Page 55 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
A mong all the works created by man, no object greater personifies “form follows function” more than the modern battleship.
Her function is to bring the largest and greatest number of guns to a naval engagement in order to defeat the enemy, and this alone determines every aspect of her form.
Nothing about the design deviates from that.
The hull is streamlined for efficiency not grace.
Apart from some wood paneling in a few officers’ cabins and their wardroom, every surface is made of steel.
The vessels are cold, industrial, brutalist, with little consideration given to the men who serve aboard, as they are effectively cogs in the great machine themselves.
The Saarland was no different. She didn’t cut through the water, rather, her high bows tossed the ocean contemptuously aside as she raced across the Atlantic for her date with destiny.
The seas weren’t particularly rough, but even then the battlewagon refused to roll with the swells.
She was like an unmovable force of nature.
Standing on the bridge of the Saarland , Karl Rath had never felt so powerful in his life. They’d just executed his most audacious plan yet, and it had gone off without a hitch.
Escaping out of occupied Belgium had been easy.
They knew all the established smuggling routes and all forty-five of them had made it to Rotterdam without incident.
There waited a small steam freighter whose captain was sympathetic to the anarchist cause and vastly reduced his charter fee.
They had sailed with the tide after the last of his men reached the port.
The trip to the Azores had been uneventful.
Rath used the time to further drill his men on how to operate the Saarland once they took her from her Brazilian minders.
Rath was in overall charge of the mission, but he lacked the experience to effectively run the ship herself.
For that he had two former Italian naval officers, who’d been drummed out of the Navy for dereliction of duty.
One had even spent six months in the brig before being dismissed.
They were both bitter and resentful of their treatment and more than willing to be recruited into Rath’s gang.
It was his chance meeting with them at a political rally in Switzerland that had given him the idea for this mission.
Under them were a motley assortment of men, some with naval or artillery training thanks to the ongoing war, of which most had deserted.
There were Germans, a few more Italians, Eastern Europeans like Rath himself, even a couple of radicalized Frenchmen who were more communist than anarchist, but were willing to sign on.
They had made certain to get noticed when they arrived in Ponta Delgada.
Those that spoke German did so at every opportunity, though never about why they had arrived on the island.
It took only a handful of days to learn the dull routine of the twenty Brazilians stuck in the Azores looking after their all-but-forgotten ship.
They lived aboard, of course, but at any time half of them were in town.
In order to support themselves, these men had taken jobs at the fish-processing plant.
It was up to the others to keep one of the ship’s boilers up and running and ensure that every moving part had been properly greased and any rust that started to show through was scraped down to bare metal and repainted.
It was little wonder that such a small team hadn’t been able to keep up on the repairs of such a massive ship.
When Rath and his men hit town, the Saarland ’s paint looked scabrous with rust spots and streaks, and the smoke chuffing out of her forward funnel appeared to be far oilier than it need be.
They had struck at midnight. The Brazilians hadn’t even posted a night watch.
As suspected, the sailors had availed themselves of the officers’ cabins.
Rath trusted this part to his Roma compatriots.
They knew the way of the knife and worked with a single-mindedness that abolished any thought of compassion.
The entire crew aboard was dispatched within a matter of minutes.
The plan was to dispose of the bodies after they were out at sea.
The following eight hours was a frantic rush to make the ship ready to depart.
Two of Rath’s men had experience working at power plants and they needed a dozen others to ramp up the saltwater evaporator for a greater supply of fresh water and then to light the idled boilers.
Their task was made more difficult because the dampers for the aft two funnels had to remain closed and all smoke vented through the forward stack.
They were lucky in one regard: The Brazilians had rotated between all of the engine room boilers during their extended stay in Ponta Delgada.
While this was going on, others among the crew, guided by the two Italian officers, checked over the battleship’s mechanical systems, steering gear, and auxiliary generators.
The men with artillery experience examined the main guns and inventoried their ammo supply.
Still others needed to head back into town for provisions.
The caretakers kept only minimal stocks, since their ship was never leaving port.
Karl himself looked over the ship’s radio array to make certain it functioned properly.
Without it, the guns would be firing blind.
He was relieved to find that one of the Brazilian caretakers must have had a real love for electronic devices.
The sets were in perfect order and kept covered by custom-sewn cozies.
They had just completed everything only moments before the British destroyer pulled into the harbor. The leader of the team in the forward gun hadn’t waited for orders. He’d taken the initiative to fire that devastating point-blank salvo that utterly destroyed the British ship.
Rath’s most trusted adviser was a man named Pesha Orsos.
As a teen, he had been press-ganged into the Austro-Hungarian Navy for two years and had been stationed as a gunner’s mate aboard a heavy cruiser until he’d jumped ship while they were at anchor in Istanbul.
He was in charge of the lead turret and had ordered the shot that sank the Mastiff and most of her crew.
He knew to approach Rath from the right, where he still had an eye.
“Karl, we’ve finished the ammunition inventory.
It’s not good. We have plenty of powder.
That isn’t the problem. What we don’t have are a lot of shells for the main guns.
It looks to me that the Brazilians sold a lot of them off as scrap to help pay their way in Ponta Delgada. ”
“How many are left?”
“Just thirty. Most are high explosive, which I doubt any local junk dealer would touch with just a couple of solid armor piercing remaining.”
Rath absorbed this news, calculating. “It should be enough, but it’s more pressure on Balka as our spotter.
We have six targets. The two train stations, the Stock Exchange, the Woolworth Building—the city’s tallest—St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and finally the Brooklyn Bridge, arguably the hardest to hit.
If we need four or five rounds to dial in on each target and destroy it at least partially, that still leaves us enough ammunition to hit the bridge. ”
“It may take more than four or five rounds, Karl,” Pesha replied.
“Yes, your brother can tell us how many blocks east or west we missed by, but these guns are unfamiliar to me. They will have quirks I do not know. And there is no guarantee each bag of powder we use is exactly uniform. It takes eight ten-kilo bags to fire one of those shells. If even one bag is a little deficient the shell will land short no matter how accurate I am.”
Rath clapped his friend on the shoulder.
“You worry too much. Do you think if we destroy the first five targets and leave the bridge standing the Americans won’t be any less eager to add their soldiers to the list of the dead in Europe?
They will be clamoring for blood if just one of our targets is leveled and the finger points to a German sneak attack. ”
“You think so?”
“I do. But that doesn’t mean you don’t drill your men every day, so we don’t squander one of our precious shells on a mistake, yes?”
“Of course. These guns are much bigger than the ones I fired in the Navy, but the principle is the same. We will be ready.”
“I know. Have you thought about afterward?”
They planned to abandon the Saarland as soon as the attack was over.
During the crossing to New York, a team was making two of the utilitarian lifeboats look like pleasure craft that would be completely anonymous as soon as they were launched.
Once ashore, the lion’s share of Rath’s men wanted to remain in America.
Most of them had family in the United States, many in New York, in fact.
They might be anarchists, criminals, and malcontents, but they were also human and liked a soft life of creature comforts that America appeared to provide.
Rath wanted to return to his homeland. Plunging Europe into war would see the end of the hated Hapsburg dynasty.
And that was the lofty goal he and others had set out to accomplish.
But there were personal scores to settle, too, petty functionaries all throughout the bureaucracy who had wronged Rath and his family in one way or another.
Policemen who’d harassed them. Tax collectors who’d overcharged them, a particular mayor who had seized valuable property.
All of them had to pay as surely as young Charles I would lose his throne.
Pesha hadn’t yet said what he would do afterward.
Karl would love to have him return with him and Balka.
It would be like old times. But Pesha was more of a humanist than the others.
Karl knew that his old friend had become disillusioned with Europe.
He hated how eagerly they turned to war and how stubbornly they refused peace.
He feared Pesha would decide not to return.
“When this is over, I will know in my heart where I belong. But not until then,” he had told him.
“Fair enough,” Rath had said.
“What are you two on about?” asked the captain, Luigi Valenza, in English, their common language. He’d come over to them from his elevated seat on the corner of the bridge. Behind them a helmsman stood at the wheel and another of the crew stood ready for whatever was needed.
“We only have thirty shells for the main gun, and I was assuring my pessimistic friend that it will be enough.”
“How fast can you fire them, do you think?” Valenza asked Pesha Orsos.
“That depends on my brother,” Rath replied for him. “As our spotter, the quicker he tells us where our shells landed versus where we aimed them, the quicker we can adjust and fire again.”
“I just worry about the American Navy. Once we open fire, we’ll be a sitting duck.”
“Bah,” Rath scoffed. “Unless they happen to have a heavy cruiser or battleship in the area we are perfectly safe. Besides, that’s the risk we all knew ahead of time. But the odds are small, and we’re exposed for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Right, Pesha?”
“At the most.”
“See, nothing to fear, Captain. You just worry about getting us there, and we’ll do the rest.”