All the rescued women had wanted to help with cooking, cleaning, sewing. In truth there was little for them to do except serve meals, hot drinks and look after their children. The boat was operating as silently as possible and movement between compartments was limited.
“Thank you, Maya,” he mumbled.
The young woman lowered her eyes.
Most of the adults they had taken onboard were Muslims although one of the old men was a Christian, but his Catholic Orthodox observance was a mystery to Dreadnought’s crew for it bore little resemblance to anything with which they were familiar. Maya had asked him in which direction Mecca lay, he’d pointed to the compass repeater in the bulkhead above his cabin’s single bunk. She had sighed her shy understanding. That was nearest they’d come to a conversation since she had been aboard, other of course than the long, slow ‘interviews’ crew members had conducted with the refugees. Those interviews were over, the last fragments of information extracted, distilled and sent back to Malta for dissection and analysis.
Maya backed away and was gone.
“Service with a smile, Skipper,” Max Forton chuckled.
His commanding officer glowered at him.
“Range to targets constant!” Dreadnought’s Executive Officer hurriedly confirmed.
Conventional wisdom suggested that any large scale invasion of Cyprus from Turkey would logically come ashore on the northern coast. There were plenty of bays, coves and sandy beaches and few obvious natural defence lines. But Red Dawn didn’t do things that way. Red Dawn murdered, burned, looted and raped wherever it went, it set off nuclear bombs in crowded ports, it clearly didn’t understand the meaning of ‘concentration of masse’ in warfare.
Simon Collingwood hadn’t been remotely surprised when the sound room reported a small armada steaming slowly down the western end of the island. Dreadnought had moved a little to the east and waited. If he had been in charge of the Red Dawn fleet preparing to land its hordes he would have sent out a screen of ships both as an outer, picket line of defence against attack and to drive any lurking submarines deep, away from his troop ships. The enemy had deployed as if nobody had yet invented the submarine.
Dreadnought had crept into the fold and now the sheep were at the mercy of the apex predator within their midst. The prey seemed to have no inkling of the presence of the two hundred and sixty-six feet long black shark moving in for the kill.
“Flood all forward tubes if you please, Number One!
Tubes One and Two were loaded with Mark XX homing fish; the other tubes with old-fashioned Mark VIIIs with warheads four times the size of the modern torpedoes. Dreadnought had sailed from Gibraltar with a full set of six Mark XXs and eighteen Mark VIIIs.
“Helm! Make your course two-eight-five degrees!”
The invasion ‘fleet’ littered several miles of sea in front of the coast north of Paphos. It comprised big and small fishing boats, a couple of small ferries, a ten thousand ton angular-looking liner, even an old rusty Liberty ship. The escorts, two Krupny class destroyers and three smaller Riga class destroyer escorts were too busy shelling the town and the empty countryside to the north to notice HMS Dreadnought creeping among them.
The Mark XXs took out the bigger Krupny class ships. Single explosions triggered by the magnetic resonance of each hull detonating their warheads directly beneath each destroyer. One hundred and ninety-six pounds of Torpex was sufficient to form a rapidly expanding ball of air under its target, lifting and in the process, unnaturally, outrageously stressing the keel. Both Krupnys, their backs broken foundered slowly while Dreadnought began to pick off the other escorts.
Two of the first four Mark VIIIs failed to find a target.
All six tubes were reloaded with Mark VIIIs.
The third Riga class escort tried to hide in the mob of ships that made up the invasion fleet. Simon Collingwood went about sinking any target worthy of a heavyweight torpedo until there was virtually nowhere for the Riga class escort destroyer to hide. By then the day was darkening and the sea was covered in oil, wreckage and bodies. Two burning merchantmen had run themselves ashore. Three miles off shore the stern of the old Liberty ship was still afloat, the rest of the vessel was gone.
The destroyer escort had no idea where Dreadnought was.
She fired salvo after salvo of anti-submarine mortars, several in and around the wrecks or boats and rafts lashed together by the survivors of other ships. Two Mark VIIIs fired at a range of less than eight hundred yards reduced her to scrap. Her shattered carcass sank within seconds.
Every hour or so as the hunt went on Maya had brought Simon Collingwood a fresh mug of tea or cocoa; each time he muttered an embarrassed ‘thank you’ and went back to the killing.
The execution complete HMS Dreadnought ran south at twenty-five knots to resume a blocking position twenty miles south-south-east of Paphos.
Chapter 48
A Maltese pilot had come onboard to oversee HMS Talavera’s departure from Sliema Creek, out into the open sea, and through the Grand Harbour breakwaters to her rendezvous with the Royal Fleet Auxilliary oiler Brambleleaf in Rinella Creek. The idea of manoeuvring the destroyer in confined waters still gave Peter Christopher nightmares but already he was beginning to believe it wasn’t perhaps, quite as daunting a job as he had first imagined. Notwithstanding, it remained disconcertingly, exhilaratingly strange and new to be responsible for everything. With her bunkers brimming over the ship had felt and moved much more surely under his feet on the journey out of the Grand Harbour, around Valletta and back into the long, broad Marsamxett Anchorage. Past St Elmo’s Bay to the left where the wreck of the old Tribal class destroyer Maori had been sunk in 1945, past Sliema Creek on the right, all the while steaming slowly under the great ramparts of Valletta on the left, and the ruins of HMS Phoenicia to starboard, he had bled off speed and steerage way beneath the Floriana bastion, before edging stern first into the narrowing Lazaretto Creek where a small tug had nudged and coaxed Talavera’s deadweight until she was able to moor beneath the high starboard freeboard of the fourteen thousand ton Royal Fleet Auxilliary armament support ship Resurgent.
The first man up the gangplank was Lieutenant Alan Hannay.
“Permission to come aboard, sir?” He inquired hopefully, as he saluted with practiced crispness.
Peter Christopher welcomed his new Supply Officer with several tersely delivered, somewhat tongue-in-cheek pieces of advice.
“Leave the ordnance to Guns,” he directed as the two men walked towards his day cabin. He couldn’t get used to ‘owning’ the Captain’s day cabin, it seemed wrong. Two months ago he’d been a junior watch keeper, the ship’s technical ‘whizz’, now he was in command. “Miles Weiss has his department under control and notwithstanding he’s a marvellous fellow, he’ll eat you alive if you step on his toes. He’s also the Executive Officer, so that’s another reason why you don’t want to muck him about. Talk to the Master at Arms and the Chief Petty Officers about whatever we’re short of and what we need as soon as possible. Oh, and don’t ever give the Master at Arms a direct order.”