The Pillars of Hercules (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 3)

by James Philip

  “I can confirm that my good friend Vice Admiral Hugh Staveley-Pope was among the dead on Manoel Island. Had the Manoel Island detention camp still been in operation the death toll on the island would have been many times higher.”

  Even as he spoke RAF and Fleet Air Arm technicians were splicing together gun camera footage from the ‘air actions over Malta’; and within days this footage would be shown in local cinemas.

  Eventually, Julian Christopher concluded the litany of death and destruction.

  “I personally, have lost many good friends in this atrocity. In the cities and villages of the Maltese Archipelago everybody will know somebody; a father, a mother, a brother or a sister, a son or daughter, a friend, or a colleague at work, or somebody one was at school with many years ago, who has been taken from us in this terrible, cowardly assault on the very soul of these precious islands.”

  The hairs on the nape of Lieutenant Alan Hannay’s neck were standing on end by this juncture. There was a cold, deadly intent in his new Admiral that he had never encountered in any other man in the Navy. It was as if he’d had his eyes opened to a truth he’d not known to exist. Nelson, he decided, must have had this self-same power to galvanise his captains, to instil in his people the belief that defeat simply wasn’t a thing within the bounds of possibility. And that, one day, there would be retribution. This he understood long before the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations signed off with the promise that: “It is my pledge to the people of Malta that if I have anything to do with it,” there was a perfectly judged pause for effect, “there will be a reckoning for this crime against humanity.”

  Chapter 21

  Monday 9th December 1963

  Emergency Field Hospital, Pembroke Barracks, Malta

  Marija Calleja shivered and drew her shawl close. She ached from head to toe after a third successive long and exhausting day mostly spent on her feet. Margo Seiffert had taken one look at her twenty minutes ago, handed her two aspirins, and taken her off the hastily organised ‘ward’ - three big tents linked by awnings to the barracks block the Army had made available - and brought her into the cluttered ‘hospital office’. The office had a telephone which had to be ‘manned’ at all times, a desk piled with medical reports, and around the walls, wooden orange crates filled with supplies. The British, as every Maltese knew, had a prodigious talent for improvisation; for sorting things out as they went along. Most of the time this wasn’t good news but in a crisis it was a positive boon, with everybody pitching in without complaint and officials who’d normally have endlessly obfuscated to avoid a thorny problem, suddenly eager to be of service. Hence, the Pembroke Barracks Emergency Field Hospital had been magically conjured into existence out of practically thin air inside a day of the bombing. However, as Marija sat at the desk slowly creating little heaps of ordered paperwork and ‘watching’ the telephone, the miracle of the new field hospital didn’t take her mind off her numerous physical vexations, or the nagging, insidious worm of doubt – distant terror, really – that had dogged her ever step these last two days.

  Peter Christopher’s ship had been badly damaged.

  She didn’t know if he was dead or alive...

  “How are you feeling now, Marija?” Margo Seiffert asked a little amused to have caught the younger woman in a rare moment when her thoughts were far, far away.

  “I’m okay, I suppose.”

  The older woman gave her a sternly maternal look, and decided not to take issue with this somewhat disingenuous claim. Her young friend was as exhausted as the rest of them and almost certainly hurting in a lot more places. Later she would order Marija to one of the cots she’d had placed in the adjutant’s room.

  “Admiral Christopher asked me to keep a particular eye on our ‘guests’ in the fort,” Margo confided. “Personally, I don’t think they are likely to come to any harm from the men who are guarding them,” she shrugged, “but if everybody knows that I and my nurses will be regularly checking the wellbeing of the prisoners, then well...”

  Marija got the message.

  Margo didn’t really want to have anything to do with her ‘countrymen’. Unlike the British, she’d have had no qualms about putting the killers up against a wall and shooting them.

  “It isn’t your fault,” Marija said sympathetically.

  The older woman’s lips twisted in contempt at the actions of her ‘fellow Americans’; her eyes despaired. She hadn’t been back to the United States for sixteen years, now she never would for it was an alien place and since the October War it could never be her home again. Some things were beyond forgiveness.

  “I know,” she snorted, shaking off her brief introspection. “Anyway. Stop what you are doing and go make friends with the...”

  “They’re just people, Margo. Obeying orders...”

  “We hung a whole slew of Nazis and Japs after the forty-five war who honestly believed claiming that they were obeying orders was their get out of jail card.”

  Marija didn’t argue.

  She walked – if one was being pedantic she mostly limped – stiffly along the corridors towards the circular defence works beyond the modern barracks, and gained access to the bridge across the dry moat to the old bastion – Pembroke Fort – where the eleven prisoners of war were being held on the Officer’s Mess level. The soldiers at the gates escorted her inside with wan smiles which she returned.

  “Captain Nathan Zabriski, ma’am,” the handsome, blond young man with an arm in a sling and a battered brow introduced himself, rising from his iron cot. “I’m the senior POW.”

  “I am Marija Calleja,” she’d replied. “Doctor Seiffert has asked me to personally confirm that you and your men are receiving all necessary medical care, and that you are all being treated properly.”

  The airman grimaced and shrugged helplessly, confused and ashamed.

  “Ma’am, most of us would be dead if your Navy hadn’t pulled us out of the sea. I guess we’d all have got ourselves lynched by now if your soldiers weren’t protecting us.”

  Nathan Zabriski’s cot was the nearest the door in the dimly lit – by hurricane lamp – limestone vaulted space. Several of the other prisoners of war had sat up or stood up and a couple were approaching. The guards outside had wanted to accompany Marija into the ‘cell’; she’d politely informed them ‘that will not be necessary’.

  A man said something in Italian.

  Marija half-turned, replied in the heavily accented Italian she’d learned at her Sicilian mother’s knee.

  “What did you say?”

  “What will they do to us, signorina?”

  “They will protect you and feed you and send you home when the time comes,” she informed the man as he emerged from the shadows. “Despite what you did.”

  Several of the prisoners cast their eyes down to the stone floor.

  Marija turned back to Captain Zabriski, speaking again in English.

  “I am to ascertain whether you have any complaints?”

  The airman shook his head.

  “No, ma’am.” The American shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Look... This is kinda awkward, but... Our SOP, sorry, our Standard Operating Procedures authorise us if captured to supply our enemies,” he stopped, knowing intuitively that this was completely the wrong word, “name, rank and service number, and that’s all any of us have given the British. But...”

  Marija didn’t immediately know what to make of his agonized indecision. She said nothing and waited, sensing that the young officer’s angst was shared in equal measure by many of the other men in the room.

  “But you see,” he shrugged, haplessly, “we were told that war had been declared. I mean, we wouldn’t have flown the mission if we hadn’t thought...”

  Marija’s almond eyes widened. Still she said nothing.

  “We were told that British V-Bombers had nuked New York and Charleston, ma’am!”

  There were vehement nods
from all the Americans. The three Italians looked to each other, jabbering questions.

  The Italian who had spoken up before stepped forward. He was a stocky man in his thirties wearing a blue boiler suit, which, presumably, the Navy had supplied him with when they recovered him from the sea three days ago.

  “I am Lieutenant Enzo Maldano of the Regia Aeronautica, signorina,” he announced in Italian. “I too was briefed that there was war; that British cruisers had bombarded Genoa and that British bombers had ‘carpet bombed’ Messina and Naples...”

  Marija frowned.

  “I know nothing of this!” Troubled she left the prisoners – hissing and squabbling amongst themselves as men who believe they have been duped are wont to do – and sought out Margo Seiffert, to whom she recounted what she’d learned.

  Margo listened, initially with weary incredulity.

  Presently, she sighed and reached for the single phone in the Emergency Field Hospital’s ‘office’. She waited for the operator to come on the line.

  “This is Dr Margo Seiffert; I must speak to somebody on Admiral Christopher’s staff immediately.”

  Marija was astonished when this demand was accepted without demur.

  The older woman handed Marija the handset.

  “When somebody comes to the phone tell them what you told me. If they don’t take you seriously or try to fob you off send a messenger to find me. I’m going to talk to those people in the fort!”

  Marija waited, a little nervously.

  The minutes passed, the line clicked and whined.

  “This is the duty desk, Lieutenant Siddall speaking...”

  “Jim?” Marija uttered in surprise.

  “Is that you, Marija?”

  “Yes, why, I don’t...”

  “I was promoted by Admiral Christopher. I work for him now. In political intelligence...”

  Marija remembered belatedly what she was supposed to be doing.

  She recounted her conversation with the POWs. In a rush, more excitedly than perhaps she would have done in the hearing of a stranger, reaching the end of her tale a little breathless.

  “I’ll make sure Admiral Christopher knows about this as soon as possible,” the man at the other end of the line promised.

  Marija was half-asleep, dozing fitfully about two hours later when a gentle hand touched her shoulder. It was Margo, who’d virtually frog-marched her to her bed when she’d got back from ‘interrogating those idiots in the fort’. Margo had ruthlessly pulled rank on Captain Nathan Zabriski and ‘ordered him to spill the beans’.

  “Fucking schoolboys!” Margo complained, her face flushed with exasperation and her eyes alight with righteous anger. “They’ll talk to us but they won’t talk to the fucking British unless we’re there to witness it!”

  It was around midnight Marija guessed when she and Margo were ushered into the POW quarters where they discovered former Staff Sergeant Jim Siddall in a creased new khaki uniform giving Captain Nathan Zabriski the full benefit of his unblinking scrutiny.

  “Right, Captain,” the big man decided sarcastically. “Now that your guardian angels have arrived perhaps you’d like to tell me what you told them earlier this evening?”

  Once he opened his mouth the American airman couldn’t stop talking.

  The story emerged in a flood of words.

  His story began with the chaos of the unscheduled rotation from his normal base at Arnold Air Force Base at Tullahoma, Tennessee, to Barksdale in Louisiana. It continued with an account of how the crews of eight of the 100th Bomb Group B-52s ‘rotated’ to Barksdale AFB on an apparently routine training deployment were quarantined from all other 100th Bomb Group personnel while their aircraft were fitted with new ‘bomb bay kits’ to carry ‘big wire-guided iron bombs’, and new, previously top secret advanced ‘radio-control bombing modules’ were installed in their Stratofortresses. Then the whole base was locked down. DEFCON2 – one step short of war. They’d waited in their ready rooms for two days before the order had come. They’d all been relieved to be given a non-nuclear mission. War had broken out with the Brits, both sides had carried out ‘demonstration’ strikes against each other; New York and Charleston had been hit; US Navy submarines had ‘taken out Glasgow and Liverpool in retaliation. In the North Atlantic British and American carriers were ‘slugging it out’ and SAC – Strategic Air Command – had been tasked to ‘systematically dismantle, dislocate and degrade the enemy’s command and control capabilities’. The B-52s had topped off their tanks over the Arctic. The long flight over the North Pole, Scandinavia, and across the devastated wasteland of Central Europe had been uneventful. ‘Unreal’. It had been a text book operation right up until the moment the first wave commenced the low-level element of the operation seven minutes late.

  “We’d anticipated there’d be a CAP over Malta, at least two, maybe four fighters at altitude at all times. A pre-condition of the operations plan was that the first wave had to go in so hard the CAP got drawn down to sea level before we hit the initial points to start our attack. But because of the FUBAR over the timings the CAP was still at altitude when we got to our IPs. We knew what was going to happen next when we started our bomb runs.” The young officer’s jaw jutted defiantly for a moment. “Nobody broke formation. They don’t call us the ‘Bloody 100th’ for nothing...”

  Chapter 22

  Monday 9th December 1963

  Estuary of the River Douro, Oporto, Portugal

  Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher gazed spellbound at the lights of the city as HMS Talavera wallowed gently in the lee of the breakwater. The waters of the River Douro ran down her sides. Emergency diesel generators worked noisily in the night powering the jury-rigged arc lamps which illuminated both stricken ships. A little over a hundred yards away the fire-scorched flank of the Country class destroyer HMS Devonshire lay in the middle of the channel, moored fore and aft like her smaller, equally wounded consort. Sailors of the Armada Portuguesa and civilian dockyard workers and medical staff worked tirelessly alongside the crews of the two ships, and a flotilla of small craft surrounded them both.

  HMS Plymouth stood guard off the mouth of the estuary, slowly quartering the big seas as the wind gusted up to force nine. Over forty members of the frigate’s crew were still onboard Talavera; and without them the ship would surely have been lost. Over half Talavera’s crew were dead, missing, seriously or walking wounded. Peter Christopher was among this latter category and despite his protests was due to be sent ashore; Talavera and Devonshire were to be patched up and steamed down to Lisbon where dry dock facilities were to be had, a proper assessment of their damage could be carried out and repairs effected. However, before that could happen to Talavera most of her crew had to be taken off and the five hundred pound unexploded bomb lodged against the aft bulkhead of her 4.5 inch magazine had to be either disarmed or removed.

  There were spits of icy cold rain in the wind.

  Captain David Penberthy joined his acting-Executive Officer at the bridge rail. Together they stared into the twinkling lights of the city along the banks of the river a mile or so further inland. Alongside, launches and lighters bumped against Talavera’s misused plates as the badly injured were carefully lowered and carried away.

  “Well,” Talavera’s Captain guffawed, his exhaustion relenting for a moment, “that was a thing, wasn’t it?”

  Neither man had honestly believed they’d reach a safe harbour.

  HMS Plymouth’s tow rope had parted twice; the second time both ships had rolled wildly in the violent cross seas for an hour that had seemed like an eternity before they’d continued at a snail’s pace towards the rocky coast. Sanctuary seemed utterly unreal, dreamlike. To stand again on a deck that wasn’t gyrating, plunging and falling – each time as if it was the last time – was pure bliss. They’d stopped worrying about the unexploded bomb fifty feet from where they stood enjoying the lights of the city of Oporto, long since. If the bloody thing went off, so be it.

 
“I wish I was staying with the ship, sir.”

  “Well, you’re not and that’s that!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the younger man chuckled. The effort hurt his chest, made his jaw ache.

  “Apart from the fact you’re pretty badly knocked about,” David Penberthy went on, wearily affable, “Talavera’s going to be out of commission for a while and chaps like you are badly needed elsewhere in the fleet.” He allowed himself a second, forced guffaw. “You never know, you might even get posted to the Med.”

  Peter Christopher doubted he was going to be that lucky. The way things were going it looked like the World was about to try and blow itself up a second time. Then what would become of his and Marija’s tryst? Had she heard of Talavera’s woes? Was she still safe on Malta? Was anyone, anywhere safe anymore?

  “I’m assigning that scallywag Griffin to you as your personal attendant,” the Captain of HMS Talavera added, clearly pleased with himself. Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin was the ship’s black sheep. The man had been a tower of strength the last three days and his attachment to Talavera’s EWO – Electrical Warfare Officer, who’d taken the rascally Griffin under his wing and miraculously curbed the foolishness that had regularly seen him hauled in front of Captain’s table in every ship he’d ever sailed in until the last year – was well known. When the Skyhawks had made their strafing runs Jack Griffin had probably saved Peter Christopher’s life by rugby tacking him out of his CIC chair to the deck as cannon shells had ripped through the thin aluminium skin of the compartment. “The last thing I need is a trouble-maker on the ship at a time like this.”