New England 11 - Rising Sun, page 20
He shook his head.
“Anyway,” Melody went on. “I thought I’d get over the way Hen and I were used by Government House, the ISS and everybody else in Philadelphia. Forget about how I feel about Alonso… I know that time is supposed to be the best healer and all that.” She looked imploringly at her husband. “And goodness knows, it isn’t as if good things, a lot of them haven’t come out of the…mess. But I’m still angry, just not with myself any more. If I don’t do something about it, constructively I mean, I’ll get bitter and twisted, and well…that’s no way to do parenting!”
Paul just nodded, thinking his thoughts.
“Say something,” she pleaded. However, before he could open his mouth her resolve faltered: “Just after we’ve had sex probably isn’t the best time to talk about this stuff, I’m sorry…”
“No, no, I’m good with this.” He smirked, mischief in his gaze as he studied her. “You’re thinking about going into politics, aren’t you?”
Melody started.
“I am?” She had not thought that at all. Except now that he had said it…
“Okay,” he went on. “Let’s put politics aside. For the moment, just for the sake of argument. Perhaps, more campaigning lawyer to start with, right?”
Again, this was not the way she would have described the disconnected ideas, or the dissonance of her emotions about the events leading up to Henrietta’s death in December.
“Yes,” she confessed, now that he had said what she had been circling around for weeks, “that’s it, sort of, I suppose.”
The man held his piece.
“Don’t ask me how that works, I haven’t figured that out yet,” Melody apologised.
Her husband was a man of action not prone to introspection or self-doubt; he cut through the complexities that preoccupied his wife.
“Maybe,” he suggested, “a new career is a long journey. The first step may be to find a cause; and fight like Hell for it, sweetheart?”
Chapter 28
HMS Temeraire
North of Madura Island, Java Sea
The cruiser staggered out of the roiling tropical squall making billowing clouds of thick, viscose, poisonous smoke, still unscathed by the swarm of Long Lance torpedoes all around her as she staggered into a forest of huge shell splashes. Up until then she had been bracketed several times by large shells but only hit by a couple of 5-inch rounds, neither of which had penetrated her sturdy armoured carapace.
Then Temeraire’s luck ran out.
A near miss by a fifteen-hundred pound 14-inch round opened her side, springing a weld attaching one of the patches fitted at Surabaya, and another slashed down through the Auxiliary Con compartment in the aft superstructure, exploding as it exited the cruiser’s port side killing and wounding over fifty men, including the ships second-in-command and for several critical minutes, paralysing Temeraire’s co-ordination of ship-wide damage control efforts.
Simultaneously, ammunition in the ready use lockers for two quadruple 1.8-inch anti-aircraft autocannon mounts began to light off, a fire quickly took hold adjacent to the after funnel, and the ship began to list to starboard as tens of tons of seawater gushed into the already wrecked, and therefore, mercifully empty, starboard boiler room.
Somehow, the ship was still making eighteen knots.
The Command Circuit was cluttered with desperate reports.
There was another hit, forward as new salvoes crashed down around the stricken cruiser. Temeraire rang like a broken bell as two more rounds – either 6- or 8-inch – came inboard.
“CHAPLET IS HIT!”
Turning up the magnification, Lieutenant Commander Bertram Holland pulled focus on the sinking destroyer. She must have collected one of the Long Lance’s that Temeraire had evaded. The destroyer’s back was broken, and as he watched, bow and stern separated and began to sink.
Temeraire had to alter course a point to the south to avoid colliding with the wreck, or running down the countless heads, contrasted with their bright yellow life preservers bobbing in the oily water.
“Oh, God…”
There were hundreds of people in the water.
Men, women and children collected from a dozen ports, rescued from under the noses of the Japanese invaders. Now they were in the water with the Chaplet’s survivors.
Beyond the upturned severed bow of the Chaplet another column of smoke reached up into the sky. Another ship ‘collected’ by the remorseless Long Lances.
“That’s the Friesland. A fish took off her stern…”
Holland saw that the Carron had creamed across the Temeraire’s bow, presumably to go to the aid of her sinking sister, a signal lamp blinking ferociously on the port wing of her flying bridge.
He guessed that Temeraire’s commanding officer had ordered Carron’s captain to run to the east at full speed because there was nothing they could do for the people in the water.
Holland felt utterly useless, hapless, ashamed.
Temeraire had no working guns that could be brought to bear on the enemy in a stern chase; to bring her two forward main battery turrets into action she would need to turn, exposing at least half her length to the enemy, which, each time she turned would draw closer.
He forced himself to swing the viewfinder onto the people in the water. The Chaplet’s stern had turned turtle, showing her red-leaded keel to the sky as it sank, slowly into the lapping waves. Arms, faces were raised as the Temeraire shouldered alongside the wreck, her two shafts churning as she attempted to flee, leaving the Chaplet’s survivors to their fate.
“What’s happening astern of us?” Holland demanded, feeling hollow.
“That squall is drifting south by west, sir!”
That was when Holland realised the ELDAR repeaters were blank; this was hardly surprising given the quantity of shrapnel, shards of white hot metal flying around, shredding power and communications wiring, most of which was external on older ships like the Temeraire.
He ordered the director to track to its port, aft position.
Yes, as squalls went it was a beauty…
It was five miles wide if it was an inch and inwardly, dark apart from a series of vicious, stabbing lightning bolts. It occurred to him that it might have been a lightning strike could have shorted out the ELDAR circuits…
He moved on past that thought; he had no ELDAR range-finding and that, as they say, was that!
“Where are the bloody Japs?” He asked, irritably after about a minute. He thought better of this. “How long have we been in action and how many miles east of the Madura Strait are we?”
Logs were consulted and a chart unfurled.
“Damned nearly two hours, sir. And we’re about six, or seven miles north-north-east of Ketapang.”
“Ammo status for the forward main battery turrets?” The ship’s Gunnery Officer demanded.
“One-three-nine rounds,” came the report. “Ninety-two AP, forty-seven HE.”
Another report came in that all 4.7-inch turrets on the starboard side were inoperable, and only Number Two secondary turret on the port side was still intact and answering commands.
Ready use rounds were still lighting off aft of the second funnel.
There was a report of an unexploded 14-inch shell rolling around in the Petty Officers’ Mess below the armoured main deck level…
Temeraire was listing three degrees to starboard and according to the inclinometer, down by as many degrees at the bow. Game old dog that she was; she could not take a lot more of this kind of punishment.
“THREE JAP DESTROYERS ARE COMING OUT OF THE SQUALL!”
Chapter 29
Saturday 28th April
Governor’s Palace
Williamsburg, Crown Colony of Virginia
The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England had preceded the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Sir Anthony Parkinson out into the garden where the two men had settled in wicker chairs to enjoy their tea, and to proverbially chew the cud awhile as they awaited the delayed arrival of the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Cuthbert Collingwood.
Superficially, the two men could hardly have been more unalike; George Washington was tall, often the tallest man in any room, while the victor of the tumultuous naval battles in the Gulf of Spain the previous year, an inch or two below average height, dapper where the Governor was rangy, rugged in a whiplash sort of way. There were only a few years between them in age, each had proven to be the master of their particular battlefields in the last year and both men were a little surprised, not to say disappointed, that they now found themselves discussing a new and potentially, desperate war in the Pacific.
One thing the two men had in common was their meteoric ascent to their present positions. Twelve months ago, Washington had been a retired cavalryman and rancher, while Parkinson – ‘Parky’ to his friends and detractors alike – had been a newly minted rear admiral whose reputation rested on his periods spent ashore as successively, Director of Plans and because he had upset so many people in that posting, his later sojourn as Director of Training at the Admiralty in England. Had George Washington not come to the attention of the then Governor, Viscount De L’Isle, and Parkinson not been the trusted protégé of the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet during the reverses suffered at the outset of the war with the Triple Alliance, each might have spent the rest of their lives in relative obscurity. That said, last year, they had sat down and planned the defeat of the Triple Alliance; and now, this year, although geographically at a remove of several thousand miles, the purpose of the coming conclave was to set in stone New England’s pivotal forthcoming role in the Empire’s oceanic war against the Japanese.
The two men had heard the First Sea Lord’s aircraft, the C class flying boat Consort which served as his airborne command centre when he was on his seemingly never-ending perambulations around the globe circling over the James River an hour ago. Whereas, Cuthbert Collingwood’s predecessor had rarely strayed far from London – presumably lest the politicians stabbed him in the back – the new man, by far the most personable and popular figurehead the Royal Navy had had in living memory, had prioritised a wholesale review of his service’s global condition, and the actual – ‘real’ – state of its operational readiness.
“Tell me more about Cuthbert’s Crusade, Tony,” George Washington invited his visitor, a man whom he had come to regard as his closest friend if not in life, then in war.
“The First Sea Lord will probably reiterate this,” Parkinson apologised, raising his tea cup to his lips. “But between you and I, I don’t think we can have any illusions about how unprepared to actually fight a war we in the Navy, or anybody else in the Empire, was this time last year. I can only speak authoritatively for the Navy, of course. I am sure that the average man on the street still thinks about the Navy as being what it was twenty or thirty years ago; in those days we had over thirty battleships. We had 1st Battle Squadron covering the North Sea, 2nd at Portland in the Channel Fleet, 3rd in the Mediterranean, 4th in the Far East and the 5th at Norfolk, and at any one time a brace of battlecruiser squadrons in the Med or the Atlantic, or scouting for the Home Fleet from Rosyth or Invergordon in Scotland. The whole debate about re-building the battlefleet or laying down what eventually became the Ulysses class carriers only really got heated outside the service when the political classes realised that at any one time there were hardly any big gun capital ships in home waters at a time when the Germans were launching one a year even in the late 1960s. Afterwards, the big story became the bitterness of the infighting between the gunners and the aviators but actually, most of the politicians just wanted castles of steel sprouting with the biggest possible rifles. You can only imagine the chagrin of the Germans when they finally caught up with, and numerically overtook our ‘in commission battlefleet’ at more or less the exact moment we decided the future was in the air not at the business end of a 15-inch gun, especially when the old Kaiser forbade his admirals to ‘throw more good money after bad’ on a new carrier ‘naval race’. All of which is now relatively ancient history. But,” he put down his cup and saucer on the low table between the two men and gazed out across the walled garden behind the old colonial mansion where, if he listened hard, he fancied he could hear the Governor’s wife, and her daughter, Constance – Connie - moving about and talking animatedly, “frankly, what with one thing and another, specifically, the preoccupation with all the new ‘wonder’ weapons, many of which have thus far failed to come up to expectations, just not worked or will never will work, we have rather neglected the state of the Fleet for well over a decade prior to the outbreak of hostilities with the Triple Alliance.”
Again, women’s voices filtered out into the garden.
It was no longer any kind of poorly kept secret that the Governor’s daughter was with child, or that she was unmarried, her child’s father having been killed in a skirmish with Mexican troops in Texas several days after the declaration of the ceasefire. Such tragedies were mercifully few but many isolated, out of communication enemy units had carried on fighting for up to a fortnight after the Laredo Front had fallen silent.
Parkinson got the distinct impression that the ongoing mother-daughter exchange was not unrelated to the older woman, somewhat infuriated, unsuccessfully attempting to persuade the younger woman, to…rest.
He concentrated on the matter in hand.
“Perhaps, it might be instructive if I speak to the state of the active fleet at the time of the Empire Day outrages in July 1976.” He smiled wanly. “In naval circles, that period was something of a nadir, and we all knew it. So, actually, did the Government, but that’s another story. One which I think, sheds no little light on its decade-long Walpolean agenda! Nadir,” he thought about it: “No, in retrospect that period will be come to be seen as a watershed of kinds; ironically, everybody remarked what a marvellous show we had put on with the Fleet Review. What was less well understood was that well over half the operational ships in the whole Navy, and some that were virtual ‘showboats’ with damned near skeleton crews, were on ‘show’ in the two bays of New York that day. Granted, at the time we had the first two Ulysses class vessels nearing completion but I don’t think even Cuthbert, the architect of the super-carrier program – could have known how important those ships were going to be in the recent war, or how crucial they and their sisters will be going forward.”
George Washington, Parkinson had discovered early in their acquaintance, was a superb listener. One only had to tell him a thing once and his subsequent questions were unfailingly incisive.
“I’ll use the capital ships present at New York that day as an example, if I may,” Parkinson continued. “At that time there were twelve battleships and three battlecruisers theoretically in commission, with seven further in the mothball fleet, all bar one of which had been extensively cannibalised for spare parts, components and spare guns, large and small over the past ten years to meet the straightjacket of ‘publicly’ fixed defence budgets in the early 1970s. Obviously, all that fiscal restraint vis-à-vis the Defence Estimates was a fiction, in reality we were throwing money hand over fist at the new submarines, missilery, MTETEEPS, a whole generation of advanced aircraft, satellite technologies, computerisation and of course, the bomb project, among other things but nevertheless, the ‘public’ armed forces, the Navy included, were working on what in real terms because of inflation, was year on year, a declining budget which had by then effectively cut the fleet by about a third in the course of the decade before the war with the Triple Alliance.”
He picked up his cup again, sipping reflectively.
“To return to the Fleet Review of July 1976,” he reiterated. “At that time five of our fifteen capital ships were non-operational. Of the fifteen, the oldest, the Royal Oak was first commissioned in 1950, and the newest, the fifth ship of the Lion class, the Warspite in 1965. Therefore, the ‘battle line’, such as it was, was aging. Royal Oak, presently at Guantanamo Bay intimidating the Cardinals, was, in 1976 scheduled for disposal later this year, plans which are now on hold although she will need a lengthy refit and modernisation if she is ever to be returned to full operational service. Not forgetting that we’d either have to do something about her 13.5-inch main battery, either start making that calibre projectile again – an expensive business just for one ship – or perhaps, re-line her rifles to take 12-inch reloads which at a pinch we might source from either the Argentines or the Chileans, again that would not be ideal but then neither would be replacing her existing turrets with twin 15-inchers, again, a fairly major undertaking, albeit one achievable by cannibalising one or more of the mothballed Centurions, the next oldest class of big gun ships in the Reserve Fleet. Apologies, I digress…”
The Governor of New England absorbed this wordlessly, waiting to hear Parkinson explain further.
“So, at the Fleet Review at New York in July 1976 we had the Lion, commissioned in 1959, which was modernised between 1967 and 1968, and again in 1974, Tiger, which joined the Fleet in 1960, Queen Mary in 1961 and the Princess Royal, 1963, all of which have undergone programmed 10-year and additional smaller refits and upgrades, mainly to their electronic systems and in the automation of gun directors, etcetera. Warspite, the last of the Lions, completed in 1965, was suffering her 10-year refit at the time of the Review. As to the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron, which if I recollect were moored in the outer bay, Indefatigable and Invincible were then twenty-three years old, and their sister, the Indomitable, twenty-one. As everybody agrees, they are handsome ships, and until Ulysses joined the Fleet, the longest albeit tipping the scales at about five thousand tons short of a Lion’s displacement. However, of the three, only Indomitable was fully operational, or indeed, crewed. Neither Indefatigable or the Invincible’s main batteries were manned. Elsewhere in the world, only two additional ‘big ships’ were in commission, Centurion, another ship commissioned as long ago as 1951 was at Singapore; and, the Dreadnought, which went to sea in 1953, was flagship of the Home Fleet based at Rosyth.” He grimaced. “We had rather more cordial relations with the German Empire in those days.”
