“Did you plant the bombs that sank HMS Torquay, Sam?”
Samuel Calleja shook his head before he knew he had reacted.
“Okay,” Rachel half-smiled. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”
Again, the man shook his head involuntarily, before his conscious mind had had a chance to catch up with his body’s instinctive response.
“If it wasn’t you, who was it who planted the bombs?”
“I don’t know. I was already hiding in the safe house at Qormi by then. I was to send daily reports about V-Bomber movements, and…”
There were places in Qormi, north east of RAF Luqa, where aircraft parked at dispersals, and take offs and landings could be observed during the day, so that made a kind of sense. Anybody with a good pair of binoculars in Rabat or Mdina would probably have a better view of the comings and goings at the air base. Why Qormi? Because it was easier to hide in the post 1945 war close-packed urban sprawl?
“And what else, Sam?” Rachel had not moved from her seat at the desk piled with files and loose documents.
“And coded messages Arkady Pavlovich needed to send to…”
“To where?”
“I don’t know. The code sign changed every twenty-four hours.”
“What happened to your radio?”
“It will still be in the basement of the house in Qormi. Arkady Pavlovich came to collect me the night before the invasion.”
“He told you it was an invasion?”
“Not exactly. He just knew something was going to happen. He said we had to be in Mdina when it happened.”
“Why did he take you with him?”
Samuel Calleja’s eyes clouded with new confusion.
“I mean,” Rachel observed scornfully, “it wasn’t as if you were going to be much use to him in a fight?”
The man bristled at this insult but he remained mute.
“You could have shot me three, maybe four times in Admiral Christopher’s office while I was dealing with Arkady Pavlovich,” she reminded him. “How did Admiral Christopher get separated from his men, by the way?”
“I don’t…”
“When the Soviet paratroopers assaulted the headquarters complex most of the fighting took place on the lower levels. I discovered you, Arkady Pavlovich and two dead British officers on the upper floor of the complex. The other officers had obviously been disarmed and executed.”
“I had no part of that!”
Rachel rose slowly to her feet and came around the desk. She settled in front of the man, resting the back of her thighs against the table. She folded her arms.
“Convince me,” she invited with an absolutely humourless smile.
“Arkady and I followed the second wave of troops into the building. The first wave got driven down into the cellars. There was nowhere for anybody to hide, no ways around the defenders. They all had Sten guns and grenades were going off. We ran into two officers carrying the Admiral. They were trying to walk him to somewhere safer. He’d already been shot…”
Rachel decided that sounded vaguely plausible.
“And?” She prompted.
Arkady Pavlovich forced them to carry the Admiral up the stairs. I didn’t know where we were going; I’d never been inside the headquarters, you see. When we got to the staff room outside the Commander-in-Chief’s office Arkady told the other two men to put the Admiral in a chair and then he, well…”
“Murdered them in cold blood?”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“We took the Admiral into the office. Arkady reckoned there would be another way out of the complex from Admiral Christopher’s office but there wasn’t. And then about a minute later you walked in.”
Rachel stared at the man and waited, knowing there was more.
“I think Arkady Pavlovich thought we could trade our lives for the Admiral’s.”
“He said that to you?”
“Yes.”
“What else did he say to you?”
“He talked about getting off the island and being picked up by a submarine but that might have been a lie. He said our comrades had done their work well and ‘blinded’ the British. I think he honestly believed that the British would surrender. He was looking forward to settling old scores.”
Rachel shivered.
Nobody had been closer to the monster that was Arkady Pavlovich Rykov than she; she would probably have been the first ‘old score’ he settled.
“Why didn’t he kill me weeks ago?” She asked, not expecting to get an answer.
“He knew he was ‘blown’. If you’d gone missing or been killed the authorities would have come straight to his door.”
Rachel levered herself away from the desk.
She stood directly in front of the man.
“Why did you betray your own people, your own family?”
“I’ve betrayed nobody,” Samuel Calleja hissed angrily. “Nothing will ever change on Malta unless the Maltese people throw off the capitalist yoke!”
Chapter 61
The bodies of the dead were in rows on the destroyer’s stern deck. The dead outnumbered the living by approximately two to one.
The survivors had all been from the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz; the men who had escaped alive from the Admiral Kutuzov — if there were any — must have drifted elsewhere in another, separate little Sargasso Sea of detritus. The two great ships had gone down several miles apart and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that while one slick of human misery had been washed inshore, the other had been swept far out to sea.
The small British minesweeper, HMS Repton had manoeuvred close alongside the USS Charles F. Adams’s starboard side so that the two captains could converse via bull horns.
“I LOOK FOREWARD TO RELIEVING YOU OF YOUR BURDEN, SIR?” The youthful lieutenant who commanded the short, broad four hundred ton minesweeper observed cheerfully.
“BY ALL MEANS, SIR!” Commander Simon McGiven replied.
In the near distance a big grey ocean going tug that was at least twice the size of the Ton class minesweeper thrust purposefully towards the two warships. The big American guided missile destroyer’s fuel bunkers were not, strictly speaking, empty but her pumps could not pump the near solid sludge left in the bottom her tanks and even if they could her boilers would probably not have been capable of burning it. Diesel generators kept the warship’s essential services running in a disabled sort of fashion but she could not steam another inch and slowly but surely she was being driven by the wind and current onto the rocky coast of the main island.
All the while the recovery of the living and the dead continued.
Forty-two year old Simon McGiven had been born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father had spent thirty years on the Great Lakes and hoped his son would be a school teacher or a bank clerk but then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour, and the rest, as they say, was history. When the time had come to return to a civilian career that he had never wanted he had applied to stay in the Navy. His first command had been an old World War II vintage barely modernised Fletcher class destroyer; in comparison to that old charabanc the Charles F. Adams was like a racing Ferrari. Except, of course, when she was dead in the water and sometime in the next ninety minutes she was liable to be blown onto exactly the sort of lee shore that must have terrified old time sailors.