by James Philip
“Can’t your Admiralty recall the bloody man?” Walpole demanded quietly.
The German shook his head.
“The Crown Prince will not countenance that,” he sighed, placing his empty tumbler on the table.
The two friends viewed each other for some moments, too distraught to say another word.
Presently, as one they rose to their feet and went to the window to stare at the great monolith of the L'arc de la Victoire.
“Sometimes,” Lothar von Bismarck confessed, wearily, “a fellow must admit, to himself if nobody else, that things might turn out as badly as one first feared.”
Chapter 28
Sunday 2nd April
HMS Achilles, 40 miles south of the Turks and Caicos Islands
Neither of the cruiser’s other pilots had the foggiest idea what they were ‘playing at’ taking their aircraft, each ‘loaded up to the gills’ with the ‘hush hush’ equipment the boffins had installed back on Bermuda, up to their maximum service ceiling of about twelve or thirteen thousand feet – on a good day – and stooging around within twenty miles of the ship until they got low on fuel. Some of the zigzag courses they had been asked to navigate added a little interest to the flying but not a lot, otherwise the two crews involved, had found the whole thing ‘tiresome’.
Meanwhile, Surgeon Lieutenant Abraham Lincoln had temporarily been removed from the flight roster because three days earlier his superior, Surgeon Commander Flynn had been flown to Cockburn Town, the capital of the Turks and Caicos Islands where the Governor had been taken ill with what now seemed to have turned out to be a straightforward case of a ruptured appendix. Abe had not even tried to get to the bottom of why a passing Royal Naval ship should have been ordered to fly its surgeon ashore to a protectorate that had its own fully-staffed garrison medical corps.
Ours is not to question why…
In any event, he had enjoyed being HMS Achilles’s surgeon the last three days and knew he was going to miss the responsibility, and the feeling of being ‘useful’, when his chief came back on board either later that afternoon or sometime tomorrow morning. Not that he had had a lot to do: the normal daily sick parade, rarely more than two or three malingerers or fellows testing if the ‘new man’ was a soft touch, the periodic health checks that every man had to undergo once every few weeks in tropical waters, this latter a regimen commenced the first day out of Norfolk en route south with no reference to when the ship was actually expected to cross the Tropic of Cancer, a thing it had not done until the day after she sailed south from Bermuda.
However, unlike his fellow pilots he had sought out an opportunity to chat with ‘the boffins’ who had come on board at Bermuda. Apparently, the two pilots had thought this was an underhand approach to discover what they were playing at.
“Well, the thing is we haven’t got a clue what sort of ELDAR coverage the Spanish have in these parts,” Abe was told. “We know they have radar stations on the northern coast of Cuba but this far east, well, nobody’s ever even looked before now. The equipment on your planes will tell us if anybody is broadcasting electronic pulses, and their wavelengths, from the south. If we pick up any signals it will tell us a lot, and if and when we compare the plots from the various flights, we ought to be able to triangulate the approximate position, perhaps to within a mile or so, of any Spanish ELDAR ground stations near to the coast. We need you chaps to fly as high as you can, so that any ELDAR activity on Santo Domingo, about seventy or eighty miles to the south isn’t blocked by the curve of the horizon. Achilles, this far north of Spanish territory will be invisible to any ELDARs on land hopefully, and in the unlikely event the Dominicans detect the Sea Foxes, they won’t think anything untoward of it!”
Abe had processed this information a lot slower than the talkative boffin, Jack Muir - a Scot from the Imperial Radio Research Laboratory in Edinburgh, the top secret government establishment which had pioneered the development of cathode ray tubes and beaten the Germans to producing the prototype black and white television broadcast and reception system back in the 1930s – a man in his middle years with a shiny, perspiring pate and quick grey eyes who clearly loved his work, had explained it.
“The thing is we have no idea how much advanced electronic technology the Germans might have transferred to the buggers on those islands down there.”
Once Surgeon Commander Flynn was safely back aboard, Achilles was to steam farther east and test the electronic defences of Puerto Rico Island, a war-torn sub-territory of the Santo Domingo colony and Anguilla, a supposedly de-militarised German protectorate under the terms of the Submarine Treaty.
In relation to its western neighbours Anguilla was an oasis of calm prosperity, visited regularly by the big cruise ships of the Hamburg-Atlantic Line, something of a must-visit destination for the wealthy of the German Empire. Once her electronic spying missions were completed the cruiser would steer to the west, running much closer inshore along the twelve-mile – self-declared by all the Spanish New World provinces in contravention of the internationally recognised three-mile territorial limit - line before making passage to Jamaica. During that part of the cruise the detection equipment would be completely removed from, and the Achilles’s Sea Foxes returned to their former state, so as to allow the precious sophisticated equipment to be mounted on the cruiser’s main and anti-aircraft directors as high as possible on the bridge and in the aft superstructure.
“I think the original idea of bringing along the extra ‘wheeled’ Sea Fox was that the Admiralty wanted the raw data flown straight back to Florida, via a fuel stop somewhere in the Bahamas, obviously, so that it can be analysed as soon as possible by the Electronic Warfare Staff at St John’s River.”
Abe had never heard of that facility.
He suspected that this was probably because it was so secret that he was not supposed to know.
“I think the Navy and my boss got their wires crossed,” the boffin, who invited everybody to call him ‘Jack’ speculated. “One of your sea planes could as easily bring our findings back to base. But, I suppose, at least this way Achilles gets to keep both sea planes, which you’ll need if you’re going on farther south and we are still going to get our preliminary findings back to Florida pretty damned quick. So, I suppose, everybody is happy at the end of the day!”
A few minutes later the manoeuvring bell rang insistently and the ship began to pick up speed.
“This is the bridge. All sea duty men to their stations! Repeat. All sea duty men to their stations. The ship is investigating a merchantman which has refused to reply to our hail. That is all.”
Achilles was at Air Defence Station Three, its lowest alert level with only one main battery turret manned, ‘A’ turret, and two of the 0.8-inch anti-aircraft cannon mounts locked and loaded. That was standard operating procedure when one of the ship’s aircraft was in the air.
Abe explained this to his pet boffin.
“The normal drill would be to send a Sea Fox to investigate but the Old Man doesn’t want to muck up your, er…”
“We call it electronic surveillance,” Jack Muir retorted. “Spying by any other name!”
“Anyway, what we’ll do is close to hailing range of the merchantman. If the Old Man doesn’t like anything he hears, or the attitude of the ship’s master, he’ll send over a boat so that an officer can check the ship’s manifest and routing papers. Standard commerce protection work, really,” he had concluded as if he was a grizzled old hand not the greenest seagoing member of the cruiser’s wardroom.
Jack Muir was suddenly very thoughtful.
“Do you think I might inveigle myself into the Achilles’s ELDAR room, Abe?”
They had got onto first name terms soon after they started to chat.
Abe was at a loose end.
“Follow me.”
The ELDAR Officer, a scrawny sub-lieutenant fresh out of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, after which he had passed a crash course at the Electronic Warfare Establish
ment at Fort Nelson, near Portsmouth, who had only arrived at Norfolk two days before the cruiser sailed for Bermuda, waved the newcomers into his cramped domain at the back of the bridge on the deck below the compass platform.
“We’re getting a fair bit of interference,” the youngster complained distractedly.
“Try tweaking the frequency down a tad,” Jack suggested.
“Seriously?”
The green repeater screens cleared.
“Somebody else is operating a search ELDAR,” the boffin declared. “Probably that ship we’re approaching.”
“But he’s only a merchie?” The youngster objected.
“There’s nothing else on the screen except distant ground clutter from the nearest land,” the civilian remarked gently.
The ELDAR officer called the bridge and reported this.
Shortly afterwards the Achilles’s Executive Officer entered the compartment, glancing askance at Abe.
“Er, Mister Muir, asked if he could visit the compartment, sir. He’s the ELDAR expert, so I thought…”
The older man grinned conspiratorially and looked to the boffin.
“Do you think that beggar may be attempting to jam our ELDAR?”
“Possibly. He’s obviously got modern, fairly powerful equipment. He certainly knows we’re here. I’m surprised he hasn’t acknowledged your radio hails?”
The Executive Officer pursed his lips.
“We may be stepping up to ADC One in a minute or two, Mr Lincoln. You may wish to make tracks back to the sick bay.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
In the event, nothing happened for some ten minutes after Abe returned to the sick bay to find that his attendants – men trained in battlefield first aid, who were otherwise the equivalent of regular naval nurses ashore who had completed the first year of their training – had worked out for themselves what was likely to happen next and had reported to their ‘action stations’ in the aft superstructure where they were already prepping to receive casualties.
“THE SHIP WILL COME TO ADC ONE!”
Abe was struck by the subtle differences between the real thing and the drills he had gone through as Michael Flynn’s number two. For one, he was nobody’s deputy today.
Achilles, having closed the range to her ‘target’ had slowed to a crawl, taking the swells on her starboard flank, rolling gently.
“The Old Man will keep the ship bow-on to the merchie,” Abe’s senior man, a petty officer who still wore the torpedo division badge of his former trade – he had been crushed in an accident some years ago and transferred to his current specialisation in order to remain at sea – on his left bicep, remarked respectfully. “This close to Santo Domingo the merchie could be anything,” the man grinned ruefully, “or nothing.”
“Bow-on?” Abe queried, curious.
“Captain Jackson is old-school, sir,” the other man said with affection and no little respect. “You never show the other fellow your flank unless you’re about to trade broadsides with him.”
“Oh, I see.”
After that they just waited, and waited.
Nothing happened.
Over an hour passed, the cruiser no more than holding her position and then, as if a switch had been flicked, the boredom dissolved.
“This is the Captain. We have stopped a German registered freighter, the SS Horst Lorenz. She’s one of those new refrigerator-cargo-passenger motor vessels the Mexico-Berlin Line has been introducing lately. About eighteen thousand tons deadweight. A glorified banana boat, really. Her master claims his WT room is out of action; I just think the fellow was being awkward. I had one of our planes buzz him to persuade him to stop so that he and I could have a jolly little chat via signal lamp. There is no reason to board the Horst Lorenz, so, in a few minutes we shall be letting her go on her way. Remain at your stations and stay alert until the stand down bell rings. That is all.”
A little later Abe felt and heard the catapult impellor fling one of the ship’s Sea Foxes into the air. Five minutes later the Tannoy blared.
“STANDOWN FROM ADC ONE. THE SHIP WILL RESUME ADC THREE.”
“Panic over, sir,” Abe’s senior sick bay rating murmured.
Abe stood back while his men began to square away the compartment, re-storing and re-packing the equipment they had swiftly, efficiently broken out of lockers and adjoining spaces, and laid out ready to receive casualties. The emergency medical kits which in extremis could be distributed around the ship were meticulously logged back into the sick bay inventory. It took over an hour to restore normality.
Such were the ways of the peacetime Royal Navy.
Everything had its place…
Chapter 29
Sunday 2nd April
Villanueva de Ávila, Castile and León, Spain
Both women had been out on their feet as they followed their infuriatingly tireless guide and protector into the woods in the darkness and waited, faint and swaying as he swiftly, efficiently hung a canvas awning between two trees and spread blankets on the ground.
“Take the weight off your feet,” Captain Paul Nash commanded softly. “Drink some water, I’ll dissolve a couple of ready meals. I’m sorry, we can’t risk a fire but you must eat and drink before you try to sleep. I know your feet must be hurting like blazes. Sorry, I’ll look at them in the morning. We can’t risk a light. The village is only a few hundred yards away.”
Neither Melody Danson nor Henrietta De L’Isle even contemplated a protest. They had walked all of the last two nights and all of that long, gruelling day. They had no idea where they were, and for the moment cared less. For most of the last few hours they had been like sleep-walkers, unconsciously putting one foot in front of the other and for periods, because of the unforgiving nature of the terrain – often with sheer drops to one side of rocky, twisting mountain paths, they had been roped together with their inexhaustible guide-protector.
Henrietta and Melody choked down the mush in the billy cans pressed into their hands, and swigged water from the canteen the man held out. Despite their thirst the sour reek of the purification tablets almost made them gag as they drank.
Melody tried to give the canteen back to Nash, guiltily realising she was about to drain it dry.
“You finish it. We passed a stream about half-a-mile back, I’ll re-fill the canteens overnight.”
“Where are we?” She asked.
“The town on the next hill is Villanueva de Ávila.”
“Castile and Leon,” Melody groaned. “I thought we’d be farther west.”
The man chuckled in the darkness.
“We’re about sixty miles from Madrid. Tomorrow we’ll lose ourselves in the Sierra de Gredos. I’d expected there to be more militia and busybodies in the hills,” he added with a suggestion of irritation as if he had been looking forward to the prospect of shooting or knifing somebody.
Henrietta’s head lolled against Melody’s shoulder, instinctively, she put her arm around the younger woman’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head. The women had made no secret of their intimacy, careless of what their soldier knight-errant guardian made of it.
Melody started doing the math – how far they had come, how far they had to go to reach the Portuguese border? – and she hated the numbers that she was coming up with.
“How far are we from the border?” She prompted wearily. “A hundred-and-ten, maybe one hundred-and-twenty miles?”
“Something like that,” the man conceded, vaguely. “We’ve come over fifteen hundred feet down the mountains. We must be at around three thousand feet hereabouts, the weather’s warmed up and dried up a bit which ought to make it easier…”
“Unless it rains again tomorrow,” Melody objected feebly.
“It won’t,” Paul Nash retorted. “Trust me, it’ll be sunshine and light winds all the way from here.”
Henrietta was fast asleep sitting beside Melody, dead to the world.
“And I’m the Queen of England!” Melody snor
ted derisively.
The man had rested his assault rifle against the bowl of a nearby tree as he squatted down opposite her. The whites of his eyes fixed on her.
“I need you two ladies to stay strong,” he said. “You stay strong and I’ll do the rest…”
“For all we know there are thousands of people looking for us?”
“I doubt it. There really aren’t that many people who give a damn about us. A lot of locals will have seen us in the last couple of days; most of them will have just shrugged and got on with their lives. The telephone system in the mountains is spotty at the best of times, right now I doubt if it is functioning at all. It’ll take a while for people to work out who is in charge in Madrid and then, it’ll be a whole mess of beans for them to try to work out who is on whose side. No, we could easily just stroll to the border from here in a week or so…”
“Seriously?”
As if to emphasise her scepticism big, cold drops of rain began to filter through the branches over their head. The man ushered the women under the shelter of the awning, pulled a poncho over his shoulders as the rain became heavier, persistent.
Henrietta lay asleep again in moments, her head in Melody’s lap. The older woman ached all over. Nonetheless, she was getting her second wind, possibly the effect of the food and water she had forced down a few minutes earlier.
“I always knew this whole ‘mission’ of ours was a complete nonsense from the outset,” she confessed. “If my head hadn’t been so turned by working for the Governor and Matthew Harrison, I’d never have allowed myself to be talked into it.”
Nash’s eye flicked at Henrietta’s sleeping form.
“Yeah, that complicates things in a,” Melody hesitated, “really nice way and I think Hen needed to spread her wings a little. We both did, I suppose.”
“Life’s complicated sometimes.”
“That’s no lie!”
The man smiled, his teeth flashing briefly in the gloom.