Penberthy handed the microphone to the Bridge Speaker, an eighteen year old seasick boy who’d only joined the ship a week ago, one of a draft of fourteen new sea duty men straight from the completion of his thirteen week basic training at HMS Collingwood in Hampshire.
“Chin up, lad,” he murmured, patting the kid’s shoulder. “Chin up.”
Penberthy had turned Talavera onto a course that would take her out into the middle of the North Sea some twenty minutes before, now she was battering her away from the English coast at twenty-seven knots. He felt like a coward, running like a scalded cat with his tail between its legs. He’d asked himself what else he could do in the circumstances, no answer had come. Talavera was a warship in name alone. She had her seaworthiness, her radar and her communications suite and that was all. She had no ammunition, nor the trained crews to fight her guns and missile launchers even if her magazines weren’t empty. His first responsibility was the safety of his ship and plainly nowhere near land was remotely safe.
“What’s the news on our bunkers?” He inquired, grimacing at the ruddy-faced, four-square man who’d come onto the bridge as he was addressing the crew.
Lieutenant-Commander John Cook, Talavera’s forty-three year old Engineering Officer’s expression mirrored his Captain’s grimace. He’d served briefly with his captain many years ago in the Mediterranean on the fast minelayer Manxman. Those had seemed desperate days when the only way to transport vital supplies into Malta — besieged and starving and under constant aerial bombardment — had been to send Manxman and her sister Apollo on forty knot helter skelter night time sorties through the blockade.
“You can have another ninety minutes at these revs, sir,” the other man replied, taciturn as ever. As he spoke he wiped his hands on a rag he produced from his almost, but not quite, pristine uniform boiler suit. “After that we won’t have enough fuel to make land,” he shrugged, “anywhere.”
“Ninety minutes?”
“Aye, sir. That’ll run tanks three and four dry, sir.”
Penberthy nodded. Talavera had been tasked to be at sea forty-eight hours operating at no more than cruising speed; fifteen to eighteen knots. The galley had taken on seven days rations but the Dockyard Superintendent had allocated a typically miserly fuel reserve despite Penberthy’s angry complaints that in her new configuration, Talavera’s centre of gravity would be unnecessarily elevated — making her sea keeping motion worse — for the purpose of running radar trials unless she flooded several of her bunkers. The Dockyard Superintendent didn’t give a damn whether the reconstructed destroyer rolled like a barge or if her bunkers would have to be cleaned when she got back to port; Penberthy wasn’t going to have a drop more of his precious bunker oil than he absolutely needed.
“What about revs for twenty knots, John?”
“Two hours, maybe.” The other man hesitated. “Two-and-a-half, perhaps.”“
Penberthy contemplated the options. No, he decided, they’d continue out to sea at their best speed for as long as they could. As if to emphasise the urgency of putting as much sea room as possible between the ship and the land the enclosed conning bridge briefly filled with blinding light through the aft viewing scuttles.
“Very well. We shall continue at present revs for one hour, Chief.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The other man departed back down into the bowels of the destroyer.
Almost immediately, Penberthy was handed another comms handset.
Lieutenant Peter Christopher sounded calm, pragmatic.
“May I have permission to operate at a reduced EWO status, sir?”
“Is there a problem, Peter?” Penberthy asked, his mind still turning over the critical fuel situation.
“I’d like to secure as much kit as possible, sir,” the younger officer explained, very patiently. “In case we get too close to one of those strikes.”
Penberthy’s mind clicked back into gear.
Much of Talavera’s electronics suite was theoretically, at least, hardened to survive the EMP — electro-magnetic pulse — from the atmospheric detonation of large thermonuclear warheads but this wasn’t the time or the place to be respecting theoretical promises.
“Go ahead and secure everything except ship to shore communications and the main search radar.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
In the CIC Peter Christopher didn’t turn from his seat behind the main repeater operator. He put down the handset. “Everything off except the Type 965 and its repeaters,” he declared. The rest of the team had been hanging on the edge of their seats waiting for the order. Screens started fading, the compartment grew dimmer. He listened to the reports, sighed with relief when the last one came in.
“EWO to bridge,” he called, lifting the speaker handset to his face. “All non-essential search, targeting and communications gear has been secured.”
For the first time in many minutes Peter Christopher became aware of the surging, bucking, violent progress of the destroyer across the stormy sea. Talavera was charging into the short, steep North Sea swells, and every now and then her propellers almost breached into thin air as she alternatively sliced through or rammed into each new wave, digging her bow deep one moment and racing forward, stern buried the next. If he hadn’t been so terrified he’d probably have been being violently sea sick by now.
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood guessed Dreadnought’s cluttered pressure hull now sheltered at least two hundred souls. Most of her fitting out crew, some forty officers and men had reported to the boat within the first few minutes of the alarm being raised. Others, local dockyard workers, civilians, families from the bed and breakfast houses outside the dockyard gates, men from other ships, had quickly coalesced around the great beached whale in the main graving dock. When he’d seen the first lightning-like strike on the southern horizon Collingwood hadn’t hesitated, he’d had a speaker mounted in the cockpit at the top of the submarine’s sail and ordered everybody still above ground to come aboard Dreadnought.
The horrible quietness in the crush of bodies in the uncompleted nuclear submarine was punctuated by the cries of a baby, the occasional whispered order. Otherwise a fog of despair began to settle.
Collingwood stood by the periscope, sweeping the horizon with the scope set at minimum magnification with the red filter on the lens. He didn’t know if that would protect his sight if he happened to focus on the vicinity of a detonation. Right now he wasn’t sure if he cared. Nearby buildings and cranes obscured some ninety degrees of the eastern horizon so it was difficult to get accurate bearings of each successive strike and in any event, it was not a clear night. Heavy banks of cloud rolled over Furness, gaps in the overcast tended to be narrow, fleeting. It was like watching an intermittent distant firework display through a blindfold.
Albeit the most terrible firework display on earth.
He was scanning the northern sky when the whole world lit up like a nightmare.
“Fuck!” He muttered, tearing his face away from the eyepiece. He shook his head, blinked, discovering to his surprise that he wasn’t blind. The periscope must have been pointed directly away from the airburst. “Count!” He demanded.
Eleven seconds later the blast over-pressure wave of the detonation across the other side of Morecombe bay smashed into the casing of HMS Dreadnought…