‘We’ve got at least one too many aircraft on board, gentlemen,’ Captain the Honourable Francis Jackson proclaimed cheerfully. ‘We can’t even risk exercising the starboard three-inch auto-cannons without blowing away one of the bally things!’
Neither of the airmen attempted to gainsay this.
‘I’m sending off the ‘wheeled’ Sea Fox at first light. I have a few despatches and the boffins have an attaché case full of papers they want sent back to Florida post-haste. I’m told the Sea Foxes have plenty of range for that sort of thing, especially the ‘land’ variant we’ve got sitting on the catapult right now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Abe agreed respectfully. ‘It’s several hundred pounds lighter than the float planes and less robustly constructed so it can fly for at least another hour, say one hundred and thirty or forty miles, on the same tank of fuel.’
The Old Man nodded sagely.
‘You and Forrest,’ he went on, ‘have the least time on the standard float plane Sea Fox. So,’ he added apologetically, ‘I have accepted your divisional commander’s recommendation that you deliver despatches to Kingston, re-fuel and fly up to Florida via a fuelling stop on Grand Turk Island, with the initial reports and some of the raw data the electronic warfare chaps compiled while we were cruising off Santo Domingo. Rest assured, you’ll be returned to the ship on the first vessel heading south in due course. Do you have any questions?’
Now, Abe and Ted Forrest were being shaken to bits as the engine ran up to maximum power with their Sea Fox firmly locked onto the catapult sledge.
To Abe’s surprise the armourers had loaded a hundred pound, and two twenty-five pound high-explosive bombs into the racks under both wings of the aircraft. This weight had more than compensated for the seaplane’s lack of big, heavy, dragging floats. Moreover, having expected the flight crew to remove the observer’s ring-mounted 0.303-inch calibre drum-fed machine gun, Ted had been pleasantly surprised to discover it still in place and two spare drums clipped into their rack near to hand. Likewise, the deck crew had re-mounted the aircraft’s 0.5-inch forward-firing gun and filled its ammunition box.
Sitting in the wheeled Sea Fox’s cockpit for the first time there were other, minor surprises. The controls were familiar, obviously, although waiting on the catapult they felt oddly strange; perhaps because the machine seemed to be brand new, everything spick and span. There was a small fire axe clipped to the inner fuselage by his right knee◦– in case there was a crash and he had to chop his way out of the wreckage, not normally a consideration at sea apparently, where it was presumed a trapped pilot would simply drown◦– and the first aid kit was in a larger, aluminium box stowed by his left ankle. There also seemed to be a thin metal bulkhead◦– in the float planes there was just a void◦– separating him from the navigator-gunner’s position.
However, these were things he only gave fleeting consideration.
Not so the uncomfortable weight of the holstered service revolver, an old-fashioned Webley six-shooter on the belt around his waist. He and Ted Forest had stared at the gun and belt presented to each of them by the armourers as they waited to mount up.
‘Captain’s Day Orders, sirs,’ they had been informed. ‘All officers going ashore are to carry firearms at all times until further notice, sirs.’
There was no space in the aircraft for personal belongings; just as well because then it would really have felt as if they were deserting the ship at the precise moment the commission began in earnest. As it was, they could still convince themselves they would be back in a few days.
However bad the news, nobody believed the balloon was going to go up anytime soon. If the ‘high ups’ were really worried about the situation in the Caribbean, Achilles would be steaming south in the wake of a battleship, several much bigger cruisers and one of the giant new aircraft carriers. And as for the rumours about the German ‘Vera Cruz’ Squadron well, with the Indomitable already guarding the Mississippi Delta and the Gulf of Spain, the Germans◦– even if they were flying the flag of Nuevo Granada◦– were hardly in any position to cause mischief. If the Vera Cruz Squadron was intent on showing its new flag it was likely to cruise down to the Antilles and all those territories like Aruba in the south which Germany had leased, or rather appropriated pretty much in perpetuity from their former Dutch owners, or to visit the Cayman Islands, another of the supposedly legitimate concessions granted to the Kaiser in the underbelly of the thirteen-year-old Submarine Treaty.
Both Abe and Ted Forrest’s emotions had therefore, been mixed as they said their abbreviated farewells and mounted up in the pre-dawn darkness that morning, especially for the Sea Fox’s pilot who had discovered the only way not to feel homesick was to bury himself in his duties to the threshold of exhaustion every day. If he allowed himself time to mope over Kate, of missing witnessing their son growing up day by day, his mood dipped and he became preoccupied, no use to man or beast on a fighting warship.
His chief, Surgeon Commander Michael Flynn had yet to get his head around the notion that Abe was a virtual teetotaller, so he put the younger man’s moments of introspection down to his sobriety.
‘Never met a woman who didn’t drive me up the wall if we spent more than a couple of days in each other’s company!’ He had proudly confessed to the younger man.
Which had left Abe reflecting that although his superior no doubt had numerous excellent qualities, in some respects his appreciation of the human psyche was sadly deficient in a man who, like himself, had devoted his life to a profession which had as its precept primum no nocere: first do no harm.
The controller’s torch flashed twice.
Abe braced himself
The next thing he knew the Sea Fox was airborne.
He heard Ted Forrest’s cheerful tones in his headphones.
“I suggest we point the old jalopy at one-one-oh degrees magnetic on that round, compass-like thing in front of you, skipper!”
Abe suppressed a chuckle and held the aircraft in a slow climbing turn to the left, planning to circle Achilles a couple of times to get his heartbeat back down to a sensible pace before setting course to the south.
“That should take us to within sight of Navassa Island in about thirty-five minutes time,” his navigator continued, “assuming we wobble along at what passes for a normal cruising speed for one of these dinosaurs.”
Both Abe and Ted had had their heads turned by the ‘demonstration’ aircraft manufacturers had sent over to Virginia to persuade the Royal Navy to submit large early orders for the next, and probably final variant of the Goshawk scout-interceptor and the latest incarnation of the Sea Eagle dual-purpose torpedo-dive bomber. The Goshawk Mark IV had a top speed in level flight closer to three than two times that of the ancient Sea Fox; the Sea Eagle Mark III could carry a ton-and-a-half of ordinance and was at least twice as fast. Both aircraft◦– already in service or coming into service with the Royal Naval Air Service◦– had service ceilings of over thirty thousand feet and a ferry range of about fourteen hundred miles. In comparison, referring to a Sea Fox as a ‘dinosaur’ was nothing but stating the fact, and if one was being picky, being a little unfair on that magnificent genus of long-extinct ancient reptiles.
As the aircraft flew to the south, climbing away from the Achilles the sky lightened to full day. It never ceased to amaze Abe that from altitude at this time of day one could very nearly see the new day racing to the west.
Suddenly, he blinked.
“Ted, put your glasses on two, maybe three ships at your eight o’clock.”
There was a delay of several seconds.
“I’ve got three ships, maybe a cruiser and two destroyers,” his friend reported.