Angels in the Gloom wwi-3 Read online

  “Are you all right, Robertson?” he asked. “Is that blood on your face?”

  Robertson looked alarmed. He brushed off the smear then put his hand to his nose. His relief was palpable. “No, it’s oil, sir.”

  “Good. Makes one wonder why I chose the navy and not the army,” Matthew said with a slight smile.

  Robertson met his eyes squarely. “Why did you, sir?” In the narrowness of the corridor he was about two feet away from Matthew.

  Matthew drew in his breath to answer just as the ship juddered and pitched, and Robertson lunged forward, throwing his arms out to save himself, and catching Matthew, pinning him to the wall.

  Matthew lifted his knee to jab Robertson in the groin just as Harper came around the corner. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted at Robertson. He charged forward ready to attack him.

  Matthew felt a wave of relief so intense he almost burst out laughing, he could feel it well up inside him, hysterical and absurd.

  Robertson looked stunned. “Sorry, sir,” he said with alarm. “Suppose I haven’t got my sea legs as well as I thought.” He turned to Matthew. “Didn’t mean to hurt you, sir. Meant to go against the wall.”

  Matthew did not believe him, but there was no point in saying so now.

  “No harm done,” he replied, straightening up. “Thank you,” he said to Harper. There was no need to let him know what he had interrupted. “All a bit tired, I expect. It must be dawn soon.”

  Harper stretched his hand out to look at the watch on his wrist.

  “Yes sir, in about half an hour.”

  Matthew stared at it. It was beautiful, wrought of mixed silver and gold, with a green line around the face. He had seen it before, when Detta had showed it to him as the gift she had selected for her father.

  Matthew was standing in the bowels of the Cormorant, facing Patrick Hannassey. That level, hard gaze, the bony features that looked so ordinary at a glance, were those of the Peacemaker who had caused the murder of so many men, and at least one woman: Alys Reavley.

  He must get out of here, quickly, before he betrayed himself even if only by his shaking body or the sweat on his skin and his ashen cheeks.

  “Thank you,” he gasped, his voice hoarse. “We must be well into the North Sea by now.” He nodded briefly and walked away, his legs like jelly, forcing himself not to run.

  He went straight to the bridge and asked for permission to see the captain. It was refused.

  “The captain gave me a particular duty to perform,” he said urgently, hearing the panic inside himself. “I have to report a conclusion. Tell him so, and do it now.”

  Something in his manner must have caught the man’s belief. He returned and conducted Matthew up to where Archie stood alone, staring across the gray water, Cape Wrath to the south, the open North Sea ahead.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “It’s Harper. I have no doubt at all.”

  Archie smiled, his eyes brighter, something inside him easing. “Good. I’ll have him put in the brig. Well done. Now you can go and get some sleep.”

  Matthew knew that it would be a long time before Archie himself could sleep. There was no one else to carry any of his burden. He was alone.

  Matthew stood to attention. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Matthew slept easily that night.

  He woke in the morning to the news that the Grand Fleet had been ordered to sea and the German High Seas Fleet had left harbor. For one idiotic moment, feeling the steel steps under his feet and the rail in his hands, he wondered if this was what it had been like on the morning of Trafalgar a hundred and nine years ago. There would have been the silence of wind and sail then, but the same tingle in the air, the unbearable sweetness of life bound up in the knowledge that this could be the last day of it for thousands of them. Then they had been outnumbered and outgunned and knew Napoleon was massed on the shores of France.

  Now they faced the kaiser, and the might of Germany and Austria. France was driven to the wall and England desperate again.

  He tightened his grip and pulled himself up onto the level of the bridge. Ragland was in the signal house, surveying a calm, slightly hazy sea.

  “Looks as if you’re going to have more than you bargained for, Matthews,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s all hands on deck.”

  “Are we going to be in time?” Matthew asked.

  Ragland smiled. “Of course we are. But at least you’ve got your man. If you want to ask him anything, you’d better do it now. By midday you may not have the chance. We’ll probably catch up with the main fleet about then.”

  Matthew considered it, but what could he ask? What was there that he didn’t know already? He did not want to face Hannassey, but perhaps he must, even if there was nothing to learn.

  He accepted the advice and went back down into the bowels of the ship and along the narrow, steel-enclosed passages. He could feel the entire hull vibrate with the racing of the engines. The stokers must be shoveling coal till their backs ached and their muscles felt as if they were tearing off the bones.

  Hannassey was in the brig, guarded by armed men. They knew who Matthew was and let him in, but with a warning to be careful.

  Hannassey was sitting on a wooden bench. Stripped of his assumed naval uniform he was a lean man, hard muscled with a flat stomach and broad, supple hands. But it was his face that held Matthew’s attention. He was no longer pretending to be ordinary, and the cold, brilliant intelligence in him was undisguised. His features were powerful, his eyes bright blue-green. He looked at Matthew with amusement. “Well, I never thought I’d go down in the belly of some damn English ship!” he said wryly.

  Matthew searched to see if he could recognize anything of Detta in the man in front of him. His coloring was utterly different—pale, washed out, where she was dark and vivid with life. He was cold where she was warm. He was all angles; she was fire, soft lines, and grace.

  Hannassey smiled. “Looking for a resemblance, are you? You won’t see much. Detta’s like her mother. But she’s mine, all right, heart and soul of her. She had the measure of you, boy.”

  Funnily enough, it was his smile that was like hers, the set of his teeth. The memory of her tore inside him. “Did she?” he responded.

  “Oh, yes,” Hannassey’s smile widened, colder than the wind over the sea. “You were desperate to trick her into confirming what you guessed about the sabotage of your munition ships. You hoped that if she believed you knew it all anyway, she’d tell you the rest. She gave you nothing! But she learned from you what she needed.”

  “Oh? And what was that?” Matthew heard the quiver in his own voice.

  “That you’re desperate,” Hannassey replied wolfishly. “You know nothing, you’re guessing and fishing around for proof of anything at all.”

  So Detta had told him what Matthew had wanted her to. She had believed the code intact. Then he felt an ice-cold fear for her. Without meaning to, he looked at Hannassey.

  Hannassey saw the fear and understood it in a flash of revelation. “You did break it!” he said, his face bleached white. His voice choked in his throat as if he were gagging blood. He lurched forward, hands stretched out to grasp and crush, but the chain on his ankles held him. “Mother of God, do you know what they’ll do to her?” he cried. “They’ll break her knees! My beautiful Detta . . .” He stopped, looking up at Matthew, his eyes burning with hate.

  Matthew froze. He knew she would be punished for failure, when at last they found out. He had thought it would be later, a long time, when there was so much lost one more person would not matter.

  “She’ll be alive.” He whispered the words, emotion choking him. “My parents are dead, and God knows how many others. You too now, whether this ship goes down or not.” He had nothing more to say. He was sick with the thought of Detta mutilated, never to walk with that easy grace again.

  He turned and left without looking back at Hannassey and his pain-twi
sted face. He heard the guards lock the brig door, but he said nothing to them.

  Up in the signal house again he found himself jobs to do, anything to keep his mind busy. He went down to the transmitting station where the fire-control table was continuously recording the data for the range and bearing of whatever enemy ship was targeted. All around the walls were different electrical instruments for sending the information up to the guns, voice pipes and telephones. There were about twenty men there, each with his own job to do.

  Up on the deck again he took the glasses and scanned the horizon, trying to force Detta from his mind.

  The weather was calm, the swell slight. There was a haze over the water, the wind from the south too little to dispel it completely.

  Everyone was looking for something to do to take their thoughts from the mounting tension. All the watertight doors were thoroughly examined, every piece of apparatus was tested and spare parts broken out to be handy if needed in an emergency. Was this going to be it, the big one at last? Perhaps by this time tomorrow it would be over. Trench warfare went on and on, a battle of slow wearing down, death month by month, a matter of who could survive the longest.

  Here at sea the war could be lost in a day because without naval supremacy, Britain was finished.

  The afternoon passed slowly, minute by minute. Matthew obeyed his occasional orders and waited, watching Ragland’s face, his self-controlled calm. What was he thinking? Did his stomach churn with fear, too, imagination of physical pain, of not being good enough, clever enough, quick enough, above all brave enough?

  What about Archie on the bridge? In the final count it all depended on him. A hundred and twenty-seven men. Would he make the right decisions?

  It was just short of four o’clock in the afternoon when they saw the smoke of gunfire on the horizon and after that, sighted the rest of the fleet spread across the sea to the east. Bugles and drums sounded the general march to call all hands to battle stations. Within minutes every station reported to the bridge that they were ready for action.

  After that Matthew was occupied with signals, messages flashing back and forth. The whole High Seas Fleet was engaged.

  He saw smoke on the starboard bow, and a few long, dragged-out minutes later he could hear the gunfire. There appeared to be at least two light cruiser squadrons coming across their bows. The roar of gunfire was now almost incessant, and great plumes of water shot into the air, up to two hundred feet high where the shells exploded upon hitting the surface.

  Matthew found himself shivering uncontrollably, but there was a strange kind of excitement inside him as well, a mixture of fear and a driving hunger to be involved, part of the action striking back.

  They were plowing through the water at tremendous speed. There was gunfire, heavy and continuous, somewhere to the rear, but through the clouds of smoke and the towers of water in all directions, it was hard to have any clear idea what was happening.

  Twice he saw torpedo tracks racing toward them, and the ship swung hard, screws thrashing, hull juddering under the strain as infinitely slowly they turned in the tightest circle possible. He heard a shout and saw through a break in the chaos the vast shape of a battle cruiser, bow high, stern wallowing. He was unaware of crying out. The thing was sinking, belching smoke, forward guns still blazing. It was struck again and the bow lifted higher, steam roaring, flame yellow as the magazine caught. He was sick with the horror of it, vomit bitter in his mouth.

  Shot fell only six hundred yards short of the Cormorant and he saw the water drench the deck, bridge, and signal house.

  “Bloody close!” Ragland said tersely.

  The next instant Matthew felt the lurch and jolt as a shell hit the upper deck and exploded. He swung around, instinct driving him to do something, anything. He felt Ragland’s hand on his arm hard enough to hurt.

  “Not yet!” he shouted in the noise of returning gunfire from their own turrets. “Sounds like the boys’ mess deck, or the after dressing station. Others will attend to it. There’ll be enough here for you to do if the signals get hit.”

  Matthew made an intense effort to control himself. His brain told him he had his own job to do and people relied on him to be in place and keep the communications open at all times.

  They were past where the cruiser was sinking. He swiveled to look, but he couldn’t see it. It must be behind the smoke.

  Another shot fell five hundred yards short of them and again the bridge and signal house were drenched with black, foul-smelling water.

  “It’s gone!” Ragland told him.

  Matthew was stunned.

  “It was German!” Ragland added. “Pay attention to what you’re doing!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again they changed course sharply and this time Matthew could see that they were steering straight into the area where the previous shots had landed. It seemed to work. He looked ahead to the bridge but he could not see Archie. He must be there, knowing everything depended on his judgment.

  There were ships all around them. One moment he could see the German ships ahead and the British fleet to the port and starboard—dreadnoughts, hard gray outlines knifing through the water, spurting flame. The next moment he was blinded again.

  The noise was almost unbearable—the roar and crash of shot, the churning of the sea, and the screaming vibration of the engines. There was oil and water everywhere, towering into the air, crashing on the deck, splinters of shell flying from shots exploded on the sea, and clouds of mist and smoke.

  Matthew worked in the signal house, hearing the intermittent bleep of the radio, voices on the telephone, shouts. He had to concentrate to make sense of it, disentangle one message from another.

  Then came one that turned his stomach cold. The British battle cruiser Indefatigable had been sunk, all hands lost. It was hideously real. In the noise and the violence men were dying, crushed, torn apart, burned, and drowned.

  Time passed in violence, half-blindness, and mind-bruising noise. The ships moved with what seemed like agonizing slow motion, the sea dragging at everything, pulling against escape, against change, against turning or maneuvering of every sort. It was a chaos of destruction. Matthew had no idea what was going on, or even if they were winning or losing.

  It was growing dusk. They took several more hits, one shell going straight through the armor plating but failing to explode. There was a bad fire aft, and Matthew was sent to help get control of it. The blast of the shell had momentarily put out the lights, but candles were lit. There seemed to be shards of broken glass everywhere, and the resin out of the corticine covered everything with a black, sticky gluelike substance that smelled ghastly, filling the throat and churning the stomach. His own stomach was too empty to be sick now.

  Some men were struggling to extinguish the flames, others to pad and block the hole in the plating, more to help the injured. Matthew had no experience, no skills. He could see in his mind’s eye the zeppelin, a sheet of flame, descending out of the sky on top of him, feel the heat of it, Detta beside him.

  He wished he knew what to do, anything to help. He knew nothing about fire, or the force of water trying to crush a steel hull from the outside. He moved, lifted, passed, everything he was told, carried bleeding men, staggering under their weight.

  He was up on the deck again before dark, his skin singed, eyes aching and gritty with smoke. As it cleared in the wind he could see a burned-out gun turret, charred wood, broken rigging, and a German battle cruiser ahead, just within range. The starboard guns fired from the good turrets one after another and he saw at least half a dozen plumes of water spout up. They were just short of the battle cruiser, but closing.

  There was another destroyer to the port side, about two thousand yards away, as near as he could judge, and beyond it, almost obscured by smoke, another. The battle cruiser was firing. A salvo of shells landed almost on them, sending up mountains of water, drenching the entire ship. They veered across rapidly to avoid the range, hull shuddering u
nder the strain, and then swerved again, coming closer.

  All the starboard guns fired. The noise was a kind of hell in itself. A gun turret on one of the other destroyers was hit and Matthew knew the men in it would all have been killed. He found himself praying it had been outright, not slow burning to death. He had seen the men’s white faces when they saw it happen a hundred yards away, and knew that even if they had been on board, there was nothing they could have done.

  Was this how Joseph felt, battered and deafened by sound, watching men being torn apart, struggling to fight, to survive, to do all that was asked of them? Matthew had experienced it for a few hours, not yet even twelve. Joseph saw it every night, and knew it would go on, maybe for years. You knew men, you cared for them, laughed with them, shared jokes and memories and family pictures—all the time knowing the chances that sooner or later they would be killed or mutilated beyond recognition.

  How did Joseph bear it and keep sane? Or Archie? Above all, how did Joseph find something to say that was anything but idiotic in the face of such reality? The kind of courage that it demanded amazed him and awoke a staggering admiration. He would never be able to look at Joseph, or even think of him again in the same casual, familiar way as before. As a child he had regarded Joseph as a hero because he was his elder brother, but this was entirely different. The Joseph he had known all his life was only part of it, the core of it was a stranger that until now he could not have seen.

  There was incessant gunfire from huge steel monstrosities—ten, twenty feet long, firing shells it took two men to lift and load. When they struck, they tore apart plate steel, and if they hit magazines, they exploded in sheets of white-hot fire that engulfed whole decks, burning men to death in minutes.

  The sky and sea were lit up by muzzle flashes all around them. He knew it must be nearing midnight by now. They were still firing at the German cruiser. Radio signals were stuttering from all directions, some making sense, others too broken to read. The losses were appalling—innumerable ships and thousands of men. The sea was rough, choppy; the wind swung around to the west.