Battlecruiser (1997)

by Reeman, Douglas

  He walked to the opposite side of the bridge. There it was, the first real hint of dawn. It was misty as well; Rhodes had prophesied as much during the afternoon watch. He licked his lips. Yesterday. His mouth was dry, which was always a bad sign. He had to be above it all. He almost smiled. Inhuman. Most of them probably thought he was, anyway.

  All hands had been called early and the watchkeepers relieved, to have a quick meal and swallow gallons of sweet tea before going to action stations. Many of the old hands would be glad that the waiting was over, until the next time. Others would be dreading it, but more afraid of showing fear in front of their messmates and friends than of fear itself.

  Rhodes said, ‘Half an hour, sir.’ He, at least, sounded calm, unworried.

  Stagg remained silent. He could have been asleep, one leg swaying in time with the slow tilt of the bridge.

  Sherbrooke watched the light exploring the forecastle, giving colour to the anchor cables and stanchions, the point where the master-at-arms had come aboard as Neptune with his villainous-looking ‘court’. It seemed like a year ago.

  Rhodes’s assistant, Frost, jammed a handset under his cap and called, ‘W/T office reports signal from Montagu, sir!’ In the strange, filtered light his wispy beard looked even more absurd. ‘Enemy vessels ahead! Small craft, moving right!’

  Sherbrooke said, ‘Tell Montagu to disregard! Do not engage!’

  Stagg snapped, ‘Landing craft?’

  Sherbrooke listened to the rasp of static from one of the speakers, then Evershed’s voice, clipped and unemotional. ‘Six or seven small craft, bearing one-three-zero, range one-double-oh.’

  Sherbrooke repeated, ‘Signal Montagu! Now!’ He could see it clearly enough. The hope of every destroyer’s commander: ships pinned down by radar, probably having run the blockade from Sicily. Montagu must be right on top of them. Their distance from Reliant was ten thousand yards: five miles.

  Stagg waved one hand in the air. ‘What’s that fool doing now?’

  Frost said, ‘No acknowledgment from Montagu, sir.’

  Sherbrooke raised his binoculars as bright stars of red and green tracer exploded through the mist like fireworks at a regatta.

  Montagu’s R/T had either been deflected by the nearness of land, or her captain had no intention of throwing away such easy targets.

  Rhodes slid back part of the screen, and above the muted din of machinery and the surge of water alongside, it was possible to hear the double crack of the destroyer’s paired mountings, and an unbroken exchange of automatic fire.

  Sherbrooke held his breath as the image strengthened in the lenses: Montagu, increasing speed, her funnel smoke dragging astern like a cloak, turning slightly to port as she charged for the rearmost vessels in the convoy. Low, chunky shapes, still too dark to identify, but probably Siebel ferries, landing craft which were heavily armed against air attack. To engage a powerful destroyer like Montagu would be like a mouse squaring up to a charging bull.

  They heard Evershed cough, or perhaps it was one of his officers in Control. Somebody had left a key down, all eyes intent on the miniature battle.

  A boatswain’s mate said, ‘Land! I can see land, sir, dead ahead!’

  Another brushstroke, undulating and yellow in the growing light.

  The speaker said, ‘A, B, and Y Turrets stand by. Follow Director!’

  There was a vivid flash, and seconds later the explosion boomed against the hull. One of the enemy vessels had blown up, perhaps carrying ammunition or fuel. The convoy must have slipped across the Strait of Sicily and around Cape Bon during the night, their crews risking everything, only to meet disaster at the end.

  Another explosion, and a towering sheet of flame and sparks, which illuminated Montagu even as she fired and fired again.

  The rest was like a sequence in a bad dream, distorted and unreal, because of the initial silence in which it took place. Three tall waterspouts burst from the sea as if propelled from the depths, and bracketed the wheeling destroyer like white pillars. They seemed to fall very slowly, and only then did the crash and shock wave of those big shells quiver against Reliant’s flank.

  Stagg muttered, ‘They’ve done for Montagu.’

  Sherbrooke called, ‘Open fire!’

  He tensed as the foremost turret moved slightly, one gun rising a little higher than its companion.

  It was not possible to see the hidden battery, but Evershed’s spotting team had marked the flashes, and marked them well.

  ‘Shoot!’

  Evershed again, icy calm. ‘Deflection seven left! Up two hundred!’ A bell jangled in the distance. ‘Shoot!’

  The bridge shook violently as the marines in Y Turret trained around as far as they could, the shells ripping past the ship to join the other vivid orange flashes on the shore.

  Sherbrooke said, ‘Stand by, Pilot. We’ll alter course after the next salvo. Tell Control to engage on the opposite side!’

  Stagg was right beside him, his eyes glittering in the reflected explosions from the stricken destroyer.

  ‘Not so fast! We might lose the chance if we turn too soon!’ He stared at Sherbrooke angrily. ‘Hit them again! It’s what we came for!’

  Rhodes watched them, and then turned away.

  Sherbrooke said, ‘I am increasing speed, sir.’

  Stagg did not reply. He was training his glasses on the Montagu. The destroyer had fallen onto her side, steam and flames spurting out of her bilges, where there was a hole big enough for a London bus. Tiny figures were running along the tilting deck or clambering onto the rails; some threw up their hands and dropped out of sight, and Sherbrooke guessed that the buckled plating was furnace-hot. As Pyrrhus had been.

  ‘Full ahead together, Pilot. Tell Control.’ Through the smeared glass he saw two signalmen cover their heads and duck down; simultaneously, he heard the rising whine of aircraft as two of Seeker’s Seafires roared from astern and headed into the smoke.

  Stagg said, ‘That’ll show the bastards.’

  ‘Time to turn on to new course, sir.’ Rhodes made a point of ignoring the rear-admiral. ‘We don’t know how many wrecks are littered about here.’

  A burning landing craft drifted quickly abeam. In fact, it was motionless, but swayed over as Reliant’s mounting bow wave surged across it, dousing flames and sweeping away dead and wounded alike.

  ‘Half speed ahead! Starboard twenty! Steady!’

  Sherbrooke watched the ticking gyro repeater but saw only the destroyer, all grace gone, a wreck, a sinking coffin for her company. They might never know if Montagu’s captain had ignored the signal to break off the action in order to seize the chance for himself, or if his R/T procedure had failed at the critical moment. Either way, it had cost him his ship and most of his men.

  It was like having ice-cold hands against his skin, although his body was sweating.

  ‘Steady on three-zero-zero!’

  This great ship had come about with an agility even Montagu could not have matched. The three turrets were even now training round, another shell and its charge already in the hoist from magazine to breech.

  They had come to destroy the remaining port facilities in a harbour already full of wrecks, and to bombard the surrounding defences, where soldiers had lived like rats for weeks. The enemy could always have been expected to do something, but a powerful shore battery had never been suggested. But for Montagu’s folly, they would never have found out, until it was too late.

  ‘Shoot!’

  The bridge fittings bucked violently again, and flakes of paint fell from the deckhead like snow. Sherbrooke raised his glasses and saw the flashes from the explosions. There was so much smoke and dust in the air that it was like firing into a fog.

  Some one yelled, ‘Montagu’s gone! Poor bastards!’

  Sherbrooke gripped a handrail, and saw Stagg turn to stare at him.

  Like the bomb, there was no warning, no sensation; he simply knew. He saw the water falling across B Turret in an endless
cascade, and yet he had seen no fall of shot, heard no explosion. Two more hideous shockwaves jarred through his shoes, and he saw a glass screen shiver to fragments, men falling, mouths wide in silent screams, faces cut to bloody ribbons. The guns fired again from forward and aft, but below the bridge, B Turret, the barrels steaming now in the flung spray, was unmoving.

  ‘Training mechanism out of control, sir!’

  The other guns recoiled again. Evershed was still firing, doing what he loved, and lived for.

  Sherbrooke said harshly, ‘Report damage!’

  His hearing was almost normal again: someone was screaming, the sound suddenly cut off as if a door had been slammed against it. Damage control and first aid parties were picking their way over broken glass.

  A messenger said, ‘The admiral’s bridge has been hit, sir.’ He faltered. ‘Three casualties.’

  Sherbrooke heard the chattering voicepipes, and imagined his men throughout the ship, then he turned and saw the war correspondent, Pat Drury, hands in his jacket pockets, the blood of a seaman who had fallen beside him splashed over his shoe.

  ‘Get some people down there, Pilot, and tell T/S what’s happened.’

  He saw a sub-lieutenant and a few spare hands running for the ladder, faces frozen in the same emotionless masks as they prepared themselves for what they would find.

  More muffled detonations, and moments later the two Seafires roared past, low over the water, heading back to their carrier. There were no more shells from the land, only a serried bank of flame and the sound of exploding ammunition, and the occasional fireball of an ignited fuel storage shelter.

  Sherbrooke called, ‘Cease firing!’ The stillness and the sudden intrusion of pain was almost worse.

  One shell, fired at a very high trajectory, had hit Reliant on the superstructure, exploding as it burst through the searchlight platform and shattering the admiral’s bridge, leaving only smashed communications gear and trailing wire, with the sunlight breaking at last through mist and smoke to reveal the full extent of the damage. A few feet in either direction, and the shell might have continued, barely hindered by Reliant’s thin plating, to explode finally in the magazine below B Turret.

  One of the first in the party to be sent from the bridge was the seaman Alan Mowbray, for a brief period of his young life a promising art student. Like most recruits selected as potential candidates for wartime commissions, Mowbray had spent very little time at sea before being pitchforked into the training establishment, King Alfred. His ship had spent most of Mowbray’s sea time in dock, undergoing repairs after months on escort duty.

  He had never been in action before. He had heard the old Jacks in his mess talking about it, embroidering it for his benefit. They had pulled his leg about his posh manner of speaking, and a gentleness which they had wrongly regarded as innocence; but in the navy the lower deck had its own rules, and a justice as rigid as any in the K.R.s and A.I.s. Leg-pulling was accepted: bullying was not.

  He clung to the side of the steel door. There were holes punched through it, like the fingerprints of a potter in clay, and blood on the broken furniture and splashed like paint across the deckhead. One man lay crushed beneath an upended wireless receiver, the back of his head smashed open, the bone protruding like the shell of an egg. The admiral’s secretary sat in one corner, his face in his hands, groaning but otherwise unmarked, even though the sunlight piercing some of the splinter holes was only inches away.

  ‘Out of the way, laddie!’ A sickberth petty officer and two stretcher bearers pushed him aside. The P.O. said curtly, ‘Leave that one. Get the admiral’s sec out of it. You, Toby, lend this chap a hand.’

  Mowbray would have fallen but for his grip on the steel door. It was his friend, Peter, now Sub-Lieutenant Forbes, who had been told to assist Lieutenant Villar with his extra duties. He sat with one leg doubled under him and his face pressed against the steel side, his eyes closed, while he gasped for breath as if he were drowning. There was a small hole halfway down the side of the compartment, and a smear of blood where he had slithered to the deck.

  Fear and shock forgotten, Mowbray flung himself down and cradled his friend in his arms. He did not know what he was saying; the words seemed to flood out of him. And all the time he was holding him, willing him to speak, to open his eyes.

  The petty officer knelt down and tore open the young officer’s shirt, and with surprising gentleness prised his interlocked fingers open and away from the wound. Another man was standing nearby, ready with a large shell dressing. For Mowbray, it was a moment locked and motionless in time.

  Two things happened. Forbes opened his eyes and stared at his friend, and in that small instant there was complete recognition. Then the frantic breathing stopped, and the eyes were closed again.

  The P.O. said, ‘Save the dressing, Toby. He’s bought it.’

  Mowbray stared at him, and then into his friend’s face. ‘Don’t leave him! He’ll be all right!’ He tried to drag the torn shirt across the wound. ‘Must get him to a doctor!’

  The P.O. stood up and exchanged a glance with his assistant.

  ‘We’re needed down there.’ But something held him back. He said, ‘It’s no use, my son. He’s dead. Nothing anyone can do.’ He looked round as a messenger hurried past. ‘Better tell the bridge. He was an officer, after all.’

  Mowbray tried to fight them as they dragged him to his feet, but his strength was gone.

  He felt the sea air in his face, the ship beneath him still surging ahead.

  There was a lieutenant and another working party clambering along a broken ladder, and when the petty officer described what had happened, he looked at Mowbray and said, ‘You knew Forbes, eh? Hard luck! Could have been worse.’ He stared at the sea far below the bridge. ‘For all of us, remember that!’ Then he was gone, running with his men.

  Mowbray cried out, ‘He was my friend!’ Then he collapsed.

  His words seemed to linger outside the door with the holes punched through it, like an epitaph.

  Lieutenant Dick Rayner gripped a stanchion and stared up at his Walrus flying boat, perched on the catapult like some tethered bird of prey. The plane was untouched; not even the smallest splinter had damaged it, although one enemy shell had exploded directly alongside the ship.

  He felt the mounting pressure under his hand and knew Reliant was turning again, and still working up to her full revolutions. It was a strange reaction, now that it was over, he thought, but he had felt a sense of helplessness. Here, but not a part of it. While the guns had roared and thundered, shaking the battlecruiser from masthead to keel, and the reports of the first hits on the enemy had been shouted down to them, he had been conscious of a peculiar remoteness, rather like the Walrus, painted in her new markings, a mere spectator.

  Splinters had penetrated one compartment, which had been used as a paint store, and for a moment Rayner and his fellow airmen had imagined the whole area would be engulfed in flames. He had sent some of his own deck crew with extinguishers and had watched as a grubby leading hand had emerged, giving a thumbs-up.

  He wondered what had happened to the survivors from Montagu, if there had been any. She had made a terrible sight going over, explosions and shattered machinery tearing her apart as she took the last plunge.

  Like the dead airman he had seen in his dinghy, or Jim Hardie in the broken Shagbat. Somebody would miss them, perhaps keep hoping . . .

  Rayner turned away from the sea, and saw the new pilot banging his cap against his thigh to remove some of the paint chippings that covered it.

  Lieutenant Leslie Niven had the additional Walrus, which had remained in the hangar during the bombardment. R.N.V.R., with what Eddy Buck had described as ‘a typical uppercrust drawl’, he would be considered dashing by many women. But ‘uppercrust’? Rayner thought of some of the other officers he had met, and had learned to judge for himself. Affected might be a better description. It was unfair, and he knew he was wrong to make such snap decisions about s
omeone he hardly knew, except for an occasional meeting here by the catapult, or across the table in the mess.

  Niven said, ‘My God, Seeker’s Seafires made a picture!’ He jammed the cap onto his head at a rakish angle.

  If he was an R.A.F. type he would probably grow one of those ridiculous moustaches too, Rayner thought.

  ‘They made a lot of noise,’ he said. ‘I thought they went in too fast to be really sure of a target.’

  Niven gave an amused smile. ‘Loyal to the old banger to the end, aren’t you?’

  Rayner leaned over a rail and saw two more stretchers being carried aft. There was no urgency this time, and the faces were covered.

  ‘How many do you think?’

  Niven shrugged. ‘Twenty, I’d say. One of the stokers just told me the flag lieutenant was killed, with another officer.’ He gestured toward the bridge, around which they could see the motionless barrels of B Turret, a hose playing water on something below the forward funnel. ‘Blown to bits, apparently.’

  Why is he trying to shock me? Why pretend that he doesn’t care, that he’s above it?

  Rayner said, ‘That’s one job I couldn’t do. Trotting around after some admiral, wiping his ass for him if you’re told to. Not for me. I’d tell them to stick it!’

  Niven’s smile broadened into a grin. ‘I think you would, at that!’

  They looked up as a speaker squeaked into life. ‘D’you. hear there? Stand by for the Captain!’

  It goes with the job. Rayner glanced down at the spray-dappled planking. There were several deep scars on the quarterdeck: the Bloke would have something to say about those. He looked up again toward the scattered parties of seamen and marines, some filthy and bedraggled after dealing with splinter holes along the waterline, and restoring communications where voicepipes and telephone lines had been broken. And the line of bodies, wrapped in blankets or pieces of canvas. Anonymous, except to the men who had found and carried them there, and then they, too, would forget them, out of necessity. The ship came first.

  ‘This is the Captain. We are rejoining the group without delay. I want you all to know that the attack was a success, there can be no doubt about that. Some of you are quite new to this ship – something your captain can share and understand.’