Alex was pleased to encounter several of his pilots chatting with, or in a couple of cases, getting their hands dirty working under open cowlings or fuselage panels with their dedicated deck ‘gangs’. Perhaps, half of all the flight engineers on board the carrier had transferred with their pilots when all bar a handful of the Squadron’s pilots had volunteered for the ‘Navy Lark’.
Simon Foljambe made his excuses and went off to get on with his ‘chores’. There was always something that needed to be done on board a warship at sea; that, Alex had quickly discovered, was it seemed, an immutable law of nature. Keeping a wary weather eye on his wristwatch, Alex stopped to talk, and to exchange passing banter with his people. Another fact of life aboard a ship the size of the Perseus with a crew of over fifteen hundred men, was that one was always bumping into new faces, and learning new names to put to those faces.
He reported to the Captain’s domain with seven minutes to spare. The CAW was already there, deep in conversation with the Old Man, who looked up and smiled a conspiratorial smile at Alex.
“Normally, I’d kick of proceedings by offering you all a stiff drink,” Captain Patrick O’Mara Bentinck guffawed, “but today we’ll be supping strong coffee. The shape of things to come if things turn out as badly as they seem to be threatening to at present!”
Oh, that does not sound good!
“As you know, I took the pledge a while back, sir,” Alex chortled. “Although, if you asked me to land on the deck in weather like this, I think I’d reconsider in a blink of the eye!”
Both Perseus’s commanding officer and Andrew Buchannan chortled ruefully.
Patrick Bentinck, Alex had discovered, was one of the men who was responsible for ‘writing the book’ when it came to the Royal Navy’s first harem-scarum flirtation with ship-borne aviation. He had flown Fleabags – the oldest, slowest, most fragile aircraft still in service, as an Army artillery spotter – off the decks and turrets of cruisers, landed back on half-decked converted merchantmen, been the first man catapulted off a ship under way, and been Air Liaison Officer to the Admiralty Bureau of Planning, Naval Architecture and Design when the first of the Ulysses class ships had been laid down. Later he had been in command of the battlecruiser HMS Indomitable at the time of the Empire Day atrocities, shortly thereafter, taking command of the still only half-constructed Perseus. Legend had it that he had personally inspected every plate, rivet and weld of the carrier. Undoubtedly, nobody was better qualified to command Perseus than he.
Fifty-two years old, Bentinck was a New Englander born and bred, a proud son of Trenton, New Jersey who had first gone to sea as a student of the Elizabethtown Royal Naval College at the age of sixteen. During his long career he had served, and fought in gunboat actions in most of the World’s oceans, winning the Navy Cross for his part in a ‘fracas with pirates in the South China Sea’ in the late 1940s. He was one of those men who is a natural enthusiast in everything he lays his hand to, and irrepressibly optimistic to a fault. With his now greying beard and fiercely attentive, piercing look he could terrify or charm any man. He had never married. Ashore he was a cricket lover – a die-hard England supporter with little time for those ‘professional’ Philadelphians who regularly ‘beat up’ the ‘Old Country’s best and brightest – that most English of New Englanders.
Perseus’s Captain waited until his senior officers were seated, and the hatch to his stateroom firmly bolted shut and guarded by an armed Royal Marine.
“Gentlemen, I fear that within a matter of days we shall be at war with His Majesty’s enemies.”
Alex Fielding was not the only man in the compartment to sit up a little straighter; although, because this was the Royal Navy, nobody actually spilled his tea, or coffee, either as a result of the motion of the ship in the heavy weather, or from any manifestation of existential shock.
“The information to hand is, in some respects, fragmentary,” Patrick Bentinck continued, his jaw set in grim resolution, “but it is incontrovertible that events in the Caribbean have taken a very bad turn.”
Alex realised that Bentinck was looking at him.
“It seems that the so-called Vera Cruz Squadron of the Navy of New Spain, Granada, or whatever those people down there call it these days,” his lip curled with involuntary contempt, “aided and abetted, no doubt, by other forces of the Triple Alliance, Cuban and Dominican, presumably, have attacked and invaded Jamaica, and,” he paused, dismay flickering in his stare, “ambushed and disabled, possibly sunk, the Achilles whilst she was in transit south through the Windward Passage…”
Alex froze.
“Sunk, sir?” He asked, dumbly.
“That may be the case. Fleet Headquarters at Norfolk has no reliable confirmation of that. What we know is that she was engaged by at least two heavy units, suspected to be the cruisers Breitenfeld and Lutzen and by those vessels’ screening destroyers. There are also accounts of Achilles’s aircraft attacking a third cruiser some miles farther to the south in the vicinity of Navassa Island, or perhaps, some distance north of that place. As I say, the intelligence picture is a tad murky at present.”
Bentinck pursed his lips.
“I know your brother is on board Achilles, Alex,” he said quietly. “Had there been more to go on, I would have let you know immediately.” He shrugged. “At the moment the people onshore are trying to work out what has transpired from intercepted signals and the nonsense that the Cubans and the others are broadcasting on their national radio stations.”
Alex nodded acknowledgement.
He did not trust himself to speak.
“The situation on Jamaica is dire but at least we have regular updates from our own people. The guard ship, the Cassandra has been heavily damaged and driven aground to stop her sinking. We know that enemy forces have come ashore, at as many as three locations but after the initial confusion our forces, in league with native militia, are resisting the invasion. Our people on the island report that six, perhaps seven enemy warships including two heavier units, assumed to be cruisers bombarded the airfield at Kingston, putting it out of action and destroying several aircraft on the ground. Further, the Naval fuel tanker farm at Kingston was set on fire. We have reason to believe that shore batteries registered several hits on the enemy vessels.”
Alex realised he had been staring into space.
He blinked back to reality.
“In addition to the modern ships of the Vera Cruz Squadron, five cruisers and a clutch of destroyers, we have reason to believe that the Kaiserliche Marine may have salted the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean with merchant cruisers and spy ships, these latter also functioning as general-purpose radio relay stations. As to the other naval forces available to the Triple Alliance and its allies, Hispaniola, Anguilla and the miscellaneous other Spanish-leaning countries in the region, we are talking about as many as thirty relatively modern destroyers or corvettes, a large number of coastal gunboats, but otherwise, older, obsolete ironclad cruisers, coal-fired escorts and suchlike, numbering perhaps fifty to a hundred seaworthy hulls. Included in that inventory of old ships are six so-called ‘slow battlecruisers’ – three Cuban and three Dominican – ships hefting twelve-inch main batteries on what are effectively lightly protected cruiser hulls. It is not known if any of them have been re-activated, or have been operated within recent years. We know that the members of the Triple Alliance have air forces, of which that of Nuevo Granada, is the most formidable, including relatively modern, German supplied, or co-developed models of fighters and ground attack aircraft. The Cubans and the Dominicans have several hundred aircraft between them, although very few modern types.”