He grew aware of sudden tension on the bridge, looked up, found all the men staring to starboard. Victoria was recovering aircraft. The clunk-clunk of feet overhead told him the Political Officers were preparing to receive messages.
A half hour passed before anything came in. One of the young men brought it down. Kurt read it quickly, surveyed the intensely inquisitive faces of his watch, smiled. “They found a forest. Not far.” Only fifteen kilometers south of the leading elements of the fleet. Five hours’ steaming for Jager, she being kilometers back in the formation. She would make it with fuel to spare.
Kurt called the Captain’s cabin. “Officer of the Deck. Signals from the flag, sir. Stop for refueling off Rotnagiri. Five hours, sir.” A pause. “Yes sir.”
Kurt turned to Hans. “The Captain said to have all boats and tools prepared before securing ship’s work.”
“Yes sir.”
Kurt again felt that little twinge of pleasure at having power over Hans, though it stirred some of the old enmity.
Although he objected strenuously, Kurt had to remain aboard while the bulk of the crew went ashore. He was willing to endure the tiresome work for the feel of earth beneath his feet — it had been a year — but von Lappus denied him on grounds of safety. He would not be allowed to risk the assassin’s knife.
Two of the three days spent at anchor were hell. The third proved both amusing and informative. Early that morning one of the boats came out with an odd, skinny little brown man perched atop a small mountain of wood. An Indian.
Kurt had the quarterdeck watch at the time, looking officious and trying to stay out of the way of ship’s work. Then came the native.
“What’ve you got there, Deckinger?” Kurt shouted as the boat came alongside.
The native jumped up, saluted in magnificent parody, and, with an abominable accent, shouted, “Hallo, Unterleutnant!” There followed a flood of speech, of which Kurt caught perhaps a third, mangled German mixed with the dregs of a half-dozen tongues. Kurt recognized some Polish and English.
“Deckinger! Can’t you turn him off?” The Indian shut up. “What’s going on? Who’s this?”
The coxswain shrugged as his boat nudged the accommodation ladder. His oarsmen chuckled. “Near as we can figure, he ran into survivors from the last Meeting. Must’ve been a rare mixture. German and Polish I speak, English I recognize. He mixes all three with as many others. Name’s Boroba Thring. Be good to him. We fought a French corvette to get him.”
The Indian galloped up the ladder, grinning, snapped another remarkable salute, promptly disappeared through the nearest door.
Kurt’s mind ran like a dog chasing its tail. He knew there had been but one ship at the last Meeting carrying men who spoke German and Polish. He hurried after the Indian, found him below, in the after crew’s quarters, cheerfully poking through everything loose.
Hours later, after questioning by the team of von Lappus, Czyzewski, de 1’Isle-Adam, and Kurt — because he spoke Danish, though the Indian did not — the man’s story became clear. A party of survivors of the last Meeting had camped near Rotnagiri while recovering from an epidemic fever, passing several months there before continuing their march to Europe. How long ago? Close to ten years.
And that was all they had from him, hopes raised and crushed. Germans and Poles had survived the Meeting, but, almost certainly, not the march home — or they would have arrived. Kurt spent the remainder of the day in depression. It had been a long time since his father had weighed so heavily on his mind.
The Indian announced he was there to trade. He offered fresh food for tools and medicines. Von Lappus turned him down. No time. High Command wanted the fleet moving before nightfall. They let the Indian stay aboard until the last boat departed.
Jager recovered that last boat on the run. The leading elements of the fleet had been underway for an hour. Sun setting, boat being hoisted out of the water, the ancient lady began the last leg of her journey to her date with Fate.
Six eventless days passed. Signals flew increasingly thick during that time, until lager’s Political Officers were almost continually busy. Flags festooned the vessels by day, flashing lights winked like hundreds of low, twinkling stars by night. In her wardroom, lager’s officers spent long hours over the messages, and battle assignments which had been delivered during the refueling pause — von Lappus still had not broached his plan for escape.
Jager’s battle assignment was minimal. When the fleet divided into fighting and support groups, she would be left to convoy the auxiliaries. Kurt suspected this was because High Command did not trust her in the battle line. He was pleased, as was von Lappus. This seemed to fit well with something building in the Captain’s mind. Late on the afternoon of the sixth day, signals went up directing all ships to the second degree of battle readiness. Watertight doors were secured, hatches were battened, life preservers and helmets were hauled from their racks and lockers and checked. Ammunition was prepared, nervous gunners labored over their weapons, making certain they were in perfect order. The cooks prepared cold foods for when men would be unable to leave battle stations. The tension built, soon became overwhelming.
It redoubled when, on the morning of the seventh day, off Trivandrum, the signal came for general quarters, the first degree of readiness. The flag expected contact soon. Kurt wondered, briefly, how anyone could know, but was too busy for deep speculation.
When there was sufficient light, one of the carriers launched a recon flight. Grumbling like tired old men disturbed, the aircraft staggered into the sky and chugged away across the southern tip of India.
An hour later, lager’s men were startled by the sound of guns kilometers ahead. Black puffs spotted the sky. Soon four aircraft — jets by their speed and racket — came darting down the length of the fleet, trailing a rolling barrage of anti-aircraft fire. They were come and gone so quickly Jager managed but a single salvo. The tension was a violin string twice too tight scraped with an unrosined bow....
Kurt, watching the silver darts climb and turn behind the fleet, overheard a muttered, “This’s it! This’s really it. After all this time...”
And, “They’re real! I never thought...”
And, “Christ, we’re in for it if all their planes are like those....”
The wing markings of the planes burned in Kurt’s mind. Australian. The Enemy. He, too, had never completely believed... but there they were, trailing thin white as they raced eastward.
The bridge was ahum with subdued, frightened talk. Jets. The hope was that those were all the Australians could put in the air. The hope was that the Australian carriers would be sunk before planes like those could strike.... They hoped.
Hours of nothing followed, until the recon planes returned. Then signals soon flew. Twenty-eight enemy ships, cruisers, destroyers, and two carriers, had been found in the Gulf of Mannar, steaming southward at fifteen knots. The division of the fleet, which had begun at dawn, hastened.
As evening drew near, powerboats raced through the fleet, collecting Political Officers. They were carried to the battleship.
“This looks strange,” Haber observed as the bridge gang watched lager’s four clamber into a boat.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t come back,” Kurt growled. ‘They’re rats deserting a dead ship.”
“How’re we supposed to get battle signals?” a seaman asked plaintively.
“Oh, they’ve given us a very good battle plan,” Haber replied sarcastically. “We don’t have to communicate.” Signals could, though, be made via the signal books.
The man missed the mockery, Kurt saw. He simply nodded and returned to work, reassured. Kurt wished he felt the same — sure of anything.
“Not all the rats have left the ship,” the Commander said in a lower voice. Kurt searched his face. He had been waiting for some comment on this, wondering how Haber felt about being left behind.
“Why didn’t they take him with them?” Kurt asked, not really expe
cting an answer from the man.
Haber shrugged. “Maybe they don’t want him either.” Was that a bit sour? “More likely, though, they feel there’s still work for him here. Every ship probably has an undercover man who’s being left behind.”
“A gruesome thought.” But he got no rise from Haber.
More wearying hours passed. The battle group formed and pulled ahead of the auxiliaries. Both forces were well into the turn around the tip of the Indian subcontinent.
By twilight the fighting force was beyond the horizon, position marked by a pall of black smoke. All was quiet.
Near midnight, when most of the men were asleep at their stations, there were light flashes far ahead, in the clouds. Not a surface engagement. A night attack from the air. Kurt worried. The Australian technology appeared more and more formidable. A night attack would have been impossible with the rickety Western aircraft. The flashes and subdued, thunder-like mutterings continued for almost two hours.
Morning came. The cooks served sandwiches on station, with vast quantities of coffee. Soon the auxiliaries reached the scene of night-battle. Wreckage. Floating corpses. Men in liferafts who were rescued by the larger support ships. A few prisoners, downed flyers.
The sun, following some retarded timetable, took eons to reach the zenith, lager and her convoy entered the Gulf of Mannar. The sun, after an eternal pause, started down its path to the west. Tension mounted, though that seemed impossible.
The first attack came from the south, low, so swiftly that bombs were falling by the time Jager’s gun started around. There were less than forty planes, all — thank God! — prop jobs as sickly as their Western opponents. Aircraft cannon shells were racketing off the forecastle when Jager’s guns first spoke.
Inside the death machine, men scrambled here and there, to little purpose, doing themselves and the ship little good.
Steel, fire-tipped fingers tracked aircraft across an angry sky, hurling fifty-five-pound packets of death as fast as men could load.
Kurt dove for cover as aircraft cannon shells hit the bridge. Supposedly bulletproof windows exploded inward. One shell screamed through, exploded in the Captain’s Sea Cabin. The mattress there smoldered. Kurt, in a daze, unaware of risk, staggered out the portside door.
The sky was speckled black with the puffs of exploding shells. A bomber scored a hit a thousand meters away. An ammunition ship became a tremendous fireball, exploding and re-exploding. Off the port quarter a destroyer took a torpedo at the waterline amidships and became two. One half sank in seconds. Kurt leaned on the rail and pitched his breakfast over the side.
A scream. “Get in here, you idiot!” Hans Wiedermann. Kurt half turned, saw the little Boatswain charging, was seized, hurled into the pilothouse. Hans leaped in after him, centimeters ahead of the deadly debris of an exploding bomber.
A dull roar ran through the ship, Jager’s gunners cheering their kill.
Another aircraft, unseen but felt and heard, dying, screamed over on a kamikaze run. A wingtip brushed the maintruck, ripped ‘away useless radar antennae. It hit water three hundred meters on, skipped like a flat stone, spinning, sailed another hundred meters, and broke up in midair.
Then came a strange quiet. The enemy fled, leaving a quarter of his strength behind, his planes low silhouettes on the southeastern horizon. Jager’s bridge gang got to their feet and stared at the tortured sea, at the flames rolling from the corpses of ancient ships. Overhead, imagined Valkyries wailed in a black mackerel sky of past explosions, and black oil smoke veiled the watching faces of the disturbed gods of the deep.
Faces pale, guts taut, men studied sea and sky, the mad waterfield of their first sea battle — so quickly come and gone...
XVII
IT got easier, the shooting and killing. Less panic, more professionalism, if thus it may be said. The threat of death spurred men to faster, more efficient reactions — though weariness sapped some of the improvement. More kills, fewer casualties, except for the Australian aircraft, whose numbers rapidly dwindled.
During the long night after the first attack, and in the interims between the two attacks the following day, Haber kept busy. The mess tables became operating tables; engineers’ quarters, the best protected, became a convalescent hospital. Deaths were gratifyingly few, fewer than the thirteen paid for passage to the Meeting.
During the interlude separating attacks three and four, Jager heard the big guns muttering in the north, a surface engagement in Palk Strait. Those ships with operable radios received progress reports, passed the news by signal flag. Both sides had expended their aircraft. The Australians, outnumbered, were losing, but were tenaciously holding the strait. The fighting was a hundred kilometers distant, but scores of five-and eight-inch trolls’ mouths were bellowing in chorus there. Their cruel song rippled down the ocean, serenaded the auxiliaries with atonal sounds of mortality.
The fourth raid came during the night.
Psychedelia: orange flashes with yellow, the green sea sparkle suddenly exposed by gun-light, and phosphorescence in the waves; poor tiny confused fishes jumping;
the gun barrels with their flames talons tearing at the night; brief dots of light which crackled in the sky;
screaming aircraft engines, screaming shells, screaming bombs, continual explosions, screaming men; a burning ship, a burning plane. Kurt grew dizzy trying to follow it all. A plane hit water a hundred meters before Jager and escaped being overrun only because she was in a highspeed turn. The pilot, inexplicably surviving the crash, scrambled from his cockpiit and dove into the sea. Someone, with unusual presence of mind and even more unusual compassion, dashed out onto the maindeck and snagged the man with a boathook as Jager drove past.
Kurt saw the man being hauled aboard. He studied the sky, looking for aircraft betrayed by moonlight. Nothing coming in. He ran along the starboard wing, down two ladders, and reached the pilot just as he rose with the help of two sailors.
Snarl of an aircraft engine, climbing in pitch and volume. “Get him inside!” Kurt ordered. “Mess decks.” The sailors supported the pilot, half carried him to the mess decks door. Kurt pulled it open.
The roar came in low, amidst bursting shells, blazing a trail with tracers. Kurt threw himself inside, as did the others. A swarm of shells accompanied them. There were screams....
Kurt rose, jerked the watertight door shut. “You all right?” he asked. Stupid question. The sailors were broken, ruined, chopped meat. The Australian, whom they had pushed ahead of them and thus shielded with their bodies, groaned weakly. Kurt, with the reluctance of one touching a poisonous snake — the pilot was that mythical Enemy he had his life long been conditioned to fear and hate — placed his fingers against the man’s cheek. The Australian’s eyelids fluttered. Kurt looked at him closely, surprised. This was an old man, at least sixty, from his brass almost certainly a high-ranking officer. Such an ancient flying combat?
“Got by my own mates.” He coughed. A rough smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “Three Meetings now, thirty-four missions, shot down three times. And finally scragged by my own wing man.” He laughed weakly. Kurt sat silently over him — said nothing because he felt the man would not want him to — stared as blood trickled over his fingers — Australian blood, yet warm, red, human.
“Ah, but it’s the Enemy’s fault, isn’t it?” the pilot murmured. “Oh, Billy, my admiral brother Bill, you’ll play avenger for me, won’t you?” He coughed gurglingly, spit up red foam. “Neatly tucked them in, didn’t we? Bottled them up.... Maybe this’s the true Last Meeting.... Molly!” Suddenly he was frightened, terribly frightened. Though he was as suddenly no longer an enemy, Kurt jerked his hand away, frightened himself. This could not be far in his own future....
“Molly!” the Australian gasped again — then seemed deflated when his soul departed.
Kurt rose slowly, suffering overpowering sadness. He had so wanted to talk to this man, even if only in anger, to make contact with a fragment of the othe
r side. But the fellow had evaded him, died without saying anything.
Or had he? Halfway to the bridge, in midstride, he jerked to a halt, finally grasping the sense of those dying words. Bottle? A picture of Ceylon, India, and the sea between flashed across his mind, and he considered the odd fact that air attacks always came from the south. And he knew
What seemed an easy victory at Palk Strait was but a small gambit in a huge defeat a-making. Almost certainly, another Australian force had hidden east of Ceylon and was now closing the Gulf of Mannar behind the Western armada. It had to be.... The northern force would hold while the southern took the auxiliaries from the rear, wolves into sheep poorly shepherded, destroying, and the Western fighting units would be without supplies. They would be easy killing once their ammunition was gone. He ran on to the bridge, reported his suspicions to von Lappus and Haber.
While he talked, he watched Haber patch a deathly pale Hans’s arm. A shell fragment had taken a chunk from it. Shock, plus the depression he had been suffering of late, had raped away the last of Wiedermann’s cockiness. His expression was that worn when his father was about to descend on him with a belt. But the punishment, this time, would be final.
The night marched slowly on. Enemy aircraft — less than a dozen now — came and went, concentrating on the escorts. Kurt wondered if this was the prelude to a surface engagement. Made sense, if his theory were correct.
Jager received her share of attention, but, by zigzagging, changing speed, and luck, she remained relatively unscathed. Plenty of holes from strafing; nothing interfering with ship’s operations.