by James Philip
It was not asked with any edge. From what Alan Hannay had heard about the Admiral’s son the man was exactly what he gave every appearance of being, a decent, straight down the line sort of fellow. He had a reputation of being something of a technical wizard, too, except without the bookishness of many of the new ‘scientific officers’.
“Very tiring sometimes, sir,” he replied diplomatically.
“Can I ask you an odd question?”
“By all means ask, sir.”
Peter Christopher hesitated, almost thought better of it, and then asked the question anyway.
“What’s the real story about Sam Calleja?”
The directness of it knocked the wind out of the younger man’s sails. His step faltered and he had to scramble to catch up with HMS Talavera’s commanding officer.
“I’m not with you, sir?”
“No? HMS Torquay is sabotaged after being floated out of a dock where Samuel Calleja worked as a senior yard foreman the day after the man goes missing, a Redcap working for the Admiral gets blown up trying to get into Samuel Calleja’s workshop, there’s some kind of island-wide manhunt and five terrorists are cornered and killed, or commit suicide, I don’t know which. In the meantime I get the oddest visit from Dr Seiffert; and my father goes out of his way to tell me it is all a devilish plot that ‘incidentally’ implicated the Calleja family in the activities of this bloody Red Dawn movement, whatever that is, and Marija Calleja,” he realised he was beginning rant and his voice was getting loud as they marched down the narrow streets back to the gate to the Citadel. “And Marija, whom I’d hoped to be the first person I saw when I finally came ashore in Malta, suddenly seems to be avoiding me like I’ve got leprosy!”
Alan Hannay understood that there was no right way to respond.
“I don’t know the truth of the Samuel Calleja imbroglio, sir,” he admitted. “Other, that is, than I am sure that whatever was going on had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of his family. The man’s wife, Rosa, poor woman, was very nearly killed in the blast that did for Jim Siddall.”
“You knew Lieutenant Siddall?”
“Yes, sir. He was a good man. Salt of the earth. He was very protective of Marija and her family during the tenure of Sir Julian’s predecessor on the archipelago when things weren’t so good for her and her younger brother, Joe. Marija was terribly upset when he was killed.”
“Oh, right. I see. They weren’t...”
“They were just friends, sir. Jim Siddall has a wife back in England,” Alan Hannay added as if to remove all doubt. “As to your earlier questions. Sir Julian may, or may not, have finessed the Times of Malta, and other organs of public information to lighten the load being borne by the Calleja family, but the wild rumours that were in circulation were, in my humble opinion, no more than that. Just wild rumours.”
Peter Christopher breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
“This must all be hellish for Marija and her sister-in-law?”
“Yes, sir. Rosa Calleja was transferred to the hospital here in the Citadel at Sir Julian’s request to ensure her privacy. I understand that Marija spends every free moment with her.” He seized his opening to close the debate: “Which might go a long way to explaining Miss Calleja’s apparent aloofness since your arrival, sir.”
Alan Hannay was surprised and a little unnerved when the tall son of his all powerful master threw him a hard, quizzical look that warned him in no uncertain terms not to ‘try to pull the other one’ again. It was a little disconcerting; the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant was entirely unaccustomed to being seen through so effortlessly.
“No, that’s probably not the truth and nothing but the truth, sir,” he said quickly.
A few minutes later Alan Hannay was immensely relieved to discover proof positive that his companion did not hold this minor obfuscation against him. As their ancient staff car rolled and jolted down the hill back towards Valletta Peter Christopher turned to him and asked, without preamble: “Why did you really want to get me alone, Lieutenant Hannay?”
“Er, I don’t...”
“You are the one man on the island who can click his fingers and make any kind of charabanc known to man materialise out of thin air. You don’t need to ask the acting-captain of a beaten up old destroyer for a lift? You certainly don’t have to chase after him outside HQ unless, of course, you don’t want anybody else overhearing what you have to say to me?”
The bearded petty officer behind the wheel of the car chortled like a bear with the choice of three full porridge bowls for breakfast.
“Don’t mind Petty Officer Griffin,” Peter Christopher smiled. “Griffin and the Talavera’s Master at Arms, Mr McCann, don’t like me going anywhere in public on my own in case the streets are full of assassins waiting to add the C-in-C’s son’s scalp to their totem poles. I managed to escape their ‘protective clutches’ the other day but they haven’t let me get away with it again since.”
“Oh, I see. That’s really quite touching actually,” Alan Hannay granted, unusually perturbed by the other man’s frankness. “Oh, I feel very foolish now, sir.”
Peter Christopher was silent.
“The thing is,” his father’s flag lieutenant blurted in a rush, “I’ve got a little bit pigeon-holed on ‘the staff’ and I was hoping somebody – a captain such as yourself, for example - would take pity on me and request my services in a more ‘active’ role?”
Chapter 42
Monday 3rd February 1964
HMS Dreadnought, 61 Miles ESE of the Koufonisi Islands, Libyan Sea
There was little spare space on a submarine at the best of times. HMS Dreadnought only had berths for seventy of her one hundred and thirteen officers and men, many of whom were expected to ‘hot bunk’. The only remotely private quarters on the boat were the officer’s ‘state rooms’; pokey little compartments not for the claustrophobically inclined. The only way that Simon Collingwood could accommodate the twenty-two refugees – he had only been authorised to bring twenty onboard – he had rescued was to surrender his officers’ cabins to the newcomers and turn the Wardroom into a communal officers’ hot-berthing space. His cabin was now the temporary home of two young women and the three small children in their care.
“God help us if we have to run silent, sir,” Max Forton, his irrepressible Executive officer guffawed as the two men stood over the plot, considering their options.
“Well, at least we’ve stopped the kids running around the control room,” his commanding officer commiserated. No Executive Officer liked having his boat transformed into a crèche any more than any rational captain liked having children or especially, women, on his vessel. Simon Collingwood was a traditionalist and the very idea of women onboard was anathema. “We’re going to run short of provisions several days earlier than expected. As for routine medical supplies, they’re practically exhausted now.”
“We could make Limassol in two days, sir?”
“I don’t want to be off station that long.” He did not want to be ‘off station’ at all. Taking on board the refugees had been a gamble; if they could provide significant new information about the situation on land it would be worth it, if not, he would have recklessly impaired the fighting efficiency and endurance of this command to no good purpose.
Simon Collingwood still remembered the faces of the men, women and children he had been ordered to expel from the protective steel cocoon of the Dreadnought’s pressure hull on the morning after the October War. There had been no more strikes like the giant airburst over Morecombe Bay – the closest strike to where Dreadnought had been fitting out in the graving dock at Barrow-in-Furness – but he had not known the war was over at the time. This time around he was not going to let down the two old men, seven women and thirteen children, several no more than babes in arms, he had taken under his protection. His conscience simply would not let him do it a second time.
The refugees, including the older children, were still being interviewe
d. Everything they learned was being carefully distilled into a series of flash communications with Malta.
“I’d guess we are sixty to seventy miles east of the Second Squadron’s picket line,” Max Forton speculated, prodding the plot with a pencil.
The Amphion class conventional diesel-electric submarines of the 2nd Submarine Squadron based at Malta ought to be in position by now. Their task was to act as a tripwire if any of the heavy unites sighted by the Dreadnought, or by earlier aerial reconnaissance attempted to approach the Maltese Archipelago.
The A class boats incorporated many of the lessons learned in World War II and included innovations stolen from later Kriegsmarine U-boats. In 1945 the Germans had led the World in submarine design; if the Germans had got enough of their revolutionary new boats into the North Atlantic in time the war might not have ended the way it did. However, the Amphions, in common with many post-Second War designs were the end result of too many compromises. The A class was old technology poorly applied, they had to spend far too much time on the surface recharging their batteries and their underwater performance left them horribly vulnerable to modern anti-submarine tactics. Nevertheless, before the advent of the advanced new Oberon and Porpoise class conventional boats Simon Collingwood had once dreamed of commanding one of the old Amphions, or another of the obsolete boats of her general type and specification, most of his career. Before the October War even that had seemed like an impossible dream.
“We’ll avoid getting much closer. I suspect we’ll hear or see them long before they know we’ve been and gone,” the captain of the most advanced submarine in any navy in the World outside of the United States Navy declared smugly. “But we won’t tempt providence.”
“Surface contact bearing zero-six-zero degrees. Many screws but very distant.”
Here in the Libyan Sea the water was over ten thousand feet deep. There were no underwater mountains, no shoaling shores, reefs or sandbanks to clutter and distort, bend or refract sound waves. Big ships advertised their presence many, many miles away. The only things that stopped sound travelling tens, perhaps, scores or hundreds of miles were minor fluctuations in temperature and salinity levels in the water column. The Mediterranean was a notoriously ‘salty’ sea, one of the few things going for a submariner in its relatively narrow, congested confines.
Simon Collingwood checked the depth reading.
“Bring the boat up to one-seven-five feet if you please, Number One.”
At the new depth they would run silent, listen again and establish if the source of the sound was approaching, or moving away. If the listening conditions were better at the lesser depth they would hold at that level, otherwise they would drop back down again into the blackness of the deep. Dreadnought could play this game for weeks on end; the Amphions picketing along their tripwire in the West had no such option. They had to spend several hours surfaced every day or day-and-a-half, or their crews would suffocate and their batteries would run flat.
The surface contact was louder, nearer at a depth of one hundred and seventy-five feet but still relatively distant; at least ten miles away. The problem was that the background noise of many propellers could easily be masking the presence of vessels steaming between Dreadnought’s ultra-sensitive hydrophones and the main concentration of whatever group or convoy of ships was slowly passing from the south-east to the north-west.
A dull, faraway thunder peeled through the depths.
“Periscope depth!” Simon Collingwood wanted to have a look at what was going on before he contemplated his tactical options. There was nothing quite like the human eye for quickly, accurately, viscerally assessing a situation. “Would somebody please ask our passengers to be very, very quiet until further notice!”
This would be a less than straightforward business; hardly any of the ‘passengers’ spoke English. Thus far most of the interrogation – actually very gentle interviewing over mugs of hot chocolate, biscuits, dried fruits, and sweets for the kids that members of the crew had eagerly donated from their personal stashes – had been conducted in halting conversational French, pigeon Cypriot, snatches of demotic Greek that a couple of the officers recollected from their prep school days, and literally, by drawing cartoons and by the liberal employment of sign language. The resourcefulness and patience of the average Royal Navy officer and rating was practically limitless when confronted by frightened women and children whose safety had been entrusted to their tender mercies.
The small, dirty tramp steamer was trailing a plume of black smoke from her single, overly high, stack. A blunt stem, a raised fo’c’sle and transom deck, pole masts fore and aft of the low, blocky amidships bridge superstructure, rust streaked and relatively high in the water, the merchantman wallowed in the short five to six feet high waves piled up by the gusting westerly winds. Now and then white spume rose over her forepeak and she was hidden from sight as either the periscope or her hull fell into a trough in the seas.
The steamer was less than a mile away.
“Down periscope! Make our depth one hundred feet!” He reported what he had seen to the control room. “Two to three thousand ton tramp steamer. No flags. Heading north, making a lot of smoke but not exactly pouring it on. She couldn’t have been making more than seven or eight knots. The sea state is deteriorating. No other surface contacts in sight.”
Max Forton pursed his lips.
They had all felt the boat’s smooth, undisturbed progress though the water alter as she had hovered at periscope depth, her motion mildly perturbed by the rising seas above.
“The last forecast we received from Malta warned that a gale was going to blow up sometime in the next couple of days, Skipper.”
Simon Collingwood nodded.
North-westerly force six building to force eight. By Atlantic standards a short-lived minor blow that would be over in two or three days. A little unseasonal for this time of year. The seasons and the weather had been messed up since the war. In any event, winter in the Eastern Mediterranean was a pussy cat in comparison with the beast it often was in less temperate zones.
“What are the other contacts doing?” He demanded.
“Speed and course unchanged, sir. Range twenty miles plus!”
The commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought frowned in concentration.
If the surface contacts were the Admiral Kutuzov and her escorts; why were their movements so apparently random?
If that was the Kutuzov group on the plot why had they let a slow, helpless tramp steamer go about her business unmolested?
Why was the Kutuzov leading her screen towards the shelter of Crete on account of the sort of stormy weather any Royal Navy destroyer captain would regard as moderately invigorating but nothing remotely worthy of more than a brief passing note in his log?
The galling thing was that he was as sure as he could be – it was not as if any other task forces had sailed over or around him in the last couple of days – that the distant surface contacts had to be the Kutuzov group; and he had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Again the faraway drum roll of detonations kissed Dreadnought’s cold steel sides. Had the killers on the Kutuzov stumbled across another hapless victim somewhere over the horizon? If so, how had that lumbering merchantman steaming only a few miles away escaped a similar fate?
Was this what it was going to be like from now on?
Fighting an enemy who obeyed none of the normal rites and practices of twentieth century warfare?
Chapter 43
Tuesday 4th February 1964
St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina
Marija Calleja felt groggy, her head hurt and she was utterly humiliated. Her ‘sister’, Rosa, had tried to comfort her, and Margo was clucking at her like her Mama used to when she was a teenager.
“How many fingers?” The Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women asked. Again!
“Two!” Marija retorted churlishly. “The same number as before.”
Rosa
Calleja, her brother’s widow squeezed her hand. Yesterday they had unwrapped the bandages around Rosa’s head. Patches of her skull had been shaved and her healing wounds, mercifully mostly superficial, and sutures were crusty and ugly looking. Her injured right eye was still half closed but that she retained vision in the eye, - blurred still - was a minor miracle and the specialist from the clinic at Msida had sounded confident when he declared she would gradually recover ‘more or less full function’, eventually. Of the curvaceous, twinkle-eyed bride in the pictures of her wedding day three years ago there was little sign. Her dislocated left shoulder was only now regaining movement, and her right foot and lower leg was solidly encased in a big, clunking cast. Moving from one chair to another, just standing up was an exercise fraught with perils.
Yesterday afternoon Marija had been helping her sister to her feet when Rosa had happened to glance out of first floor window of the treatment room.
‘That’s him!’ Rosa had declaimed hoarsely.
Marija, worried that what she had actually heard was a cry of pain did not immediately register Rosa’s meaning, or her urgency. She was focused on supporting her sister in case she stumbled; nothing else really mattered for a moment. It was only when she was confident that Rosa was steady, safe, that she asked: ‘Who?’
‘The Admiral’s son!’
Marija had blinked uncomprehendingly at the other woman.
‘Peter!’ Rosa had gesticulated painfully, jabbing an arm towards the window. A thick lace drape was hung across the old tall window for the sake of the patients’ modesty. ‘Your Peter!’
‘Peter Christopher is not my anything, sister,’ Marija had protested before she finally made sense of what her sister-in-law had actually said to her. ‘Where is Peter?’ She had belatedly inquired, sudden consternation furrowing her brow.