CHAPTER 30
////// SMS Amerika
“What the hell!” roared Captain Jis-Tikkar, commander of Flight Operations for the 1st Naval Air Wing, as SMS Amerika got underway and began moving toward the distant, smoke-crowned harbor. His Nancy had been idling along, wallowing in the growing chop alongside the big steamer, waiting to be refueled and rearmed. Now his and several other planes had been left bobbing and spinning in the rising wake. “What the goddamn hell!” he bellowed again when another clearly leaking Nancy pirouetted dangerously close to his. He spun to face his backseater. “Get on the wireless and find out what they think they’re doin’! They tryin’ to kill us all?”
“I try!” the backseater yelled back. “They’s too much traffic!”
“Stomp on it,” Tikker ordered, meaning for his observer-copilot to hold the transmit key down, essentially jamming all other messages on the frequency. A few moments later, the ’Cat reported. “Amer-i-kaa says they is ordered to move closer to the harbor, to turn planes around quicker!”
“What about the planes they just ran off on!” Tikker cried incredulously. “They don’t care to turn us around?”
“Uh . . . Kap-i-taan Leut-naant Becher Laange begs our forgiveness, an’ says Kap-i-taan Von Melhausen got the order an’ maybe got a little ahead o’ himself.”
“I’ll say,” Tikker griped. Even as he watched, the liner-turned–commerce raider in a more-distant war than he could imagine began to slow. “Send to the other planes to motor over to her,” he instructed. “They’ll never get that thing turned around.” The backseater acknowledged, and Tikker advanced his throttle. Packets of spray wet the two ’Cats as the pitching bow of the little seaplane tossed it back. It took nearly thirty minutes, by the clock on Tikker’s instrument panel, before the half-dozen planes were back in position. By that time, nearly as many more had landed in the water.
“Keep an eye on things,” Tikker ordered, dropping his goggles on the wicker seat and swinging up the cable that supported the fueling boom. He reached the deck of the big ship even before his ground crew—hesitant to meet his eye even though they’d had nothing to do with the fiasco—scrambled down to service his plane. Another boom was lowering a basket of ordnance. “What a screwed-up mess,” Tikker growled, disgusted. “The whole damn fight’s gonna go in the crapper just because everybody wants in on the show so bad.” He stopped one of the Lemurian crew of the Republic vessel. It dawned on him that he’d never spoken to one of the “foreign ’Cats” before, and he hesitated. “Hey,” he finally demanded. “Where’s the bridge on this tub? I gotta see your crazy skipper!”
“Kap-i-taan Von Melhausen is not crazy!” the ’Cat defended uncomfortably in a strange accent, even though he was clearly aware of the situation. He’d hesitated as well, and Tikker briefly wondered if the other Lemurian had trouble understanding him. His speech was laced with so many Americanisms now that he doubted he’d have understood himself just a few years before. “And you cannot just go to the bridge whenever you decide!” the other ’Cat added indignantly.
“Yes, he can,” interrupted a voice from the deck above. “Seein’ as how he outranks both of us!” Tikker looked up and saw a burly man with a gray-blond beard, dressed as an officer in the Republic Legion. “Please come along, Cap’n Tikker. I know who you are. Doocy Meek’s my name, and we’ve got a proper knot to unravel here!”
Tikker nodded and trotted up the stairs to join the man. “I know you,” Tikker said. “What’s going on?”
“Orders came from your Adar to move the ship closer in. Kapitan Von Melhausen’s rather keen to prove the Republic’s bound to the Alliance in this fight, and he complied just a bit too quickly.” Meek tapped his head. “Von Melhausen’s a fine man and a damn good seaman, but he’s a bit far along, if you get my meanin’. Tends to get a bit . . . overly focused. Follow me, if you please.”
Meek wasn’t a young man, but the pace he set proved he remained in top form. Just a few minutes passed before he brought Tikker to the bridge. The scene there was . . . unexpected.
“Kapitan,” said Kapitan Leutnant Becher Lange, obviously still in the middle of a confrontation with the much older man, “we will proceed to our appointed station as soon as is practicable—but we can’t simply leave the planes already fueling in our wake!”
“But our orders!” Von Melhausen insisted. “I swore I would obey all signals from the flag! You have prevented me from keeping my word!”
“No, sir! I have not. And I have already sent an explanation that will amply explain our delay. This ship is supposed to serve as a tender for the flying boats in this action, not a surface combatant. What use are we if we do not ‘tend’ the planes, as we were entrusted to do?”
Von Melhausen blinked, and Tikker caught Lange’s pleading glance. “Kap-i-taan Von Melhausen,” Tikker said, his anger dying away, “I am Cap-i-taan Jis-Tikkar, COFO of the First Naval Air Wing aboard USNRS Salissa. Do you remember me?”
Von Melhausen looked at him and blinked confusion in the Lemurian way. “I’m not sure. How did you come to be aboard my ship?”
“I arrived in one of the planes now floating alongside—the planes that must have fuel and ordnance to continue our attack.” He was still standing adjacent to the port bridgewing and pointed down and aft. “One of my planes is sinking now, a plane that might have returned to action if it had not been forced to lie so long in the water. Please, sir, all I ask is that you allow my planes and the ground crew personnel that transferred to this ship to complete their current evolution. After that, you may certainly proceed to the station appointed you.”
Von Melhausen blinked doubtfully and removed his hat from his balding head. “But Chairman Adar ordered me to move my ship,” he complained.
“Which you may quickly do, as soon as my aircraft have been serviced,” Tikker stressed. “I swear to you by the Heavens above that this is the intent, if not the specific wording of the orders Chairman Adar sent. He does not want your ship to move closer to the fight so you may tend aircraft that have been left so far away from it!”
Von Melhausen looked at Becher Lange. “Was this your understanding when you countermanded my orders?”
“It was, mein Kapitan,” Lange fervently assured the old man. Von Melhausen shook his head and smiled wanly, his white mustache arching upward. “Very well. I believe I shall retire to my quarters. Would you be so kind as to have some of that wonderful pudding Admiral Keje sent brought there for me?”
“Of course, mein Kapitan!” Lange said with relief as Von Melhausen shuffled off the bridge. Immediately, he turned to Tikker. “Please accept my most profound apologies! Kapitan Von Melhausen is an old man, and he is not often . . . like this.”
When Tikker replied, the soft voice he used with the elderly officer was gone. “You should not have allowed him to be ‘like this’ now. Precious time has been lost, not to mention an equally precious aircraft! The Heavens only know how many lives those things might cost us! I understand your desire to spare the feelings of an aged one, but a battle is underway! You wished to participate in it, and lives depend on you.” He gestured at the departed captain. “Not him, who cannot help himself, but you who must!” Lange nodded miserably, and Meek cleared his throat.
“You must understand Kapitan Von Melhausen’s position, and Mr. Lange’s as well. The old man has been like a father to him—to many of us. . . .”
“Then you should have protected him from himself—and us from him!” Tikker lashed out. “I swear, by all the stars, if this . . . idiocy has cost us this fight, I will drop a bomb down the stack of this useless ship myself and save us all from any further ‘assistance’ it may inflict on us! Good day!” With that, Tikker spun and stalked back the way he’d come. Doocy Meek spared Becher Lange a rueful glance and chased after him. “Captain Tikker,” he called, “I’ve a request.”
“What is it? I must get back in the air.”
“Just so—an’ I’d like to fly with you.”
Tikker paused, beginning to regret how harshly he’d spoken to their allies from the Republic. “How’s your fist on a wireless key?”
“Smooth as breathin’.”
“Very well. You will relieve my OC. Perhaps it is time someone from your nation saw just what kind of war you’ve joined.”
When they reached the bulwark under the fueling boom, Tikker glanced over the side and saw his plane. Its engine already idling, it was preparing to cast off. “Wait here,” he ordered, and dropped down on top of the wing. Meek winced at the nonchalant way the ’Cat performed the feat with a spinning propeller just a few feet away. “Go aboard up there,” Tikker shouted at his OC over the motor noise. “I gotta carry a passenger on this run.”
Reluctantly, Tikker’s backseater climbed the handling line, leaving the trailing edge on his seat. When he reached the deck, he granted Meek a surly series of blinks while he stripped out of his parachute and handed it over. “That’s the rip cord there,” he said, pointing, “but if you get knocked around bad enough you gotta jump, I wouldn’t pull that if it looks like you gonna go in the water, if I was you. Better you go spaack! Die when you hit, er get knocked out an’ drown than get ate to death by flashies!”
Meek nodded his dubious thanks and donned the chute. Then he had to negotiate his way out on the boom before sliding down to the seat below—again, just a few feet from the whirling prop.
“Strap in,” Tikker called. “It’ll be bumpy.” The engine roared and the prop blurred. Moments later, the plane was wallowing away from the ship, picking up speed. Tikker had the most time in Nancys of any man or ’Cat, and he was familiar with all their idiosyncrasies. He quickly had the plane bouncing over the swells and clawing into the sky. “Raise the wing floats!” he ordered. “It’s that crank down by your left leg. Wind ’em up smart!” Meek complied. When he finished, gasping from the exertion, he realized they were already high in the air. He looked around. A fat bomb, an antipersonnel incendiary he supposed, hung beneath each wing, secured by pins. He quickly deduced that the lever by his right leg provided the mechanical advantage to release them.
“I assume that I am your bombardier?” he asked loudly into the voice tube.
“Right. But you just leave that lever alone until I tell you. Right now, you send to all Second Bomb Squadron planes to form on us, over Big Sal. We’re gonna have a look at Walker. All other squadrons is to make theirselves useful to Second Corps.”
Meek gazed at the unfamiliar wireless set in front of his right knee and saw that it was on. Grasping the key, he sent the message. Belatedly putting on the headset, he caught the replies.
“I, ah, believe I’ve accomplished that.”
“Good. Now we gotta wait.”
Meek glanced down and saw Salissa proceeding toward the harbor, wisps of smoke hazing the tops of her funnels. A pair of DDs preceded her, and another pair brought up the rear. Tikker had banked the plane slightly, setting up a leisurely orbit of the flagship. Eventually, three other Nancys joined them as they lifted off from Amerika’s lee. A terse signal from the last informed them that there’d be no more at present.
“I guess we’re it, then,” Tikker announced, peeling off to the south. The other planes quickly followed, forming on Tikker’s starboard wing. With nothing to do for the first time since they’d lifted off, Doocy Meek had a moment to view the spectacle of the battle from his lofty perch. He’d never ridden in an airplane before and was experiencing a strange tightness in his chest. The closest he could come to describing it was as a kind of excited anxiety. He shook his head. He’d asked for this, damn it! Smoke from the fires still raging in the harbor towered high in the sky, much higher than they were, before blending with the overcast sky or dissipating in the wind. More smoke rose above what he assumed must be II Corps’s position to the southeast, but the plane was headed toward a lone column of smoke rising above a grounded Grik steamer. He didn’t have a telescope—Tikker’s OC must have taken his—but even he could see the slender shape of the stranded American destroyer not far from the burning enemy ship. What took his breath was the crowded swarm of Grik funneled up against it, their reserves curling back and around on shore, beyond the burning cruiser. It looked like a tightly focused stream of ants picking at the innards of some great, helpless insect.
“There’s thousands of ’em,” he observed, “and Walker has what, three hundred crew?”
“Maybe, with the reinforcements that went aboard.” Tikker grunted. “It don’t look good, huh? Hold on, and stand ready with that bomb lever. When I say ‘Now,’ don’t think, just do. We gotta make these bombs count, or some really good folks are gonna buy it!”