Alan Evans - Thunder at Dawn

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.

Sunlight sparked on a quiet sea. Smith stood forward of the conning-tower, clear of the twisted wreckage of the bridge. He was numbed. The deck on which he stood was unrecognisable as that of any ship let alone his. Forward of him the turret smoked thinly, the barrel of the gun askew; the fore part of the ship was a moonscape of craters. Aft was a scene of tangled wreckage laced with licking pools of flame fought by men who stumbled over and around the wreckage, weaving like drunken men. It was a cat’s-cradle of twisted steel, riven plates. Of the three funnels remaining to Thunder only one stood, riddled. The two aftermost had fallen in on each other, joined by the mast and the whole steel mountain sagged over the port side, canting the deck. She was down by the stern.

Garrick was alive. His face was streaked with black blood from his scalp, one arm hung limp and his face was drawn with pain but he had reported and returned to his duty. So had Davies, his boiler-suit half-burned from him, his grizzled hair singed. And the long Miles, who seemed to bear the mark of every fire aboard.

And Smith had gone to see for himself. The steering compartment was wrecked and flooded; she was flooded right forward to the engine room bulkhead. She was also flooded in several compartments forward. There was no power at all.

Davies summed it up, hugely understated the obvious: “It’s a dockyard job.”

That meant a tow. No doubt a tug would come, hurrying, a vulture. It meant internment. For the ship and her crew, for Smith himself.

But the fires were under control and Thunder was not sinking.

Wolf was sinking.

They could see her by squinting red-weary eyes against that sun that was still low, across the miles of sea. Smith, with his glasses, could see her better. He looked again and again during the swift-flying minutes of his tour of inspection. A man here and there would lift his head to pause and breathe and stare before working again. Watching as she sank. They were all still, watching, when her stern lifted and her bow went under and she slid down. A rush of steam, and smoke from the funnels hung in a spreading pall like a shroud.