The absence of significant heavy bunker oil contamination and the fact that the Engine Room bilge was dry after the run from Portsmouth tended to indicate that Talavera had come to no harm touching bottom in the muddy waters of Fareham Creek at the end of September.
“Carry on,” Peter Christopher nodded to the panting artificer who fled back down towards the cauldron of the Boiler Rooms. Peter didn’t watch him depart. He stepped over to the nearest communications handset. “Bridge for the Captain.”
“Captain here,” rang out David Penberthy’s unusually terse voice.
“Officer of the Watch, sir,” Peter retorted mechanically. “I thought you’d like to know the latest bunker report gives the ship a clean bill of health, sir.”
“That’s good news. How much gas have we got left in the tank after last night?”
Once out in the Channel Talavera had worked up to twenty-nine knots. Her stern had dug deep into the black water and her bow had cleaved a great furrow in the cold dark waves.
“Eighty-one percent, sir.”
“Perhaps we weren’t quite down to the sludge in the bottom of the bilges like the Chief was afraid?” The Captain of HMS Talavera chortled as he and the younger man did the mental arithmetic and approximately reconciled the Engineering Department’s original bunker capacity estimate with the amount of fuel the destroyer had burned in the high speed overnight steaming trials. They must have had at least thirty to forty tons more bunker oil on board than the Chief had estimated seventy-two hours ago.
The Chief — Lieutenant-Commander Neil Fisk was new to Talavera, having come aboard only two months ago — as the Engineering Officer was always referred to, was a quietly spoken man of very few words who was never happier than when he had his arms up to the elbows in grime and his head stuck inside a grubby manual or peering into a gearbox or boiler.
Nobody talked about his predecessor; John Cook. John had been a decent man profoundly happy in his marriage and devoted to his three young children. He’d never come to terms with things after he finally accepted that the road where they’d lived just outside Chatham no longer existed. In retrospect it was inevitable that he’d commit suicide as so many others had done before him. The only oddity about the event was the manner in which he’d done the deed; wrapping himself in a loop of anchor chain as he stepped off the stern. Divers had found his body buried chest deep in the mud of the Creek within a few feet of where he’d gone into the water, his arms waving slowly in the ebbing tide.
More than once Peter had caught sight of Spider McCann, the Master of Arms, standing at the stern deck house rail beneath the quadruple Sea Cat mount gazing thoughtfully down into the green grey waters. He and the Engineering Officer hadn’t been close friends, service relationships and the protocols governing the conduct of commissioned and even the most senior non-commissioned officers didn’t allow for such things but the two men had shared a deep mutual respect. They’d both been men of Kent, both were from families deeply rooted in the Naval society and traditions of the Medway towns, and both had been widowed by the 1.17 megaton ground burst that instantaneously erased hundreds of years of history and the nation’s oldest naval community.
John Cook had been the last of Talavera’s five suicides.
Another seventeen men who’d been onboard her that dreadful night thirteen months ago had deserted, although eight had subsequently rejoined the ship of their own volition. Men who deserted and returned voluntarily were always accepted back into a ship with a clean slate. The Admiralty had attempted to crack down in the first weeks after the war; but most Captains were only too eager to welcome back a man, any man, who came to his senses and asked to be readmitted to the brotherhood of his old crew. Such were the realities of the new age in which every ship was a repository of untold grief, loss and incendiary outrage.
Anger was too small and frail a word to describe how Peter Christopher’s generation felt about what had happened to the old world. His generation had never seen the face of their enemies. His father’s generation had fought Hitler, that generation had known their enemy. Not so their sons and daughters. The Soviet Union had always been an amorphous thing forever beyond and below the horizon, too far distant and in so many ways incomprehensible to the generations brought up in the diminishing austerity and gathering optimism of the post-1945 western world. Every last scintilla of the future of which Peter Christopher’s generation had dreamed had been shredded, blasted and incinerated not by the Soviets but by Uncle Sam. That the moribund, complacent hide-bound, inbred incompetents who’d overseen the terminal decline of the British Empire were partly to blame for the catastrophe was a self-evident truth. But Harold MacMillan and his cronies hadn’t actually caused the cataclysm, that had been an act of malignant hubris far beyond the limited imagination of Supermac’s feeble-minded crowd…
“Sir?”
The voice of the yeoman standing by his shoulder snapped Peter out of the brooding introspection which had fallen upon him without warning. He hadn’t heard the other man come on the bridge.
“Yes, what is it?” He asked, removing his cap and running a distracted hand through his tousled hair. ‘I need a haircut,’ he told himself.
“RFA Sycamore reports she’s dragging her stern anchor, sir.”
Chapter 11
“It was so good of you to make time in you busy schedule to fit me in,” Margaret Thatcher declared as if she was reciting from articles carved into tablets of stone. Her whole being communicated how extremely pleased and flattered she was to be spared a few minutes of the great man’s time.
The tall patrician man with the handsome weather-bronzed features and the bearing of a man who’d commanded others in battle more times than he could casually recall took the Minister of Supply’s cool white manicured hand in his own large, calloused grasp. His grip was gently firm and when the woman closed her other hand over it he half-smiled, and imperceptibly, bowed his acknowledgement.
Since their first encounter Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher had spoken to his colleagues and made certain, very discreet, enquires about the background, character and qualities of the thirty-eight year woman — the sole representative of her gender in the first rank of Edward Heath’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration — who seemed to have an uncanny knack of either enchanting or completely alienating everybody who came into contact with her. Everything he’d learned in the last few days had heightened his curiosity so when the ‘Angry Widow’ had invited him to join her ‘for tea’ that afternoon he’d dropped what he was doing without a moment’s hesitation.
“I confess,” he assured his host, “that your invitation provided me with the perfect excuse to escape, albeit briefly I fear, the interminable merry go round of meetings that have become the bane of my life ever since I landed on home soil. I can honestly say that never was an invitation to tea more gratefully received and subsequently more instantaneously accepted than your kind invitation, Madam.”
Margaret Thatcher had never been above flirting to advance, or to ease her way in politics but she never, ever let it distract her from the main thing. If there was quiet amusement in her blue eyes that afternoon it was tempered with a steely appreciation of the manner of man whom she’d invited into her inner sanctum. Into her home, what little there was of it to call home in this bleak old house outside Cheltenham.