short of her goal. Struck a submerged log or something.” Jameson stood there with salt spraying his face. “I thought I saw something just before the explosion. It looked like a… log. Yeah. That was it. A log.”

“Lucky for us, eh, sir?”

“Yeah. Damn lucky.”

“Depth-charge! Toss ’em!”

Depth-charges were dropped. Moments later a subwater explosion tore up the water. Oil bubbled up to color the waves, with bits of wreckage mixed in it.

“We got the sub,” someone said.

“Yeah. And the sub almost got us!”

The destroyer ran in the wave channels, in the free wind, under a darkening sky.

“Full speed ahead!”

The ocean slept quiet as the convoy moved on in the twilight. There was little movement in its deep green silence. Except for some things that may have been a swarm of silver fish gathered below, just under the waters where the convoy had passed; pale things, stirring, flashing a flash of white, and swimming off silently, strangely, into the deep green soundlessness of the undersea valleys….

The ocean slept again.

The end