by Alan Evans
He stood up and leaned to one side to peer past the radiator, pushing up the goggles. He tapped Pearce’s shoulder, pointed to a thicker patch of darkness in the murk ahead and Pearce nodded, eased the Short over a point or two and steadied it on the new course. Smith remained standing in the battering wind as the Short closed the smoke. If it was smoke? Delilah was losing height as Pearce brought her down. There was something ... it was smoke ... and under it a ship!
Pearce yelled, “That’s her!”
Smith dropped back in his seat, switched on the wireless, unreeled the aerial furiously, then tapped out again and again Walküre’s position, course and speed as Pearce sent Delilah sliding down after the cruiser. Smith wondered if his signal was being received or whether they were out of range. He had no way of knowing. He reeled in the aerial as Pearce glanced back at him and nodded, tight-lipped.
Long ago the pilot had said you would have to be lucky to get near a ship like Walküre, but Smith knew Pearce had been keeping back some idea of his own. Now he eased forward the big wheel, Delilah’s nose dipped and their dive steepened until Smith could see over Pearce and the upper wing to Walküre floating up towards them. They had been seen. The guns were flaming aboard the big cruiser and the Short lurched as a shell burst close, then steadied under Pearce’s hands.
Walküre was big now and Smith saw she had been mauled by Dauntless, there was damage amidships and aft and one gun pointed askew. She was huge! She seemed to climb above them as Pearce hauled back on the wheel and Delilah pulled out of the dive with her floats skimming the surface of the sea. They were under the traverse of the worst of Walküre’s guns. Smoke streamed past them and it was smoke from Walküre’s funnels rolling down across the sea, half-hiding them for the final approach. But then they were through it, above it as Delilah climbed. She lurched again, side-slipped, then, for brief seconds only, was flying level and sweeping in through a torrent of fire, low over Walküre’s stern. Smith remembered Pearce’s harsh dictum: “To hit a ship under way you’d have to sit the Short on the funnel!”
Pearce did it.
The smoke-belching funnels loomed like towers as Delilah bucked and dipped wildly in the heat-laden air they streamed. Smith saw Pearce yank on the toggle release, felt the lift as the bomb fell away and a second later they were past Walküre , tearing away ahead of her over open sea and he was twisted in his seat. He saw the after of the two funnels topple and the smoke jetting, the soaring wreckage, felt and heard the explosion. Walküre dwindled as the Short laboured away, her guns still firing. Delilah shook again and again, holes appeared in the fuselage and fabric streamed on the wind then tore away.
The Short was climbing slowly and turning in a shallow bank to port. Walküre was far behind them but Smith saw she still poured out smoke — and she was stopped. There was neither bow-wave nor wake and Walküre lay dead on the sea.
He thumped Pearce on the shoulder and bawled at him, “You got her, Chris!” Pearce looked round and his teeth showed in a grin but then he turned back to his flying and briefly his head sagged, jerked up again to peer ahead past the radiator. Smith shouted, “Chris! Are you all right?” Pearce nodded but he was lying, Smith could see the great holes torn in the Short around the pilot’s cockpit. He shouted again, “Anything I can do?” This time Pearce shook his head and slowly Smith sat down. He wound out the aerial and switched on the wireless, tapped out that Walküre was hit and stopped and her position. That Delilah was returning. She droned on shot through and tattered, over a darkening sea.
He was first to see the light that wavered on the horizon like a beckoning finger. He leaned forward to point it out to Pearce who nodded, hands opening and closing more tightly on the big wheel. They flew towards the light and Smith made out through the rain and the darkness closing around them that it was a searchlight from Dauntless. Blackbird was alongside her and stopped to make a lee, her funnel smoke trailing downwind.
Pearce had shrunk down in his seat, struggled ineffectually to sit up but Smith grabbed his shoulders and hoisted him upright, held him there. Pearce’s lips were moving again as he turned Delilah into the wind and brought her down until she skimmed the tops of the waves then rubbed the floats into them, set her down in a burst of spray. Smith’s arms ached with holding Pearce as the pilot worked the throttle and the Short swerved erratically into Blackbird’s lee, turned too late and crumpled a wing against the ship’s side, despite the seamen on the rubbing strake striving to boom her off. The engine cut out. Smith had to let go of Pearce to crawl past him and grab at the heaving line, haul down the block and hook on the Short. He turned then and sprawled across the fuselage as the Short was tossed on the sea, saw Pearce collapsed in the cockpit and reached down to lift his head.
Pearce said, “Good old Delilah.”
Smith barely heard the whispered words, felt Pearce sag. The winch hammered but as the wire tautened the ring on the Short’s centre-section tore loose, its retaining wires severed and trailing. Smith realised they must have been cut by shell-fire, also that with the engine dead and the Short not secured she would smash herself to pieces against Blackbird’s hull.
“Sir!”
He twisted his head around to the shout. The cutter was slipping in below him, bow reaching out to seize a float, Buckley at the tiller. Smith croaked, hoarse now, “Give me a hand here! Mr. Pearce is hit!”
Two of the cutter’s crew clawed their way up to him and together they got Pearce down into the boat as the sea pounded Delilah on to the steel of the ship’s side, tried to tear them from their hold on the breaking-up Short. Smith sat in the sternsheets and held the pilot as the cutter pulled back to Dauntless where Merryweather waited. But Chris Pearce died in Smith’s arms in the cutter.
Smith went to the bridge and asked Ackroyd, “You received our signals?”
Ackroyd frowned. “Signals? Sparks only heard bits of one that said Walküre was stopped and you were on your way back.”
So if the Short had been shot out of the sky as Pearce made his attack on the cruiser then her position would never have been reported and Smith would have vanished without trace. He looked across and saw the seamen busy aboard Blackbird, trying to get lines around the damaged Short, and ordered Ackroyd, “Tell them to belay that and sink her.” Then he added, “We haven’t time.” That was as explanation and it was true. If there were many who would be glad to see the last of Delilah, they were wrong. The war, not Delilah, had killed Chris Pearce. Delilah had found Walküre for them, in Pearce’s hands had stopped her and then got them home. And Chris was dead ...
He stirred uneasily, turned his back on Delilah as Dauntless got under way. It was true they could not waste a second let alone a half-hour rescuing one smashed seaplane — Walküre had been stopped but her engineers might get steam on her again. So Dauntless worked up to her pitiful twelve knots while Blackbird took up station to port and the little chaser to starboard. They went hunting Walküre in a creeping line.
Henderson, one eye on Smith propped against the bridge screen, said, “This is like shoving your head in the lion’s mouth.”
Ackroyd muttered, “You’re a cheerful bastard!” But Henderson was right.
*
Dauntless rocked to a beam sea and the sluicing rain made worse the darkness of the night. Smith asked Jameson, “Torpedo gunner is ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He fires on my order and not before. Tell him.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Because they would only get one chance.
And it would come soon.
Walküre, if she were still stopped, was somewhere close ahead of them. She still had teeth, more than enough to deal with this puny force of ships. If he was to have any chance at all, Smith needed Blackbird and the chaser, but Walküre could destroy the carrier with one salvo and the chaser with a single big shell from her 8-inch guns. And Dauntless would get only one chance.
Smith rubbed sore and aching eyes, set the glasses to them again. He p
icked out the bulk of Blackbird under her smoke, then swept the glasses slowly through an arc across the bow of Dauntless and then on, seeking the chaser now. He only found her because he knew where to look. Low in the water as she was, only the broken water of her bow and the phosphorescence of her wake marked her.
Jameson said softly, “Hell of a game of blind-man’s-buff.”
Apart from her labouring engines the ship was eerily quiet, as if every man aboard her held his breath, nerves strung tight by waiting through the dragging minutes, waiting for the flash out in the darkness and the shattering blow from the salvo that would follow if Walküre saw them first ...
The flash and the crash came as one and snapped their heads around.
“Chaser, sir!” That was Bright reporting. But all of them had seen the flaming explosion to starboard.
Was she hit?
But a heartbeat later a star-shell burst ahead and to starboard. The chaser had not been hit but had fired her gun and the star-shell lit Walküre.
“Starboard ten!” Smith gave the order as he saw Walküre was still stopped and a scant mile away. Dauntless turned as the darkness rushed back to hide Walküre and he ordered, “Steady! ... Steer that!”
The beams of searchlights poked out from Walküre and fingered jerkily across the surface of the sea until one of them found the chaser and the other beams closed on the little ship, lit her up. She was turning as she fired her little 3-inch again and a second star-shell burst above Walküre as the gun-flashes prickled along the big cruiser’s side. The fall of those shells hid the chaser in huge towers of water and when they fell she was gone. Smith tore his eyes away from the beams where they lit a torn and empty sea and stared ahead of him over the bow at the source of those lights, at Walküre.
A gun cracked again to starboard and Jameson yelled, “The chaser ducked out of it! Bloody good, Petersen!”
The beams of light were searching frantically. Smith’s orders to both the chaser and Blackbird had been to draw the fire to give Dauntless a chance to close. As things had turned out Petersen had drawn the short straw because Walküre lay at his end of the line, and now he was carrying out his orders. They were certain to kill him in minutes — Smith had known that when he gave them, and gave them anyway because he had to, because it was the only way he might win that one chance for Dauntless.
But Walküre was alive to the threat now. The night vision of all aboard her would be destroyed by the firing and the lights but the beams of the searchlights were swinging out to sweep all around her, not just seeking the chaser. And this was no textbook torpedo attack by a greyhound destroyer hurtling in at thirty-odd knots; this was one battered, frail light cruiser limping to destruction. But they were closing.
A beam flickered over Dauntless and on, wavered, returned and it lit them all on the bridge. Smith ordered, “Starboard ten!” Walküre lay only a half-mile distant and the turn would take Dauntless closer still before pulling away. The bow started to swing. Flashes licked out at them from Walküre and a second later hell broke loose on Dauntless.
She rocked and shook through her frame as the shells hit her, flame spurted and splinters whirred. The tripod mast, severed high above the bridge, crumpled and fell to hang against the starboard side with the control-top over the sea. Rigging collapsed like a steel and hempen web across the bridge and one big double-pulley block felled Henderson. The top of the second funnel disappeared, blasted out of existence and it seemed that the length of the upper deck was aflame. Smith was numbly aware that Dauntless was still turning, Jameson and Bright stood with him while Buckley stooped over Henderson. Walküre lay to port and she was so close the black bulk of her filled his vision. He croaked, “Fire!” He did not hear his own voice but Jameson saw him mouth the order and repeated it to the torpedo gunner in the waist.
Smith lurched across to the port wing of the bridge and stared aft, squinting against the smoke and the glare of searchlights and flames. He saw the port tubes and the gunner on his seat, saw one torpedo leap out into the sea, then the other. Guns flashed again on Walküre and he was thrown to the deck as the shells ripped into Dauntless.
She still turned. He pulled himself up by the screen, held on to it and stared across at Walküre as Dauntless slowly swung away so now the big cruiser was off the port quarter. It was nearly half-a-minute since the torpedoes were fired and at any second there would come another broadside from the big cruiser and Dauntless could not stand much more.
The sea lifted against Walküre’s side right under her bridge and a second later it spouted again below the solitary funnel the bomb had left her. The thumping explosions came deeply to him across the sea dividing the ships and the beams of the searchlights jerked away, wandered aimlessly about the sea as if the directing hands had been torn from them. Maybe they had. The salvo did not come, only a single gun fired and the shell shrieked overhead. Walküre was slipping astern of them now.
He shouted hoarsely, “Meet her! ... Steer that!”
The searchlights went out and he peered blindly into the rain and the darkness that was broken by the yellow lick of the fires that roared aboard Dauntless. Walküre was lost in the night somewhere astern of them. He was certain she was finished but he had to be sure. While he listened to Ackroyd’s report the torpedo gunner and his crew were loading the tubes again. When Ackroyd finished reading the long list from the smudged pages of his notebook, Smith summed up for him: “So we’re afloat and under way and that’s the best you can say.”
He had to raise his voice above the roaring fires. Ackroyd nodded, the whites of his eyes gleaming through the grime and soot.
Smith said, “We’ll attack again.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Dauntless turned and dragged herself once more towards her quarry, while Ackroyd’s stumbling, exhausted parties still fought the fires aft and in the smoke-filled inferno below. Ackroyd went down to that inferno but paused briefly at the sick bay to shove his head in at the hooked-back door and ask, “How’re things, Doc?”
Merryweather did not look up from the gash he was stitching, only jerked his head sideways indicating the crowded sick bay. And this was only where he operated, most of the wounded had spilled over on to the mess-deck. He seemed to work in a mist of air made thick with the smell of blood and antiseptic. “As you see. What’s happening?”
Ackroyd answered, “We’re attacking again.” He pushed away from the door and was gone to his duties.
Merryweather whispered, “Jesus wept!” His gaze lifted and fastened on Adeline Brett where she knelt on the deck, her quick fingers completing the dressing on a man’s chest. He smiled up at her weakly, grateful as she rose to her feet and drew the back of her hand across her brow.
Matthews, the cook, had brought a man in and sat him against the bulkhead clutching a makeshift bandage about his leg. As the cook made to leave Merryweather said, “Here, Matthews, take Miss Brett on deck but see her safe under cover.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Adeline protested, “Why? I’m perfectly all right. I —”
Merryweather cut her short. “Never mind what she says. She’s not all right. Take her out of this if you have to carry her and get some clean air into her lungs.” To himself he added, “We’ll need her again soon. Or she might get a chance in a boat or a life-raft. I’ll not keep her down here for the end of it.”
The cook’s big hand encircled Adeline’s arm and she had to go.
*
Blackbird and the chaser were left astern; there was no point in exposing them again to Walküre’s guns and this time Dauntless would not have to search for the big cruiser. They saw the light of fires aboard her now and Smith stared at them as Dauntless crept towards her. Until he ordered, “Searchlight.”
The beam swept out from above the bridge, settled on Walküre and edged along her length. She was listed to port and down by the head, already her deck forward was awash as far as the bridge. Boats were clustered at her side and filling with men,
while other crowded boats pulled away from her. They were launching life-rafts. Her ensign still flew but no gun fired.
Smith said quietly, “Slow ahead both.”
The little way Dauntless had fell off until there was barely a ripple at her stem as she edged in towards Walküre and the boats.
Buckley said, “If you’ll let me have that jacket, sir. It’s a bit of a mess. I found this one in your sea-cabin.” He held Smith’s best jacket and said apologetically, “Nothing much left o’ the cabin aft, sir.”
Smith nodded, dragged off the filthy, soaked garment and pulled on the other, shoved his hands in his pockets and found the letter. He took it out, frowning, then remembered. Braddock’s broad hand was scrawled across the envelope: “Cdr. D. C. Smith.” He broke the seal, took out the single sheet of paper and held it up to his eyes. In the spilt light from the searchlight’s beam he read:
I could not tell you this before you set Edwards ashore to lead the attack on Lydda because I would not add the burden of this knowledge to the others you already bear. But Edwards is the cousin I mentioned. He will, no doubt, contest your grandfather’s will ...
There followed reassurances but Smith crumpled the letter into a ball in his fist and threw it over the side. Braddock was mistaken; Edwards would not contest the will because he lay dead by the railway track outside of Lydda. So Smith would inherit after all. Edwards his cousin, of the same blood? Selfish, ambitious, wild — there could be a lot of Edwards in himself. But it was all irrelevant, unreal. This was reality, this shattered ship of his, the big sea running and Walküre’s boats pitching as Dauntless slipped down to them.
Lofty Williams came from the wireless office aft, climbed the twisted ladder to the bridge and handed the signal to Smith. “From the admiral, sir.”
Smith read it and lifted his eyes, saw them all on the bridge watching him and said, “The Australians have taken Beersheba.”
