A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-flavoured stuffiness of the officer’s cabin aboard the U-18, to the stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of German words in his ear. "Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!" Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou’wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun. But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out: "The boy—the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil’s name?" Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily: "If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he’s alive. Don’t worry about that!" Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered furiously: "_Himmelkreüzbombenelement_! What is the _verdammt_ boy to me? It is the satchel that was strapped about the boy’s middle I am asking for—the Emperor’s—_Herr Gott!_—I shall go mad!" He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer’s cabin, into desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the U-18’s forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander’s order to be finally abandoned to her fate. *CHAPTER XXXV* *NUMBER EIGHTEEN* They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird’s waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.