Stanton hesitated.
“Now! Can’t you see she’s absolutely besotted with you, man?”
“Leonora!” Maud complained, suddenly sobering.
Albert Stanton’s response was measured.
“Oh,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Is that so, Miss Daventry-Jones?”
Leonora rolled her eyes, suspecting Maud really would swoon now.
However, in the event her friend surprised her.
She blinked up◦– Maud was little more than five feet tall◦– at the Manhattan Globe’s star reporter with quietly determined eyes.
“Yes, Mr Stanton,” she admitted defiantly. “That would be pretty much the size of it.”
The man considered this, albeit not for very long.
“Well,” he sighed, “that’s a very good thing to know. Perhaps, in that case we ought to find somewhere a tad quieter where we can sit and discuss matters further?”
Chapter 6
Monday 13th March
HMS Achilles, Chesapeake Bay
On board a Royal Navy ship when a man errs it is not initially the Captain who takes him to task it is usually the Executive Officer, or on really big vessels like battleships, battlecruisers or the new fleet carriers, the ‘First Lieutenant’, usually a senior lieutenant or a lieutenant-commander, who is specifically responsible for crew discipline and the efficient running of the ship.
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh, the Achilles’s Executive Officer had wasted no time summoning Abe and his co-offender, Ted Forest to his cabin. He had ripped into them the moment the cabin door shut behind them.
‘What the bloody Hell were you playing at?’ He had demanded of Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln, RNASR, whom rightly, he considered to be the primary malefactor. ‘You came within a whisker of getting yourselves, and God only knows how many of your crewmates killed and badly damaging the bloody ship!’
By then Abe seriously doubted he could possibly feel any more wretched.
He had been convinced the diving Sea Fox was going to pile into the deck somewhere aft of the funnel, probably on top of the ship’s second sea plane, stowed at the time on the midships catapult. Hauling back on the stick and closing his eyes had been the only thing he could do. Nobody had been more surprised than him◦– Ted Forest apart, that is◦– when at the last second the aircraft had, with a gut-wrenching protest that very nearly tore off the wings somehow… missed the ship.
In fact, technically the Sea Fox had not actually ‘missed’ Achilles; the small rudder of her port float had struck the top of the funnel and the aircraft had carved through two thin radio cables before, on the verge of a stall it had… missed.
Instantly, Abe had pushed the stick forward before the machine plummeted into the grey North Atlantic like a stone. Clipping the crest of a wave the Sea Fox had struggled into the air and miraculously… survived.
Understandably, the Achilles’s Executive Officer had been in a mood to have the two ‘maniac flyers’ keel-hauled.
Abe knew exactly what he had done wrong.
‘It is my fault entirely, sir. Ted, I mean, Sub-Lieutenant Forest was literally just a passenger,’ he had said blankly, staring to his front not daring to meet Peter Cowdrey-Singh’s blazing stare. ‘They warned us about ‘target fixation’ at Virginia Beach but the training regime on shore was never as intense as that moment… half-an-hour ago. I got so wrapped up holding the deck in my sights that I forgot everything else I had been taught, sir!’
Now, Abe was standing in front of Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson. Unnervingly, the magnificently piratical, greying man in his late fifties, the younger man concluded, ought to have been an awful lot angrier than he seemed to be that morning.
“Who told you to attack the ship the way you did that second time, young man?” The senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet inquired, deciding he had allowed the young man before him to ‘stew’ long enough.
“Sir?” Abe blurted, not sure if he had heard his captain correctly.
“You made a minor, very understandable hash of your first attack but then you altered your tactics and◦– had we been in a real battle◦– you might very well have dropped a clutch of bombs down my bloody funnel,” Jackson complained laconically.
Abe scrambled to recollect his thought processes on the day he had almost got himself killed.
“In the first attack I misjudged the aircraft’s manoeuvrability in the dive◦– they never allow us to ‘go in that deep’ in training◦– and I suppose, the speed of the Achilles’s turn. Again, I’d never flown anywhere near a ship operating at flank, or top speed, sir.”
Captain Jackson was listening indulgently.
The two men were alone in Jackson’s big stateroom near the cruiser’s stern. Achilles had been built as a ‘flagship’ but only rarely employed in that role and ‘officer country’ was unusually spacious as a result even though part of it had been modified to accommodate the Petty Officers’ Mess some years ago.
It was Abe’s understanding that when a man stood before a Captain’s Table to be disciplined for his egregious offences there were numerous other interested parties in the room. Like, for example, the Executive Officer, his own Divisional Commander, and customarily, the Captain’s Secretary minuting proceedings.
However, that morning he was alone with the great man.
“But you got it right the second time?” The older man ruminated. “Granted, by very nearly crashing into MY ship!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry about that, sir.”
Captain Jackson grunted softly, shook his head.
“You commenced your dive before the ship began to turn. Was that a lucky guess?”
“Yes and no, sir. I don’t have much, any real experience of these things but I guessed the ship’s first ‘jink’ was probably just the rudder going over a few degrees, then I saw the port screws going astern. After that it was just a matter of following the ship deep enough into the dive to be sure of a hit… before pulling up, obviously, sir.”
“Um…”
Abe swallowed, his mouth aridly dry.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“I know hanging back that way would have got Ted and me shot down in a real battle but if it was ‘for real’, I’d have hung back farther away or farther astern where the medium AA cannons and the three-inch auto-cannons are blocked by the aft deckhouse. Obviously, anybody who tried to attack the ship in an old Sea Fox would be on a hiding to nothing…”
Abe realised he was getting carried away.
“In any case, I reckon that in a real fight there would be several aircraft attacking at once, splitting the ship’s fire, sir.”
The older man was a little… amused.
“Do you apply this same grasp of logical complexity to your work as a healer, Lieutenant Lincoln?”
Even though he was still standing rigidly to attention Abe involuntarily shrugged.
“I like to think that I am always working to be the best physician, the best flyer, and,” he hesitated, “the best husband and father that I can be, sir.”
Francis Jackson studied the tall, handsome dark-haired young man before him. He had had his doubts about having such a ‘celebrity’ aboard his ship, wondering whether a man with such a colourful recent history could ever really fit into the closely-knit, generally happy crew he had nurtured in his eighteen months in command of the old trade route cruiser. The jury was still out on that one; in the meantime, the young man had contrived to make himself something of a ship’s talisman and he was not about to take him to task for obeying his mantra of ‘train for war to fight a war’ to heart.