Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [117]
Presumably they would be ambushed by a U-boat. There would be no point in torpedoing them. The last place the Germans wanted the prototype was on the bottom of the Atlantic.
Time was short. What would he do, in their place? Have a U-boat shadowing them, stalking, and keep in touch with them somehow. Radio signals. A sharp burst, too quick for anyone on the Cormorant to detect. Just sufficient to keep in touch and mark their position. A destroyer was not an easy target to disable adequately enough to be certain of getting the prototype off before sinking it. They carried four four-point-seven-inch guns, two pairs of pom-pom guns, and four torpedo tubes, and they could move through the water at twenty-five knots. They were the wolves of the sea—swift, maneuverable, and often running in packs. But even alone, they would fight hard for their lives. It would take two U-boats at least to be sure.
Whoever was on the Cormorant had to be one of the new men on this voyage. It was a matter of elimination. He must begin immediately in the morning, even if he had to get Archie’s permission to delegate some of his signaling watch duties to somebody else.
But he did not get the chance. He woke in the dark to the urgent sound of alarms. All hands on deck. He scrambled into his jacket and boots and, heart pounding, he made his way up to the bridge, feet slipping on the steps.
The ship seemed to be alive with movement, men running, shouting orders, manning the gun turrets. The wind was rising, sharp and startlingly cold for the end of May. The ship bucked and slithered on the long Atlantic swell. Over in the southeast there was a gray blur across the horizon. It would be dawn in half an hour.
Matthew scanned the surface of the sea for any sign of the black presence of a U-boat, but he saw nothing except the glimmer of waves as the half-light caught their backs, and the occasional paler tips of spume.
“You won’t see them,” Ragland said from beside him.
“What do we do?” Matthew asked.
“Wait,” Ragland replied. “Listen. Be ready to act.”
Minutes dragged by. There seemed to be noise everywhere, the wind on the metal of the ship, whining in cables, wires, against the housing of the bridge, the rhythmic hiss and crash of the water, and now and then footsteps of men. Matthew found his breathing was ragged; his muscles ached, and he was so cold his legs were numb below the knee.
Suddenly the order came and they changed course dramatically, swinging to the west, and a few moments later back again. The light was broadening in the sky. Then he saw it, a long silver trail in the water to the left. He knew what it was: a torpedo. It had missed them, but somewhere under that dark, heaving sea was the U-boat that had fired it.
A moment later there was another, closer this time. The U-boat commander had anticipated their turn and moved more rapidly.
The Cormorant replied with a torpedo of its own, but no one expected to see wreckage on the paling water.
They zigzagged again, avoiding more torpedoes, and discharged their own sporadically, not to waste shot. The game of hunter and hunted went on for four more hours, tense, eyes aching. The torpedoes shot past in glistening trails, many times far too close. Twice they knew the U-boat passed directly under them. The depth charges exploded with deep rumbling violence, churning up gouts of water, but still no wreckage.
If this was the U-boat sent to take back the device, why only one? Was another going to appear and take them down? Hit them where they would sink slowly enough for one man at least to leave them and board the U-boat with the prototype, presumably the man on the ship who was signaling them? He was here, wasn’t he? One of the seven other new men on this voyage?
Matthew stood in the signal house, cold, hungry, eyes aching, his muscles locked with the