THE CUTTING OF A CABLE.
Submarine E-16, taking an air bath off Tenedos, and floating in the
shadow of the mighty "Warspite," awaited orders that would send her
night-groping under the strong current of the Dardanelles channel, and
with the set purpose of clipping a cable connecting the European and
Asiatic shores of the straits.
If not detected by the Turkish searchlights, the expedition might win
forward, and, perhaps, back. Captain Montgomery, a regular fire-eater,
was in command, with a picked crew, including our young friend, Jimmy
Stetson.
The enterprise was to have aviation aid, and sure-shot candidates for
such participation were the veteran pair, Johnson and Freeman. As there
was possibility of a bit of a scrap before the affair ended, it was
deemed expedient to carry extra pilots in case of accident.
"Keeping it all in the family," was Johnson's humorous way of later
telling Billy and Henri that he wanted them to go along.
The upshot of it was that in the late afternoon of the day fixed for the
undertaking, two biplanes rose high above the Ægean sea, high enough to
make them appear as mere specks in the sky. Turning north, their course
followed the line of the Dardanelles.
The submarine waited for nightfall before it made the plunge that would
start its journey in the same direction pursued by the aircraft on high.
Porus-Tabia battery, on the European shore of the straits, stands close
to the ruins of the ancient stone fort, Bokal-Kale, from where there is
a submarine cable that connects it with Nagara on the Asiatic shore.
This was the cable that the military promoters of the submarine journey
proposed to sever, if they got near enough to it.
The aviators were to play into the scheme in some manner yet to be
developed. It would not be Johnson or Freeman if their long heads failed
them on this or any other occasion. It was a safe wager that they had
some sort of working plan up their sleeves, and the two boys in their
company were certainly ready to produce a vote of confidence.
The lay of the land here is an elevation, not approachable from the
front without sure discovery, but some opportunity for concealment at
the rear--more favorable, for example, for a drop-down party to operate
and escape immediate detection.
Four aviators, at least, were taking the chance of a night prowl here,
after coming down at dusk, with muffled motors, behind a clump of trees,
and within fairly easy reach of the ruins of the ancient fortress.
"Now, my hearties," advised Captain Johnson, when the four edged against
a clammy stone wall for council, "this is only a two-gun battery; the
garrison is not expecting company at the back door, and for this reason
it's a fair shake that we might be able to attend to a little business
here and get away with it.
"The active end of this position, further up," he continued, "I propose
to visit a little later on, and it is a crawling contract all the way. I
feel sure that the two guns here are in need of repair, and I guess I'll
have to fix them!"
The captain mixed a chuckle with these concluding words, and set a deep
bite in a lengthy plug of tobacco.
"What's the object, anyhow, of this cable-cutting business?" asked
Billy, who liked to dig at the roots of anything that puzzled him.
"To strike terror in the heart of the Turk," commenced the captain--but
he switched off to the practical statement that he only knew that
military strategy demanded it--and so ordered. To the soldier this
latter was all-sufficient reason.
This conversation was in tone audible only to the closely knit group in
hiding.
Now the captain was making ready to "repair" the guns above the water
front. He took off his boots and his topcoat, transferring therefrom to
the inside of his blouse a tool commonly known as a monkey-wrench,
tightened his belt and pulled his cap down to his ears. Revolvers
swelled both of his hip-pockets.
"If you hear any shooting," he whispered, "just make a break for the
biplanes, stand by until you see 'em coming, if I don't get there first,
and then pull out."
With these words the veteran airman disappeared in the darkness with all
the stealth of an Indian in moccasins.
"When the submarine crowd gets to work on the shore end of the cable
there will be a stew in the operating room up here. The captain fears
that in the excitement those defective guns might explode and hurt
somebody. That's the reason he is so anxious to get everything fixed to
prevent accident."
Josh's explanation was taken no more seriously than he intended it to
be. The boys knew well enough that the captain was taking his life in
his hands to so upset the mechanism of the guns that they could not be
used in throwing lead at the submarine, if discovered during the
cable-cutting performance.
An hour passed, in which the anxious waiters, in the chill precincts of
the ruins, would have promptly testified was six times sixty minutes.
Billy started to say as much, when Josh gave him a poke in the ribs in
the way of mute advice to keep still.
There was some sort of commotion breaking out in the quarters of the
cable operators, at the north end of the ruins.
"Something doing now, sure."
Henri sidestepped further along the wall in order to get a little closer
to the scene of action.
"The connection's shut off, that's what's the matter," predicted Josh,
speaking into Billy's ear. "The job down below is going on. We'll know
in a minute or two whether or not the captain has 'fixed' the big guns."
A door was flung open and a broad stream of light penetrated the outside
darkness. In the illuminated opening was framed a stalwart Turk, and he
started a yell, which found echo in the high-pitched voices of several
more of the fez wearers behind him.
The sentries at the fort, two hundred yards distant, responded quickly
to the summons, coming in twos and threes, pell mell, toward the cable
station, brandishing their rifles, and doing some shouting on their own
account.
"Gee whiz," muttered Billy, "it's a regular riot!"
Then to the rear of this noisy demonstration, the real note of alarm to
the trio of watchers in the ruins rang out in the night.
Crack, crack--the whiplike snap of small-bore shooting irons!
The last words of the captain had been for his companions to make for
the biplanes when shooting commenced. In compliance, the trio retreated
in single file, close to the wall, and then ran like deer across the
open, luckily for them a little way and partially screened by trees.
Up to the moment there was never a boom from the big guns, and even the
spatting of the lesser weapons had ceased after the first few shots.
As instructed, Josh and the boys "stood by" the biplanes. The captain
had failed to get there first, and it did not look like he was going to
even get there next, for already the soldiers of the garrison were
scattering in search of a certain disturber, who had the nerve to fire
back when he was fired at.
The entire garrison appeared to be charging about except the disgusted
gunners, who found that they could not pump even a single shell at a
suspicious-looking object off the water front.
The cable operators, with a number of the sentries, had raced down the
steep incline to where the cable lifted from under the current of the
straits. The casing of the wires on shore had twisted up like a great
snake, hacked apart from the tension-creating line under the channel.
For a scant minute or two the far-reaching rays from the lighthouse
tower on Bakkal headland splintered on a polished surface like a whale's
back, which quickly disappeared in a circle of foam below the rushing
tide.
The gunners above had seen much more of the submarine before it dived,
but that is about all the good it did them.
It was dawn before any of the Turks stumbled upon the hiding place of
the aviators and their craft, and there was only four of this advance
guard.
Josh counted a red furrow across the cheek after the first fire, and
retaliated with one of the big service revolvers he carried, sending the
marksman who marked him to the ground with a shattered knee-pan. Another
of the attacking party got a chunk of lead in the shoulder, and the
remaining two backed out for reinforcements.
In the meantime, the boy pilots had started the motors to humming, and
Josh, though his fighting blood was up, concluded that there were too
many coming just then, and hopped aboard with Henri.
"Not by a blamed sight are we leaving the captain to skirmish for
himself," he announced with the uprise; "we'll hang around here till
doomsday but what we'll get him out."
It was a mighty brief hang-around, after all, for the aviators were
barely out of range of the Turks' rifles, when Billy's quick and roving
eye caught the vivid flutter of a bandana handkerchief, Captain
Johnson's favorite colors, from a cactus cluster in the sandy expanse
over which the aircraft circled.
The Turkish troopers had ceased fire at the biplanes--a mere waste of
powder now--but when they saw one of the machines dip and dive, a dozen
or more of them, howling in triumph over the belief that their bullets
really had winged one of the big flyers, charged full tilt across the
plain.
Billy, however, had the bulge on the quick-comers, in that he was
skimming the sandy soil before the Turks were fairly started, and
Captain Johnson swung a leg in the aeroplane without compelling a stop.
The soldiers popped away with their rifles, but made no holes in the
deceptive target. On the rise, Captain Johnson gave them a couple of
rounds from his revolvers, and shouted, as a farewell salute:
"Dern your pictures, haven't you got enough yet? We'll come back some
day and carry off the whole fort!"
"Of course," concluded the captain, settling into his seat in the
space-killing biplane, "they couldn't understand a word, but there is
nothing like relieving your mind of extra pressure."
He also relieved the tobacco plug of about a third of its weight.