Thunder at Dawn (24 page)

*

They entered, and existed in, a world of thunderous discharge and shuddering impact as hits ripped into the old ship’s frame. Damage reports came in by voice-pipe or gasping, staring messengers. Smith conned his ship, swerving her to try to unsight the enemy, listening to the endless reports of damage and death, to the ranges called: “Double-five-doubleoh! … five-six-double-oh! …”

The range was opening. “Port four points!” Smith set to closing it again. The enemy was edging away, trying to open the range and make it a big gun battle.
Thunder
had only one big gun now.

Minutes later
Kondor
opened the range again, and again Smith ordered a closing course. The message he sent was clear: If
Kondor
edged away he would follow her until she ran aground. But he knew the Captain of
Kondor
would not just accept that.

When Wakely shrieked, “
Torpedo
!
Red
-
four
-
oh
!” Smith leapt to his side and peered at the tell-tale track.

“Hard aport!”
Thunder
turned towards the enemy and the torpedo. The alternative was to turn away but Smith would not open the range, would not show
Thunder’s
stern with her after-turret incapable of firing, still smoking. The torpedo ran down
Thunder’s
side, well clear of her and clear away. Smith stared at
Kondor
as
Thunder
held the turn.
Kondor
was already turning, intent on running back along her wake and then clawing out to sea where she could dictate the course of the fight. Smith held the turn, then: “Midships!”

So they were running again on parallel courses five thousand yards apart and
Thunder
a steel door between
Kondor
and the open sea.
Kondor
hammered at the door; the nerve-battering, brutal slogging match went on.

In the conning-tower, thrown about, deafened, bruised, Smith took the reports as they came in. They came baldly, without lurid description that would only have understated the horror of a ship and a crew being torn apart.

The twin after six-inch casemate on the port side took a direct hit from an 8.2-inch shell that wrecked the main-deckgun, the upper-deck gun above and decimated the crew of the latter. Only Daddy Horsfall walked out of it and clear around the splinter-swept chaos of the upper-deck before consciousness crept in slowly from his body to his mind. He felt for the carefully sock-wrapped bottle that held his illegally hoarded tots and found that as miraculously intact as himself. He drank as if it was water then looked for a way off that exposed upper-deck and for work for his hands. He ducked below and headed forward. Behind him, a minute later the after starboard casemate was mangled beyond recognition.

The port forward casemate took a freak hit on the muzzle of the gun that left its crew tossed about like dolls but still alive. That was Nobby Clark’s gun. He bellowed at them, dazed and deaf, “All right! Don’t lie there idling an’ scratching your arses!” He started to shove them out of the smoking wreckage like a dog herding sheep. His intention was to aid any short-handed gun; there would be gaps from casualties now. Before he got them out another shattering hit sent them all flying again. But once more he rounded them up. One of the port side midship casemates had ceased to exist, blasted clear out of the ship into the sea, leaving a smoking hole.

The upper-deck was an obstacle course from a nightmare, unrecognisable, a strange place of ripped, curled plates, jagged-edged; piled wreckage and tangled rigging; sprouting fires fought by ghosts that came hoarse-voiced, haggard and filthy out of the smoke, trailing hoses, and were lost in it again; over all rolled the smoke, from the fires, the clanging guns, and
Thunder’s
belching funnels. Clark fought his way through and hauled and herded his crew along by willpower and discipline. He lost his layer to a hit somewhere forward that filled the flaming hell with screaming splinters and threw them all to the deck. Clark would mourn for the layer as a friend but later. He led the rest below to a starboard six-inch with a dead crew they dragged aside.

They manned the gun moving like automata. The shell and the charge came up after Clark talked on the voice-pipe with Sergeant Burton who now seemed to be running some of the magazines. It was a miracle that repeated itself while they laboured unaware that fighting had run the magazines low and some were lost and locked under water in flooded compartments. The ammunition that came up the hoist, which was worked manually because the power had failed, had travelled half the length of the ship from a port side magazine. The few men of the ammunition parties that were left carried those shells and charges along narrow ammunition passages. These were in almost total darkness, smoke-filled, blocked in places by wreckage they had to climb around or over and the projectile a huge deadweight.

Elsewhere in the ’tweendecks men toiled in the smoke and frying heat, hauling at canvas hoses as they choked, with weeping eyes but fighting the fires. They saw the horror around them, the littered dead in the bloody, smoking wreck that
Thunder
had become but they kept on. Duty was something to hold on to in a world gone mad and being blasted apart around them.

Clark in the layer’s seat squeezed the trigger and the gun slammed into action.

Down in the forward 9.2 magazine Benks continued the praying he had begun before the action, with only a break for the catch of his breath. He knew nothing of the progress of the battle, down there below the waterline in his hushed little monk’s cell with the charges. He only knew the turret still fired rapidly and he was kept hard at it filling the demanding hoist. And that
Thunder
had been hit and hit again more times than he could count but he had felt them all, shuddered to them. He had commended his soul to God and now prayed for the men in the turret above him. He had not expected they would all live this long.

*

In the conning-tower the reports came in. “Hit forward, sir! Torpedo flat and prison flat flooded!”

Smith acknowledged the report, it was just one more blow, and altered course again in that continual erratic weave trying to out-guess the enemy guns. Occasionally he saw
Kondor
through the drifting smoke that surrounded her and saw she was badly mauled. As a raider she was finished; she needed a dockyard and that meant internment.
Wolf
was in at least as bad a case and probably worse, lying crippled, miles away.

But as
Thunder
fired her remaining guns, there were only three now, and as Smith strove to evade the salvoes that rained down in reply, it was evident that
Kondor
had the whip hand. She was firing more guns, four or five, in regular salvoes, the flashes rippling down her side.

The beating went on. An explosion right over the conningtower sent them sprawling for the twentieth time, there was a rending crash and as Smith dragged to his feet with blood running from his nose he saw that the mast had gone, fallen back along the length of
Thunder’s
deck, thrusting the tilted, riddled funnels to an even crazier angle.

Garrick’s voice, hoarse and urgent, no longer echoed down the voice-pipe because the fore-top was now just part of the wreckage heaped in the waist.

The beating went on.

Thunder
swerved under Smith’s orders and twice salvoes fell alongside, while he saw that
Kondor
was hit and that she had fires of her own, flames licking yellow through the smoke, but her firing did not falter.

Thunder
had only one six-inch gun still in action besides the forward-turret. She took a direct hit on the turret. The orange flash split the smoke-filled drum of the conning-tower. As the flame blinded them, the blast rattled them around the drum but Smith held on and kept his feet as did the Coxswain at the wheel. As Wakely rolled to his knees Smith grabbed at him and hauled him upright, croaked, “Get a fire party on that turret!” And thrust him, staggering, on his way. That was the most Smith could do. The turret and the men in it he must now forget. He looked again for the enemy.

Thunder’s
speed was falling away.
Kondor
was head-reaching on her and he saw she was starting to turn, slowly, to creep across ahead of
Thunder
and so out to sea. She was trying again to make it a big gun battle and
Thunder
did not have a big gun. She would haul out of range of the lone six-inch and then smash
Thunder
to pieces. Smith could not stop it.

“Steer four points to port!”

Thunder
started to turn so that at least that one six-inch would bear.

Reports had built on themselves to tell him of a ship so battered that it seemed not an inch of her but had been torn by high-explosive, ripped by splinters or scourged by fire, a ship that still fought with a solitary gun, that still functioned only by the courage and the dogged discipline of the men who manned her. He did not need reports. He could see some of the havoc from the conning-tower, feel the sluggish response with the ship’s speed down below ten knots and falling still.

She was dying beneath his feet.

XVI

When the hit smashed the mast below Garrick it threw him up in the air to fall on his back in the fore-top, that was itself already falling. For a second it hung as stays parted, then it fell and Garrick fell with it. He clung on with arms wrapped around the mast as the fore-top smashed against the funnel and then on to the boat-deck. He was hurled loose to roll and almost plunge the ten feet to the upper deck but he grabbed half-dazed for handhold, found one and held and checked that rolling as he hung on the edge.

He was winded, bruised, disorientated. His left arm
hurt
and he could not move it. He collected his scattered thoughts slowly but with instinctive sense of priority realised his danger out there on the boat-deck where splinters whined with every hit that
Thunder
took. So he rolled over the edge, this time of his own volition and at his own speed, lowered to the length of his good arm and dropped to the deck. His legs gave under him and he collapsed in that illusion of shelter as
Thunder
was hit forward.

Flame reached back a long tongue to lick at the conningtower, blinding him. When he opened his eyes he was staring down at the deck below his face, clinging to it. His legs felt numb, useless. He rolled over and rubbed at them, flexed them, until he felt the numbness running away and instead the pain of a huge bruise across the backs of his knees. He tried to stand and succeeded at the third attempt. He had to reach the Captain. He took a step and
Thunder
was hit aft and he skidded once more across the deck. He climbed to his feet blaspheming, sobbing at the pain in his arm then stopped and stood with breath held. Then he turned and started to stumble aft, felt the shock and slam of a six-inch firing and thought that there was one gun still firing, and then somehow broke into a shambling trot.

The engine …

*

Albrecht’s little party consisted of Gabriel, the sick-berth Petty Officer, and Purkiss, with half-a-dozen cooks detailed as assistants and gruesomely, the butcher. Through the first few minutes of the action they waited scattered around the sick-bay. The ventilation was still working then and the air was tolerably clean but they sweated. The scuttles were closed so they could see nothing of the dark world outside. They rocked and braced themselves as
Thunder
heeled and rolled in those tight turns and shuddered as her guns fired and jerked at the nerves of all of them.

They waited, Albrecht with hands resting on the operating table, shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbows. His eyes checked once again the knives and saws, the gag and the drop-bottles of chloroform and ether.

Until
Thunder
shook to shock that was not recoil and a crash that was no discharge. She had been hit.

The horror began. The casualties came down; vicious splinter wounds, the flesh cloven to the bone; hideous burns. Albrecht saw the shock on the faces of his raw amateurs and even, carefully concealed but obvious in its stiff-faced absence, on Gabriel and Purkiss. This was new to all of them. Albrecht seized on his expression of professional detachment and stamped it on his face and on his mind. Feeling he would banish until later when it would hurt no one but himself. From now until it was over he would not feel. It was a determination hardly held.

The trickle of casualties became a stream, the wounds more terrible, the task impossible. The sick-bay filled as Albrecht operated with Gabriel’s assistance, Purkiss stitched and treated and the amateurs wound on dressings. As the ship rocked and lurched around them the light flickered and returned, went out and gave way to the emergency lighting. The ventilator sucked down smoke and fumes now, and vomit added to the stench. The stream of shattered men became a river, overflowing the cots and carpeting the deck with their bodies.

Then the firing ceased. Albrecht thought, ‘Maybe he’s surrendered. He must have surrendered.’ But he did not believe it. Or was Smith dead? Were all of them dead up there — it was incredible that they should survive — were all the survivors here, around him in this abattoir?

Looking up for an instant he saw Daddy Horsfall and a stoker black with coal dust stumble in, a body between them. They found a space and carefully, gently laid him down and Purkiss went to them.

Albrecht called, “Horsfall!”

He came over, looked once, quickly, at the thing on the table then up at Albrecht. Who asked, “Has the action ended?”

“Dunno, sir.”

“If it has I want to move out of this. Find out what you can: I want a place with light and air —”
Thunder
came out of a turn and the smoke and opened fire. The ship shook. Albrecht finished: “— as soon as it’s over.’’

“Aye, aye, sir.” Daddy went away, thinking: ‘You’ll be bloody lucky, old cock. D’yer suppose some referee’ll blow fer time? More like the first you’ll know’ll be the water round your balls.’

Albrecht worked on. The hit just forward sent him to the deck and Gabriel sprawling, clawing over the table to hold the latest victim from following the surgeon. The emergency lighting failed totally. Gabriel produced a torch then others flicked on and bobbed around them. The ship still shook but Albrecht knew his shaking came from inside now and clamped down on that weakness to keep his hands steady until the job was done. And the next one. And the next …

Until he stopped. Everything stopped. He stared across at Gabriel, similarly frozen, as the sick light of the torches made greasy yellow masks of their faces.

Gabriel said dully, “Stopped, sir.” And: “Engines have stopped, sir.”

*

Gibb had worked lost to the world outside the clanging, reeking turret. Fletcher, and the trainer and the layer through their telescopes, saw something: smoke, spray, a blurred and lurching, distant target that was lost, seen and lost again. Everyone else sweated in ignorance of how the battle went. Until they were hit.

Gibb returned to hazy half-consciousness to realise numbly that a great weight lay across his legs, pinning him to the deck. He had been hurled against the side of the turret and lay there. Now besides fumes, smoke rolled in the turret and flame danced. Hit in the instant of loading, the shell lay on the deck below the open breech and the charge was scattered around the turret and blazed in a dozen places. It blazed around Gibb. The crew, like the charge, were tossed about the turret. Through weeping eyes he saw that the weight on his legs was Farmer Bates.

He had to move. He shoved feebly at Farmer’s bulk but could not shift it. He choked on fumes and then he saw the figure that blundered through the smoke and stooped over him. He recognised him by the bandage. Rattray glared at him. He carried a bucket of sand and he dumped it on a flaming fragment of charge. Then he knelt and rolled Farmer Bates away, worked a hand into Gibb’s collar and dragged him across the turret.

Gibb’s legs hurt him. They screamed with pain at the slightest movement and he almost fainted again on the rough passage across the turret. At the door Rattray let him down. The door was jammed and Rattray had to kick at it until it swung heavily open. He fell out on to the deck, scrambled around on hands and knees and hauled Gibb out after him. Still-on all fours he dragged him clear of the turret to lay him down by the conning-tower, then collapsed beside him.

Rattray lay for a full minute, chest heaving, coughing, eyes narrowed on Gibb, then he pushed up on his hands and crawled back to the turret and in. Gibb saw him standing, a bucket in his hands, and saw another flame doused. When Rattray came out again he brought Bates with him.

After another minute of retching and coughing Rattray went to the turret again and Gibb watched him, vague in the smoke, before his eyes closed. He slumped against the conning-tower and sucked in the air that was tainted with smoke on the deck of this smoke-wreathed ship, but sweet compared to the murderous reek in the turret. When he opened his eyes again smoke still oozed from the turret but there was no longer the flicker of flame. Rattray did not come out.

He looked beyond the turret and saw the enemy cruiser and the flashes along her hull and he knew that another salvo had been fired at
Thunder
, at him.

He tried to get away from it, dragging his body around the conning-tower and somehow dragging Farmer Bates as well. He cried at the pain in his legs but strove frantically for shelter. As he went the random thought flicked through his mind that
Thunder
had not fired a gun for a minute or more, but when he reached the dubious shelter to port of the conning-tower, and slumped there with Farmer beside him, he felt and heard the thump and bang of a six-inch firing and thought, ‘We’re not finished yet.’

But he knew he was finished.

He should try, somehow, to reach the sick-bay but he was just too tired. Somebody might find him and Farmer and take them there. He doubted it but he could do nothing about it.

He wondered if there
was
a sick-bay any longer. He could see no one forward of the conning-tower. No fire party. Young Mr. Wakely lay not far away, scalp bloody and eyes closed. He still breathed. Gibb could see the rise and fall of his chest, would have liked to help him but he just could not move.

Thunder
was hit as the salvo fell, the deck lifted beneath him and splinters whanged and whined around the conningtower. As he started to breathe again a seaman’s sense warned him that something was amiss. He groped for it, woolly-minded and then it came to him: the engines had stopped.

*

Just feet way, Smith felt the heart stop, as they all did. Now
Thunder
lay inert to be destroyed at will.

Another salvo shrieked in.

*

Nobby Clark, eye glued to the layer’s telescope, squeezed the trigger and the gun recoiled and spat flame, the smoke blew back and fumes swirled. The gun’s crew at his back rocked to the recoil, recovered then fell yet again as
Thunder
was hit.

Nobby rubbed at his forehead where it had slammed against the telescope and snarled back at them, “Come on, you lot! They’ve just dropped another brick on us. Let’s ’ave another one for them!” And under his breath: Bastard’s
too
bloody good!

He held that breath, feeling the heart-stop, and the sightsetter croaked, “Engines have stopped.”

Nobby sighed. Oh, Christ. He bellowed, “Where’s that flaming round?” He half-fell from the layers seat, stumbled back to the hoist and bawled down into the darkness, “Where’s the ammunition? What’re you doing down there, for Gawd’s sake?”

There was silence, only the ringing in his sound-battered ears, then he heard movement in the passage below and saw at the bottom of the hoist a face turned up to him, just a smudge, unrecognisable under the filth and in the gloom but the voice was unmistakable. It came up, gravelly, calm, “Noisy bastard, ain’t you.” Burton the indestructible.

“Just give us the round,”

The hoist creaked and the round came up, was rammed. The charge was inserted. As the breech clanged shut Nobby slipped back into his seat, rubbed at blood-shot eyes and peered through the telescope again. This was one of the main deck guns, close to the waterline, and unthinking he muttered another old jest of
Thunder’s
crew: “Like being in a submarine!”

He could see the cruiser as a ghost ship almost hidden by the smoke she made and trailed; he could see she was burning, great gouts of flame leaping through holes in her hull. He thought that
Thunder
was sinking but she had savaged the cruiser. Or Smith had. Got the first one in and a few more. Like he laid for them down some dark alley and turned them over afore they could help themselves.

He laid the gun. The way had fallen off
Thunder
and she was still in the water so that he was firing from a rock-steady platform. He squeezed the trigger.

Recoil. Flame and smoke and fumes.

With his eye glued again to the telescope, watching, he ordered automatically, “Load!”

“No bloody round to load.”

He heard them shouting huskily down the black steel well of the hoist.

It was now too terribly easy to watch.
Thunder
lay still, dead still, so that he and the trainer kept the ship in the scopes easily, hardly touching the wheels.
Thunder
was a sitting target and they both knew it.

He saw the flash on the hull of the distant ship and thought, ‘Hit her —’

Blinded, he recoiled from the telescope, hands to his eyes. A flash like a great burning sun had blotted out the cruiser. He rubbed at his eyes, blinked at the wheeling lights. The explosion came rocking across the sea in great shock waves and he clawed at the telescope, pulled his watery eye to it, spun the wheel till the gun was laid and he glared at the cruiser. A ball of smoke climbed up from the cruiser, rolled up and up, shot with sparks and debris soared in that smoke, soared and then fell.

He whispered, “She’s blown up.”

Kondor
sank.