‘Mr Stevens. I don’t know who you have served under before, but I am not in the habit of having my XO bark at me,’ Harper began.
‘Sir, it is my…’
‘Or indeed interrupt me. I have received the orders. We are still more than seventeen hours away from the point at which they will need to be acted on. I fail to see why you are here acting this way. In fact, I could do with an extremely good reason why I shouldn’t have you removed from duty and confined to quarters. Lieutenant Talpur, frankly I expected better of you.’ The young Pakistani woman at least had the decency to look guilty. Harper was less than pleased when he noticed that Stevens had his sidearm at his hip.
‘Sir, you do not have the authority to remove me from command,’ Stevens said, a little too smugly for Harper’s taste.
Captain Harper’s anger moved like a thundercloud across his face.
‘Why? Has God come on board in the last five minutes?’
‘Sir, these are decisions being made at board level by CELL command. They feel that you may not be prepared to properly execute their orders.’
‘And I wonder where they got that opinion from?’ Harper demanded. His reply was one of Steven’s thin, evil little smiles. That was it. He turned to Talpur.
‘Lieutenant, do you still recognise me as Captain of this ship or are you in mutiny as well?’
‘Now just a minute!’ Stevens objected.
‘You, sir, will remain quiet!’ Harper shouted. He rarely raised his voice.
‘Yes, Captain, but…’
‘Mr Stevens, you are relieved of command. Lieutenant, escort Mr Stevens to his quarters and confine him there.’
‘Mr Stevens,’ Lieutenant Talpur said, gesturing towards the door. He turned to look down at the much smaller woman.
‘Are you out of your mind?!’ he demanded.
‘Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be please, sir.’
Stevens swung round to face Harper again.
‘You’re going to pay for this!’ he spat.
‘Another word and you’re confined in the brig. Lieutenant, relieve Mr Stevens of his sidearm, please. Leave it on my desk and escort him out of here.’
The lieutenant removed Steven’s M12 Nova from his holster and laid it on the Captain’s desk. She all but had to drag the protesting XO out of Harper’s stateroom.
Harper sagged in his chair as soon as the door closed. He had lost his temper and he knew it. He had let the evil little shit get under his skin and he had done something rash.
He glanced over at the half-full bottle of good whiskey next to the model of the 55-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Prince Royal. He desperately wanted a drink but knew he wouldn’t succumb to the desire. Not this time.
Any kind of ruckus of this nature on a Royal Navy ship meant a serious black mark on everyone involved’s record. The problem was he didn’t appear to be in the Royal Navy anymore. It seemed that they were even going to change the name of the ships. They would no longer be His Majesty’s Ships.
He glanced in the mirror over the sink in his cramped stateroom. He was tall, craggy, and had a hooked nose, which along with his eyebrows gave him a bird-of-prey-like appearance. Despite having waged constant war against middle-aged spread he normally thought that he was doing well for his age. Today he just looked tired, tired and old. He cursed this so-called “anti-CELL” resistance movement. If only they had left it another month before starting, he would have been out of the navy.
He could understand why CELL wanted some assurances that he would follow orders when the time came. If he balked at the last moment it could really mess up their plans. CELL had a lot of influence with the US government and although they had managed to buy the US Marines, which effectively had its own navy and air force, it had not bought the US Navy. The HMS Robin Hood was their best hope for a naval bombardment in the area. Though why they hadn’t chosen to use what had been, until recently, the US marines was beyond him.
Most of the conflicts that Harper had served in during his thirty years had been so-called low intensity conflicts: Iraq, the London Emergency, Sri Lanka, Columbia, even dealing with Ceph nests. Too many of them had involved him firing guns or missiles into civilian centres. Next to none of them had been stand-up fights. Once again his targets were ‘terrorists’. He knew that Yonkers had mostly been evacuated when CELL had effectively annexed New York in the wake of the Ceph invasion. On a conceptual level, Harper still had problems with an alien invasion of New York.
The problem was, he knew the people he was being asked to bombard. Not personally, though it wouldn’t surprise him if there were a few familiar faces amongst them. But these were the same people he had known all his life. They were military people. He had served with their like. He understood why they were fighting. They were angry about the stranglehold that CELL’s energy monopoly had on the world and their privatisation of the militaries of a number of different nations.
He knew his orders were wrong, but he’d known orders had been wrong in the past. He had been aboard HMS Anguish when her Captain had been ordered to fire on south London in the face of widescale social disorder. That had been wrong. He’d spent the next four years as a functional alcoholic as a result of watching the south London skyline burn.
More than once he had questioned orders to fire on civilian population bases in Sri Lanka. By questioned he meant internally, of course, not out loud. He couldn’t afford to not play the game, not in His Majesty’s Navy. Not if he wanted a career.
At least he knew that he would be firing at soldiers who were under arms and intent on violence. He just wasn’t sure he disagreed with them. Just like he didn’t want to be taking orders from a rapacious multinational company.
Just one more month. Rachel and he had intended on using what was left of their savings, the little they had managed to protect in this apparently never-ending recession, and their paltry pensions to buy a place in Dorset. She would continue to teach, he was hoping to get work as a consultant for companies with ship building contracts with the navy.
He slumped in the chair and looked at the whiskey again. He knew what the easy option was. He knew what he owed Rachel, particularly after she had stood by him after the London emergency. After all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t bombarded cities from the sea before.
What he needed was intelligence. The problem was that he was the only one he trusted with gathering the information. He didn’t want to leave the ship — in fact, it could be seen as treason — but he was running out of options. Actually, you old fool, you still have two, you just don’t like them, he thought. He didn’t trust his new employers. The Royal Navy wasn’t meant to be the enforcement arm of a multinational corporation. He needed to know more about the armed insurrection. The resistance wouldn’t risk their comms discipline to speak to him. That left speaking to them face-to-face, and the only person he fully trusted to do that was himself. He told himself that it was because he wanted to make an informed decision. He stood up and left his cramped cabin.
Harper reflected that he had a love-hate relationship with the HMS Robin Hood as he made his way towards the bridge through the ship’s narrow corridors. It was a superb vessel. It had a trimaran hull that incorporated SWATH — Small Waterplane Area Triple Hull — technology to minimise the ship’s volume at the surface area of the sea, where it would encounter resistance from wave energy. This meant reduced acoustic and wake signatures, which added to the vessel’s stealth capabilities. It also made the guided-missile stealth destroyer very fast. During test runs they had managed to get the ship up to speeds of just under sixty knots.