cast iron. He’d almost reached the point where he first began his dive when he watched the last ship go in. He was preparing to make another pass, low and slow, so Cisco could hand-drop mortar bombs on the enemy, when he realized the last plane was still barreling in.
Even as he watched, knowing with sick certainty what had happened, he saw the plane lurch upward, apparently dropping its bombs at last, but it was too late. Against a floating target on the open sea, the air crew of the last Nancy might have had a chance, but here… there were trees. Even so, miraculously, the plane almost made it, clearing the first trees by the width of a whisker. Tikker had never believed in anything like the human concept of “luck” before he became an aviator. He did now, with good reason, and thought he had it in spades. But he also knew “luck” was a fickle phenomenon. Just when it looked like the Nancy below might actually survive, it clipped a treetop with its fuselage and created a small explosion of leaves. The contact slowed the plane just enough to force it into another treetop, then another. It collided head-on with the fourth tree, the pilot’s compartment crumpling under the engine, the wing wrapping around the trunk. The ruptured fuel tank ignited almost instantly with a hungry rush of flame, and the tangled wreckage of the fragile plane tumbled to the jungle floor, leaving a dwindling fire in the treetops and a chalky black pall of smoke.
Tikker blinked rapidly with sadness and irritation; his lips were set in a grim frown. Target fixation. Ben had warned them, and they trained hard to avoid it. They’d even lost a couple of pilots and ships in training, and he’d known it was going to be a problem. He blinked again, and surveyed the field below. Their target had evaporated. The Grik gathered there had either fled or died, and there was no point in wasting the little bombs.
“Cisco,” he said, “send to ‘A’ flight: ‘Well done, but let that be a lesson to us all. Never forget it.’ ” He sighed. “‘This squadron’s going home, unless we receive further orders from Commodore Ellis. “B” flight will withhold ordnance for targets of opportunity. That is all.’ ”
The squadron re-formed and together made a low-level pass over the field. Unheard over the engines, the Marines cheered them; Tikker saw their gestures and the waving banners. Without orders, every ship in the 1st Naval Bomb Squadron waggled its wings at the 1st Marines. The squadron had done well in its first action, no doubt about it. The outcome of the fight below had been a foregone conclusion, but the squadron had saved a lot of lives. A lot of highly professional and experienced lives. It was a heady moment. Tikker knew their success would have been proclaimed even more exuberantly in the air and on the ground if not for the already dwindling black column of smoke.
The squadron climbed to a thousand feet. That was high enough to see the jungle panorama below and avoid the eruptions of lizard birds and other flying creatures that flushed, panicked, into the sky at their passing. Larger flying things, like nothing he’d ever seen, with half the wingspan of his plane, didn’t seem too alarmed and even tried to climb and pace them. Whether they were driven by hunger or curiosity was moot because the Nancys easily outpaced them. The port city, “Raan-goon,” still burned, and they flew east, over Donaghey, to skirt the smoke and updrafts.
There were wounded on the docks, waiting to be carried out to the ships. There weren’t a lot of wounded, compared to the depressing throngs he’d seen after other battles, and he supposed they were getting better at this business of war. The battle wasn’t over, though, even if it had essentially degenerated into a general chase; it might last many hours more. Whatever it had become, there would be more wounded before it was done. More dead. He hoped this exercise would be worth the price.
CHAPTER 12
Eastern Sea
W alker had averaged eight knots during the last week, a respectable speed given the generally light airs the other ships relied on. Sometimes she sped up, steaming a wide circle around her plodding consorts. Occasionally, she hove to and let the Nancy down into the sea and Reynolds flew. Matt forbade him to fly out of sight, but one of the flights did warn them of a basking mountain fish, several miles farther out than they would have detected it with lookouts. This allowed them to give it a wide berth. Fred Reynolds saw nothing else, no islands or ships at all. If they’d been in the Carolines before, they must have left them behind. Otherwise, the sea was calm, the weather pleasant, and if not for the antiquated sailing steamers they kept company with and the Lemurian heavy crew, it would have been easy for the men aboard USS Walker to imagine that they’d somehow returned to the world they’d left behind.
Beginning the third week out of the nameless atoll where the ships refitted after the fight, the sky grew dark and the sea began to dance. A cool wind pushed rolling swells out of the south, and Walker started rolling sickeningly, as was her custom. A pod, or herd, of gri-kakka, a form of plesiosaur they’d grown uncomfortably accustomed to, crossed their path and blew among the swells. The creatures veered away and plunged for the depths as the ship’s sonar lashed at them. They used the sonar to frighten mountain fish-or “leviathans,” as the Imperials called them-away, and it seemed to work extremely well. Walker ’s crew was glad to learn it worked on gri-kakka too. They’d taken some damage once by just striking a young one.
That night Walker ran under running lights and the other ships hoisted lanterns. The wind and sea continued to build, veering out of the southwest. The quartering swells made Walker ’s crew, particularly the Lemurians, even more miserable as the roll took on a swooping, corkscrewing motion. Even the ’Cats who’d been on the sea all their lives had a hard time with it. Except for the ones who’d made their living on the fishing feluccas, none had ever noticed any except the most severe storms. Riding heavy seas on a Lemurian Home was like doing so on an aircraft carrier. Walker ’s relatively small and slender round-bottom hull made for a far more boisterous ride. With the dawn came the realization that they were unquestionably in a typhoon, or possibly a Strakka-something even worse that this world’s different climate managed to conjure. They’d never experienced a deepwater Strakka before.
Ever eastward they struggled, in the face of the mounting sea. Waves crashed across Walker ’s narrow bow, inundating the forward four-inch-fifty and pounding against the superstructure beneath the bridge. During her refit, they’d replaced Walker ’s rectangular pilothouse windows with glass salvaged from Amagi, but there hadn’t been much to spare. To protect the new glass, as well as the people behind it, plate steel shutters had been cut and installed that could be lowered into place over the windows. The shutters retained only small slits to see through, and all but eliminated visibility, but they had the compass, and soaked lookouts stood watch on the bridgewings. Chack stood watch-on-watch high above in the crow’s nest as well. He had the longest experience aboard the old destroyer of any Lemurian, and had probably developed the strongest stomach of any of his farsighted peers. Still, the wildly erratic and exaggerated motion of the crow’s nest would have made the post hell for anyone. As the storm built, he was the very last to report visual contact with the lanterns of the other ships.
Even then, they maintained wireless contact with Achilles, but her signal grew weaker with every passing hour. The growing distance between the ships wasn’t to blame. The problem was that they hadn’t been allowed time to install and regulate one of the virtually “Allied standard” 120-volt, 25-kilowatt generators in Achilles ’ engine room when they left Baalkpan. She still relied on one of the portable six-volt winddriven generators used by Allied sailing ships. The wind had grown much too violent to continue operating it, though, and the batteries were beginning to fade. Icarus and Ulysses had only lanterns, flags, guns, and rockets to communicate with, and by late afternoon even Achilles couldn’t see them anymore over the mounting crests of the tortured sea.
“Jeez, this is awful!” protested Frankie Steele through clenched teeth, struggling with the large polished wheel. Water beaded in his beard. Everyone on the bridge had been saturated by windblown rain and spray. “I remember steering Mahan through that big Java Sea Strakka on one engine, but I don’t think it was this bad.”
“If you’ll remember,” said Matt, “ Walker only had one engine at the time as well, and I believe you’re right. The water’s a lot deeper and the swells are more organized, but the troughs are deeper too.” He braced himself against his chair, bolted securely to the bulkhead, when the bow shouldered through another high peak and then tilted downward at an alarming angle. With a rushing crash, it pierced the next enormous wave and the sea boomed against the pilothouse. Through the slits in the shutters all Matt could see was a swirling white vortex, and water gushed into the pilothouse over the bridgewing rails, nearly sweeping the lookouts aft and down onto the weather deck. Somehow, they managed to hold on, and climb hand over hand back to their posts as the rush of seawater drained through the bridge strakes. Slowly, reluctantly, the bow came up again and the ship heaved sharply over to port.
Kutas, clinging to the support pole near the chart table, watched the clinometer pass twenty degrees. “A lot
