“It was always a trap, Ted,” Abe said blankly. “If Achilles managed to outrun the heavies coming out of Guantanamo Bay the Karlsruhe and those two destroyers were positioned to block her way south. With other ships shelling Kingston this has to be practically the whole of the Vera Cruz Squadron mounting a pre-emptive operation against us in this part of the Caribbean!”
His friend was silent for some seconds.
“If the Old Man pulls out all the stops, I bet Achilles can show those big beggars a clean pair of heels,” Ted Forrest speculated.
But they both knew that the Old Man was not going to run away from anybody.
The Royal Navy had not become the globe’s premier navy by running away. It was hammered into all inductees at every naval college in the Empire that ‘no captain can do wrong if he lays his ship against his enemy’. Three hundred years of indefatigable tradition and the honour of the service dictated that whatever the odds no Royal Navy ship declined battle on the piffling grounds that it was massively out-gunned.
As to how a captain was expected to react to a supposedly ‘hopeless’ situation, that was simple: one fought until one could fight no more, and then one fought on regardless…
Chapter 39
Wednesday 5th April
Puente de Congosto, River Tormes
In the darkness the lights of the village seemed unnaturally bright as the two boats, little more than what New Englanders would regard as ‘punts’ and the locals called ‘skiffs’, drifted slowly beneath the arches of yet another very old stone bridge.
Had Melody Danson not been exhausted◦– it seemed as if they, Albert Stanton, she and Henrietta De L’Isle and the grim-faced Spanish teenagers steering the two boats had spent longer manhandling the wooden punts over two or three inch deep stone-fields and through muddy shallows than actually afloat◦– she might have recognised that she was travelling through an antique landscape, surrounded by the immutable evidence of the suffocating stasis which had gripped this once great nation. It was as if time had stood still in this country; away from the big cities the majority of the population lived more or less as they had done in the seventeenth century everyday viewing bucolic rural vistas and living in communities which might have been recognisable to the Roman, Visigothic and Moorish-ruled inhabitants of those places in long-gone past ages.
Henrietta only let go of Pedro when she took a corner of the frail vessel that she and Melody shared, to help lift it over obstructions. The second they were back on the water again she squeezed the child, who was near catatonic, to her bosom and resumed whispering, cooing words of comfort.
They had eaten the stale bread and mouldy cheese which had been thrown to them as they cast off downstream from Barco de Avila that afternoon, scooping water from the river to slake their thirst under a cruelly searing spring sun until evening finally allowed them a merciful relief.
“The river widens soon,” the young Spaniard in the stern of the punt whispered. The two boats were roped together to prevent them becoming separated. The water had only been a few feet deep beneath them thus far, so the risk of drowning was the least of their problems whereas, separation, would have been a disaster given how many people had already probably died since Don José’s motley party had departed Navalperal de Tormes.
‘Before he left us,’ Albert Stanton had confided to the women, ‘Paul Nash told me he did not think anybody knew that you were being sheltered in Don José’s household. It might be that the sort of people who are looking for us, the bad guys still have no idea where we are. And,’ he had remarked, ‘now that I’ve travelled through this country the lack of basic services like telephones, motorised transport, anything that you or I would consider as the pre-requisites for a modern civil society, mains electricity, for example, must make it incredibly hard for anybody to mount, let alone co-ordinate a man, or a woman hunt, in this country. It is as if the countryside is a different, alien Spain to the worlds of Madrid and the cities. The twentieth century has just not happened out here.’
Melody had wordlessly agreed,
Living in Madrid these last few months and visiting Toledo and Segovia, and on their one extended foray to the south, Cordoba and Seville, had been to explore places that were sufficiently modern, familiar to her eyes and senses despite their ancient architectural wonders. Even their stay in Chinchón had hardly been any kind of culture shock◦– until the night of the coup, obviously◦– because up in the mountains the town had been a little bit of oldy-world Spain that was still very much connected to the milieu of Madrid. However, walking in the mountains, passing through and around villages that still sat on the footprint of pre-Roman, possibly Neolithic settlements in which nothing had changed since before the time of the Great War, and twentieth century sanitation or medicine had certainly not yet arrived, had been a rude introduction to the realities of life for the majority of the population of Old Spain.
Now, of course, that dislocation from the modern world was their friend, their one ally in an otherwise wholly hostile land. Moreover, while they might still think themselves in some way superior, or exotic they all looked grubby, weary, and their clothes were ragged just from the adventures and traumas of the last twenty-four hours.
‘A lot of people will see us on the river,’ Albert Stanton had explained. ‘The guides,” he nodded to the two teenage boys, “tell me nobody will give us a second look. Everybody will assume we are a family going down river searching for work in the upper reaches of the Douro Valley. Pedro, they will assume is our child, likewise the youngsters steering the boats, other adolescent family members…’
Melody had asked the man how far they were from the Portuguese border.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he had confessed sheepishly. “Further downstream the river runs through several larger towns, and Salamanca before it flows into the Douro somewhere quite close or opposite the border. I don’t know which. I don’t know how far we will be able to get by boat. Farther downstream the river is dammed and we can’t risk crossing those waters in these punts. We’ll have to start walking again or ideally, find somewhere to hole up for a while until we’ve all got our strength back…’
Melody thought that was woolly thinking.
Every day they remained in Spain they were in deadly peril.
‘The Douro marks the border between Spain and Portugal at one point,’ she had offered, trying to be helpful.
‘Oh, right. I didn’t know that.’
Wisely, the man had taken back the gun he had given Melody before she inadvertently wounded or killed somebody, and kept his submachine gun hidden beneath a blanket in the bottom of his punt. Strangers carrying expensive-looking modern foreign-made guns was a sure-fire way of attracting unhealthy attention on these upper navigable reaches of the Tormes.
‘We’ll have to find serious boats if we’re still on the river in a couple of days,’ Stanton had cautioned Melody, very confidentially, seemingly contradicting his previous thoughts on the subject. ‘Or maybe, before, depending on how fast the stream is flowing.’
Normally, Melody would have asked what she could do to help, or even tried to take charge of the situation. Tonight, she was too tired and actually, notwithstanding Albert Stanton was primarily a very good journalist, and probably not a natural warrior-type, she was pretty sure he was a lot better at using a gun than she was and right now, that was what actually mattered the most if she and Henrietta, not to mention little Pedro, were going to get through this alive.