Alan Hannay had looked into the older man’s cloudy grey-blue eyes and seen pure cold patent steel.
‘Are you with me, sir?’
‘Er, yes…’
‘Good! I’ll take over the damage control crews,” Spider McCann had growled, ‘you get these guns back into action!’
HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer had a very limited theoretical knowledge and no practical experience whatsoever of organising, directing and co-ordinating ‘damage control’; but when it came to shooting guns that was a different kettle of fish. Everybody in the Royal Navy understood the basics. Bullets in at one end and out the other, point the end farthest from the breech in the general direction of the target and pull the trigger. When the gun stops firing load more bullets. Simple. Even a Supply Officer could manage that!
‘Whatever you say, Mister McCann!’
That could only have been minutes ago; but it seemed like hours because in between then and now the madness had been so outrageous that his mind was incapable of reconciling the mill race of events with his, or anybody else’s actions. He had been in a daze, some kind of trance, almost as if he had been outside of his body watching the nightmare unfold…
The Master at Arms had donned a yellow life preserver over his filthy, blood-stained and ragged uniform. He was holding out a second life jacket in his free hand.
“You need to put this on, sir,” he directed with gentle, calmly compelling implacability.
Alan Hannay felt his arms sliding into the unwieldy jacket.
That was when he finally took a pause for breath; and gazed, perhaps for the first time down the length of the doomed destroyer and his conscious mind actually registered what he was seeing. From his viewpoint on the shattered stern house roof he could see approximately two thirds of the ship’s length from the stern to the wrecked bridge. The stump of the great smashed lattice foremast blocked any sight of the foredeck. His first thought was: how on earth is Talavera still afloat? The sleek grey lines of before were gone, above him the tattered and torn battle flag still flew, somehow, from the halyards of the pole mainmast but everything around it and forward of it was mangled, charred, on fire and there were bodies everywhere. Men were clambering up onto the chaos of the main deck from below and the wounded were being carried to the port rail. Around the ship an evil brown-black slick of heavy bunker oil was spreading across the choppy waters, calming the short, close-packed waves before they could strike the flanks of the stricken ship.
Suddenly, Alan Hannay felt very tired.
Was that me screaming and cursing as I swung the barrels of the cannon round to bear on the nearest of the two big ships? That ship which looked like something out of somebody’s First World War scrapbook? How could we possibly have been that close to a monster like that? I just pulled the triggers and watched the shells walking down the main deck of the dinosaur…
Strong hands grabbed him otherwise he would have fallen.
He thought he was going to be sick.
The moment passed and he felt a little better, suddenly his ears seemed to be working again and he shrugged off the supporting hands.
The ship was steadier but down several degrees by the bow.
In his peripheral vision he was aware of a looming long grey shape.
He blinked at the apparition in mute supplication.
The big American destroyer was very nearly alongside.
So near he wanted to reach out and touch her.
The other ship had to be one of the two modern Charles F. Adams guided missile destroyers which had creamed past HMS Talavera to interpose themselves between her and the surviving Russian cruiser coming down from the north east. Both American ships had surged past with huge bones in their teeth, their quick firing automatic five-inch guns pumping defiance.
Now the other ship completely filled Alan Hannay’s field of vision, rising and falling on the swell as she manoeuvred to shelter the Talavera in her lee. Boarding nets were rolling down the American destroyer’s flank; men were crowding her starboard rail as if steeling themselves to jump down onto the Talavera’s deck.
Unyielding steel ground against steel as the ships came together.
The first men threw themselves from the side of the American destroyer and landed amidst the carnage on the stricken destroyer’s main deck. Multiple lines were hurled. Alan Hannay watched mesmerised, hardly believing what he was seeing. Talavera could sink or capsize any moment. She might blow up and take both ships to the bottom. More men from the American destroyer tumbled onto the Talavera; he could hardly credit the courage of the men jockeying to be the next man to leap onboard the stricken Battle class destroyer, already groups were gathering around the wounded men lying on the deck behind the bridge.
A flapping, cracking sound over his head made Alan Hannay glance upwards to where HMS Talavera’s battle flag still streamed proudly, raggedly in the gusting wind.
“Mr McCann,” he said hoarsely. “If you’d be so good as to haul down the remaining flags.” As an afterthought, most likely grinning like an idiot he added: “The way things are in the World I wouldn’t be the least surprised if we don’t need those dusters again one day!”
Chapter 4
Marija Christopher and Rosa Calleja were carefully, almost tenderly, handed down from the back of the army Bedford lorry they had flagged down at Kalkara. Marija had taken charge the moment it became evident the truck was transporting badly injured men to the nearest hospital at nearby Bighi. The grim-faced, trigger-happy soldiers riding shotgun had gladly relinquished their charges to the two young Maltese women. There were five men lying on the bloody floor of the Bedford. One was already dead. There were two Royal Engineers with single gunshot wounds to the torso, and an unconscious Redcap — a Royal Military Policeman — with a facial wound that looked worse than it was and shrapnel injuries to both legs. The other wounded man was wearing strange and unfamiliar grey camouflage fatigues.
‘He’s a fucking Russian!’ The women were informed.
Marija was a nurse; she did not care whose side the wounded man had been on before he had been injured and captured.
The enemy soldier’s left arm was shattered above the elbow and he was in terrible pain.
No, there had been no morphine left!
Marija had applied pressure to the wound of one of the badly injured Royal Engineers and brusquely ordered the nearest guard to turn the other onto his left hand side before he drowned in his own blood. Meanwhile, Rosa had taken the Russian’s undamaged arm, begun to talk lowly, reassuringly to him as the lorry bumped and ground along the pot-holed road above the burning village of Kalkara.
Prior to deciding to get to Bighi as soon as possible the two young women had not spent overlong surveying the devastation of their island home before leaving their shelter on the heights and flagging down the Bedford truck.
They had watched the two modern American destroyers racing north like sharks hunting prey, their guns spitting fire. Both ships had passed so close inshore that they had, briefly, feared they might run aground as they ran up the coast at breakneck speed, carving huge bow waves as they cut every corner to close the range with the enemy as fast as possible. The gun in each ship’s fo’c’sle turret had fired every two or three seconds, the puff of grey smoke of each shot instantly whipped away by the rushing wind.