New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 6
Bentinck pursed his lips.
“I know your brother is on board Achilles, Alex,” he said quietly. “Had there been more to go on, I would have let you know immediately.” He shrugged. “At the moment the people onshore are trying to work out what has transpired from intercepted signals and the nonsense that the Cubans and the others are broadcasting on their national radio stations.”
Alex nodded acknowledgement.
He did not trust himself to speak.
“The situation on Jamaica is dire but at least we have regular updates from our own people. The guard ship, the Cassandra has been heavily damaged and driven aground to stop her sinking. We know that enemy forces have come ashore, at as many as three locations but after the initial confusion our forces, in league with native militia, are resisting the invasion. Our people on the island report that six, perhaps seven enemy warships including two heavier units, assumed to be cruisers bombarded the airfield at Kingston, putting it out of action and destroying several aircraft on the ground. Further, the Naval fuel tanker farm at Kingston was set on fire. We have reason to believe that shore batteries registered several hits on the enemy vessels.”
Alex realised he had been staring into space.
He blinked back to reality.
“In addition to the modern ships of the Vera Cruz Squadron, five cruisers and a clutch of destroyers, we have reason to believe that the Kaiserliche Marine may have salted the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean with merchant cruisers and spy ships, these latter also functioning as general-purpose radio relay stations. As to the other naval forces available to the Triple Alliance and its allies, Hispaniola, Anguilla and the miscellaneous other Spanish-leaning countries in the region, we are talking about as many as thirty relatively modern destroyers or corvettes, a large number of coastal gunboats, but otherwise, older, obsolete ironclad cruisers, coal-fired escorts and suchlike, numbering perhaps fifty to a hundred seaworthy hulls. Included in that inventory of old ships are six so-called ‘slow battlecruisers’ – three Cuban and three Dominican – ships hefting twelve-inch main batteries on what are effectively lightly protected cruiser hulls. It is not known if any of them have been re-activated, or have been operated within recent years. We know that the members of the Triple Alliance have air forces, of which that of Nuevo Granada, is the most formidable, including relatively modern, German supplied, or co-developed models of fighters and ground attack aircraft. The Cubans and the Dominicans have several hundred aircraft between them, although very few modern types.”
Bentinck let this sink in.
“I do not know what will happen next. What I can tell you, and what I will be telling the crew later this afternoon, is that the Task Force Commander has issued General War Order Three-Bravo, requiring all ships to prepare for imminent hostilities against air and surface targets. Further, Task Force 5.2 has been ordered to make best speed to Norfolk, there to take on personnel drafts to bring all ships up to their rated war complements, refuel and take onboard whatever additional special munitions are deemed appropriate by Fleet Command.”
Nobody said a word.
“Do you have any questions, gentlemen?”
Heads were shaken.
“If you’d stay behind awhile, Alex,” Bentinck qualified, “I’ll let everybody else get back to their departments. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we are ready for whatever awaits us in the coming days and weeks!”
The stateroom cleared.
Presently, Alex was alone with the Captain of the Perseus.
“This must be tremendously difficult for you?” The older man put to him rhetorically.
By then Alex had stopped feeling sorry for himself. He had lost a lot of good men, friends back in the day down on the Border. That hardened a man. What did not kill you made you stronger. The bad dreams were collateral damage, what mattered was that the layers of psychic scar tissue taught a man how to carry on, whatever went wrong. Or that was the way it worked for him.
If he paused to think about what Kate – Tekonwenaharake – was going through, or would be going through in the coming days, he could easily lose the plot. Then, Leonora would be in the same place that Kate might – he hoped against hope not – find herself in. There was no spare, safe space in which to mope or get distracted, one simply had to get on with the job.
That was what every old scout pilot knew.
It was not being insensitive, indifferent, or in any way callous; it was simply how things had to be.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll be okay.”
Bentinck met his gaze, unblinking.
“You can rely on me, sir,” Alex told him.
The older man nodded solemnly.
“Yes, I know I can, Commander.”
The two men nodded one to the other.
“That will be all,” Bentinck murmured.
Chapter 6
Friday 7th April
SMS Breitenfeld, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh limped stiffly up the gangway of the battle-scarred flagship of the Vera Cruz Squadron. A fresh-faced Kaiserliche Marine officer had offered him his arm as he stepped, awkwardly out of the launch which had ferried him the two hundred yards from the German prison ship, the Weser.
‘Get your filthy hands off me!’
The younger man had recoiled.
So much for the famous English sangfroid!
If he had had a cutlass to hand, HMS Achilles’s Executive Officer would have slashed the smug expression off the arrogant little shit’s face.
He was sweating, grimacing with pain by the time he reached the deck, his look as black as Hades. Notwithstanding, there were some things which were immutable. Hurtfully, he eased his right arm out of its sling and returned the officer of the deck’s salute.
What he did not do; and would never, ever do again so long as he lived, was look towards the filthy rag flying from the cruiser’s mainmast halyards. Right then, it was all he could do to stop himself spitting on the deck!
He glared around him.
Germans in neat, tidy uniforms, looking military; Spaniards loafing, hanging around, sulky-eyed, ignored by their own officers in their flashy, old-fashioned popinjay finery. So far as he could see the bastards had not even got around to re-naming their bloody ships!
“If you would be so kind as to follow me please, Commander. Admiral von Reuter will interview you in his quarters.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh had been born in central south India at Ootacamund in the Madras Presidency, the son of an Anglo-Tamil District Commissioner and his Ceylonese wife. The fourth of five sons, he had been sent to school in England under the auspices of the Imperial Scholarship Scheme when he was twelve years old, ostensibly to enable him to qualify for the Indian Civil Service upon his return home aged eighteen. And that would have been the course of his life had his father not died when he was sixteen. His mother, a clever, very well-read, and in hindsight feisty woman, had travelled to Europe with his younger brother – his three elder siblings had by then established careers in public administration, education and the law back in the Presidency.
In retrospect, it was apparent that she had always anticipated that Peter, as a child the smallest, slowest, most delicate of her sons, might never return to India. As she had hoped, he had thrived in England, found a community of lifelong friends and excelled in his school’s Cadet Program. The rough and tumble, regimented life of the armed forces beckoned and aged eighteen he had boarded not a ship to Madras, rather he had stepped onto a train to South Devon bound for the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He had never looked back.
That was twenty-six years ago.
To be appointed second-in-command to the senior post captain in the Atlantic Fleet had been his service’s ultimate accolade. The last eighteen months had been the happiest, most satisfying days of his life.
However, right now, his dear wife, Melanie, would be starting to wonder how on Earth she was going to prepare the kids – thirteen-year-old Indira, ten-year-old Peter junior, and eight-year-old Maryam – for the bad news about their father. Melanie was a profoundly practical woman, herself a ‘Navy daughter’, she would know what to do and that the kids needed to hear the bad news from her before they heard it on the TV.
Despite his near incandescent outrage, righteously simmering volcanically just behind his eyes the Achilles’s Executive Officer missed nothing as he was escorted below.
The whole ship still stank of fire.
There were a lot of walking wounded.
From his seat on the Weser’s launch, the Breitenfeld had seemed to have a slight list to port: an underwater hit?
A glance at the ship’s bridge told him that the gunnery ELDAR aerial array that appeared on every intelligence photograph of the Lutzen class of heavy cruisers, was not there anymore. The ship’s catapult, boat deck and several of her midships anti-aircraft gun positions looked a real mess.
The cruiser’s aircraft hangar was a scorched shell, its catapult a tangle of steel.
Nor had he missed the bunker fuel discolouring the aquamarine blue of the anchorage. He had not got such a good look at the Lutzen, partially obscured by the Breitenfeld’s bulk but it was obvious that Achilles’s starboard three-inch auto-cannons had given her armoured hide a damned good peppering.
All of which tended to explain why the crew of the Weser had been less than triumphal. In fact, the beggars who still retained a scintilla of self-respect had seemed positively down in the mouth, and a little – rightfully – ashamed of themselves. The bastards had taken away his torn and bloodied uniform jacket and given him a German rig, absent any insignia of rank. He would much rather have carried on wearing his blood, oil and sea-water-soaked rags; at least he could wear those with honour.
“We must wait a few minutes,” he was informed in a gloomy passageway somewhere forward of the cruiser’s third – under standard Kaiserliche Marine conventions, ‘Caesar’ – turret.
The lighting circuit in this part of the ship is down…
Good!
There was a scraping noise at Cowdrey-Singh’s back.
A chair…
“Please. I apologise for keeping you hanging around like this,” his escort told him with what seemed like entirely genuine chagrin. The man might have learned his English in the Home Counties, his diction was so perfect he could easily have been a newsreader for the Empire Broadcasting Corporation. “I believe that the Surgeon is presently attending to Admiral von Reuter’s injuries.”
“He was wounded?”
“When the bridge was hit, yes.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh chewed on this; wondering privately, if this had had anything to do with the Lutzen suddenly closing the range with Achilles, apparently in a misbegotten bid to hasten ‘the kill’. Even in the heat of battle he had thought that was odd. The big German cruisers were shooting Achilles to pieces from a distance at which, excepting an outrageous stroke of luck, no six-inch shell could possibly penetrate to their vitals. And, as for steaming straight down the throat of Achilles’s starboard three-inch auto-cannons!
How many men had died unnecessarily on board the Lutzen as a result of that blunder?
Likewise, whoever had ordered that destroyer to come in so close to Achilles’s as yet unengaged port three-inchers before launching her torpedoes, well, that was just amateur dramatics!
But…
If von Reuter, by all accounts one of the Kaiserliche Marine’s finest minds had been incapacitated at the key moment, it explained a lot…
He was still pondering this when he was belatedly ushered into the presence of the man whose actions had killed and maimed so many of his friends and crewmates a little over two days ago.
Erwin von Reuter looked like death warmed up.
There was fresh blood on his collar, a bandage held a thick wad of gauze against the side of his throat and a freshly stitched two to three-inch long jagged gash at his right temple still wept small gobbets, which he distractedly mopped with a stained handkerchief as he stepped forward to offer the newcomer his free hand.
The Executive Officer of HMS Achilles ignored the gesture.
This man was no comrade.
The German withdrew his hand. There was an oddly poignant sadness, dull in his grey eyes, his ashen expression resigned.
“Please, take a seat Commander Cowdrey-Singh,” he sighed wearily, “I suspect that both of us probably feel even worse than we look at present. Let us at least take the weight off our feet for a few minutes.”
In his long career von Reuter had never had an uncivil conversation with an English officer. It simply was not done, until a few days ago he and the man standing before him would have been nationalities and navies notwithstanding, members of the same brotherhood of the seas. Civility would have been the unshakable bedrock of their professional respect, immutable and yet now; well, he more than any man had transgressed against a pact understood, meticulously respected ever since the end of the great War over a hundred years ago.
He had fired upon a British warship; it mattered not one jot that his Squadron had no longer been under the Eagle flag of the German Empire, flying the ‘red rag’ of Nuevo Granada. He remained, and would live and die a German officer, and he had fired upon a British ship at a time when no state of war existed between his Kaiser and the King of England.
He was damned for all time and he did not need anybody to tell him as much.
Von Reuter searched for some common ground with his guest.
The Royal Navy man had been so preoccupied with his black dog rage that he had failed to notice that there was a small, neat hole in the port bulkhead, and another across the other side of the compartment where one of the auto-cannon’s three-inch high-explosive rounds had entered, and presumably, exited the ship without detonating.
The two men viewed each other warily as they settled in their hard-backed chairs beneath the stateroom’s one open port hole on opposite sides of a small writing table. A cool breeze wafted across them.
Von Reuter followed his guest’s gaze, focusing on the holes in the hull plating.
“Several of the smaller rounds failed to explode,” he remarked, almost as if he was one navy man to another.
Peter Cowdrey-Singh refused to be drawn, to respond at all other than to shrug, a thing which caused him no little discomfort.
“Your injuries?” Von Reuter inquired solicitously, noting the pain creasing the other man’s face.
“I have several small lumps of shrapnel in my back and right calf. They think I’ve cracked my collar bone. My shoulder got dislocated when I was chucked against what was left of the catapult when one of your eight-inchers did for ‘C’ turret. My chaps put it straight back in but…”
He bit his tongue, irrationally, feeling like he was collaborating with the King’s enemies.
Von Reuter mopped at his bloody brow anew.
“They say I was unconscious for several minutes,” he forced a grimace. “Fortunately, as my friends tell me, I have a particularly thick skull!”
The Anglo-Indian could not stop himself quirking a spontaneous half-smile.
“I am sorry,” von Reuter said without preamble. “Whilst I still command the operational, day-to-day functions of my Squadron, I must obey the commands of my superior, Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh did not care for such disingenuous sophistry.
Von Reuter leaned towards him.
“The German Empire is not at war with the British Empire, Commander.”
“Tell that to the Atlantic Fleet when it steams into the Windward Passage and settles your hash, old man!”
The normal proprietaries, respect of rank and all that tosh had gone out of the window the moment the Triple Alliance’s German mercenaries had ambushed Achilles. The Vera Cruz Squadron was not an honoured foe, it was a pirate fleet operating in contravention of all the accepted rules of war.
“I am sorry,” von Reuter groaned, rising to his feet. “I had hoped we might discuss matters like gentlemen.”
“I had hoped that my wounded would receive the medical care and attention they so badly need, and the other survivors of the Achilles would not have been locked in a stinking sweat hole on the Weser, sir!”
“Something will be done about that,” the German rasped irritably. “My medical staff has not rested since the action was joined two days ago. Normally, I would be in a position to send the most seriously injured men ashore. Here, unfortunately, because of certain ‘local’ tensions, I cannot do that at this time. Since I am unable, in good faith, to guarantee the safety of any of your men I send ashore – any less than I can my own people – I have no choice but to use the Weser as an ad hoc hospital ship. True, she is equipped for that role but for dozens, not scores of casualties. As for keeping your men cooped up below in a cargo hold, I am sorry but I cannot risk them being observed on deck.”
Peter Cowdrey-Singh was scowling.
“Why the Devil not, sir?”
“Because my bloody allies are demanding that I hand you and your men over to the Inquisition!”
The Royal Navy man exhaled a long, contemplative breath.
“Is that your intention?”
“No, dammit!”
“What about this Gravina fellow?”
“You and your men are no more than political bargaining chips to these people.” Von Reuter collapsed back into his chair.
Very carefully, his guest resumed his seat.
The two men exchanged quizzical looks.
Neither spoke until there was a rap at the bulkhead.
“Come! Von Reuter called.
A steward entered bearing a silver tray bearing two, unlikely, chipped mugs.
“A six-inch round demolished the Wardroom galley,” the German explained, “and much of the crockery. Fortunately, the drinks cupboard survived more or less intact. He looked to the steward as he placed the mugs on the table between the men. “Schnapps, I think.”
The scent of fresh coffee made Cowdrey-Singh momentarily light-headed.
“Leave it, please,” his host instructed as a half-filled bottle of Austrian liquor was placed before him. Von Reuter unscrewed the top. “Whatever our differences, we should drink to the memory and the valour of our dead friends, no?”
