The house seemed to shudder, sway.
The sound of breaking, falling glass on bare boards seemed deafening.
For a moment they held their breath, expecting the whole building to crash down on top of them.
“I love you, Jo,” Walter said.
His wife snuggled closer.
“I’ve always loved you, Walt. Always and forever.”
“Always and forever,” her husband repeated, kissing the top of her head.
What was going on?
Marija Calleja peered across the wide neck of Sliema Creek into the blackness of Marsamxett Harbour towards the looming bastion walls of the fortress city of Valetta. Only the bow and stern lights of the warships and the waving fingers of light from hand held lamps illuminated the dark waters. Her eyes had quickly adjusted to the night. Launches and whalers plied between the big ships as they raised steam. In their anxiety to get out to sea their boilers were burning unusually noxious, acrid plumes of smoke into the clear Mediterranean air.
Panic.
No, not panic, but the next best thing.
What was going one?”
The air raid sirens wailed in the distance but nobody knew where they were supposed to go. The war had been over for seventeen years and the old shelters had been barred and locked years ago. After the war people had lived in some of the caves beneath the citadel of Valetta and the ruins of the Three Cities — Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua — for years until, finally, the ruins were demolished, new housing built and where possible, wrecked buildings repaired. Under a cool, cloudless, star-filled sky the ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron were desperately lighting off their boilers.
HMS Scorpion must have been the squadron duty ship with at least one, possibly two of her boilers primed or minimally fired and ready for movement at less than two hours notice otherwise she’d never have had sufficient steam to have cleared the anchorage so swiftly. Scorpion was already out of sight beyond Tigne Point. The next destroyer, HMS Aisne was only now starting to move. This vessel was an earlier sister ship of Peter Christopher’s Talavera, in silhouette he said a perfect mirror image of her pen friend’s ship. Pen friend? That sounded so inadequate it was ridiculous, Marija chided her girlish other self. But how was she to think of Peter, a man of approximately her own age with whom she’d corresponded since she was eleven years old? No man would ever know her as well as Peter Christopher knew her; and she hoped that no woman would ever know him as she knew him. So how should she think, speak or dream of him on a night like this when something so strange and frightening was happening all around her?
A tug’s whistle repeatedly blared a warning.
HMS Aisne seemed for a moment as if she might drift broadside on against the persistent south easterly wind blowing down the length of Sliema Creek. Then a tug moved under her port bow and in a mad churning of the shallow waters pushed the destroyer’s head around to face towards Valetta.
“The British are scared of something,” Marija Calleja’s twenty-two year old brother Joseph declared, grinning. Joe worked in the docks at Senglea when he wasn’t on strike or organising demonstrations against the ‘occupying power’.
Marija folded her arms, hugging herself as if there was a sudden chill in the air in the balmy Mediterranean night.
Brother and sister stood in the road looking down to the harbour.
In the distance the red-hot jet pipes of jets taking off from the RAF base at Luqa climbed into the night, the rushing thunder of their engines falling down to the ground like some ill omen from the gods.
“Don’t you think that if ‘the British’ are afraid of something,” Marija suggested, unaccountably vexed by her little brother’s smug complacency, “that perhaps, we ought to be also?”
This thought hadn’t occurred to Joseph Calleja.
“Why?” He asked before he switched on his brain.
“The British have hundreds of soldiers, they have jet fighters and bombers and big grey warships with guns and space age missiles,” she reminded her brother patiently. “Why would they be afraid of anything?”
“Ah…”
Lieutenant-Commander Simon Collingwood had donned an anti-flash balaclava, pulled on a Parka and climbed up the ladder to the small cockpit on top of HMS Dreadnought’s great shark fin sail. He expected another airburst any moment but he felt, in his bones, that he needed to see, with his own eyes, what was going on. It simply wasn’t the same seeing it through the periscope.
There were two small fires near the northern dockyard gate and more, larger fires in the town beyond. Within the Vickers Armstrong Industries Yard the brilliant arc lighting was off although here and there the standard pole lights survived. There was dust and grit in the wet air, he could taste it. In the middle distance he saw hand torches weaving through dockyard machinery. He stared hard at the access ways and roads around Dreadnought’s graving dock. They were strewn with small pieces of debris, otherwise clear. There were no bodies on the ground within his field of vision and he sighed with relief.
His relief was short-lived.
There were big fires flickering distantly across Morecambe Bay. Heysham, Lancaster, Cairnthorpe, places he knew well would have been hit hard. He tried to get his mind into gear. It wasn’t easy; he was numbed to the core with the terrifying enormity of the disaster. The bomb must have airburst somewhere over the Bay several miles away or he wouldn’t still be here. None of them would still be here if it had gone off much closer.
Collingwood snatched the trailing bridge microphone, clicked it on.
“Can you hear me down there?”
There was a burr of static.
“Yes, sir,” acknowledged the man at the talker station in the crowded control room fifty feet beneath Collingwood’s feet.
“Everything is still intact up here. I want the galley up and running. I’m sure our guests would appreciate tea or hot chocolate. Somebody can bring me a flask of tea when that’s organised.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Collingwood was amazed at how calm he sounded.
Given that his pulse was racing and that under his layers of protective clothing he was sweating like a pig despite the frost of the Cumbrian night, he didn’t know how he could possibly sound that calm.
The horrors of nuclear war had seemed so banal, surreal a year ago at the staff college course he and the other prospective members of Dreadnought’s wardroom cadre had attended at Devonport.
‘We think the most likely scenario is that both sides will shoot themselves dry as fast as they can,’ the chief instructor had concluded. ‘Basically, once the thing kicks off there’s no point holding fire. You either hit the other fellow with everything you’ve got as soon as you can or you lose. So, we might be talking about a war that’s over in hours, five or six bar a few afterthoughts. The aggressor’s first strike, and whatever counter strike the non-aggressor can mount while under attack. That’s it. After the first strike command and control doesn’t exist. After the first strike everybody goes underground, under the sea, or if you’re on a surface vessel, as far out to sea as you can get as fast as you can hoping to lose yourself in the vastness of The world’s oceans…’
Except you couldn’t do any of those things if you were on board a ninety-five percent complete nuclear submarine that was sitting in a dry dock!
Simon Collingwood didn’t know how long this real, hot war was going to last. The one thing he couldn’t afford to assume was that it was already over. His mind was ticking through the possibilities, the practicalities. He had two hundred people sheltering on his boat. In the morning there would be more. They had to be fed, watered, sustained, protected. By him. Until somebody told him otherwise they were his responsibility now that the world had gone mad.