Abe circled, making absolutely certain he had his bearings and that he had got his nerves under control again, before lining up and putting down, rather more bumpily than he had planned. The wind was gusting a little despite the cloudless skies and the waters of the Great Sound were nowhere near as millpond flat as he had expected. Nevertheless, soon he pointed the aircraft’s nose towards Cross Island.
Achilles was only just beginning to pick her way through the shoals by the time the Sea Fox was safely moored to a floating jetty directly astern of the Section CO’s seaplane.
It seemed that Achilles was due to berth alongside the main quay, well over a mile away as a bird might fly but two or three by land. It was early afternoon and the sun burned down on the naval aviators who quickly began to divest themselves of their heavy leather flying accoutrements. Goggles, helmets, fur-lined jackets, essential to survival at ten thousand feet were somewhat superfluous in the tropical heat of Bermuda.
Ted Forest looked around.
He sniffed, and when he spoke his voice was a little vexed.
“I’d expected dancing girls, or suchlike!” He complained.
“I don’t think this is that sort of tropical island, Ted,” Abe chuckled wryly, thinking about his very own ‘dancing girl’ he had left behind in Norfolk. He had been away less than a week and already he felt disconnected from things, incomplete without his precious… Tekonwenaharake.
Belatedly, he remembered the folded papers he had stuffed inside his jacket before clambering up onto the catapult and dropping into the cockpit of his Sea Fox half-an-hour ago.
“I reckon the fort must be over there,” he decided, pointing across the basin to the barracks and what looked like white bastion walls in the middle distance.
Surgeon-Commander Flynn, Abe’s medical superior had asked him to visit his opposite number on Bermuda.
‘I plan to keep out of his way, ancient history, you understand,” the older man had explained, for him somewhat tersely, for reasons he soon clarified. “There was a member of the fair sex involved, I’ll say no more. Other than Ralph” the officer Abe was charged to visit, “and I don’t get on with each other. We’ve managed to avoid each other for the last fifteen years, be a pity to come to blows again at our advanced ages, what?’
Achilles had sailed with a regulation medicine ‘cupboard’ fully stocked but Flynn wanted to ‘cadge whatever tropical medicaments’ could be begged, borrowed or stolen from the Fleet Stores on Bermuda.
Guardships on the Caribbean and other distant stations were de facto floating hospitals, their crews often deployed ashore as good Samaritans mending infrastructure and ‘mucking in’ on local construction projects. Yes, they were there to keep good order, to knock heads together if it came to it, and occasionally, to hunt pirates and such like but wherever the Navy went it looked first to make friends, influence people and to preserve the King’s Peace any way it could. That was why most ships returned from their stations with their drugs lockers emptied; so, Abe’s chief wanted as much ‘therapeutic ammunition’ as he could get his hands on before Achilles ‘shot’ the Windward Passage into the Caribbean.
Ted Forest had offered to accompany Abe on his delicate mission and he was grateful of his moral support. They had begun on foot, hitching a lift from a passing Military Police patrol. Soon they were outside the gates of the base hospital. Chatting to their driver Abe had learned that the main hospital was located across the other side of the Great Sound in the town of Hamilton, which was where all the ‘bigwigs’ hung out and the location of all the best bars and ‘fleshpots’ of Bermuda were to be found.
Achilles’s Surgeon had informed Abe that his counterpart on Bermuda was ‘not a fellow who approved of such things’ and therefore confined himself to the Naval Base most of the time.
For a man he claimed to have fallen out with and to not, like very much, Abe thought his chief seemed to know an awful lot about Surgeon Captain Ralph McNab.
Thinking about it later he realised he ought not to have been totally surprised when he was ushered into an airy office and greeted by a man who was the spitting image of Michael Powell Flynn.
It transpired that McNab was older, by five years, than his half-brother, Achilles’s avuncular surgeon, Michael. McNab’s mother had remarried a Bostonian physician a year after his father’s death. As is often the case the two brothers◦– albeit half-brothers◦– had been broken from radically different temperamental templates and this was self-evident from the moment Captain McNab opened his mouth.
“The damned philanderer doesn’t have the courage to face me man to man!”
Abe did not care to disagree with a four-ringer.
Especially as he was half in-uniform as a pilot and half out of uniform as a surgeon-lieutenant and he got the distinct impression that Captain McNab was the sort of man who put men on charges for a lot less. The most disarming aspect of the meeting was that the elder brother had exactly the same Boston-Irish accent of his sibling, not to mention several of his mannerisms.
“I suppose Michael has sent you to raid my medical lockers?”
Abe saw no good reason to lie.
“Yes, sir. Surgeon-Commander Flynn has spoken to me of the exigencies of service especially on the Leeward Islands Station and Trinidad.”
Captain McNab had re-taken his seat and now viewed the young man before him with thoughtful eyes.
“Are you a competent surgeon, Lieutenant?”
“Not yet, sir. I plan to be one day.”
The older man reviewed Abe’s relative dishevelment.
“I never knew my father,” he said, astonishing the younger man. “You and I have that in common. That and the contagion that is my brother.”
Abe kept his mouth firmly shut.
Albert Stanton had observed that ‘being famous cuts two ways and not invariably in the ways you’d like it to.’ Thus far, the Navy had shielded Abe from the worst of that.
“That was unfair,” McNab apologised punctiliously. “Often it is best to separate family and service matters. Never the twain shall meet, and all that. I take it Michael sent you over with a list?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Leave it with my secretary,” the older man decided, indicating that the interview was concluded.
Chapter 22
Easter Saturday 25th March
Hacienda de Cortés, Navalperal de Tormes, Avila
Albert Stanton had initially feared he had broken three or four bones◦– important ones◦– after he had finally come to rest against the bowl of a gnarled olive tree in the fading light of yesterday afternoon. In retrospect he was to reflect that it was a miracle his spectacles had survived undamaged, stowed at the last minute in an inside pocket of his jacket before he had fallen into the void. He had lain very still for some minutes before the pain started to ease and air slowly, gaspingly, re-filled his lungs as his parachute billowed around, and eventually over his prostrate form.
He had taken Paul Nash’s◦– the man had to be a spy or some kind of special forces soldier whom he hoped, fervently, was actually on his side but would have been hard-pressed to testify under oath that he was entirely convinced he was◦– talk about Portugal with a pinch of salt. It would not have been the first, or the last big lie the man had told him.
Portugal was a friendly country: why on earth would they be parachuting into it like thieves in the night (and heavily-armed ones at that)?
‘Bend your knees and roll when you hit the ground,’ had been another lie. For one, it pre-supposed you knew you were about to ‘hit’ the ground, when in fact, ‘the ground’ had ‘hit’ him first!