“NOBODY LOOK BACK!”
In that split second the whole world seemed to burn pure, blinding white.
There was no noise other than the churning of the rotors of Mil Mi-6 heavy lift helicopters which had belatedly lifted him and the last survivors of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment rearguard out of the doomed city.
Pausing several seconds until he knew it was safe to look back the veteran soldier turned around.
“Shit!” He muttered involuntarily as he eyed the giant mushroom cloud rising above what had once been the capital city of Iran.
There was no way that was a piddling little fifteen kiloton tactical nuclear warhead!
He could see the pressure wave of the huge explosion radiating out; of Tehran there was nothing left, just churning superheated irradiated dust. The breeze plucked at his face ahead of the approaching over-pressure wave.
Nobody had told him that there had been a change of plan.
If the fucking plan had been to nuke the whole fucking city all along why the fuck had he had to leave two hundred of the finest fucking combat troops in the whole fucking world dead on the ground?
What the fuck is going on?
Chapter 63
Earlier that afternoon Peter Christopher and his wife had gone out to meet his men — and one woman, Rosa Calleja — as they clambered down from the dusty old buses requisitioned to bring them across the island from Kalkara. It had been an emotional reunion and there had been tears in the eyes of several Talaveras and both women. While her husband, stiffly formal in his new uniform but incapable of not constantly breaking into conspiratorial grins with his men, attempted to maintain ‘proper’ decorum; Marija felt under no such obligation. Once her husband had saluted and shaken hands solemnly she seized hands and pecked cheeks, beaming at each battered hero as he stepped down and blinked in the glare of the hastily erected arc lights outside the ‘Palace’.
Her brother, Joe, had held up a defensive hand, abjuring physical contact. The last time his sister had tried to embrace him back at Royal Naval Hospital Bighi it had almost finished him off. Marija settled for a mock hug before studying her younger sibling. The man the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta regarded as a Bolshevik trades union troublemaker was every bit as much the hero of the Battle of Malta as any man. There was a lump in her throat and she thought she was going to burst into tears again. Her brother’s emotions were not dissimilar but he had been pumped full of pain killers prior to his departure from Kalkara that he was not entirely aware of what was going on around him.
Marija and Rosa had looked at each other and embraced.
However, time had been short. The newcomers had needed watering and feeding and the staff of the Verdala Palace had been instructed to ‘spruce up’ and make everything and everybody ‘ship shape’ ahead of the arrival of the ‘VIPs from London’.
Thus it was that Peter Christopher, Alan Hannay, Dermot O’Reilly, Spider McCann, Jack Griffin, and thirteen other Talavera’s formed into a parade line in the Reception Hall of the old castle. Rosa Calleja had hung back in the shadows, desperately trying not to make eyes at or to constantly distract HMS Talavera’s former Supply Officer. Marija meanwhile had taken her place to her husband’s left in the line.
She squeezed his hand for the others had brought sad news from Bighi. Another Talavera had died of his wounds that morning and Miles Weiss, the destroyer’s Executive Officer, had not yet regained consciousness following an emergency operation to relieve what had turned out to be a massive sub-cranial haematoma. Miles had seemed fine — albeit a little dazed — until several hours after the battle, and then he had begun to exhibit symptoms of a mild concussion which had got progressively worse. He had had some kind of epileptic fit while he was being taken into the operating theatre.
“Admiral Clarey has had to return to his flagship,” Captain Lionel Faulkes, a veteran U-boat hunter from the days of the Battle of the Atlantic in Hitler’s War who having retired from the Navy in June 1962, now found himself the senior surviving Royal Navy staff officer on Malta. He had arrived shortly ahead of the VIPs. Faulkes was the man who had patiently, with great charm and pragmatic dexterity guided Peter Christopher and Talavera’s Navigating Officer, Canadian Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly through the hasty preparation of the official ‘After Action Report’ of the ship’s part in the Battle of Malta the previous night.
Faulkes ran his eye down the line, smiled at Marija and returned his full attention to the tall young man who was about to become — somewhat reluctantly — a national hero.
“Air Vice-Marshal French will be accompanied by the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, Mr Neave, the Secretary of State for Supply, and Mr McLeod, the Secretary of State for Information and the Leader of the House of Commons.” Behind him the film crew which had arrived with a crowd of journalists — who were milling around outside in the courtyard — was setting up, installing still more dazzling lights. The first two planes into RAF Luqa had carried over fifty doctors and nurses and several tons of medical supplies. The VIPs’ aircraft had likewise been packed with medical supplies and transported several dozen ‘experts’, mainly Royal Engineers to the archipelago. “I will do my best to stop this thing becoming a scrum,” Captain Faulkes promised. “You will be introduced to each of the VIPs in turn by the Acting C-in-C; thereafter you will escort the aforementioned VIPs down the line introducing each man to Sir David Luce. The other VIPs will follow you and the First Sea Lord as you progress down the line. If you would introduce each man,” he glanced to Marija, “and your good wife in a moderately declamatory fashion so that each VIP catches each name that would be most helpful, Commander.”
“I shall do my best, sir.”
Captain Faulkes was shorter by nearly a head than Talavera’s former commanding officer and significantly more than twice his age, his grey hair thinning and his eyes a little rheumy. His was a very old head on a body wearied by a life leavened with more than its fair share of spills and privations. But for a quirk of fate might have died with so many of his friends and colleagues at Mdina two days ago. He felt the loss of the Fighting Admiral as any friend would; the Navy had lost its finest son and yet when he looked at Peter Christopher he now found himself looking at a youthful reincarnation of the father.
The King is dead; long live the King!
Lionel Faulkes had never married. His naval career had been everything to him and he had never wanted for company; the countless friendships he had formed in peace and war had been the real joy of his life. Wherever he went or looked in Navy circles he saw and was found by true friends, such was the real underlying, virtually indestructible strength of the Navy. Within those circles he had always been an oddly bookish man, the butt of many well-meant jibes for his scholarly conversation and carefully considered opinions and perspectives. After the 1945 war, his general health and constitution having been somewhat impaired by having had two ships sunk under him, he had become a career ‘staffer’. He had been an instructor at Dartmouth when Peter Christopher had scraped through by the skin of his teeth, much to his father’s infuriation at the time. Faulkes had not actually taught the boy but his father had asked him to ‘keep an eye on the lad’, so he had, albeit from afar and nothing which had happened to that apparently callow, unfocused youth, had subsequently surprised him. In most of the ways that mattered Peter Christopher had already been his father’s son back in those days at Dartmouth; he just had not realised it. He was a natural seaman with an innate eye for the weather and sea conditions, a born ship handler even when he was messing about in a skiff on the River Dart in the shadow of the Britannia Royal Naval College on the hill above it. He had always been the sort of man others followed; it was simply that he had only latterly accepted in full the terms of his contract with the Royal Navy. Back at Dartmouth he had still been trying to be a civilian in uniform.