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with two heavy bombs.
    Thinking aloud Hechler said, That is the railway station. We are ordered to destroy it. Ivan will bring up reinforcements by that route. We'll give him a headache.'
    He withdrew from the hood and climbed on to the forward gratings to let the salt air sting away any lurking weariness. He thought of his men, sitting and crouching through his command. Some able to see the heaving water like himself, others confined to their armoured turrets, waiting to feed the big eight-inch guns, or down in the bowels of the engine- and boiler-rooms, deafened by the din of machinery and fans, watching dials or each other. Trying not to think of a shell or torpedo changing their roaring world into a merciless inferno.
    In the streets of Kiel or some occupied seaport you would not notice many of them as individuals, Hechler thought. It was a pity the people at home could not see them here, in their environment. It might give them heart and perhaps some hope.
    Theil said quietly, Time, sir.'
    Hechler nodded. Glad they were committed. Alter course. Full ahead, all engines.' For a second his guise fell away and he added softly, 'Another time, Viktor, but the same enemy, eh?'
    Fifteen minutes later the ship surged away from the mist to greet the first weak sunlight like an enraged tiger.
    As the four main turrets swivelled soundlessly on to the precribed bearing, all eight guns opened fire.
    'Alter course, steer two-three-zero!' Hechler lifted his eyes from the gyro-compass repeater and tensed as the sea lifted and boiled into a solid cone of white froth some cable's length beyond the port bow.
    He felt the deck tilt as the order was passed to the wheelhouse, the instant response as the raked stem bit into the glittering water. The forward turrets swung slightly to compensate for the sudden change of direction and then each pair of guns recoiled in turn, the shock-wave whipping back over the bridge, hot and acrid as the shells tore towards the land.
    Hechler waited for the hull to steady and then raised his glasses once more. The land was blurred with smoke, the colour drained out of it by the hard, silver sunlight. Shell-bursts pockmarked the sky where the ship's three Arado float-planes ducked and dived over their targets, and the fall of the cruiser's shells was marked by great smokestains, solid and unmoving. They made the landscape look dirty, fouled, he thought vaguely.
    Tracer lifted from the rubble of some dwellings near the waterfront, and he guessed that the army were using their fire to retake their old positions, the bitter house-to-house fighting which was an infantryman's lot.
    Hechler thought briefly of his father, and the unexpected distraction disturbed him. He was unused to having his mind shifted off-course when he needed it most.
    His father had been a soldier in the Great War, and had been wounded several times on the Western Front until he had been badly gassed and sent home, a coughing, broken wreck of a man. In clear moments he had described war at close quarters, and had chilled his family with tales of wiring parties in no-man's-land, raids on enemy trenches armed with sharpened spades, nailed clubs and long knives. No time to load a rifle, and a bayonet was next to useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, he had said. You could smell your enemy, feel his strength, his fear as you tried to kill him with the same methods they had used centuries earlier.
    At sea you rarely saw the enemy. Gun flashes, the fall of shot, a shadow against the moonlight or fixed in a range-finder. It was better that way. Cleaner.
    A great gout of fire, bright orange and tinged with red, erupted Irom the shore and Theil, who had a handset jammed beneath his cap, shouted, 'Railway station., sir!'
    A seaman nudged his friend and they grinned at one another. The young officer, Leutnant Jaeger, shaded his eyes to look up at the control station with its narrow observation slits, like the visor of a massive helmet. He did not even duck