New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 5
Still he saw nothing.
I must have hit something!
Two bullets at point blank range, I must have hit something!
He began to look anew, harder this time.
What was that?
He took a couple of faltering steps, began to push through the waist high scrub. Even then, he almost fell over the carcass before he saw it.
A small goat: white, dirty brown flecked with black. An immature male, he decided. He exhaled a ragged sigh of relief. If he had downed a donkey, he would never have been able to drag it back to the beach.
One bullet had nicked the animal’s right fore leg, probably breaking it, the other had gone through its shoulder. This round was the killer, the unfortunate beast had bled out in a minute or so. Abe breathed a sigh of relief; he hated it when an animal suffered in the kill.
Slowly, carefully, he returned to the rain pool to search for his gun. Finding it, he stuffed it inside his shirt and waistband and went back to the dead goat, contemplating for some minutes how best to take it back to the crash site.
He tried to convince himself he could sling it over his shoulder, ideally, his uninjured one. No. Bad idea. He would have to drag it, by the hind legs.
The sooner I start the sooner I’ll get back to Ted.
Remember the canteen, man!
Abe realised he was talking to himself.
Sign of madness. Or delayed shock. Or a bang on the head. The latter would explain the headache. Of course, thirst might be a contributory factor. He had to be dehydrated…
Too much thinking, not enough doing!
He drank straight from the pool.
Briefly, he passed out again and came too lying on his side in the cooling muddy water.
Eventually, he picked himself up.
He grabbed the goat’s back hooves, began to pull it towards the rain pool. Each time the carcass caught against a bush or bumped over a root the pain jarred through his whole torso even though his left arm still hung stiffly, mostly useless at his side.
He thought about all those times he and Kate had been out in the woods in the Mohawk Valley, stalking – when they were not fooling about – critters and when they were older, bigger prey with that long rifle borrowed from Tsiokwaris. How quiet they had been! How careful not to spook anything, wraiths in the undergrowth, as if they were a part of the forest itself.
Here, he had just blasted away at a herd of curious, unsuspecting beasts with no real idea what was in front of his gun, and taken down a young goat almost by accident.
He trudged forward, wincing with every step.
Yes, fooling about with Kate in the foothills of the Catskills had been a heck of a lot more fun than this game!
Abe tried very hard to cling to that thought as each step seemed to be through treacle. By the time he heard the surf on the offshore reefs again he was almost treading water.
Back beside Ted Forest…at last, he propped the canteen upright.
“I have to let this stand awhile, let the mud in the water settle,” he explained, his own throat burning, hoarse.
The man on the ground muttered something inaudible, incomprehensible.
“I shot a goat,” Abe explained.
Ted Forest forced a parody of a grin.
He croaked: “I couldn’t possible eat a whole goat, old man.”
This lifted Abe’s spirits.
“I plan to cook it first.”
“Oh, well, that’s different…”
Chapter 5
Thursday 6th April
HMS Perseus, 35 Miles SSE of Sable Island, North Atlantic
The forty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier was battering her way west against the rising seas and howling winds of a force eight gale at twenty-three knots. Every few minutes she shipped white water over her enclosed, clipper bow and the whole ship seemed to reverberate like a huge sounding board.
Commander Alexander Lincoln Fielding shuddered to think what conditions must be like on the smaller ships struggling to keep up with the Perseus and the flagship, the fifty-thousand-ton impregnable castle of steel that was HMS Tiger – or as everybody affectionately called her, ‘the Big Cat’ – and the larger of the four cruisers now in hand with Task Force 5.2.
Even from his position high above the rain and windswept flight deck in the Combat Air Wing – CAW – Commander’s chair in ‘Flight Control’, the light cruiser Dido and the more distant, screening destroyers bobbed into and out of sight, disappearing into the troughs of the long, precipitous Atlantic rollers as the Task Force defied the weather.
“They said I’d find you up here!”
Alex half-turned – gazing out across the magnificent, angry, primal confusion of the churning grey seascape was seductively mesmeric – and grinned at Lieutenant Commander Simon Foljambe, RNAS, the CO of the carrier’s strike wing of eighteen Sea Eagle torpedo bombers.
Built to operate up to eighty fixed wing aircraft and half-a-dozen of the new helicopters, presently, Perseus had a complement of just thirty-nine aircraft: the seventeen Goshawk Mark IV interceptor-scouts of Alex’s 7th New York Squadron, the fifteen Sea Eagles, eight of which were configured in a torpedo-bomber role, four ancient Bristol Monarch biplane reconnaissance ‘string bags’, and three of the semi-operational, frankly experimental, Isle of Wight Light Aircraft Company’s Newport helicopters, two-man machines capable of performing short-range search and rescue missions and transferring a pair of passengers from ship to ship, although not in this weather.
The newcomer perched against the Flight Deck Plot, the ten feet long table shaped exactly like the Perseus’s flight deck upon which, when the carrier was operating aircraft every kite and item of topside equipment – everything from the size of an oxygen bottle to a recovery tractor or a Goshawk or Sea Eagle – was represented by models and symbols by a team of a dozen movement masters. Prior to joining the ship Alex had always assumed that the Navy had some kind of high-technology, super-duper machine that kept track of what was going on, or that in some way the Mark I eyeball of whoever was in charge, sufficed to choreograph affairs. He had very swiftly been disabused of any notion that a single man, or any, as yet un-invented, non-existent electronic or mechanical brain, could possibly manage the horrendously dangerous environment of the flight deck of an operational carrier. Thus, when Perseus was conducting flying operations this compartment, like the huge deck below, was the scene of semi-orchestrated…mayhem.
But not today, so, Alex’s boss, the ships’ CAW, had temporarily abandoned his ‘office’ to spend a while in his cabin catching up with his department’s paperwork with his two loyal, hard-pressed ‘writers’. Alex was still too new to the ways of the Royal Navy to begin to understand why the CAW’s two secretaries, one a junior petty officer and the other a senior rate, were ‘writers’, not ‘secretaries’, when the Captain’s secretary, was always referred to as a ‘secretary’. But then in his bones Alex was still a Major in the Colonial Air Force, compensated for coming to sea – with all its myriad of new perils – with a temporary commission at his present exalted ‘on board’ rank.
In fact, his status on the Perseus was a thing which he well knew might easily cause friction. The CAW, Commander Andrew Buchannan, a forthright ruddy-faced veteran naval aviator, and his deputy, Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Brooke, a taciturn Irishman from County Meath, both sat above him in the Air Wing’s pecking order, yet Alex’s rank meant that he was automatically included in the Captain’s Departmental Heads Command Group, whereas, Brooke, his operational superior, was not…
Both Buchannan and Brooke had told him not to worry about it. Basically, the Navy was so grateful to ‘chaps like you’ who had ‘the gumption to turn yourself into deck jockeys at the drop of a hat’ that it would forgive, forget, and applaud, practically anything he or his men got up to!
Actually, apart from being separated from his very expectant wife, whom he missed with a passion that seemed wholly incompatible with his formerly jaundiced outlook on life, and things in general, Alex was having a whale of a time.
It was small comfort that he and Leonora had known that there would be periods, possibly long periods, of separation when they had fallen into each other’s arms. That he had finally married a woman who understood that he was never going to be one of those tame nine to five ‘city men’, and seemed, thus far at least, to be at peace with it, was perhaps, the most extraordinary of all the adventures of his life to date.
And now he was, literally, all at sea with a true band of brothers!
“This really is the best view in the house,” Simon Foljambe chuckled. He was the youngest son of a prominent Whig family which, he joked, ‘owns half of Cumberland, which probably explains why the family has been on its uppers for as long as anybody can recall!’ His father was a sometime Member of Parliament, regularly voted in and out as one election followed another, and his mother a well-known children’s author – who published under the pen name of Dorothy Malone, her mother’s maiden name - whose books sold well in several of the First Thirteen.
“I don’t know about that, old chap,” Alex objected, grinning broadly and flicking his eyes to the deckhead. The Flying Control Compartment was directly below the ship’s bridge. “On a day like this we get to enjoy the view; upstairs, it’s business as usual all the time!”
The two men were of an age, and like the New Englander, Foljambe was a relatively recent recruit to the Senior Service. He had transferred to the RNAS from the Royal Air Force some eighteen months ago, spent a year or so at an operational training unit in Canada, and joined Perseus while she was still fitting out at Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn.
Upon first acquaintance Alex had been afraid Foljambe was just another stuffed shirt type, a notion comprehensively exploded when Simon and his ‘Sea Eagle Boys’ had mucked in with the New Yorkers ‘doing the town’ in Perseus’s recent visit to St Margaret’s Bay. Oh, there had been the normal manly arm-wrestling, and a few of the chaps had been inclined to knock heads with Foljambe’s mostly ex-RAF long-service men. However, as the party progressed from one hostelry to another the Goshawk men and their Sea Eagle comrades in arms had buried the hatchet and together, they had had a right royal old time of it!
It seemed Simon Foljambe had married a Canadian woman, a widow with two young sons. He had planned to move his new family down to Norfolk, Perseus’s likely home port in North America; but like many men he was holding fire on that for the present. Nobody really took seriously rumours that the ship was going to be sent to the Mediterranean or the Far East, not now that it was obvious that there was going to be trouble down south, much closer to home. That said, in the Navy nobody took anything for granted until they saw it in writing.
The two men watched as the mighty Tiger buried her fo’c’sle in a big wave and green-grey water submerged her stem.
“We do seem to be in rather a hurry to be somewhere else?” Simon Foljambe observed ruefully.
Alex was thinking of something pithy to say when the bell rang and the Tannoy blared into life.
“NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS!”
The two men waited.
“ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS AND COMMANDERS TO REPORT TO THE CAPTAIN’S STATEROOM AT THIRTEEN HUNDRED HOURS!”
The order was repeated.
“THAT IS ALL!”
“Oh, well,” Foljambe grimaced. “It sounds as if we’re about to find out what the hurry is, old man?”
“In that case,” Alex concluded, laconically, “I won’t pop outside for a quick smoke, then!”
The appointed hour was some twenty-five minutes yet.
The Captain’s stateroom was below the island bridge, a spacious suite of cabins incorporating a conference-dining room large enough to comfortably accommodate twenty or more at a sitting. Situated between the hull and the armoured starboard flank of the hangar deck, it could be accessed directly from the bridge, however, that afternoon Alex and Simon Foljambe diverted to the great, long, two deck-high clammy steel cathedral of Perseus’s hangar deck. The structure was contiguous for almost three-quarters the length of the ship, with great elevators at the bow and stern ends, and cut into by a third, midships elevator half across it, the only major structural obstruction in its otherwise uninterrupted six-hundred-foot length. Other than where the midships elevator impinged, it was between sixty and ninety feet wide, its width reduced where additional armoured boxes protected key fuel pipes and pumps, and guarded the hoists to the magazine rooms buried deep beneath the waterline. The hangar deck crew lived and worked in shops, messrooms and supply stores located, like the Captain’s Stateroom, between the hardened carapace of the giant armoured box and the outer hull. Even in heavy weather, the hangar deck was never quiet, never still, although today, with every aircraft tied down and the deck gyrating unpredictably underfoot, only routine maintenance was being attempted.
Alex was pleased to encounter several of his pilots chatting with, or in a couple of cases, getting their hands dirty working under open cowlings or fuselage panels with their dedicated deck ‘gangs’. Perhaps, half of all the flight engineers on board the carrier had transferred with their pilots when all bar a handful of the Squadron’s pilots had volunteered for the ‘Navy Lark’.
Simon Foljambe made his excuses and went off to get on with his ‘chores’. There was always something that needed to be done on board a warship at sea; that, Alex had quickly discovered, was it seemed, an immutable law of nature. Keeping a wary weather eye on his wristwatch, Alex stopped to talk, and to exchange passing banter with his people. Another fact of life aboard a ship the size of the Perseus with a crew of over fifteen hundred men, was that one was always bumping into new faces, and learning new names to put to those faces.
He reported to the Captain’s domain with seven minutes to spare. The CAW was already there, deep in conversation with the Old Man, who looked up and smiled a conspiratorial smile at Alex.
“Normally, I’d kick of proceedings by offering you all a stiff drink,” Captain Patrick O’Mara Bentinck guffawed, “but today we’ll be supping strong coffee. The shape of things to come if things turn out as badly as they seem to be threatening to at present!”
Oh, that does not sound good!
“As you know, I took the pledge a while back, sir,” Alex chortled. “Although, if you asked me to land on the deck in weather like this, I think I’d reconsider in a blink of the eye!”
Both Perseus’s commanding officer and Andrew Buchannan chortled ruefully.
Patrick Bentinck, Alex had discovered, was one of the men who was responsible for ‘writing the book’ when it came to the Royal Navy’s first harem-scarum flirtation with ship-borne aviation. He had flown Fleabags – the oldest, slowest, most fragile aircraft still in service, as an Army artillery spotter – off the decks and turrets of cruisers, landed back on half-decked converted merchantmen, been the first man catapulted off a ship under way, and been Air Liaison Officer to the Admiralty Bureau of Planning, Naval Architecture and Design when the first of the Ulysses class ships had been laid down. Later he had been in command of the battlecruiser HMS Indomitable at the time of the Empire Day atrocities, shortly thereafter, taking command of the still only half-constructed Perseus. Legend had it that he had personally inspected every plate, rivet and weld of the carrier. Undoubtedly, nobody was better qualified to command Perseus than he.
Fifty-two years old, Bentinck was a New Englander born and bred, a proud son of Trenton, New Jersey who had first gone to sea as a student of the Elizabethtown Royal Naval College at the age of sixteen. During his long career he had served, and fought in gunboat actions in most of the World’s oceans, winning the Navy Cross for his part in a ‘fracas with pirates in the South China Sea’ in the late 1940s. He was one of those men who is a natural enthusiast in everything he lays his hand to, and irrepressibly optimistic to a fault. With his now greying beard and fiercely attentive, piercing look he could terrify or charm any man. He had never married. Ashore he was a cricket lover – a die-hard England supporter with little time for those ‘professional’ Philadelphians who regularly ‘beat up’ the ‘Old Country’s best and brightest – that most English of New Englanders.
Perseus’s Captain waited until his senior officers were seated, and the hatch to his stateroom firmly bolted shut and guarded by an armed Royal Marine.
“Gentlemen, I fear that within a matter of days we shall be at war with His Majesty’s enemies.”
Alex Fielding was not the only man in the compartment to sit up a little straighter; although, because this was the Royal Navy, nobody actually spilled his tea, or coffee, either as a result of the motion of the ship in the heavy weather, or from any manifestation of existential shock.
“The information to hand is, in some respects, fragmentary,” Patrick Bentinck continued, his jaw set in grim resolution, “but it is incontrovertible that events in the Caribbean have taken a very bad turn.”
Alex realised that Bentinck was looking at him.
“It seems that the so-called Vera Cruz Squadron of the Navy of New Spain, Granada, or whatever those people down there call it these days,” his lip curled with involuntary contempt, “aided and abetted, no doubt, by other forces of the Triple Alliance, Cuban and Dominican, presumably, have attacked and invaded Jamaica, and,” he paused, dismay flickering in his stare, “ambushed and disabled, possibly sunk, the Achilles whilst she was in transit south through the Windward Passage…”
Alex froze.
“Sunk, sir?” He asked, dumbly.
“That may be the case. Fleet Headquarters at Norfolk has no reliable confirmation of that. What we know is that she was engaged by at least two heavy units, suspected to be the cruisers Breitenfeld and Lutzen and by those vessels’ screening destroyers. There are also accounts of Achilles’s aircraft attacking a third cruiser some miles farther to the south in the vicinity of Navassa Island, or perhaps, some distance north of that place. As I say, the intelligence picture is a tad murky at present.”
