Captain Skinner lowered his binoculars, his face set and watchful. Then he leaned into the voice pipe that snaked down below. ‘Bridge to wheelhouse,’ he barked. ‘Increase speed to 15 knots!’ I could hear men all over the ship still hurrying to their various action stations. ‘Number One,’ he said to Weston. ‘See if you can get that bearing.’
Thankfully, the firing ceased almost as soon as it started, and the whole thing was over in a matter of moments. And as I quivered behind Captain Skinner, wondering quite what had just happened, I was reassured to hear his voice take on a less anxious tone.
‘Looks like we’ve just been caught in the crossfire,’ he said to Weston. ‘That salvo clearly wasn’t meant for us, or they would have hit us, wouldn’t they? Perhaps it was just a show of strength.’
‘Or they didn’t see the ensign,’ Weston suggested.
‘Maybe so.’ He paused and peered across at the north bank, which clearly told him little. ‘Well, unless we’ve an errant communist shore battery on our hands. Order the X gun crew to unfurl the Union Jacks just to be on the safe side.’ The first lieutenant did so. ‘In any event,’ he mused, scanning the north shore once again through his binoculars, ‘we’re sitting ducks and need to be clear of this as soon as possible.’ He leaned again to the voice pipe. ‘Bridge to wheelhouse. Let’s have 19 knots now. Full ahead.’
He turned to me then. ‘You still here, Simon? Looks like you’re finally seeing a bit of action, eh?’ He stroked me absently. ‘Let’s hope we don’t see any more, eh?’
It was a wish that was not to be granted.
We continued up the river for several minutes, everyone on the bridge tense and watchful. Despite Captain Skinner’s apparent confidence that the shells hadn’t been meant for us, there was still a sense of nervous anticipation in the air. He’d been right. Whoever they’d been meant for – the nationalists on the south bank, presumably – we were right in the path of any further fire directed their way.
The minutes continued to pass, though, and with every mile we put between ourselves and whoever had fired on us, I began to feel a little less frightened. We’d soon be clear of the wayward battery and could relax, if only a little. Even so, my hackles kept rising and I refused to be reassured, and, ever conscious that the captain might need to take decisive action, I decided to go below again and get out of his way.
I jumped down from my box, and made my way down the ladder to the foredeck, passing Frank, who was hurrying up it past me, his eyes focused up and forward. He almost vaulted me, seemingly oblivious to my being there.
Other than that, I saw no one. The whole crew were on alert still, everyone manning their various stations. From the passageway that led to the captain’s cabin, which seemed as sensible a place to go as any, the thing I could feel, over and above everything else, was the vibration under my paws as the huge turbines toiled beneath me; powering the Amethyst at a speed I had yet to feel her go, and churning the water into an angry, boiling soup.
But it seemed there was more than one shore battery keeping watch on our progress, because no sooner had I hopped up onto the captain’s desk, in order to see out of the scuttle, than the Amethyst lurched violently to starboard, knocking me off my feet. I scrabbled back up, but no sooner had I got my balance once again than another blast – another shell! – made the water foam in front of me. Just as I recognised that I should immediately take cover, I was ripped from my feet again, the air torn from my lungs, and the world swam away from me and disappeared.
Chapter 10
When I woke I could hear nothing but the drone of a mosquito. For a time I simply focused on the low, monotone buzzing sound, and tried to work out where I was. I was lying on a bunk, so my first thought was that I was still in Captain Skinner’s cabin, but something felt wrong. I struggled to clear my head enough to work out what it was. I was definitely in a cabin, but which? Not the captain’s. I couldn’t be in the captain’s, because… because… because what? Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to focus. I looked around me, sideways on, only one eye fully open, and at last my gaze came to rest on something that looked familiar – the collection of photographs pinned on the bulkhead opposite, which I recognised as belonging to Petty Officer Griffiths. I saw his locker then, as well. The place where he often parked his cap. But there was no cap. It was now open, the lid upright and some of the clothing spewing out of it, as if caught in the act of escaping.
I strained to listen; to pick up something other than the mosquito’s incessant whining, and realised that it wasn’t even a mosquito – the noise was a constant ringing inside my ears. But there was nothing to help me make sense of what had happened. I hadn’t the slightest idea of how I came to be here.
I tried to ferret in my mind for the last thing I could remember, but hard as I tried, I found I could not. There had been shouting, the clang of the ship’s bell – which resulted in more shouting – and yet more of those terrifying noises. Explosions and wheee sounds and deafening crumps that sounded like the ship was being ripped and gored and beaten, the licks of flame, the sting of smoke thick and acrid on the air.
And then… what? What had happened? How had I come to be here? How long had I been here? I knew it was light – well, more a dove grey, from what little that I could see through the scuttle – but I realised I had no idea of time, of what day it was; no idea how long I might have slept. I felt sluggish, stiff and listless, as if I’d been asleep for a long time – a deep, dreamless sleep – having lain in an awkward position.
I lifted my nose to sniff the air again and immediately regretted it. For some reason it hurt to move my head. It hurt a lot, in fact; a tentative stretch of my neck immediately confirmed it, pain streaking through my hind legs with such heat and intensity that I knew I must be very badly hurt.
I stayed still, concentrating as hard as I could on not moving; despite the constant urge to shake the noise out of my ears. It helped that I was too scared to even try to see my injuries, so I lay rigid but inert, waiting for both my heart and my head to stop pounding, and for the pain to subside to something I could deal with.
And I would have dealt with it, had my slow slide back into painless oblivion not been arrested by the sound of a single, anguished moan, which seemed to be coming from somewhere close by. I thought I recognised the voice, too. Was it Lieutenant Weston’s? Fear flooded in. Was he hurt? Had he been injured as well?
It all came back to me then, quickly, intensely and chillingly: the communists. The shells. The orders barked down the voice pipes. Bridge to wheelhouse. Full speed ahead! The Amethyst powering upriver, away from the first shore batteries, the captain not quite believing that what was happening could be happening; that we’d been anything other than simply caught in the crossfire between the communists and nationalists occupying the opposite shores.