Peter Cowdrey-Singh interpreted this as a very polite reminder that he and his men were guests on board the Weser, and that whether they liked it or not, they might conceivably be at war with each other in the near future. Wisely, Weitzman wanted there to be no scope for misunderstandings.
“I understand. I and my people will remain below if the Weser closes up for action, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Chapter 31
Tuesday 12th April
HMS Perseus, North Atlantic
Task Force 5.2 was thundering south at twenty-five knots, having parted company with its supporting Royal Fleet Auxiliaries, two hours out of Norfolk. The supply ships could catch up later, right now the priority was to reinforce Task Force 5.1 in the waters north of the Bahamas.
“The weather is a tad more clement where we’re headed!” The carrier’s CAW, Commander Andrew Buchannan guffawed as Alex Fielding and the Perseus’s Strike Group Commander, Simon Foljambe arrived in the Flight Control compartment overlooking the windswept flight deck.
About a mile to port the Lion class battleship Princess Royal was battering effortlessly through the long, white-capped Atlantic rollers, while around the storm-tossed horizon the grey, half-invisible shapes of the cruisers and destroyers protecting the two big ships rose and fell into the troughs of the angry seas. Somewhere out there were two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and eleven sleek fleet destroyers. In cruising order the fleet occupied well over twenty square miles of sea room, on a day like this a piece of ocean that stretched from one horizon to another.
Task Force 5.1, built around the Ulysses and the Tiger, was even more formidable, incorporating the four 8-inch gun cruisers of the Bellerophon class as well as a bevy of light cruisers and some fifteen other escorting warships.
Perseus had left behind her slower escorts, the three anti-submarine frigates – part of a program cut short by the Submarine Treaty – to shepherd her fleet train south at a relatively sedate thirteen knots; after sloughing off four of the Task Force’s allotted destroyers to escort the Indefatigable Group, made up of the hastily reactivated battlecruiser and three light cruisers, following some forty miles distant in Task Force 5.2’s wake.
Given that the Atlantic Fleet’s big ships were going to be operating relatively close to land and that oiling, re-ammunitioning and re-victualing stations were available at the Floridian St John’s River base, and at Bermuda, the fleet train was considered less operationally critical than it would have been in any trans-oceanic war scenario. For example, like those contemplated on Staff College ‘situation tables’ concerning operations in the Pacific against the Japanese Empire, or contingency planning in the event that a major German fleet ‘escaped’ into the North Atlantic. Up until now in comparison with those scenarios, a war in the Caribbean had seemed almost light relief; at least from a planner’s perspective.
“Ulysses’s Sea Eagles put a couple of torpedoes into the side of a light cruiser off Little Inagua this morning,” the CAW reported cheerfully. “They think they got a couple of five-hundred pounders onto one of the Ferdinands, too. Although, I’m not sure if that’s wishful thinking, apparently, the blighter steamed away under her own power. I’d have thought a couple of bombs would have done for one of those misbegotten scows!”
Suddenly, Andrew Buchannan was somewhat less sanguine.
“Ulysses had problems with her amidships elevator. She only got about thirty aircraft in the air. If she’d been able to throw the kitchen sink at that flotilla off Little Inagua we might well have scratched it off the order of battle.”
Nobody in Flight Control needed any reminding that both the Ulysses and the Perseus were very big, very new, horrendously complicated and largely untested ships. Ulysses had had a little more time to work up to something like peak efficiency; Perseus remained very much a work in progress.
It would be another twenty-four hours before Task Force 5.2 was in range to fly off strikes against targets south of the Bahamas. Palpably, the ship was going to war.
“Things are looking black down on the Border,” the CAW observed. “Our chaps seem to have been rolled back pretty much everywhere. The CAF report coming up against modern German aircraft types. Now our intelligence people are trying to work out if the Cubans or the Dominicans have got hold of any of the new models.”
“Joy,” Alex Fielding growled. Actually, he did not care what kites his enemies flew; the more the merrier was his attitude. “It’s the chaps at the controls that matters, not the airframe!”
“Quite so,” Buchannan agreed. He waved through the windows at the storm-tossed seas. “They say we’ve got another twelve to fifteen hours of this. So, no flying. The flight deck is a no-go area.”
As if to support his contention green water shipped over the carrier’s enclosed clipper bow and streamed half-way to the island bridge across the empty steel deck.
“Once we get the all clear I want a CAP in the air during daylight hours. I want horizon to horizon cover out to fifty to sixty miles ahead of the Task Force. Be prepared to mount strikes at maximum effort from the moment we enter the battle zone, gentlemen.”
Chapter 32
Wednesday 13th April
Little Inagua, West Indies
To say that Abe had thought his number was well and truly up when he was tackled to the ground by two men, while watching the Dominican Squadron seeking sea room – running away, more like – leaving scores of their own men to drown, or to be dashed against the reefs all along the southern shore of the island, would have been something of an understatement.
He had struggled as hard as he could for as long as he could but there were two of them and they were already on top of him. Briefly, his hand closed around the haft of the axe but that was his last moment of hope. The hatchet was torn out of his hands and suddenly, his arms were pinned behind his back. The agony from his right shoulder made him cry out – well, it was more of a scream of unadulterated anguish – and ended all further resistance.
He had allowed his body to go limp; knowing it was over.
He felt sick and bizarrely, a little relieved.
His hunter’s soul crept back into the dark place from which it had emerged; exhausted, pain-wracked, and beaten, he was again himself, not the wild animal he had been for much of the last forty-eight hours.
“Steady on, old man,” a voice with a relaxed Connecticut twang said Abe’s ear. “You could go taking out a fellow’s eye with a hatchet like that!”
The other man spoke.
He sounded uncannily Bostonian.
“Methinks, that you’d be the chap whose been chopping up all these Dagoes we keep tripping over?”
Abe’s captors relaxed their grip on his arms a little, half-turning him so he could see his captors for the first time.
Two men with cork-blacking on their faces, kitted out in mottled khaki camouflage battle dress wearing the green berets of the Royal Marines. Each man was festooned with combat webbing, and wearing lightweight ballistic body armour.
“You must be Mister Lincoln, your friend Mister Forest said we’d probably find you over this way.”
Abe stared at the man dumbfounded.
“Actually,” the trooper with the Connecticut accent offered, “he said that the thing to do was to follow the trail of bodies. But not to creep up on you…”