Flat on the duckboards beside Carrington and the Kapok Kid, Turner pounded his fist on the deck in terrible frustration of anger.
He thought of Starr, the man who had brought all this upon them, and hated him as he would never have believed he could hate anybody.
He could have killed him then.
He thought of Chrysler, of the excruciating hell of that gun-rest pounding into that shattered shoulder, of brown eyes glazed and shocked with pain and grief.
If he himself lived, Turner swore, he would recommend that boy for the Victoria Cross.
Abruptly the firing ceased and a Heinkel swung off sharply to starboard, smoke pouring from both its engines.
Quickly, together with the Kapok Kid, Turner scrambled to his feet, hoisted himself over the side of the bridge. He did it without looking, and he almost died then.
A burst of fire from the third and last Heinkel-the bridge was always the favourite target-whistled past his head and shoulders: he felt the wind of their passing fan his cheek and hair. Then, winded from the convulsive back-thrust that had sent him there, he was stretched full length on the duckboards again. They were only inches from his eyes, these duck-boards, but he could not see them.
All he could see was the image of Chrysler, a gaping wound the size of a man's hand in his back, slumped forward across the Oerlikons, the weight of his body tilting the barrels grotesquely skywards.
Both barrels had still been firing, were still firing, would keep on firing until the drums were empty, for the dead boy's hand was locked across the trigger.
Gradually, one by one, the guns of the convoy fell silent, the clamour of the aero engines began to fade in the distance.
The attack was over.
Turner rose to his feet, slowly and heavily this time.
He looked over the side of the bridge, stared down into the Oerlikon gunpit, then looked away, bis lace expressionless.
Behind him, he heard someone coughing.
It was a strange, bubbling kind of cough.
Turner whirled round, then stood stock-still, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.
The Kapok Kid, with Carrington kneeling helplessly at his side, was sitting quietly on the boards, his back propped against the legs of the Admiral's chair.
From left groin to right shoulder through the middle of the embroidered
"J "on the chest, stretched a neat, straight, evenly-spaced pattern of round holes, stitched in by the machine-gun of the Heinkel.
The blast of the shells must have hurtled him right across the bridge.
Turner stood absolutely still.
The Kid, he knew with sudden sick certainly, had only seconds to live: he felt that any sudden move on his part would snap the spun-silk thread that held him on to life.
Gradually, the Kapok Kid became aware of his presence, of his steady gaze, and looked up tiredly.
The vivid blue of bis eyes was dulled already, the face white and drained of blood.
Idly, his hand strayed up and down the punctured kapok, fingering the gashes.
Suddenly he smiled, looked down at the quilted suit.
"Ruined," he whispered. "Bloody well ruined!" Then the wandering hand slipped down to his side, palm upward, and his head slumped forward on his chest.
The flaxen hair stirred idly in the wind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SUNDAY MORNING
THE Stirling died at dawn.
She died while still under way, still plungjng through the heavy seas, her mangled, twisted bridge and superstructure glowing red, glowing white-hot as the wind and sundered oil tanks lashed the flames into an incandescent holocaust.
A strange and terrible sight, but not unique: thus the Bismarck had looked, whitely incandescent, just before the Shropshire's torpedoes had sent her to the bottom.
The Stirling would have died anyway-but the Stukas made siccar.
The Northern Lights had long since gone: now, too, the clear skies were going, and dark cloud was banking heavily to the north.
Men hoped and prayed that the cloud would spread over FR77, and cover it with blanketing snow.
But the Stukas got there first.
The Stukas, the dreaded gull-winged Junkers 87 dive-bombers, came from the south, flew high over the convoy, turned, flew south again.
Level with, and due west of the Ulysses, rear ship in the convoy, they started to turn once more: then, abruptly, in the classic Stuka attack pattern, they peeled off in sequence, port wings dipping sharply as they half-rolled, turned and fell out of the sky, plummetting arrow-true for their targets.
Any plane that hurtles down in undeviating dive on waiting gun emplacements has never a chance.
Thus spoke the pundits, the instructors in the gunnery school of Whale Island, and proceeded to prove to their own satisfaction the evident truth of their statement, using A.A. guns and duplicating the situation which would arise insofar as it lay within their power.
Unfortunately, they couldn't duplicate the Stuka.
"Unfortunately," because in actual battle, the Stuka was' the only factor in the situation that really mattered.
One had only to crouch behind a gun, to listen to the ear-piercing, screaming whistle of the Stuka in its near-vertical dive, to flinch from its hail of bullets as it loomed larger and larger in the sights, to know that nothing could now arrest the flight of that underslung bomb, to appreciate the truth of that.
Hundreds of men alive today-the lucky ones who endured and survived a Stuka attack-will readily confirm that the war produced nothing quite so nerve-rending, quite so demoralising as the sight and sound of those Junkers with the strange dihedral of the wings in the last seconds before they pulled out of their dive.
But one time in a hundred, maybe one time in a thousand, when the human factor of the man behind the gun ceased to operate, the pundits could be right.
This was the thousandth time, for fear was a phantom that had vanished in the night: ranged against the dive-bombers were only one multiple pom-pom and half a dozen Oerlikons-the for'ard turrets could not be brought to bear-but these were enough, and more, in the hands of men inhumanly calm, ice-cool as the Polar wind itself, and filled with an almost dreadful singleness of purpose.
Three Stukas in almost as many seconds were clawed out of the sky, two to crash harmlessly in the sea, a third to bury itself with tremendous impact in the already shattered day cabin of the Admiral.
The chances against the petrol tanks not erupting in searing flame or of the bomb not exploding were so remote as not to exist: but neither happened.