Abe had never taken his eyes off the distant ships.
He chopped back the throttle and the aircraft slowed, juddered on the point of a stall as its airspeed dropped to little more than sixty knots.
“What are we doing, skipper?” His navigator asked anxiously, still badly shaken by the radio broadcast in his earphones.
“Alex, my brother had a theory that the 5th Battle Squadron couldn’t dial back its rangefinders and fire-control directors to cope with the slow speed of the aircraft which attacked its ships on Empire Day,” Abe informed his friend, his tone didactic, unemotional. “That’s why all the attacking aircraft got through. My guess is that the fellows below assume that nobody would be so stupid as to mount an attack at their slowest, rather than their fastest speed.”
Ted Forrest was still listening to the broadcast from Kingston.
“Cassandra is confirmed as beached and on fire. The shelling has switched to the town… There are at least two enemy spotter planes circling the harbour… Two other floatplanes have strafed the airfield… The aviation spirit tanks are on fire… It sounds like bedlam down there, Abe!”
HMS Cassandra was a one-off, an experimental ‘anti-aircraft cruiser’ built on a similar hull to that of the Achilles. However, instead of eight 6-inch guns main battery in four twin turrets she mounted twelve 4.7 inch, long-barrelled◦– fifty-seven calibre◦– rifles in six twin gun houses capable of elevating their rifles to eighty degrees. An odd-looking ship even more lightly armoured than Achilles, she had clocked up nearly thirty-six knots in full-power trials shortly after her commissioning over twenty years ago. It was probably Cassandra’s ‘oddness’ which had consigned her to a so-called ‘guard ship’ career mostly spent in the Far East and here on the Caribbean Station, where she had been off and on, for the last five years based at Georgetown, Barbados.
Cassandra would be no match for that Emden class cruiser now beginning to grow larger in the ring-sight of the Fire Fox’s single forward-firing machine gun. Cassandra’s 4.7-inchers would barely tickle a ship like that…
The first salvo of anti-aircraft shells exploded well over half-a-mile ahead of Abe’s shallow windscreen.
“Achilles is now ordering us to fly straight up to the Turks and Caicos Islands, skipper!”
“Acknowledge that, Ted.”
Abe had to gun the throttle to stop the aircraft falling out of the sky; more airbursts blossomed several hundred yards ahead of the aircraft.
The cruiser was turning and from her broadening wake ‘opening all the taps’ and pouring on the power. The destroyers had raced past her, now they were having to heel into violent turns of their own to regain station.
Okay, that is interesting…
This is all new to them, too…
“Oh, God!” Ted Forrest cried excitedly.
One of the other Sea Foxes emerged from a cloud of shell bursts in pieces, tumbling end over end down towards the blue, glittering waters a mile below.
The other aircraft pressed on, diving now.
“Skipper, we’re supposed to be heading straight for Grand Turk Island or Cockburn Town on the way up to Florida!”
“Yes,” Abe agreed. He left his intercom switched to ‘transmit’. He needed to focus on that cruiser… and nothing else for the next minute or so.
The Sea Fox was less than a mile away, in a shallow dive with its engine throttle back so far that its propeller was virtually feathered when either Blue leader or Blue One, plummeted to its fiery death. For a moment Abe was unsure if it had hit the stern of the cruiser a glancing blow on its port side or just crashed into the sea. He was amazed the surviving Sea Fox had emerged more or less whole from the blizzard of small-calibre anti-aircraft fire thrown up in a seemingly impenetrable umbrella above the fast-moving ship.
Then there were three explosions.
Simultaneously, on the roof of the cruiser’s after triple turret, another right at the transom end of the quarterdeck and another, to the eye slightly delayed, from inside the ship bursting out of the deck planking in a splinter-filled mushroom of grey smoke shot through with crimson.
The Sea Fox had released its bombs in its death dive…
Abe decided, however unlikely it was, that his guess that the cruiser had stopped shooting at him, was correct. The reason why was of no consequence. Likewise, the reason why the ship which he had calculated to have been making at least twenty-five knots and had been picking up speed all the while just seconds ago had, although still turning hard to starboard, visibly slowed.
He pressed forward the throttle lever until it hit the stop bar.
Pushed the nose of the aircraft down.
He clasped the stick with his right hand as his left closed over the bomb release lever.
Instantly, the cruiser was filling his gunsight.
His thumb closed over the firing button.
He waited.
Pressed the button hard.
The Sea Fox shook as the slipstream roared past.
Chapter 37
Wednesday 5th April
El Barco de Ávila
Everything had gone to Hell in seconds.
There had been a blizzard of rifle and machine gun fire from up ahead, the Bentley had swerved off the road and very nearly overturned and men, women and children had spilled out of the following vehicles as the first bullets tore into the convoy and ricocheted off the road and the rocks to either side of it. It was bedlam with bodies falling, scythed down everywhere.
“If we stay here, we’re done for!” Albert Stanton shouted, blinking fiercely through the dusty lenses of his spectacles, as he dropped into the dirt where the women and the traumatised boy, Pedro, who had been dozing on Henrietta’s lap when the mayhem erupted, were sheltering.
The Bentley was fifty feet away, burning fiercely.
The driver, Don José and his wife, had been shot before they could move and Melody Danson did not have any idea how she, Henrietta and the boy had got out, scampered across open ground and fallen into the dry trench, some kind of drainage channel, without anything worse than a few grazes and scratches.
The man from the Manhattan Globe was hefting an old-fashioned sub-machine gun of the kind one saw German gangsters using in so many films these days…
“We have to get out of here!” He yelled.
He pressed a grey automatic pistol into Melody’s hands.
“The safety is off, there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to shoot anybody, grab it in both hands, point in the general direction of the target and keep pressing the trigger.”
“I don’t…”
“We have to get out of here,” the man repeated breathlessly. “NOW!”
He did not wait for a response.
Instead, he grabbed Melody’s arm and suddenly the two women, the boy, whom Henrietta in her terror had found the strength to sweep up in her arms, were running bent double towards a nearby tree line above where the river Tormes in spring spate burbled past the walls of a dusty village.
Others were running with them.
Bullets kicked up stones.
They hurdled a fallen body without thinking to stop.
They fell, tumbling into the trees.
They jumped up and ran again.
They halted under cover, listened to the water flowing nearby.
They could smell the river, an oasis in an otherwise dry, rocky landscape.
“Keep low,” Stanton directed, gasping for air. “If we got this far the plan was to meet up with ‘friends’ on the other side of the river. There was some talk of transferring to boats, the river isn’t navigable all the way to the Douro, which it joins at a place called Ambasaguas, but where it narrows or passes over natural outcrops or rocky sub-straits, I’m given to believe that it is just about passable if one is travelling in lightweight skiffs that can be manhandled over obstacles…”