At the time Talavera had been one of the most advanced ships in the Royal Navy. Not so today. A couple of months ago off Cape Finisterre an A-4 Skyhawk’s bomb had exploded at the base of her main mast, and another alongside her stern, The first hit had destroyed most of her electronics suite, the second — a near miss — had ignited two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles and detonated several ant-submarine mortar rounds loaded in her stern-mounted Limbo launcher. Every man caught on deck aft of the amidships deck house had been killed or seriously wounded within seconds. Shortly afterwards, as the ship’s doctor — a perpetually sea sick young man who’d been deemed fit to practice medicine at the end of his penultimate year at medical school under the War Emergency Act, and sent onboard Talavera just ten days before she left Portsmouth — and every single one of his qualified sick bay orderlies had been transformed into disambiguated parcels of flesh and bone randomly sprayed across burning bulkheads during the Skyhawks’ first strafing run. Peter, his position in the Radar Room compartment of the Command Information Centre — CIC — partially shield by structures farther aft from the hail of cannon fire raking the main deck, had been knocked unconscious but otherwise emerged remarkably uninjured, a concussion, a gashed head, a very sore shoulder and several deeply bruised and miscellaneously cracked ribs excepted. Approximately half his shipmates had not been so lucky. Ignoring the walking wounded among whose number he had considered himself, of the 218 officers and men onboard fifty seven were killed, eight men were listed as missing presumed killed, and forty-one had been so seriously injured as to be unable to return to duty before the ship reached port. Nobody knew how many of the dead might have lived if the ship’s surgeon — albeit a not quite qualified doctor in normal times, inexperienced and horrendously out of his depth as he would inevitable have been had he survived the attack — not been killed when the Skyhawks returned to torment their helpless victims.
HMS Devonshire, Talavera’s consort that stormy afternoon, had suffered a similar casualty list. Unlike Talavera she was a brand new ship with a green crew and it was only the fact she was twice Talavera’s size, built like a cruiser with a complement over twice the size of the converted Battle class ship had enabled her to survive. Talavera had survived because her core of experienced old hands had somehow managed to keep her afloat long enough for help in the form of HMS Plymouth, a modern Rothesay class frigate commanded by a veteran captain with a seasoned crew, to come to her aid.
HMS Devonshire had been sent back to England.
Talavera had not; and Peter Christopher wasn’t complaining.
There was a rapping knock at his cabin door.
“Come in!”
Chief Petty Officer ‘Spider’ McCann stepped in from the corridor. The small, lined, sinewy ex-champion pugilist was a little surprised — pleasantly so — by the effortless aplomb with which the formerly easy going Electronic Warfare Officer had rejoined the ship in an entirely new role. Not that he’d ever mention it to anybody. A ship’s Executive officer trod an extremely narrow path; he needed to retain the respect and trust of the crew but he could never forget that he was the man answerable to the Captain for the smooth running and the battle readiness of the ship. It was very hard for any second-in-command to actually be liked or popular and friendships were things many Executive officers eschewed. Yes, Lieutenant-Commander Christopher began from a good place; a lot of the men knew him and he and the Old Man had virtually carried Talavera into Oporto on their backs after the action off Finisterre. But no, that didn’t count for much as time went by and the destroyer fell back into normal seagoing routines. Half the crew were new men, many of them on their first ship, lacking the sea legs, the professionalism, the seamanship and the priceless seagoing experience of the men they’d replaced. Which made it even more remarkable how sure-footed Talavera’s ridiculously young — the kid was only twenty-seven, the Master at Arms continually reminded himself — new Executive Officer had been in the five days he had been aboard.
“Any new defaulters for the Captain’s table overnight, Mister McCann?”
“No, sir.”
Peter Christopher checked his watch. It would be dawn in thirty minutes. In Ten minutes time the ship would stand to Air Defence Stations One; a drill that owed its origin to the exigencies of former wars. In the pre-dawn twilight surface ships were marvellously silhouetted against the half light of the new day, periscopes and even small boats, like torpedo boats, were almost invisible to the naked eye down low against the background of the iron grey sea. In the twilight there was no real horizon, no ranging point for the lookouts high in a warship’s superstructure, the only sign of a threat was a trail of bubbles in the water or a tell-tale smear of exhaust smoke. The advent of radar in World War II had somewhat eroded the necessity and the utility of the pre-dawn drill, but as a way of waking up the ship and starting each new day with a metaphorical ‘bang’, closing up at Air Defence Stations One was hard to beat. In any event, who really trusted in radar? HMS Talavera’s slowly rotating four-ton double bedstead Type 965 long-range air defence system atop her great lattice foremast could supposedly see to and slightly beyond the visible horizon; but seeing danger hurtling towards one wasn’t the same thing as being capable of fending it off when it actually arrived overhead. This was never more true than in the ship’s current, electronically denuded condition. The wreckage of the GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air quadruple launcher had been removed, likewise the Limbo anti-submarine mortar; bare steel plates covered the decks where they had blown up and burned off Cape Finisterre. The 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannons on the stern deckhouse had gone, too, and while the twin 4.5 turrets of the destroyer’s main battery on the foredeck looked mightily impressive and made a comfortingly loud noise when fired in unison, currently the guns could only be directed, ranged and fired under local control. The gunnery control radar and all its associated electronics had either been destroyed off Cape Finisterre or removed or disconnected during the desperate rush to patch Talavera up for the run to Malta.
“Mr Weiss has the watch, sir,” the Master at Arms reported. Both men knew the watch list but the formalities had to be observed. Redundant information was nowhere near as big a problem as risking a failure to communicate a potentially vital piece of information one believed a colleague already knew.
Peter Christopher eased himself to his feet, grabbed his cap.
“Lead on, Mister McCann.”
The two men went first to the bridge.
“Good morning, Mr Weiss,” Peter half-smiled. Miles Weiss had joined the destroyer two months after the October War. Eighteen months his new Executive Officer’s junior in age, the two men were both ‘modern technical officers’ by training and vocation. For Peter the fascination was with radar and electronics, for Miles Weiss it was with guns and ordnance of every imaginable description. “Any surface contacts?”
“We’re painting several fishing boats on the Type 965 repeater, sir.” The dark-haired shorter man reported. “Nothing closer than seven miles. We have a couple of larger contacts farther out. Range thirty miles and slowly falling astern. Might be the Spanish destroyers Gibraltar warned us were stooging about out here?”
Peter Christopher could feel the easy motion of the ship under his feet as she effortlessly breezed along at a speed no merchantman in the world could match, her blowers hissing, her fabric softly, rhythmically vibrating.
“They probably don’t realise we’re half-blind with most of our radars down,” he chuckled. Before they departed Gibraltar he had heard that the Spanish had sent a delegation to the border of the colony to deliver a formal ‘ceasefire concordat’. It seemed that, just so there could be no further ‘unfortunate misunderstandings’, Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde had personally commanded all Spanish land, air and sea forces, and all internal militias to observe an indefinite unconditional unilateral ‘armistice’ with the ‘forces of the British Empire’. “If those contacts are Spanish they’re a long way from home?”