He had swung Talavera to the north, crossed the entrance to Marsamxett Anchorage and followed the coast, reducing speed to twelve knots and after a few minutes, reversed his course. The enemy had stopped shooting at him — well, if one discounted an occasional two-gun ranging salvo from the battlecruiser’s secondary battery — and he had forced himself to think through his next actions.
Miles Weiss trotted onto the bridge.
“Do I have torpedoes yet, Number One?”
“Ten to fifteen minutes, sir. Mr Calleja is working on the mount with Griffin.”
Peter Christopher blinked at his Executive Officer.
“Joe’s onboard?”
“Yes, sir.” Miles Weiss moved on. “The radio room is a mess but we’re re-running cables to the aerial array which looks undamaged. We’re also putting up a couple of whip aerials. Hopefully, we should be able to raise the Citadel or the Yarmouth fairly soon.”
“Do we have a casualty count?”
“The Master at Arms says we lost a couple of men overboard. Otherwise we’ve got three dead and fourteen wounded but only four of them seriously. Quinn and most of the torpedo division were hit when that near miss went off in the water alongside and the poor fellows on the stern deckhouse gun platform caught a packet. Alan Hannay is re-organising the twenty-millimetre gun crews.” Sub-Lieutenant Rory Quinn had only come aboard a week ago. “Otherwise, we got away lightly.” He glanced overhead as the shrapnel-severed wires flapped in the wind high on the great lattice foremast. The four-ton double bedstead aerials of the Type 965 long-range air search radar still rotated but the bridge repeater was dead. “The next job is getting some chaps up the mast to reconnect the ‘bedsteads’,” he grinned.
“God alone knows how the Type 293 is still working,” Peter chuckled. Just because things weren’t looking very good there was no need to get down hearted about it.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Miles Weiss asked. The two friends had no need to beat about the bush with each other.
“Number Two boiler is lit,” his commanding officer told him. “We’ll have sixty to seventy percent steam on that in ten to fifteen minutes. Assuming we’ve got torpedoes we can fire by then we’ll do this thing the old-fashioned way.”
It was not as if there were that many ‘tactical options’ available to them. Basically, they could run and hide; or they could fight. Running and hiding was the sort of thing other navies did, and if they were going to fight then there was absolutely no point mucking about.
“We’ve got two big ships slowly steaming up and down the coast at about eight or nine knots approximately nine-miles east of Fort St Elmo,” Peter explained. The big ships have three or four smaller units in company but presently they’re two or three miles farther out to sea, presumably screening the gun line from submarine attack. An additional fly in the ointment is that there appears to be another group of ships coming down from the north-east. One big contact and at least three smaller ones. Another cruiser, I shouldn’t wonder. That group is making about twenty knots. I’ve got no idea what they’re up to, but it doesn’t really matter. We’ll worry about them when we’ve done something about those blighters lobbing shells onto the island.”
Miles Weiss’s grin broadened.
“Full speed ahead, all guns blazing and a sharp turn for a broadside torpedo salvo it is then, sir!” He guffawed as if the two young men were discussing sporting tactics. “I’ll tell Jack Griffin and your brother-in-law to shoot a few hundred feet in front of the target!”
“That’s the ticket.” Peter Christopher’s grin became a positively wolfish smile.
“Do I have your permission to resume my post as Gunnery Officer for the duration of the attack run, sir?”
“Granted. Request Mr McCann to stand to the auxiliary steering post in your absence, Miles.”
The two friends knew that there was much to be done and little time.
The met each other’s eye, sobered a little.
They both knew they would probably not live through this day.
“We’re being signalled!”
Both men turned.
“FOXTROT-ONE-OH-ONE!”
The signal lamp winked through the haze.
“Yarmouth!”
“Acknowledge by pendent number.”
In a moment the yeoman standing at the Aldis Lamp on the destroyer’s port bridge rail was clattering Talavera’s own number.
“On acknowledgement send the following signal in the clear,” Peter Christopher ordered, in that moment his voice becoming a hard-edged weapon. The Yarmouth was a post World War II ship not built for this sort of fight, her two 4.5-inch quick firing Mark VI naval rifles were no more capable of scratching the antique ex-German battlecruiser currently raining death on Malta than Talavera’s Mark Vs. However, unlike the rebuilt Talavera, Yarmouth had no torpedo tubes. The two ships’ 4.5-inch shells might inconvenience the Yavuz’s consorts but that was not the primary object of the exercise. Putting as many of Talavera’s 21-inch torpedoes as possible into the side of the Yavuz was.
The twenty-seven year old commanding officer of HMS Talavera did not hesitate. This was like that night off Lampedusa all over again except this time he was a little older, wiser and he understood that what he was about to do could only end badly.
“IN ONE FIVE MINUTES I WILL MAKE A TORPEDO RUN AT ENEMY HEAVIES STOP REQUEST YOU APPROACH ENEMY AT SPEED AND DIVIDE HIS FIRE MESSAGE ENDS”
It did not need to be any more complicated than that.
Although, to the best of his recollection Peter had never met the Captain of HMS Yarmouth; his brother officer would know his duty.
No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy…
Chapter 48
Clara Pullman stared into the gloom of the cellar in a shocked daze. The events of the last few minutes had registered on the surface of her mind yet seemed strangely disconnected from her actual experience. Replaying the violence of those last few minutes was like watching a movie, almost as if she had stolen somebody else’s memories except that every time she re-ran the movie she was the one left holding the smoking Kalashnikov.
She saw the paratrooper lying crumpled and broken on the flagstones of the inner courtyard. The silken cords and the flapping grey canvass of his parachute torn and shredded in the branches of the tree high above.
Margo Seiffert had instinctively rushed to the aide of the man on the ground, stepping over his discarded gun.
When the other soldier had opened fire Margo’s slight, bird-like frame had been dashed headlong to the flagstones.
Clara’s mind replayed the nightmare again and again, faster and faster.
Most of the bullets went straight through Margo, sparking on the instantly bloody stones onto which, a moment later, she sprawled. The Medical Director of the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women was virtually cut in half by the magazine-emptying burst of fire, her atomised life blood hanging in suspension in a fine mist for several seconds over her lifeless body after she fell.
Clara had screamed a dreadful, keening scream.