A shadow had flitted across the lens.
He flipped the ‘sky’ switch on the right hand twist grip of the attack periscope, peered into the greyness of the clouds. Circled, circled, straining his eyes.
And then he saw it.
“Down scope!”
He swung around to face Max Forton.
“Take us down to three hundred feet!”
He collected his wits.
“Warn engineering for maximum revs on my command!”
The deck under his feet canted forward.
“There was an old-fashioned float plane right on top of us,” the submarine’s commanding officer announced flatly. “My assumption is that it spotted our scope.” Dreadnought couldn’t outrun the Admiral Kutuzov’s escorts but they couldn’t hunt her while they were charging around like that Skoryy class destroyer. Most shipboard sonar was useless in a vessel travelling faster than fifteen knots.
Simon Collingwood briefly considered running silent, playing cat and mouse, but only briefly. The way these fellows carpet bombed large tracts of ocean with big World War II type one-ton depth charges, that wasn’t an option that encouraged him to wait and see if they knew Dreadnought’s position. Moreover, so far as he knew he wasn’t actually at war with the men in the ships above him. If he was he’d have flooded down his torpedo tubes by now. No, he’d dive deep and run for open water at top speed and then at a safe distance, rise close enough to the surface to transmit a sighting report and await further orders.
Chapter 34
Petty Officer Jack Griffin pulled the tarpaulins off the piles of scrap metal and wiring littering the ground along the shore. Behind him the low hump of the island between Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks rose gently to meet the still intact sixteenth century bastion walls. Within the wall a single large thermobaric — fuel-air — bomb had extinguished all human life in a split second; and other than to pick up the body parts, nobody had yet attempted to reclaim any part of the old fort which, as HMS Phoenicia, had previously been the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean.
“Most of this equipment,” the bearded, mightily peeved Petty Officer complained, “had salt water in it at some stage, was damaged in the bombing, or was destroyed by the half-trained monkeys who salvaged it. A lot of the kit that ought to be here, the good stuff, isn’t here at all. Those arseholes,” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the barge tied alongside the crazily canted stern of HMS Agincourt grounded on the rocks of Sliema Creek a hundred yards away, “have probably half-inched the best stuff!”
A weather-beaten fishing boat was lashed to the stern of the sunken destroyer. It seemed that this vessel was the abode of the ‘dockyard approved and appointed salvage master’ and several of his male relations.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had actually thought it was a stupid idea, not to mention impractical, trying to refit HMS Talavera using materials salvaged from her sunken sister ship. However, in the Royal Navy a man got used to being given — if not stupid, then less than thoroughly thought through — orders, so he’d been game. Until, that was, he’d taken a look at the scrap beneath the tarpaulins.
HMS Talavera’s Master at Arms, Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann sniffed the air as if something smelled bad.
Peter Christopher didn’t need to spend overlong investigating the scrap heap to know that somebody somewhere not a million miles from where he stood was cheating the Royal Navy.
“Mister McCann,” he said stiffly. “I would be obliged if you would organise a party to board that barge and that fishing boat,” he nodded towards the offending articles, “to detain all those persons you encounter and to search the same for contraband.”
It was all the licence that HMS Talavera’s senior non-commissioned officer needed.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The scowling, teak hard little man who’d one been the Mediterranean Fleet’s flyweight — or bantamweight, nobody seemed to know which — boxing champion marched purposefully back down the jetty towards HMS Talavera.
Peter Christopher turned back to Jack Griffin.
“I want you to compile and inventory of all the big items — don’t bother with the small stuff that people always walk off with in their pockets — comparing what has been recovered from the Agincourt with Talavera’s original technical commissioning manifest. The two ships should have had a more or less identical sea-going rig. I want to know what is missing and I want to know it as soon as possible. Any questions?”
For once in his life Jack Griffin didn’t have any questions, or any personal, pithy or otherwise, comments he cared to share.
Miles Weiss, Talavera’s Gunnery Officer and senior surviving watch keeper after Peter himself, was waiting for his acting Captain when he returned aboard.
“Those people,” Peter Christopher growled, nodding towards the salvage barge, “have been filching equipment from the Agincourt. The ‘salvage’ they’ve piled up on the shore is scrap. Most of the sounder items in the pile have been damaged in the salvage operation.”
“That’s a poor show,” the younger man frowned. “Goodness, that’s like grave robbing!”
“Yes, it is,” his commanding officer agreed sourly. “When Mr McCann returns to the ship he will have several guests. They are to be accommodated in the brig until I decide what to do with them.”
“Whatever you say, sir. But isn’t that going to cause an awful stink?”
Peter Christopher gave his friend a hard look.
Miles Weiss grimaced.
“I’ll make sure they’re thrown in the brig, sir.”
“Good. I’m going ashore. I want to talk to somebody in authority at the dockyards!” It was still early and hardly anybody was about as he walked through the trees on the landward side of the old ramparts and knocked on the frame of the guard house door. HMS Phoenicia might lie abandoned and for the while, forgotten but the rest of Manoel Island had rapidly been re-colonised by the Royal Marines, the Redcaps and the crew of the depot ship HMS Maidstone, moored in Lazaretto Creek. “I want a car for official business,” he demanded brusquely.
“But it is Sunday, sir.”
“I don’t care if it is Christmas Day!”
Ten minutes later a dusty old Humber with dented chrome fenders was forthcoming. It was driven by a boy soldier — he couldn’t possibly have been eighteen — who’d yet to acquire a Mediterranean tan.
“What’s your name, Private?”
“Timpkins, sir. Royal Warwickshire Regiment, sir!”
“How long have you been on the island?”
“A week, sir.”
“Do you know your way around?”
“I know the way to Mdina, sir. And Luqa. And I went to the dockyards yesterday!”
“Try and find the dockyards again.”
The boy was a surprisingly accomplished driver. Peter Christopher commented on it and he discovered Private Timpkins had grown up helping out in his father’s garage in Nottingham. No sooner had he joined the Army than he’d been posted to the garrison motor pool.
At first it seemed as if the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta were closed.
Well, it was Sunday.
After driving from gate to gate it eventually transpired that the Dockyard Office at Senglea ‘never closed’. Parking up in the shadow of HMS Ocean, whose crew was taking on stores unconcerned, and therefore unhindered by the absence of civilian dockyard workers, Peter Christopher walked, unchallenged into the ground floor lobby of the two storey, ugly concrete post-Second War building. He quickly discovered that although the offices might ‘never close’ that on a Sunday they were open only in a Wild West ghost town sort of way. On the ground floor two ratings from HMS Ocean were minding the front desk.