“You said you were the only man who knew how to fire these things?” Sean O’Flynn objected almost speaking in a whisper.
“Anybody can fire the bloody thing!” McCormick grunted. “You just won’t have a snow flake’s chance in Hell of hitting anything!”
“So what’s the…”
Frank Reynolds patted his comrade’s shoulder and gave McCormick a dark look.
“You said there was only one launcher, friend?”
The former British soldier shrugged.
“I lied.”
Chapter 52
“MAN IN THE WATER!”
The moment the call reached the bridge of the guided missile cruiser the alarm sounded, the engines were stopped and crewmen streamed up onto the decks of the USS Charles F. Adams. All night she had been standing close in off St Paul’s Bay with over fifty of her people ashore and onboard the wreck of HMS Yarmouth. The last of the seriously injured had been airlifted by the USS Independence’s Sea Kings to hospital on Gozo or directly back to the big carrier. The destroyer’s small marine detachment and twenty seamen under the command of the ship’s Executive Officer had remained on land when the Charles F. Adams had been forced to crawl into deeper water and head south.
Her main fuel bunkers were nearly dry and any time now her pumps would be sucking sludge out of the bottom of the starboard emergency tank. After that she would be adrift off a rocky and visibly unforgiving lee shore in water too deep to safely anchor until — hopefully — a tug arrived to haul her into port.
In St Paul’s Bay HMS Yarmouth smouldered, a partially gutted hulk. Overnight her Squid anti-submarine mortars had lit off, sympathetically igniting hundreds of rounds of forty-millimetre ammunition stored in her after main deck ready lockers. By then everybody who could be saved had been lifted off the wreck. Over half the frigate’s crew were dead or missing.
As the Charles F. Adams lost weigh heavy objects clunked against her port hull plates.
Commander Simon McGiven had been down in the engineering spaces discussing how soon his ship could take on a hundred tons of heavy bunker oil at Marsamxett Anchorage — where he was assured that the oiling wharf had survived the recent bombardment unscathed — and get back on station off St Paul’s Bay when the alarms sounded.
A lean compact man of only slightly more than average height he had trotted — not run, for that was a thing a commanding officer could not do with dignity — up the ladders to the main deck and gone immediately to the port rail. As a young man, a very young man in fact, he had been a midshipman on the USS Honolulu at Pearl Harbour that fateful day in December 1941 and had enjoyed a charmed career for the rest of that war right up until the morning of 10th June 1945 when his ship, the Fletcher class fleet destroyer USS William D. Porter (DD-579) was sunk by a Kamikaze off Okinawa. He had only been in the water thirty minutes before he was rescued but that was long enough for him to understand, completely, what the men in the cold, choppy Mediterranean had been through since their ship sank the best part of forty-eight hours ago.
Two days ago McGiven had not wasted a second thought looking for the survivors of the Yavuz and the Admiral Kutuzov, or of their escorts the Independence’s Air Group had mercilessly hunted down and destroyed farther out to sea. No sooner had the Charles F. Adams and the Berkeley raced to interpose themselves between the last enemy cruiser and the by then burning British vessels, the enemy had promptly disengaged and attempted to retire north east at flank speed. McGiven had manoeuvred to open his ship’s A arc — so that both his fore and aft quick firing automatic five-inch turrets could engage the enemy — and the Berkeley had raced back to stand by HMS Talavera. McGiven would have pursued the fleeing enemy until the ends of the Earth but at flank speed he would have run his bunkers dry in literally minutes, so reluctantly, after a few minutes he had called off the chase and left the surviving enemy vessels to the tender mercies of the Independence’s A-4 Skyhawks.
He had since learned that the Skyhawks had bombed the Chapayev class Soviet cruiser to a standstill fifty-six miles north-north-east of Valletta and finding her dead in the water but stubbornly still afloat the morning after the battle the SSN USS Permit had administered the coup de grace with two Mark 14 torpedoes, both of which exploded beneath the keel of the crippled enemy ship, breaking her back and sending her to the bottom in less than three minutes. Nobody had sent out search and rescue ships or choppers to the co-ordinates where the cruiser — thought to be the Komsomolets — and her eight hundred man crew had gone down.
Commander Simon McGiven and his comrades had been far too busy rendering assistance to real heroes.
HMS Yarmouth had taken a direct hit to her bridge early in the action. Likewise, another hit had opened up her single twin 4.5 inch gun turret like a sardine can ripped apart by a rifle bullet. Most of the later hits seemed to have passed through the ship before exploding but near misses and massive splinter damage had set her on fire amidships. By the time the Charles F. Adams hove alongside the frigate was being conned from her emergency steering position on the stern.
Simon McGiven had no idea how HMS Yarmouth’s people had contrived to successfully run their sinking ship practically up onto the beach in St Paul’s Bay. What he did know was that by so doing whoever was responsible had probably saved the lives of most the men who had survived the Battle of Malta.
Now the commanding officer of the Charles F. Adams gazed at the heads bobbing in the tangle of floating wreckage in a long thin, current-sculpted slick, for hundreds of yards out to sea. Here and there an arm waved. He guessed that many of the heads bobbing in the cold water had died many hours ago.
He looked to the sky, the clouds and back down to the sea.
The flotsam and detritus of battle was drifting down onto the destroyer. Boarding nets were going over the side, life jackets and flotation blocks were being hurriedly stacked along the rail.
He sighed and hastened to the bridge.
“How much water do we have under the keel?” He demanded.
“Six hundred feet, sir.”
McGiven strode to the bridge wing.
“SLOW ASTERN!” He ordered. The destroyer’s forward momentum was carrying her ahead of the slick of survivors and debris.
He waited for the screws to bite the iron grey seas and to feel the movement of the ship under his feet.
“ALL STOP!”
He turned to the Officer of the Deck.
“Manuever so as to keep the ship between the survivors and the coast.” Then, after giving orders for a report to be transmitted to the USS Iowa and copied to the flagship, he returned down to the main deck to supervise the recovery of men who had ceased to be his mortal enemies the moment they went into the water.
Ship-wrecked mariners all.
May God have mercy on our souls.
Chapter 53
Major Denzil Williams, the MI6 Head of Station on Malta and as of thirty-three hours ago, give or take a few minutes — the de facto ‘Security Chief’ of the archipelago reporting directly to the Acting C-in-C, Air Vice-Marshal French, had had to forego the ‘pleasure’ of interrogating Samuel Calleja overnight as a constant stream of new prisoners was processed into the hastily designated ‘Joint Interrogation Centre’ in the old fort opposite Valletta.