Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(152)
“You co’er us,” Lawrence asked doubtfully. “Not do so’thing else?”
“I won’t take a single eye off ya,” Silva promised loftily.
“You only got one eye, and it gets easy distracted,” Lawrence accused.
“Quit bitchin’. Have I ever let ya down? Besides that one time, I mean. An’ here’s your big chance to finally make somethin’ o’ yerself, do somethin’ useful for a change.”
? ? ?
“You! Hands up!” screamed Lieutenant of the Sky Iguri, leading a squad of Grik guards around the corner of the northeast wall of his master’s compound. He looked bedraggled, as well he might, after crash-landing his fighter at the destroyed central airstrip. Hearing from Fukui that their prisoners were missing, and fully understanding how important they might be to their survival, he gathered some Grik troops to search for them himself, after he reported to his lord. There was nothing else to do. If there were any planes left, they were five miles away on the peninsula strip. As he neared the HQ, however, he’d been stunned to discover the very prisoners he sought poking their heads over the far side of the stockade to view events in the bay. There was no mistake. He clearly saw the bleached-out sandy-brown hair and delicate features of Captain Reddy’s wife. Without stopping to go inside, he went to investigate. “Your hands! Now!” he screamed again, rigidly pointing his pistol at the group.
Corporal Tass of the 1st North Borno stood, still clutching his rifle, looking just like any other Grik. “I and One squad catched these, tryin’ to get gone,” he said excitedly, waving the other Khonashi to their feet. The Grik troops with the Japanese officer probably didn’t understand him, but visibly relaxed. With the slightest hesitation, but grasping his intent, Tass’s Khonashi comrades rose, leaving Sandra, Diania, Ruffy, and the three Shee-Ree sitting by the stockade.
Iguri looked at Tass with red-rimmed eyes, unsure. Something wasn’t right. Perhaps he’d never heard a Grik speak English so well or he recognized Maggiore Rizzo, bound and gagged. Maybe he realized there were too many Lemurians and not enough . . . That was when the “prisoners” raised their Blitzerbug SMGs and opened fire with a clattering roar. The first shots were ill aimed and some of Iguri’s squad was able to shoot back, but Iguri’s suspicions ended when a .45-caliber bullet spun through his left eye and blew out the back of his head. It was all over in seconds, hopefully little noticed over the roar of battle quickly approaching and the deadly duel at sea, but their small victory didn’t come without a cost. . . .
Savoie
Number Two Turret
“Whatever you do, don’t close that firing circuit!” Gunnery Sergeant Arnold Horn shouted down in the gun pit. He was back in the turret officer’s booth, staring through the range-finding periscope. The number one turret in front of them had already fired three times—six rounds—somewhat wildly missing their targets: ten lightly armored wooden frigates, their sails brailed up tight, steaming swiftly for the line of ironclad Grik cruisers. The four-stacker destroyer had made a pass at the cruisers, shooting them up with her 4″ guns before laying a heavy smoke screen in front of her friends. Then she raced behind the smoke, hopefully avoiding long-range fire from the two Grik BBs and a blizzard of shells from Savoie’s secondaries. Silva had told him that was James Ellis out there, not Walker, but the enemy wouldn’t know. And it was clear she was trying to bait Kurokawa’s heavies away from the impending frigate/DD-cruiser fight. Somewhat to Horn’s surprise, it seemed to be working. The smoke screen was dispersing now, but the Allied frigates would be masked by the cruisers and Ellie would be the only target for the mighty guns of two Grik battleships—and Savoie.
“Us not!” came the indignant roar from a Khonashi in the gun pit, awkwardly seated on the trainer’s stool. “Are us gonna shoot? Hoo at? How co’ us e’en load the dan’ guns?”
The loading procedure would’ve been comical if it hadn’t been so urgent and terrifying. As soon as the command for all guns to load and commence firing came over the speaker, a bell rang, signifying that a shell was in the hoist. After a frantic search by Horn and Lange—the first looking for a familiar lever switch; the second trying to read tiny brass plaques in the low light, while bleeding all over everything—they found the proper control, and a massive shell appeared in the hoist, nose down. What came next was intuitive to Horn, since USS New York had handled her shells the same way. He showed Brassey how to rig the brass loading tray and position the cradle to place the shell on it. “Wait!” he’d cried. “Pull the lift key in the base of the shell. Twist it out and throw it in that chute behind you.” Brassey did so, mystified. “Now everybody stand clear. Push that big lever there, Mr. Brassey.” A heavy, greasy chain ram clanked forward and pushed the huge shell into the breech. “Ease it in,” Horn almost whispered. “Okay, now reverse the lever.” Two big powder bags, together the size of an acetylene bottle, appeared in another chute, and the “prisoner” Grik, in apparent exasperation, hopped the tray and helped Brassey roll them on it. So intent on what he was doing, Brassey wasn’t even alarmed when the strange Grik joined him.
“There will be two more!” Lange had called. He’d gone to the other side to supervise the same effort beyond the partition. Horn had wondered how he knew, then realized the German sailor probably remembered quite a lot about the specs, if not the operation, of this class of ship. From their old war. The Grik prisoner helped push the bags forward, then joined Brassey in rolling two more into place before returning to stand by the breech. That was when Brassey realized how close he’d just been to a Grik that would’ve shredded him without thought minutes before. Lawrence had told him that older, smarter, “technical” Grik would surrender if given time to think about it. They might even cooperate. They had no idea if “combat” Grik would do so. Still, despite what Brassey told Horn earlier, this had been his first up-close experience with the phenomenon. Hands suddenly shaking, he’d used the ram to push all four bags behind the shell.