“You knew Lieutenant Siddall?”
“Yes, sir. He was a good man. Salt of the earth. He was very protective of Marija and her family during the tenure of Sir Julian’s predecessor on the archipelago when things weren’t so good for her and her younger brother, Joe. Marija was terribly upset when he was killed.”
“Oh, right. I see. They weren’t…”
“They were just friends, sir. Jim Siddall had a wife back in England,” Alan Hannay added as if to remove all doubt. “As to your earlier questions. Sir Julian may, or may not, have finessed the Times of Malta, and other organs of public information to lighten the load being borne by the Calleja family, but the wild rumours that were in circulation were, in my humble opinion, no more than that. Just wild rumours.”
Peter Christopher breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
“This must all be hellish for Marija and her sister-in-law?”
“Yes, sir. Rosa Calleja was transferred to the hospital here in the Citadel at Sir Julian’s request to ensure her privacy. I understand that Marija spends every free moment with her.” He seized his opening to close the debate: “Which might go a long way to explaining Miss Calleja’s apparent aloofness since your arrival, sir.”
Alan Hannay was surprised and a little unnerved when the tall son of his all powerful master threw him a hard, quizzical look that warned him not to ‘try to pull the other one’ again. The C-in-C’s flag lieutenant was entirely unaccustomed to being seen through so effortlessly.
“No, that’s probably not the truth and nothing but the truth, sir,” he said quickly.
A few minutes later Alan Hannay was immensely relieved to discover proof positive that his companion didn’t hold this minor obfuscation against him. As their ancient staff car rolled and jolted down the hill back towards Valletta Peter Christopher turned to him and asked, without preamble: “Why did you really want to get me alone, Lieutenant Hannay?”
“Er, I don’t…”
“You are the one man on the island who can click his fingers and make any kind of charabanc known to man materialise out of thin air. You don’t need to ask the acting-captain of a beaten up old destroyer for a lift? You certainly don’t have to chase after him outside HQ unless, of course, you don’t want anybody else overhearing what you have to say to me?”
The bearded petty officer behind the wheel of the car chortled like a bear with the choice of three full porridge bowls for breakfast.
“Don’t mind Petty Officer Griffin,” Peter Christopher smiled. “Griffin and the Talavera’s Master at Arms, Mr McCann, don’t like me going anywhere in public on my own in case the streets are full of assassins waiting to add the C-in-C’s son’s scalp to their totem poles. I managed to escape their ‘protective clutches’ the other day but they haven’t let me get away with it again since.”
“Oh, I see. That’s really quite touching actually,” Alan Hannay granted, unusually perturbed by the other man’s frankness. “Oh, I feel very foolish now, sir.”
Peter Christopher was silent.
“The thing is,” his father’s flag lieutenant blurted in a rush, “I’ve got a little bit pigeon-holed on ‘the staff’ and I was hoping somebody — a captain such as yourself, for example — would take pity on me and request my services in a more ‘active’ role?”
Chapter 42
There was little spare space on a submarine at the best of times. HMS Dreadnought had berths for seventy of her one hundred and thirteen officers and men, many of whom were expected to ‘hot bunk’. The only remotely private quarters on the boat were the officer’s ‘state rooms’; pokey little compartments not for the claustrophobically inclined. The only way that Simon Collingwood could accommodate the twenty-two refugees — he’d only been authorised to bring twenty onboard — he had rescued was to surrender his officers’ cabins to the newcomers and turn the Wardroom into a communal officers’ hot-berthing space. His own cabin was now the temporary home of two women and three young children.
“God help us if we have to run silent, sir,” Max Forton, his irrepressible Executive officer guffawed as the two men stood over the plot, considering their options.
“Well, at least we’ve stopped the kids running around the control room,” his commanding officer commiserated. No Executive Officer liked having his boat transformed into a crèche any more than any rational captain liked having children or especially, women, on his vessel. Simon Collingwood was a traditionalist and the very idea of women onboard was anathema. “We’re going to run short of provisions several days earlier than expected. As for routine medical supplies, they’re practically exhausted now.”
“We could make Limassol in two days, sir?”
“I don’t want to be off station that long.” He didn’t want to be ‘off station’ at all. Taking on board the refugees had been a gamble; if they could provide significant new information about the situation on land it would be worth it, if not, he’d have recklessly impaired the fighting efficiency and endurance of this command to no good purpose.
Simon Collingwood still remembered the faces of the men, women and children he’d been ordered to expel from the protective steel cocoon of the Dreadnought’s pressure hull on the morning after the October War. There had been no more strikes like the giant airburst over Morecombe Bay — the closest strike to where Dreadnought had been fitting out in the graving dock at Barrow-in-Furness — but he hadn’t known the war was over at the time. This time around he wasn’t going to let down the two old men, seven women and thirteen children, several no more than babes in arms, he’d taken under his protection. His conscience simply wouldn’t let him do it a second time.
The refugees, including the older children, were still being interviewed. Everything they learned was being carefully distilled into a series of flash communications with Malta.
“I’d guess we are sixty to seventy miles east of the Second Squadron’s picket line,” Max Forton speculated, prodding the plot with a pencil.
The Amphion class conventional diesel-electric submarines of the 2nd Submarine Squadron based at Malta ought to be in position by now. Their task was to act as a tripwire if any of the heavy unites sighted by the Dreadnought, or by earlier aerial reconnaissance attempted to approach the Maltese Archipelago.
The A class boats incorporated many of the lessons learned in World War II and included innovations stolen from later Kriegsmarine U-boats. In 1945 the Germans had led the World in submarine designs; if the Germans had got enough of their revolutionary new boats into the North Atlantic in time the war might not have ended the way it did. However, the Amphions, in common with many post-Second War designs were the end result of too many compromises. The A class was old technology poorly applied, they had to spend far too much time on the surface recharging their batteries and their underwater performance left them horribly vulnerable to modern anti-submarine tactics. Nevertheless, Simon Collingwood had once dreamed of commanding one of the old Amphions, or another of the obsolete boats of her general type and specification, most of his career. Before the October War even that had seemed like an impossible dream.
“We’ll avoid getting much closer. I suspect we’ll hear or see them long before they know we’ve been and gone,” the captain of the most advanced submarine in any navy in the World outside of the United States Navy declared smugly. “But we won’t tempt providence.”