by James Philip
Ted Forrest was peering through binoculars.
“Yes, I’ll buy that!” Then: “What the Devil are they doing here, Abe?”
Emden class: launched between 1969 and 1972, ten thousand tons of menace armed with nine 5.9-inch guns in three triple turrets, two forward and one aft, and reputedly capable of thirty-three knots. By length and breadth, the Emdens were a few feet longer, and eight or nine wider in the beam than Achilles and protected by well over twice the weight and thickness of armour.
The C and D type fleet destroyers were less than eight years old, two-an-a-half thousand tons of fast-moving trouble mounting either ten, in the case of the Cs, and eight in the slightly newer Ds, 4.1-inch dual-purpose high-angle cannons, a battery of up to sixteen 1.5-inch anti-aircraft auto-cannons in twin or quadruple mounts, in addition to at least eight 20-inch torpedo tubes.
Given that one, possibly all three of the ships cruising in and out of the haze now rapidly burning off the sea – which had just started shooting at the Sea Fox again – were clearly hostile it was not unreasonable to conclude that they had been lying in wait for the Achilles.
Abe banked away from the onrushing shells.
“I think that was only the nearest destroyer letting fly!” Ted Forrest speculated. “Oh, Achilles has just repeated the order for us to make ourselves scarce, Abe!”
Of all the things that were likely to happen in the next few hours the least plausible was that Captain Jackson would turn Achilles around and run away. Confronted with the big destroyers the cruiser might get the best of any battle; but not if the Emden class ship was in the mix too. Achilles was not built to slug it out, that cruiser was…
“Our two friends will be here in less than fifteen minutes,” his navigator informed Abe. “They plan to go in together, wingtip to wingtip.”
They both knew that was not going to work.
Without really thinking about it, Abe had turned back towards the enemy flotilla, intuitively flying long, lazy S’s to confuse the ELDAR-directed gun layers on the distant ships.
He had learned a brutally hard lesson that day he had nearly crashed into the Achilles in a spoof bombing run gone horribly wrong; and another unnerving one not long ago about never flying straight and level in a combat zone. He wondered if his crewmates and fellow airmen in the two approaching Sea Foxes were wiser men than he had been a fortnight ago.
“Warn our friends not to fly a constant course for more than thirty seconds at a time, Ted!”
Both the other pilots were vastly experienced naval aviators and had regarded Abe as very much the new boy on the block; the Flight’s part-timer, a ‘sprog’, still decidedly wet behind the ears. The oddity of Abe being a Surgeon Lieutenant, albeit two to three years junior to the other pilots, had been a vexation to his fellow front seaters, who otherwise would have felt freer to throw their weight around in his presence. Not that Abe would have begrudged them their sport. He was a big boy now, he understood how the world turned and that the Navy had its traditions, one of which was to frequently remind one’s juniors of their proper place in the order of things.
He had little doubt that the other men were better pilots than him: how could they not be with their hundreds of hours flying time on Sea Foxes? The question was: how quickly could they adapt to the kill or be killed rules of this deadly new game?
Those ships had opened fire on him when he was flying over international waters twenty plus miles outside the Dominican territorial limit.
They had clearly meant to kill him.
That was an unambiguous act of war.
In that moment everything had changed.
I ought to be afraid; instead, I feel…alive.
“Blue Section Leader is ordering us to disengage, skipper!”
“Acknowledge…”
“He says the reports we have on board are more important than a gaggle of hostiles.”
Abe frowned and clicked his intercom switch.
“Put me on the scrambler circuit, Ted.”
“Blue Three to Leader,” Abe said tersely into his mask. “I am flying in and out of the enemy’s effective envelope of fire to establish its limits. Presently, I estimate that to be around three nautical miles for the two smaller ships. I don’t think the cruiser has fired a shot yet…”
“Blue Leader to Blue Three!” Retorted Achilles’s senior pilot, cutting in angrily. “You were given a direct order to disengage. Do as you were bloody well told!”
Abe’s thoughts were turning slowly, coldly.
“Very good,” he drawled. “They’re all your’s, Blue Leader.” Not waiting for the other man to confirm he had heard this he switched back to intercom mode. “Those fellows are going to barrel straight in on the cruiser.”
He left unsaid the obvious corollary that: ‘And they are going to get themselves killed for nothing.”
“What are you thinking, Abe?” Ted Forest demanded.
Abe almost chuckled to himself.
His friend knew him too well already.
“I’m going to put us in the Sun to those fellows down there. They’ll be busy when Blue Leader and Blue Two get within range. This kite is a little slippier through the air than they are, she’ll be handier in the dive, too…”
“Our bombs will bounce off that cruiser, Abe.”
“Maybe,” Abe conceded. “But you wouldn’t want to be standing on the deck next to one of them when they go off!”
He was remembering the exquisite thrill of that day he had risked diving his aircraft down the Achilles’s funnel, the moment of terror when he had approached Albany field on his first solo landing, and that time he had had to land his misfiring Bristol VII on White Bear Lake in the darkness…
Perhaps, he was his father’s son after all.
The Hunter’s blood ran through his veins.
And those ships far below were his prey…
Chapter 35
Wednesday 5th April
Valley of the River Tormes, Avila
Sporadic bullets were whistling through the air, randomly thudding into walls and deflecting, dusting off the ground as the two women were bundled into the back of, all things, an ancient Bentley limousine of the vintage type only owned in the British Isles or New England by wealthy collectors and the most obsessive of historic car enthusiasts.
Something pinged off the bonnet bringing a scowl to Don José de Cortés’s whole face for a moment as he unhurriedly deposited his large frame in the front passenger seat of the Bentley and touched the driver’s shoulder, a man with a pugilist’s broken, half-mended face, indicating for him to proceed. The car lurched forward, falling into convoy with the rusty, open-topped Land Rover in the lead. This vehicle was itself, perhaps thirty or forty years old, one of the original, very basic models so beloved of farmers and colonial administrators in far-flung rough country where simplicity and ruggedness – which even the earliest Land Rovers had always had in bucketfuls – were priceless assets.
Melody Danson and Henrietta De L’Isle had needed no encouragement to cower low on the crowded back seat with the patriarch’s wife Señora Margarita – a slim, bird-like woman – and a wide-eyed boy, a skinny urchin with a mop of rebellious dark hair of no more than three or four years of age, who apparently, was the son of the man behind the wheel.
Picking up speed the car rocked and rolled on its rusty springs like a dinghy in a tideway, creaking and groaning as its wheels encountered potholes, dips and ridges in the barely maintained road along the foot of the northern side of the valley.
The sound of a huge explosion from somewhere near the Hacienda de Cortés reached the Bentley as it negotiated a sharp turn some minutes into the headlong flight to the west.
Don José turned and looked back at his passengers.
“Do not be alarmed. When I put it to Paul that I wished to leave nothing for the vultures to pick over when we departed, he suggested a use for the blasting powder kept in the village store and for some of the ‘special stores’ that Señor Stanton brought w
ith him.” He smiled grimly. “There will be further explosions,” he warned. “Please do not be alarmed.”
Don José was not a man who believed in ‘alarm’.
When the stray rifle rounds had started fizzing through the air he had stood, unconcerned, in the courtyard marshalling his people into the waiting vehicles, pausing here and there to pat a shoulder or to murmur a reassuring word. More than once he had cracked a wry, one-liner and guffawed, slapping his thigh as if today’s desperate escape was no more than the preparation for a family picnic in the hills.
The ‘further explosions’ were much smaller than the first but there were a lot of them.
Grenades, Melody guessed.
“The country is at its finest in the spring when the waters run strongly in the Tormes. Later in the year the sun beats down and the river becomes a stream,” Don José explained affably. “Some years the river dries up, although not so much of late; the winters have been harsh and the snow on the highest peaks does not melt until this time of the year. As a boy I fished in the Tormes, even this high in the hills. Not of late, though,” he reflected sadly. “Or, perhaps, ever again.”
His wife spoke for the first time since leaving her home.
“We have had forty good years together in this country,” she comforted her husband. “We shall have more to come. Just not in the land of our birth.”
The old woman’s stoicism made Melody a little ashamed of herself. Don José and his family had nothing to look forward to but exile; she and Henrietta might, although at the moment it seemed unlikely, get to go home at the end of this…nightmare.
It was this which made her sit up.
She was at least going to enjoy the view as the Bentley trundled to the west. Henrietta did likewise and gestured to the boy still crouched in the foot well to pop up on her lap.
“My name is Henrietta, what is your name?” She inquired maternally.
“Pedro,” the kid murmured.
Señora Margarita smiled fond indulgence.
“He’s not normally such a quiet one, that boy,” she said with a fond severity. “Sergio’s dear wife,” she nodded at the driver, “died when Pedro was young. We had Polio and Diphtheria in the village that year, our precious monarch and his circle do not care to ‘waste’ their treasure on programs of inoculation of the type common in the rest of the civilised world.” She sighed in disgust. “Worse, they frown upon Alcaldes like my husband infringing upon their ‘prerogatives’ by doing the work they ought to be doing. Pedro was brought into our household as a baby.”
The old lady smiled.
Henrietta had hugged the boy to herself to stop him being thrown about by the unpredictable gyrations of the Bentley.
Melody gave her lover a look, unsurprised that the kid had brought out Henrietta’s mothering side. The younger woman looked back, shrugged imperceptibly, almost defiantly and clung onto the boy.
Behind them a battered Morris estate car – possibly less than twenty years old – and a slightly more modern, early 1960s battered Leyland lorry rumbled along in the Bentley’s wake. Despite the recent rains the vehicles were kicking up rooster tails of dust and loose stones.
Melody’s thoughts wandered.
Of course, Spain has no real automotive industry. A few factories made spare parts, albeit only for the relatively small number of imported cars and commercial vehicles – a business severely constrained by the Spanish government’s Draconian foreign exchange and currency rules – and several workshops produced hand-made, very expensive cars for wealthy customers, otherwise the country had no native ‘car industry’ in the sense understood by the citizens of the British Isles, Germany, New England – where approximately half the cars and six in every ten large lorries, that is, over five tons deadweight in the Empire were built – France, or elsewhere in the ‘first’, industrialised World. Even Russia produced several hundred thousand cars and trucks a year, and both Australia and India had their own thriving automotive industries. But not Old Spain whose industrial economy had scarcely progressed since the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Part of that was the legacy of the Great War, or that was the lie still parroted by the courtiers of the King-Emperor’s court, and by the organs of a Mother Church that was content to see Spain remain a bastion of medieval orthodoxy in all things…
Melody caught occasional glimpses of the Land Rover foraging far ahead of the rest of the convoy. The men riding precariously on its rusty, bucking ribs were armed with rifles, looking for a fight. Problematically, in this sort of valley and mountain terrain, it was patently obvious that a single militiaman with a gun could stop the convoy in its tracks on this road.
Don José was ahead of her.
“In two or three miles we will go to the north, the rest of our journey will be through ‘bandit’ country which the Army and the policía fear to enter.”
He went on to answer Melody’s next, unspoken question.
“We shall drive through the night. At some stage we will have to halt to refuel the vehicles. We have several cans of petrol in the Leyland. With God’s providence, that will be sufficient to carry us to our destination.”
Chapter 36
Wednesday 5th April
Windward Passage, Caribbean
“I’m picking up a broadcast from Kingston!” Ted Forrest yelped. His voice rang with shocked disbelief. “They’re broadcasting in the clear and they say they are under attack. Cassandra has been hit and has gone aground in the harbour. Several ‘heavy units’ are shelling the naval base and the airfield…”
Abe was so insulated in his own intense little bubble of concentration that the words did not register for some seconds.
“Somebody’s shelling Kingston!” His navigator shouted into the intercom.
“I heard you the first time, Ted,” Abe retorted perfunctorily.
When you were in the woods the best hunter always focused on one thing at a time. Distraction was failure, a kill missed. He and Kate had gone off into the forests of the Mohawk country as kids trapping critters, wrangling snakes but that had got old, rattlers were not good eating. Thinking about it they rarely caught anything in those early years, nobody would let him have a gun until he was in his mid-teens. Then Tsiokwaris had loaned him a long Martini-Henry, a gun allegedly brought back by a man of the nation from the Border Wars, Kate had taught him how to be silent in the forests and he had begun to learn the ways of the hunter. Had he known then what he learned later he might have become a crack shot, not merely a journeyman with that gun but at the time the fun had been in the hunt, tracking, plotting, and of course, being alone in the woods with… Tekonwenaharake.
It was the oddest thing: right now, her spirit travelled with him through the wind as strongly as it had in those lost days of their childhood. It was as if a part of her was with him, looking over his shoulder, the angel of his better nature curbing the lust for blood that always lurked, demon-like, beneath his skin when he was like this, hunting his prey.
“It has to be the same people as the one’s down there!” Ted Forrest said, stating what was patently obvious before he knew what he was saying.
Abe had never taken his eyes off the distant ships.
He chopped back the throttle and the aircraft slowed, juddered on the point of a stall as its airspeed dropped to little more than sixty knots.
“What are we doing, skipper?” His navigator asked anxiously, still badly shaken by the radio broadcast in his earphones.
“Alex, my brother had a theory that the 5th Battle Squadron couldn’t dial back its rangefinders and fire-control directors to cope with the slow speed of the aircraft which attacked its ships on Empire Day,” Abe informed his friend, his tone didactic, unemotional. “That’s why all the attacking aircraft got through. My guess is that the fellows below assume that nobody would be so stupid as to mount an attack at their slowest, rather than their fastest speed.”
Ted Forrest was still listening to the broadcast from Kings
ton.
“Cassandra is confirmed as beached and on fire. The shelling has switched to the town… There are at least two enemy spotter planes circling the harbour… Two other floatplanes have strafed the airfield… The aviation spirit tanks are on fire… It sounds like bedlam down there, Abe!”
HMS Cassandra was a one-off, an experimental ‘anti-aircraft cruiser’ built on a similar hull to that of the Achilles. However, instead of eight 6-inch guns main battery in four twin turrets she mounted twelve 4.7 inch, long-barrelled – fifty-seven calibre – rifles in six twin gun houses capable of elevating their rifles to eighty degrees. An odd-looking ship even more lightly armoured than Achilles, she had clocked up nearly thirty-six knots in full-power trials shortly after her commissioning over twenty years ago. It was probably Cassandra’s ‘oddness’ which had consigned her to a so-called ‘guard ship’ career mostly spent in the Far East and here on the Caribbean Station, where she had been off and on, for the last five years based at Georgetown, Barbados.
Cassandra would be no match for that Emden class cruiser now beginning to grow larger in the ring-sight of the Fire Fox’s single forward-firing machine gun. Cassandra’s 4.7-inchers would barely tickle a ship like that…
The first salvo of anti-aircraft shells exploded well over half-a-mile ahead of Abe’s shallow windscreen.
“Achilles is now ordering us to fly straight up to the Turks and Caicos Islands, skipper!”
“Acknowledge that, Ted.”
Abe had to gun the throttle to stop the aircraft falling out of the sky; more airbursts blossomed several hundred yards ahead of the aircraft.
The cruiser was turning and from her broadening wake ‘opening all the taps’ and pouring on the power. The destroyers had raced past her, now they were having to heel into violent turns of their own to regain station.
Okay, that is interesting…
This is all new to them, too…
“Oh, God!” Ted Forrest cried excitedly.
One of the other Sea Foxes emerged from a cloud of shell bursts in pieces, tumbling end over end down towards the blue, glittering waters a mile below.