And Smith had gone to see for himself. The steering compartment was wrecked and flooded; she was flooded right forward to the engine room bulkhead. She was also flooded in several compartments forward. There was no power at all.
Davies summed it up, hugely understated the obvious: “It’s a dockyard job.”
That meant a tow. No doubt a tug would come, hurrying, a vulture. It meant internment. For the ship and her crew, for Smith himself.
But the fires were under control and Thunder was not sinking.
Wolf was sinking.
They could see her by squinting red-weary eyes against that sun that was still low, across the miles of sea. Smith, with his glasses, could see her better. He looked again and again during the swift-flying minutes of his tour of inspection. A man here and there would lift his head to pause and breathe and stare before working again. Watching as she sank. They were all still, watching, when her stern lifted and her bow went under and she slid down. A rush of steam, and smoke from the funnels hung in a spreading pall like a shroud.
It covered the men in the water. Smith could not see them with the glasses but they would be there. There were no boats to be seen and Smith had none to send. The pinnace had crabbed alongside to weak cheers, Manton at the wheel and all hands bailing. When Manton stood swaying before Smith he had explained, “One dropped rather close, sir.” She leaked in a dozen places and now she hung in the water, not floating, where they had made her fast at Thunder’s side. She was no more seaworthy than a colander.
Smith came on Gibb where he sprawled blank-eyed and gasping by the conning-tower, Bates at his side. He had them carried to the upper-deck abaft the bridge where Albrecht had contrived to clear a space to which he was evacuating his wounded. They carried them up, coughing, from below.
Albrecht glanced at him coldly. Albrecht was devoid of emotion; professionally he had no time for it but in any event he was drained of it. He had seen too many men die, was glutted with pain. “I’m setting up here. The sick-bay is impossible. Everything smashed. A hit —”
“I know. Do what you can.”
“I’ve blankets, bandages and cold water for one-hundredand-forty-seven cases of everything from concussion to amputation, to severe scalding, to burns. The burns —” He shook his head. “There are more. They’re still coming in, they’re still finding them. Young Thorne has a broken leg, young Vincent is dead. Knight is dead.”
He stopped at sight of Smith’s face, who knew that Lieutenant Day was dead. He had commanded in the afterturret which was a total loss. Lieutenants Knight and Day, who had been the coster and his missus at the ship’s concerts. No longer a comic turn. He knew that Thunder had seventythree dead — so far.
Albrecht sighed and went on wearily, “I’m not blaming you. I know that if you hadn’t fought those cruisers they’d have run wild all along this coast, and all the rest of it. I know. It had to be done. You did it and still saved most of us and the ship though only God knows how. I still can’t believe it. The surgeon’s knife. I only wish my surgery was as successful as yours, but we both have to live with it.”
Smith knew that; he had laid one ghost only to raise another. He said, “Anything you want, anything I can do …”
“I know. If you have time, later, you ought to come and talk to the men.” Albrecht smiled wryly. “They call you all kinds of a tough, mad bastard, but they love you, all of them.”
That silenced Smith, daunted him while he simply could not understand it. But he looked at the men where they lay uncomplaining, silent or weakly joking on the deck and beyond them to the others who laboured like filthy spectres, and beyond them in his mind’s eye to the others below, out of his sight in the smoke-filled reeking darkness. And he wondered for the thousandth time or more in his life how he could deserve men like this.
Albrecht cleared his throat. “And I’d like to see that boy Wakely. One of my lads put a dressing on him but I want him as soon as you can spare him.” Smith had seen him working on the deck below, the once plump and pink Wakely now haggard and grey, skull wrapped in a bloody bandage.
Albrecht started to turn away and the shell shrieked in and landed aft in the centre of a working-party. Smith winced against the flash, rocked by the burst and saw men tossed like bloody dolls. He stared stupidly then his eyes searched as be cursed himself for forgetting, knowing what he would find.
The Leopard was coming in from the sea. Thunder had left her behind guarding the mouth of the river, a cork in an empty bottle, but she had followed the cruisers. He had forgotten her. She was coming in from the sea because she would have set that course while Kondor still fought, not risking going inshore of the bigger ships. Now she was left with nothing but vengeance and she would take it. She must know Thunder hadn’t a gun that would fire seaward. She only had two four-inch guns herself and they would not sink Thunder quickly but they would steadily tear her to pieces.
There was nothing to stop her. Garrick was trying with a party to clear a midships twelve-pounder that looked as if it might have survived. If he succeeded that pop-gun would not stop Leopard. The men were ready to fight again but they stumbled with fatigue. Near one-hundred-and-fifty wounded and not a boat.
He saw Benks standing among the wounded where they lay in rows on the deck. “Benks!” He spoke briefly, tonelessly, to the hollow-eyed steward and Benks disappeared below and Smith climbed to the fore-deck to stand by the conningtower, eyes fixed on the gunboat. Like a rich man’s yacht. He flinched as her forward gun fired again. The round burst close alongside.
Smith had thrown himself to the deck but he scrambled up as Benks called to him and he took the bundle from the steward. He jammed it inside his jacket to leave his hands free and started to climb painfully slowly, wearily up through the tangle of wreckage to the top of the conning-tower. A shell burst on the useless fore-turret and blast plucked at him, splinters droned and snarled through the wreckage. He hung on, looked down and saw Garrick standing by the twelve-pounder that was abandoned, unworkable, staring dumbly up at him, agony in his face. Smith turned away from him and climbed again. The gunboat was only nine hundred tons, not a tenth of Thunder’s bulk. She had only ten knots of speed and was manned by a rusty, unhandy crew but she carried Thunder’s certain death in that gun.
He stood up on top of the conning-tower, blinking at the gunboat as he fumbled at the big, white tablecloth tucked inside his jacket. Garrick’s face showed agony but Garrick knew as well as he that Smith had no choice. The gunboat came on. She would turn soon so that she could fire both the fore and aft guns, and then …
The water-spouts rose in white towers, a line of them that hid the Leopard behind a curtain of water that hung for seeming seconds as the sound of that salvo came rumbling across the sea. As the water fell and the spray blew away he could see her turning on her heel, but turning away from that sudden enormous salvo from out of the blue. The soundwave rumbled in bass over the sea and staring aft he saw Kansas, unmistakable, huge, roaring up from the south.
Aboard Kansas the messenger from the wireless-room said, “Signal, sir.”
Donoghue took it, read it and handed it to Corrigan who muttered the words as he read: “… ‘commence hostilities’ … Came just a trifle late.”