The pointer moved onto Asia Minor.
“We knew that Ankara was almost totally destroyed by several airbursts during the October War. We don’t know what happened to all the NATO military assets based in Anatolia. Incirlik, for example, was abandoned within a month of the war. Frankly, the Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan could be at large across the Anatolian plains for all we know. What we do know for sure is that in the last few weeks our listening stations on Cyprus are picking up a lot of radio chatter from the vicinity of Incirlik, the coastal strip directly north of Cyprus, and from around Izmir on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. People who know about these things categorise this ‘chatter’ as being typical of a Division or perhaps, an under-strength Corps-sized military organisation. Some of the ‘chatter’ is in the clear, mainly in Turkish but we’ve also got intercepts in various Russian dialects, but most of the traffic is non-voice and coded so we’ve got no real feel for what’s being said to whom about what.”
“Reformed Turkish Army formations?” Walter Brenckmann asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Julian Christopher guffawed ruefully.
The pointer returned to Istanbul.
“There has been fighting in and around Istanbul in the last month or so. Or that was what we thought. Three days ago the destroyer HMS Undaunted, on patrol at a mid-point between Cyprus and Malta acting as an emergency communications relay between RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus and my headquarters in Malta, rescued several fishermen from a badly shot up fishing boat that had run out of fuel. The boat had been fired on by a Turkish warship somewhere off Rhodes. Two men dressed like Soviet naval officers had been put aboard and the crew ordered to sail the boat to Crete. To cut a long story short there was a storm and the crew threw the ‘Russians’ over the side. Not knowing that Crete wasn’t safe they headed for Souda. When they got there they were ordered to anchor off shore, refused fuel and provisions and questioned by another ‘Russian’. Concluding they weren’t among friends the crew decided to make a run for it. Which they did but there was another storm and eventually they ran out of fuel. They claim that before they left Rhodes on their last voyage there were rumours that a pogrom against Westerners and Jews was under way in Istanbul.”
“Just gossip?” Margaret Thatcher asked.
“This big ship making a lot of smoke you mentioned earlier, Admiral Christopher?” Tom Harding-Grayson inquired idly. “Modern ships make relatively little smoke unless they mean to lay a smokescreen?”
“Quite,” the First Sea Lord concurred tersely.
“The smoke is a problem,” Julian Christopher added. “But we’ve got enough detail on the pictures we’ve got of this ship to make a preliminary identification.”
Margaret Thatcher was both intrigued, and troubled by the two Admirals reluctance to share their little secret.
“Tell me more,” she demanded, trying not to flutter her eyelids.
“There’s only one big ship that fits the bill,” Sir David Luce explained. “Big guns in five twin turrets, one forward, two aft and two offset amidships. A big, coal-burning ship, that’s what the smoke must be, coal smoke.”
Tom Harding-Grayson barked a short laugh.
“My God,” he whistled, “just when you think the World has stopped going mad, something comes along and disproves one!”
“You’re going to have to explain it to me,” the Angry Widow said, beginning to frown. “Whatever it is you are all laughing about.”
“It has got to be the Yavuz,” her Foreign Secretary announced. “I thought the Turks scrapped her years ago!”
Julian Christopher concluded that a little straight talking was in order.
“The battlecruiser Yavuz was built as the Seiner Majestät Schiff — His Majesty’s Ship — Goeben by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg before the First World War. She was commissioned into Kaiser Wilhelm II’s High Seas Fleet in July 1912 but trapped in the Mediterranean by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Basically, she was chased into the Sea of Marmara by the Royal Navy where she was handed over to the Ottoman Empire as part of the deal that saw the Turks come in on the German side.”
“Oh.” The Prime Minister didn’t know what to make of this news.
Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord decided to clarify matters.
“The Turks struck the ship off their Navy list four years ago. The ship had never been properly modernized. It was and probably remains a museum piece. The thing that worries me is that somebody — somebody who has other big, more modern ships at their disposal — has obviously gone to a great deal of effort to re-activate one of the Kaiser’s dreadnoughts. It speaks to me of a disturbing obsession to put every available weapon, regardless of its usability or suitability, to the, er, wheel.”
“It is madness to waste time and resources on a ship like this when you have better assets to hand, Prime Minister,” Julian Christopher said sombrely. “To me it suggests a military mind that doesn’t care about waging war effectively,” he concluded, “but a mind whose one guiding purpose is simply to make war.”
Chapter 17
The Battle class destroyer was loping along at twenty knots with only one of her Admiralty three-drum boilers lit. Her captain, David Penberthy was taking full advantage of his orders requiring him to make an independent passage to Valletta to test the hurried repairs to his ship. If he’d been allowed to top off his bunkers in Gibraltar he would have fired up her second boiler and let HMS Talavera off her leash; as it was he planned to wait until he was closer to their destination. Besides, if the forces detailed to seize the three rebel-held islands of Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa on the way to Malta ran into any significant resistance he wanted a healthy operating reserve in his tanks. In the Royal Navy no self-respecting destroyer captain wanted to miss a potential scrap on account of a trifling thing like empty fuel bunkers.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher wasn’t about to get used to his new berth, the Executive Officer’s cabin, any time soon. His old friend Hugo Montgommery’s ghost still lingered in the cabin and throughout the ship. His predecessor had been a harsh task master when he had to be; but always a man ready to put a consoling hand on a fellow’s shoulder.
Accommodation on a destroyer tended to be at a premium. There was a bunk against the aft bulkhead, a writing table over a slim chest of drawers, a couple of small overhead lockers. There was no port hole because the original scuttle had been welded over during Talavera’s eighteen month long conversion from an old-fashioned gunboat to a Fast Air Detection Escort.
Ironically, the only reason he and so many of the men still onboard the destroyer had survived the October War, was because Talavera had been at sea running radar trials when a megaton-range ground burst had destroyed her home port of Chatham.