Alan Evans: Thunder at Dawn

Smith nodded. “Get on with it.”

Knight went off to decode the telegram and Smith ordered a course for Guaya and went to his sea-cabin below the bridge. As he dragged off his jacket he caught the whiff of cordite that still clung from Sarah Benson’s shot and he saw it all again, the man kicked back, the spattering blood and her face and he shivered.

Sarah Benson lay awake. Exhaustion claimed her but memory hinted then eluded her. Purkiss, the sick-berth attendant, brought her a cup of tea. He was twenty years old, nearly three years out from home and soft-hearted. He looked at her and was smitten. It was obvious and too good a chance to waste and she did not waste chances even when her eyelids dragged and her stomach rebelled. She pumped him. He talked to her about Gabriel, the sick-berth P.O., Albrecht the ’orrible ’un, Garrick and the others. And Smith. “Real mystery man. They shipped him out in a hurry — practically shanghaied him. There’s talk of a lady, a real Lady. They say he’s a reglar divil with —”

Albrecht came then but it was enough. Memory functioned and the pieces clicked into place.

Her sister, Alice, was a governess in London and wrote her long weekly letters in copperplate about the War and Society and The Town. Sarah read them fascinated by an alien world. And one small item concerned a Commander David C. Smith, “a handsome, charming young gentleman they say …”

Sarah had looked to find a man in command of this ship because she felt Thunder might soon need a man. Instead there was this poodle-faking, social climber who had stared at her with horror as she shot the renegade Englishman. Oh, she knew the man and that he carried a pistol in a shoulder holster and his empty hands meant nothing. She had never before fired a shot in anger and the memory would haunt her the rest of her days. It haunted her now but she would not explain to Smith. He could think what he liked.

She was frightened, fear coming late to shake her, miserable. She was lonely, curled small in the bed and she cried herself to sleep.

Knight brought the decoded telegram to Smith. It came from the Consul in Guaya, Chile: “Request urgently your presence this port. Extreme importance.” Cherry would not know Thunder’s whereabouts. This telegram would be one of several sent to ports along the coast where she might call for news or orders. Smith handed it back to Knight without comment, grunted “Goodnight,” trying to sound like a man who wanted his sleep and was unmoved by the adventures of the day or this telegram. But when Knight had gone he lay awake. “Extreme importance.” “Request urgently.” Cherry could only request but Smith would need to have a good reason to ignore that request. In the event it did not matter. He had to be rid of the girl and that meant Guaya and Cherry. Thunder had a rendezvous with a collier to the north but that was two days hence and she held coal now for eight days’ cruising.

Cherry’s telegram had come on the heels of the girl’s message but each carried its own warning. Of the same danger? What danger? The girl knew of no danger. Cherry spoke of none. But Smith was certain that danger was there. He lay wide-eyed, staring sightlessly at the deckhead above him with its slick of condensation and rust breaking through the white enamel in a red rash.

He slept, to wake sweating as the big ships roared down on him out of the night and a white-faced girl shot a man again and again.

In the morning Horsfall woke Smith with a cup of coffee. Smith had inherited him. Tall and thin and lantern-jawed, he was obviously sometimes called Horse-Face but usually it was Daddy.

Now he fussed around the cabin like an old hen.

Daddy was a reservist, not a grandfather like Davies, the Engineer, or some of the others but he looked the oldest man aboard. He had been one of Thunder’s caretaker crew; the only one of that ancient little band who had somehow wangled his way to sea and they said he had been scraped off the dockyard wall along with the ship. He shuffled about in an old pair of plimsolls by express permission of the Doctor because his feet troubled him greatly. They also served him and a lot of the crew as a barometer because he claimed he could predict the weather by the feel of them.

“Lovely morning, sir. Sky’s cleared beautiful but I reckon it won’t last. I can tell. Me feet, you know, sir.”

“Yes, I know.” Smith sipped at the coffee and thought about Sarah Benson and Cherry.

“Gabriel, that’s the Doctor’s mate, sir, he says that young lady woke up and ate a breakfast near fit for a horse and turned over again.”

“Good.” He would be rid of her.

“Funny her coming aboard like that, sir.”

There was nothing funny about it. Two dead men. Smith might have been another.

“All the lads are wondering about her, sir, keep asking me they do, what about that young lady? ’Course I can’t tell them anything.”

“Of course not.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, when they ask you again you can tell them —” Smith paused, thinking.

“Yes, sir?”

“You can tell them I’ve sworn you to secrecy.”

Daddy looked at him blankly and Smith went on, “Well, it’s better to be sworn to than at .”

Daddy took the point and the empty cup philosophically. “Aye, aye, sir.”

Smith grinned wryly at his departing back.

They raised Guaya at noon. The port itself lay two miles up-river on a big basin. They first entered what appeared to be an estuary but was really one channel of several of the river’s delta mouth. The coast was hills dropping green forest down steeply to the sea and the river. The river ran wide from the basin for a mile then on approaching the sea split into channels that threaded through a tangle of tree-clothed islets, most of the channels so shallow as to be swamp. Thunder steamed up the most direct channel that had for that reason been cleared, and was kept clear, by dredging.

They passed the signalling station to port where it stood on a low hill, Punta Negro. Past it another channel wound away between forest walls. The delta in that direction, north, was a huge swamp that bred a yellow fog with each dawn. The telephone line that linked the signalling station to the port looped sagging across that channel to the mainland. A small launch was moored against a little jetty from which a narrow track led up to the signalling station. The launch was the only other link between station and port; there was no road. To starboard a cove was bitten out of the forest: Stillwater Cove.

Smith thought that Cherry would have known of Thunders arrival since the station saw her lift over the horizon. So he could expect Cherry and his explanation soon. He shifted restlessly on the bridge.

Thunder rode rock-steady in this sheltered water, only the slightest nodding of her bow as she butted into the current, steaming slowly with the engines thump-thumping over, slipping through the water of the river that was brown with mud. On either hand the hills rose up from the river and climbed to the sky. A bend in the river lay ahead. They hauled slowly up on it, rounded it and opened up the basin and Guaya. There were a score of ships in the basin and room for them. Most lay out at anchor but three lay at a long wharf taking on copper ore. Guaya was a mushroom town. Twenty years before it had been a village, but then the copper mines opened inland and it had boomed.

Smith took in the town, white buildings against the green of the hills behind. He also took in the ships in the basin and one of them in particular. As Thunder’s three-pounder saluting gun began its metronomic popping, saluting the port, Smith stared at the ship.