Through the undergrowth Melody thought she glimpsed the shape of the arches of a stone bridge.
The intensity of the shooting had lessened.
“Well,” she decided. “I have no idea what’s happened to our ‘friends’ but I don’t think hanging around here any longer than we absolutely have to is going to be a very good idea!”
“I agree,” the man said. Although he was soaked in perspiration and trembling from the violent physical exertions of the last few minutes, he retained the presence of mind to nudge the muzzle of the gun gripped in Melody’s now cramping grasp away from his legs.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
“Don’t mention it,” he chuckled ruefully.
Henrietta was hugging Pedro to her breast.
“What do we do?” She asked, surreally calm in that moment.
“People are trying to kill us on this side of the river,” the man replied. “It can’t be any worse on the other side.”
Melody was tempted to disagree with this premise.
Every police officer, particularly every detective, took it as an article of faith that things could always get worse. However, in the circumstances she decided that it would have been less than helpful to belabour the point.
However, with bullets fizzing through the branches above them the simple act of steeling oneself to get to one’s feet was going to be a near insuperable psychological obstacle.
That was, right up until the moment there were two small, ear-splitting detonations less than thirty yards from where they lay. After that they were on their feet in a flash and running along the eastern bank of the Tormes towards the bridge Melody had glimpsed through the trees a minute ago.
There were several men with rifles hunkered down behind sand bags and an overturned truck guarding the village end of the bridge. They saw Stanton and the women and waved the fugitives past.
“Date prisa los bastardos están llegando!”
HURRY, THE BASTARDS ARE COMING!
In reality, this incitement could not possibly have hastened their steps across the horribly exposed span of the medieval humped-back bridge. Nevertheless, with it ringing in their ears they ignored their pains and their terrors and sprinted as if they were possessed.
Chapter 38
Wednesday 5th April
Windward Passage, Caribbean
It was like a dream, a kaleidoscopic melange of impressions rather than a linear ‘real’ experience. Abe recollected the machine gun falling silent, its magazine boxes emptied, the cruiser’s funnel beckoning black and abysmal, the imagined tang of boiler exhaust in his face, the Sea Fox twitching and shaking, and something plucking at his left shoulder, the aircraft zooming away after the bombs dropped and Ted Forrest’s cockpit mounted 0.303 gun rattling angrily.
And then it was over.
“One of our eggs must have gone down her bally funnel!” Abe’s friend was yelling exuberantly. “She’s coming to a dead stop in the water! There’s a bloody big fire on her boat deck amidships! She’s venting steam from one of her boilers like nobody’s business! Even those little twenty-five pounders went off with a frightful bang when they hit her boat deck!”
Abe turned his head to snatch a look for himself.
Why aren’t the destroyers shooting at us?
Be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.
The aircraft felt a little heavy, he glanced to left and right trying to see what damage there was to the Sea Fox’s wings. He saw several uncomfortably large, fist-sized holes.
“Ted, what does the tail look like?”
“The rudder has got a bloody big hole in it, skipper!”
“What about you, are you okay, Ted?”
“Yeah, what about you?”
“Something clipped my shoulder but I’m fine.”
A fierce blaze had taken hold aft of the cruiser’s single, now somewhat abbreviated and re-profiled formerly elegant funnel and exhaust gases were pluming almost vertically above the wreckage. From the altitude Abe had released his bombs he knew none of them could have penetrated the two to three inches of Krupp cemented plate covering the cruiser’s vitals, so the ship was not about to sink but on the other hand she was on fire and virtually stopped in the water.
“I think I read KARLSRUHE on that beggar’s aft superstructure, Skipper,” Ted Forrest reported.
“Report to Achilles that the KARLSRUHE is temporarily dead in the water and on fire. I’d guess her main battery is still intact, I don’t think that bomb that went off on her aft turret will have done anything more than concuss the gun crew.” He hesitated. “Did you see those great big Spanish-looking flags the Karlsruhe was flying from her forward yards and from her main mast, Ted?”
“Yes. But they weren’t Spanish. They look like the Nuevo Granada version of the Old Spanish rag.”
“Okay. Make sure you report that too, please.”
“I’m on it, skipper.”
Not that being at war with New Spain, or Nuevo Granada, and probably Cuba, Santo Domingo and God alone knew who else in this part of the World was better than being at war with Germany, leastways, from a New England perspective but none of that was Abe’s immediate concern.
Reporting exactly what they had observed was the main thing.
Abe circled, climbing back up to around four thousand feet, retreating out of the two destroyers’ anti-aircraft zone of engagement. One of the smaller ships had closed to hailing range of the Karlsruhe.
He checked the fuel gauges.
“Report to Achilles that we are disengaging. If we stooge around much longer, we won’t have any kind of reserve if we run into head winds on the way up to Cockburn Town.”
One last, long climbing circle and Abe pointed the Sea Fox to the north towards where he assumed Achilles was pounding south at her best speed.
“Achilles is engaging two heavies!”
Initially, Abe was a little afraid that all the excitement had proved a little too much for his friend.
“What was that, Ted?”
“Achilles reports she is engaging two heavy cruisers,” his friend said doggedly. “From what I’m hearing the hostiles must have come out of Guantanamo Bay, or the clutter of the land thereabouts, and suddenly popped up on Achille’s ELDAR plot at a range of only fourteen miles…”
Abe did the math: the 8-inch guns of the latest generation of Kaiserliche Marine heavy cruisers had a range of around twenty miles. Fourteen miles was well within the killing envelope of those guns and at the absolute outer effective range limit of Achilles’s 50-calibre 6-inch Mark XXIs. More pertinently the German ships were shooting two hundred and seventy-pound projectiles against Achilles’s one hundred and twelve pounders. Even taking into account that Achilles could probably throw two broadsides to the bigger ships’ one that still meant her eight guns could only put one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two pounds of metal in the air per minute, against the four thousand three hundred and twenty pounds of her two much bigger, heavily armoured foes. Worse, especially at long-range, plunging fire from the German ships would tear through Achilles’s thin skin and parsimoniously light armoured protection like a hot knife through butter, while her own rounds would simply crumple up or bounce off the three or four inches of plate protecting the enemy’s machinery and magazine spaces.