On Her Majesty's Behalf

by Joseph Nassise

  Burke stood by politely while the other man waited for the connection to be made and then spent several minutes arguing with whoever was on the other end of the line about the orders he’d just received. That someone must have pushed the issue higher up the chain of command, though, for Wattley’s attitude underwent an abrupt change a few minutes later, his speech suddenly interspersed with short silences followed by several “Yes, sir”s and “Of course, sir”s. When at last he hung up the phone, his attitude was noticeably improved.

  “It seems that my boat and I are at your disposal, Major. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what this is all about?”

  “What did the Admiralty say?”

  “Just that this is a highly classified mission and that I am to take you to London as quickly as possible.”

  Burke had no doubt that the mission would go much more smoothly if the captain’s assistance was given willingly, so he decided to trust the man and give him a little more information.

  “My men and I have been tasked with rescuing several individuals from the heart of London. We need you and your boat to take us as far up the Thames as possible. Getting us all the way to the Westminster Bridge would be ideal, but if you can’t make that, then the Waterloo or Blackfriars Bridge will have to do. Any farther east of that point and we probably won’t live long enough crossing the city to reach our objective.”

  From the look of surprise on the captain’s face it was obvious that he hadn’t expected Burke to answer him and the extension of trust seemed to go a long way, just as Burke had hoped. The captain’s annoyance was greatly mitigated as he turned his full attention to dealing with the issue at hand.

  “Normally we’d have no problem making Westminster Bridge,” he told Burke. “The river’s deep enough to carry us through the city and out the other side for that matter when the tide is high. But that was before the Germans tried to bomb us back into the Stone Age. Who knows what’s in the water at this point?”

  The captain pulled a chart from a nearby shelf and spread it out on his desk. He stared at it for a moment, his fingers tracing the course of the river as it made its way through the heart of the city, and then looked up at Burke.

  “If the bridges are intact, we should be fine.” He paused, glanced at the map, and then up again at Burke. “Are the bridges intact?” he asked.

  “Reconnaissance photos show the London, Southwark, Millennium, and Blackfriars Bridges to be undamaged. The Westminster Bridge has taken some hits, but appears to be mainly intact as well. We’re less certain of the Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges, however, as smoke from a large fire burning out of control in South Bank has obscured every attempt we’ve made to get a decent look at them.”

  “Nothing to do but wait and see then,” Wattley said. “I’ll get you as close as I can, you can rest assured of that.”

  Burke nodded; he’d expected as much.

  “How many men are we talking about?” the sub captain asked.

  “Eight. Myself, plus seven others.”

  “And for the return?”

  Burke shrugged. “Unknown. Might be one. Might be a dozen or more. We really won’t know until we get there.”

  He could see by Wattley’s face that he didn’t care for that answer, but there wasn’t much Burke could do about it. Drummond had reported that the party had consisted of the King, the Queen, and fifteen soldiers when he’d been sent for help. But that had been days ago; there was just no way of knowing how many had survived at this point.

  The submarine captain must have worked that out for himself, for he shrugged and said, “Good enough, I guess. Let’s just hope they don’t expect first-­class accommodations.”

  Burke was certain they’d be too thrilled at being rescued to care and said as much.

  “I suppose you’ve got that right, Major,” Wattley said with a laugh. “You know, you should feel right at home here.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “The Reliant’s an H class submarine, built by you Yanks in the Quincy Navy Yard outside of Boston.”

  “Good old American engineering, is that what you’re telling me?”

  Wattley shrugged. “She hasn’t let me down yet,” he said, with a grin.

  Burke very carefully avoided mentioning that there was a first time for everything.

  The captain didn’t notice Burke’s hesitation. “Ever been aboard a submarine, Major?”

  “Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Well, then, how about a quick tour while we make the necessary arrangements to get your men aboard and squared away?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Burke replied, thinking the more he knew, the better chance of survival they all would have should something go wrong.

  They left the radio room and stepped back into the control room. Lieutenant Sanders glanced in their direction, but Wattley waved him off with a quick shake of his head and led Burke to the right, toward the aft section of the boat.

  “The Reliant’s one hundred seventy-­one feet long, with a beam of just over fifteen feet. We’re slightly smaller than the older E class subs, which makes us a bit more maneuverable when we need to be, especially in tight quarters.”

  Burke stiffened; he hadn’t even thought about maneuverability, particularly within the confines of the Thames. A mental image popped into his head of the bulkhead in front of him tearing open as the boat ran hard aground deep beneath the surface of the river and he could almost hear the shouts and cries of the wounded as the water began to pour into the compartment . . .

  Focus, Burke, focus.

  “This here’s the main battery compartment and crew accommodations. Since my men will be at their posts during the run across the Channel, your men can use this compartment for the passage,” Wattley told him.

  Burke nodded; the space looked like it would be more than adequate for their purposes. After all, there wasn’t much for them to do but sit around and wait for Wattley and his men to take them to their destination. Hopefully the Reliant’s fate would turn out better than that of the Victorious, the British airship that had ferried the Marauders across the lines into German-­held territory in eastern France just a few weeks before.

  That had not ended well, Burke remembered, with a rueful shake of his head.

  Just beyond the battery compartment was the engine room. Looking in through the hatch, Burke saw a burly chief directing several sailors as they stripped the covers from two large engines, one on either side of the compartment.

  Wattley pointed in their direction. “The boys there are giving our electric motors a final once-­over and should be done within the hour. The motors deliver 160 horsepower each and provide us with nine knots of speed when we’re submerged.”

  Burke did the math in his head and realized that nine knots was only about ten miles per hour. Not all that fast, but he supposed speed was less of an issue when you were down deep beneath the waves where no one could see you.

  “What about while on the surface?” he asked.

  “That’s the job of our primary diesel engine,” Wattley told him, pointing to another hulk of machinery deeper in the compartment. “Without the water resistance, we can make eleven, sometimes twelve knots on a good day.”

  Burke frowned. That didn’t sound like much compared to the twenty or so knots he knew a German König class battleship could reach. While he didn’t expect to meet a vessel like that on the Thames—­Good God, he hoped not!—­he was still surprised that the disparity was so high and mentioned it to Captain Wattley.

  “You’re thinking like a surface captain and not a submariner, Major. Follow me.”

  Wattley waved to the engine room chief and then turned and headed back the way they had come. He passed through the control room and into the wardroom where the crew took all their meals. Beyond that was another crew accommodation space, this on
e with hammocks still hung throughout the compartment, and then finally a large space with racks of torpedoes on either side.

  “You’re standing in the forward torpedo storage compartment. From here the weapons chief arms the eighteen-­inch torpedoes we carry and loads them into the bow tubes for use against the enemy.”

  Wattley smiled. “We don’t need to be faster than the König or Kaiser class dreadnoughts. We just need to be able to sneak up on them long enough to fire a few of these pretties in their wake and sit back to watch the fireworks.”

  Burke would feel much more comfortable knowing he could escape an engagement if it went wrong, but he’d give Wattley the benefit of the doubt given that he was the submarine captain and Burke was not.

  Wattley asked about the state of things at the front, and Burke was happy enough to share what he knew as they made their way back to the control room and the exit from the boat. Wattley didn’t follow him topside but bid him good-­bye at the base of the ladder, returning to his preparations while Burke went to round up his squad.

  BACK AT THE mess hall, Burke waited for his men to finish eating and then led them outside. Commandeering a truck and driver, he had the driver take them back over to the docks to where the Reliant was berthed. From there it was a simple five-­minute walk to the Reliant’s individual slip.

  Burke was walking next to Jones, his haversack slung over one shoulder, when the conning tower of the boat came into view and Jones stopped short at the sight of it. “That’s a submarine,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Burke replied. “The HMS Reliant. Quite the modern vessel, I’m told.”

  “But . . . it’s a submarine.”

  Burke frowned. “Yes, a submarine. What’s the problem?”

  Ahead of them, the rest of the squad slowed, then stopped as they realized that Jones and Burke had fallen behind.

  Sergeant Drummond turned and headed back in Burke’s direction. “Everything all right, Major?” he called.

  Burke waved him off. “Go on and get the others settled, Sergeant. I’ll be along directly.”

  Drummond nodded and did as he was told, heading for the gangplank with the rest of the squad in tow. There were a few curious backward glances, but that was all. Once they’d passed out of earshot, Burke turned and faced Jones directly.

  “What’s the problem, Jones?” he asked.

  A look of embarrassment crossed the man’s face as he said, “I can’t swim, sir.”

  His answer caught Burke off-­guard. Can’t swim? What the hell does that have to do with anything?

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I can’t swim, sir,” Harrison said, stressing the latter word as if that was enough, but to Burke it still didn’t make any sense.

  “What in the blue blazes does swimming have to do with the submarine?” Burke asked. “It’s not like you have to get out and push!”

  You hope, his conscience said.

  Burke ignored it.

  “I told you, sir, I can’t swim. What if there is a . . . a problem, sir?”

  A look of horror crossed the man’s face at the word problem, and at last Burke began to understand. It wasn’t his ability or lack thereof that was bothering Jones; it was the idea of getting trapped in what was little more than an oversized tin can hundreds of feet beneath the surface in the event of an emergency.

  Jones was afraid.

  Burke almost didn’t believe it. Of all the men under his command, Jones was the last person he’d expect to balk at the sight of the boat. He’d personally seen Jones jump out of a burning airship with nothing more than an experimental gliding device strapped to his back, go toe-­to-­toe against the twin Spandau machine guns on a diving Fokker D.VII with just a Lee Enfield rifle, and face down ravaging hordes of the undead with a smile on his face. A quick submarine ride across the Channel should be easy after all that.

  Jones, however, didn’t think so.

  “I . . . I can’t go in there, sir.”

  Burke laughed, trying to make light of the situation. “Sure you can, Jones,” he said, clapping the younger man on the shoulder. “Nothing to it.”

  But Jones was shaking his head. “I can’t, sir. I really can’t.”

  The corporal took two steps back as he said it, as if to punctuate his statement.

  Burke frowned, uncertain of what to do next. Manhandling Jones aboard the boat didn’t seem to be the answer; the man’s fear would make him go hog-­wild the moment he thought they were going to force him aboard. Doing so would just give the British sailors aboard the boat a reason to ridicule the U.S. Army, never mind one of his men.

  No, that wasn’t any kind of solution at all.

  If he couldn’t force him aboard or convince him to make the choice on his own, there seemed to be only one other solution.

  “It’s all right, Jones,” he said, not unkindly. “You’ve done enough. I’ll find something for you to do here at the port until we get back and keep the reasons to myself; no one else needs to know.”

  The original squad had been made up of volunteers, including Jones. As much as he wanted Jones by his side for the mission ahead, he couldn’t, in good conscience, force him to come along. The man was terrified, that was easy to see, and Burke had no doubt that the fear would get worse if Jones couldn’t conquer it before boarding. Being trapped inside the Reliant was going to be hard enough on all of them; they didn’t need a raving lunatic along to keep them company.

  Burke clapped a hand on Jones’s shoulder, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “See what you can do about arranging transportation for us back to MID headquarters for when we return, yeah? And make sure it’s something reasonably comfortable. I don’t want to be the one to tell the Queen of England that she’s going to have to ride in the back like some common piece of luggage, understand?”

  Jones was staring at his feet, refusing to meet Burke’s gaze, but he nodded slightly to show he understood. Burke decided that was going to have to be good enough.

  He clapped Jones on the shoulder one more time and then turned away, his steps heavy as he covered the last few dozen yards to the submarine slip. Jones was a helluva soldier, for all his authority issues. Burke was going to miss having his skill with a rifle . . .

  The sound of running feet behind him drew Burke’s attention. He turned and was just in time to see Jones jog up the gangplank behind him. There was still fear in the man’s eyes, but Burke could see he had it under control. His next comment proved that was the case.

  “If I drown in this blasted tin can, I swear I’ll haunt you forever, Major!”

  Burke laughed. “Welcome aboard, Corporal, welcome aboard.”

  Chapter Twelve

  On the River Thames

  LONDON WAS ALL but unrecognizable.

  From his position in the conning tower next to Captain Wattley, Burke stared out at the devastation around him and wondered just how Sergeant Drummond had ever managed to cross more than forty kilometers of such destruction and live to tell about it.

  After boarding the HMS Reliant earlier, Burke and his men settled into the compartment that had been assigned to them. Some, like Sergeant Drummond and Private Bankowski, slipped into the canvas hammocks hanging from the ceiling and tried to catch some sleep while the rest simply found a convenient stretch of decking out of the main traffic pattern running through the compartment and did the same.

  It was raining when they slipped their berth but Captain Wattley made the decision to remain on the surface; the winds weren’t strong enough to kick up the kind of swells that would necessitate a dive beneath the surface, and the low cloud cover would make it unlikely that any German aircraft would be patrolling in this weather. It was a decision that pleased Burke almost as much as it did Jones. As far as Burke was concerned, boats were made to stay on the surface of the water, not dive beneath it.

&n
bsp; At twelve miles per hour he knew that it was going to take them practically all night to cover the 150 miles between Le Havre, their starting point, and their destination midway along the Thames estuary. Perhaps longer, if they ran into any trouble.

  Burke kept his eye on Jones, who had borrowed a deck of cards from one of the British sailors and was passing the time by teaching Private Cohen to play poker. Jones seemed to be doing just fine, his initial fear of the boat not showing at all, and eventually Burke stopped worrying about him.

  Somewhere along the way, Burke had fallen asleep, only to be woken up several hours later by Sanders, the executive officer, who told him Captain Wattley was looking for the major to join him in the conning tower.

  Now Burke and Wattley stood side by side, gas masks securely on, staring out at the devastated city as they headed into the heart of London.

  The Tower of London rose on their right as they slipped beneath the Tower Bridge, and Burke could see that while some of the lesser buildings had taken some damage, the White Tower, the oldest of the group, still stood tall in the early morning light. The sight of the age-­old edifice still standing despite the Germans’ bombing of the city gave him a small bit of hope amid the destruction he was witnessing around him.

  They motored onward and glided beneath each of the other bridges connecting the north side of the city with its counterpart on the south. The London Bridge, the newly built Southwark Bridge, the Blackfriars Bridge—­all were intact and provided no barrier to their passage. There were a few anxious moments when they came up on the old Waterloo Bridge, site of so many of London’s suicides in its early days, and found the crossing tilting dangerously to one side, but they managed to maneuver around the impediment and continue on their way without striking anything.

  All the buildings they could see as they made their way deeper into the city were in various states of destruction. Some had been hit by falling bombs, some by falling buildings as the bombs took out the structures around them. Runaway fires claimed a lot of the rest, and Burke could still see patches of flame burning here and there against the dark night sky. Billowing clouds of smoke and ash drifted here and there amid the ruins, a visual reminder of all that had gone before.