A nurse with her cheeks flushed with excitement stuck her head around the door.
“There are Fleet Air Arm jet fighters overflying the Bay and there are two of our destroyers out in the Straits!”
“Comrade Rykov,” Denzil Williams inquired, not hiding his disdain, “are you able to walk?”
“I think so.”
“In that case I suggest you and Clara follow me.”
Progress through the corridors and up two flights of steps was slow and painful. It was some minutes before the trio emerged into the late afternoon windblown winter sunshine. By then Arkady Rykov was virtually being carried between the man and the woman. The whistling whine of jet engines roared across Algeciras Bay, reverberating off the Rock. A Bentley in drab Army green was idling outside the service exit. Arkady Rykov and Clara Pullman were gestured to get into the back seats and Denzil Williams dropped beside the driver a hatchet-faced Redcap who seemed to know where to go. Arkady Rykov thought he was going to be sick when the car lurched forward.
The Bentley rumbled across Main Street down towards the docks. In the fading light the slab-sided bulk of HMS Albion nestled in the safety of her dry dock. Moored just inside the sea wall the dark silhouette of HMS Cavalier lurked, her hull partially masked from view of watchers on the other side of Algeciras Bay, her guns elevated to fire over the wall. Every door they passed seemed to be heavily sandbagged and most of the side roads were barricaded or obstructed with checkpoints.
“Where are we going?” The prisoner asked.
“England, eventually.”
“Oh…” The man felt Clara’s hand squeeze his.
“First you get to go on a little helicopter trip out to the Hermes. Assuming you don’t get shot down by the Dagoes — their copies of the old Messerschmitt 109 are just about up to shooting down a chopper — it’ll be up to the Navy to get you back to blighty. Probably, in its own sweet time knowing the Navy.”
HMS Albion’s surviving helicopters were parked with their rotors folded back on every available piece of hard standing on Europa Point. A landing pad area had been cleared on a grassy area near the eastern shoreline and on it sat a Westland Wessex with its rotors milling slowly.
Denzil Williams clambered out of the car with the agility of a fur seal hauling itself up onto dry land and half-jogged, half-waddled over to two Royal Marines carrying L1A1 SLRs. They pointed him towards a figure emerging from the cabin of the Wessex. He and the SIS man and he fell into conversation for some seconds. Hands were shaken.
“They’re ready to go as soon as the current combat air patrol is relieved,” Denzil Williams explained cheerfully when he got back to the Bentley. “The chaps up above right now are running low on fuel so they’d be in a bit of a jam if the Dagoes got cheeky. You two love birds better get onboard sharpish. When the chaps get the word to go they won’t be hanging around.”
Arkady Rykov had to be lifted into the cabin of the helicopter.
The crewman who dragged him into the aircraft — as carefully as was possible in the circumstances — frowned worriedly at him.
“Jesus, shouldn’t you be on a stretcher, mate?”
The man was even more taken aback to discovered that the injured man’s companion was a shapely blond attired in what looked like a Royal navy engine room artificer’s boiler suit.
“No luggage?”
“No,” Clara Pullman replied, sparing the man a harassed smile. She’d got to the stage where she was becoming totally disorientated by events.
Both passengers were strapped into jump seats on the port side of the fuselage opposite the big hatch through which they’d entered the machine. Suddenly, the engine noise became a whining, deafening roar and the whole world began to thrum and shake. A few seconds later the Wessex rolled forward and then, as if by magic it was rising into the air.
“It’s about a thirty minute run back to the Happy H!” Shouted the crewman who was obviously the helicopter’s load master.
“The ‘Happy H’?” Clara yelled in confusion. She was beyond confused, baffled, bewildered; she was about to start giggling hysterically.
“HMS Hermes, ma’am!”
“Clara?” Arkady Rykov asked anxiously, his smashed face contorted into a mask of worry as he clasped her arm.
The woman heard somebody yelling to her through the infernal din of the engine above their heads and the thrashing of the great rotor blades; she heard herself sobbing, and felt her whole body convulsing with…relief.
Utter, uncontrolled, insane relief.
They’d survived. She didn’t understand how they’d survived a week, or a month let alone a whole year, running, hiding just hours, or minutes or seconds ahead of their pursuers, never knowing what awaited them around the next corner or if their next encounter would be with a friend or a mortal enemy. But they’d survived. In a few minutes they’d be onboard one of the Royal Navy’s biggest and most powerful warships.
They’d survived and at last they were homeward bound.
Or rather, she was homeward bound. She’d wanted so badly to go home with him, whoever he was. But he could never go home and that was so achingly, heartbreakingly unfair…
Chapter 30
Tom Harding-Grayson picked up his phone and spoke clearly, crisply with the voice of a man on a mission: “If you would show the American Ambassador in now please.”
He’d kept Loudon Baines Westheimer II cooling his heels for forty-one minutes during time which he’d made three calls. One to his wife promising to be home ‘at a sensible hour for dinner’, a second courtesy call to the Angry Widow asking if ‘the Admiral’s flight’ had taken off on time and wishing her good luck and his sincere solicitations on her elevation to the post of Home Secretary, and thirdly, he’d briefly, succinctly rehearsed what he planned to say to Loudon Baines Westheimer II with his old friend Henry Tomlinson.
As the door to his room opened he closed the folder on his desk.
The two surviving pilots who’d participated in the attacks on the Balmoral Estate — now unfortunately barely surviving but he had no sympathy for the plight of either traitor — had been bled, in every sense, of what little information they possessed about the people and the forces who’d actually been behind the attempted assassination of the Royal Family.
What little had been beaten out of the two pilots confirmed the veracity of the preliminary intercept and signals triangulation plots the RAF had been able to reconstruct, and the provisional inferences drawn from radio traffic analysis by the cipher and communications experts at GCHQ here in Cheltenham. The intelligence at Tom Harding-Grayson’s disposal would not necessarily have convinced a High Court Judge, or a jury beyond reasonable proof of the guilt of the men and or of the foreign organs of state implicated in the atrocity but right now, nobody in the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration or in the higher echelons of its military and intelligence communities was worrying overmuch about the legal and diplomatic niceties of the atrocity.
“Good afternoon, Ambassador,” the Foreign Secretary smiled, stepping around his desk and risking his sinewy pale right hand to the bear like grasp of the American’s large fleshy paw. He needn’t have been concerned for the safety of his hand because the lumbering bear like man who stormed into his office with a face like thunder completely ignored it.
Loudon Baines Westheimer II poked a thick sausage shaped, nicotine stained finger in the shorter man’s face.