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

by James Philip

  “What do we do about Number Four?” He asked, pointing at the torpedo half in and half out of its tube.

  “Two or three guys ought to be able to push it in,” the shorter man explained, “there are rollers and springs in the tube. Just don’t do it too fast. On the tubes I trained on it always made a loud clicking noise when it was in.”

  “You didn’t train on exactly this model?”

  “No, but the theory is the same on all these old Second World War mountings. They all work the same way. The internal tubes they put on some of the newer ships are more complicated and the electronics aren’t so, well, basic.”

  Miles Weiss was a man in a crashing hurry.

  However, he paused long enough to ask one final question: “Do you know how to set the ‘angles’ on these things?” Everything he had ever learned about torpedoes had included reams of theory about the best ‘spread’ or the best ‘deflection’ tactics. He had not paid that much attention because he was a gunnery man and torpedoes were for people who lacked the intellectual wherewithal and the moral fibre to properly understand and appreciate guns.

  Joe Calleja returned a blank look.

  “I know how the electrics work, Mr Weiss. As for the rest,” he shrugged apologetically.

  HMS Talavera’s Executive officer had acquired a certain practiced sangfroid in the last few months and now it came to his rescue.

  “Never mind, I’ll warn the Captain that we’ll need to get up close and personal and aim for the enemy’s forward funnel!”

  Joe Calleja started smiling; and then realised that the young officer was being deadly serious. His smile faded.

  “Right,” Miles Weiss decided. “I’ll leave you in charge of things, Mr Calleja. Griffin,” he turned to the red-haired and bearded Petty Officer who could not quite hide the nameless horror bubbling beneath his bluff expression. “Do whatever Mr Calleja tells you must to be done to get this mount into operation. Report to me as soon as we’re ready to launch all four fish!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Jack Griffin muttered. The Executive Officer was already gone. The Petty Officer gave Joe Calleja a mildly disenchanted glare.

  Marija’s little brother was as dumbfounded as the Navy man.

  “Did he really just order me to get the mount ready for action?”

  Jack Griffin nodded.

  “He did and he’ll have our guts for garters if we let him down!”

  Chapter 44

  12:24 Hours

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  Situation Room, HQ of the C-in-C, Mediterranean, Mdina

  “Do we have any way of communicating with HMS Talavera?” Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations asked as he strode into the bunker.

  “Negative, sir. She probably took damage to her aerials and rigging from a couple of near misses as she exited the Grand Harbour.”

  “Keep trying.” Julian Christopher ordered. The tactical plot showed the USS Permit ninety-five miles east of Malta racing to intercept the suspected ‘invasion convoy’. An ‘invasion convoy’ that ought to have already been savagely mauled by the strike force despatched from RAF Luqa shortly before the base was shelled. Given that there was nowhere for the returning aircraft to land on Malta, or anywhere else within range before their fuel was exhausted, the men in the surviving strike aircraft would have to eject over the island. There was no way to warn them; apart from a few land lines the island-wide telephone network was down and both VHF and short wave communications were being heavily jammed.

  The jamming was so bad it was as if it was coming from right next door.

  “We’ve got HMS Yarmouth back on line, sir.”

  Julian Christopher grabbed the handset.

  “This is the C-in-C.”

  The Type-12 frigate’s Captain sounded positively insouciant but the older man knew this was an act for the benefit of his bridge team. Julian Christopher’s path had crossed that of Commander John Pope more than once over the years. Very distantly related on his father’s side to the C-in-C’s predecessor on Malta, Hugh Staveley-Pope, John Pope was a thoroughly sound forty-one year old career naval officer who had commanded Yarmouth with distinction while attached to the Hermes’s Battle Group in the closing stages of Operation Manna. Yarmouth had remained in Maltese waters in the capacity of a ‘guard ship’ when the rest of the Fleet had departed. The intention had been for her to be supported in that role by two US Navy Coontz class missile destroyers but at the last minute Rear-Admiral Detweiller had decided to send the two destroyers back towards Gibraltar to supplement the screening forces of the USS Independence and the USS Iowa.

  Yarmouth had, therefore, been left to plough a lonely furrow, to be reinforced by HMS Talavera when she returned from sea trials.

  The Americans had been infuriatingly coy about when the USS Independence – allegedly fully operational again – and the USS Iowa could be expected in the Central Mediterranean. Julian Christopher understood the need for secrecy as well as any man, and was aware that the Americans viewed his Headquarters as the leakiest of sieves when it came to keeping secrets. He even understood why the Americans were reluctant to allow him to factor in or integrate the two capital ships into the planning for Operation Grantham. But understanding did not actually help anybody; one of the reasons he had been prepared to tolerate leaving Malta so exposed was that he had assumed – and received tacit assurances that - Rear-Admiral Detweiller would leave significant elements of his squadron at Malta awaiting arrival of the Independence and the Iowa.

  The Yarmouth’s captain wasted no time making his report.

  “I think what we’re dealing with is a Sverdlov class cruiser in company with that bloody battlecruiser the Kaiser gave the Turks all those years ago, sir. They’ve got several escorts in tow and I had a radar ‘sniff’ of another biggish ship, perhaps, another cruiser over the horizon about twenty miles behind the lead group. Presently, I’m playing hide and seek with a couple of Krupny class destroyers in the South Comino Channel. One of the beggars fired a missile at me but we didn’t see where it went. I tried keeping them at arm’s length with the main battery but...”

  Some genius at the Admiralty had decided not to install torpedo tubes into the later ‘modified’ Type-12 Rothesay class frigates. Yarmouth was the end ship of the class and was pitiful equipped for any kind of surface action. Her single twin 4.5-inch turret was a good piece of kit but her entire close-range anti-aircraft armament comprised a single double 40-millimetre cannon. Before the October War there had been discussions about stripping out the 40-millimetre guns and installing a quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat launcher but nothing had come of it. Designated ‘anti-submarine’ frigates, the Rothesays were never intended to go toe to toe with an enemy in a surface action.

  “I understand completely,” Julian Christopher assured the younger man. “For your information Talavera has cleared the Grand Harbour.”

  There was a short, hissing silence.

  Having just taken possession of his death warrant, the Yarmouth’s Captain was not the man to cry over spilt milk.

  “Right you are, sir,” drawled Commander Pope. “In that case I shall endeavour to make a nuisance of myself.”

  “Good luck, Captain.”

  Julian Christopher put down the handset and gazed at the plot.

  First things first; worst case scenarios.

  The USS Independence had departed Gibraltar over forty-eight hours ago. The big carrier had delayed sailing because she was awaiting the arrival of the USS Iowa. It was reasonable to assume that both ships and their fast modern escorting vessels would be in the central Mediterranean sometime in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Meanwhile, if and when she could be contacted, the USS Permit was within three to four hours steaming time of the Maltese Archipelago. If recalled, fighters and strike aircraft from HMS Eagle’s and HMS Hermes’s air groups might be over the island in strength within forty-eight hour
s. Moreover, it was not too late to recall the assault force from Cyprus, its troops might be storming ashore on Malta in five to six days under cover of a withering bombardment from HMS Belfast and the two Big Cats, HMS Tiger and HMS Lion.

  He kept staring at the tactical plot despite a loud altercation outside the Situation Room. He leaned forward, resting the palms of his hands on the edge of the table. Deep beneath the medieval Citadel the impact of each of the Yavuz’s four shell salvos was transmitted through the ground rock, the floor, and absorbed by the wooden table.

  Presently, he stood tall.

  He sighed.

  “Confirm that the Welsh Guards are dispersing into the streets of Sliema and Gzira. They should be ready to defend and hold that area and if possible extend their left flank as far towards Msida Creek as possible.”

  The Guards were in the wrong place.

  There was nothing he could do about that.

  “OC Welsh Guards is to co-operate as he thinks fit with other local defence forces. That is all.”

  Julian Christopher ran his eye around the room.

  “Everybody should arm themselves. Soviet paratroopers will be landing on the archipelago in the next few minutes. Their objective will be not to seize or to hold the island but to spread terror by killing as many people as possible.” He steeled himself. “My orders are that all enemy combatants are to be attacked and killed on sight. No prisoners. No quarter. No surrender! Yield no ground! Please transmit that order to all units in the clear by any means possible.”

  There was still a shouting match going on outside in the corridor.

  “And would somebody please tell those idiots outside to stop shouting the house down!”

  Chapter 45

  12:26 Hours

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina

  Margo Seiffert had begun transferring patients from the first floor down to the cloistered garden in the middle of the hospital immediately she heard the ululating wail of the air raid alarms travelling like a tsunami across the island. The more seriously ill patients, or those confined to bed were carried straight down into the cellars of the old houses that comprised the modern hospital. The staff at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women had practiced this drill regularly since the air raid in early December, and today everything went so smoothly that Margo was able to return to her office to attempt to make some calls. It never hurt to find out what was actually going on. She felt the distant explosions through the soles of her feet; but had shown no hint of alarm as the hospital went into its well practiced air raid drill. She was unsurprised to discover that the telephone lines in her office and in the Reception Room were dead.

  Clara Pullman stuck her head around the door.

  “The lines are down,” Margo announced, phlegmatically.

  “I went up to the western battlements,” the other woman said, still a little breathless. She was flushed and her fair hair was awry. Her pale blue auxiliary nurse uniform smock did not flatter her mature figure the way it inevitably did some of the younger women. However, Margo doubted that her newest, very able and very worldly recruit, was preoccupied with such things right now. “Soldiers and Redcaps are ordering everybody inside,” she reported calmly, collectedly. “I think Luqa was hit first. Now they are hitting Ta’Qali. You can’t see much over towards Valletta, there’s too much dust and smoke. Once your eyes get used to the haze you can see the flash of the big guns out to sea.”

  Another salvo plunged into the nearby airfield, the windows rattled, the ground seemed to recoil in pain and the sounds of the explosions rumbled through the narrow streets of the Citadel like great iron wheels. Margo looked down into St Paul’s Square as a squad of British infantrymen doubled towards the main gates.

  More guns were firing.

  Margo scowled her frustration and hurried through the lobby onto the cobbled piazza outside the hospital. Clara followed her, unsure whether she should attempt to restrain the older woman.

  The sky was criss-crossed with grey tracers and black spots, hundreds, no thousands of them were crawling like insects between the sporadic shell bursts and shot-torn air.

  “Get inside!” A man yelled at the two women as he sprinted past. When they did not move he skidded to a halt, holding his steel hat on his head. “Get off the street, ladies! This place will be raining shrapnel and bloody paratroopers in a minute!”

  Margo did not move a muscle.

  Clara snatched her arm, refusing to be shaken off.

  “Margo, you’re the last person we need becoming an unnecessary patient!”

  The older woman saw the logic of it but hated showing weakness. Unhurriedly, she followed Clara back inside grumping and complaining almost but not quite under her breath. She had got so used to having Marija pull her up short when she was being too awkward, or stubborn about something that now that her protégé was rarely around she was enjoying the freedom to be as awkward and as stubborn as she pleased. Clara apart, few of her other women had the nerve to stand up to her. Suddenly seeing a lot less of Marija – in most of the ways that counted the daughter she had never had – heightened Margo’s awareness of her advancing age and had given her an uncomfortable glimpse of an aching loneliness in the years to come. She had led a lonely life until she had come to Malta after the 1945 war. She had been married but that had been a loveless experience; it was in Malta that she had fallen in love, befriended Marija as a child and grown with her over the years, sharing the young girl’s every minor and major triumph, spill, setback and step along the road to womanhood as any mother would. She knew she had not really ‘lost’ Marija any more than Marija’s own mother had ‘lost’ her. But everything had changed. Her little princess was in love and glowing with the joy of exploring the first days of what seemed likely to be a blissfully happy marriage. All being well Marija would soon be producing her own bambinos and bambinas...

  The staccato ripping of automatic gunfire from very nearby stopped both women in their tracks.

  “Everybody get down into the shelter!” Margo snapped. The dreamy mental picture of her holding Marija’s first born in her arms evaporated. Except that for the rest of her life she remembered that Marija’s first born was a beautiful, perfectly formed, healthy baby girl...

  There was a continual racket, savage to the ear. Outside. It was all around the hospital. In the piazza, in the surrounding streets and from above. Most of the shooting seemed to be coming from above, short, odd sounding burps. Metallic detritus was tinkling onto the cobbles, ringing as it struck iron gutters and pipes, and making a cracking, rolling noise on the tiles of sloping roofs.

  At the door down to the cellar the women involuntarily flattened themselves against the wall, covered their heads.

  In the enclosed inner courtyard glass shattered, the old tree that had grown in its centre for fifty years shuddered, branches creaked and gave way and with a sickening, bone-breaking thud a man crashed head first into the stone floor in front of the benches, where nurses and patients alike had come to reflect, to be quiet, and to reconcile their lives in the sanctuary of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women.

  The man on the ground was dressed in military camouflage fatigues, weighed down with a huge bulging backpack and black webbing festooned with grenades and ammunition pouches. His gun, a Kalashnikov with a polished wooden stock lay between the door to the courtyard and the soldier’s unmoving, prostrate body.

  Before Clara could stop her Margo had instinctively rushed out into the open to find out if the man was still alive.

  Clara turned just as the never-ending burst of automatic gunfire defiled the courtyard with sound, fury and the pitter-patter ringing of falling cartridge cases hitting the iron hard, centuries old granite flagstones.

  Chapter 46

  13:33 Hours (Local)

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England

  The Secretary of Defence, William Whitelaw, looked pee
ved and untypically worried when he accompanied the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson into the Prime Minister’s Private Office. The bright spring sunshine pouring into the room fell across Margaret Thatcher’s desk, its colour tinted sepia by the ancient imperfections of the sixteenth century glass in the windows. She put down her pen and looked up as a third man entered the room and quietly shut the door at his back.

  No trace of the unease he was feeling at that moment found its way into Sir Henry Tomlinson’s demeanour. The greying éminence grise of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, by the grace of God and her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Secretary to the Cabinet and head of the Home Civil Service, had witnessed many dark days in the last eighteen months. The one facing the Government and the country today might, he fervently hoped, seem like a storm in a tea cup in a few days. The problem was that in his heart he did not actually believe it. Still, a visible manifestation of existential angst in public was not going to help anybody.

  Tom Harding-Grayson spoke first.

  He was angry, very angry which was not at all like him.

  “The bloody Argentine has invaded the bloody Falkland Islands, Margaret!” He blurted the instant normal civilities had been completed.

  “It is a bad show,” William Whitelaw concurred. His own outrage was somewhat muted by another, apparently inconsequential coincidental note which had been flashed to his chief of staff as he was getting ready to join the Foreign Secretary for the short walk to their leader’s lair. “A very bad show, but there’s something else.”

  “Oh, that!” Tom Harding-Grayson sighed.

  “It is probably nothing,” the Defence Secretary went on, unconvincingly. “But we haven’t been able to make contact with Malta for over three hours.”