“The enemy seem to be tracking us by our electronic emissions, sir,” Talavera’s Electronic Warfare Officer reported. “They may be homing onto us using some kind of antiquated cat and mouse targeting system. Several of them seem to be inadvertently squawking IFF.”
The Executive Officer didn’t wait to hear any more.
Something odd was happening and that was never good news.
The klaxon sounded above decks and the sharp, jarring of the ringing of the alarm bell filled the spaces below. Positions began to report in so quickly that many of them must have been fully manned ahead of the call to Battle Stations. Hardly anybody could sleep or rest properly with the ship smashing her way through the storm swells, and often a man’s ready post was as comfortable as anywhere in such conditions.
Peter Christopher watched the amber system status lights blink green on the GWS 21 Seat Cat board. More men piled into the CIC and dropped into empty seats, senior men replacing their juniors and apprentices.
“Main battery reports ready!”
The two 20-millimetres cannon mounts showed green moments later.
“The Royal Marines report four heavy MGs lashed to the amidships deckhouse and ready for action!”
HMS Talavera’s EWO grinned. The destroyer had taken onboard six Royal Marines, a Sergeant, a Corporal and four tough looking troopers at the same day the infamous ‘defaulters draft’ came up the gangway at Portsmouth. That was less than a fortnight ago but might have been months. The Marines had been pestering Guns, Lieutenant Weiss the ship’s Gunnery Officer, for an appropriate action station ever since. Now they were topsides, each trooper manhandling a big general purpose machine gun with several ‘defaulters’ primed to feed ammunition and fetch more if the need arose.
“Two hostiles! Low! Range two-three miles! Bearing zero-six-eight. CBC!”
Constant bearing and course…
Collision course…
“Paint them as bogey one and two for the Sea Cat launcher,” Peter ordered without a pause for conscious thought.
“They’re coming in hot,” somebody observed dispassionately.
“Speed four-two-zero!”
Two fast jets skimming the top of the waves. They’d been invisible, lost in the chaos of returns from the rocky coast. The old piston engine bombers and fighters climbing slowly over Ferrol had probably been a deliberate diversion but it wouldn’t have worked if the jets hadn’t been so low.
“Two more bogeys bearing zero-seven-eight! Range one-nine miles!”
Peter Christopher touched the microphone stud at his throat.
“CIC to Bridge. I recommend we show the bogeys out stern to increase the odds of achieving a Sea Cat firing solution.”
Captain David Penberthy’s voice acknowledged this calmly.
“Very good,” the destroyer was already heeling hard to port as the manoeuvring bell clanged repeatedly. “Devonshire has been flashed to manoeuvre independently.” He ordered: “Flush the Sea Cats whether you get a firing solution or not.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Peter Christopher didn’t think the Sea Cats had a snow flake’s chance in Hell of achieving a target lock on any of the four aircraft barrelling across the wave tops at over four hundred miles an hour. Not in these seas, not against four wildly manoeuvring small fast targets. He was suddenly icily calm. It never occurred to him — not for a nanosecond — that this was anything but a deadly, carefully planned and professionally executed attack against two targets with absolutely no air cover.
The range closed with terrifying speed.
“Bastards!” Grunted the man on the ranging table as the sweeping bedsteads Type 965 resolved the nearest bogeys into symbols they’d grown familiar with in pre-war NATO war games. “Bogeys Three and Four are A4s!
US Navy Douglas A4 Skyhawks.
Peter Christopher’s mind seemed to slow as he mulled the options at a thousand miles an hour. First, a low-level strafing attack with cannon and, or ground attack missiles. Second, if the Skyhawks were carrying iron bombs; they’d climb and lob their weapons from as far away as a mile. A tricky evolution, rather hit and miss. Ideally, the attacking jets would prefer to climb to at least ten thousand feet and dive bomb the two destroyers but if they tried that they almost certainly risk being locked up by the Sea Cats before they had a chance to drop their bombs.
“No lock! No missile lock!”
Peter Christopher decided it was time to gamble. He was the man in the CIC hot seat; he was the man controlling and fighting the ship’s state of the art systems.
The ship shuddered as the main battery opened fire.
“Devonshire has launched her Sea Cats!”
They’d run out of time.
“Flush ALL Sea Cats!” He barked.
Chapter 33
There was a peculiar party atmosphere that Friday evening when Marija met her father and mother at the taverna where, before the October War, the whole family had often congregated on a Saturday afternoon. It seemed odd that neither Marija’s younger brother, Joe, or her elder sibling, Samuel were present but then the one was forbidden to set foot in Gzira, and the other was estranged from her and to a degree, her mother.
Marija had inherited her willowy, sparely formed frame from her father whom today, looked ten years too old and too grey and worn to be only fifty-two years of age. Peter Calleja nursed a murky cup of coffee — not the real thing, that hadn’t been available for months — and viewed with wry amusement his daughter’s discomfiture.
“I have told you many times that Staff Sergeant Siddall is a good man. That he is not like so many of the others,” she hissed this lowly, her face flushed with colour, “but he is a friend and no more I tell you!”
Her idiot little brother had given her a long letter to hand to her parents and she was regretting not having torn open the envelope and — if necessary — censored whatever he’d written that had so greatly amused and entertained her mother and father. She was a good Maltese daughter who dearly loved and respected her parents; notwithstanding that sometimes they drove her to distraction. Like now, for example.
“Jim,” she went on, caught herself instantly after she’d inadvertently used the big Redcap’s Christian name, “Staff Sergeant Siddall may well feel things for me that I do not feel for him. That is not my fault. Why are you always trying to marry me off?”
Peter Calleja sighed and put down his cup. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed these slow, early evening family occasions, especially at this time of year when the weather tended to be balmy some nights despite the advancing season. He planned to visit Mdina-Rabat sometime in the coming week, to take his wife to be reunited with her miscreant bambino. Joe would always be the baby of the family if he lived to be a hundred; that was the way of things. He wished his first born, Samuel, was sitting at the table beside him but some things were not destined to be so he’d settle for every small mercy that the loving God who’d thus far preserved his little family from serious harm deigned to grant him. He and his wife had lived through Hitler’s War. In that terrible war they’d nearly lost the jewel in his life, Marija, but with God’s will she too had been saved. Looking at the vivacious — unfortunately angry at present — young woman sitting with her back to the sea front Peter Calleja complacently counted his blessings.
Marija belated realised that her father had been teasing her.
She huffed once or twice and forgave him.