Chapter 8
The first survivors from HMS Exmouth had arrived on HMS Hermes around dusk the previous evening. They were cold and battered; they’d been in the water several hours and they’d watched most of their comrades and friends, and all the more seriously injured men die long before the handful of search helicopters from the Hermes and her escorts fished them out of the frigid North Atlantic. During the day a trickle of injured and wounded men from the ships of the Battle Group had been carried, or walked into the flagship’s sick bay and hospital compartments far below the armoured flight deck three decks above.
Clara Pullman had no real idea what her status on board HMS Hermes was; passenger, refugee, or suspected spy? The men who’d greeted the Westland Wessex on the flight deck two days ago had taken one look at her partner, former KGB Colonel Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s state of near total physical collapse and rushed him down to the sick bay where until a few hours ago he and she had remained. When the first serious casualties arrived Arkady had insisted on freeing his cot for ‘a man who needs it more than I’, but she’d remained. She’d trained as a nurse a long time ago and although she couldn’t do much more than smile and hold hands and utter reassuring words, in between the endless fetching mugs of steaming rum-laced cocoa from the nearby Petty Officers’ Mess, she’d felt like she was making herself useful and Surgeon Commander McKitterick, the ship’s doctor hadn’t objected to her ongoing presence in his domain. Quite the contrary, in fact.
“I think you have made another conquest,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov observed when at around two in the morning Clara joined him in the claustrophobic two bunk cabin he’d been allocated after he left the sick bay. They’d both expected to be confined to cells on their arrival on the Hermes. Perhaps, to be interrogated, again and again before being dispatched, like parcels to England to confront whatever fate awaited them. Yet ever since they’d set foot on the aircraft carrier they’d been treated with unfailing, good-humoured courtesy and offered every conceivable convenience available on a man of war about to go into battle. It was all very confusing.
“Do you think the people on this ship have any idea who we are?” Clara asked, ignoring the man’s teasing remark about the twinkle in Commander McKitterick’s grey eyes every time she was in the vicinity.
“I’m sure they know who we are,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov retorted ironically. “Whether or not they care what we are at the moment; well, that’s another thing.”
Clara looked at the man with whom she’d shared the adventure of a lifetime — several probably — in the last thirteen months, and whose real name she’d only discovered in a fetid rock cell in Gibraltar days ago. The man she’d believed to be a British naval officer had turned out to be a senior KGB man who’d been trying to defect to the West. He said he’d been working for the Americans for years; she didn’t know what to believe. Or care. She loved him and one day she might even forgive him; but not yet.
She looked at his smashed face.
They’d very nearly beaten him to death at Gibraltar.
He’d been in the lower bunk reading when she’d come looking for him. ‘They said we could have this compartment,’ he’d explained, ‘for as long as we are onboard the ship.’
“What are you reading?” She asked.
He held the dog-eared Penguin paperback up for her inspection.
The Road to Wigan Pier.
“I found it in the locker under the bunk.”
Clara Pullman had carefully positioned herself, sitting as near the foot of the bunk as she could manage, mindful not to knock her head against the upper bunk. She’d been surprised by how much a ship as big as the Hermes pitched and rolled, especially when she changed course. As if on cue the manoeuvring bell clanged and a few seconds later the carrier heeled into a turn to starboard.
“What else did you find in the cabin?” She asked, knowing the man would have searched every inch of the compartment before he attempted to make himself comfortable in the bunk. The fact that he could hardly walk two steps unaided wouldn’t have stopped him crawling into every corner, running his fingers along every surface, and poking into every gap.
“A copy of Murder on the Orient Express and a couple of slim volumes of rather narcissistic poetry.”
“There were hardly any survivors from those two ships that were sunk this afternoon,” she said, blankly as if she was making polite conversation.
The man put down his book and reached out for her hand.
She wanted him to fold her in his arms except she was afraid he was too badly beaten, too broken to contemplate attempting anything more physically demanding than quietly holding her hand.
“Such is the pity of war,” he murmured, betraying a trace of the accent of his Russian mother tongue.
Clara didn’t know if he was trying to be funny or just humouring her. While she thought about it the alarm bells they’d grown so familiar with in their short time onboard the carrier began clanging insistently.
“All hands to Air Defence Condition One Stations!”
Beneath their feet they felt the quickening of the engines, the screws biting deeper and faster into the water. The bells kept ringing as the ship heeled into a violent turn to the left. There were running feet in the corridor outside the open door of the cabin. A bearded man with Petty Officer’s stripes on his arm stuck his head into view.
“When I shut this hatch dog it behind me!” Then he was gone before the metal door had clanged noisily against its steel frame.
“He wants us to clip the door so it can’t blow open if there is a nearby explosion,” the man in the lower bunk explained gently.
“Oh…”
Clara jumped up and dropped the clips on the door.
“Won’t we be trapped?” She asked.
“If something bad happens?” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov shrugged painfully. “Probably,” he conceded philosophically. “But at least we will be together, my love.”
The whole ship was beginning to tremble as more and more power was fed to her engines and her propellers thrashed her forward into the long North Atlantic swells. One moment the carrier was pitching over the crests of the seas, the next falling into the troughs; and then she was driving straight into the waves, her bows thumping, cleaving aside the freezing dark waters, each new impact sending a shuddering shock wave down the whole length of the twenty-five thousand ton vessel.
Clara edged closer to the man.
“I haven’t heard the catapults,” she observed. Every time the carrier had worked up to top speed before, it had been to launch or recover its aircraft. Typically, each of the steam catapults would hiss and thud, sending a concussion through the fabric of the vessel ever few minutes. Sometimes, when a big jet fighter landed it sounded like a crash, the aircraft not so much landing as hitting the rear half of the flight deck.
The manoeuvring bell clanged.
HMS Hermes heeled into what seemed like an impossibly tight turn to port, as she came abreast of the seas she rolled five, ten then more degrees before righting herself with a slow, stately reverse roll that went almost as far in the opposite direction before a swell half-lifted, half fell upon her tall starboard profile. Clara heard heavy objects tumbling onto decks hundreds of feet away. She was convinced that she heard the whole ship groan in a great outpouring of protest to be so misused.
Clare found herself awkwardly circled in the man’s arms.
She leaned against him, afraid he’d flinch with agony.