The wreck looming over his head creaked ominously and something fell noisily onto a steel bulkhead deep in the hulk. Sam Calleja wondered idly if the ship was about to break in two and if the bow would fall on him. He made no attempt to run, he simply waited.
If he died tonight it didn’t really matter.
Nothing really mattered any more.
Chapter 16
It was just beginning to lighten, not yet quite dawn as the small party gathered to wait in the cold, clammy compartment at the base of the carrier’s island bridge superstructure looking through the open hatch onto the grey, pitching deck.
“It seems the Portuguese are our new best friends,” the young Fleet Air Arm lieutenant explained cheerfully as the delay lengthened. “As I understand it the Captain was asked to get you two to England as soon as possible and what with the Portuguese suddenly opening their air space to us,” he shrugged, “it gives us the opportunity to send you to Lisbon — along with dispatches and several of the other wounded — in a Wessex.”
Clara Pullman gazed at the angry white-horses chasing from the crests of the huge waves the carrier was smashing into every few seconds.
“We’ll bring the stretcher cases up on the centreline lift,” the youngster went on. “Cart the poor fellows straight onto the aircraft then we’ll wheel you two out into the rain and you’ll be on your way.”
“Lieutenant,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov asked, “what happened last night?”
“Oh, you mean all the high speed turns and the whizz bangs?”
“Yes,” the former KGB Colonel confirmed patiently. He was swathed in several layers of clothing against the cold and the wet and a crewman was strapping an inflatable lifejacket bib around his brutally beaten torso. His head was bare and the bruising on his face was subsiding a little. Now that the swelling was subsiding his features looked less lopsided and his lips no longer slurred his words.
“We intercepted a couple of merchantmen. A big tanker with a refrigerator ship in company. They were bound for Genoa so we impounded them. Or rather, we tried to impound them. The refrigerator ship was torpedoed.”
“Torpedoed!” Clara exclaimed.
“We think Hermes was the target but the SS Sevonia got in the way. The submarine must have fired a spread of five or six torpedoes, most likely at extreme range and it was just unlucky the Sevonia happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously, as soon as the ball went up the Hermes got her skates on and the escorts got stuck into her would be assailant!”
“So the groups of three explosions we heard later were depth charges?” The Russian checked, nodding.
“Yes, anti-submarine mortars. Limbos,” the younger man confirmed enthusiastically. “HMS Duncan thinks she got the blighter with the first salvo but the Venerable followed up afterwards, just to be sure. There was a fairly big oil slick so we’re pretty confident the sub was a Spanish diesel-electric boat.”
“What happened to the SS Sevonia?” Clara inquired. Out on the wet, windswept flight deck she saw two stretchers being carried towards the big helicopter which had moved into the periphery of her vision.
“You’d have thought she’d have gone down like a stone, wouldn’t you?” The younger man replied his expression perplexed. “Great big hole in her side like that! The torpedo hit her plumb on the waterline, she must have been digging her stem into a big swell I suppose for it to have clocked her that high. So, a great big hole but not a huge amount of underwater damage. The Rhyl is escorting her to Lisbon. You’ll fly over the two ships in a few minutes; they can’t have gone far yet.”
Clara heard the matter of fact, whatever will be will be fatalism in the young man’s voice. She guessed he was in his early twenties and already a veteran of this callous new age.
“What about the other merchant ship?” She asked.
“The tanker? We turned her around. No idea where she went.”
“Oh.”
“Right! If you’d come with me please!” The youthful lieutenant took Clara’s arm and led her out into the wind and the spray while two burly ratings half-carried her companion to the waiting Westland Wessex. The helicopter rocked and swayed as the passengers were hurriedly arranged in the cargo cabin. There were four stretcher cases and a sickbay attendant, with Clara and Rykov planted in the only free corner.
The big doors clanged shut and the machine seemed like it was about to shake itself to pieces as it clawed into the air; wobbling, fish-tailing it dragged itself away from the carrier. The rain beat angrily at the sweaty aluminium skin of the Wessex.
Clara was glad of the arm Arkady Rykov cautiously extended about her shoulders and she carefully, mindful at all times of his injuries, melded against him. The last few days had become a blur of fear, relief, horror and incomprehension. The past year had been exciting, exhilarating and well, terrifying but she’d probably never been so alive and now, she was a little afraid that was all over. Assuming the helicopter they were riding in didn’t crash into the sea in the storm; what awaited her and Arkady back in England? They’d half-beaten him to death in Gibraltar; were they going to finish the job as soon as they got home? And what was it really like in England? One heard so many awful things. She couldn’t begin to picture London where she’d lived half her life in ruins. They said there’d been famine, plagues last winter and that many of the old and the very young had not lived through the snow and ice of that ‘nuclear’ season.
“Ma’am?” The Wessex’s load master was crouching beside her. “They said you are a nurse?”
Clara didn’t try to explain that she hadn’t been for years; in the circumstances one didn’t split hairs.
“Yes,” she yelled above the roar of the rotors and the thunder of the rain-heavy slip steam.
“One of the stretcher cases is in a bad way, can you help?”
Clara was already getting up before she nodded, brusquely.
“Yes, of course.”
The flight was much longer than she had expected. It seemed to go on, and on, and on, the buffeting and the shaking, the racket of the engine over their heads was deafening. She couldn’t imagine how nightmarish it must have been for the four badly injured, sedated men on the stretchers. She stroked the face of the badly burned boy, waiting as long as possible before injecting another ampoule of morphine into the kid. He was a little more peaceful after that and his breathing, and pulse, which she checked from minute to minute steadied.
The Wessex outran the leading edge of the storm front as it crossed the coast; watery grey sunshine filtered, now and then, into the cargo bay as the helicopter banked and turned, searching for the nominated landing ground.