Gold From Crete by C.S. Forester

compressed into a diving suit. Crowe went below and shouted for fresh clothes to be got out for him; he took another bath and dressed himself as rapidly as the heat permitted, and with all the care the occasion demanded. Then he slung his gold-peaked cap onto his head and hurried over the brow into the clattering din of the navy yard. Mr Cockburn-Crossley was waiting with every sign of impatience consistent with his customary elegant nonchalance. He was putting his watch back into his pocket as Crowe hurried up.
    ‘You’re late, Captain Crowe,’ he said. ‘It is most unfortunate. I wish you could have been more punctual; punctuality is a virtue anyone can cultivate, and it is most important that you should be punctual at this time when we have Anglo-American relations to consider.’
    Crowe looked at Mr Cockburn-Crossley for a second or two before he replied, and he swallowed hard too.
    Tm sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I was detained by business in the ship that could not possibly wait.’
    He felt there was nothing else he could say to Mr Cockburn-Crossley.
     

Night Stalk
     
    ‘There aren’t any whales in the Mediterranean,’ said Nickleby, the flotilla gunnery officer, in tones of deep satisfaction.
    ‘There are big tunny fish, though, that go in shoals,’ said Rowles, the navigating officer.
    ‘What about cold currents?’ asked Captain Crowe. This discussion dealt with the sort of technical point the solution of which was the task of those highly trained staff officers specifically assigned to him for the purpose; but he knew enough of the subject to take part-in the argument.
    ‘Nothing here worth mentioning, sir,’ said Rowles. ‘Of course, there may be a casual freak.’
    ‘Wrecks?’ asked Holby.
    ‘Plenty of those,’ admitted Rowles.
    The flotilla was creeping through the night, guided by the most minute physical influences imaginable - too minute really for the human imagination to grasp, thought Crowe; the merest echoes of something already beyond human senses. They were trailing a submarine. Somewhere inside HMS Apache a skilled rating was sending out sound waves into the sea with an apparatus that had never been thought of before Crowe became captain. It was all very difficult, for these sound waves were not the sort that one could hear; they were too high-pitched for that. Crowe could remember being shown a dog whistle once which blew a note too high for the human ear, but which yet could be heard by a dog. The sounds being sent out through the water were the same kind of noiseless sounds - what an absurd expression! - but even higher in pitch.
    The principle was that when these radiating waves struck a solid body in the water, a minute proportion of them bounced back and could be picked up in the ship by an apparatus even more novel than the one which sent them out.
    The fantastic sensitiveness of the whole affair could lead sometimes to curious results - shoals of pilchards off the Cornish coast had been depth-charged more than once; and the dividing wall between a cold current and a warm current could reflect enough of the waves as well as refracting the rest to produce a positive indication in the receiver, so that the ship might find itself launching an attack upon nothing at all, like a blindfolded fighter assaulting a whiff of cigarette smoke.
    It was like some deadly game of blindman’s buff, or like two men stalking each other with revolvers in a completely dark room, for the submarine was by no means helpless; as she crept about underwater her own instruments could tell her, roughly, the bearing of her enemy, and when she was pressed too hard she could endeavour to relieve herself of her enemy’s attentions by a salvo of torpedoes loosed off in the general direction of the pursuing ship.
    The little chartroom was hot with the heat of the Mediterranean summer night and the stuffiness which comes with the inevitable interference with ventilation caused by the complete darkening of the