“You see far too much, Richard,” she said finally, only half sad as she stepped away from him and began to walk back toward Lyness Naval Base, raising a hand as a farewell without breaking step or turning back.
“More than you’ll ever know,” Kransky muttered softly, staring after her. He could only watch for a few moments before he felt the need to turn away and stare at one of the nearby headstones instead. He knew that his own nightmares were going to be bad that night, and years of experience told him that all the alcohol in the world wouldn’t help.
‘Glad of the company’, he thought sadly of what he’d said as she’d approached, then thought of where he stood. A shudder ran through him as he noted there were plenty of new piles of earth for company in that cemetery now. Being alone was something Kransky was no stranger to — his whole ‘working’ life had been spent alone, in one hellhole or another — and as such he hoped things would work out between Donelson and Thorne… they could both do a good deal worse than each other in both an immediate and a broader sense, and neither deserved the loneliness under which they both clearly suffered. The shudder ran through him once more, and he decided he’d probably spent as much time in the company of others for the time being as was prudent. His thoughts were becoming darker than anything he could imagine, and he started to once more relish the idea of solitude on the field of combat.
More than you’ll ever know… He thought sadly in silent response to Eileen’s parting remark. More than you’ll ever know…
Martello Towers were a common theme for defensive fortifications built by the British at home and around the Empire during the 19th Century. Standing up to twelve metres high, and with two or three floors (and sometimes also a basement), the round, cylinder-like structures were built with thick masonry walls that were highly resistant to the cannon of the time. Usually garrisoned by around twenty men and one officer, the forts normally carried one or two cannon on the rooftop terreplein, mounted on pivots that allowed a 360̊ firing arc. Beneath the gun platform, barracks, food and ammunition storage would all be housed within its walls, and the structure was usually built upon a well or cistern that could be refilled with rainwater drained from the roof.
The inspiration for the towers had come from experience in combat against a similar type of round fortress that had been part of Genovese defences at Mortella Point in Corsica. On the 7th of February 1794, two attacking British warships with a total of 106 guns between them were beaten off by the fort’s two 18-pounder cannon. Unfortunately for the tower’s garrison however, its design meant that its two main guns could only fire out to sea while there was only a single six-pounder cannon that could be used for defence against attack from the rear.
The tower eventually fell to a landward attack after two days of heavy fighting, but the impact the structure’s capabilities had made upon the British was nevertheless significant. Within just a few years, a huge construction program saw Martello Towers (the name incorrectly taken from their inspiration — Mortella Point in Corsica) appear all over the British Isles and in other Empire colonies around the world. Intended to protect against French invasion forces during the Napoleonic Wars, over a hundred were built around the English coast alone, and another fifty in Ireland.
Only three towers were built in Scotland. One, known to locals as the Tally Too'er, was erected during 1807-09 at Mussel Cape Rocks (on what is now the land-locked eastern breakwater for Edinburgh’s Leith Docks. The remaining two could both be found at Scapa Flow; one at Crockness on Hoy, about 2,000 metres south-east of HMS Proserpine, while the other stood at Hackness on the north-east coast of South Walls, both guarding the Bay of Longhope and the south-eastern approaches to the anchorage. The Hackness Martello Tower stood in open fields, a hundred metres back from the water and perhaps twice that distance to the south-east of the disused Hackness gun battery, also dating from the 19th Century.
A narrow track ran past the tower and on to the battery, and an old, flatbed Ford truck stood parked beside that track, in the lee of the tower. A small concrete pillbox stood at the shoreline directly in front of the tower, and from that point it was possible to look straight out across The Flow and the surrounding islands. Flotta lay to the north-west, and the NEB Coastal Battery on that island’s southern-most tip was clearly visible across the water. As Max Thorne sat on the grass, not far from the pillbox, he could also look out across The Flow to the north-west between Flotta and Hoy, and stare in silent wonder at the silhouettes of warships anchored there in the fading light of dusk.
Among them stood Malaya, Warspite, Queen Elizabeth, Nelson and Repulse; a powerful collection of battleships and battlecruiser that should’ve put the fear of God into any prospective enemy battlefleet. Yet Nelson, completed soon after the signing of the Washington Treaty in the mid-thirties, was the only ship present that wasn’t of World War One vintage. In Realtime, none of those capital ships anchored there would still exist by the time of his birth in 1965: Repulse would be lost in action off Malaya in 1941, and the rest would be struck off just a few years later, having succumbed to post-war navy cut backs and that last, terminal voyage to the breakers’ yards.
Just the Americans’ Iowa class battleships had ‘fought’ on, clinging to sporadic periods of service in Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts as floating batteries and then, during the 1980s and ‘90s, as refurbished combat vessels intended to counter new Soviet warship classes. They’d fired Tomahawk cruise missiles and their 16-inch shells into Kuwait and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, but they’d been decommissioned again soon after, this time for good.
For many students of modern military history living at the end of the Realtime 20th Century, the age of the battleship was the last great, ‘romantic’ era of naval prowess prior to the ascension of the aircraft carrier and sterile air power. It was to some extent a symptom of comfortable hindsight produced of having not lived through the age itself, and Thorne had been one who’d sometimes ascribed to it. To be able to now sit and stare out across such a collection of powerful warships was almost as intoxicating a drug as the white rum he carried in his often-used hip flask… the same flask at which he now sipped carefully.
He knew his alcoholism was creating serious problems (there was no point in ignoring the fact that alcoholism was exactly what it was), and he also knew it wasn’t getting better… quite the opposite in fact. Thorne was still at a complete loss however to explain to himself, or his conscience, why he wasn’t able to arrest the continuing slide into booze and despair that had gripped him almost from the moment of their arrival at Scapa Flow. Prior to their departure back in 21st Century Britain, he’d been able to control the problem — barely — but this had become impossible now he was alone and to all intents and purposes devoid of higher authority in any direct sense.
He knew all of this, but his usually-strong willpower had nevertheless failed him miserably. Instead of galvanising him into action, his spirit had instead ‘seized up’ and chosen pathetic resignation, and as is often the case in such situations, the guilt and sense of failure that came with his inability to stop what he was doing in turn made the cravings worse and created a vicious circle of secret self-loathing.