“We should pray,” Marija said.
The murmur of approbation filled the cavern.
Marija bowed her head.
Chapter 43
Joe Calleja’s ears were still ringing and blood was trickling into his eyes from somewhere on his scalp. A big shell had exploded in the water alongside the bridge and he had been blown across the deck. His flight had only been halted when he crashed into the destroyer’s quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount, or more accurately, the rear end of the torpedo stuck half in and half out of tube Number Four. From the way his chest hurt he guessed he had cracked a rib.
However, he did not waste time worrying about that.
The deck around him was littered with the bodies of the men who had been attempting to load and secure that final torpedo into the mount on the open deck behind the destroyer’s single stack.
The young officer who had been supervising the operation was white-faced on the deck, twitching in a spreading pool of his own blood. Joe pulled off his jacket and jammed it into the fist-sized hole in the man’s right leg, knowing that if somebody did not put a tourniquet on the man’s upper thigh he was going to bleed to death sooner rather than later.
There was a pat on his right shoulder.
Initially, he could not hear what the man standing over him was saying.
A Royal Marine crouched beside him, shouted in his face: “Good man! You’ll have to lift his leg for a second so I can tie him off!”
HMS Talavera was heeling into a violent turn to port and had Joe not been already leaning against the side of the quadruple torpedo launcher mount he would have fallen over. There were more explosions, and the air was filled with the angry whistling of small, razor-sharp objects parting lines and pinging off metalwork like a swarm of enraged killer bees. The ship juddered momentarily as her main battery fired a broadside.
“Now! Now! Now!” The Marine bellowed.
In a daze Joe raised the wounded man’s leg, desperately attempting to maintain pressure on his gory wound.
“Down! Down!” The Marine screamed above the bedlam all around them on the main deck. He had looped what looked like a length of insulated two-core electrical wiring around the young officer’s thigh and was tightening the improvised tourniquet using a small monkey wrench, turning it smoothly, oblivious to the chaos.
Joe was lifted unceremoniously to his feet; another Royal Marine tossed away his bloody jacket and pressed a thick white dressing over the wounded officer’s blood-soaked thigh. A strong hand took the dockyard electrician’s elbow as he started to retch uncontrollably. It had all happened too quickly. He could have sprinted for cover beneath Corradino heights, instead, some contrary impulse had made him step onboard the destroyer. It was like a dream; the shells throwing up massive columns of water that fell back onto the ship drenching everything and everybody, bowling men over literally like skittles. He had blacked out after he hit the torpedo tube mount, albeit momentarily. He had seen the officer bleeding on the deck, reacted, ignored the shells bracketing the ship as she dug her stern into the waters of the Grand Harbour and dashed for the open sea.
The main battery fired again.
“Don’t I know you?” Demanded the grinning, red-headed and bearded man in a blood-spattered Petty Officer’s uniform who was peering into Joe’s face. The bearded man was holding Joe upright with thick, teak-like arms that vaguely reminded the young Maltese dockyard electrician of something he remembered from Popeye the Sailor cartoons…
Joe’s head cleared, his ears unclogged.
“Joseph Calleja,” he blurted guiltily.
“Jesus!” The other man exclaimed, his grin freezing on his lips. “The Skipper’s frigging brother-in-law! This just gets worse!”
Actually, even as he said it, Petty Officer Jack Griffin knew full well that he was guilty of a gross exaggeration. There was very little scope remaining for the current situation to get ‘worse’. Beneath his feet there were men struggling to light off Talavera’s second boiler and out to sea — a lot closer than was remotely healthy — were several big ships with very big guns trying very hard to kill him.
“Damn it!” Said the youthful figure who materialised out of the spray at the troubled Petty Officer’s side.
“The civilian is the Captain’s brother-in-law, sir,” Jack Griffin reported to Lieutenant-Commander Miles Weiss, HMS Talavera’s newly promoted Executive Officer.
The newcomer frowned at Griffin.
He quirked a welcoming grin at Joe Calleja.
“I know that!” He grunted. “More to the point,” he frowned again, watching two Royal Marines and a medical orderly gently carrying the stricken officer whom Joe had been tending below. “Now that the Torpedo Officer is incapacitated is there anybody onboard who knows how to fire these bloody things?” He demanded, gesturing with disgust at the quadruple torpedo tube mount. “And we have to do something about this bloody fish sticking out of Tube Number Four!”
“Er,” Jack Griffin began uncertainly. “I, er…”
Joe Calleja coughed.
“I trained on these mounts as an apprentice, Mr Weiss,” he claimed diffidently. A little more confidently he added: “Once the torpedo is in the tube it is simply a matter of pointing the tubes over the side, starting the motors, that’s done on the circuit board over there,” he pointed at the side of the tubes where the mount’s operator sat. “By connecting up the impellor charge ignition, and,” he shrugged, “there’s a small bang, compressed air is injected into the tube and the torpedo goes out of the other end.”
Miles Weiss did not think it could possibly be that straightforward. However, given that the torpedo officer was badly wounded and most of the other men in his ‘Torpedo Division’ were dead, on their way to the sick bay or wandering around in a state of near catatonic shock, he was going to have to take Joe Calleja’s word for it.
“What do we do about Number Four?” He asked, pointing at the torpedo half in and half out of its tube.
“Two or three guys ought to be able to push it in,” the shorter man explained, “there are rollers and springs in the tube. Just don’t do it too fast. On the tubes I trained on it always made a loud clicking noise when it was in.”
“You didn’t train on exactly this model?”
“No, but the theory is the same on all these old Second World War mountings. They all work the same way. The internal tubes they put on some of the newer ships are more complicated and the electronics aren’t so, well, basic.”
Miles Weiss was a man in a crashing hurry.
However, he paused long enough to ask one final question: “Do you know how to set the ‘angles’ on these things?” Everything he had ever learned about torpedoes had included reams of theory about the best ‘spread’ or the best ‘deflection’ tactics. He had not paid that much attention because he was a gunnery man and torpedoes were for people who lacked the intellectual wherewithal and the moral fibre to properly understand and appreciate guns.
Joe Calleja returned a blank look.
“I know how the electrics work, Mr Weiss. As for the rest,” he shrugged apologetically.
HMS Talavera’s Executive officer had acquired a certain practiced sangfroid in the last few months and now it came to his rescue.
“Never mind, I’ll warn the Captain that we’ll need to get up close and personal and aim for the enemy’s forward funnel!”
Joe Calleja started smiling; and then realised that the young officer was being deadly serious. His smile faded.
“Right,” Miles Weiss decided. “I’ll leave you in charge of things, Mr Calleja. Griffin,” he turned to the red-haired and bearded Petty Officer who could not quite hide the nameless horror bubbling beneath his bluff expression. “Do whatever Mr Calleja tells you must to be done to get this mount into operation. Report to me as soon as we’re ready to launch all four fish!”