I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

The Cannon thundered in the South.


Christmas evening, 1944. South China Sea.

The hour she had predicted passed without result.

Ono, on the barge, had sent one of his friends down the hatchway to grab some jugs of beer to keep the barge crew occupied, and the Captain caught him on the way up and shoved a big handful of dice into his pockets.

The whole control room was already nervous: Qiang Jue was well within shooting range of both large escorts, and very soon, radio or no, she would be expected to authenticate herself. Dark was coming, but radar could keep the escorts on their tail indefinitely, should they choose to pursue. The trick would be to get completely out of range without the hunters suspecting them.

"It's been a while, Chief. Should we excuse ourselves?" Song asked. A groan circled the control room, and one of the gunners dialed the radio back and forth between frequencies. Silence.

Captain Swann picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the escort ships: they could have been sleeping, though that wouldn't likely last. "In time," she told him. "Bjorn, pass the word to burn another jar of smoking grease in the stern, if you would."

"Aye, Zhu Hong," said the Viking, and stumped down the stairs. His Cantonese was bad, but better than his English.

She stifled a sigh. "Song, feather the throttle; let them see us limping. Ono will know what to say." It seemed the whole take for Qiang Jue today would be whatever Ono had found in the barge crew's pockets. Captain Swann hated to drop a pursuit, but this was no time to be stubborn.

She herself took the ladder to the island's roof, overlooking the ship, the convoy, and Ono and his supporting cast, opened a chest of silk flags, and began to hook together the signal for returning to home port for repair. She sat on the blanket-sized Stars and Stripes that lay taut against the steel decking, concealed from the boats' eyes, and huffed to herself, watching a fresh plume of noxious smoke roil out of the stern, feeling the ship lurch under her at Song's touch. The last signal on the mast under the Rising Sun, fit for escort duty, stayed up. They had every reason to dawdle. Soon they would be turning around, putting their wake to the ships, and they would be lost beyond the horizon before the escorts put together that no gunboat with their name ought to have been near this area.

On the deck, a few navy men from the barge had climbed up to the Qiang Jue carrying toolkits, and now trooped cheerfully down the pitch-dark hatchway, presumably to help their fellow Japanese with the engines.

Captain Swann started in horror as the men disappeared below, and stifled a rain of curses.

By letting them board, and encounter the rest of the crew, Ono Toru had just let them fall into a bloody hostage crisis. There was no way now Qiang Jue could simply slip toward Japan out of sight, not with three Japanese crew in the hands of the riled brigands blocking the halls belowdecks.

For them to get away, the barge had to rejoin the convoy without raising an alarm. They barge's crew now had to be silenced--but bound, unconscious men could not drive. Perhaps Ono could tie the tiller and use the tents to shield the captain's place from view: then if by some miracle the sea stayed flat, the convoy kept straight, and no one turned their binoculars too closely to the crew tent, Qiang Jue might be able to release the barge, then play injured and limp toward Japan far enough to lose the escorts.

They might.

Captain Swann was furious. Where before, she had had a decent plan—risky, but with good enough rewards and an excellent escape route—now she had a very bad plan, a foolhardy plan, a bloody stupid daft plan for no reason at all but the judgment lapse of an irresponsible Japanese negotiator.

She grunted in frustration, biting her fist, then took a slow breath, lowered herself down the ladder to the deck, and limped across to the men at the railing, favoring one foot and clutching an arm to her chest, keeping the bandaged side of her face toward the barge. Pulling to the edge of the little crowd, she grabbed a friend of Ono's by the elbow. "Why don't we share that tuna we caught this morning with these sailors?" she whispered in his ear. "Tell them about the sake, too, the aged jug. Give anyone who declines the invitation a nap. Take your time, and tie the steering." He nodded, and offered her a pitcher of beer and a mug, which she waved off. She glanced down over the rail at the barge and saw Ono and three of her crew working some sort of eight-way dice game with the barge crew, playing for cigarettes. She forced herself to nod approval; no sense in unsettling them during such a delicate operation.

She returned to the stifling glassed-in control tower, and watched as a whole passel of hungry sailors swarmed up the railing and filed down the hatchway to the waiting pirates, no doubt to be clubbed and trussed: the first stage of a fruitless retreat.

There were no shots fired below, and for that she was grateful.

"Stern and port!" the Philipino shouted, breaking her thoughts.

Captain Swann and everyone who was able spun about. A tiny shadow rose above the horizon in the South-East.

Elizabeth lunged for the radio and turned to 42.3. "'—in sight. Torpedoes ready? Sound off.' 'Ready.' 'Ready.' 'Roger.' 'Ready.' 'You know it!' 'Ready.' 'Check all! Whoop!'"

She grinned. The men around her cheered, and she fairly panted with triumph.

"How long?" Song asked. He had barely taken his eyes off his course and the vessels beside them.

"Minutes," said the Captain. "Begin to move off."

Another young Chinese man listened to the calls of the radio. "What are they saying?"

"They are readying their bombs," Elizabeth breathed, before snapping to the next task. She reached into a jacket pocket, pulled out a small booklet printed on thin, waterproof paper, and turned it to the day's date. "Quiet, may I have quiet please, men. Thank-you." She took up the microphone and began to broadcast, muffling the sound under a handkerchief, dragging out an American accent, and deepening her voice. "Fox, oboe, negat, one, zero, niner. The fresco is on the East wall. Fox, oboe, negat, one, zero, niner. The fresco is on the East wall. This is Private Morrison, Marine reconnaissance. Come in, flyboys, over."

"Get off the radio, Dick, we're on a torpedo run, here, over."

"Roger that, flight commander, I'm watching your approach as we speak. The south-west gunboat is not Japanese, over."

"What the hell?" The flight commander fairly spat into his microphone.

"Repeat, the south-west gunboat is friendly. Pass the word to spare the boat with the Stars and Stripes on the roof. We'll start shooting when you start bombing; right now we're incognito. Thank-you kindly for stepping in, over and out."

Captain Swann set down the microphone with a click, as the flight commander shouted for Morrison to repeat himself, and switched to the navy's frequency, where the escorts' captains were exchanging battle plans: they, also, had sighted the incoming torpedo planes. "I will run up the flags for 'enemy sighted,'" she announced. "Song, you can start breaking away in earnest."

Outside, the whine of Helldiver engines sang over the water, and she looked down at the barge in satisfaction: two genuine navy men lay hogtied next to an overturned table, and Ono stood over them, signing her the thumbs-up. She strung together the appropriate signal, fingering the black flag that lay in the box beside the silk: coarse, bullet-ridden, fading. Hers.


Enemy sighted SE fluttered aloft under the Rising Sun, and Elizabeth laughed.

The convoy was dissolving, barges stringing out into a broad fan, the forward boats piling on speed and the rear boats cutting power, to present as thin a killing ground as possible to the incoming planes. Qiang Jue, as it sped off to the South, might have been following procedure but for the barge strapped to its side.

Faster and faster the planes closed, looming blocky, clumsy, with big tails and enormous round noses, their shadows streaking over the water, as the escorts brought their antiaircraft cannons to bear and at last unleashed a gut-shocking roar of gunfire. The planes swept overhead—so many of them, twelve planes for twelve vessels—and stooping to the sea like gulls, great columns of torpedoes fell. All of them hit the water beyond Qiang Jue.

As escorts and barges began to founder, as the blasts boomed with fire and spray, Song pounded the throttle and showed their massive wake to the convoy.

"Run out the crane!" Captain Swann bellowed, half-leaping, half-sliding down the island ladder to the deck. She cranked open the hatchway. "All's well! Load this catch, so we can cut the barge away to run free!"

Guns forgotten, her crew poured, blinking, into the daylight, the American marines bringing up the rear. Coulter and Morrison were treated to the retreating sight of a flight of American torpedo planes sinking a tiny convoy of insignificant warships and small supply barges, as Qiang Jue's crew swung crates of who-knew-what and bundles of cloth and food onto the deck by a swinging boom crane.

As Captain Swann stood on a low rung of the ladder, calling out to the men to direct the flow of heavy boxes and sort supplies for storage, Sally poked her in the ankle. "Cap'n," said Sally, catching her at a pause. "What'd'you say we do with the Japs in the cafeteria?"

"Get Bjorn to haul them up and dump them in the barge," the Captain replied carelessly, before yelling in Korean, "Kim! Go left!" and averting a collision between two men with boxes in front of their eyes.

"That'll be a bit tricky without tying them up first," said Sally. "How about we just wave some beer in their faces and lead them to their barge—"

"Navy men are loose in our ship?" Captain Swann demanded, alarmed. "Have you no idea the damage they can do?"

"Why would they? They think we're one of theirs."

Captain Swann blinked down at the flighty bronze face below her. "Do you mean they don't yet know they were captured?"

"They're eatin' fish and drinkin' sake as we speak, Cap'n."

"But the men, the guns! How did they not see—"

"The hall light's broke. I had 'em scoot back a bit when the Japs came. Greeted the boys myself!"

"What of your accent?"

"They thought I had a lithp."

"But with a woman aboard—"

"They thought I had a cold, too, and it was pitch dark. They're full out stonkered, Cap'n. You could play Girl From Ipanema, hand a bloke a mop, and he'd kiss it and tango 'cross the deck."

Sally grinned, and Captain Swann broke into a surprised smile. "So all this time," the Captain said, "we could have returned these gentlemen to their vessel, sent them along, and made a clean retreat by the original plan."

Sally nodded, then hooked an elbow around the ladder in a show of nonchalance.

"Whoever thought this up," said Captain Swann, still smiling, "that was very clever. If the planes had not come, that could very well have saved the ship."

"Don't act so surprised, Cap'n," said Sally, her grin tightening into what to Captain Swann was a long-familiar smirk. "After all, I am—"

"Get below and do not finish that sentence," Captain Swann growled. Sally huffed and stalked off. "Insufferable…"


Helldiver: a genuine name for a genuine plane, a carrier-launched torpedo bomber.

Well, I hope that wasn't too boring. I tried real hard to tighten up those last two chapters.