Iron Gray Sea: Destroyermen (35 page)

“Maybe some have been preserved,” Tex suggested encouragingly.

“Possibly. Governor Sir Humphries is a naturalist.” Jenks chuckled softly. “As you said, otherwise the place is hell on earth. One would
have
to be a naturalist to request a posting there! You have cheered me a bit, Mr. Reddy.”

“Good,” Shinya declared. “We have a battle to plan, and I have learned that a positive mood promotes objectivity in regard to such things.”

CHAPTER
21

////// The Battle of Cape Comorin

March 16–20, 1944

C
aptain Jis-Tikkar, or Tikker, saw the massive fleet spread across the hazy sea off the southwest coast of India, and for a moment he thought he would have to swallow his heart. He’d seen a bigger fleet before, riding as copilot with Colonel Mallory in the old PBY Catalina during the Battle of Baalkpan, but he’d never seen
so many big things
in
any
fleet. Before, there’d been
Amagi
, which was terrifying enough at the time, but now there were five—no,
six
—ships defining themselves against the blurry horizon, that looked just as big as the Japanese battle cruiser. The things were dark, squat, and massive, with four tall funnels each, all belching thick, black coal smoke. They looked like mountain fish that someone had built pyres upon—and they weren’t alone. Trailing above and behind the great ships were zeppelins, just as had been reported, and they looked . . . maybe even a little bigger than others he’d seen. Looking back down, Tikker saw more large ships as long as
Walker
but with higher freeboards and two tall masts, steaming in company with the monsters. There were more than twenty of those. The hundreds of Indiaman-style Grik ships flocking along hardly gained his attention.

“Get on the horn,” he shouted into the speaking tube to his backseater over the roar of the engine and the slipstream. “Send that the scout reports are correct, but you really need to see these things to believe them!” He paused a moment. “Enemy position is about forty miles west-northwest of First Fleet flag, course one two zero. Speed, about eight knots. I confirm the number at two hundred plus, including, ah, twenty-three heavies, and six
really
heavies! I also confirm at least a dozen airships—they’re all bunched up from here. Request instructions!”

He waited a few minutes for a reply while he led the First Naval Air Wing in a gentle circle north, then west, keeping the enemy in sight. “Hey! The zeps are breaking away!” he cried into the tube when he suddenly saw the large tan shapes start to scatter. “They seen us! First and Second Pursuit Squadrons, taallyho the zeps! They gonna be makin’ for land or the fleet, I bet!”

The entire 1st Pursuit was armed with a single.50-caliber machine gun each. The 2nd had no mounted guns so far, but the OCs each had several shortened rifles—carbines—loaded with hollow-based bullets filled with the same phosphor compound they were using in the new tracers. They
would
light a zeppelin if they could hit it.

“Taallyho! Taallyho!” Tikker cried as the two squadrons peeled off in pursuit of the airships. The First Naval Air Wing didn’t have voice communications yet, but he remembered having it before, in the
Catalina
, and he got caught up in the moment.

“You want me send what I already send two time more, or take down fleet orders?” came a shouted, peevish voice through the tube.

“What’s fleet say?” he asked.

“The old-style ships gotta be full o’ Griks. We don’t want them on shore. We do want idea what ordnance does on
all
ships. Fift Air Wing forming up over
Arracca
now. Fift COFO report to you for taac-tical direction when it arrive!”

“Okay! Send: First Bomb Squadron on me; we go for big monster ships. Second will attack the little monsters, and Third will burn Grik transports! Taallyho!”

The three remaining squadrons of the 1st Naval Air Wing turned toward the enemy together, at an altitude of five thousand feet. The pursuit ships had already scattered into pairs, going for the zeppelins their squadron commanders sent them after, and Tikker tried to concentrate. Except for the scary, ugly steamers, there wasn’t really any shape to the enemy formation, so his guys would have to be careful not to run into each other. Target fixation had been a problem for his pilots before and he worried about that, particularly when the targets were so large—and frightening. Over the next few minutes, he delegated three planes of the First to attack each of the lumbering behemoths ahead. The commander of the 2nd would work out his own assignments, as would the commander of the 3rd Bomb Squadron. As usual, the air frequency turned into a hash of OCs stomping all over each other, but they had a sequence now, so it didn’t last long. He wondered if Ahd-mi-raal Keje-Fris-Ar himself was sitting in his own COFO chair, in
Big Sal
’s Flight Ops right now, monitoring the traffic. He doubted it. This would be First Fleet’s first “fleet action,” and the admiral was doubtless busy with many things.

The two planes that would attack the lead monster ship with him stayed on his wing as the squadron began to ease apart. The closer they got to the dreadful-looking thing, the bigger and more invulnerable it looked.
It’s iron,
he told himself with sudden conviction.
The whole thing is iron—or at least covered with it!
The Allies had begun plating sections of the sides of their ships to protect the engines and boilers, but they hadn’t done anything like this! He felt his heart drop down in his gut then and he knew—
knew—
their puny firebombs would have little or no effect on such a thing.

“Steady,” he said aloud, and pushed the stick forward.

PB-1B Nancys were good all-around practical aircraft. Even without knowing much about seaplanes, Ben Mallory’s education and experience had paid off on their first real try, and Nancys had become the workhorses of the Allied air effort. They’d proven themselves many times and were now in combat across the known world. With their center of gravity where it was, redundant wing bracing, and, yes, relatively high drag configuration, they even made tolerable dive-bombers. After much practice at close air support on land, the ships—particularly the very large ones—should be easy targets, if Tikker’s pilots remembered to lead them. Sailing ships could do little to avoid the bombs, and Tikker doubted the plodding iron monsters could maneuver very smartly. He wondered in a flash what kind of antiair defenses the things might have.

“Send: We’re going in!” he cried.

Maker, that thing is big!
he thought as the Nancy steadied its dive, angling just forward of a massive raised structure that seemed to extend most of the length of the ship. Smoke gushed skyward from the four tall funnels, and he thought the flat, wide feathers of the ship’s wake had grown a little broader. Maybe it had increased speed? Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the great ship was that despite its size, there was not a living thing moving upon it. All its crew had to be enclosed within. It was as if this huge thing he, his OC, and two other frail planes were hurtling toward was a giant, unfeeling, uncaring—maybe unkillable—machine. His left hand inched toward the low, leather-wrapped lever nestled down to the side of his wicker seat. The closer he got to his target, the surer he was that the iron was bolted onto some kind of framework, at least. But the bolt pattern was almost continuous, so maybe there was solid wood beneath the iron? That had to be it, and the bolts were huge! Big enough to see at— Shutters suddenly rose near the apex at the top of the ship, where the sloping iron of one side joined that of the other, and what looked like dozens of small muzzles appeared briefly before his target was obscured by a monstrous, white cloud!

Large objects, bigger than musket balls,
vroop
ed
past Tikker’s Nancy, and the plane shuddered when one struck the leading edge of his starboard wing. Instinctively he knew it was time, and he pulled up hard on the lever and back on the control stick almost simultaneously. The weight of two two-hundred-pound incendiary bombs dropping away and the backward pressure on the stick caused his plane to rocket skyward, and it dashed through the bitter coal smoke and rising white smoke of . . . whatever shot at him. Moving the stick to the left and pushing hard on the left rudder, his plane practically spun on its axis, and he saw the immediate aftermath of his bomb hits. Both had struck, as had at least two other bombs, and black mushrooms roiled above splashes of greasy orange fire. But as he’d feared, he could see no gaping holes beneath them, vomiting flame. He continued his tight bank, hoping for a better look. Maybe they’d gotten some fire through the open ports at the top?
No. They must have closed them just as we released,
he realized. Still, that may be something . . . The burning fragments of a Nancy were in the water, disappearing aft of the monster as it churned forward, and Tikker knew he’d lost at least one of his planes and two talented young people. Whether it had been shot down or just crashed into the ship didn’t matter; its crew was doubtless dead, and they hadn’t even hurt the thing! He quickly leveled off and looked around. Another Nancy was off his starboard wing, apparently still trying to match his maneuvers. He sighed with some relief and led his surviving companion back through the black smoke and southward. Only then did he try to gauge the success of his other squadrons.

The attack on the transports had gone well. Fiery columns of gray smoke stood, slanting slightly, against the bright sky. Some of the smaller monster ships were burning as well, a few dead in the water.
They
were vulnerable, at least. Great, falling fires crept down toward the sea in the distance to join other smoldering, sinking heaps. So. His pursuiters had done good work against the zeppelins too, but . . . Burning specks lay upon the water here and there, and he knew he’d lost other planes as well. Turning back to see the big monsters again, he saw them all still steaming relentlessly forward, the fires from the bombs already diminishing. One still smoldered, he thought. Maybe some fire did get into that one, but the rest . . .

“Send to all squadrons: Regroup on me as soon as all ordnance is expended; then fly to
Salissa
to refuel and rearm. Send to CINCWEST and the Fifth Air Wing: Attack successful against Indiamen and smaller iron ships, but ineffective against larger ones. The enemy has dangerous, close-range antiair capability, so watch out. Suggest concentrate on small boys for now, but enemy heavies may be vulnerable when antiair is in use. Propose a combined assault on them using both the First and Third Wings after the current sorties have rearmed.”

* * * 

The air attack that swirled above and around General of the Sea Hisashi Kurokawa’s Grand Fleet for the last several days had been . . . interesting, certainly. But the frustration it caused was threatening to send him into one of the almost incapacitating rages he’d guarded against for so long. There’d been reports of the enemy aircraft for a long time, of course, and Kurokawa had appreciated the threat and even taken precautions, but until the first attacks slashed down on him, he secretly hadn’t expected much. Now he was, frankly, amazed that the Americans and their pet monkeys had put such capable craft—and in such numbers!—into the air.

Kurokawa’s conventional ships—mere transports, as far as he was concerned—built along the age-old East Indiaman lines the Grik had used for centuries, had been savaged during his plodding advance. He’d started with nearly two hundred of them, filled with fifty thousand more of the new Grik he’d been so instrumental in creating. Some had been lost to sea monsters, of course, but more than half had been bombed into sinking torches by the highly effective enemy air. He didn’t really care about dead Grik, regardless how elite, but knew General Esshk would be furious. He finally released the ships after nightfall of the first day to make their own way to the coast. There was no port they could reach before daylight, and trying for one would leave them helpless again beneath the sky, so he’d ordered them to run themselves aground on the closest shore so the troops might survive to report to General Niwa, who Kurokawa knew was in the south.

Kurokawa
did
care about the loss of many of his towed zeppelins, armed with Muriname’s special bombs, and he’d released them immediately—to make for the concealed aerodromes where Muriname himself had begun hoarding airships after his own arrival two weeks before. Sadly, there had not yet been enough of the special bombs completed for Muriname to bring more than a few at the time, and none had been sent since. Kurokawa had been bringing more himself and there was no way to know how many of the towed zeppelins survived. Hopefully, the enemy had been too focused on destroying the transports to chase fleeing airships, but he had to assume most were destroyed. The “specials” might now lack the punch of numbers he’d hoped for, but maybe there would be enough—and it was still possible he wouldn’t need them.

What annoyed Kurokawa most were the losses of cruisers and battleships his fleet had endured—many before it ever came in contact with the enemy! The capital ships of his invincible fleet, ships that had taken almost two years to build, had dropped like flies before ever firing a shot. He’d been faced with the fact that regardless of how well constructed and mighty his navy was, his engines, all of them, were
kuso
. They were simply too crude and inefficient for reliable service—and, of course, when the machinery didn’t fail, the Grik engineers did. He had a sprinkling of Japanese engineers in his battleships, but even they were plagued by breakdowns. For once, no suspicion of treachery entered his mind; he felt secure that all his engineers were dedicated to him and the parts of his mission he’d revealed to them, but if the fundamental design of his engines wasn’t at fault, then shoddy, crude construction was to blame.