by James Philip
“Visibility must be at least twenty miles today, skipper. We ought to catch sight of Achilles sometime in the next ten minutes if we carry on along this heading. Out.”
“Roger, Ted.”
The cruiser had a homing beacon and powerful transmitters which it was not going to use unless it had to. Captain Jackson had drummed it into his crew that ‘one operates as if one is at war because that is the only way to train for war’. Constantly broadcasting one’s presence was not good practice, so HMS Achilles moved about like a wraith…
Nonetheless, Abe soon spied the tell-tale shimmering grey plume venting from the cruiser’s single funnel, faintly above the horizon some fifteen degrees to the east of his current course. He banked the sea plane and began to climb.
He hit the speak button.
“Get your camera out, Ted. Over.”
The Achilles’s executive officer, a fierce, bearded man in his forties was determined to make the ‘old man’s last commission a ‘bloody memorable one’ and one of the things he had mandated was that upon his retirement his crew would gift Captain Jackson the best possible set of aerial photographs of ‘his’ ship, one of the few tasks that a Sea Fox was actually marvellously suited to perform.
Two fixed cameras: one pointing directly below the aircraft and another to port, sited between the pilot and the observer positions, and a hand-held high-resolution 1.5-inch 6x-zoom camera operated from Ted Forest’s cockpit meant the aging workhorse was, in the right conditions, a very capable photographic aerial reconnaissance platform and today, the ‘conditions’, particularly the clarity of the atmosphere and the sunshine threatening to poke through the thinning overcast off Chesapeake Bay, were damned nearly ‘ideal’.
As to HMS Achilles, the last of the much-loved Hero class ‘trade route protection’ light cruisers, well, only a man without a heart could not fall in love with her long, elegant, somehow ‘classy’ lines. She was a real lady, every inch the perfect expression of a school of naval architecture now cruelly overtaken by the onrushing pace of technological advances.
The first ship of the Hero class of light cruisers had been launched as long ago as 1944, Achilles, the eighth and last ship of the ‘first group’, six years later as budget cuts, changing construction techniques and political wrangling had delayed practically every major building programme in the late 1940s.
Achilles had been one of the first major warships in which – to reduce weight and reduce costs – large parts of her hull had been welded rather than rivetted. This innovation had reduced her tonnage from the 7,500 ‘light’ tons of the class ‘leader’, HMS Hector, to 7,130 and shaved nearly ten percent off her original ‘in commission’ price tag. Moreover, in the long term it had ensured that unlike her six older sisters her hull had been able to accommodate a raft of modifications sufficient to ensure her retention in the Fleet well into her third decade of service.
Ironically, the radical re-design of the second group of so-called ‘Improved Heroes’ involving using different, supposedly higher performance lighter-weight machinery sets had ultimately doomed that whole sub-class to early appointments with the breakers during the latter 1960s, whereas, Achilles with her – essentially original 1950s – half-a-dozen ‘heavy’ old-fashioned Admiralty 3-drum boilers and tried and tested, more or less un-modified 1930s geared reduction turbines, had just gone on steaming, year after reliable year.
Achilles’s Engineering Officer boasted that even though he had never ‘got anywhere near opening up all the taps’ the cruiser had ‘clocked up’ over thirty-one knots on high speed trials a few weeks before Abe had joined the ship.
The cruiser had been in dry-dock in January for a routine minor refit during which upgrades to her gunnery ELDAR, new breeches for her three-inch high-angle anti-aircraft auto-cannons had been installed, she had received a paint job from the keel upwards and her port inner screw had been replaced. This latter had belatedly resolved a problem first logged over five years ago which had limited the shaft to one-hundred and fifty revolutions per minute, reducing the ship’s top speed to about twenty-nine-and-a-half-knots.
Drawing closer to the cruiser Abe could see that the Old Man was pouring it on. Achilles was racing south-east like a greyhound with a mighty bone in her teeth.
The plan had been to sound battle stations the moment the Sea Fox appeared on the ship’s air search ELDAR, thereafter the aircraft was to mount a series of ‘spoof’ bombing runs so that the anti-aircraft gun crews could test their mettle acquiring and tracking the ‘attacker’.
Abe had eased the seaplane up to around five thousand feet.
It was as cold as hell up here!
“TALLY-HO! TALLY-HO!” He called over the intercom.
The left wing of the Sea Fox dropped and the aircraft began to fall towards the racing cruiser.
Five hundred-and-fifty-five feet long and a few inches broader than fifty-six feet in beam, recently out of dry dock with a slick, clean bottom, with her four racing propellers each turned by up to eighteen thousand shaft horsepower, Achilles was classically ‘slippery’ through the water, a superb sea boat in any weather and for a ship of her size, unreasonably agile in the turn.
Even as Abe lined up on her midships section where her boilers vented to a single long, narrow funnel ahead of the seaplane catapult and boat deck, Achilles was heeling into the turn. He tried to adjust, follow the changing angle, cursed and pulled out of the half-dive.
“What’s wrong?” Ted Forest asked in his ears.
Abe hit the talkback switch.
“She’s even more slippery than the guys in the Wardroom said!” He snapped in exasperation. “I couldn’t hold the funnel in my sights!”
For his next ‘attack’ he circled astern and slowly approached from the port quarter, this time watching for the first indication that the Old Man had put the helm over. In a way this was cheating because this sort of attack would have been suicidal in a real war situation; he would have been shot to pieces by Achilles’s battery of twin 0.8-inch cannons and or the port twin high-angle three-inch quick firing auto-cannons (capable of firing up to thirty ELDAR-predicted rounds a minute) long before he was close enough to attempt a bombing run.
He watched the cruiser’s wake.
She was turning to starboard.
He waited.
No, not a turn, maybe ten degrees of starboard wheel.
A feint…
He jinked to the right as if he was taken in, closing the range, dropped his wing-tip as if he was about to plummet on his prey like a Sea Eagle.
Achilles was suddenly swinging to port.
The Old Man had put one or both of the port screws half or possibly, hard astern and the cruiser was slowing and literally, hauling away beneath the Sea Fox’s left wing-tip.
Without hesitation Abe threw the seaplane into the dive.
In a moment the aircraft sitting on the Achilles’s catapult was filling the ring sight of his cockpit bomb aiming sight.
Abe was so exultant, so pleased with himself it was only when he was far, far too low that he realised he was an idiot.
Oh, shit…
I’m far too fucking low…
Chapter 4
Saturday 11th March
Hacienda de los Conquistadores, Chinchón
When, shortly after dawn Melody Danson crept back into her room dressed in no more than a very crumpled shift with the rest of her clothes bundled in her arms, she discovered Henrietta De L’Isle, still fully dressed, asleep in her bed. The door creaked, shutting it seemed to her, deafeningly behind her as she attempted to tiptoe to the chamber’s small washroom – even grand Spanish haciendas lacked anything that a New Englander would class as an ‘en suite bathroom’ – guiltily intent on trying to make herself look at least a little presentable.
The younger woman blinked awake and sat up on the bed in the chaos of her long skirts and petty coats.
She had been crying.
Now she sniffed accusatively and her low
er lip quivered as she blinked back new tears.
Melody in turn felt ashamed, replete, dirty, and yet defiantly unrepentant, as well as sore – in a half-pleasant, tingling way - in places she had not been that sore, or stimulated…for a while. She was also very aware that a woman is not necessarily in the best frame of mind to have a…scene with her lover the morning after she has just spent the night before being fucked every anatomically practicable which way around, by an attentive, sensitive and very, very ardent lover like Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, most recently less than twenty minutes ago.
“You look,” Henrietta began, her voice trailing away as she stared at her feet.
“A mess, probably,” Melody offered, in her dishevelment hugging the clothes so expertly eased off her back and recklessly discarded on the floor of Alonso’s lair the previous evening.
After dinner last night, Henrietta had made her excuses and retired to her room; Melody and their host had drifted onto the veranda and talked, flirted really, as they gazed down into the festival lights of Chinchón.
‘This is a very ancient place,’ Alonso had told her, ‘although it only came into my family at the turn of this century. The previous Castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas was an absentee landlord of the worst kind. My grandfather poured his fortune into this town and his other holdings on the plain of Tajuña, replanting the vineyards, building the modern distillery where Chinchón’s famous Anisette is now produced. He was the man who revived the ancient festivals – although not without resistance from the Mother Church – which now attract so many people from Madrid and Toledo and far beyond every year.
Melody had tasted the legendary Anis de Chinchón with great caution, deciding that ‘yes, I could get used to this’, notwithstanding the concoction’s vicious, mule-like alcoholic ‘kick’.
Alonso had been in no apparent hurry to seduce her.
‘The Plaza Mayor is surrounded by houses that date back to the fifteenth century, in many cases outwardly, and in many cases inwardly, they are little changed from that period other than by the introduction of rudimentary sanitary provisions which town ordnances dating to my grandfather’s time require to be out of sight and mind. You must let me escort you to our church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción for Mass on Sunday, it too dates back to the glorious days of the First Empire of New Spain in the reign of Philip II.’
Goya’s brother had lived in Chinchón, his house was a place of pilgrimage to the faux literati of the capital, a thing Alonso had quietly mocked.
They had laughed together and Melody had allowed herself to be charmed all the way into her host’s bed chamber. But not before they had talked, and talked, sipping the local medium dry fruit-scented red wine with constant care lest they spoil their memories of what they both knew was to come.
‘People lived all across the Plain of Tajuña in olden days,’ her host had explained. ‘My House employs several archaeologists, you know. They spend every spring and summer digging up Neolithic, stone and iron age sites, the traces of long-gone Celtic tribes, and scratching over the legacy of Roman, Visigothic and Moorish occupations. La Reconquista – the re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim caliphate which was not to be finally completed until the time of Ferdinand and Isabella in the 1490s began in these parts when a Christian monarch, Alfonso VI of Castile reclaimed Toledo for the Holy Cross way back in 1085.’
Chinchón was also renowned for its many traditional breads, its garlic and the rustic country cuisine preserved in its old tavernas and eating places. During the summer hundreds of visitors braved the twisting mountain roads to enjoy its tranquil, lost-world charms, to gorge on its surfeit of fine wine and ‘peasant’ food, or just to wander its narrow, unspoiled streets or to stand on the battlements of the rebuilt medieval castle, the best place to take photographs to immortalise a visit to a jewel of a Spain that was crumbling, picturesque but impoverished, its traditions turning inward, its cities stagnating in the unrelenting vice of theocratic orthodoxy, merely the stages upon which the nation’s warring factions vied for advantage as if the modern world beyond the Iberian Peninsula simply did not exist…
‘Most Spaniards think that the pace of change is too fast, that we have come too far too quickly and that it will all end, inevitably, very badly,’ Alonso had chuckled, his gaze fixed on Melody’s face and unambiguously liking everything he beheld, ‘however, you and I both know that for all the talk of progress, this is a country still mired in the throes of its first industrial revolution in which innovation, imagination itself, is stifled by the dead hand of an infallible monarchy and the Inquisition. Oh, yes, I know, we no longer burn heretics, and it is hard – but by no means impossible - to see us going back to the days of the Jewish pogroms, that I suppose, is progress of a sort. But we both know that even those provinces – like New Granada, or as some now call it ‘Mexico’, Cuba, Santo Domingo, the Philippine lands, even some of the kingdoms of the Southern Americas – who still pay lip service to the Empire, have each developed their own systems of civilization, their own interpretations of the one true Faith and that none of them can be trusted to bend the knee, let alone bow their heads to the will of the King-Emperor.’
It had been nearly midnight by then.
Melody had been light-headed.
‘I think we should stop talking now,’ she had declared, suddenly nervous. Her moment of panic came and went in a blink of the eye, washed away by a rush of pure…wanting.
The man had walked her to his rooms on the opposite side of the house from the guest quarters. In the corridor outside his bed chamber he had halted, and like a true gentleman, waited for a final, unambiguous sign.
That had been a nice touch.
She had placed his hands on her breasts and stretched her arms around his neck – he was three or four inches taller than her – and pulled his mouth down to hers.
After that things had taken their natural course.
Naked in his bed he had stroked, kissed and tickled her until she was practically wetting herself and then, very tenderly made love to her as if she was precious, fragile until she began to whisper the sort of things in his ear which were guaranteed to bring out the beast in any man.
She had fallen asleep in his arms sometime after their second lazy, greedy coupling as he nibbled the lobe of her left ear and only awakened when the first greyness of the pre-dawn began to spread into the bedroom.
‘How long have you been watching me?’ She had asked sleepily.
‘Not long,’ he had smiled, his left hand beginning to rove beneath the sheets as they lay facing each other. ‘I may not see you again this way for a long time. I wish to remember everything…’
Men are so full of horse manure!
Melody had pretended to play hard to get; he had enthusiastically taken her from behind and she was not about to complain. She had giggled when he thrust one last, shuddering time and collapsed upon her, briefly crushing her down into the mattress and lying on top of her gasping for breath.
The man’s wife really did not know what she was missing!
Alonso had watched her searching around for a shift to hide her modesty and gather up her other, wantonly strewn garments from all around the bed.
Presently, she had leaned across him, planting a wet kiss on his mouth, resisting the temptation to fall back into his arms.
‘Thank you,’ she had murmured.
‘The pleasure was all mine, Melody.’
She had straightened, looking down at him.
‘Thank you, anyway,’ she had said, giggling. ‘That was a truly lovely fuck, Alonso…’ And then she had fled like a thief in the night. Except it was getting light at the time…
And now she did not have the first idea what to say to Henrietta, whom she was as sure as she had ever been about anything in her whole life, she loved…
Melody sat down on the edge of the bed.
She shrugged: “You know more about me than anybody alive,” she sighed. “It just happens that t
he only people I have fallen in love with up to now happen to be women but I’m not any kind of nun… I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say…” She groaned, her head befuddled by post-coital confusion and suddenly aware of how tired and battered she felt. “God, I must look dreadful…”
“You smell of him,” Henrietta retorted, dully.
That was what you smelled like when you had been frantically exchanging body fluids with somebody most of the night.
“I’m being stupid,” the younger woman muttered and made as if to rise to her feet.
Melody reached out for her arm and dragged her back down beside her. Henrietta put up only token resistance.
The women sat close yet apart.
“Don’t tell me you slept with him because of politics,” Henrietta hissed.
“I didn’t. But I’m not about to become Alonso’s mistress or anything.”
The high excitement of the women’s first infatuation had soon been subsumed into the reality of their lives and their primarily cosmetic part in the futile mission in Spain. They were hardly ever really alone together, always watched either by the Spanish or their own people, forever having to pretend that they, and their feelings for each other, were something other than what they were and as time had gone by it had become very nearly unbearable.
It was worse for Henrietta, whom the other members of the Commission regarded as mere ‘pretty window dressing’ and generally treated, albeit with exaggerated courtesy, like a brainless teenager. Melody at least, was in some sense ‘on the team’ and had the title of CSS Liaison Officer, thereby guaranteeing she was automatically copied into the never-ending, largely ephemeral documentation the exercise generated to keep its paymasters back in Whitehall busy.
“What if you get pregnant?” Henrietta blurted, on the verge of a flood of tears.
“I won’t.”
“How can you know that?”
Melody had confided most of her secrets to her friend and thus far, to her chagrin, only very occasional lover. Henrietta was very innocent in some things; and she had made allowances as one did for somebody one cared, deeply about.