The deep silence, p.36
The Deep Silence,
p.36
‘Up periscope!’ He hardly recognised his own voice.
The sea was calm again, but for a few scattered pieces of bobbing flotsam. He moved the handles briefly to watch for the other ship. It had altered course, baffled by the Temeraire’s sudden dive.
He remembered Colquhoun’s stricken face as he had clambered aboard with Lightfoot’s body. There was a story there, he thought. But it could keep. Colquhoun had done well. They had all done well.
He tensed as a double explosion rumbled through the sea and battered against the Temeraire’s hull. Then there were other, disjointed sounds, terrible noises of tearing metal, accompanied by the jubilant inrush of water.
Then he saw it. Just briefly. Like the ending of a nightmare. The stricken submarine’s stem was rising straight up out of the sea, her twin screws still turning, burnished in the sunlight.
Around him, excluded from what he could see through the periscope, the others watched his face and waited.
Jermain saw the grey hull begin to slide under in a welter of giant air bubbles and a thick, spreading blanket of black oil, It was like blood, he thought.
Then with sudden force the submarine gave up the fight and went into a steep dive. For many minutes they all heard her falling, down and down, the toughened steel screaming through the water as if in torment.
Jermain stepped back from the periscope and said, ‘Bring her round to one seven zero. Dive to six hundred feet.’
When he looked again through the periscope he could see the water already closing over the upper lens to blot out the nodding flotsam and the spreading stain of oil.
Mayo asked quietly, ‘Shall we attack the A/S trawler, sir?’
Jermain shook his head. It was almost an effort to reply. ‘No, Pilot. We’ll leave them to talk about it.’ He looked around at the tired, watching faces. ‘I think someone should talk about it!’
The Temeraire lifted her rudder and dived deep into the embracing darkness, and set course for home.
Douglas Reeman, The Deep Silence
