"Jawohl, Herr Kapitan."
The tense-faced men gathered round the Kapitan in the control room saw him stiffen to rigidity, and heard an explosive "Du lieber Gott! He turns! He cannot see my torpedoes — but he turns under full helm."
"One minute, Herr Kapitan."
The Kapitan, watching the destroyer in the circular view of the periscope, saw that her bow was pointing directly toward him; and before he had seen the whole of her port side. She was still turning; as much of her starboard side was now visible as before there had been of the port. The target was already moving slowly to the right across the little black lines etched on the glass of the periscope — and the torpedoes had been fired with twenty-five degrees of left deflection. He had missed.
Von Stolberg whipped the periscope down. "Dive to eighty meters, Herr Oberleutnant. Silent routine. Warn Engineer Kritz that we shall be shortly attacked with depth charges."
In the last second before he lowered his periscope the Kapitan had seen the destroyer's bows begin to turn back to starboard — toward him. The turn had not, then, been a lucky chance but a deliberately timed and carefully thought-out maneuver. He realized for the first time that he was up against another brain — and suppose the opposing brain were better than his own?
"Asdic transmissions green one-six-five," Braun reported, spinning the polished wheel that directed the hydrophones. Before the Kapitan could acknowledge the information, he added: "Closing. Propeller noises. Probably turbines, one-five-oh revolutions."
In the silent control room the waiting men, hardly daring to breathe, could hear the sharp zip of the asdic transmissions that struck the U-boat's hull ten seconds apart. It was heard by them as the whisper of a whip about to be laid across their steel back.
Asdic Duel
0635 Zone Time, Wednesday, 8 September
THE Hecate advanced upon her quarry. Circumstances had decided her Captain that he must attack up his adversary's tail. There was no time to work out on her beam, and he did not wish to risk another torpedo attack by delaying his own too long. In any case an alert U-boat, fighting a single escort, would nearly always present her opponent with a stern attack by continually turning away from his approach.
The Captain crossed to a conical metal table on the port side of the bridge and raised the lid to view the automatic plot below. At the moment all he could see was the head and shoulders of the navigator. "Stand back, Pilot, and let me have a look," he said.
On the deck below him the battle was laid out in colored chalk, red for the enemy, blue for his own ship. "Echo bearing two-one-oh. Going away. Range thirteen hundred," announced the voice pipe from the asdic cabinet.
The navigator glanced up inquiringly at his Captain. "Plot it," the Captain told him, and to the First Lieutenant: "Steer two-one-oh. He certainly is wedded to that course!" He glanced again at the plot and saw that the navigator had marked up another red cross.
"Double echoes, the first at a thousand, the second at twelve hundred," the asdic voice pipe said.
The Captain crossed to the voice pipe. "Don't lose the further one. Try and give the plot the range of both." He went back to the plot.
"Echoes two-one-oh degrees. The first range seven hundred, the second nine hundred. First echo stationary," the navigator said.
"Thank you, Pilot," and to the asdic: "Disregard the first echo. It's a pill."
So the German thought to fox him with that old Pillenverfer game. The big bubble released from a canister aboard the U-boat would temporarily give off an echo very similar to that made by a submarine. Behind this underwater smoke screen the Germans hoped to slip away. But accurate plotting had detected the device.
The Hecate bore down on her quarry.
"Echo bearing two-one-oh. Five hundred. Interrogative depth settings, sir?" the asdic queried.
"Set the charges to seventy-five feet. If I want to make a last-minute alteration, I may do so," the Captain replied.
In the asdic hut Hopkins, the operator, turned the dial that repeated the depth-setting order to the depth-charge party aft. That would start the ratings there in a hurried scampering to set the ten charges that were being prepared.
The Hecate's Captain had no idea of the depth of his enemy, who could be as much as six hundred feet below the surface, but he would get some idea from the last asdic contact with the U-boat. The asdic beam did not go straight down: beneath the ship there was a cone of silence, the sides at an angle of sixty degrees. Within this cone the U-boat could not be detected. The farther away it was when it passed inside the cone, the deeper it must be.
"Two-one-oh; four hundred."
If only another escort was with him! Then he could break what he now guessed would be an endless series of stern attacks. Already he half regretted his self-confident words to the Doctor the night before.
"Two-one-oh; three hundred."
He must think of the depth-charge position too. The Hecate's full complement of charges was one hundred and ten, of which ten charges had been spent on a previous mission. He'd got to sink the enemy in ten tries — or if not sink, then force the U-boat to the surface, so that with his guns or by ramming he could finish it off.
"Lost contact ahead, sir," said the asdic hut.
"Set charges to one fifty feet," the Captain ordered.
Hopkins spun the wheel of the repeater and pressed the buzzer that was the "Stand By" for the depth-charge firing party on the afterdeck. The procedure was now automatic. No one in the Hecate could know what the submarine was doing, for the destroyer was passing over it. They only knew what it had been doing. This knowledge had been put on the instruments that would fire the charges by electrical impulses.
Two charges were automatically released from the afterrails. The depth-charge throwers barked, sending their charges wobbling through the sunlit air, two on each side, four in all. Two more pairs of death-dealing canisters rolled from her rails; already Mr. Grain, Commissioned Torpedo Gunner, was tongue-lashing his men to get the throwers reloaded and the rails refilled smartly.
High on the bridge, expectant faces peered aft. The rising sun into which they looked warmed their tanned skins. The water astern shimmered golden and was broken by the wide, dark arrow of the Hecate's wash. Then came the bursting of the first charges, followed by more surface-shaking explosions, until the watchers wondered how anything made by man could withstand the terrible shock.
The silence after the last explosions was almost palpable, and for a while men lowered their voices as in the presence of the dead.
Von Stolberg turned to his Executive Ofiicer. "Course and depth, Heini?"
"Course two-one-oh. Speed four knots, depth eighty meters, Herr Kapitan."
"Good. Oberleutnant von Holem," he said over his shoulder. There was no need to raise his voice in the confined quarters of the control room.
"Herr Kapitan?" Von Holem stood stiffly to attention by the chart table, expressing all the pride of a man who considered both himself and the man to whom he offered this deference to be of a race apart.
"Otto," the Kapitan said, "let us consider the rendezvous. Where are we now?" He moved to the table.
"Here, Herr Kapitan." Diagonally across the white chart a black line was traced. There were many little crosses, very near the line. The cross to which von Holem pointed was the one nearest to the big, heavily marked circle where the line ended.
The Kapitan thought quickly. "Then we shall be in position at four o'clock tomorrow morning, with eight hours to spare."
"Provided our course and speed are maintained, Herr Kapitan."