Gold From Crete by C.S. Forester Read Free Book Online

coolness in the sweltering heat.
    ‘I fancy that means trouble, all the same,’ he said.
    Crowe was right. The visitor introduced himself as Mr Cockburn-Crossley, from the Embassy.
    ‘I have made arrangements for you to pay your formal call upon the admiral commanding,’ explained Mr Cockburn-Crossley. ‘Can you be ready in half an hour, Captain?’
    The watch that Mr Cockburn-Crossley consulted was just like Mr Cockburn-Crossley, very slim and very elegant and very polished.
    ‘I can,’ said Crowe, conscious of the fleeting glance which Mr Cockburn-Crossley had passed over his slightly grubby whites. It was still hardly more than two hours since he had been in the open Atlantic, with the possibility every second of being torpedoed.
    ‘I will expect you, then, in half an hour, Captain Crowe,’ said Mr Cockburn-Crossley.
    Ever since the heat of New York struck him, Crowe had been thinking about a cold bath, and he retired gratefully into this one; he had yet to learn that in a heat wave in New York one emerges from one cold bath thinking longingly about the next. He dressed himself carefully in his blues. In wartime the glories of full dress and cocked hat and lightning-conductor trousers were discarded. There was not even a sword on board - what they would do if ever a court-martial became necessary, Crowe could not imagine. The mere effort of dressing made him sweat afresh; the tiny cabin under the naked iron deck in the blazing sun was like a furnace, and yet there seemed to be no relief when he stepped out into the open air.
    Exactly coincident with his arrival on deck there was a loud splash from astern, an unusual enough noise to attract his attention. What he saw aft, when he directed his gaze there, shocked him inexpressibly. That infernal monkey whom he had detested throughout the long and arduous campaign was standing there gibbering triumphantly and waving in his paw a small glittering object. Crowe raced up to him, but he arrived there no sooner than did Hammett and a perspiring chief petty officer and a couple of ratings.
    ‘Little beggar,’ said the chief petty officer. ‘ ‘E’s done it proper this time.’
    What the monkey had done was to release one of the depth charges that lay ready on the deck for action against submarines.
    ‘Look at ‘im wiv the key in ‘is ‘and,’ said one of the ratings.
    ‘ ‘E’s only done what ‘e’s seen us do often enough,’ said the other.
    It was withdrawal of the key that actuated the detonating mechanism of the depth charge; the naval rating whose business it was to release the charge would always produce the key to show that he had not forgotten the most important detail of the operation.
    ‘What are those things set for?’ demanded Crowe of Hammett.
    ‘Two hundred feet. It’s twenty-seven here; and the safety device won’t allow the detonator to operate before thirty feet,’ replied Hammett, and then, as another series of thoughts struck him, ‘But it’s a soft bottom. The thing will go on sinking. And the tide’s rising.’
    ‘And not just that,’ said Crowe, delving back in his mind to recover the memory of the mechanism of a depth-charge detonator. There was a little hole through which water was admitted; regulating the size of the hole regulated the speed at which the water entered, and that controlled the depth at which the charge, slowly sinking from the surface, eventually exploded. But even if, as it soon would be in the present case, the charge lay at thirty feet, the water would still slowly penetrate, and when the detonator was full it would explode, whatever the depth was.
    Crowe looked up at the towering bows of the Coulterville ; the depth charge was under those bows as well as under the Apache ’s stern, and when the thing should go off, it would do terrible damage to the American ship as well as to the British ship. He did not expect that the Coulterville had any steam up to enable her to move; he doubted if even the Apache