looked directly at them. Beneath them the surface of the sea was polished ebony,

sculptured and scooped with the pattern of the swells. The two ships were starkly and crisply lit, steaming on converging courses, already so close to each other that the mile-long, solid white beams of their battle lights jumped out to join, fumbling together like the hands of hesitant lovers.

In almost the same second both ships opened fire, but the banging of Bloodhound's little 4.7-inch guns was lost in the bellow of the cruiser's broadside.

Blitcher was firing over open sights with her guns depressed until the long barrels were horizontal to the surface of the sea. Her first salvo was aimed a fraction high, and the huge shells howled over

Bloodhound's open bridge.

The wind of their passage, the fierce draught of disrupted air they threw out, caught Charles Little and sent him reeling against the compass pinnacle. He felt the ribs below his armpit crack.

The command he shouted at the helm was hoarse with pain.

"Turn four points to port! Steer for the enemy!" and Bloodhound spun like a ballet dancer, and charged straight at Blitcher.

The cruiser's next broadside was high again but now her secondary armament had joined in, and a four-pound shell from one of the quick-firing pom-poms burst on the director tower above Bloodhound's bridge. It swept the exposed area with a buzzing hailstorm of shrapnel, It killed the navigating lieutenant instantly, cutting away the top of his head as 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.