“There has been a change of plan. The Weser will accompany the fleet for at least the next twenty-four hours. When we approach Jamaica, Admiral von Reuter plans to dispatch us into the Atlantic via the Lesser Antilles. He will report to his Spanish superiors that the Weser has been assigned to a commerce-raiding role; in fact, we will steam directly for home waters, or if that proves impractical, make passage for the Imperial concession of San Juan on Hispaniola, so that I may place you, your men, the young people transferred from the Breitenfeld and the Lutzen, and our wounded into the custody of the German Minister.”
The Achilles’s former Executive Officer stared at the German for several seconds, hardly trusting his ears.
“This is a filthy business,” Weitzman said, obviously not caring – certainly not fearing – who overheard his words. His English was of the type rigorously schooled long ago in German naval cadet colleges, as perfect as that of any newsreader employed by the Empire Broadcasting Service in Hampstead. “You and your people are not my prisoners. You are passengers on board a ship of the Kaiserliche Marine, who will be put ashore or transferred to a friendly vessel at the earliest practical time consistent with your safety, and that of my ship. All I ask of you and your people until that time, is that you refrain from showing yourselves on deck other than in the company of guards, who will make a show of watching over you for the benefit of our Spanish ‘friends’ on the other ships. I trust that this arrangement will be acceptable to you for the remainder of your time aboard my ship?”
“Yes, most satisfactory,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh murmured. He glanced at the stern of the Lutzen, in whose broad wake the Weser was following.
“The Kaiser’s orders were addressed to the men and the ships of the West Indies Squadron, now the so-called Vera Cruz Squadron of the Armada de Nuevo Granada,” Weitzman explained resignedly. “The Weser is a vessel of the Imperial Fleet Auxiliary, and like several other ancillary vessels on the West Indies Station, it was not listed in the schedule of Fleet Orders transferring Admiral von Reuter’s command to the Mexicans.”
“Surely the Spanish won’t just let the Weser sail away?”
“We shall see,” Weitzman shrugged, a little apologetically. “Regrettably, we must remain with the Fleet for the present. Before we steam to the east, Jamaica must be reduced. The Weser will take no part in that.” The old man shook his head. “You should also be aware that Admiral von Reuter authorised the transmission of a comprehensive list of Royal Naval personnel under his protection at zero-six-hundred hours this day. I am informed that your base at St John’s River in Florida, acknowledged receipt of the same. I know it will be of no comfort to the relatives and friends of the missing but at least, for a few people in New England, I sincerely pray it will make these dreadful times a little more bearable.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh nodded, could not speak for a moment, the words choking from emotion in his throat.
“Thank you, sir.”
In open waters the fleet, the Southern Strike Force slowly shook itself out into steaming formation. At its heart were Breitenfeld and Lutzen, fore and aft respectively of El Rey Ferdinand II, followed by the Cuban ironclad cruiser Santa Ana, her four 9.2-inch main battery guns in twin turrets at bow and stern, jauntily elevated fifteen degrees, flanked by two relatively modern – dating from the 1960s – general-purpose frigates. Farther out four big, former-German fleet destroyers loped along effortlessly in the long, shallow Caribbean swell, as if contemptuous of the Cuban and Dominican coal-burning three and four-stack torpedo boats half their size. The Weser, two old ferries and a dilapidated five-thousand-ton tramp steamer carrying troops and equipment bound for Kingston, Jamaica, paced the battlefleet at a sedate eleven knots by the time the grandiosely named Dominican 2nd Battle Squadron straggled into range of the Weser’s air search ELDAR.
A bridge officer punctiliously offered Peter Cowdrey-Singh his binoculars as the motley collection of ships led by a single, light cruiser – which from a distance reminded him a little of Achilles – hove into view. The Hero class trade route protection cruisers had set the standard for all other navies back in the 1940s, and several had attempted to replicate – with varying degrees of success – the key features of the class.
The La Romana had been the Ferrol Naval Arsenal’s botched attempt to copy the Hero and her sisters. ‘Botched’ in the sense that her all-rivetted, armour-heavy design had necessitated the removal of her ‘C’ turret, and of any secondary armament heavier than a machine gun, in order to preserve her stability, and even before her transfer to the Dominicans in the 1960s the ship’s machinery had been so unreliable that in the ten years after her commissioning, she had only spent eleven months at sea.
Trailing in La Romana’s wake were more multi-stack, thousand-ton torpedo boat destroyers carrying a handful of 4-inch calibre guns and one or, more normally, two quadruple twenty-inch torpedo tube mounts.
Bringing up the rear was a sight to bring a lump to the throat of any self-respecting naval historian, the Tomás de Torquemada, the twin-stack, black smoke-belching twenty-five thousand-ton museum piece, flagship of the Santo Domingo Navy, thought at one time to have been so badly neglected that she had sunk at her moorings in the late 1960s.
The old dinosaur was not so much cleaving through the waves as shouldering them aside, riding so low in the water it seemed she was part-submerged when her blunt prow met each wave.
“Bloody Hell,” Peter Cowdrey-Singh muttered privately. “Now I’ve seen… everything.”
Originally, the German-built, Turkish Sultan Osman I, launched as long ago as June, 1923, the Tomás de Torquemada, had been envisaged by the Ottomans in Constantinople as the ultimate ‘guardian of the Bosphorus’.
In essence, the Torquemada was conceived as a giant armoured raft mounting the two biggest naval rifles ever taken to sea, two of the ten Kaiserliche Marine Experimentelle Waffeneinrichtung (the Imperial Navy’s Experimental Gun Establishment at Stettin) guns planned to be incorporated in the German Empire’s fortification program to prevent an enemy fleet, specifically the British, from ever again forcing entry into and roaming the Baltic at will, as had happened in 1865.
The guns, 18.3-inch 45-calibre, one hundred-and-fifty-ton, sixty feet-long monsters, one housed in a turret forward, the other aft, fired a one-and-a-half-ton shell with a two hundred-and-fifty-pound bursting charge at a muzzle velocity of three-quarters of a mile a second up to twenty-three miles down range. In tests, the Kaiserliche Marine had conclusively demonstrated that armour-piercing rounds fired from these barrels could penetrate sixteen-inch-thick Krupp patent cemented plate – the thickest protection carried by any battleship of any navy, afloat – up to striking angles of forty-three degrees at a range of nearly fourteen miles.
Back in 1929, Russian objections during a brief period of Russo-German rapprochement, had prevented the nearly-completed ship being delivered to Constantinople; a slight that was still largely responsible for the generational coolness of German-Ottoman relations. Several years later the ship was sold to the Swedes, who moored it at Stockholm, then off Gotland and finally at Malmo as a floating gun battery. When the ship was sold on, for little more than its scrap value to Santo Domingo in 1963, nobody had expected the rusting hulk to survive the Atlantic crossing under tow. Thereafter it had been employed as a headquarters ship, an accommodation barge and latterly, legend had it, been somewhat rejuvenated as a gunnery training school. Persistent rumours that the old scow had been refitted for operations in the open ocean had been universally decried as nonsense.