They snapped to attention when Peter Christopher walked in.
“I’m looking for somebody in charge?” He informed the two seamen.
“Sorry, sir. Don’t know who is in charge, sir. There are a couple of Maltese gentlemen upstairs but we don’t know who they are. They were here when we came on duty, sir.”
There had been soldiers on guard at the main gate otherwise the dockyards seemed wide open; practically anybody could walk in. How hard would it have been to sabotage HMS Torquay?
“What’s upstairs?”
“That’s where the Dockyard Superintendent and the Under Managers have their offices, sir. I think there may be a board room up there, too, sir.”
Peter Christopher strode up the stairs and emerged onto a single corridor with officers off to each side. Most of the doors were locked. He walked down the corridor, reading nameplates.
“Can I be of assistance to you, Commander,” a soft, tired voice inquired from behind his shoulder.
Peter Christopher turned on his heel.
The lean, greying man in shirtsleeves had emerged from a door near the stairs the younger man hadn’t tested. He viewed the tall Lieutenant-Commander thoughtfully for a moment.
“I certainly hope so!”
The other man nodded.
“I’m the duty Under Manager today,” he explained. “Why don’t we continue this in my office?”
The two men marched to the first open door, half-way down the building. Peter Christopher didn’t look for the name plate on the door as he followed the older man inside.
“Please take a seat, Commander.”
HMS Talavera’s Captain hesitated and then accepted the hard chair as his host settled behind the cluttered, somewhat battered desk set at an angle across one corner of the musty room. The atmosphere smelled of old paper, tobacco smoke, grease and oil.
“Commander Christopher, isn’t it?”
“Lieutenant-Commander, actually,” the younger man retorted with a vexed ill-grace that was wholly out of character. He relented. “Sorry. I’m not on top of my form at the moment.”
The civilian was in his fifties. He was sparsely built and there was a weary dignity in his dark eyes. The office around him might be cluttered, but there was order in the clutter.
“HMS Talavera distinguished herself in the action at Lampedusa by all accounts?”
Peter Christopher shrugged, self-conscious and uncomfortable with any kind of praise. It wasn’t as if he’d done anything terribly brave or noble at Lampedusa. Captain Penberthy was badly wounded, the ship was getting shot up, HMS Puma was dead in the water and things were fast going to Hell in a handbag. All he’d done was stand in for the Captain and done exactly what David Penberthy would have done in the same situation. He had got the flotilla organised, seen what he could do to help the Puma. It just so happened the only way to help the crippled frigate was to draw the fire of the shore batteries while a tow was secured. Honestly and truly he didn’t know what all the fuss was about!
“The ship and her crew acquitted themselves well,” he agreed. “Which makes it even more galling that the bunch of pirates allegedly salvaging parts for Talavera’s refit from the wreck of the Agincourt have dumped a pile of scrap on the quayside and probably walked away with the few useful pieces of equipment that survived the bombing and the fire!”
The other man’s face fell.
“Actually,” Peter Christopher explained, feeling a little foolish now that he’d had a little time to reflect on his initial reaction to discovering what had been going on, “before I came over here I ordered my people to search the salvage barge for contraband and to arrest the salvage master and anybody else who was hanging around on his boat.”
“Oh, I see.” The man behind the desk half-smiled, before forcing a severe expression to form that belied the amusement in his tired eyes. “That will no doubt lead to a deal of bad feeling.”
“Frankly, I don’t really care. My ship is a mess and I was counting on Agincourt’s spares to start getting her back to her rightful state, Mr,” he hesitated, “forgive me, I don’t believe I know your name, sir?”
The other man sat back in his chair.
It creaked unnaturally loudly in the quietness of the Sunday dockyard.
The older man fixed the younger man with his gaze.
“My name,” he said, sighing, “is Peter Calleja.”
The younger man stared at him.
“I am Marija’s father.”
Chapter 35
“My fellow Americans,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States said, instantly finding the voice he knew to be the nearest he would ever come to matching the delivery of his Democratic predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legendary ‘fireside chats’. FDR had talked America through the travails of the Great Depression, the fears of the uneasy peace while Europe fell into war, and then through the tumultuous years after Pearl Harbour in a series of thirty of those radio ‘fireside chats’ between 1933 and 1944. Presidents since FDR had tried to emulate him, becoming increasingly seduced by television in the 1950s. People said that Jack Kennedy was the first President of the ‘television age’ but tonight he was going back to basics. America had very nearly lost its soul in the months before the Battle of Washington; its soul, its conscience and its sense of manifest destiny. Never had his mighty nation more needed somebody to remind it of what it really meant to call oneself ‘an American’. “As I travel our proud land people say one thing. One thing, my friends; they tell me that they want America to be one America again.”
Coming out to Camp David, hidden away in the Catoctin Mountains where he and Jackie and the kids could actually be safe — Secret Service paranoia about the security of the family compound at Hyannis Port had finally shut it down three days ago — had focused Jack Kennedy’s mind and convinced him that, despite his reservations, he had no choice but to circumvent the constitutional conventions which had since the time of George Washington, guided the nation.
Bill Fulbright, the man he ought to have appointed Secretary of State in 1961, the Vice-President, and his brother, Bobby, had steeled him to take decisive action when he was in Philadelphia. He had still honestly hoped that a direct appeal to Congress would unblock the political log jam; and had determined to make one last attempt to persuade the jeremiads.
He had spoken to the ‘leaders’ of the House. He had appealed over their party and vested interests to their patriotism, to their sense of duty and to their idealism. He might as well have been talking to a pack of wolves around the carcass of a buffalo. The bastards had just wanted to know what was in it for them.
He’d asked LBJ to keep J. Edgar Hoover on a tight leash a little while longer. In the meantime he’d light another kind of fire under ‘the House’. Once they let the FBI go to war with the House there would be no rowing back, the well would be poisoned for a generation. Besides, Hoover would go after the Administration’s friends with twice the energy he went after its foes. Trying to have one’s political opponents locked up was always bad politics; basically, it was bad enough dealing with the enemies you knew about without having to worry about the ones who might replace them. The Vice-President had confronted the House with one kind of justice, now he’d confront it with another.