“We’re only to take out the wireless station, sir. Then right back to the ship,” I whispered at the lieutenant’s ear. It wouldn’t do to undermine him in front of the crew. He’d gotten used to some unorthodox ways of doing things in our time abroad.
There’d been that attack on Port Doula where we’d been rather more active as military observers than one would generally expect. And then he’d been sent to Germany with me tagging along to see if the good will from the role he’d had in Afrika might allow him a close view of military aeroplane developments.
It had.
He, and then I, had learned to fly the damned things and then shoot from the damned things. It had gotten bloodier and bloodier from there.
I stood at attention in my very best formal imitation of a solid U.S. Navy chief who hadn’t gone tearing after Lieutenant Marshall on all those escapades. He gave me a bear hug and spun me around by one shoulder to leave both of us facing the team.
So much for military discipline.
The seventeen sailors looked on with mixed interest and amusement. Petty Officer Wicklow’s eyes twinkled and our boss gave him a slight nod of acknowledgement before raising his voice to be easily heard by all.
“The chief’s doing a chief’s job reminding me of our narrow orders. But what do you think, boys?” The delight in Lieutenant Marshall’s eyes promised nothing the political campaign managers back home were going to like.
Damn it, so what if he’s ‘unmanageable’ and ‘a blight on the vice president’s political prospects?’ Why did they have to tell him that right before shipping us off to be quietly useful?
“Ah, no, I’m to say, ‘Gentlemen.’ And pretend to be one myself.” He gave me an exaggerated wink.
Sir, please don’t embarrass yourself. These are regular American servicemen, not sons of the rich playing at aeroplane flying or foreigners accepting of odd ways from strangers.
Lieutenant Marshall executed a disaster of a German court bow, making fun of himself. It was much worse than the much practiced one he’d used when presented to the Kaiser back when he’d thought being amenable was the quickest way to be allowed back into an aeroplane.
“I’m not so good at talking.” He shrugged.
Not quite a lie, I agreed with his self-assessment. If he could talk just a little bit less about the nasty parts of war, he’d be excellent at talking. Instead his talking got us all here.
“And yeah,” my lieutenant continued, “you’ve probably heard it all already. Yes, the Vice President is my uncle. Yes, President Wilson has still not recovered, and my uncle intends to seek the nomination and ask the country to let him run things officially. But that other stuff in the papers isn’t quite right: I only shot down a couple of British warplanes dropping bombs on my friends...”
And learned how to fly Eindeckers and flew one of those first dozen aeroplanes to have Fokker’s machine gun on it when actually he was only ordered to tour German bases and learn what he could about military uses of the aeroplane.
It was only my long years of service that allowed me to keep a poker face while several months of memories, more bad than good, flashed through my head.
But sure, boss, we can pretend it was all exactly what Rear Admiral Fiske expected.
“And then,” he said, “I got recalled home to write stacks of reports about how to make aeroplanes with guns on them.”
“And to make speeches,” Petty Officer Wicklow added. “I was at the one in Virginia where you answered that reporter asking after Lieutenant Thompson and how that crash looked and the trouble it was to get the body parts together for the burial.”
“Glad we aren’t getting into any aeroplanes,” Davis, a young sailor in the back, muttered to the general agreement of the group.
Never mind that bullets are quite good enough at making people dead, I added to myself. Never mind what you’re carrying.
Davis’s pack included most of our explosives, and he’d actually volunteered to carry it. He was plenty brave enough walking around on the ground.
“Like I said, I’m not so great at talking,” Lieutenant Marshall acknowledged. “They didn’t much want me speaking up once they realized I was going to answer the questions about what it was like over there. People die when folks start fighting, and I figure it’s only worth doing if there’s something important to be fighting each other about.
“So, let’s be clear on what we’re doing now. On the other side of that.” He pointed at the horizon, a dark blue line of South Atlantic Ocean meeting a pale sky of fading light. “Is a collection of little islands filled mostly with sheep and rotting whale carcasses. The Malvinas, or Falklands, if you’d rather. A couple decades now they’ve been claimed as a British Overseas Territory. Not so polite of them to be taking American lands and we’re going to do something about it.”
“Um, we are going to take down their wireless station, that’s it,” I said, with what I hoped was an agreeing sort of expression on my face. I do not look like a recruiting poster.
“So we will.” Marshall gave me a jovial shoulder punch. “Tell the fine gents what we know about the locations.”
“Um. Right, sir.” I hadn’t expected to have a speaking role. I hastily pulled from my pack a copy of the coastal chart I’d nabbed from naval records back when I’d first heard whispers of this plan while we were in Virginia. “Uh, this island is the one with most of the people living on it, unfortunately, but it’s of course where the wireless antenna is too. Plenty tall and easy to see in daylight, but we’re going over in the dark on account of wanting to not get seen ourselves. They’ve got it high enough and high-powered enough to signal Montevideo in Uruguay and Buenos Aires in Argentina. Both those mainland countries are neutral in the European war just like us, um, of course,” I added.
“For however long that lasts,” one of the sailors snarked. That was Allen, a sandy-haired broad-shouldered recruit who idolized the lieutenant and spoke out of turn too often, but if even he was paying attention, then everyone in the bunch was listening close.
I ignored the comment but couldn’t suppress my own thoughts: Attacking a Brit territory isn’t the way to stay neutral if anyone ever learns who did it.
“The wireless is here.” I tapped a spot on a peninsula where the tower itself was marked as an aid to navigation. Not far to the south of it was a small ridge labeled Sapper Hill that might be useful if it were tall enough. We’d have to scout it, so I moved on rather than mention it now.
“That tower is about two miles away from the town proper. It’s a village, really, and the British call it Port Stanley.”
Lieutenant Marshall gave me an encouraging nod and beckoned the group to huddle around me.
“So, uh, Stanley is there.” I pointed at a couple other aid to navigation marks for a church steeple and a building described in the mariner’s notes as ‘Governor’s House.’
“And maybe we don’t even meet up with anybody but a night operator or two, if they bother to have one.” A note of hopefulness crept into my voice, so I did my level best to add in what cautious information I’d been able to glean from buying rounds for that one merchant sailor I’d found in a Norfolk dock bar who’d worked as a whaler down this way.
Best money I’ve ever spent, honestly.
“There’s some sort of town watch. Could be a tough group with all the ship repair shops closed. Or, um, nearly so. That is, now that Panama’s canal is open and the merchant ships don’t make the trip around the Horn anymore.”
I gave a pleading look to the lieutenant. I’d never been part of a raiding party before and really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be saying.
Petty Officer Wicklow noticed and stepped up.
“Hundreds of muscle-bound out of work dock workers too buzzed to feel any pain, but lacking sufficient funds to be truly drunk, and with nothing better to do of a night than wander the beaches looking for a fight then,” Wicklow summarized, most unhelpfully. The man had a thick Boston accent, but th
e group had been together too long for me to hope nobody understood him. “And they’ll be locals, too, mores the pity. Not really Brits.”
I remembered then that his family had lost all they’d had in Ireland before coming over, and he was very much looking forward to getting some licks in against the British. Lots of Americans still liked the idea of letting the continentals have their Great War alone, but not all. Some couldn’t wait to join Germany, Austria-Hungry, and Italy in the fight against the Entente powers.
The lieutenant took one look at the mixed expressions of eagerness and fear on the assembled faces and let out a genuine belly laugh.
“Ha! As if they could take you boys!” Marshall’s confidence spread through the men and banished the uneasy expressions as even Brown, our smallest sailor, stood taller.
“We will,” Marshall admitted, “go in quiet like to avoid waking His Governorship, but don’t think it’s because we’re afraid of some minor militia. My aunt met the governor’s wife at an event once when both were in Nova Scotia, and it’d be awkward if we had to shoot her husband.” He gave the group a wink.
Quiet? I carefully did not look at the spools of wire and explosive charges we had already loaded onto our small boats.
“Right then.” I clapped my hands together. “Everyone check their packs are secure. As soon as dusk falls, the Denver will steam in to drop us off. Then we’ll have some hard rowing to do, a quick scramble over the beach, watch things for just a bit to get the lay of the island, then we do some good old fashioned destruction.”
So, so neutral.
“After that, we scramble back to the Denny again.”
Allen blinked at me. “Scramble back? But won’t the ship just steam into the harbor to pick us up?”
“Did you hear anything Chief said?” Williams, our radio expert, rolled his eyes. “We go in. We take the island’s communication rig out, and we come back. Might be a lot of rowing after depending on how far out the Denver is and if we miss the tide.”
“What if we just took the whole place over though?” Petty Officer Wicklow mused. “That’d sure put paid to these British Overseas Territories, wouldn’t it, sir?”
“That it most certainly would.” Lieutenant Marshall agreed.
No, sir, don’t go thinking like that, I pleaded. Because that’d put us in the war for certain.
I looked around the ship’s deck to see if the cruiser’s captain or any other officer of rank might come over to say a few words and, just maybe straighten things all out. The decks were conspicuously empty besides our almost two dozen man landing party.
“Uh, what do you think, Chief?” the radioman asked.
The lieutenant’s political handlers were idiots if they expected someone who routinely went off script on the campaign trail would make a good choice as the leader for a politically-delicate raid, I thought. And a vice president’s nephew was a long way from being a deniable link if they wanted to pretend this was an unauthorized attack in the event we all ended up captured or dead. Unless…
Oh shit. Maybe they did want into the war and needed a good reason. Like a dead hero. God help us.
“I think our lieutenant will lead us right in and right out,” I lied.
“So, we should leave American soil under British control?” Marshall asked the men.
Hell yes!
“This is South America, sir. Not any sort of part of the United States,” I protested.
“Still America,” Davis pointed out. The others looked at him and nodded giving me sidelong looks as if I needed to go back and study my geography a bit more.
As if I didn’t know more about British Overseas Territories than any self-respecting American ought to.
“Should we leave a place for hostile ships to coal up and restock on ammunition so that they can take their embargoes over to our side of the ocean?” Marshall shook his head. “I’d rather not. But, Chief Hays, if you really think it’s in the interest of the people of the United States of America...”
I sighed. The lieutenant had an irritating tendency to be right.
“What the hell, sir. Why not? It’s not like these Falkland Islands could have any real strategic importance to the Great War over in Europe. But your uncle might have you write an apology note to King George V or something after.”
Or go ahead and declare war like it seems the political handlers have wanted all along.
“They can trade notes then.” Lieutenant Marshall agreed. “It’ll make him feel better about all the apologies the British have been making about taking our merchant cargoes.”
“This is the first step, boys,” Marshall said. “We may only knock over a wireless tower and destroy a few war supplies this time in, but America is done letting the Brits built forts on our shores. Let’s go take back America!”
Argentina might have a few things to say about that. I kept my grumbling thoughts off my face while everyone from Seaman Brown to Petty Officer Wicklow cheered.
* * *
Our row boats scraped onto the sand in the dim moonlight. Bleached whale bones, stripped of their lucrative blubber and everything else of any remote value, gleamed in white shards scattered over the sand.
“Whales,” Marshall said with a speculative tone in that single word.
The rest of us kept strict silence in case our voices carried across the cove to some garrison or troop manning the port guns.
Petty Officer Wicklow and three others crunched up the sand to near the peak of a seagrass and scrub covered rise. Continuing up on their bellies, Wicklow lifted a glass, ducked down again, peered at his wrinkled map, and repeated the process several more times.
With quick hand gestures, he sent the sailors scrambling over the rise and off in three directions to scout and return.
On a tip from that Norfolk merchant seaman, we’d avoided any coves likely to hold carcasses still being processed. The governor had strict limits on the number of whales allowed to be taken in each season, but the blubber’s value kept going up, especially as it proved more and more useful to His Majesty’s war effort.
Logistics, I was coming to suspect, might win wars more than aeroplanes or even battleships. Though in this case maybe logistics could end a war…But probably not. I paused to kick a whale bone and pulled my boot back in disgust to find it hadn’t been picked as clean as it should have been. We could maybe strangle the supply lines? I wondered if it’d be possible.
Whale oil typically made soap. But it also produced glycerin as a by-product, which was converted in turn to nitroglycerine, a component of cordite, the oh-so-useful standard propellant for artillery shells and small arms ammunition.
Norwegian captains and Norwegian shipping companies owned most of the whaling fleets, and Norway was neutral in the war. But they used British Overseas Territories as supply ports and sold primarily to the Entente side of the war. When we’d been in Germany, they were so short on glycerin supplies that there were posters in all the portside bars begging fishermen to kill anything at all with blubber, even little seals and dolphins. The United States might need to have something to say about those ‘Overseas Territories’ that happened to be located in the Americas.
“Not just coal at issue here, huh, sir.” I pointed out, keeping my voice as soft as I could manage.
Lieutenant Marshall nodded quiet agreement.
“Several senior officers pulled me aside before we left. They’ll all have to deny everything if we don’t pull this off. But quite a few men will also be patting themselves on the back for their insight and strategic brilliance as well, if we win.”
“When, sir.” I corrected.
He smiled wanly. “If we get separated, get as many of the boys off the island as you can. The Denny’s captain assured me he’ll try a pickup no matter what happens.”
Oh hell no. Don’t imply the ship might abandon us all here if it gets too risky!
“They’ve only got two shore guns!” I protested. A ship’s a fool to fight a fort, my mind rem
inded me. Even a wimpy fort. “But sir—”
“And they have a quite reasonably sized militia if they ring up the bells hard enough before we get into position.”
“We hold the governor hostage then?” Petty Officer Wicklow suggested. I started. He’d ambled up to us without me hearing him and had both Williams and Allen with him.
“Might work.” Williams replied.
“Nah.” Lieutenant Marshall shook his head. “My aunt says he’s not so popular around here. Keeps limiting the increases on the whaling and elephant sealing.”
“But they’ll have no work for their sons if they don’t cap it down now?” Allen whispered with a note of protest raising his voice enough for Wicklow to shush him.
“Didn’t say the governor was wrong to do it,” Marshall acknowledged with a softer tone. “Just folks don’t necessarily appreciate being stopped from killing their golden geese.”
Seaman Davis, lying flat up on the rise, signaled warning and we all went silent and unholstered our rifles.
The sound of feet on sand crunched way too nearby. Then the brush rustled on both our left and right, and I just about had a heart attack until a sheep lifted its head high to blink at me before leaning back down to gnaw on some tender green shoots.
Laughter spread through the group, and I was grateful nobody had shot at any of the sheep now wandering across our beach.
The three scouts returned with nothing useful to share other than the belated information that sheep were wandering freely all around our position.
We divided ourselves into two groups, and in minutes we too were crunching along on seagrass-covered sand away from our hidden boats to circle wide of the herd in case a shepherd came looking to pen them up for the night.
Sweaty and tired with our packs of explosives grown far heavier with the night march, we reached Sapper Hill a few hours before dawn. Petty Officer Wicklow repeated his work with the scouts and then turned the glass over to the boss.
Lieutenant Marshall took a look at our target and with careful thoroughness scanned right all the way to the lighthouse at the point and left to Port Stanley himself. Sliding back down to the indent where I waited, he handed the glass back to Wicklow.
Trouble in the Wind Page 22
