Meanwhile, every available vessel the Cubans and the Dominicans could scrape up was supposed to get on with seizing the Bahamas, investing and invading Southern Florida, raiding all the way along the coast of the Gulf of Spain to the so-called ‘Delta Lands’ – there to somehow ‘bottle up’ a powerful English squadron apparently moored a hundred miles up the Mississippi guarding New Orleans – and to ‘concentrate’, supposedly at some undefined critical moment, to meet the English battlefleet which would, sooner or later, obligingly steam south to engage it.
Meanwhile, the Armada de Nuevo Granada, equipped with several relatively modern German-supplied or designed destroyers and frigates, and several partially modernised older cruisers would ‘protect’ the western half of the Gulf of Spain and ‘blockade’ the Caribbean west and south west of Cuba while offering what support it could to the land offensive in West Texas and the borderlands.
Erwin von Reuter would have regarded all this as the drooling of a maniac had it not been for the ‘undersea’ wild cards, operating separately from the Cubans and the Dominicans, under the direction of the Armada de Nuevo Granada from naval headquarters in Vera Cruz, where long-embedded German officers still had, at least a modicum, of influence.
To his knowledge seven, perhaps eight or nine, of the small, four hundred-ton coastal submarines secretly constructed in sheds and bunkers in the German Imperial enclave on Hispaniola and at Aruba, had been allocated to support the Northern Strike Force. Another three, seven hundred-ton ocean-going diesel electric submersibles had been undergoing trials with all-Kaiserliche Marine crews in the Southern Caribbean, well out of sight of prying British eyes. These vessels might, even now, be available to operate in tandem with Gravina’s Southern fleet.
Not that this was a very comforting thought.
Until now the British Government had been able to turn a blind eye to Germanic ‘experimentation’ in distant oceans; the first torpedo to smash into the side of a Royal Navy warship would be proof positive that the German Empire had flouted the Submarine Treaty.
And only God alone knew what would happen after that!
Chapter 15
Sunday 9th April
Pelayos, Castile and León
Melody Danson knew she ought, by now, to be thoroughly inured to the realities of surviving, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day in the madhouse that she and Henrietta De L’Isle had been stumbling through the last few weeks. However, she was not in any way fully acclimatised to those realities, and this clearly irritated Paul Nash.
“How could you possibly know these people were Inquisitors on their way to Puente de Congosto?” She demanded, as the man dragged the third body to the side of the road and rolled it unceremoniously into the ditch on top of the other two men.
Two of the men had had loaded revolvers, all three had had wicked switchblades, knuckledusters and coshes in their jacket pockets.
Paul Nash had ordered Albert, Stanton, Henrietta De L’Isle and Pedro to lie down behind a wall just north of the tiny village they had just passed through after abandoning the car – a thirty-year-old Ford, the only vehicle in Congosto – they had stolen after escaping from the late Brother Mariano and his ‘flock’.
‘You,’ Nash had barked at Melody, ‘come with me. Look as if you can’t make up your mind if you’re trying to stop me falling on my face or you want to give me a piece of your mind.’
So, they had walked up the road towards the approaching car acting like a bickering couple, pointing and gesticulating with only half-feigned anger.
‘Why did you have to do that to that woman back there?’ Melody had put to Paul Nash. ‘You could have killed her!’
Consuela had taken unkindly to Nash kicking down her door.
‘She tried to put a knife in my eye,’ the man retorted. ‘I punched her in the throat. What was I supposed to do? Let those two-faced hand bastards you over to the Inquisition?’
‘Well, no…’ Melody was not finished; in fact, she had hardly started: ‘Did you really have to shoot both those men?’
‘Yes, I did have to shoot them both! There’s only one of me, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t have the luxury of playing patter-cakes with people who mean us, you, me, Henrietta and the others harm. If I get sloppy, if I make a mistake, or I get sentimental that’s it, game over! For all of us!’
That was when, without warning, he had pushed Melody – quite hard, she thought but only after she had got over her shock – into the path of the ongoing vehicle.
Not unnaturally, she had screamed in a very convincing way, no doubt suggesting to the occupants of the car that she was every bit as shocked and terrified as she seemed.
There had been a squeal of brakes and the air had clouded with dust. Seconds later the three men in the car were dead and their blood was liberally spread around the inside of the otherwise spic and span, well-polished, only ten-year-old German limousine.
“There are bound to be blankets in the boot,” Nash observed conversationally. “It gets cold at night and cars break down a lot on these roads.”
Melody had glared daggers at the man as she brushed herself down and contemplated her latest bumps and grazes, principally to her left knee and elbow.
“You enjoyed that,” she complained.
The man viewed her quizzically.
Melody scowled: “Pushing me in front of that car, I mean.”
“Oh, that,” the man murmured. “Yes, a little bit, perhaps,” he agreed urbanely. “You’ll need to spread the blankets over the seats. We don’t want to go spooking the others, what?”
Without further ado he left Melody staring angrily at thin air and strolled back down the road signalling for the others to come out of hiding.
She watched his broad, retreating back for a moment then walked around the car, and retrieving the blankets the man had predicted she would discover in the trunk, hurriedly arranged them as best she could to cover up the worst signs of the recent carnage.
“Just for the record. These blokes,” Paul Nash sniffed, returning to the car and flicking an impatient look to the bodies in the ditch, “aren’t Inquisitors. They’re paid helpers. Low life. The lowest of the low. The big wigs don’t get to do any of the arresting, hunting or fetching, or, I daresay, much of the actual torture. They have animals like these guys to do it for them. They’d have had their fun with you,” he held eye contact with Melody, “and Henrietta, then they’d have beaten you all to a pulp, and almost certainly put you in shallow graves if they hadn’t reckoned there was a bonus to be had, taking you back up to Salamanca. Church, state, organised crime, are all the same thing in this bloody country!”
He stepped towards Albert Stanton.
He handed him one of the revolvers he had recovered from the dead men.
“Don’t throw this one away.” He grinned towards Melody. “Even if she tells you to,” he emphasised, “comprende vous, mon ami?”
The Manhattan Globe man glanced sheepishly at Melody who was too busy rolling her eyes to notice, and nodded tight-lipped acknowledgement.
“There’s no need to pick on Albert,” Henrietta objected. “It’s not his fault he got whacked on the head by those horrible people. Any more than Melody and I had any way of knowing we’d get locked up like that!”