Thorne Guy
The Secret Service Submarine: A Story of the Present War

"Yes, sir. Karl, sir. Coming, sir. Porterhouse steak, sir, what you always used to like. No, sir – Swiss really – not a German. Oh, Captain Carey, don't kill me, sir" – the voice rose into a shriek of agony – "I am Karl, sir!" – the words came in an ecstasy of conviction. "Karl, head-waiter at the Portsmouth Royal! Why, sir, you've tipped me half a crown twenty times. Oh, sir …"

My brother's face seemed cut in granite, but he began to laugh.

"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 God!" 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. Dickson!"

"Sir!"

"Instruct the boatswain to pipe all hands tidy ship."

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. Dickson, 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 grass 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 Dickson 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 passed. 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 unbuttoned and at ease, the parson in his pulpit or trimming 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 Dicksons. "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 passed 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 shining machinery, brass 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 assuming that this German boat is about equal to one of our own of its class, 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-class, but I'm pushing her along for all I know."

We passed 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 accumulators. 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 accumulator 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 shining flanged 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, passing 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 battleship 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.

"The propelling engines," he went on, "are inside – for you must remember that a torpedo is a little ship in itself and is not a projectile at all. There are three hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene in this beauty – we've done away with the old-fashioned gun-cotton now – and she's got a range of seven thousand yards – over four miles, Johnny, my boy! Now, Mr. Dickson and Mr. Harold Dickson, you will stay here with Scarlett. It will be your part, when we go into action, to fire these torpedoes. There ought to be six or seven of you to do it. There are only three, and two of you are quite untrained. Scarlett, get to work at once and give these gentlemen a practical drill. Show them exactly what they will have to do and explain the orders that will come from me. Miss out anything superfluous; remember we've hardly any time. Just teach them what is absolutely necessary."

"Aye, aye, sir!" said Scarlett, and as we turned back I heard him at once beginning his lecture.

And now we came to the most interesting part of that world of marvels, to the brain of the submarine. Adams stood in the first stage of the conning-tower, his hands upon a little leather-covered steering-wheel. In front of him was a gyroscopic compass and a row of speaking-tubes. A light threw a bright radiance upon a framed chart hanging on the wall, marked everywhere with faint purple pencil lines.

Bernard glanced at the compass and gave the man a few directions. Then we went up a short ladder of half a dozen rungs into the highest chamber of all.

It was perfectly circular. There was just room for two or three people, and the steel roof was two feet above our heads. A great tube came down through the roof and disappeared beneath the open grating of the floor. It was like the mast of a ship going through the cabin down to the very gar-board strike. There was a row of brass clock-faces with trembling needles and oddly shaped gauges, in which coloured liquid rose and fell. The whole ganglion of nerves met here in the cerebellum of the ship, and at a glance its commander knew exactly what she was doing, her speed, her depth below the surface of the water, the pressure – a thousand other things which I am not competent to name. The whimsical idea came to me that it was like lifting up the top of a man's head and seeing the thoughts which controlled every motion of his body.

There were charts, also, spread upon a semi-circular shelf of mahogany, with dividers, compasses, and a large magnifying glass.

Fastened to the wall, just above this shelf, was something that touched me strangely. It was a photograph in a silver frame, the photograph of a young, light-haired girl, and upon it was written in German, "An meinem lieber Otto."

Bernard saw it too and sighed. "It's the skipper's girl," he said. "Poor chap! he'll never see her again in this world! It was an ugly death to die, John!" and his voice had a note of deep feeling in it. "But it had to be, and Scarlett told me that he didn't know what hurt him.

"Now," he continued, "I'm going to show you something." He pulled out his watch and then, leaning over to the wall, he snapped over something like the stunted lever of a signal box. Then he pressed a button and a bell rang somewhere far down below. A hoarse voice sounded in our ears from a speaking-tube, and there was a quick, throbbing, pumping sound from the column in the wall.

Looking down, I saw that immediately below us was a circular white table. I put my hand on it and it was painted canvas, dazzlingly white.

"The periscope is going up," my brother said. "It should be light, now – watch!"

There was a click and the lamp in the roof went out. We were in darkness. A slight creaking sound, a movement of my brother's arm, and there flashed down, in clear light upon the table, a picture of the upper seas.

Forty feet above, the eye of the submarine surveyed the dawn, and in that still box where we stood, we saw it also.

Dawn upon the waters! A tossing grey expanse of waves. It was like the film of a cinematograph, only in colour, and as Bernard turned the wheel, picture after picture glided over the table – the most incredible thing!

Not a sail was in sight. The North Sea was an empty, tossing waste of waters in the cold light of the winter's dawn.

The dawn of – what?

CHAPTER X
THE SPEAR OF FOAM

"A little fresh air is clearly indicated," said my brother, "and after that, when I've attended to another little matter, a good breakfast. Some of us may be taking our next meal in Fiddlers' Green, which, they say in the Navy, is nine miles to windward of hell, though I hope not."

He switched on the light again and went to the side table, where there was a complicated array of wheels and levers, all of which were duplicated in the chamber immediately below and by means of which the Commander, watching the picture of the periscope, could control every movement of the boat with his own hands if necessary.

He pulled a lever and a bell clanged. At once the loud purring of the electric engines ceased.

Bernard pulled over another and larger lever with both hands. I suddenly felt myself slipping backwards, until I fetched up against the wall of the conning-tower, narrowly missing the opening to the steersman's chamber.

"By Jove! I forgot to tell you," said Bernard. "You see, I've stopped the electric engines and jammed over the horizontal rudders. We're slanting up to the surface – look!"

Immediately in front of me and a little above my head, I now saw round portholes filled with amazingly thick, toughened glass. These had been quite black and had escaped my notice before. Now, as I watched, they grew a little lighter. Click! and the lamp went out. The portholes were grey now, grey melting into green, which grew brighter and brighter until it turned into a froth of soda-water, and then there was nothing but white sky. There was a slight jerk and the floor seemed to right itself.

"We're just awash now, but we'll get above water."

Again the ring of a bell, an order through a speaking-tube. After that came a clang of machinery and an extraordinary bubbling, choking noise, like a giant drinking.

"Just blown out the water tanks, old soul. Feel her lift? Now her whale-back is above water and we'll go and say good-morning to the sun, which I perceive is very kindly beginning to show himself. But before that …"

He shouted another order and there came a deafening din from below. Bang! Bang! Bang! till the whole steel hull quivered.

"That is the surface engine starting. It'll be all right in a minute," and even as he spoke, the noise subsided into a regular throb. It was for all the world like a motor car starting on bottom speed and then slipping into top gear.

Scarlett came hurrying up into the conning-tower and he and my brother unlocked the sliding hatch. In a minute we had emerged into the keen air of the morning. How fresh and sweet it seemed to me it is impossible to say. The sun was rising. The bitter cold of the marshes had gone. The small waves were flecked with gold as we stood upon the wet steel plates and drank in the air as if it had been wine.

"An ideal day for a submarine action!" Bernard said, rubbing his hands. "There's just enough ripple on the surface to make us difficult to detect, and yet it is smooth enough to give me a clear view. This boat is beautifully trimmed, she doesn't roll a bit. I'll send those boys up in a minute or two, but meanwhile I've got to play a bit of bluff. A lot depends on it."

I nodded. It was not my place to ask questions.

"You see," he went on, "of course the German battleship expects us. I know exactly the spot in the North Sea where we are supposed to pick her up some time after lunch – provided, of course, that the Germans have carried out their plans successfully and our scouts really have been decoyed away. It is part of a huge scheme.

"Well, assuming that their own plans are successful, they will be on the look-out for us and they'll send us a wireless message when we're within close range. This will be some prearranged signal, a single letter repeated a certain number of times or something of that sort, so that any of our ships picking it up would not know what it meant. We've got a wireless mast on board which can be shoved up at will and there's a complete installation in a little room down below next to the cook's galley. Unfortunately there is not one of us who knows anything about wireless. Bosustow is a capable electrician and could control the machinery, but he can't understand the signals. Therefore, when we sight the Friesland– and I want to get as near her as possible so as to make no mistakes – we must signal with flags.

"I've got their signal book and in it is a special code made for this occasion. The flags are in the flag locker all right, but I don't understand a word of German and none of us here do, so I'm going to put the fear of God into our friend, Karl of the Portsmouth Royal. A lot depends on that.

"Just skip down, young John, and tell Scarlett to bring him up here."

"Aye, aye, sir!" I said – it came to me quite naturally, I didn't think about it – and I climbed down into the interior of the submarine.

Scarlett was standing by the starboard torpedo tube, while the Dickson brothers, with their backs turned to me, were chuckling delightedly. I heard a fragment of the conversation.

"… and so, sir, I ses to the gal, Molly her name was, they used to call her the belle of South-sea pier, 'Molly,' I ses, 'you're a little bit of all right, but …'"

I cut short that anecdote. My pedagogic instincts awoke and I forgot that the Dicksons were now brevet officers of the King.

A sharp order did it. The two lads turned away and began to be ostentatiously busy, while Scarlett, his face did not belie his name at that moment, pattered along the grating, caught hold of the ex-German waiter with unnecessary roughness, and kicked him towards the ladder of the conning-tower.

I went up first, and when Karl emerged he stood to attention with a very pale face, though I did not miss a quick glance round the horizon. My brother was looking down upon a shining magazine pistol in his hand.

Then he raised his head and his voice grated like a file.

"Look here, you Karl, or whatever you call yourself, you're a spy!"

There was a torrent of expostulation. "No, sir, not a spy; I never was that. I was a reservist in our Navy. I was called out and I had to go. I'm a prisoner of war, sir, that's what I am."

My brother shook his head. "You can't prove that," he said, "and the circumstances are most suspicious. I spared you last night, thinking you might be useful, and you certainly made some very good coffee this morning. But I've come to the conclusion …" – he lifted the pistol.

I had had my brother's word for it that Karl was an excellent head-waiter. My own observations showed me that he was a coward, for he fell on his knees and tears began to stream from his eyes. My brother spat over the side in disgust and I kicked the fellow up to attention again.

"Well, I'll give you one more chance before shooting you out of hand. You must come down with me and translate the German in the Flag Signal Book. You must tell me all you know about the plans of your late commander. Then, if you make us a good breakfast – I thought I saw some tinned sausages and some marmalade in your rack – I may possibly not shoot you, though I shall tie you up when we go into action. At any rate, you will have the same chance as the rest of us."

The fellow's gratitude was painful to see. He was all smiles and obsequiousness at once, and so that little matter was concluded satisfactorily.

We had our breakfast, and an excellent one it was, all sharing alike. Afterwards I went up on deck with the Dicksons.

We saw the sails of two trawlers a mile away on the port bow, but save for them the sea was deserted. The boys were in high spirits. Not a thought of what was to come troubled them for a moment. "Just think, sir," said Dickson max., "what a bit of luck to be in for a rag like this!" But I won't recount any more of their joyous prattle. It was real enough. They had not a trace of fear, but underlying everything there was a deep seriousness that had made them men in a few short hours.

For two hours I worked hard with Bosustow at the engines. There was lots to do. The gauges of the petrol tanks needed attention. There were many details which would only interest an engineer were I to recount them.

At a quarter to twelve I went forward with my brother. We were still on the surface – heading fast for our destination – and saw the port and starboard torpedo tubes loaded. It was astonishing how the Dicksons had picked up something of their work, and Bernard was very pleased.

At twelve we lunched and a tot of rum was served out to the three sailors. Everything was now ship-shape. We were all dressed in uniforms of the dead crew. We tied up Karl and lashed him securely in his galley. Then, Adams being at the wheel in the lower portion of the conning-tower, my brother assembled us aft, by the clanging petrol engines.

"In ten minutes," he said, "I shall sound 'Prepare for action,' and from that time onwards you will be at your posts. I believe we are going to surprise the Germans and surprise the whole world. I believe we are going to save England from this raid. But we've got to remember that we may not pull it off. I am very pleased, more than pleased, with all you have done. I never want to command a better crew. It is the best scratch crew in naval history. We are only seven and we ought to be fifteen, but that does not matter. We have shown it does not matter, already. Now before we get to quarters I think we ought to remember what day this is. It happens to be Sunday."

I am ashamed to say we all looked up in surprise, but so it was.

"Well," my brother continued, "by good luck, I happen to have a prayer-book in my pocket and I am going to read a bit of the service and the ninety-first psalm."

Very straight and stiff, he pulled out a battered little book and began. This is not a scene I wish to linger on, but you will understand my reasons.

After the last sonorous Amen, Bernard said:

"Well, we've said our prayers and we've thought of our wives and – and of our girls. That is all I have got to say."

He nodded to Scarlett and a shrill whistle – the trumpet of the Navy – rang and rattled through the tube.

The two boys and Scarlett went forward to the torpedoes. Adams was called down from the steering wheel to assist Bosustow at the engines. My brother ordered me up into the conning-tower by his side.

"You'll be of more help to me here," he said. "I shall control the ship entirely myself, but I may want your assistance. Watch me carefully in case I have to go below at any moment."

At twelve-thirty precisely, the gasolene engines were stopped. Bernard filled the tanks, slightly deflected the horizontal rudders, and we dived into the smooth, green wall of an approaching swell and sank to ten feet. The light was switched off, the periscope rose, and we bent over the white table, white no longer.

At five minutes to one the picture of the empty sea was altered. Our range of vision was about two miles, and at that distance to the north-east we observed a cloud of smoke upon the horizon.

"There she is!" I said, and put my finger upon the rapidly growing smear.

Within twenty minutes, a large battleship raised her hull, making directly towards us. We altered our course a little, and as we swerved I could see she had four funnels which grew larger every moment. Of her accompanying flotilla and of the transports we could see nothing at all.

Then we rose to the surface.

Our short-handedness became apparent at once. Adams had to be called from the engines to stand at the wheel. Scarlett and my brother went on deck as I was useless at the manipulation of flags. It was a critical moment.

"I am determined to take no chances," Bernard said; "that is why I am risking signalling. We could probably get her without showing at all, but as she expects us and will lay to for us, we can make it absolutely certain."

He had the signal book, over which he had pencilled translations of the German, in his hand.

"That flag, Scarlett – 'wireless out of order,' it means."

That flag ran up a steel halliard bent to the top of the conning-tower.

"Ah, they see us!"

Scarcely three-quarters of a mile away, the great battleship was moving at a snail's pace. Her decks were crowded with men – in the clear sunlight I could see every detail. A piece of bunting ran up her mast in a ball and opened to the breeze.

"I'm damned if I know what it means, but it's obviously all right. Now then, Scarlett, the black flag with the white stripe. That means 'am successfully bringing despatches' – got it? – good!"

There was another signal from the battleship, to which we had now approached within half a mile. The smoke from her funnels had almost ceased. She was lying to and waiting.

Slowly we forged onwards. Then came a sharp order. We jumped back into the conning-tower and the sliding hatchway closed. Scarlett had gone like a flash to his torpedo tubes, and we dived. We sank in just a hundred and fifty seconds.

"Good!" said Bernard, as the periscope panted up and the battleship lay on the table before us.

The hum and tick of the electric motors began again. Bernard turned his wheel and the picture of the battleship opened out in full broadside.

"They don't know what to make of it," he remarked, to himself, rather than to me. "Now, I think – steady – steady …"

The ship grew larger every moment, higher and higher. It seemed as if she was rising out of the water.

"Now!" – he leant over a speaking tube.

He had hardly given his order when a bell rang smartly, close by my head. I heard staccato voices below in the bows of the submarine, and then the clang and swish of the discharge. We were only three hundred yards away. A white streak appeared shooting towards the monster, like a spear of foam. It was so quick that I could hardly have followed it with my finger upon the table.