Lawless, who was still at the wheel when the _Knat_ took her final plunge, was drawn down by the suction of the sinking vessel. Instinctively he struck out as soon as the waves closed above his head, but it seemed to him that he must be miles and miles below the surface. A horrible feeling of impending suffocation and an almost intolerable pressure on his lungs oppressed him as he struck upwards. At last, when his chest felt as if it were about to burst, he reached the surface and trod water while he sucked in deep breaths of air. Then, through the thin veil of mist, he caught sight of what looked like the hull of a vessel or, at any rate, something solid and capable of affording support. He started to swim towards it, hoping it might be some ship which had arrived on the scene since the fight, and not caring much whether it proved to be a friend or an enemy.
In a few minutes he was alongside, and had caught hold of some tackle hanging from a spar. Hauling himself up, he managed to get astride the spar, and then realised that the vessel had a heavy list to port. Too dazed to draw any significant deductions from this, he worked his way along the spar till he found himself looking down upon a slanting deck, littered with wreckage and apparently deserted. Then, and not till then, he realised where he was.
He had unwittingly climbed aboard the German cruiser, which was sinking and had been abandoned by her crew. Obviously, therefore, his last torpedo had found its billet, and the cruiser had been hit at the moment when victory seemed hers--it was a great consolation.
The Lieutenant's first thought was to dive back into the sea, and he was about to do this when a noise above his head made him look up. A Zeppelin, no doubt the same one which had been piloting the cruiser, was hovering above, evidently with the object of ascertaining what had happened to the combatants.
"Lord, if I could only bring that thing down," reflected Lawless, forgetting his own peril for the moment.
His eye wandered over the deserted decks, and then he gave a sudden whoop of joy. Not twenty yards from where he stood were a couple of anti-aircraft guns, and, without stopping to weigh the consequences, he crossed to one of them, found it was loaded, and at once trained the muzzle on the ponderous mass hovering overhead. Then he fired.