“Why not?” Curtis LeMay demanded.
“I’m no submarine man, sir.”
“You’re more of a submarine man than I am, Captain!”
Walter Brenckmann shrugged. He’d never met the famous Air Force general before and couldn’t help but compare the public persona, the great American legend with the flesh and bones man whose scowling face impatiently awaited his answer. If he’d tried to envisage this encounter five minutes ago he’d not have factored in the apparently genuine, man to man, tenor of the quick fire interrogatives flying at his head.
“They say Scorpion manoeuvred so close to HMS Dreadnought that the two boats almost collided shortly before the shooting began,” Walter Brenckmann replied, thinking his thoughts out aloud. “Maybe her skipper worked out what the S-2s were about to do and believed that if he placed his vessel between them and Dreadnought, or simply manoeuvred in close order with the British boat then the S-2s would back off.” The smaller, shorter man shrugged with the weariness of a grieving father. Scorpion was gone and with her over a hundred men including his eldest boy. He didn’t really care about the reasons why as the numbing emptiness of loss began to consume him like some debilitating virus for which his body had no natural immunity. “I don’t know, General,” he confessed. “Not a lot makes much sense lately. Just ask yourself why the skipper of the British boat would start a fight with boat with exactly the same capabilities as his while the water all around him was full of air-dropped sonar buoys? I mean, he’d have to know how a fight like that was going to end. Our sub skippers know we’ve got another twenty nuclear boats; the guy commanding the Dreadnought knew that Dreadnought is the Brits’ only nuclear submarine. With respect, sir,” he concluded, “CINCLANT’s version of events is probably as reliable as its version of what happened last year to the USS Beale.”
The Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff let this bitter accusation — for ‘accusation’ was what it was — go unremarked.
“You’ve got to hold yourself together, Captain.”
Walter Brenckmann said nothing, allowing the dull irritation in his eyes do the talking.
Curtis LeMay was used to dealing with men who weren’t, at some level, afraid of him. Brenckmann was beyond being afraid of any man. He didn’t give a dam about anything the Acting Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces could do to him. Where’s this guy been hiding? If he was in my air force he’d be major-general commanding a Bomb Wing, not wasted on Embassy chores as a lowly four-ringer…
“You and I need to talk to the President,” Curtis LeMay decided.
Chapter 42
The single-engine fighter that narrowly avoided crashing into the stern of the aircraft carrier looked exactly like a Second World War era Messerschmitt Bf 109. The iron bomb it had been carrying detonated in the big ship’s wake as the fighter hit the sea. A great, ugly plume of white water rose briefly above the stern and was gone.
HMS Hermes’s 40-millimetre Bofors anti-aircraft cannons pumped continuously, and on the sponsons below flight deck level and from the bridge wings Royal Marines manned heavy machine guns. High above the leaden Atlantic overcast Hermes’s seven serviceable Sea Vixens and three of her five newly arrived Blackburn Buccaneers — low-level strike bombers rather than fighters — were engaging in a surreal battle with scores of antiquated Spanish copies of the aircraft that Hitler had employed to conquer Poland and France two decades ago. Neither the Sea Vixens or the Buccaneers had guns — the former had taken off with the carrier’s last Firestreak short-range air-to-air missiles, the Buccaneers with the last half-dozen Sidewinders — and for all that they were faster and were in every respect more advanced, capable and superior to their foes they were outnumbered and basically, not designed to refight a Second World War style air battle. Inevitably, now and again one, two or three enemy aircraft broke through to the Battle Group. It had been a gamble coming in so close to land, especially as the fleet was known to be under surveillance by at least one Spanish submarine. However, there had been no choice. The Spanish had started lobbing artillery shells onto Gibraltar from the Andalusian hills to the north and across Algeciras Bay from the west, and then the entire Spanish Air Force, minus its small but potent American-supplied modern component — P-80 Lockheed Shooting Star and North American F-86 Super Sabre fighters — had risen in a large disorderly gaggle over Cape Trafalgar and, albeit slowly, attacked en masse.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher and his ‘steward’, Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin, had arrived on the carrier minutes before the radar pickets ten miles off the Spanish coast had first detected the aerial armada forming thirty miles north-east of Cadiz. The Battle Group had closed up at Air Defence Stations One, he and Jack Griffin had been handed flash gear — balaclavas and gloves — and told to ‘keep out of everybody’s way’. This they’d achieved by finding a viewing perch at the bottom of Hermes’s island mast, a great steel structure like that on their beloved Talavera that seemed infinitely smaller and more consistent with the scale of the carrier than it ever had on the old Battle class destroyer. But then Hermes was ten times the tonnage of their former ship.
“I wondered if I’d find you fellows back here!” Declared the Battle Group Commander’s flag lieutenant, a bearded man of Peter Christopher’s own age. “It looks like the first wave is turning away. We’ll be trying to recover our aircraft in a few minutes. Buggered if I know what we’re going to give them to shoot with but never mind, what?”
Peter’s gaze had fallen on HMS Duchess, a Daring class destroyer that had ranged up alongside the carrier and was holding position almost exactly to starboard of the bigger ship at a range of around three hundred yards. A frigate, HMS Plymouth, Talavera’s saviour newly arrived from Oporto was manoeuvring to assume station on the other side of the Hermes.
“Goalkeepers!” The junior officer exclaimed cheerfully.
Hermes’s Bofors guns had fallen silent.
The manoeuvring bell clanged
“You two are to come with me. The Admiral wants to say ‘hello’.” When Jack Griffin hesitated he went on: “Come on, you too!”
Rear-Admiral Nigel Grenville was bent over the chart table on the flag bridge. The ‘flag bridge’ was situated half-way up the carrier’s island superstructure. The space was crowded; radar repeaters and tactical plots were crammed onto bulkheads and most of the windows were screened with heavy steel blast shutters. Hermes didn’t have the full ABC — atomic, biological and chemical warfare — ‘lock down and wash down’ facilities of the Tiger class cruisers and some of the new frigates coming into service, but notwithstanding her twenty-five thousand tons of bulk, she was a relatively small ship in which to accommodate modern jet aircraft, helicopters and all the technology required to support them. Practically ever operational space on the carrier was cramped and the flag bridge was no exception.
Peter Christopher presented himself to the C-in-C Hermes Battle Group.
“Welcome aboard, young man.” Grenville was in his late forties, a small, hook-nosed man with piercing faded blue eyes. “You must have had a rough old time on the Talavera? How are you bearing up?”
The younger man was a little taken aback by the transparent and hugely public friendliness of his reception by a man who was, after all, in the middle of a major fleet action.