“Brother Mariano and another tough knocked me about and threw me in that cellar. There’s a woman called Consuela, that’s who Mariano left the ladies with while he locked me up.”
“Okay, possibly another two bad guys and a female accomplice. No problem, we out-number them!”
“The ladies have a small boy with them. He’s about three or four,” Stanton hissed, realising it was important that Nash was as well informed as possible.
“Name?”
“Er, Pedro, his father was killed in the ambush along with the Alcalde and his wife…”
Paul Nash hesitated, stopping dead in the street.
It was almost as if what Albert Stanton had just told him had given him a horrible jolt.
“That was a damned shame,” he murmured. “They were good people.” Then, with a hard-edged, intense urgency he asked: “The boy, is he okay?”
“Yes. Henrietta hasn’t let go of him since the ambush.” Stanton was getting breathless. “How are we going to play this?”
Nash said nothing for a moment.
It was as if he was questioning each and every one of his previous assumptions, forming new plans, taking on board wholly new priorities.
“These people in Puente de Congosto will have sent a message through to the nearest office of the regional Inquisition, probably to the one in Salamanca, the day you arrived. The bastards ought to be here already. They would have been if the city wasn’t in such a mess!”
“There’s fighting in Salamanca?”
“The general in charge of the District tried to arrest a couple of the Colonels, the young Turks, the beggars trained in Germany in the fifties and early sixties, who have taken over in Madrid, Toledo, Seville, Granada, Cordoba and a lot of other places but not so much in this part of the country. Galicia and the Basque territories and what used to be called Navarre in the olden days, is a bad career posting for any ambitious Spanish officer so support for the coup in Madrid isn’t so strong in these parts. Well, less organised, at any rate. What matters to us is that he Inquisition is a tad distracted at present. So, what we’re up against hereabouts are, as it were, freelance contractors working for the Grand Inquisitor in Salamanca. Not true-believers, just piece-rate workers paid by the head, as it were.”
They marched on down the dark, deserted street.
“That’s why the pilgrim wheeze might actually work for us,” Nash went on, not troubling to lower his voice. “At some stage, assuming we can extricate ourselves from this shit hole!”
They were closer to the commotion now.
A man’s voice was raised in remonstration.
To no avail, the women started screaming.
Paul Nash broke into a sprint leaving Stanton trailing far behind. There was a splintering of wood, a new woman’s scream cut short in an instant, and then belatedly, the staggering, gasping Manhattan Globe man blundered through the smashed door, now hanging precariously on a single surviving hinge.
He tripped over a body on the floor.
Recovered himself, realised he had fallen over the prostrate form of a woman – Consuela? – coughing and retching helplessly, her hands tearing at her throat. Onward he lurched, stumbling into a yard.
“Albert, are you all right?” Melody Danson demanded, wrapping the newcomer in her arms as if he was her long-lost prodigal brother. “It’s Albert,” she called over her shoulder.
In a moment the newspaper man was also being ecstatically embraced by Henrietta De L’Isle.
Standing over the unmoving bodies of two men in the gloom, the broader one, Brother Mariano, wearing only a nightshirt, the other his working clothes – although it was hard to be sure in the gloom – was Paul Nash, cheerfully bouncing the boy Pedro on his broad shoulders.
“Careful where you step,” their guardian angel said casually. “I’m afraid that there’s quite a lot of blood on the ground.”
Chapter 11
Sunday 9th April
Situation Room, Royal Navy Norfolk, Virginia
Fifty-five-year-old David Cuthbert Horatio, 9th Baron Collingwood whose illustrious forebearer, was the great admiral of the French Wars of the early nineteenth century, the man who had engaged and destroyed in detail, a Franco-French fleet nearly twice the size of his own at the Battle of the Channel, notwithstanding the shattering blow of that other legendary hero of the period, Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship, the Temeraire, suddenly blowing up some twenty minutes into the day and night-long action, was not in a very sanguine frame of mind.
Anybody who cared to study portraits of the 1st Baron invariably remarked upon the fact his modern descendent was, uncannily, the spitting image of his illustrious ancestor. Like the 1st Baron, the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet, was also famous for his dour, no nonsense, methodical approach to his duties. At the Admiralty they called him the ‘Navy’s voice of common sense’, renowned for his implacable decisiveness once he had determined that the good of the Navy – and the Empire, to his mind the two were inseparable – demanded a particular course of action.
Many speculated, that it was this trait which had permitted him, as a career gunnery specialist, to appreciate much earlier than any of his senior contemporaries that the days of the big gun ship of the battle line, were numbered. In fact, he had been the man who, as Director of Naval Planning (DNP), had drafted the directive cancelling the construction of four new ‘super’ Vanguards – the latest and most formidable, fifty thousand ton-plus battleships – and placing, six years ago, the orders for the first of the Ulysses class aircraft fleet carriers; the corollary to having spent the previous four years of his time as DNP thanklessly fighting a bitter, rear guard action against the dyed in the wool ‘battleship’ men who still, truth be known, were under the mistaken impression that they – rightfully – still dominated the Board of Admiralty.
Although he had a well-earned reputation for being an ‘absolute tartar’ for rooting out men whom he deemed ‘not to be up to the job’, he ran his New England headquarters with a relatively light touch. He explained this apparent contradiction thus: ‘Spit and polish, tradition and respect for the chain of command must be a given; however, within an efficiently ordered regime there must, in this new age when everything we do is dependent upon the ever-developing technologies of civil society and war-fighting, there must be a recognition that not all of the old ways are appropriate. What is required is a collegiate atmosphere at all levels in which no man fears disadvantage for honestly speaking his mind. Concomitant to this it must be a sine qua non of the modern Royal Navy that men in positions of responsibility should be mindful of the physical and mental well-being of those under their command. If the Navy is to continue to be one big happy family, reason must replace the rod and we must allow our people to develop alongside, and wherever possible, to embrace change and the marvellous boons of modern science.’
So, while old fogeys muttered darkly about the new ‘soft Navy’ in which an officer was as likely to ‘ask’ one of his men to do something rather than to directly ‘order’ it, and in which it was considered good man-management practice to actually ‘thank’ a man for doing a good job, in which the acknowledgement of excellence and as importantly, ‘potential’ in a man reflected as much credit on the issuer and the recipient of praise, under Collinwood’s tenure the Atlantic Fleet had begun to be a repository of efficiency and modified good practice.
In other words, the Atlantic Fleet was as ready for war, if it came, as it could possibly be, given that theoretically peace had ruled the Atlantic approaches to the disputatious waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain for the best part of the last decade.