by Alan Evans
‘Patrol with the two MAS boats, a mile west then back again.’ Fred Archbold spoke around the pipe, unworried, and that came not from ignorance; Fred knew the danger he would be in.
Smith said, ‘You might not always see the boats but they’ll see you. Lieutenant Gallina is in command as the senior but you’ll take orders from him or Pagani. And try to keep out of trouble.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
If trouble came the two MAS boats could make a run for it, but it would be God help Archbold and Menzies. Hercules wouldn’t outrun an Austrian patrol-boat and she couldn’t do much fighting with that single six-pounder popgun. Suppose an Austrian torpedo-boat, like the one the boats engaged two nights ago, turned up? The Austrians would take their revenge at leisure, steam circles around the drifter and shoot her to fragments.
Menzies added anxiously, ‘Good luck, sir!’
‘Thank you.’ Smith left the wheelhouse and climbed down to the deck. He forced those worries from his mind. There was nothing more he could do for Hercules.
He made his way aft and found a party in the stern hauling in on the tow and stood beside them and watched Balestra’s Flying-Fish brought alongside.
Back on San Elena when Smith had first seen it Balestra said he had got the idea from the tanks used by the army in Flanders. It was built of timber an inch thick on a timber frame and was a simple rectangular box fifty feet long by ten across, like a barge except for the upward slope of the square bow. That made it look a bit like a tank and the tracks that ran around the hull on either side completed the resemblance. It was completely decked over save for two cockpits, one aft and to port of the centre line and one amidships and starboard. The two torpedoes were mounted in the waist, either side of the forward cockpit, in the same type of clamp-launching apparatus as used in the MAS boats.
Balestra glanced at Smith who asked, ‘Ready?’
The young engineer nodded, ‘Yes.’ He was not excitable or nervy now, but quiet. He had worked a long time to prepare for this moment. Now he was no longer the abstracted inventor wary of strangers and wryly grinning at the jibes levelled at the Mad Professor. The drive that had kept him working around the clock and the toughness that had helped him shrug off the jeers, these were now welded into a single-minded determination. He told Smith quietly, ‘Tonight I will sink Salzburg.’
He did not say, — or die. But he meant it.
Buckley and the rest of the crew of the Flying-Fish climbed down to her deck. The torpedoman, Udina, was from Pietro Zacco’s boat because the torpedoes came from her. He was a middle-sized man with thick legs and heavy shoulders. The seaman, Marani, came from Pagani’s boat and was lean and wiry, quick on his feet about the deck. A heavy moustache laid a black bar across his face. Then there was the tubby, round-faced Enzo, Balestra’s motorista. Marani was talking with Buckley and Smith could see the flash of Buckley’s teeth as he grinned at the seaman’s pidgin English. But Buckley could understand it and Marani understood Buckley very well.
Buckley and Marani stayed on deck. Enzo and Udina climbed into the forward cockpit and Enzo descended to his engines in the bowels of the boat. There were two electric motors under the flush deck, one to drive the twin screws, the other to drive the tracks. Smith and Balestra squeezed into the after cockpit, Balestra at the wheel. Zacco’s boat slipped by, stopped. Its screws thrashed and then it went astern, sidled stern first up to the bow of the Flying-Fish. A line was thrown from the MAS to Marani and he made it fast to a hook in the square bow. He and Buckley cast off from Hercules, Zacco’s boat eased forward, the tow straightened and Flying-Fish followed. Smith caught a glimpse of Menzies in the wheelhouse of Hercules, his face only a pale blur in the darkness but Smith remembered that worried, ‘Good luck, sir!’ He understood Menzies’ anxiety. Then a squall whipped rain and spray between and Hercules was lost astern with the other MAS boats. There were only Zacco’s boat and Flying-Fish, alone on the black sea.
Flying-Fish wasn’t living up to her name. She towed as might be expected of a rectangular box. She was a bitch. She pitched, rolled and yawed. Smith clung to the coaming of the cockpit beside Balestra, cursed Flying-Fish for the cow she was and gave thanks that the journey would not be long. Balestra beside him, face only inches away, gave Smith a quick grin. His hands rested lightly on the wheel and he stared ahead. If he was nervous now he showed no signs of it. The deck was empty but Smith could see the heads of Buckley, Udina and Marani poking up from the forward cockpit, packed close together.
Zacco was towing them in as far as he dared so as to save the power in the batteries of Flying-Fish. Already they must be close. The growl of Zacco’s engines had stopped, he was now running very slowly, towing with his electric motors. There was no chance of hearing them because of the wind, the slap of the sea on the side and the drum of the rain on the deck of Flying-Fish.
Smith rested his eyes briefly from peering ahead and looked about him. The port-side track was only inches from him. It was like a huge bicycle-chain with steel teeth at three foot intervals, projecting six inches or so. Like the starboard track it was endless and ran along the side of the hull on pulley wheels mounted right forward in the bow, on the stern and aft on the bottom. The tracks ran in wooden channels from the bow along the bottom to the stern. Behind Smith were the drive sprockets, mounted on a shaft across the stern. This in turn was driven via worm-gearing by a shaft coming up through the deck from the engine-room below. The engine turned the worm-drive which turned the cog which turned the wheels that drove the chains. Smith grinned tightly. It sounded like some childhood song, but it was simple and effective. In rehearsal. They had yet to try it in action.
The tow slackened and Marani trotted lightly forward across the deck, cast off and the MAS came slipping back along the port side of the Flying-Fish. Zacco stood tall in the cockpit of his boat pointing out on the starboard bow. He called softly, ‘The mole!’
Smith saw it, picking out first the phosphorescence where the sea broke against it and then its black length. This was the southernmost mole, longest of the three. He pointed it out to Balestra who nodded and called down the voice-pipe: ‘Avanti mezzo!’
The motor of Flying-Fish purred and Zacco’s boat was left astern. Smith saw the wave of his hand then his figure blurred, became one with the receding MAS. Smith turned to look forward again. Flying-Fish was creeping in towards the mole at half-speed, a slow walking pace. Her twin screws were driving her now, seated with the rudder in a tunnel under the stern so they did not project outside the line of the hull and thus would not catch on any underwater obstacle. Balestra was steering to port because the boom at that northern end of the mole was furthest from land. His low speed was to conserve the batteries. It would be a long night and he did not know how much power he would need.
They knew where Salzburg lay from the aerial photographs, not deep inside the harbour as might have been expected but anchored little more than a quarter-mile the other side of this mole. In daylight Smith could have seen the towering super-structure of the battlecruiser, but that was looking in a straight line. Flying-Fish had to go a roundabout route, up to the booms to force her way into the harbour and then southward into an attacking position. Smith realised the confidence Voss must have in the harbour’s defences — and why shouldn’t he? They would stop anything — except Flying-Fish? There was still that question mark. When Smith came to Venice his task had seemed possible. It was still hazardous in the extreme but there was a fighting chance of success.
Salzburg was a scant half-mile away now.
They passed the end of the mole, a hundred yards out from it. Balestra eased the wheel over and Flying-Fish turned in. She handled far better under her own power, little though it was, than at the end of a tow. The boom, like the mole, was marked by a white line of, breaking water but this was thinner, like a thread stretched across the sea between the breakwaters. Balestra headed Flying-Fish for the centre of the boom because that was not only the point furthest from the moles �
� and any sentries — on either hand, but also where the chains and timbers might be marginally lower in the water.
Smith licked salt from his lips. They had not been seen, not challenged. On a night like this a watcher on the mole would have hell’s own job seeing anything with the rain driving into his face from off the sea, and any guard-boat would be sheltering inside, nicked under the lee of the breakwater.
Balestra had surprise on his side and that was essential. Flying-Fish was only a marine tank in so far as she was fitted with toothed driving chains that worked like tracks. Otherwise she was desperately vulnerable. She was not armoured at all, her timbers were only an inch thick and would not even keep out a rifle bullet, let alone a shell. Her top speed was only four knots, there were two torpedoes mounted atop of her, and below the after cockpit, right under Smith, was a scuttling charge that could blow her to pieces if capture seemed likely.
They sat, in fact, on a fragile, floating bomb.
They were close, the boom coming up at them and stretching out on either hand into the darkness. Smith could see the massive baulks of timber near-awash, the sea breaking over them and the huge connecting chains. As these slid under the bow Balestra shouted down to Enzo at the engines. The hum of the motors rose to a whine as the second motor started, the worm-drive close to the after cockpit turned and the chains clank- clanked along the deck. Flying-Fish drove on into the boom.
Smith saw the bow rise and gripped Balestra’s shoulder. Balestra shouted again, ‘Avanti tutti!’
With the engines full ahead the sea boiled under the stern as the screws thrashed, driving the boat forward. The teeth on the slow-clanking chains hooked on to the timbers and chains of the boom and hauled her up. She lurched and wallowed, slipped and slid as she rode the boom that sagged under her weight and sank below the surface. She staggered like a drunken man trying to walk across a suspended net, but she moved forward, the screws threshing, the chains steadily clanking, sometimes slipping but then gripping and dragging her onward. She lurched and wallowed again but this time her bow went down. She slid forward and briefly the bow plunged under so the sea washed back against the coaming of the forward cockpit. Then she was over and rose, riding easily in this more sheltered water.
Flying-Fish had crossed the first boom. Balestra’s bizarre device worked, even in the currents at the harbour mouth, and they were going to make it!
Enzo stopped the drive to the chains on Balestra’s order and with the cessation of their clanking there was only the hum of the motors and the beat of the screws as Flying-Fish plodded across the open water at her best speed of four knots. Balestra shot a triumphant glance at Smith. ‘Only one to go!’
Only one more. Then Salzburg. In five minutes she would be in sight and in range of the torpedoes of Flying-Fish. Smith said, ‘Better warn them to swing out the torpedoes as soon as we are over.’ Not while Flying-Fish was crossing the boom because then her crazily tip-tilting deck would make even standing nearly impossible, let alone hauling on the tackles to swing out the torpedoes.
Balestra called softly and in the forward cockpit Udina lifted a hand in acknowledgement.
Less than five minutes. Soon Smith would see Salzburg. He strained his eyes to try to make out the bulk of her but she was still too far away and would have the black background of the land behind her. The night was very dark with the rain that drummed on the deck of the Flying-Fish, and very quiet. Only the hum of the motor below, the drum of the rain and the slap of the sea against the bows.
Very quiet.
That stillness was shattered as the second and final boom showed right ahead and the long sheer of the bow rode on to it. Balestra called down to Enzo and the worm-drive turned, the chains jerked and clanked across the deck again and the teeth bit on the timber of the boom. Flying-Fish staggered up on to it. And it was then, without warning, that the searchlights flicked on, one on either shore. The sweeping beams found her in seconds. Aboard Flying-Fish they squinted against the glare. Tracers curved out towards them but fell short. The first shells ripped overhead. Then there was a slamming blow near the bow that vibrated through the hull. Smith saw the heads in the forward cockpit duck down and then, after a moment, reappear. He made a funnel of his hands and shouted at Buckley, ‘Where were we hit?’
‘In the bow just below deck an’ went out the port side, sir! Well above the water-line — at the moment!’
But they would probably make water when they wallowed over the obstruction. They were hit again and a bellow from Buckley said it was low and they were now making water. The tracers spattered the sea and tack-tacked along the side. The chains kept up their slow clanking, Smith felt the grate of their biting shudder through the hull and the bow lifted. Flying-Fish staggered and lurched, always edging forward, but trapped in a circle of light. They were hit again. So far they were under fire only from small-calibre guns but still the blast threw Smith back against the cockpit coaming and he recovered to see a hole punched in the deck forward. Balestra still held the wheel, his arms straight, legs braced, face set and his eyes fixed ahead.
Clank! Clank! of the chains.
They were hit yet again and this time the slam of it shook the bow. It was so low that Smith saw water spouting. The portside chain collapsed, cut under the bow, and became a growing pile of useless steel sliding across the deck as the cogwheel still turned and wound it in. Flying-Fish swerved to port. Buckley shouted, ‘The bow’s near shot away, sir! We’re awash down here!’ Tracers whipped up the deck around the forward cockpit and Buckley ducked. Flying-Fish was slowly turning on her axis, Balestra still struggling with the wheel, but his efforts were hopeless with only one track.
Smith knew it.
They were caught on the boom like a fish in a net and the guns would blast them to pieces.
A shell burst in the sea, sent spray lashing across them and it stank of explosive. Smith shouted, ‘It’s no good! We’ll have to swim for it!’
‘No!’ Balestra still wrestled with the controls and shouted at Smith, ‘No! Almost there! We keep on! We must!’
‘It’s too late!’ It was. Flying-Fish would not move forward, only thrashed around pivoting on the boom, and the essential element of surprise was lost. Smith heaved himself up on to the deck, and bawled at the men forward. They clambered out of the cockpit, came stumbling aft, staggering as Flying-Fish was hit again. The motors stopped, and with them. the chain’s clanking and the thrashing of the screws. Flying-Fish lay still on the boom like a stranded whale.
Enzo appeared in the forward cockpit, started to climb out then collapsed over the coaming. Smith and the others were throwing away their oilskins, dragging off their boots. Smith panted, ‘Get him!’ Marani and Udina ran forward.
Balestra beat his fists on the wheel then hauled himself out of the cockpit and on to the deck. He leaned back down and snapped the cover away from the housing of the time switch to the scuttling charge, threw the lever. Marani and Udina returned. Enzo hung limply between them, and Balestra went with them over the side into the sea.
Smith shouted at Buckley, ‘Go on!’ Buckley ran and dived over the stern and Smith fell as Flying-Fish was hit again. He lurched to his feet, looking over the lifted bow at the light-washed water of the harbour and in that instant a signal flare burst above the boom, drifted brightly down and the shelling ceased. A big motor pinnace slipped into the lake of light and curved in towards the boom, turned her side to it. The machine-gun mounted in her bow was manned, its barrel swinging around to point at Flying-Fish, at Smith. He ran for it, dived clumsily over the stern and into the sea. He came up into the light, gasping as the cold of the water took his breath, and struck out. A score of fast, floundering strokes carried him out of the light and into sheltering darkness. Then he slowed. He knew he had to pace himself if he was to reach the first boom. But then what?
Another flare burst and burned above him. He caught only a camera-blink impression of the near-wrecked Flying-Fish hung up on the boom, alone under the
lights, then she was hidden by the rain and spray thrown up in his face. He laboured on. So the pinnace had taken a look, suspected a charge aboard Flying-Fish and cleared out. He wondered how far he was from the first boom and how quickly the Austrians would send out more pinnaces, this time to search for him and the rest of the crew of Flying-Fish. It would be a simple piece of work for the hunting boats and then a prison camp for him. If he didn’t drown first. He was tiring and could not see the boom.
‘Sir!’ Something black thrashed towards him then Buckley turned to swim alongside. ‘All right, sir?’
‘Fine!’ Smith choked on seawater as he spoke, spat it out. ‘Hang on to me if you like, sir!’
Smith did not answer this time, plugged wearily on with Buckley keeping anxious station a yard away. Until at last the boom showed. He found the others clinging to its seaward side, Balestra holding the face of the unconscious Enzo out of the water. Smith climbed over the boom and slipped down to hang from it beside Balestra. They felt the blast of the explosion, saw it whipping spray from the sea. Then came the slam of it in their ears. In that second of brilliance they watched the pieces of Flying-Fish hurled skyward — and Smith saw the misery on Balestra’s face.
Darkness rushed in once more but there were lights moving in the harbour and they would be the boats coming to take them prisoner. Zacco was lying off, somewhere out there in the darkness covering the sea. Smith could swim out seeking Zacco’s boat, like seeking a needle in a haystack and if he did not find it he would die. The beams of the searchlights fingered out again, searching over the boom, lighting them where they hung dripping and cold. It was a bitter ending to the assault on Trieste.
A hand shook at Smith’s arm and he turned and found Buckley, who pointed seaward. Smith followed the direction of the outstretched arm and saw the white flicker of bow-wave and wake, the low, cigar-shaped silhouette, then the MAS dashed into the light, the lifted bow sinking as the way came off her and the engine’s snarl fell to a muttering grumble. She hove to only feet away and they all left the boom and swam out to her, grabbed her side, Marani and Balestra with Enzo between them. A shell moaned overhead and burst beyond the MAS. Smith hauled himself over the low side of the boat, an Italian seaman grabbing at his arms as if to drag them from their sockets. He saw Enzo pulled in, the others clawing aboard, the big figure of Pietro Zacco standing over the wheel with his face turned towards them, counting.