The Steel Duichman

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20363, 21 July 1934, Page 30 (Supplement)

The Steel Duichman

A IREAT STORY OF ADVENTURE ON LAND AND SEA

(Author of “Paradise Orchid,” “The Green Hat,” etc.)

By

Vincent Cornier

CHAPTER XXIV. Van Klaus Fight*. Karly in the morning of this day a strange little drama had been staged ov the grey seas off the Norwegian coast. The Rykneld, a Norwegian fisheries'' White vessel coursing at tremendous speed in the lee of the island of Stavrensaar. The Rykneld, warned by order to keep a watch for the pirate craft called the Fliegende Schaum, recognised the lean ship. Knowing Van Klaus’ armament and only too well her own second-hand imitation, Rykneld did no more than slink off into the haze about the ragged shore. Then, when half an hour had passed, she cautiously broadcast a message in international code which told of what she had seen. According to the Rykneld’s captain, the pirate had entered Stavtensaar Fiord, a twisting lane of deep water that bit back inio the Norwegian coast for a matter of fifty-seven miles. And. making a promise which lie hoped he could keep, the most discreet captain of Rykneld told the awaiting world of ships that he would take jolly srood care that the Fliegende Schaum should not leave the fjord without his mentioning the fact. It was noticeable that he did not say anything about tackling Van Klaus, or following him into that land-locked vein of water. But that did not matter . . . Within another hour seven battleships of Britain went thundering across the eighty miles of sea that separated their station from the territorial limit of Norwegian water —off ,the splay mouth of Stavrensaar Fiord.

Rykneld greeted their appearance With a sturdy show of sea courtesies, and actually sailed a mile or .so into the fjord to counter any unfavourable impression the “bulldogs” might have formed upon her laggard tactics, previous to their coming. Unfortunately for the little Rykneld. she_ met a proudly, fearsome shape, all white enamel and gilt and gleaming rails, coming back to the open sea-ways. This vessel flew a sable velvet fla<- with a dead-white skull and crosshones centred on it . . . and from lier stumpy mainmast streamed a crimson pennant trom which a bunch of broom-twigs twisted and twirled in the wind of her tremendous passage; the olden Dutch defiance of the bold Van Trom p. who once dared so greatly as to enter the lhames and bombard London . . . There was many a senior officer, watchmg the pirate from the steady decks of the British ships, who suddenly remembered the days of his Osborne history courses, and grinned in half reluctant admiration for the gesture. Van Klaus, according to his trailing sign, was another Dutchman who intended to “sweep the seven seas.”

However, they had not time nor inclination for grinning long. The unfortunate Rykneld dare not go backequally she was no fit antagonist to go extremely forward. But she did all that could be expected of her at the last. „„¥f r i PUD -I , a r mamcr,t of 12-pounders suddenly belched at the Fliegende Sehaunv—and, hearteningly enough, two . t . , shells scored direct hits. The pirate s after rails and his flaunting flag vanished in a glow of red fire and splinter-laden smoke. Part of his deck housing was ripped along as though by a fPef-ntic lance and (one could almost feel that the Flying Foam stopped to more 1 the little R ykneld was no

Something skinny and brown leapt out of the waters and struck her abaft her engines. There was a pinnacle of foam and a mighty detonation—and the pirate rode steadily onwards, while the crippled little fisheries protection gunboat, hideously gashed and spinning like a blue-grey top by reason of her wounds and her shallow draught, spouted steam and fire and sank with ijl hands. A terrible shiver seemed to go across the serried squadron of the waiting battleships. There was a sudden grim flutter of movement. Two destroyers began to vomit smoke under forced draught, and three giant battle cruisers moved forward in stately array. But the Fliegende Schaum, like the Revenge of Sif 1 Richard Grenville, rode on and on straight into the heart of the foe. Never for one moment was her course deflected. Her serene insolence persisted all the while she tore her way across the intervening water space that was the territorial limit. And as she proceeded, the destroyers and the battle cruiser** spread into a fan formation and retreated. When Fliegende Schaum surged into the free seas her patient foes were spread about her in a crescent that commanded an area of twelve to fourteen square miles. Big as she was, swift as she was, she began to look paltry and rather pitiful in that deadly •moking bend of doom.

That it was her doom not a man nor an officer of the battleships doubted for one moment. They simmered and seethed with rage. The awful ending of the little Rykneld’s sea account had infuriated the British. Where there had been that reluctant quirk of admiration, there was now only the down-poop of bitterest enmity. Where the fine beauty and the remorseless purpose and the high courage of the Fliegende Schaum had caused hearts to glow for a valiant antagonist, now nothing remained but an emotion not far removed from hatred.

Poor little Rykneld, for all her previous cautiousness in sending for the big dogs to worry the rat, had paid a penalty beyond her dues. Had Van Klaus used his turn of speed to leave her hopelessly in his wake—-had he countered her with gunfire for her gunfire, the British would have found some leakage in their make-up to acquit him as “a sport.” But to discharge a torpedo straight into the little craft’s vitals, knowing full well that its explosion not only meant the sinking of the vessel but the blasting into eternity of all her crew, was for ever beyond a seaman’s pardon.

Into the deadly arc of steel went the Fliegende Schaum.

She sailed as though she were entirely unaware of any opposition. All the change in her life was to be noticed at her broken stern-railing, where another mast had been stepped and another deaths’ head banner broken. Not a man was to be seen on her decks. He* twin automatic quick-firers were without their crews —only a stern grey face that appeared now and then at a window in her covered bridge was revealed to watching glasses; the proud face of the man who had defied the world —Mynheer Rvjer van Klaus. Perhaps Fliegende Schaum was waiting for the call that the Rykneld had not made—a summons to surrender. Perhaps she bad forgotten the maritime ritual that applied to her case—that no truck is ever held with the sea outlaw.

Whatever she thought, whatever she waited for, she got wliat it was intended she should have. H.M.s. Heraclon, a battle-cruiser of some 18,000 tons, suddenly fired a broadside that was a blistering tide of flame, and heavy with twenty tons of high explosives. The shattering roar and the scream of pointed steel awoke the ocean for miles—but the Fliegende Schaum went on.

If those sensitive islands of metal and electricity, yclept the modern warship, have souls, then those souls quaked with superstitious dread in that instant. The gunnery officers of the Heraclon must have thought themselves bewitched—hoodooed. Their squares and calculations and trigonometrical lore went for naught. Those tons of metal and explosive, which had cost the British taxpayer all of a thousand pounds, plunged harmlessly into water—far beyond the Fliegende Scliaum, when, by all the laws of ballistics and mathematics, they should have split th© pirate from stem to stern at a blow. Then the simple yet overwhelming truth was ascertained. Immediately the spurt of flames betrayed that the Heraclon had fired (even before the mighty concussion of the exploding guns could be heard) the pirate speeded up her course. The shells had been intended to hit her as she attained a certain point, on her passage, which, with allowance for the time taken for the flight-of the projectiles, a matter of a few seconds, she should have obtained, had she travelled as she was travelling when the naval guns were fired.

But no, in a flash that made the discharging contact from the firing controls to the turrets, the pirate with equal ease, accelerated her speed by fully twenty knots. Hobop. when the shells rushed a'- oos to the space she should have occupied, had her rate of knots been constant, she simply wasn’t there at all . . . but five to six hundred yards ahead of the plotted position of doom. Of course it was a supreme victory for the element' of surprise. Although the naval commanders had been told of the pirate's stupefying turn of speed, yet they could not have let it enter their calculations that Fliegende Schaum could strap out another 30 miles an hour at one swift acceleration, exactly as a racing car can do from a standing start. At the precise moment that Heraclon’s missiles crossed her wake, she was doing all of 50 knots —a speed hitherto impossible, except to racing hydroplanes. And,,another thing; up to the time of the discharge of Heraclon’s eight apd sixinch broadside, the avenging squadron had been in completest touch by wireless, one with the other, and with the Admiralty in London. Now, on this incredible surge forward of the Fliegende Schaum, all wireless communications ceased as thought it had never been . . . Frenziedly, one ship after another got into touch by semaphore. But the damage was done; the pirate had a clear field. In a streaming line the battleships pursued her, doing the level best to converge on her by destroyer speed, while the slightly less cruisers bombarded her as they chased.

But she set herself to twisting and turning; then to lagging back at something which was snail’s speed compared to what she was capable of doing . . . and at last she fought back. 'While she had bewildered, her cunning master, Van Klaus, had been planning a new surprise foes.

During one of her laggard periods, the Fliegende Schaum allowed Heraclon to draw dangerously close—then four long cigar shapes were launched from her decks at the battle cruiser.

Immediately, every ship of the squadron entered on torpedo evasion tactics. Heraclon whipped into a veritable adder line of a course . . . and, according to the rules of the game, according to the accepted knowledge of torpedo potentiality, all those missiles should have swept past her armoured flanks. But they did not! Instead of that they twisted with each twist she made; where she went, there went the rushing easements of death. As though a goblin sat at the tiny helm of each torpedo, they dogged Heraclon. As a magnet attracting steel filings, her great body drew; the deadly things toward her. They struck her in the order they were launched. Not four yards separated one from its fellow. And they burst on the warding blisters of the giant vessel with a roar that made all previous gunfire sound tinny . . . and H.M.s. Heraclon, a heavily armoured battle-cruiser of 18,000 tQns, rocked and split and broke and began to sink—defeated by the pirate called the Steel Dutchman. Then, while destroyers and the remaining cruisers rushed to save the Heraclon’s crew, the Fliegende Schaum raced for the horizon at the speed of a fast express train. In less than 10 minutes she was lost to all knowing. CHAPTER XXV. The Broom Sweeps Again. The destroyer consorts of the doomed Heraclon made no attempt to pursue the Fleigende Scliaum. Apart from the desperate urgency of the situation, that demanded all efforts to be concentrated on saving as many of the battle cruiser’s crew as was humanly possible, they had no orders. Heraclon had been the flagship of the squadron. And, ever since the peculiar failure of wireless transmission, Heraclon had not spoken to them —by semaphore or flags—except to order, once, “concerted attack.” After that her doom came. It was so swift and ruthless, so complete and devastating, that no signals were any longer possible. In ten minutes she lay awash ... in another ten she was sliding like a great and dying whale into the depths. Luckily the armoured “blisters” of Heraclon's hull had been fashioned not. only out of toughest steel but out of experience gained in actual warfare. For all Van Klaus’ torpedoes were terrible beyond anything known to modern science, those huge defences had not wholly gone to ruin. So it was rendered possible, despite the rapid sinking of the vessel, to rescue nearly all her men. They saw, with seamen’s quick vision, that the heeled-over cruiser had so upthrust those ragged “blisters” that it was easy to slide down the ship’s flanks and, gaining the “blisters,” congregate thereon—exactly at the height of the destroyers’ decks. One after another these little ships raced alongside the stricken majesty of Heraclon, and as each one did so, the seamen jumped down to safety. Tweqty minutes is not a long time, du t when Heraclon sent up her last great thundering groan and died in the

seas which had borne her, not a single' rating was left to be entrapped in her wild vortex; not a single man swam ami called, in vain, for aid. So cleverly had advantage been taken of the means

of safety, so neatly had trained intelllgenee and better trained muscles coordinated —neither panic nor recklessless militated against the rescuer’s efforts. The unfortunate little Rykneld had never the chances of the vast Heraclon; her complement had been lost on an instant. And, curiously enough, it was more a mourning for Rykneld than for Heraclon that subdued the sailors as they thought back qn the stupendous content of those 45 short minutes. If ever Van Klaus were brought to the bar of international justice, neither he nor any of his piratical crew could hope to escape the rope, or lifelong imprisonment.

To many of the naval officers this pursuit of the modern “Captain Kidd” had begun by being rather in the nature of a novel adventure. They had set out in command of their craft with a peculiar air of romantic purpose stirring in them. They had pictured themselves as the justly appointed and inevitable executioners of a corsair. Apart from their grim duty, a certain novelty had tinctured the essay. Now that the corsair had so bewildcringly sunk two units of naval importance, 20,000 tons in all of armed fighting craft, novelty and the sense of adventure were both dead. Nothing but a glum and overpowering mood of revengefulness remained. For a yacht —a white sea-toy—to overwhelm warships, was an unthinkable thing. Yet it had been done. Never could defeat have been so poignantly pointed; never had morale been so violently subdued. The Fliegende Schaum had been out sight for perhaps five minutes when wireless intercommunication again was possible. Like the sudden lifting of a silencing veil, the vessels were able to talk with one another. As their officers had expected, London also wanted to talk! The air simply bristled and blistered with Admiralty remarks. * What had been the matter? Why had wireless messages been ' ignored? What did the ships of that particular squadron mean by their contemptuous indifference to “my lords” for all of half an hour? When the story of the sunken Heraclon was told, and when it was explained that the absolute “fade-out” of radio communication seemed to have been brought about by some mysterious faculty possessed and emanated by the pirate Dutchman—“seek and destroy” was, in curtest essence, the only reply that was flashed back to them. . . . As it chanced, that deadly message reached the Fliegende Schaum as well, intelligibly.

Van Klaus had not set out on his piratical venturings without taking every possible precaution against surprise, and with surprise, disaster. Hence, from a source which only he knew, he had been provided with a current naval code book. And as the Admiralty messages were brought in to him by his wXcless operator, he calmly grinned and turned to a huge lead-enshrined volume on his chart table, decoding them almost as smartly as they were delivered.

“Seek and destroy” —the icy implacability of so much was to have been expected. Nevertheless, Vau Klaus spent an ugly five minutes, pondering over the doom. He realised that from that moment he would never have rest. No longer was it a case of tip and run, but night and day, week in and week out; relentlessly, remorselessly, the squadron of which Heraclon had been the leader would be on his trail.

He could not seek to escape for all dime. By some flirt or fluke of fate he would be delivered into those avenging hands. But, after his first period of sullen dismay, he plucked up courage again and became the roaring and hearty-looking master that his men had come to fear and respect, much in the manner that old Viking crews felt awed reverence for their Thanes.

With apparently arrogant disregard for the pursuit, he put about and raced back along the tracks he had followed after the fight.

Only when he saw, steaming along in a furiously smoking string on the horizon, the squadron he had tackled, did he alter his course. They had seen him. He had v intended they should see him, and he fled like a hare before them with their screaming shells bursting about the Fliegende Schaum for the greater part of 15 miles. He did not attempt to reply. Indeed, his armament was nothing like sufficient to make a return—nor were his torpedoes capable of functioning outside a radius of a few thousand yards. The squadron smashed out every ounce of speed it could. He merely touched a dial here and a knob there, and for every hard-won knot the battleships gained he made five. In another hour there were 85 lone sea miles separating him from the avengers. When he had made this into 100, he deliberately veered at right angles and ran again for the north Norwegian coast. This time he did not enter the Stravensaar fiord, but a narrow and rocky gorge which was the outlet for a salmon river, some 20 miles to the nor’* east. In that gully the Fliegende Schaum disappeared at ten o’clock of the morning on the twelfth day of November. And never again was a vessel in any way resembling the lean white yacht seen on the face of the waters. be continued daily.)