"George Griffith - The Raid of Le Vengeur" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith George)

As we dive under her they will point upwards. When they are perpendicular the overhead torpedo will be
released. Its magnets will fasten it to the bottom of the doomed ship. Le Vengeur will sink deeper,
obeying always the warning of the sounding indicator, and seek either a new victim or a safe place to rise
in. In ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, as I please, the torpedo will explode, the battleship or the cruiser will
break in two and go down, not knowing whose hand has struck her.

"Ah, Albion, my enemy, you are already conquered! You are only mistress of the seas until Le Vengeur
begins her work. When that is done there will be no more English navy. The soldiers of France will
avenge Waterloo on the soil of England, and Leon Flaubert will be the greatest name in the world. Dieu
Merci, it is done! I have thought the thought which conquers a world---and now let me sleep."

His clasped hands fell away from his head; his eyelids drooped over his aching, staring eyes; his body
swayed a little from side to side, and then fell backwards. As his head rested on the pillow a long deep
sigh left his half-parted lips, and in a few moments a contented snore was reverberating through the little,
plainly-furnished bedroom.

II.--A DINNER AT ALBERT GATE.
Curiously enough, while Captain Leon Flaubert had been worrying himself to the verge of distraction
over the problem of seeing under water, and had apparently solved it by substituting electric nerves of
feeling for the sight-rays which had proved a failure, Mr. Wilfred Wallace Tyrrell had brought to a
successful conclusion a long series of experiments bearing upon the self-same subject.

Mr. Tyrrell was the son of Sir Wilfred Tyrrell, one of the Junior Lords of the Admiralty. He was a year
under thirty. He had taken a respectable degree at Cambridge, then he had gone to Heidelberg and taken
a better one, after which he had come home entered at London, and made his bow to the world as the
youngest D.Sc. that Burlington Gardens had ever turned out.

His Continental training had emancipated him from all the limitations under which his father, otherwise a
man of very considerable intelligence, suffered. Like Captain Flaubert he was a firm believer in the
possibility of submarine navigation, but, like his unknown French rival, he, too, had been confronted with
that fatal problem of submarine blindness, and he had attacked it from a point of view so different to that
of Captain Flaubert that the difference of method practically amounted to the difference between the
genius of the two nations to which they belonged. Captain Flaubert had evaded the question and
substituted electric feeling for sight. Wilfred Tyrrell had gone for sight and nothing less, and now he had
every reason to believe that he had succeeded.

The night before Captain Flaubert had fallen asleep in his quarters at Cherbourg there was a little
dinner-party at Sir Wilfred Tyrrell's house in Albert Gate. The most important of the guests from
Wilfred's point of view was Lady Ethel Rivers, the only daughter of the Earl of Kirlew. She was a most
temptingly pretty brunette with hopelessly dazzling financial prospects. He had been admiring her from a
despairing distance for the last five years, in fact ever since she had crossed the line between girlhood and
young womanhood.

Although it was quite within the bounds of possibility that she knew of his devotion, he had never yet
ventured upon even the remotest approach to direct courtship. In every sense she seemed too far beyond
him. Some day she would be a countess in her own right. Some day, too. she would inherit about half a
million in London ground-rents, with much more to follow as the leases fell in, wherefore, as Wilfred
Tyrrell reasoned, she would in due course marry a duke, or at least a European Prince.

Lady Ethel's opinions on the subject could only Ix gathered from the fact that she had already declined