Alex had climbed up to the flight deck from his cabin in the bowels of the leviathan to get a bit of fresh air and untypically, to clear his head of some of the jangling contradictions he had rarely experienced down on the Border as a singleton ‘hot-shot scout jockey’. Much to his surprise the responsibilities of squadron command had washed off his shoulders like water off a proverbial duck’s back; right up to the moment they had told him about Perseus.
To have only had three bad crashes was near miraculous…
‘A testament to how well you’ve brought your chaps on,” the CAW had declared.
Alex thanked the fates that he had been lucky enough to have inherited half-a-dozen real fighter pilots, men who had served on the Border, survived enough scrapes to know that blinking twice was never going to cut it. Those experienced men had carried the ‘newbies’ and the ‘sprogs’ along in their wake, and to the credit of the CAF’s peacetime flight training programs◦– which old hands tended to regard as overlong and fussy◦– once they had got over their terrors many of the junior men had soon got the hang of ‘catching a wire’.
Not that landing on the Perseus was ever going to be routine. If take-off and landing were the two most dangerous times on land then at sea, the perils were positively extreme. It was with good reason that the most hazardous place on any ship in the Royal Navy was the flight deck of an operational carrier.
Worse, the Navy was still only just beginning to get used to operating high-performance low-wing monoplanes like the Goshawk off the decks of the big new carriers. Previous experience flying string-bag, hundred-mile-an-hour machines too fragile to ‘catch a trap’ off the much smaller decks of the first carriers◦– often converted merchantmen or cruisers from the Reserve Fleet◦– significantly less than half the size of the Ulysses class ships, had proven useless and many of the attempts to transfer the ‘lessons’ learned in that previous era had ended up killing too many brave men.
Perseus was scheduled to be at St Margaret’s Bay for seventy-two hours. Insofar as the giant base was practically in the middle of nowhere and literally miles from what New Englanders◦– particularly from Alex’s neck of the wood◦– tended to call ‘civilisation’, its main attractions were a couple of big cinemas, and some of the most notorious bars in the Empire.
The gentrified civilian settlements where the wives and families of Navy personnel and the permanent civilian employees of the dockyards lived◦– regimented streets of detached and semi-detached married quarters up and down the coast and around Halifax to the north◦– were a world apart from Royal Navy St Margaret’s Bay.
The fleshpots of St Margaret’s Bay, wet and chilly, arctic for two to three seasons of each year were the exclusive preserve of the crews of visiting ships. Alex planned to take his boys on a monumental pub crawl they would remember the rest of their lives before Perseus sailed again. There was nothing like a party to blow away the cobwebs and besides, the Squadron’s fallen deserved a bloody good wake!
The carrier’s fog horn blared deafeningly.
Cynics claimed that the Empire had invested so heavily in the St Margaret’s Bay-Halifax shipbuilding, maintenance, stores and base infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century, primarily in furtherance of a concerted attempt to shrug off the dead hand of organised labour back in the Old Country. However, if that had been the case the Crown would hardly have developed Norfolk into the largest naval base in the World outside of Europe, nor would it have continually modernised and kept busy, the Admiralty yards at Brooklyn, given that the civilian workers employed in any Empire facility in either New England or Canada had◦– by statute◦– enjoyed the same workers’ rights as their ‘British’ counterparts since as long ago as 1916.
People said the days of St Margaret’s Bay were numbered. However, while it was true that none of the contracts for the new fleet carriers had been allocated to its yards, it was also true that the era in which the Navy mandated that its big ships be constructed in secret, far from the prying eyes of potential enemy agents, were long gone. The Ulysses class was being built as visibly as possible just so that everybody knew that the Royal Navy was acquiring and enthusiastically embracing, a new and formidable technological edge on its rivals.
Leonora had looked at Alex as if he was pulling her leg when he told her he was ‘joining the Navy’; at the time he had rather been hoping that somebody was indeed pulling his leg! It had been a lot harder to leave her that last time, especially as he had no idea◦– nor did anybody else◦– when he would be back. Everybody assumed Perseus’s home port was going to be Norfolk but in reality, that was no more than scuttlebutt. Other rumoured home ports had been Gibraltar, or Alexandria in Egypt, although it was said that Malta was unlikely because the dry docks there were too small.
The notion that he might be hundreds or thousands of miles away when his first◦– so far as he knew, he had been drunk a lot in the latter half of the 1960s and the first half-decade of the 1970s◦– son or daughter emerged squalling into the world, preyed on Alex’s mind.
I must be getting old…
Either that or his twenty-one deck landings on and twenty take-offs from the deck of the Perseus to date, had reminded him of his own mortality.
In the middle distance the armoured flank of HMS Tiger was emerging from the mists, her fighting tops proudly grey, glistening in the damp air above the murk. The rumbling of the ammunition wagons carrying pallets of one-ton, 15-inch main battery rounds from the subterranean bunkers in the surrounding hills to the dockside reverberated across the dark waters.
Even in port the battleship’s air search ELDAR aerials rotated slowly, ceaselessly and a translucent plume of light grey exhaust fumes rose from her forward, raked funnel.
Although the Atlantic Fleet was not quite at war yet, every ship not in dockyard hands had at least one boiler lit, a watch closed up and several of her guns manned. On the forward flight deck Perseus had turned out a hundred men to salute the Admiral’s flag flying from Tiger’s main mast halyards.
A small saluting gun popped.
The men on deck came to attention.
Chapter 26
Friday 31st March
Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
Melody guessed Captain Paul Nash, allegedly of the Seaforth Highlanders◦– she took his stated rank, name and regimental affiliations with a particularly suspicious and very large pinch of salt◦– was in his early to mid-thirties with a build that might have been designed for trekking across one hundred and seventy miles of mountains, valleys and forests along the spine of the Sierra de Guadarrama, Sierra del Norte and the Sierra de Gredos all the way to the Portuguese border. Unfortunately, Melody had no illusions that her and Henrietta’s bodies were in any way ‘up to it’, and this she had pointed out to their would-be rescuer in no uncertain terms.
The man had listened respectfully.
He was stocky, quite obviously without an ounce of extraneous flesh on his teak-hard muscled skeleton, an inch of so taller than Henrietta which made him about five feet ten in height, and moved with an almost cat-like grace and purpose.
What he had neglected to tell the two women last night prior to advising them to try to get as much sleep as possible, was that when, several days ago, he had thrown himself out of the light plane several thousand feet above the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, he had jumped with a cannister containing weapons, lightweight camping equipment, iron rations, packs of dried ready-cook meals, a first aid kit, several courses of anti-biotics◦– because you never knew if you might need them◦– and his ‘personal’ weapons: an automatic assault rifle, a .45-inch calibre semi-automatic pistol, enough ammunition to start a small war and a wicked, hunting knife with a nine-inch blade, razor-sharp on one side and serrated on the other which he carried strapped to his left shin.