“Seventy-four. Only three officers, including Commander Cowdrey-Singh…”
Kate nodded.
“Melanie has been very kind to me.”
Alex realised his sister-in-law was eyeing him inscrutably.
“You must not allow your anger to heat your blood, brother,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Abe would not wish that. Your wife would not want that. You have an unborn son…”
“Or daughter,” Alex quirked.
Kate half-smiled.
“Son,” she murmured, gently correcting him. “I shall be all right,” Kate went on. “I carry Abe’s daughter in my belly. I have no need to be brave, I must just be sensible. Until Abe returns to me.”
“Yes, of course.”
In truth, Alex was still in a daze when he returned to the Perseus. At a pier a quarter-of-a-mile south the battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable was loading one-ton 15-inch shells into her forward magazines.
Three of the new Goshawk IVs had already been hoisted onto the Perseus’s midships elevator – situated immediately aft of the island bridge on the starboard side of the ship – and manhandled onto the hangar deck, where mechanics were clambering over their brand-new charges.
“The Indefatigable has been attached to Task Force 5.2. Her after main battery turrets are mothballed but her forward fifteen-inchers are operational, as are her secondaries and all her AA guns.” This Alex was told by Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Brooke, the second-in-command of the ship’s Combat Air Wing. “Princess Royal, the Ulysses and the rest of Task Force 5.1, reinforced by the 21st Escort Group, are heading straight down to Bahamian waters to force the Windward Passage and to relieve the garrison on Jamaica. Well, assuming it holds out that long. If not, they’ll blockade the island and soften up the forces of occupation ahead of an amphibious assault.”
Alex had noted more than once that although his new, Navy comrades in arms shared the bluff, esprit de corps he had been familiar with down on the Border, few if any of them, combined their confidence and – possibly justified – sense of moral and martial superiority, with the innate caution that an old pilot, like him, carefully accumulated over the years.
Notwithstanding the persona he projected, nobody needed to tell Alexander Fielding that there were no old, bold pilots. It troubled him, not a lot but a little, certainly, that the general assumption on board the Perseus was that the Navy was going to steam down south and basically, ‘sort out’ the enemy, and that, was that…
He, for one, did not think the coming fight was going to be a pushover. To the contrary, it seemed to him that it had all the signs of being a very bloody business indeed!
The thinking was that the Indomitable, a fully-operational sister ship of the mighty Indefatigable, and her escorting cruisers and destroyers would ‘lock up’ the Gulf of Spain from the Mississippi Delta to Florida, and stand ready to sortie against any invasion fleet heading for the Gulf Coast of New England, or against any attempt to resupply by sea enemy troops on the ground in the anticipated invasion of the South West. While Task Force 5.1 was roaring south via the Windward Passage to the relief of Jamaica, its aircraft and big gun ships liberally dispensing fiery ruin on coastal targets on Cuban and Santo Domingo; Task Force 5.2, with Indefatigable in hand, would launch strikes on the Spanish possessions in the Lesser Antilles, hitting Anguilla and Hispaniola hard before blocking any move by the Triple Alliance to ‘island hop’ to the south, or to threaten the chain of British colonies from St Kitts and Nevis, Barbuda, Antigua and Montserrat all the way to the margins of the Southern continent where Trinidad and Tobago lay, on the map at least, like ripe fruits waiting to be plucked off the low hanging branch of the tree of Empire.
All this was, apparently, putting into effect long-standing war plans which ought to have, but did not, reassure Alex. If any of his fellows on the Perseus, other than a handful of his pilots, had ever spent any time down on the Border in the old days, they would know full well that no plan ever survived first contact with the enemy.
Chapter 19
Monday 10th April
Alba de Tormes, Castile and León
Neither Melody Danson nor Henrietta de L’Isle had anticipated that Paul Nash’s idea of finding them somewhere ‘comfortable for the night’ had been a dirty, dusty cell in the local Policia Federales lock-up. It was bad enough being incarcerated by one’s enemies; when one’s friends did it to you, it was just too much!
Okay, they had eaten very well before they were locked up – it was amazing what luxuries a dead Inquisitor’s cash procured at the flick of the fingers – and the women had overheard what their demonic guardian angel had said to the two men responsible for their care: ‘Touch one hair on their bodies and I will personally cut off your dicks.”
For emphasis, he had added: ‘Then I’ll start cutting off other parts of your anatomy!’
Whereupon, Paul Nash and Albert Stanton, the latter blinking apologetically at the women, had departed. The only one who seemed to be taking it all in his stride was Pedro; who now definitely seemed to think Henrietta was his ‘Mama’.
There had been no boat to be had in Alba de Tormes.
The men were seeing what could be had farther downstream. So, in the meantime, the women were… locked up.
‘It isn’t safe to go any farther,’ Paul Nash had decided. ‘The nearer to Salamanca we get the more likely it is we’re going to run into more trouble than we can handle.’
By which he meant ‘trouble that he could handle on his own’.
Handling trouble was his area of expertise, not Melody’s, so she had not attempted to argue the point.
“This is officially a nightmare,” Henrietta declared.
“Night… mare,” Pedro echoed.
It was dark outside, the cell was unlit other than by the loom of the single, naked lamp illuminating the next room where their gaolers were chain-smoking and morosely playing cards.
Melody said nothing.
“If we ever get out of this,” Henrietta went on, “what then?”
“How do you mean?”
“Life is going seem a bit humdrum, don’t you think?”
Melody touched her lover’s knee. The women were sitting on a thin straw mattress with their backs to the wall watching over Pedro, who, just for a change, had gone to sleep in Melody’s lap.
Henrietta took Melody’s hand and clasped it tightly.
“Don’t you think?” She repeated.
“I don’t know,” the older woman confessed. “I thought I had everything figured out. My life, who and what I was, I’d got comfortable in my own skin. And then your dad gave me a job that, to be honest, I ought to have refused,” she shrugged, “I met you, and well, here we are. I started over once, I can do it again.”
The women fell into quietness.
“You and I,” Melody continued, “would have taken ten, twenty years to get to know each other as well as we do now but for everything going crazy around us the last month, and that’s a fact. If we get out of this there will be other men like Alonso. That’s just the way I am. You’ll still be ten times more maternal than me. Whatever happens, we’ll have a lot of stuff to work through. That would have happened anyway, it’s just that everything has got speeded up, I suppose.”
Not thinking she was making a lot of sense, she shut up.
The women leaned into each other.
“Maybe,” Henrietta giggled, “if you share the next Alonso with me, that’ll help sort out my maternal issues?”