Dive! Dive! Dive! by J.E. Macdonnell

Dive! Dive! Dive! by J.E. Macdonnell

Author:J.E. Macdonnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Piccadilly


The searching Japs missed their quarry. On the morning of the third day eastward from the Thousand Islands, quarry Arrow became the hunter.

The call “Captain in the control-room!” brought Grayson out of his cabin, stepping quickly into the instrument-packed room. Pilot was at the periscope, and at Grayson’s touch on his shoulder he stepped back.

“Tanker, sir, two small escorts,” he put Grayson in the picture swiftly, “we’re two miles north of Madura Island. They’re probably heading for Surabaya.”

“How nice,” Grayson grunted, and took the periscope.

He sighted the tanker at once, and immediately circled his feet round the periscope well, checking the dispassionate face of the sea for further enemies. Conditions were good for a daylight attack—a fresh westerly was lifting the blue surface into a myriad of whitecaps, excellent covering companions for the small wake of an inquisitive periscope. He was confined somewhat by the Java coast to starb’d, to the south, but northwards the wide stretch of the Java Sea waited with enfolding, protective deeps into which Arrow could sink and flee.

“Down periscope!” A whir of wires, a silent sliding of greased tube. “Starb’d fifteen, full ahead together!”

His orders given to put Arrow on a course at ninety degrees to the line of approach of the tanker, Grayson stood staring at the backs of the hydroplane operators. But his mind was on the surface, projected two miles over the blue and white sea, seeing his target, fat, loaded down with oil and petrol, and the two escorts, ahead and on either bow of their charge, small escort ships.

He wanted that tanker—they all wanted her. For days now they had been on the defensive, up through the minefield, creeping into the beach, bombed, waiting for the bomb to explode, waiting to die, hunted, drowned in a flood of black water.

His orders had been to avoid detection, not to attack anything, on his way to the beach to meet Trenton. He had Trenton now. He also had six torpedoes waiting in his forrard tubes, and a fat tanker, and a crew of sixty men who’d been hammered enough.

“Up periscope!”

There she was, a little closer through the thrust of Arrow’s screws, steady on course, a white brush of bow-wave before her heavy snout. He switched to high-power and swung the lens across the sky—there could be an aerial escort, so close to Surabaya.

The bright sky smiled emptily back at him, the sunlight reflecting down the long tube and shining from his eyes in small twin points of blue.

“Down periscope!”

He could not leave it up for more than a few seconds at a time—the wake was white, but the thin tube showed black, a moving stick which alert eyes would be looking for.

“What’s on, skipper? We’re having a crack?”

“Yes, major, a nice fat tanker.”

In the past two days he had come to know the huge Australian, a process helped along considerably by Trenton’s complete lack of reserve, and his eagerness to talk among men of his own kind. Grayson had already concluded that



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