Alan Evans - Thunder at Dawn

He stared at the chart and fiddled with a pencil, shivered with the cold of the wet clothes. He was unaware of Aitkyne watching him.

He ‘knew where she was not’. That ruled out one of a long list of possibilities that Maria had sailed west for Juan Fernandez. But there were still a thousand places spread over the hundreds of miles of coast to the south, seamed as it was with channels and inlets, where the collier could hide. If she could hide. What if she had a rendezvous to keep at all costs, with cruisers that had traversed the Atlantic and rounded the Horn, coaling secretly and precariously from colliers like the Maria ? They would want to meet without delay. And there was a place the Germans knew and had proved in the far-off days of 1914 when Von Spee had cruised this coast. His fingers were tight on the pencil now.

It was logic allied with intuition and faith.

It was all based on his conviction that the cruisers would come.

He jabbed the pencil down at the chart. “A course for the Gulf of Peñas, pilot. Revolutions for fifteen knots.”

Thunder headed south.

Thunder ploughed out of Malaguay and into the night and the storm. She was rolling and Smith was grimly aware that rolling was made worse by the lightness of her bunkers. The seas were black mountains in the night, capped with the snow of driving spray. Thunder thrust her bow into those seas to lift then fall, bow going down and stern lifting and all the time she rolled.

He stood by Garrick on the bridge and Garrick glanced sidewise at him and said, “Coal, sir.”

“I know, I asked Thackeray for help. The Mary Ellen will be waiting for us here.”

Garrick chewed worriedly at his lip and scowled out at the humping seas. “Going to get worse before it gets better.”

He referred to the storm but Smith thought of the cruisers, out there, somewhere, in the all-surrounding darkness.

Smith said, “Yes.” Garrick thought they were on a wildgoose chase, that there would be no cruisers to meet the Maria . Smith knew they were there. He said again, but tiredly, “Yes,” and, “Call me at first light or immediately anything, anything , is sighted.”

He went to his cabin below the bridge, stripped and towelled himself dry, holding on to his bunk with one hand against Thunder’s pitching and dressed in dry clothes. A hot meal had been cooked while they lay at Malaguay, a stew of corned beef. Horsfall had kept some warm for him and brought it now, even managing to keep it warm through the journey forward, Smith sent Horsfall away and wolfed the meal. He laid himself down fully-dressed. He might get a few hours sleep before first light.

But he knew that sleep was impossible. Thunder’s rolling and pitching and the continuous hammering of the sea on her hull would see to that if his thoughts did not and they were black enough.

He was acting only on the evidence of one collier that had been suspect and another that seemed to fly at his approach. The seaplane could easily be a coincidence. He had no scrap of evidence that the cruisers were or would be in the Pacific. It was like assuming a murder without a body.

If he was right there would be a murder and Thunder would be the victim.

If he was wrong he faced professional ruin and worse. He would be the man who single-handed upset the pro-British feeling in South America at a time when Britain needed all her friends. There would be a clamour for his blood and no reason at all why that clamour should not be satisfied. If he was wrong.

And again, if he was right? The cruisers loomed huge in his mind and he twisted in the bunk and put a hand to his eyes. He had to sleep.

Bradley had done well. Do it again, would he? Guts. Bradley. Graham. Sarah Benson. He was rid of her now. He was grateful for her help, God knew! She had brought the word that the Germans were watching Thunder , spotted the oddity of the collier with wireless and but for her he would not have flown with Bradley. Because of her Thunder would not sail unprepared into an ambush.

If ambush there was.

Only Sarah Benson believed he was right.

He threw an arm across his eyes. But she was a prickly, short-tempered — Her face when she killed that man. He would not sleep. Somers: ‘Follow you anywhere, sir.’ The boy meant it. Thackeray, Graham. The water closing over him.

Sarah Benson …

He slept.

Dawn came in a full gale and as Smith clung on the bridge the seas broke over the bows to sweep aft like a green glass wall and smash against the conning-tower. Visibility was maybe three miles. There was no ship in sight.

He ate breakfast there, a sandwich of the inevitable, monotonous bully beef that tasted vile and was washed down by tea that was cold before he drained the cup. It was all gulped down, forced down, eaten one-handed as he held on with the other. The galley fires were out. There was no hot food nor would there be until this weather abated. The messdecks were in chaos and awash. Visibility was no better and the storm was even worse than in that heaving dawn. Thunder was reduced to ten knots and making hard work of that. In the stokehold men were thrown about as they fought to feed the fires and were bruised and burned.

Garrick said, “ Maria ’ll be no better off, sir. She’ll be lucky to be making more than five knots in this sea.” His face was grey as the sky under the prickling black stubble and there were shadows around his eyes.

Smith grunted in black bad temper, “I suggest you turn in, Number One.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” But Garrick hung on, reluctant, until Smith’s baleful glare caught him. He left the bridge.

Kennedy had the watch. He took one look at his Captain and ventured no comments at all. Smith swayed to Thunder’s heave and roll and peered wearily out at the wild sea. They would be making better speed than the collier but that did not mean they would catch her. In an ocean of millions of square miles Smith could see only a tiny circle and beyond that was lost to him in rain and leaden cloud. It was like seeking a needle in a haystack, and he could well be searching the wrong haystack.

He wailed it out.

At mid-morning the visibility was scarcely improved, variable as the squalls swept in over the mountainous seas.

For what seemed the hundredth time Kennedy hailed the look-out: “Masthead! Anything seen?”

The answer came down from the man miserably wet and cold on his swaying, swooping, dizzying perch: “Nuffink, sir!”

Smith opened his mouth but shut it again, biting back the irritable chiding that came to his tongue. He waited a moment then said in as normal a tone as the wind allowed, “He’s a good man, Mr. Kennedy?”

“Picked, sir.”

“Then I think we’d do well to leave him alone.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He was trying to maintain an air of calm certainty but he knew they saw through it. He had been on the bridge for four hours. Waiting. Wait and see. But would they see? They could pass the Maria within a few miles and not see her in this weather. They should see her if Smith was totally, completely right, but if her course varied from his by only a degree that divergence would take him past her. He cursed the absence of a consort. If he had another ship with him, any ship, an armed merchant cruiser say, it would widen his search and be another pair of eyes.

What if Maria’s rendezvous was not the Gulf of Peñas, if she was already lying snugly hidden in some sheltered inlet? Thunder could sail on for ever like the Flying Dutchman, chasing a similar phantom.