Then two huge waterspouts reared up between the battleship and the beach.
Big bombs…
Five hundred or one-thousand pounders, he guessed.
Abe rolled onto his back and peered into the grey blue above the enemy ships; spied the ever-growing forms of aircraft diving very nearly vertically on their prey, fancied he saw more black specs tumble away from their under-wing hard points.
Those were Sea Eagles…
The seas around the battleship erupted.
There was a livid crimson flash somewhere in the vicinity of the old ship’s aft main battery turret.
A Goshawk flashed along the line of the beach, scything down a gang of gawping Dominican seamen. The idiots had not even had the presence of mind to put their rifles to their shoulders and shoot at the attacking aircraft.
Abe clearly saw the RNAS roundel on the Goshawk’s flank.
As the cloud of smoke and falling debris began to lift Abe could see that the Reina Eugenie was in a bad way. Flames licked all around her aft deckhouse, her stern chains had parted and the tide was already swinging her quarterdeck towards the beach.
Although it all seemed timeless, he guessed the attack had been under way for less than a minute. Notwithstanding the sky looked like it was full of aircraft he had thus far only counted about a dozen machines.
Now the ironclads out in the channel were blazing away.
Abe had no way of knowing what they were shooting at.
Not for a moment or two.
Then he realised they were engaging planes low down, skimming the waves: torpedo bombers. As if in confirmation the first of the Sea Eagles barrelled above the westernmost ironclad at literally, masthead height.
Another followed, then a third and a fourth.
He waited for the ironclad to be torn apart by the multiple impacts of the ‘fish’ that must be tracking straight for her. Instead, the oddest thing happened.
Barely fifty feet down the beach a silvery metal tube flew through the surf and came to a whirring, noisy stop several feet out of the water.
Abe blinked in astonishment.
The 21-inch torpedo must have passed under the ironclads, and missed the stern of the Reina Eugenie by a whisker before driving on, and up the beach.
Still he waited for the detonations of the other torpedoes.
Nothing happened.
All the Dominican ships were shooting, although at what exactly, was something of a moot point for a minute or so.
Abe was preoccupied watching the Reina Eugenie. The ship had definitely settled in the water by the stern. One of her screws was turning, she must have cut loose her forward anchors, and she was, ever so ponderously, edging away from the shore, with ever-more copious amounts of black smoke belching from her single stack.
It was not until the battleship started to crab against the current in the channel that Abe saw the farthest of the two ironclad cruiser slowly capsizing. Men were clambering up her barnacle-fouled sides to find temporary salvation on her upturned keel, while all around the waters seethed with debris and the bobbing heads of men trying not to get dragged out to sea, or through the nearby channel by the tides.
The skies were suddenly quiet.
Men were dying on those ships out in the channel, in the strangely placid seas, and on the beach.
Abe stared stupidly at the torpedo just above the surf line like a stranded silver Dolphin.
It’s propeller still raced, its motor still whirred, smoking greyly as it overheated.
He did not remember getting, well, shambling to his feet.
Now he stood swaying, patiently waiting for the torpedo to catch fire or just, blow up.
He never saw the two men rise from the brush nearby.
He never heard their stealthy approach.
He did not even know they were their until in combination they bowled him to the ground, much in the fashion of bulls charging down a lamed matador at the very moment the four-hundred-and thirty-seven-pound high explosive warhead of the beached torpedo exploded.
Chapter 29
Tuesday 12th April
River Tormes, Castile and León
Paul Nash had lied to them about abandoning the boat and going ashore as soon as they were past Salamanca. They had not hauled the vessel ashore until around midnight, waited helplessly in the dark and the rain while their guardian angel disappeared into the darkness for about an hour. He returned with dry blankets, cups to bale out the boat, stale bread and a couple of bottles of beer.
‘Safer than the water,’ he grunted as they pushed the boat back into the water.
‘Pedro will catch his death out here,’ Henrietta had protested.
‘Believe it or not I am not going out of my way to give you all a hard time, My Lady,” Nash had retorted, testily, momentarily betraying his own weariness.
It was some time later that Melody asked: “So, we’re following the river to Ledesma.”
“Yes,” the man murmured.
“That’s what, another twenty miles downstream?”
“Something like.”
“Will we get there before first light?”
“No.”
Melody sighed: “Then we walk again?”
“That’s the plan. The border is about thirty miles west-north-west of Ledesma.”
“The ‘border’ is the River Douro, how do we get across that, Paul?”
“We swim if we have to.”
“The Douro is fifty or more yards across at that point!”
Everybody else was listening, tensing for an outburst which never came.
“I know all that,” Paul Nash admitted. “I had a plan right up to that cock-up at El Barco de Avila. After that, well, I’ve been winging it. That’s the way it is. I came to Spain to rescue you two damsels in distress. I brought Albert along to add his manly support but mostly, to document the adventure for posterity. We’ve had a few setbacks along the way. Nevertheless, be assured that I will rescue you.”
The boat drifted on, pulled this way and that by the current as it left the lights of Salamanca far behind. Sometime after midnight the clouds rolled away and the stars came out.
The two women and Albert Stanton took turns baling.
Now they were in quieter waters the boat’s planks worked less and the leaks became more easily containable.
“My turn,” Melody said, realising that the Manhattan Globe man was practically baling in his sleep. Not that any of them could sleep, the night was cold and they shivered in their damp clothes, all except Pedro who was swaddled in a couple of dry blankets and always hugged tight in either Henrietta or Melody’s arms.
Albert Stanton handed over his baling cup.
To Melody’s surprise he chuckled softly.
“Do you remember that first time we met?” He inquired.
“In that tea house in the shadow of the bridge at Brooklyn?”
“Yes.” The man groaned. “If only we had known then what we know now, what?”
“If we had,” she offered ruefully, “would we really have done anything differently?”
“Maybe not,” he confessed. “Adventures are always more seductive in concept than in practice.”
“Every needs to be very quiet, please!” Paul Nash hissed urgently. “Stop baling. Everybody down low, now!”
A car was trundling along the northern side of the valley, its headlamps pools of white light. More by starlight, Melody glimpsed other boats moored on the river, all closer to the half-flooded banks than the one they were in, as they slowly drifted in the main channel.
Paul Nash was in the stern, leaning on the rudder oar.
“There are boats on the river ahead of us. They might just be putting down nets, or traps. Everybody under the blankets. I’d rather they think I’m smuggling than running apostates to the border.”