by James Philip
To Abe it seemed like an unnecessarily complicated way of doing things.
‘Yes, of course we could just unload the kites alongside the dock in Bermuda,’ Ted Forest had agreed, ‘but then this way the deck crew, the Section Commander and you, get the experience of a catapult launch while the ship’s under way. The Old Man is a tartar for using every opportunity to train his people.”
Now Abe was waiting to be shot off the Achilles as she idled along in the thankfully benign Atlantic swell. His eyes were rivetted to the launch officer standing below the right-hand end of the catapult rails.
‘Look, there’s nothing to it,’ Ted Forest had assured him. ‘We make sure the kite is locked down, run up the engine to full power, wait a few seconds to check that everything is hunky dory, the launch officer gives you the nod,’ a chopping down of both arms like a linesman at Wimbledon signifying that a close line call was good, ‘then the crew releases the brake, we wiz forward and a second later the impellor charge goes off firing a blast of compressed air into the back of the sled and the next thing you know we’ve gone from nought to sixty knots in no time flat and we’re in the air!’
Abe held the throttle up against the stops.
The Sea Fox thrummed and vibrated, desperate to surge ahead.
Before him there was nothing between the blur of the propeller and the shores of the Iberian Peninsula thousands of miles away. He raised his right hand, thumbs up and quickly grabbed the control stick, bracing himself.
The launch officer’s arms came down in the approved manner.
The ball is good…
The aircraft began to move.
There was a popping BANG, Abe was pressed back in his seat and in the blink of an eye the Sea Fox was airborne. Gentle pressure on the stick and they were climbing away from the cruiser.
“I told you it was a piece of cake!” The man in the rear cockpit chortled over the intercom.
Climbing to fifteen hundred feet Abe circled the cruiser once, then again before waggling his wings and turning south towards the long, low sprawl of the archipelago protecting the finest natural anchorage for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Achilles’s two float planes had taken off with only about thirty minutes fuel in their tanks so there was no real scope for ‘sightseeing’ or the usual ‘malarkey’ that ‘RNAS types got up to’.
Abe throttled back and tried to detect the navigable channels between the reefs through which the cruiser would have to tiptoe to get into the deep water of the Great Sound at the south-western expanse of the archipelago. He was struck by how crystal clear the blue water was and how easily he could see every lurking shoal just beneath the surface.
There were two destroyers tied up in the inner basin of the Navy Dockyard, and a big tanker - presumably off-loading its cargo – at the oiling jetty refilling the ‘tank park’ on Ireland Island. Achilles’s first Sea Fox had already put down and was taxiing through the gap in the breakwater between Cross Island and the isthmus to its north.
Abe circled, making absolutely certain he had his bearings and that he had got his nerves under control again, before lining up and putting down, rather more bumpily than he had planned. The wind was gusting a little despite the cloudless skies and the waters of the Great Sound were nowhere near as millpond flat as he had expected. Nevertheless, soon he pointed the aircraft’s nose towards Cross Island.
Achilles was only just beginning to pick her way through the shoals by the time the Sea Fox was safely moored to a floating jetty directly astern of the Section CO’s seaplane.
It seemed that Achilles was due to berth alongside the main quay, well over a mile away as a bird might fly but two or three by land. It was early afternoon and the sun burned down on the naval aviators who quickly began to divest themselves of their heavy leather flying accoutrements. Goggles, helmets, fur-lined jackets, essential to survival at ten thousand feet were somewhat superfluous in the tropical heat of Bermuda.
Ted Forest looked around.
He sniffed, and when he spoke his voice was a little vexed.
“I’d expected dancing girls, or suchlike!” He complained.
“I don’t think this is that sort of tropical island, Ted,” Abe chuckled wryly, thinking about his very own ‘dancing girl’ he had left behind in Norfolk. He had been away less than a week and already he felt disconnected from things, incomplete without his precious…Tekonwenaharake.
Belatedly, he remembered the folded papers he had stuffed inside his jacket before clambering up onto the catapult and dropping into the cockpit of his Sea Fox half-an-hour ago.
“I reckon the fort must be over there,” he decided, pointing across the basin to the barracks and what looked like white bastion walls in the middle distance.
Surgeon-Commander Flynn, Abe’s medical superior had asked him to visit his opposite number on Bermuda.
‘I plan to keep out of his way, ancient history, you understand,” the older man had explained, for him somewhat tersely, for reasons he soon clarified. “There was a member of the fair sex involved, I’ll say no more. Other than Ralph” the officer Abe was charged to visit, “and I don’t get on with each other. We’ve managed to avoid each other for the last fifteen years, be a pity to come to blows again at our advanced ages, what?’
Achilles had sailed with a regulation medicine ‘cupboard’ fully stocked but Flynn wanted to ‘cadge whatever tropical medicaments’ could be begged, borrowed or stolen from the Fleet Stores on Bermuda.
Guardships on the Caribbean and other distant stations were de facto floating hospitals, their crews often deployed ashore as good Samaritans mending infrastructure and ‘mucking in’ on local construction projects. Yes, they were there to keep good order, to knock heads together if it came to it, and occasionally, to hunt pirates and such like but wherever the Navy went it looked first to make friends, influence people and to preserve the King’s Peace any way it could. That was why most ships returned from their stations with their drugs lockers emptied; so, Abe’s chief wanted as much ‘therapeutic ammunition’ as he could get his hands on before Achilles ‘shot’ the Windward Passage into the Caribbean.
Ted Forest had offered to accompany Abe on his delicate mission and he was grateful of his moral support. They had begun on foot, hitching a lift from a passing Military Police patrol. Soon they were outside the gates of the base hospital. Chatting to their driver Abe had learned that the main hospital was located across the other side of the Great Sound in the town of Hamilton, which was where all the ‘bigwigs’ hung out and the location of all the best bars and ‘fleshpots’ of Bermuda were to be found.
Achilles’s Surgeon had informed Abe that his counterpart on Bermuda was ‘not a fellow who approved of such things’ and therefore confined himself to the Naval Base most of the time.
For a man he claimed to have fallen out with and to not, like very much, Abe thought his chief seemed to know an awful lot about Surgeon Captain Ralph McNab.
Thinking about it later he realised he ought not to have been totally surprised when he was ushered into an airy office and greeted by a man who was the spitting image of Michael Powell Flynn.
It transpired that McNab was older, by five years, than his half-brother, Achilles’s avuncular surgeon, Michael. McNab’s mother had remarried a Bostonian physician a year after his father’s death. As is often the case the two brothers – albeit half-brothers – had been broken from radically different temperamental templates and this was self-evident from the moment Captain McNab opened his mouth.
“The damned philanderer doesn’t have the courage to face me man to man!”
Abe did not care to disagree with a four-ringer.
Especially as he was half in-uniform as a pilot and half out of uniform as a surgeon-lieutenant and he got the distinct impression that Captain McNab was the sort of man who put men on charges for a lot less. The most disarming aspect of the meeting was that the elder brother had exactly the same Boston-Irish accent of his sibling, not
to mention several of his mannerisms.
“I suppose Michael has sent you to raid my medical lockers?”
Abe saw no good reason to lie.
“Yes, sir. Surgeon-Commander Flynn has spoken to me of the exigencies of service especially on the Leeward Islands Station and Trinidad.”
Captain McNab had re-taken his seat and now viewed the young man before him with thoughtful eyes.
“Are you a competent surgeon, Lieutenant?”
“Not yet, sir. I plan to be one day.”
The older man reviewed Abe’s relative dishevelment.
“I never knew my father,” he said, astonishing the younger man. “You and I have that in common. That and the contagion that is my brother.”
Abe kept his mouth firmly shut.
Albert Stanton had observed that ‘being famous cuts two ways and not invariably in the ways you’d like it to.’ Thus far, the Navy had shielded Abe from the worst of that.
“That was unfair,” McNab apologised punctiliously. “Often it is best to separate family and service matters. Never the twain shall meet, and all that. I take it Michael sent you over with a list?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Leave it with my secretary,” the older man decided, indicating that the interview was concluded.
Chapter 22
Easter Saturday 25th March
Hacienda de Cortés, Navalperal de Tormes, Avila
Albert Stanton had initially feared he had broken three or four bones – important ones – after he had finally come to rest against the bowl of a gnarled olive tree in the fading light of yesterday afternoon. In retrospect he was to reflect that it was a miracle his spectacles had survived undamaged, stowed at the last minute in an inside pocket of his jacket before he had fallen into the void. He had lain very still for some minutes before the pain started to ease and air slowly, gaspingly, re-filled his lungs as his parachute billowed around, and eventually over his prostrate form.
He had taken Paul Nash’s – the man had to be a spy or some kind of special forces soldier whom he hoped, fervently, was actually on his side but would have been hard-pressed to testify under oath that he was entirely convinced he was – talk about Portugal with a pinch of salt. It would not have been the first, or the last big lie the man had told him.
Portugal was a friendly country: why on earth would they be parachuting into it like thieves in the night (and heavily-armed ones at that)?
‘Bend your knees and roll when you hit the ground,’ had been another lie. For one, it pre-supposed you knew you were about to ‘hit’ the ground, when in fact, ‘the ground’ had ‘hit’ him first!
The unmarked Blenheim twin-engine transport aircraft had been waiting for them outside Perpignan, its very military, RAF-looking crew, clearly feeling somewhat out of sorts in their grubby civilian flying kit.
‘The container with all the stuff we’re going to need once I get the ladies to Navalperal de Tormes will follow you out of the door,’ Paul Nash had explained airily to Stanton, who, in retrospect had taken in very little of the advice or the pseudo-information he was given before or during the long, very bumpy ‘terrain-hugging’ flight south. ‘The static line will automatically spring your chute a couple of hundred feet after you jump’, actually he had frozen in the open hatch and had to be pushed, ‘so, all you have to do is find and secure the supplies in the container before you make contact…’
None of which took account of him bashing his head when he landed, or his being so badly concussed that by the time he had stopped throwing up and his eyes were starting to focus it was pitch black inside the olive grove he had come down in.
This is insane…
And now there were people in the grove nearby.
He could hear his parachute, somehow detached from him rustling and cracking in the branches. He knew he was never going to find the container and its precious supplies. The whole thing was hare-brained; how the Devil was Nash going to find ‘the ladies’ in the bloody mountains in the first place? Let alone get from there to here – God only knew how many miles separated their jump positions - and find him again?
No, this is beyond insane…
Nash claimed to know where Melody Danson and the Governor of New England’s daughter had been ‘parked’ for quote: ‘safe keeping’.
Not that Stanton needed to know this, or really, anything about anything in particular.
‘We can’t have you blabbing the first time they snip off one of your fingers, old man,” Nash had guffawed cheerfully.
There had been a bright light in Stanton’s face.
That must have been when the man from the Manhattan Globe passed out…
Now, he blinked into muzzy-headed consciousness.
Somebody was swinging a hammer against the inside of his skull as if he had the worst hangover in human history and he was half-afraid to open his eyes in case he bled to death.
A cool, damp cloth was placed on his brow.
He did not understand what was being said to him, registering only that the woman’s voice was soothing, unthreatening.
He groaned, attempted to sit up.
Bad mistake; he collapsed back into the warm, soft pillows.
Okay, the Inquisition have not got me yet…
“Rest easy, Señor,” the woman said in awkward, heavily accented English. “The Alcalde has been called…”
Albert Stanton squinted myopically at the woman, a large lady with a heavily tanned complexion and dark eyes, who was smiling stoically.
“Where am I?” The man croaked. He had no Spanish, other than pigeon.
“You are among friends and my husband’s men have buried your,” she hesitated, “goods in the hills. Even if they look the militia will find nothing. But they will not look…”
The woman pressed a cup to his lips and cool liquid slipped like nectar across his parched palate and down his throat.
“Little at a time,” he was cautioned. Then: “You do a very brave thing. These are bad times…”
Stanton slept after that and when he awakened the nausea and the worst of his pain was gone. He reached around for his glasses, found them on a table by the bed, crammed them on his face. His head remained sore, his thoughts muzzy but he felt stronger, strong enough to swing his feet over the side of the bed and scan the room for a suitable pot or bowl in which to relieve his bursting bladder.
Hearing movement a man entered the room.
“Bathroom?” Stanton muttered.
“Of course. This way.”
Presently, the New Englander looked at himself in the mirror.
Not a pretty sight!
His left cheek, which seemed about twice its normal size, was stitched – it was hard to tell if that was one or two gashes – and he was going to have the mother and father of all black eyes. His nose felt…wrong, and his spectacles would not quite sit normally atop it. His ribs hurt and his right knee was swollen, hardly mobile.
What was it they said: ‘Worse things happen at sea?’
The Alcalde, Don Jose de Cortés, was a broad, magnificently moustachioed man in his sixties who insisted that Stanton “lie down again before you fall over” in heavily accented English, and drew up a chair by his bedside before sobering, albeit only by a degree before offering to fill him in on one or two little things that “my good friend el Escorpion will have neglected to share with you!”
“The Scorpion?”
Don Jose grimaced and slapped his right thigh.
“My Duke’s name for Señor Nash. But,” he chortled and shook his head, “but it is apt.”
Don Jose’s ‘lord’ was Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, whom Albert Stanton had never met but heard a lot of conflicting things about during the two years that the man was his country’s Consul General in Philadelphia. The consensus had been that he was a charming, somewhat dim-witted buffoon, an aristocratic place man a little out of his depth in New England who was most famous for his legendary philandering.
Stanton got confused at this point. Well, if he was being honest, even more confused, and because he was so beaten up, he must have allowed his bewilderment to show.
He compounded this when he admitted: “Nash told me to hide the ‘equipment’ – I haven’t a clue what was in that big box – I dropped with and that he would rendevouz with me here, and then…”
Actually, he realised he had no idea what was supposed to, or likely, to happen then.
“Are you a soldier?”
“I did my militia service several years ago. I know which end of a rifle to hold, but…”
Don Jose smiled sympathetically.
“What?” Stanton blurted.
“Perhaps, your pen will be mightier in our cause than any sword we might put in your hands, Señor Stanton.”
The reporter did not care to contemplate the thought that Paul Nash – or whoever the man he had met on the Express train to Lyon was - had played him like a fish on the end of a very short line, flattering and bamboozling him into jumping out of a bloody aeroplane, for goodness sake!
The older man had turned deadly serious.
“If all goes well, we shall be reunited with his excellency, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and our Catholic Monarch Sophia Louise in Portugal. In the meantime, we await the arrival of the Scorpion and his charges, then, if necessary, we shall fight our way to the border.”
Chapter 23
Wednesday 29th March
Government House, Philadelphia