Gold From Crete by C.S. Forester Page A

ship. Rowles was bent over a large sheet of squared paper on which, with the aid of protractor and dividers, he was plotting the moves of the deadly game.
    ‘ Cheyenne signals, “Three-four-O”,’ came the voice of the chief yeoman of signals down the voice pipe from the bridge.
    ‘Three-forty degrees!’ exclaimed Rowles eagerly. ‘That gives us a fix.’
    Cheyenne was in the second division of destroyers out to port and she was giving the bearing of the unseen submarine as deduced from her instruments. Crowe could picture the transmission of the signal, the tiny flashes of the signalling lamp, screened and hooded, so that only the Apache , and no possible enemy, could pick them up. Rowles drew another line on his squared paper and made a cabalistic sign at the end of it. ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘Don’t think it can be a cold current. And it seems to have moved, so it’s not a wreck. Too many propellers going for the hydrophones to help us out.’
    Twenty years ago the hydrophone had been the only instrument which could be used for tracking a submarine; it actually listened to the beat of the submarine’s propeller, and all the efforts of all the scientists had not yet succeeded in improving it to the point where it could pick up and follow the sound of a submarine’s propeller through the noise of those of a whole flotilla.
    The message tube buzzed, and Holby snatched the little brass cylinder from it, took out the message and tossed it across to Rowles, who read it eagerly. He ruled another line on his squared paper; the diagram he was drawing there was beginning to take some kind of shape, for the lines all had a general trend, and the little ringed numbers made a series which, though wavering, still had definition.
    ‘I’d like to alter course, sir, if you please,’ said Rowles, and Crowe nodded.
    Rowles spoke first into one voice tube and then into another. It was only an alteration of five degrees, but, with the flotilla fanned out on a wide front in pitch-darkness and with signals restricted to the barest minimum, it was not such a simple matter to wheel the line round as might at first be supposed. A moment later Rowles asked for an increase in speed, and the officers sitting in the silent little cabin were conscious for a brief space of a change in the tempo of the throbbing of the propellers; at the end of that time they were accustomed to the new rhythm and the throbbing passed unnoticed again. Then came fresh information, messages from the sonic apparatus below and from other destroyers in the flotilla.
    ‘He’s altered course,’ said Rowles.
    The captain of the hunted submarine was receiving indications as well, and was turning his boat in a desperate effort to get out of the path of his enemies. But submerged as he was he could only creep along at six knots, while the destroyers were charging down on him at twenty-five. If only they could maintain contact with him, his end was certain. Rowles wheeled the flotilla farther round to intercept him. Another voice tube in the little chartroom squeaked a warning, and Holby answered it.
    ‘Torpedoes fired,’ he announced. The hydrophone apparatus had picked up the heavy underwater concussion. The Italian was trying to rid himself of pursuit by launching his torpedoes into the midst of his pursuers. Firing under water and aiming only on the strength of the data supplied him by his sound apparatus, he could not hope for very accurate aim; the deployed destroyers made a wide target, but one with a good many gaps in it.
    ‘One hundred and sixty seconds, I should say,’ said Holby, and all eyes turned involuntarily on the stopwatch ticking away on the chartroom table. With torpedoes and destroyers approaching one another at eighty knots, each little jump of the hand brought potential death forty yards nearer. Crowe took his attention from the watch and turned it upon Rowles’ diagram. The destroyers were headed straight for the submarine, meeting the