All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3

by Alexander Fullerton

  “In the for’ard corner there.” Haskins had started by shouting, but he’d found there was no need to, suddenly a normal tone of voice was perfectly audible … “I’ve seen—first thing I did was—anyway, there’s no point, sir, I’m sorry but—”

  “All right.” He’d check for himself though, all the same. Haskins seemed to be taking personal responsibility for his captain’s death. Shock, perhaps. The ship was lying stopped, rolling very slightly, and none of her guns was in action now. Gunfire from other ships was distant and sporadic. The battle had passed on, and Defiant was alone. Haskins stopped beside the binnacle, which was still vertical and seemed intact. He stooped, wary of what it was that he’d found here, and Chevening told him, “I’m all right. I think I was knocked out.”

  Getting to his feet. Haskins said, helping him, “It’s the navigating officer, sir. Binnacle must have sheltered him. And the deck isn’t holed here. Here, steady …”

  “You’re right, I was behind the binnacle. Is the captain—”

  “Not a hope … Look, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Bit dizzy, that’s—”

  “Well, you’re damn lucky.” The marine tried a voicepipe: “Bridge, wheelhouse!”

  “SBA Green down ’ere, sir. And a stretcher party.” The reply had come from the void below them: and that voicepipe led nowhere, as Gant’s torch revealed. He’d been unwilling to switch it on until now, when it was plain there was no enemy anywhere near them. The beam of light flickered over bodies and parts of bodies enmeshed in twisted steel. The plot was open to the bridge. A pair of shoes were jammed in torn deck-plating, their soles upward: if there was a man still in them he’d be hanging head-downwards in the lower compartment. A voice from the rear of the bridge asked gruffly, “Captain, sir?”

  Mr Nye, the gunner. Down from the director tower. Gant told him, “The captain’s dead, Mr Nye. What’s the state of things in the tower?”

  A low groan led his torch-beam to a body and an upturned face. It was PO Ruddle, one of the signals yeomen. Gant had already seen what was left of the chief yeoman, CPO Howell. Nye told him, “Only communications link is with number three gun, sir. PCO’s sent me and Colour Sergeant Bruce to get the lads out of the TS—the circuits is all gone, sir, see—and put the other guns in local control. Not much else we can do, sir. Except the ACP might—”

  “All right, carry on.” Gant called down, “We need stretchers up here. And morphine.” Morphine for Ruddle. Gant couldn’t imagine there’d be anyone alive on that lower level, where the shell had burst. “You still there, Green?”

  “I’m coming up now, sir!”

  He told his “doggie,” Pinner, “Go down to the lower steering position. Know where it is?”

  “Platform deck, sir, just about under ’ere.”

  “Good man. Tell them I’ll be testing communications to them from the after conning position. Then I can decide whether to steer from there or from the after position.”

  Haskins joined him as he picked a way forward through jagged edges of torn plating, wreckage, bodies you didn’t need to look at twice and could not afford to allow to imprint themselves on your mind. They did, however hard you tried not to let them into your consciousness; and in later days, nights and years you’d see them again, these and others … The full force of the shell had blown up through the middle, under these men’s feet … He remembered, like something in a dream, Sandilands, the commander (E), saying there’d been a shell in the top of number two boiler room. It had cut steam pipes, smashed other gear, killed or wounded most of the men in the compartment. Number two was the larger boiler room, with four boilers in it, and Sandilands had said he’d be able to provide steam from number one—steam for slow speed—in roughly half an hour. But how long ago that report had been made was hard to remember: an hour, ten minutes, it was what happened in any given space of time that counted, not the time itself.

  He told Haskins, “Job for you, soldier. There was a hit aft, starboard side, and it started a fire. I want to know whether they’ve put the fire out, and the extent of the damage and what’s being done about it. Rowley may be there. Find him anyway, and tell him I want a situation report made to me in the ACP. All right?”

  “Aye aye, sir.” ACP stood for after conning position. It was abaft the funnels, near the mainmast, on a platform which also supported the searchlights.

  Haskins said, “Here, sir.”

  The captain’s wooden seat had been smashed against the forefront of the bridge. Splinters of its wood were mixed with the slumped body in its overall suit that had been white but was now bright red. It was in the corner, in a heap suggesting bonelessness, and the head was like raw meat.

  He’d taken the torch-beam off it. Haskins had been right when he’d said there was no point in looking. The beam moved back—as if the torch had moved his hand, more than the other way about. There was a smear of blood all down the front of the bridge, over a nest of telephones and the captain’s action-alarm button and a fuse-box, right down to the body, and at the top the glass windscreen had been shattered. He must have been hurled on to it, and the half-inch glass, jagged now and bloodstained, had just about decapitated him.

  “Captain, sir?”

  Gant’s torch-beam swung around, to blind the doctor, Sibbold. Sibbold’s whites were bloodstained too. A broad, solid-looking man, capless and dishevelled, peering blinking at the torchlight and the man behind it. Morphine ampoules in his top pocket were like a railway clerk’s fountain pens.

  “There he is.” The light-beam acted as a pointer. “I wouldn’t think there’s the slightest chance of—”

  “Stretcher here, please. Quick, now!” Sibbold dropped down beside the body. Gant said, “Not a hope. My God, look at him. He’s dead, damn it.”

  He’d had to state the fact, oblige himself to face it. He didn’t want Everard’s job, this command, this rotten, hopeless situation. All his life he’d funked command. Now it was being thrust on him, and in the worst of all worlds. He told Sibbold, “Petty Officer Ruddle’s over there, and he’s alive, so—”

  “One thing at a time.” Sibbold shouted, “Green, are you—”

  “Coming, sir, coming!”

  You could sympathize with the doctor’s refusal to accept the truth, that Everard was dead. But he oughtn’t to be wasting time that might have been spent on men with a chance of living … Well, it was Sibbold’s business. Gant turned away, knowing that his job now was to get Defiant under command and moving, get her away before the enemy returned.

  “Another quarter of an hour should do it.” John Sandilands’s voice was hoarse-sounding over the telephone between engine-room and ACP. “But then you must let us work her up very gradually. I can just about promise you revs for five knots. If we’re lucky and it looks good we might get her up to ten.”

  Gant hesitated for a moment before he answered. Anxiety made him want to shout. It was an effort to speak normally. He said, “It’s fifty miles to Surabaya, chief, and we have to get there before dawn. That calls for ten knots as an average if we were to get cracking now, this minute.”

  “It wouldn’t help anyone if the repairs don’t hold, Bob. And they won’t if you go and—”

  “Now listen …” Everard had asked him, an hour or two ago, what he’d have been doing if he’d had Doorman’s job. Now Doorman was probably dead, but the job he’d got was Everard’s, not the Dutchman’s, and it was just as bad. You had to shut your mind to the hopelessness of it, just get on with what had to be done immediately. Such as, now, persuading Sandilands to see the wood as well as the trees. They’d been patching steampipes, or rigging jury ones, from the for’ard boiler room through the after one where they’d been holed by blast or splinters. It was an engineering problem, Sandilands’s, not his. He had God knew how many of his own—insoluble, overwhelming problems … He told Sandilands, his voice thin with anxiety, “If we don’t get into Surabaya before daylight, we’re finished. Ten knots, John. I’m not asking y
ou, I’m bloody well telling you, d’you understand?”

  He hung up. His hands were shaking, from that flare of temper. No: from taut nerves, not temper. If Sandilands had insisted that ten knots was an impossibility, he’d have been beaten, stumped. He hadn’t, thank God. So it was all right, for the moment, you could press on—to the next problem … This telephone was working only because its line went straight down through the deck under the after conning position, and it hadn’t therefore been cut by that shell-burst near the tubes. There was no communication from here to the lower steering position, for instance. None to the after steering position either, the ASP being a closet-sized corner of the steering-engine flat. Helm orders, when they got her moving, would be passed down to it from this conning position by voice, from man to man via a chain of sailors who were already in position. And steering would be by magnetic, since although the gyro itself, which was down on the platform deck for’ard, was all right, its repeaters weren’t functioning.

  What if Sandilands rang back now, said no, he couldn’t do it?

  Christ …

  The hit below the bridge, or the upward blast of it, had cut all the gunnery control circuits except for the telephone connection between the tower and number three gun. As the TS was isolated, this one link wasn’t of any value from the point of view of gunnery control, but it was being made use of all the same, linking the tower as a lookout position with the upper deck, and, by messengers, with the other guns and with the ACP.

  Number one gun, on the foc’sl, had been knocked out in the same salvo that had wrecked the bridge.

  The hit aft had killed the crew of the starboard after torpedo-tubes and wrecked that triple mounting. Luckily none of the torpedo warheads had exploded. Flying debris had smashed the starboard searchlight, torn holes in the armoured side of this conning position, and the shell had blown a hole through the upper deck, cutting leads and communications to the two after guns and jamming the ammunition hoist to number four. Artificers were working on that now, but meanwhile shells were being brought up by manpower through the hatches and stockpiled near the gun. The fire which Gant had seen from the bridge hadn’t been an upper-deck fire at all. Its flames had been shooting like a blowtorch’s through the hole in the deck, but it was an internal fire, in the lower deck. Charles Rowley and his damage control parties had it under control now, but it had taken a lot of water to subdue it and the water couldn’t be got rid of until there was steam-pressure to run the pumps.

  He kept mentally cataloguing damage and the measures that were being taken to deal with it. As if there was a danger of losing some element of the overall picture and, through oversight, making some colossal blunder in a moment of emergency.

  In number two boiler room, seven men had been killed and two wounded. The latest count of casualties was nineteen dead and fourteen wounded. Everard was being counted as one of the fourteen, but Sibbold wasn’t holding out much hope for him. He’d glanced round from a man whose leg he’d been amputating and told Gant, “The presence or absence of life can be a technicality, you know.” He’d proved Gant wrong in the basic fact that Everard had been alive—technically, whatever that meant—when they’d got him down to the sickbay. Since then, he’d been ready to accept the inevitable. He was single-handed and struggling to meet all the demands that were being made on him; he’d had an assistant, a younger RNVR doctor, but he’d been landed at Batavia to look after wounded British and American naval personnel in a Dutch hospital where nobody spoke English.

  There wasn’t much room in this ACP, and Chevening’s bony length wasn’t any help. The navigator squeezed out past Gant now, emerging from the little cubby-hole that held a chart table. He said, “Course will be south forty-eight west, sir, if our DR’s reasonably accurate.”

  “What’s the compass error?”

  “Two degrees west, sir. Variation and deviation just about cancel each other out.”

  Gant had only asked the question to see what sort of an answer Chevening might give him. The navigator’s manner was peculiar, as if he hadn’t completely regained contact with his surroundings. Perhaps he’d always been like that: but Gant hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Pinner?”

  “I’m ’ere, sir.”

  Ordinary Seaman Pinner was on the ladder outside the ACP, slewing himself aside from it when anyone needed to go up or down it. Out of the way, but in earshot, which was the ideal disposition for a “doggie.” Gant was impressed by young Pinner, who’d shown a lot of common sense during the past hour’s unpleasant moments. He told him now, “Go down to the sickbay, and ask the PMO that same question.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Pinner dropped off the ladder. It was the only entrance and exit, as the starboard one had been blown off at the same time that the searchlight on that side had been smashed.

  Gant asked Chevening, “Time now?”

  “Eleven twenty-two, sir.”

  Sandilands’s quarter-hour would be up at about 11:30, he supposed. There’d be time to tour the upper deck, visit the guns’ crews and have a word to Greenleaf. He told Chevening, “Hold the fort here now. If the engine-room pipes up, or anything else, send a messenger after me. I’m going to walk around the guns.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  He added from the ladder, “Keep Pinner here when he gets back. Use him to find me if you need to.”

  The ship lay motionless in black water dappled where moonlight filtered through strips of cloud. She felt dead, spiritless, and the stink of burning still hung over her. Sandilands, he thought, had better get a move on. It was getting to the point when every passing minute mattered, if they were to reach Surabaya before daylight.

  What might happen after that—with the ship crippled and a Jap invasion imminent—didn’t bear thinking about. At this very moment they could be ferrying their troops ashore … Thinking didn’t help anything at all. You had to go through the motions, but when you forced your mind past them to where they’d get you in the end, you came back to that nightmare of the no-way-out. The only trick he’d found that did help him to stave off the sense of pointlessness was to ask himself, What would Everard be doing now? The answer was simple, each time: Everard would have been dealing with each problem as it arose, with the situation as it was at any given moment, in this minute or the next—and so on, step by step. And he’d have looked to the future, the longer term, in the same way, deciding to cope with new developments as they cropped up.

  Gant found he could only look a few hours ahead. Because beyond that, eventually, he knew he’d be on a cliff-edge; and he’d have brought a whole ship’s company to it with him. That was the thing that froze him when he let his mind loose.

  The one objective that was rational and achievable—with luck—was to get the ship to Surabaya. Surabaya and not Batavia, because it was the nearest and because Sandilands’s repairs obviously couldn’t be relied on for more than a short distance. And there was the need to get there quickly, not to be caught at sea, alone and in this semi-wrecked condition, in daylight.

  There’d be air attacks on Surabaya, of course. There’d been raids since the beginning of the month, but they’d be intensified now because the Japanese worked to a set pattern of heavy bombing before a sea or land assault. But there’d be some collective defence, with other ships there—Exeter and Encounter and the American destroyers.

  Except they’d almost certainly be ordered to run for it, now …

  One’s mind flitted, sometimes recoiling from what it found.

  “All right here?”

  He’d stopped at number three gun, the one that had a telephone to Greenleaf in the director tower. He’d passed by number four, the gun with the jammed ammo hoist, because the telephone link made this the key position now.

  CPO Hughes, chief gunner’s mate, told him, “Top line, sir. Standing by, and no problems.”

  No problems, Gant thought. Weren’t there? Really, none!

  From his jaunty tone, Hughes might
have been outside a drill-shed on his native Whale Island, the Navy’s gunnery school. From memories of the course he’d done on Whale Island in the remote past when he’d been a sub-lieutenant Gant still shuddered mentally at the thought of it. Whale Island produced gunnery specialists, in Gant’s imagination, as primeval swamps produced pterodactyls.

  “Let me have a word with Lieutenant Greenleaf.” He took the telephone headset from the sightsetter, removing his own tin hat so he could slide the earphones on. “Greenleaf?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “All right, up there?”

  “Well—the horizon’s clear, sir …”

  “We’ll be getting under way in a few minutes, I hope. With luck we’ll be in Surabaya before sunrise. But I’ll have you relieved before long.” “Any news of the captain, sir?”

  “Not yet.” The question had taken him by surprise, like a blow below the belt. In an attempt to sound brisk and optimistic he’d forgotten Everard, for that moment. He told Greenleaf, “When there is any, I’ll let you know.” He handed the gear back to the sightsetter, and put his tin hat back on. “I’ll be taking a walk around, chief. Is Mr Nye—”

  “Mr Nye’s aft, sir, looking after five and six.”

  “I’ll see him there, then … You chaps all right?”

  “Aye, sir.” The gunlayer, Jackson, answered from his seat inside the shield. “But—the captain, sir—do they reckon he’ll—”

  “PMO can’t say yet, Jackson. It’s touch and go.”

  Everard had been alive when they’d got him down from the bridge, but he’d been in a coma, lifeless-looking, and Sibbold had admitted that the odds were against his coming out of it. Minor damage consisted of an arm broken in two places and a lot of cuts and punctures, but the main injury was to his head where he’d been flung on to the glass windshield. And since then, well after that, Sibbold had made his remark about the presence of life being no more than a technicality. Meaning that a man in coma was alive but he didn’t necessarily have to wake up? Gant had had no time, and nor had Sibbold, for any longer session of questions and answers: the simple fact was that he didn’t know, could only wait and see.