Dan French felt the hairs start to tingle and stand up on the back of his neck.
“P Four-One-Seven?”
“HMS Alliance, sir.”
“Give me that pad!” The Acting C-in-C demanded crisply. “Are there any other copies of this signal on Malta?”
“Er, no, sir.”
“How many of your people saw the plain text version of the original cipher?”
“One man other than myself, sir.”
“Reliable man?”
“Yes, sir.”
The electricity was sparking up and down the Acting Commander-in-Chief’s spine like lightning now. If the captured Turkish destroyer really did possess a full set of code books, encryption procedures and its full electronic ciphering suite, the possibilities were limitless. Even if the enemy changed all his codes and encryption protocols in five minutes time the people at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, and at Langley in Virginia would be able to piece together exactly how the attack on Malta had been, one, made possible, and two, executed in detail. There was no knowing what other priceless enemy intelligence might be wrung from previously intercepted traffic, or how critically important this capture might be in the future.
We might just have won the war!
If that turned out to be the case then the nightmares of the last day might actually have been for something after all. However, the forty-eight year old Second World War Bomber Command pilot whose wife and daughter had been vaporized in the October War would never take anything that mattered, or might matter, on trust ever again. The whole Cuban Missiles Crisis farrago could never have happened if otherwise intelligent, worldly, family men like him had not mistakenly taken it for granted that everybody knew — at some fundamental cognitive level — that nobody could conceivably win a nuclear war. Yet the cataclysm had fallen upon the Northern Hemisphere anyway.
The man who was presently in effect, God, in the Maltese Archipelago hurried tuned his mind to operate in small, sequential steps. First things first was a thing too many alleged military geniuses tended to forget when the going got sticky.
First, maintain secrecy. If the enemy got wind of this cryptographic gold mine which might be priceless — the suspected treasure might turn out to be fool’s gold not the real thing — and the future value of the cache would plummet overnight.
Second, communicate the possible coup to his superiors in England. He would leave it up to them to deal with the Americans; he had enough problems of his own.
Third, safeguard the treasure. Specifically, recover it from the Turkish destroyer and discreetly salt it away in a place of safety pending instructions from the Chiefs of Staff.
Four, worry about one, two and three above before wasting time thinking about all the ways the potential intelligence bonanza would, in an ideal world, be utilised to prosecute the rest of the war.
The phone on his desk rang.
“French,” he intoned briskly.
“The USS Berkeley has now anchored in Kalkara Creek. The Captain of the Berkeley hopes to start the offloading of Talavera’s survivors and wounded within the next few minutes, sir.”
Dan French breathed the latest in an endless stream of sighs of relief.
“How many of Talavera’s people does the Berkeley have onboard?”
“There is no precise head count, sir. All we know is that there are about a hundred survivors of whom some dozen are critically or very seriously injured and some forty to fifty men are less seriously wounded requiring hospitalization or immediate medical attention including all four surviving officers of lieutenant rank or above. All of the latter including Commander Christopher are described as being in effect, ‘walking wounded’, sir.”
HMS Talavera had had a complement of around two hundred and fifty men. A number of her crew members had been left ashore by the speed of her departure from port; the suddenness of this departure had prevented a handful of dockyard workers from disembarking. Nobody actually knew how many men had been onboard the destroyer when she and the frigate Yarmouth had engaged the battle cruiser Yavuz, the fifteen thousand ton Russian cruiser the Admiral Kutuzov, a third cruiser approaching from the north-east and the two big ships’ numerous escorts, each of whom would have — on paper — been a match for either Talavera or the Yarmouth in a straight ship to ship fight.
The figures he had just heard indicated that as many as one hundred and forty of HMS Talavera’s men had perished in the desperate action that members of Dan French’s staff were already calling the ‘Battle of Malta’. HMS Yarmouth’s final butcher’s bill was likely to be lower than Talavera’s numerically but proportionately as high. Yarmouth, the more modern ship had had a smaller crew and had stayed afloat long enough to be run aground in St Paul’s Bay, several miles up the east coast of the main island.
It was a miracle anybody from either ship had come out of the Battle of Malta alive.
“Very good,” Dan French acknowledged, dully. “Please inform me when secure local communications have been established with the USS Berkeley. I wish to personally pass on my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to her commanding officer, and,” he tried to sound formally severe, “and to speak with Commander Christopher.”
He replaced the receiver.
The positions in which the Yavuz, the Admiral Kutuzov and the Talavera had sunk were marked on the maps on his situation table. The notations formed a roughly equilateral triangle some three miles on each side with its nearest co-ordinate, Talavera’s last resting place on the sea bed some nine-and-a-half miles almost due east of the entrance to Marsamxett Anchorage, with the nearest coast being the rocky tip of Tigne Point, Sliema.
Chapter 25
Peter Christopher had sent Alan Hannay ahead of him in the boat taking HMS Talavera’s concussed and somewhat delirious former Executive Officer, Miles Weiss and two stretcher cases across the Creek to Royal Naval Hospital Bighi. Poor Miles could not stand up unaided and he hardly knew where he was from one moment to the next.
Atop the cliffs overlooking Kalkara Creek the Doric columns of Royal Naval Hospital Bighi were illuminated in the headlamps of vehicles parked on the cliff edge. Before the First World War a stone shaft had been built at the foot of the cliffs below the hospital to accommodate a bed lift direct from the stone jetty, thus avoiding the need to cart sick and wounded men over the uneven Kalkara roads up to the main hospital. As Peter moved among the men waiting on stretchers on the deck of the American destroyer, lighting cigarettes and chatting in hushed, comforting tones about nothing in particular as commanding officers have done to reassure their sick and injured men down the ages, his gaze repeatedly strayed to the jetty some thirty or forty yards distant. Arc lights threw a cruel white light across the stretcher parties queuing to load their charges onto the bed lift. Several nurses fussed over their new patients. Occasionally, one or other of the women spared a moment to glance towards the big guided missile destroyer moored to the buoys in the Creek. Maddeningly in the darkness and the glare of the lights no matter how hard he squinted at the faraway figures on the quay he was unable to make out any real details.
He wanted to know, needed to know and to see with his own eyes, that one of the nurses on the shore was Marija.