“Oops, that’s torn it!” Max Forton groaned irritably.
The squealing, gravelly electronic rasp of a single long targeting sonar ping seemed to reverberate around and through the Dreadnought’s pressure hull.
“Send S-One-Zero-One by target pings,” Collingwood ordered. There was another submarine out there, probably beyond the Enterprise. He asked himself if he ought to have gone silent as soon as the carrier altered course. Perhaps. He’d been playing hide and seek with the Yanks for a week and this was the first time they’d got the drop on him. There was no shame in it. He listened to the sonar man sending HMS Dreadnought’s pennant number in staccato pings of electrical energy.
There was a spine chilling pause while the control room held its collective breath after the signal had finished.
“I have low speed cavitations bearing zero-zero-eight, sir.”
“Range?”
There was a moment’s hesitation.
“Between three and four thousand yards, sir. I think he must have been deep and periodically coming up for a look around.”
That made perfect sense if there was more than one American SSN attached to the Enterprise battle Group.
New sonar pings began to scratch at the hull and the nerve endings of the men in the control rooms. The message seemed to go on forever. The Captain of HMS Dreadnought didn’t need to wait for a report.
SSN 589 TO S101 STOP IF EVER IN NORFOLK MEET ME AT VINCENTS BAR CAPTAIN STOP WE OUGHT TO COMPARE NOTES STOP GOOD HUNTING SIR STOP
Simon Collingwood drew breath again.
Okay, it transpired that the Captain of the Skipjack class attack submarine USS Scorpion didn’t want to trade torpedo salvoes today.
I can play nicely, too.
“Send,” he ordered, his heart beat slowing: “Thanks for the dance. Stop. I hope we never have to do this for real. Stop. God be with you sir. Message ends…
Chapter 16
Marija Calleja returned to her sparsely furnished, whitewashed second floor room — more of a nun’s cell — overlooking the shaded, garden courtyard of the inner hospital as the dusk was fast falling over the hilltop city at the heart of the island. The quiet daytime coolness of the room had turned to a chill as the night settled, so she drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders as she sat stiffly on the bed and with hands that trembled still, even after all these years as she steeled herself to open Peter’s latest letter.
By the grace of God it had been a good day.
Two baby girls born without apparent defects.
Both mothers were weary but overjoyed; and a little drunk with relief.
In the first days after the war they’d braced themselves for horrors to come. Mercifully, such horrors had been rare. There’d been more miscarriages, a few damaged babies. Perhaps, one-third more cases than in the two years before the cataclysm. Doctor Margo Seiffert, Marija’s mentor and friend since her earliest adolescence, had produced statistics measuring the pre and post-natal ‘conclusions’ before and after the war. She’d wanted to correlate her clinical records against the daily radiation counts she knew the British authorities monitored at twelve separate sites on the Maltese archipelago. The Surgeon General’s Office of the British Military Administration of the Maltese Archipelago had ignored her requests. They hadn’t even acknowledged receipt of those requests, this despite the fact St Catherine’s Hospital had submitted all its live and stillbirth statistical returns to the SGO, as required by the BMA of the MA. The proliferations of official acronyms was one of the numerous small, maddeningly petty daily vexations of living under martial law.
Peter’s letter was post marked 29 OCT 63. It had been franked by BFPO GOS. If it had been posted in Gosport, it told her that Peter’s ship was still based at Portsmouth. Or that it had been at Portsmouth around the end of last month. Many of his letters had reached her so badly mutilated by the censor that she had no idea where he was or had been for months. She took a deep breath. She’d been promised the censorship would cease and what she held in her trembling fingers was an apparently undoctored envelope holding out the tantalising promise of a similarly unmolested letter within.
She broke into the envelope.
27th October 1963
HMS Talavera, Fareham Creek
Dear Marija,
This is our seventh week swinging around our anchors and I think it is fair to say that we are getting royally cheesed off with the prolonged inactivity. I noticed that your last two letters (of 9th and 17th September) were more than usually ‘censored’ and had ISD stamps on every page. I hope this doesn’t reflect on the Med Fleet’s treatment of Joe, or suggest that you and your family are being overly put upon by the so-called security services.
Marija turned the three sheets of closely written script on the thin sheets she’d retrieved from the envelope and gasped with pleasure. There was not so much as a comma deleted, inked out, smudged or otherwise physically removed from Peter’s letter.
Things back in the old country improve a little, notwithstanding the rationing situation, which is now beginning to oppress the Fleet shore establishments.
People are quite horrified when I complain about your letters being mucked about so clumsily. It seems to me that if the rationale for holding onto bits of the Empire (or ‘Commonwealth’ as the politicos say these days) is to maintain the British way of life then exactly the same standards of justice, freedom of speech and association and so forth ought to apply in those ‘dominions’ or ‘protectorates’ as apply at home. We’re either all in this together or we’re not, etcetera!
Marija’s equilibrium was slowly returning. She forced herself to breathe deep and long in a useless attempt to still her rushing thoughts before she read on. Peter’s letters tended to dance about all over the place which made it even harder to follow his thoughts when a letter was heavily censored. Often, she’d spend literally hours piecing together what he’d been trying to say to her. A serious remark was followed by a quip, or an anecdote about the antics of a man in his division, or insights into the realities of life in the ‘old country’, a complaint about this or that naval idiosyncrasy, or a sardonic observation about his illustrious father’s latest ‘newspaper adventure’. It was pure bliss to be able to read Peter’s actual words. The letters they’d been exchanging for half a lifetime had become a long, unbroken conversation; a voyage into the unknown that over the years had become an exploration into the mind and the thoughts of one into the other.
She read and reread the letter until there was a gentle knock at her door.
It was Margo Seiffert who grinned wanly and dragged into the room. The older woman planted herself on the bed beside her younger friend. Marija held up the thin sheets covered in script, her mouth involuntarily quirking into a laughing, girlish smile.
“You have a visitor, my dear.”
Marija knew who’d be downstairs, cap in hand, pacing the small ground floor reception area. She said nothing, simply nodded.