IN THE DARK AND THE DEEP - Steve Vernon's Sea Tales Book #1

Introduction

I am a storyteller, first and foremost.

My natural habitat is close to the campfire and I breathe words the way that some men smoke.

I have lived by the ocean for nearly four decades. I have listened to the waves talking to the shoreline. I have heard the old ghost stories told around a thousand campfires. I have listened to the sea gulls complaining about the fishing.

This is the first of what will be a series of stories based around the sea.

You don't have to read every one, any more than you have to count every wave that rolls up to slap itself upon the beach.

Come here and give a listen.

I've got a tale for the telling.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

In The Dark and the Deep

It happened that fast.

A torpedo track, furrowing the water, passed straight abaft of our corvette, the Thistle. There was a muffled crump of impact. A mere seventy-five yards away from us, the tanker Cassandra settled and tilted, taking on water fast.

"Man the depth charges," our captain sang out.

The order was instinctive and unnecessary. Men already stood by, ready to roll the fat deadly barrels from the stern rail. The crews of the port and starboard throwers launched another pair of depth charges into their high carved arcs. We spread the charges out as widely as possible, knowing that the U-boat would already be on the move, trying to evade our certain retaliation.

The depth charges were a blind luck measure. They sank slowly, giving the U-boat a lot of time to escape. It was almost impossible to aim them, and the hulls of the U-boats were so solid that only a near-direct hit would have any effect, but they panicked the U-boat crew, and more importantly, they gave our crew the much-needed feeling of accomplishment.

The asdic crew hunkered beneath their headsets, knowing full well that the rough water and the impact from the depth charges' undersea explosions rendered their listening gear nearly useless.

We were aiming blind, as usual.

Fumes of petrol coiled up from the tanker like slow blue snakes curling hypnotically through the air. I saw the captain frozen at the helm for less than half of a second, his mind warring between trying to save the crew of the Cassandra or else hunting the U-boat.

A fragment of a second.

That's how long a war can last, sometimes.

The Cassandra went up in a ball of fire. Men screamed in the flames, their lungs filling with oil, flame and sea water. The tanker - gutted and twisted into a dozen strange angles, slowly slid a little farther beneath the calm gulp of the cold gray Atlantic water.

Silhouetted by the lantern of the rising flames of the sinking tanker we saw the the U-boat, its deck crew frantically training their gun towards us.

He might have surfaced to finish the tanker off, or perhaps our depth charges had driven him up to the surface. We didn't know, and it didn't really matter. We hit them with everything we had. We pounded them with our 4-inch cannon, the steady 2-pounder pom-pom, the 40mm Oerlikons, and the big .50 caliber machine guns. Those who had pistols and rifles stood at the deck railing firing away like we had come to a pigeon shoot.