"McCammon, Robert R. - The Night Boat" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

Cover art copyright © 1988 Rowena Morrill

Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-66741

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-66483-2

First Pocket Books printing October 1988

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POCKET and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Author’s Note

It may be interesting to note that U-boats were referred to by both captains and crews as “Iron Coffins.” Rightly so; 736 German submarine crews still lie with their boats on the ocean floor.
R.R.M.




God how the dead men
Grin by the wall,
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.
—Alfred Noyes,
A Victory Dance

Evil… has infinite forms.
—Blaise Pascal,
Pensees

Prologue

CLOUDS SWEPT ACROSS the yellow oval of the moon, one moment obscuring it, the next opening chasms so that its ocher light could stream down upon the plain of black ocean beneath. The moon hung motionless, while around it the clouds roiled. It was as if they possessed a life of their own, whirling upon themselves, breaking into pieces and attaching themselves, leechlike, onto others. They were first the maws of fantastic monsters, then men’s faces with mouths open and screaming, then bare, bleached skulls shattered slowly into fragments by the Caribbean winds.
There were two lights panning across the surface of the sea—one high, over a dark mass of land, flashing intermittently, and the other floating low, just above the stern of a rusty-hulled American freighter hauling eight thousand tons of raw sulfur.
And one hundred yards beyond the freighter’s wake was something else.
Quietly and smoothly a dark cylinder of iron rose up from the depths on a slender tower. The metal had been painted black to avoid reflection, the viewing lens sheathed in concrete—a single freezing eye.
The periscope turned, the only noise betraying its presence a soft hissssss of foam rushing around the tower; it sighted the island beacon, paused a few seconds, and turned several degrees to study the specter of the merchant vessel. Moonlight glittered off railings, off porthole rims, off the glass in an upper-deck wheelhouse.
Easy prey.
The periscope descended. A gurgle of water and gone.
Then, with a noise like the death threat of a striking serpent, the first G7A concussion torpedo, loaded with eight hundred pounds of explosive, left its forward tube. Powered by compressed air, it left a thin trail of silvery bubbles on its course toward the freighter’s stern. It moved with a fluid grace, a smaller replica of the huge machine that had borne it across six thousand miles of ocean. Gradually it rose to within ten feet of the surface and hurtled onward toward its rendezvous.
When the torpedo slammed into the freighter’s screws, it ripped open a gash below the waterline with an explosion that lit the sea with fire and fury. There was a long scream of iron as ton after ton of sea broke open the freighter’s stern plates. Then there came a second explosion, hotter and redder than the first, sending up a gout of heavy black smoke through which burning men leaped over the shattered deck railing for the sea. Flame spread along the lower deck, greedily chewing its way toward the wheelhouse. A third explosion; a spray of metal and timbers tossed into the sky. Shuddering, the freighter veered toward the beacon light less than a mile away. The captain did not fully realize what had happened. He was perhaps thinking that they had struck something underwater: a reefhead, a sunken wreck. He did not know the screws were mangled and useless or that the fires were already out of control; he did not know the great shafts of the diesel engines had been thrown forward by the blast, grinding men to bloody pulps before them.
When the second torpedo hit, just to starboard of the first strike, the explosion collapsed the stern section of the lower deck. Supports shattered and fell away, and men struggling blindly through smoke and flame were crushed beneath tons of iron. The entire superstructure trembled and began to cave in.
Bulkheads moaned, split, burst as the sea gnawed its way through; iron crumpled like waxed paper; men clawed at each other as they sank, drowning. Some, above decks, were quickly burned into stiffened crisps. The dying ship, filled with the hideous racket of screams and moans, of shattering timber and glass, lurched sharply to starboard and began to sink rapidly at the stern.
A red emergency flare was fired from the remains of the burning wheelhouse; it exploded in the sky with a sharp crack and floated lazily back down toward the sea. Black smoke churned over the freighter, becoming thicker and thicker, filling the air with the stench of scorched iron and burned flesh, until finally it turned the moon ebon.