“From her pennant number the destroyer is HMS Talavera,” Walter Brenckmann explained. “She was running radar trials out of Chatham the day the war happened. A lot of her people had families in the Medway Basin. Obviously, they don’t have any more. But that’s not the thing.”
“I still don’t understand, sir?”
“How would you feel about cross decking ammunition on a day like this in peacetime, Lieutenant?”
“The Brits are crazy, sir. Everybody knows that.”
“What Executive Officer in peacetime would allow his paintwork to bump and grind up and down the side of rusty old scow like that?”
The Marine did not respond and the older man realised the young man was beginning to suspect he was being mocked.
“You’re new over here, son,” he said lowly in his best courtroom fatherly manner. “I spent three years on a tin can in the Atlantic fighting side by side with the Brits and yes, they can be a little crazy. But what’s going on down there ain’t crazy. All you’ve got to do it look at it from their point of view. That destroyer cross-decking ammunition is doing it down there for a reason. Everywhere up and down this coast British ships are filling their tanks and taking on bullets wherever and however they can in a God-awful hurry,” he hesitated, wondering if he was being melodramatic. No, he wasn’t being melodramatic, he decided. “They’re not doing it because they like doing it. They’re doing it because they believe they must do it. They’re sending everything they’ve got that will float to sea. Any day now the first of their big rescue convoys is arriving and they’re telling us, us, Lieutenant, that if we mess with them we’re going to be in a world of pain.”
The younger man frowned as he digested this.
“Why would we mess with their goddam convoys, sir?” The very notion of it seemed utterly preposterous to him.
“How would you feel if your best buddy burned down your house and killed your mother and father just to save his daughter’s Wendy House from burning down?” He picked up his Zeiss binoculars and focused on the human chain manhandling 4.5 inch fixed shells into HMS Talavera’s forward magazines. He tracked aft. A long wooden crate was swinging above the quadruple air to air missile launcher on the stern house. The flyboys didn’t rate Sea Cat as any kind of threat but if it ever came to a fight they wouldn’t be dodging single shots, the Brits didn’t fight that way.
“That wasn’t the way it was, sir,” the younger man objected, becoming ever more respectful. He’d already worked out that his new chief wasn’t one of those old Navy arseholes who regarded Marines as knuckleheaded semi-evolved punch bags. Brenckmann reminded him of Mister Santos, the history teacher at his High School back home who’d coached the ball team. Mister Santos was grey haired, round-faced and wise-eyed and he’d recognised in the angry, tearaway kid that everybody else had already written off something that the tearaway kid hadn’t recognised in himself. Karl Devowski wouldn’t have got to go to college, or got to go to the US Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico if it hadn’t been for Mister Santos. Captain Brenckmann had the same calm, unflappable reasonableness about him and it underlay every word he said. “Was it?”
“It probably doesn’t matter how it was, Lieutenant,” the older man conceded, “but that’s exactly the way the Brits see it, and that’s the thing that matters.”
“Sir!” Called one of the M16-totting Marine bodyguards. “I think we’ve got a problem!”
If Walter Brenckmann had learned one thing above all others in his years in the US Navy it was that when a Marine admitted ‘we’ve got a problem’ he wasn’t usually joshing.
He turned to face the grim-faced youngster.
“We got people coming up the hill, sir.”
Brenckmann nodded. “Shoulder your weapons. Nobody fires a round unless I tell you to!” He was already walking around the staff car, a big Plymouth shipped in from the States and instantly recognisable as being ‘not of these islands’.
There were three vehicles coming up the hilclass="underline" a small black police car, a camouflaged Land Rover and some kind of old, flat-sided civilian truck with a canvass enclosed cargo deck.
“What do you think, sir?” Karl Devowski asked unbuttoning his uniform coat to give him easy access to his holstered Colt.
“I think we show these guys our ID papers and make nice.”
“What if they don’t want to play nice, sir?”
Spits of rain carried on the wind as two uniformed police offices, both armed with ancient Webley pistols holstered but on lanyards around their necks, clambered out of the small black Austin police car. Men in brown Army uniforms tipped out of truck and formed into a short line. The soldiers looked like members of the new Home Defence Volunteer Militia. They were carrying Second World War vintage lee Enfield rifles. Their officer, a tall, hatchet faced man of late middle years stalked stiffly towards the Americans flanked by the two policemen.
“Who the blazes are you fellows?” He demanded irritably.
Walter Brenckmann came to attention and Karl Devowski did likewise. Both men saluted crisply.
“Brenckmann,” he intoned. “Captain, United States Navy. I am the Naval Attaché to the US Embassy to the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, sir.”
The officer scowling at him wore the insignia of a major.
“And this,” Walter Brenckmann continued levelly, “is my aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Devowski, United States Marine Corps.”
The militia officer eyed the two Marine bodyguards, each with their M16s slung over their broad shoulders. Belatedly, he returned the salutes of the two Americans.
“Cummings,” he growled. “Second South Dorset Regiment, First Battalion Queen’s Own Volunteer s. Were you aware that Weymouth, Chesil Beach and Portland are currently designated as restricted military areas?”
Walter Brenckmann affected wounded bewilderment, falling back onto a well-rehearsed court room expression.
“Restricted military areas? I’m sorry I don’t understand the problem, Major Cummings?”
The other man was grinding his teeth.
“No, people like you never do,” he muttered. He took a deep breath. “You and your men are under arrest for trespassing in a restricted area. Put down your weapons.”
Nobody moved.
“Major, is this really necessary?”
Both policemen at the British officer’s shoulder were fingering their pistols. A rifle bolt clicked loudly, then another and another from the ragged line of brown uniformed militiamen standing in front of the truck.
“Stand easy!” Walter Brenckmann called, exclusively for the ears of the two Marines with the M16s. He reached slowly into his coat and pulled out his ID card. “Major Cummings. I am obliged to show you my accreditation…”
Once disarmed the four Americans were instructed to get into the Plymouth and to follow the police car further up onto Portland Bill with the Land Rover and the civilian truck full of ‘volunteers’ bringing up the rear. The road terminated inside the quadrangle of an old white stone fort. Walter Brenckmann found himself separated from his men and marched to a holding cell two levels down in the bowels of the fortress. His captors didn’t bother to close the door but two regular Army soldiers equipped with L1A1 SLRs as opposed to the antiquated Lee Enfields of the militia volunteers stood guard in the corridor. After about an hour a subaltern stuck his head around the door and asked him if he was ‘comfortable’.