The Cruise of the Albatros

by E. C. Williams

  “What happened to the man on the stretcher?” Bill asked a Leading Gunner who came down next.

  “Snake-bit, sir.”

  “Snake-bit! But I thought there were no venomous snakes on Madagascar.”

  “Well, there's at least one, ain't there, sir? Cuz Johnson here's right leg is swole up twicet as big as the other'n.”

  “Were you bitten by a snake, Johnson?” Sam asked the pale, sweating man on the stretcher.

  “Yessir. And he dug in his fangs so I was afraid to pull him loose, lest he take a big chunk of my leg with him. Finally I were able to shake him off. Then I felt poorly, like, and had to sit down.”

  “Get this man straight down to sick bay,” Sam ordered – needlessly, since he was plainly being carried there.

  Once they had recovered the landing force, the two vessels shifted to an anchorage in the nearby ancient harbor of Anosy, to the south of the town, and Sam signaled for Captain Ennis and his XO to come aboard the Albatros for a post-exercise conference.

  When the four officers – Sam, Bill, and their executive officers, the latter still in their sweat-stained greens – were gathered around the dining table in the captain's mess, Sam opened with, “Well, that didn't exactly go as planned, and we need to know why.

  “We're not going to assess blame – just try to see where our planning broke down, and derive lessons-learned for next time. Al, you go first.” Kendall, as senior officer of the landing force, was in overall command ashore.

  “Everything went fine right through the landing,” Kendall replied, mopping his brow with the green bandanna he had worn around his neck to keep off the sun. “Then everything slowed to a crawl, and our schedule went to hell.”

  “Why was that?”

  “The terrain, mainly – it was far rougher and the brush was much denser than it looked from the deck through a telescope. The men kept tripping and falling – one man sprained his ankle badly.”

  “One of my guys broke his – the doc says he'll be on light duty for weeks,” interjected Schofield.

  “The brush was so dense that, where it was head-high, men kept losing their sense of direction and wandering off at right angles to the main axis of attack. Of course, this slowed us down, too.

  “Then, once we had occupied the sites of the hypothetical batteries, we had to make our way back down to rally for the attack on the town, and this went almost as slowly. By the time we had re-grouped for this next phase, you signaled FINEX and recall.”

  “And I wish I had done it sooner, given the problems the boats had with the rising surf. But I don't suppose it would have mattered, since it would still have taken you just as long to regroup on the beach,” Sam said. Then added, “So … lessons learned?”

  “Recon,” said Kendall and Schofield in near-unison, making all four laugh. Then Kendall continued, “If we do this for real, we'll have to have a much better appreciation of the terrain. And that can be accomplished only by landing a small recon party well in advance of the main landing.”

  “The only way we could do that without alerting the enemy would be to do the recon by night.”

  “Exactly, Skipper – I mean Commodore. So we need to train for that, too.”

  Sam drummed his fingers on the table and thought for a moment. Then he said, “I had thought of re-writing the op order to take into account what we've learned, and running the exercise again to see how much better we could do. But I'm not sure the benefits of that would outweigh the costs in time, and possibly more injuries. What do you think?”

  Kendall and Schofield looked at one another, and both shook their heads.

  “I agree with you, Commodore – about re-running the full-scale exercise, I mean. But I think we might be well advised to pick a small group from the gunners on both vessels to train as our recon team. We could put them ashore at night, on a different stretch of beach, and have them exercise stuff like noting the nature of the terrain, sketching a map, locating possible defensive positions, and the like.”

  Sam nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Al, I'll leave it to you and Dave to decide on the optimum size of the recon team, and pick its members. We'll try that tonight. Here's as good a place as any – they can be tasked with reconnoitering the ruins of the old harbor complex.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Sam thought a moment, then said, “By the way, how's that gunner who was snake-bit? Johnson? Will he live?”

  Kendall replied, “Doc Girard said she thought he'd recover, but he'll be on the sick list for awhile.” He paused, then added, “His leg was so swollen they had to cut off his trousers to get at the wound.”

  “I had no idea there were poisonous snakes on Madagascar – did any of you know that?” All shook their heads.

  “We'll have to get Johnson to give us the best and most detailed description he can of the serpent that bit him, so we can warn everyone about it.

  “And now, I guess this conference is over. Well done, Al and Dave. Once you've had a chance to clean up and rest a bit, write brief reports we can file with the op order – I want to build a complete operational history we can use for training, and developing tactical doctrine.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Sam rose and went on deck with the others, and then headed forward for sick bay. He made it a policy to always visit wounded, sick, or injured men as soon as possible, and he was especially curious about this unique – in his experience, at least – kind of wound.

  He and Girard had managed to interact normally, at least in front of others, since their brief amorous encounter back in the shipyard, in French Port, but he was always still tense around her. She, for her part, treated him with the distant formality of their first voyage together.

  The doctor was examining Johnson's wound when he entered sick bay and threaded his way toward them through the hanging cots, slung waist-high from the overhead for the convenience of the medicos in tending their patients.

  “Hello, Johnson. Don't worry, you're in good hands. Not in much pain, I hope …?

  “No sir. Not too bad. Doc's looking after me real good.”

  “Of course she is. Just take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to sleep all day, and do as the doctor tells you – you'll be back on deck in no time.

  “Doctor, a private word … ?”

  “Certainly, Captain … I mean Commodore.” It wasn't only Sam who was having trouble getting used to his new title.

  They stepped away to a corner out of earshot of Johnson or any of the other patients, and Sam said, “Will he live, Doctor?”

  “Oh, I'm confident that he'll survive. There may be more or less permanent sequelae, but we'll only know that in time.”

  “I was under the impression that there were no poisonous snakes on Madagascar.”

  “Well, that's almost true. There is one family of venomous snakes, the Colubrids, specifically Ithycyphus miniatus. They are not normally aggressive toward humans, nor is their bite particularly dangerous unless they can grasp and hold their prey with both jaws and inject venom through their lower fangs – unlike many venomous snakes, whose poison is injected from the upper fangs. Unfortunately, Johnson seems to have blundered right on to the snake, and then the animal managed to get a firm grip on his leg.”

  Sam was astonished at this display of erudition, and exclaimed, “How in the world did you come to know all that, Doctor?” The treatment of snake bites formed no part of a Kerg physician's usual practice – there were no snakes on Kerguelen.

  Doctor Girard looked down modestly. “When I first joined the Albatros, I made a quick study at the Institute of everything it had on the dangerous flora and fauna of Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands.”

  “What is the treatment for such a bite?”

  “Unfortunately, there's not much we can do except keep him off his feet, and keep the wound site as clean as possible. We'll have a better prognosis in a few days.”

  The two stood in silence for a moment. Sam felt the usual strong surge o
f physical attraction to her whenever they were near. He wondered if she felt it, too.

  “Very well, Doctor. Thanks for your time. I'll let you return to your patients.”

  Girard watched him go, then turned abruptly and walked, face averted, to her tiny office just off sick bay proper.

  Why the Hell did every contact with that man make her so God-damned weepy?

  CHAPTER 15

  That afternoon, the recon party, composed of six men carefully chosen from the seamen-gunners of each vessel, mustered on board the Albatros. Kendall and Schofield agreed without debate that Landry, formerly a Leading PO and now the first Chief Petty Officer of the gunnery rate, was the ideal man to put in charge of the recon gunners. Kendall, in particular, had special reasons to rely on the intelligence, resourcefulness, and leadership skills of CPO Landry.

  Rather than plan the exercise in detail for him, Kendall simply outlined the goal of the evolution to Landry, and left him to plan the exercise and decide on tactics, arms, and equipment. The XO only stressed that the exercise should be made as realistic as possible.

  Landry divided the party into teams of two men each. The junior man in each time was to be armed with a rifle, and his sole duty was to defend his team-mate, and make sure he escaped from any confrontation with the enemy, even if at the cost of his own life. The senior man was armed only with a pistol, and equipped with a hand-bearing compass, a pad of paper and pencil, and an electric torch – bulky and heavy, but still more convenient than a hand-lantern – with its lens covered in thick dark red fabric, so that it produced only a very dim reddish glow, just enough to write by. Because an actual recon mission would originate much further off shore than their present anchorage, and would be mounted against a largely-unknown coast, Landry allowed the men a single timed, two-minute study of the target area from the deck, without the aid of a telescope, then moved the party below decks for the balance of their preparations.

  Landry marked off a ten yard line on the tween-deck, and had each man walk the line blind-folded, counting paces, until he could take one-yard strides consistently and not deviate from the line. He also had each man make up a length of knotted small-stuff, an overhand knot for every tenth yard up to a hundred yards; in this way, the man could keep track of distances marched until he had an opportunity to write them down. Riflemen went through this exercise, too – although their duty was simply to accompany the team leader and be alert for danger, Landry wanted them prepared to take over their team leaders' functions if required.

  Kendall simply observed all this without comment, but in the process became even more impressed with Landry. The man was wasted as a petty officer, even as a CPO; he clearly merited warrant or even commissioned, status. Al resolved to talk to the Commodore about another promotion for Landry at the earliest convenient moment.

  Landry kept his team below decks until full darkness, in the unlighted hold, then brought them topsides to be taken off the Albatros by the Joan's motor whaleboat. Fortuitously, for the purposes of the exercise, it was a fairly dark night, with a quarter-moon mostly obscured by clouds. Landry asked the watch officers of each schooner to black out their topsides except for a single anchor light each, to preserve the recon team's night vision. He also requested a lookout to be kept toward the shore, to note any visible flashes from their electric torches, as a check on his detachment's light discipline.

  In addition to their surveying gear, the men carried one full water bottle each, a knife, one iron ration, and, in the case of the riflemen, a hundred rounds. The team leaders carried fifty extra rounds for their pistols. There was almost no chance that the party would encounter another human, much less pirates, but Landry wanted the men to carry a realistic burden of gear for the exercise. To avoid accidental discharge of firearms, he ordered that pistols and rifles have an empty chamber under the hammer, and checked each weapon himself to ensure this.

  The six men, in jungle green but wearing dark watch caps instead of the straw hats usual in the tropics, and with all exposed skin smeared with soot from the MG set's exhaust, boarded the motor whaleboat on the offshore side of the Albatros. The boat was then to proceed out to the mouth of Anosy harbor, then swing back to the westward to approach the stretch of narrow beach north of the ruins of the Anosy marine terminal. The terminal and the beach were both protected by two ancient, partially-ruined breakwaters, a small one to the north, and a much larger, more substantial one to the south, jutting out toward the north-east. The stretch of beach between the smaller breakwater and the terminal ruins was fairly steep-to, according to their chart, and experienced only a gentle breaking surf. The recon party would be landed on this beach, and the whaleboat would then wait offshore, just outside the breakers, for the signal to pick them up.

  The motor whaleboat cast off from the Albatros, and was soon lost from sight in the darkness. The faint sighing sounds of its Stirling-cycle engine became inaudible soon afterwards. Except for one faint and momentary flash of red light noted by the Albatros's watch shortly after midnight – the watch on the Joan, anchored somewhat further offshore, saw nothing – there was no further sign of the reconnaissance mission until the motor whaleboat was sighted approaching the Albatros just at first light.

  Sam met the tired men as they pulled themselves up the pilot ladder to re-board the Albatros. They were exhausted, naturally, having had no sleep in the past twenty-four hours, their greens stained and the soot on their faces and hands mostly washed away by sweat. But they appeared to be uninjured, in spite of an evening spent feeling their way around ancient ruins in pitch-darkness.

  “How'd it go, Chief?” Sam asked as Landry's weathered face appeared above the rail, the last man out of the whaleboat.

  “Pretty well, I think, Cap'n … Commodore. I'll know for sure once I've debriefed the guys, compared notes and so forth.”

  “If you don't mind, I'd like to sit in on that.”

  Landry may very well have minded, preferring to debrief his men in private before briefing the Commodore, but, if so, he was tactful enough to keep that to himself.

  “Sure, Commodore.”

  “Tell you what, Chief – let your men have a chance to clean up a bit, have some breakfast, then you all muster in my mess at, say, 0800. We'll do it there.”

  “In that case, sir, why don't I bring just the team leaders? I don't think the riflemen would add much to the debrief, and it'll be less crowded that way.”

  “Sound idea, Chief. Make it so.”

  At 0755, CPO Landry and his two team leaders stood at the door to the captain's mess, freshly showered and in clean uniforms, Landry imperturbable as usual, his two subordinates nervous and awed at being in the sacred precincts of the Commodore. Sam had invited Bill Ennis over from the Joan to sit in, as well as Al Kendall.

  Bill had Ritchie bring a pot of coffee, a beverage still rather new and strange to the seaman-gunners, but made very acceptable by the addition of a shot of vodka. Then Landry collected the notes of his two subordinates, and began describing how they had surveyed the ruins of the terminal.

  “We walked down the beach as a group, then at the edge of the old terminal, we spread out about twenty paces apart, then proceeded slowly in a southeasterly direction on parallel tracks, as near as we could, counting paces and sketching what we came across. When all three teams had reached the southeastern edge of the terminal – we could tell where the ancient paving ended, even though it was much over-grown – we turned and went back to the northwest, on a path offset from our original track by about ten paces. This gave us six roughly parallel bands of information about the terminal ruins.

  “You can see from here a stretch we didn't cover – a big pier sticking out to the northeast that, with the larger southern breakwater, creates a basin. I didn't want to risk my team on that old pier in the dark – I got no idea what condition it's in. Also, that's the most visible part of the terminal from seaward.”

  At first, the men's notes made no sense to Sam – they were just
pages of magnetic bearings, numbers representing paces, and crude sketches of bits of ruined structure. Then he began to see how, if collated and combined on a single large page, they would form a partial but useful map of the ruins. The map would consist of six narrow bands of detailed information separated by wider blank strips. But with a little imaginative interpolation, those blanks could be filled in with fair accuracy.

  “Well done, Chief. If this had been the real thing, instead of an exercise, we would now know the location of every battery or strong point.”

  “Not if the ragheads had caught us in the act, sir,” replied Landry. He glared at one of his men. “Albatros's watch reported seeing a light. I saw it, too, and it came from your direction, Paramore.”

  Paramore, abashed, replied, “Yeah, I guess that musta been me, Chief. I tripped just as I switched on my torch.”

  “That's why I told you esels to always stop dead still before you turned on your torches, to make sure you kept 'em pointing straight down and shielded with your hand! If this had been a real recon, you coulda got us all killed, Paramore.” The man reddened, looked down, and muttered apologies.

  “Well, that's why we have drills,” Sam interjected, taking pity on Paramore. “To get the mistakes out of our systems before we have to do it for real. I think it went remarkably well for a first effort.” The other two officers present murmured their agreement.

  Soon afterwards, Sam dismissed Landry and his gunners with further praise for a job well done, but asked the officers to remain.

  “That was a damned impressive performance by Landry,” Sam then observed. “He planned that exercise to the last detail, then led it with only one minor glitch – the first night recon ashore we've ever tried, mind.”

  “I agree, Commodore,” Bill said. “In fact I've been thinking that maybe we should create a new warrant billet, and give it to Landry.”