"Petersen, sir!" The stoker had understood immediately. "Petersen!"
"Of course!" Carrington clapped gloved hands together. "We're on our way, sir.
Acetylene?
No time!
Stoker, crow bars, sledges... Perhaps if you would ring the engine-room, sir?"
But Turner already had the phone in his hand.
Aft on the poop deck, the fire was under control, all but in a few odd corners where the flames were fed by a fierce through draught.
In the mess decks, bulkheads, ladders, mess partitions, lockers had been twisted and buckled into strange shapes by the intense heat: on deck, the gasoline fed flames, incinerating the two and three quarter inch deck plating and melting the caulking as by some gigantic blow-torch, had cleanly stripped all covering and exposed the steel deck plates, plates dull red and glowing evilly, plates that hissed and spat as heavy snowflakes drifted down to sibilant extinction.
On and below decks, Hartley and his crews, freezing one moment, reeling in the blast of heat the next, toiled like men insane.
Where their wasted, exhausted bodies found the strength God only knew.
From the turrets, from the Master-At-Arms's office, from mess decks and emergency steering position, they pulled out man after man who had been there when the Condor had crashed: pulled them out, looked at them, swore, wept and plunged back into the aftermath of that holocaust, oblivious of pain and danger, tearing aside wreckage, wreckage still burning, still red hot, with charred and broken gloves: and when the gloves fell off, they used their naked hands.
As the dead were ranged in the starboard alleyway, Leading Seaman Doyle was waiting for them.
Less than half an hour previously, Doyle had been in the for'ard galley passage, rolling in silent agony as frozen body and clothes thawed out after the drenching of his pom-pom.
Five minutes later, he had been back on his gun, rock like, unflinching, as he pumped shell after shell over open sights into the torpedo bombers.
And now, steady and enduring as ever, he was on the poop.
A man of iron, and a face of iron, too, that night, the bearded leonine head still and impassive as he picked up one dead man after the other, walked to the guard rail and dropped his burden gently over the side.
How many times he repeated that brief journey that night, Doyle never knew: he had lost count after the first twenty or so.
He had no right to do this, of course: the navy was very strong on decent burial, and this was not decent burial.
But the sailmakers were dead and no man would or could have sewn up these ghastly charred heaps in the weighted and sheeted canvas.
The dead don't care, Doyle thought dispassionately, let them look after themselves.
So, too, thought Carrington and Hartley, and they made no move to stop him.
Beneath their feet, the smouldering mess decks rang with hollow reverberating clangs as Nicholls and Leading Telegraphist Brown, still weirdly garbed in their white asbestos suits, swung heavy sledges against the securing clips of 'Y' magazine hatch.
In the smoke and gloom and their desperate haste, they could hardly see each other, much less the clips: as often as not they missed their strokes and the hammers went spinning out of numbed hands into the waiting darkness.
Time yet, Nicholls thought desperately, perhaps there is time.
The main flooding valve had been turned off five minutes ago: it was possible, barely possible, that the two trapped men inside were clinging to the ladder, above water level.
One clip, one clip only was holding the hatch cover now.
With alternate strokes of their sledges, they struck it with vicious strength.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, it sheared off at fts base and the hatch cover crashed open under the explosive upsurge of the compressed air beneath.
Brown screamed in agony, a single coughing shout of pain, as the bone crashing momentum of the swinging hatch crashed into his right hip, then fell to the deck where he lay moaning quietly.
Nicholls did not even spare 'him a glance He leant far through the hatch, the powerful beam of his torch stabbing downwards into the gloom.
And he could see nothing, nothing at all, not what he wanted to see.
All he saw was the water, dark and viscous and evil, water rising and falling, water flooding and ebbing in the eerie oilbound silence as the Ulysses plunged and lifted in the heavy seas.
"Below!"
Nicholls called loudly.
The voice, a voice, he noted impersonally, cracked and shaken with strain, boomed and echoed terrifyingly down the iron tunnel. "Below!" he shouted again. "Is there anybody there?" He strained his ears for the least sound, for the faintest whisper of an answer, but none came. "McQuater!" He shouted a third time. "Williamson!
Can you hear me?" Again he looked, again he listened, but there was only the darkness and the muffled whisper of "the oil-slicked water swishing smoothly from side to side.
He stared again down the light from the torch, marvelled that any surface could so quickly dissipate and engulf the brilliance of that beam.
And beneath that surface... He shivered.
The water, even the water seemed to be dead, old and evil and infinitely horrible.
In sudden anger, he shook his head to clear it of these stupid, primitive fears: his imagination, he'd have to watch it.
He stepped back, straightened up.
Gently, carefully, he closed the swinging hatch.
The mess deck echoed as his sledge swung down on the clips, again and again and again.
Engineer-Commander Dodson stirred and moaned.
He struggled to open his eyes but his eyelids refused to function.
At least, he thought that they did for the blackness around remained as it was, absolute, impenetrable, almost palpable.
He wondered dully what had happened, how long he had been there, what had happened.
And the side of his head just below the ear that hurt abominably.
Slowly, with clumsy deliberation, he peeled oflf his glove, reached up an exploratory hand.
It came away wet and sticky: his hair, he realised with mild surprise, was thickly matted with blood.