No matter that everything that could be lashed down was lashed down thrice, life below decks when the ship was racing harum-scarum towards the distant — hundreds of miles distant at the bottom of the Iberian Peninsula in this case — sound of gunfire was a thing Peter Christopher had never really believed would ever happen to him. He’d joined a peace time navy, a peace keeping force that occasionally involved itself in old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy but was never, ever going to get into a real shooting war again. Notwithstanding the October War, 2his still felt bizarre. Perhaps, it was because they’d spent so much time in harbour in the last year. So much time messing around with and tweaking the ship’s expensive and fiendishly complicated systems. Or perhaps, it was because he — and most of his shipmates — had come to the conclusion that their leaders simply didn’t have the stomach for the fight any more. Either way, the events of the last few weeks had come as a rude shock and he very much doubted he was the only one who was still struggling to adjust to it.
HMS Talavera was at war.
Everybody was still buzzing with the tense excitement of the early morning action off Santander. Peter Christopher had watched the radar traces of the destroyers’ broadsides flying over nine miles to their target. Talavera had been the first ship to cease fire having emptied her magazines of contact-fused high explosive rounds. She’d fired 387 shells of which approximately a dozen had fallen short and forty-four had been fired long — speculatively — into an area of Santander Bay where a number of vessels were reported at anchor by Ark Royal’s high-flying Sea Vixens. HMS Aisne had taken another ninety seconds to exhaust her HE rounds, and the Devonshire, firing slower than the two Battles, a further three minutes. Then the small task force had turned away and headed north at twenty-eight knots.
“How is our big friend doing?” Yelled Commander Hugo Montgommery, Talavera’s executive officer joining Peter Christopher at the rail without the younger man noticing.
“Riding a little better than us, sir!”
The two men laughed into the teeth of the wind.
“God! This is the life!” Talavera’s second-in-command chuckled. “Just so long as we don’t shake the old girl to pieces before we get to where we’re going!”
Where they were going was to join the gun line plugging the Straits of Gibraltar in general and the approaches to Cadiz Roads and Algeciras Bay in particular.
Peter Christopher and the Talavera’s executive officer had both been advanced in rank half a ring in anticipation of Talavera operating as a Destroyer Leader, commanding and administering her own squadron but until today that role hadn’t materialised. First the ship had been assigned to the Ark Royal’s air defence screen, then assigned to lead the Santander raid, now she was rushing to join yet another hastily formed flotilla off Gibraltar. War was chaos; and chaos was war.
That was something his father, the Admiral, had told him the last time they — purely accidentally — encountered each other at a Navy Day in Portsmouth two-and-a-half years ago. Having studied electrical engineering and physics at University Peter suspected that what the old timers called ‘chaos’ was actually entropy. Simply a case of all the most likely outcomes playing out in a volatile medium. Good luck, bad luck when all was said and done, was just luck. War and conflict stressed people, systems, faith to the limit and the October War had ripped asunder the fabric of the old world. None of the old rules counted now. Given that the average temperature of the universe was around two degrees above absolute zero; a rational mind could only conclude that in such a universe the well of pity was empty most of the time…
Peter Christopher realised he’d allowed his spirits to darken.
The freezing spray whipping into his face brought him out of his introspection with a rude slap.
“Putting the helm over in this sea will be a thing!” Hugo Montgommery shouted above the roar of the wind, clapping the younger man on the back. “Make sure you ring the collision bell first!”
Peter Christopher waved as the executive officer departed for the dry warmth of the conning bridge one level below his feet. Then he went back to watching the seas, trying to predict the angle of the confused, storm flecked swells building in the south-south-west. Odd that, he’d have expected most Atlantic gales to blow more from the west than the south but half the world had gone up in flames a little over a year ago. It stood to reason that it had to have had some effect on the weather? People talked about the last winter in the northern hemisphere being a ‘nuclear winter’. The early onset of the present winter seemed to lend credence to the theories about the smoke, ash and dust from the great firestorms blotting out the light of the Sun like the eruption of a great volcano like Tambora in Indonesia in 1816. In Europe the following year — of 1817 — had been remembered as the ‘year without summer’. Somebody would work out what was going on one day. Until that day he’d stick to what he was being paid to do; he’d watch the pattern and the height of the waves, attempt to calculate how close to due south Talavera could steam without having to reduce speed or risking putting the ship on her beam ends.
All things considered it was much better, he decided, to focus on the things one understood and over which one had a modicum of control.
“CIC to Bridge.”
“What is it CIC?” He called, snatching up the nearest comms handset.
“The plot is painting unidentified aircraft. Eight targets at level one four and climbing at five-zero-zero feet per minute bearing one-zero-five, range six-five miles. Closing speed five zero knots, sir.”
Peter Christopher frowned.
The climb and closing speeds seemed positively pedestrian.
“Very good. Label the contacts as hostiles and keep me informed.” Next he hit the button to put him through to the Captain’s day cabin. “We have unusual air activity over the Spanish mainland, sir.”
Captain David Penberthy didn’t hesitate: “Ask Mr Montgommery to take the bridge watch and get yourself into the hot seat in CIC. Then tell me what we’re looking at.”
Hugo Montgommery stepped onto the flying bridge before the younger officer could summon him.
“I have watch!” He smiled piratically. Like many members of the wardroom he’d begun to cultivate a beard and this gave his facial expressions a new aspect of humour or menace, depending upon his mood.
Peter Christopher handed off his wet-weather gear to a willing pair of hands as he entered the Combat Information Centre. He scowled at the developing plot.
“Prop aircraft?” He asked, thinking aloud. Then: “Are we picking up any other radar signatures.”
“Negative, sir.”
The Spanish might be painting the two destroyers passively; tracking Talavera and Devonshire’s electronic emissions but he didn’t think the enemy had kit sophisticated enough to do that. Unless somebody had given them state of the art former NATO equipment.
“CIC to Bridge.” He waited.
Hugo Montgommery joined the circuit.
“What do we have, Peter?”
“It looks like we can expect to be visited by a gaggle of 1945-war vintage aircraft. With the ship working the way she is in these seas we’re having trouble updating the plot but I’d say what we’ve got is half-a-dozen bombers and about twice as many fighters. Unless the fighters have got drop tanks they’ll be getting their feet wet by the time the bombers reach us.”
There was a touch on Peter Christopher’s arm.
“Several of the bogeys have begun squawking unidentified IFF codes, sir.”