Drawing closer to the cruiser Abe could see that the Old Man was pouring it on. Achilles was racing south-east like a greyhound with a mighty bone in her teeth.
The plan had been to sound battle stations the moment the Sea Fox appeared on the ship’s air search ELDAR, thereafter the aircraft was to mount a series of ‘spoof’ bombing runs so that the anti-aircraft gun crews could test their mettle acquiring and tracking the ‘attacker’.
Abe had eased the seaplane up to around five thousand feet.
It was as cold as hell up here!
“TALLY-HO! TALLY-HO!” He called over the intercom.
The left wing of the Sea Fox dropped and the aircraft began to fall towards the racing cruiser.
Five hundred-and-fifty-five feet long and a few inches broader than fifty-six feet in beam, recently out of dry dock with a slick, clean bottom, with her four racing propellers each turned by up to eighteen thousand shaft horsepower, Achilles was classically ‘slippery’ through the water, a superb sea boat in any weather and for a ship of her size, unreasonably agile in the turn.
Even as Abe lined up on her midships section where her boilers vented to a single long, narrow funnel ahead of the seaplane catapult and boat deck, Achilles was heeling into the turn. He tried to adjust, follow the changing angle, cursed and pulled out of the half-dive.
“What’s wrong?” Ted Forest asked in his ears.
Abe hit the talkback switch.
“She’s even more slippery than the guys in the Wardroom said!” He snapped in exasperation. “I couldn’t hold the funnel in my sights!”
For his next ‘attack’ he circled astern and slowly approached from the port quarter, this time watching for the first indication that the Old Man had put the helm over. In a way this was cheating because this sort of attack would have been suicidal in a real war situation; he would have been shot to pieces by Achilles’s battery of twin 0.8-inch cannons and or the port twin high-angle three-inch quick firing auto-cannons (capable of firing up to thirty ELDAR-predicted rounds a minute) long before he was close enough to attempt a bombing run.
He watched the cruiser’s wake.
She was turning to starboard.
He waited.
No, not a turn, maybe ten degrees of starboard wheel.
A feint…
He jinked to the right as if he was taken in, closing the range, dropped his wing-tip as if he was about to plummet on his prey like a Sea Eagle.
Achilles was suddenly swinging to port.
The Old Man had put one or both of the port screws half or possibly, hard astern and the cruiser was slowing and literally, hauling away beneath the Sea Fox’s left wing-tip.
Without hesitation Abe threw the seaplane into the dive.
In a moment the aircraft sitting on the Achilles’s catapult was filling the ring sight of his cockpit bomb aiming sight.
Abe was so exultant, so pleased with himself it was only when he was far, far too low that he realised he was an idiot.
Oh, shit…
I’m far too fucking low…
Chapter 4
Saturday 11th March
Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Chinchón
When, shortly after dawn Melody Danson crept back into her room dressed in no more than a very crumpled shift with the rest of her clothes bundled in her arms, she discovered Henrietta De L’Isle, still fully dressed, asleep in her bed. The door creaked, shutting it seemed to her, deafeningly behind her as she attempted to tiptoe to the chamber’s small washroom◦– even grand Spanish haciendas lacked anything that a New Englander would class as an ‘en suite bathroom’◦– guiltily intent on trying to make herself look at least a little presentable.
The younger woman blinked awake and sat up on the bed in the chaos of her long skirts and petty coats.
She had been crying.
Now she sniffed accusatively and her lower lip quivered as she blinked back new tears.
Melody in turn felt ashamed, replete, dirty, and yet defiantly unrepentant, as well as sore◦– in a half-pleasant, tingling way◦– in places she had not been that sore, or stimulated… for a while. She was also very aware that a woman is not necessarily in the best frame of mind to have a… scene with her lover the morning after she has just spent the night before being fucked every anatomically practicable which way around, by an attentive, sensitive and very, very ardent lover like Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, most recently less than twenty minutes ago.
“You look,” Henrietta began, her voice trailing away as she stared at her feet.
“A mess, probably,” Melody offered, in her dishevelment hugging the clothes so expertly eased off her back and recklessly discarded on the floor of Alonso’s lair the previous evening.
After dinner last night, Henrietta had made her excuses and retired to her room; Melody and their host had drifted onto the veranda and talked, flirted really, as they gazed down into the festival lights of Chinchón.
‘This is a very ancient place,’ Alonso had told her, ‘although it only came into my family at the turn of this century. The previous Castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas was an absentee landlord of the worst kind. My grandfather poured his fortune into this town and his other holdings on the plain of Tajuña, replanting the vineyards, building the modern distillery where Chinchón’s famous Anisette is now produced. He was the man who revived the ancient festivals◦– although not without resistance from the Mother Church◦– which now attract so many people from Madrid and Toledo and far beyond every year.
Melody had tasted the legendary Anis de Chinchón with great caution, deciding that ‘yes, I could get used to this’, notwithstanding the concoction’s vicious, mule-like alcoholic ‘kick’.
Alonso had been in no apparent hurry to seduce her.
‘The Plaza Mayor is surrounded by houses that date back to the fifteenth century, in many cases outwardly, and in many cases inwardly, they are little changed from that period other than by the introduction of rudimentary sanitary provisions which town ordnances dating to my grandfather’s time require to be out of sight and mind. You must let me escort you to our church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción for Mass on Sunday, it too dates back to the glorious days of the First Empire of New Spain in the reign of Philip II.’
Goya’s brother had lived in Chinchón, his house was a place of pilgrimage to the faux literati of the capital, a thing Alonso had quietly mocked.
They had laughed together and Melody had allowed herself to be charmed all the way into her host’s bed chamber. But not before they had talked, and talked, sipping the local medium dry fruit-scented red wine with constant care lest they spoil their memories of what they both knew was to come.
‘People lived all across the Plain of Tajuña in olden days,’ her host had explained. ‘My House employs several archaeologists, you know. They spend every spring and summer digging up Neolithic, stone and iron age sites, the traces of long-gone Celtic tribes, and scratching over the legacy of Roman, Visigothic and Moorish occupations. La Reconquista◦– the re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim caliphate which was not to be finally completed until the time of Ferdinand and Isabella in the 1490s began in these parts when a Christian monarch, Alfonso VI of Castile reclaimed Toledo for the Holy Cross way back in 1085.’
Chinchón was also renowned for its many traditional breads, its garlic and the rustic country cuisine preserved in its old tavernas and eating places. During the summer hundreds of visitors braved the twisting mountain roads to enjoy its tranquil, lost-world charms, to gorge on its surfeit of fine wine and ‘peasant’ food, or just to wander its narrow, unspoiled streets or to stand on the battlements of the rebuilt medieval castle, the best place to take photographs to immortalise a visit to a jewel of a Spain that was crumbling, picturesque but impoverished, its traditions turning inward, its cities stagnating in the unrelenting vice of theocratic orthodoxy, merely the stages upon which the nation’s warring factions vied for advantage as if the modern world beyond the Iberian Peninsula simply did not exist…