Ted Forrest was peering through binoculars.
“Yes, I’ll buy that!” Then: “What the Devil are they doing here, Abe?”
Emden class: launched between 1969 and 1972, ten thousand tons of menace armed with nine 5.9-inch guns in three triple turrets, two forward and one aft, and reputedly capable of thirty-three knots. By length and breadth, the Emdens were a few feet longer, and eight or nine wider in the beam than Achilles and protected by well over twice the weight and thickness of armour.
The C and D type fleet destroyers were less than eight years old, two-an-a-half thousand tons of fast-moving trouble mounting either ten, in the case of the Cs, and eight in the slightly newer Ds, 4.1-inch dual-purpose high-angle cannons, a battery of up to sixteen 1.5-inch anti-aircraft auto-cannons in twin or quadruple mounts, in addition to at least eight 20-inch torpedo tubes.
Given that one, possibly all three of the ships cruising in and out of the haze now rapidly burning off the sea◦– which had just started shooting at the Sea Fox again◦– were clearly hostile it was not unreasonable to conclude that they had been lying in wait for the Achilles.
Abe banked away from the onrushing shells.
“I think that was only the nearest destroyer letting fly!” Ted Forrest speculated. “Oh, Achilles has just repeated the order for us to make ourselves scarce, Abe!”
Of all the things that were likely to happen in the next few hours the least plausible was that Captain Jackson would turn Achilles around and run away. Confronted with the big destroyers the cruiser might get the best of any battle; but not if the Emden class ship was in the mix too. Achilles was not built to slug it out, that cruiser was…
“Our two friends will be here in less than fifteen minutes,” his navigator informed Abe. “They plan to go in together, wingtip to wingtip.”
They both knew that was not going to work.
Without really thinking about it, Abe had turned back towards the enemy flotilla, intuitively flying long, lazy S’s to confuse the ELDAR-directed gun layers on the distant ships.
He had learned a brutally hard lesson that day he had nearly crashed into the Achilles in a spoof bombing run gone horribly wrong; and another unnerving one not long ago about never flying straight and level in a combat zone. He wondered if his crewmates and fellow airmen in the two approaching Sea Foxes were wiser men than he had been a fortnight ago.
“Warn our friends not to fly a constant course for more than thirty seconds at a time, Ted!”
Both the other pilots were vastly experienced naval aviators and had regarded Abe as very much the new boy on the block; the Flight’s part-timer, a ‘sprog’, still decidedly wet behind the ears. The oddity of Abe being a Surgeon Lieutenant, albeit two to three years junior to the other pilots, had been a vexation to his fellow front seaters, who otherwise would have felt freer to throw their weight around in his presence. Not that Abe would have begrudged them their sport. He was a big boy now, he understood how the world turned and that the Navy had its traditions, one of which was to frequently remind one’s juniors of their proper place in the order of things.
He had little doubt that the other men were better pilots than him: how could they not be with their hundreds of hours flying time on Sea Foxes? The question was: how quickly could they adapt to the kill or be killed rules of this deadly new game?
Those ships had opened fire on him when he was flying over international waters twenty plus miles outside the Dominican territorial limit.
They had clearly meant to kill him.
That was an unambiguous act of war.
In that moment everything had changed.
I ought to be afraid; instead, I feel… alive.
“Blue Section Leader is ordering us to disengage, skipper!”
“Acknowledge…”
“He says the reports we have on board are more important than a gaggle of hostiles.”
Abe frowned and clicked his intercom switch.
“Put me on the scrambler circuit, Ted.”
“Blue Three to Leader,” Abe said tersely into his mask. “I am flying in and out of the enemy’s effective envelope of fire to establish its limits. Presently, I estimate that to be around three nautical miles for the two smaller ships. I don’t think the cruiser has fired a shot yet…”
“Blue Leader to Blue Three!” Retorted Achilles’s senior pilot, cutting in angrily. “You were given a direct order to disengage. Do as you were bloody well told!”
Abe’s thoughts were turning slowly, coldly.
“Very good,” he drawled. “They’re all your’s, Blue Leader.” Not waiting for the other man to confirm he had heard this he switched back to intercom mode. “Those fellows are going to barrel straight in on the cruiser.”
He left unsaid the obvious corollary that: ‘And they are going to get themselves killed for nothing.”
“What are you thinking, Abe?” Ted Forest demanded.
Abe almost chuckled to himself.
His friend knew him too well already.
“I’m going to put us in the Sun to those fellows down there. They’ll be busy when Blue Leader and Blue Two get within range. This kite is a little slippier through the air than they are, she’ll be handier in the dive, too…”
“Our bombs will bounce off that cruiser, Abe.”
“Maybe,” Abe conceded. “But you wouldn’t want to be standing on the deck next to one of them when they go off!”
He was remembering the exquisite thrill of that day he had risked diving his aircraft down the Achilles’s funnel, the moment of terror when he had approached Albany field on his first solo landing, and that time he had had to land his misfiring Bristol VII on White Bear Lake in the darkness…
Perhaps, he was his father’s son after all.
The Hunter’s blood ran through his veins.
And those ships far below were his prey…
Chapter 35
Wednesday 5th April
Valley of the River Tormes, Avila
Sporadic bullets were whistling through the air, randomly thudding into walls and deflecting, dusting off the ground as the two women were bundled into the back of, all things, an ancient Bentley limousine of the vintage type only owned in the British Isles or New England by wealthy collectors and the most obsessive of historic car enthusiasts.
Something pinged off the bonnet bringing a scowl to Don José de Cortés’s whole face for a moment as he unhurriedly deposited his large frame in the front passenger seat of the Bentley and touched the driver’s shoulder, a man with a pugilist’s broken, half-mended face, indicating for him to proceed. The car lurched forward, falling into convoy with the rusty, open-topped Land Rover in the lead. This vehicle was itself, perhaps thirty or forty years old, one of the original, very basic models so beloved of farmers and colonial administrators in far-flung rough country where simplicity and ruggedness◦– which even the earliest Land Rovers had always had in bucketfuls◦– were priceless assets.
Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle had needed no encouragement to cower low on the crowded back seat with the patriarch’s wife Señora Margarita◦– a slim, bird-like woman◦– and a wide-eyed boy, a skinny urchin with a mop of rebellious dark hair of no more than three or four years of age, who apparently, was the son of the man behind the wheel.
Picking up speed the car rocked and rolled on its rusty springs like a dinghy in a tideway, creaking and groaning as its wheels encountered potholes, dips and ridges in the barely maintained road along the foot of the northern side of the valley.