The 23rd Escort Flotilla was due to sail from its anchorage in Sliema Creek later that afternoon; there were no plans for Talavera to attempt to rejoin Captain Nicholas Davey’s command before its return from participating in Operation Grantham. For the next few days Talavera was scheduled to run engineering trials and to exercise her gun and torpedo crews. When she returned to Malta the Fleet Engineering Officer, the Fleet Gunnery Officer, and the Fleet Torpedo Officer would decide if the ship was fit to be restored to ‘active service’.
“Slow astern BOTH!” Peter Christopher commanded. “Wheel AMIDSHIPS!”
HMS Talavera’s twin screws began to drag her out into the open water of the Grand Harbour. Her commanding officer eyed the wreck buoy bobbing in the water a hundred feet off the rocks at the foot of Fort St Angelo beyond the nearby headland on the other side of Dockyard Creek. The stern section of HMS Torquay was no threat but the big ships crowding the bays and creeks were. As the bow cleared the entrance to French Creek he turned.
“Stop BOTH!”
He heard the order repeated.
“Starboard TEN!”
HMS Talavera’s bow began to drift around, slowly, slowly. The whole Fleet would be watching, eagerly waiting for the youngest destroyer captain in the Royal Navy to make a complete ass of himself. Peter Christopher grinned because that was not about to happen!
HMS Talavera’s recently joined Navigation Officer; a Canadian reservist in his forties was quietly, competently taking bearings, checking angles. Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly had been a sub-lieutenant on a Flower class corvette on the Atlantic run in the last year of the 1945 war, afterwards a mate on a factory ship in the South Atlantic whale fishery, and before the October War a carpenter and an odd job man in his native Montreal. He had never married and but for the war he might have carried on inexorably sliding towards lonely, failed middle age and the bottle. His father had drunk himself to death at fifty, bereft of purpose in his life. After the October War, O’Reilly had applied for service in his own Navy in Canada but his own country had scrapped most of its Navy — or as good as — and sheltered behind American military power since 1945. Thwarted, he had gone to the British consulate, offered his ‘extensive combat experience’ to the Royal Navy. The people in Montreal had not known what to do with him, and referred him to the British Embassy in Ottawa. The ‘call’ had arrived six months ago. He had had to wait two months to hitch a ride across the North Atlantic in one of the old Liberty ships the Canadian Government had loaned from the Americans — the Canadians had carried on sending grain, strategic metals and oil to the old country even though the British pound was worthless on a North American continent in which the dollar was king — and eventually fetched up at the Admiralty Reception Centre in Portsmouth. He had been shocked by practically everything he saw and discovered in England; but the Brits had converted his wavy one ring to two solid ones and after a couple of months cooling his heels teaching navigation to pale-faced kids, teenage sub-lieutenants straight out of school, he had boarded the RMS Sylvania. The rest, as they say, was history. He had reported on board Talavera a fortnight ago.
For the first time Peter Christopher had a clear view of all the shipping in the Grand Harbour. The Big Cats, HMS Lion and HMS Tiger were moored fore and aft to emergency destroyer buoys opposite Corradino heights, beneath which in deep bunkers and tunnels lay the primary naval arsenal of the Mediterranean Fleet. Beyond the cruisers the chimney of Marsa power station belched grey smoke. The P and O liner Canberra — her outline broken by her drab camouflage — was berthed under the ramparts of Floriana. The landing ships and many of the pre-loaded transports were anchored on the other side of Valletta in Marsamxett, cluttering Lazaretto and Msida Creeks. Two big fleet oilers lay deep in the water, filled to their load lines in Kalkara Bay, where as Talavera emerged into the waters under the bows of the Big Cats, the three aircraft carriers that were vital to the success of the forthcoming operations in the Eastern Mediterranean slowly came into view from the destroyer’s bridge. The Commando carrier HMS Ocean was nearest — she would sail with the assault force — and behind her HMS Eagle’s bulk hid most of the smaller HMS Hermes from sight. The Eagle had been two-thirds of the way through a radical reconstruction at Portsmouth at the time of the October War. The rebuild had begun in 1959 and progress had been slow; however, in her new incarnation Eagle was a significantly more modern and capable weapon of war than her half-sister, HMS Ark Royal, the worn out heroine of Operation Manna. Fully loaded, the Eagle displaced over fifty-four thousand tons — making her nearly twice the size of the Hermes — and carried an air group of over forty aircraft. In the distance, HMS Sheffield still stood sentinel just inside the northern breakwater. The battered old cruiser had already surrendered over two hundred men to bolster the complement of HMS Belfast, the Flagship of Task Force Alpha. After the Fleet had sailed for the Eastern Mediterranean the Sheffield was to be sent home with a skeleton crew.
A thin tendril of smoke was rising from the Belfast’s after funnel and a host of flags were flying from her halyards, both fore and aft. Inboard of the Flagship the tall masts of three US Navy ships were a veritable forest of aerials. Elements of Rear Admiral Detweiller’s ‘American Squadron’ had departed the Grand Harbour in company with a convoy of US Navy stores, ammunition ships and tankers that outnumbered the handful of modern anti-aircraft and submarine missile destroyers and frigates at his disposal. The story was that the logistics ships were part of the USS Independence’s task force. The American super carrier was still at Gibraltar by all accounts.
“Slow ahead PORT!”
Peter Christopher waited until her felt the deck under his feet responding.
“Slow astern STARBOARD!”
And then: “Helm AMIDSHIPS!”
HMS Talavera’s bow swung towards the east.
“Stop BOTH!”
The Captain of the elderly Battle class destroyer had no intention of tiptoeing nervously out of harbour.
“Slow ahead BOTH!”
Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly stepped up to his commanding officer’s shoulder. He was a tall, bearded figure with weathered features of a similar stature to the younger man. He followed Peter Christopher’s gaze up to the left where the Commander-in-Chief’s flag flew above the Saluting Battery.
“Starboard TEN!”
The destroyer responded; Peter Christopher judged the delay before his next helm command too effect.
“Helm AMIDSHIPS!”
Dermot O’Reilly tried not to grin too broadly.
HMS Talavera was not about to leave harbour like a thief in the night, juggling revolutions on her two screws, or with a flurry of constantly adjusted helm orders. Her Captain had pointed her at the middle of the northern breakwater and was letting the ship pick up speed; two or three cables short of colliding with HMS Sheffield’s starboard side Talavera would swing to the right and by then, with her turbines half-ahead, race out of port with the élan of a salmon leaping a waterfall.