“Raring to go, sir,” he blurted.
“Like father like son!” Guffawed Admiral Grenville, sliding a glance at LEA Jack Griffin who was doing his best to lurk, unseen behind Peter Christopher’s shoulder. “We’ll have a proper chinwag once we’ve seen off the Spanish Luftwaffe,” he promised, turning back to the younger man. “In the meantime you and PO Griffin can make yourself useful in here.”
Jack Griffin was bemused.
He opened his mouth to speak as the manoeuvring bell clanged again and the big ship began to heel into a southerly turn.
“STAND BY TO RECOVER AIRCRAFT!”
Peter Christopher didn’t have time to explain to his ‘steward’ that his days — or rather his day — of ‘stewarding’ was already over. He suspected that Jack Griffin’s promotion was one of many being liberally and possibly, not very judiciously handed out among warrant officers and leading rates from the Talavera and the Devonshire. He saw his father’s hand in that. His ships were suffering damage, he was losing good ships and men at an unsustainable rate, so he’d promote from within the body of the survivors and ensure that not one scintilla of irreplaceable battle experience was wasted.
In reality there was very little that Peter could actually do to make himself ‘useful’. He didn’t know the ship, or any of its people. He was unfamiliar with Hermes’s electronic warfare and radar systems and had absolutely no practical experience of carrier operations. He and Jack Griffin were worse than spare parts, they were a positive menace. Both men found corners of the flag bridge where they weren’t directly underfoot and could observe the quiet, unflustered, methodical business of the Battle Group Staff.
The first returning aircraft, a Buccaneer thumped down onto Hermes’s deck with a reverberating thud and a scream of jet engines. The moment the aircraft’s landing hook caught on one of the four arrester cables the pilot shut the throttles and hit the lever to fold the big beast’s wings. A glance astern found the small dark silhouette of a Sea Vixen on final approach as the Buccaneer rolled onto the forward flight deck. Fuel lines were already uncoiling.
Peter Christopher might have been unfamiliar with carrier operations but he knew that the one thing the Captain of any carrier would never, given the choice, do was fuel returning aircraft on deck in the middle of a battle while recovering other aircraft. If anything went wrong or the enemy showed up at an inopportune moment the consequences might be catastrophic. He glanced again at the two escorts holding station on each side of the Hermes, each presenting a defiant physical barrier with their unarmoured, paper thin hulls; and knew in that moment, not that he’d ever doubted it, that the spirit of Admiral Lord Nelson was alive and well in the post-cataclysm Royal Navy.
Chapter 43
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher hesitated before he picked up the phone in his sparsely furnished and equipped new office in what until a week ago had been the RAF Officers Club located within the ancient citadel of Mdina. For a moment the steely calm which had characterised everything he done since his arrival in the Maltese Archipelago had threatened to desert him.
“Christopher speaking,” he said. Realising that his flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay was hovering in the doorway he waved him away. The boy was a marvel but this was one conversation he didn’t want him noting, or given his other skills, memorizing for future reference. Even the C-in-C was allowed a little privacy sometimes.
The line was surprisingly clear, presumably routed via the GCHQ eavesdropping facility at Oakley. There was a low background hiss; no spitting and clicking.
“Sir Julian!” The melodic soprano tones cried with barely concealed pleasure. “It seems an age since we said our farewells at RAF Cheltenham. I know that was less than a week ago but so much has happened in the last few days!”
Julian Christopher didn’t think that Margaret Hilda Thatcher ‘gabbled’ very often. He was touched that she was apparently so happy to hear his voice that she was unashamedly ‘gabbling’ now.
“The feeling is completely mutual, Home Secretary,” he replied. He didn’t know who was listening in at her end of the line and didn’t want to do or say anything which might risk causing her embarrassment. A woman in a position of power was so much more vulnerable to the sniping of her male peers and detractors than a man. It was best not to offer hostages to fortune. “My staff assures me that this line is secure at my end. May I speak freely?”
“Yes,” the Angry Widow rejoined, sobering a little. “I am also assured the line has been appropriately ‘scrambled’ by the technical people. I think we may speak freely. I am given to understand by the First Sea Lord that our ships have survived a major air attack in the Straits of Gibraltar?”
The man smiled to himself.
Business before pleasure would always be this woman’s hallmark.
“Sir David is probably better informed of the details at this time than I am,” Julian Christopher confessed. “We lost a couple of aircraft unfortunately and several units of the Hermes Battle Group suffered superficial damage. One aircraft, a single-engine C-4K, that’s the Spanish version of the old German Messerschmitt Bf 109 which they call the ‘Buchón’, apparently carrying a large iron bomb may have attempted to dive into HMS Hermes’s flight deck. That apart, only a handful of aircraft got through the Hermes’s outer screen. If our Sea Vixens and Buccaneers hadn’t run out of air-to-air missiles we’d have wiped out the attacking force which was comprised of entirely old World War Two type vintage aircraft. Admiral Grenville reports that ‘even the bloody Sea Cats work against Heinkels and Dorniers if the blighters get close enough’.” Julian Christopher decided he was sounding too triumphal. That was the effect this woman seemed to have on him; it was a very long time since a woman had so seized him. “Actually, it is a bad business all round. The Spanish haven’t employed any of their more advanced aircraft. They don’t have that many but if they wheel them out tomorrow we will be in trouble. As for the poor brave fellows they’ve been sending against us in their Luftwaffe hand me downs and copies,” he groaned at the thought of so many obviously courageous men dying for nothing in such a perverted cause, “I think we all feel for them. Our pilots take no pleasure in shooting down men who have no real chance of defending themselves, let alone fighting back. I think it is different for the men on our ships. They have no espirit de corps with the enemy airman and a bomb from a Heinkel or a Dornier or a Junkers makes just as big a hole in their decks as one from a modern jet like a Skyhawk.”
While the Hermes Battle Group was fending off air attacks there had been six V-Bomber strikes by aircraft based in England and Scotland, against targets in the hills around Algeciras Bay and north and east of the Rock of Gibraltar, and against Spanish Air Force bases in Morocco. Shortly after the first of these raids the sporadic artillery barrage on the Rock had ceased. After darkness had fallen destroyers and frigates had shelled Cadiz, Tarifa and Algeciras, engaging and probably, disabling or sinking, two Spanish destroyers sheltering in Cadiz Roads.
“I was so relieved to hear that your son suffered only minor injuries in the attack on HMS Talavera,” Margaret Thatcher said suddenly. “It must be a great weight off your mind?”
“Yes,” he replied flatly. “In a funny sort of way coming back to Malta after so many years has reminded me of, shall we say, unfinished business. Not to mention serving to remind one of one’s own mortality.”