“Our fish is active!”
“Target lock!”
“Helm! Make your course zero-three-zero!”
“Revolutions for twenty knots!”
Seventy-one seconds later the dull, rumbling detonation touched the pressure hull.
“We are clear of the sailing boats!” Sang out one report.
Another man was calling down the decreasing ranges to Krupny class destroyer.
“Six thousand yards!”
“Bandit One is holding her course. Speed constant at eight knots.”
Simon Collingwood and his Executive Officer exchanged raised eyebrows.
A Royal Navy ship would have jumped to life by now; cranked up to fifteen to twenty knots, started pinging frantically in every direction. This fellow seemed to be cruising along as if nothing had happened. Or had the Krupny interpreted the detonation as Dreadnought’s demise?
“Five thousand yards!”
“Four thousand yards!”
Still the escort lazily continued to proscribe a leisurely orbital course around the remnants of the sailing fleet.
“Perhaps, they’re all drunk?” Max Forton suggested.
There were chuckles and guffaws around the control room.
“Confirm firing solution please!” Simon Collingwood snapped.
“Confirmed!”
“Recommend a narrow spread, sir!”
“Affirmative, make it so!”
This is too easy!
The commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought was still thinking ‘this is too easy’ right up until the moment the first of two Mark XIII torpedoes crashed into the side of the four thousand ton Soviet destroyer at over forty knots. The first of the three torpedoes had narrowly missed the ship’s bow, the second smashed through her side below her bridge; the third penetrated her machinery spaces amidships. The seven hundred and twenty-two pound Torpex warheads exploded within seconds of each other. The ship ceased to exist. Less than a minute later her splintered bow and stern, floating separately apart, rapidly filled with water and sank.
“Take us down to three hundred feet!” Captain Simon Collingwood ordered tersely.
Chapter 40
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher paused for a moment when his flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay slid the latest signal from HMS Dreadnought in front of him.
“Excuse me a moment, David,” he apologised to his old friend, Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord as he held the telephone receiver away from his head for a moment, “I’m just receiving the latest from Dreadnought.”
His youthful flag lieutenant withdrew from the room.
“Most urgent from Dreadnought,” Julian Christopher read aloud. “Ongoing interrogation of survivors of civilian refugee fleet suggests pogroms and a reign of terror on the mainland opposite north coast of Cyprus and a simultaneous military build up. Boys and young men are being conscripted into militias, old people sent to the hills to die, women are being horrifically used and abused and military age men who refuse to join Krasnaya Zarya’s Shock Militia are being shot.”
“It sounds like something from the Stalin era,” Admiral Sir David Luce, remarked stoically through the buzzing, clicking static on the scrambled long-distance line. “Except much worse, perhaps?”
“I authorised Dreadnought to take up to twenty people, women and children and a few old men onboard. Captain Collingwood had no option but to leave the rest to their fate. As it is the extra bodies will no doubt seriously impinge upon the smooth operation of the boat. Still, Collingwood seems to know what he’s about and he’s sending through reports as they become available.”
“A curious little action south of Rhodes?” The First Sea Lord mused, not actually asking a question.
“Dreadnought was very well handled, David,” the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre stated unequivocally.
“Oh, absolutely. Collingwood is a very sound man.”
When two admirals talked about one of their captains as ‘a sound man’ or noted that a man had handled his ship ‘well’ in action, there was no more ringing endorsement of a man’s conduct in the performance of his duty and his obvious suitability for future high command.
Julian Christopher had read the rest of the latest report from HMS Dreadnought now. Captain Collingwood’s previous reports had made chilling reading.
“These refugees are reporting the signs of a forthcoming major invasion of Cyprus,” he decided. “Landing craft and small boats of all descriptions are being seized, likewise gunboats and small escort type vessels of every size. There are reports of villages being strafed by helicopter gunships and MiGs.”
“That’s not good news.”
It seemed that Red Dawn had been obsessed with keeping its build up, and particularly its air force hidden. The implications of this were deeply worrying to both men.
“What does Dan French think about this?”
Air Vice-Marshall Daniel French was Julian Christopher’s deputy on Malta; a most able man who had flown a tour on Avro Lancaster bombers in World War II and had commanded one of the first V-Bomber squadrons in the 1950s.
“He thinks Red Dawn’s main problem won’t have been collecting ‘airframes and engines’ or necessarily ‘pilots’ because they’d have been to hand all over the Soviet Union after the October War. The big problem will have been maintenance, securing runways, base facilities and things like how you get the right sorts of aviation fuel to the right places to enable continuous operations. He says that if he was in charge of Red Dawn’s air force he’d have taken over Incirlik air base and Ankara airport. The Asia Minor part of Turkey wasn’t exactly a first World country before the war. Most of the modern military infrastructure was put in by NATO in the fifties, mainly by the Americans, and the road system is best around Ankara and Adana right next to Incirlik.”
“Presumably, Dan being an RAF man wants to bomb both locales to smithereens?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the shooting has already started. We are at war and should act accordingly. All things being equal my recommendation is to conduct Arc Light strikes on both air bases and to carry out pre-emptive conventional strikes against the main ports of Southern Turkey opposite Cyprus. I’d want to co-ordinate these actions with strikes on the main pre-war airfield on Crete, at Heraklion. In an ideal World I’d kick off the ‘home run’ phase of Operation Reclaim at the same time.”
The First Sea Lord absorbed this. His old friend and he were thinking along similar lines but it was still good to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“So that would be your recommendation to the Prime Minister, Julian?”
“Yes, David.”
“What if Arc Light isn’t on the table?”
Julian Christopher sighed, the verbal equivalent of a Gallic shrug down the telephone line.
“If we adopt a self-denying ordinance when it comes to the tactical use of nuclear weapons, realistically, we will have to modify our strategic objectives.”
The First Sea Lord bypassed his old friend’s dryly enunciated sophistry.
“You mean we have to get used to the idea that we’ll probably lose Cyprus and find ourselves driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean?”
“Possibly, yes.”
Admiral Sir David Luce knew his old friend too well to be gulled into any sense of false optimism. When a man like Julian Christopher said ‘possibly’, what he meant was ‘probably’. If the C-in-C Mediterranean had honestly believed that, with the forces he had to hand, he could hold Cyprus and continue to prop up the United Kingdom’s tenuous presence in the Eastern seas he would have said so.