They’d made two strafing runs. Opposed by only a pair of Royal Marine manned heavy machine guns lashed to the amidships deckhouse rail they’d been able to rake the burning destroyer virtually from end to end. That was when CIC had been hit. Peter Christopher had observed the world around him become a smoky, spark-filled bad dream before he’d lost consciousness. He’d awakened on a stretcher on the wardroom floor. Somebody had been screaming; mercifully the screaming had stopped after a few seconds. He’d wondered if he’d been the man screaming then strong, gentle hands had helped him into a sitting position and Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin’s filthy, blood-stained visage had been grinning at him.
“What?” Peter had muttered. His ears were ringing and his head hurt. He was bloody but had no idea if the blood was his.
“You hit you head, sir!” The other man shouted.
“I don’t…”
“When I jumped on you, sir! If you’d carried on sitting in the CIC high chair a second longer you’d have been mince meat!”
Peter Christopher blinked down at himself.
His right trouser leg was shredded below the knee. His jacket was torn and singed. That explained the smell of burning. His face was caked…with blood. His left should felt like somebody had hit it with a hammer.
Jack Griffin pressed a tin mug to his lips.
“Drink this!”
HMS Talavera’s dazed Electronic Warfare Officer did as he was told.
He gagged on the heavily rum-laced chocolate.
“You going to throw up, sir?”
“No,” Peter Christopher decided after several long moments.
“The Old Man says for me to get you back in CIC. We’re blind. No radar, no comms…”
That was hours ago.
Peter Christopher didn’t know how many hours ago except that when he’d been half-carried back into the smouldering chaos of CIC there were still body parts on the floor and it was still daylight outside.
Nobody knew what had happened to HMS Devonshire.
The big County Class destroyer had been dead in the water and on fire several miles downwind as night fell. They’d seen the fires flickering in the north east for about an hour after darkness, and then nothing…
Talavera hadn’t gone to her consort’s aid because she was too busy trying to save herself. It was all the crippled destroyer could do simply to keep her relatively undamaged bow into the teeth of the storm.
Peter Christopher brooded.
They’d been taken almost completely by surprise and it was his fault.
Only God knew how many fine men had died today because of his failure to grasp the tactical situation. It was no comfort for the Old Man to tell him that Command knew the risks when they dispatched Talavera and Devonshire on a route so close to the Spanish coast. It had seemed a calculated enough risk at the time. The Gibraltar gun line needed every barrel the Navy could beg, borrow or steal and it needed those barrels now. Terrible things happen in war and today’s debacle was nobody’s fault.
Surgeon’s mates had appeared and attempted to clean him up a couple of times. Blood still oozed from his scalp and his left arm was in a sling. They guessed his collar bone might be cracked or broken. A shot of morphine had deadened the worst of the pain.
“We’ve got the Type 293 back on line, sir!” Somebody reported, breaking though Peter Christopher’s drowsy ruminations. They’d restored radio communications about an hour ago.
“Anything on the plot?” He asked, afraid of the answer he was likely to get.
There was a long, horrible hesitation.
“Negative, sir. No surface or air contacts. The way we’re bouncing about in these seas we’d lose anything inshore in the ground clutter, sir.”
Peter Christopher groaned inwardly.
They’d lost four fast, low flying jets in that clutter but a five thousand ton cruiser-sized destroyer ought to stand out like a sore thumb. HMS Devonshire was gone. In seas like these most of her crew of around four hundred and seventy men would have little or no chance of rescue or of reaching the storm lashed shores of Spain.
After the strike both destroyers had been burning, defenceless hulks.
A second strike would have sunk them then and there.
“Messenger please.”
It was Jack Griffin who stepped up.
While isolated CIC systems had been restored to some minimal level of operation all intercom links to the bridge remained severed. The only way Peter Christopher could report to the Captain was by messenger.
“Find the Captain. Report the 293 set is nominal but only in basic search mode.” He swallowed hard. “Report that we have no major surface targets in range at this time. That is all.”
The other man nodded and hurried away.
The ship had a sickening, waterlogged motion as she pitched into each long angry Atlantic swell and slid like a sodden log down the other side.
Peter Christopher became aware of the presence of Talavera’s Master at Arms, CPO Spider McCann. The wiry, teak hard little man spared the young officer a weathered, rueful grin.
“It’ll be light in a couple of hours, sir,” the older man observed. “Things will seem better in daylight.”
“If you say so, Master.”
Spider McCann chuckled.
“Trust me, sir. Things always seem better in daylight.”
The two men were in the middle of a ruined compartment in which four men had died and five had been seriously wounded. Everybody else had survived as walking wounded as cannon shells had ripped through the thin skin of the destroyer as if it was wet paper. The majority of the hits — presumably with armour piercing rounds — had gone straight through the ship without exploding, only those whose progress had been impeded or obstructed by a piece of kit, a human body or had landed short of the ship and ricocheted into their target had actually detonated.
The senior non-commissioned officer on the ship had disappeared the next time Peter Christopher looked around. He made a concerted effort to pull himself together.
“Status report on the 293 set,” he demanded.
“Still nominal, sir. The forward mast has a lot of fragmentation damage around the cable ducts. I think we’re getting water in the system somewhere. That or the stabilizer isn’t functioning…” The man cursed in the darkness. “Sorry, sir. The repeater dropped out again. Everything to the 965 must be cut. For all I know the aerial might actually be fully functional, but…”
Peter Christopher acknowledged this without comment.
The four ton double bedstead type 965 air defence radar fifty feet above his head hadn’t done Talavera much good against low flying target approaching out of the loom of the land.
HMS Devonshire had been sunk.
Half of Talavera’s crew were dead or wounded and the ship was in a sinking condition in the middle of a North Atlantic winter gale.
He watched the CIC plot; known something was wrong.
Hundreds of men were dead because he’d made a mistake…
Chapter 35
Joe Calleja and Margo Seiffert stood on the Gzira waterfront and stared. The fire blackened stern of the British destroyer rested barely awash on the shore of Manoel Island, her bow sunk in the deeper water in the middle of the Sliema Creek anchorage. Her great lattice foremast leaned forward at an unnatural angle of about thirty degrees towards Gzira.
“Which ship is that?” The woman asked, unable to drag her eyes off the surreal sight of the oily, wreckage strewn harbour. The stink of the fires that still smouldered in Fort Phoenicia and behind the gutted shell of what once had been the Royal Marines’ Headquarters. The atmosphere was hazy, the acrid air caught at the back of the throat. Fires still burned in Valetta to the south and smoke cloaked Luqa airfield west of the Three Cities. “D96,” she added redundantly, squinting at the scorched numerals on the destroyer’s splinter-riddled stern.