Command, p.10
Command, page 10
The ship vibrated, and things began to happen so fast that afterwards Randall was never quite clear on what had gone wrong, or how Bentley had got out of it.
The pier and the corvette began to slide past the destroyer’s side with rapidly increasing speed. In a fraction of time, it seemed, the big merchantman’s blunt, towering bow loomed above them. The officers stared astern in sudden apprehension. Of them all it was Bentley who first realised the reason for their rapid exit. He was used to Scimitar. She was a destroyer, but Wind Rode, while having almost the same power in her big boilers, was much lighter.
“Stop both!” he snapped into the voice-pipe. And, before the answering clang of bells had died away, “Slow ahead both.”
He straightened up and watched what would happen. The temptation to go half-ahead to stop her was almost irresistible. But once, exercising on their own in Jervis Bay, Sainsbury had demonstrated to him how a ship could be made to surge astern and ahead in a disastrous see-saw by giving her heavy power astern, and then the same power ahead. A ship’s turbines take time to slow down—you can’t cut them off like lifting your foot from a motorcar’s accelerator. So once you stopped her, and surged ahead with half-power, it took a long time to pull her up.
The problem here was whether slow-ahead would be enough to stop her from her swift dart astern. If not, they would be smack into the high bow waiting for their vulnerable stern. Waiting, feeling her shuddering, Bentley clamped down on the temptation to give her more power. He knew that if he did, judging by the swift way she had already handled, he would be ahead and into the corvette before he could drag her to a stop.
His eyes darted from the pier and the rate of its slipping past, to the merchantman. There were only a few yards to go. Along Wind Rode’s slim flanks, the water boiled, stirred-up and muddy. Even on the bridge they could feel the shuddering of her thin plates. Men on her quarter-deck waited under Hooky to fend her off as much as they could. They would not be able to do much.
Then, yard by tense yard, she slowed. She stopped, and her stern was ten feet away from the Liberty ship’s stem. The pier began to slip past them the opposite way.
“Starb’d twenty,” Bentley ordered.
He could not put her rudder hard-over. She would then swing too sharply and possibly clout the pier with her stern as she came round. But her rudder was not enough in that short distance to clear the corvette ahead. She needed help.
“Half ahead port!”
Now the added, dragging thrust of the port screw shoved her ahead, at the same time as it pulled her stern round. She pivoted beautifully, almost in her own length. In two minutes she was clear of all obstructions and heading her slim snout into the open middle of the river.
“Midships. Port fifteen. Half ahead together.”
Long, slim, compact, her portholes and water-tight doors closed, she speared into the current, nosing for the entrance and the open sea, twisting her flanks effortlessly and with feline grace round the river’s twists, fleeing past the stone jungle of the city, nosing down until the banks widened out into open fields of green, and finally breasting through the current-swirling mouth into the clear, salty blue of the bay.
Most of the officers had left the bridge. Randall hauled his big body up on to the grating.
“Nice work, skipper,” he said softly.
“Thank God it’s over,” Bentley returned, in the same low voice. Then he said, normally:
“She’s like a dart. A power dart. You can take her when we get out a bit. Ahead and astern a few times. You’ll be surprised.”
“I bet,” the ex-navigator grinned.
Bentley waited till he was through the shoal-edged channel and into the deep friendliness of the Pacific before be picked up the little black microphone
His voice reached into almost every compartment of the ship—forrard into the cable-locker, midships in the messes and store-rooms, deep down into her heated bowels, right aft into the tiller-flat. And everywhere in those compartments, on the upper deck and closed up at the guns and tubes, men waited to hear what he had to tell them.
“This is the captain speaking.” Bentley spoke slowly and distinctly. He knew the value of all hands getting a clear picture of what the ship had to do, and where she would do it.
“We have been ordered north to join the American Seventh Fleet. It’s old territory for most of us, and our job will be the same—escorting the Fleet on bombardment strikes, convoying, and perhaps a bit of bombardment for ourselves thrown in. Whatever it is, the job will mean that we’ll be in close contact with the enemy. And that means we’ve got to work like hell to make sure we come out of that contact with the enemy. We’ve all had a long rest in Brisbane. Now comes the pay-off. Every day till further orders every piece of armament in the ship will be exercised and drilled. The first-lieutenant has made out a programme. It will be posted on all noticeboards.”
The clipped voice paused. It was replaced on the fo’c’slemen’s mess-deck by a coarse sneer.
“Here it comes, boys. Let’s all be hard-workin’ chaps together.”
“Pipe down, Snade!” said Gellatly curtly.
Bentley’s voice came through again, metallic and concise.
“If we all dig-in together we’ll make this ship a fighting craft that will take us into anything—and bring us out. That’s all.”
“What’d I tell yer!” Snade leered triumphantly round the crowded mess. “Bull from beginnin’ to end.”
At the end of the mess sat the young Jew, Jacoby. He looked down the table at Snade’s coarse face, and he wanted to say something, to rebut the blighting effect which hung like a foul miasma around everything Snade said or did.
He hesitated, remembering with still-painful clarity the beating he had taken. Then he saw Gellatly at the next mess, opening a writing pad. Jacoby’s voice was high and clear when he said:
“I don’t think it was bull.”
A dozen heads turned to stare at him. Jacoby felt suddenly exposed; he wished he had not spoken. Some inner force drove him on.
“The captain’s right. It’s a plain matter of survival. The ship has got to be brought up to scratch.”
It was a weak speech, judged by the calibre of his audience. He knew that, but he was unfamiliar with using the tough, obscenity-punctuated sentences, which another man would have got his meaning across.
Most of his audience agreed with what he he’d said. But they felt vaguely uncomfortable at the parsonical manner in which he had said it. He sounded like a starry-eyed midshipman joining his first ship.
They turned their heads away, wordless. Only Snade looked at him. Jacoby quailed. There was murder in the heavy, sottish face. But Snade made no move to get up. Instead, he said, in a low voice;
“You’ll keep, Jew-boy.”
Wind Rode drove on across an empty and friendly sea. The sky was a miracle of azure, and under it she steamed on with a spurting fan of spray in her teeth.
Mile after mile she logged, her big screws thrashing beneath her quarter-deck in smooth and disciplined efficiency. On her two forrard gun mountings men drilled in a clatter of loading machinery and bellowed orders; her tubes were trained outboard across her narrow-gutted waist, the crews carrying out a dummy run: flags hauled up her signal halliards in swift jerks, in flotilla manoeuvres with a line of imaginary ships astern; and from the bridge came the never-ceasing, resonant pinging of the asdic set: the sound-scenery of the sub-hunter.
She was at last a vessel with a purpose; alive and pulsing, vibrant with energy on the bosom of her natural element.
Gradually as the afternoon wore on the drills ceased. Her men changed watches, and went below to tea. They finished tea and got out their writing-pads, or their washing, or their tombola boards, or—in a secluded corner of the mess-deck, run by Snade—the crown and anchor board.
The sun was sinking lower on the horizon, its full crimson glow shafting across the crimson sea and delicately tracing its finger along the side of the ship. Gradually, as the sun inched itself out of sight, darkness folded in from the east.
Leading-telegraphist Jacoby came out of the wireless office and carefully shut the door behind him. He had supervised the changing of the watch, and he had worked on instruction all day. He was tired, and his hammock beckoned invitingly.
He came down the ladder from the fo’c’sle head and stepped on to the deck of the ship’s waist. Here the shadow was dense, thrown both by the galley and the big funnel.
In the shadow he thought he detected a deeper shadow. Memory flooded through him in a watchful surge. Then he smelt him—a sour and sweaty smell.
“Come on, Jew-boy,” a low voice jeered at him. “We’ve gone quiet all of a sudden. We was shoutin’ our mouth off in the mess-deck. Come on, come and get what’s comin’ to you, you trouble-makin’ little swine!”
Jacoby saw the shadow detach itself and move towards him. His mouth dropped open, and his throat tightened in the preliminary formation of a scream.
Maybe Snade had not meant to hurt him physically; remembering Gellatly, he may have merely intended to frighten him by the threat of another bashing. Then he saw Jacoby’s open mouth. Fear of the consequences, added to the state of his demented mind, sent both his huge hands in a lightning thrust at Jacoby’s throat.
The youngster felt the two sweat-clammy talons fasten on his neck on either side of his ears, enclosing his jaws. He screamed. Spittle ejecting from his mouth under the force of his twist, Snade screwed the slight young neck sideways. Jacoby screamed again, a descending, gurgling sound.
Then there was a soft, smothered, horrible snapping sound.
Chapter Four
THE SCREAM SHEARED suddenly through the silent ship with an electrifying urgency that brought Bentley out of his bunk and up on his feet as if he had been snatched up on wires.
He stood in the middle of his cabin, almost naked in the heat, crouched forward a little, his head on one side, listening. Never before had he heard such a scream in a quiet ship not in action. Every nerve in his body felt like a violin string that had been tuned to within an eyelash weight of breaking.
Silence. He jerked on a pair of shorts, pushed his feet into scuffs and climbed quickly up the bridge. As his head appeared above the top of the ladder he heard the gunner snap:
“Stop both engines! Hard a port!”
And then, confirming Bentley’s interpretation of the scream. Lasenby ordered:
“Away lifeboat’s crew!”
Bentley stepped up beside him on the grating.
“Port side, Guns?”
“Far as I could judge, sir,” the gunner said quickly. “It seemed to come from down near the galley somewhere.”
Bentley was over at the port side of the bridge, his glasses up and on the curving white swath of Wind Rode’s wake.
“You heard a splash?”
“No, sir. Midships—steady as you go. I got the first yell, then another. Probably as he went under.”
The ship was alive now under the bridge, men clambering into the whaler, already hung outboard on the davits for just such an emergency as a man overboard.
“Get a lookout up in the crow’s nest,” Bentley snapped. His voice rose. “Below there, whaler! Who’s the cox’n?”
“Me, sir,” Hooky’s bellow came back. “Buffer.”
“Right. Man overboard port side, Buffer. Get her down and pull back over the wake. Smack it about now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Hooky shouted orders, and the falls creaked as the boat was lowered. Bentley heard Randall’s voice roar: “Slip!” and heard the boat meet the water with a sharp, tearing slap. The ship was still doing about six knots. He watched while the whaler pulled away, curving round to search back over the wake. He looked up and saw a signalman climbing the mast like a monkey, heading for the crow’s nest, his binoculars swinging round his neck. Then he picked up a phone.
“Lifebuoy sentry? Captain speaking. You heard that scream? Did you see anything?”
The sentry’s voice came back from X-deck above the quarter-deck, thin and urgent.
“No, sir. I heard the yell. But I didn’t see nobody, sir.”
“All right. Keep a sharp lookout dead astern.”
Bentley replaced the phone. He crossed to the binnacle.
“How quickly did you stop engines, Guns?”
“Not for half a minute, I’d say, sir. I heard him yell, but wasn’t sure if he was overboard.”
Bentley’s thumb and forefinger pulled at his chin.
“Looks like the screws might have got him,” he said, worriedly. “The lifebuoy sentry didn’t see him, and he would have, normally.”
Heavy feet rattled on the ladder.
“D’you know who it is, sir?”
Bentley turned slightly.
“No, Bob. Not a clue. That reminds me, Bosun’s mate?”
“Sir?” The able seaman, his face alert, was beside him at once
“Tell the cox’n I want all leading-hands of messes to muster and report their messes right away. Quick with it.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” He clattered down the ladder.
“Check the wardroom, Bob.”
“Yes, sir. By the way, I saw where he went over.”
“Oh? Guard rail gone?”
“Something like that. Except that the slip of the top wire was open. He could have been sitting on the top rail, and the slip sprang open. That’d drop him straight into the drink.”
“Stop both,” the gunner ordered beside them. “This would be where he went, sir.”
Bentley nodded, noting the whaler a hundred yards to starb’d, pulling slowly in a wide circle. He looked around the quiet sea. There would be at least fifty men now scanning the water, and as the ship had been stopped and turned almost as soon as he had gone overboard, they should have had no difficulty in sighting him.
Bentley doubled his right fist into a tight knot and rubbed it slowly into the palm of his left hand. The exasperation that found an outlet in that controlled gesture went all the way up his arms into the muscles of his chest. His eyes were narrowed between a crinkle of hard lines.
There was something he did not like about this apparently cut and dried case of man overboard. The guard-rails were one of the things he had personally seen to shortly after he had joined the ship—he had seen too many accidents through rusted wire or improperly fastened slips.
A guard-rail slip was a cunningly designed instrument. Normally it took a hefty whack with a hammer to free the tongue from its little ring of steel. Why, then, had this slip given way? And what the hell was a man doing sitting on the top rail, a precarious perch in any case, at this time of night?
A thought struck him.
“Get the search radar operating,” he told Randall. “In this sea we might pick up his head.”
Randall nodded, and juggled a phone out of its socket on the other side of the bridge. In a moment an electronic whirring started above their heads. The queer-shaped aerial swung round on the mast, round and round the watery circle, slowly.
An hour later no sign of any man, alive or dead, had been found. Bentley had thought of switching on the powerful ten-inch signalling lamp, a miniature searchlight, but decided that one man’s life was not worth endangering the lives of two-hundred men. And that thought sparked another—there could easily be a telescopic, periscopic eye laid on them.
They had gone down and up the short distance she had steamed between the hearing of the scream and the stopping of engines at least six times, when Bentley turned to his friend.
“What do you think, Bob?”
“I think we ought to give it away, sir. We’re alone on top, but I’m not at all happy about what might be underneath. Calm like this—we’d make a sitting shot. If he was alive, we’d have sighted him long before this.”
Bentley breathed in deeply, a slow expansion of his chest.
“You’re right. Signalman—recall the whaler. Get her hoisted, Bob.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Before the whaler had hooked on, the cox’n came on to the bridge, a sheet of paper in his hand. Bentley saw him and gestured him up on to the grating.
“Well, ’Swain, who is it?”
“Dunno yet, sir. But it won’t be long. There’s seven blokes out of the ship. Six of ’em are in the whaler.” He paused, and his weathered wise old face peered up at Bentley.
“I see,” Bentley said slowly. “Let’s have those names.”
He crossed with the paper to the shaded light under the chart-table. There they were. Buffer, Jamieson, Riordan, Snade, Tukely, Jacoby, Bennett; with the number of their mess printed beside each name.
He stepped to the side of the bridge, trying to identify the oarsman in the approaching boat. But he could pick out only the giant form of Hooky, standing in the stern sheets. He called down to the davits:
“Get the names of those men in the whaler, Number One. Let me have them as soon as you can.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Randall called back, and went on with his job of getting the falls ready for hoisting.
The long ropes were laid out along the deck. There was no need to pipe lower-deck cleared to rouse out the men to man them. “Away lifeboat” is an unusual and emergency order, and nearly every man in the crew had come on deck to see what was happening.
Hooky’s bull voice came up from below the ship’s side:
“Hooked on!”
Randall gave the order, “Hoist away!” and the long twin lines of men broke into a run. The boat came up faster than a fast lift.
“Avast hoisting!” Randall roared. She was up.
Because he did not yet know all the men in the boat, Randall got their names as they swung on to the guard-rails and jumped on to the deck, tired and sweating. He wrote the names on a signal pad, then mounted the ladders to the bridge.
