“We inherited a few defaulters, too,” Miles Weiss snorted.
HMS Talavera’s Executive Officer had taken a good, long look at the ship from a distance before coming down onto the dockside. The destroyer’s amidships deck houses were gone, her main mast — previously festooned with sensors and aerials — had been replaced with a spindly, old-fashioned radio pole with a cross yard to string flags off. The stern deck house looked odd without the quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat launcher, and the stern seemed positively naked without the Squid anti-submarine mortar. From afar one couldn’t see the hastily welded patches over the countless ragged holes in the hull and the surviving superstructure, which was freshly covered with several coats of Navy grey paint. However, recollecting that the destroyer had been a barely floating wreck the last time he’d seen her seven weeks ago she’d brushed up nicely, he decided.
“How long was she in dry dock after she got here?” He asked.
“Eight days, sir,” Miles Weiss told him. He had sobered somewhat, the initial excitement of the reunion passing. “We didn’t have that many underwater holes but we had a couple of deformed bottom plates just aft of the bridge; remember when we thought we’d grounded on that equinoctial spring tide in Fareham Creek?”
They had put divers in the water to check for damage but visibility in the Portsmouth anchorage was so bad that the Captain had called off the inspection after an hour or so. There had been no internal leaks, no seawater in the engine room bilge, so it hadn’t seemed worth risking lives any longer than necessary.
“The dockyard stripped out the port reduction gear,” Miles Weiss said in a rush. “The Chief says they machined whatever they couldn’t replace out of stores. We’ve turned the port shaft a few times at low revs while we’ve been moored but obviously, we won’t know how good the repairs have been until we stretch our legs out at sea.”
Peter Christopher nodded.
Right! I’m the ship’s Executive Officer!
Stop messing around and get on with it!
Miles Weiss, who clearly wasn’t reading his friend’s mind, remembered another thing he’d meant to tell the newcomer.
“Once we’d got that bloody bomb off the ship,” he grinned. “That was a good job done, I can tell you! We got ourselves organised and recovered most of your gear from your cabin. It was a bit wet, obviously but we dried everything out. It is all stowed ship shape and Bristol fashion in your new cabin, sir.”
Peter had come aboard with a change of uniform and very little else to his name. He hadn’t given a thought to his lost kit and personal effects for several weeks. Today got better every minute!
“You can tell me all about how you got that five hundred-pounder over the side over a drink tonight, Guns,” he declared, taking charge. “Mister McCann,” he turned to the Master at Arms. “If you’d detail somebody to put my gear in my cabin, we’ll inspect the ship now.”
HMS Talavera’s new Executive Officer spent most of the next two hours exhaustively ‘inspecting’ his old ship. The dockyard had made a good fist of papering over the cracks but the destroyer was a shadow of her former glory. Practically every trace of modernity had been ripped out of the aft half of the ship, ruined equipment had been ruthlessly removed, and where previously the ship had been a cramped warren of passageways she now seemed roomy, almost airy. Everywhere stank of paint and detergent, and even seven weeks later the occasional taint of burning assailed the nostrils; burning and the reek of bunker oil the deeper one descended into the bowels of the vessel.
Standing on the open bridge Peter looked down on the two twin four point five inch turrets of the main battery. The deck had been re-plated where the five hundred pound bomb had penetrated the fo’c’sle before lodging unexploded against the magazine bulkhead. He looked up as two Westland Wessex helicopters thrummed overhead to land on HMS Ocean. Closer inshore, tenders and tugs were clustering around HMS Hermes, which had arrived around dawn that morning from Lisbon. Out in the Straits of Gibraltar the sleek grey silhouettes of the carrier’s escorts stood out to sea. He wondered how the Spanish in the surrounding hills and across the other side of Algeciras Bay must feel about the concentration of so much naval power. Perhaps, they were belatedly asking themselves why they had been so stupid as to confront it; certainly they would still be counting the high cost of their folly. Two Sea Vixens circled high over the fleet before swinging out over the sea.
“That’s the Lion, sir,” Spider McCann told the younger man, guessing where his eyes had focused. “The Blake sailed to join Tiger at Malta about a week ago.”
Peter studied the elegant lines of the modern cruiser. Like Talavera and her reconstructed sisters Tiger, Lion and Blake were new ships built on World War II vintage hulls, young ships notwithstanding they had been laid down in the middle of another war. Out in Algeciras Bay the three carriers were each as old. Hermes had been fifteen years in the building, HMS Victorious had been young when her antiquated Swordfish torpedo bombers had flown off her flight deck to attack the Bismarck in 1941, and even the Ocean, now converted to the role of a commando carrier operating only helicopters, was a Second World War build. Nevertheless, the fleet still presented an impressive spectacle.
Peace had broken out but it didn’t feel like peace.
Returning aboard around dusk Captain David Penberthy was cheerfully preoccupied as he greeted his new Executive Officer. Over pink gins before dinner the two men fell straight back into the friendly, mutually respectful relationship cemented forever in those dreadful storms off Cape Finisterre when they’d fought to save Talavera.
“The dockyard’s done us proud, Peter,” David Penberthy conceded. “But there’s only so much they can do for us. Basically, the kit we need to restore the old girl to her former fettle simply doesn’t exist. Apart that is, from in one place. Malta.”
Peter Christopher had held his breath.
“Right now in Sliema Creek the salvage people are recovering everything that might conceivably be re-usable from the wreck of the Agincourt. Which is why, when the carriers sail we’ll be following them to Valletta!”
HMS Victorious and HMS Ocean were to be the flagships of two battle groups, each with half-a-dozen screening destroyers and frigates and a fleet train of oilers, ammunition and stores ships. The Cunard liner Sylvannia would also accompany the fleet to Malta and remain in theatre as a troop transport and at need, a hospital ship after an initial spell moored in the Grand Harbour as an accommodation ship. The Sylvania was carrying eight hundred troops and several hundred skilled workers and their families, the latter to be relocated on the Maltese Archipelago.
David Penberthy wasted no time bringing his Executive Officer up to speed on the conference he’d attended that afternoon.
“Once we’d all discovered most of us were off to Malta in the next few days, to be perfectly honest,” the Captain of HMS Talavera confessed, “the interesting part of the briefing was the lowdown on what else is going on in the World.”
“Oh, how so, sir?”
“It seems the old country is now being run by a blond bombshell who goes by the name of Margaret Thatcher,” David Penberthy sipped his gin. “Never heard of the bloody woman, myself. Apparently, she was the Member of Parliament for Finchley before the war. Obviously, she isn’t any more because that part of Greater London doesn’t exist these days. Anyway, no sooner had the Prime Minister been murdered in Washington by that mad woman…”
“Edna Zabriski,” Peter Christopher said helpfully.