Bentinck let this sink in.
“I do not know what will happen next. What I can tell you, and what I will be telling the crew later this afternoon, is that the Task Force Commander has issued General War Order Three-Bravo, requiring all ships to prepare for imminent hostilities against air and surface targets. Further, Task Force 5.2 has been ordered to make best speed to Norfolk, there to take on personnel drafts to bring all ships up to their rated war complements, refuel and take onboard whatever additional special munitions are deemed appropriate by Fleet Command.”
Nobody said a word.
“Do you have any questions, gentlemen?”
Heads were shaken.
“If you’d stay behind awhile, Alex,” Bentinck qualified, “I’ll let everybody else get back to their departments. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we are ready for whatever awaits us in the coming days and weeks!”
The stateroom cleared.
Presently, Alex was alone with the Captain of the Perseus.
“This must be tremendously difficult for you?” The older man put to him rhetorically.
By then Alex had stopped feeling sorry for himself. He had lost a lot of good men, friends back in the day down on the Border. That hardened a man. What did not kill you made you stronger. The bad dreams were collateral damage, what mattered was that the layers of psychic scar tissue taught a man how to carry on, whatever went wrong. Or that was the way it worked for him.
If he paused to think about what Kate – Tekonwenaharake – was going through, or would be going through in the coming days, he could easily lose the plot. Then, Leonora would be in the same place that Kate might – he hoped against hope not – find herself in. There was no spare, safe space in which to mope or get distracted, one simply had to get on with the job.
That was what every old scout pilot knew.
It was not being insensitive, indifferent, or in any way callous; it was simply how things had to be.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll be okay.”
Bentinck met his gaze, unblinking.
“You can rely on me, sir,” Alex told him.
The older man nodded solemnly.
“Yes, I know I can, Commander.”
The two men nodded one to the other.
“That will be all,” Bentinck murmured.
Chapter 6
Friday 7th April
SMS Breitenfeld, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh limped stiffly up the gangway of the battle-scarred flagship of the Vera Cruz Squadron. A fresh-faced Kaiserliche Marine officer had offered him his arm as he stepped, awkwardly out of the launch which had ferried him the two hundred yards from the German prison ship, the Weser.
‘Get your filthy hands off me!’
The younger man had recoiled.
So much for the famous English sangfroid!
If he had had a cutlass to hand, HMS Achilles’s Executive Officer would have slashed the smug expression off the arrogant little shit’s face.
He was sweating, grimacing with pain by the time he reached the deck, his look as black as Hades. Notwithstanding, there were some things which were immutable. Hurtfully, he eased his right arm out of its sling and returned the officer of the deck’s salute.
What he did not do; and would never, ever do again so long as he lived, was look towards the filthy rag flying from the cruiser’s mainmast halyards. Right then, it was all he could do to stop himself spitting on the deck!
He glared around him.
Germans in neat, tidy uniforms, looking military; Spaniards loafing, hanging around, sulky-eyed, ignored by their own officers in their flashy, old-fashioned popinjay finery. So far as he could see the bastards had not even got around to re-naming their bloody ships!
“If you would be so kind as to follow me please, Commander. Admiral von Reuter will interview you in his quarters.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh had been born in central south India at Ootacamund in the Madras Presidency, the son of an Anglo-Tamil District Commissioner and his Ceylonese wife. The fourth of five sons, he had been sent to school in England under the auspices of the Imperial Scholarship Scheme when he was twelve years old, ostensibly to enable him to qualify for the Indian Civil Service upon his return home aged eighteen. And that would have been the course of his life had his father not died when he was sixteen. His mother, a clever, very well-read, and in hindsight feisty woman, had travelled to Europe with his younger brother – his three elder siblings had by then established careers in public administration, education and the law back in the Presidency.
In retrospect, it was apparent that she had always anticipated that Peter, as a child the smallest, slowest, most delicate of her sons, might never return to India. As she had hoped, he had thrived in England, found a community of lifelong friends and excelled in his school’s Cadet Program. The rough and tumble, regimented life of the armed forces beckoned and aged eighteen he had boarded not a ship to Madras, rather he had stepped onto a train to South Devon bound for the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He had never looked back.
That was twenty-six years ago.
To be appointed second-in-command to the senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet had been his service’s ultimate accolade. The last eighteen months had been the happiest, most satisfying days of his life.
However, right now, his dear wife, Melanie, would be starting to wonder how on Earth she was going to prepare the kids – thirteen-year-old Indira, ten-year-old Peter junior, and eight-year-old Maryam – for the bad news about their father. Melanie was a profoundly practical woman, herself a ‘Navy daughter’, she would know what to do and that the kids needed to hear the bad news from her before they heard it on the TV.
Despite his near incandescent outrage, righteously simmering volcanically just behind his eyes the Achilles’s Executive Officer missed nothing as he was escorted below.
The whole ship still stank of fire.
There were a lot of walking wounded.
From his seat on the Weser’s launch, the Breitenfeld had seemed to have a slight list to port: an underwater hit?
A glance at the ship’s bridge told him that the gunnery ELDAR aerial array that appeared on every intelligence photograph of the Lutzen class of heavy cruisers, was not there anymore. The ship’s catapult, boat deck and several of her midships anti-aircraft gun positions looked a real mess.
The cruiser’s aircraft hangar was a scorched shell, its catapult a tangle of steel.
Nor had he missed the bunker fuel discolouring the aquamarine blue of the anchorage. He had not got such a good look at the Lutzen, partially obscured by the Breitenfeld’s bulk but it was obvious that Achilles’s starboard three-inch auto-cannons had given her armoured hide a damned good peppering.
All of which tended to explain why the crew of the Weser had been less than triumphal. In fact, the beggars who still retained a scintilla of self-respect had seemed positively down in the mouth, and a little – rightfully – ashamed of themselves. The bastards had taken away his torn and bloodied uniform jacket and given him a German rig, absent any insignia of rank. He would much rather have carried on wearing his blood, oil and sea-water-soaked rags; at least he could wear those with honour.