Peter Christopher brushed this aside.
“I gather Yarmouth was run aground?” He asked, his voiced hollowed out with exhaustion.
“That other American destroyer, the John Adams, she shepherded Yarmouth onto the beach in St Paul’s Bay, sir. The locals went out in fishing boats and such like to take off her people…”
HMS Talavera’s former commanding officer vented a new sigh of relief. He had ordered Yarmouth to draw the enemy’s fire while Talavera raced in to launch her torpedoes; he had known at the time that he was issuing the under-gunned frigate’s death warrant.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“Yes.” Peter Christopher was half-a-head taller than his escort. “Yes, thank you,” he added absently, quirking a curious eyebrow at the bloody bandana around the other man’s brow. “You look like you’ve been in the wars, too, old man?”
“Oh, this?” The RAF man grinned crookedly, raising a hand gingerly to his head. “We had a field day shooting down the second wave of transports that came over the islands. Well, until we ran out of ammo and fuel, that is. All the runways hereabouts were cratered to buggery by then. I ejected straight into a pack of the blighters. Last thing I remember was falling through dozens of parachute canopies before I woke up in a crater at Hal Far with a cracked skull!”
Neither man spoke for a minute or so as the whaler slowly proceeded deeper into the anchorage.
“Air Vice-Marshal French has moved his command centre to the old seaplane station at Marsa Creek, sir. The hangars aren’t ideal but I think it was a question of finding somewhere with uncut telephone lines to the outside world which hadn’t been completely flattened by that blasted Turkish battlecruiser!”
Peter Christopher had been staring at the darkened wharves below Corradino heights where less than twenty-four hours ago Talavera had been ammunitioning and provisioning ship when the balloon had gone up.
‘Cut your lines and go, Peter…’
Chapter 26
The tall blue-eyed, flaxen-haired youthful American naval officer had found the nutmeg-haired, slender young woman in the blood-stained pale blue nursing smock at the cliff top wall in front of the shell-scarred main building of the hospital complex.
Marija was staring down into Kalkara Creek, apparently transfixed by the shape and form of the big guided missile destroyer gradually emerging out of the shadows with the onrushing dawn. The USS Berkeley looked like something out of one of her little brother, Joe’s, comics. With its boxy superstructure, its harsh edges, lattice masts festooned with a myriad of radar sensors, dishes and aerials, rounded gun turrets fore and aft, and the tall pylons of what could only be the launchers for her Tartar surface-to-air missiles she was the shape of things to come; and yet yesterday’s battle had been fought and by, and largely won by two smaller, older and infinitely — on paper — less formidable British ships. It was all very confusing. Marija’s family had always been a ‘dockyard family’; her father was a senior Under Manager at the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta, her elder brother Samuel had been a foreman, and Joe was an electrician. Her earliest memories of sitting at the dinner table with her father and siblings had been of the talk of ships, the sea and of the strengths and weaknesses of British naval architecture, radar, sonar, guns, torpedoes and latterly, missiles. All things considered she was something of a connoisseur of the ships, engineering, mechanical, electrical and weaponry systems of the post-World War II Royal Navy. Now as she stared in wondrous fascinated curiosity at the USS Berkeley — a veritable apparition of applied scientific shipbuilding design the like of which was almost entirely new to her uncannily knowledgeable eye — she silently marvelled at the shape of things to come.
The American coughed, softly so as to not risk alarming the woman.
Marija turned.
“I was admiring your fine ship, Lieutenant,” she half-smiled.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Marija gave him a seraphically quizzical look.
“My husband has been called away,” she said simply before the newcomer had had a chance to open his mouth again.
“Er, yes, ma’am. How did you know?”
“Because he would have been standing where you are standing now if he had not been ‘called away’, Lieutenant,” Marija explained, her rueful serenity completely disorientating the young American. Her terrors had fled away when she had recognised the tall figure of her husband gazing towards her at the rail of the USS Berkeley two hours ago. She looked away, back down at the long menacing lines of the USS Berkeley. “They say your Captain took your ship alongside HMS Talavera as she sank?”
“Yeah, I guess he did…”
“That was very brave. One day I will thank him personally for saving the life of my husband,” Marija declared solemnly. She had come up to the cliff top to be alone for a few minutes to reflect on the knowledge that against all expectations the man she had loved half her young life had really survived. She had wanted to believe it when the first of the wounded men on the jetty below Bighi had told her that Peter lived. She had started to actually believe it when Alan Hannay, very nearly unrecognisable beneath his bandages had staggered up to her and blurted out the news. She had finally believed it when Chief Petty Officer McCann — a small man whom she knew to be a veritable legend in his own lifetime in the Mediterranean Fleet — had paternally taken her aside and assured her that ‘the Skipper is a little worse for wear but he’ll better for laying eyes on you, I’ll wager!’
Marija had almost fainted with astonishment when, dazzled by the brilliant arc lights, she had practically walked into her little brother, Joe. Joe had looked sorry for himself and he had yelped in pain as she had tried to hug him. Joe’s right forearm was in an ultra modern-looking tubular metal and fabric splint; he had looked as if he had been beaten up by a gang of drunken matelots in a Valletta backstreet and left for dead.
‘Marvellous!’ The red-headed, stocky Petty Officer who had been guiding Marija’s brother towards the bed lift had complained. Jack Griffin had looked almost as bad as Joe had, the difference was that this was not the first time he had been badly knocked about and he was immensely smug about having actually survived the previous day’s adventure. ‘This little so and so gets a hug from a beautiful girl and all I get is pointed to where I’m supposed to queue for the bloody lift!’
Marija had allowed Jack Griffin to renew his protective grip on her brother’s undamaged left arm. She had wanted to ask how Joe had come to be onboard HMS Talavera but she had been called away and had not seen either Joe or his unlikely guardian again since.
It was so strange to think that a little more than a day ago she had been in Peter’s arms; and that since then the World had gone mad.
At the height of the bombardment from the sea Marija had been pierced by a dagger of terrible loss. She had feared she had lost Peter, now she knew she had lost somebody else close to her. There were no working telephone lines at Bighi, and one glance across the waters of the Grand Harbour at the fires still burning in Valletta and beyond, told her that everywhere was chaos, the roads were blocked and that there was no knowing who had lived and who had died in yesterday’s nightmare. Yet somebody she loved had died. This she knew with horrible certainty. Not her husband. Not her little brother Joe, by any standards the most improbable hero of yesterday’s great naval battle. But if not Peter or Joe, then whom? Her parents, any one of the nurses she had trained and worked with in Mdina for these last ten years? Or Margo…