This last comment was uttered with a genuine, if grudging respect. Whatever the Army thought about the Royal Navy, the Navy never ran away from a fight.
“Parachutists?” Marija asked, breaking out of her darkling thoughts for a moment.
“Only a couple of dozen came down over this side of the Grand Harbour,” the corporal explained, glancing back to her before resuming his watch. “I think they tried to get into the Hospital at Bighi, there was lots of shooting. Something’s burning in the Hospital grounds so maybe we didn’t get all of the bastards. We were shooting them as they came down. Bastards!”
Marija rose stiffly to her feet, balanced herself by resting a hand on the rough hewn wall of the cave.
“You can’t go out there, miss,” the corporal hissed.
“I must see what is happening.”
“It isn’t safe. We don’t know if we got all those bastards. They were shooting at everybody.”
Rosa also had risen to her feet.
The soldiers shook their heads as the two young women walked to the entrance of the shelter.
Marija and Rosa stared out at the surreal, sickening scene of a familiar vista transformed into something out of a fever-induced nightmare.
From where they stood they could see little to the west and nothing to the south, the higher ground obstructing those views. In front of them Valletta was burning, and great roiling blankets of grey-black smoke drifted across the Grand Harbour. Beyond the sandstone ramparts more pillars of smoke rose from the direction of distant Gzira and Sliema, and the air sea was tainted with the vile stench of bunker oil. Shells had taken huge lumps out of the previously immaculate curve of the northern — King George V — breakwater.
Far out at sea sudden flashes of white fire glittered through the smoke and haze. It was like a panorama out of Dante’s Inferno. Near to the epicentre of the faraway sea battle a huge, ominously black rain squall tracked across the sea, threatening to engulf the ships now fighting for their lives. A fork of lightning branched in an instant, stabbed down, discharging; and then another, its super-charged trident spearing imperiously into the midst of the battle.
Rosa grabbed her arm, pointed inland towards where the twin city of Mdina-Rabat must lie, hidden in the seething fog of war. A downward curving finger of livid red flame told of the death of an aircraft.
The Corporal had joined the women in the entrance, standing a little in front and ahead of them, his rifle ready, his eyes scanning constantly.
He chuckled grimly.
“I bet those jammy buggers who came out her on the Sylvania don’t think Malta’s such a cushy billet now!”
Chapter 57
Clara Pullman’s two tame Royal Military Policemen thought she had taken leave of her senses when she ordered them to break into a boarded up disused bakery in a cul-de-sac enclosed by the outer bastion wall of the Citadel. While she had said they were going to the Headquarters building; she had actually led them through streets heading away into the southern quarter. They would have said something had not the sound of gunfire become more muffled, reassuringly distant as they walked and trotted down streets strewn with bloody bodies. Death seemed to have made little distinction between men, or women, or those in and those out of uniform. Clara had paused momentarily over the corpse of an eight or nine year old girl who had been shot in the face at point black range, otherwise she maintained a measured, cat-like, watchful pace.
“Get on with it!” She snapped, quartering the entrance to the death trap into which she had, without a qualm, entered seconds earlier. “Break down the door!”
The two men began kicking and shouldering the door.
The ancient, dry, cracking wood was tougher than it looked.
A booted foot smashing a small hole low down. More kicks broadened the hole until it was just big enough for Clara and perhaps the smaller of the two Redcaps to crawl through. She did not hesitate. Pushing the Kalashnikov inside she squirmed into the darkness. Once inside she ignored the Redcaps kicking to enlarge the hole, alternatively opening her eyes wide, and squeezing them shut, willing them to adjust to the lower light faster than was humanly possible. Another body rolled through the doors as Clara began to move a table over to the back of the dusty, dank room.
Outside in the street there was shooting.
An explosion, a grenade. The boarded up windows splintered but held.
“Help me up!” She yelled at the surviving Redcap as she clambered onto the table and reached up for the two foot square hatch directly above her head. The hatch would not move. The man was beside her, the table creaking and groaning under their combined weight as finally, the hatch lifted, dust and cobwebs falling into Clara’s hair.
She hated spiders…
Clara had slung her AK-47 over her shoulder.
Her hands sought purchase on the rough wood frame of the trap door.
“Push me up!”
The Redcap was so scared that in forming his hands into a stirrup into which she could put her right foot he very nearly propelled her straight up into the ceiling. As it was Clara’s head bumped sickeningly against the frame of the hatch. She rolled clear of the opening as the Redcap threw his Kalashnikov ahead of him and began to scrabble for a handhold.
Clara, a little dazed flinched.
She had seen AK-47s spontaneously empty a magazine when they were dropped.
She grabbed the man’s arm.
The Redcap was half-way through the hatch…
Clara’s befuddled brain could make little sense of what had just happened for several seconds. The loft was full of dust and smoke, she was coughing, desperately trying to suck air into her lungs. A few inches from her face splinters spat from new holes in the wooden floor boards.
She heard a string of vile Russian curses in the room below and out in the street.
“Prekratit' strel'bu!” She choked. Stop shooting! “Prekratit' strel'bu!” She did not think it would help, nonetheless she added: “Ya s vami, tovarishchi!” I am with you, comrades!
If they fell for that one the idiots did not deserve to go on living!
“Tovarishch?”
“Da tovarishchi!”
The dead Redcap’s Kalashnikov was by the hatch.
“The pigs chased me up here!” She wailed, hoping she sounded like ‘the pigs’ had also despoiled her. “Svin'i presledovali menya zdes!”
The average Soviet private soldier never got to do a lot of thinking for himself and so, when faced by a dilemma, he either panicked, shot first and asked questions later, or tried to get one of his comrades to make his decision for him. Luckily for Clara, these comedians obviously did not have an NCO or an officer with them.
Clara rolled to the open hatch, sweeping up the AK-47.
By the time she had emptied the red-tipped magazine into the press of troopers in the room below very little that was recognisably human remained scattered across the floor and walls of the abandoned bakery.
Her hair was sticky with blood.
“Shit!” She muttered, staggering to the narrow, padlocked door to the next building along the top of the old ramparts. In the half-light she smashed the lock with the stock of the Kalashnikov. She threw the gun on the ground, unslung her own, fully-loaded AK-47 and stumbled through the door.
Clara Pullman, whoever you are, not even Arkady Pavlovich Rykov could have turned you into a monster in his own image.