Life was good.
Peter Christopher refocused his attention on his duties, reminding himself that HMS Talavera’s primary role was neither anti-submarine work, nor single-handedly tackling fast jets at close range. The utility of the Squid anti-submarine mortar and the relatively new and unproven capabilities of the GWS 21 Sea Cat System were peripheral to Talavera’s primary role. The Navy was planning to build a new generation of big carriers and the converted Battles, Agincourt, Aisne, Barossa, Corunna, Oudenarde and Talavera were to act as fast radar pickets in the task groups which would be formed around each of the new ships. In each battle group the big carrier’s fighters would deal with air threats; the purpose-built frigates of the carrier’s anti-submarine screen would deal with the undersea menace. Of the six Battle conversions, four had already joined the Fleet, Talavera was running trials, and Oudenarde was still in dockyard hands at Rosyth, work on her having been delayed two months by persistent labour troubles.
Peter Christopher heard the bulkhead door behind him open, booted feet on the steel deck, then the door being dogged shut again. Nobody in the broad, dimly lit compartment moved or looked around. They’d been trying to unwrinkled the mysteries of tuning the foremast Type 965 AKE-2 and the Type 293Q systems in such a way as to eliminate the one interfering with the returns of the other for several days. It transpired that the boffins at Portland had been tinkering with the Type 965 to improve the performance of the single bedstead variant for years but nobody seemed to have considered the ramifications of the most recent modifications for the twin bedstead installations in the last two Battle conversions. The first four Battle Fast Air Detection conversions had older — unmodified bedsteads — and hadn’t encountered the interference problems Peter and his people had discovered within moments of spooling up the array. They’d thought they had the problem cracked twenty-four hours ago but then the wind had started blowing up a Force 8 gale from the south west and they’d realised they’d only half-solved the puzzle.
“Kye, sir,” murmured the gruff baritone voice of Leading Seaman Jack Griffin. Griffin was the same age, within a few months, of his Division Commander but he had a lived in, prize fighter’s face that added years to him.
“Good man,” Peter muttered, accepting the mug of hot cocoa brewed from pure melted dark chocolate, already a middle watch CIC and Radar Room tradition on the newly commissioned destroyer. “What’s it like topside?”
“Blowing up nicely, sir,” the Leading Rate chuckled. “Every third or fourth wave we’re shipping white water over the bow. I reckon we’ll empty a few bunks when we put about.”
There were muted guffaws around the compartment.
“You’ve got an evil sense of humour, Griffin,” Chief Petty Officer Max Crawley grunted. He was a small, sinewy man whose head only came up to Peter Christopher’s shoulder. He’d been in the Navy so long he remembered the last time there’d been a mutiny — at Invergordon, a fortnight after he joined his first ship, the battleship Valiant — and everybody tacitly assumed this would be his last ship. The grizzled CPO had been a tower of strength to Peter in the last few weeks as he struggled to get Talavera’s complicated new electronic systems on line. Peter had been appalled, and continued to be appalled, by the slapdash, careless working practices and the poor quality control of much of the work carried out by Chatham Naval Dockyard. Every second weld on the new superstructure had had to be re-welded, cableways routinely breached watertight compartments rather than following prescribed, pre-prepared conduits, every other seal leaked, and whole sections of wiring were missing, or installed in completely the wrong place. To his chagrin he’d discovered that nothing on the master conversion planning schematics was to be trusted without exhaustive and time consuming checks and tests. Peter’s division had spent so much time putting right the shoddy workmanship, mistakes and omissions of the dockyard that it was only in the last week, five weeks behind schedule that they’d found themselves in a position where they could begin to chase down basic operating faults and start to fully familiarise themselves with their new ‘toys’. Without CPO Max Crawley, the nearest thing to a bull terrier he was ever likely to encounter in uniform, Peter knew they’d still be tied up alongside at Chatham squabbling with the dockyard’s battalion of jobsworths.
Max Crawley was always looking for something to knock Jack Griffin down a peg or two. He didn’t think Lieutenant Christopher was lax when it came to discipline, just a little too one-eyed about the number and variety of complex new gizmos on the converted ship. Crawley was a veteran of the Malta convoys twenty years ago. He’d been on a destroyer that had shot itself dry on one run, been forced to dump depth charges over the side to distract charging Italian motor torpedo boats, and attempted to fight off a dozen Stukas with rifles and pistols. But that was twenty years ago, this was now as the old sea salt clung grimly to the back of the EWO’s command chair he conceded that HMS Talavera didn’t like a cross sea any more than any other ship with mostly dry bunkers and empty magazines.
Aye, she’d roll like merry hell when they put the helm over, true enough.
Peter Christopher was thinking the same thought as he sipped his steaming Kye. The rich bitterness took his mind off the imperfect circular sweep of the Type 965 repeater in front of the middle-aged dockyard technician sitting in the chair next to him. Talavera had commissioned with so many niggling problems that there were still nine civilian workers, electricians and specialist radar men like Ralph Hobbs, the thirty-nine year old Marconi assembly supervisor with whom he’d been working for the last two months. Hobbs was bespectacled, six inches shorter than Peter Christopher, balding, and one of those people who lived, ate and drank his work. Having been a wireless operator on Lancasters in the war, he’d worked for Marconi ever since his demob from the RAF in 1945. He and the Talavera’s Electronic Warfare Officer had quickly formed a strong professional bond, strengthened and nourished by the fact that Peter Christopher wasn’t the kind of Navy man who automatically looked down on people in Civvy Street.
Jack Griffin had brought mugs of Kye for everybody in the CIC, including the civilian, as he called Hobbs when the man in question was out of his hearing.
“Thank you, Jack,” Ralph Hobbs murmured, not looking up.
“Don’t mention it, Chief.”
As he spoke the civilian frowned hard at the fuzzy green sweep of the antenna through another 360 degrees. The screen seemed to shiver, settling anew several times each orbit and the distortion effect had got worse in the last few minutes. Its other worldly green glow threw the faces of the men around it into cruel reliefs, every deep shadow taking on a sinister hue.
“That’s definitely not interference from the Type 293, Peter,” the civilian declared, glumly.
“What do you think, Ralph? Something external?”
“It’s as if we’re sailing across some kind of very strong directional…” The civilian’s voice trailed away.
Both men were studying the changing returns on the repeater.
“Are you seeing this, Selvey?” Peter Christopher asked, without turning to look at the specialist manning the range finding Type 293 display.
“Yes, sir. Many low level contacts climbing…” Leading Electrical Artificer Denis Selvey’s voice was distracted as his mind worked through the possibilities. The only time he’d seen patterns remotely like the one on the Type 293Q repeater was on a half-forgotten training course over a year ago. That mocked up training display had been a kind of practical joke, a test to discover who’d been paying attention.