The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

  Captain Nicholas Davey, the crown of his head swathed in thick crepe bandages and his left arm in a sling did his best to straighten his generously proportioned, somewhat bruised frame, into a semblance of naval good order. He threw a parody of a salute; it was the best he could manage while somehow contriving to keep a relatively straight face as his old friend stood at the top of the gangway like an aging Greek god in his immaculate uniform.

  “Granted, sir!”

  Julian Christopher looked about him at the wreckage and the twisted metal, the wooden deck planking scorched by fire. The ship stank of aviation fuel, a lot of it only half-burnt.

  He sniffed, maintained the severe severity of high command for a little longer.

  “Quiet a mess,” he observed tartly.

  The side party waited with baited breath.

  Suddenly the Commander-in-Chief’s handsome tanned face broke into a smile and his eyes glistened with mischief and relief.

  “While I was listening to the Enterprise’s radio traffic during the worst of the fire there were a couple of times,” he declared loudly, “that I thought you and the boy were gonners, Nick!”

  Captain Nicholas Davey had raced big – ocean-going America’s cup contenders - and countless smaller yachts with Julian Christopher before the 1945 war; they had raced hard and partied harder, and later they had served together many times in these very waters. The last time they had been together in Malta he had been his old friend’s second-in-command.

  “Yes, well,” the portly commanding officer of HMS Scorpion bemoaned, his face flushing with good humour, “needs must, sir.”

  “What you did was heroic, Nick,” Julian Christopher said much more loudly than he needed. “Bloody heroic!” He swung around and let his eye fall randomly on the men around him. “Bloody heroic, I say! There aren’t enough bloody medals in the World for you and your men!” The ship was half-wrecked and it was astonishing that there had been no deaths on either HMS Scorpion or on HMS Talavera during the Hellish hours they fought to pump water into the USS Enterprise’s fire-ravaged stern. Both destroyers had had several men badly injured; but nobody was on the critical list which was proof positive that miracles happen sometimes. “Finest traditions of the Service! The finest bloody traditions!”

  The Commander-in-Chief was about to call for three cheers when he, the Captain of HMS Scorpion, and everybody else on the deck of the destroyer, and on the dockside and on the high ground flanking both sides of French Creek were distracted by a commotion on the quay alongside HMS Talavera.

  “Ah,” Captain Nicholas Davey sighed, “that will be that boy of yours making a damn fool of himself, no doubt.” The words were said with a mellow, brotherly indulgence that belied their apparent harshness. Without a word both men stepped to the head of the gangway to get a better view.

  “Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”

  “Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”

  “Hip! Hip! HURRAH!”

  It seemed as if every member of HMS Talavera’s crew – decked out in unreasonably good order considering the parlous state of the ship around them – was lining her starboard rail. Not that much of her starboard rail survived; many men were leaning precariously into space to get an unobstructed view of the scene on the quay. A hundred caps were raised in the air in unison; on shore there was more cheering and then, wild clapping.

  At the foot of HMS Talavera’s gangway Marija Calleja was in her beau’s arms, clinging onto his neck, her feet dangling clear of the concrete dock while the couple slowly turned circles.

  Julian Christopher saw that his son’s cap had fallen to the ground.

  The young couple were briefly so caught up in the moment that they completely forgot about the hundreds of watching eyes; but because they were both sensible, organised, rather conventional young people, as soon as they realised that they were making a spectacle of themselves they felt a little foolish and made a half-hearted attempted to retrieve the situation.

  Peter Christopher carefully returned his fiancée’s feet to terra firma.

  “I got a little carried away,” he muttered, blushing deeply. “I didn’t hurt you, lifting you off your feet that way?”

  “No,” Marija giggled, loving the closeness of him, wanting him to pick her up again and yet knowing that would probably have to wait for another time, another place; another place much more private that this one. “I am not a wallflower. I will not break,” she said awkwardly. And hissed: “Everybody is looking, Peter!”

  The man grinned, holding the woman a little apart from himself.

  Decorum! Stop mauling the poor girl in front of all these people, man!

  Oh, no, my father will be watching this...

  The last time he had seen the woman he loved – the woman he had loved since he was a spotty adolescent, half a lifetime ago – she had been in a hospital bed with a fat lip, two black eyes, and with a freshly stitched wound in her left eyebrow. The swelling had gone down. Make up, he assumed, had covered up the darkness around her eyes which was all the more reason not to maul her! Not right now.

  “You look much recovered?” He stammered.

  “Margo spent forever making me presentable this morning,” the love of Peter Christopher’s life confessed. “But I am okay. Really I am.”

  “Just don’t try to run again until you are fully healed up,” Peter quipped, wondering as he said it if it was the wrong thing to say. Less than a week ago Marija had fallen – literally on her face - because she was trying to attract his attention, call to him, catch up with him as he strode down the narrow cobbled streets of the Mdina Citadel in conversation with Lieutenant Hannay. She had been so agitated that she had tried to run after him. Which was fine except for the fact the last time she had run anywhere was in 1942 when she was five-and-a-half years old. In between then and now she had spent her childhood and teenage years in hospitals slowly, painfully being put together after being crushed in the rubble of a collapsed bomb shelter in Birgu. Last week she had briefly forgotten she couldn’t run. Or rather, after she had run five or six steps she had remembered she couldn’t run, and straight away fallen flat on her face. “Sorry, silly thing to say...”

  Marija raised her right hand and touched his lips with her finger tips.

  Such a sweet man!

  Suddenly, they both forgot all about the watching eyes.

  Peter bent his head to hers, she clasped her hands behind his neck melded into his arms and again, her feet left the ground. This time they kissed. A first, exploratory kiss before they stopped caring about where they were, who was looking, or even who they were until after an eternity, they had no option but to come up for air.

  “Well,” Margo Seiffert declared a little later as she approached Julian Christopher and the heavily bandaged inordinately cheerful, somewhat portly man standing on the dock beside HMS Scorpion’s blackened bridge, “I thought that went better than expected!”

  “Yes,” the proud father murmured ruefully. “I think we can say that the young lovers were, er, glad to see each other again.” The Commander-in-Chief grimaced and introduced the Captain ‘D’ of the 7th Destroyer Squadron. “Margo, his is Nick Davey, Peter’s squadron commander,” he guffawed, “Nick, this is Surgeon Commander Margo Seiffert, formerly of the United States Navy but soon to be Medical Director of the Malta Defence Force.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Captain Davey.” Hands were shaken. Margo cast a peeved look at Julian Christopher. “As to the MDF thing, you know full well that I haven’t decided yet!”

  Now that the crowds had cleared the air was filled with the sound of the regular gushing, spewing rhythm of the pumps that were keeping the two damaged destroyers afloat while preparations were finalised to transfer them into dry docks on the other side of French Creek the following morning.

  A slim young lieutenant approached the group, came to attention, saluted the C-in-C and waited respectfully to be asked what he wanted.

  “I hear you acquitted yourself with distinction, Hannay?” The
great man smiled, returning his former flag lieutenant’s salute. “Welcome to the real Navy.”

  A little over a week ago Alan Hannay had had what most of his peers regarded as the cushiest job in the whole Mediterranean Theatre of Operations. He had been Julian Christopher’s bagman, the guardian of his diary, the man who organised his life, basically. Nobody got in to speak with the C-in-C without getting past him, and whatever he asked for he got. For the last two months he had spoken with the C-in-C’s voice, and he could easily have lived the rest of his career safely on the staff, far away from the shooting. Julian Christopher had known this but he had done nothing to stop Alan Hannay sailing towards the sound of gunfire.

  “Ah,” the young officer’s Squadron Commander recollected, “you must be ‘that blasted young rogue Hannay’ the Captain of the Resurgent wanted me to place in irons the morning we sailed out of Sliema Creek?”

  Alan Hannay looked sheepish.

  “Talavera was rather short of a longish list of essential supplies, sir.”

  Nicholas Davey was laughing softly under his breath.

  HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer did not immediately realise as much.

  “I probably bent a few Regs, sir. Sorry, I...”

  Both his Commander-in-Chief and Captain ‘D’ exploded with laughter.

  “Ah, I see,” Alan Hannay mouthed, feeling even more idiotic than before.

  Captain Nicholas Davey waved at the two battered destroyers moored alongside Parlatorio Wharf.

  “I suspect that your particular acquisitive skills will come in very handy over the next few weeks, Lieutenant Hannay. But be a good chap; try not to be so bloody obvious in your circumvention of the Regs in future.”

  Alan Hannay finally caught the mood of the small gathering.

  “Right ho, sir. We wouldn’t want any word of any irregularities coming to the ears of the Commander-in-Chief?”

  Julian Christopher, the Captain of HMS Scorpion and the newly designated Medical Director of the nascent Malta Defence Force watched the younger man hurry back to his ship.

  “I still don’t understand why you let that boy go?” Margo queried in the descending quietness of the late afternoon. “He might only have been your Flag Lieutenant for a couple of months but he was already a legend?”

  The three of them had focussed on the great, brooding hulk of the USS Enterprise being made secure ahead of the Cunard liner RMS Sylvannia at what had been the old passenger terminal on the Floriana - Valletta side of the Grand Harbour.

  “If I hadn’t let him go he had only have stowed away on Talavera,” Julian Christopher chortled.

  “I hear things will speed up a gear or two in the dockyards now the first batch of chaps from the old country has arrived?” Nick Davey asked idly.

  “Assuming the locals can be persuaded not to down tools tomorrow morning!”

  “Is that likely, Julian?”

  Margo Seiffert was struck by the easy informality of the two men when they were out of earshot of strangers, interlopers. Two old friends reunited in a good war, just like old times.

  “We shall see, Nick. We shall see.”

  Margo decided it was time to take a professional interest in Captain ‘D’.

  “How soon do you plan to have your injuries properly assessed, Captain Davey?”

  “I’m fine. The old collar bone is a bit creaky on the left wing. Oh, and I got a tad scorched when a limp of helicopter dropped onto the side of the bridge. Think I might have knocked my ribs in all the commotion. But I’m fine, dear lady. I’ve had much worse knocks playing rugger for the Navy...”

  “Dear lady?”

  “Forgive me, a lapse of the tongue. Forgive any discourtesy, none was intended...”

  Margo gave him a hard, unblinking look.

  “Er,” Nick Davey sighed, knowing when he had met his match. “Perhaps, the knock on the head was harder than it seemed at the time.” He forced a grimace. “I shall get myself a jolly good looking over in the morning. Just as soon as the old girl,” he flicked a look over his shoulder at his ship, “is safely tied up in dry dock.”

  Realising this was the best offer she was going to get Margo relented, made her excuses and departed.

  “My, what an extraordinary woman!” Nick Davey whistled.

  “Yes, indeed,” his old friend concurred.

  The two men were silent awhile.

  “Will you come on board for a snifter, Julian?”

  “Another time, Nick.”

  There was another pause, a silence that threatened to linger.

  “I thought it was all up for us last week,” the shorter, plumper man admitted. “Taking Scorpion and Talavera under the Enterprise’s stern was the only thing I could think of to take everybody’s minds off what was probably coming next. Goodness knows what it must have been like being here watching the mushroom clouds in the distance. Do we have any idea why there wasn’t a second strike?”

  “None at all.”

  “And we’re,” Captain ‘D’ of the 7th Destroyer Squadron suspected he was overstepping the bounds of his old, and hugely valued friendship with his Commander-in-Chief. He went on, trying not to push the boundaries of long acquaintance beyond breaking point. “And we’re, keeping our powder dry on the Arc Light front for the time being?”

  “Yes,” Julian Christopher retorted flatly. “Bone dry, old man.”

  Chapter 7

  Tuesday 11th February 1964

  Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire

  Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith rose to her feet when her guests were ushered into the East Library. There were the normal understated bows and then everybody sat down in the Queen Ann chairs arranged around the low gilded table placed slightly off centre towards the rear of the room where, if she cared so to do, the Queen could easily gaze out across the drab, wintery landscaped Oxfordshire countryside.

  Margaret Thatcher recollected how nervously awed she had been the first time she had made her monarch’s acquaintance. That had been the strangest day of her life, the day she discovered her true infatuation with Julian Christopher, the day of the murderous bombing attack on Balmoral Castle and its surreal aftermath in which she, her friend from that day onwards, Pat – now Lady Patricia – Harding-Grayson, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, and the Queen had organised an emergency field casualty clearing station while the late, genuinely lamented in her heart, Edward Heath had taken personal command of the surviving members of Her Majesty’s bodyguard...

  “I shall be mother today,” the Queen announced.

  “How is Prince Philip, Ma’am?”

  His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, had very nearly lost his legs in the attack on Balmoral. His recovery from his injuries was slow and fraught with complications.

  “Some days better than others. They say it will be at least another month before we can risk flying him south. The children are still in Scotland, of course, and they visit him most days. It will be marvellous when we are all together again here at Blenheim Palace.”

  The thing that struck a person the first time one met Queen Elizabeth II was not how small she was; but that after that first face to face encounter one never again really noticed her lack of stature. Perhaps, it was because she was innately regal, something in her bloodline? Margaret Thatcher did not think it was that simple. The better she got to know her sovereign the more she recognised the iron resolution of the woman, and understood that duty and service ran through her veins like seams of gold through ancient bedrock.

  Cups and saucers were passed to William Whitelaw, the Defence Secretary, and James Callaghan, the Deputy Prime Minister. In a situation in which the exigencies of government were inevitably compromised by questions raised about the legitimacy of those holding the reins of power, it had been the Queen’s suggestion that until there wa
s a return to ‘politics as normal’ that both the major parties ruling in coalition as the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom should be represented at audiences with her Prime Minister. The protocol recommended itself on two grounds to Queen Elizabeth II. It was a public nicety designed to silence possible accusations of Royal ‘partiality’ towards one or other of the parties; and it provided her with a wider cross-section of opinion in a crisis. Since there was a crisis most weeks this was doubly important.

  “I gather that the situation in the Mediterranean is quiet?” The Queen asked, hoping above hope that her question would turn out to be entirely rhetorical.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” her Prime Minister confirmed. “Thank goodness!”

  “Hear! Hear!” William Whitelaw concurred.

  James Callaghan, the big lugubrious man who had somehow contrived to hold the core of the Labour and Co-operative Party together for the last year while being a consistent voice of sanity and moderation in government, pursed his lips and pondered whether to speak.

  “What are your thoughts on this subject, Mr Callaghan?” The Queen inquired pleasantly.

  The man hesitated.

  “Willie,” he prefaced – everybody in the Cabinet called William Whitelaw, the hangdog-faced forty-five year old Member of Parliament for Penrith and Border ‘Willie’ because that was what he preferred, and he was the sort of genuinely personable colleague one really did not like to offend – before continuing, “knows more about this than me but we’re beginning to get fragmentary of information from the few foreign legations still operating in and around the Black Sea area, and via our listening posts...”

  “Yes,” the Defence Secretary agreed affably, his brow furrowed with concentration. “Honestly and truly we really don’t know what to make of it, Ma’am,” he explained apologetically.

  Margaret Thatcher was in a quandary.

  She hated passing on what was at the moment mostly gossip, idle speculation and suppositions of the most unreliable kind to her monarch. She preferred to convey facts, information which she or one of her senior military or political advisors vouched to be true, or if not true, then of a ‘probable’ rather than a ‘possible’ character.