The father’s eyes clouded with remorse.
A few minutes later Joe Calleja left the house. If he stayed in it a minute longer he’d want to throw himself under a bus. He was a little guilty he couldn’t share in his mother and father’s, or really, in Marija’s grief. He was sad about Sam, and ashamed, mostly he was spitting mad. How could that miserable, self-centred, selfish bastard do this to them all? He’d murdered Joe’s friend, Jim Siddall, and worse, he might have succeeded in doing the impossible; breaking Marija’s spirit. When he’d set off those bombs in the bowels of HMS Torquay, Joe hoped his brother had lived long enough to know what he’d done, long enough to suffer.
He worked his way to the sea wall, sat on the cool concrete.
He smoked one, then a second cigarette, watching what was happening on HMS Talavera.
Two tall men, officers, were standing on the stern a little apart from a gang of others, talking, perhaps laughing as they examined the ship’s many jagged wounds.
For the first time he wondered exactly what kind of a man Peter Christopher was; any man who’d done what he’d done off Lampedusa — assuming the stories were true — was a brave man. Marija had said he was a good man. A brave good man. Now there was a thing!
After an age the whaler which had transported the Commander-in-Chief across the glassy waters of Sliema Creek to welcome home his conquering hero son, filled with bodies and serenely chugged back towards the ferry jetty.
Joe began to work his way along the waterfront to get a better view.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher was his father’s height, possible an inch taller, a perfect, carbon copy of the great man as he must have been in his late twenties.
Joe saw the younger man looking around; knew he was questing for Marija.
He waved but then so was everybody else.
Flash guns popped and dazzled, the Pathe film crew stalked their prey. Big, round metal microphones were pushed into the younger Christopher’s face. He took it in good spirit, smiling a little shyly, self-consciously the way all movie stars wish they could but never, ever quite manage to pull off.
“On behalf of my crew,” he said sheepishly, his father standing back out of the limelight as his son’s voice carried, echoing along the seafront and up the narrow streets of Sliema. “I must thank everybody for such a marvellous welcome. I’m told the crowds on Tigne Point and the ramparts of Valletta were a thing to behold. I missed most of it, I’m afraid. I’ve never been to this part of the World before and I was rather keen not to inadvertently run Talavera aground on her first visit to this lovely island!”
There was laughing, a shuffling clamour for more.
What followed was a quick-fire barrage of shouted questions which the youthful destroyer commander parried with what appeared to be practiced grace but was in fact, simply well-manner charm.
“All I can say is that I’ve been looking forward to visiting Malta for a long time and now that I am finally here, I intend to enjoy every minute of it. Although obviously, not until my ship is patched up and ready to rejoin the fight!”
Chapter 26
In another fifteen minutes Captain Simon Collingwood, the commander of the Royal Navy’s most advanced warship, the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine HMS Dreadnought, would have dived deep and commenced a twenty-four hour high speed run to his new patrol box one hundred and fifty miles south of Crete. Then the sound room had picked up surface contacts coming his way.
For the previous forty-eight hours Dreadnought had slowly cruised off Souda, and Heraklion and back again. The presence of a few small fishing boats had been noted, but the pre-October War ferry traffic, and the criss-crossing of the Southern Aegean by merchantmen of every shape, size and antiquity was a sad memory. The seas north of Crete were eerily quiet and lonely. The waters under the boat’s keel were also astonishingly deep in this part of the Eastern Mediterranean. Here only a few miles off the north-western coast of Crete there was no bottom for nearly two miles down.
The hairs on the nape of Simon Collingwood’s neck had tingled, stood up on end when he had received the orders to proceed to Crete. Crete was one of those places that had a special resonance to Royal Navy men. It was in the waters around Crete in 1941 that the Mediterranean Fleet had fought some of the most gallant actions of the whole Second World War. Tasked to evacuated the defending troops routed by massed German paratrooper drops, cruisers and destroyers weighed down with rescued soldiers had shot themselves dry as they twisted and turned beneath a rain of bombs. When ships ran out of ammunition men had picked up pistols and rifles, anything to fend off the relentless Stukas and Junkers Ju 88 dive bombers. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk, another fifteen warships damaged in rescuing over sixteen thousand of the twenty-two thousand men of the original garrison on Crete. When questioned about the Royal Navy’s appalling losses in the evacuation the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham famously replied: ‘It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It takes three hundred years to build a tradition. The evacuation will continue.’
Right now the hairs on the back of Simon Collingwood’s neck were starting to stand up again.
In the distance the tall superstructure of the approaching cruiser had reminded him of old photographs of the Bismarck’s consort at the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the Prinz Eugen. This was hardly surprising because Soviet naval architects had stolen practically all the best ideas of their German enemies after the Second World War; not to mention one or two of their not so good ideas. Notwithstanding, the fifteen thousand ton Sverdlov class cruiser bearing down on HMS Dreadnought cut a singularly impressive dash. Nearly seven hundred feet long, armed with a dozen six-inch guns in four turrets, with her superstructure bristling with anti-aircraft guns, equipped with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes, and with her vitals protected by up to four inches of armour plate, the cruiser was approaching at thirteen or fourteen knots.
Even at a range of over a mile Simon Collingwood could clearly see the huge flag flying from her tripod main mast abaft her second stack as it streamed out to port on a stiffening southerly wind.
No battle flag he’d ever seen flown by a Royal Navy ship, not even by one of the old King George V class leviathans he’d served on as a snotty — a midshipman — at the end of Hitler’s war, was half the size of the great rippling blood red standard lashed to the Sverdlov class cruiser’s halyards.
He clicked the button to take photographs.
The mechanism of the camera module built into the periscope mounting whirred and advanced the film. He clicked again, and again.
“Down scope!”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought stood up straight.
“Down planes! Make our depth one-five-zero feet!”
The deck under his feet began to gently cant forward. Soon they would all hear the onrushing cruiser, her screws thrashing at the water, her passing like the distant thunder of a score of express trains in the night.
“She’s a later Sverdlov class ship,” Simon Collingwood announced conversationally. “More radio and radar clutter on her superstructure than I’ve seen before. I couldn’t see any escorts but the sky behind her was very hazy. The haze might have been funnel smoke, but,” he shrugged, grinned at his red-headed, rusty-bearded Executive office, Max Forton. “Nothing would surprise me, frankly!”
There was a brief low mutter of amusement before everybody got on with their jobs.
“Once she’s gone by we’ll come up to periscope depth again and see what’s coming up behind our Sverdlov, Number One.