Angels in the Gloom (38 page)

Some men were struggling to extinguish the flames, others to pad and block the hole in the plating, more to help the injured. Matthew had no experience, no skills. He could see in his mind’s eye the zeppelin, a sheet of flame, descending out of the sky on top of him, feel the heat of it, Detta beside him.

He wished he knew what to do, anything to help. He knew nothing about fire, or the force of water trying to crush a steel hull from the outside. He moved, lifted, passed, everything he was told, carried bleeding men, staggering under their weight.

He was up on the deck again before dark, his skin singed, eyes aching and gritty with smoke. As it cleared in the wind he could see a burned-out gun turret, charred wood, broken rigging, and a German battle cruiser ahead, just within range. The starboard guns fired from the good turrets one after another and he saw at least half a dozen plumes of water spout up. They were just short of the battle cruiser, but closing.

There was another destroyer to the port side, about two thousand yards away, as near as he could judge, and beyond it, almost obscured by smoke, another. The battle cruiser was firing. A salvo of shells landed almost on them, sending up mountains of water, drenching the entire ship. They veered across rapidly to avoid the range, hull shuddering under the strain, and then swerved again, coming closer.

All the starboard guns fired. The noise was a kind of hell in itself. A gun turret on one of the other destroyers was hit and Matthew knew the men in it would all have been killed. He found himself praying it had been outright, not slow burning to death. He had seen the men’s white faces when they saw it happen a hundred yards away, and knew that even if they had been on board, there was nothing they could have done.

Was this how Joseph felt, battered and deafened by sound, watching men being torn apart, struggling to fight, to survive, to do all that was asked of them? Matthew had experienced it for a few hours, not yet even twelve. Joseph saw it every night, and knew it would go on, maybe for years. You knew men, you cared for them, laughed with them, shared jokes and memories and family pictures—all the time knowing the chances that sooner or later they would be killed or mutilated beyond recognition.

How did Joseph bear it and keep sane? Or Archie? Above all, how did Joseph find something to say that was anything but idiotic in the face of such reality? The kind of courage that it demanded amazed him and awoke a staggering admiration. He would never be able to look at Joseph, or even think of him again in the same casual, familiar way as before. As a child he had regarded Joseph as a hero because he was his elder brother, but this was entirely different. The Joseph he had known all his life was only part of it, the core of it was a stranger that until now he could not have seen.

There was incessant gunfire from huge steel monstrosities—ten, twenty feet long, firing shells it took two men to lift and load. When they struck, they tore apart plate steel, and if they hit magazines, they exploded in sheets of white-hot fire that engulfed whole decks, burning men to death in minutes.

The sky and sea were lit up by muzzle flashes all around them. He knew it must be nearing midnight by now. They were still firing at the German cruiser. Radio signals were stuttering from all directions, some making sense, others too broken to read. The losses were appalling—innumerable ships and thousands of men. The sea was rough, choppy; the wind swung around to the west.

The Cormorants guns were silent for minutes. They were closing on the cruiser.

Then they opened fire again, the noise mind-numbing. There seemed to be flame and smoke everywhere, searing the skin and hair, choking the lungs. The bridge and signal house were shrouded by it. Matthew had not the least idea whether anything was hit or not.

He stared to the east, straining until the smoke cleared. Ragland beside him seemed to be holding his breath, his face masklike in the glare of the lights.

Gradually the wind blew the smoke away, cold salt instead of burning cordite, and they saw the cruiser engulfed in flame. The magazines had taken a direct hit and exploded, breaking its back. It was listing already, in the first terrible throes of its long plunge to its tomb in the depths.

Matthew was speechless. The tactics had been brilliant. The Cormorant had sunk an enemy cruiser with more weight, more guns, and more men, but there was no sweetness in it at all. The fact that they were German, and would have sunk the Cormorant if they could, seemed almost irrelevant. They were close to a thousand living, breathing men, seamen like themselves, going to a fearful and certain death. It was all he could think of as he stood transfixed with pity watching as the great ship burned lower and lower in the water. Ammunition still exploded, tearing her apart until she slid beneath the black surface, shining in the flames of other gunfire, leaving the sea littered with struggling men and the debris of death.

There was no one there to help, and no one came. They were under the guns of the Cormorant. Please God, Archie would not have shot at a rescuer, but they could not know that, nor could the Cormorant risk going any closer to the array of German destroyers on the farther side, well within firing range.

Matthew turned away and saw Ragland’s face in the light. The same wrenching pity was in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, although it was impossible to tell in the red and yellow glare of muzzle flames and the smeared darkness of drifting gun smoke, if he was as ashen as he looked. The noise had started again closer, others joining those of the injured ships around them. There was no time for shock or mourning. The battle raged on.

Midnight passed. In the signal room they heard that both the Ardent and the Fortune had been sunk.

At two o’clock news came that the armored cruiser Black Prince had blundered into the German firing line and been lost with all hands. For the first time Matthew began to believe that the British fleet might lose. It was a strange thought, alien and hard to grasp. Britain had not lost a crucial battle at sea since before the Spanish Armada in the reign of Elizabeth I, over three hundred years earlier. This would mean the end. Without a navy to guard the shipping lanes, to evacuate the army from France, to prevent the German army landing on the beaches of Britain, the war was lost. In a month, two months, the fields and trees of England could be trampled by German boots, burned, torn up, destroyed by an occupying army.

What then? Retreat to the hills of Wales, Scotland? Fight in the forests and fens until there was no one left? Or submit, sue for peace and some kind of survival? On what terms? Would that be to betray the dead who had already paid so high a price, only to have it thrown away now? Or the living, who had to make the best of what was left? At what point was it no longer worth fighting?

He listened to the signals coming in with a kind of grim despair. He thought of Hannah and the children, the village, the fields under the great, silent elms. Were they better destroyed in the last battle, or conquered, surviving, and changed forever?

He was still thinking of that, angry and tormented, his ears deadened by the noise, when he heard shouting and saw Archie waving his arms, signaling frantically to the men on the deck below him.

Ragland peered forward. Then Matthew saw it as well, a German cruiser coming straight toward them. He realized what Archie’s order had been—“Clear the foc’sle!”

The next instant they crashed together with an impact that hurled Matthew off his feet and the whole room seemed to pitch over on one side and then right itself and send him back again, staggering against the table. The ship rolled over to starboard, and the next moment there was the roar and crack of fire raking the length of the ship.

Matthew clambered to his feet, shaken and hurt. Ragland was doing the same, but with more presence of mind, he made for the door, threw his weight against it and burst it open. Matthew followed him. The front glass was shattered; only then did he see on the port side the vast, towering bow of the German cruiser almost cleaving them amidships, buckling and ripping off the steel plating.

“God Almighty!” Ragland gasped, standing momentarily rooted to the deck.

Very slowly the German ship eased back into the sea and the Cormorant rocked violently and righted itself a little, wallowing hard in the water.

The German guns had cleared the decks. The foremast was toppling, the for’ard searchlight had fallen from the fire-bridge down to the deck, and the funnel was blown back until it rested between the two foremost ventilation cowls. The boats had come down and even the davits were torn out of their sockets. The cruiser’s guns must have been elevated too high to rip open the deck, or they would have been on fire by now, and settling in the water.

Matthew knew it before the order came to man the boats: They were sinking. There was no way to save her. A wild terror assailed him that Archie would go down with her. He swung around, looking for him, but the bridge was invisible through the smoke.

Someone was manning the guns, firing with everything they had at the German ship, spewing shell, flame, smoke in choking clouds. They’d go down locked together!

Except that the German ship was not holed. It was still well afloat.

One of the boy sailors, not much older than Tom, came scrambling up the steps, shouting something. Matthew tried to read his lips and the meaning in his wildly swinging arms.

“The brig’s burst open!” the boy yelled, the words piercing a sudden moment’s lull.

Hannassey! He’d go for the prototype. He didn’t know it was no good. And perhaps it wasn’t. The Germans might be able to finish it!

There was no point in trying to explain anything to Ragland. The roar of the guns had started again and he would hear nothing anyway. Matthew pushed past him and plunged down the steps, now twisted and torn loose at the bottom.

Men were running up. Smoke caught in his nose and throat, half blinding him, making him cough and his eyes stream, but he was determined to catch Hannassey, at all costs. If they were going down, all of them—Archie, Ragland, all the men and boys he had eaten with, worked beside, and whose courage and good humor he had known—then Hannassey was bloody well going down with them. He was not going to escape to the German ship that had rammed them, not even for a few minutes before it too sank. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Maybe someone would survive, and it was not going to be the Peacemaker!

Where would he go when the brig burst open? To the prototype, surely. He wouldn’t leave the Cormorant without at least trying to get it. He was not a man to save his own skin without playing the last card!

He swiveled in his tracks and went toward the torpedo room where the prototype was stored, theoretically ready for testing.

It was difficult to keep his balance; the list to starboard was growing worse. He kept sliding, losing his footing and having to catch himself, one hand against the bulkhead, then an elbow, then a shoulder as he ran. He stumbled over bodies and wreckage. The guns were still roaring, as if the crews were determined to take the German ship with them. There was shattered glass on the floor and the air was thick with the stench of gun smoke, burning oil, and rubber from the corticine. And it was getting hotter all the time as he got closer to the fires.

There was another explosion, a tearing thunder of sound, and the whole ship juddered and sank lower, throwing Matthew forward onto his hands and knees, then rolling him over, bruised and wounded, hands cut, burned, streaming blood. He clambered to his feet again, gasping and coughing, retching to catch his breath.

Was Hannassey still somewhere ahead of him? What if he was wrong, and he had abandoned the prototype and was even now saving his own life by jumping to the German ship? It would be possible. It was lower in the water now, at least from the raised port side.

He hesitated. Which way?

The ship lurched again. Was it even lower? There seemed to be smoke everywhere, and the heat was intense! Were they on fire? Please God, if they were, they would explode! Better to be consumed in a fireball, blown apart in an instant, than to sink knowingly, wide awake, into the darkness and the crushing weight of the ocean, struggling for breath, or drowned as the water poured in, black and ice-cold from the lightless depths.

But he’d get Hannassey first! If he’d already got the prototype, and was struggling to carry it, which way would he go?

Portside, of course. It was higher. If she listed any more there was a risk the starboard side would actually be below water level, and if it was holed either by enemy shot or their own gun turrets or magazines exploding, that would be the end.

It was not his imagination; it was getting hotter. His hands hurt from the broken glass. Somewhere there was burning. It could reach the magazine any minute. He had no idea where it was, or how bad. A voice inside him screamed to go up, toward the light and the air! Escape… escape… escape!

The smoke was thicker. He was having trouble breathing. His eyes were streaming, he could hardly see. He fell over another body, inert and wet with blood.

But he would get the Peacemaker, and die knowing for certain that he had destroyed him. It was worth it. Don’t die for nothing. He just wished he could have told Joseph that he’d done it.

And Judith and Hannah—they deserved to know, too. Especially Judith. He could not tell Detta, he could never tell her, but she deserved to know, for the way he had used and broken her also, and taken from them both what they could have had.