Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil

by Shout At The Devil(Lit)

  "I think we must accept that the enemy machine has returned safely to her base," said Lieutenant Kyller. "Therefore we can expect the enemy to mount some form of offensive action against us in the very near future." Kyller enjoyed a position of privilege in the wardroom. No other of the junior officers would have dared to express his opinions so freely. Yet none of them would have made as much sense as Kyller. When he spoke his senior officers listened, if not respectfully, at least attentively. Kyller had passed out sword of honour cadet from Bremerhaven Naval Academy in 1910. His father was a Baron, a personal friend of the Kaiser's, and an Admiral of the Imperial Fleet. Kyller was wardroom favourite, not only because of his dark good looks and courteous manner but also because of his appetite for hard work, his meticulous attention to detail, and his ready mind. He was a good officer to have aboard a credit to the ship.

  "What can the enemy do?" Fleischer asked with scorn.

  He did not share the general opinion of Ernst Kyller. "We are safe here " what can he do?" Falkland "A superficial study of naval history will reveal, Sir, that the English can be expected to do what you least expect them to do. And that they will do it, quickly, efficiently and with iron purpose." Kyller scratched the lumpy red insect bites behind his left ear.

  Hah!" said Fleischer, and sprayed a little pea soup with the violence of his disgust. "The English are fools and cowards at the worst, they will skulk off the mouth of the river. They would not dare come in here after uS." I have no doubt that time will prove You correct, Sir." This was Kyller's phrase of violent disagreement with a senior officer, and from experience Captain von Kleine and his commanders recognized it. They smiled a little.

  "This soup is bitter," said Fleischer, satisfied that he had carried the argument. "The cook has used sea-water in it." The accusation was So outrageous, that even von Kleine looked up from his plate.

  "Please do not let our humble hospitality delay you, Herr Commissioner. You must be anxious to return up-river to your wood-cutting duties." And Fleischer subsided quickly, hunching over his food.

  Von Kleine transferred his gaze to Kyller.

  Kyller, you will not be returning with the Herr Commissioner. I am sending Ensign Proust with him this trip.

  You will be in command of the first line of defence that I plan to place at the mouth of the delta, in readiness for the English attack. You will attend the conference in my cabin after this meal, please." "Thank you, Sir." His voice was husky with gratitude for the honour his captain was conferring upon him. Von Kleine looked from him to his gunnery lieutenant.

  "You also, please, Guns. I want to relieve you of- your beloved upper deck pom-poms."

  "You mean to take them off their mountings, sir?" the gunnery lieutenant asked, looking at von Kleine dolefully over his long doleful nose.

  "I regret the necessity," von Kleine told- him sympathetically.

  Well, Henry. We were right. BBlitcher is there."

  "Unfortunately, Sir." Two heavy cruisers tied up indefinitely on blockade service." Admiral Sir Percy thrust out his lower lip lugubriously as he regarded the plaques of Renounce and Pegasus on the Indian Ocean plot. "There is work for them elsewhere."

  "There is, at that," agreed Henry Green.

  "That request of Joyce's for two motor torpedo-boats "Yes, Sir?" "We must suppose he intends mounting a torpedo attack into the delta." "It looks like it, Sir."

  "It might work worth a try anyway. What can we scratch together for him?"

  "There is a full squadron at Bombay, and another at Aden, Sir." For five seconds, Sir Percy Howe reviewed the meagre forces with which he was expected to guard two oceans.

  With this new submarine menace, he could not detach a single ship from the approaches to the Suez Canal it would have to be Bombay. "Send him an M. T. B. from the" Bombay squadron."

  "He asked for two, sir."

  "Joyce knows full well that I only let him have half of anything he requests. He always doubles up."

  "What about this recommendation for a decoration, sir?"

  "The fellow who spotted the Blitcher?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "A bit tricky Portuguese irregular and all that sort of thing "He's a British subject, sir."

  "Then he shouldn't be with the dagos," said Sir Percy.

  "Leave it over until the operation is completed. We'll think about it after we've sunk the Blucher." The sunset was blood and roses, nude pink and tarnished gold as the British blockade squadron stood in towards the land.

  Renounce led with the commodore's peri ant flying at her masthead. In the smooth wide road of her wake, Pegasus slid d over the water. Their silhouettes were crisp and black against the garish colours of the sunset. There was something prim and old-maidish about the lines of a heavy cruiser none of the solid majesty of a battleship, nor the jaunty devil-may-care rake of a destroyer.

  Close in under Pegasus's beam, screened by her hull from the land, like a cygnet swimming beside the swan, rode the motor torpedo-boat.

  Even in this light surface chop she was taking in water.

  Each wave puffed up over her bows and then streamed back greenish and cream along her decks. The spray rattled against the thin canvas that screened the open bridge.

  Flynn O'Flynn crouched behind the screen and cursed the vaunting ambition that had led him to volunteer as pilot for this expedition. He glanced across at Sebastian who stood in the open wing of the bridge, behind the batteries of Lewis guns. Sebastian was grinning as the warm spray flew back into his face and trickled down his cheeks.

  Joyce had recommended Sebastian for a Distinguished Service Order.

  This was almost more than Flynn could bear.

  He wanted one also. He had decided to go along now for that reason alone. Therefore Sebastian was directly to blame for Flynn's present discomfort, and Flynn felt a small warmth of satisfaction as he looked at the flattened, almost negroid contours of Sebastian's new nose. The young bastard deserved it, and he found himself wishing further punishment on his son-in-law.

  "Distinguished Service Order and all. he grunted. "A half-trained chimpanzee could have done what he did. Yet who was it who found the wheels in the first place? No, Flynn Patrick, there just ain't no justice in this world, but we'll show the sons of bitches this time..." His thoughts were interrupted by the small bustle of activity on the bridge around him. An Aldis lamp was winking from the high dark bulk of Renounce ahead of them.

  The lieutenant commanding the torpedo-boat spelled the message aloud.

  "Flag to YN2. D P departure point. Good luck." He was a dumpy amorphous figure in his duffle coat with the collar turned up. "Thanks a lot, old chap and one up your pipe also. No, Signaller, don't make that." He went on quickly, "YN 2 to Flag. Acknowledged!" Then turning to the engine voice-pipe. "Both engines stop," he said.

  The beat of her engines faded away, and she wallowed in the trough of the next wave. Renounce and Pegasus sailed on sedately, leaving the tiny vessel rolling crazily in the turbulence of their wakes. A lonely speck five miles off the mouth of the Rufiji delta, too far off for the shore-watchers to see her in the fading evening light.

  Lieutenant Ernst Kyller watched through his binoculars as the two British cruisers turned in succession away from the land and coalesced with the darkness that fell so swiftly over the ocean and the land. They were gone.

  "Every day it is the same." Kyller let the binoculars fall against his chest and pulled his watch from the pocket of his tunic. "Fifteen minutes before sunset, and again fifteen minutes before sun-up they sail past to show us that they are still waiting."

  "Yes, sir," agreed the seaman who was squeezed into the crow's-nest beside Kyller.

  "I will go down now. Moon comes up at 11-44 tonight keep awake." "Yes, sir." Kyller swung his legs over the side and groped with his feet for the rungs of the rope ladder. Then he climbed down the palm tree to the beach fifty feet below. By the time he reached it the light had gone, and the beach was a vague white blur down to the green ligh
ts of phosphorus in the surf.

  The sand crunched like sugar under his boots as he set off to where the launch was moored. As he walked, his mind was wholly absorbed with the details of his defence system.

  There were only two of the many mouths of the Rufiji, up which the English could attack. They were separated by a low wedge shaped island of sand and mud and mangrove.

  It was on the seaward side of this island that Kyller had sited the four-pounder pom-poms taken from their mountings on Blucher's upper deck.

  He had sunk a raft of logs into the soft mud to give them a firm foundation on which to stand, and he had cut out the mangroves so they commanded an arc of fire across both channels. His searchlights he sited with equal care so they could sweep left or right without blinding his gunners.

  From Commander Lochtkamper he had solicited alength of four-inch steel hawser. This was rather like an un rehabilitated insolvent raising an unsecured loan from a money-lender, for Commander Locktkamper was not easily parted from his stores. Far up river Ensign Proust had diverted some of his axe-men to felling fifty giant African mahogany trees. They had floated the trunks down on the tide; logs the size of the columns of a Greek these and the cable Kyller had fashioned stretched across both channels, an obstacle that it would rip the belly out of even a a heavy cruiser coming down on it at speed.

  Not satisfied with this, for Kyller had highly developed the Teutonic capacity for taking infinite pains, he lifted the fat globular mines with their sinister horns that Blitcher had sown haphazardly behind her on her journey up-river. These he rearranged into near geometrical ranks behind his log boom, a labour that left his men almost prostrated with nervous exhaustion. This work had taken ten days to complete, and immediately Kyller had begun building observation posts. He placed them on every hump of high ground that commanded a view of the ocean, he built them in the tops of the palm trees, and on the smaller islands that stood out at sea. He arranged a system of signals with his observers flags and heliographs for the day, sky-rockets for the night.

  During the hours of darkness, two whale boats rowed steadily back and forth along the log boom, manned by seamen who slapped steadily and sulkily at the light cloud of mosquitoes that hal oed their heads, and made occasional brief but vitriolic statements about Lieutenant Kyller's ancestry, present worth and future prospects.

  At 2200 hours on the moonless night of 16 June 1915, the British motor torpedo-boat YN2 crept with both engines running dead slow into the centre of Lieutenant Kyller's elaborate reception arrangements.

  After the clean cool air on the open sea, the smell was like entering the monkey-house of London Zoo.

  The land masked the breeze, and the frolic of the Surface chop died away. As the torpedo-boat groped its way into the delta, the miasma of the swamps spread out to meet her.

  "my God, that smell." Sebastian twitched his flattened nose. "It brings back pleasant memories."

  "Lovely, isn't it? "agreed Flynn.

  "We must be almost into the channel." Sebastian peered into the night, sensing rather than seeing the loom of the mangroves ahead and on either hand.

  "I don't know what the hell I'm doing on this barge, grunted Flynn. "This is raving bloody madness. We've got more chance of catching a clap than finding our way up to where Blitcher is anchored." "Faith! Major O'Flynn, and shame on ye!" The commander of the torpedo boat exclaimed in his best musichl brogue. "We put our trust in you and the Lord." His tone changed and he spoke crisply to the helmsman beside him. "Lay her off a point to starboard."

  The long nose of the boat, with the torpedo tubes lying like a rack of gigantic champagne bottles on her foredeck, swung fractionally.

  The commander cocked his head to listen to the whispered soundings relayed from the leadsman in the bows.

  "Twelve fathoms," he repeated thoughtfully. "So far so good Then he turned back to Flynn.

  "Now, Major, I heard you shooting the blarney to Captain Joyce about how well you know this river, I think your exact words were, "Like you know the way to your own Thunder Box." You don't seem so certain about it any longer. Why is that?"

  "It's dark, "said Flynn sulkily.

  "My, so it is. But that shouldn't fluster an old river pilot like you."

  "Well, it sure as hell does."

  "If we get into the channel and lay up until the moon rises, would that help?"

  "It wouldn't do any harm." That exchange seemed to exhaust the subject and for a further fifteen minutes the tense silence on the bridge was spoiled only by the commander's quiet orders to the helm, as he kept his ship within the ten fathom line of the channel.

  Then Sebastian made a contribution.

  "I say, there's something dead ahead of us." A patch of deeper darkness in the night; a low blurred shape that showed against the faint sheen of the star reflections on the surface. A reef perhaps? No, there was a splash alongside it as an oar dipped and pulled.

  "Guard boat!" said the commander, and stooped to the voice-pipe. "Both engines " ahead together." The deck canted sharply under their feet as the bows lifted, the whisper of the engines rose to a dull bellow and the torpedo-boat plunged forward like a bull at the cape.

  "Hold on! I'm going to ram it." The commander's voice was pitched at conversational level, and a hubbub of shouts broke out ahead, oars splashed Frantically as the guard boat tried to pull out of their line of charge.

  "Steer for them," said the commander pleasantly, and the helmsman put her over a little.

  Flash and crack, flash and crack, someone in the guard boat fired a rifle just as the torpedo-boat struck her. It was a glancing blow, taken on her shoulder, that spun the little whale boat aside, shearing off the protruding oars with a crackling popping sound.

  She scraped down the gunwale of the torpedo-boat, and then was left astern bobbing and rocking wildly as the larger vessel surged ahead.

  Then abruptly it was no longer dark. From all around them sparkling trails of fire shot into the sky and burst in balls of blue, that lit it all with an eerie flickering glow.

  "Sky rockets, be Jesus. Guy Fawkes, Guy," said the commander.

  They could see the banks of mangrove massed on either hand, and ahead of them the double mouths of the two channels.

  "Steer for the southern channel." This time the commander lifted his voice a little, and the ship plunged onward, throwing out white wings of water from under her bows, bucking and jarring as she leapt over the low swells pushed up by the out-flowing tide, so the men on the bridge hung on to the hand rail to steady themselves.

  Then all of them gasped together in the pain of seared eyeballs as a solid shaft of dazzling white light struck them.

  It leapt out from the dark wedge of land that divided the two channels, and almost immediately two other searchlights on the outer banks of the channels joined in the hunt. Their beams fastened on the ship like the tentacles of a squid on the carcass of a flying fish.

  "Get those lights!" This time the commander shouted the order at the gunners behind the Lewis guns at the corners of the bridge. The tracer that hosed out in a gentle arc towards the base of the searchlight beams was anaemic and pinkly pale, in contrast to the brilliance they were trying to quench.

  The torpedo-boat roared on into the channel.

  Then there was another sound. A regular thump, thump, thump like the working of a distant water pump. Lieutenant Kyller had opened up with his quick-firing pam-pam.

  The four-pound tracer emanated from the dark blob of the island. Seeming to float slowly towards the torpedo boat but gaining speed as it approached, until it flashed past with the whirr of a rocketing pheasant.

  "Jesus" said Flynn as though he meant it. He sat down hurriedly on the deck and began to unlace his boots.

  Still held in the cold white grip of the searchlights, the torpedo-boat roared on with four-pounder shell streaking around her, and bursting in flurries of spray on the surface near her. The long dotted tendrils of tracer from her own Lewis guns still arched out in
delicate lines towards the shore, and suddenly they had effect.

  The beam of one of the searchlights snapped off as a bullet shattered the glass, for a few seconds the filaments continued to glow dull red as they burned themselves out.

  In the relief from the blinding glare, Sebastian Could see ahead, and he saw a sea serpent. It lay across the channel, undulating in the swells, bellied from bank to bank by the push of the tide, showing its back at the top of the swells and then ducking into the troughs; long and sinuous and menacing, Lieutenant Kyller's log boom waited to welcome them.