J. E. MacDonnell - 021

by The Coxswain(lit)

  "We've gotta do something!" Hooky growled. His voice was made angry by realisation of the truth of what Rennie had said, and by the coxswain's apparent defeatism. "You know what thieving can do in a ship, especially a destroyer!"

  "I know," Rennie nodded soberly.

  There was some element of worried knowledge in his face that made the big chief look at him with squinted eyes.

  "It's a funny thing," he said slowly, "we had none of this before, not until those bods you brought come along."

  "I didn't bring them!" Rennie stepped. "You can put that down to your precious bloody captain!"

  Hooky was too interested by the coxswain's sudden heat to be angry at this reflection on Bentley. He thought for a moment, rolling the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, before he said:

  "Listen, `Swain, this is ruddy serious. I know you're brassed-off, and I can guess why. But you and me got to work in together on this thing. I was in a ship once where thievin' started - it bloody near split the crew to pieces. A man got that way he couldn't trust his best go-ashore oppo. I don't want that happenin' here. Searches, kit-lockers locked, a man not game to go to his cobber's locker for a packet of fags..."

  He paused, his eyes intent on Rennie's pinched face. Rennie breathed in, then slowly out through his pursed lips.

  "You don't have to tell me," he said tiredly, "I've just come from that sort of thing."

  He might have struck Hooky in the face.

  "What!" The big man jumped up, staring down at Rennie. "You had a tea-leaf in Pelican? Why the hell didn't you tell the Old Man?"

  Rennie glanced up at him, then down again.

  "Button your flap, for hell's sake," he said in a patient voice. "Why should I pass on all the gossip to Bentley? What happened there is Holland's business."

  Hooky swore.

  "Now it's happenin' here! And the mongrel came over with you!"

  "You can prove that?"

  "Eh?"

  "You see what I mean? Sure we had thieving on board the old hooker. But how the hell do I know the bloke responsible is not still over there? Listen to me, Buffer - some decent matloes came over with me, don't you make any mistake about that! They're just as browned-off as I am, but that don't make `em crooks."

  "Some, eh?" Hooky said quietly, "what about the others? Pascoe's one of them others, I'll bet me deferrers."

  "Pascoe's a bludger and a messdeck lawyer, yes, but no one's got any proof he's a thief."

  "But it narrows the field down, chum."

  "You think so?"

  "I sure do. And I'm gonna tell the Jimmy what I think, right now!"

  He swung, and had the sliding door half-open, when Rennie's hard voice cut across the room.

  "Chief bosun's mate!"

  The title, as much as the tone, jerked Hooky's head round. He looked at Rennie, his eyes narrowed, waiting. Rennie didn't keep him waiting.

  "I'm the cox'n of this ship," he rasped, "if there's anything to be passed on up top, I'll look after it. Is that clear?"

  There were several things on the tip of Hooky's tongue, all of them vehement. Then into his angered consciousness the impression of Rennie's face crystallised - hard now, but deadly weary, the skin pallid under that crown of tell-tale hair. Hooky nodded.

  "Okay, `Swain, it's clear." He pulled the door open. "Remember-I'm with you when you want me."

  For a few minutes after his visitor had gone Rennie sat at his bench, his forehead resting against his fingertips. Beneath the hands his face was creased in lines of tiredness and worry. He was trying to think, and decide, through the turmoil in his mind.

  At that moment it was not the happiness and efficiency of the ship which was at sake, but Rennie's judgment and loyalty. He knew what he should do about Pascoe and the stealing report, at the same time as he knew he couldn't care less. What he didn't know was why he felt that way.

  It was not an abstruse psychological problem; any normally acute observer, apart from the patient, could have diagnosed his condition accurately enough. Rennie had been at sea, at war, a long time. He had had a medically shocking experience in an old destroyer, and he had been sent almost immediately to another ship of the same vintage. In those early days a man's condition was judged mainly by his physical health, and the coxswain's wound was deep and invisible.

  He had served and fought eighteen months in the old Pelican. Now, with surcease at long last in sight, he found himself in another ship-new routine to master, more work, strange ways and faces to become accustomed to. Normally he would have compassed those problems easily enough, but he was not normal. And, most bitter of the forces arraigned against him, was the enervating blow to his hopes of relief.

  The measure of his moral debilitation was indicated, not by the fact of his sending for Pascoe, but in the way he handled him.

  He caught a passing seaman in the passage.

  "Tell Able-seaman Pascoe I want him."

  "Pascoe, Chief?"

  "One of the men from Pelican. Foc's'le messdeck."

  "Oh. Right, Chief."

  When the sharp face showed at the door Rennie gestured him in and told him to shut the door. Pascoe did this and turned round, his face as watchful as a fox.

  "Pascoe," Rennie started, "some money's been stolen from your messdeck."

  The coxswain watched, disinterested and expectant, the outraged protest form on Pascoe's narrow face. The words came, glib and vehement in denial:

  "So you send for me? Anything goes wrong anywhere and who do they send for? Me! Two hundred blokes aboard this hooker and who do they send for? I tell yer, `Swain, I've had a gutful of this! Over there I was the one they always picked on and here it's the bloody same! Some silly sailor loses his dough and kicks up a squeal. It ain't fair, I tell yer! I'm gonna see the Old Man about this, I tell yer straight! I've had a gutful! No proof, no nothin'. Just send for Pascoe! You just watch me-right now I smack in me request to see the Old Man about unfair treatment. I ain't gonna take..."

  "Oh, get to hell out of here!" Rennie said wearily.

  Pascoe did not put in his request to see the captain. Captains, Rennie knew, were people his compulsory shipmate kept away from.

  The day dawned bright and clear, as it did most times in that tropical area, and Wind Rode ran on for the archipelago. Her daily routine moved as smoothly as her own powered progress through the turquoise water, and when night once again shrouded her she was fifty miles from her objective, out of sight below the curve of the earth from watchful eyes ashore.

  By the time the islands were visible through night-glasses, the cool night air had condensed the sun's vaporisation into an overall cape of clouds; which absence of moonlight suited Bentley perfectly.

  He closed the ship up at action stations and took her at a fast clip round the islands. He did not really expect to find any significant build-up of Japanese naval forces - the Admiral would not have sent him in alone if there had been a chance of that - and so he was not surprised when the circuit was completed and they had found nothing.

  Wind Rode's presence there was meant to be a cautionary check-just in case the enemy had ideas about mounting an attack to retake Guadal Canal. Apparently he did not. At a little before midnight Bentley slowed his speed back to the economical knottage and had her laid on course for Guadal Canal, several hundred miles to the north-east.

  Action stations fell-out. There was no clatter or loud talking. Through long experience - a surfaced submarine charging its batteries might have listened eagerly to noises in the quiet - the men filed below to their hammocks and the watch on deck took over their duties.

  Hooky Walker did not go below at once: he waited in the shadow of the port seaboat.

  He was not taking the air, nor a last surreptitious smoke before turning-in - his wait was deliberate. Randall knew sailors, but Hooky had forgotten more about that complex subject than the lieutenant ever knew - he had been one himself.

  Now Hooky was not only suspicious, he was worried. Thieving,
with the ship about to enter Brisbane or Sydney, he could understand. But not up here, where every port was either embattled, in the hands of the Japs, or else newly-occupied after a destructive landing. There was no scope whatever for shore-leave, for the spending of money.

  A thief would be a fool to steal now and alert the whole ship. Certainly there was plenty of money about, but a cunning man would wait and make a rich haul a few hours from a place where he could take it ashore and enjoy it.

  That was what had Hooky worried; the fact that the thief would act now. There must be a reason for his wanting cash at this time, and the sailor-wise chief bosun's mate had a pretty good idea what that reason was.

  He waited another ten minutes. Now all about him the ship was still. Above him he could see the outline of the starb'd lookout's head as he quartered the sea, complementary eyes to what radar might miss; further aft a shadow moved now and then about X-gun, the duty mounting. Wind Rode never moved from harbour without a third of her main armament ready to open fire.

  Quietly, his steel hand glinting faintly against the brown of his shirt, Hooky eased from the seaboat and walked slowly to the passage leading to the mess-decks.

  Had he been returning to his own mess he would have diverged at the passage entrance and climbed the ladder to the foc's'le head. His entry into the passage meant only one destination - so that he was not surprised, but convinced of the accuracy of his suspicions, when from the canteen door some yards along the passage a dark shape detached itself and hurried forward.

  Hooky did not increase his pace, nor did he call out. The man ahead was unrecognisable, and already he was through the first messdeck door - the alarm would have been given. All the chief bosun's mate hoped to do on this first night was to verify his suspicions. Then, later, the trap could be laid.

  He passed through the iron-deckmen's messdeck. All quiet there, the space lit dimly by the blue police-lights, the cocoons of hammocks swinging a little as Wind Rode eased herself from side to side. But he had not expected to find anything so close to the upper-deck - the trouble would be as far forrard as they could get.

  He stepped over the foot-high coaming and was in the foc's'le messdeck.

  They had no time to douse the lights and swing into their hammocks. He knew they were going to brave it out. He knew something else - the first to speak of those six men sitting at the mess-table, shrouded in cigarette smoke, would be his man.

  "What's all this?" Hooky demanded, and his eyes ran over the table, seeing, as expected, nothing but cigarette packets. "Lights-out went long ago."

  "Hullo, Buffer. These blokes were just putting me in the picture about the ship - you know, what she's been up to. Sorry - didn't realise it was so late."

  The speaker was big. His voice was reasonable and his smile was twisted.

  "What's your name?" Hooky asked, and kept his tone normally stern, the accents of a chief who had discovered a misdemeanour.

  The time was not yet for action.

  "Beuring, chief - just joined from Pelican."

  He said nothing more, made no further excuses. Their offence was not serious. The others kept their eyes on the table, silent.

  "If you birds can't sleep I'll find some work to keep you awake," Hooky promised. "I'll give you three minutes to turn in."

  "Sure, chief," Beuring smiled, and his eyes held Hooky's. "We were about to break it up anyway."

  "Then start breaking!"

  They pushed up from the table and Hooky walked back on to the upper-deck, pulling the darken-ship screen carefully to behind him. He climbed the ladder, and outside his own mess he leaned for a moment on the guard-rails.

  There it was. Now he knew. Beuring had brought with him a curse more virulent in a small ship without recreation than smallpox. It might have been banker, but he was almost certain it was crown and anchor. There were rich pickings on the celibate ship, and once the word got round Beuring would be knocking them back with a stick.

  Hooky saw again the narrow watchful face of Pascoe sitting beside the big man. There you had the perfect example of cause and effect. Already the poison had begun to act. Pascoe had stolen money to gamble. If he lost, he would steal again. But it wasn't only Pascoe. He himself, as well as Smales, knew that though Wind Rode was a taut ship, there were more than a few men who would return their haloes to store just as soon as the slightest slackening in disciplinary supervision allowed them to.

  Beuring would reef their money from them; he was cunning, experienced, completely ruthless. The man's face was a living portrait of his character. They would lose, and because they were so desperate for entertainment, they would not wait a fortnight till payday. There was hardly a kit-locker in the ship which didn't hold twenty pounds. And there wouldn't be one in fifty which was locked.

  He could see the old vicious pattern repeating itself, the same disruptive cancer which had spread in the ship he had warned Rennie about.

  Rennie... If only old Smales were here. By now both of them would be closeted with Randall. Then up to Bentley's sea-cabin. First thing in the morning the captain would clear lower-deck and he would put the fear of God into guilty hearts. From then on there would be hardly a moment when a petty-officer or leading-seaman wasn't prowling through the messdecks.

  He pushed himself up from the rail. He felt he should go to Randall right this minute. And he knew he would not.

  Hooky Walker was absolutely loyal to his captain and officers. But there are more loyalties than one man can hold. He had just as strong an obligation to his messmates. He was the chief bosun's mate, a very senior rating in charge on the upper-deck. But there was a chief even senior to him, a man whose specific task it was to handle this situation. Bentley would be the first to query the absence of the coxswain.

  The picture of Rennie's face came back easily in his memory. What a hell of a thing to hit him with so soon, to go over his head about. He couldn't, and he wouldn't, do it. Rennie must be told, of course. Then wait and see how he handles it.

  Relieved at his decision, Hooky stepped into his mess. He saw at once that the coxswain's hammock was empty. Rennie must be still down in his office. Hooky undressed and swung up. The morning would do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MORNING DID NOT do, at all.

  Even a cheetah like a destroyer is bound inexorably by the law of mathematics. From midnight to dawn round the Louisiades is five hours, and five multiplied by fifteen knots makes a figure which patrolling fighter aircraft can cover in fifteen minutes.

  In accordance with his usual practice, Bentley was on the bridge a few minutes before dawn action-stations was due to be sounded. So that he heard at first-hand the radar report:

  "Bearing 225 degrees, angle of sight 45, two aircraft. Identified enemy. Coming towards."

  Bentley's first reaction was not to look astern on the reported bearing, but at the sea about him. He knew that radar would have picked up the aircraft at long range, and that they had a few minutes of grace. What concerned him immediately was the state of visibility.

  There was no doubt about the breaking dawn. But the lightness was ahead to the east; the ship herself was steaming in dark-grey, semi-opaqueness. From ten thousand feet she would make a difficult target to sight. The only trouble was that, just as there is no twilight in the tropics, nor is there any dilatory nonsense about the sun's rising.

  "Sound action," he ordered.

  The clangour shrilled out and the feet began to run.

  It would be true to assume that Commander Bentley had been to action stations more than a thousand times in that war. Just as true is the fact that the strident ringing of the bells never failed to jump his stomach-and increased his alertness to bow-string tautness.

  It is not surprising therefore that even on this latest of his multiplicity of action-stations he knew that something was wrong. He knew, and in the next second diagnosed what had concerned his watchful mind.

  "What's wrong with the close-range armament?" he queried Randall
.

  "They haven't reported closed-up yet, sir," Randall, now the gunnery-officer, answered.

  "I know that! Find out why."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  It took ten seconds on the phone for Randall to find out why.

  "Two men adrift from the pom-pom mounting, sir," he reported.

  Bentley's frown was more puzzled than angry. The pom-pom was normally one of the smartest weapons in the ship. And now its efficiency was crucially important.

  "Names?"

  "Pascoe and Hawkins, sir."

  There was no doubt now which feeling predominated in the captain's face.