And now Roy Jenkins was discovering that MI5 was wasting time mercilessly prosecuting four senior men who had had the temerity to go over the heads of their chiefs to appeal to the Prime Minister in an attempt to remedy this disgraceful state of affairs!
“I take it the Prime Minister has not had sight of this letter?” The Home Secretary asked his Private Secretary, a young man snatched from his post-doctoral studies in economics and politics at Worcester College in January.
“No, Minister. It is my information that MI5 intercepted it and this is the first time it has seen the light of day since then.”
For all that Roy Jenkins sometimes gave the appearance of a mild-mannered, bumbling country solicitor with a minor speech impediment there were occasions when a volcanic fury fulminated just beneath his calm, unruffled mask.
“Where pray is the Director General of the Security Service?”
“I believe he is in Belfast, Minister.”
The Home Secretary was tempted to observe that if Sir Roger Hollis, whom he had come to regard as a hollow place man, was in Ulster then he was probably in the one place in the kingdom where he could not possibly make the existing situation worse! However, he refrained from voicing his innermost thoughts out aloud.
He slapped the file before him shut.
“I intend to show this to the Prime Minister at the earliest opportunity.” Thereafter, he strongly suspected that Sir Roger Hollis would be seeking alternative employment. It beggared belief that MI5 had, in effect, been conspiring to suppress bad news coming out of GCHQ!
Chapter 10
Commander Peter Christopher had realised what the captain of the USS Berkeley was planning to do and had hopped falteringly to the port bridge rail, a less than straightforward business since the bridge was a barely recognisable tangle of twisted and blackened metal and his right knee and ankle collapsed agonisingly every time he tried to put any weight on that wing. He was as bloodied, battered, bruised and scorched as any man and had absolutely no idea how he or anybody else on the bridge had survived. Leaning over the rail he had cupped his hands to his mouth.
‘STAND OFF, SIR!’
His voice had cracked with strain.
‘STAND OFF, SIR!’
The immaculate superstructure of the modern American guided missile destroyer had ranged alongside and the gap between the two ships had rapidly narrowed; already Talavera’s bow-heavy wallowing motion previously threatening an imminent capsize had moderated, sheltered as she was in the lee of the bigger US Navy vessel.
On the bridge wing opposite Peter Christopher a man in a helmet wearing a bulky life preserver raised a megaphone to his lips.
‘NEGATIVE TO THAT, SIR! PREPARE TO RECEIVE BOARDERS, SIR!’
Despite everything Peter Christopher had half-smiled and had shaken his head. This latter was a bad idea because he almost passed out. Had his hand not involuntarily tightened its grip on the bridge wing and somebody behind him not steadied him he would surely have taken a fall.
‘TOO DANGEROUS, SIR!’ He had protested, cursing his failing voice. ‘TALAVERA MAY CAPSIZE OR BLOW UP ANY MINUTE!’
‘DAM THE TORPEDOES, SIR!’ Boomed the uncompromising reply of the commanding officer of the USS Berkeley.
Peter Christopher would have argued the point further but his seaman’s eye recognised that the two ships were about to come together regardless of any action he or his American counterpart took in the next few seconds. He also knew that because of the American captain’s courage and willingness to put his own ship directly in harm’s way that potentially, many of his men — and most of his seriously wounded — who would surely have died in the water, would now live.
Besides, he was in no position to argue. His counterpart on the USS Berkeley had a megaphone and he only had his broken voice.
‘All hands to assist with the evacuation of the wounded to the USS Berkeley!’ He ordered, knowing that it was not an order he actually needed to give. He was very nearly beyond reason by then.
Despite the warmth of the afternoon he shivered.
‘Sir?’ An anxious voice inquired.
‘I’m okay,’ he had retorted instantly, harshly. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, thanks,’ he had added, more gently.
The USS Berkeley had ground against the sinking destroyer with a loud squeal of metal on metal, and a veritable flood of men had leapt down onto Talavera’s decks. Peter Christopher had watched as a helpless spectator, humbled and thankful that so many of his men who would otherwise have died in the seasonal cold of the waters off Malta would now live.
“We should go down to the fo’c’sle, sir?”
“Yes,” he agreed, watching the first of his most badly wounded being hauled onto the deck of the Berkeley. “Clear the bridge!”
But the Captain of HMS Talavera himself made no move to follow.
While a single man remained alive on his ship he would remain aboard.
He had led his men into the jaws of death; what honourable man could conceive of saving himself before he knew that all those brave fellows who might be saved had been saved?
A hand touched his left elbow.
“Wasn’t that a thing?” Miles Weiss, HMS Talavera’s Executive officer and Peter Christopher’s oldest surviving friend in the service observed rhetorically. He blinked and squeezed his eyes shut, unable to focus on anything in particular as blood trickled from his left ear. Remarkably, he had survived the destruction of the gun director — by a direct hit from a large shell which had failed to explode — with hardly a scratch.
The Captain of the destroyer half-turned.
“Wasn’t it just,” he concurred.
“You can’t stay here, Peter,” the other man said quietly, his words a little slurred as if he was moderately inebriated.
“What else can I do, Miles?”
The two friends looked dazedly one to the other, unhurriedly contemplating the matter as if there was no particular urgency in their situation.
Peter Christopher met his friend’s unfocused stare for a moment. The two men understood each other perfectly. Miles Weiss knew that if it had come to it he would have driven Talavera into the side of the nearest of the two big ships. Given the option he would have rammed the Soviet cruiser; that would have been better than crumpling his fragile little ship against the thickly armoured carapace of the Yavuz, the ancient battlecruiser the Turks had inherited from the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet back in 1914. The Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov’s armour was less than a third as thick as the old German behemoth’s, at speed Talavera would have made a big hole in her…
Thankfully it had not come to that.
One of Talavera’s torpedoes had jammed the old dreadnought’s rudders; another had exploded beneath the keel of the Sverdlov class cruiser and broken her back somewhere in the vicinity of her forward turret. While she was lying dead in the water the Yavuz, her rudders jammed and out of control had rammed the Admiral Kutuzov moments before the first giant armour-piercing shells of the USS Iowa’s 16-inch 50-calibre main battery had started to fall like watery Redwood trees all around the two interlocked, stricken enemy warships.
Not for the first time since the night of the October War the twenty-seven year old commanding officer of the sinking Battle class destroyer HMS Talavera paused to take a deep breath and to reflect upon his situation. He was living his life in a series of intense thousand mile-an-hour episodes, each climactic battle more desperate and more murderous than the last; but even by his standards the events of the last hour had been completely insane.