Page 11 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
T he docks at Southampton were as busy as Bell recalled, but with one critical difference.
Gone were the elegant express liners with their gleaming black hulls and cloud-white superstructures topped by brightly colored stacks.
Gone, too, were the gentlemen in tailored suits and ladies sporting the latest fashions surrounded by dockworkers unloading matching sets of steamer trunks.
What greeted Bell when he arrived in a military staff car alongside Valentine Fleming was an armada of warships in muted gray livery, each bristling with cannons of every caliber from massive naval fourteen-inchers to twenty-millimeter close-in defensive weapons.
There were also dozens of freighters and troopships either loading or being unloaded.
Many of the cargo ships that had come from America in convoys still sported the now defunct “dazzle camouflage,” which consisted of oddly shaped geometric blocks painted in various colors on the hull and superstructure in an attempt to fool U-boat range finders.
The scheme hadn’t worked as its early supporters, including Winston Churchill, as Admiralty Lord, had hoped.
Gone, too, were eager passengers ready to board their ships or enjoy their stay in Europe if newly arrived.
Bell saw a sea of men in matching brown uniforms, with flat helmets that reminded him of armor from Cromwell’s reign.
They were burdened with heavy packs and belts and ammo pouches made of webbing material.
Most carried rifles with long bayonets scabbarded at their waists, their shins covered in puttees as defense against the inevitable mud they would face in the trenches.
It was a sobering sight, Bell thought as the driver threaded the car along Southampton’s massive quay in search of their assigned ship. The war’s death toll was already horrendous, and by the looks of things, it was only going to get worse.
He wondered about the United States entering the war.
“This is a European affair” was so often the reason given for American neutrality.
But that would no longer be the case now that Germany had declared war on any ship plying the Atlantic.
Bell thought about Wilson’s upcoming decision, which wasn’t really a decision at all, but rather a response to changing circumstances.
He thought about his own reasons for taking the assignment.
He decided that what he had said the night before, about Wilson’s conscience, was the answer to why he was here.
He didn’t mind that he would play no role in deciding if the United States joined the fight, but he was happy enough to serve the commander in chief if it helped him accept the inevitability of total world war.
“Ah, there we are,” Valentine Fleming said and pointed to their right. Their ride to France was the HMS Acasta , a thousand-ton destroyer that had been severely damaged the year prior at the Battle of Jutland. She was returned to service as a Channel escort following extensive repairs.
Compared to the large freighters and heavy cruisers in port, she was a small ship, narrow in the beam and only some two hundred and sixty feet. She was lightly armed with only four cannons and a pair of torpedo tubes, but she was devilishly fast with a top speed better than thirty knots.
Smoke coiled from her single funnel and joined the general pall that settled over the port, the smog a mix of coal soot, harbor stink, and the very real fear of the men boarding the troopships.
At the base of the destroyer’s gangway, the staff car squalled to a halt on poorly maintained brakes and Fleming practically leapt from his seat.
Bell joined him on the quay. Now that they didn’t have the car’s engine blatting away, they could hear the sounds of the mighty embarkation around them.
Thousands of men and thousands of tons of matériel were going to be poured into the upcoming spring offensive, and so the loading proceeded with an air of urgency.
Sergeants blew brass whistles to get their men in order and great overhead cranes struggled to swing pallets of artillery shells into waiting holds.
Farther down, Bell caught the whinny of horses being loaded for the front and wondered if any of them were the ones he’d seen in Liverpool.
The corporal who’d driven them wrestled a heavy trunk off the sedan’s rear cargo deck and caught the eye of a passing stevedore pushing an empty metal-wheeled dolly.
The two men hoisted the trunk onto the handcart and, with Bell and Fleming carrying their own leather bags, the three men made for the HMS Acasta .
The ship’s first officer greeted them at the head of the gangplank, checked their identification, and welcomed them aboard.
Churchill had smoothed out the whole thing.
Since the weather for the crossing looked good, Fleming gave permission for the trunk to be lashed in a protected nook just outside the ship’s small pilothouse.
“Are you going to tell me what it is you felt you had to lug to France?” Fleming asked.
“You’ll see,” Bell said, smiling. “I will say it had all the hallmarks of my loving and caring wife.”
They were allowed onto the small bridge provided they stayed up against the back wall and that they were to evacuate to the officers’ wardroom at the first sign of trouble.
Twenty minutes after boarding, the captain called for the boilers to be run up.
Jets of inky smoke boiled from the stack.
Up and down the pier, other ships were making ready to cross the channel in a tight convoy.
Some of the larger vessels required plucky little tugboats to pull them from the dockside and aim their noses toward the open sea.
The Acasta soon joined the exodus, and when they reached the Channel she swung out to the south and east of the main body of ships to act as a picket against any U-boats that had somehow made it into these heavily patrolled and defended waters.
The sea was relatively calm, but appeared in an ominous dark gray shade that made Bell think of the slag fields outside a Pittsburgh iron mill.
Fleming didn’t look like he was enjoying the experience despite the flat waters, and not long after they’d made the channel, he asked if he could make the crossing on a bridge wing.
The captain okayed his request and Bell went with him.
Fleming didn’t look ill, but apprehensive, and Bell quickly understood why.
The major scanned the water from horizon to horizon, his eyes never still, his neck on a swivel.
The other ships in the convoy sailed as tightly as possible and seemed to fill the ocean with their bulk.
Bell caught an occasional flash of an Aldiss lamp as coded messages were passed from ship to ship.
“I was on the Lusitania that fateful morning,” Bell said. “I tell you this because the odds of me being torpedoed twice in the same war are staggeringly low.”
“If it’s all the same, I like to keep an eye out,” Fleming said after finally getting a cigarette lit.
A few companionable minutes passed.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Fleming said without looking at Bell. “Lord knows Winston would have my hide if he heard me give an unfavorable opinion about the war to you. The thing is, Mr. Bell—”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac. The thing is, the individual no longer matters on the battlefield.
Not in this mechanized industrial style of warfare.
We stand in the middle of the most dehumanizing event in human history.
It matters not how well trained a soldier is or how well equipped.
Nothing matters out there but random chance.
“Not to be immodest, but I am a very good horseman. Been riding since before I can remember. At another time and place my skill would mean something. I would be able to ride into battle faster and safer than anyone else because I have an eye for covering terrain and a mastery over my animal.
“But not here. Not in this war. My skills mean nothing against a double line of crisscrossing German machine guns and a tangle of barbed wire. That’s not to mention the artillery barrages that have raged without end it seems since the opening salvos back in ’fourteen.
To the lads in the trenches, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a good soldier or not.
All he needs to be is lucky. Lucky that a fifteen-centimeter shell full of high explosives from one of the German howitzers lands at any spot other than where he is standing.
“It’s the same out here. You were a victim of it.
It mattered not that the Lusitania was a fast ship in closely watched waters and crewed with plenty of well-trained lookouts.
That morning, chance put her abeam of a U-boat that managed the luckiest shot of the war.
Twelve hundred perished when she went down for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Not much I can do in the trenches if shells start raining down, but out on the water I can at least keep a weathered eye for a periscope or a torpedo already heading for us. It’s my way of trying to stay alive long enough to see an end to this whole wretched business.”
Bell understood the randomness of a gunfight.
He’d been in far too many to count. He understood what Fleming meant.
He practiced shooting every week to keep his skills honed to a razor’s edge to give him the advantage of speed and accuracy over an opponent.
But what good would that do if your enemy threw up a wall of lead with Maxim guns while at the same time shelling you with a hundred big guns?
“Grim,” was his one-word reply.
“Depending on what you see and don’t see on your tour, it’s something you needed to know.”
“Thanks for that.”