“Very funny,” Melody whispered.
Together, she and Henrietta held Pedro out of the cold water beginning to seep again into the bottom of the boat.
“For the record,” Paul Nash observed idly, clearly distracted, “the Douro runs very shallow at places along the border we’re heading for. Even with the rains we might still be able to wade across it…”
He broke off.
Cursed under his breath.
The boat was suddenly gliding through a pool of blinding light.
“Melody!” He snarled.
“What?”
“Stand up in the boat and start shouting and screaming in your best peasant Castilian. Tell them to turn those bloody lights off. Put in lots and lots of contemptuous accusations about the manhood of the men pointing those bloody lights at us please!”
Melody over-balanced rising to her feet as the boat moved under her feet, would have gone overboard had not Paul Nash grabbed her arm.
Unsurprisingly, it happened that she was in exactly the mood to be very, very rude to somebody. She struggled momentarily to get into character, thereafter the profanity flowed with marvellous fluency.
It did not matter that she did not have a clue who she was subjecting to her little stream of consciousness outpouring of quite the foulest invective she had ever heard, let alone spoken. All she needed to know was that there were men out there – standing on a man-made jetty-promontory jutting out into the River Tormes – who were, for the umpteenth time in the last month, making her life a lot more miserable than it really needed to be!
She got quite carried away.
So much so that it was some moments before she became aware that Paul Nash was standing up beside her – in the full, dazzling fire of the powerful torches, at least two or three directed at their faces – making hopeless shrugging gestures and pulling faces, as if to say, what can I do?
All the while the boat was drifting towards the jetty, and then, miraculously gliding on past.
Somebody on the bank shouted something.
Melody thought it sounded like: “Eres bienvenido a ella, Compadre!”
You are welcome to her, friend…
“Who were they?” Melody asked the man breathlessly.
“I have no idea. Local tax men? Federales National? Local guild members out to fleece honest citizens on the river?”
Melody slumped down into the water in the bottom of the boat.
Oh well, at least Paul Nash had not had to kill anybody yet tonight.
Chapter 30
Tuesday 12th April
SMS Weser, Kingston, Jamaica
The city was on fire in the night. Having surrendered after being given guarantees as to the decent treatment of the civilian population, prisoners of war and the wounded, the victors were now running riot in Kingston; and despite the presence of Marines from the ships of the Vera Cruz Squadron under German officers, Cuban and Dominican troops were running wild, shooting and burning, looting and raping. The situation was completely out of control and all military discipline and civil order had broken down.
Kapitan zur See Albrecht Weitzman watched the sack of the city with abject shame. That he, as a German officer should be placed in a situation where he was powerless to intervene. That he should be condemned to collaborate with so-called allies whose bestiality seemed limitless, was the final insult.
The British had laid down their arms after being offered honourable terms. What was happening now was an abomination; something out of a medieval fable, a catastrophic miscalculation that would stain the name of the German Empire for generations to come.
The Spanish had marched their prisoners down to the harbour and shot them to pieces, dumping the bodies into the water where now, schools of sharks feasted in the bloody water.
Albrecht Weitzman had pulled up the Weser’s gangways and quietly warped his ship farther out into the main basin. He had posted armed guards at the rail and ordered that the ships four concealed 6-inch guns be readied for action. The false hull plates hiding the rifles could be dropped in a moment and the barrels swung outboard in seconds at need.
Standing at the back of the Weser’s bridge Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh had watched it all. Having taken it as read that the Weser had been converted to serve as a commerce raider, and suspected the supposedly ‘dead’, unused deck areas fore and aft must be gun positions, he had determined not to discuss such things with the Weser’s officers.
It would have been bad form.
Stepping over a line, bad etiquette.
While Kapitan zur See Albrecht Weitzman’s raging internal angst never touched his face, the former Executive Officer of the Achilles saw the man’s anger in his every move and gesture.
The Breitenfeld and the Lutzen lay lashed together opposite Port Royal, cross-decking munitions and with joint damage control and repair teams hard at work. Both ships were lit up like Christmas trees, seemingly oblivious to what was going on ashore a few hundred yards away.
Admiral Gravina had sent all his big ships to the northern shore of the island, where his troops were ‘mopping up’ the few remaining pockets of resistance and presumably, torching, murdering and raping as they went.
Peter Cowdrey-Singh questioned the wisdom of effectively immobilising the Southern Strike Force’s two most capable units – forget the big guns of the Ferdinands and the other Cuban-Dominican ships, the Breitenfeld and the Lutzen were by far and away the most formidable ships under Gravina’s command – but then von Reuter was a man used to making hard calls. He needed his two ‘heavies’ as seaworthy and as battle-worthy as possible PDQ, pretty damned quickly. Albeit at the risk of his ships being sitting ducks if the British attacked – that morning’s battle at the Inagua Archipelago was a salutary lesson in the dangers of complacency – by combining the resources of his two biggest ships he knew he could address key outstanding problems… fast. That was the other thing about a real, live war situation. Everything happened fast and anybody who did not get up to speed fast, was going to be in big trouble in no time flat.
It had occurred to him that one of the reasons Gravina had kept the Cuban, Dominican and Hispaniola elements of his rag-tag fleet at sea, was that many of the ships badly needed more time to ‘shake out’ their largely untried, possibly untrained, crews.
Not that doing that in the middle of a war was a particularly good idea. But then history reminded those who studied it that wars were always fought with the men and weapons you had to hand, rather than the ones you actually wanted or needed.
“This is a disgrace,” Weitzman remarked, taking off his cap and running a hand through his white hair. He glanced to the chronometer above the Anglo-Indian’s head.
“Admiral Gravina has ordered the Weser to sail to the Antilles to commence raiding operations,” he announced. “A variation on Admiral von Reuter’s intention. Initially, we shall be in company with the Emden. We shall part company with her once we are out of sight of land. There is no work for us here,” he flicked a look landward.
The old man’s face was a subtle mask of unhappiness.
“It remains my intention to off load you and your men at the first friendly port we touch. However, in the event we are engaged in a surface action or air attack I must request that you and your men stand aside, and let my people go about their business.”