It was surreal.
Tracers looped lazily across the water, kicking up spray, pitter-pattering on steel somewhere far aft. Something whooshed through the air, a column of water rose between the ship and the abandoned port of the Imperial Concession.
“MAKE SMOKE!”
“All secondaries may return fire at will in local control!”
Rifle and machine gun bullets were clunking harmlessly off the armour of the conning tower.
Peter Cowdrey-Singh spared a thought for the men manning the Emden’s anti-aircraft gun pits; many of those positions amidships were protected only by relatively thin splinter guards which were liable to spalling if struck by even a rifle-calibre round.
Finally, the cruiser’s bow was swinging across the channel, clearing the wrecks of the San Miguel and the Weser. The water all around was fouled by floating debris, and dull with coal dust from the ironclad’s shattered bunkers.
Idly, Peter Cowdrey-Singh wondered if one of the Emden’s shells had ignited a magazine or perhaps, a gun room full of cordite might, or conceivably, simply triggered a chain reaction of coal-dust explosions along the flank of the old ship.
Astonishingly, it was as if the people on shore still could not make up their minds if the cruiser was a friend or a foe!
Nonetheless, that the harbour master should still be sitting back, presumably in a fog of indecision, and carrying on watching as a vessel which had just sunk two of the Armada del Santo Domingo’s ships, not even challenging her defied credulity.
But then when the Emden had arrived at San Juan she had pretty much, sailed into the bay without a by your leave to anybody in particular. Claude Wallendorf had had to order a pair of small tugs to assist him to navigate the main channel; with the harbour authorities never at any stage really catching up with events as the cruiser edged towards its berth alongside the main quay of the Port of the Imperial Concession.
Hans von Schaffhausen had been as surprised as anyone!
Although, on reflection, the German Minister had confided that it was not at all uncommon for one hand of the Dominican government not to have the remotest idea what any of the other agencies were up to. Add into the mix the machinations of the autonomous organs of the Inquisition and obviously, the potential for chaos was unlimited. Likewise, as implausible as it sounded, it might well have been that the only reason the badly damaged Weser had been allowed to enter the port unmolested was that nobody had forewarned the harbour authorities at San Juan that the Inquisition had ordered two Dominican Navy torpedo boat-destroyers to intercept the commerce raider.
Peter Cowdrey-Singh flinched as a heavier shell erupted in the water near the bow sending a jolt through the deck at his feet. Briefly, he spared a thought for the hundreds of German non-combatants below decks, huddling in claustrophobic, humid compartments dogged shut to guarantee the maximum possible watertight integrity in the event of a hit below the waterline.
Anecdotally, his understanding was that the Emden’s design incorporated approximately three the times the weight of armour as Achilles – a ship a little less than two-thirds of her tonnage – had, and that below the level of the main deck, itself protected in places by up to two-and-a-half inches of modern Krupp cemented plate, there was up to five inches around her magazines and engineering spaces at the waterline, tapering to about two at the joint with the main deck.
As a rule, all German cruisers tended to be more heavily protected than their Royal Navy counterparts, a thing the Kaiserliche Marine could get away with because range was not the priority for it – historically a North Sea and Baltic Fleet – as it was for a Navy with global responsibilities. In essence, Emden’s weight of armour and general protections system was roughly comparable with that of the latest class of British heavy cruisers.
In other words, Emden was built to be tough for her size, and ought to be capable of taking a fair bit of punishment. Which was just as well because if the gunners manning the batteries guarding the main entrance to the port got their act together, things were going to get somewhat more than middlingly unpleasant if and when, assuming she did not go aground, the cruiser rounded Point La Puntilla, turning her bow to the west following the deep water channel before she made the long, slow, very predictable turn to the north and if she was still under control at that time, ran for the open sea.
The bridge chronometer reported it was 04:07; although dawn was around six o’clock that did not mean they had another two hours of darkness in which to fight their way out to sea. Twilight, the pre-dawn brightening would be with them in about an hour. After that, if there had ever been anywhere that a ten-thousand-ton cruiser with a fighting top seventy to eighty feet above its waterline could hide, it would not be inside this port no matter how much smoke she was making.
Presently, a long, choking pall of steamy, half-burned oil was drifting ahead of and a point east of north of the cruiser as she crawled, barely at walking pace away past the graveyards of the San Miguel and the Weser.
Whatever awaited the Emden around the headland of Pont La Puntilla, there would be no dodging it. If she deviated from the channel she would ground and thereafter the Dominicans would surely shoot her to pieces at their leisure.
Chapter 36
Monday 8th May
San Juan, Santo Domingo
No plan survives first contact with the enemy, and one simply had to be philosophical about these things. But when the enemy started the battle before one had even arrived, when the nearest of the Perseus’s and Hermes’s aircraft were still over thirty miles away, that was ridiculous!
Approaching the enemy coast at three-hundred-and-forty-knots, Alex Fielding flicked across UHF frequencies, picking up the excitable, panicky, oddly angry babble of Spanish on both of the frequencies the Armada del Santo Domingo was known to employ before re-selecting today’s designated command channel.
Up at twenty thousand feet the pre-dawn twilight began to turn the blackness of the night into subtle greys, with the diamond twinkle of the stars above fast winking out while down below, on the deck, the darkness clung on another few minutes. Or rather, it ought to have lingered a while longer.
In the distance the flash of big guns sparkled, many, many fires were burning and a plume of grey-black smoke was drifting across the San Juan Bay and the city around it.
Racing south, giving a wide detour to the Princess Royal, Indefatigable and their escorts – they were bound to be trigger happy on a morning like this – Alex’s Goshawk was closing the range with the northern coast of Santo Domingo at nearly six miles a minute.
Down lower there was tracer fire reaching up into the sky.
Anti-aircraft fire?
How the Devil do they know we are out here?
The Princess Royal and the Indefatigable would have launched her Gimlet amphibians by now. They were supposed to stay well to the west of the line of the Rio Hondo, which marked the western border of the German Concession and report the big ships’ fall of fire as best they could from a safe distance away.
Oh, well, there was nothing for it but to go and have a closer look!
Alex put the nose of his Goshawk down, he was not going to see an awful lot of ground detail from four miles high!
He rocketed over the long isthmus protecting San Juan Bay where the original conquerors had established their city in that long-ago post-Columbian epoch, where, nowadays, the Armada del Santo Domingo had its only large, relatively modern base.