She had been so traumatised in that instant that she had not known who was screaming as she stumbled out into the courtyard and with dull, unknowing eyes looked up at the man who just butchered the most remarkable woman she had ever known.
The man’s parachute had snagged on the ridge tiles of the house next to the hospital, he had slung his gun around his neck and he was half-climbing up the cords of his parachute, half-kicking away the remaining glass in the first floor window of the room below him. He was trapped between the urge to climb up or to attempt to break into the building, all the while he was terrified that his parachute might suddenly tear free above him and hurl him to the ground. His discarded back pack and webbing thumped heavily down onto the granite stones close to where Clara stood.
In that instant a murderous coldness had fallen on her. She had been prepared to hide with the others, defend them if it came to it but hide, fade into the background if she could. She had maintained her cover for nearly a year-and-a-half; and she had actually begun to like the person she had lately become. She and Clara Pullman had come to an accommodation; Clara was a good person and something deep within in her did not want to let that woman die.
Everything had slowed down.
Beyond the courtyard there was gunfire, shouting, the ear-hurting bark of grenades bursting, windows shattering, men and women screaming, bedlam.
In the courtyard and inside Clara’s head there had been only quietness.
Margo was dead.
The trooper who had fallen through the branches of the tree was dead.
Unhurriedly, Clara had bent down and picked up the dead Russian’s AK-47 Kalashnikov. Her left hand hefted the wooden barrel grip, her right hand closed around the trigger guard.
Very slowly, she looked up at Margo Seiffert’s executioner.
‘Niet! Niet!’ The man had pleaded, struggling desperately to free himself from his parachute harness.
Words came unbidden from her lips.
‘Vy ubiystve ublyudok!’
‘Niet! Niet!’
She had emptied the magazine into the twisting, twitching, convulsing body of the murdering bastard; and afterwards, she had gone back to the dead soldier on the ground next to Margo, retrieved a fresh magazine from his webbing, clicked it home and stood up, pausing to survey the carnage. Just in case there was somebody else she needed to kill.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had taught her well.
The body of the trooper she had executed fell — his parachute belatedly coming free of the unseen snags somewhere on the roof. She slung her Kalashnikov over her shoulder and took the killer’s AK-47 from around his neck. She found another fresh magazine, snapped it home.
She had given the second gun to the first woman to fearfully poke her head around the door.
‘Margo is dead. The bastards murdered her,’ Clara had explained flatly, her voice the voice of a stranger. ‘Keep your hands away from the trigger unless you need to shoot somebody. Get back to the cellar.’
That seemed like an hour ago, it was probably only a minute or two.
The sound of explosions and small arms fire was muted beneath ground.
All the other nurses and patients were looking at her with wide, frightened eyes and it was this which finally broke her trance. She suspected the numbness would take longer to go. A part of her had died out in the courtyard and for the first time she understood what had made Arkady Rykov, the man she still loved and could not stop loving, a monster.
Clara refreshed her hold of the Kalashnikov.
“Everybody stay here. Whatever happens, everybody must stay here. When I go upstairs lock and bolt the door behind me.”
There were protests.
Clara was already on her feet and suddenly, the others were noticing how comfortably she hefted the assault rifle in her hands.
Oh, yes.
You and all the others trained me well Arkady Pavlovich…
Chapter 49
“What is it?” Rosa Calleja whispered.
Marija could not stop shivering. One moment she had been fine — or as fine as a woman can be cowering in a cave while two warships bombarded one’s home — and the next she had felt an awful, crushing sense of absolute and hopeless loss descend upon her, enveloping her like a suffocating miasma. She had felt this way when her father had broken the news about her brother, Samuel’s disappearance and probable death, except this was many times worse as if some unimaginably dark blight had fallen upon the World. What had happened to Peter? What had happened to her Mama and Papa? What had happened to her little brother, Joe? Margo?
Rosa was panicking.
“Sister, what is it?” She had hugged the slighter woman to her.
Marija was wracked with the shivering. It was as if her body was in the throes of a fierce fever.
People around them were looking on anxiously.
Fires were burning in Kalkara now.
The burning time had come.
Chapter 50
The battleship and its two escorting guided missile destroyers had parted company with the USS Independence and the rest of Task Force 21.1 at midnight, when the big carrier and her screening force had headed north into the Tyrrhenian Sea and rounded the coast of Sicily. Since Operation Grantham was proceeding without apparent let or hindrance the Task Force Commander, Vice-Admiral Bernard A. Clarey, had determined to make a ‘show of strength’ off Palermo at dawn and to intensively exercise the Independence’s air group in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea, putting on a crushing display of maritime air power for the benefit of the air forces and navies of the Fascisti presently in nominal control of Italy and Sicily. Thereafter, the Independence and her escorts would make an unannounced passage south to Malta via the Straits of Messina, just in case the Fascisti on the mainland had failed to get the message that the US Navy was back and it planned to stay.
Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt had raised no objections to the change of plan. The Independence’s air group was rusty after so long in port and heck, when was he going to get another chance to command his own little fleet again?
With the sudden change of plan the two oilers loitering north of Lampedusa had been bypassed. Iowa and her two screening destroyers would enter the Grand Harbour in a morale boosting show of strength and the two tankers could catch up with the warships later.
The Iowa’s escorts, the Charles F. Adams class destroyers Berkeley and John King had run their bunkers low steaming at twenty — eight knots for the best part of three days, so the Iowa had slowed to twenty-two knots once Schmidt’s newly designated Task Force 21.2 headed through the narrows between Sicily and the Tunisian coast.
Shortly afterwards, the garbled reports of ‘invasion’ forces and radar breakdowns had started trickling into the battleship’s communications centre. Schmidt’s operations orders required Iowa to listen and log but not to respond to intercepted traffic. While the old sea dog had disliked a lot of what he was hearing, he assumed Vice-Admiral Clarey would have a better, clearer picture of what was going on onboard the Independence. The big carrier had a state of the art communications and sensor suite, airborne early warning aircraft, and the capacity to maintain a continually updated ‘big’ picture of the three dimensional air, surface and undersea battlefield out to ranges of over two hundred miles in every direction. All he had was a radio and a mess of ten year old radars that barely reached to the visible horizon.