"MacDonnell, J E - 125 - Blind Into Doom UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonnell J E)

pleased because he knew how they hated those big remote vultures,
and so far as he knew no other escort had shot one of them down.
There was one man who knew nothing of the Condor's fate. His
action station was deep down in the Remote Control Position. Here,
five decks down, were fitted a steering wheel, engine-room
telegraphs, a repeat gyro compass and a voice pipe. It was an auxiliary
control position, to be used in the event of the main bridge instruments
being shot to uselessness.
There was only one officer amongst the small group of men, yet
in the whole ship he was junior only to the captain, for if the bridge
were so badly damaged as to be inoperative it could be assumed that
the captain would be similarly out of action, and the R.C.P. would
have to take over the handling of the ship.
- J.E. Macdonnell: Blind Into Doom Page 22 -



On receiving the order to secure, Commander Blake hoisted his
tubby body up the vertical iron ladder and then climbed other slanting
ones till he emerged on the upper-deck. The first things he noticed
were that the rain had stopped and that Warwick was running directly
away from the convoy, northward. Then he saw that the columns of
merchantmen were lumbering round in a large alteration of course,
and he knew well enough what that meant. But of the other thing he
knew nothing.
Walking forward along the deck, trying not to appear hurried, he
passed at least fifty men, any one of whom could have told him the
Condor's fate. But as a commander and deputy-lord of the ship must
not appear to hurry when there was no longer an emergency, so must
he not appear to be ignorant of something which everybody else
knew. It was a subtle situation, to do with discipline, and only one
man could solve it.
Blake found him seated in his high-backed chair, smoking a pipe.
"Bloody lovely," Blake growled. "I have a telephone in that hole
you know, not to mention a voice pipe."
Duncan was genuinely surprised. "Sorry, old chap, never occurred
to me. It was only one plane, and took a few minutes. Anyway, I
knew you'd be up."
"Well, here I am."
Duncan took a deep lungful of smoke and exhaled it slowly, which
told Blake how relieved he was.
"We shot him down," Duncan said. "Damn good shooting,
actually, got him just as he started to turn away. Poor devil broke in
half, sliced clean through. Must have been nasty, coming down."
"Shocking, poor devils," Blake said, in a tone which told Duncan
he was thinking it was nasty going down with U-boat torpedoes in
your ship's
belly. "He got a signal off?"
"Yes." Duncan waved his pipe astern. "But the commodore's
doing something about that."