The Weapon class ships were slightly smaller that the Battles which came after them, because at the time the Royal Navy had wanted to use all the available building slips. Both classes were designed, ordered and laid down during the Second War when such considerations were paramount, according to her father who was the indisputable font of knowledge on these things. One of the reasons the Weapon class ships looked a little unbalanced — rather ugly, actually — in comparison to practically every other type of British fleet destroyer, was that they were the first class to have ‘in-line’ engine and machine spaces. Previously, British destroyers had had a boiler room forward of an engine room. This was fine but if one or other of the ‘rooms’ was disabled in action the ship was dead in the water. The Weapon class had a port and a starboard combined boiler and engine room, one set of machinery for each propeller basically. The Americans had been doing this for years but their ships tended to be bigger, and in order to implement the new layout in the relatively small Weapon class hulls two funnels were required. Hence the stumpy exhaust vents trunked through the lattice foremast, and the peculiar looking stunted ‘pipe’ sticking up amidships between the box-like radar and generator rooms. The Navy hadn’t known what to do with the Weapons after the Second War until a handful of them were converted as Fast Air Detection Escorts along with six of the later Battles. For reasons only known to the Admiralty — Marija’s father speculated that somebody had done the stability sums and belatedly discovered that the Weapons were too small to carry the full radar and sensor suite of the modified Battles — Scorpion and her sisters had only been partially converted and re-equipped for their new role. Unlike the Battles’ double bedstead four-ton Type 965 aerials, the Weapons made do with a single, older single bedstead model. The Weapons had also been left with their original Squid anti-submarine mortars, and refitted with a pale shadow of the electronic counter measures wizardry of the converted Battles. Another oddity of the Weapons was their four-inch calibre main battery; previous classes had carried 4.7-inch guns, and subsequent designs the 4.5-inch semi-automatic naval rifles of the Battles.
One was sometimes moved to ask exactly what went on in the heads of naval architects, Marija reflected. Her father quietly detested the Weapons as ‘war time lash ups’. He said the turbines installed in the whole class were ‘accidents waiting to happen’; the original design of the turbines was so suspect that several years ago a major redesign had resulted in the removal of the steam feed to part of the reversing turbine. While this had reduced the number of major breakdowns it had also drastically cut the power available to retard the forward motion of the ship, guaranteeing that the ships of the class would handle leadenly in normal, everyday situations. In comparison, the bigger Battles handled much more nimble both in the open sea and in harbour.
The next ship to nose cautiously out of Sliema Creek was Scorpion’s sister, HMS Broadsword. Wisely, Captain ‘D’ was moving his clumsy Weapons out of harm’s way before the three Battles, HMS Aisne, HMS Oudenarde, and Peter’s patched up HMS Talavera cast off.
From where Marija stood the bulk of Manoel Island hide HMS Talavera from sight. She had been taking on stores — replenishing, as the Navy called it — moored alongside a big store ship in Lazaretto Creek all night. In the way of these things Talavera would be the last ship to leave port, as befitted her Captain’s tender years and lack of seniority. The Royal Navy tended to be a stickler for these things.
“You ought to be sitting down,” Dr Margo Seiffert complained, shaking out a shawl and draping it around her young friend’s shoulders. “The idea of coming down here at this ungodly hour wasn’t for you to tire yourself out standing up on your hind legs for hours on end!”
“I am perfectly fine, Margo,” Marija insisted.
HMS Aisne eased out of Sliema Creek; the water churned white under her transom as she swung gracefully into the middle of the deep water channel out to the sea. The air shimmered with heat above her single funnel, and the sound of her blowers whispered across the water. On her foredeck and at her stern, seamen stood at one yard intervals, lining the rails. The ship’s pennants fluttered, the big White Ensign cracked now and then as the wind caught it.
Next came her sister, a carbon copy; HMS Oudenarde.
Finally, in the distance HMS Talavera emerged into Marsamxett, straightened down the line of the anchorage and began to pick up speed, following the other four ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron.
Without her discarded amidships deck houses and with her cut down main mast and comparatively naked stern the Talavera seemed incomplete. Two single twenty-millimetre Oerlikon cannons were now mounted on top of her stern deckhouse and brand new whip aerials had been rigged aft of the funnel. Her great lattice foremast looked different, too. Perhaps, they had fixed the gun director radar?
“Doesn’t she look so fine, Margo!”
Margo Seiffert put her arm around her younger friend’s shoulders.
Slowly HMS Talavera crossed the mouth of Sliema Creek beneath the ramparts of Valletta and drew abreast of Fort Tigne.
As the sun broke through the haze a strange thing happened.
All along the side of the destroyer men suddenly raised their caps.
And on the open bridge men waved.
Margo Seiffert chortled.
“Like father like son,” she murmured.
Marija hardly heard her speak.
She waved back.
Chapter 50
“The Enterprise and the Long Beach have passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, Mr President,” General Curtis LeMay reported. “I take it all back. The Navy can get its thumb out of its butt when it wants to!”
Jack Kennedy was wearing a thick cardigan and had a blanket over his shoulders. He could never get comfortable in jetliner seats and often, as today, the pressurized cabin seemed very cold. However, his singular human frailties aside, he was in a relatively sanguine mood.
“How many of their escorts had to stop to refuel in Lisbon and Gibraltar?”
“Most of them, sir,” grunted the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What had happened in Cyprus — what was till happening in Cyprus — was an object lesson in the predictable consequences of a failure to manage the peace. After the October War, which he respectfully believed to have been the biggest geopolitical FUBAR in human history. The subsequent US decision to pull out of Europe and attempt to exact an immediate ‘peace dividend’ had now resulted in a potentially even more catastrophic FUBAR. Fucked Up Beyond All Repair didn’t begin to describe the current race to disaster. They were throwing irreplaceable military assets into the fire knowing it might already be too late. The Brits had lost a cruiser, several destroyers and frigates and hundreds, maybe thousands of people they couldn’t afford to lose trying to get out of Cyprus. Red Dawn — for all he knew the was still fighting the Soviet fucking Union — or whatever these bastards called themselves, were throwing unarmed militia ashore on Cyprus in their tens of thousands, driven forward by a hard core of heavily armed ‘real soldiers’. The British were holed up in the mountains and forests in the middle and west of the island and around the Akrotiri — Limassol area. “The Brits are sending out everything they’ve got to meet our boys before they reach the narrows between Sicily and Tunisia.”