Although Max Forton looked a little ragged, he was still raring for action, yearning for the chase. After the last year no man in the Royal Navy was better fitted to occupy Simon Collingwood’s seat when inevitably, his time in command ended. For all he knew this was his last cruise.
Clutching his precious mug of cocoa HMS Dreadnought’s commanding officer headed aft, sticking his head into the nooks and crannies where his men lived and worked until he entered the machinery spaces where he had a brief chat with the Engineering Officer. He looked into the Wardroom where three women and four child refugees were chatting with a steward. Sighting the Captain they silence fell. Maya was restraining Yelda, trying to stop her hiding under the table.
“Pretend I’m not here,” Simon Collingwood suggested uncomfortably. He placed his now empty mug on the Wardroom table.
The young woman’s brown eyes flashed demur amusement.
At exactly that moment HMS Dreadnought’s pressure hull trembled and filled with a sound like the muffled roar of a volcanic eruption.
And then the collision alarm sounded.
“GET ON THE DECK AND HOLD ON TO SOMETHING!” Simon Collingwood barked and without waiting to see if his order had been obeyed he stumbled towards the control room.
Max Forton’s voice broke hoarsely over the submarine-wide public address system.
“This is the Executive Office! Brace for collision! Brace for Collision!”
Dreadnought was heeling into a tight starboard turn and Simon Collingwood almost fell over the hatch combing as he entered the control room.
“Very, very large underwater explosion, Skipper!” Max Forton announced tersely.
The noise was muted as if a ten mile wide drum had been struck by mile-wide drumstick under water a great distance away. The delayed pressure wave smashed into HMS Dreadnought’s bow like a giant hammer; the whole boat seemed to stop dead in the water for a second before she lurched forward, her bow rising.
“Level the boat!” Simon Collingwood demanded. “Number One,” he added, beckoning Max Forton over to the command chair. They both knew they had been closer to a big nuclear depth charge than they ever wanted to be again. There was no profit belabouring the point. “I may be being a tad paranoid but I think somebody had just blown a big hole in the Amphions’ picket line. As soon as the acoustic disturbance has dissipated we’ll creep up to periscope depth and have a look around.”
“We ought to get a signal off to Valletta, Skipper,” Max Forton muttered confidentially.
“Yes. Trail the aerial and we’ll get that sent soonest.”
Some ninety minutes later HMS Dreadnought’s attack periscope skimmed the surface of the almost smooth, very nearly perfectly dark azure Central Mediterranean. The surface contact they had discovered before the explosion was gone. A careful orbit of the horizon revealed nothing, an ocean devoid of shipping.
“Periscope down!” Simon Collingwood frowned in intense concentration. “Has Malta acknowledged our last transmission?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Very good, take the boat down to two hundred feet if you please, Number One. Once we are at depth please plot a course to place us twenty miles magnetic west of Amphion’s last known position. We will fill the gap in the picket line pending further communication with Fleet HQ in Malta.”
It was reasonable to assume that the surface contact had waited until HMS Amphion had challenged her; shortly thereafter she had detonated a massive nuclear depth charge, probably within a few hundred feet of the ‘A’ class boat.
That was cold!
Dreadnought had a Mark XX homing torpedo and four heavy-weight old-fashioned Mark VIIIs loaded in her five working torpedo tubes. He had thought he was going to have to take them back to base; perhaps, God had had a change of mind.
He dictated a terse message to Fleet HQ.
Shortly after nightfall a flash transmission pad was pressed into his hands.
IMMEDIATE X CINCMED TO S101 X CONCUR WITH YOUR ACTIONS X BE AWARE OF AIR AND SEA ASSETS APPROACHING YOUR PATROL LINE FROM EAST X HOLD THE LINE X DEPLOY 2SF AS YOU SEE FIT X MESSAGE ENDS
Simon Collingwood struggled to stifle a shivering yawn as he passed the pad to his Executive Officer. The younger man raised an eyebrow.
“Congratulations, Skipper. The C-in-C has just given you command of the 2nd Submarine Squadron!”
“Establish contact with whichever boats are still on station please.”
There ought to be four, possibly as many as five Amphions twenty to thirty miles apart in the picket. One was sunk; if another had departed its station since Dreadnought had picked up the last general situation report nearly twenty-four hours ago there might be wide gaps in the theoretically impenetrable line. Only Dreadnought — assuming she did not have a major breakdown — was capable of covering any additional holes in Malta’s eastern submarine defences although with only five torpedoes remaining from her initial war load of twenty-four, it was a moot question as to what she might actually achieve if confronted with multiple targets.
Simon Collingwood breathed a long and heartfelt sigh of relief when after a wait of over two hours the last of the remaining Amphions reported in.
The southern extremity of HMS Alliance’s five mile wide patrol box was twenty-three miles north-east of Dreadnought’s current position. HMS Artemis was nineteen miles to the south-east; HMS Alderney forty-two miles, the Ambush seventy-one miles, and HMS Astute one hundred and four miles to the south.
Other than ordering the Astute to withdraw twenty miles to the north-west to ‘better cover the flank of our line’ he left his captains to their own devices. On balance he suspected their irritation to be ‘bullied’ by the new boy in the class, would be greatly outweighed by how glad they were to have a nuclear-powered hunter killer boat to back them up if they ran into the sort of trouble which had proven fatal to the Amphion.
“Did you know anybody on the Amphion, sir?” Max Forton asked quietly as the two men studied the extended tactical plot.
“No, not really.” That was a lie. A classmate of his at Dartmouth had been her captain; a decent, unimaginative, utterly solid man who had lost his wife and two young sons in the October War.
What was wrong with the World?
There was a polite cough behind the two men.
“They said there was ‘too much excitement going on’ before,” Maya Hayek apologised, holding out a mug of steaming cocoa. “I sorry I did not bring the Captain’s Kye before… Now…”
Chapter 11
The two staff cars transporting the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, and his Deputy on Malta arrived at the gates of the narrow bridge over the Citadel’s thirty feet deep dry moat within moments of each other. The two cars crossed into the ancient fortress in convoy and parked in the courtyard of the derelict Connaught Hospital.
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher and Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French greeted each other with wry grins, casual salutes and brief handshakes. The two men had instantly hit it off when they first met in the aftermath of the devastating air raid on the Maltese Archipelago in early December last year. They did not invariably see eye to eye — one man was an admiral, and the other an airman so they were never going agree about everything — but their robustly friendly and wholly collegiate working relationship had served the men under their command well and thus far at least, delayed the complete collapse of British power and influence in the Mediterranean.