No, the British didn’t operate that way.
But it would still be a helluva headline!
Every American in the hangar had been declared persona non grata by the UKIEA, and that was that. Nobody in the hangar had any special rights or privileges. Harry Verity was trying to be decent about the whole disastrous mess and Walter Brenckmann’s former colleagues didn’t get it. They didn’t even begin to ‘get it’.
“We’re going to be here forever,” he remarked to the Departure Liaison Officer after the Ambassador and his coterie had retreated to the farthest corner of the hangar to discuss the feasibility of insurrection against the brutal, unfeeling dead hand of British imperialist oppression.
“Afraid so, old man,” Harry Verity agreed. “I’m trying to beg, borrow and steal enough mattresses for your countrymen to sleep in shifts. The girls from the Catering Corps are trying to rustle up some rations to keep bodies and souls together for a day or two. After that you are the responsibility of your ‘State Department’. Nobody expected you to be dropped in our laps here, you see. I can’t really ask the Station Commander to empty his stores for a crowd of people he’d rather see starve. Besides, he won’t have his own people go hungry. Not after Washington’s failure to make good on its post-war promises…” The Englishman stopped, held up his hands. “Forgive me, from what I hear you are the sort of fellow who doesn’t need to be told how wrong-headed things have been, on both sides of the Atlantic, lately.”
The two men lapsed into silence for a minute.
The RAF man made no sign of intending to move on.
Walter Brenckmann, conditioned by his years before and between wars as a Boston lawyer — even after all his years in the Navy he still regarded himself as a litigator first, an Officer and a gentleman a poor second — waited patiently, sensing that the other man had something he wanted to get off his chest.
“There are rumours about incidents in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,” the Englishman murmured presently, almost inaudibly. “The upshot is that I’m afraid nobody’s coming to collect you or your fellows. Right now any American aircraft approaching these islands would be shot down. I’ve been ordered to keep the peace as long as possible. To avoid unnecessary unpleasantness.”
“Okay…”
“We don’t want war, Captain Brenckmann.”
“Nobody wants war.”
“Quite. I think that is why I’ve been instructed to put a very odd request to you.”
Okay, I didn’t see that coming!
“Go on.”
“Hypothetically speaking, you understand,” the RAF officer qualified, “would you be prepared to return to the UKIEA Government Compound at Cheltenham to speak to, er, certain parties?”
Chapter 6
The wind had touched hurricane force just before dawn but during the morning the fury of the cruel iron grey seas had slowly abated. Unable to make more than steerage way into the teeth of the gales HMS Talavera had been driven thirty miles back towards the rocky Atlantic coast of northern Spain. Now at least, she was holding her own as she pitched and rolled like a drunken matelot after a run ashore, her pumps straining to keep her afloat as each long, uncaring swell sweep under her keel. Big waves had flooded the upper deck and inundated the wrecked Combat Information Centre during the night; the ship was blind, defenceless.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher — cuts, bruises, a bump on the head and a very sore shoulder apart — was among the fittest of the destroyer’s walking wounded. Knowing that he was the only surviving watch-keeper that the Captain, David Penberthy, trusted to stand a bridge watch in these seas he’d volunteered his services, vehemently insisting — mutinously in hindsight — that he was fit to stand a watch. This had allowed the Old Man a chance to go below decks — where he was desperately needed — to save the ship.
It was over twenty hours since the attack.
Another spume-topped wave threatened to break over the bow. The whole ship shuddered, seemed to stop dead in the water then after a long, heart-stopping hesitation, she lurched ahead again. After several aborted attempts they’d succeeded in welding a crude patch over the jagged hole behind B turret where the unexploded five hundred pound bomb lodged in the flooded bilge abaft the main battery magazine bulkhead had crashed through the fo’c’sle. Guns — Talavera’s Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Miles Weiss — had packed the space around the bomb to stop it rolling with the ship’s motion, before minutely examined the missile and declared that ‘messing around with the bloody thing is probably the worst thing we can do in the circumstances’. Nobody had cared to debate the point. If the bomb went off it went off, there was nothing anybody could do about it.
Two of the four Douglas A-4 Skyhawks had gone for the big County class destroyer HMS Devonshire, and two for Talavera. Devonshire, the bigger, less handy ship had burned in the night for several hours before the fires had disappeared from view. Talavera had been in no position to offer aid or comfort to her larger consort.
The initial attack had happened so fast that it was only later that they’d been able to piece together the sequence of events. Each Skyhawk had dropped two iron bombs — a five hundred pounder and a thousand pounder, an odd loading but then airmen were an odd breed — and escaped out to sea before returning a few minutes later to strafe the two crippled and burning destroyers.
Both of the five hundred pound bombs had hit Talavera: the one lying malevolently like a ticking time bomb next to her 4.5 inch magazines; the other exploding on contact somewhere in the vicinity of the base of the main mast. One of the thousand pounders had detonated alongside the stern of the ship; the other…well, they’d searched the vessel from stem to stern and not found it so basically, it didn’t matter what had happened to it. At the time it had seemed academic; when the mainmast went over the side it had fouled the port shaft and destroyed the port reduction gear, while simultaneously the near miss had swept the stern with a blizzard of supersonic shrapnel spontaneously igniting the fuel and warheads of two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles. Among the two dozen dead had been Talavera’s Executive Office, Hugo Montgommery. It was a miracle that the ready lockers containing a dozen charges for the stern-mounted Squid anti-submarine mortar hadn’t blown up. Such small mercies tend to be lost, instantly forgotten in the general mayhem that ensues in the minutes after the first, catastrophic impacts. When the Skyhawks had commenced their strafing runs Talavera was dead in the water, and the destroyer’s only working weapons system had been a single heavy machine gun lashed to the amidships deck house roof manned by a pair of suicidally courageous Royal Marines.
The Skyhawks had made two strafing runs. Approaching from astern they’d raked the destroyer from end to end. The Combat-Information-Centre, the fighting heart of the ship, had been demolished during the first run; Peter Christopher had watched CIC disintegrating around him as if in slow motion. Sparks, flames, binding flashes and billowing smoke concealed the blood and body parts randomly splashed on the walls, and running, falling dark and evil on the deck. If Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin — who’d always enjoyed the reputation of being the ship’s roughest of rough diamonds — hadn’t rugby tackled him out of his command chair he’d probably have been cut in half by a cannon shell.
Over half of HMS Talavera’s crew were dead or seriously wounded. The destroyer’s doctor, a nervous young man who’d been drafted into the Royal Navy after the October War while in his penultimate year at Medical School — therefore deemed under the War Emergency Powers Regulations a ‘qualified medical practitioner’ — had been killed attempting to minister to the handful of survivors on the stern as the Skyhawks had made their first strafing run.