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Everybody was saying that if HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera had not immediately come to the leviathan’s assistance to train their fire hoses directly into the infernos raging in the USS Enterprise’s stern, that the carrier would have had to have been abandoned, doubling or tripling the loss of life. The Scorpion and the Talavera, later assisted by HMS Broadsword had steamed so close under the overhanging flight deck that they had collided, time and again with the red hot steel flanks of the massive ship while, above them fully armed and fuelled jet interceptors and helicopters burned, exploded and showered the destroyers’ relatively fragile superstructures and hulls with a rain of flaming debris. The four surviving ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had been unable to do anything for the Enterprise’s consort, the nuclear-power anti-aircraft cruiser the USS Long Beach, other than to take off as many of her survivors as possible before the wintery chop of the iron grey Mediterranean seas had consumed her shattered, fire-ravaged hulk. The Long Beach and the missing HMS Aisne had been almost directly beneath the airburst; the yield of which Admiral Christopher’s experts now speculated must have been in the one to two megaton range. The Aisne was gone, lost without a trace with her two hundred and seven man crew. Between them HMS Broadsword, and Talavera’s sister ship, HMS Oudenarde had lifted nearly three hundred survivors off the Long Beach and out of the sea before she sank.

Tragically, although over eight hundred men had perished on the American guided missile cruiser and nobody yet knew how many hundreds more on the Enterprise but oddly, today was a day of celebration. The salvo of nuclear weapons thrown at the Maltese Archipelago had detonated — or in the case of the ICBM which had plunged into the three mile channel between the main island and the islet of Filfla off the south coast, fortuitously not detonated at all — so far from the islands that not a single person had so much as been scratched on land; and somehow, against all the odds, the battered ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had helped to put out the Enterprise’s fires and successfully escorted the mighty ship into the safety of the Grand Harbour.

All things considered Marija had decided to forgive Peter Christopher his recklessness. This time, anyway.

The Commander-in-Chief — her courageous fiancé’s father — had briefly separated himself from his entourage of bodyguards and staff officers to seek out the two women.

‘I must detour to the new Communications Centre to take an urgent call from England,’ he had apologised. The Signals Corps had taken over an annexe to a bomb damaged former Grand Master’s Palace in the heart of Valletta and set up a small, state of the art, secure telecommunications facility with equipment flown out from England in the last forty-eight hours. Until yesterday all ‘secure’ traffic had had to pass through the antiquated emergency command centre in the Citadel at Mdina. ‘I have arranged for transport and the necessary clearances to enable you both to have a ringside seat in French Creek. HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera will tie up alongside Parlatorio Wharf. Broadsword and Oudenarde don’t seem to be so badly knocked about so they will anchor in Sliema Creek pending engineering reports on their condition. I hope to rejoin you by the time Scorpion and Talavera are tying up alongside.’

Neither of the women had expected to be chauffeured, much in the custom of visiting movie stars or VIPs, directly onto the quayside just in time to watch the smoke billowing again from the saluting battery below the Upper Baraka Gardens — now on the opposite side of the Grand Harbour — as the first of the two fire blackened destroyers nosed under the ramparts of Valletta and swung their sharp prows into the broad entrance to French Creek. Both ships looked a little strange quite apart from their discoloured, grubby appearance. Both were listing; Scorpion to starboard by perhaps two or three degrees, Talavera to port by about the same angle. But it was more than that; their lattice foremasts were bent out of true and Talavera’s four-ton double bedstead Type 965 aerials were drunkenly leaning aft. Both ships were pumping frothing white water over their fo’c’sles from multiple hoses. Marija also noted that both ships were making more smoke than was customary; this latter spoke to sloppy engine room drills or more likely, major structural damage not visible to the naked eye. However, while all these things caught Marija’s practiced eye — she was after all a daughter of the Naval Dockyards, had grown up in a family that talked of nothing but the Royal Navy and its ships at meal times, and had watched a thousand grey warships come and go from the anchorages of the Maltese Archipelago in her young life — nothing took her breath away so much as the big, embroidered battle flags streaming from each destroyer’s main mast halyards. Her father was fond of reminding anybody with ears and the inclination and patience to listen that ‘when push comes to shove the Royal Navy doesn’t care about ships, all it cares about is its traditions’. Until she had laid eyes on those magnificent battle flags she had never really understood what he was talking about. Now, in a flash of revelation, she understood. And in that moment she understood also why she would never, ever ask the man she loved to ‘be careful’. In the last three months over half the Mediterranean Fleet had been sunk or put out of action; in the bigger picture it meant nothing. More ships would be sent to Malta, the war would go on. Nobody seeing those flags streaming proudly in the unseasonal gusting wind from the main masts of the two badly damaged British destroyers could doubt it.

Marija shivered involuntarily and mistaking this for trepidation Margo Seiffert put her arm around her younger friend’s shoulders. The older woman was a little surprised when she found herself studying the broadening smile on her protégé’s face.

“What?” She asked before she could stop herself. Margo had been married once but never wanted children at the time. Fate had decreed that she had eventually met the love of her life many years too late for all of that child-bearing nonsense and looking back she would have changed nothing. In her sixty-third year she was a hyper-active small, wiry woman with piercing dull blue eyes and short straw grey hair whose look could sometimes be amply sufficient to turn a strong man’s knees to jelly. She had always enjoyed a very special relationship with Marija. Marija had been her child patient, later she had mentored and overseen her blossoming into the woman she was now. Marija had become her best friend on Earth; the nearest thing to the daughter she had never had. “I know that look!”

“Peter does not believe in God,” Marija said, smiling seraphically before sobering a little. She went on: “But that doesn’t matter. I have enough faith for both of us.”

Margo Seiffert pursed her lips, held her peace.