“The long and the short of it, Sir Ian,” Lieutenant General John McKeown said, biting the bullet, “is that our most recent intelligence assessments indicate that significant quantities of mainly American-made light armaments and munitions have been stockpiled by the IRA and other Nationalist and Republican insurgent groups.”
“What sort of ‘light armaments’ are we talking about General?”
“Infantry weapons, sir. Machine guns, modern assault rifles such as M-16s, pistols, various types of hand grenades and a significant quantity of military grade plastic explosive, along with detonators and time delay fuses.”
Sir Ian MacLennan looked to Sean Lemass.
“Her Majesty’s Government was given assurances earlier this year that the Irish Government was taking steps to,” he paused, ‘counter this threat, Taoiseach?”
More importantly, in January the President of the United States of America had personally promised Margaret Thatcher that his people would crack down hard on ‘any leakage of weapons from US sources’ to dissident factions within the Irish Republic.
“The American authorities mounted a crack down about two months ago but since then the situation has got worse rather than better,” Frank Aiken growled. “Your Government accuses us of trading food and medical aid donations from the Irish in America for arms! That’s pure blarney! We spend every penny we get trying to feed and clothe our people and trying to keep our hospitals running! Most of the money that comes into this country from the Americas goes straight into the hands of self appointed ‘Irish Aid’ committees and most of those are either fronts for the IRA or for organised crime gangs.”
The British Ambassador had heard this narrative before; unlike his compatriots in Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom he actually had a deal of sympathy with it. Ireland was an impoverished country attempting to cling onto its self-respect. It did not have a large army or police force and given the choice of alienating the United States or the United Kingdom it was permanently pinned on the horns of an intractable dilemma.
“From what you’ve said, General McKeown,” he suggested, knowing that he had not yet heard the really bad news, “the IRA is gearing up for a renewed offensive along the border with, and presumably, in Londonderry and Belfast this summer?”
“Probably sooner than that, sir.”
That was hardly news; Northern Ireland Command had been preparing for just such an upsurge in violence for several weeks. He had already warned — informally and very confidentially all three Irishmen in the room that such an offensive, if in any way supported by or encouraged by the Irish Government, or by members or organs of that Government, would regrettably have potential consequences equally violent if not more so, south of the border.
However, it was evident that this was not what was worrying the Taoiseach, his Minister for External Affairs or the Chief of Staff of the Irish Armed Forces.
Sir Ian MacLennan’s throat had gone dry.
He focused on the Irish Prime Minister and to his credit Sean Lemass did not flinch.
“What else has the IRA managed to acquire from its American ‘friends’ on the black market, Taoiseach?”
Chapter 7
Dockyard electrician Joseph Calleja recovered consciousness in a miasma of pain in which he was struggling to catch his breath. He did not know where he was wounded; he just hurt everywhere.
I was on the quay below Corradino heights?
But he was somewhere else now.
It was like a dream. The panic, the alarm, the water suddenly churning under HMS Talavera’s stern; crew men wrestling with the destroyer’s mooring ropes. Something had made him step — consciously, deliberately — from the dock onto the deck of the ship while all his fellow dockyard hands were desperately attempting to get off it. In no time at all the destroyer had been charging towards the opening in the Grand Harbour breakwaters at a rate of knots that would have got her captain cashiered on any other day…
Just before the Talavera reached the breakwaters she had been bracketed by a salvo of big shells. One had landed in the water so close that the whole ship had seemed to lurch sideways for a moment before she charged on out to sea.
His ears had been ringing; everything had been in slow motion for a while after that. He had picked himself up, ripped off his jacket and without thinking balled it up and pressed it into the horrific wound in the young Torpedo Officer’s thigh to try to stop the bleeding. There had been a lot of blood, and everywhere around him on the deck other bodies had lain torn and twitching. He had been totally focussed on the ashen boy lying in a spreading pool of his own life blood until a burly Royal Marine had got a tourniquet in place and the wounded officer had been carted below…
Did that really happen?
He was staring at grey, sooty smoke drifting across a perfect azure blue spring sky, aware, but only in passing, that there were other men prostrate on the deck around him. It took several more seconds to work out what he was doing lying on the unforgiving steel deck.
And then the memories came back with a rush.
He was fairly confident that they had got the fourth and last torpedo away before most of the ship around the torpedo tube mounting had fallen on top of him. He remembered the thump of the impellor charge, the soft whoosh of the fish and a big splash as it went into the water…
Or at least he thought he remembered that.
Things were a bit confused and he was not sure if he was remembering them in the right order.
Had he and that red-headed idiot Jack Griffin really been jumping up and down on top of the mounting?
Yes, they had!
Everybody around the quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount had been pointing at the fish, yelling encouragement as if they were in the grandstand at a horse race. One of the fish had porpoised and disappeared, he remembered that. But the other three seemed to have run true. Suddenly the bow of the big Russian cruiser had sagged down brokenly and the big ship had come to a dead halt. And then there was a big explosion at the stern of the old Turkish battleship…
Yes, after that he and Jack Griffin had been jumping up and down on top of the torpedo mounting. They had been laughing like madmen, hugging each other like they were long lost brothers.
And then there had been a huge explosion and now…
And now he was lying on the deck.
And he hurt everywhere…
“Jesus wept!” Complained the man spread-eagled on top of the stocky Maltese electrician. He coughed asthmatically, and rolled off the smaller man. “Jesus,” he whistled dazedly, “I think we just sunk half the whole fucking Russian Navy!”
This said Petty Officer Jack Griffin lay for some seconds on his back, ignoring the discomfort of the miscellany of sharp shards of debris sticking into his torso and legs.
“We did?” Joe gasped. His ribs felt like they had just been released from the squeezing clasp of a giant vise, his face was wet and his right arm felt wrong but for the moment he did not care about that as he sucked in huge gouts of air and contemplated how pleased he was to still be alive.
“Too fucking right we did!” Groaned the other man, trying to sit up. His movements were like those of a drunk who has fallen over one too many times trying to get back to his ship after a run ashore. His first couple of attempts to raise himself from the deck failed dismally. However, he accomplished his mission on the third attempt. He looked around at the burning scrapheap which less than an hour ago had been the finest ship in the whole Royal Navy; and was both relieved and pleasantly surprised to discover that nobody seemed to be shooting at HMS Talavera. The quadruple 21-inch torpedo tube launcher mount on which he and his unlikely Maltese comrade in arms had been so exuberantly cavorting shortly before seemed to have gone. It had completely disappeared, in fact. Where it ought to have been — welded to the deck abaft the destroyer’s single funnel — lay the mangled remains of what might once have been the port amidships twin 40-millimetre Bofors cannon tub. Mashed body parts of the Bofors’s gunners were liberally distributed across the deck and hooked obscenely on jagged outcrops of what little survived of the torpedo director. “Shit,” he muttered, realising for the first time that he and Joe Calleja looked as if they had been rolling around on the floor in an abattoir.