“I know my father is dead,” he said simply, his face a mask of indifference. “Who else?”
The woman hesitated.
“Margo Seiffert.”
Peter Christopher’s heart sank.
“Oh no…”
“She was shot going to help a Soviet trooper,” the woman explained coldly. “There were a lot of casualties among your father’s senior staff officers. The Soviets practically over-ran his Headquarters at one stage. The bastards killed everybody who got in their way. Men, women, children. That was what they did everywhere they landed.”
“Marija and Rosa Calleja were safe and well at Bighi last night,” Peter returned, trading information.
The woman signed a visible sigh of relief.
“Thank goodness.” She rubbed the threat tears from her eyes. “Marija’s family in Sliema should have been all right assuming they got to the shelters before the bombardment switched to the area. From what people on the Acting C-in-C’s staff say the Welsh Guards based at the Cambridge Barracks dispersed into Sliema and Gzira and made short work of the parachutists who came down in that area…”
“It is a mess,” he agreed. “Marija’s brother Joe was on Talavera during the action.”
Her eyes widened, so he explained.
“We left harbour yesterday in such a hurry he got caught onboard. He’s at Bighi now. A little worse for wear but he’ll be okay.”
The woman told him he real name.
“Rachel Angelika? Sounds Polish?” He queried.
She nodded.
“So you were a spook after all?”
“Yes.”
Peter Christopher’s mind was not working at anywhere near full speed. He needed a few seconds to re-arrange his thoughts.
“Our side or theirs?” He asked quietly.
“Our side, I think but sometimes it is hard to tell.” Having agonised over how she was going to tell him what she had wanted to tell him for several hours, she blurted: “Your father knew you’d sunk those big ships before he died. His last words were ‘The boy and his Talaveras must have settled those bastards hash’ and that I was to tell you how proud he was of you…”
It was a long time since Rachel had cried real tears; now the tears trickled and then poured down her cheeks and, pausing only to place his half-drunk mug of heavily rum-laced chocolate on the floor, Peter Christopher cautiously staggered to his feet and cautiously wrapped the woman in his arms not knowing how much the embrace was likely to hurt either of them.
“Miss Piotrowska asked to speak to you before she went off with the security people,” Air-Vice Marshal Daniel French, the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on the Maltese Archipelago explained when HMS Talavera’s former commanding officer was eventually ushered into his drab, grubby room at the end of the decrepit old seaplane hangar.
Dan French was not alone.
A balding middle aged man in a spotlessly crisp US Navy uniform stepped forward to shake the newcomer’s hand.
“Commander Christopher,” the Englishman announced, making the introductions, “this is Vice-Admiral Clarey, C-in-C United States Sixth Fleet.”
Fifty-one year old Iowan-born Bernard Ambrose Clarey had been COMSUBPAC–Commander Submarine Force, US Pacific Fleet — at Pearl Harbour at the time of the October War. Two decades before he had won a Navy Cross for heroism serving on submarines in the war against the Japanese and after a career of steady, predictable progression been plucked from the highest echelons of the Submarine Service to take command of the Independence Task Force at Gibraltar a little over a month ago, charged with permanently re-establishing the Sixth Fleet in the Central Mediterranean.
The American had fixed the tall young destroyer captain with a steely gaze and been immediately struck by the presence of the son of the famous Fighting Admiral. Although he had never quite understood the concept of the British stiff upper lip; he suspected that the demeanour of the younger man was an object lesson in it. The kid had bottled up his emotions tight as a drum.
Peter Christopher began to straighten to his full height to attempt a passable imitation of a salute but the American stepped forward and stuck out a hand, which he shook in lieu of saluting.
At Dan French’s suggestion the three men took seats.
“Presently,” he said by way of bringing the meeting to order, “every available man is either filling in the holes in the runway at Luqa or laying down tarmac over the holes that have already been filled in. The moment the runway opens everybody and their dog Spot is going to want to come to Malta to begin the inquest, or more likely an inquisition into what went wrong.”
The airman halted, thinking that the battered younger man sandwiched between the two most senior surviving allied officers in the Mediterranean might need a moment to get his bearings and come to terms with the implications of what he had just said.
He need not have worried.
“I don’t know what happened, sir,” Peter admitted. “Obviously, it would not have been possible for us to be as surprised by the arrival of the enemy fleet, as in fact we were, if something hadn’t gone badly wrong with out early warning systems. I know that the whole system was comprehensively wrecked by the EMPs from those big air bursts back in February. That was why I thought we’d had two or three radar pickets patrolling fifty miles out to sea around the archipelago for most of the last couple of months. While Talavera was in dockyard hands I sent my radar men ashore to help the RAF and Army people trying to put the air defence net back together again. From their reports I gathered the whole thing was a bit like all the King’s men trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together after he’d fallen of that wall of his.” Nobody interrupted him so he went on, his voice ringing dull with tiredness. “A lot of our best technical people sailed to Cyprus with the Operation Grantham task force; presumably in their absence the enemy somehow sabotaged our radar and communications net, sir. I honestly can’t imagine there will be much profit in conducting an ‘inquest’ into that? After the December bombing and the February near misses the whole air early warning system was held together by pieces of string.” He shrugged. “If you’ll pardon my saying it.”
Vice-Admiral Clarey chuckled and shook his head.
“A lot of mud is going to get thrown around in the next few days,” he observed sagely, wondering as he spoke if the kid understood that nothing could now stop his face being splashed across every TV screen, Pathe movie reel and newspaper front page in the World. “A lot of people will be queuing up to hear what you’ve got to say about this, son.”
The heat was slowly rising in Peter Christopher’s bruised cheeks.
“You mean that the British and American governments will do their best to make my father the scapegoat for yesterday’s,” he caught himself before he said the first word that came into his head, contenting himself with, “tragedy.”
The Commander of the United States Sixth Fleet was impressed by the fact that the young tyro had not phrased his words as any kind of question. He had simply stated the obvious.
“Commander,” Dan French said grimly, “if that ever happens it will be over my dead body. We find ourselves in an invidious position in which our political masters have neglected to agree among themselves a chain of command in this theatre of operations. Your father, my friend, made the best of a bad deal and if somebody has to fall on his sword rest assured that it will be me.” He glanced at Admiral Clarey. “However, in the meantime what we cannot afford at this time is a new rift between our people and Admiral Clarey’s people. For all we know yesterday’s attack was only the first of many. We must be prepared for whatever is to come.”