“True,” the officer of the watch agreed. “Initial contact was on a northerly bearing. As I say, they’ve slipped back a bit in the last hour or so. Obviously, in our present situation there’s no way we can interrogate their radar signatures,” presently, Talavera’s electronic warfare capability was negligible, “so for all we know those fellows might not even be Spanish.”
“The French and the Italians had US search and fire control kit before the war,” Peter Christopher mused aloud. He didn’t overly care for the notion that the two shadowing contacts might have better eyes over the horizon than his own ship. In this age having better and more capable electronics systems was the equivalent of having the lee gauge — the advantage of the wind — in former, pre-steam eras. He sighed, focused on more immediate matters. He glanced at the bulkhead clock. “Air Defence Stations in eight minutes,” he grinned. The old hands were accustomed to being welcomed into the new dawn by the alarms blaring through the ship; for the green draftees many of whom were still sea sick, it was a horrible introduction to another exhausting and bewildering shipboard day. “The Master and I will make our way to the auxiliary damage control station.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Auxiliary Damage Control station — ADC — was in the gutted after deckhouse. The dockyard had restored direct telephone links to the bridge and the engine room, repaired the emergency steering position, and tested all the linkages to the destroyer’s twin rudders. In dire extremis HMS Talavera could, theoretically, be conned from the ADC station although in practice, the very thought sent a shudder of apprehension through every fibre of the destroyer’s Executive Officer’s being.
Petty Officer Jack Griffin was waiting for the two men when they reached the stern. He was staring into the darkness where Talavera’s propellers churned the water white and faintly iridescent. The deck vibrated much more noticeably nearer the stern.
“Morning, sir. Morning, Master,” rasped the stocky, red-bearded man who Spider McCann had commandeered as his Deck Division number two and made responsible for turning the greenest of the latest replacements into ‘real seaman’.
“Not like you to be woolgathering at this time of day, Petty Officer Griffin?” Peter Christopher observed.
“I’m getting soft in my old age, sir!” The other man retorted.
Spider McCann snorted derisively
”Seriously, Master,” Jack Griffin protested. “Some of the blokes we took onboard at Gib are just kids who volunteered for this lark to get…” His voice trailed away. “You know, things aren’t that good at home, I suppose.”
“It’ll get a lot worse if we fuck up!” The Master at Arms reminded his most junior Petty Officer.
Peter Christopher had wondered how Jack Griffin would cope with suddenly finding himself at the bottom of the pecking order in the Petty Officers’ Mess. He needn’t have worried. Spider McCann had set him to work night and day with the youngest, least ‘naval’ of the new men and from what HMS Talavera’s Executive officer had heard and seen to date, Jack Griffin might have been born to bully and mentor confused, frightened and sometimes angrily belligerent boys towards manhood. Jack Griffin threw a salute and departed ahead of the alarm to his damage control station in the empty deck space behind the funnel where the CIC had been. The compartment had been so comprehensively wrecked that the whole structure had been cut away and dumped on the dockside at Gibraltar. The absence of this element of superstructure, the GWS 21 Sea Cat system, the Limbo anti-submarine mortar and the old main mast meant that Talavera had lost somewhere around seventy tons of top weight, all of it relatively high above her notional centre of gravity; consequently she was a much stiffer sea boat, and her period of roll shorter. This ought to have made life easier for the new men, reduced the agonies of sea sickness. It ought to have, anyway. In another way it made Miles Weiss’s job as ‘Guns’ — the gunnery officer — harder because not only did he have to contend with an absence of a working fire control system but the new ‘stiffness’ of the ship made her a much less stable gun platform in any kind of cross sea.
“Another few days and we’ll be in Malta, sir,” the Master at Arms remarked as the two men waited on the stern beneath the flapping White Ensign on the jack staff over their heads.
Everybody who’d been on Talavera any length of time, certainly everybody who’d been onboard before the action off Cape Finisterre, knew the story about the Fighting Admiral’s son and his Maltese sweetheart. There were few if any secrets on a ship the size of the old Battle class destroyer, especially when the ship had been tied up in harbour most of last year awaiting a call to action nobody had seriously believed would ever come.
Well, they’d been wrong about that as they’d been wrong about practically everything else!
“Yes,” the younger man muttered. “In my spell on Hermes I allowed myself to get carried away with things,” he confessed. If he couldn’t trust the Master at Arms with a harmless secret then what hope was there? He’d started dreaming of seeing Marija waiting for him on the quayside as the carrier glided into the Grand Harbour. “For the moment I think taking things day by day is the ticket.”
The older man sniffed.
“That’s very wise, sir!”
Chapter 18
“Good morning, gentleman!” Margaret Thatcher called as she swept into the oak beamed room which the previous owner of the mansion — a now deceased Fleet Street press baron — had probably honestly believed resembled a classic Tudor reception room. The dead newspaper magnate had been a man of decidedly flawed and ill-informed tastes and the big house that now accommodated the Cabinet Office and the rooms of several of the most senior members of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom reflected his foibles. The devil, as they say, is invariably in the detail and the one thing the magnate had not invested in was the building’s plumbing and central heating; neither of which worked. The Cabinet Room was relatively warm thanks to a roaring fire in the great, baronial hearth at its northern end; facilitated by the Prime Minister having given her personal seal of approval to the pooling her Ministers’ daily personal coal rations. Today was going to be a long day and she didn’t want her key associates slowly turning into blocks of ice when there was work to be done.
The Prime Minister was in bullish form, her mood untouched by the troubling news from the Mediterranean and the disturbing intimations from across the Atlantic that the ‘America First’ camp in the relocated Congress in Philadelphia was stronger and more vociferous than Tom Harding-Grayson, the Foreign Secretary, had anticipated in his worst nightmares. As much as she hated waiting on events, the situation was what it was and there was no point moping about it. One played the game with the hand one was dealt.
Besides, half-an-hour alone with Julian Christopher had made her invincible.
At the end of the ‘conference’ in the Officers Mess at RAF Brize Norton yesterday evening, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations had baldly requested: ‘Might I have a few moments alone with you, Prime Minister?’