Dauntless (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Pearce recovered himself, took Cole by the arm and led him away. “Come on, Mike.”

  Smith watched them walk forward and out of his sight, following the way the others had taken Wilson’s body. The hands now folded back the wings of Delilah and began pushing the seaplane on its trolley into the gloom of the hangar. Right by the entrance stood the drum of fuel they had used for the Shorts, and Smith frowned at that. But he heard voices, glanced over the side and saw the whaler that had brought Merryweather, and the gig still waiting for himself. It was time he got back to his ship. Where was Merryweather? Gone forward with Wilson’s body?

  He faced forward. Suddenly Delilah twisted on the trolley, one wing nudging the drum of fuel and sending it toppling, crashing to roll on the deck. At that same instant a flame flickered at the tail of the Short and there came a yell of “Fire!”

  Smith ran at the drum that rolled slowly back and forth with the gentle motion of the ship, a pool of petrol spreading beneath it. Two of the fitters came running. They all arrived at the drum together, Smith gasping, “Over the side!” He remembered the gig and the whaler but mercifully they lay the other side of Blackbird. They shoved at the drum and as it rolled Smith saw the fracture from which the petrol leaked, leaving a dribbling trail. He was aware of the potentially explosive fuel under his hands, of the other drums in the hangar, the bomb store beneath. They came to the side, and his feet slipped in the petrol on the deck, he sprawled and rolled out of the way of the other two, had his hands on the deck and his feet under him as the drum teetered on the edge. Flames whipped past him in the petrol trail across the deck and licked at the drum as the fitters heaved it over.

  The explosion was muffled but the yellow flame of it lifted high above the side. Then it was gone. He was climbing to his feet again and felt a hand on his arm, saw Pearce helping him up, and jerked out, “The fire —”

  “Out, sir.”

  Smith pointed at the two fitters sprawled at the side, went to them with Pearce, and swallowed. The flame had burned both men. As Pearce retched, Merryweather appeared with Maginnis at his heels. The surgeon took one look and sucked in his breath.

  Smith dragged Pearce aside and demanded “What are the orders regarding ready-use fuel?”

  Pearce blinked and a nerve twitched in his cheek, “Orders, sir? I — I don’t think —”

  “How long had that drum stood about, half-full and open?”

  “I — don’t know, sir. I didn’t notice.”

  Smith rubbed at his face, tried to damp down his anger. “You didn’t notice? You’ve given no standing orders regarding ready-use fuel? What the hell’s wrong with you, Chris?”

  Pearce had been shaken but now the shutter came down, his face went blank. “There’s nothing wrong, sir.”

  Smith said softly, savagely, “For God’s sake, Chris! There are two men lying there between life and death because of bloody stupidity!”

  Merryweather moved across to Smith. “I’ll have to get them aboard Dauntless.”

  Smith nodded and told Pearce, “Signal Dauntless to come alongside and take off two serious cases of burning.”

  Pearce left, running. Merryweather and the gorilla-like Maginnis were kneeling over the fitters. Smith walked into the hangar and found the men in there sprinkling sand about the deck. There was little sign that there had been a fire at all, just a smoke-blackened streak on the deck disappearing under the sand. And Delilah? Surely the fire had started in Delilah? He saw another rigger stooped under the fuselage and went to crouch beside him, asked, “This is where it started?”

  The rigger glanced at him. “Yes, sir. I was at the tail and saw it start, just a little flame. I was up to it and had it out in seconds but by then it had caught on the petrol that splashed across the deck.” He shoved back his cap and scratched at his head. “Can’t make it out. Looks as if a bullet passed through here —” He poked a finger in the hole in the slender wooden spar, the fabric burned from it. He said doubtfully, “Might have been a tracer, but for the wood to smoulder all that time —” He shook his head. “I just can’t credit it. Never known nothing like it.”

  They straightened together and Smith said, “The Short — what caused it to swing?”

  “Damned if I know that, either, sir. She was coming in just like normal, like we run them in all the time. I’d swear the wheels of the trolley didn’t snag or jam. She just — swung.”

  There would be a court of enquiry, of course. First the drowned man, and now this. Smith walked away from the head-shaking rigger, out of the hangar and on to the deck. A steward had come, carrying an armful of clean, white sheets. Smith watched as Merryweather and Maginnis carefully wrapped the two burned men, then Merryweather turned to his bag, took out a hypodermic and injected both of them. As he turned back to the bag he saw Smith and said, “At the moment they’re both unconscious and in shock. Those jabs will stave off the pain when it comes, for a while.”

  Smith asked, “What’s your opinion?”

  The surgeon came close and said bitterly, “What a bloody day! First Hamilton nearly kills himself, then Wilson and now —” He rubbed at his face and sighed, “Not much of a chance aboard this ship or Dauntless, but if we can get them to Deir el Belah there’s a big forward hospital and I know for a fact that the burns men there are top class, known them for years. And the hospital is almost empty at the moment.”

  Smith knew why the big hospital was empty. It was waiting for the attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line.

  The sun was down and the night closing around them. Dauntless came alongside, her crew lowering fenders and the two ships were briefly secured while the burned men, lashed to stretchers, were swung over by a derrick to a waiting party that hurried them below to the sick bay.

  Smith climbed to the bridge. He was certain Adana was the place to look for the Afrika Legion. His task was to find the Legion and if he delayed now, went south to Deir el Belah and so missed them, then he would be called to account.

  The two ships eased apart and Henderson asked, “Course, sir?”

  Smith hesitated, then said, “Steer one-nine-oh. Revolutions for twenty knots. Pass that to Blackbird. And I want a course for Deir el Belah.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Dauntless slid away from Blackbird, starting to work up to twenty knots and every second on this course took him further from Alexandretta and Adana. He had been certain he should go racing north but he had been wrong before and anyway he could not let those men die.

  “Blackbird acknowledges, sir.” That was the signal yeoman. Smith had seen the light flickering from the carrier taking station astern, a shadow of a ship in the night. Doubt was racking him now.

  5 — A Quiet Little Run up the Coast

  Dauntless and Blackbird made the passage to Deir el Belah in just four hours. A signal wirelessed ahead requesting permission to transfer two badly-burned men to the hospital, was rapidly answered in the affirmative. The ships raced through the night, passed Gaza, the town unseen but the opposing armies marked by the flicker and flame of the guns, and so came to Deir el Belah.

  Smith conned Dauntless as she closed the darkened anchorage, a rectangle of sea enclosed by anti-submarine nets on three sides, the shore forming the fourth. A drifter patrolled at the opening in the nets, a lamp aboard her flashed the challenge and the signal yeoman answered from the bridge. Dauntless slipped past the drifter and through the gap in the buoyed nets.

  Deir el Belah was no port but an Arab village and an oasis. In the anchorage ships discharged their cargoes into lighters and surf-boats to be carried ashore and a small army of men of the Egyptian Labour Corps worked at this. There was a ship discharging in the anchorage now, a lighter alongside her and winches hammering as the derricks swung, both ship and lighter alive with the figures of men labouring under the big lamps. The lighter was one of four at Deir el Belah that were engined and had first been used for landing troops in the Dardanelles. They were no more than big, shallow box
es with a ramp that came out over the bow and an engine right aft.

  Morning Star lay at the far end of the anchorage, almost lost in the outer darkness beyond the lights of the discharging ship, but there was a guard-boat, a motor-launch, puttering around her.

  Dauntless steamed gently on past the two M-class monitors, each with its single 6-inch gun, like a pointing finger, and there lay Phoebe, Braddock’s armed yacht. Smith saw faces on Phoebe and the monitors, the ship and the lighter, turned towards Dauntless. He knew the picture she made as she slipped over the water of this man-made lagoon and was proud of her. She was his and a beauty.

  The thought came: if a guard-boat patrolled around Morning Star then Taggart’s battalion was still aboard her — and Adeline Brett? There was a blur of white moving on the deck of Morning Star that might be —

  He ordered, “Stop both!” Dauntless came to anchor. The land prickled with a thousand lights, the fires of the army, but one stuttered at Dauntless a succession of signals: an oiler waited for Dauntless, a coaling lighter for Blackbird, and Braddock wanted to see Smith at army headquarters.

  Smith told Ackroyd, “We sail in two hours. Pass that to Blackbird.” He had to go back to the search, to Alexandretta. And here came a boat, a big, white-painted launch with a red cross on her side. He said, “Tell the doctor they’ve come for his patients.” He dropped down the ladders and hurried aft to his main cabin where he stripped, shaved and dressed in fresh white drill. He returned to the deck in time to see the second of the burned men lowered on a stretcher into the white launch alongside.

  Merryweather was there and turned a worried face to Smith. “I’d like to go to the hospital with them, sir.”

  Smith nodded. “You’ve got two hours.” He added gently, “Cheer up, Doc. No man could have done more than you, I’m sure of that, and if they have a chance it’s due to you.” But the burly young surgeon refused to be consoled.

  Smith went down into the motor-boat that lay astern of the launch. As the boat headed for the shore he thought that soon another boat would come off to take Wilson’s body from Blackbird. He would be buried in the morning and not by strangers, though Dauntless and Blackbird would be at sea by then. There were two battalions of the Norfolks here, Wilson’s regiment.

  He landed at the temporary jetty, walked rapidly along its echoing planks and up through the gap in the dunes that lined the shore. He passed a train on a siding, the engine hissing softly as steam escaped somewhere, and took the dusty palm-fringed road towards army headquarters.

  *

  Charlie Golightly, in the shadow of the engine, glanced absently at the white-uniformed figure striding up the road, then turned back to business and Albert. “You say this feller was goin’ round asking questions about scotch, had anybody seen any and where’d it come from?”

  Albert nodded vigorously. “Corporal say a big man. Captain Jeffreys.” He repeated the name carefully, syllable by syllable as the corporal had taught him. “Corporal say this man from Pip Emma.”

  “Provost Marshal,” muttered Charlie. He did not like the sound of it. “We’ll give things a rest for a bit.”

  Albert nodded knowingly, “Big fighting soon.”

  Charlie said shortly, “Bugger the fighting. That’s the army’s business.” He was only concerned with his own. “It’s this Jeffreys feller I don’t fancy.” He hesitated, weighing odds and not wanting to take a loss on a transaction. He decided, “There’s one more lot o’ scotch at Port Said already paid for. We’ll fetch that, then pack it in.”

  *

  Smith strode up the road that now ran between ranked tents, fires burning before them, their light glinting on the water of a small lake in among the palms. He had come this way in the light of day past crowded horse-lines and these tents had swarmed with men cleaning arms and equipment, currying horses. Now the horse-lines were deserted. A few men moved among the small fires, keeping them burning, but the tents were empty. He was not surprised, knew the men had moved eastward and the tents and fires were there only to fool any Turk watching from Gaza.

  *

  Lieutenant Bill Jackson, standing tall in the darkness, watched Smith pass and thought that must be the captain of the cruiser. He remembered the talk of her raiding the length of the coast and of her hell-raising commander. There was a driving energy in the way he hastened up the road.

  A big trooper slouched up to the fire nearest Jackson, scowled at it morosely and spat into it. Jackson rasped, “You’re supposed to keep it going, Jasper, not put it out!”

  Without turning the trooper grumbled, “Aw, give it a rest, Jacka. We’re all sick o’ this flamin’ job.” He threw wood on the fire and slouched away, hands in the pockets of his patched breeches. Jackson grinned sympathetically. These men of his were a handful when out of the line as now. In Port Said they were worse than a handful and they weren’t allowed in Cairo at all. They had thrown a piano through a window in the course of one fight. There were men from sheep stations but also from many other jobs and backgrounds such as teachers and lawyers, including men who read poetry and one who wrote it. Their only uniformity was their toughness and soldiering skill and up here at the front they were the best, the very best, Jackson was certain.

  And they would be in the attack. Jackson’s grin faded. They would be moved up at the last minute and he thought maybe they were too good because when the attack came they would be right at the bloody front.

  *

  The village of Deir el Belah was a huddle of little grass-thatched houses and Finlayson’s headquarters lay north of it, in a tent the size of a large bungalow. It stood at the centre of the mesh of roads built by the army who had named them Dover Street, Oxford Street, the Strand — there was even a Marine View. In all the way from the shore Smith had met only the two men, but now that emptiness was behind him and he walked through a crowded, tented town. He had to wait for a convoy of camels to pass before he could cross to the H.Q. They rocked by under mountainous loads roped on to the big Buladi saddles, with their high cross-trees sticking up front and rear, 350 pounds to a load that included two fanatis, galvanised iron tanks of fresh water. They plodded past at their flat-footed two to three miles an hour and passed on into the night, heading eastward. In the day the roads and tracks carried traffic north up to Gaza but now they were crowded with column after column of camels, mules, horses and chugging lorries all moving eastward while night hid them from the Turks.

  An aide led him through an ante-room in the huge tent where a dozen clerks hammered at typewriters by the yellow light of paraffin lamps. Beyond was a room with a desk and a wide table spread with maps. Finlayson and Braddock straightened from stooping over the maps and Braddock said, “All right, Smith. Come on over here.” And as Smith crossed to the table: “How are those two men?”

  “They have a chance, sir.”

  “Bad luck, that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Two men he knew and liked, respected for their skills and the men they were, might die. But Braddock knew that and how Smith felt. There was nothing more to say.

  Finlayson said, “We’ve studied all your wireless reports and so have my Intelligence staff. Anything to add?”

  Smith hesitated, marshalling his thoughts, then said, “From Adana down to Gaza is roughly three hundred miles as the crow flies but the railway is about five hundred miles long because of the way it winds about. There are stretches the Shorts can’t reach but they have twice flown over the accessible areas — and that means most of the line from Adana down to Lydda — and seen nothing. This isn’t France or Germany where there are railway systems like spiders’ webs. There’s only the one track which runs down from Adana to the Gaza-Beersheba line with only a spur off here and there to Haifa, Jaffa and so on.”

  He paused and saw Finlayson shift impatiently. So he went on. “I know you are aware of this, sir. I only repeat it because it is relevant to my conclusion.” And when Finlayson nodded Smith went on, “Five thousand men on that railway means a dozen t
rains at least and they would be seen, if not on the first search then certainly during the second. They might have been passing through one of those patches of dead ground we couldn’t reach but the second search would have caught them in the open. They wouldn’t be hanging about in that dead ground because Kressenstein won’t let the Legion rest. He’ll ram it down to the Gaza-Beersheba line as fast as he can because the summer is ending and he knows General Allenby’s attack must come soon.” He paused then finished positively, “At this moment therefore I don’t believe the Afrika Legion has cleared Turkey.”

  Finlayson was nodding and smiling now. “I told you my staff studied your reports. They reached the same conclusion but they went a stage further. The Turks and Germans have supply problems already because they are desperately short of rolling stock on that railway. If they want to maintain their rate of supply to the front line, then they can’t turn over a dozen trains to the Legion. They’ll have to bring it down piecemeal and that means it will be too late.”

  Smith did not like that reasoning and said uneasily, “With respect, sir, I’m not too sure. Maybe the Germans have thought of a way around that one.”

  Finlayson’s fingers drummed testily on the map. “You bring us good news then try to put a dampener on it.”

  Smith remembered Finlayson’s distrust of unconventional officers and that with Edwards he was classed as such in Finlayson’s book. “Only giving my opinion, sir.”

  Finlayson grunted, glanced at Braddock. “I’d like the search to go on. When they do arrive, we want to know.”

  Braddock nodded and Smith said, “I propose to sail north immediately and patrol off the Gulf of Alexandretta. I believe the break in the line at the Taurus mountains will slow them up and that’s where we’ll find them.”

  They discussed it for a few minutes, leaning over the map and then Braddock agreed. Smith asked, “Any word from Edwards, sir?”

  Finlayson shook his iron-grey head. “Nothing. I’m not surprised because clearly the Legion isn’t there to be found.” He stretched wearily. Under the yellow light he looked older, tired, but he seemed less tense than when Smith had entered. As if summing up he said, “The date for the attack is confirmed, final. The build-up is exactly on time and Allenby will have the advantage of surprise on the day that he must have, that he has worked for. Only one German aircraft got over our lines in recent weeks and a Bristol Fighter of the Flying Corps shot it down. About two weeks ago a certain staff officer got lost in the desert and rode out into no-man’s-land. A patrol of Turkish cavalry saw him and shot at him so he ran for it, but he dropped his briefcase. The Turks found it covered in blood and stuffed with marked maps from a staff meeting — maps that showed a plan for an attack on Gaza.” Finlayson chuckled softly. “It worked. The Turks have reinforced Gaza.” His smile faded and he finished, “We need a victory. Badly. Allenby has been told to provide one and God willing, this time we shall have it.”