J. E. MacDonnell - 012

by Coffin Island(lit)

  His brown face expressionless, he thought with prideful satisfaction that no shell, even an armour-piercing projectile, from an American or British battleship could punch in through that thick solidity of hardened steel. Paradoxically, the only craft who might open her up would be a destroyer. Torpedoes. But even then she would have to hit with a full salvo of ten, a maximum hitting effect which had never yet happened in naval warfare. Captain Yamato allowed his lips to ease in a hard smile as he thought of what he would do to any destroyer who forced in close enough to ensure all her torpedoes hitting. With the brief smile he dismissed the possibility of a destroyer's strike against him.

  He walked slowly down her length, passing the engine-rooms. From these massive compartments sprang the four forged shafts connected to her four propellers, turned by an output of 150,000 shaft horsepower-enough to thrust her bulk through the sea at 32 knots-not much slower than a destroyer! To handle this vast tonnage at high speed she mounted steering gear of novel design, with a rudder that could be swung hard-over in thirty seconds at full speed. Captain Yamato did not know, nor would he have cared if he did, that this steering system was a faithful copy of that incorporated in the British battleships King George V and Duke of York. All that concerned him was that he had it.

  He stopped abreast the cliff of steel which was the bridge. But his interest did not lie there-though inordinately massive, it was still only a bridge, the only unfamiliar thing about it its size. What captured his attention was B-turret, which squatted its bulk directly below the bridge. Here, protruding from the armoured face of the turret like three rigid pythons in their camouflaged paint, was the main purpose of all the armour-plate and engines, the towering bridges and the nine hundred feet stretch of her deck-the 16-inch guns. She mounted four triple turrets, 12 monster guns in all, each one of them weighing one hundred and twenty tons, firing a shell weighing a ton and a half, bursting it from the muzzle at a velocity of three thousand feet per second. Flung by half a ton of cordite, there was no armour afloat which could withstand the shock of receiving such a shell. If only half of the Satsuma's broadside of twelve projectiles were to hit, they would burst the object of their high-velocity flight open to the sea.

  Captain Yamato felt a sudden and fierce impatience to get this impregnable vessel to sea to pit her against anything the enemy could put before her. His impatience grew when he thought of the sea-trials ahead of her, but he quietened it by rememberance of their necessity.

  Yet his face was inscrutable when he walked further on and came to a stop directly under her bow. Captain Yamato had been trained since his boyhood in one single thing-the art of destruction. He had practised it with conspicuous success in his manhood. Yet even his agate soul was moved by the sheer beauty of the shape in front of him. The battleship's bow rose from a knife-edge, at the water's edge, in a graceful and perfectly symmetrical flare to meet her upper-deck guard-rails: a symphony in steel.

  He dragged his gaze from her bow and looked aft along the bulging belly. And he saw one thing in all this strength that worried him. The heavy armour-plate covered her vulnerable belly, thickly and impenetrably. He would have liked the armour to extend its protection to her bow and propelled stern, but there were considerations of speed and manoeuvrability and stability, as well as the lack of suitable steel. The workshops of the embattled country had been scoured for special steel to build this monster, and only the appeal to national pride in her completion rode over the objections of other war-material manufacturers.

  Even so, he thought grimly, in her comparatively un-armoured sections she was still stronger than any other vessel of her class. Of her class? She was in a class by herself.

  "Good morning, Tai-sa," a respectful voice said beside him.

  Yamato recognised the voice of Tosa, the dockyard manager. He ignored the familiar rendering of "captain," recognising that though Tosa would jump when he commanded, it was foolish to deliberately and needlessly antagonise the little man who was responsible more than any other for the Satsuma's completion. Even so, he kept his gaze on the ship for several more seconds before he answered:

  "Good morning, Tosa. You are up to schedule?"

  "No, Tai-sa," the soft voice answered him.

  Yamato swung upon him, his weatherbeaten face hard and savage. Tosa recognised the symptoms, and he added hurriedly:

  "We are a day ahead of schedule, sir."

  Yamato noticed the return to formality, and he smiled inwardly. His face and manner were still grim when he said:

  "That is good, Tosa. You will keep it that way."

  Yamato swung about and strode down the pier towards the gangway. Deprived of the congratulations he had expected, Tosa stared after him, his lips twitching.

  "Bushido pig!" he snarled softly. "You fool-this is my ship!" He walked quickly to his office, to vent his feelings on juniors who would absorb them.

  About him as he went the huge dockyard was filled with clamour-the chattering cacophony of pneumatic riveters, the clang of hammers, the whining of electric cranes. And most of the noise came from the vast waiting bulk of the new battleship. But Tosa did not notice the Satsuma's birth-sounds. He was used to them.

  Wind Rode was making good time at her economical cruising speed. At five o'clock, when Randall took his running sun-sight, she was put down on the chart as being fifty miles south-east of Saumarez Reef, which itself lay just outside the Great Barrier, off MacKay. The destroyer had come up outside the Reef-she had no need to put in at any coastwise port, she liked plenty of open space to hunt in, and the twists and turns of the inner passage were not made any healthier by the extinction of all leading-lights.

  Randall came over and told Bentley the ship's position, and then left him to continue his conversation with Captain Sainsbury.

  The older man was not, like Bentley, a gunnery specialist. He had of course a working knowledge of everything his ship carried in the way of offensive armament, but his main forte was seamanship: his flotilla-leader carried specialist officers to ensure the correct functioning of her aids to survival.

  That afternoon Bentley had been talking of the electronic wonders of his new ship. Sainsbury could not hope to understand the technical jargon with which the younger man tried to explain the navigational and gunnery-control radar whose weirdly-shaped antennae cluttered the aluminium latticework mast above their heads. There were few destroyer commanders who could have, and Bentley's superior knowledge was due mainly to the special course he had taken at the radar school on South Head.

  Nor could Sainsbury be expected to be au fait with the uncanny omniscience of the asdic sets which automatically controlled the firing of the triple-barrelled "squid" on the quarter-deck. But he could understand the enthusiasm of the younger man for the scientific aids which made of this destroyer a fantastically deadly young cruiser in comparison with the cockle-shells in which Sainsbury had learned his ship-handling.

  So that the nods of his gaunt and sparsely-haired head were not of technical understanding, but of thankfulness that the Navy still bred men who loved their craft and their weapons. With that he was content.

  As is well known to travellers of the Grey Funnel Line, their naval life is composed mainly of unrelieved monotony, climaxed by a few swift minutes of action. So that the incidents which followed one another in startling succession on the destroyer's bridge just before dusk that night fitted naturally into the pattern of naval life.

  Bentley and Sainsbury were still yarning on the bridge after action-stations had fallen out, enjoying the cool quietness of dusk. Now and again each man's eyes sought out the darkening sea ahead, unconsciously, automatically, noting the long, smooth swells growing from out of the northward, gliding with a quiet presage of menace to meet the ship. Each knew what those swells meant, each had estimated the strength of the blow which would follow, and each had not the slightest alarm in his mind as to what it and the sea could do to this modern, well-found greyhound.

  Sainsbury smiled at his though
ts and said:

  "Your precious radar won't be able to do anything about this, Peter."

  Bentley, nodding, remembered a new Admiralty publication he'd been reading on tracking the paths of cyclones-not that this promised to rate anything as high as that. He eased himself from his stool.

  "I'll jump below and get it for you. You'll be interested-a lot of new ideas."

  He walked to the top of the almost vertical bridge ladder. In the dim light the bosun's mate was just ahead of him, about to start his rounds of piping "Hands to supper." The seaman, fumbling for his bosun's call, found he'd left it on the chart-table. He turned at the head of the ladder. Bentley's big body cannoned abruptly into him. The bosun's mate fell headlong, almost without touching a rung, to the steel deck fifteen feet below.

  When the surgeon got to him he found him unconscious and breathing with a startling sort of rattling sound, interposed with wheezings. It needed a less-skilled diagnosis than the doctor's to realise what had happened-the shock of his body striking that unresistant deck had broken two of his ribs and forced them like puncturing swords into his lungs.

  The surgeon ordered him carried carefully down to the little sick-bay and then ran up the bridge ladder.

  Bentley was waiting for him, his face worried.

  "No go, sir," the surgeon shook his head. "Ribs have punctured his lungs. It would be a major job to open the chest cavity. In any case, I couldn't operate-I'd need an intra-tracheal anaesthetic, a tube right down his throat and into his lungs. Once I exposed the lungs they would collapse-he couldn't breathe then. So it must be an intra-tracheal. And I haven't anything like that equipment on board."

  "Can you manage him till we get to the mainland?" came Sainsbury's quiet voice.

  "Yes, sir. He's not in any real danger unless I incise into the chest cavity."

  "Right!" Bentley decided briskly. "Mackay is the nearest port. We'll alter in through the Reef now. All right, Doc," he nodded dismissal, "we'll get him there."

  When the surgeon had gone below Sainsbury crossed to the chart with Bentley. They bent in together. Bentley's forefinger whispered across the parchment.

  "Through here. Fitzroy Passage, where Swain Reef comes out to meet the Barrier." He looked sideways at his companion. "It won't upset your schedule, sir. I'll crack on a bit tomorrow and make it up."

  Sainsbury did not answer. He withdrew his skinny body from inside the canvas weather-dodger and looked forward over the fo'c'sle, to the white patch of B turret, livid in the dying light's gleam; the fence of grey guardrail stanchions marching on ghostly legs to converge at the bullring; the flat blackness of the fo'c'sle itself, all swooping swiftly over the rising sea, invisible now save where the arrow-headed bow was flanked occasionally by barbs of fleeting white, and a slight exploding of spray as she buried her snout.

  Impatiently Bentley glanced at him. All he saw was a narrow-gutted reef passage through which he had to con his ship ahead of the approaching weather. For the first time, but only very vaguely, he began to regret Sainsbury's presence on board. Undoubtedly Bentley was captain of the ship, but undoubtedly Sainsbury was his flotilla-leader: there was a moral obligation to hear his comments on the decision.

  Come on, Bentley urged mentally, for Pete's sake say something!

  Sainsbury turned his head, his dark-burned face edged sharply in the grey of hair and eyebrows.

  "I am not concerned with my schedule, Peter. You're taking Fitzroy Passage?"

  Oh, hell, here it was! The thing every commander dreaded- divided command. "Yes, sir. It's the quickest route in."

  Captain Sainsbury did not comment, verbally, on his lack of right to intrude. His question to a young lieutenant-commander indicated the appreciation of his own position. He looked up at the rangy length of the other.

  "You won't have much to go on in this sea. I remember the reef is just about awash either side?"

  Bentley curbed himself. He was impatient to give the course-alteration order and to get on with the job. He could not understand Sainsbury's hesitancy. It was a case of simple navigation. And hadn't he spent all the afternoon telling him about their radar equipment?

  "Radar will pick it up all right, sir. There's no danger."

  Bentley felt the older man stiffen at the word. He pulled his pipe from his mouth and grunted:

  "All right. Peter, she's your ship."

  Bentley almost answered "Yes, sir." She was his ship, the decisions were his, and if anything went wrong there was only one boy to take the can-him! Then his unaccustomed heat brought him up with a round turn. What the hell was wrong with him? Touchy because this was the first out of the ordinary job he'd handled in his new command? You'd make a bloody good Bollard-head Palesy if they ever give you an admiral's stripes, he grinned to himself.

  He answered "Aye, aye, sir," to Sainsbury, and sent the new bosun's mate for the navigation chart.

  "Well, that's her, Pilot," said Bentley. He backed out from the chart-table. On the whiteness of the chart, virgin where they were now, speckled as though thistles had been flung on to an iced cake where they were heading, a straight black pencil line ran, till it passed through a quarter-inch gap between two thistles. The black line was their new course; the thistles were reefs; and the quarter-inch gap was a couple of hundred yards' distance between two of them-hopefully named Fitzroy Passage.

  Back at the binnacle, Bentley straightened up after passing the course alteration down to the wheelhouse. He felt the ship stagger as a wave belted her flare, and saw the water erupt over the fo'c'sle in a cloud of flung white. He felt, also, the judging presence of the elder man huddled on his wooden chair ahead of him and to his right. Bentley found himself wishing he would go below. He'd like to see him run her in through that gap without radar. But as Wind Rode's up-to-the minute radar was a closed book to him, what was the point in his staying up here? Easy, boy, easy, he told himself.

  But that didn't help much, either-for he was irritated by the knowledge that it was only Sainsbury's judging presence on the bridge which required him to hold himself in. On the other hand, it might be a good thing he was there to see how, in some cases at least, science could triumph over seamanship.

  The thought of radar prompted action. He crossed to the radar-office voice-pipe, an unworthy feeling of superiority filling him as he spoke down its resonant throat.

  "Two-seven-five?"

  "Sir?"

  "Start operating."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  Almost at once a reflector like half a cheese began revolving above the bridge, its searching electronic fingers fanning out over the bow in an embracing arc of sensitivity, which not even the wind, now a rising snarl in the rigging, could divert.

  "Bridge?" The disembodied voice sprang from the voice-pipe.

  "Bridge."

  "Nothing on the two-seven-five, sir."

  "Very well. Keep sweeping. You should pick up land echoes-right ahead."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  The matter-of-fact tone of the operator, as though picking up a wave-washed reef in a black night was as much everyday work as echoing off North Head, calmed Bentley's momentary concern. They were, of course, too far off yet.

  An hour later, with the sea battering over the stem in gouts of spray, and the reef-by dead reckoning-only fifteen miles ahead, there was still nothing on the two-seven-five. Nothing, in fact, anywhere, but a wilderness of darkness and ridged waves; a howling wind that slapped your face with invisible hands reaching over the useless windbreak; a growing worry in your brain; and a calm old man sitting perfectly still in his chair, taking the storm's buffets heedlessly in his weathered old face.

  At the binnacle, a dozen feet away, Bentley was surprised at the clearness with which he heard Sainsbury's voice. But then he remembered it had been trained to clarity in a thousand gales.

  "Peter! Anything on that gadget of yours yet?"

  Bentley handled himself across the lifting bridge.

  "No, sir," he bellowed. "Can't ma
ke it out. Should be echoing strongly. Unless..."

  Abruptly, the thought struck him speechless. He stared out over the streaming fo'c'sle, glistening in the moon-filtered light. He had never been through this passage-prior experience was not necessary, with the chart as his reliable eye. Normally. But, he realised with a sudden chill sense of inadequacy, though the chart gave, well enough, the depths of water round the reef, it did not give you the height of the coral above it.

  That was what the Old Man was thinking of when he had mentioned that he seemed to remember the reef was almost awash either side... He knew little enough of Wind Rode's new and complicated sets, but he'd had some experience of radar, by hell!

  Bentley staggered back to the radar voice-pipe.

  "Anything yet?" he bellowed.