The Straits of Tsushima: An action-packed historical military adventure (Marcus Baxter Naval Thrillers Book 1)

by Tim Chant

  “Language, my husband,” Ekaterina said mildly, with a fond smile.

  “I imagine not dying was also a relief,” Baxter muttered sourly. That was another source of guilt — Juneau had looked to be in dire straits in the magazine but Baxter had prioritised stopping the revolutionaries from blowing the whole thing sky high. It seemed he should have had more faith. “You really should have let the bluejackets go first.”

  Juneau’s mood wasn’t punctured by the sour words, he merely shrugged diffidently. “This happened on my watch and I therefore had to deal with it myself,” he said simply.

  “Not that any of us were there to witness this,” Ekaterina said acidly, glaring at Baxter before turning a dutiful smile on her husband. “And have the prisoners been talking?”

  “Oh, full confessions are being made,” Juneau said.

  Baxter shook his head, trying to clear it. Their voices were coming from a great distance away as they talked about the testimony. His arm throbbed painfully and he felt oddly cold, though his shirt was already clinging to his back.

  “Though one of them did embellish it somewhat,” Juneau was saying as Baxter managed to fight down the nausea and dizziness. Tommy watched him with a concerned expression but Ekaterina was absorbed by what her husband was saying. “Making some wild claims that one of the officers was in contact with British Intelligence, who were rendering aid.”

  “That would be beyond the pale, even for perfidious Albion,” Ekaterina said flatly, then looked up as Baxter pushed his chair back with a loud scrape. He put his head in his hands, feeling the clamminess on his brow. “No offense, Baxter,” she said quickly, but he wasn’t really listening. His vision was swimming, but there was something important he needed to tell them. If only he could remember…

  “I don’t think the British government would stoop to such levels,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “But those within the intelligence services already have.”

  Stunned silence greeted that pronouncement. At a whispered command Tommy dashed from the room. Baxter watched his feet trot to the door, the view at an odd angle, and realised that somehow he was on the floor. It was comfortable enough, so he decided to stay put.

  The next week or so was a blur of sweat and half-remembered dreams. Of the distant crack of firing squad rifles drifting up from the bay, a jagged interjection into dreams of leering slender daemons feeding him poison (or, as Baxter realised later, Dr Andropov feeding him quinine pills). An ever-changing cast of the daemon’s acolytes filtered through the dreams as well, alternating concern for his well-being with trying to drown him in warm water.

  “Dr Andropov tells me you came close to death on Wednesday,” Ekaterina told him one morning as he lay still, weak and exhausted, under a fresh sheet and in fresh cotton pyjamas. She had pushed the window open and for once a cool sea breeze blew through the room. “He was concerned the infection in your arm would turn gangrenous.”

  He stirred weakly, trying to see the offending appendage. He could feel it, but he’d known men who’d lost limbs but swore they could still feel a phantom of the appendage. She smiled gently, eased him back and held a glass of water to his lips. “Don’t worry, everything is still where it should be. He said the fever would break on Saturday if the rot didn’t set in.”

  “What day is it?” he asked after taking a sip. He wanted more, but she eased the cup away.

  “Friday.”

  “I was always an overachiever.” It was a rough quip, but the best he could manage given he felt utterly drained.

  She actually smirked. “At least you don’t finish everything early.”

  He blinked, utterly astonished at the innuendo. “Mrs Juneau, I am horrified that you would subject a man in my weakened condition to such bawdy wit.”

  Her laugh was clear and bright and he sensed the relief that lay behind it. “I really don’t know what you mean, Mr Baxter,” she said primly, and offered him more water. “Gently, gently. Not too much at once.” She sat back, folding her hands in her lap and looking down at him, her smile fading. “You gave us much cause for concern, Baxter,” she said softly. “And I am glad you have pulled through.”

  He lay still, basking in her presence but waiting for the ‘but’.

  “It pains me to press a man in your weakened condition, but I must know … what you said, just before you collapsed…”

  He couldn’t tell if she was truly pained, but he could also guess that questioning him in this state was deliberate and felt a flare of old familiar anger.

  He stared at her through aching eyes, struck again by how unfathomable she was. But he was tired, and ached from head to toe, and the hot rage had died as quickly as it had come. He owed Arbuthnott and whomever was behind the rogue agent nothing.

  So he told her everything.

  Nothing more was said of it during his convalescence, though he saw her most days. Tommy was a constant presence, ready to run and fetch anything he needed, and Andropov was a regular visitor.

  “You probably should not be out and about, Mr Baxter,” the doctor said reprovingly as he arrived to find his patient on the veranda, sipping a long glass of iced mango juice.

  “I’ve never been one to lie around in bed, Doctor, unless I’m truly hungover.” Baxter tipped his broad-brimmed straw hat back to regard the cadaverous medical man. “Your ministrations have put me well on the way to mending.”

  “It is nothing — in cases like this the strength of the patient is the best indicator.” Andropov sighed as he took a chair opposite him. “Unless other outside forces intervene,” he went on, voice sad.

  “Did they shoot the injured men as well?”

  Andropov made a wide gesture with his long-fingered, expressive hand. “The Graf argued for clemency, at least until nature ran its course, and as you know Admiral Rozhestvensky has previously refused to sign any death warrants here, but Gorchakov was insistent on the sentences being carried out. They had to tie poor Alexei Dmitryich into a stretcher and tie that to a post. At least he knew nothing of what was happening.”

  The speed with which the trials and executions had been carried out astonished Baxter. Even in the RN, with its emphasis on firm discipline, it would have been weeks if not months before a proper court martial could have been carried out; and even for a crime as severe as mutiny the punishment was not always so swiftly enacted.

  He knew he’d killed one of them outright, in the heat of the fight, and more or less killed Alexei Dmitryich who’s head he’d smashed. Men who had wanted him and everyone else dead. There was nothing he could do about that, and he refused to feel too bad about it. “I haven’t heard any more firing squads over the last few days,” he said, rather than follow that train of thought further.

  Andropov sighed again. “Word has reached the squadron of events in the Motherland. Disturbances, some have said revolutions, and brutal reprisals by the Tsar’s army and secret police. That and the conditions here trigger a wave of unrest on the ships. Our lord and master feels, though, that he cannot find a worse punishment than leading these men into certain battle and probable death.”

  “Too damn hot for them to have achieved much, anyway,” Baxter said darkly, mopping his brow. In truth the warmth had been a godsend for him once the fever had broken. “Hard to work up revolutionary fervour when the air feels like a wet blanket.”

  “If they had succeeded aboard our own ship…”

  “That’s quite enough, Doctor.” Ekaterina’s flat, hard voice chopped across the conversation as she stepped out onto the veranda. “As you said yourself, Mr Baxter is still convalescing and it would be well not to trouble him with such matters.”

  “Of course, your Serenity,” Andropov said urbanely, but not before Baxter caught the slightest flash of fear in his eyes.

  Ekaterina settled into the other wicker chair and topped up Baxter’s glass. “Let us talk of pleasanter things,” she said, her voice lighter. “I am joining my husband and the other officers on something of an exp
edition into the interior, and wondered if you yet feel up to it, Mr Baxter?”

  CHAPTER 13

  When Baxter finally returned to the cruiser — over Dr Andropov’s objections — he found it much changed. Some semblance of military order had returned, the men and officers moving with a bit more purpose. The many exotic pets that had been bought over the last few weeks had been thrown overboard, mercifully close enough to shore to escape, and there was barely a hint of bloodstains on the planking of the quarterdeck where the revolutionaries had been shot. The Russian navy, he was told, laid out tarpaulins first.

  It felt good to have a moving deck under his feet again, the sea breeze in his face as the Yaroslavich shouldered aside light seas.

  “It’s the admiral, you see,” Juneau said as he joined him by the rail. “The threat of a complete breakdown of discipline brought the man out of his cabin and taking command again.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Baxter muttered, then shook away the last of the sourness. “The mutiny, I mean — a breakdown of discipline?”

  Juneau’s smile was disarming. “What else could it be described as, my dear Baxter?”

  This was the first time he’d really spoken with Juneau since the night of the ‘breakdown of discipline’. He hadn’t been deliberately avoiding him, but Juneau had been kept busy with the aftermath. Despite what Ekaterina had said about her marriage, Baxter couldn’t quite shake the sense of guilt over having bedded her.

  “Fair point,” he grunted. “I wasn’t here so couldn’t say, of course.”

  The cruiser was steaming in line astern with the faster, newer cruisers of Enkvist’s squadron. She was the last ship in the line, trailing slightly, and Baxter looked hungrily along the sleek, grey shapes of the modern warships as they commenced a slight turn to starboard. He had a superb view along the length of the line, and his heart ached with the knowledge that he’d never command a ship like that. The Yaroslavich was dumpy and old by comparison, and noticeably the only ship still carrying a vestigial sailing rig.

  “When I see a line like this, I wonder how we can ever be beaten,” Juneau said wistfully.

  “The Japanese line will be just as impressive.” Baxter bit back on saying anything more. “Though you have all done an incredible job coming this far. Rozhestvensky seems to be the man for the job.”

  “Whether he is Togo’s equal in battle remains to be seen,” Juneau finished the thought for him, though quietly enough that the other officers clustered on the upper deck couldn’t overhear. He gave Baxter a brittle smile. “Well, we’re about to commence firing practice, and my place is on the bridge.”

  The whole 2nd Pacific Squadron was on exercise, though the cruisers were some way distant to the big beasts of the line squadrons. No one wanted a repeat of the near-disaster in the North Sea. Steam pinnaces had finished laying out a series of targets — empty salt meat barrels lashed together with flags on them, in time-honoured tradition — and were now hurriedly clearing the area.

  Baxter turned, with mild curiosity, to watch the crew of the nearest 4.7-inch gun; he leaned against the railing as much for support as to show a lack of concern. One of the many ways the cruiser showed her age, dating as she did from another era of naval architecture, was in the arrangement of her armament. Her main guns were 6-inch, single barbette mounts two to a side, fore and aft. The secondary armament of the twelve 4.7s were mounted primarily along the sides, firing through piercings in the manner of the old wooden warships rather than in fully traversable mounts. The gun captain was watching the lieutenant in charge of the starboard battery, who in turn had his eyes on the bridge. Baxter felt a stir of familiar excitement as Juneau called down orders from the bridge wing and the loading proceeded.

  The bluejackets were … slapdash, it was fair to say. Not through any fault of their own, but for lack of proper training. He’d seen them at work in the North Sea, though it had been harder to see what was going on in the darkness, and he thought they had improved since then at least. Juneau at least took his duties seriously.

  The order came down to fire on their selected target, and Baxter twisted back round just as the great guns spoke, first the two six-inchers and then, in a ragged broadside, the lighter guns. He watched the fall of shot, a scattering of water spouts mostly around the float aside from one errant shot that landed closer to a different target. The other ships unleashed their own broadsides a moment later, a heavy crash of guns even at that distance, and he watched their own fall of shot with increasing dismay.

  “I really need to get off this ship, Tommy and Ekaterina as well.”

  No sooner had he muttered that when something clanged heavily behind, to the sound of much hilarity. One of the loaders had fumbled a shell, and it was rolling across the deck. Men shrieked and leapt away, either thinking this was amusing or worried that the shell would detonate. Baxter reacted without thought, jumping down to the gundeck — managing not to fall flat on his face as his knees threatened to buckle — and got his foot on the shell. “Not like that, you bashi-bazouks!” he snarled. “Take this seriously, would you?”

  They stopped, staring at him with their mouths open. He may have been a pale shadow of himself after the fever, but his rage was towering and, he realised, he’d roared at them in passable Russian.

  Well, he was in it now. He may as well wade forward. He bent, scooped the shell up and shoved it into a loader’s arms. “Like this — like you’re holding a baby,” he went on, lowering his voice and trying to inject some humour into it. “Don’t be shy, it won’t explode until the pointy end hits an enemy ship. Now, did you remember to open the bloody breech?”

  The gun captain nodded uncertainly.

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  He took them through the correct methodology for loading quickly and safely, then had to reach out and stop the gun captain leaping forward to pull the firing lanyard. This, he suspected, was their favourite part — most sailors loved a good bang. “Remember, firing fast is good. Firing accurately is better. Firing fast and hitting your target is what we’re aiming for.” He stripped off his linen jacket. “Let’s do this properly, shall we?”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in honest toil, until Baxter’s hands shook slightly with fatigue and his vision swam; sweat stuck grime and powder residue to his skin. Pretty soon he was instructing the neighbouring gun, the diffident lieutenant — Koenig, he thought — who was supposed to be in charge taking instruction with his men. At one point he caught Juneau watching him from the bridge, but no word came down for him to butt out. The cruiser line came about to fire the port weapons, by which time at least one of their compatriots managed a near enough miss or two that their target floats were looking in a shabby way. The Yaroslavich’s target still floated unsullied and defiant.

  While the ship was manoeuvring and their colleagues on the other side were having their go, Baxter took the crews through a few dry firing runs, then gathered them around him.

  “Remember, fast and accurate if you can — but accurate if you can’t.” The ship was starting to turn again — the flag had ordered that no vessel was to return to port without having first hit her target — and the orders were coming down for the starboard battery to prepare. “Now let’s show those bastards how it’s done, eh?”

  He took command of one of the guns. He knew he shouldn’t, that it could be seen as an insult to the Russian gun captain, but it had been years since he’d laid artillery and he sorely missed it. “You fire when I give the signal, though,” he told the burly, shaven-headed man, who gave him a smile that was mostly metal.

  He peered through the crude gunsight, which gave a little magnification, and used hand signals and grunted commands to get the rest of the crew to lay the weapon on target.

  He held his breath, held his fire. Waited. The six-inches spat flame and smoke and noise, briefly obscuring his vision, but he knew they wouldn’t hit. The rest of the 4.7s fired, similarly wide. Then he raised his hand and chopped it d
own sharply. The gun to his left fired, the shell sending splinters hurtling through the flag on the target. Cheers went up as it started to topple, then Baxter’s own gun went off with a crash, hurtling back on its springs next to him and deafening him with the report. A second later and one of the big casks that made up the raft exploded under a direct hit; he staggered back from the gun with a triumphant grin as the gunners pounded him on the back and Juneau raised his cap in salute.

  It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. And exactly what this crew needed.

  Some of the cruisers were still firing on their targets when the Yaroslavich and the other ships that had achieved ‘victory’ turned back to the bay, sailing away from the rapidly setting sun. With their own guns housed, it was easy to hear the heavy thunder of the big battleships’ batteries, long tongues of flame licking out in the gathering darkness. Baxter shuddered to think how much ammunition was being used, particularly as the expected resupply of 12-inch armour-piercing shells had so far not arrived.

  Dinner that evening in the wardroom was a raucous, cheerful and informal affair.

  “Gorchakov, of course, is not happy,” Juneau told Baxter quietly. “I had to pretend I couldn’t hear his orders to have you dragged away and prevented from interfering. Even after we started hitting he remained unconvinced you had anything to do with it.”

  On a personal level, Baxter was gratified that Juneau had backed him like that. Professionally, he was horrified that command aboard the cruiser had broken down to that point and that he was the cause of it.

  “I have some influence, you know,” Juneau said cheerfully, and slightly drunkenly. “I could arrange for you to be offered a commission. There are many honourable precedents — even John Paul Jones, you know…”

  Baxter looked at him in surprise. Everyone, by now, knew that he was a former RN officer, but only Ekaterina knew under what circumstances — that had been part of his confession. Juneau gave no hint of having been informed, though, and seemed to be making the offer out of genuine kindness. And self-interest, of course. Baxter couldn’t make claims to be the greatest officer ever to have trod a deck, but he’d shown himself to be competent. More than most around the table, for all that they were genial, could claim.