J. E. MacDonnell - 012

by Coffin Island(lit)

  J E MacDonnell - 012 - Coffin Island

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHRISTMAS DAY IN KURE that year dawned hard and clear and very cold. Above the vast spread of the naval dockyards hung a cloud-piled sky, sullen with the threat of snow. In front of the long piers, with their cranes nodding over ships in for repair and refit, waited the protected waters of Lyo Bay-lead-coloured, calm, unapproachable to enemy warships; blocked in by Shikoku Island on the south, and Kyushu on the west.

  Kure lies near the western tip, and on the southern side of Honshu, Japan's main island. Behind the water-lapped naval installations reared a spine of mountains; through them, disappearing into a big tunnel-mouth, ran the road to Hiroshima, 20 miles away to the northwest.

  A small fleet of fishing boats was anchored a few miles off-shore, riding safely in the easy wash of the protected bay. Each boat had a square stern and high pointed prow, so light that they breasted the waves like a flock of gulls.

  Each boat rated one man, standing in the stern, line-fishing- bare-legged, owning only a thin cotton jacket to halt the knives of the bitter wind. There was little clothing to be had in the land of Nippon-all the wool and cotton were needed for the uniforms of the Emperor's fighting forces.

  Now and again, as he waited for his line to twitch, each fisherman would turn his brown, hard face and stare at the shape clasped to the long pier by big berthing wires-a gigantic shape, almost completed, the greatest battleship in the world. Then, into each expressionless face came a look of vicious pride. It would not be long now before the giant Satsuma steamed to sea. When she did, the ships of the enemy yapping and biting at the sea-perimeter of the sacred islands would be scattered like a shoal of fish before the onslaught of a shark; and once again a fisherman could buy clothes and food to warm his body and fill his belly.

  As with fishermen, Christmas Day meant nothing to the workers in the dockyard. They flowed in through the gates in thick, black streams, and most of them ended their walk aboard the cavernous reaches of the Satsuma. They began work immediately.

  Already the bombers with the white five-pointed star on wings and belly had been over Tokio. They represented a small, token force, and they must have come from an aircraft-carrier. But they had come and they could be followed by more, and the vast spread of the naval base offered a natural and juicy target when they did come. Fortunately, the foreign swine knew nothing of what was happening there.

  No foreign Government knew anything about the Satsuma-not even Germany. They would probably have decried the information even if they had received it-a battleship weighing 50,000 tons, almost a thousand feet long, mounting nine 18-inch monster guns? There would be tolerant smiles in the Embassies to which such information usually filtered. The Japs were copyists, no original creators. Admittedly they had produced the Zero fighter, the best of its kind, but a fifty-thousand-ton battleship! Even if they were capable of building such a monster-which they weren't-it would turn turtle as soon as it slid from the slips and fell into the water.

  But the Satsuma did not turn turtle. She had forged into the waters of Kure Bay, dragging her tonnage of chains and weights behind her, and she had come to rest, floating solidly, immovable under the urge of the wind, a vast cliff of steel towering above the workshops and cranes and other ships. They had towed her to the fitting-out wharf, and there the workmen swarmed aboard her, filled with pride in their achievement and with hope of what she could do let her loose with her great guns in the Pacific. For two hard years they had toiled to get her ready; billions of yen had been poured into her guns and radar and boilers and armour-plating.

  Now, she was almost completed; a massive, unsinkable monument to their work and hopes.

  The battleship's captain walked through the gates. He walked steadily and deliberately past the destroyers and cruisers berthed under their cranes. Once, when his sidelong glance saw what enemy bombs had done to a cruiser's upper-works, his thin mouth curled down at each corner. The gesture could have been hateful, or vengeful.

  He slowed his pace when he came abreast his own gangway, and finally he halted, his head craned back, staring up at the controltowers and bridges ranging in steely symmetry high above the deck.

  Warned in his office of the captain's presence, the dockyard manager came hurrying along the pier. He eased alongside the uniformed figure, his face respectful-to be given command of this great brute of a ship, the captain must be both a first-class seaman, and looked upon fondly by the naval hierarchy.

  "Good morning, Captain Yamato," the manager said, "she is coming along nicely."

  Captain Yamato remained looking at his ship for five seconds. Then he turned his head and looked down at the manager. On each side of his nose a fold or furrow lanced from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed to be cut into his face. He was not (as is the popular conception) short and bow-legged; he was close to six feet tall, and built sideways in proportion. Nor did he hiss and bow (an even more erroneous conception); his voice when he answered was hard and clear.

  "Not nearly fast enough, Tosa. She must be at sea within a month!"

  "A month, captain? But..."

  Yamato silenced him with a brief movement of his right hand. Then he continued the gesture to take in the pier to their left.

  "There is a cruiser. She has been bombed. You have men working on her. Which is more important? To get a damaged ship to sea, or to finish the Satsuma?"

  "I know, captain, the urgency, but..."

  "American bombers have already been over Tokio," the cold voice spoke above him. "They will be back. If one reconnaissance aircraft sees what we have down here they will consider no risk too great to bomb her."

  "They will not sink her!" The manager said fiercely.

  "They will not sink her," Yamato agreed coldly. "But they could damage her. One heavy bomb on her superstructure will delay her sailing a month." The hard, oblique eyes glanced down at him. "You are not a seaman, Tosa. Yet even you should realise how helpless even such a ship as ours is when tied up at a pier." He paused, and the manager licked his lips, looking anywhere but up at the captain's eyes.

  "I am surprised that I should have to point these things out," Yamato went on, and Tosa wriggled at the tone. "Perhaps Naval

  Headquarters have overestimated your zeal."

  Fear chased the apprehension across Tosa's brown face.

  "No, captain, no! You know that is not so! There is no one- excepting your illustrious self-who desires more than I to get the ship to sea!"

  "Then the men on the cruiser will be sent here?"

  "At once! They will begin work at once!" Yamato permitted himself a slight smile. "That is wise of you, Tosa. When the Americans find out about my ship, I want it to be in the open ocean, with their convoys going down in flames." The smile hardened. "See to it now!"

  Tosa nodded, three swift jerks of his head. Then he almost ran towards the cruiser. Yamato watched him go, and then his eyes swung back to the towering steel above him. His face hard and expressionless, he walked deliberately up the gangway.

  Christmas Day outside Sydney that year dawned, as it usually did, fine and hot and clear. Four thousand miles south of Kure the sun lifted above the eastern horizon and showered that southern world with brilliant light. The sky was brushed clear by a light wind, and the sea was a miracle of azure, broken into a million sparkling facets under the gentle suasion of the breeze.

  Westward, the sun shone on the coastal mountains of New South Wales, rolling like the chest muscles of a giant; closer, it warmed the grey sides and superstructure of H.M.A. destroyer Wind Rode, despatched north from Sydney the night before on her lawful occasions-to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he could be found.

  Wind Rode was a
lone on this sparkling sea; neither smoke nor mast broke the even weld of sea and sky. She was a new ship, but she was not, at this particular moment, a happy one. Last night, when she had sailed, there had been uttered things about the Commonwealth Naval Board which would have made the senior officers who comprised that august body reach for keel-hauling ropes if they had heard them.

  But Wind Rode's complaints had been uttered in the privacy of mess-decks and hammocks. "Their's not to reason why" had no application here-they reasoned loudly and logically, and the general tenor of their reasoning took this line-the ship, brand-new, had been lying alongside Garden Island for months while she had been fitted-out with all her aids to destruction-radar, guns, depth-charges, big torpedoes. Now, the night before Christmas Day, the congenital idiots in whose palsied and unprintable hands ships' movements lay had sent her to sea. Not a week before, which they would have understood, nor yet a day after Christmas Day, which they would have understood and been thankful for; but the night before, so that they were a hundred miles north of their home port when Christmas Day dawned.

  It looked almost deliberate. It was not, of course. The senior officers who had decided Wind Rode's sailing time had spent many Christmases at sea themselves, and their ordered time of sailing had been governed by only one factor-was the ship ready to sail? She was, and so she went. The closeness of Christmas was purely coincidental, and had no bearing whatever on the matter. There were several hundred Allied warships who would eat their Christmas dinner at sea that year-if they had time in between submarine and air-attacks to eat at all-and it was inconceivable that a new and heavily-gunned destroyer should be kept out of the action area a minute longer than was necessary.

  So Wind Rode sailed.

  A hairy-chested able-seaman swung out of his hammock on that Christmas morning, just missed planting his big foot on the face of the man sleeping on the mess-table below him, scratched his belly, looked round at the petulant complainers dressing themselves, and summed it all up through the age-old scapegoat.

  "What are you whingein' about? You know the bloody Navy. Nelson went to sea on Christmas Day-so we go to sea!" Summary delivered, he picked up his towel and forced through the swaying hammocks to the bathroom.

  Wind Rode's bridge was a scene of quiet efficiency-you were an officer, so you suppressed your complaints inside your disciplined mind. First-lieutenant Bob Randall, as is usual in destroyers, had the morning watch, from four a.m. till eight. Though there was no need of navigation here-the well-known coast to port was more than sufficient for competent pilotage-he had taken star sights just before dawn, to get his hand in. Randall's banana-fingered hand had been mixed up in everything but navigation and seamanship for months past, and he needed the practice. He admitted this ruefully to himself when he noticed that he had taken almost an hour to work out sights which normally employed him for half that time. He also noticed that his star-sight position put him ten miles further to the east than the actual point he got from his coast bearings. As the latter were accurate, he put his other deficiency down to the unsteadiness of his shore-side hand while holding the sextant...

  A step sounded on the bridge ladder behind him.

  He turned, expecting it. He had already put his cap on, so that he was able to salute his captain, as is traditional, on sighting for the first time of the day.

  "Good morning, sir," he greeted cheerfully, "on-course, no ships in sight, weather calm and clear."

  "Good morning, Bob," Lieutenant-commander Bentley answered, and automatically looked round the horizon. Randall waited while the captain quartered the guiltless sky overhead, then he said:

  "Happy Christmas."

  "Huh," Bentley grunted, and then remembered the signalman and the bosun's mate. "Thanks, Bob," a little more cheerfully, "same to you."

  "Usual issue?" Randall grinned, correctly interpreting Bentley's change of attitude.

  "Yes. I mean no," Bentley rubbed his unshaven chin. "Make it two bottles a man. It might take some of the sourness out of `em." He looked up at Randall quickly. "But tell `em they're to drink it right away."

  Randall nodded. At the moment they were just north of Sydney- safe country. If some of the crew kept their two free-issue bottles of beer for a later date, they could be drunk a few minutes before a gunlayer or radar operator required all his faculties at razor sharpness.

  "The Old Man been up yet?" Bentley asked in a low voice. Randall shook his head.

  "I'd say this is the first time he's been carried as a passenger, and he's making the most of it."

  Bentley grinned, so that the disciplined hardness of his burned face broke up.

  "Don't you believe it. He's been all over the ship already. The only reason he's not up here is because he's down in the paint-locker somewhere."

  Bentley's grin tightened on his cigarette. The two young officers were somewhat unfair to their passenger, who was known by the name of Captain Sainsbury, V.C., and known for an auntyish exterior which hid a terrier-like propensity for fighting-he had, one day, sunk five U-boats in the Atlantic. Captain Sainsbury, while in command of destroyer Scimitar, had taught both Bentley and Randall most of what they knew, and both men (in the secrecy of their own minds) idolised him. Now he was in command of the Tenth Destroyer Flotilla, of which Wind Rode formed the newest component. Sainsbury had flown down to Melbourne to attend an important conference on naval policy, leaving his own ship in Port Moresby. He could, of course, have flown back to her-but he would as soon miss the chance of sailing back in a brand-new ship commanded by his protege as he would deliberately throw himself overboard into a sea infested with sharks.

  And he was not, at this moment, down in the paint-locker, or poking around in some other of Wind Rode's nether compartments: he was mounting, in his quiet, deliberate way, the bridge ladder.

  "It beats me," Randall was saying. He unslung his binoculars and hitched them over the soft-iron sphere on the magnetic compass. "He could have flown back in a fast aircraft, had Christmas Day at home, and what does he do? Deliberately passes that up so he can chug along in a blasted destroyer. Maybe he's getting old, eh? I know what I would have done!"

  A thin, high-pitched cough sounded behind them.

  The two men wheeled round.

  They stared into a thin, high-bridged face with a pursed mouth and gimlet eyes, whose piercing glance seemed to reach out and stick them, so that they wriggled like grubs on a pin.

  "Oh... ah..." said Randall expressively, and rubbed his hand across his mouth like a schoolboy caught pinching chalk.

  "Good morning, Bentley, good morning, Randall," said the thin, penetrating voice. "Happy Christmas to you both. I'm not," he went on, overriding their replies, "getting old. Nor do I require my head read, as you seemed to imply."

  Randall's eyes studied the rivets in the deck as if they were nuggets of gold. "I elected to return to my ship via this one for the good and simple reason that I doubt if you two experienced old sea-dogs can handle her without my help."

  They knew they were forgiven then-Randall for speaking as he had, Bentley for listening. Bentley said-and he was only half-joking-" It's nice to have your help around, sir."

  "I hope it does not need to be exercised, Bentley," the thin voice decided, and the vinegary face twitched in the closest it ever got to a smile.

  "No, sir," Bentley agreed, and he meant it. All three of these officers had had what could be called a gluttonous share of the war at sea, and, being normal men, and not copybook heroes, were quite content for Wind Rode's passage up to Moresby to be completely free of untoward incident. After that... but they did not think of what would certainly be waiting for them in the torn waters of the Pacific, with the Allied offensive against Japan mounting in weight and savage intensity.

  Bentley looked at Sainsbury, and his mind reverted to a favourite subject-one he had been toying with ever since he had learned that they would have a distinguished passenger on the way north. Wind Rode was a new ship, and some of her office
rs were in the same category. It would amount almost to a dereliction of his captainly duty if he did not persuade Sainsbury to give at least one lecture to the wardroom-for Bentley was quite definite in his own mind that there was no other man, in any Navy, who was more fitted to talk on the offensive character of destroyers in wartime. Captain Sainsbury had not got the letters after his name through his good looks...

  "I was thinking, sir," Bentley began, and put a thoughful frown on his good-looking, piratical face.

  "I know," the thin voice said, and the vulturine head nodded. "You were thinking that I should be roped in for a lecture."

  "Yes, sir," Bentley grinned, not surprised, for he had hinted at the matter before.

  "The lecture can wait," Sainsbury decided flatly. "Today is Christmas Day, and neither the lecturer nor the audience would be interested."

  "Yes, sir."

  "What I would like to do," Sainsbury's lips drew together in the purse-string variation of a smile, "would be to walk round the ship to see what they do in the matter of decorations. It has been my experience that destroyermen are somewhat versatile and-ah- unconventional in the matter of Christmas decorations. And even though this craft you command is more like a young battleship than a destroyer, most of its men learned their knots and splices in the boats. Could that be arranged?"