Kesselring had his man on the ropes and was going for the knockout. He knew it; they knew it. Because without fighter aircraft to challenge the Luftwaffe’s aerial dominance, there was little hope of any supply convoys getting through. And if that didn’t happen very soon, the guns would fall silent and the island would starve. Invasion, an imminent threat for months now, would inevitably follow.
Christ, it was unthinkable. So, best not to think about it, Max told himself, topping off his glass once more and turning to survey the garden.
He found himself face-to-face with Mitzi.
She had crept up on him unannounced and was regarding him with a curious and slightly concerned expression, her startling green eyes reaching for his, a stray ray of sunlight catching her blond hair. Not for the first time, he found himself silenced by her beauty.
“What were you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing important.”
“Your shoulders were sagging. You looked … deflated.”
“Not anymore.”
“Flatterer.”
“It’s true.”
“If it’s true, then why didn’t you even look for me?”
“I did.”
“I was watching you from the moment you arrived.”
“You were talking to that bald chap from Defense Security over by the bench.”
“Well, I must say, you have excellent peripheral vision.”
“That’s what my sports master used to say. It’s why he stuck me in the center of the midfield.”
“You don’t really expect me to talk about football, do you?”
“When Rosamund rings her bell, we might have no choice.”
A slow smile broke across her face. “My God, I’ve missed you,” she said softly and quite unexpectedly.
The desire in her voice was palpable, almost painful to his ears.
“You’re breaking the rules,” said Max.
“Damn the rules.”
“You’re forgetting—you were the one who made the rules.”
“Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Max.”
“It’s the best I can come up with under the circumstances.”
“Now you’re being abstruse.” She handed him her empty glass. “Mix me another, will you?”
“Remind me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Bandits at one o’clock,” he said in a whisper.
He had spotted them approaching over her shoulder: Hugh with Trevor Kimberley’s dark and pretty wife in tow.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mitzi sighed volubly. “Another gin and French.”
Max took her glass. “So where’s Lionel? Out on patrol?”
Hugh was within earshot now. “Be careful, old chap. Asking questions like that can land a man in deep water.”
“Hello, Margaret,” said Max, ignoring him.
Margaret Kimberley nodded benignly and maybe a little drunkenly.
“I mean,” Hugh persisted, “why would you want to know the details of what our noble submariners are up to?”
“Besides, I’m hardly the person to ask,” said Mitzi. “Lionel doesn’t tell me anything. One day he’s gone, then one day he’s back; that’s all I know.”
“It’s all any of us needs to know.”
“Trevor tells me nothing,” chipped in Margaret.
Hugh peered down at her. “That, my dear, is because your Trevor does next to nothing for most of the time. Take it from me as his commanding officer.”
“Somehow, Hugh, I can’t think of you as a commanding officer,” Mitzi chimed, a playful glint in her eye. “A genial one, maybe, and slightly inept, but not a commanding one.”
Margaret’s hand shot to her mouth to stifle a laugh, which drew an affronted scowl from Hugh.
“Bang goes Trevor’s promotion,” said Max, to more laughter.
A little while later the ladies left together for the far end of the garden. Max fought to ignore the lazy sway of Mitzi’s slender hips beneath her cotton print dress.
“Entre nous,” said Hugh, considerably less abashed about admiring the view, “all the subs will be gone for good within a week or so.”
“Really?”
“Well, you’ve seen the pasting they’ve been taking down at Lazaretto Creek. And since Wanklyn came a cropper …”
The loss of the Upholder a couple of weeks back had rocked the whole garrison, right down to the man on the street. Subs had been lost before, subs driven by good men known to all, men who had once lit up the bar at the Union Club and whose bones were now resting somewhere on the seabed. “Wankers” Wanklyn was different, though. A tall, soft-spoken Scotsman with a biblical beard, he’d been modest in the way that only the truly great can afford to be. With well over one hundred thousand tons of enemy shipping under his belt and a Victoria Cross on his chest, he’d exuded a quiet invincibility that others had fed off, had drawn strength from. Not one of his peers had begrudged him his star status because he’d never once played to it; he’d just got on with the job. And now he was gone, sent to the bottom, a mere human being after all.
As the information officer, Max had been the first to learn of the Upholder’s fate. The announcement had been buried away in the transcript of an Italian broadcast—a brief mention of a nameless submarine destroyed in an engagement off Tripoli. Max had made some discreet inquiries, enough to narrow the field to the Upholder, and then he had sat on the news for a couple of days.
Yes, he had wanted Wanklyn to prove him wrong, he had wanted to see the Maltese packing the bastions again, cheering the Upholder home, straining to see if there were any new chevrons stitched to the Jolly Roger she was flying. But he had known in his bones that it wasn’t going to happen. He had known that what he needed was a couple of days to figure out how to play it, how to soften the blow for his readers and listeners.
But that was then, and this was now, and while he understood that pulling the subs off the island might be the judicious thing to do, he wasn’t thinking about his job and how he was going to break the news on the island. He was thinking about Mitzi. If the subs were really leaving, then she would be too; posted elsewhere with her husband. Where would they end up? Alexandria, probably. He wrestled with the notion—separated from Mitzi by nigh on a thousand miles of water—but it was too big and unwieldy to get a grip on.
Hugh misconstrued his silence as professionalism. “Mum’s the word, but I thought I should tip you the wink.”
“Thanks, Hugh. I appreciate it.”
“You’ll find a way to present it in a positive light; you always do.” He rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. “Now go and join the other renegades in the crow’s nest. Freddie and Elliott are already up there. No Ralph, though—he called earlier to say he can’t get away.”
Max did as he was told, eager for the distraction of his two friends, the chance to throw a blanket over his confused feelings and put Mitzi out of his mind. Villa Marija had been occupied by a naval officer before the war, and its large flat roof, still referred to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.
There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colorful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropy view—or accusing one another of “shooting a line.” Enemy bombers were “big jobs,” enemy fighters “little jobs.” The cockpit was their “office,” and they never landed, they “pancaked.” The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.