Ship of Force (29 page)

Smith watched her and waited.
Sparrow
had done all she could and so had
Marshall Marmont
and he thought they had done enough. He could only watch and wait as they dragged up the wounded from the wardroom through the hatch aft one at a time and laid them on the deck in a rapidly lengthening line. A fire burned in the waist because there were no hoses, no pumps, no pressure on the water, and nobody to fight it. The smoke hung around
Sparrow
where she lay heeling, sinking under him. He seemed to watch it all from a distance as if he floated above the deck. His vision would blur and then clear and he clung to the stanchion and peered out through the smoke to the bright, blue sunlit sea beyond.

* * *

Marshall Marmont
was Garrick’s first command in action. He did not bemoan the fact that she was a ship only in that she floated.
Marshall Marmont
was his and Smith had given him the chance and he was grateful. He was an unimaginative man but he saw very clearly that it was an opportunity he might regret and he might be lucky even to live to regret it. That was irrelevant. He had a command and an action to fight. He stood on his bridge and through his glasses he watched
Sparrow
’s smoke that showed where she steamed hull-down over the horizon and saw from that smoke that she had turned. Towards the enemy, of course. He turned, sea and sky blurring in the glasses, then stopped, steadied them. He could see a lot of smoke but there would be more than one ship because the battlecruiser would have an escort.

“‘Guns’ reports enemy in sight, sir! Twenty thousand yards!”

Garrick grunted, acknowledging the report, not lowering the glasses, and ordered, “Open fire!”

That was how Smith would have done it. The imitation was unconscious.

The Gunnery Officer high in the control top would see more than Garrick below him. Garrick thought that the battlecruiser would have vision equally as good as ‘Guns’ but not the indications he had, the smoke to lead him on to the tiny speck of the ship beneath. And the men in the battlecruiser were staring straight into the morning sun. It would be a miracle, or rather the devil’s own luck, if they saw
Marshall Marmont
where she lay low in the water.

The twin fifteen-inch fired and the long barrels recoiled, licking out long tongues of flame and pouring smoke. Garrick stood as immobile as the ship, as quiet as the sea on which she lay as the salvoes roared out again and again.

“Leading destroyer altered course towards us, sir!”

“Seen.” Garrick thought, sent to look for us. And take us on? Through the glasses he saw her head-on, high-stemmed with a big white bone in her teeth as she came on at full speed.

“Battlecruiser’s signalling, sir!”

He lifted the glasses fractionally and the battlecruiser swam in the lenses and then was still. He just caught the final blinking of the searchlight and then it stopped.

“Destroyer’s turning, sir.”

He grunted again. She was turning away towards the battlecruiser. So the big ship was calling back her escort, as if, now that the destroyer had reported the solitary monitor, the enemy commander was guarding against another threat, leaving the monitor to his big guns. Another threat?
Sparrow
? Ridiculous! Then maybe the battlecruiser, eight miles or so to westward could see something he could not?

Or had Smith contrived something?

He grinned with the rest of them when ‘Guns’ reported a hit and then another, and ducked inside himself though he never visibly flinched as the first salvo from the battlecruiser howled overhead and into the sea four hundred yards inshore. Then into one voice pipe he said, “Good shooting, ‘Guns’. Keep it up!” And into another, “Baker. Got your damage-control party alert?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Keep ’em on their toes. You’ll be busy soon.”

When Garrick had served under Smith not long ago in the Pacific the ship had been almost totally destroyed beneath them. He would never forget that. He knew the horrors to come. But he watched the battlecruiser through his glasses as she came on, steaming hard inside her destroyer screen and he saw she had been hurt.
Marshall Marmont
could not kill her but she bore the marks of this action in the smoke she trailed that was not funnel smoke and the yellow flick of flame that marked a fire.

In the control-top ‘Guns’, Lieutenant Chivers, short and stocky and crouched like a gnome over the director sight, saw the damage he had done. This was justification, reward, for all the training, practice shoots, and the coastal bombardments of targets unseen over the horizon; this sight of a big ship being hit by his guns. He had never been in a big ship action, and never expected to be, not in
Marshall Marmont
. He did not know what was to come but he knew the German gunnery was good and they were seeking him out, that they were firing eight gun salvoes and the range was closing, that
Marshall Marmont
was a stationary target to be shot at. He knew these things and he could have drawn some unpleasant conclusions if he had let his imagination run away with him but he refused to allow that, huddled lower over the sight and grew hoarser as he called his orders. His thumb punched the salvo button again and in the turret the bells rang and the twin fifteen-inch fired. He thought they would hit, the sight and deflection right, the battlecruiser a clean-cut target. He thought she might be
Siegfried
.

That was his last thought.

Garrick’s stolid, appreciating glance took in that the battlecruiser was hit but maintaining course and speed, that ahead of her and to seaward destroyers were fighting an action, tiny ships flickering with gunfire as they seemed to creep towards each other. He never heard the salvo that hit them and blasted the control-top into wreckage that went over the side. He found he was on his face on the deck and his nose was bleeding. He climbed to his feet to receive reports and coughing in the smoke he ordered the guns: “Independent firing!” Before they could fire, another salvo hit
Marshall Marmont
and he sprawled again, rose again, holding on to keep his balance in a reeling world and saw through the smoke and flames surrounding the bridge that the turret leaned drunkenly on its mounting. He found he was the only man on his feet on the bridge and set himself to gathering reports, staggering to the voice pipes, stubbornly determined to fight his ship to the last, to save her.

Then the last salvo plunged down.

* * *

Jack Curds had climbed the single mast of the CMB and clung there with one leg over the yard, watching, waiting. From there he could see
Marshall Marmont
firing and he saw
Sparrow
start her charge. He saw
Siegfried
heave up over the horizon and swallowed at the sight of her. He watched and waited as
Sparrow
charged in and slipped one destroyer then was lost in the smoke that rolled across the sea and hid her and the others. He watched and waited till then, seeing the fires start on
Siegfried
and then others start on
Marshall Marmont
as she was hit again and again and became a ship aflame. He felt sick and angry, frightened and cold and eager. But this was the moment that Smith had ordered and
Siegfried
was only two miles away and his CMB lay dead ahead of her.

He slid down the mast, burning the inside of his thighs, said, “Start —” But his throat was choked up and he had to cough to clear it. This time his voice croaked harshly, “Start up!” The engines burst into life with a roar and CMB 19 moved ahead. Curtis stood in the cockpit behind the wheel and stared through the already lifting spray at the knife-edge bow of the battlecruiser, the big turrets and the superstructure that climbed up to the control top and stood like a castle out of the sea. The CMB was alive now, smacking across the wave crests and now she would not be invisible. Bow-wave and wash would mark her like banners, plainer than the big ensign she flew and that cracked above Curtis. He glanced up at it then back at the midshipman. He shouted, “Ready?” And when Johnson lifted a hand and gave him a tight grin: “You’d better be! Only get one chance!”

He turned away and gulped. In those few seconds the battle-cruiser had seemed to leap towards him. The CMB was up on the step now, making her thirty-odd knots and still accelerating. She was closing the battlecruiser at their combined speeds of nearly seventy miles an hour and she was too quick and too sudden for
Siegfried
and the destroyers. They picked her out but not until she began to move, making that bow-wave and wash. Till then she lay unseen, a splinter on the surface of the sea while a tethered monitor fired big gun salvoes from inshore and an old torpedo-boat-destroyer manned by lunatics charged in from the sea. Now they saw her and it was too late. She had raced in under their noses and the seaward destroyer screen was involved with
Sparrow
. The others tried to intercept her and fired on her but she was too close and too fast for them to hit.

Curtis steered the boat and thought with a part of his mind that he and his little crew might be the only men still alive in Smith’s flotilla and he must not waste the chance that the rest, that Smith, had thrust upon him. He hunched over the wheel and stuck his jaw out as he peered over the screen and through the spray at the battlecruiser. The midshipman watched him and thought, You can see by the look of him he’s goin’ to set his teeth into this one. Christ! He’s whistling!

Curtis’s lips were pursed and he was whistling as he might have whistled when baiting a line. The same frown of concentration was there. It was a toneless whistle and his lips were dry. The CMB fled over the sea with her fore half lifted clear of the water and her stern dug in and the battlecruiser grew to a giant and then a monster. Curtis eased on the wheel as the thought registered ‘seven hundred yards’, and the CMB spun away to starboard out of the path of
Siegfried
. The sea lifted in tall towers of upflung water ahead of him and alongside and he could see from the corner of his eye the destroyer to port and plunging across towards him. But he eased the wheel back and the CMB spun again and this time turned in towards
Siegfried
.

Aboard her they saw the motorboat off the port bow and looking to be standing on end in the sea as she snarled in at them. Curtis peered over the lifted stem and watched the bow of
Siegfried
, gauging her speed and how she lay to the boat, the distance between. He lifted one hand. The midshipman had been waiting for it, for seconds had been begging for it. Come on. Come on! Any closer and you’ll run
aboard
her?
Come
on! Curtis held on because
Siegfried
was no destroyer under which a torpedo might run if he fired too near her. She was a deep-draughted ship so he would get in close.

Nearly there.

Nearly…

Now!

He cut down the hand, felt the jar, then the leap of the stern as Johnson yanked the release handle and fired the torpedo stern first into the sea. Curtis turned the wheel and the CMB spun to starboard, laid right over in a skidding turn. He held the wheel but sat half-turned in the seat shooting glances astern. The midshipman was yelling, red-faced with excitement, both hands lifted in a ‘thumbs-up’ sign and beyond him Curtis saw the track of the torpedo. He had held on to the last split-second to be certain and now he could watch the track and knew it could not miss.
Siegfried
was trying to turn away but he had run too close and she had no time. She was firing every gun that would bear, hurling ton after ton of steel and high explosive at the slender, flitting, bouncing black speck in its shifting curtain of spray that jinked and swerved and ran for dear life.

* * *

Aboard
Sparrow
Sanders came up to Smith and reported, “The wounded are on deck. All clear below.” And warned: “She’s making water fast, sir.”

Smith could feel it in the way she listed under him, see it in the way the sea was reaching up on her. “No boats, Sub?”

“No, sir.”

“Rafts, then. Wounded first.”

There were few rafts intact on that shattered deck and it was hell’s own job to clear them, but they got enough over the side to take the wounded and passed them down. The ship was still, lying lifeless in the sea. The big destroyers were moving now, slowly edging away, the one that
Sparrow
had rammed being towed by the other. Smith could still hear firing and saw that
Siegfried
had steamed on and left the two destroyers to their own devices. It was the battlecruiser firing and the remainder of her destroyer screen were increasing speed as if to concentrate ahead of her.

He helped the last of the wounded down to a raft and Sanders at his elbow said, “Here, sir.” And thrust a lifebelt at him. “She’s going, sir.”

Smith held the lifebelt but turned away and started to scramble painfully up to the wrecked bridge again. Sanders shouted after him. “Sir! She’ll go any
minute
, sir!” But Smith ignored him. He reached the bridge and climbed up on to the searchlight platform at the back of it. The light was shattered and the mounting twisted so he could not get on to the platform. He climbed carefully up on to the lamp itself and slowly straightened, balanced there. The glasses still swung on his chest from their strap and he set them to his eyes.
Siegfried
was easy to find, plunging along with guns blazing. He brought the lenses creeping down, searching the sea — and caught the flying CMB as it hurtled in on the battlecruiser, close and closer until it spun away and raced past Siegfried’s stern. Smith held his breath.

* * *

Curtis steered with one hand and one eye past the battlecruiser’s stern, starting to tear away to safety but still half-turned in the cockpit watching for the torpedo. And because she was steaming at nearly thirty knots and starting to turn,
Siegfried
almost drew clear of the torpedo and left it astern.

Almost.

But Curtis had gone in to ram it down their throats.

He saw the sea heave at
Siegfried’s
stern and saw the stern, twenty-eight thousand tons or no, lifted out of the sea by the burst of the torpedo. Johnson was capering like a monkey in the torpedo bay, yelling and waving his arms. The destroyer astern of
Siegfried
was firing, the shells falling close as the CMB swerved and ran away but no one aboard her noticed. Curtis’s leading hand was hammering him on the back and bawling something about “bloody marvellous.” Curtis was numb. The CMB flew over the sea to the south-west and soon the guns ceased firing.

* * *

Smith saw the sea spout at
Siegfried’s
stern and seconds later the
thump
! came dully across the sea. He saw her speed fall away, she slewed off course and the screening destroyers turned to her. That was all he saw but it was enough.

He turned and found Buckley on the bridge below him and realised Buckley was bellowing at him, had been bellowing for some time, “For Gawd’s sake, sir! She’s near awash!”

He looked and saw that Buckley was right and
Sparrow
was settling under them. He started down, slipped and fell but Buckley caught him. The burly seaman was muttering under his breath and scowling, for once out of patience with his wayward officer. But he got Smith down to the deck and into his lifejacket. With Sanders, they jumped.

The rafts were crowded but they found hand-holds on the lines of one of them and hung there watching as
Sparrow
sank, slowly at first but then at the last with a rush as if to get it over with.

McGraw said, “Puir auld cow.”

* * *

Siegfried
and her escorts had made off to the north-east, were small with distance when Curtis came seeking
Sparrow
’s survivors, the CMB riding high and fast ‘on the step’ and sweeping in wide, lazy arcs until someone aboard her spotted the rafts in the sea. Then she straightened out to point at them and the bow dropped, her speed fell away as the engines’ snarl faded to a low grumbling and she slipped slowly down on them, gently probing her way through the litter of flotsam that was all that was left of
Sparrow
. Curtis took all of the survivors aboard, cramming them in the torpedo bay, taking them on the deck, anywhere they could hold on. There were thirty-four survivors and of that number fifteen were wounded, one of them, a stoker, severely. Him they settled in the cockpit by Curtis’s legs.

The CMB sat low in the water under its heaped human load, but Curtis said. “Won’t be for long, sir. I made a signal to
Marshall Marmont
to tell ’em I was going to look for you an’ I asked if there was anything I could do for them. They said, ‘This ship will cope.’”

Smith saw one or two grins on the faces of
Sparrow
’s survivors. They remembered that signal.

Curtis went on, “So I suppose she’s floating and I can transfer your crew when we come up with her.”

Smith nodded. He sat on top of the cockpit so Curtis was speaking in his ear. Buckley crouched on the deck by his shoulder. As the CMB got cautiously under way and her bow swung around he looked ahead and saw the smoke that marked
Marshall Marmont
. He watched all through the long minutes as the CMB cruised steadily towards her.

* * *

There was no billowing cloud of smoke now though a blue haze still hung around her. Smith could see no flames. It was impossible to tell whether she lay lower in the water; she was always low. Her silhouette was changed because the tall mast and control top had gone and the bridge was a heap of wreckage. The turret was there but twisted at a crazy angle, the long barrels of the guns pointing at the sky. He said huskily, “Ask her condition.”