by Tim Chant
“As you say, sir.”
The Yaroslavich was taking hits now, bursts of flame appearing across her upper deck. Baxter knew that his guess about the enemy’s artillery was about right, and that if Juneau could get even one of his six-inch guns to bear he could do some real damage.
He had Vasily steer wide of the engaged vessel, to ensure no near misses would hit them, but close enough that they could still use the cruiser’s bulk for cover. “And where would you like to punch this enemy cruiser?” Vasily asked drily.
“Let’s see what condition she’s in. Stand by on the forward guns!”
They came round the Yaroslavich’s stern and saw the enemy lying not a mile off, her side flashing as the five light guns mounted without protection along the port side fired. As they watched, one of Russian great guns fired and a six-inch shell smashed a hole in the armed merchantman’s stern. That was the problem with using converted merchant ships, Baxter thought grimly — they didn’t have armour protection to speak of or any of the other protections a purpose-designed warship had. They were a good stopgap, and he had to admit one of them had proved its worth in finding the Russian ships, but you didn’t want to get into a knock-down fight in one.
“Where that shell just hit — that will do nicely!”
Despite that hit, the Japanese were clearly starting to get the advantage. The captain — or one of his ‘advisors’ — had realised just how damaged the target vessel was, and he was manoeuvring to take advantage of that, trying to get into a blind spot for the main guns.
“I’m going forward,” Baxter told Vasily, then scrambled along the narrow gangway. The little vessel was rolling and pitching now as it crashed across the water in its mad headlong dash towards destruction.
“They’ve seen us,” one of the crewmen in the bows said, then spat into the water creaming past the bows.
Baxter could see a number of Japanese sailors pointing towards them, others running towards the stern with rifles. Even a single hit from one of the four-inch guns she mounted would do for them, but Baxter had been counting on the enemy not wanting to divert any of his weak main battery from the cruiser.
The gamble, it seemed, had paid off.
“Ignatyiv, if you would put fire onto those riflemen please — and don’t worry about the ammunition this time!”
There were grins all round as the machine gunner, a small but broad and swarthy man, shifted uncomfortably before crouching down behind his weapon. “Right, gentlemen, let’s see if we can do something about his main guns.”
The Yaroslavich was starting to score more hits against the cruiser with her secondary batteries, the crews Baxter had spent most time with. Careful shiphandling was going to put her across the Russian ship’s bows, though, where the main guns couldn’t hit her and only some of the 4.7s could. From there she could lob shells along the length of the Russian ship, and at that range could barely miss. It would be carnage aboard if that was allowed to happen.
Baxter almost burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of their own course, which chased the relatively fast Japanese ship around the sluggish Yaroslavich.
He ducked down behind the pinnace’s Hotchkiss gun as one of the bluejackets swung the breach closed with the distinctive clang of steel on steel. At this speed, they weren’t much of a gunnery platform, and were closing fast enough that the guns mounted along the freighter’s sides would soon be out of reach anyway. Ignatyiv was blazing away at the Japanese riflemen, keeping their heads down to some degree but by no means suppressing them entirely. Bullets started to smack into the water around them, and someone cried out as one hit the railing and drove splinters across the deck.
All of this was secondary in Baxter’s attention. Not ignored, just put to one side as he concentrated in the right moment to pull the firing lanyard. He stepped back smartly and pulled it at the same time, the little Hotchkiss gun crashing out flame and smoke as it spat a shell into the superstructure about four feet to the left of the gun he’d been aiming at. Men went down, visible at this close range, but others were already running to replace them. Some of the main guns were being brought to bear on them as the enemy realised they were more than just a distraction.
“Faster, lads!” he shouted to the men bringing up one of the last of their three-pound shells, then flinched as a much larger round hit the sea behind them, close enough that the pinnace rose by the stern. For a moment he thought they might actually go over, then the whirling screw dropped back into the sea.
“Remarkably good practise,” he said, forcing a light tone into his voice as he looked round at his crew. “Let’s show them how it’s done.”
It took a moment to recover the shell, dropped as a result of the near miss. This would be his last shot, he knew, and took the time to make it count. They were barely two hundred yards from the auxiliary cruiser and he was staring down the muzzle of one of her guns, at maximum depression, as he pulled the lanyard. He didn’t see exactly where the shell hit, but when the burst of smoke cleared the men around started cheering as they saw the enemy gun had been bent right back and torn half off its mounting.
Baxter didn’t cheer, because he’d seen the dazed and bloodied gunner staggering to the weapon, obviously too badly injured to realise the weapon was in a worse state than he was. “Don’t do it,” he whispered, but even the force of his personality could not still the Japanese sailor at that range. The shell burst in the breech, of course, tearing apart the gunner and everyone else within range in a storm of hot steel. The explosion seemed to stun the riflemen firing on the pinnace, buying them a few precious moments to get into the lee of the cruiser.
“Daft fucker,” Ignatyiv said, turning away from his machine gun to grin at Baxter. A moment later his face exploded into gore that spattered across the gun crew as a heavy rifle round took him in the back of the head.
That single moment of horror, the cheerful grin dissolving into destruction, threatened to take the fragile momentum out of the men he had led on this dangerous attack. Then they crashed into the side of the Japanese ship, Vasily hitting surprisingly hard and smashing in the pinnace’s bow even though he’d started a turn to starboard to bring them alongside rather than ram.
There was nothing else for it.
“Get grapnels up into that hole!” Baxter shouted. He seized one of the coiled lines they’d prepared and whirled it around his head before hurling it up into the jagged metal mouth torn into the ship’s side. It clanged and snagged, but didn’t take properly and fell into the sea. Faces were starting to appeared above them, followed by rifle barrels.
“You three, get that damn machine gun pointed upwards and keep them off us!” He coiled the line as he rapped out orders. The rope was heavy with water as he spun the grapnel. This time it caught, along with one of the other grapnels. The three men he’d detailed to the heavy Maxim machine gun had managed to lift it out of its mounting and now one of them was crouched with the water-cooling jacket on his shoulder, hands over his ears and a grimace on his face as his mates used the extra elevation to give the rest of them covering fire.
“Come on, your bastards!” Baxter shouted, securing the end of his rope and swinging himself out over the water as the damaged pinnace drifted a bit away from the cruiser’s side. The rope sagged alarmingly and for a heart-stopping moment he thought the grapnel was coming loose, then he got Japanese steel under his feet and pulled himself up the side. It wasn’t far, but it felt like the longest climb he’d ever had to complete — even more nerve-wracking than going up the Yaroslavich’s masts in the typhoon.
The rent in the ship’s hull was as sharp and jagged as it had looked, the metal still hot to the touch. He didn’t have time to be careful, but somehow managed to pull himself into the devastated inner compartment without anything more than a few scratches. He straightened up and took stock of his surroundings.
At least one person had died in here, but it was hard to say how many. He saw a leg, standing eerily upright in the middle of
the devastation, but no sign of the body it had been attached to scant minutes ago. It reeked of burnt flesh and blood and spilled guts and he knew the sailors couldn’t be allowed to linger here. It was easy to cheer the death of an enemy at distance, and do the things that made those deaths happen, but in close action even the bravest or most bloodthirsty man could lose his stomach for it.
His boarding party was coming up the side now. “Secure the hatch,” he said brusquely as he pushed them through the carnage, not giving them time to think about what they were walking through.
The hatch had been torn out by the explosion, along with much of the bulkhead, but the bluejackets obediently crouched where it had been, aiming their rifles along the corridor beyond.
“Where’s Vasily?” he asked the last man up.
“He has been injured, sir, and remains on the pinnace.”
That caught him off guard — the enormous sailor had seemed so utterly indestructible, untouchable, that him being wounded seemed like an ill omen. He couldn’t let that stop him now.
“Sir…” someone else said, and he looked round to see the sailor was offering him the polished wooden grip of a revolver.
“Well, not my brightest moment — leading a boarding action without a weapon!” He took the pistol, though he knew he wouldn’t do much good with it.
“What now, sir?”
He realised, as they huddled around him in the corridor beyond the charnel room, that he had no particular plan. He hadn’t even expected to get this far.
He didn’t let that sudden doubt show. He had a decent force, even with Vasily and Ignatyiv out of the fight, and they had spirit. “We take the bridge.” Arbuthnott was likely to be on the bridge, and that made it as good a plan as any.
The inside of the ship was much the same as any other he’d been on, with the exception that any script he saw was, of course, in Japanese. Orienting himself from the fact they’d entered by the stern and knowing they wanted to go up and forward, he led his little group of intrepid boarders deeper in.
It didn’t take the Japanese long to find them, although they tried to move quietly — greatly aided by the fact the Yaroslavich was still peppering the ship with what guns she could bring to bear.
He heard them first, shouted orders and the rattle of rifles being prepared. What he wasn’t expecting was a young officer wielding a sword and leading a bayonet charge down the companionway towards them, the enemy sailors letting out a blood-chilling battle cry.
Baxter was so startled he jerked the trigger of his revolver three times without really looking. The Russians fired at the same time, the noise and stench of gunpowder overpowering in the enclosed space, and still three Japanese made it through the fusillade, two of them bayoneting the sailor in front of him as he tried desperately to work his rifle’s bolt. He went down screaming and Baxter shot the first man. The hammer dropped into a dud cartridge and he dropped the weapon as he twisted aside from a desperate bayonet thrust. He was acting on instinct now, underpinned by the rage that was always there but had been kept on a tight leash for months.
He let it out now, a great roaring rush of fury, grabbing the polished wooden furniture of the rifle and using it as a lever to slam the hapless enemy sailor into the wall before driving the brass buttplate into his face. He felt bone crunch, definitely more than just the nose, and the man dropped in an untidy heap. The other sailors were bludgeoning the third survivor down, hammering until he was well and truly incapacitated, and probably dead.
Baxter stalked forward, the anger pulsing through him now. The Japanese sailors weren’t the focus of it, but they would bear the brunt of it. The sword-wielding officer was bleeding from two small-calibre wounds in his chest but still weakly scrabbling for his sword. Baxter kicked him in the head on the way past. “Stay with me,” he ground out and, abandoning all attempts at stealth, headed for the bridge.
They were confronted by two steep flights of metal steps to the bridge of the cruiser, with light plating welded on to the sides as an afterthought when she’d been repurposed. It wasn’t unlike the arrangement on the Yaroslavich, Baxter thought, as he considered the problem.
The rage had cooled as they’d fought their way here. The Japanese ship didn’t seem to have a large crew, or at least no longer had one, and they’d only met scattered parties on the way here. He’d still lost people, though, either killed outright or too seriously injured to keep going. The ship was still taking fire from the Russian cruiser, but so far this seemed to be a single-ship duel.
He didn’t fancy the idea of trying to storm the bridge up those ladders but couldn’t see any other access point. He certainly couldn’t ask any of the sailors to lead the way.
“Well, well, Mr Baxter, this is a pretty pickle, ain’t it?”
He stiffened at the horribly familiar tone behind him. He’d become so fixated on the problem, so convinced that they were secure behind, that he hadn’t heard the party of Japanese sailors creep up behind them. He had detailed someone to keep watch, little Fridrik, but he was down and a Japanese sailor was pulling a larger knife from his back.
Most of Baxter’s attention was on the big European following the sailors into the space below the bridge. His face was as familiar as his voice, although they’d only spent a few hours in each other’s company before.
“Billings,” he spat, naming the former RN petty officer who had been Arbuthnott’s hatchet wielder aboard the yacht where all this had started.
“I’m touched that you remember me,” Billings said urbanely. He had a much larger pistol in his hand than the one he’d tried to intimidate Baxter with before. “Now, why don’t you tell your lads to lay down their arms, and pass on the cap’n’s promise that they’ll be well treated if they surrender now.”
Baxter licked his lips. Billings had fifteen men with him, more than they could feasibly deal with after their own losses and without the element of surprise being on their side. Fighting now would be suicide for all of them, whereas surrendering would just likely mean death for him.
“That annoying little Jock sprog with you, by any chance?” Billings said, bringing the big Webley pistol up and thumbing the hammer back theatrically.
“Tommy? He died,” Baxter extemporised desperately.
“Really? Our man aboard…”
“Malaria, long after Yefimov had been shot,” Baxter said.
“You ’ear that, sir?” Billings shouted up the ladder.
“I did,” Arbuthnott’s nasal voice came from above, the first time they’d heard any noise from the bridge. “Well, take care of the situation please, Billings.”
Baxter felt his muscles tense. Deal with the situation. Deal with it. Casually ending his life. Billings tutted and Japanese rifles came up to point at the tense and confused Russian bluejackets, none of whom had enough English to follow what was happening.
Baxter opened his mouth to order his men to lay down their arms, and the world exploded in tearing noise.
He dived for cover as soon as bullets started ripping through the space. A lot of his people were already crouched and threw themselves flat. He didn’t know where the fire was coming from or which side was firing, but it was loud enough that he had to cover his ears as the large, fast rounds tore Japanese sailors from their feet. One managed to get off a round that smacked into the deck by his head, and then the firing stopped an eternal second or two after it had started.
Baxter leapt to his feet, driving forward at Billings who was down, clutching a wound in his shoulder but not dead. The burly petty officer tried to bring his revolver up and Baxter kicked it from his hand, before he dropped a blow into his head that started somewhere up in the clouds and knocked the man clean out.
“Billings? I say, Billings?” Arbuthnott’s querulous voice cut through the stunned silence. The intermittent firing of the main guns of both ships had finally come to an end, as though some uneasy truce had fallen while this peculiar tableau played out.
Baxter held up his ha
nd to keep the sailors quiet and moved to the hatch that the Japanese had come through and from which the machine-gun fire had come. He dropped into a crouch and took a quick peer round, then sighed in relief.
“Nice of you to join us, Vasily,” he whispered. The Russian sailor’s answering grin was tight with pain and he moved stiffly as he and the other sailor they’d left behind rose and hauled the machine gun up into the compartment. Both men were injured, and he hated to think how hard it must have been for them to haul the heavy Maxim gun up here. Now it was here, though, they could put it to good use — more good use, he corrected himself, looking around at the dead and dying Japanese sailors sprawled out around them.
“How many belts do we left have left?” Baxter whispered. Vasily shrugged and held up the half belt remaining — barely enough for a couple of seconds’ fire.
“Well, we’ll have to make do,” Baxter said with a vicious grin, looking up at the deckhead — the virtually unarmoured barrier between them and the bridge above.
The sailor who had previously stood in for the machine gun’s tripod flat out refused to repeat the experience, tapping his ear and shaking his head to indicate he’d suffered more than enough of that duty. They didn’t have time to argue about it — the longer they left it, the more time the bridge crew would have to prepare for them. In the end, though it had left a bad taste in his mouth, he’d let the Russians quickly stack a few dead bodies for Vasily to prop the Maxim gun on.
“Arbuthnott,” Baxter called up the stairs. He didn’t know how many men were up there, but guessed more than a few. They were all keeping very still and very quiet. “Arbuthnott, I’m going to give you this one chance to surrender. It seems reasonable, given you gave me the same chance.”
There was a sullen pause. “Ah, Mr Baxter. Can I assume that Billings is dead?”
“No. I don’t … deal with situations, was that what you said? I don’t shoot unarmed prisoners. Which means, if you surrender now, you get to live.”
“And, one assumes, I’ll be handed over to the Russians?”