Travels Through The Wind (New England Book 3)

by James Philip

  The other aircraft pressed on, diving now.

  “Skipper, we’re supposed to be heading straight for Grand Turk Island or Cockburn Town on the way up to Florida!”

  “Yes,” Abe agreed. He left his intercom switched to ‘transmit’. He needed to focus on that cruiser…and nothing else for the next minute or so.

  The Sea Fox was less than a mile away, in a shallow dive with its engine throttle back so far that its propeller was virtually feathered when either Blue leader or Blue One, plummeted to its fiery death. For a moment Abe was unsure if it had hit the stern of the cruiser a glancing blow on its port side or just crashed into the sea. He was amazed the surviving Sea Fox had emerged more or less whole from the blizzard of small-calibre anti-aircraft fire thrown up in a seemingly impenetrable umbrella above the fast-moving ship.

  Then there were three explosions.

  Simultaneously, on the roof of the cruiser’s after triple turret, another right at the transom end of the quarterdeck and another, to the eye slightly delayed, from inside the ship bursting out of the deck planking in a splinter-filled mushroom of grey smoke shot through with crimson.

  The Sea Fox had released its bombs in its death dive…

  Abe decided, however unlikely it was, that his guess that the cruiser had stopped shooting at him, was correct. The reason why was of no consequence. Likewise, the reason why the ship which he had calculated to have been making at least twenty-five knots and had been picking up speed all the while just seconds ago had, although still turning hard to starboard, visibly slowed.

  He pressed forward the throttle lever until it hit the stop bar.

  Pushed the nose of the aircraft down.

  He clasped the stick with his right hand as his left closed over the bomb release lever.

  Instantly, the cruiser was filling his gunsight.

  His thumb closed over the firing button.

  He waited.

  Pressed the button hard.

  The Sea Fox shook as the slipstream roared past.

  Chapter 37

  Wednesday 5th April

  El Barco de Ávila

  Everything had gone to Hell in seconds.

  There had been a blizzard of rifle and machine gun fire from up ahead, the Bentley had swerved off the road and very nearly overturned and men, women and children had spilled out of the following vehicles as the first bullets tore into the convoy and ricocheted off the road and the rocks to either side of it. It was bedlam with bodies falling, scythed down everywhere.

  “If we stay here, we’re done for!” Albert Stanton shouted, blinking fiercely through the dusty lenses of his spectacles, as he dropped into the dirt where the women and the traumatised boy, Pedro, who had been dozing on Henrietta’s lap when the mayhem erupted, were sheltering.

  The Bentley was fifty feet away, burning fiercely.

  The driver, Don José and his wife, had been shot before they could move and Melody Danson did not have any idea how she, Henrietta and the boy had got out, scampered across open ground and fallen into the dry trench, some kind of drainage channel, without anything worse than a few grazes and scratches.

  The man from the Manhattan Globe was hefting an old-fashioned sub-machine gun of the kind one saw German gangsters using in so many films these days…

  “We have to get out of here!” He yelled.

  He pressed a grey automatic pistol into Melody’s hands.

  “The safety is off, there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to shoot anybody, grab it in both hands, point in the general direction of the target and keep pressing the trigger.”

  “I don’t…”

  “We have to get out of here,” the man repeated breathlessly. “NOW!”

  He did not wait for a response.

  Instead, he grabbed Melody’s arm and suddenly the two women, the boy, whom Henrietta in her terror had found the strength to sweep up in her arms, were running bent double towards a nearby tree line above where the river Tormes in spring spate burbled past the walls of a dusty village.

  Others were running with them.

  Bullets kicked up stones.

  They hurdled a fallen body without thinking to stop.

  They fell, tumbling into the trees.

  They jumped up and ran again.

  They halted under cover, listened to the water flowing nearby.

  They could smell the river, an oasis in an otherwise dry, rocky landscape.

  “Keep low,” Stanton directed, gasping for air. “If we got this far the plan was to meet up with ‘friends’ on the other side of the river. There was some talk of transferring to boats, the river isn’t navigable all the way to the Douro, which it joins at a place called Ambasaguas, but where it narrows or passes over natural outcrops or rocky sub-straits, I’m given to believe that it is just about passable if one is travelling in lightweight skiffs that can be manhandled over obstacles…”

  Through the undergrowth Melody thought she glimpsed the shape of the arches of a stone bridge.

  The intensity of the shooting had lessened.

  “Well,” she decided. “I have no idea what’s happened to our ‘friends’ but I don’t think hanging around here any longer than we absolutely have to is going to be a very good idea!”

  “I agree,” the man said. Although he was soaked in perspiration and trembling from the violent physical exertions of the last few minutes, he retained the presence of mind to nudge the muzzle of the gun gripped in Melody’s now cramping grasp away from his legs.

  “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “Don’t mention it,” he chuckled ruefully.

  Henrietta was hugging Pedro to her breast.

  “What do we do?” She asked, surreally calm in that moment.

  “People are trying to kill us on this side of the river,” the man replied. “It can’t be any worse on the other side.”

  Melody was tempted to disagree with this premise.

  Every police officer, particularly every detective, took it as an article of faith that things could always get worse. However, in the circumstances she decided that it would have been less than helpful to belabour the point.

  However, with bullets fizzing through the branches above them the simple act of steeling oneself to get to one’s feet was going to be a near insuperable psychological obstacle.

  That was, right up until the moment there were two small, ear-splitting detonations less than thirty yards from where they lay. After that they were on their feet in a flash and running along the eastern bank of the Tormes towards the bridge Melody had glimpsed through the trees a minute ago.

  There were several men with rifles hunkered down behind sand bags and an overturned truck guarding the village end of the bridge. They saw Stanton and the women and waved the fugitives past.

  “Date prisa los bastardos están llegando!”

  HURRY, THE BASTARDS ARE COMING!

  In reality, this incitement could not possibly have hastened their steps across the horribly exposed span of the medieval humped-back bridge. Nevertheless, with it ringing in their ears they ignored their pains and their terrors and sprinted as if they were possessed.

  Chapter 38

  Wednesday 5th April

  Windward Passage, Caribbean

  It was like a dream, a kaleidoscopic melange of impressions rather than a linear ‘real’ experience. Abe recollected the machine gun falling silent, its magazine boxes emptied, the cruiser’s funnel beckoning black and abysmal, the imagined tang of boiler exhaust in his face, the Sea Fox twitching and shaking, and something plucking at his left shoulder, the aircraft zooming away after the bombs dropped and Ted Forrest’s cockpit mounted 0.303 gun rattling angrily.

  And then it was over.

  “One of our eggs must have gone down her bally funnel!” Abe’s friend was yelling exuberantly. “She’s coming to a dead stop in the water! There’s a bloody big fire on her boat deck amidships! She’s venting steam from one of her boilers like nobody’s business! Even those lit
tle twenty-five pounders went off with a frightful bang when they hit her boat deck!”

  Abe turned his head to snatch a look for himself.

  Why aren’t the destroyers shooting at us?

  Be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.

  The aircraft felt a little heavy, he glanced to left and right trying to see what damage there was to the Sea Fox’s wings. He saw several uncomfortably large, fist-sized holes.

  “Ted, what does the tail look like?”

  “The rudder has got a bloody big hole in it, skipper!”

  “What about you, are you okay, Ted?”

  “Yeah, what about you?”

  “Something clipped my shoulder but I’m fine.”

  A fierce blaze had taken hold aft of the cruiser’s single, now somewhat abbreviated and re-profiled formerly elegant funnel and exhaust gases were pluming almost vertically above the wreckage. From the altitude Abe had released his bombs he knew none of them could have penetrated the two to three inches of Krupp cemented plate covering the cruiser’s vitals, so the ship was not about to sink but on the other hand she was on fire and virtually stopped in the water.

  “I think I read KARLSRUHE on that beggar’s aft superstructure, Skipper,” Ted Forrest reported.

  “Report to Achilles that the KARLSRUHE is temporarily dead in the water and on fire. I’d guess her main battery is still intact, I don’t think that bomb that went off on her aft turret will have done anything more than concuss the gun crew.” He hesitated. “Did you see those great big Spanish-looking flags the Karlsruhe was flying from her forward yards and from her main mast, Ted?”

  “Yes. But they weren’t Spanish. They look like the Nuevo Granada version of the Old Spanish rag.”

  “Okay. Make sure you report that too, please.”

  “I’m on it, skipper.”

  Not that being at war with New Spain, or Nuevo Granada, and probably Cuba, Santo Domingo and God alone knew who else in this part of the World was better than being at war with Germany, leastways, from a New England perspective but none of that was Abe’s immediate concern.

  Reporting exactly what they had observed was the main thing.

  Abe circled, climbing back up to around four thousand feet, retreating out of the two destroyers’ anti-aircraft zone of engagement. One of the smaller ships had closed to hailing range of the Karlsruhe.

  He checked the fuel gauges.

  “Report to Achilles that we are disengaging. If we stooge around much longer, we won’t have any kind of reserve if we run into head winds on the way up to Cockburn Town.”

  One last, long climbing circle and Abe pointed the Sea Fox to the north towards where he assumed Achilles was pounding south at her best speed.

  “Achilles is engaging two heavies!”

  Initially, Abe was a little afraid that all the excitement had proved a little too much for his friend.

  “What was that, Ted?”

  “Achilles reports she is engaging two heavy cruisers,” his friend said doggedly. “From what I’m hearing the hostiles must have come out of Guantanamo Bay, or the clutter of the land thereabouts, and suddenly popped up on Achille’s ELDAR plot at a range of only fourteen miles…”

  Abe did the math: the 8-inch guns of the latest generation of Kaiserliche Marine heavy cruisers had a range of around twenty miles. Fourteen miles was well within the killing envelope of those guns and at the absolute outer effective range limit of Achilles’s 50-calibre 6-inch Mark XXIs. More pertinently the German ships were shooting two hundred and seventy-pound projectiles against Achilles’s one hundred and twelve pounders. Even taking into account that Achilles could probably throw two broadsides to the bigger ships’ one that still meant her eight guns could only put one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two pounds of metal in the air per minute, against the four thousand three hundred and twenty pounds of her two much bigger, heavily armoured foes. Worse, especially at long-range, plunging fire from the German ships would tear through Achilles’s thin skin and parsimoniously light armoured protection like a hot knife through butter, while her own rounds would simply crumple up or bounce off the three or four inches of plate protecting the enemy’s machinery and magazine spaces.

  “It was always a trap, Ted,” Abe said blankly. “If Achilles managed to outrun the heavies coming out of Guantanamo Bay the Karlsruhe and those two destroyers were positioned to block her way south. With other ships shelling Kingston this has to be practically the whole of the Vera Cruz Squadron mounting a pre-emptive operation against us in this part of the Caribbean!”

  His friend was silent for some seconds.

  “If the Old Man pulls out all the stops, I bet Achilles can show those big beggars a clean pair of heels,” Ted Forrest speculated.

  But they both knew that the Old Man was not going to run away from anybody.

  The Royal Navy had not become the globe’s premier navy by running away. It was hammered into all inductees at every naval college in the Empire that ‘no captain can do wrong if he lays his ship against his enemy’. Three hundred years of indefatigable tradition and the honour of the service dictated that whatever the odds no Royal Navy ship declined battle on the piffling grounds that it was massively out-gunned.

  As to how a captain was expected to react to a supposedly ‘hopeless’ situation, that was simple: one fought until one could fight no more, and then one fought on regardless…

  Chapter 39

  Wednesday 5th April

  Puente de Congosto, River Tormes

  In the darkness the lights of the village seemed unnaturally bright as the two boats, little more than what New Englanders would regard as ‘punts’ and the locals called ‘skiffs’, drifted slowly beneath the arches of yet another very old stone bridge.

  Had Melody Danson not been exhausted – it seemed as if they, Albert Stanton, she and Henrietta De L’Isle and the grim-faced Spanish teenagers steering the two boats had spent longer manhandling the wooden punts over two or three inch deep stone-fields and through muddy shallows than actually afloat – she might have recognised that she was travelling through an antique landscape, surrounded by the immutable evidence of the suffocating stasis which had gripped this once great nation. It was as if time had stood still in this country; away from the big cities the majority of the population lived more or less as they had done in the seventeenth century everyday viewing bucolic rural vistas and living in communities which might have been recognisable to the Roman, Visigothic and Moorish-ruled inhabitants of those places in long-gone past ages.

  Henrietta only let go of Pedro when she took a corner of the frail vessel that she and Melody shared, to help lift it over obstructions. The second they were back on the water again she squeezed the child, who was near catatonic, to her bosom and resumed whispering, cooing words of comfort.

  They had eaten the stale bread and mouldy cheese which had been thrown to them as they cast off downstream from Barco de Avila that afternoon, scooping water from the river to slake their thirst under a cruelly searing spring sun until evening finally allowed them a merciful relief.

  “The river widens soon,” the young Spaniard in the stern of the punt whispered. The two boats were roped together to prevent them becoming separated. The water had only been a few feet deep beneath them thus far, so the risk of drowning was the least of their problems whereas, separation, would have been a disaster given how many people had already probably died since Don José’s motley party had departed Navalperal de Tormes.

  ‘Before he left us,’ Albert Stanton had confided to the women, ‘Paul Nash told me he did not think anybody knew that you were being sheltered in Don José’s household. It might be that the sort of people who are looking for us, the bad guys still have no idea where we are. And,’ he had remarked, ‘now that I’ve travelled through this country the lack of basic services like telephones, motorised transport, anything that you or I would consider as the pre-requisites for a modern civil society, mains electricity, for example, must make it in
credibly hard for anybody to mount, let alone co-ordinate a man, or a woman hunt, in this country. It is as if the countryside is a different, alien Spain to the worlds of Madrid and the cities. The twentieth century has just not happened out here.’

  Melody had wordlessly agreed,

  Living in Madrid these last few months and visiting Toledo and Segovia, and on their one extended foray to the south, Cordoba and Seville, had been to explore places that were sufficiently modern, familiar to her eyes and senses despite their ancient architectural wonders. Even their stay in Chinchón had hardly been any kind of culture shock – until the night of the coup, obviously – because up in the mountains the town had been a little bit of oldy-world Spain that was still very much connected to the milieu of Madrid. However, walking in the mountains, passing through and around villages that still sat on the footprint of pre-Roman, possibly Neolithic settlements in which nothing had changed since before the time of the Great War, and twentieth century sanitation or medicine had certainly not yet arrived, had been a rude introduction to the realities of life for the majority of the population of Old Spain.

  Now, of course, that dislocation from the modern world was their friend, their one ally in an otherwise wholly hostile land. Moreover, while they might still think themselves in some way superior, or exotic they all looked grubby, weary, and their clothes were ragged just from the adventures and traumas of the last twenty-four hours.

  ‘A lot of people will see us on the river,’ Albert Stanton had explained. ‘The guides,” he nodded to the two teenage boys, “tell me nobody will give us a second look. Everybody will assume we are a family going down river searching for work in the upper reaches of the Douro Valley. Pedro, they will assume is our child, likewise the youngsters steering the boats, other adolescent family members…’

  Melody had asked the man how far they were from the Portuguese border.