The fish had exploded on contact with the outer plating and its warhead, its effect multiplied by hydrostatic forces, had punched through the carrier’s double hull like a fist through paper. The Navy’s boffins had studied the hole and determined that it had been caused by the detonation of approximately seven hundred-and-fifty pounds of, probably, ‘enhanced high-explosive’.
‘Bloody hell,’ Alex Fielding thought to himself, ‘no wonder the powers that be decided they wanted to ban submarines back in the mid-1960s!’ And, ‘no wonder the top brass is absolutely livid that two of their biggest ships – the battlecruiser Indomitable, and now the Ulysses – had, thus far, been so badly damaged by internationally outlawed weapons.’
Worse, the very existence of the Spanish submarines had forced the Fleet to fight at long-range and compelled a hurried, somewhat ad hoc re-writing of the rulebook of naval warfare.
It was hardly any surprise that people in New England, and presumably, back in the Old Country, were presently asking themselves what the Navy was doing?
The answer, of course, was that the Navy was licking its wounds prior to getting stuck in again with a vengeance. However, with the sinking of the Indomitable in Mobile Bay, the crippling of the Ulysses and the loss of so many of her aircraft – although most of her birds had landed on the Perseus there had been no room for all those kites on her flight deck so they had had to go over the side – and the threat of the submarine menace ever-present, there was an awful lot of head-scratching going on at Norfolk trying to work out how exactly, the Royal Navy was going to reassert its supremacy over the waters of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean when clearly, not even Atlantic waters were safe!
Alex had been staring into the dark depths of the great gash in the carrier’s flank for some moments, unaware of anything going on around him.
“It’s Fielding, isn’t it?”
For once in his life Alex had been, quite literally, lost in his thoughts.
He had steered clear of the gaggle of senior officers down at the other end of the dry dock when he had descended into its depths. He was killing time before he boarded his flight to Bronxwood Aerodrome that afternoon; by tonight he hoped to be holding his nineteen-day-old son, Alex junior, in his arms for the first time.
Leonora’s parents said the baby had his nose. He could not see it himself, or at least, not in the photograph Leonora had sent him of his then, day-old first born. Every baby he had ever laid eyes on looked exactly the same to him but he knew it would be different once he got to hold the little sprog in his own arms.
He would never have visited the dockyard had he not been in such a state of high anxiety about his forthcoming, seventy-two hour-long furlough on Long Island. Which was crazy, not like him at all. Leonora had obviously spun some web of bewitchment about him. That said, now that he was down here, he was fascinated, especially looking into that dark chasm in the great ship’s flank.
The new carriers were of all-welded construction; a technique that saved weight – on a ship the size of the Ulysses, up to five or six thousand tons – and, Alex had been assured more than once, made any ship, especially a really big one, a significantly tougher ‘nut to crack’. Apparently, rivetted ships of yore had ‘worked’, much as old-time wooden sailing ships had; and absorbed a little of the motion of the seas. Modern ships were ‘stiff’, unbending and more easily repaired. Farther aft the sparks of several oxy-acetylene torches showered down the side of the carrier.
The torpedo had stove in the longitudinal, strengthened ‘mine bulkhead’ – in future they would call that a ‘torpedo bulkhead’ – seven or eight feet inboard of the outer hull. The impact point had been below the ship’s tapering armoured belt, three-and-a-half inches thick in places, and flooded one of the Ulysses’s three port fire rooms. Despite the ship being at Battle Stations with all watertight doors dogged shut, each of the three port-side fire rooms had flooded to varying degrees although all the initial fatalities – some twenty-three men – had occurred in the compartment directly breached by the hit.
In all, one hundred and forty-seven men had lost their lives and another two hundred and four had required hospital treatment, of whom nearly fifty had suffered disabling burns.
The man who had called out was approaching.
Alex half-turned, still a little distracted.
Suddenly, he straightened, and put his shoulders back.
It turned out he had been ignoring Admiral Lord Collingwood, C-in-C Atlantic Fleet and the second most senior officer on the latest Navy List.
In desperation he threw a belated salute.
The great man, accompanied by a bevy of staffers and civilian dockyard officials, seemed to tower over Alex. He had only met the C-in-C once, last week when he had pinned that damned medal on his chest. He still thought that was a nonsense. If his instruments had been working properly, he would never have had to ditch in the sea, and as for all that tosh about being the ‘Pied Piper’ of the Atlantic Fleet leading all of Ulysses’s returning strike aircraft back to the Perseus, well, that really was gilding the lily!
All he had done was stooge around the Ulysses making sure that the returnees knew which vector to fly to find the Perseus, at the time about eighty miles away and closing the distance with a mighty bone in her teeth.
True, the chill of the sea as he floated around in his little inflatable ‘bath’ waiting to be picked up, or to drown – he had expected there to be sharks and been disappointed – for the best part of two days had not been a lot of fun. Still, it was good to have had a chance to have a nice long think about things and the feeling in his hands and feet was coming back nicely…
“I was informed you were supposed to be taking a few days well-earned leave, Commander Fielding?”
“Yes, sir. I’m just killing time before I fly out…”
“Jolly good!”
Alex realised that Lord Collingwood, a large, ruddy-face man with eyes that missed absolutely nothing, had gently waved away the rest of his entourage.
The two men stood a few feet apart from the others.
“When I joined the Navy,” Collingwood remarked cheerfully, “a hit like that would have sprung every rivet for ten, fifteen feet or more either side of that hole. Ulysses would have been out of action for six months!”
Alex had no idea what he was supposed to say; so, for once in his life he held his piece.
The C-in-C peered into the chasm above them.
“You and I both know that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We knew the Spaniards, the Triple Alliance were preparing for war and had been for some years,” he confessed, without deprecation, simply stating a fact. “But German re-armament in Europe meant that the priority was home defence, the security of Europe, not that of New England which, when all is said and done, is just one among several imperial imponderables. India is another, obviously, and of course, Africa baffles us all.” He gestured at the great hole in the ship. “We even anticipated that, or something like it. Crying wolf, however, was never an option for reasons which will become clear to you in the days, or at most, the weeks to come.”
Alex opened his mouth to speak, bewildered.
“I planned to have this little chat with you when you returned from Long Island, Commander,” Collingwood confided. “So, this encounter is serendipitous. I want you to accept a permanent commission in the Royal Naval Air Service. It goes without saying that your present rank would be made substantive. I have plenty of sea-going captains with the aggressive, never-say-die spirit we are going to need in the coming months, and possibly years. However, the RNAS is still young, and its esprit de corps a fragile thing threatened by its rapid expansion. I badly need chaps exactly like you to command my carrier-borne air wings.”