She thought about trying to crawl along the ridge. No, that would never work. Somebody would see her and the way things were they would shoot her, or she would have to shoot them. Either way, she would be frustrated in her belated attempt to do what she ought to have done several weeks ago. Betrayal was a funny thing; sometimes it was unclear who was betraying whom and the meanings of loyalty got twisted, blurred out of any kind of recognisable shape.
She had comforted herself that she was not the first double agent to become a triple agent, or to forget who she was really working for and then lapse into a state of self-defensive quasi-denial. She had allowed her emotions to get in the way. She had fallen in love with this island and the people who had treated her, for the first time in her adult life as a normal woman. Worst of all she had got too close to Arkady and fallen in love with him. Was it any surprise that she had lost the plot? Yes and no. At some level she had known she was doing the wrong thing, permitting her feelings for a monster to warp her perspective. Nobody had ordered her to do otherwise and it was hardly as if she had sworn any kind of oath of fealty to the British or what remained of their stupid Empire. Notwithstanding, in retrospect she had made a series of increasingly bizarre, and in the light of recent events, very bad decisions.
The odd thing was that if that fucking Spetsnaz trooper had not murdered Margo Seiffert she would have carried on being Clara Pullman, the aging courtesan who had been for a while the mistress of Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and who had been, in her naivety duped by him just like everybody else including the Head of MI6.
Unlike the illustrious Head of the Secret Intelligence Service she could blame her hormones; she had fallen in love with Arkady, and for a short time honestly believed despite all the evidence to the contrary that one day she might be his wife.
How did I get across that sloping roof?
Her shame, anger and self-loathing had transported her across the treacherously angled tiles before she knew she had even set off. One moment she was burning with a nameless violent fury, the next she was clinging to the lintel of the wall between the buildings, peering over the empty, flat roof between her and the skylight above the office of the Chief of Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations.
She sucked in air, her chest heaved.
It was ludicrous but she felt uncomfortable, unhappy for anybody to see her the way she was with her hair a mess and wearing the blood-spattered slightly oversized pale blue nursing auxiliary’s smock that gave her figure a vaguely dowdy, matronly look. What little make up she had put on that morning must be a disaster area, and to cap it all she had broken a least two nails.
Her scalp was sticky with blood, a rivulet of which trickled down the back of her left ear.
I must look like a scarecrow!
She dragged herself over the wall, aware for the first time of her bone deep weariness and near exhaustion.
She straightened, took a fresh grip of the AK-47 Kalashnikov loaded with a red-dotted magazine filled with doctored man-killing, flesh and bone wrecking bullets. A brief shake of the head to clear her scattered thoughts and she was moving forward again, like a tigress stalking her prey.
Chapter 61
Joe Calleja had been dragged onto the deck behind the splinter-riddled funnel by Petty Officer Jack Griffin. The other men hastily recruited to the replace the members of the original Torpedo Crew cut down by before the ship had got out of the Grand Harbour, were similarly hunkered down behind or under the loaded quadruple mount, and around them on the deck. Standing up was to invite being sawn in half by flying shrapnel. Around them HMS Talavera was being shot to pieces. Somehow, the Battle class destroyer kept moving forward but there were fires burning aft and the ship was down at the bow. Each time a new salvo arrived the deck recoiled with fresh impacts, water deluged onboard and Talavera shuddered. And yet ‘B’ Turret was still firing, the starboard twin 40-millimetre cannon thumped, and on the cruelly exposed aft deck house volunteers queued to step up to man the surviving 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannons as men before them were cut down and their bodies piled on the bloody deck house roof.
The Yavuz had stopped shooting at Talavera with her big guns.
Joe did not know why. Perhaps, Talavera was so close the Turkish battlecruiser could no longer depress the barrels enough?
Talavera was making clouds of acrid black smoke to help mask her dark bow on silhouette against the background of the island as the ships drove deep into the giant thunderstorm which was advancing on Malta from the south east. Jagged spears of lightning lit the unnaturally gloomy afternoon.
This was what it was like in Hell!
The destroyer’s hull rang like a bell as white hot smashed into her port side forward of the bridge, and miraculously, exited her starboard side without exploding. The last time Joe had dared to look up he had seen the long low outline of a foreign-looking grey warship less than a mile away. The other big ship appeared to fire rockets at Talavera; he might have imagined that because nothing made much sense anymore. He had never imagined anything so beautiful and as deadly as the tracers arcing between the ships and crashing into the destroyer’s side, or watching the dark harbingers from the starboard 40-millimetre guns walking along the decks of the nearest enemy ship.
Petty Officer Jack Griffin was grinning.
He was actually grinning!
“Two minutes!” The red-bearded man shouted.
Joe Calleja was determined not to raise his body a single inch above the deck. He was not particularly happy or comfortable with his nose pressed hard against the planking, but it was infinitely preferable to standing up in the constant rain of splinters and shrapnel.
Jack Griffin understood this and on a man to man, personal level he entirely sympathised, not to say empathised, with the dockyard electrician’s preference in the small matter of wanting to stay alive a little longer. Notwithstanding, he hauled the other man to his feet, brushed him down and looking him straight in the eye said: “Don’t you dare try to tell me that this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had in your entire fucking life, Mister Calleja!”
Chapter 62
“The Berkeley and the John King are engaging a Krupny class DD at extreme gunnery range!”
Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt stepped across to the plot to watch the display update. Extreme gunnery range for the Mark 42 5-inch 54 calibre automatic guns on the two Charles F. Adams class US Navy destroyers was between twelve and thirteen miles. Shooting at a potentially fast moving, aggressively manoeuvring relatively small target at that kind of range was a singularly unrewarding pastime. Each shell would be in the air over a minute. Never mind, if nothing else the sudden barrage of plunging long-range fire — up to eighty rounds a minute from each ship — was likely to concentrate the enemy’s mind wonderfully.
Captain Schmidt stomped to the front of the bridge, gazed down grimly upon the Iowa’s forward main battery turrets as they swung ponderously to point their great Mark 7 16-inch 50 calibre naval rifles towards the co-ordinates supplied by the Berkeley and the John King.