Before she became a warship disguised as a merchant ship, Atik was a merchant ship named Carolyn. The steel-hulled steamer was laid down on March 15, 1912, at Newport News, Virginia, by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. She was built for the A. H. Bull Steamship Lines and launched on July 3, 1912, sponsored by Carolyn Bull, granddaughter of the shipping firm's owner. For thirty years, Carolyn carried freight and passengers between the West Indies and the eastern seaboard. She served through World War I with a Navy armed guard detachment aboard from June 1917 to November 1918. Then she went back to hauling cargo. By December 1941, she was an aging freighter operating under the Bull Line house flag when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Navy came looking for expendable ships.

The conversion happened fast. In February 1942, Carolyn steamed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the Navy took her over under a bareboat charter. Over the next few weeks, she received main and secondary batteries and sound gear, all concealed behind structures that made her look like what she had always been: a cargo ship. Carolyn became Atik, hull number AK-101. Her sister ship Evelyn became Asterion, AK-100. If friendly vessels hailed them, they would respond as Carolyn and Evelyn. If a German submarine challenged, they would identify themselves as the SS Vill Franca, Portuguese registry, callsign CSBT. The holds were packed with pulpwood, chosen for its ability to keep the ship floating after torpedo damage. Pulpwood was a gamble. Dry, it could explode. Wet, it could rot and catch fire. Commissioned on March 5, 1942, Atik put to sea on March 23. Three days later, she was dead.

Kapitanleutnant Reinhard Hardegen, commanding U-123 on her second war patrol off the American coast, spotted Atik that afternoon and began stalking her on the surface. At 19:37, he fired a single torpedo that struck the ship on her port side beneath the bridge. Fire broke out immediately. Atik began to list. The crew sent a distress message using the old identity: "Carolyn burning forward, not bad." Then a second: "Torpedo attack, burning forward, require assistance." Hardegen circled behind his victim's stern and watched men lowering boats, apparently abandoning ship. Then Atik made her move. She gathered steerage way, turned to parallel the U-boat's course, and dropped her concealment. The false structures fell away. Guns opened fire. The first shell fell short. The rest missed in deflection. Machine gun rounds struck U-123's bridge, mortally wounding a midshipman. Hardegen later wrote: "We had been incredibly lucky."

U-123 pulled out of range behind a smoke screen, submerged, and came back. At 21:29, a second torpedo hit Atik's machinery spaces. The submarine surfaced at 22:27 and watched as the Q-ship settled by the bow, her screw rising out of the water. At 22:50, an explosion blew Atik to pieces. Her entire crew perished, either in the blast or in the severe gale that followed. The tragedy compounded itself ashore. The duty officer who received the SOS had never been told that Carolyn was a secret warship. He forwarded the message routinely. No ships were dispatched. Hours later, someone in the COMINCH Operations room asked whether the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier had been notified. He had not. By the time a destroyer and an Army bomber reached the area, heavy weather had scattered the wreckage. Atik's sister ship Asterion intercepted the distress messages and steamed toward the area, but her steering gear failed and she was forced into Hampton Roads for repairs.

Twelve days after the sinking, the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier reported that there was "very little chance" any of Atik's crew would be recovered. On April 9, 1942, Radio Berlin announced that a U-boat had sunk a Q-boat off the American coast after a "bitter battle." The Associated Press picked up the story and the New York Times printed it the next day: a 3,000-ton Q-ship sunk by torpedo after a fight "fought partly on the surface with artillery and partly beneath the water with bombs and torpedoes." The German communique was, ironically, the closest thing to a eulogy Atik's crew received. Their ship rests on the floor of the Atlantic, roughly 300 miles offshore, in waters too deep and too remote for salvage. No other vessel in the United States Navy has carried the name Atik since. Kenneth M. Beyer, who served as an officer aboard Asterion, published the definitive account in Q-Ships Versus U-Boats in 1999, ensuring that the story of the crew who sailed knowingly into a fight they were not expected to survive would not disappear beneath the waves with them.