That the battle had cost him his ship there was little doubt; nothing else was simple, or straightforward. Many of his men, his people, had been killed and maimed in a battle that neither he, nor anybody else should or ought to have had to fight.
He thought about his father in distant Mdina; was he still alive?
‘Cut your lines and go, Peter!’
For all he knew those would be the last words he would ever hear his father say to him.
And what of Marija?
There had been no time to worry about Marija once he had decided what he had to do. Between that moment and now he had not, for a moment, believed that he or any of his men were going to survive the day. That had been easier to accept than the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing if the last people on earth he loved and cared for were dead or alive.
He had peered at the two enemy ships — Red Dawn ships, perhaps — locked together in their deadly dance as the USS Iowa’s broadsides had plunged down through the great electrical storm which had become the Wagnerian background to the battle. Massive blooms of crimson fire had splashed across the Admiral Kutuzov. Pieces of the cruiser’s superstructure had been sent wheeling through space to crash into the ocean hundreds of yards away. Enormous fires had begun to belch black smoke, one of the Yavuz’s amidships turrets had ignited like a giant Roman candle and burned with the momentary blinding ferocity of a two hundred feet tall blow torch. Later, the cruiser had drifted away, settling fast as seawater rushed into the huge rent in her side. With spine-tingling speed the fifteen thousand ton Admiral Kutuzov had lurched to starboard and within less than a minute capsized, her red-leaded hull briefly visible before she went down by the bow. He stern had hung suspended in the air for a moment and then she had dived towards the bottom of the sea.
The Yavuz had reeled away, her screws reversed and her rudders hopelessly jammed she had proscribed a wide slow circle under a murderous rain of shells. The old battlecruiser had disappeared from sight each time a new deluge of 2700-pound super-heavy Mark 8 armour piercing 16-inch rounds fired by the fast approaching USS Iowa fell upon her. Some of the battleship’s shells carved right through the ship and exploded in the water around and beneath her, while others wrought untold mortal carnage within her thickly armoured carapace.
Nobody on HMS Talavera had actually seen the Yavuz turn turtle, or linger capsized on the surface for another minute as one last dreadful broadside lanced down upon her like multiple blows from Thor’s mighty hammer before the darkling, lightning bolt illuminated squall finally drifted away to the east.
The skies over the seas which had consumed the two great ships remained grimly brooding; now and then the last paroxysms of the enormous electrical storm which had raged throughout the battle sent tridents of lightning spearing into the iron grey Mediterranean in the middle distance.
If there had ever been a time in Peter Christopher’s life that he had been tempted to, or had entertained a sneaking suspicion that there was some guiding handing in human affairs, that time was long gone. Surely, no merciful loving God would sit on His hands and allow what had happened this day. The only kind of deity who might conceivably take any pleasure from the sheer bloody murder of the last couple of hours was the sort whose rightful place was adjacent to Lucifer’s right hind claw.
Mile Weiss had patted his arm a second time.
“We have to go, Peter.”
The commanding officer of Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera nodded. He waved for his friend to precede him to the ladder. They were alone on the bridge and the destroyer was settling ever deeper into the water beneath their feet.
At the head of the ladder Peter Christopher hesitated.
Talavera’s bow was awash now in an oily, flotsam fouled sea.
There would still be men trapped below decks in the mangled, twisted wreckage and he imagined he could hear their plaintive, hopeless cries for a succour that would never come.
He felt physically sick.
Was this what the future held?
War and only war?
War without end?
Chapter 11
The whole ship shuddered as two McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms thundered off the foredeck catapults, and with full after burners lit climbed into the stormy Mediterranean skies like a pair of homesick angels. On the aft flight deck of the USS Independence Marines and every man with medical training and first aid skills who could be spared were being packed — like sardines, in fact — into three waiting Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings for the long flight to Malta, still more than two hundred miles to the south. Down in the fire rooms of the great ship all eight of her Babcock and Wilcox boilers were on line, and in the huge machine rooms the carrier’s four Westinghouse geared turbines were running faster, hotter and farther beyond the red line than anybody had ever run them. Six months out of dock and long overdue a full machinery overhaul the one thousand and seventy feet long seventy-five thousand ton super carrier was hurtling south at flank speed, thirty-three knots — over thirty-seven miles an hour in landsman’s terms — on a mission. Several of the big ship’s smaller consorts were already trailing far in her wake. The nine thousand ton Leahy class nuclear powered guided missile destroyer leader Bainbridge, commissioned only days before the October War, and designated as the Independence’s ‘backstop’ — or as the British would say ‘goalkeeper’ — had long been detached and now, ironically, only the fleet-footed Farragut and Charles F. Adams class destroyers of Rear-Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller’s so-called ‘Malta Squadron’, still paced the Independence as she crashed south spitting F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks off her catapults as fast as the deck crews could refuel and rearm them.
Fifty-two year old Vice Admiral Bernard Ambrose ‘Chick’ Clarey stood on the inboard wing of his Admiral’s Flag Bridge gripping the rail with such angry, helpless fury that his hands eventually rebelled. The agonising spasms of cramp shot up his arms and he swung away from watching the dangerous, organised chaos on his flagship’s flight deck, to face his operations staff.
The USS Independence’s CAG — Commander Air Group — had been issued his orders and was absent, carrying them out with ferocious and calmly, impressively competent zeal. The carrier’s F-4s were assigned to combat air patrol roles over the Maltese Archipelago and its environs out to a range of one hundred nautical miles from Valletta, while A-4 Skyhawks and the Grumman A-6 Intruders ‘dealt with’ any ‘hostile surface units’ they encountered ‘anywhere’ within a two hundred nautical mile radius of Malta. The Independence had also launched three Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine birds each carrying two live ‘homing’ torpedoes to hunt for any ‘Soviet submarines’ in the vicinity. Every aircraft and every ship in Bernard Clarey’s Task Force — since midnight designated United States Sixth Fleet — was now operating on a war footing, ‘weapons free’ at the discretion of individual commanding officers.
Bernard Clarey might have been dispatched to Gibraltar to take command of the disparate units of the new US Mediterranean Fleet with orders that focussed more on organisational and diplomatic niceties, than practical war fighting; but now that he was the man ‘on the spot’ in what was self-evidently a war zone, there was absolutely nothing unambiguous about the instructions he had issued to his captains approximately an hour ago.