The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5) Page 9

  He turned on his heel and marched back up the gangway.

  “Inform Mr McCann that if the dockyard people are back in board within fifteen minutes they may have their tools and equipment returned to them,” he said to Peter Weiss. “Oh, and indicate to Mr McCann in the strongest possible terms that I don’t want any of the dockyard police on my ship.”

  Returning to his day cabin he was relieved to hear booted feet clunking on the deck over his head and in the adjoining compartments as Joe Calleja’s chastened comrades trudged back onto HMS Talavera.

  Now that the ship was out of the water every inch of her fabric needed to be checked and surveyed and a comprehensive repair, refit and maintenance program executed as quickly as possible.

  However, most of all he needed to get ashore and to be with Marija.

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday 12th February 1964

  HMS Dreadnought, 157 miles West of Grand Harbour

  Captain Simon Collingwood was almost as exhausted as his boat. HMS Dreadnought had been far too long at sea and her commanding officer had been pushing himself too hard for too long and he knew it. A minor but possibly significant factor which constantly exacerbated his weariness was the presence of so many supernumeraries – refugees rescued from a convoy under attack by a Red Dawn squadron off Cyprus – onboard the submarine. Dreadnought’s was a horribly cramped, crowded, claustrophobic environment at the best of times. The addition of twenty-two additional souls, many of them young children in Dreadnought’s close-packed little world could not but be a tremendous strain on both the boat’s internal systems, and on her whole crew.

  However, there were compensations.

  “Your cocoa, Captain Collingwood,” said the soft, lilting feminine voice. The words seemed to swirl about him in the darkness for a moment before his hair-trigger awakening response brought him crashing down to earth with a hard bump.

  The commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s most advanced and dangerous vessel – albeit a vessel whose capabilities were somewhat impaired at present – blinked into the face of a serenely lovely young woman and miraculously, for a little while, his weariness completely evaporated.

  He tried to remember when he had last had a good night’s sleep. Probably not since the boat had sailed from Gibraltar. He and his officers had surrendered their tiny cabins to the refugee women and children, resting when they could in the Wardroom, often under the table, or cat-napping in warm corners. Simon Collingwood had got by taking ten, twenty or thirty minute catnaps in his control room command chair.

  “Thank you, Maya.” The young woman, she was twenty-three he had discovered from the notes of her debriefing, was called Maya Hayek and she had come aboard with her younger sister, and two young children; a girl called Yelda and a boy called Yannis, cousins whose parents were likely dead somewhere in Turkey. Yelda was the older child. In her own tongue the name meant ‘summer rose’; now she was orphaned and travelling on a submarine whose only reason for being was war.

  The World had gone mad.

  The Captain of the United Kingdom’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine allowed himself to meet, momentarily, Maya Hayek’s limpid brown gaze, knowing that nothing again in his life would ever quieten his thoughts, nor fill him with such gentle strength as the calm in her eyes. Maya was dressed in an over-sized blue boiler suit, her long black hair modestly contained and mostly hidden by a scarf.

  Reality suddenly impinged.

  “SURFACE CONTACT!”

  Simon Collingwood waited for the next report.

  “Bearing three-two-zero! Single screw! Range ten plus miles!”

  Commander Max Forton, Dreadnought’s Executive Officer had been napping in the sound room. He stepped into the control room rubbing his red-rimmed eyes.

  “Let’s go and have a look at her,” Simon Collingwood decided.

  His second-in-command leaned over the tactical plot.

  “Amphion should be dead ahead of our contact, Skipper.”

  A picket line of conventional ‘A’ class – diesel-electric submarines like museum exhibits from a far distant past age in comparison to Dreadnought even in her present somewhat tired incarnation – was strung north to south along longitude seventeen degrees East. It was the job of the ‘Amphions’ to intercept and challenge all ships attempting to pass to the west. The picket line had been established after Red Dawn had used a passenger ferry, crowded with refugees from Turkey to smuggle a tactical nuclear weapon into Limassol harbour to sink the cruiser HMS Blake, and to put the port out of action. This attack, coming shortly after the Blake had stowed the last of the thirty-eight nuclear warheads previously stored at RAF Akrotiri in her magazines, and at the moment the evacuation of the garrison, its dependents and friendly Cypriot citizens from the island was about to commence, had begun the bloody decline and near collapse of British arms in the Eastern Mediterranean. Fear that the fate of Limassol could be repeated at other ports, like for example, Malta’s Grand Harbour, was constantly in the forefront of the mind of every senior officer in the theatre. Hence, the line of obsolete Amphions patrolling down longitude seventeen degrees East.

  Simon Collingwood allowed himself a moment’s reflection.

  It was too easy to make a fast decision when one was tired; and he had just made a ‘fast’ decision that failed to take account of at least one very important tactical fact. HMS Amphion. HMS Amphion probably did not know Dreadnought was transiting her patrol box, and Collingwood had no intention of advertising his boat’s presence to the ‘A’ class boat, or to anybody else for that matter.

  “Belay that last order, Number One. Thank you for reminding me Amphion is on station. We’ll let Amphion do her job. Plot a course well south of the surface contact. We’ve had quite enough excitement on this cruise; perhaps we should let somebody else have a little fun?”

  “That’s confoundedly generous of you, Skipper!”

  There was a mutter of amusement in the control room.

  When Simon Collingwood looked around Maya had disappeared like a beautiful apparition he had glimpsed in a dream. He knew her disappearance would trouble him, lingering in the back of his head until he next saw her. It was getting very hard to remind himself that commanders of nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines could ill afford distractions.

  He clenched his right fist, clunked down it on the arm rest of the command chair. If he got careless people would probably die; and that would never do. Not if they were his people.

  “Take the boat down to two-seven-five feet if you please, Number One. We will maintain our present course and speed until we are well past the surface contact.”

  His orders were repeated around the control room.

  “I suggest we come left onto two-six-zero degrees, sir!”

  “Very good! Carry on!” Simon Collingwood stretched in the chair. The ache in his shoulders and behind his eyes wasn’t going to go away any time soon. He stood up. “You have the watch, Number One.”

  “I have the watch, Skipper!”

  “I’m going to wander around the boat for a few minutes.”

  Although Max Forton looked a little ragged, he was still raring for action, yearning for the chase. After the last year no man in the Royal Navy was better fitted to occupy Simon Collingwood’s seat when inevitably, his time in command ended. For all he knew this was his last cruise.

  Clutching his precious mug of cocoa HMS Dreadnought’s commanding officer headed aft, sticking his head into the nooks and crannies where his men lived and worked until he entered the machinery spaces where he had a brief chat with the Engineering Officer. He looked into the Wardroom where three women and four child refugees were chatting with a steward. Sighting the Captain they silence fell. Maya was restraining Yelda, trying to stop her hiding under the table.

  “Pretend I’m not here,” Simon Collingwood suggested uncomfortably. He placed his now empty mug on the Wardroom table.

  The young woman’s brown eyes flashed demur amusem
ent.

  At exactly that moment HMS Dreadnought’s pressure hull trembled and filled with a sound like the muffled roar of a volcanic eruption.

  And then the collision alarm sounded.

  “GET ON THE DECK AND HOLD ON TO SOMETHING!” Simon Collingwood barked and without waiting to see if his order had been obeyed he stumbled towards the control room.

  Max Forton’s voice broke hoarsely over the submarine-wide public address system.

  “This is the Executive Office! Brace for collision! Brace for Collision!”

  Dreadnought was heeling into a tight starboard turn and Simon Collingwood almost fell over the hatch combing as he entered the control room.

  “Very, very large underwater explosion, Skipper!” Max Forton announced tersely.

  The noise was muted as if a ten mile wide drum had been struck by mile-wide drumstick under water a great distance away. The delayed pressure wave smashed into HMS Dreadnought’s bow like a giant hammer; the whole boat seemed to stop dead in the water for a second before she lurched forward, her bow rising.

  “Level the boat!” Simon Collingwood demanded. “Number One,” he added, beckoning Max Forton over to the command chair. They both knew they had been closer to a big nuclear depth charge than they ever wanted to be again. There was no profit belabouring the point. “I may be being a tad paranoid but I think somebody had just blown a big hole in the Amphions’ picket line. As soon as the acoustic disturbance has dissipated we’ll creep up to periscope depth and have a look around.”

  “We ought to get a signal off to Valletta, Skipper,” Max Forton muttered confidentially.

  “Yes. Trail the aerial and we’ll get that sent soonest.”

  Some ninety minutes later HMS Dreadnought’s attack periscope skimmed the surface of the almost smooth, very nearly perfectly dark azure Central Mediterranean. The surface contact they had discovered before the explosion was gone. A careful orbit of the horizon revealed nothing, an ocean devoid of shipping.

  “Periscope down!” Simon Collingwood frowned in intense concentration. “Has Malta acknowledged our last transmission?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Very good, take the boat down to two hundred feet if you please, Number One. Once we are at depth please plot a course to place us twenty miles magnetic west of Amphion’s last known position. We will fill the gap in the picket line pending further communication with Fleet HQ in Malta.”

  It was reasonable to assume that the surface contact had waited until HMS Amphion had challenged her; shortly thereafter she had detonated a massive nuclear depth charge, probably within a few hundred feet of the ‘A’ class boat.

  That was cold!

  Dreadnought had a Mark XX homing torpedo and four heavy-weight old-fashioned Mark VIIIs loaded in her five working torpedo tubes. He had thought he was going to have to take them back to base; perhaps, God had had a change of mind.

  He dictated a terse message to Fleet HQ.

  Shortly after nightfall a flash transmission pad was pressed into his hands.

  IMMEDIATE X CINCMED TO S101 X CONCUR WITH YOUR ACTIONS X BE AWARE OF AIR AND SEA ASSETS APPROACHING YOUR PATROL LINE FROM EAST X HOLD THE LINE X DEPLOY 2SF AS YOU SEE FIT X MESSAGE ENDS

  Simon Collingwood struggled to stifle a shivering yawn as he passed the pad to his Executive Officer. The younger man raised an eyebrow.

  “Congratulations, Skipper. The C-in-C has just given you command of the 2nd Submarine Squadron!”

  “Establish contact with whichever boats are still on station please.”

  There ought to be four, possibly as many as five Amphions twenty to thirty miles apart in the picket. One was sunk; if another had departed its station since Dreadnought had picked up the last general situation report nearly twenty-four hours ago there might be wide gaps in the theoretically impenetrable line. Only Dreadnought – assuming she did not have a major breakdown – was capable of covering any additional holes in Malta’s eastern submarine defences although with only five torpedoes remaining from her initial war load of twenty-four, it was a moot question as to what she might actually achieve if confronted with multiple targets.

  Simon Collingwood breathed a long and heartfelt sigh of relief when after a wait of over two hours the last of the remaining Amphions reported in.

  The southern extremity of HMS Alliance’s five mile wide patrol box was twenty-three miles north-east of Dreadnought’s current position. HMS Artemis was nineteen miles to the south-east; HMS Alderney forty-two miles, the Ambush seventy-one miles, and HMS Astute one hundred and four miles to the south.

  Other than ordering the Astute to withdraw twenty miles to the north-west to ‘better cover the flank of our line’ he left his captains to their own devices. On balance he suspected their irritation to be ‘bullied’ by the new boy in the class, would be greatly outweighed by how glad they were to have a nuclear-powered hunter killer boat to back them up if they ran into the sort of trouble which had proven fatal to the Amphion.

  “Did you know anybody on the Amphion, sir?” Max Forton asked quietly as the two men studied the extended tactical plot.

  “No, not really.” That was a lie. A classmate of his at Dartmouth had been her captain; a decent, unimaginative, utterly solid man who had lost his wife and two young sons in the October War.

  What was wrong with the World?

  There was a polite cough behind the two men.

  “They said there was ‘too much excitement going on’ before,” Maya Hayek apologised, holding out a mug of steaming cocoa. “I sorry I did not bring the Captain’s Kye before... Now...”

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday 12th February 1964

  The Citadel, Mdina, Malta

  The two staff cars transporting the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, and his Deputy on Malta arrived at the gates of the narrow bridge over the Citadel’s thirty feet deep dry moat within moments of each other. The two cars crossed into the ancient fortress in convoy and parked in the courtyard of the derelict Connaught Hospital.

  Admiral Sir Julian Christopher and Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French greeted each other with wry grins, casual salutes and brief handshakes. The two men had instantly hit it off when they first met in the aftermath of the devastating air raid on the Maltese Archipelago in early December last year. They did not invariably see eye to eye - one man was an admiral, and the other an airman so they were never going agree about everything – but their robustly friendly and wholly collegiate working relationship had served the men under their command well and thus far at least, delayed the complete collapse of British power and influence in the Mediterranean.

  Julian Christopher paused to look around the courtyard his staff had requisitioned as a car park.

  “Young Hannay was going to look into the history of this place,” he remarked, waving up at the first and second floor balustraded balconies and the high arched neo-classical windows of the old abandoned hospital.

  “I can help you there,” Dan French guffawed. “Its location just inside the Citadel gates gives the game away.”

  “Oh,” the men had urgent business but they were old hands who knew that it was best not to rush towards the sound of the guns without first catching one’s breath. “How so?”

  “The original building on this spot was a ‘Universita’, or ‘Government House’. It was ideally located to regulate traffic in and out of the main gate and presumably, if need be to tax whatever was coming in or going out of the Citadel. When the gate was rebuilt in the early eighteenth century the then Grand Master, Manuel de Vilhena – a Portuguese gentleman, I believe – forked out from his own pocket to create the palace we see around us now. Until the mid-fifties we were using it as a hospital. The Connaught Hospital, so named because His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught stumped up the readies to fund the conversion work. Before the October War there was talk of turning it into a museum of some kind.”

  Julian Christopher g
rinned broadly.

  “My word,” he sighed, “I never knew you were such a font of local knowledge, Dan!”

  “Well, I’d hate to think I was working for a fellow who knew all my secrets!”

  The two men laughed. Out of earshot of their subordinates they were comfortable in their unforced informality. They fell into step for the short walk across the Citadel to the Headquarters of Mediterranean Command beneath the western ramparts.

  “This is a Hell of a thing,” the airman, the younger man by a decade or so observed. The eventual safe arrival of the USS Enterprise in the Grand Harbour, and that morning of several of her conventionally powered escorts - left behind fuelling and provisioning at Gibraltar while the two American ‘nuclear’ warships, the carrier and her escorting cruiser, the USS Long Beach forged on ahead – and the unanticipated stalling of all enemy offensive action in Cyprus and the Balkans following Friday’s nuclear strikes, had given Mediterranean Command a short opportunity to draw breath. However, the attack on HMS Amphion and the temporary breaching of the 2nd Submarine Squadron’s picket line chillingly echoed what had happened to HMS Blake in Limassol Harbour. Neither man, nor any of their closest advisors knew what to make of the incident one hundred and fifty miles west of Malta. But for the fortuitous presence of HMS Dreadnought in the vicinity of the missing Amphion, the one Royal Naval vessel in the Mediterranean capable of guarding, almost single-handed, the eastern approaches to the Maltese Archipelago, both men would have been significantly less sanguine.

  “It is a little bizarre,” his C-in-C agreed. “Our best intelligence is that all Red Dawn major surface units have withdrawn into the Sea of Crete or are heading back to their bases in the northern Aegean. Why the blazes would the blighters blow a hole in the Amphions’ picket when they’ve got nothing within several hundred miles to put through it?”