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whose places were taken by the more desperate or strong, and though he thought it was impossible for anyone to escape, one man rose up on straightened arms and toppled headlong into the water.
    By then the conning tower platform was crowded with sailorswaiting to climb down, descending the handholds as if they were in some mad race, dropping to the deck whose pitch was so acute they had trouble standing. They moved in unison, like a herd of animals, farther up the incline whenever another man came down, holding on to each other, gazing fearfully at the water. A few sought safety on the bow. Bent over, they grasped the sides of the catwalk and shinnied crabwise ten or fifteen feet before they slipped and went over the side. One tumbled back to the crowd, grabbing at outstretched hands and knocking his saviors into the sea. A heavyset chap, an engineer from the look of his tattered, oil-stained shirt, stepped away from the group to the edge of the catwalk, pinched his nose, and jumped, coming up a few yards away sputtering, gesturing to the others. Another leapt with his arms extended in a swan dive, tattoos snaking up them and over his chest before he entered the water with hardly a splash, his dive emboldening others, who went over singly, in pairs, in a troika, one after the other like penguins leaving an ice floe.
    Only two Germans remained on the catwalk and Conrad was wondering what they were going to do when he saw the captain reemerge on the conning tower, sans hat this time, soaking wet but still armed, staring at his men in the water. Suddenly he looked up at the minesweeper’s bridge and raised his pistol. A bullet hole appeared in the window not six inches above Fox-Bourne’s head, the bullet ricocheting off a steel plate behind Conrad before it smashed through the window on the far side. The glass was still falling when he heard the report of the forward gun and the top portion of the conning tower disappeared. That was enough for the dawdlers to join hands like schoolboys and plunge into the water. Higgins fired another round and a muffled roar came from the Valkerie’ s engine room. The sea roiled, turned white, exploding in a plume of water while her bow rose to an impossibly steep pitch, sixty percent, perhapsmore, the gash and the faces it framed disappearing, and Conrad imagined the Germans floating inside the boat like a school of fish as the Valkerie’ s bow went higher, her torpedo ports glistening like some strange animal’s snout, the harsh, discordant scream of the diving siren persisting till she went down.
    The Germans who could swim scattered in all directions to avoid the suction. Those who could not flailed about in the oil slick. They looked like seals, their heads black, viscous diesel oil dripping from their arms. One man after another went under. A few orange life vests flecked the water, not many, not nearly enough, there having been no time to prepare for anything but a headlong dash. The engineer was treading water, as were the two who jumped holding hands, one pulling the other by the straps of his life vest, stroking frantically with his free arm, the others swimming and flailing and dog-paddling toward the Brigadier, the nearest maybe twenty meters away, the farthest a hundred or more, all those blackened heads bobbing in the sea, the blackened arms either slicing gracefully through the oily water or beating it as if they were threshing, separating wheat from chaff. The frantic efforts of the Germans to save themselves, the senseless yet understandable last act of the German captain firing at the minesweeper’s bridge had suppressed the terrible scene of Whelan’s murder. Now it came back full force. Conrad saw again the two men shouting at each other, the captain firing, Whelan’s operatic tumble. The captain had been blown to bits and there was a satisfaction in that, a sense of justice. By all rights Whelan’s murder should have hardened his heart