Everything that she was designed to do.
In the end — and this was the point on which the lives of the officers and men of Nottingham depended — she was designed to fight. That was a fact about which there was no dispute. Her four Admiralty three-drum boilers and four steam-powered Parsons single-reduction-geared turbines driving four shafts at eighty thousand shaft horsepower, so that she could close with the enemy at thirty knots and bring her twelve 8-inch guns to bear — that was a certainty. The uncertainty lay not with the crew, or their vessel, or its capabilities — it lay with her captain. Would he be willing to sacrifice the machine that he cared so much for; would he take it where it would be horribly mutilated or destroyed; or would he, for whatever reason, Exhibit Reluctance?
Captain Prader, DSO, was chatting with an officer and eight ratings manning the two huge electronic computing tables occupying half the deck space in the transmitting room, twenty feet below the waterline. The room was aft of B Magazine and forward of A Boiler, uncomfortably pinned between fuel tanks — when he heard the announcement over the Tannoy System.
“Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Captain Prader to the compass platform, please.”
It was strange because the yeoman’s human voice was converted to electronic signals and transmitted over miles of wires to come out of a speaker box mounted on the wall. The journey was mostly by machine and yet the message sent a chill down Prader’s spine because he could read, machine or not, wires and speaker boxes aside, that something extraordinary was happening.
Cole had called Rebecca and offered to come over and help her clean up after the raid. She would be at work, she had said, but the front door would be unlocked. He surveyed the disheveled condition of the house after he arrived and couldn’t decide where to start. It was apparent she’d managed to pick up a few things after the raid, but for the most part the place was a wreck.
Rebecca came in several hours later. She looked worn out and Cole fixed her a drink.
“The tram was out most of the way and the buses were packed,” she explained as they sat on the couch.
“You should have told me. I would have picked you up.”
“I didn’t know when I left,” she replied, cradling the glass in her hands. “It was especially bad today. Jerry’s bombed the docks again. Fixing the poor souls up in the infirmary or an operating room is bad enough, but at least you can control things there. Believe it or not, it’s a sort of haven. But the corridors, they must lead straight to hell. That’s where we put the patients when there is no room in the wards. Blood everywhere, torn bodies, people screaming. One man stopped me, holding a little boy in his arms. He said, ‘Miss? Miss? Can you see to Tommy? He’s been hurt in the bombing. What shall I do?’” She took a drink and Cole could see her hands tremble. “The child’s leg was gone, Jordan. There wasn’t a drop of blood left in that pale little body. I can’t help them, can I? Not after all the life’s drained from them or there’s whole pieces missing. After a while I simply get numb. But I have to, don’t I?”
“It’s a way to survive.”
“It’s not such a bad way to handle things, is it? Simply turn your emotions off. If not, I’d go mad, more so than I am now. I don’t want to remember what I’ve seen — I don’t want those chalky white faces or shattered bodies in my dreams. I’m damaged enough, Jordan. Even before I got into this bloody business, I was damaged. I thought, ‘Here is something I can do. Here is a way to be me.’ Just my cursed luck a war breaks out. Now life is a constant, endless carousel of death.” She smiled weakly and he could see the unfathomable pain behind the mask. “So you see,” she added, “if I can keep at least one part of my life from falling to pieces…” She was talking about her marriage, of course, and Cole had a sinking feeling that she was going to tell him that they couldn’t see each other anymore.
He watched her make a drink, the silence between them saying so much more than any words could. She sat down and after taking a healthy swig fixed Cole with red-rimmed eyes.
“Doesn’t ever seem to end, does it?”
He knew that she was grieving for herself as well as for those that she fought to save. He listened.
“I’ve something to tell you.”
He watched her struggle with the words, his insides churning. He wanted to stop her from saying whatever she was going to say because he was afraid. His world was crumbling and he felt like a child again, lost, betrayed, abandoned.
“Greg’ll be coming home soon. Perhaps a month.”
Jordan sat back in the couch, trying to fight the panic that welled up in him.
“That’s what the army tells me. Thirty days. They sent me a cable at work.” She took a drink. “He’s been burned. That happens to a lot of chaps in the tank corps. He wrote me a letter when he first got there. He was afraid of being ‘lit up.’ That’s what he called it. ‘I shan’t like to be in Rebecca if she’s lit up,’ he said.”
She took another drink, finished it off, and made herself another. “Well, I suppose he was in Rebecca, when it happened. He named it after me. Ironic, don’t you think?” She pulled a letter from her purse and slowly opened it. Cole watched without saying a word.
She looked at Cole and said offhandedly: “It’s from Greg. It came just after the cable.” She opened it tenderly, took a drink, and read. “‘It won’t do any good to be cheery because there is nothing to be cheery about. Colin and Angie are dead.’” She looked up. “Those were his chums,” she said and continued reading. “‘I wish I were. The butchers took my leg and they won’t give me a mirror, so I suppose I’m burned as black as a nigger. It’s all too funny, isn’t it — I was such a handsome fellow on the arm of the most beautiful woman in London. Now I’ll be on your arm so that you can help me walk. I cry a lot, as much for myself as the other chaps. You get close enough with your fellows in a tank so that when you hear their screams, as they are burned alive, it does something to you. I was lucky, I suppose. I got blown right out of the top hatch when the shell hit. I must have looked like a Guy Fawkes rocket. All fire and smoke. I don’t know what happened. Honestly.’”
She took a drink and turned the letter over. “‘We’ve got to come to terms with some things, Becky. I’m not the man that left — I almost said that I’m not the man you loved, but I’m not sure that was ever the case. Maybe…’” She stopped reading, stuffed the letter in the pocket of her jacket, and finished off her drink.