They watched a couple of electrician's mates taking down the radio antennae, a necessary preparation for setting sail. Once the schooner was underway, they would go aloft again to re-rig them. That reminded Sam of something.
“Did Sparks get that message off?”
“Message?” Ennis had been so consumed with preparations for getting under way that the message had momentarily slipped his mind. “Oh, yes – the message. Sorry, Skipper, I don't know but I'll find out.”
“Never mind, Bill. I'll just pass the word for Mister Robert.”
The communications officer soon appeared, and in response to Sam's query replied, “We got the first two sections off tonight, Captain – well, last night, now. The first two full sections, I mean, plus the intro. I stood over the operator and read out the groups to him, while the other radioman looked over my shoulder to check that I didn't omit or transpose any digits. If conditions stay good, we may be able to get the rest of it off before sunrise; otherwise we'll certainly complete transmission tonight.”
“Well done, Sparks.” When the communicator had left, Sam said, “I won't rest easy until that message is transmitted, and we hear from Foch that it was received in full and understood. We have to spend as little time as possible at home, lest the pirates run amok with our trade while we're gone.”
“God se wil, they'll cruise the Seychelles and the Comoros with the greater part of their force, looking for us, and not realize they've been duped until we return.”
“They might stay fooled for weeks, but not months,” Sam replied pessimistically. “They've already proven they're cleverer than that. I just hope they don't do too much damage before we can return.”
“With a consort or two – a squadron! – and defeat them decisively.”
“Oh, I don't think so, Bill. We'll have a temporary advantage, but we'll have to make the most of it while we can, because the pirates will almost surely escalate to match or exceed our new level of force. I'm afraid this is going to be a long war.”
Bill could find no reply to that – despite his congenital optimism, he feared Sam was correct in his assessment of the enemy. So on that somber note, he returned to his duties. Sam stood on the quarterdeck, watching the motor sloop's searchlight as it picked out each channel buoy in turn.
Once out of Hell-ville harbor, the Albatros stood northward up the west coast of Nosy be, well offshore to avoid the un-marked shoals, on an easy broad reach. She rounded Cape Bobaomby in daylight, as planned, and came up into the gentle south-westerly on a close reach, verging on a beat, to the south-south-east, homeward bound. The green eastern shore of Madagascar receded very gradually to starboard.
One watch below in their hammocks had restored the crew physically; their spirits remained higher than the maintop, full as they were of elation at the thought of home. Too, the at-sea routine resumed its comfortable grip on everyone. The watches coming in their regular rotation, the endless cleaning and polishing during the day, drills of all sorts, the anticipation of “up spirits” followed by dinner – all combined produced a soothing effect of continuity and sameness.
Sam ordered a careful lookout to be maintained. So long as the Albatros remained in pirate waters – and he reckoned all of the southern Indian Ocean in the vicinity of Madagascar and the Mascarene islands to be pirate waters – there remained the possibility of encountering one, or more likely a pair, of enemy vessels cruising for prey. But Madagascar receded out of sight, and the schooner came abeam of Cape Vohimena, far out of sight below the western horizon, without sighting another vessel, pirate or Kerg.
Mr. Robert had reported successful transmission of the lengthy message they had sent. Success on the part of the recipients in breaking the code was indicated by Foch's message of acknowledgment being encoded the same way. Receipt of the final acknowledgment from Kerguelen started Sam thinking about the message they had intercepted that led them to Pirate Creek, and the simultaneous battles fought there, at sea and ashore. This, in turn, made him think of Midshipman Dallas.
With the Albatros temporarily absent from the Indian Ocean, she no longer needed a liaison officer on Nosy Be, so Mr. Dallas was now back aboard. Once the Albatros had arrived in French Port, Sam planned to assign the midshipman to Lieutenant Commander Foch as a full-time assistant, to lift some of the burden from his shoulders of being the entirety of the Navy's intelligence branch, while continuing to perform his duties as a commandant of police and head of the French Port constabulary's criminal intelligence division.
Sam had offered Foch a regular commission, with pay, but Foch did not want to leave the police, where he could hope for future promotion and eventually a pension, and was happy to remain a reservist, performing his navy duties in his spare time.
Sam had been aware that Dallas had acquired a girlfriend in Hell-ville; what he only discovered on their return to Nosy Be was that the midshipman had married her. This annoyed Sam. He wasn't at all sure that midshipmen should marry, certainly not without the permission of their commanding officer. But there was no regulation prohibiting it, and annoying one's skipper was not a court-martial offense. He certainly couldn't simply order Dallas to divorce the girl – that would be tyranny indeed. The situation only confirmed Sam in his intention to assign Dallas permanently to intelligence duties ashore. This would create its own problem, however: it would mean Dallas would never build up enough sea time to sit for his master's license, and without that credential he could not be promoted to lieutenant under current policy. Not only would this be unjust to Dallas, it would almost certainly mean the loss to the Navy of a talented young officer, once he realized that he could never rise to commissioned rank.
Well, he was confident that he and Bill could devise some new policy or regulation to fix this, so he'd worry about it later. Right now, he needed his curiosity satisfied on one point, and Dallas was the man to solve the problem.
“Gadget, I want you to see if you can break an encoded pirate message for me,” he said to a panting Mr. Dallas, who had responded on the double to the call: “Passing the word for Mr. Dallas; Mr. Dallas to the quarterdeck.” The mid wore the look of apprehension common to junior officers abruptly summoned to the presence of the CO. “Ask Sparks for a copy of the message we intercepted on the passage from Mauritius to Reunion, the one that led to the battle off Pirate Creek. See what you can make of it.” Sam deliberately failed to mention the XO's theory that it was Arabic transmitted in Morse; he wanted Dallas to attack the problem with no preconceived notions.
“Aye aye, sir.”
Dallas returned the next morning, red-eyed and weary-looking, with a sheaf of paper in his hand. It occurred to Sam with a pang of guilt that he had failed to order Dallas relieved of his other duties for the duration of this task, and that the kid had spent all his off-watch time working on the message. He consoled himself with the thought that hardship was good for gadgets.
“Any luck, Mister Dallas?”
“Yessir. I fooled around with various letter-substitution schemes, but it occurred to me pretty quickly that it might be simply that they used our Morse code to transmit a message in Arabic, using the digits one and two for the extra letters, and that proved to be the case. The transposition of the two alphabets was simple: letters of both ranked in order, with the digits standing for the last two letters in the Arabic alphabet. They made no effort to match up the two alphabets according to the sounds the letters represent, which would have made it somewhat more complicated.
“After that, it was simple. The message, however, is poorly drafted, with many grammatical mistakes. My impression is that the message was put together and encoded by someone who was not very familiar with one of the languages. Or perhaps it was a joint effort by two people, each not very fluent in the other's language. Anyway, here it is, sir. I didn't try to clean up the grammar and such – I just decoded it as sent.”
Sam took the proffered message, and glanced at it. It was, indeed, a mess of misspelled words and garbled syntax
, but the gist was clear: two named vessels were to rendezvous as soon as possible with the shoreside group at the latitude and longitude indicated, and lift the shore party with their captives – presumably for further transport to some unnamed destination. Just as they had suspected.
“Thanks, Gadget. Well done.”
Sam sought out the XO and shared the translated message with him. “Your hunch was right on the money, Bill.”
“Lucky guess, Skipper.”
“An intelligent guess. But this is making me have second thoughts about Dallas.”
“What about him?”
“I was planning to leave him ashore in French Port, to work with Foch. But now I'm thinking what a valuable asset he'd be if he remained aboard – he could break any intercepted pirate messages for us immediately. Otherwise, we'd have to re-transmit them to Kerguelen and wait for a response before we could act – and the intel could get stale while we waited. And if the pirates intercepted the re-transmission, they'd guess we were trying to break their code, and change it. What do you think, Bill?”
Sam also shared with Ennis his concerns about Dallas's ability to ever make lieutenant if he was prevented from earning the seatime to sit for his master's ticket. Keeping him aboard made that problem go away.
Ennis pondered this for a moment while they paced back and forth along the windward rail – the usual venue for CO/XO conferences.
“Skipper, you know if Dallas stays aboard he'll have to stand a watch and be an assistant division officer, like the other gadgets; being intelligence officer aboard ship can only be a collateral duty. We can't have him just sit around waiting for a message to decode. But that would be, to my mind, a waste of his colossal talents – and, frankly, he'll never be more than a mediocre sea-officer. Aside from all that, we've agreed that Foch could really use some help. I vote we leave him ashore, as you originally intended.”
“That leaves us with no one aboard who can decode intercepted pirate traffic.
And what about the problem of his eligibility for promotion if he stays ashore? Once he realizes that his naval career is permanently stalled at the rank of midshipman, we'll lose him – a brilliant youngster like him would have his pick of opportunities shoreside.”
“I've got a couple of ideas about that, Skipper.”
“Then let's hear 'em.”
“First, we could have Dallas start right now training another gadget to take his place. After all, he doesn't have to teach his relief to speak, read, and write Arabic – just to learn the Arabic alphabet, and use the table Dallas made up to transpose the Latin letters of an intercepted message into Arabic. Then he could use a French-Arabic and an English-Arabic dictionary – which we'll have to get from the Institute once we're back in French Port – to translate the message word by word. A brute-force approach, but I can't see why it wouldn't work.”
Sam thought about this as they made a couple of circuits. “Okay, Bill, I'll buy that. What about the promotion issue?”
“I remember reading that ancient navies – well, one, at least – had commissioned staff officers. They were not line officers – they were ineligible for command at sea – but they had professional specialties the Navy needed, specialties that required a broader education than could reasonably be required of a warrant officer, and more responsibility.”
“Now that you mention it, I remember reading something like that, too. Not in great detail, though.”
“Yeah, Skipper, that's the frustrating thing about the Institute's holdings on ancient navies. There's a ton of stuff on naval history, sea battles, and the like, and lots of fiction with naval settings. But there's hardly anything on the details that would be really helpful to us, like shipboard organization, training, rank structure, operational planning, technical specs for weapons, and so forth. There are hints of this stuff in the fiction – but since it's fiction, how much reliance can we put on it? We're just making a lot up as we go along.”
“That's worked pretty well so far, Bill. Anyway, our circumstances are very different from the ancients. Everything about our culture, not just our Navy, exists on such a drastically smaller scale that even if we knew everything about how the ancients did things, most of it would hardly be applicable to us.
“But back to Midshipman Dallas. Do I hear you suggesting that we create a new category of commissioned officer just for him...?”
“No, not just for him – Foch would be a good candidate for that status, too. And we'll certainly need other professional specialties that don't fit our current division into commissioned officers in the line of command and warrant officers with narrow technical specialties. Engineering, for example.”
“Yeo is a warrant officer.”
“Yes sir, and he's now as high as he can rise in the Navy, despite the fact that he's a brilliant and innovative marine engineer. We'll eventually need engineers to work ashore, on their own, supervising warship design, construction, and repair. That's a job that requires a higher status than warrant officer.”
Sam pondered this for a few more turns along the rail, then said, “I can't find any holes in that, Bill. We'll do as you advise. Which mid do you recommend for Dallas's relief?”
“How about Christie? He's a bright lad.”
“Christie's too promising a sea-officer, Bill – I don't want to lose him to staff-officer status.”
“Not suggesting that, Skipper. Just assigning it as a collateral duty. I agree with your assessment of Christie, and I think this assignment would broaden him as a line officer – give him a perspective on operational issues most gadgets don't get.”
Sam turned all this over in his mind for four more turns up and down the weather rail, and could find no obvious problems. “Okay, Bill. Get Christie and Dallas started right away. Release 'em from some of their duties, if you think that's necessary.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
CHAPTER 10
One day at sea was much like every other; only Sundays were somewhat different. On that one day a week, the crew was excused all work not essential to the safe operation of the vessel. For most it was simply a day of rest, a break from the routine. Others formed little groups according to religion – Catholics, the various Protestant sects, and a handful of Jews – for prayer and discussion of Scripture. (Kerguelen's Jews who followed the sea were excused, by the Rock's Chief Rabbi, from the traditional Jewish sabbath observance, and were also exempt from the requirement of a minyan for the purpose of public prayer.)
While the routine was unvarying, the weather gradually changed as the Albatros reached south. The wind backed more westerly and freshened, and the temperature gradually dropped until first those on night watches, and then everyone when on deck at whatever time of day, donned sweaters dug from the bottoms of sea bags, musty and unworn for months. The schooner enjoyed days of brilliant weather – clear skies of an intense blue reflected by the ocean, bright sunshine glinting on scattered whitecaps.
Since Ritchie, his steward, had taken on far more fresh food for the captain's mess than Sam could possibly eat before it spoiled, he decided to entertain his officers to dinner, in turn, before they entered the Roaring Forties and the motion of the schooner made dining at table impossible. This suited Ritchie very well – the man loved any opportunity to display his culinary talents – and the series of dinners began while the Albatros was still in the twenties south latitude.
The dinners were successful; the officers were now much more at ease with one another and with their Captain than they had been on the voyage north. Although Sam still forbade shop talk, they now had a fund of common experiences ashore, mainly on Nosy Be, from which to draw stories and anecdotes, so the talk flowed freely without any need for conversational heavy lifting on Sam's part, as host, to draw everyone in.
The timing of the dinners proved to be fortunate, too. The final one was held on the last afternoon of reasonable weather before the wild seas of the Roaring Forties began to build to a point that would have made any more such
convivial gatherings impossible.
Doctor Girard, as a senior warrant officer and department head, was of course included in one of these dinners. Sam had been apprehensive about her attitude – after the fierce dressing-down he had administered on their last day in Hell-ville, would she sulk, remain silent, cast a pall over the gathering? Or would she, as Kerg sea-officers had learned to do over the centuries, take the rebuke to heart, modify her behavior accordingly, and then refuse to brood about it? He was relieved to discover that her reaction was much closer to the latter than the former. She had treated the Captain with friendly respect, and contributed appropriately to the general conversation around the table.
Two things were different about her, however, one subtle and one obvious to everyone. The subtle change manifested itself in more subdued behavior, fewer of those flashes of wit that had so amused her brother officers, and a complete absence of the gossip about her patients from French Port's upper crust – all names and other identifying information strictly withheld, of course – that had fascinated and entertained her middle-class audience. Sam, for one, was just as pleased at this change; he could do without the reminders, however unintended they may have been, that the Doctor moved in higher social circles than the rest of them.
The other change he regretted, although he saw it as a sincere attempt by the Doctor to conform to the behavior of the other officers of the Albatros. Like Sam's other dinner guests, she wore the normal at-sea rig for these latitudes: trousers and pullover sweater. There being as yet no dress uniform, or indeed any uniform, for officers, their only other alternative was to dress as if going ashore, and Sam had included in his invitation, relayed through the XO, an insistence that he didn't want this level of formality. She and the other officers had of course made an effort to spruce up a bit for the Captain's dinner, wearing the most presentable, least wire-rope-lube-stained (or, in her case, blood-stained) of their working wardrobes. In addition she had done something with her hair, wearing it in an artful arrangement rather than pulled back into a severe bun, as usual. She was also wearing just a hint of perfume.
The Cruise of the Albatros: Book Two of the Westerly Gales Saga Page 17