J. E. MacDonnell - 012

by Coffin Island(lit)

  "No, sir," the answer came up, unmoved, secure in the faith the operator far below had in his bridge officers-and his set. "Only grass, sir."

  Grass! The jumbled reflection on the radar-scope from those marching mountains of water ahead and around them. Water which, if the reef were low enough-and the two-seven-five obviously said it was-would pour over their guiding land in a continuous, smothering cascade.

  Bentley reached back to the binnacle. Sainsbury had risen quietly and was now standing beside the compass, hanging on to the wheelhouse voice-pipe, the light from the compass-card playing on the hard, wet edges of his face.

  "What is wrong, lad?"

  Bentley said, "Grass," unsurprised at the form of address. His old mentor had called him that often enough before. Sainsbury looked into his face, both of them swaying beside the binnacle like a couple of drunks.

  "Your radar, then, I gather, is inoperative for our passage through?"

  "Yes, sir. It looks like it."

  "You are still going to attempt the passage?"

  Bentley wiped the salt from his mouth.

  "If I don't, we might not make the northern entrance either before the sea gets really up. And we've got to get in somewhere..."

  It was some time before the older man spoke. When he did, his voice was almost gentle.

  "You know that regulations prevent my taking command of your ship-even were I qualified to do so."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You also know that I have no intention of doing so, regulations regardless." They bent their heads as a lather of spray swept the bridge.

  "But," Sainsbury went on in his penetratingly resolute voice, "I think you will be willing to accept a little advice."

  Bentley looked sideways into the craggy face. The tight mouth was twisted in a little smile.

  "I have complete faith in your ability to fight this vessel, Peter. I would say that you are one of the most successful younger captains in the Service. But... I have some knowledge of ship-handling in these waters." Suddenly, and completely, Bentley wanted his advice. The advice of an old seadog who was weathering storms bigger than this before Bentley was in short pants. He felt no diminution of his own ability or power of command in wanting Sainsbury's help: it would not be the first time he had used it. On the other hand, he would be an inexcusably stubborn idiot if he refused it.

  "I'd be glad of your help, sir," he said. If he expected the flotilla-leader to change instantly into a flotilla-leader, he was mistaken. Sainsbury gave his advice calmly, explaining the need for it (for future reference), the reasons behind it, letting Bentley implement it.

  He brought her head round, punching her to the northward, so that she could run down with the seas, then turn in; instead of driving straight for the gap, and in all probability being battered to leeward, to where an unbroken chain of cruel coral snags awaited her.

  Sainsbury stayed at the compass while Bentley checked the chart.

  "Distance?" he asked when the younger man clambered back.

  "I make it little more than a mile ahead."

  "Better get the searchlight crew closed-up."

  Bentley swallowed.

  "We don't carry a searchlight aboard, sir. Radar..."

  Sainsbury smiled openly as the other's voice trailed off. It was the first time Bentley had seen the apparatus at full extension.

  "Then it's our glasses against the reef, eh? Right! Bring her round. Easy now, while I take a look."

  Gradually Bentley eased her head round, till she was pointing on-course for the gap. If their-the old man's-calculations were right, they should be almost directly opposite it. Just far enough north to be driven down by the wind and sea in a slanting line to meet the opening. If they weren't...

  Sainsbury stood rigid behind the binnacle, glasses up, staring with single-minded concentration over the bow.

  He snapped: "Switch off compass lights!"

  Bentley did so and came upright beside him. Through his glasses he could see only blackness, relieved by brief splashes of toppling white. Then, with a shock, he saw the reef-or the wave-smothered, boiling white indication of it. To his eyes it seemed to stretch in an unbroken line ahead of them to right and left as far as he could see.

  Sainsbury gave no indication of what he could see. From under his glasses he began his helm-orders. Bentley, straightening each time from the wheelhouse voice-pipe, strained to see a break in the leaping white mass. It was then he realised, through his own comparative impotence, that this was the test: this the crucial height of one man's struggle against the sea.

  They were almost on the white breaking line before Bentley saw, right ahead through straining eyes, a slightly lower level of white; white which was rolling more than breaking, in vicious gouts of upflung spray. Waves, yes, but waves rolling through the gap. The gap which the old man had seen with the inward, judging eye of remembered experience rather than with the visual concept of his binoculars.

  A final, sky-wiping roll of her masts and they were through, the ship easier almost at once. Sainsbury lowered his glasses. His voice was strained.

  "I think I'll go below, Peter. You've got all the light beacons you want from now on-beautiful radar echoes! And," he turned from the edge of the grating round the binnacle and grinned into Bentley's salty face, "you know exactly where you are."

  Looking back a month later, when the nightmare commission was over, Bentley wondered if his run of misfortune had not started when he temporarily relinquished command of his vessel. This thought did not occur to him at the time, or shortly afterwards, for his bad luck had not begun then, and he was quite satisfied in his own meticulous mind that letting Sainsbury bring her through was not only the sensible thing to do, it was his duty. What had been at stake was not his feeling, but the survival of the ship. In accepting the older man's help he had acted wisely, and correctly.

  Still... All blue-water seamen-perhaps by virtue of the vast and mysterious power they constantly combat-are in greater or lesser degree, superstitious. The servitude of the sea is austere, and the sea will soon find the weakness in any man who sails on its powerful bosom. Bentley certainly was no weakling; young as he was, he had been toughened and experienced by years of battling against men and the sea; and so when his bad luck began, and over the weeks continued, he accepted the fact that the sea had been indulgent long enough, and was now whittling him down to size before allowing his earlier success to manifest itself again.

  It is well known to seamen that big waves come in threes. It seemed more than coincidence that Bentley's troubles rushed upon him in the same sequence.

  It started with his bringing the ship alongside to get the injured bosun's mate ashore. It was a lovely morning, with the expiring breath of the storm sending flotillas of white clouds scudding inland from the sea. Everything was ready. Bentley had sent a signal as soon as he was safely inside the Reef, and on the pier they could see the ambulance waiting, behind a fairly large crowd, interested in this unusual visit of a powerful warship to their port. The injured man had been brought up and lay on a stretcher near the torpedo tubes, ready to be carried ashore as soon as she was berthed alongside and the gangway run out. He was drugged with a sedative.

  The whole ship was in its normal efficient state. Randall was at the side of the bridge as the pier loomed closer, ready to give orders from his vantage point to either fo'c'sle or quarter-deck-warp her in here, ease out your wires there. The crews were standing-by their wires and fenders, and Hooky Walker, the giant chief bosun's mate, was up on the fo'c'sle-it was from there the first heaving-line would fling out as soon as the captain got her bow in close enough.

  Unaccountably, the captain was experiencing difficulty in doing just that. Admittedly, there was some wind, and there was a current setting against him. But Bentley had been handling destroyers for years now, and he had something like fifty-thousand horse-power to help him against the machinations of wind and current.

  It could have been that he was new to this
brand-new ship; it could have been anything. What was certain was that he put his bow in towards the pier correctly enough, and the seamen stirred around their heavy wires. Then, much too far from the pier, he put her engines astern to pull her up. She pulled up, all right, shuddering with the power he gave her, twice the distance from the pier over which a heaving-line could be thrown. Turbines spun by super-heated steam do not run down like a car's engine when the foot is lifted from the accelerator-they take time. Wind Rode stopped, then began moving astern-and kept moving that way.

  To stop her going out too far, Bentley put his engines half-ahead. The big screws gripped and thrashed, and a miniature maelstrom frothed up around her stern, the water discoloured brown from the stirred mud of the shallow harbour bed. She slid quickly ahead.

  That was the start of the see-saw. Wind Rode's worried and sympathetic men had seen it happen often enough in a high-powered craft like a destroyer, but never with this captain. Surreptitiously, Hooky turned his head up to the bridge, thinking that perhaps Bentley had given the ship to Randall, for exercise in coming alongside. But there was no doubt that the officer with the calm, hard face standing behind the binnacle had the ship. Quietly, Hooky took the heaving-line himself. He could throw further than any other man in the ship.

  Bentley was forcedly calm. He saw the faces turn up to him from the fo'c'sle, and he was conscious of the silent, watching faces on the pier. He strove to dismiss the audience, and what they must be thinking, from his consciousness. And the fact that his own bridge team were so obviously avoiding his eye. Their sympathy welled round him like tangible smoke.

  His brown face set hard, he stopped her in one of her backward gyrations. Deliberately he calmed himself, and looked up at the sky, then down at the roiled water. There was wind, certainly, and there was current. But he had brought the old Wind Rode alongside hundreds of times in circumstances less propitious than these. What was wrong, then? It wasn't the ship-she handled beautifully, and his orders were executed promptly and correctly in the engine-room. The ship was giving him everything he asked for. It could, then, be only him. His orders must be incorrect.

  But he knew they were not. He wasn't a green sub-lieutenant on his first flotilla exercises. He had once managed to ram an enemy submarine, at night, with half his bow blown off and his engines sick nearly to death. Now he had a perfectly normal ship-and he was driving her like a ham-handed amateur.

  He turned to Sainsbury, standing quietly at the rear of the bridge behind him, and his exasperation crept into his voice.

  "I'm damned if I know!" he expostulated.

  The old man was feeling keenly Bentley's discomfiture. But this was a time when he could, under no circumstances, interfere. There was little actual danger to the ship-she was manoeuvring too slowly for that-but there would be immense and damaging danger to Bentley's prestige if he had to relinquish command to have his craft brought alongside.

  Something else was worrying Sainsbury. He had watched his protege's wheel and engine-orders carefully, if outwardly casually, and-give a point here and there-he would have ordered the same movements of wheel and power. The ship was answering helm and engines promptly and efficiently, but they were no nearer the pier.

  He shook his head in mystification, knowing that the bridge team were watching him.

  "I can't help you, Peter," he said, and was glad he spoke the truth. "She seems cantankerous, that's all."

  With the ship stopped, though drifting a little to seaward, Bentley stared at the pier. He knew he was glad that his orders had received the tacit approval of the flotilla-leader, and he was glad that now his bridge team also knew that. And he was quite sure that his apparent incompetence was not due to Sainsbury's presence on the bridge behind him. He was too sure of his own proved ability for another's watching presence to worry him. All right, then, you mule-in we go again.

  She went in beautifully. Easily, safely, accurately. He was coming in at an angle, which you can do with destroyers, and at exactly the right moment he swung her, so that she slipped neatly alongside. Hooky drew back his muscled arm and threw. The heaving-line shot out like a striking snake, and was grabbed by a waterman on the pier. The big berthing wire followed quickly. Eager to get her secured, for the exhibition reflected as much on themselves as it did on the captain, the three men handling the berthing wire on the fo'c'sle swiftly took their turns around the bollards. Then, anxious to stop her forward movement, they hung on.

  She was still moving ahead with the impetus of her approach, and normally she would have been halted with a touch of engines astern. But now she was being dragged to a stop by the wire. It was a strong rope, made of strands of steel, but it was not meant to stop nearly three thousand moving tons. Bentley was leaning to the voice-pipe to order the engines astern, and he did not see what was happening on the fo'c'sle. Randall did. He leaned over the windbreak and opened his mouth to bellow.

  Before he could order them to slack off, the wire came up as taut as an iron bar. It quivered as the whole weight of the moving ship came on it. Then it snapped, and the end came coiling inboard like the lash of a giant whip.

  Luckily the whipping coils slashed over the heads of the fo'c'sle party before they clumped down on the steel deck. Hooky at once picked up a spare heaving-line and heaved. And a derisive voice came clearly from the watching crowd.

  "Why don't yer get a tug, mate!"

  It was the crowning, insult to a destroyer captain, a seaman who would as soon use a tug to get his ship alongside as he would if he were in a skiff. Bentley heard the call as he came upright from the voice-pipe and a little ridge of muscles knotted along the line of his jaw. Deliberately he left the binnacle and walked to the edge of the bridge, hanging over it and looking down at the edge of the pier, showing himself clearly to the mob in a perverse sense of anger. Behind him Pilot at once stepped up beside the wheelhouse voice-pipe.

  "Stop both engines," Bentley rapped over his shoulder.

  Pilot passed the order, and the quiet shaking of the ship ceased. She came to rest alongside the wooden pier, and her lines went out.

  Bentley came back and looked at Randall.

  "What a bloody fiasco!" he said bitterly.

  Maybe that's why, Bentley thought wrily to himself, they call ships "she". After her earlier termagant display she had come away from the wharf as nicely and daintily as he could wish-no tantrums, obedient, eager to fulfil his every command. Until, he concluded his thought as he conned her into the open blue sea, the next time. There was one consolation-Rear-Admiral Palesy had not been watching the performance of his newest ship and captain.

  They swung to port and coursed up through the waters inside the Reef, as calm as a tarnished silver plate. They would turn out through Cook Passage, and then strike straight up for Port Moresby through open water.

  The coming-alongside incident was soon forgotten. Sailors are an equable breed, and in any case they knew well enough what their commander could do-the great majority of them had joined this ship straight from the earlier Wind Rode. Bentley himself realised this, and the memory of his fiasco dimmed, smoothed over in the friction less running of the ship's routine.

  Even in bright sunshine the inner Reef passage is tricky, and he waited till they had swept through Cook Passage, Lizard Island rearing rockily on their starb'd hand, before he approached Sainsbury again. He found him leaning in the warm sunshine against the forward bank of five torpedo-tubes. Bentley saluted and said, grinning:

  "You must be bored stiff, sir. Nothing to do..."

  Sainsbury knew what was coming.

  "Like hell I am!" he disagreed. "I've never been so contented in my life. Er-these brutes here are controlled by a new system, I believe?" He slapped his hand on the quiet grey tube. Inside it, and in the other nine, a long steel shape lay, the explosive-packed warhead filling the mouth of each tube like a swollen red tongue.

  "Yes, sir. There's not much chance of a miss now. Ah-speaking of torpedo attacks..."

&nb
sp; "We weren't, you know."

  "No, sir. But we are now. I thought this might be a good chance to give the chaps..."

  "All right, all right," Sainsbury groaned. He shoved his skinny length upright. "I'll get no peace until I fill their heads with a lot of rubbish. When?"

  "Right now, sir, if you're agreeable."

  "I'm not, but I'm trapped. What do you want me to talk about?"

  "I think a destroyer torpedo-attack would be appropriate."

  "Do you, now? How many torpedo-attacks do you think I've carried out?"

  "Heaven knows! But I remember one against an armed-raider down near the South Pole somewhere. I also seem to remember it came off."

  "So it did, so it did," Captain Sainsbury said softly. "And I still get nightmares thinking of what would have happened if it hadn't! No," he said, pursing his lips, "I won't tell `em about that. I'll talk on a torpedo-attack that took place not so far from here. It was much more dangerous and foolhardy. It might make `em think twice before they rush in to get mixed up in a torpedo-attack. Y'know, young fellow," and he looked up at the muscled length of the officer before him, "I can't think of a more efficient method of committing suicide than a torpedo-attack against a bigger opponent."