Winds of Wrath

by Taylor Anderson

  “Don’t let ’em put any holes in us, and I’ll try,” Parks replied.

  Ronson kept jogging past the searchlight tower and cluster of 25mm guns. He finally reached the aft deckhouse and clambered up. A ’Cat talker was already waiting by the auxiliary helm controls. The number four 4″-50 crew was training their gun out to port and raising the muzzle to the sky. Ronson nodded at the talker.

  “Auxiliaary conn, aaft aantiair baatteries, an’ number four gun maaned an’ ready,” the ’Cat reported. White water was churning up through the propeller guards as Ellie increased speed. Ronson raised his binoculars again. Bomb blasts were marching across the airstrip in the distance and antiaircraft bursts from the two 4″-50s they’d emplaced there were popping in the sky. He caught a glimpse of a cluster of swooping shapes and saw a bomber cough black smoke and veer out of formation. A couple of parachutes opened before it exploded in a greasy slash of orange flame. Another simply dipped its nose and powered straight down.

  “Yes!” Ronson exulted. “Our Bull-Bat jockeys’re havin’ a swell time!”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Ronson quickly realized there were only about a half dozen pursuit planes in the air, and they were chewing on targets that could bite back. Smoky tracers from dorsal gun positions on several planes converged on a Bull-Bat and it went into an impossible spin after a wing folded up. Another exploded and flaming debris fluttered down. A third staggered and started to smoke. But the fighters were through the bombers now, pulling up to hit them from below. The League bombers had guns there too, and more tracers sizzled across the sky. With half their number damaged or destroyed putting on a spirited performance, the Allied pursuiters broke off. The airfield already lay at the mile-wide base of a towering plume of smoke in any event.

  The next to catch it was Santiago. Streams of bombs tumbled from the bellies of the strange-looking tri-motors, impacting near the middle of the city. Black geysers crowned by rubbled white masonry smothered the commercial district, pounding remorselessly right across the classically impressive-looking Government House. Ronson didn’t see if it was hit or not, the dust and smoke just seemed to swallow it, and it was quickly obscured even further when bombs exploded along the waterfront, shattering docks, ships, and fuel storage tanks. Ronson couldn’t watch anymore, because now it was Ellie’s and Adar’s turn.

  “All guns, fire at will!” came the order from the bridge. Since there was no centralized antiair fire control, like for surface targets, all they had was local control and the skill of the ’Cat gun’s crews. Fortunately, like everything else, they’d practiced for this, shooting at target sleeves towed by aircraft all across the Pacific. It was no real substitute, but it was better than nothing, and keen-eyed Lemurian gun captains had developed a knack for calculating where their target would be when their shells got there, and set their fuses accordingly. Ellie’s four main guns started hammering in rapid fire, throwing a wall of dirty brown-shrouded iron fragments in the path of approaching League planes. One of them, a twin-engine job, was hit almost at once, right on the nose. It pulled violently upward, fell on its back, and spiraled down. Another was hit by Adar, a blast ripping its tail, and it fell out of formation. Rolando was startled to see a couple start to smoke or burn for no apparent reason, then realized they were taking hits from fragments falling from higher bursts. The deafening roar of the portside pair of twin 25mms started pounding his ears and he roared down at their gunners. “Cut that shit out! They’re too high, and you’re just wasting ammo!”

  “Bombs, Commaander Ronson!” cried his talker, before shouting the report in his mic. Ronson looked up, first surprised by how many planes seemed to be shying away from their aerial barrage, but also by how many bombs were wobbling downward, starting to straighten out. . . . The crowned deck slanted beneath his feet as Ellie turned hard to starboard and white water churned up around him as the ship went to emergency flank and the stern crouched down. Towering white jets of spray erupted all around, but mostly in their wake. One hit barely twenty yards to port, however, throwing up enough water that it pounded him when it fell. There was a loud clanging as iron splinters sprayed the ship, and screams rose from the gunners he’d just yelled at.

  A quick glance at Adar, now a quarter mile off their beam, showed she was enduring a similar dowsing . . . until it changed entirely. A ball of fire engulfed her amidships deckhouse and black smoke and steam jetted from her two center stacks. She wallowed to a stop almost instantly, as if she’d run hard aground. More geysers shot up around her, joined by another indistinct dark blast that shook her somewhere forward. Guns still pounding, Ellie was shrugging off the latest cataract, her deck awash as far forward as Ronson could see, when he chanced a look up. The planes were peeling away, probably satisfied they’d killed Adar, at least. They flew to join their comrades still working the city over, or starting to hit the rest of the anchorage.

  Ronson noted Ellie was still accelerating, still heeling to port in her hard starboard turn. The talker’s mic was soaked, so Ronson removed the cover of the voice tube to the bridge. Shouting into it, even as the ship’s guns kept hammering, wildly shifting to compensate for the moving ship and targets, he got no response from the pilothouse. “Shit!” he shouted, opening other tubes. “This is Mr. Rodriguez, I’m taking the conn, aft. Corps-’Cats to the bridge, on the double. Damage control parties report to the auxiliary conn!” He turned to the ’Cats moving to their conning stations. They were blinking concern over their popular skipper. “Rudder amidships. All ahead one- third.” He looked forward and thought he saw wisps of smoke peeling back from the pilothouse. “Can’t see a goddamn thing. For all I know, we’re about to hit the breakwater! Left standard rudder. Bring us around toward Adar.”

  The League bombers broke off their attack. Even if they saw Ellie slow and start easing toward her burning sister, they didn’t pay her any more attention. They’d received quite enough from her, and there were easier targets in Santiago Bay. They had limited time over target in any event and Martinique was a long way off so they focused on bombing and strafing the cluster of wooden ships, which, like the airfield, docks, and Santiago itself, they set afire before winging away to the east.

  Ronson conned Ellie as close to Adar as he dared, ordering boats in the water. The other destroyer was listing and burning from her amidships deckhouse forward. Firefighting parties sprayed water on the flames and steam rejoined the malignant black column standing over her. On Ellie, excited ’Cats chattered and boasted they’d hit ten enemy planes, distracting and engaging wounded shipmates as they carried them down to the wardroom. Ronson thought they might’ve hit half that many—still pretty good—and Adar could’ve hit a few. The pursuit planes definitely got a couple. Eight to ten, all told, was a respectable score, and a damaging percentage of the whole.

  Still, the price was high. Ellie had suffered seven dead and five wounded. Except for those in the portside 20mm tubs, most of the casualties were on the bridge, also slashed by bomb fragments. Captain Brister was only slightly wounded, catching a few small iron splinters and knocked cold when a severed conduit conked him on the head. His helmet saved him. There were plenty of little leaks that needed attention as well: popped rivets, opened seams, more splinter wounds. Generally speaking, though, considering they’d been hit in broad daylight in restricted waters by a helluva lot of planes, James Ellis came out pretty well. Her pilothouse needed work, but she could steam and fight. Adar wasn’t so lucky.

  Nineteen of her crew were dead and twenty-three badly wounded. Injured and nonessential personnel were taking to the boats Ellie sent, and Adar was dead in the water, leaning heavily to starboard. Signals flashing from a Morse lamp aft detailed her damage. She was taking water in both firerooms and all but her number one boiler was out. Worse—and they could see this for themselves—the water pressure was beginning to fail. On the other hand, her captain, Lieutenant Commander Pina-Ta-Biaa—aft now, like Ronson—was optimistic
her ship could be saved if Ellie would join the firefighting and pumping efforts.

  With the help of a couple of ’Cats, Captain Perry Brister joined Ronson atop Ellie’s aft deckhouse. His trouser legs had been cut away and he wore bandages on his legs, but he seemed to have recovered from the blow to his head. Ronson was torn between concern for his skipper and relief he was no longer in charge. “Tell Commander Pina to abandon,” Brister rasped. “Our freighters are coming and we have to scram. The whole League fleet’s on its way and we can’t get stuck in here.”

  Leaving the freighters in the harbor that brought a lot of the planes to the sacrificial airfield—along with some other things—had been High Admiral Jenks’s idea. Since they had to stay close, he’d proposed they’d draw less attention stationary, near shore, covered with brush laced into netting, than if they’d been underway. They’d nervously watched the attack from as far away as they could get from anything else on the west end of the bay, but now they were coming.

  “Caap’n Pina . . . strenuously objects to your order, sur,” the signal-’Cat said diplomatically. Brister barked a laugh. He’d seen the somewhat insubordinate response himself. “Nevertheless, repeat that it is an order, and she needs to hurry it up.”

  It took an hour to complete Adar’s evacuation, her wounded coming aboard strapped in long baskets. Ronson was sickened by the mixed smells of burnt oil, flesh, and fur. By the time Pina herself climbed up Ellie’s side, the freighters were closing. And though Adar was burning from stem to stern, she wasn’t noticeably lower in the water. Still, Pina had lost a lot of her own heat by then, and joined Ronson and Brister (for whom a chair had been provided), on the aft deckhouse. She noted Ellie’s starboard torpedo mount had been trained out over the side, pointing at her ship.

  “We caan do nothing for her?” she almost pleaded.

  “Just one last thing.” Brister’s gravelly voice managed to sound amazingly gentle. “I’m sorry. Adar’s finished and the League fleet’s coming. Their ship-mounted scout planes might be overhead soon and we need to be gone.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why, or even how they might recover Adar, but we won’t be here to stop ’em if they try and I’m damned if I’ll leave her for ’em.” He nodded at the torpedo tubes. “Lay your ship to rest, Captain Pina.”

  Back in Ellie’s pilothouse (her wheel and EOT were intact), a Nussie pilot took her out, carefully threading a specific channel. The two freighters dutifully followed in line abreast like a pair of oxen sniffing a cheetah’s tail, but they had another final chore. Still on the aft deckhouse, physically and emotionally exhausted after the long morning, Ronson Rodriguez watched the smoke of Santiago Bay merge with the haze of early afternoon. Adar’s smoke had quickly vanished when the single torpedo broke her back and put her on the bottom.

  Raising his binoculars, Ronson caught occasional splashes aft of the large, wooden-hulled freighters as they filled the gap in the minefield they laid when they arrived. He knew, even if these mines were essentially just anchored depth charges, their magnetic influence exploders were fairly sophisticated. Industrious ’Cats had been inspired by (but absolutely didn’t copy) the Mk-6 magnetic torpedo detonators that proved so useless against the Japanese and that Bernie Sandison abandoned in favor of contact exploders. The mines required no electricity and worked just fine, if they didn’t leak. And if a steel-hulled ship passed close enough.

  Ronson hoped they’d blow the bottom out of a few Leaguers but wasn’t optimistic. The enemy would have to come close in, almost into the mouth of the bay, and why should they? Their BBs could churn the rubble of Santiago from here. Maybe we should’ve left Adar afloat as bait, he thought to himself, as USS James Ellis headed south to link up with TF-Tassanna.

  CHAPTER 42

  ////// Impero

  League-Occupied Martinique

  The Caribbean

  August 5, 1945

  0012

  It was just after midnight in the flag officer’s suite aboard Impero, but nobody slept as messengers scurried in and out with new dispatches every few minutes. Gravois was exhausted, but dutifully digested each new piece of information before relating it to the small, vocal mob that had become his staff. He’d never felt the burden of command on such a scale, particularly when failure entailed such daunting personal consequences, but after a couple of profoundly frustrating days, things seemed to be looking up.

  Most of the planes had returned from their raid on Santiago where—they claimed—they’d destroyed the enemy airfield entirely, inflicted heavy damage on the docks and city, as well as a large number of NUS warships, and sunk one of Captain Reddy’s modern destroyers. So at least they were even for the enemy raid on Martinique. With fuel more suddenly precious than ever, however, Gravois had directed Ammiraglio Gherzi to proceed into Santiago Bay and attempt to replenish his bunkers there before bombarding the city. He’d considered that a brilliant stroke. To his dismay, Gherzi almost immediately reported that three of his ships struck underwater mines. A destroyer sank immediately with great loss of life, another would have to be scuttled, and a battleship had been damaged. A mocking backhand by the fickle fates had left it bleeding oil from a ruptured torpedo blister and slowed by a damaged propeller shaft. The effort had proven worse than useless and Gravois ordered Gherzi to haul off, shell the city, and begin making his way back to base. All his fuel hopes now rested on the convoy coming from the Azores.

  On the other hand, there’d been no more enemy air raids. Even better, he now saw, looking at the latest dispatch from the cruiser he’d sent scouting with two destroyers, its seaplane had discovered the enemy carrier at last, barely two hundred miles to the north.

  “Two carriers, in point of fact,” Gravois declared with new enthusiasm, “though I can’t imagine where the other came from. They’re in company with what may be a Republic seaplane tender and two enemy destroyers, one slightly larger than the other. . . .” He glanced up and murmured, “The bigger one must be their new light cruiser, if two destroyers were at Santiago. But how could the survivor have joined so swiftly?” He shook his head bemusedly. “And the pilot swears he saw our own Savoie in company with the enemy!”

  This elicited an astonished explosion of voices, mostly proclaiming its impossibility, but Ciano silenced them. “It’s quite possible. We know little of the events surrounding Savoie’s engagement with Captain Reddy’s forces at Zanzibar, but he’s here so he must’ve won. It follows that he could’ve taken Savoie from Kurokawa. She was . . . less than properly manned, if you’ll recall. Yet even if the enemy captured her intact, she’ll be little use to them.” He glanced at Gravois. “We disabled her fire control apparatus ourselves. She might be dangerous at very close range,” he qualified, “but they still have only animals to crew her.”

  Gravois refrained from pointing out those “animals” had stymied them quite effectively so far, and ravaged their air bases and oil storage here on Martinique. Just as bad, even if most of their bombers safely returned from the attack on Santiago, the gasoline stockpiles were sorely depleted as well. And the crash on the fueling pier was proving more problematic than first suspected. It was nearly impossible to refuel their ships from what remained onshore until repairs were completed. At present they were utterly reliant on four medium-sized tankers, and they were sucking them down like ticks.

  “Regardless,” Gravois said, “we’re gifted with an opportunity. We’ve found what can only be the entire remaining enemy fleet. We’ll launch an air strike immediately, vectored by the scout ships, which will attack in concert.”

  “In the dark?” Impero’s XO asked, incredulously.

  “When better?” Gravois countered. “In spite of the fact there’ll be little moon, the phosphorescent wakes of the enemy are quite clear. They’re like lighted roadways in this sea, that stretch for miles.” He raised the message in his hand. “That’s how our scouts discovered them. Besides, we have no fighters left
to protect the bombers and the new enemy fighters are more effective than expected. A night attack will be safer.”

  “We’ll have no fuel left for our planes when they return,” groused the Italian colonel in charge of air operations. “None.”

  “If they’re successful, they won’t need more before replenishment arrives,” Gravois argued reasonably. “Those are my orders. We attack at once!”

  Another messenger arrived, looking more harried than the others, and a little nervous too. “Sirs,” he said, not waiting for the printed words to make their rounds, “there’s been a sudden explosion of radio traffic. Most is coded, of course, but some is in the open. The animals . . . Lemurians . . . seem incapable of maintaining proper procedures, especially when they’ve been quiet so long.”

  “Have you determined the direction of these transmissions?” Campioni questioned.

  The messenger actually shrugged. “They seem to be coming from everywhere, sir, but the voice transmissions are in the southwest. It’s impossible to say how far, but they made mention of our bombardment force.”

  Gravois slapped the table with his hand. “A ruse, no doubt, to distract us from their force to the north.”

  Ciano was shaking his head. “I refuse to accept they’re that cunning, and Lemurians are loquacious. They may be stalking Gherzi. We know they watch him with scout planes, probably from steam-powered sailing ships they use as seaplane tenders.”

  “Stalking him with what?” Gravois asked.

  “I don’t know . . . but they already surprised us with one air strike—and mines. Perhaps they’ve gathered a number of those seaplane tenders and mean to make an air attack. I don’t know!” he repeated in frustration.

  Gravois steepled his fingers, elbows on the table. “Gherzi is still about eight hours out. Have him reduce speed to conserve fuel, but scout his surroundings as best he can.” He frowned. Gherzi had lost five of his six seaplanes. Some may have simply gotten lost and gone down, but at least one was probably destroyed by surviving fighters out of Santiago. They now knew those could even be a threat to modern fighters. A floatplane would be helpless against them. He looked up. “As to the other transmissions . . . clearly, the enemy is preparing an attack of his own from the north. Why else is he so close? We must beat him to it.”