Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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I moved forward, a few feet above a seabed that was littered with plating, spars and bits of ship. As I did so, the smooth intact steel of a large section of her keel began to rise up from the fantail and a gap began to appear between the seabed and this intact section of keel and hull. The keel swept upwards towards the vertical sternpost which would have held the rudder – and there just forward to port, and still supported on its bearing and struts, was the massive 43-ton manganese bronze, three-bladed prop – about 16 feet across according to the ship’s drawings. Sections of the underside of the quarter deck lay flat on the seabed to port, and it appeared that the ship had sagged to starboard as the higher levels collapsed aeons ago.

The gap between the seabed and the intact section of the ship continued to increase – and then the reason for this became apparent. The large gunhouse of the 7.5-inch gun Y turret, situated on the centreline of the quarter deck, was resting upside down on the hard shale seabed. Rising up from its underside, the cylindrical armoured trunking that held the ammunition hoists extended all the way up to the underside of the keel bar. The ammunition hoists transported shells and cordite propellant charges up from the magazines and shell rooms, far below the surface in the bowels of the ship, to the gunhouse. Inside the ship, adjacent to the hoist trunking, masses of 6-inch shells for her secondary armament and QF 3-pounder shells had tumbled down from above to litter the underside of her main deck, now at seabed level. High up on the wreck, the keel plating had split open to expose the port 7.5- inch shell room, the large shells still neatly stacked in rows.