“I’ll make sure Admiral Christopher knows about this as soon as possible,” the man at the other end of the line promised.
Marija was half-asleep, dozing fitfully about two hours later when a gentle hand touched her shoulder. It was Margo, who’d virtually frog-marched her to her bed when she’d got back from ‘interrogating those idiots in the fort’. Margo had ruthlessly pulled rank on Captain Nathan Zabriski and ‘ordered him to spill the beans’.
“Fucking schoolboys!” Margo complained, her face flushed with exasperation and her eyes alight with righteous anger. “They’ll talk to us but they won’t talk to the fucking British unless we’re there to witness it!”
It was around midnight Marija guessed when she and Margo were ushered into the POW quarters where they discovered former Staff Sergeant Jim Siddall in a creased new khaki uniform giving Captain Nathan Zabriski the full benefit of his unblinking scrutiny.
“Right, Captain,” the big man decided sarcastically. “Now that your guardian angels have arrived perhaps you’d like to tell me what you told them earlier this evening?”
Once he opened his mouth the American airman couldn’t stop talking.
The story emerged in a flood of words.
His story began with the chaos of the unscheduled rotation from his normal base at Arnold Air Force Base at Tullahoma, Tennessee, to Barksdale in Louisiana. It continued with an account of how the crews of eight of the 100th Bomb Group B-52s ‘rotated’ to Barksdale AFB on an apparently routine training deployment were quarantined from all other 100th Bomb Group personnel while their aircraft were fitted with new ‘bomb bay kits’ to carry ‘big wire-guided iron bombs’, and new, previously top secret advanced ‘radio-control bombing modules’ were installed in their Stratofortresses. Then the whole base was locked down. DEFCON2 — one step short of war. They’d waited in their ready rooms for two days before the order had come. They’d all been relieved to be given a non-nuclear mission. War had broken out with the Brits, both sides had carried out ‘demonstration’ strikes against each other; New York and Charleston had been hit; US Navy submarines had ‘taken out Glasgow and Liverpool in retaliation. In the North Atlantic British and American carriers were ‘slugging it out’ and SAC — Strategic Air Command — had been tasked to ‘systematically dismantle, dislocate and degrade the enemy’s command and control capabilities’. The B-52s had topped off their tanks over the Arctic. The long flight over the North Pole, Scandinavia, and across the devastated wasteland of Central Europe had been uneventful. ‘Unreal’. It had been a text book operation right up until the moment the first wave commenced the low-level element of the operation seven minutes late.
“We’d anticipated there’d be a CAP over Malta, at least two, maybe four fighters at altitude at all times. A pre-condition of the operations plan was that the first wave had to go in so hard the CAP got drawn down to sea level before we hit the initial points to start our attack. But because of the FUBAR over the timings the CAP was still at altitude when we got to our IPs. We knew what was going to happen next when we started our bomb runs.” The young officer’s jaw jutted defiantly for a moment. “Nobody broke formation. They don’t call us the ‘Bloody 100th’ for nothing…”
Chapter 22
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher gazed spellbound at the lights of the city as HMS Talavera wallowed gently in the lee of the breakwater. The waters of the River Douro ran down her sides. Emergency diesel generators worked noisily in the night powering the jury-rigged arc lamps which illuminated both stricken ships. A little over a hundred yards away the fire-scorched flank of the Country class destroyer HMS Devonshire lay in the middle of the channel, moored fore and aft like her smaller, equally wounded consort. Sailors of the Armada Portuguesa and civilian dockyard workers and medical staff worked tirelessly alongside the crews of the two ships, and a flotilla of small craft surrounded them both.
HMS Plymouth stood guard off the mouth of the estuary, slowly quartering the big seas as the wind gusted up to force nine. Over forty members of the frigate’s crew were still onboard Talavera; and without them the ship would surely have been lost. Over half Talavera’s crew were dead, missing, seriously or walking wounded. Peter Christopher was among this latter category and despite his protests was due to be sent ashore; Talavera and Devonshire were to be patched up and steamed down to Lisbon where dry dock facilities were to be had, a proper assessment of their damage could be carried out and repairs effected. However, before that could happen to Talavera most of her crew had to be taken off and the five hundred pound unexploded bomb lodged against the aft bulkhead of her 4.5 inch magazine had to be either disarmed or removed.
There were spits of icy cold rain in the wind.
Captain David Penberthy joined his acting-Executive Officer at the bridge rail. Together they stared into the twinkling lights of the city along the banks of the river a mile or so further inland. Alongside, launches and lighters bumped against Talavera’s misused plates as the badly injured were carefully lowered and carried away.
“Well,” Talavera’s Captain guffawed, his exhaustion relenting for a moment, “that was a thing, wasn’t it?”
Neither man had honestly believed they’d reach a safe harbour.
HMS Plymouth’s tow rope had parted twice; the second time both ships had rolled wildly in the violent cross seas for an hour that had seemed like an eternity before they’d continued at a snail’s pace towards the rocky coast. Sanctuary seemed utterly unreal, dreamlike. To stand again on a deck that wasn’t gyrating, plunging and falling — each time as if it was the last time — was pure bliss. They’d stopped worrying about the unexploded bomb fifty feet from where they stood enjoying the lights of the city of Oporto, long since. If the bloody thing went off, so be it.
“I wish I was staying with the ship, sir.”
“Well, you’re not and that’s that!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the younger man chuckled. The effort hurt his chest, made his jaw ache.
“Apart from the fact you’re pretty badly knocked about,” David Penberthy went on, wearily affable, “Talavera’s going to be out of commission for a while and chaps like you are badly needed elsewhere in the fleet.” He allowed himself a second, forced guffaw. “You never know, you might even get posted to the Med.”
Peter Christopher doubted he was going to be that lucky. The way things were going it looked like the World was about to try and blow itself up a second time. Then what would become of his and Marija’s tryst? Had she heard of Talavera’s woes? Was she still safe on Malta? Was anyone, anywhere safe anymore?
“I’m assigning that scallywag Griffin to you as your personal attendant,” the Captain of HMS Talavera added, clearly pleased with himself. Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin was the ship’s black sheep. The man had been a tower of strength the last three days and his attachment to Talavera’s EWO — Electrical Warfare Officer, who’d taken the rascally Griffin under his wing and miraculously curbed the foolishness that had regularly seen him hauled in front of Captain’s table in every ship he’d ever sailed in until the last year — was well known. When the Skyhawks had made their strafing runs Jack Griffin had probably saved Peter Christopher’s life by rugby tacking him out of his CIC chair to the deck as cannon shells had ripped through the thin aluminium skin of the compartment. “The last thing I need is a trouble-maker on the ship at a time like this.”