New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 21
Paul Nash and Albert Stanton sweated and strained on their oars, Melody Danson held another, shorter oar over the stern of the twelve-foot, leaky boat as Henrietta – and to less effect, little Pedro – desperately baled water over the side.
“Right, right, right!” Paul Nash growled at Melody, who did what she was told, instantly feeling the iron-heavy weight of the river resisting her makeshift rudder.
The boat grounded momentarily before it was swept along.
It began to rain as they all heard the river tumbling over the approaching flooded weir. A hundred years ago the Tormes had been partially dammed east of the city but that structure had – like many of the boons of Spain’s long-lost golden age – fallen into disrepair and collapsed decades ago, leaving several perilous threats to navigation. The weir was breached in three places, most badly in the mid-stream, where the current had sculpted a plethora of deep, fast-flowing channels, small whirlpools and nearer the banks, dead, unmoving pools which were only disturbed when, as now, the Tormes was in semi-flood.
“Don’t try to fight the current!” Paul Nash commanded.
The soldier, adventurer, spy was imperturbable, inexhaustible, and relentlessly cheerful. Inevitably, it was this latter which most irritated the others.
Although they had eaten well in the morning before they had set out from Alba de Tormes, the parting gift from the wives of the men for whose derelict boat they had exchanged the Inquisition’s Blohm and Mertz limousine, they were all hungry again and not so much at the end of their tethers, as well beyond, yet Paul Nash remained unwearied, unworried and infuriatingly optimistic.
And always, enigmatic.
Melody never quite felt she understood who or what he was. It had dawned on her that she might not even be right about the real nature of the mission the man had been sent on. True, he had hinted that rescuing Henrietta was the main, if not the big thing, and that subsidiary to this he was not going to let either her or Hen fall into Spanish hands.
But what was real?
And what was smoke and mirrors?
Most of all it made her aware that for all her worldliness – certainly by New England standards – she had not really appreciated, until it was far too late, that by returning to Europe and then Spain, she would be so profoundly out of her depth.
Accepting the mission to Madrid had been a mistake on so many levels that looking back, she was appalled that she had been so easily gulled into playing along. Obviously, the coup cum civil war which had turned her and Henrietta into fugitives, presumably with huge prices on their heads, trumped all other considerations for the moment but even had their time in Spain ended uneventfully, coming back to Europe on a commission to be a part of a Colonial Office fig leaf, feminine window dressing to mitigate the worst implications of Spanish involvement in the Empire Day atrocities, had been just plain…dumb.
“Oars out of the water now!” Paul Nash yelled.
Melody struggled to lift her rudder oar, lost her balance and fell into the boat. The oar gave her a painful thwack as she was briefly spread-eagled across it. Feeling very stupid she tried to regain her feet; to no avail because that was when the boat flew through the torrent pouring through the big breach in the old weir.
It was a moment before she realised that she was the one screaming the loudest. The next thing she knew was that suddenly there was an awful lot of water in the boat.
Paul Nash had splashed his oar back into the water.
“Everybody bale for your lives!”
Apart from the two tin mugs that Henrietta and Pedro had been employing there was nothing for it but to cup hands and do what could be done as the craft wallowed down river, slowing a little as it passed into deeper waters between the half-flooded darkling woods on the mudbanks to either side.
Nobody looked outside of the boat.
Melody tore off her head cloth, breathed a sigh of relief as it immediately proved a more effective way of getting water over the side. Needless to say, she was soon soaking wet, as were the others. For an age their frantic efforts seemed to make no difference and then, ever so slowly, the level of water began to fall. When the water only wetted their knees, they began to sigh heartfelt sighs of relief.
“That’s enough. Everybody as quiet as a mouse, please!”
Instinctively, the two women tried to make themselves invisible beneath the gunwales, sheltering Pedro between them, meanwhile Albert Stanton picked up the rudder oar.
As the boat swung slowly around a bend in the broadening river the city of Salamanca reared high above the passing banks: darkly to the south, brightly, magisterially proudly to the north.
They drifted under another bridge.
Something clunked against the planking.
“Just a branch from a tree,” Paul Nash said reassuringly. “There’s a lot of debris in the river at this time of year.”
A drizzle of rain was falling.
Melody imagined she heard a car driving across the bridge above her, and in the distance the ringing of bells. She had lived in Salamanca for a month or so as a girl; her parents had dragged her around endless churches and museums. The only thing she still remembered, vividly, was putting her young hand in the yawning cracks – crevices by any other name – in the walls of the great cathedral, the legacy of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
“Hang on!”
The boat crunched into something so solid, so unyielding that it could only have been the footings of a bridge. There was a brief, horribly loud scraping noise which seemed to the occupants of the wildly rocking boat like a cat’s claws raking glass, and then they were drifting onwards.
“Sorry about that,” Paul Nash guffawed, “our dinghy decided it wanted to shoot the narrowest arch.”
Melody sat up.
She stared at the lights of the city.
The last day had been exhausting but otherwise without particular terrors. Perhaps, that it only seemed that way because they were all so inured to things; aware, as never before, of their frailty and of exactly how tenuous human existence could be and often was. She knew she was already a changed woman and suspected Henrietta was no different; that neither of them could or would lead the lives they had planned back in new England. It was as if they had lived one life up until that night at Chinchón, and another, totally other life thereafter. There was no going back, no becoming again the women they had been before that fateful night when the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s arms men had spirited them away from the clutches of the Inquisition.
She wondered if Alonso was still alive.
She thought about him a lot…
She also fretted about the fate which might have befallen the people she had met at the Embassy in Madrid.
But mostly, she thought about Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 18th Duke of Medina Sidonia, the handsome thirty-nine-year-old castellan of the Comarca de Las Vegas; the mysterious, beguiling courtier-diplomat-cavalryman-spy whom it seemed had been aligned to the losing faction – the Queen’s, or one of the other losing factions, she did not know which clause applied – that night around a month ago.
Alonso…
Paul Nash had brought his oar inboard.
The boat was gliding, carrying them where it might.
The loom of Salamanca’s lights glistened dully off the gun metal of the silenced automatic pistol cradled in his hands as he surveyed the northern bank of the river.
The city seemed to be sliding past interminably slowly.
“Try and steer us closer to the bank, Albert,” Nash suggested.
The Manhattan Globe man grunted an acknowledgement and leaned on his oar.
Melody tried to make herself small in the three inches of water lapping around in the bottom of the boat. Henrietta was mouthing a prayer. She blinked at Melody.
The women tried to lift Pedro out of the water, keep him warm with their bodies. The boy was shivering.
Paul Nash seemed to be reading their thoughts.
Although, actually, he was simply two or three steps ahead of them; as indeed, he had been all along.
“Once we’re past the city we’ll look for somewhere to go ashore. Send the boat on down-stream. We need to find somewhere to dry out and warm up. After tonight we walk until we drop.”
Melody would have argued.
She was too tired.
From memory, she thought that west of Salamanca the Tormes cut through increasingly jagged valleys and canyons as it fell off the great plateau of central Spain to join the Douro at, or near the Portuguese border. Salamanca was about forty or fifty miles from the border…
Time passed, the city lights dimmed and contrary to his promise, clearly a thing said to raise their spirits, Paul Nash made no attempt to put the boat aground. In the end Melody must have drifted into a fitful sleep.
Or more likely, just passed out.
Chapter 25
Tuesday 11th April
Little Inagua, West Indies
Abe had waited until the disorganised Mauser-armed skirmish line – with twelve-inch bayonets fixed and glinting in the night - had walked, or rather, stumbled past him. There were too few sailors in the search line, there was too far between each man for easy or in any sense effective communication, and in any event, as they moved forward – with understandable caution and a natural lack of enthusiasm – the men’s spacing became ever more irregular. Nobody seemed to be setting the pace, let alone checking the integrity of the line and there were soon exaggerated dog-legs in the formation.
Nevertheless, one man had almost trodden on Abe as he lay motionless in the undergrowth.
Abe had silently risen to his feet, walked two paces, and then a third, and brained the poor fellow with the flat of his hatchet. He had used the ‘flat’ of the axe blade because he wanted to avoid covering the man’s kit and weapons in blood. If he had stopped to think about that he would have realised how ‘cold’ that was; but he did not. Stop to think about it, that was. The man had gone down on his face, thereafter it had been the work of a moment to snap his neck, much in the fashion Tsiokwaris had taught him all those years ago to finish off a wounded, downed deer.
He had pulled off the man’s jacket, struggled into it. It was a size or two too small. However, sartorial elegance was secondary; right now, he just needed to looked vaguely like all the other Dominican sailors on Little Inagua.
He had picked up the dead man’s Mauser.
A bullet in the chamber…
There were two more five-round clipper strips in his waist pouch to add to the four rounds in Abe’s tattered trousers’ back pocket.
Then he carried on moving into the interior with the others, gradually falling behind the majority before, judging he was far enough away from where he had left Ted Forrest, he ducked down and waited.
It was about fifteen minutes before somebody realised a man was missing. The idiots only sent two men back to find him. Not together, or working as a team, you understand but as two individuals quartering the ground as they saw fit. Abe shot one by the loom of the searchlights continuously playing across two to three miles of the southern coast of the island. Any man who put his head above the bushes at the wrong moment was visible for hundreds of yards in every direction.
Within seconds several other rifle shots rang out.
He had no idea who the Dominicans were shooting at; although he was certain they were not shooting at him.
More searchlights began playing across the island.
Just to add to the confusion Abe shot another man a quarter-of-a-mile to his left before he ducked down again and zig-zagging through the undergrowth, careful not to leave a trail of moving brush and saplings, moved towards a position a couple of hundred yards nearer to the beach.
He needed to draw the searchers away from where he had left Ted Forest, and the only way that was going to happen was if he got close enough to the beach to snipe again at the Reina Eugenie.
From what he had seen of his enemy he reacted badly to pain and had not the first idea how to respond to surprises. So, he planned to give them as many very nasty surprises as he could!
The bayonet on the Mauser kept fouling the undergrowth.
A couple of times he contemplated ditching it; he had the hatchet, after all, uncomfortably bouncing against his lower spine, loosely slung in his back waistband.
“A qué mierda crees que vas, marinero?”
The man ahead of him was a little to Abe’s right and had stepped out of the bushes with his Mauser pointing, albeit only more or less, in his direction.
Abe did not speak Spanish.
Nevertheless, he got the gist of the question: “Where the fuck do you think you are going, sailor?”
He thought about shooting the man.
No, I need to be closer to the beach before I make a nuisance of myself!
Several seconds later he was reflecting that, in hindsight, it might have been much better to have just shot the man. Abe’s initial bayonet thrust must have skewered him; he still screamed and went on screaming as he twisted the blade, sucked it out of his guts and struck a second and a third time. Momentarily, the bayonet had got stuck…
He killed the Dominican with the hand axe.
Splitting his face and head…
By then the hue and cry had already begun.
Leaving his own bloodied, possibly damaged Mauser on the ground next to the dead man he swept up his victim’s weapon and ammunition pouch and navigated an erratic route through the scrub which he hoped would bring him close to the shore more or less opposite the gap in the reef, some three hundred yards astern of the Reina Eugenie.
There were more shots.
None passed near Abe.
Searchlights were blazing above his head, focusing on the area he had just vacated. Each time he stopped to bob half a head, periscope-like above the level of the surrounding vegetation he noted the marvellous contrast the loom of the searchlights cast far and wide. Their dazzle would make it virtually impossible, other than by a fluke of circumstance, for anybody on those ships to identify the muzzle flash of his rifle. The fools needed to switch off the big lamps, to allow the eyes of the men onshore to adjust to the darkness; presently, the Dominicans were as good as blind on those ships, and on land.
Sensing a searchlight beam sweeping his way Abe flattened himself on the sand and shut his eyes. He had always had good night vision, ‘cat’s eyes’, Kate used to tease him. He had never imagined it would come in so useful in a situation so extraordinary to defy…belief.
He waited, listening hard.
Then, satisfied that nobody was in the vicinity he scrambled forward, pausing only to discard the Mauser’s bayonet, remembering how he had seen the blades of the other sailors’ weapons glinting in the night.
Some minutes later, dripping in sweat and gasping for air, his heart pounding madly, Abe collapsed onto the ground. He knew he was close to the beach because the surf sounded loud. Presently, his heart beat and his thoughts slowed and he began to assimilate his new surroundings.
The Dominicans had stopped shooting, and shouting, at each other as they crashed around like bulls in china shops. Curiously, no further reinforcements had come ashore and there was very little visible activity on board the Reina Eugenie.
Okay, they finally got it that it was dangerous on deck!
That said, the poor chumps standing on the open searchlight platforms must be feeling like tin soldiers in a fairground shooting gallery!
The odd-looking battleship’s forward and aft turrets were trained inland. Even in the gloom Abe made out a thin plume of smoke hazing the atmosphere above her funnel. In fact, he could taste the acrid tang of coal dust in the atmosphere.
The wind had shifted after sunset…
Studying the battleship, he realised that there was a new silhouette, another big ship anchored farther out in the channel. It was hard to make out any details but this vessel had a more modern look about it than the Reina Eugenie’s two ironclad consorts.
A blocky, overlarge bridge, three stacks, two turrets fore and aft reminiscent of the layout of British heavy cruisers of the mid-century period. Ted Forest would know more about these things than he, of course. Abe had never taken any interest in things naval before he was co-opted in the RNAS; before he had joined the Navy the only waters he had ever ‘messed about on’ were those of the Mohawk River…
He needed not to be thinking about those days.
Or of Kate…it hurt too much.
He decided to shoot out the battleship’s aft searchlight first.
Chapter 26
Wednesday 12th April
Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia
Admiral Lord Collingwood, C-in-C Atlantic Fleet was cheered by being able, for the first time in this war, to be able to report a little good news to the Governor of New England. However, his morsels of encouragement were, inevitably, somewhat over-shadowed by the grim reports pouring in from the South West Front.
Colonial forces were in retreat everywhere from West Texas to the borders of Spanish Alta California, having been struck by a tsunami of land cruisers and massed infantry, supported by thousands of cavalrymen beneath skies black with aircraft of the Fuerza Aerea de Nueva Granada – the Air Force of New Granada – mercilessly dive-bombing and strafing the fleeing Imperial formations.
It was common knowledge that the ‘Mexicans’ had obtained, courtesy of their German ‘friends’ numerous 1950’s and early 1960’s cast off from the Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches, the Imperial German Flying Corps, when that service was in the process of modernisation into its present incarnation, the Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte; what had not been appreciated was that many of the Mexicans’ front line units were, it now seemed, equipped with variants of state of the art propeller-driven bombers and fighters quite the equal of anything possessed by the massively outnumbered Colonial Air Force units in the theatre.
