“You,” her friend had said with a twinkle in her grey eyes, “are on the lightest of light duties today. Is that clear Nurse Calleja?”
Marija had nodded guiltily.
The POWs had been allowed onto the ramparts of the old circular fort at the seaward point of the triangular defensive bastions of the Pembroke Barracks. The breeze out of the south was warm and a haze concealed the eastern horizon as Marija climbed up to the battlements to check on her charges. Two of the POWs, an American and an Italian had been transferred to Kalkara for minor surgical procedures, the remaining nine men turned to greet her arrival with guarded smiles and mostly hooded eyes.
Captain Nathan Zabriski, who’d been standing apart from the others, approached her.
“We missed you yesterday, ma’am,” he said, tight-lipped. He’d been smoking a cigarette which he’d crushed underfoot.
“Doctor Seiffert sent me home to catch up on my sleep, Captain,” Marija reported. “I am to be your guardian again today. Although, I don’t think it is very likely your British captors mean you any harm.”
Marija and the airman’s eyes fell upon the two unarmed soldiers, a lance-corporal and a private wearing the insignia of the Pay Corps who’d escorted the POWs up onto the battlements. The two men were chatting amiably, smoking cigarettes and evidently, wholly disinterested in ‘guard duty’. There had been an armed sentry at the gates to the fort but otherwise the British had donned their kid gloves. The man and the woman grinned at each other before they remembered they weren’t supposed to behave like normal human beings.
“You look less,” Marija was finding it hard to be as distant and detached from the American officer as she ought to be, “battered today, Captain?”
“I’m fine, ma’am. We’re being treated well.”
“My name is Marija,” she informed him. “Doctor Seiffert was an officer in your Navy. I am a Maltese civilian.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am…” The man caught himself. “Marija.” He grimaced. “My Ma’s middle name is Maria.”
They’d wandered idly to the wall and now they gazed into the haze. Inshore two small fishing boats, high prow and stern painted in the blue and red and yellows of the ancient Phoenicians bobbed on the gentle swells.
“I grew up on Air Force Bases in the mid-west,” the man offered. “Everything for hundreds of miles was flat, just farmlands and prairies. We once lived in a place that was over a thousand miles from the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean.
Marija leaned on the pitted limestone rampart.
“Your father was in the air force?”
“He was with the 7th Bomb Wing at Carswell until a couple of years before the war. That’s in Texas. He went to work for Boeing in Seattle when he and my Mom split up. That kind of messed up Mom for a while. She’d had crazy times when I was a kid but after Pa left she, well, sort of changed. She was angry all the time. Betrayal does that to you, I suppose? I don’t think my Pa found anybody else, or anything, it was just that after he left the Air Force he didn’t want to be with Mom any more. It was like it was the Service and base life that had kept them together all those years and when he stopped flying the big birds… Hell, I don’t know. You think you know your Mom and Dad and then something like that happens…” He shook his head, eyes misty. The moment of self pity quickly passed. “After the October War my Ma moved up to Washington DC to live with my Aunt Ida. The last thing I heard she was applying for a government job…”
Marija said nothing.
“Sorry, you don’t want to hear about my…”
“Don’t be sorry, Captain,” she assured him. “We all have our stories and sometimes I am afraid that people have stopped listening to them.”
The man and the woman lapsed into silence.
The voices of the other men speaking lowly didn’t register.
“From what I overheard some of the Brits saying,” the American prompted, nervously breaking the spell, “you have quite a story yourself?”
Marija laughed.
“No, not really.” But instantly, she wanted to explain. “When I was nearly six years old I was trapped in a building that was hit by a bomb. Me and my little brother, Joe. He was unhurt; I was trapped by falling masonry. My pelvis and my legs were crushed. They’d never have found us but for Joe’s crying.”
“Oh, right…”
Marija wasn’t worried that the young American officer didn’t know what to say.
“They didn’t expect me to live,” she explained. “And when I did they didn’t expect me to ever walk again. If it wasn’t for Commander Seiffert and a British Naval Surgeon called Reginald Stanley Stephens, I’d have lived a different life.” She half-turned to study the airman. They were — give or take a year — the same age. He was a handsome boy with, she suspected, a placid disposition. In another time and place he’d smile mostly with his eyes and confuse more girls than he knew. “I lost nobody who was close to me in the October War. I don’t know about on Friday night, things are still too confused. People I know must have been hurt, or killed, because so many are dead and injured…”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to be said, Captain. The World is the way it is and we must carry on as we may.” Looking away she peered into the blue-grey haze out to sea. She couldn’t begin to imagine living a thousand miles from the ocean. That sounded so profoundly unnatural as to be…
“Marija!”
Margo Seiffert was trotting up the curving stone steps to the battlements with a flustered grin on her face.
“Marija!”
The younger woman’s heart missed a beat.
“Peter is safe!” Her friend called breathlessly immediately she spied Marija on the opposite side of the fort. “Peter is safe!”
Marija stared at her.
Why was Margo looking so worried?
And why was the World going around in circles?
Chapter 32
“Full left rudder!” And so the dance begins again, thought Commander Simon Collingwood. He wasn’t as much surprised as intensely irritated that the USS Scorpion had clung onto Dreadnought’s wake with such tenacity the last sixteen hours. The Scorpion’s Skipjack class consort had broken off the chase nine hours ago and headed north, presumably into a blocking position between Dreadnought and the Enterprise Battle Group.
The submarine heeled into the high speed turn.
“Reverse course! Come to zero-nine-five degrees!”
“Zero-nine-five, aye!”
Collingwood waited until the boat had steadied on the reciprocal course: “All stop! Repeat, all stop!”
Now they’d really find out what their opponent was made of!
The last time Dreadnought had turned back she’d targeted the Scorpion with active sonar. For some seconds both boats had exchanged shrill, nerve jarring electronic pulses and fallen silent almost as one. Short of opening their bow tubes and trading salvoes of torpedoes; they’d gone to the brink.
Lieutenant-Commander Max Forton moved across the control room to stand by his Captain’s shoulder.
“I don’t understand why this chap is hanging on to us like grim death,” he confessed. “I mean, we must be close enough to the Enterprise or one of her escorts for them to have put a sub-hunter or a chopper into the air over us. They’ve probably got half-a-dozen sonar buoys in the waters hereabouts. So why in blazes is this beggar is still charging up our bloody prop wash?”