The stricken ship was almost abreast of Europa Point.
HMS Albion was listing to port, slowly drifting into Algeciras Bay bleeding bunker oil from a huge underwater wound close to her bow. A mile deeper into the bay the floating debris from HMS Cassandra, the carrier’s escorting destroyer now straddled the notional boundary between Gibraltarian and Spanish territorial waters. Spanish patrol boats traversed the floating debris field like gulls flocking to pick up scraps from a trawler’s nets.
A thin plume of grey smoke still rose from the Albion’s single tall stack; at least she still had one of her boilers lit. If she lost power for her pumps she was doomed.
“They actually did it,” the blond moaned, folding her arms across her breasts. Her expression was suddenly pinched and accusative as her gaze discovered the long low silhouettes of two Spanish destroyers out in the straits. “They mined the bay!”
Her companion thought he could make out ant-like figures moving around on HMS Albion’s empty flight deck and geysers of water erupting from hoses along her flanks.
Albion had fouled a mine first; then Cassandra had hit a second and blown up. It was likely that the explosion had triggered a secondary detonation of her forward magazine. The wreck of the destroyer had sunk in less than a minute. As if things couldn’t possibly get worse there was unlimited scope for it to get much, much worse. Even now the minesweeper HMS Castleton was leading a big Admiralty tug towards the drifting carrier. From the speed at which the Castleton was surging across the relatively calm waters of Algeciras Bay it was apparent that she was not so much clearing a safe path through any remaining underwater booby traps, as breaking trail. The tug surged along in her wake, presumably damning the torpedoes to do their worst in the best traditions of the Service.
“If this sort of thing can happen here perhaps it will wake up those idiots in charge on Malta?” The blond observed to nobody in particular when her partner gave every appearance of being lost in his thoughts.
“No,” he murmured. “The last thing the Italians or the Sicilians, or even those terrorists across the water in Libya want to do is block the Grand Harbour or Marsamxett. There’s no profit in that for them. That’s why we’ll sink ships in the main channels and blow up the port installations if those idiots in England give Operation Homeward Bound the green light. We’ll probably mine the South Comino Channel and Marsaxlokk Bay, too. Just for good measure. If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well,” he concluded sourly.
The woman raised an eyebrow.
The crowd gathering on Europa Point was growing all the time. Small boats; fishing smacks, whalers and launches were putting out from the Naval Dockyard in a swarm.
Out in the straits the two Spanish destroyers cruised like sharks waiting for their quarry to succumb to her wounds. High above the Bay antiquated Spanish single engine World War Two vintage fighters circled. The jackals were gathering around the dying corpse of the British Empire.
The man’s eyes flicked to seaward, to the skies, returned to the crippled carrier.
HMS Albion had been converted into a ‘Commando Carrier’ before the war. By removing her steam catapults and all the other paraphernalia required to operate fixed wing aircraft, she’d been transformed into floating base for two squadrons of helicopters, a battalion of Royal Marines and all their heavy equipment. Several of Albion’s helicopters had been flown off in the minutes after she struck the mine; others had had to be pushed over the side to clear the canting flight deck of fire risks. There were at least sixteen hundred men trapped on the sinking ship; nine hundred crew and over seven hundred Royal marines of 2nd Battalion 4 °Commando.
“If the Spanish have mined the Bay and they’ve got hundreds of guns in the hill pointing at the air base,” the blond woman queried, “I don’t see how we can pull out of Gibraltar even if somebody in England thinks that’s a good idea.”
“They’ll let us go if we hand everything over in pristine condition,” the man replied evenly. They’d been on the last transport the Spanish had allowed to land on the short, treacherous runway across the isthmus — La Linear — that connected the Rock of Gibraltar to the mainland. No sooner had their aircraft — a lumbering, creaking four turbo-prop Blackburn Beverley — lurched to a halt than a salvo of mortar bombs had cratered the middle of the single runway. These projectiles, lobbed fairly haphazardly across the border — the border between British and Spanish territory being the northern boundary fence of the airbase — by troops positioned in trenches shielded from direct view and fire by the small village of La Linear had fired four salvoes of five mortars. Just to make absolutely sure that the runway was completely out of action. At least half the rounds had fallen short, some in the Spaniards’ own forward lines, and some had gone long into civilian and military accommodation blocks south of the runway killing and wounding at least twenty people. The Gibraltar garrison had not returned fire. Nor had the Royal Navy but since the cruiser HMS Tiger, and four of the five destroyers of the 3rd Destroyer Squadron had departed the colony a fortnight ago, there was very little the single remaining World War Two vintage ship, HMS Cavalier, and half-a-dozen minesweepers and patrol boats could do in the face of overwhelming land based artillery. Wisely, HMS Cavalier had kept her powder dry. Gibraltarians had viewed the arrival of HMS Albion with her helicopters and elite Royal Marine Commandos as the modern day equivalent of the cavalry riding to the rescue. For most of the people standing on Europa Point HMS Albion’s heart-wrenchingly slow motion death represented the beginning of the end. “The Spanish will let us go eventually.”
“Eventually?” His companion asked.
“They’ll want to disarm and humiliate anybody in uniform. They’ll want to round up civilian men of working age to send north as slave labour. Then they’ll let their conscripts have their fun with the colony’s women. After they’ve done that they’ll let us British go. But only eventually, after the bastards have had their pound of flesh.”
“Would they really behave like that? I mean, in front of the whole world?”
“Franco was the last surviving fascist dictator in Europe until last autumn. He came to power standing on Mussolini and Hitler’s shoulders. Guernica happened because of Franco, tens of thousands of men, women and children were disappeared by the Generalissimo and his Falangist bully boys during and after the civil war. The revenge killings went on for years. Before last year’s war Spain and to a lesser extent Portugal — another fascist military dictatorship by the way — were the pariahs of Western Europe, the last blood-stained relics on the proud escutcheon of the new democratic post World War Two settlement.” He waved at the sky where distant aircraft circled. “The Spanish air force is still mostly equipped with locally manufactured copies of Messerschmitts, Dorniers and Heinkels it got from Hitler during the 1945 war!”
The woman frowned at him. In the year she’d known him she’d never heard him speak so bitterly, or with such sick resignation.
“None of this is your fault. You didn’t know we were going to get stuck here when you talked us onto that flight out of Malta, sweetheart.”