The Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online Page B

inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau turned their great guns on the Rawalpindi that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.
    The 17,000-ton Rawalpindi, in peacetime a crack P & O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnishedinterior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament—eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the Rawalpindi might as well have been made of paper.
    The crew of the Rawalpindi knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age—but more often than not in age as well—it was a crew of old men. Apart from fiftyodd officers and men who had served with the Rawalpindi as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR—civilians with the bare essentials of naval training—reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the Rawalpindi, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crewknew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63° 40′ North, II° 29′ West, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the Scharnhorst looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.
    On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the Deutschland, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battle-cruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine 11-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400—and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.
    Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the Scharnhorst ’s big signalling lamp was stuttering out the command to ‘Heave-to’. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing—for which there couldn’t possibly have been any reproach—would have been to do as the Scharnhorst ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British navalcaptains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the Scharnhorst, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.
    The Rawalpindi was still heeling over on her turn when the Scharnhorst again ordered her to