CHAPTER V

THE GERMAN RAIDERS

As the Dewey settled into the water. Lieutenant McClure and his executive officer peered intently though the periscopes, hoping to catch sight of the unknown craft and speculating on her nationality. The sky was flecked with clouds and there was no convenient moon to aid the submarine sentinel—-an ideal night for a raid! "Little Mack," as the crew had affectionately named their commander, was in a quandary as to whether the approaching vessel was friend or foe.

"We'll lie right here and watch him awhile," he told his executive officer. "Pretty soon he'll be close enough for us to get a line on his silhouette."

It had been an interesting revelation to the Brighton boys soon after their entry into the navy to learn that each ship was equipped with a silhouette book. By means of this it was possible to tell the vessels of one nation from another by the size and formation of their hulls, their smokestacks and general outline. Each officer had to be thoroughly well informed on the contents of the book.

Quietly, stealthily the hidden submarine awaited the approach of her adversary, for it seemed only too certain that the ship that had suddenly come dashing up out of the east was out of Cuxhaven or Wilhelmshaven, and had but a short time before passed under the mighty German guns on Heligoland.

Chief Gunner Mowrey and his crew in the torpedo chamber forward were signaled to "stand by the guns ready for action," which meant in this case the huge firing tubes and the Whitehead torpedoes. Jack and Ted fell into their places, stripped to the waist, and making sure that the reserve torpedoes were ready for any emergency.

By adjusting the headpiece of the ship's microphone to his ears Chief Electrician Sammy Smith kept close tabs on the approaching vessel with the underwater telephone. With the receivers to his hears he could hear plainly the swish of the vessel's propeller blades as she bore down upon the floating submarine. With his reports as a basis for their deductions, the Dewey's officers were able to figure out the position of the mystery ship and to tell accurately the distance between the two vessels.

"Reckon he'll be dead off our bow in a minute or so," observed Cleary as he completed another observation based on Smith's latest report.

McClure sprang again to the periscope.

"Yes, we ought to get a line on him soon enough now," was his rejoinder.

For a moment the two officers studied the haze of the night sea around them, unable yet to discern the form of the approaching vessel. And then came a huge specter, looming up directly off the starboard quarter of the Dewey in the proportions of a massive warship.

"Looks like a German cruiser," said the American lieutenant as he gripped the brass wheel of the periscope and gave himself intently to the task of divining the identity of the unknown ship.

Cleary was making observations at the reserve periscope, the two officers having plunged the conning tower of the Dewey in utter darkness that they might better observe the shadowy hulk bearing down upon them.

"It is a German cruiser—-Plauen class—-and coming up in a hurry at better than twenty knots," exclaimed McClure, as the outline of the ship was implanted clean-cut against the horizon dead ahead of the Dewey.

His hand on the firing valve, the submarine commander waited only until the bow of the German warship showed on the range glass of the periscope, and then released a torpedo.

Instantly a great volume of compressed air swirled into the upper port chamber; the bowcap was opened and the missile sped on its way.

"Gee, I hope that 'moldy' lands her!" shouted Jack at the sound of the discharged torpedo.

Although but a short time in the North Sea and just getting well acquainted with their English cousins, the American lads were fast learning the lingo of the deep. To every man aboard the Dewey a torpedo was a "moldy," so named by the English seamen.

As the torpedo crew sprang to reload the emptied chamber the Dewey's diving rudders were turned, ballast was shipped and she started to dive. The plunge came none too soon. A lookout on the German cruiser, eagle-eyed about his daring venture, had noted the approaching torpedo and sounded an alarm. At the same moment the ship's rudder was thrown over and she swung to starboard, paralleling the position of the Dewey. And just as she came around one of her big searchlights aft flashed into life and shot its bright rays over the water. For a moment or two a finger of ghostly white shifted aimlessly to and fro over the surf ace of the sea and then centered full upon the disappearing periscope of the Dewey! Instantly came the boom of the ship's guns as they belched a salvo at the tormenting submarine.

"Missed him by inches," growled McClure after waiting long enough to be convinced that the torpedo had sped wide of the mark.

"And he is firing with all his aft guns," added Cleary as he observed further the flashes of fire from the turrets of the German cruiser.

McClure signaled for the Dewey to be submerged with all speed.

"He'll never get us," he announced a few seconds later as the submarine dived down out of sight.

Jack and Ted, with the rest of their crew, had by this time shunted another Whitehead into position, adjusted the mechanism and were standing by awaiting developments.

"Just our luck to slip a moldy to the blooming Boche and draw a blank," grumbled Mike Mowrey, who was mad as a hornet over the "miss."

Ted was inclined to be a bit pessimistic, too; but Jack was sure the Dewey would make good on her next try. Bill Witt started to sing: "We'll hang Kaiser Bill to a sour apple tree," but got little response. The torpedo crew were glum over their failure to bag the German raiding cruiser and in no mood for singing.

"Cheer up, boys; better luck next time," called out Navigating Officer
Binns as he peered into the torpedo compartment.

All at once the boys were startled by a cry from Sammy Smith, who had suddenly leaped to his feet and stood swaying in the wireless room with both microphone receivers tightly pressed to his ears. Above the clatter of the Dewey's engines the gunners forward could hear the electrician talking excitedly to Lieutenant McClure.

"Listen, listen, other ships are coming up," Smith was shouting. "I can hear their propellers. That's the fellow we missed moving off there on our port quarter. You can hear at least two more here in the starboard microphone. We seem to have landed plumb in the nest of a German raiding party," rattled off the electrician glibly as he passed the receivers to his commander for a verification of his report.

McClure snatched the apparatus and clamped it to his ears. For a moment he listened to the mechanical whirr of churning propellers, borne into his senses through the submarine telephone.

"Great!" he exclaimed. "Some more of the Kaiser's vaunted navy trying to sneak away from their home base for a bit of trickery."

As he rang the engine room to shut off power, the American commander added, with flashing eyes:

"If we don't bring down one of these prowlers before this night is over
I'll go back home and ship as deckhand on a Jersey City ferry-boat."

Suspended fifty feet below the surface of the sea, the Dewey floated like a cork in a huge basin while her officers took further observations on the movements of the German warships above them. Now that their presence was known the American officers realized they would be accorded a stiff reception when they next went "up top.".

"I'm going to try it," announced McClure shortly. "We'll take a chance and pay our respects to one of their tubs."

The Dewey forthwith began to rise. At the direction of the navigating officer two hundred pounds of ballast were expelled. Tilting fore and aft like a rocking horse, the submersible responded gradually to the lightening process until at last the depth dial showed only a margin of several feet needed to lift the eyes of the periscopes above the waves. The little steel-encased clock in the conning tower showed ten minutes past one—-just about the right time for a night raiding party to be getting under way.

"Guess we'll lie here and wait for them to come along," whispered McClure to Cleary as the periscopes popped up out of the depths into the night gloom.

"We seem to be right in their path and may be able to get one of them as he shoots across our bow," added Cleary as he took another telephone report from the wireless room.

According to Sammy Smith's observations there were two vessels coming up to starboard, while the third, the one the Dewey had missed, was dim in the port microphone and almost out of range. Engines shut off, the submarine lay entirely concealed, awaiting the coming of her prey. It was McClure's idea to lie perfectly still in the water until one of the enemy warships swung right into the range glass of the Dewey and then give it a stab of steel—-a sting in the dark from a hidden serpent!

The waiting moments seemed like hours. Gradually, however, the leader of the silent ships drew nearer. There was no mistaking the telltale reports in the wireless room. Basing his calculations on the chief electrician's reports, McClure figured the leader of the oncoming squadron to be now not more than half a mile away and moving steadily forward toward the desired range—-a dead line on the bow of the Dewey.

Executive Officer Cleary at the reserve periscope was first to detect the mass of steel looming up out of the darkness. Lieutenant McClure swung his periscope several degrees to starboard and drew a bead on the German warship an instant later.

"We'll drop this chap just as he shoots across our bow," declared the Dewey's commander.

Five hundred yards away came the speeding warship. It was close enough now for the American officers to make out her outlines in detail and to satisfy themselves that this was another member of the raiding party out of the great German naval base in back of Heligoland.

"All right, here goes," shouted the doughty Yankee skipper a moment later as the German cruiser drew up until her bow edged into the circle that McClure had marked off on the periscope as the exact spot on which to aim his fire.

Swish! went the torpedo as it shot from the bow of the Dewey and straightened out in the water on its foamy trail, cutting through the sea like a huge swordfish.

It took only a moment—-an interval of time during which the torpedo from the American submarine and the German cruiser seemed irresistibly drawn toward each other. And then came the crash—-the impact of the torpedo's war-nose against the steel side of the cruiser, the detonation of the powerful explosive, the rending of the German hull.

And then, loud enough for his crew forward to hear his words, McClure called out:

"A perfect hit, boys; torpedo landed plumb in the engine room of a big
German cruiser."

A great cheer resounded through the hull of the American undersea craft as the good news was borne to the torpedo crew forward and to the engine room aft.

Keeping his eyes to the periscope, McClure beheld the most spectacular picture that had yet been glimpsed through the eye of the American submarine. The torpedo had struck squarely abaft the ship's magazine and wrecked her completely. The night was painted a lurid glow as a titanic explosion shook the sea and a mass of yellow flame completely enveloped the doomed warship from stem to stern.

"Look, she is going down by the stern," called out Officer Cleary as he took one last squint at the Dewey's quarry just before the stricken warship slipped away into the depths.

The jubilation of the crew knew no bounds. The men were wild with joy over their success. Jack and Chief Gunner Mowrey were "mitting" each other like a prize fighter and his manager after a big fight, while Ted and Bill Witt were clawing each other like a pair of wild men.

Through the main periscope Commander McClure was noting the death struggle of the German cruiser, when Executive Officer Cleary, swinging the reserve periscope around to scan the horizon aft the Dewey, suddenly called out sharply:

"Submerge, quick! Right here abaft our conning tower to starboard comes a destroyer. She is aimed directly at us and almost on top of us. Hurry, or we are going to be run down!"