YOU ARE IN RESTRICTED WATERS. PLEASE OBSERVE RADIO SILENCE.
Until then he had suspected — but not known for a fact — that Carrier Division Seven was steaming into hostile waters.
Walter had passed the word for the commanding officer of the Kitty Hawk, Captain Horace Epes to come to the bridge. Shortly afterwards, Captain Epes had requested the man in command of Carrier Division Seven, Rear Admiral William Bringle’s presence on the bridge.
Captain Epes had been mightily displeased by the approaching destroyer’s presumption. Nobody told a US Navy ship how to conduct its operations in international waters.
Rear Admiral Bringle had visibly stiffened with outrage.
Her Majesty’s Australian Ship Anzac, a vessel completed shortly after the Second World War on the pattern of the Royal Navy’s later Battle class ships had careened through the heart of Carrier Group Seven at better than twenty-five knots before turning in a wide circle to assume station on the Kitty Hawk’s starboard flank at a range of less than two hundred yards; at which stage an abbreviated acrimonious exchange via a crackling, distorted FM radio link had commenced between the commanding officer of the Anzac, and Admiral Bringle.
‘Please state your intentions, Kitty Hawk?’
‘My intention is to go about my lawful business in international waters, Captain.’
Anzac’s commanding officer had identified himself as Commander Steven Turnbull and he clearly did not have much time, or any innate sympathy, with the senior officers of foreign navies.
‘I am instructed to inform you that the United States Navy has no lawful business in these waters, sir. Your government surrendered any lawful business your Navy might have had in these waters when it reneged on its obligations to its friends in these parts. Stand ready to receive the Commander-in-Chief of All British and Commonwealth Naval Forces in the Indian Ocean. His helicopter will approach your flagship from approximately due south within the next thirty minutes. On his arrival I strongly recommend you think up a better story than the one you’ve just given me to justify your presence in these waters, Admiral. I will hold position to starboard until further notice. Please notify me by signal lamp if you intend to alter course. That will be all.’
The link went dead.
Admiral Bringle had stared at the receiver in his clenched fist.
‘Continue to recover aircraft,’ he had grated, clunking the handset onto the bridge plot.
Kitty Hawk’s Executive officer had hurried onto the bridge at that juncture.
‘I have the deck, Mr Brenckmann!’
‘You have the deck, sir!’
As promised the helicopter bearing the Commander-in-Chief of All British and Commonwealth Naval Forces in the Indian Ocean approached out of the south. After a terse radio conversation with Captain Epes, the Westland Wessex had swooped down to land abreast the carrier’s big island bridge.
Moments later a generously fleshed man of indeterminate middle years had emerged from the Wessex.
Walter Brenckmann, having been hastily dragooned into joining the reception committee for the flagship’s unexpected visitor, found himself at Captain Epes shoulder.
‘Horace Epes, Kitty Hawk.’
The newcomer had viewed the carrier’s captain thoughtfully for a moment; and then his cherubic, lived-in face had split with a broad grin.
‘Nick Davey, Rear-Admiral, these days. I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, sir. I probably need to make my apologies to your Admiral for Steven Turnbull’s rustic misunderstanding of the correct protocols. But what can you expect? That’s our Antipodean friends for you!’
He had saluted and stuck out his hand which Kitty Hawk’s commanding officer had, after an awkward hesitation, shaken. The commanding officer of Carrier Division Seven, the captain of the Kitty Hawk and the British Admiral had locked themselves in the Bringle’s day cabin for approximately fifteen minutes; thereafter Rear Admiral Bringle and Captain Epes had emerged with faces dark as thunder and Rear Admiral ‘Nick’ Davey, exuding charm and roguish insouciance had been whisked away by the Royal Australian Navy Westland Wessex which had conveyed him onto the deck of the carrier only shortly before.
The Kitty Hawk had been buzzing with rumours and outlandish gossip in the last two days, and now anybody who was not on watch who could get up on deck or crowd around a vantage point on the ship’s port side was watching the approaching squadron.
It was a somewhat rag tag sight but none the less impressive for all that.
At a distance the silhouettes of the three aircraft carriers exuded menace as their stark lines emerged out of the morning haze, while around them their escorts slowly quartered the azure blue waters.
The Kitty Hawk had suspended air operations over an hour before the flagship of the ‘Australian, British and New Zealand Task Force’ came over the southern horizon.
The modern all-gun cruiser HMS Tiger was streaming a huge battle flag from its tripod main mast, as was every vessel in ‘Nick’ Davey’s motley fleet. Behind the Tiger, the only operational aircraft carrier, the twenty-two thousand ton HMS Centaur, had parked all her fighters and helicopters on her deck. Behind Centaur the HMAS Sydney and HMS Triumph, two decommissioned British wartime light carriers converted respectively to the roles of a fast transport and a heavy repair ship, shouldered through the four or five feet swells.
Through binoculars Walter Brenckmann blinked in astonishment to see that the flight decks of both former aircraft carriers were crowded with tanks, mobile howitzers and other vehicles amidships and forward and aft of the ‘vehicle parks’ with helicopters and aircraft. Most of the deck cargo was protected by dark tarpaulins but any fool could tell what was under them.
Her Majesty’s New Zealand Ship Royalist, an aging Dido class British light cruiser completed in 1943, steamed ahead of the second echelon of the ‘ABNZ’ fleet. Several small Ton class minesweepers kept company with a big grey fleet oiler and another Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel that looked like an ammunition ship. There were three bigger escorts, two of which Walter Brenckmann identified as the Voyager, an Australian fleet destroyer, and HMS Palliser, a British anti-submarine frigate.
In purely naval fighting terms the approaching squadron was no match for the Kitty Hawk, or frankly, any two of her main escorts; but as a visible statement of intent the ABNZ flotilla made a fine sight. The two old-fashioned cruisers bristled with naval rifles — always a more impressive sight than the clean, modernistic pylons of missile launchers — and the carriers, well the carriers just looked ‘mean’.
“Those are Centurion tanks on the decks of the carriers,” a man by Walter Brenckmann’s shoulder said in astonishment. “Where the fuck did they get all those tanks and choppers?”
“Australia,” he suggested. The Australian military had been buying small job lots of British tanks ever since the Korean conflict. There had to be at least thirty of the monsters on the decks of the Sydney and the Triumph, perhaps half the armoured inventory of the CMF — the Citizens Military Force of Australia — on those two old carriers. How many more had been stowed below? The Australians would have had to have emptied out their entire armoured ‘locker’ to send so many tanks abroad.
Who said the British Empire was dead?
Chapter 31
Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson and Joanne Brenckmann exchanged pecking kisses of greeting before settling in comfortable chairs in the Ambassador’s private rooms. There was a quiet air of siege in the collection of ancient buildings next to Oxford Castle which had been allocated to the American Embassy; outside there were Coldstream Guardsmen in battledress and full combat webbing cradling loaded L1A1 rifles beside uniformed US Marines still equipped with pre-World War II ceremonial carbines. Policemen armed with Webley revolvers and long night sticks manned the cordons roping off the surrounding streets.