Marija had spared herself the indulgence of a single second glance over her shoulder.
Valletta was burning. The airfield at Luqa and all the surrounding villages burned. Senglea, Cospicua and Birgu where she had been born were on fire; she hardly trusted herself to imagine what carnage the rain of shells had wrought in the dockyards of French Creek, Dockyard Creek and elsewhere in the Grand Harbour, the surface of which was now vilely fouled with leaking bunker oil. She had wondered briefly if her new married home in Kalkara had survived. Beyond Valletta there were big fires in Gzira and Sliema, and distant Mdina was enveloped in the burning haze. The entire island was disappearing beneath a spreading pall of smoke, dust and ash.
Notwithstanding that Marija understood that in the last hour her whole life had just been torn asunder she had important work to do. Far out to sea her husband — the man she had loved since she was thirteen — had probably gone to his death in the last few minutes. It had been impossible to make out the details of the faraway battle in the middle of the darkling, lightning-forked Mediterranean squall. Guns had flashed; there had been huge explosions, and the rumbling thunder of distant big guns. Future historians would know the exact moment the final sea battle had begun because the big guns had stopped shelling Malta when HMS Talavera had commenced her attack; one small ship against a whole fleet…
Oh Peter!
The Russian soldier groaned as he was dumped on the ground.
Marija realised she had been woolgathering.
That was unforgivable.
“Be careful please!” She snapped in the tone of voice she had learned from her friend and mentor, Margo Seiffert. Marija knew she had a long way to go before she could match her friend’s uncanny talent for turning strong men’s knees to jelly; so she was pleasantly surprised that when the soldiers next they picked up the delirious Russian it was with no little care for his injuries.
The air was laced by fine ash and pulverised brick dust, and tainted with drifting smoke. One part of Marija’s mind registered that a fire was burning somewhere in the hospital complex and that there were spent cartridge shells in the rubble under her feet. Occasionally, there were single gunshots, now and then bursts of automatic gunfire and the crack of grenades. Fortunately, the shooting sounded as if it was several hundred yards away. And mercifully, the naval bombardment had not yet resumed.
She became aware of Rosa’s presence at her shoulder.
“What shall I do, sister?” The other woman asked simply.
Marija thought about it.
The two women had been strangers — they had not even liked each other — before Marija’s elder brother, Samuel, had gone missing a day or so before HMS Torquay was destroyed by sabotage in the Grand Harbour. Soon afterwards Rosa had been injured in the booby trap explosion which had killed Marija’s friend and self-appointed guardian, Lieutenant Jim Siddall, when they had gone together to examine her brother’s workshop. The women had been brought together by their grief and been virtually inseparable — Marija’s short weekend-long honeymoon apart — ever since. Marija was the slimmer of the pair, descended from a half-British and wholly Sicilian mother; Rosa was the daughter of an old Maltese landowning clan that rather looked down on ‘dockyard’ families like the Callejas who had no claim to having been ‘of the archipelago’ for centuries. Rosa was a little shorter, bustier and her unhappy marriage to Marija’s brother had made her a little dowdy, filling her with a self-doubt that had only really begun to fade with the hesitant, rather shy introduction of Lieutenant Alan Hannay into her life. Both women had fled from the house they shared in Kalkara when the alarms had sounded and the first shells had screamed overhead on their way to RAF Luqa.
They looked at each other. They were grimy, sweaty, hair awry like urchins out of some World War II Pathe report on the bombing of Malta straight out of 1941 or 1942. Instinctively, the two young Maltese women exchanged forced smiles.
“I am not a nurse,” Rosa reminded her friend.
“I don’t think that matters, sister,” Marija decided.
An emergency casualty clearing station had been established on the ground floor of the damaged West Wing of the hospital. The ‘damage’ was blasted windows apart, thankfully cosmetic and nobody was overly worried about the splintered glass underfoot. The injured were already backed up into corridors and lying beneath makeshift awnings in the courtyard outside.
A stone-faced Royal Navy Surgeon Lieutenant was hurriedly inspecting each new arrival and mandating priorities.
Marija introduced herself.
“I am Maria Calleja-Christopher. I am an auxiliary nurse,” she glanced to Rosa. “My sister and I are at your disposal, sir.”
“Calleja-Christopher?” The naval doctor was probably only in his late twenties, little older than Marija and obviously — from his pale complexion — very new to Malta. “Marija Calleja-Christopher?” He asked again, a sudden smile in his eyes threatening to burst across his suddenly not very severe face. He wiped his hands on his apron. “I’m Michael Stephens.”
Marija shook the hand he offered.
“I’m Reginald Stephen’s nephew,” the man went on, his lips quirking into the previously threatened smile.
Marija blinked, struck at once by the absurdity and the poignancy of the moment. She was looking into the face of the man whose uncle — and Margo Seiffert — had painstakingly put her back together again after she had been crippled in a bombing raid over twenty years ago.
“My goodness,” the man shook his head. “It really is a small World, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she agreed numbly.
“Right,” the man declared, coming back down to earth. “I need you two ladies to intercept new arrivals. The dead need to be carried directly to the morgue. The most seriously wounded need to be brought to me immediately, everybody else will have to join the queue. Make sure pressure pads and tourniquets are applied where necessary. Any questions?”
“No,” Marija said and turned away.
With Rosa she made her way to the main entrance to the hospital and instructed the guards where to send vehicles bearing the wounded. The truck she and her sister had turned up in had initially been misdirected over rough ground and she made it crystal clear that this was not to be allowed to happen again. Of course, because it was her, she commanded it with a winning smile and the men defending the gate took it in good — albeit harassed — heart.
Then she and Rosa returned to the clearing station to begin their work.
Chapter 5
Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French paced the small, dusty room packed with communications equipment which no longer worked — or if it did still work it either could not talk to anybody else, or there was nobody else left alive to talk to — technicians, staff officers and countless dazed Maltese civilians simply seeking shelter, like a caged tiger. Radio links with the United States Navy ships in the vicinity of the Maltese Archipelago and sporadic reports from units dispersed across the main island apart, he was both deaf and blind to the actual ‘tactical situation’.
“Sir!” A man called from across the room. “I have the Captain of the USS Iowa on the net. He’s asking to speak to the ‘Surviving Senior Officer on Malta’.”
The last message received from Headquarters in the citadel at Mdina had been to the effect that there had been an assault on the HQ complex and that Soviet Spetsnaz troops were inside the building…