The Straits of Tsushima: An action-packed historical military adventure (Marcus Baxter Naval Thrillers Book 1)

by Tim Chant

  Baxter nodded. He was getting used to Juneau’s odd insights into the Russian court’s inner working. “Plus, we’ve come this far,” he said, rather than commenting on that, straightening and stretching his back until something popped. “I had been pretty keen to return to the sea, but months aboard…”

  “While the admiral has indicated that we will be moving on swiftly, it would not surprise me if our stay here will be … protracted. As much as there is a need to hurry, our vessels are all in a sorry state — the bottoms must be cleaned, the boilers maintained, and only our most obtuse officers argue we are ready for combat,” Juneau went on. “Rozhestvensky has ordered a curfew and forbidden the officers and men from staying ashore. The order does not, of course, apply to my wife. She has taken lodgings in the, well, town. As the prohibition does not apply to you either, you would be welcome to stay with her. And Tomas’ka, of course.”

  Baxter opened his mouth to refuse, and realised how churlish that would seem. “Are you not worried that I will attempt escape?”

  “My dear Baxter, where would you go? No, it is settled. I will have Vasily bring your things ashore.”

  They settled into something approaching domestic bliss on the island, in a pleasant and obviously very new bungalow in the colonial style, higher up on the hillside where they could get more of a breeze. Juneau may only have been the first officer of a clapped-out old cruiser not far from the scrapyard, but he also wasn’t adverse to using his court influence when it came to it. While the house may have been sparse in its construction and smelled of freshly hewn wood and sap, it was in a fine location. Ekaterina had already settled in with Tommy Dunbar when Baxter arrived, Vasily in tow with his meagre belongings.

  It was late afternoon, and Baxter was sweltering despite the light suit he wore. Heat had never bothered him much, but it was humid to the point where the air almost felt like a wet rag in the face. At least up on the hillside it was cooler, and Pavel greeted him with a cold gin and tonic.

  “Good lord, I didn’t realise how much I’d missed this until this moment,” Baxter declared after taking a long pull from the frosted glass, the ice clinking against the side.

  “And the tonic will keep away the various miasmas of this place,” Ekaterina said from the door onto the veranda, before sweeping in to greet him. Tommy was in tow, but seemed almost shy of him.

  “That’s why we drink it, ma’am, though I was afflicted with enough tropical diseases as a young’un that my system seems to fight them off.” Baxter smiled down at Tommy. “Master Dunbar, good to see you.”

  Tommy bobbed his head but didn’t meet Baxter’s gaze. It was indeed good to see the lad, who’d been keeping his distance of late. He realised for the first time that he’d never actually heard where the lad had got to on the night of the storm — what had passed between himself and Ekaterina had driven such thoughts from his mind.

  He looked back at Ekaterina sharply, an ungallant thought in his mind, but as always he found himself completely disarmed. She smiled slightly. “Come, let me show you the rest of our humble house.”

  To many, it would indeed have been humble. To Baxter, after months at sea and before that the cheapest lodgings he could find, it was almost luxurious, and certainly clean. As befitting a man of his rank, Juneau’s staff did not stop at Pavel. It turned out that he’d also brought the chef who had served the officers on the Yaroslavich — “I engaged him personally,” Ekaterina told him as they breezed past the kitchen, “And of course the captain has little interest in epicurean delights” — and engaged some local people to keep the house. Baxter’s room faced onto the bay, comparatively cool and airy and (he admitted to himself privately) mercifully as far from the master bedroom as it could be.

  “Well, I will let you settle in before dinner.” She gave him an arch look over her shoulder as she left. “We dress for dinner here, Mr Baxter.” There was no sting to her words, and he couldn’t help but grin as he flipped open his case.

  “Have I done something to offend you, young Tommy?” he said quietly, without turning round. There was a disgusted noise from behind the mosquito netting around the window and the boy emerged into view.

  “Miss Ekaterina made me promise…” Tommy said, voice miserable.

  “To keep away from me?” Baxter asked, nonplussed.

  “Naw, not to tell ye…” Tommy’s Edinburgh accent was coming through, sure sign that he was upset.

  “Hang this up for me, would you?” Baxter said, keeping his voice level. He handed the lad his other, more formal suit and nodded to the wardrobe in the corner of the room. To think that a few weeks ago this area had been untamed jungle. “And tell me what it is you’re not supposed to tell me.”

  Tommy seemed relieved to have this demand made of him. Baxter would never understand the mindset of children — though Tommy was near enough a young man, almost the age he’d been when he’d joined the Royal Navy.

  “She told me to hide, during the storm. From everyone. Hid me away in a cupboard, she did!”

  “We call them lockers aboard, lad,” Baxter said, absently. Breaking the flow of words coming out of the youth to give himself time to think. “But go on.”

  “She didna say why, just hid me away. Didn’t even tell Pavel. Let me out when she got back — she seemed awf’ly upset about something.”

  Baxter finished unpacking his handful of shirts, neatly laying them side by side on the low net bed. “I see.” He absently wandered across to Tommy, ruffled his hair — earning himself a disgusted look. “But if you make a promise to anyone — especially a woman — you should keep it. A man is only as good as his word, lad.”

  Tommy looked like he couldn’t decide to be angry or upset and had settled on somewhere between the two. “So I shouldn’t have told ye, aye?”

  “No, but I’m glad you did.” Baxter closed the case and put it into a corner before he went on. “I thought we were in dangerous waters before, Master Dunbar,” he said quietly. “But there is far more going on here than I’d imagined. You must not tell anyone I know what happened, especially the countess.”

  The thought of lying to her, even by proxy, left a sour taste in Baxter’s mouth. But it was becoming increasingly clear that she was up to something, more than just being an adventurous young noblewoman. That something was in danger of drawing both him and Tommy into it.

  “And I should keep this promise?” Tommy asked.

  Baxter stared out of the window. The squadron spread across the bay, a truly breath-taking assembly of warships. “Yes, yes you should,” he said quietly.

  “Is this domestic bliss, I wonder?” Ekaterina asked as they made their way through one of the markets that had sprung up in Nosy Be. It was busy with locals and sailors, haggling and bartering for trinkets, fresh fruit and exotic pets. A party of swaggering bluejackets Baxter recognised from the Yaroslavich were attempting to haggle over the price of bread with a sharp-looking Arab who obviously had their number.

  They weren’t so far from areas where other, more basic human interactions were going on — Baxter could hear obviously bawdy singing from an establishment that catered to the enlisted men. Something about Courlander women — he couldn’t quite make the lyrics out, but while the details were different the theme would be the same as that of many of the songs he’d heard in the Royal Navy. The rowdiness was why, ostensibly, Vasily Ivanovitch followed in their wake — the big Russian sailor had become a de facto part of the odd little household over the last few weeks, despite Juneau’s protestations that he didn’t think Baxter would attempt an escape.

  Baxter caught an arch look from Ekaterina. “Hmm? Oh, I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. I’ve been at sea most of my life, and before then my mother raised me more or less herself while my father was at sea.” He realised how self-pitying that might sound to someone who didn’t know him, and sought to shift attention. Esme, one of the local woman engaged by the household, followed on behind with the shopping basket, Vasily hovering protective
ly beside her. Neither would be any use. “What say you, Master Dunbar?”

  Baxter glanced across at the lad, who was ambling along with a grin on his face and his hands — protruding from too-short sleeves — were shoved in his pockets. His arms and legs were tanned, and only a sennit hat saved his face from being as tanned as any sailor. His grin spread further. “Just like the market by the Custom House. Bit warmer though.”

  “Well, there you have it.”

  Ekaterina laughed, low and full-throated, and linked her arm through Baxter’s, causing the hair on the back of his neck to stand up. He could feel her flank against his arm, the warmth of her, and he wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and…

  Well, best not to think about such things.

  They had settled into a kind of odd almost-friendship since the night of the storm and what had passed — both what they had seen and what had happened between them. Neither of them spoken of it and — he felt, at least — that they had become increasingly comfortable in each other’s company over the past weeks trapped in this tropical bay. Rozhestvensky’s plan to plough ahead had come to nothing, just as Juneau had predicted, stymied by interference from St Petersburg.

  “You must stop calling me ‘ma’am’,” she said suddenly, with an almost-convincing impression of both his baritone voice and manner. She looked sideways at him. “My friends call me Ekaterina. Or just Katya.”

  “As you wish,” he said. He caught her enquiring look, shrugged slightly uncomfortably. “Baxter. My friends, such as they are, just call me Baxter.”

  “Well, Baxter, I have to say that does not surprise me,” she said, taking any possible sting out of her words with a smile.

  They walked on in companionable silence, aside from stopping and haggling with a storekeeper over the price of mangoes — everything was going up in price as the storekeepers realised how much they could make from the Russian sailors. Ekaterina ruthlessly drove the man down from exorbitantly expensive to merely very expensive, and walked on with a nod to Esme — pay the man, the expressive gesture said — and a contented smile. Baxter knew full well that as soon as they were out of earshot, the maid would finalise the transaction and extract a much fairer price from the storekeeper, knowing as she did the true value of the fruit.

  There was no need to explain this to Ekaterina, though. She was happy believing the price had been right.

  In truth there was no need for them to do this at all. Most of the fleet’s aristocracy engaged in far more diverting pursuits such as gambling and hunting. He suspected, though, that Ekaterina actively enjoyed these simple, household pursuits — probably as close as she had ever come to chores.

  “After Gabon, I’m surprised you want to be out and about like this,” Baxter said after a while, remembering the last time he had escorted her around a market.

  She glanced sharply at him, then smiled. “While you are a magnet for trouble, Baxter, I think we are probably quite safe here. The French are our allies, and this community exists only because we are here.”

  He didn’t know why he was suddenly uncomfortable. Why he’d even spoken. Perhaps just the familiarity of the scene, even though Gabon was a thousand and more miles away across a vast landmass. He forced himself to relax, tried to smile. “Well, whether I attracted the trouble depends very much on who you think the target was.”

  She acknowledged the point with a gracious smile. They were interrupted as a noisy crowd of drunk bluejackets spilled across their path. She wrinkled her nose with distaste as one or two of them, recognising her nature if not her person, made clumsy bows before staggering after their fellows. “Are all sailors like this?” she asked.

  He shrugged uncomfortably. “More or less,” he said slowly. “You take a man far away from his home, further than he’d ever dreamed of going — whether he has chosen the life or no — and subject him to hard conditions and military discipline. He’s going to kick up Bob’s a-dying when he’s ashore. Of this we can be certain.”

  “Not the officers, of course.”

  “No — they find more refined ways to let off steam.”

  The occasional crackle of distant rifle fire from the hills above the township was a fine illustration of how the gentry wrought their own chaos. Baxter didn’t add that more than a few of them would be frequenting the more expensive bawdy houses that had appeared.

  “This seems far worse than at previous ports of call, nonetheless,” she said, a real note of concern in her voice.

  He’d noticed this as well, but hadn’t want to voice his suspicions. “The news from the front won’t have helped,” he said eventually. It was well known in the fleet, at this point, that the garrison they had been sailing to relieve had fallen, the ships of the 1st Pacific Squadron sunk. “And no one knows why we aren’t either turning around or cracking on. That, the heat and the shock of the unfamiliar will breed ill-discipline.” He didn’t want to speak of what would come from that. Mutiny was an ugly word.

  “That, or something more political,” she said, her voice dark. Baxter’s mind flashed back to the coven of revolutionaries they had both overheard, but who had so far remained at large as far as he was able to tell. “Rumours abound of risings in the home country.”

  That was a reminder of just how isolated they were, stranded at what felt like the edge of the world. A tropical idyll that was rapidly becoming a prison. News filtered through by telegram, although the nearest telegram station was seventy-five miles away and the relay to St. Petersburg uncertain, or from visiting ships. The occasional supply ship from Russia brought mail and news along with such necessaries as heavy winter coats but not sufficient 12-inch shells for the battleships to exercise their main batteries. No one knew exactly what was happening, although the rumours spoke of massacres in response to massive strikes and unrest.

  He shook his head. “Ill-discipline, and acts of defiance, yes. But this heat, particularly if you’re not used to it, will sap the will of even the most committed revolutionary for any sort of sustained action.”

  “Perhaps you are right, though they are no doubt among us.”

  It was the closest they’d come to talking about the cabal they’d uncovered, and he wondered again exactly what she was up to. What game was she playing, and how did he fit into it? He’d guessed, perhaps always known, that she wasn’t quite what she appeared to be. He knew how he wanted to fit in to her life, but she’d made it clear that this wasn’t on the cards.

  “Zinovy Petrovich does his best,” she said after a moment, referring to the vice-admiral. “Though even he struggles.”

  That Baxter couldn’t deny. Having met the squadron commander and seen him at work, he had little time for him as a man. He knew ships and the sea, though, and certainly had the force of will to drive this — to Baxter’s mind doomed — expedition onwards.

  The conversation — muttered quietly between themselves while Vasily, Tommy and Esme talked happily amongst themselves — was cut short by a commotion ahead, the sounds of shouted indignation and then something approaching panic. He and Ekaterina exchanged glances, neither of them needing to say anything — the irony was not lost on either of them.

  The crowds were thick enough that they couldn’t see what was going on. Ekaterina bit her lip and he noticed her hand drift towards the closure of the bag she carried. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Well, nonetheless. Vasily, Tommy, stay with the countess and Esme.”

  Baxter strode towards the sounds of confusion, knowing he was being unnecessarily dramatic but not able to stop himself. People were starting to run around him, mostly away from the noise, but he had the bulk to shoulder through what threatened to become a stampede. A few Russian sailors were moving towards the sound of trouble, and he was glad he’d left Vasily to look after the others.

  A rickety stall toppled just ahead of him, scattering people and goods and setting the stallholder to a furious tirade of French. He dashed forward as he realised the sailor who had fallen into the s
tall was holding a bloody hand over his guts.

  The man was half-propped against the rough wooden planking and started to slide down, leaving a red smear across the brightly-coloured local fabric that was on sale. Baxter caught him as he fell, one arm under the man’s shoulder. The front of his uniform was stained dark and his face was pale — he must have come some distance despite the wound.

  “Help here!” he roared, then remembered to shout in Russian and French. He pulled off his jacket and wadded it, knowing how futile that would be but that he had to try. He pulled the man’s hands away from the wound to have a quick look, seeing a deep and long gash, then got the fabric against the bloody mess and pressed the man’s hands on it.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked quietly in Russian. He’d seen few wounds for someone in his profession, but enough to know it didn’t look good.

  “Countess…” the man whispered.

  Baxter realised he knew the fellow, albeit only in passing — one of the Yaroslavich’s foredeck hands. He’d been one of Neptune’s helpers at the line-crossing ceremony. “What’s that? The countess…?” For a moment he genuinely thought that the sailor was accusing Ekaterina of stabbing him.

  “Must … tell … Countess…”

  “Tell me what?” Ekaterina asked, appearing from the rapidly dispersing crowd, Vasily and Tommy in tow. Baxter looked up and around instinctively, realising the man could very well have been pursued. He caught a flash of someone vaguely familiar disappearing behind a low, ramshackle warehouse, but Ekaterina laid a hand on his arm to still him as he tried to rise and pursue.

  “This evening, Countess…” the dying sailor murmured. “It starts … at the curfew.”

  He didn’t die immediately after that, his voice breaking down into a quiet and increasingly nonsensical ramble.