It was as if the World had been turned upside down yet again.
Chapter 3
HMS Talavera was sinking. The horribly mauled carcass of the old destroyer wallowed deep in the troughs of the short Mediterranean swells. She was no longer rolling with the seas, more a water-logged breakwater than the sleek deadly war machine she had been when she and her consort, the desperately under-gunned modern frigate HMS Yarmouth, had joined battle with the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz and the former Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov. Great gouts of venting steam escaped from her riddled funnel, fires burned on her deck and within her mangled superstructure fore and aft. In a moment a change in the wind blew the steam and smoke out to sea cruelly laying her mortal wounds bare for any eye that could still see.
Lieutenant Alan Hannay clung to the shoulder frame of the twin 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon mount into which he had been strapped for the final dreadful, exhilarating minutes of the fight. His right hand was still closed over the big trigger mechanism of the twin mount although both magazine boxes were empty and the guns had been silent several minutes. The dead still lay around him; at his feet and sprawled obscenely mutilated on the stern house gun platform. The sun had come out just after the battle and now the blood which randomly splashed him from head to toes was drying, coagulating fast in the warmth of the early afternoon. He guessed that some of the blood was probably his but there was as yet, little pain. He was still mostly deaf, his ears rang and nothing he saw was real. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood that he had just survived the most intense, insane few minutes of his life. However, if anybody had stopped to ask him what had actually happened in the last hour he would have been hard pressed to explain.
His thoughts jarred, one falling over another in no particular order or rational sequence as he desperately attempted to collect his scattered and shocked wits.
In what seemed like less than a blink of the eye ago HMS Talavera had been tied up alongside the ammunitioning wharf below Corradino heights; that much at least made some kind of sense. Reloads for the main battery had been passing down the chutes into the forward shell rooms; that had been the Gunnery Officer’s concern while Alan Hannay had supervised and chivvied along the general provisioning of the ship.
As he had organised the human chains transferring frozen and chilled meat, porridge oats, coffee, tea, soap, tins of spam and dried fruits, bags of bread flour, pulses and bottles of cooking oil, engine room spares and books and magazines for the ship’s tiny onboard library, he had been assiduously preoccupied with ensuring that the galley pantries and larders, refrigerators and freezers, spares and pre-designated lockers were stacked and stocked in an orderly fashion so that once at sea it would be unnecessary to constantly turn them out to find a given item. When he had taken over as HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer and Purser he had been shocked by the disorganised, slovenly way his predecessor — the poor fellow had been badly wounded in the Battle of Lampedusa so he tried not to think of speak ill of a wounded fellow officer other than in moments of particular angst — had managed his bailiwick. All the fellow had had to do was make sure the ship had the supplies and spares it needed to go to sea; but somehow he had made a complete hash of it! Alan Hannay was proud of the way he had swiftly put his department in order and quickly freed up sufficient of his time to be able to offer his services and that of his senior divisional writer as stand-in Captain’s Secretaries…
The ship lurched drunkenly under his feet and there was an ominous creaking, tearing sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the sinking destroyer.
It was a funny old World…
What with one thing and another the last few days and weeks had been by far and away the happiest days of his life…
Rosa…
He had fallen head over heels for his commanding officer’s beautiful dark-eyed sister-in-law shortly before coming onboard HMS Talavera. This despite the fact that the first time he had encountered Rosa Calleja — who was still officially a married woman because her missing husband had not been legally declared dead — she had been an invalid with her right leg in a bulky plaster cast and half her head swathed in thick bandages. None of that had mattered one jot. He had taken one look at her and for a split second she had looked back at him… And, well, something had just clicked. It was nothing he could put his finger on yet the moment had been uniquely electric.
He had never even known that Rosa existed until she had been blown up and badly injured in the same explosion which had killed his first real friend on Malta, Lieutenant Jim Siddall…
Jim had been a fine fellow…
Rosa, there were so many things I ought to have said but…
Alan Hannay felt a firm hand on his arm.
“Mister Hannay.”
His fingers were being gently prised off the twin Oerlikons’ trigger.
“It is time to go now, sir.”
He stared at Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann’s bloodied face. The Talavera’s senior non-commissioned officer — the ship’s Master at Arms — had taken hold of the younger man’s left elbow.
“There’s no more to be done here, sir,” the older man said, his voice reaching Alan Hannay’s traumatised consciousness as if it was coming from the other end of a long tunnel.
Spider McCann was a small, sinewy, muscular man of indeterminate middle years who had once been the Bantamweight boxing champion of the Mediterranean Fleet. His face was deeply burnished by the sun, and wrinkled with irrefutable salty sagacity. The man was the rock around which the Talavera’s mixed complement of battle hardened old sweats and green new draftees had coalesced in recent weeks and months. Within minutes of Alan Hannay reporting onboard either the Captain or the Executive Office, he could not remember which and this bothered him somewhat, had succinctly explained the unique status of the destroyer’s Master at Arms thus: ‘There are only three people who have the right to give Mister McCann a direct order; God, Mrs McCann and the Captain.’ Apparently, the Executive Office got away with it on good days, but the rest of the wardroom ‘asked’ politely and respectfully, rather than ‘ordered’ the diminutive former pugilist when they required his assistance.
In the recent battle Alan Hannay had staggered onto the stern to discover the Master at Arms standing atop the deckhouse bellowing at damage control teams as he stomped through the wreckage. The stern house cannons had been silent, their crews lying in shredded heaps on the bloody steel deck plates.
The destroyer’s Supply Officer was, even at that relatively early stage of the battle, already feeling a little worse for wear and sorry for himself; by then having already been blown off the stern deckhouse at least once.
‘Get yourself back up here, Mister Hannay!’ The Master at Arms had bawled. ‘Sharply, sir, if you please!’ It had never occurred to the younger man to hesitate, let alone query the unequivocal command. Confronted by the carnage on the stern house gun deck he had been momentarily paralysed. ‘Worry about those boys later, Mister Hannay,’ Spider McCann had counselled, grabbing his arm at the very instant HMS Talavera seemed to plough into an impenetrable wall of huge shell splashes. All around him the ship had clanged and shuddered as a storm of shrapnel had filled the air. The two men had been drenched and forced to cling onto the nearest Oerlikon twenty-millimetre mount to stop being bowled over the side of the ship. One smashed body and several parts of another had disappeared by the time the destroyer surged defiantly through the near misses and out into clear air again. ‘Look at me, sir!’