Peter Christopher raised an eyebrow.
“Er, on the bridge, sir.”
“Very good.” A telephone line had been strung across the dock shortly after HMS Talavera had berthed that morning. It made for easier communication between the ship and the dockyard superintendent’s office.
An urgent call.
That was never good news, so he walked briskly forward to the bridge and trotted up the ladder.
“Talavera,” he announced, taking the proffered handset. “Commander Christopher speaking.”
“One moment, sir.”
Peter Christopher waited patiently; keen to appear wholly relaxed and untroubled for the benefit of any man watching him.
“Peter,” Admiral Sir Julian Christopher said brusquely to his son. “How far advanced are you with your ammunitioning?”
“I’ve got about a hundred-and-fifty rounds, mixed common and AP per barrel onboard for the main battery. We’re loading the last torpedo as we speak. Most of the smaller calibre ammunition is pretty much onboard and stowed, sir.” He had not been asked but he automatically answered what he guessed would be his father’s next question. “I’ve got one boiler lit at the moment, sir.”
“Good. That’s good. Flash up your Number Two boiler and get out to sea soonest.”
“Soonest, sir?”
“Yes.” There was a moment of silence. “Cut your lines and go, Peter!”
“Sir…”
“Get out to sea and await further orders!”
“Yes, sir!”
It was all Peter could do not to drop the handset and run to the bridge rail. Instead, he sighed, jammed the handset in place and turned to the bridge talker.
“Sound Air Defence Stations Condition One!”
Instantly the alarms blared throughout the ship.
Peter Christopher slid down the ladder to the main deck, almost colliding with Peter Weiss running the other way.
“There’s a flap on. I don’t know the details,” he explained. “Get our people back onboard. Clear the decks.” Leaving his Executive Officer bawling orders through a megaphone, Talavera’s commanding officer hurried back up to the bridge. The ship’s Master at Arms, Chief Petty officer Spider McCann materialised as if by magic at his shoulder. “Single up the lines, Mister McCann. We’re casting off in,” he glanced at his watch, “in thirty seconds regardless whether all our people are back onboard or if we’ve still got civilians on deck!”
The diminutive little man scurried away.
Petty Officer Jack Griffin appeared.
“Find the Engineering Officer. I need him to flash up Number Two boiler like his life depends on it!”
Because it probably does depend on it!
Peter was already doing rough calculations. Talavera had the thin-end of seventy tons of oil in her bunkers. At full speed she would burn that off in two or three hours. There was nothing he could do about that; he would worry about that later. He glanced at the wharf, 4.5-inched fixed reloads were laying on the concrete everywhere, boxes of Spam and tinned fruit had been discarded in a line between the supply lorries and the ship, and men were sprinting to get back aboard from every direction.
“Sound the horn three times!”
The sound of the ship’s horn — strictly speaking an air horn — rumbled so deeply that the sound seemed to be reverberating inside Peter Christopher’s chest as he went to the port bridge rail.
“Raise the gangways!”
His father had told him to cut his lines and go!
“Cast off! CAST OFF!”
He did not wait to see if his orders were being obeyed.
“Are the engine room telegraphs answering?”
“Yes, sir.”
“FULL left rudder!” A moment to catch his breath. “SLOW ahead STARBOARD!” Then. “Slow ASTERN port!”
This was one of those rare occasions, he decided, when he could probably risk swiping the dockside with Talavera’s transom and get away with it. The destroyer began to move forward and away from the quayside. Two men leapt across the gap as it widened. Others shuddered to a halt, knowing intuitively that the gap was too wide. Perhaps, a dozen men collected on the edge of the dock, staring wide-eyed as their crewmates moved across the decks and their ship left them stranded ashore. Civilians stared in astonishment.
What was going on?
“Stop PORT! Rudder AMIDSHIPS!”
Peter Christopher heard the distant rending, shrieking sound high overhead but ignored it.
“Full ahead BOTH!”
There was a delay and then both Talavera’s propellers began to spin, faster and faster. Like a sprinter settling into her starting blocks she seemed to dig her stern into the azure blue water of the Grand Harbour, and her bow rise slightly before she began to drive, inexorably forward.
Suddenly the air was filled with an unearthly tearing, roaring as if the heavens were being torn asunder. The noise was like an express train racing downhill at a thousand miles an hour with its brakes squealing in an agony of sparks. Ashore air raid sirens began to howl and the rumbling thunder of very large explosions rolled across the island from the east.
And with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach Peter Christopher understood exactly why his father had told him to cut his lines and get out to sea.
Chapter 40
When the big guns fired the whole ship seemed to lurch sideways in the water with a gut churning kick. Dust exploded from seams between wood and steel, pain flaked and drizzled to the deck and the noise, well, the noise was like Lucifer striking the side of the ship with a giant hammer.
The old dreadnought from a bygone age had closed up at battle stations two hours ago. While the passageways became shouting, crowded bedlams the occupants of the sick bay had been carried and guided deep into the battlecruiser. Over their heads great armoured hatches had clanged shut, and suddenly the sound of the Yavuz’s engines had become louder, the vibration of massive machinery more exaggerated.
‘The sick bay is in a lightly protected part of the stern of the vessel,’ the elderly ship’s surgeon explained matter of factly. ‘Down here,’ he patted the cold steel of the nearest bulkhead, ‘we are safe behind several inches of Krupp cemented plate in every direction.’ He reconsidered for a moment. ‘Well, except under our feet, of course. But nobody is going to shoot at us from below.’
Nicolae Ceaușescu, who with Eleni’s help had managed to hop down the relatively steep gangways, and to negotiated the passageways with the aid of his crutches, had been struggling to catch his breath as the surgeon had delivered his meaningless homily to the excellent work of a generation of long dead German naval architects and the shipbuilding prowess of the Blohm and Voss yards of pre-Great War Hamburg.
‘What is going on?’ He asked flatly.
‘I don’t know,’ the Turkish doctor had confessed.
‘Find somebody who does know!’
Second-Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev had presented himself a few minutes later. The man looked like he was convinced that somebody was jumping up and down on his grave.
Nicolae Ceaușescu had expected to be exposed for whom, and for what he was at any time in the last three weeks. The worst days were while the Yavuz had sat off Rhodes for nearly a fortnight. Other ships had come and gone; the battlecruiser had sat inactive until one morning he had awakened to the sound of shovels, hundreds of feet stomping on the deck over his head, shouts, the sound of cranes, of old coughing steam motors and the occasional grinding of another ship’s hull against the dreadnought’s fenders. The Yavuz was ‘coaling’, a filthy, back-breaking task for her crew. During that day and the following night two thousand tons of coal had been muscled from the hold of the steamer alongside and evenly distributed among the great ship’s dusty bunkers.