Assault on Zanzibar

by E. C. Williams

  “Roger that. But, Chief, you know our sweeps over Mafia will have to take place at the beginning or end of scheduled over-ocean recon flights. So, not so random timing – generally, early morning and late afternoon. Sorry, but I don't have a spare plane to dedicate just to your Pirate hunt. We'll be pretty well fully occupied with Stone Town overflights and searches for gun-dhows.”

  Landry shrugged philosophically. “It is what it is. We'll take what help we can get.”

  “Good. We'll do our best – you know that.

  “Now, before you go back ashore, stop by the Air Shack for a snort – we've got a little bar set up in there for post-flight debriefs. You can share with my pilots the stuff you just told me.”

  “Aye aye, sir. I make it a rule to never turn down a free drink.”

  Lieutenant Commander Mike Christie returned aboard his command, the Roland, as soon as he could get away after the conference, excusing himself, with apologies, from the Commodore's dinner for the captains. Bowditch understood – operational exigency came before social duties.

  His hurry was caused by his assignment, which was to stand off and on to intercept Pirate reinforcement-resupply missions; and the fact that the moon was new, and set early that evening: Ideal conditions for lurking. And Roland had a lot of coastline to watch. Mafia Island covered nearly four hundred square kilometers. Naturally, he could rule some areas out as potential landing spots for the enemy – all the coastline of Chole Bay, for example, which the presence of the task force would discourage.

  But other stretches would be a challenge to patrol, particularly the west coast, where many shoals and a twisting, unmarked channel presented serious navigational challenges. Mike could imagine small dhows, innocent-looking fishing boats, slipping down the shore of the African main at night and lying up in the daytime in one of the coves and creek-mouths, then dashing across to Mafia in the dark of the moon. It's what he would do, were he in the Pirates' place. This was the challenge he had to meet. Failure meant more guns and more fighters to terrorize the settlers and harass the Kerguelenian forces. Reporting failure to Commodore Bowditch … well, that didn't bear thinking about.

  Mike boarded on the port side of the Roland and raced up the pilot ladder, shouting for his XO, Lieutenant Tommy Murphy, an old shipmate of his from the first cruise of the Albatros. Murphy met him at the rail.

  “Tommy, we've got a mission. We need to get under way soonest.”

  “Roger that, Skipper.” Murphy asked no questions, but called for the pipe, “Hands to stations for leaving port”. Bosuns' calls twittered, the pipe was repeated over the PA, and the deck of Roland became a hive of activity.

  As soon as Mike had received his assignment during the conference, he had mentally calculated that, if he hurried, he could just catch the ebb tide to help him out the channel. All captains were under strict orders to conserve fuel, so instead of starting up main engines, Mike ordered the motor whaleboat launched to take Roland in tow, and mizzen and staysails set. The schooner was soon underway at a stately one or two knots, bare steerage-way, the tidal current doing most of the work.

  Commodore Bowditch and Captain Murphy watched from the quarterdeck of the Charlemagne.

  “Sjoe! Mike wasted no time!” Sam exclaimed.

  “He's a bright young officer. He should go far. If he lives.” The last phrase in a more somber tone.

  “He and Dave Schofield are mates. I've got a notion there's a friendly rivalry at work there, each trying to out-do the other. They'll both go far – if, as you say, they survive.”

  This spoken acknowledgment of the hazards of their profession put them both in a thoughtful mood. Each rested his hand on the wooden rail, in a mute appeal to fate to ignore their unlucky words.

  Within a couple of hours, Roland was off the east coast of Mafia, headed north, running free on a mild south-south-easterly, bound for Ras Mkundi, the island's northernmost tip. Murphy joined his captain on the schooner's quarterdeck. Mike knew he was burning to know the Roland's mission, so he summed it up.

  “Tommy, we're ordered to cruise the northern end of the island to intercept reinforcement or resupply missions to the Arab raiders still on the island. We'll stay on station until recalled, or we need to return to Chole Bay to replenish our supplies. That's our primary mission; a secondary task is to act as rescue ship as required for downed fliers if they ditch in our vicinity.”

  “Do we know what form these resupply missions are likely to take, Skipper – do we have any intel?”

  “We know there's been one already, that we couldn't do anything about 'cause we only found out about it after the fact. We're probably looking at small, fast dhows that slip down the mainland coast, then cross to the island at night, when it’s overcast or there’s no moon. We'll have to keep a sharp eye out – we should probably post double lookouts between dusk and dawn. And Tommy, study the chart and mark likely beaches. We'll use the motor whaleboat to patrol inshore on the west coast. I don't want to risk putting Roland aground in that tricky shoal water.”

  Sam went down to his cabin and resumed work on his monthly long letter home. Addressed to his parents, he also had to keep in mind that they would share it with his siblings, cousins, friends of the family – essentially, the entire population of Long Island. So: nothing too personal, and of course nothing operational. These restrictions left him with damn’ little to say. He had long ago given up trying to match his parents’ letters page for page, filled as they were with all the family and island gossip. But he had to try, if only to dissipate the lingering hurt feelings occasioned by his sudden (from their point of view) marriage to Maddie Dupree and especially his failure to postpone the wedding until it could be performed back home on Kerguelen. It was difficult to get them to understand that, given the uncertainty of war, this would mean an indefinite, and probably very long, postponement. His mother had even hinted, with the typical practical Kerg attitude toward sex, that they needn’t have postponed the honeymoon, just the wedding ceremony. Maddie had been getting the same hints of hurt feelings from her family, so the two of them agreed to promise, in their letters to their respective families, a big wedding reception in French Port at the earliest opportunity. Trouble was, there was no telling how early that opportunity might occur; Sam felt that he could not possibly take a long home leave at this critical stage of the war.

  He finished the letter to his parents, finally, and turned with relief to the latest of his (much more frequent) letters to Maddie. In these letters, he could be as personal as he liked; as well, he felt a somewhat greater freedom in sharing operational details, and his concerns and doubts about them. He knew he could trust her to be totally discreet.

  He treasured her letters, which arrived in bundles on every vessel from Hell-ville. They were intimate and loving – and filled with details about the shipping situation, the attitudes of vessel owners and cargo interests, the chronic shortage of seamen, all gleaned in the course of her work as manager of the Hell-ville office of her family’s chartering and brokerage firm.

  As interesting as those were, he most valued her insights into the effects of the war on the Mascarene Islands’ trade, and the morale and confidence level of the maritime industry. In this respect, the news was encouraging; the naval base at Mafia Island had greatly reduced the number of Zanzibari raiders that could reach their cruising grounds off Madagascar, and so the number of vessels attacked had fallen significantly. This situation had so heartened ship-owners and shippers alike that trade had recently surpassed pre-war levels. Sam knew strengthened political support for the Navy would be one side-effect.

  Political support the Navy badly needed – as tiny as it was, the fleet was an enormous fiscal drag on the finances of Kerguelen. Only the financial support of the Mascarenes, especially Nosy Be, and the rest of the Southern Ocean settlements, kept the burden manageable. Naval aviation was especially costly, and thus politically vulnerable, given the inevitable disappointment of unrealistic expectations that com
bat aircraft would be a magic bullet bringing the war to an instant and victorious conclusion. While the Navy held Mafia, it could protect Kerguelenian shipping – but the taxpayers wanted more than an expensive stalemate, dragging on into the indefinite future. They wanted a decisive victory over the Sultanate.

  And Sam just did not see how that could be done. Not now, not with the forces he had.

  He deliberately put aside these dark thoughts, lest they infect the letter he was writing, and focused on making it light, affectionate, and informative about Sam’s activities without exposing useful operational info to possible unfriendly eyes. He didn’t think it was likely that Zanzibari agents could intercept and read his personal mail, but he was taking no chances.

  Sam finished the second of his personal letters, signing off with “your loving husband”, and turned with a sigh to his overflowing in-box. He had made the painful sacrifice of giving up command of the Albatros to focus on his leadership of the entire task force – and the Navy – but he could not seem to escape paperwork, no matter how much he delegated.

  The sigh turned into a groan when he saw the subject of the first memo he picked up. It was the latest round in an ongoing battle the Navy was having with the politicians controlling the purse strings. It seems that the Kergs, with their characteristic parsimony, had found a use for the detritus of the growing coffee culture, the grounds left when brewing coffee.

  Throwing away, wasting, such a large volume of residue from what began as an expensive luxury product, offended every fiber of the frugal Kerguelenian soul. It turned out, after some research, that with the addition of some other ingredients, used coffee grounds were fermentable, then distilled into a strong alcoholic drink, a sort of schnapps. This liquor was considerably cheaper then rum, so, acting on the theory that seamen would drink anything alcoholic, the politicians were urging the substitution of this booze for the daily tot of rum issued to every hand.

  Sam had tasted the stuff, as had the officers, and it had tested on the seamen. It wasn’t bad, although it had a bitter aftertaste that some people found off-putting.

  But the seamen rejected it outright. They liked what they were used to, and what they were used to was rum. Sam had no doubt that, given its lower cost, the hands would willingly choose the coffee liquor over rum if they were spending their own money. But they regarded the daily tot of rum as an essential part of their earned privileges, and would accept no substitute.

  Sam started writing a reply, explaining the seamen’s rejection of the coffee liquor for the second time, in stronger terms, stressing the adverse effect on morale of forcing the substitution. He also added an argument – relying, he had to admit to himself, on somewhat dubious numbers – that, given the facts that rum was available locally but that the coffee liquor was shipped from Kerguelen, the cost savings were minimal. He finished off his hand-written draft, and placed it in his out-box for typing and review. This niggling over what was a trivial budget item compared to, say, a single airplane, was maddening. And the politicians would ultimately win, if they pushed it. But Sam intended to stall for as long as he could.

  With another sigh, he reached for the next document in his in-box.

  Tommy Murphy sat perfectly still at the tiller of the motor boat, peering into the darkness for any hint of another vessel. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic whoosh-whoosh of the engine at idle speed, sounding rather like the heartbeat of a very large animal. A seaman in the bow whispered something to his mate, and Murphy hissed “Quiet, Dubose! No talking!” The AB muttered an apology and shut up.

  The boat was drifting a mile or so off Ras Mkundi. The moon had set, and there were patchy low clouds giving intermittent glimpses of the stars. Each man aboard had an assigned sector to watch, but there was nothing to see but blackness. Murphy worried that fatigue and boredom were lessening everyone’s alertness – it was certainly affecting his. The wind was light and variable, the prevailing southerly breeze having temporarily died away and land breezes off both the island and the mainland were competing for dominance.

  Then a man muttered, “Something broad on the starboard bow, Skip – can’t make out what.” Murphy and every man aboard came instantly alert. Now they could just make out a shape somewhat solider and darker than the darkness, a sort of dhow-shaped shadow.

  “Slow ahead, right ten,” Murphy hissed. “Stand by the reckless rifle.”

  “Slow ahead, right ten, aye.” “Rifle manned and ready, aye.”

  The shape had now taken dim form against the stars, as the sky behind it cleared momentarily. It was a single-masted dhow, ghosting along on the starboard tack in the general direction of Mafia Island, no more than a couple of hundred yards distant. By sheer chance, the Roland’s boat had happened to be in the right place at the right time.

  At that moment, a guttural cry went up from the dhow – her lookout had seen the boat, or perhaps heard her engine as she revved up to get way on. Several things then happened at once: there were splashes in the water alongside the dhow as she threw something – several somethings – overboard. The dhow fell off the wind to bring her bow around 180 degrees to run back to the mainland. Both vessels opened fire, the dhow with small arms and the motor boat with her 75mm recoilless rifle. The crash of the rifle, and the spear of flame as long as the boat which was her muzzle flash both deafened and blinded Murphy temporarily.

  “Full ahead! Helmsman, steer after the target – can you see her?”

  “Nossir! Nossir! Blinded by the muzzle flash, sir.”

  “Steer where you saw her last! Gunner, did you get a hit?”

  “Didn’t see the round go off, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  The motor boat charged forward at her full ten knots, every man aboard blinking and straining to see the dhow, their night vision wiped out by the rifle’s flash. This went on until the African shore loomed darkly over them, so close that Murphy called for soundings. A seaman in the bow began swinging the lead and calling out the depths: When the water had thinned to just over a fathom, he stopped the boat and set everyone the task of quietly looking and listening for any sign of the dhow. After a fruitless half-hour, Murphy reluctantly concluded that they had passed the dhow unseen; they had lost her in the darkness.

  She wouldn’t get far by dawn, however; Murphy hoped that, when it was light, they would either catch her fleeing back toward Zanzibar or hiding in the mangroves on the African shore.

  Murphy decided to retrace his course back toward Mafia Island. To do this, he turned right until he was 60 degrees off his original course, then came left until he could steady up on the reciprocal of the westerly course he had taken in pursuing the dhow. In theory, this should send him right back down his own wake. He motored at half-speed, determined not to miss the dhow again, with every man on lookout.

  At that speed, it took longer to return than he expected, and first light was growing faintly right in the east, dead ahead, when he could see the Mafia shore, a dark line on the horizon. As the boat drew closer inshore, he thought he could make out some movement on the beach. He took up his telescope and focused it carefully. In the dim light, it was difficult at first to make anything out; then he saw tiny figures moving about in the surf, and objects floating there.

  “Full ahead – flank speed!” he ordered. “Man the rifle; small arms, too.”

  The boat surged forward as it picked up speed, and vibrated as the little engine reached max rpm. “Reckless rifle manned and ready,” came the instant response – the gun crew had never actually stood down from Murphy’s earlier call to action. But the weapon was not yet in range.

  Murphy kept his telescope on the beach, striving to make out details in the semi-darkness. It seemed that the people on the beach were now aware of his boat – not surprising, since she was probably now pushing a white, frothy bow wave visible for miles. Their movements became quick, almost frantic. It was still impossible to see what they were doing, but it was clear they were in a hurry to finish. The beach was now well wit
hin the range of the stern 75mm, but Murphy hesitated about giving the order to fire. After all, he couldn’t be sure yet that the activity on the beach wasn’t somehow innocent.

  The figures on the beach vanished into the low, jungly growth crowding its landward edge before Murphy could make up his mind. By the time the boat’s bow crunched into the sand, only the objects that had been the focus of their frantic attention left on the beach – now identifiable as wooden barrels thickly coated with pitch. They were open, their heads smashed in, and were now empty. One unopened barrel bobbed gently back and forth in the low surf.

  Murphy ordered this barrel retrieved and opened. It was filled with guns and ammunition, packed tight and wrapped in greased cloth.

  He counted the open and empty barrels on the beach: there were nine. With a mixture of rage and shame, Tommy Murphy realized that he had detected, but could not stop, the landing of a significant quantity of arms for the terrorists.

  Sam Bowditch sat at his desk, re-reading the long signal from Roland, the morning sun falling full on it from the skylight overhead. No matter how many times he perused it, the gist was the same: the Roland had detected, chased, but didn’t stop a smuggling vessel in time. From the contents of the single barrel the terrorists left, Mike Christie extrapolated that they had now been supplied with ninety new carbines, with more than one hundred rounds of ammunition for each of them.

  The only consolation was that they were simple, single-shot breech-loaders of crude manufacture. Nevertheless, the simplest firearms trumped the machetes and mattocks that were all the islanders had with which to defend themselves. And the obvious Pirate strategy was to avoid any contact with Landry’s gunners and attack only defenseless villagers, to terrorize them into supporting the Arabs with food and intelligence.

  Sam looked up with a sigh – quickly suppressed – and said, “Mister Konyn, how d’ you think the smugglers and the terrorists know where and when to meet up?”