by James Philip
Rosa had pulled up a chair and watched Alan Hannay sleeping on her bed. She had cleaned up his head wounds – two superficial but nasty gashes to his scalp, applied a little liniment to his bruised mottled right cheek and persuaded him to take off his shirt, so that she could liberally apply more of the same calming balm to his bruised, literally black and blue, ribs – and afterwards he had needed no encouragement to stretch out on her cot.
“This is awfully good of you,” he had muttered, embarrassed and promptly fallen asleep.
Rosa had lost track of time as she watched over him. He murmured incomprehensibly in his unconsciousness, perhaps reliving the horrors he had witnessed on HMS Talavera’s burning deck. She had wasted no time worrying about the fact that she hardly knew the young naval officer; that they had never actually walked out together, only ever really met in passing and never had the opportunity to privately talk to each other about anything in particular. He had looked at her in that special way from the start. The first time they met she had been a bandaged mess, in plaster and yet he had still looked at her in that very special way. He had always looked at her as if she was special and nobody had ever done that before. She had been slow to reciprocate but by the time she was recovering and able to move – albeit with great clumsiness, difficulty and no little pain – around St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Alan who regularly looked in to say ‘hello’ to Marija, had begun to seek her out. Again, just to say ‘hello’. Now and then they would pass a few minutes together, usually in the company of other women, nurses and patients, in the courtyard before he had to rush off on his latest errand. He had of course, been Admiral Christopher’s flag lieutenant in those days, with practically no time for himself, let alone anybody else. Less than a week ago – although it seemed longer, a scene from another age – in the moments before he drove Peter Christopher to the docks and HMS Talavera left harbour for three days of sea trials he had shyly suggested they might ‘go out for dinner’ on his return. Rosa’s heart had very nearly failed her; by then she had been hopelessly smitten, hanging on his every word, longing for his next passing visit and his every spoken syllable turned her previously cold, lonely world upside down.
Now at last she had Alan Hannay to herself.
The day had turned to evening, and then night had fallen.
It was a clear night and Rosa’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom.
The man stirred and blinked at Rosa.
She had offered him a glass of water and he had drunk deep.
She had taken his hand stroked and squeezed it comfortingly.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “Don’t know what came over me,” he yawned, his thoughts still scrambled. “How long have I...”
“Several hours. You were exhausted,” Rosa cooed.
“I suppose I must have been,” he conceded, attempting to prop himself on an unsteady elbow. He slumped back. “I thought I was dreaming but I wasn’t.”
Rosa was proud that she had never been anything other than proper in her relations before and during her unhappy marriage. She had not used her husband’s obvious physical indifference to her as an excuse to consider, or even contemplate unfaithfulness. She had never so much as flirted with another man. She knew she was attractive to men; the boys had always circled her at school. Yet her husband whom she had convinced herself she loved had, after coldly, mechanically consummating their marriage abjured all physical contact with her for long periods. Until the war he had occasionally come to her bed but after each of those cold-hearted couplings she had felt used, unhappier and less sated than ever; but now her husband was gone and she was a free woman again, if not in the sight of the law then certainly, in her own head.
“I almost lost you,” she said timidly, in a tone so tremulous that had she not formed the words in her own mouth she would not have recognised the stranger’s voice.
“Sorry,” he grinned lopsidedly. “I’ll try to be more careful next time.”
Rosa was in a daze, her thoughts churning.
She stood up and in an ever deepening trance collected the hem of her dress in her hands, lifted it over her hips and over her head in a single dreamy movement. She paused, feeling her face flush with heat. Her mouth was dry and she did not trust herself to speak. She did not dare to meet the man’s gaze as she unhooked her bra and slipped off her knickers.
“Rosa, I...”
She reached for his hand, pressed it to her belly.
“I want this,” she blurted in breathless whisper.
The man had levered himself off the bed, self-consciously discarded his borrowed trousers without daring to look again at the woman and together they had, awkwardly, mindful of each other’s minor fresh in his case, and in her case healing old injuries, eventually and in a shroud of almost suffocating embarrassment arranged themselves uncomfortably, face to face in the narrow cot, he on his left side, she on her right and although touching each other involuntarily somehow, remained impossibly a little apart like the innocents abroad that they both for all the madness of their lives, remained.
“Gosh,” Alan Hannay confessed, “look, I don’t know how to say this, but... You should know I’ve never done this before.”
They had contrived to lie together in the darkness for some minutes barely touching.
“Never?”
“I was a bishop’s son, you see,” he explained lowly. “And until lately most girls of my acquaintance thought I was rather a swot. Putting on the Queen’s uniform rather improved things but then the war came along, and well, what with one thing and another I really didn’t have much time or reason to socialise, or to meet girls. And I well; basically, I never was the sort of chap to take liberties...”
Tentatively, Rosa pressed her face to his, sought out his mouth and kissed him. She was trembling with something akin to terror for moment, shocked that she could be acting so brazenly but all those fears and doubts faded in an instant.
He kissed her back, as uncertainly, their lips pressing, open together.
Her mouth was soft, warm, wet.
Rosa tried to draw him against her but he flinched, could not suppress a groan.
“Sorry,” he moaned, “I don’t remember much about it but the Master at Arms said I fell off the dashed stern house quite early in the battle. I think I probably cracked a rib.”
“You fell off?” Rosa demanded hoarsely in horror.
Alan Hannay realised that he had stopped feeling like an idiot.
“Well, now that I think about it I think I was more ‘blown off’. I landed on a pile of floats, cork-filled things that had just been spread all over the deck by a shell that must have gone straight through the stern without going off...”
Rosa shut his mouth with a new, gently lingering kiss that went on and on and on until the lovers had no choice but to come up, gasping for air as if they had been holding their breath under water for several minutes. Her fingers cautiously roved his misused torso, and then hesitantly, his loins. His hands responded, moving wonderingly over her breasts and belly but were strangely shy of delving lower until she guided his fingers between her thighs. Thereafter, things happened of their own accord. He seemed impossibly hard as she sought to draw him inside her. Momentarily, it seemed neither he nor she could couple. She squirmed onto her back and he entered her, sank inside her and she held him.
Their pains went away.
Later they lay together beneath the sheets, melded as one, breathing the same breaths, safe from the nightmare of a war which had so nearly torn them apart before they had ever had a chance to discover what was meant to be.
And then they slept the sleep of the young and the pure of heart and the just.
Chapter 48
05:49 Hours (Local)
Sunday 5th April 1964
Mehrabad Air Base, Tehran, Iran
“Stop looking at your bloody watches, boys!” Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik, the commanding officer of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment barked with jovial brutality. A
lready the stars twinkling between the drifting clouds of smoke were beginning to wink out; soon the pre-dawn twilight would lighten the darkened airfield. It would not have been lost on the men manning the forward defence line that their commanding officer had walked arrogantly across nearly a hundred metres of completely open ground – as if he personally ‘owned’ every millimetre of those one hundred metres - to join them in their shallow entrenchments. A show of bravado went a long way even with seasoned regulars; officers who failed to, or were unwilling to lead their men from the front had always been a waste of space in the Red Army.
Kurochnik was a solidly build man who shrugged off the onset of early middle age with the rugged pugnacity that he commanded his elite paratroopers. He had trained the men around him harshly, mercilessly but the ferocity of his training regime was the reason most of the men around him were still alive. Every one of his veteran troopers was a match for five or ten of the lazy, indolent amateurs the Iranian Army had clumsily and incompetently thrown at them. It was only in the last couple of hours that the enemy had given any real indication of an understanding of the fundamental principles of manuever and concentration and belatedly brought up armour to support his conscript infantrymen.
Everybody around Kurochnik instinctively ducked at the whistling passage of a 105-millimetre round from the long gun of one of the Iranian’s British supplied Centurion tanks. The shell slammed into the control tower five hundred metres to his right.
“Fucking idiots!” He snorted contemptuously. If the numerically superior Iranian forces massing in the buildings beyond the southern fence of the air base had known what they were doing they would have started lobbing mortars into his positions by now. What was the point of bringing up tanks if your infantry commander had still not taken his thumb out of his arse? If the enemy had the balls to attack now they would lose a lot of men but they would quickly over run his lightly held outer perimeter. Konstantin Kurochnik had no respect for enemies who were afraid to die.
Ten minutes ago his men had put a shoulder-launched rocket propelled anti-tank round into the turret of a Centurion that had been so unwise as to expose itself. The explosion had been satisfyingly loud and bright in the night but the tank had been undamaged and backed into dead ground a minute later.
Centurions were bastards to take out!
If he had learned anything that night it was that Centurions were two times as tough as they had any right to be!
At a guess twice as hard to knock out as a standard T-62.
He had read the reports about the way the British had fought their Centurions back in the Korean War; not really believed what he was reading. But now he had actually seen a Centurion in anger with his own eyes. How the fuck could a twenty year old design handled by such imbeciles still be so fucking hard to knock out?
Another 105-millimetre round whistled past to harmlessly demolish another section of the abandoned control tower.
“In eight minutes!” Kurochnik yelled. “At zero-five-five-eight hours shoot your last RPGs and empty your mags into the enemy lines, throw out a screen of smoke grenades and run like fuck through the inner perimeter line and don’t stop running until you reach the pick-up point!” He took another breath. “Any questions, boys?”
There were no questions.
Kurochnik waited a few seconds before climbing out of the trench and marching, as upright as if he was on parade in Red Square on May Day towards the rear.
His men did not know how hot this place was going to get in a little over a couple of hours time. But his boys were nobody’s fools; they guessed that time was running out.
A single bullet pinged on a slab of nearby tarmac.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik did not break step.
Chapter 49
03:58 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
Bomb Shelter No.3, Floriana Bastion, Malta
The bunker was cool, dank and stank of sweat and worse. Electric lights had been hurriedly installed and the faint stink of a diesel generator chugging wearily in the darkness outside the entrance seeped into the depths of the old, half-forgotten bomb shelter reactivated less than twelve hours ago to accommodate sleeping quarters and additional ‘secure’ working spaces for the joint Anglo-American operations staff set up by Air Vice-Marshal French and his United States Navy counterpart Vice-Admiral Clarey.
The British had started excavating the sections of the nearby Lascardis War Rooms complex below Valletta which had been collapsed by the B-52 strike in December a couple of months ago; mainly to recover the bodies of the dead rather than in an attempt to bring the warren of tunnels and caverns back into use. In the mean time other long neglected and shut up bomb shelters had been surveyed and readied in case of need. Sections of Bomb Shelter No. 3 had been condemned just after the 1945 war and permanently closed off with concrete plugs; but the caves remaining were still capable of housing and sheltering – albeit for brief periods – several hundred people.
“You must rest, husband,” Marija decided.
Peter Christopher was too exhausted to argue; even had he been of a mood to argue with his wife. In his as yet short married life he had already worked out that he would not be arguing overmuch with Marija, not now, not ever, about anything in particular or general.
Finding a gloomy, private corner Marija had laid one of the blankets they had been handed at the entrance to the shelter on the rock floor. Stiffly, she had lowered herself into a sitting position with her back to the wall. She patted her lap and her husband obediently lay down so that she could cradle his sore head. Despite the discomfort of the uneven floor he had slept almost immediately, unaware of the blankets spread over him by women from the section of WRENS in charge of the shelter.
Marija watched over her husband.
She felt a little guilty abandoning her friends in Mdina. Also, for so meekly surrendering St Catherine’s Hospital to the tender mercies of the Military Administration; Margo would never have run away or surrendered anything but she was not Margo; any more than she was just a younger replica of her own Mama, whom she loved dearly and fondly respected despite her old-fashioned, quirky and stiflingly limited perspective on the outside World. Margo had had big dreams; her mother no ambitions beyond her immediate family, her husband and her children. Although first and foremost Marija planned to be a good wife and mother; she wanted to live her own life and when she had lived that life for however long it lasted in this changed new post-cataclysm World, she hoped to have as few regrets and as few unanswered questions as possible. Wherever Peter went, she would follow.
Marija distractedly stroked her husband’s head, slowly losing herself in her tiredness and her thoughts.
“Excuse me, Mrs Calleja-Christopher.”
Marija realised she must have dropped off to sleep.
She looked up into the youthful face of a man who seemed very familiar. It irked her not to be able to immediately put a name to his face. He had spoken in Maltese, quietly, respectfully and a little sheepishly.
“Forgive me. We met once or twice when you were leading the Women of Malta protests outside the gates to Manoel Island last year,” the man who was about her own age explained. “You probably don’t remember me...”
“Mr Boffa,” Marija recollected, without confidence. “Paul, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the man agreed with relief. He squatted down so that his eyes were on a level with Marija’s. “I was honoured to be permitted inside the Cathedral at your wedding. Sir Julian arranged for me to have a pass on account of my being the editor of The Times of Malta. Well, the temporary editor, the board hasn’t actually met to confirm my post or anything very much at all really this year. After the bombing raid in December some colleagues and I decided to try to keep the paper in print, and your good friend the late Lieutenant Siddall pulled strings to get us back into production soon after Sir Julian arrived in Malta. You wrote a fortnightly diary about the Women of Malta for my predecessor as editor until the
bombing in December but I was only a stringer in those days...”
The visitor realised he was talking too much and shut up.
Marija waved him to sit near her on the floor. She also put her finger to her lips and glanced down at her fitfully sleeping husband.
“A stringer?” She asked in a whisper.
“I was paid per column inch of script that appeared in the paper. I wasn’t even a full-time journalist in those days...”
“Oh,” Marija murmured. She looked down at her sleeping husband’s face. “I don’t think my brave husband has slept for at least two days,” she explained, proudly, tenderly stroking his face.
“This is awkward,” the other man confessed. “I feel like I am intruding...”
Marija studied Paul Boffa. The stubble on his young chin was more down than beard. Like her he was a Maltese native who had seen far too much grief and suffering in his as yet half-lived life. They were both of the generation who might yet hold the future of their home islands in their hands.
“I did not know that my father-in-law,” she involuntarily crossed herself at mention of her husband’s slain father, “was involved in helping your paper. But,” she smiled sadly, “I should not be surprised. I read the story you printed about my brother Samuel being an innocent pawn in that dreadful business with the sinking of HMS Torquay. I wondered at the time if Sir Julian was behind that.”
“All the rumours about your brother must have been horrible for you, Mrs...”
“Please. We are hiding in a bomb shelter and our islands are in ruins around us. I am Marija. May I call you Paul?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I would be...” Paul Boffa was about to say that he would be ‘honoured’ to call her Marija. He thought better of it at the last moment, perhaps realising that she would tease him for his cupidity. This he knew because her kind smile told him she saw right through him. “Air Vice-Marshal French’s information officer said it would be all right if I talked to you and Commander Christopher,” the flustered journalist went on. “But this obviously isn’t a good time...”