Repeat, port 60.
Can you see it?...
No, no, port 60-70 now!" he shouted desperately. "Oh, good, good!
Commence tracking."
"On target, sir," the receiver crackled in his ear.
"Open fire-continuous!"
"Sir-but, sir, Kingston's not here.
He went------"
"Never mind Kingston!" Etherton shouted furiously.
Kingston, he knew, was Captain of the Gun. "Open fire, you fools, now!
I'll take full responsibility."
He thrust the phone back on the rest, moved across to the observation panel...
Then realisation, sickening, shocking, fear seared through his mind and he lunged desperately for the phone.
"Belay the last order!" he shouted wildly. "Cease fire! Cease fire!
Oh, my God, my God, my God!"
Through the receiver came the staccato, angry bark of the two-pounder.
The receiver dropped from his hand, crashed against the bulkhead.
It was too late.
It was too late because he had committed the cardinal sin, he had forgotten to order the removal of the muzzle-covers, the metal plates that sealed off the flash-covers of the guns when not in use.
And the shells were fused to explode on contact...
The first shell exploded inside its barrel, killing the trainer and seriously wounding the communication number: the other three smashed through their flimsy covers and exploded within a second of each other, a few feet from the faces of the four watchers on the fo'c'sle deck.
All four were untouched, miraculously untouched by the flying, screaming metal.
It flew outwards and downwards, a red-hot iron hail sizzling into the sea.
But the blast of the explosion was backwards, and the power of even a few pounds of high explosive detonating at arm's length is lethal. The padre died instantly, Peters and Charteris within seconds, and all from the same cause-telescoped occiputs.
The blast hurled them backwards off their feet, as if flung by a giant hand, the backs of their heads smashing to an eggshell pulp against the bulkhead.
The blood seeped darkly into the snow, was obliterated in a moment.
Marshall was lucky, fantastically so.
The explosion, he said afterwards that it was like getting in the way of the driving piston of the Coronation Scot-flung him through the open door behind him, ripped off the heels of both shoes as they caught on the storm-sill: he braked violently in mid-air, described a complete somersault, slithered along the passage and smashed squarely into the trunking of 'B' turret, his back framed by the four big spikes of the butterfly nuts securing an inspection hatch.
Had he been standing a foot to the right or the left, had his heels been two inches higher as he catapulted through the doorway, had he hit the turret a hair's-breadth to the left or right, Lieutenant Marshall had no right to be alive.
The laws of chance said so, overwhelmingly.
As it was, Marshall was now sitting up in the Sick Bay, strapped, broken ribs making breathing painful, but otherwise unharmed.
The upturned lifeboat, mute token of some earlier tragedy on the Russian Convoys, had long since vanished into the white twilight.
Captain Vallery's voice, low and husky, died softly away.
He stepped back, closing the Prayer Book, and the forlorn notes of the bugle echoed briefly over the poop and died in the blanketing snow.
Men stood silently, unmovingly, as, one by one, the thirteen figures shrouded in weighted canvas slid down the tipped plank, down from under the Union Flag, splashed heavily into the Arctic and were gone.
For long seconds, no one moved.
The unreal, hypnotic effect of that ghostly ritual of burial held tired, sluggish minds in unwilling thrall, held men oblivious to cold and discomfort.
Even when Etherton half-stepped forward, sighed, crumpled down quietly, unspectacularly in the snow, the trance-like hiatus continued.
Some ignored him, others glanced his way, incuriously.
It seemed absurd, but it struck Nicholls, standing in the background, that they might have stayed there indefinitely, the minds and the blood of men slowing up, coagulating, freezing, while they turned to pillars of ice.
Then suddenly, with exacerbating abruptness, the spell was shattered: the strident scream of the Emergency Stations whistle seared through the gathering gloom.
It took Vallery about three minutes to reach the bridge.
He rested often, pausing on every second or third step of the four ladders that reached up to the bridge: even so, the climb drained the last reserves of his frail strength.
Brooks had to half-carry him through the gate.
Vallery clung to the binnacle, fighting for breath through foam-flecked lips; but his eyes were alive, alert as always, probing through the swirling snow.
"Contact closing, closing: steady on course, interception course: speed unchanged."
The radar loudspeaker was muffled, impersonal; but the calm precise tones of Lieutenant Bowden were unmistakable.
"Good, good!
We'll fox him yet!" Tyndall, his tired, sagging face lit up in almost beaming anticipation, turned to the Captain.
The prospect of action always delighted Tyndall. "Something coming up from the SSW., Captain.