The Secret Service Submarine Part 17

"Tie this up!" he said, and Adams ran forward--Adams was all black and red and his clothes were torn.

Then Bernard turned to me.

"By G.o.d!" he said, "we've done it, John, we've done it so far!"

Then I realised that, save for the whining creature being trussed upon the grating, the crew of the German submarine were all dead.

"Mr. d.i.c.kson!"

"Sir!"

"Instruct the boatswain to pipe all hands tidy s.h.i.+p."

It was the man Adams who, fumbling in his clothes, produced a whistle which shrilled loudly and acted as a strange tonic to us all.

"I give you quarter of an hour," Bernard said. "Bodies to be heaved overboard; gratings to be swabbed as well as possible in the time. Get a hose overboard, Mr. d.i.c.kson, and have the hand-pump manned."

Then Bernard took me by the arm and led me up the slippery ladder. We stood upon the long, narrow deck, and the snow fell over us like a mantle.

"Now, old boy," he said, "pull yourself together. All has gone well, but in half an hour we must be out in the North Sea, five fathoms deep. Feel a bit sickish? Oh, you'll get over that in a few minutes. We have only just begun."

END OF PART II

PART III

CHAPTER IX

OUT IN THE NORTH SEA. PREPARING FOR ACTION

The bees were humming through the orchard with a long, droning sound as I lay in the hammock of my old home, once more a careless boy. My eyes were closed, but the bright sun shone upon my face, and Peters, my father's old butler, was coming over the gra.s.s to tell me that tea was ready.

He touched my arm.

It was not Peters; it was a pale, clean-shaved fellow with an obsequious manner, who held a wooden bowl of steaming milk and coffee in his hands.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The deep, droning noise, which had seemed like the bees of childhood in my dream, was the noise of engines not far away. I had slept three hours in the hammock, as my brother had insisted, and here was the captured German waiter bringing me coffee. I took it, but half-awake, and watched the man go to two other hammocks which stretched away in front of me. The d.i.c.kson boys tumbled out of them and I became fully conscious of where I was.

For the moment, but only for a moment, I was unmanned. The horror of all that we had been through so recently rolled over me like a flood. The shambles that the submarine had become, the ruthless killing of fourteen men--the horrible little snick as I broke the back of my own victim!...

But it pa.s.sed. The coffee was excellent and invigorating, and in a minute I tossed the empty bowl into the hammock and stood upon a steel grating, looking about me with wide eyes.

At that moment my brother came up, walking briskly, like a man at home.

He seemed changed in some way, and I realised what it was--the policeman on his beat, and unb.u.t.toned and at ease, the parson in his pulpit or tr.i.m.m.i.n.g roses in the rectory garden, are two very different people.

"Where are we?" I said. "What has happened?"

"You've had a very good sleep, John. You went off like a log directly I had the hammock slung. It was necessary, too, or you'd never be fit for what is coming."

"Have we started?"

"Started!" he grinned. "We're thirty miles away from Morstone Marshes, abreast of Skegness, I should judge, which, as far as I can calculate, is about sixty miles to the westward--and heading straight out into the North Sea. We're just crossing the line of the Rotterdam boats from Hull."

"But there is no movement!"

"No, my son, because we're twenty-five feet under water, that's why.

Now, you had better come and look round the boat; I shall have to explain everything to you and show you what you will have to do later on." He turned to the d.i.c.ksons. "You come, too," he said, "and if ever the three of you have your wits about you, have them now. You've got to learn in an hour or two what it takes an ordinary seaman six months to learn--or part of it, at any rate."

I am not going to describe everything I saw in detail. This is a story of action, and I always skip the descriptive parts in books, myself. The Johnnies only put them in to fill up. I expect they are paid so much a page, if the truth were known! Still, I must try and give some picture of the strange and unfamiliar world in which I found myself. Here I was sailing under the sea for all the world like someone in Jules Verne, experiencing something that only the tried men of the navies ever know.

I was in a long, narrow tunnel, most brilliantly lit. The air was warm and close, tainted a little with a faint suggestion of chemical fumes.

It was rather like being in a chemist's shop in winter time when a large fire is burning.

Immediately to my right, the German waiter was busy over a little electric stove, in a doorless compartment not bigger than a bathing machine, Pots and pans hung above him and there were shelves covered with wire netting containing stores of food. We pa.s.sed him, and I judged, from the breadth from side to side, that we were standing almost in the middle of the submarine.

Upon white-painted gratings, my brother's sailors moved here and there with bare feet, quiet and alert in their jumpers. The light was caught by, and reflected again, from innumerable pieces of s.h.i.+ning machinery, bra.s.s and silver and dull bronze. There was a tension both of physical atmosphere and mental excitement, strange and unnatural to me, but which those who go beneath the waters and explore the mysterious deep always have with them.

We walked down a central gangway and stopped by two powerful gasolene engines, one on each side--long, lean, polished monsters, that lay inert, but ready to leap into action on the turn of a switch and the pulling of a lever.

"Those are the engines which run the boat when we are on the surface--'awash,' we call it. We can do seventeen knots then--I am a.s.suming that this German boat is about equal to one of our own of its cla.s.s, though I have already come across several remarkable improvements in her. We are running now by electric motor and doing about twelve knots, which is first-cla.s.s, but I'm pus.h.i.+ng her along for all I know."

We pa.s.sed onwards and to where Bosustow stood beaming over three great purring, spitting dynamos, a piece of cotton waste in one huge paw.

"Oh, they're daisies, sir," he said, as he patted coils of insulated wire in an ecstasy of appreciation. "They can show us something, sir, the Germans can. The sleeve that carries the commutator is keyed to the armature shaft on an entirely new system; it's a fair miracle of ingenuity. But where they beat us hollow is in the acc.u.mulators. I've not had time to inspect them thoroughly, but if we get out of this, then the whole of our system will have to be altered."

We all bent over a rail towards the great acc.u.mulator tanks below, and I felt a faint, acrid odour rising up from them.

"You're smelling electricity, sir," said Bosustow to me. Then he turned to a big, table-like switch-board which controlled the flow of current from below and commanded all the electrical machinery on board. He fingered the big, vulcanite handles as if he loved them and stroked the s.h.i.+ning f.l.a.n.g.ed rim of the volt meter as a mother strokes her child.

"Now Mr. Carey understands something about machinery, Bosustow," said my brother. "You can trust him to follow out your directions without making any blunders, I think. John, your station will be by Bosustow until you are wanted forrard, but there is no need for you to stay now. There is a good deal more that I must say."

All the voices were sharp and staccato, my own sounded like that in my ears when I answered. They echoed and rang in the heavy air of the sealed, steel tube, voices that were not quite free and natural, for all their readiness of tone.

We turned and went forward again, pa.s.sing an open doorway and a few steps which led upwards to the conning-tower. The gangway ran at each side of it.

The long, tunnel-like vista grew narrower and the roof began to slope downward to a point. In front of us, in the extreme bows of the boat, were two huge, circular steel doors, like the doors of a safe, clamped and locked by an intricate mechanism.

"These are the mouths of the torpedo expulsion tubes," said Bernard. "We carry six torpedoes, I am glad to find--two more than I should have expected in a boat of this size--and, by Jove, we shall want 'em! If we throw away a single one, the game will be up, I expect. The torpedoes are run into these tubes along steel rails. They're discharged from the tubes by compressed air from the air tanks below. I see here the pressure is several thousand pounds to the square inch. In some boats we send out the tin fish by exploding a few ounces of cordite, but the air is the better way."

He turned to where Scarlett was busy and I saw a submarine torpedo for the first time. I confess there was a little inward shudder as I looked upon the deadly thing that could send the largest battles.h.i.+p afloat to the bottom in a few minutes. It was like a huge fish of steel with a large propeller at one end.

"These are beauties," Bernard said, "and to think that we are going to have the chance of using them against their original owners!" He chuckled.