Dan French took the handset.
“This is Air Vice-Marshal French,” he announced. “For my sins, Deputy C-in-C Malta.” Even if he had not been so painfully conscious that he was the sole object of attention in the crowded room his the airman’s voice would still have rung with calm, mildly insouciant command. He owed it to everybody to make a good impression. He had flown Lancaster bombers over Germany in 1943 and 1944; one night a fighter shot away large lumps of his port wing over Magdeburg, on another night he had brought back an unrecognisable lump of meat in his rear turret that had once been a nineteen year old gunner from Maltby in Yorkshire. The turret had been shattered by a brace of twenty millimetre cannon shells and the following morning ground crew had had to hose the remains out of what was left of the it. No matter how bad things looked they could always be worse and a wise man knew as much. “To whom do I have the pleasure to be speaking, sir?”
“Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt, sir!”
Dan French tried and failed to suppress a wan smile.
“How do you do, Captain Schmidt?”
This amiable riposte seemed to momentarily disarm the man at the other end of the connection,
“My radio people tell me that you have limited communications on Malta, sir?”
“I have virtually no communications other than with and via the good offices of the United States Navy at this time, Captain Schmidt,” Dan French confessed affably. “I am out of communications with my HQ in Mdina. We believe the Citadel may have fallen to enemy forces but have no way of confirming this at this time. May I rely on you for naval gunfire support if offensive operations to retake the Citadel are necessary and practical later this day?”
The Deputy Commander of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was a little surprised by the unhesitating vehemence of the other man’s reply.
“Yes, sir!”
“Oh, jolly good. That’s, er, good to know. Are you in a position to give me an update of the naval situation around the Maltese Archipelago, Captain Schmidt?”
“Yes, sir. There is one enemy heavy retiring at flank speed to the north east in company with at least two escorts. There are other small enemy surface units retreating in an easterly direction and I have reports of the presence of one confirmed and one suspected enemy submarine to the north.” The Captain of the USS Iowa seemed to realise at this juncture it was probable that the man in the bunker at RAF Luqa might not have any idea whatsoever of the bigger ‘picture’. He digressed, seeking to ensure everybody was reading from the same page. “Vice Admiral Clarey is coming south via the Straits of Messina at his best speed in the USS Independence. He has delegated tactical command of all US forces in the area ahead of his arrival off Malta to Iowa, sir. In the mean time one of the Independence’s E-2 Hawkeyes,” brand new state of the art electronic surveillance and command and control aircraft, “is operating north of Gozo keeping eyes and ears on all hostile air and sea activity in the area. Independence will mount a strike on all surviving enemy surface and submarine units at the earliest time.”
Dan French decided he needed to make an admission.
“I’m blind here, Captain Schmidt. I have no idea what has been going on for the last hour or so or what the situation of my surviving forces may be. All I know for sure is that the island has taken a Hell of a beating, and that the strike force I launched this morning to intercept a suspected Red Dawn invasion fleet some one hundred plus miles due east of the archipelago has been lost. I have no operable runways on the archipelago, no radio or radar net worth a candle and for all I know there are Soviet paratroopers besieging this command bunker at this very minute.”
Such forthright honesty gave the American a very brief pause for thought.
“The naval situation is under control, sir. As to the land situation,” there was an unspoken shrug of the shoulders, “that I cannot speak to at this time. As soon as the Independence is in range her helicopters will fly off every Marine in the battle group to assist your ground forces but that won’t be for another two to three hours. Independence’s E-2 put a couple of sonar buoys in the water and we have anti-submarine aircraft in the air over both suspected hostile submarines operating north and east of the island of Gozo.”
The Captain of the USS Iowa digressed for a moment; he literally could not help himself.
“Somebody ought to start looking for a chest full of medals for your guys on those two destroyers you sent out to attack the Soviet heavies,” he observed gruffly.
Dan French frowned.
“We sent ships out to fight the enemy?” He vaguely recollected that the frigate HMS Yarmouth had been running post-refit trials for the last couple of days but had no knowledge of any other ‘big’ ship available to his friend, the C-in-C, Sir Julian Christopher.
“HMS Yarmouth and HMS Talavera,” the American reported, not able to hide his concern that the Englishman apparently had no idea what he was talking about. “Yarmouth decoyed the heavies from the north and the Talavera dove straight at them and put fish into both the bastards!”
That explains why the shelling stopped a while back!
“I thought Talavera was still in dockyard hands?” Dan French speculated before he decided it was for the best to keep his mouth shut.
“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it. She ran at the bastards for ten, maybe fifteen minutes before she launched her fish,” Anderson Schmidt declared. “One destroyer up against a goddammed dreadnought and a cruiser. By the time she was in close at least two of the Krupny class escorts must have been shooting at her too!”
“What happened to Talavera and Yarmouth?” Dan French demanded dry mouthed.
“Yarmouth is on fire off St Paul’s Bay. She may still be under weigh but she’s trailing a lot of smoke. The USS Charles F. Adams is manoeuvring to offer all assistance at this time. HMS Talavera is in a sinking condition approximately ten miles off Sliema. The USS Berkeley is alongside her standing by to take off her people.”
Dan French took a deep breath.
“Thank you, Captain Anderson.”
There was a brief pause.
“What are your orders, sir?” The American asked.
Dan French recognised that this was the first time in his life an American serviceman had ever said that to him and meant it. He swallowed hard, looked around the room at the worried, haggard faces.
“Park your ship off the Grand Harbour breakwaters and carry on the good work, Captain Schmidt,” he said. “Oh, and keep this channel open, if you please.”
“Affirmative, sir!”
Dan French surrendered the handset.
“It seems that the cavalry has arrived, gentleman.” There was a hubbub of relief and an undercurrent of muttered dissent to the effect that the cavalry ought to have been on the scene all along, which the Deputy Commander of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta immediately quashed. “We will leave the recriminations to the politicians,” the man who, with a heavy heart, assumed he was now probably the man in charge in Malta added grimly, “it is not the business of any man under my command to cast the first stone.”
This said he headed for the door.
“Right! I’ve had enough of skulking down here. Somebody find me a bloody gun!”
Chapter 6
Sir Ian Morrison Ross MacLennan had been the British Ambassador to the Irish Republic since 1959. He was a seasoned diplomat and considered by his peers in England to be a very ‘safe pair of hands’. Having joined the then Colonial Office in 1933 after graduating from Worcester College, Oxford, he had previously served with distinction as High Commissioner in Southern Rhodesia between 1951 and 1953, in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland until 1955, returning to London for two years as Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Relations Office, before undertaking his next High Commissioner stint between 1957 and 1959 in Accra, Ghana during the run up to that nation’s independence. In all his overseas postings the fifty-four year Ambassador had formed close and lasting friendships and connections men and women who were often instinctively hostile to British interests, but nowhere more so than in Dublin. Insofar as it was possible for an interloper representing the former imperial power — a power still distrusted and loathed throughout the twenty-six counties — to have built ‘bridges’, few men could have done more than Ian MacLennan in the years he had been in Ireland. Not that many ‘bridges’ had been built in recent months as the strife in the north worsened and passions burned ever more brightly in the south in the aftermath of the October War.