The old man seemed to be reading her thoughts.
“Like my old friend Don Rafael, My Lord’s strong right arm, I and my family’s banner has been loyal to the Duke’s House since before the time of the Great War. His Grace has declared for the Queen and we are thus, condemned. We must flee, come what may because there is no place for us, or for any of our clan or mind in this new Spain.”
He spoke with stern, implacable gravitas as if there was no choice but to accept his fate.
Melody felt a tear trickle down her left cheek.
“No, no,” Don José murmured. “It is God’s will. My family is descended from that great butcher Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, who died in debt, shunned and shamed by his own people. It matters more to my household that we live in honour rather than bend our knee to those who would betray Old Spain.”
Paul Nash coughed.
A starter motor fired, died, roared again in the yard outside.
He looked hard at Melody and Henrietta.
“Neither of you is fit to walk.” He shrugged. “Which rules out a slow, possibly safer trek over the mountains.” This said he grimaced: “Well, ‘safer’ being a bit of an oxymoron in this case.”
Albert Stanton opened his mouth to speak.
Nash cut him off.
“So, what we’re going to do is mount up in every available vehicle and make a headlong dash for the Portuguese border. Several of Don José’s most trusted men will go ahead of the main convoy. As a vanguard, or trail blazers, if you like. I will hang back in the rear guard. If all goes well, we shall meet up again on friendly territory in twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ time.”
Melody had always been a woman trying to compete with men in their world and in her experience, it was exactly this sort of macho, testosterone-driven do or die crap which was responsible for most, if not all, of the World’s troubles.
Infuriatingly, in this situation she could not think of a better idea. She knew that although there probably had to be one◦– a better idea, that was◦– she just could not think of it.
So, do-or-die it had to be…
Involuntarily, she put her hand to her neck where habitually she twirled her hair in moments of concentration. Her fingers encountered fresh air and she snapped back her hand, suddenly feeling very self-conscious.
Don José was viewing her with concern.
“It is nothing,” she assured him quickly, with a tight-lipped smile. “Hen and I used to have long hair. Like I say, it is stupid…”
“Only two women of such fortitude and distinction could have survived the long walk out of the Sierra de Guadarrama. I did not think it was possible,” the old man grimaced. “Your beauty is not in your hair, it shines from within your souls.”
Melody blinked, tried not to start crying.
And I thought Alonso was a sweet-talking seducer…
This must have been the guy who taught him all he knows!
She heard what she took to be an engine backfiring in the distance. The men in the room were suddenly tense, listening hard.
“That sounded like one of those old policía carbines,” Paul Nash suggested.
Don José nodded.
There was more shooting, albeit still distant.
The rattle of return fire, a ragged fusillade was not perhaps, as far away as they had all first imagined as it filtered into the room like the commotion of fireworks in the next valley.
Nash patted Don José’s arm.
“That settles it,” he decided. “I need to be somewhere else and you and the ladies need to be heading in the other direction!”
Chapter 34
Wednesday 5th April
Windward Passage, Caribbean
Knowing that they were too far away from the Achilles to communicate via scrambled VHF radio transmissions Abe climbed to rise, hopefully, high enough above the cruiser’s line of sight horizon to establish secure voice communications. All the while Ted Forrest tried to raise the ship having been ordered not to broadcast in ‘the clear’ a second time.
“That’s it!” He proclaimed triumphantly. “I’ve made contact again!”
The ships below had stopped shooting at the Sea Fox.
Either the range was too long, or they were flying too high. More likely the former than the latter, although their altitude was a perishingly cold nine thousand feet at present.
Abe had decided he was not going to miss the old-fashioned open cockpits of the Sea Fox when somebody offered him the chance to fly a more ‘modern’ aircraft.
“The other two kites are going to bomb those fellows!” The man in the aft cockpit reported. “We’re to keep well out of the way and when it is all over, we’re to report to Achilles and to beetle off down to Jamaica pronto!”
Abe did not think a Sea Fox could get anywhere near one of those ships down there without getting shot to pieces.
“Those ships almost knocked us down at a range of three or four miles,” he reminded his friend. “They’ve got to have ELDAR-controlled gun directors on at least one of those boats. Our kites will be sitting ducks!”
“I’m just telling you what Achilles told me, skipper,” Ted Forrest retorted tersely.
Abe realised that discussing it was not going to change anything.
“See if you can raise the other kites on the scrambler link, Ted.”
“What do you want me to say to them?”
“Tell them we’ll approach the targets from the west if they want to attack from other points, say north and east of the compass. That way, we’ll at least split their fire and hopefully, make it impossible for their ELDAR directors to concentrate on a single aircraft.”
Well, until the beggars have shot down the other two Sea Foxes...
“We were ordered to stay out of it, skipper?”
“Our friends will get themselves blown to bits if we don’t do something, Ted.”
“Okay, okay. But for goodness sake try not to fly down the funnel of the nearest ship this time!”
Abe began to bleed off height, seeking to get below the haze to find a clearer view of the enemy’s◦– people who fired at one were by definition ‘enemies’◦– vessels.
He blinked.
Whoever those ships belonged to the biggest of the three was no antiquated ironclad. To the contrary, just a fleeting glimpse of its three-quarters silhouette was enough to betray the purposeful lines of a modern cruiser, escorted by two big, very mean-looking fleet destroyers built on the… German model.
No, that was insane!
There were no big Kaiserliche Marine warships in the western Caribbean. The radio listening services in Florida and along the Gulf Coast all the way to the Mississippi Delta below New Orleans routinely triangulated all radio traffic in the region, identifying and locating◦– within a few miles◦– where every active unit of the Cuban and New Spanish navies were, day by day. Add to that the reports of ship sightings by the countless British and New England-flagged, not to mention friendly merchantmen plying these waters and a foreign vessel, especially a warship could not fire up a boiler without, within hours, appearing on the big situation board at Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk. Besides, all the German warships in the region were supposed to be down in Vera Cruz the best part of eighteen hundred miles away…
“The big ship looks like an Emden class cruiser. The destroyers with her look like C or D type ships.”