“Yarmouth has opened fire, sir!”
“Very good!” Commander Peter Christopher acknowledged.
Some small part of the back of his brain told him that what he was doing was insane. His father had told him — strictly speaking he had ordered him to ‘get out to sea’ — and if he had taken Talavera out of range of the big guns and lurked in the haze, he could later have claimed under oath, with complete honesty, that he was obeying orders. Except that was not the way things were done in the Royal Navy. In the Royal Navy an order to ‘get out to sea’ was no more or less than an unambiguous incitement to immediately join battle with the Queen’s enemies. His father had not specifically ordered him to do his duty because he had not needed to; such things were so implicitly understood within the brotherhood of the Service that no commanding officer worth his salt actually needed to explicitly order anybody to actually ‘steam towards the sound of the guns’. In olden times no captain could do better than lay his ship alongside his foe; in modern times that was neither practical nor militarily sensible, so Peter Christopher he was about to do the next best thing.
Excluding the second group of enemy ships coming down from the north-east Talavera and Yarmouth were outnumbered five or six-to-one. In terms of firepower they were probably out-gunned by twenty or thirty-to one. Worse, both Royal Navy ships were ‘trapped’ between the Maltese Archipelago and the greatly superior enemy ‘fleet’, and therefore had little or no room for manuever, and even had they been looking for it, nowhere to run.
All of which Peter Christopher knew and accepted. The tactical situation was what it was and there was nothing he could do about it. It was not as if he had any kind of death wish. He had married the love of his life less than a month ago, he had been given command of a fleet destroyer at a ludicrously young age, even contrived an unlikely rapprochement with the father with whom he had been estranged since his mother’s death in the 1950s; he had everything to live for. And yet it never occurred to him to walk away from this self-evidently hopeless fight.
Not that he had believed that any fight was intrinsically ‘hopeless’.
Without duty a man was nothing.
He saw the flash of the First World War German battlecruiser’s broadside in the distance, not knowing if the big ship was shooting at Talavera yet. The former SMS Goeben was belching black smoke in a passable impression of a forest fire at sea. The smoke and the haze made it hard to pick out the shapes of the two big ships until they fired their main batteries. The dinosaur battlecruiser was half-a-mile-astern of the Sverdlov class cruiser; the Russian ship was probably using her range-finding radar to signal fall of shot corrections to the Yavuz. If so, that was a horribly cumbersome way to fight any kind of action, let alone the sort of fast moving Boy’s Own sort of battle Peter Christopher had in mind.
Talavera’s main battery fired again.
“Range to target?”
“Sixteen thousand five hundred yards!”
That was approximately nine-and-a-third 1760-yard land miles, a tad over eight-and-a-quarter 2000-yard sea miles. Talavera had worked up to revolutions for thirty-one knots — over thirty-five miles per hour in land-lubber money — so the arithmetic was straightforward; Talavera and her chosen target, the old German battlecruiser with her eleven-inch naval rifles, would collide in about fifteen minutes. Not that a collision was exactly what Peter Christopher contemplated. His battle plan envisaged approaching to within about five hundred yards of his quarry, throwing the helm over and loosing off all four of his torpedoes at point blank range. It was good plan, good not brilliant, but like most good plans it had the singular merit of having very few moving parts. All that needed to be done for it to have a chance of success was for him to place Talavera into position to fire her torpedoes without getting sunk first.
The main battery fired.
At this range the Yavuz’s shells would take over a minute to reach the destroyer. In that time Talavera would have fired between ten and fifteen four-gun broadsides at the two big ships. ‘A’ Turret was shooting at the leading ship, the Sverdlov class cruiser armed with a dozen 6-inch guns; ‘B’ turret was shooting at the Yavuz. Oddly, the battlecruiser’s 11-inch — strictly speaking 11.1-inch, or 28-centimetre Krupp model SK L/50 — guns only out-ranged Talavera’s 4.5-inch main battery by a few hundred yards and both ships were already well over four thousand yards within their maximum engagement ranges. Back in the days that the Yavuz had been in the service of the Kaiser her crew might have fired off two to three broadsides in a two minute window; thus far today she had managed only a single four-gun salvo every two minutes, give or take. Having switched to eight-gun broadsides her rate of fire had become even more funereal.
Talavera’s next broadside barked.
A single hit from one of the Yavuz’s 666-pound high explosive rounds would probably cripple or sink Talavera. This being the case there was not much point wasting time contemplating that particular eventuality.
Pragmatically, Peter Christopher was more worried about the Sverdlov class cruiser. Once she realised what Talavera and Yarmouth were up to she could shoot half-a-dozen, perhaps more, twelve gun broadsides a minute at the approaching ships. The rate of fire of the Yavuz’s 6-inch calibre secondary casemate-mounted armament was unlikely to be as fast, but nevertheless, she would soon be adding an additional six-gun broadside to the Sverdlov’s twelve. At ranges within ten thousand yards the cruiser’s 4-inch calibre quick-firing secondary guns would, if properly handled, lay down a withering wall of fire. If the big ships realised that the torpedo-less Yarmouth was no real threat to them and concentrated their combined fire on the Talavera, this was going to end very quickly in a maelstrom of shot and shell.
If Peter Christopher had learned anything in the last few months it was that that sometimes, when all else failed, a man had to have a little faith. Either the Gods of war were on a chap’s side or they were not.
A line of tall water spouts reared up half-a-mile ahead of the racing destroyer.
And then the seas all around HMS Talavera seemed to erupt in a paroxysm of mountainous geysers of dirty grey water and her hull rang like a cracked bell as countless shards of spent shrapnel crashed and clattered inboard. The ship staggered, and then drove on, her screws threshing the wine dark Mediterranean with a new and terrible purpose.
Chapter 56
The rolling thunder of naval gunfire filtered into the bomb shelter but the ground was still, no shells had exploded on land for several minutes and the sound of nearby small arms fire outside the cave entrance had ceased.
Three dusty, sweating British soldiers had rushed in and squatted on their haunches, anxiously looking out, their FN L1A1 Self-Loading Rifles at the ready, guarding the forty or so mainly women and children who had sought sanctuary in the old shell store.
Marija had stopped shaking and regained a little of her normal composure. The coldness in her heart was now a dull ache, the feeling of loss like a dark spirit whose tendrils reached into every part of her waking mind.
“What is going on?” Rosa Calleja asked of the soldiers.
“The big ships have stopped shelling us,” one man grunted.
“There don’t seem to be any more parachutists coming down over on this side of the island. They’re all dropping the other side of Valletta,” the oldest of the three, a man with corporal’s stripes on his arm added. “I think the Navy is getting stuck into the bastards offshore!”