This was the time.This was the ultimate test.This was what they had trained for, sweating and cursing the boiling sun; sensing, but not sure, that their drill would be used in ship-to-ship combat.And now, with the enemy destroyers almost dead ahead, Lasenby knew with a savage, convincing pride that this gun crew of his would load and fire and keep loading and firing as long as they had ammunition.

Scimitar—a new ship with a green crew—was already at 25 knots and in the ridged sea she could take no more. Her nose was pointing straight at the Jap cruiser's bridge. Snelling's eye caught the flicker of tumbling numbers on the range-repeat dial. Five thousand yards. God, why hadn't the Jap opened fire? Five thousand yards! He couldn't miss. And then the Japanese cruiser opened up, and a storm of high-explosive burst all about them.Then the captain looked at his first mate, and the first mate would never forget the sight of his captain for as long as he lived. With his left hand clutched round his throat, red as though he had hauled it, dripping, from a tin of red paint, he bent over the voice-pipe and ordered, "Full ahead together." Then he turned to them and spoke as if he tasted every word."Stand by to ram!"

It was a remarkable invention—a camera that could to take one brief, flash-lit shot of the night sea and discover with amazing clarity exactly what might be lurking out there in the darkness. But when the equipment was trialled aboard H. M. S. Wind Rode, it set in motion a chain of events that could only end in death. For there was a German submarine out there in the deeps, on its way to mine Jomard Pass and effectively cripple Allied shipping for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, its commander was a fanatical Nazi totally dedicated to his job.But Peter Bentley was equally dedicated—dedicated to stopping the German from succeeding in his mission ... and that's when the deadly battle of wits began between destroyer and submarine really started ...

Bentley's first sight when Wind Rode broke clear was not for the cruisers, but the destroyers.His task was difficult enough as it was. But the destroyers could make it even tougher if they decided to join in. Spitting the oily taste from his mouth he swung his glasses. No—there they were, still milling about the torpedoed flagship. Wasted.But maybe the Japanese admiral did not think so. Bentley had to concede his point of view. He was in a crippled ship, there could quite easily be enemy submarines about. And to handle the three midgets he still had two great cruisers.Bentley's decision to continue fighting was possibly the simplest he had ever made in all his life. It would be true to claim that the decision had been made for him, centuries before. Never in the memory of living man, nor for a long time further back than that, had a British warship surrendered to, or run from, an enemy.

The captain was furious. "I warn you, if you want to name this ship the Bounty, I shall be Captain Bligh!" His right hand punched forward in vehement emphasis. The crew stared at him in deep and attentive silence. The voice then came from the middle of the pack – high, thin, disguised, rendered more effective in the tense quiet by the tone of laughter. "Yeah, and we'll cut you adrift!"The tension among the crew was hard, menacing. Wind Rode was perilously close to mutiny.

It was as if something were driving Commander Valance to get right in where the shot and shell were thickest ... driving him above and beyond the call of duty. And whether they liked it or not, the men in the destroyer Sabre knew their lives depended on his judgement ...

As the Guadalcanal campaign got underway, the new coxswain of the Australian fleet destroyer Wind Rode found himself faced with a twin challenge—to sort out the bad apples who had come aboard as replacements for men lost in a recent action ... and to somehow found his way back to the man he had been before being sunk a couple of years earlier. That time he had almost drowned in a cabin that filled frighteningly fast with seawater. Something in him had changed, he'd lost his pride in himself and the Senior Service for whom he served. And a coxswain like that is no use to anyone. So Commander Peter Bentley made up his mind to throw the 'Swain a metaphorical lifeline ... even if he had to take on the entire Japanese Navy to do it!

In recognition of his bravery in piloting a midget submarine into a harbour thick with the Japanese, and sending one of their largest battleships to the bottom of the sea, Peter Bentley was given command of H.M.A.S Wind Rode. It should have been a proud moment for the young lieutenant-commander ... but Wind Rode was a sorry-looking destroyer. Everything about her had been allowed to slide.Peter had his work cut out for him, bringing her up to the standards he'd grown used to aboard his old ship, the Scimitar. And it was a job he couldn't do alone.His old commander, Bruce Sainsbury V.C., recognized this and acted at once. He sent Bentley a new Number One, Bob Randall. And of course the one and only Hooky Walker as his buffer. With their support, Bentley was going to bring Wind Rode up to scratch, or the merciless enemy was going to send them down to Davy Jones' locker ...

No foreign Government knew anything about the Satsuma—not even Germany. Neither could the Germans possibly imagine that the Japanese had built such a monster—a battleship weighing 50,000 tons, almost a thousand feet long, mounting nine 18-inch guns that could rip the guts out of any enemy flotilla she came across.But when rumours began to reach the Allies about an indescribably large warship that was undergoing repairs in the harbour of remote Coffin Island, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Bentley and the crew of Wind Rode were dispatched to take a closer look. Wind Rode was hopelessly outclassed by the Satsuma ... but that wasn't going to stop Bentley from risking everything to send the larger vessel to the bottom of the sea!

When his ship was laid up for repairs, two-fisted petty-officer William Walker volunteered for a spell with the Light Coastal Forces, working alongside a crew full of Brits in a lightning-fast Motor Torpedo Boat. He knew it was going to be an education, but he never dreamed he would eventually find himself caught up in a deadly attack on Cherbourg Harbour.A flotilla of E-boats and destroyers, hidden in the fog, gave Walker a further chance to use his own special expertise in fighting the enemy. But nobody expected him to come out of the conflict changed as he did ... in more ways than one.

Petty Officer Clive Gellatly was a former boxer who had been in the Royal Australian Navy for about ten years. But he was champing at the bit for more athletic duty. So when a request came through to join a suicide squad of frogmen, he was quick to sign up. He was taken to a remote oceanside base where he trained with another four men for several months ...and along the way the five of them coalesced into a strong, capable fighting unit. Then came their first big mission—to destroy a powerful radar station smack in the middle of a Japanese-held island!

Royal Australian Navy Commander Bentley knew this was the time for nothing but concentrated attack ... This was no exercise, no leisure manoeuvre by which Wind Rode could show her competence. They were up against a desperate enemy submarine, a vehicle armed with explosive teeth and claws—the destructive potential of which they could not gauge. A terrifying secret weapon!

The charges went over, and some evil fate exploded them right outside the forward engine-room; the possible weak spot. An engine-room artificer stood before his huge bank of wheels: behind him, the force of the hammering explosions burst a rivet from her side. The steel particle flew across the engine-room with the force of a bullet.But it wasn't the rivet that hit him. Outside that tiny hole the deep ocean was thrusting against the hull, clamping round it with a pressure of hundreds of tons per square inch. As the rivet exploded into the room, it was followed by a thin, horizontal jet of water; a jet under such enormous force that it was solid, like a thin, steel rapier. The jet struck the artificer in the neck, a trifle behind his left ear. Before he knew what had hit him, the jet bore into his head like a gimlet, smashing the lower part of his brain, careering round inside the bony cranium of his skull with ten times the damaging effect of a bullet. He fell backward,...

"Stand-by depth charge attack!"Termagant's men had seen action before. They knew how her quarterdeck could spew out the crushing canisters of high-explosive amatol, and they felt a rising certainty that this particular Japanese submarine was due shortly for a violent and conclusive death.The order from the bridge was all they needed to relax their vigilance a little and to savour in its place the grim and pleasurable certainty that the ship was about to kill.So that none of them was prepared for the next startling evidence of the progress of the hunt.

The three Seafires were diving and zooming, banking and diving again at the gun-positions. But the big Barracudas, coming in on a set line, made easy targets. A stream of tracer bit into the body of the left-hand bomber of the third flight and Haining felt his guts tighten as its nose dipped.He did not see the third lot of torpedoes strike and as he came around again he could see the dam clearly enough, and he saw it was still intact. It was then the first doubts slid into his brain and charged him with failure. He had assumed twelve torpedoes would smash that concrete into a water-pouring cleavage. He had assumed ... now it looked as if he could be hellishly wrong ...