He turned on his heel and marched back up the gangway.
“Inform Mr McCann that if the dockyard people are back in board within fifteen minutes they may have their tools and equipment returned to them,” he said to Peter Weiss. “Oh, and indicate to Mr McCann in the strongest possible terms that I don’t want any of the dockyard police on my ship.”
Returning to his day cabin he was relieved to hear booted feet clunking on the deck over his head and in the adjoining compartments as Joe Calleja’s chastened comrades trudged back onto HMS Talavera.
Now that the ship was out of the water every inch of her fabric needed to be checked and surveyed and a comprehensive repair, refit and maintenance program executed as quickly as possible.
However, most of all he needed to get ashore and to be with Marija.
Chapter 10
Captain Simon Collingwood was almost as exhausted as his boat. HMS Dreadnought had been far too long at sea and her commanding officer had been pushing himself too hard for too long and he knew it. A minor but possibly significant factor which constantly exacerbated his weariness was the presence of so many supernumeraries — refugees rescued from a convoy under attack by a Red Dawn squadron off Cyprus — onboard the submarine. Dreadnought’s was a horribly cramped, crowded, claustrophobic environment at the best of times. The addition of twenty-two additional souls, many of them young children in Dreadnought’s close-packed little world could not but be a tremendous strain on both the boat’s internal systems, and on her whole crew.
However, there were compensations.
“Your cocoa, Captain Collingwood,” said the soft, lilting feminine voice. The words seemed to swirl about him in the darkness for a moment before his hair-trigger awakening response brought him crashing down to earth with a hard bump.
The commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s most advanced and dangerous vessel — albeit a vessel whose capabilities were somewhat impaired at present — blinked into the face of a serenely lovely young woman and miraculously, for a little while, his weariness completely evaporated.
He tried to remember when he had last had a good night’s sleep. Probably not since the boat had sailed from Gibraltar. He and his officers had surrendered their tiny cabins to the refugee women and children, resting when they could in the Wardroom, often under the table, or cat-napping in warm corners. Simon Collingwood had got by taking ten, twenty or thirty minute catnaps in his control room command chair.
“Thank you, Maya.” The young woman, she was twenty-three he had discovered from the notes of her debriefing, was called Maya Hayek and she had come aboard with her younger sister, and two young children; a girl called Yelda and a boy called Yannis, cousins whose parents were likely dead somewhere in Turkey. Yelda was the older child. In her own tongue the name meant ‘summer rose’; now she was orphaned and travelling on a submarine whose only reason for being was war.
The World had gone mad.
The Captain of the United Kingdom’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine allowed himself to meet, momentarily, Maya Hayek’s limpid brown gaze, knowing that nothing again in his life would ever quieten his thoughts, nor fill him with such gentle strength as the calm in her eyes. Maya was dressed in an over-sized blue boiler suit, her long black hair modestly contained and mostly hidden by a scarf.
Reality suddenly impinged.
“SURFACE CONTACT!”
Simon Collingwood waited for the next report.
“Bearing three-two-zero! Single screw! Range ten plus miles!”
Commander Max Forton, Dreadnought’s Executive Officer had been napping in the sound room. He stepped into the control room rubbing his red-rimmed eyes.
“Let’s go and have a look at her,” Simon Collingwood decided.
His second-in-command leaned over the tactical plot.
“Amphion should be dead ahead of our contact, Skipper.”
A picket line of conventional ‘A’ class — diesel-electric submarines like museum exhibits from a far distant past age in comparison to Dreadnought even in her present somewhat tired incarnation — was strung north to south along longitude seventeen degrees East. It was the job of the ‘Amphions’ to intercept and challenge all ships attempting to pass to the west. The picket line had been established after Red Dawn had used a passenger ferry, crowded with refugees from Turkey to smuggle a tactical nuclear weapon into Limassol harbour to sink the cruiser HMS Blake, and to put the port out of action. This attack, coming shortly after the Blake had stowed the last of the thirty-eight nuclear warheads previously stored at RAF Akrotiri in her magazines, and at the moment the evacuation of the garrison, its dependents and friendly Cypriot citizens from the island was about to commence, had begun the bloody decline and near collapse of British arms in the Eastern Mediterranean. Fear that the fate of Limassol could be repeated at other ports, like for example, Malta’s Grand Harbour, was constantly in the forefront of the mind of every senior officer in the theatre. Hence, the line of obsolete Amphions patrolling down longitude seventeen degrees East.
Simon Collingwood allowed himself a moment’s reflection.
It was too easy to make a fast decision when one was tired; and he had just made a ‘fast’ decision that failed to take account of at least one very important tactical fact. HMS Amphion. HMS Amphion probably did not know Dreadnought was transiting her patrol box, and Collingwood had no intention of advertising his boat’s presence to the ‘A’ class boat, or to anybody else for that matter.
“Belay that last order, Number One. Thank you for reminding me Amphion is on station. We’ll let Amphion do her job. Plot a course well south of the surface contact. We’ve had quite enough excitement on this cruise; perhaps we should let somebody else have a little fun?”
“That’s confoundedly generous of you, Skipper!”
There was a mutter of amusement in the control room.
When Simon Collingwood looked around Maya had disappeared like a beautiful apparition he had glimpsed in a dream. He knew her disappearance would trouble him, lingering in the back of his head until he next saw her. It was getting very hard to remind himself that commanders of nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines could ill afford distractions.
He clenched his right fist, clunked down it on the arm rest of the command chair. If he got careless people would probably die; and that would never do. Not if they were his people.
“Take the boat down to two-seven-five feet if you please, Number One. We will maintain our present course and speed until we are well past the surface contact.”
His orders were repeated around the control room.
“I suggest we come left onto two-six-zero degrees, sir!”
“Very good! Carry on!” Simon Collingwood stretched in the chair. The ache in his shoulders and behind his eyes wasn’t going to go away any time soon. He stood up. “You have the watch, Number One.”
“I have the watch, Skipper!”
“I’m going to wander around the boat for a few minutes.”