Joe Calleja moaned loudly when the other man shook his shoulder.
“Good!” Jack Griffin chuckled. “If it hurts you must still be alive!”
“Obviously!” Joe complained, his voice slurred.
“Cheer up; nobody’s shooting at us anymore!”
Joe Calleja took very little comfort from this.
“At the moment!” He gasped.
“Oh, well. That’s the Navy for you!” As his wits slowly unscrambled Jack Griffin’s mind was turning to practicalities. His first rational thought was to search for the Captain. No, if the skipper was still alive he would have people around him already. Today, he would have to settle for saving the Old Man’s brother-in-law’s life. Today was one of those days when it was easy to be a hero. Besides, the successive waves of nausea probably meant he had either lost a lot of blood or taken a bad knock on the head; he was not about to go climbing ladders up to the bridge until he got his balance back again. “Can you move?” He asked his companion.
“Maybe. My arm’s bad…”
Jack Griffin eased the younger man into a sitting position, all the better to view the last minutes of their lives. Men were struggling up from below and steam was escaping, hissing insanely as it vented through the big steel sieve that had previously been the destroyer’s perfectly proportioned funnel.
“I thought I was already dead,” Joe Calleja declared philosophically as he tried to cradle his broken right arm with his left. Most of the pain had subsided but he felt so terribly, helplessly tired, old and cold.
Shadows fell across both men.
Unwounded men had come to help them.
“Naw!” Jack Griffin shouted, angrily fighting off helping hands. “Leave the civilian to me! Help those boys over by the 40-millimetre! We’ll be fine!”
It was the self-evident absurdity of this latter declaration which finally snapped Joe Calleja back to reality.
“We’ll be fine?” He demanded incredulously.
Jack Griffin lurched to his feet, swayed briefly before he established his balance and looked down at the shorter man with vaguely pitying eyes.
Civilians!
“Aw, stop belly-aching!” Behind the harsh sentiments and the apparent reprimand there was a peculiar respect. Moreover, when he went on there was a hint of a twinkle in the Navy man’s eyes. “There are boys with real wounds over there! Not a couple of little scratches and a sprained wrist like you!”
Joe found himself being hauled unsteadily to his feet.
The other man flung his arms around him to stop him immediately crumpling back onto the deck. Joe cried with pain as his damaged arm was crushed in the protective embrace.
“Sorry,” the other man grunted.
Jack Griffin sniffed the smoky air, looked around.
“See? Nothing at all wrong with you!”
Joe Calleja was staring past the other man’s shoulder at the futuristic, long grey silhouette of the big ship close alongside the water-logged, wallowing hulk of HMS Talavera. He felt almost close enough to shake hands with the American sailors poised at the other ship’s rail to leap across fast the narrowing gap between the warships.
“Now ain’t that a sight for sore eyes?” Jack Griffin exclaimed grudgingly, less than ecstatic to be in such a hopeless situation that he had to be rescued by a bunch of Yanks.
Joe’s head lolled against the other man’s chest.
“What did I say?” Jack Griffin chuckled. “Didn’t I say this was the most fun you’ve ever hand in your whole fucking life?”
“Yes, I recall you said something like that…”
Chapter 8
Over half-an-hour after the event she wondered if she had glimpsed the ghost of a smile forming on Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s face in the split second before her finger closed on the trigger of her AK-47 Kalashnikov. However, by the time she had emptied approximately half a magazine of hollow point rounds into her former lover’s torso and his broken body had jerked obscenely backwards until it met the wall and slowly, slowly slid down to the floor leaving a broad track of gore on the floor and the plaster, his amusement had been well and truly terminated.
She had known that there was nothing she could do to save Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s life. She was in a small room with two KGB assassins and by the time she had executed the first one the other would have had ample opportunity to despatch her. That was why she did not try anything clever. She held down the trigger until she had all but destroyed Arkady Rykov. It was Arkady who had re-taught her that one always had to decide what was most important; who to kill first. Killing him had seemed the most important thing in the World at the time she pulled the trigger.
The silence was dangerous and threatening.
The atmosphere stank of burnt cordite and blood.
Fresh blood, she had discovered long ago had an iron, slaughterhouse stench that lingered in one’s nostrils and face for days. Especially, when it had been explosively sprayed upon one and upon everything around one.
She had waited for the bullet.
Perhaps, I am already dead?
No, that was crazier than all the other possibilities!
Without lowering the muzzle of the AK-47 in her coldly steady hands she had turned.
Julian Christopher was slumped in his chair, deathly ashen, hardly able to keep his eyelids open; standing behind him the second KGB man, dressed in airborne forces camouflage battle dress was pressing the muzzle of his 9-millimetre Makarov pistol to the seated man’s head.
The shooting elsewhere in the Headquarters complex had suddenly ceased.
‘Admiral Christopher will die if he does not get urgent medical attention,’ the man with the KGB flashes on his collar observed in heavily accented Moskva Russian. Moskva Russian that was so heavily accented it struck her as being almost theatrical.
She had not imagined the scene playing out like this. Not that she had had much of an idea about how anything in particular was going to play out at any time since she had been sent on her mission to find Arkady Rykov in the months before the October War. An hour ago she had been waiting to see what happened next; and but for the murder of Margo Seiffert by that brainless — probably panicking and scared shitless — paratrooper who had got his chute hung up on the chimneys of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women she might simply have kept her head down, contented herself with protecting the nurses and patients in the basement of the hospital. That was the trouble with life, something always came along and threw all the cards into the air, and afterwards nobody could ever predict which way up they would fall.