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

by Tim Chant

  “Of course. You have some crimes to answer for.”

  Arbuthnott, if anything, sounded even more officious when he spoke next. “Do you have any idea what that would lead to? What a trial, and what I may reveal, would do to relations between our countries?”

  “I imagine there might be a war,” Baxter said, making himself sound more casual than he felt. “It seems to me that’s what you want.”

  “The situation is entirely more fluid and complicated than someone like you could possibly understand,” the intelligence agent said, sounding like every other posh officer Baxter had ever served with. “I can assure you, my goal was never a war with Russia. Or at least, not an extensive one…”

  “You wanted a naval panic,” Baxter said, the words like lead in his mouth. “Maybe a bit of shooting between the fleets, and then a massively increased spend on ships.”

  “Ah, you understand after all.” Arbuthnott sounded almost paternal. “Now, why don’t we stop all this foolishness and…”

  Baxter had had enough. He looked over to Vasily, and nodded sharply.

  The machine gun’s fire lasted a handful of seconds before the greedy weapon had sucked in the last of its ammunition belt, but the sound was still stunning. Wood fragments and dust rained down from the section of ceiling Vasily had fired into, roughly where they guessed the captain’s chair would be.

  Baxter took the steep ladder two steps at a time, pulling himself up with his hands as much as driving with his feet. He didn’t really expect the fire to have done any damage, but that wasn’t the point of it. He exploded onto the bridge while the crew were still recovering. He roared, fired the Webley he’d taken from Billings with no expectation of hitting anything, and the Russians responded with their own guttural war cries as they came up both ladders.

  He pistol-whipped a Japanese subaltern down, punched a petty officer who came at him with a knife so hard he flew halfway across the bridge. A blood-curdling scream emanated from another young officer as the first bluejacket up the other ladder put a bayonet into his belly, then a shot rang out as one the enemy sailors seemed to remember he was armed. More shots, but he couldn’t tell who was shooting at what because all he could see was the tall figure and pale, aquiline features of Arbuthnott.

  The rogue intelligence agent was backing up, hands — bloody from where he’d been trying to tend to the dreadfully wounded captain slumped in his chair — held out in front of him in a gesture that was almost placating. Ignoring the bullets that whizzed past him, Baxter stalked forward, barely breaking stride to throw a Japanese sailor through a shell hole in the side of the enclosed bridge.

  “Now, Mr Baxter…” Arbuthnott stammered. The sounds of fighting had died down, but Baxter could barely hear the agent over the pounding of his own pulse in his ears. He could only guess that his people had won, as no one was trying to attack him. “Everything I did was for the good of the Service! We need more funding, to stand up…”

  “Why … the fuck … would I care about the good of the Service?” Baxter asked, his voice dangerously low and calm. He reached out, grabbing a handful of Arbuthnott’s linen jacket, and hauled him off his feet with no apparent effort, carrying him towards one of the open wings of the bridge. He didn’t have a plan, he’d never really had a plan. All he knew was that there should be some sort of consequence for Arbuthnott, that he had to be made to understand that it was not right, proper or decent for him to play with people’s lives in this way.

  Before Baxter realised what he was doing, he was dangling the babbling intelligence agent over the side of the bridge wing. There was a dampness in the crotch of Arbuthnott’s suit trousers, sharp tang of urine in the air cutting smoke and burnt gunpowder. Baxter brought one first back, but Vasily was there at his side, one hand on his arm.

  “This is not good,” he said simply, shaking his head firmly. “We do not kill prisoners.”

  Baxter looked at him, nostrils flared and eyes furious, then slowly brought himself under control. “You’re right,” he said, and dropped his struggling prisoner.

  Anything else that might have been said was lost in a great tearing noise, the sounds of tortured metal sheering and hulls grinding together, the cruiser losing way so suddenly it threw them all from their feet.

  CHAPTER 26

  “You’ve made your point, Juneau!” Baxter called up from the stern of their appropriated boat. “Honour has been satisfied.”

  The Russian captain, standing at the top of the boarding ladder as the last of the evacuees descended into the cutter, nodded. “I believe you are right, Baxter,” he replied. “And I see you have made yours.” He gestured expansively to the prisoner tied up in the bows. Arbuthnott’s broken ankle was splinted and they’d acquired morphine from the Japanese cruiser’s infirmary. It was mostly to shut him up, rather than out of any real pity on Baxter’s part. Billings had been left in the care of Dr Andropov and would remain aboard the Yaroslavich.

  “That was quite something, my friend,” Juneau went on after a moment’s pause. “Boarding an enemy vessel with only thirty men, and carrying her.”

  Baxter shrugged. “You had already chewed her up very well, Captain, we merely finished the job.”

  The two men grinned at each other, both realising they could get trapped in a vicious circle of attributing the small victory to each other. “You had best get under way,” Juneau said, his smile fading. “I do not know how long we will remain unmolested.”

  The Japanese cruiser was sinking. Having lost steerage when he had torn up the bridge, she had cut directly across the Yaroslavich’s bows. Unable to manoeuvre effectively, Juneau had instead increased revolutions and rammed his tormenter, the old-fashioned and armoured bows of his vessel sheering through the flimsy sides of the converted freighter. The remaining crew had taken to some of the ship’s boats — luckily, the action had not been furious enough to smash them all to splinters — and Baxter and his people had had to fight to ensure they got two. Their trusty pinnace had slipped below the water by the time they’d finish storming the ship, the damage from the collision proving more extensive than Baxter had realised.

  The Russian cruiser was in little better condition. She’d taken a number of hits in her last battle, although the real problem remained the damage to her engines. Having turned off the course they had laboured onto, there was no way Juneau could bring the cruiser back round. His choice now was all stop and drift until they were found or sail directly for Japan.

  Juneau had chosen to remain where he was, the cruiser’s great beating hearts that had brought them all the way around the world stilled now. As many officers and sailors as possible were being packed into the longboat and cutter Baxter had appropriated from the Japanese cruiser, but some would remain behind in the hope of being encountered by a friendly ship.

  “First Japanese flag you see, you surrender, do you hear?” he said. “Honour really has been satisfied.”

  Juneau didn’t look happy, but nodded. “There is nothing else for it,” he agreed. “We cannot fight her.”

  “I will of course make a full report and deliver your logs — I may yet see you in Vladivostok.”

  “Perhaps. And I doubt this war will last much longer, so even if we are taken we will not long be prisoners.” Juneau nodded with considerably more crispness. “Are you sure you can make it? We’re still some distance from Vladivostok.”

  Baxter shrugged. “A paltry distance — Bligh had much further to go and managed it.”

  “In that case, on your way, Mr Baxter. That’s an order.”

  “I’m not under your command,” Baxter replied with a grin, then — bracing his feet apart to keep stable — rose and offered Juneau the smartest salute he had ever managed. Juneau returned it with equal formality, then Baxter turned his face to the oarsmen who looked up expectantly at him. They had a long way to go still, he knew.

  “All right, lads,” he said, switching into Russian. “Prepare to cast off.”

  It took t
hem two days to complete the journey that, for most of them, had begun as far away as the Baltic. The men had rowed like heroes, officers included, and there had been enough hands to on each boat that they could switch people out. Baxter was careful to ration the contents of the small water cask Juneau had put aboard, along with some ship’s biscuit and salt meat that kept the men sustained. Along with the boats, they had captured some Japanese provisions, but to a man the bluejackets rejected the dried fish and rice. A small jar of pickled vegetables had been declared acceptable, even if some of it had been unidentifiable.

  A westerly breeze, warm and gentle, had sprung up in the morning of the second day. At first it had been unfavourable but shifted about mid-morning to a westerly direction, and they’d been able to rig the boats’ masts and rest the oarsmen until it came time to navigate into the sheltered harbour or Vladivostok.

  Somehow, they had managed to avoid the enemy, and indeed had barely seen any other ships. Baxter had found himself torn between hoping to see Koenig’s pinnace along the way, and willing them to make a swift passage. None of them relaxed, though, until the afternoon of the second day when a lookout in the bow called out the words they had been waiting for. “Land! Dead ahead!”

  They all strained their eyes and peered ahead. Gradually, low sullen hills started to take shape out of the haze. Baxter consulted the chart Juneau had given him, spreading it across Vasily’s broad back. The big petty officer had been grazed by a shell splinter as they had made their final approach to the enemy ship — a lucky escape indeed, not least because it had excused him time at the boards.

  Having checked the chart, he went forward, past the single pole mast with its big sail, to stare at the approaching land mass through his binoculars. He had one boot up on the rail, not far from Arbuthnott’s head. As always, he had to resist the urge to kick the man and felt the familiar stir of anger course through him as he came close. It wouldn’t have been worth the effort, though. As well as his injured ankle, the man had been relentlessly seasick for the entire journey, and Baxter had kept him dosed with morphine to keep him quiet and less of a problem.

  The rogue agent was a problem for when they got ashore, and Baxter made himself ignore the recumbent and gently muttering figure as he focused on the approaching land and started to pick out recognisable features. He couldn’t quite believe it, particularly as he’d only ever been average at navigation.

  “Russky Island, gentlemen,” he announced loudly, once he was certain. “And beyond that, Vladivostok!”

  A great cheer went up. Baxter let them cheer for a few minutes — for one thing, it would let the following longboat know they were almost home — and then raised his voice. “All right! Let’s get this mast down and then stand to the oars. And I want us to come in smartly, do you hear?”

  The wind had veered to an extent that they would have to tack endlessly to pass between Russky Island and the mainland if they’d tried to do it under sail. It would be a hard row, but faster than trying to go in under canvas.

  Despite their exhaustion, the men set to with a will and it wasn’t long before the oars were creaking in the rowlocks, driving the little wooden boats towards safety. It took them the rest of the day to creep round the headland before making a dogleg turn and into the deep, capacious harbour of Vladivostok. It should have been thronged with the ships of the Pacific Fleet, the anchorage crowded with the great steel behemoths. As it was, the meagre independent cruiser squadron that made this their home port formed the bulk of the warships present, sleek and dangerous shapes that had been nowhere to be seen when the Pacific Fleet was being destroyed. Baxter was too tired to worry much about that, now — all he wanted was a hot bath, a steak and enough vodka to knock him out between clean sheets.

  Maybe, a traitorous part of his mind though, maybe with Ekaterina next to him. There was nothing to say she would have forgiven him, of course.

  As the tired oarsmen pulled slowly towards the nearest pier, they were cheered to see some familiar vessels, including a pair of destroyers and the armoured yacht Almaz. They exchanged greetings with the crew of the latter as they pulled slowly towards the pier, the tired sailors lining the yacht’s rail to cheer the little boats on as they made their slow way inland.

  “What word of any other escapees?” Baxter asked, after he had identified the ship they were from and her probable fate.

  “If anyone else made it, they haven’t made it here,” the captain replied, his voice showing what he thought of the idea of any others breaking through the ring of Japanese steel. “Some may have turned back or made for neutral water.”

  “And any other boats from the Yaroslavich?” Baxter asked anxiously. “A pinnace?”

  They were starting to get out of shouting distance and could barely hear each other over the cheers. The shake of the burly captain’s head was clear even at that range, and an apologetic shrug. Not that I have seen, the gestures said. Baxter stood in the stern to scan the collection of small vessels at the pier, and felt his heart grow cold when he realised he could not see Koenig’s pinnace.

  A guardboat chugged out to intercept them as they bobbed across the dirty, oily water of the harbour. “What ship?” someone demanded in French, then again in Russian. Despite the fact they had come in past a destroyer picket and under the guns of the shore defences, this was the first time they had been challenged. But then, two tiny boats perhaps did not pose much of a threat. Anyone turning a pair of glasses on them would have seen the crews were in Russian naval uniforms, after all.

  Baxter pulled himself up straight in the stern. “Yaroslavich, of the Pacific Fleet!” he shouted back, sounding perhaps slightly angrier than was warranted.

  The moments of silence that followed that announcement spoke to the surprise aboard the little steam ship that had swung round to parallel their course. Then came a slightly bemused hail. “Welcome to Vladivostok!”

  “Lovely to be here,” Baxter said quietly in Russian. “After all, we did come all this way to visit this shithole.”

  A ripple of laughter ran through the tired sailors. In truth, Russia’s far eastern port wasn’t much to look at, beyond the characteristically Eastern Orthodox domes of the church that loomed above everything, gleaming white in the late afternoon sun. It represented safety, he thought tiredly as he threw a line up to a couple of sailors who had come out to meet them on the pier. He tried not to think about Koenig’s pinnace, about Ekaterina and Tommy. It was a big harbour and he may just not have seen the boat.

  For the first time in weeks — since Madagascar, in fact — he got dry land under his feet, scrambling up the slippery iron rungs of the ladder built into the pier. The sudden lack of motion under him made him feel slightly nauseous, but that sense was quickly dispelled by the mix of uniformed men and officious-looking civilians marching swiftly towards them. At least two of the men were carrying rifles slung over their shoulders, and one of the men not in uniform looked suspiciously like a police officer.

  “Perhaps they’ve seen we have a prisoner,” he muttered as Vasily joined him. “Get him up out of the boat, would you?”

  Something about the way the men moved, the way the two with rifles were unslinging them, made him nervous. Made him think that they were, perhaps, here not just for Arbuthnott. He tried to dismiss those thoughts — if the worst had happened and Koenig’s boat hadn’t made it through, after all, then they would not know anything was amiss. It could just be a greeting party for survivors, and they had come armed in case the crews of the boats were unruly or were deserters.

  Baxter squared his shoulders, despite the fatigue that washed through him. Rather than stand and wait for them, he went to meet them — and whatever came next — head on.

  EPILOGUE

  The waves marched away towards a far horizon, cold and slate grey. A few hundred miles to the south, these waters were the grave of many men Baxter had come to think of as comrades. Some as friends. Many more, hopefully, had survived and were either interned in
neutral ports or prisoners of the Japanese.

  Here, the sea wasn’t so different to the icy expanse of the Baltic or the equally miserable North Sea — home waters for many of those men. A far cry from the turbulent but sweltering climes they had struggled through for much of their 18,000-mile journey to disaster.

  “And I’ve come full circle as well,” Baxter muttered, shoving his hands into the pockets of the slightly too-small borrowed greatcoat he wore against the early spring chill. “It’s a less sinkable prison, but still a prison.”

  He glanced across at one of his impassive, plain-clothed guards. Okhrana men, he knew. The Tsar’s Guard Department. They stared back at him, unmoved and unmoving. Probably didn’t even understand a word he was saying. He toyed again with the idea of trying to make a break for it, but they wouldn’t let him take these constitutionals on the hill overlooking the Pacific if they weren’t confident of forestalling any escape attempt. And, as always, gnawing at the back of his mind was a worry of what had become of Tommy and Ekaterina.

  He heard boot heels on paving stones, turned to see Lieutenant Koenig striding purposefully towards him, a diffident smile on his face. “Marcus Baxter,” the Russian officer greeted him.

  “Mr Koenig,” Baxter said, masking how pleased he was to see the young lieutenant. “Still alive, I see.”

  Baxter was pleased, he realised, not just because Koenig being here meant Ekaterina and her charge were safely landed, but for his own sake. Koenig had shown himself to be a capable officer and a good man; the sort the Imperial Russian Navy would desperately need in the next few years.

  Assuming his career wasn’t completely derailed by the debacle he’d been caught up in.

  “I am, indeed alive. As is everyone else on the pinnace.” Koenig looked slightly uncomfortable. “All are safe and well.”

  Baxter felt a release of pent-up tension at that news. He had been in Vladivostok for almost a week, in the custody of the Okhrana along with Arbuthnott, and they had told him absolutely nothing. About anything, but especially what had become of his crewmates.