Peter Christopher tried to focus on the feel of the ship under his feet.
“Try to bring her head around to two-six-zero!” He called, sensing that Talavera might ride a little easier if her bow could be persuaded to point a few degrees further south of south-west. He eyed the leaden skies, his gaze flicking slowly from the heavens to the seas and back again. The glass had been rising slowly for the last three hours as the storm front passed over, raging north into Biscay. With luck the sea state would moderate a little that evening. He guessed the wind was blowing at a steady force six, gusting now and then to force eight; but always out of the west-south-west.
“SURFACE CONTACT!”
Peter Christopher swung around so fast he lost his balance and had to make an undignified and painful grab for the bridge rail to avoid taking a tumble. Wrapped in layers of cold-weather gear beneath his oilskins, keeping his feet on the wet, wind-blown, pitching open bridge required care and attention, both of which he’d been neglecting as his mind ran through the uniformly bleak likely outcomes of his, and his ship’s current predicament.
“SURFACE CONTACT BEARING THREE-FOUR-FIVE DEGREES
Peter Christopher raised his binoculars.
A first he saw nothing but the churning grey sea, the spray of enraged white horses breaking from the crests of countless wild waves, and the gloom and the rainy haze that hung like a mist across the middle distance. He kept looking, searching for a shape with hard edges, a wisp of smoke, lighter or darker than the gun metal greyness of the sky and the sea.
“CONTACT BEARING…THREE-FOUR-SEVEN DEGREES!”
Peter Christopher stared down the compass bearing as the ship rose and fell. The waves were so big an aircraft carrier a thousand yards away would have appeared and disappeared in their troughs.
“RANGE?” He shouted over the whistling, rippling roar of the wind.
“FIVE MILES, SIR!”
He raised his glasses to find the swooping and gyrating horizon.
Still, he saw nothing.
And then…
Was that the black lattice of a frigate’s foremast?
He lowered his binoculars for a moment and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d banged his head last night, passed out for a while. Concussion, most probably. His temples thumped and although he’d stopped throwing up several hours ago he was having trouble forcing his vision to focus for more than a few consecutive blinks. He picked up the glasses anew.
He saw the mast rise, roll and fall once, and rise again.
“Runner!” He yelled. The ship had virtually no electrical power and practically all internal communications lines were shredded. “Find the Captain. Give him my compliments and report that we have an unidentified surface contact approaching our position from the north.”
“SURFACE CONTACT IS SIGNALLING BY LAMP, SIR!
The big Aldis signal lamps bolted onto each wing of the bridge were undamaged; unfortunately, they were useless without electrical power.
“FIRST LETTER IS ‘F’!” Reported the lookout who had made the initial sighting. “SECOND IS ‘ONE’!”
Peter Christopher watched the winking light.
“F-One-Two-Six!” He chuckled, suddenly relieved as if all the weight of the World had suddenly been lifted off his aching shoulders. “That’s the Plymouth!”
Within seconds the lookout had confirmed it.
The other ship was much closer now, corkscrewing and pitching sickening as she quartered the mountainous Atlantic swells.
HMS Plymouth was a Rothesay class anti-submarine frigate commissioned some eighteen months before the October War. With a displacement several hundred tons lighter than Talavera but with more or less the same general hull dimensions, Plymouth was handier ship than the older converted Battle class destroyer; even so, her Captain was battering south with a fearsome bone in his teeth and life onboard the frigate must be as interesting as it was precarious for her crew. The approaching warship was closing the distance at in excess of twenty knots.
There was a clunking noise on the deck behind Peter Christopher.
Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin smiled piratically at his divisional officer through his thick black beard. At his feet lay two large battery boxes; while snake-like coiled cables terminated by wicked-looking crocodile clips were draped around his broad shoulders.
“These boys,” the newcomer declared, flicking a glance at the two battery boxes, “should have enough juice left in them to let us talk to our new friend, sir.” He coughed, still struggling to recover his breath. The batteries weighed over thirty pounds each and were normally stowed in the aft electrical locker in the bowels of the ship. “Give me a jiffy and I’ll strip the cables off the bridge lamps and we’ll be up and running, sir.”
Peter Christopher suppressed a conspiratorial grin.
A few minutes later Captain David Penberthy came onto the bridge as Jack Griffin was standing up to admire his handiwork. Below the signal lamp mount the deck was a riot of severed and stripped back wires, flaked paint and crazily uncoiled cables.
HMS Talavera’s exhausted commanding officer eyed the mess for a moment before he took the binoculars Peter Christopher offered him and studied the approaching frigate.
Plymouth was flashing her pennant number — F126 — every few seconds.
“Number Two Bridge Lamp is back in commission, sir,” Jack Griffin boasted.
“Acknowledge with our Pennant number,” David Penberthy ordered.
HMS Plymouth turned a long, slow circle around the stricken destroyer after ranging alongside so that the two Captains could exchange megaphone pleasantries. Then Plymouth manoeuvred to within fifty feet of the Talavera’s port side.
“MY! MY!” Boomed the hearty voice from the bridge of the frigate. “YOU CHAPS REALLY HAVE BEEN IN THE WARS! NEVER MIND! THEY SAY THAT WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA!”
There followed a cheerful discussion as to how best to proceed.
Talavera needed fit men to help her stay afloat and whatever medical assistance Plymouth could render. The problem was in the transference of the one to the other. In the end the two captains agreed that ‘this was no time to be pussyfooting around worrying about the paintwork’ of their respective commands.
Talavera would make whatever revolutions she could and attempt to hold her present course; Plymouth would, literally, ‘bump against her windward flank’. Every available mattress and life jacket would be strewn on Talavera’s amidships port main deck and Plymouth’s people would — all being well — jump from the deck of one ship to the other.
In the middle of an Atlantic gale it was insane.
However, it was no less insane than the world in which they had all lived these last thirteen months.
First across the lethal gap between the rising and falling, erratically rolling warships was HMS Plymouth’s Executive Office — Lieutenant-Commander Edward Perry — a small wiry man with beetle brows and a stern smile that radiated confidence in everybody he met. He slightly mistimed his leap, stepping off the cliff-edge of the frigate’s bow at the very moment Talavera’s deck fell off the crest of a particularly tall swell. He and the destroyer fell into the trough of the waves together as Plymouth’s plates ground loudly, horribly against the destroyer’s rail, ripping away a ten foot section. The falling man hit the pile of mattresses and lifejackets hard, rolled and was grabbed by the waiting hands of the reception party that, to a man, fell unceremoniously on top of him to stop him sliding between the screeching hulls of the two ships.