Alan Evans - Ship of Force

“‘Guns’ reports enemy in sight, sir! Twenty thousand yards!”

Garrick grunted, acknowledging the report, not lowering the glasses, and ordered, “Open fire!”

That was how Smith would have done it. The imitation was unconscious.

The Gunnery Officer high in the control top would see more than Garrick below him. Garrick thought that the battlecruiser would have vision equally as good as ‘Guns’ but not the indications he had, the smoke to lead him on to the tiny speck of the ship beneath. And the men in the battlecruiser were staring straight into the morning sun. It would be a miracle, or rather the devil’s own luck, if they saw Marshall Marmont where she lay low in the water.

The twin fifteen-inch fired and the long barrels recoiled, licking out long tongues of flame and pouring smoke. Garrick stood as immobile as the ship, as quiet as the sea on which she lay as the salvoes roared out again and again.

“Leading destroyer altered course towards us, sir!”

“Seen.” Garrick thought, sent to look for us. And take us on? Through the glasses he saw her head-on, high-stemmed with a big white bone in her teeth as she came on at full speed.

“Battlecruiser’s signalling, sir!”

He lifted the glasses fractionally and the battlecruiser swam in the lenses and then was still. He just caught the final blinking of the searchlight and then it stopped.

“Destroyer’s turning, sir.”

He grunted again. She was turning away towards the battlecruiser. So the big ship was calling back her escort, as if, now that the destroyer had reported the solitary monitor, the enemy commander was guarding against another threat, leaving the monitor to his big guns. Another threat? Sparrow ? Ridiculous! Then maybe the battlecruiser, eight miles or so to westward could see something he could not?

Or had Smith contrived something?

He grinned with the rest of them when ‘Guns’ reported a hit and then another, and ducked inside himself though he never visibly flinched as the first salvo from the battlecruiser howled overhead and into the sea four hundred yards inshore. Then into one voice pipe he said, “Good shooting, ‘Guns’. Keep it up!” And into another, “Baker. Got your damage-control party alert?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Keep ’em on their toes. You’ll be busy soon.”

When Garrick had served under Smith not long ago in the Pacific the ship had been almost totally destroyed beneath them. He would never forget that. He knew the horrors to come. But he watched the battlecruiser through his glasses as she came on, steaming hard inside her destroyer screen and he saw she had been hurt. Marshall Marmont could not kill her but she bore the marks of this action in the smoke she trailed that was not funnel smoke and the yellow flick of flame that marked a fire.

In the control-top ‘Guns’, Lieutenant Chivers, short and stocky and crouched like a gnome over the director sight, saw the damage he had done. This was justification, reward, for all the training, practice shoots, and the coastal bombardments of targets unseen over the horizon; this sight of a big ship being hit by his guns. He had never been in a big ship action, and never expected to be, not in Marshall Marmont . He did not know what was to come but he knew the German gunnery was good and they were seeking him out, that they were firing eight gun salvoes and the range was closing, that Marshall Marmont was a stationary target to be shot at. He knew these things and he could have drawn some unpleasant conclusions if he had let his imagination run away with him but he refused to allow that, huddled lower over the sight and grew hoarser as he called his orders. His thumb punched the salvo button again and in the turret the bells rang and the twin fifteen-inch fired. He thought they would hit, the sight and deflection right, the battlecruiser a clean-cut target. He thought she might be Siegfried .

That was his last thought.

Garrick’s stolid, appreciating glance took in that the battlecruiser was hit but maintaining course and speed, that ahead of her and to seaward destroyers were fighting an action, tiny ships flickering with gunfire as they seemed to creep towards each other. He never heard the salvo that hit them and blasted the control-top into wreckage that went over the side. He found he was on his face on the deck and his nose was bleeding. He climbed to his feet to receive reports and coughing in the smoke he ordered the guns: “Independent firing!” Before they could fire, another salvo hit Marshall Marmont and he sprawled again, rose again, holding on to keep his balance in a reeling world and saw through the smoke and flames surrounding the bridge that the turret leaned drunkenly on its mounting. He found he was the only man on his feet on the bridge and set himself to gathering reports, staggering to the voice pipes, stubbornly determined to fight his ship to the last, to save her.

Then the last salvo plunged down.

Jack Curds had climbed the single mast of the CMB and clung there with one leg over the yard, watching, waiting. From there he could see Marshall Marmont firing and he saw Sparrow start her charge. He saw Siegfried heave up over the horizon and swallowed at the sight of her. He watched and waited as Sparrow charged in and slipped one destroyer then was lost in the smoke that rolled across the sea and hid her and the others. He watched and waited till then, seeing the fires start on Siegfried and then others start on Marshall Marmont as she was hit again and again and became a ship aflame. He felt sick and angry, frightened and cold and eager. But this was the moment that Smith had ordered and Siegfried was only two miles away and his CMB lay dead ahead of her.

He slid down the mast, burning the inside of his thighs, said, “Start —” But his throat was choked up and he had to cough to clear it. This time his voice croaked harshly, “Start up!” The engines burst into life with a roar and CMB 19 moved ahead. Curtis stood in the cockpit behind the wheel and stared through the already lifting spray at the knife-edge bow of the battlecruiser, the big turrets and the superstructure that climbed up to the control top and stood like a castle out of the sea. The CMB was alive now, smacking across the wave crests and now she would not be invisible. Bow-wave and wash would mark her like banners, plainer than the big ensign she flew and that cracked above Curtis. He glanced up at it then back at the midshipman. He shouted, “Ready?” And when Johnson lifted a hand and gave him a tight grin: “You’d better be! Only get one chance!”

He turned away and gulped. In those few seconds the battle-cruiser had seemed to leap towards him. The CMB was up on the step now, making her thirty-odd knots and still accelerating. She was closing the battlecruiser at their combined speeds of nearly seventy miles an hour and she was too quick and too sudden for Siegfried and the destroyers. They picked her out but not until she began to move, making that bow-wave and wash. Till then she lay unseen, a splinter on the surface of the sea while a tethered monitor fired big gun salvoes from inshore and an old torpedo-boat-destroyer manned by lunatics charged in from the sea. Now they saw her and it was too late. She had raced in under their noses and the seaward destroyer screen was involved with Sparrow . The others tried to intercept her and fired on her but she was too close and too fast for them to hit.

Curtis steered the boat and thought with a part of his mind that he and his little crew might be the only men still alive in Smith’s flotilla and he must not waste the chance that the rest, that Smith, had thrust upon him. He hunched over the wheel and stuck his jaw out as he peered over the screen and through the spray at the battlecruiser. The midshipman watched him and thought, You can see by the look of him he’s goin’ to set his teeth into this one. Christ! He’s whistling!