This small show of public intimacy drew a vexed look which the woman ignored.
“Sweetheart,” she persisted lowly, moving close until their shoulders were touching. “After what we’ve been through I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened before. What about that time in Beirut?”
“That was hairy,” he conceded with a grunt.
“Sometimes whatever you do you just get unlucky.”
The man scowled. He’d tried to get them on a Comet bound for RAF Brize Norton but the Redcaps at Luqa Air Base weren’t as gullible or as paranoid as the Internal Security Division goons who called the shots everywhere else on Malta. It had been a transit to Gibraltar or nothing for the next week and that would have been a disaster. As if their current situation wasn’t a disaster! He’d anticipated a day’s delay hanging about on the Rock twiddling their thumbs while he wangled two seats on a flight back to England. He’d had no idea things were so bad in Gibraltar.
In Malta Naval Intelligence had told him things were ‘a bit sticky’ with the Spanish, but ‘when were things ever otherwise?’ The general appreciation was that things were bad but ‘Franco would be mad to try anything now.’ Things were falling apart and if ‘he waits a year or two he’ll probably be able to walk in any time he wants’.
The trouble with that kind of thinking was that it assumed one was dealing with a rational enemy. Old Fascists like Franco weren’t rational. People who seize power at the point of a gun and methodically murder anybody who might be a threat don’t usually have thought processes which function in the same way as those of the leaders of mature democracies who — however reluctantly — actually possess some modicum of respect for the rights and the liberties of their people. Neville Chamberlain was a decent, rational man who devotedly yearned to prevent general blood-letting in Europe in 1938; he believed that Adolf Hitler was a statesman like him and that therefore, he didn’t want war either. Chamberlain was duped by a monster in exactly the same way Stalin duped Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Trueman at the end of the Second World War. Good men — these things are relative but Chamberlain, FDR and Harry Trueman were not monsters — struggle to comprehend the minds of real monsters like Adolf Hitler, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, and would be monsters like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco Bahamonde the last of the dictators of the class of the 1920s and 1930s. Before the October War the thinking in the capitals of Western Europe — rather muddied by American meddling in the Iberian peninsula because successive administrations had no scruples about propping up vile dictatorships if it suited their overall foreign policy objectives — was that Franco was in his cage and thus easily contained. In the fullness of time the old devil would die and then perhaps, there might be a possibility of change. In the meantime Spain was economically, industrial and militarily enfeebled and therefore in no position to challenge British and French naval hegemony in the western Mediterranean Basin. The October War had changed all that.
What remained of France was a disparate collection of enclaves nominally loyal to the Provisional Government in Orleans. Paris, Strasbourg and Toulon were gone and with those cities the cohesion of the newly created Fifth Republic. French Fleet had concentrated at Brest and Lorient on the Biscay coast. There was talk of an alliance between the Italian fascists and their brothers in the Iberian Peninsula, it was only a matter of time before the Western Mediterranean became a no go zone for the Royal Navy from the Balearic Sea to the Ligurian Sea. Given that Corsica and Sardinia were effectively rogue independent states how long could the British cling on to Cyprus, Malta and Gibraltar?
The world was turning to chaos and in that chaos he ought to have known that Gibraltar would be the fulcrum around which British command of the Inland Sea would ultimately unravel. He ought to have known that when the collapse began it would progress with terrifying and unpredictable rapidity and that the collapse would be total. He ought to have waited to get them onto a direct flight to England!
He stared at the listing carrier in Algeciras Bay haemorrhaging bunker oil as her pumps fought a losing battle against the inrushing water. HMS Castleton was almost alongside her now. The big, ugly red and black liveried Admiralty tug was churning water nearby, slowly drawing beneath Albion’s starboard bow. She carrier was noticeably down by the head. The first of the fishing boats was approaching the big ship. A ragged cheer made him glance to his right. HMS Cavalier was nosing out into the Bay, the merest wisp of smoke curling from her single stack. The old destroyer’s decks were awash with bodies because her captain wanted as few of his men as possible below decks if he ran his ship onto another mine.
The man who’d claimed to be Commander William Drayton McNeill in Cyprus and Malta watched the destroyer point her sharp prow at the small rescue flotilla now assembling around the dying carrier. He gazed at Cavalier for several minutes while he thought his thoughts, knowing that he had a decision to make and hating the fact that in his heart he’d known what that decision was all along and that he ought to have acted days ago.
He turned to face the woman who’d been viewing him quizzically as she waited patiently for him to inform her how their mutual adventure was to proceed next. He’d been pretty badly knocked about when they’d met in that US Army hospital at İncirlik Air Base. He said he’d been in Ankara when The world went to hell in a handbasket but she didn’t believe it. He hadn’t had a building fall on him; he’d been in a fight and got beaten to a pulp, even a girl could tell that. She’d got to be at İncirlik by accident, her overnight flight to Beirut having been forced to land by the ongoing nuclear nightmare. The Americans hadn’t checked her papers; they’d had other things on their minds and after a couple of weeks at a loose end she’d offered her services to the base hospital. Years ago she’d trained to be a nurse; until she’d got a better offer. She’d made a good living for herself ever since although in the year or so before the war she’d begun to ask herself how much longer rich men were going to continue to make her ‘better offers’. She wasn’t getting any younger and men were fickle animals, easily distracted, always on the look out for a younger, more nubile model. Her figure, once hour glass slim and supple had filled, become bustier — which was good because most men were actually ‘breast’ men whatever they claimed — but also increasingly matronly. Had it not been for the war and the slop she’d been forced to live on the last year, she’d have continued to bloat towards fat the way her mother had in her late thirties and early forties. Being with Mcneill — she had no idea who he really was or what his real name might be — the last year had been fun and she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. However, all good things come to an end and she suspected their good thing was about to end messily.
“I think,” the man said, “the time has come to make an honest woman of you, Third Officer Porter.”
“I don’t need anybody to make me an honest woman!” She hissed angrily, recoiling from him.
The man held up an apologetic hand.
“An unfortunate use of words. Forgive me. I meant no offence.”
“Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it!”
“Let’s get in the car.”
Neither of them spoke until they were locked in the private cocoon of the borrowed Royal Navy Land Rover.