“That was a gutsy landing!” A large, bearded, piratical figure of a man some years Alex’s senior declaimed heartily as he crushed the newcomer’s right hand in a bear-like calloused paw. “Come and join me at the best seat in the house!”
Alex found himself leaning on the back of a chair high up in the Island with an unobstructed view of the entire massive◦– it looked very, very big down at this level◦– flight deck of the brand-new carrier. In addition to his Mark IV there were several Bristol torpedo bombers neatly parked near the bow and to his surprise two of the experimental small helicopters◦– machines clouded in real rather than perfunctory secrecy◦– he had been starting to hear so many good things about. One of them was slowly spooling up its small tail-mounted stabiliser and twenty-feet diameter main lift rotors.
“I’ve ordered your chaps to try a couple of trial approaches while we get our little friend,” the Perseus’s CAW intimated, “into the air. Just in case we have to pull anybody out of the sea in the next few minutes.”
Alex sobered, gave the man a very hard look.
The big man grinned.
“Those whirlybirds are still very much works in progress,” he confessed. “I’d hoped to have one in the air for your landing but we’re having to learn as we go along.”
The other man became more serious.
He gestured to the thickening overcast.
“You’ve made your point,” he said, breathing respect. “You’ve shown what can be done. Are those two chaps out there up to this work?”
Heck, that was honest!
“Up to it and up for it,” he retorted briskly.
“Good. We’ll give the whirlybird a couple of minutes to get onto station then we’ll call your chaps in again.”
Alex watched the fragile-looking helicopter lift effortlessly off the deck and swing away to port, its main rotor a blur in the greyness. Three or four miles away the indistinct silhouette of a sleek fleet destroyer kept pace with the Perseus.
“When we go to sea with Task Force 5.2 there will be a battlewagon, cruisers and a pack of destroyers like the Campbeltown◦– out there◦– all around us, not to mention oilers, ammunition and general stores auxiliaries in company,” the Perseus’s CAW remarked cheerfully. With our Goshawks, torpedo and dive bombers we will be able to make mincemeat of any battlefleet that ever sailed the seven seas at a range of two to two hundred-and-fifty miles.”
“That’s quite a thought, sir,” Alex grimaced. “You’ll forgive me if I worry more about the mechanics of taking-off and landing on this boat rather than grand strategy for the next few minutes.”
The older man laughed heartily.
“I can see that you and I are going to be a damned good team, Major!”
Chapter 19
Maundy Thursday 23rd March
Bridge Street, Manhattan, New York
Brigadier Matthew Harrison tried not to dwell on the news he had received two days ago, about the tumour discovered last year in the x-rays taken after his admittance to the Accident and Emergency Department of the Queen Eleanor Hospital in the wake of the Temple Gardens shooting. It seemed that the surgery he had undergone last August, had only delayed the inevitable and that his present, oddly rude health was simply the precursor to a sudden terminal decline which might set in any day without warning.
Rather than dwell upon his own troubles, he had begun to reflect on the many regrets he would be relieved to be leaving behind sometime later that year.
Last night he had visited the Brooklyn Admiralty Dockyards to walk down the now repaired slipway where so many people had died on Empire Day two years ago, and a great ship had been wrecked. The death of John Watson, an innocent man in the confusion some hours later was a thing that would be on his conscience forever; few days passed when he did not think of the man’s poor widow and his orphaned children.
In comparison, the news of his boyhood friend, Isaac Fielding’s death had left him cold. The man who had been his oldest friend had become his most implacable enemy and the shame of it would cling to him like a bad smell, an itch it was far, far too late to scratch. Isaac had won in the end: in the last few years everything he touched turned to dust, went bad on him.
Harrison still had no idea why the Spanish had had Sarah Arnold assassinated, or even if she, not Melody Danson had been the real target…
He should never have let that woman go to Spain on that fool’s errand. Now she, and almost as bad, Henrietta De L’Isle had disappeared into the chaos of what had every manifestation of a civil war, a war to the knife for the soul of Spain.
What made it ten times worse was that he could and should have called her back two or three months ago. Those idiots in Madrid hated having such an intelligent, perceptive◦– and strong◦– woman in their midst in a position of authority. That was why they had progressively cut her and the Governor’s daughter out of the main work of ‘the Commission’, and probably why so little had been achieved other than to delay the moment the men in London had to take action against the Spanish for turning a blind eye to the Empire Day plot.
Although, in that respect, that time had been coming soon anyway; and the current disorder, probably a botched coup attempt in Madrid and other major regional capitals in the Iberian Peninsula, had merely pre-empted matters.
At least Melody and Henrietta had contrived to make contact with one or two of the saner players on the undercast of the ongoing Spanish tragedy. Moreover, they had managed to travel around the country last year, collecting a wealth of ‘soft’ intelligence before the Mission’s senior men◦– dolts one and all◦– had succeeded in clipping their wings.
Melody Danson’s acutely observed, detailed reports of what the two women had seen, and heard being said, in several of the big cities and their conclusions on the actual, not the theoretical, workings of Old Spain had been remarkably illuminating. On their own initiative they had moved around◦– in the guise of Melody escorting Henrietta around the landscape of her childhood in Spain, gaining access to what was essentially, the last ‘closed’ society in Western Europe◦– and with nothing more potent in their armoury of subterfuges than their charm, quiet persistence and their nascent curiosity had set about overturning a raft of long-held misconceptions about the relative modernity and stability of Spanish society, and partially de-bunked a slew of brainless assumptions about the real nature and virulence of the Inquisition.
The two women had ruthlessly exploited their hosts’ notion◦– shared by the male hierarchy of the ‘Joint Commission’◦– that they were just a pair of exotic adornments, window-dressing. Therefore, the Spanish had let them roam about at will just like two wide-eyed tourists on some kind of old-fashioned Grand Tour. The great families of the cities they had visited had been only to eager to welcome ‘Lady Henrietta’ and her quaint, New England ‘friend’ into their houses, and now and then, to talk with what seemed like reckless abandon about the issues confronting their fiefdoms, and their country.
There was no single Inquisition in Spain in exactly the same way there was no controlling Mafia family in the affairs of Italy or Sicily or anywhere else in the Mediterranean world. Everything was a lot more complicated than people imagined and Old Spain was simply an umbrella nomenclature under which Castile, Asturias, Galicia, Catalonia, Aragon, the Basque lands and all the other fiercely independent ‘nations’ of the Iberian Peninsula, without the borders of Portugal, co-existed in a constant state of flux. Seville and Cadiz, Granada, Toledo, Salamanca, Segovia, Barcelona and a score of other communes and communities were each in permanent low-level opposition to the writs of the Royal Palaces of Madrid. To many Spaniards the King-Emperor was an irrelevant lapdog of the Mother Church locked away in his bunker in the Mountains of Madrid…