The Maltese Defence

by Simon Brading

  Marco brought the boat in smoothly and, while Matteo and Orazio were throwing ropes to the men on the shore and tying up the boat, he approached Kitty.

  ‘A happy ending.’

  ‘For now at least. Thank you again, Marco.’

  ‘It has been a pleasure; I am very happy to have been the one to bring you home.’ He grinned. ‘And thank you for the coffee. It will make things a lot easier in the village for a long while.’

  He held out his hand for her to shake, but she slipped past it and threw her arms around him. ‘Take care of your family, Marco.’

  She held him tightly for a few seconds, then turned and went down the gangplank and back onto Malta.

  Chapter 15

  The Misfits flew with renewed vigour in the week after Kitty’s return, but they were never able to turn the bombers away again, like they’d done that first raid after they had destroyed half the Prussian fighters. They did drop their payloads far more haphazardly, though, in a hurry to get home and out of range of the British fighters. Most bombs fell harmlessly in the water of the harbour or on the deserted city, but another freighter was destroyed and the Arturo was hit dozens more times, but her flight deck continued to absorb the worst of the attack and repairs below decks continued unhindered. In fact, on one of his few visits to Hal Far, Captain Hewer reported that they were making good headway, despite the difficulties of the situation and the lack of proper facilities.

  The battle for the skies over Malta quickly turned into one of attrition. The Coalition had the same problem they’d had over England; British pilots who bailed out were being recovered by rescue boats or simply gliding to safety on the island, but the Italian and Prussian pilots were going straight into captivity and there were noticeably fewer bombers in each raid as they ran out of crews.

  However, the supply of Spitsteams was beginning to run dangerously low. Of the fifty that had been delivered, there were only five left in their crates. The rest had either been destroyed or condemned as beyond repair and cannibalised for spares to repair the ones they were flying. The Misfit aircraft, with their better performance and much sturdier construction, hadn’t fared nearly as bad, but every one of them had sustained damage which had forced them off the flight line for days at a time. Luqa reported that Drake and Tanya’s machines were almost ready, though, and their arrival would hopefully take a bit of the strain off the Spitsteams.

  If both sides continued to fight as they were and nobody was resupplied, it would be a close run thing as to who would run out of aircraft first.

  Dorothy Campbell wasn’t one to sit and wait for an outcome if she could do something to affect it, though, and she decided the time had come to tip the balance further in the favour of the British and hit the enemy while their morale was low.

  Wendy had finally managed to get together enough rockets for the Misfits to carry out another attack and Campbell authorised a reconnaissance flight by Vulture in order to find the best fighter base to target.

  Chalky’s photographs were disappointing, though; the enemy had learnt from their mistake and moved their fighters back from the south coast of Sicily, spreading them around several airfields so that no more than a single squadron was based in any one place. Not only would the Prussians have far more warning and be able to intercept them on the way home, but the possible gains had been reduced so far as to render it almost pointless to attack them.

  However, with the British convoy only a day or two from Gibraltar, something had to be done to secure air superiority.

  Up till then, the Misfits hadn’t been properly engaging the enemy fighters. With four squadrons of MU9’s, two of MU10’s and one more each of Italian T202’s and older T200’s, there were just too many of them and Bruce, Monty, Drake and Tanya’s job as Blue flight had just been to keep them occupied and away from the Misfits attacking the bombers. They hadn’t always been successful and occasionally the Coalition fighters had been able to force the British away, but, with such inferior numbers, it was a game the Misfits were forced to play if they were to have a chance at putting the bombers off from their targets.

  Campbell wanted to scrap those tactics completely, ignore the bombers and target the fighters. Wendy’s rockets could then be used to destroy the bombers on the ground instead. The larger machines couldn’t operate from the small or hastily constructed airfields that the fighters could; they needed proper infrastructures like hydrogen supplies as well as a much larger takeoff run, so they were still clumped up on their four bases around the south coast of Sicily. They would be sitting ducks when the enemy fighters were no longer so much of a threat.

  The plan was simple, but it had its risks, not least of which was that the bombers would have a clear run on their targets in the Grand Harbour, with only the anti-aircraft guns to dissuade them, so Campbell went to speak to Admiral Myerscough, to warn him about the change. He was understandably doubtful at first, but when she gave him her reasoning he finally agreed; even though his ships would take a pounding they were next to useless stuck in port, whereas the convoy was desperately needed.

  None of the Misfits liked leaving the Navy high and dry, especially Farrier, who already had to suffer seeing her fellows in the Navy attacked every day, but they saw it as a necessary evil and, from the very first sortie, they couldn’t deny how effective it was.

  As with most times the Misfits did something new, the enemy were taken by surprise. They expected to be playing the same game of cat and mouse as usual and were thrown into chaos when instead the British engaged them head on with all their fighters and two of them even collided.

  The Misfits took down a dozen enemy fighters in the first sortie, fully twice as many as they had been able to destroy in the weeks since the raid on the Prussian fighter base. They shot down a further twenty more during the next two raids, leaving the Coalition reeling, a third of their fighters gone.

  The Navy paid the price for the Misfits’ success. During the course of the day, the last two remaining freighters were sunk, along with one of the destroyers and the Arturo added more than a dozen new potholes to her already scarred flight deck.

  Campbell had initially thought that it would be at least a couple of days before the Misfits could attack the bomber bases in relative safety, which would be cutting it fine; the convoy would be almost in range by then. However, after seeing their success and hearing reports of fighters breaking off and fleeing almost before the fight had begun, she decided to take a risk and had the fitters ready the first load of rockets.

  Wendy’s rockets had been produced by the mechanics in the workshops of the undersea boat squadron on Manoel Island and the men and women there had been fully aware of the use that they were going to be put to. They had taken the time to engrave the names of the friends they had lost on them, making the simple brass tubes into things that were as beautiful as they were deadly. The Misfits, by unspoken agreement, took the time that their aircraft were being rearmed and rewound to read as many of the names on the weapons as they could instead of resting. Nothing was said, but not a few of the Navy mechanics working on the aircraft did so through reddened and moist eyes.

  Rockets were notoriously unreliable and difficult to aim, but for some reason every single one of them hit their targets that evening and the Misfits left two entire HO111 squadrons lying broken and burning in the smoking ruins of their base in the west, near Marsala.

  They repeated the feat the next morning, directly after the first raid of the day, then once more after lunch.

  In less than 24 hours, all three of the Prussian bomber bases and almost their entire fleet of bombers were destroyed, along with twenty more fighters. The Misfits left the fourth base intact, though; it was Colonnello Vitelli’s base and they wanted to show their appreciation for how well the Italians had treated Kitty.

  A few days later, the thirty-ship convoy made it to Malta almost completely unscathed, with the loss of a single destroyer, which had fallen foul of the torpedoes of Prussian undersea b
oats.

  Only a quarter of the merchant vessels were stopping at Malta, the rest were destined for Alexandria and the island of Crete and continued straight on, deeper into the Mediterranean, taking with them most of the survivors of the convoy that had brought the Misfits, including Admiral Myerscough and his staff. However, those few ships brought with them desperately-needed food, materials and, vitally for the defence efforts, eighty more Spitsteams, sixteen pilots to fly them, and two tankers of hydrogen, enough for the bombers at Luqa and Ta’Kali to finally be let loose.

  The tide had firmly turned in favour of the British.

  With air superiority now firmly in their hands and the Coalition unable to bomb Malta, the Misfits were able to turn their attention towards the shipping supplying the enemy forces in North Africa.

  Wendy had been tasked with finding a way to mount torpedoes on the Misfit fighters, but neither she, nor her contact in the undersea boat base at Manoel Island, Georgina Strangeways, a tiny woman in her early fifties, had been able to do so. They had quickly come to the conclusion that it would be impossible without making the torpedoes a lot smaller, and therefore ineffective, or completely redesigning the aircraft, defeating the object. It had been easy enough to design a system to mount them on the Nelsons, though, and the workshops at Luqa and Ta’Kali had immediately started producing them and attaching mounts to the bombers, while the two turned their minds to new and interesting ways to blow up ships with fighters.

  Nothing they came up with was practical or destructive enough to guarantee the destruction of a target with only a few hits, though, and they had more or less given up, with Strangeways returning to her vital work on the undersea boats, when Scarlet and Tanya had flown their stillborn mission against Bertha.

  Curious about the Italian explosives, Wendy had stolen one and it hadn’t taken long for her to realise that they would be ideal for her purposes. However, while redesigning them to be deployed from a fighter would be easy enough, they would be useless unless they could replicate the special metal-destroying acid they contained.

  Thankfully, as well as being just as enthusiastic about destroying things as Wendy, Strangeways was a member of the Chemists’ Guild, and she proved equal to the task. By the time the convoy arrived they had a prototype of the deployment apparatus ready for testing on the Spitsteam she’d been given for her experiments, but it wasn’t until the munitions supplies were unloaded that Strangeways had the raw minerals needed to create the acid.

  Without telling anybody what it was for, she had the carcass of a Grand Eagle bomber hauled from the Graveyard and placed in a field next to Hal Far. Then, first thing the next morning, she arranged for the Misfits and Dorothy Campbell to meet Strangeways by the perimeter fence overlooking it and took off in the Spitsteam from Ta’Kali.

  The sight of the pilots wandering over to the perimeter fence with bacon sandwiches in one hand and mugs of tea in the other was already enough to draw a fair amount of attention, but after Strangeways was quietly quizzed by one of the fitters there was such an exodus from the underground bunker that it was left almost entirely deserted.

  ‘Wrecker, this is Chemist. Ready when you are, over.’ Strangeways had brought a portable radio transceiver and she used it to contact Wendy.

  ‘Chemist, this is Wrecker. Coming in hot!’

  The pilots and the group of more than two hundred men and women looked skywards as the buzzing of an airscrew became audible over the sounds of the countryside.

  The Misfits had an advantage over everyone else in that they were wearing their helmets, ready for the morning’s sortie, and they slotted lenses in place to better see the Spitsteam as it came into sight. The two long thin tubes under the wings, one on each side, immediately provoked excited comments and Bruce glanced at Strangeways.

  ‘What the hell has she got under her wings? Are those bigger rockets or something?’

  Strangeways said nothing, she just tilted her head in the direction of the bomber, gave him a wink, then turned to watch Wendy make her run. The Australian grinned and gave the woman a speculative look before doing the same.

  The Spitsteam came in straight and level on a flightpath parallel to the perimeter fence, which gave them a perfect view, but also meant that there was no possibility of disaster if something went wrong. Everyone, except Strangeways of course, was expecting either the nose of the aircraft to dip and rockets to fire or the tubes to fall away like bombs, but they did neither. Instead, they split down the centreline on approach, opening up like bomb bay doors, and half a dozen small metal objects fell from each.

  The Misfits flinched back, expecting one of the enormous explosions that was customary during any display related to Wendy’s inventions, but there was only a clang, almost drowned out by a disappointing dull coughing sound, and a few small clouds of earth thrown up by the ones that had missed.

  Many of the onlookers began muttering and a few even started to wander away, but Strangeways kept her eyes on the Grand Eagle, a stopwatch in her hand. ‘Wait for it...’

  There was a sudden squeal of tortured metal and then the Italian bomber just seemed to collapse under its own weight.

  Strangeways clicked the button to stop the timer, then scribbled something in a small notebook. When she looked up she found every single one of the pilots looking at her.

  ‘Uh. Yes. Wendy will explain. And don’t let anyone touch that aircraft for a while, just in case.’ The small woman turned and hurried away through the crowd, deliberately not meeting anybody’s eye.

  Abby chuckled, then looked back to the wreck. ‘I don’t care how much of a bang it makes; if it can do that to Duralumin that thick, then I’m looking forward to seeing what it can do to a ship.’

  Wendy’s Spitsteam buzzed overhead, on the downwind leg of a textbook circuit of the airfield, betraying her nervousness with the handling of the fighter, and the pilots started back to the hangar to meet her.

  Wendy had landed and was crouched beneath the Spitsteam with Strangeways when the Misfits arrived, the two of them speaking animatedly and fiddling around with one of the tubes.

  They waited patiently for the big woman to come out and she grinned at the pilots while she brushed the dust off her hands.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You tell us,’ said Campbell. ‘What did we just see?’

  Wendy pulled one of her bombs from a canvas bag on the floor and hefted it in one hand.

  ‘This is based on those explosives that Scarlet and Tanya got from the Italians. Those things can melt through anything metal, but they have to be placed so that the explosive charge is pointing in the right direction, which would make throwing them out of the cockpit of a Spitsteam pretty ineffective and a bit silly. I’m fairly sure we’ve solved that problem.’ She held up the bomb. It was black, roughly conical in shape and about eighteen inches long, with a couple of small fins at the fat end. ‘The fins create resistance as it drops and orient it point downwards. The tip is lead, which is broken off on impact, up to here.’ She pointed to a seam running around the cone, about six inches from the sharp end. ‘That breaks the glass vial inside which contains the acid and then, when the weak explosive in the tail goes off, the liquid is sprayed through the tip, keeping it concentrated in a fairly small area. As you saw on the Grand Eagle, it takes a few seconds for the acid to have an effect, but once the process starts it is unstoppable and it will keep burning a hole through a ship until it reaches the sea. Even just one of these might be enough to sink a relatively large vessel. Oh, and they will set off anything explosive they come across, so if they find their way to a magazine or hydrogen tank they’ll make one hell of a bang!’ Wendy grinned, obviously looking forward to witnessing the explosions her weapons caused.

  ‘What if someone gets hit by the acid?’ asked Kitty in a quiet voice.

  Everyone went silent as a horrific vision of men with their flesh melting off of them springing into their minds - not even the enemy deserved that.

  Wendy shoo
k her head, though. ‘Nothing would happen to them. The acid only eats through metal.’

  Quite a few of the pilots sighed in relief and a couple of green faces started going back to their normal colour.

  ‘Um.’ Gwen looked at the device thoughtfully. ‘Do you think you could put a warhead like that on a rocket? For if we come up against Bertha?’

  Wendy exchanged a glance with Strangeways, whose eyebrows raised, expressing her surprise.

  The tiny woman shrugged and nodded. ‘We’d have to make the glass receptacle a bit thicker to survive the initial acceleration, but I don’t see why not.’ She pulled her notebook out of her pocket and flipped to a clean page. ‘Don’t know why we didn’t bloody think of that before. Perhaps we could...’ She trailed off, mumbling to herself while she wrote furiously.

  The Misfits watched her for a few seconds to see if she would speak to them again, but the woman just wandered off distractedly, so they turned back to Wendy, who shrugged. ‘She does that a lot. When she comes back she’ll have the solution and probably a better proposal.’ She looked to Campbell. ‘What do you think, Commodore? Are we going to be able to use these?’

  Campbell nodded. ‘Oh yes. When can you have them ready?’

  ‘It depends how busy the undersea boat people are. A week? Two? Maybe three if a boat comes back in a bad shape.’

  ‘Make sure they know that this is a priority please.’ She waited for Wendy to acknowledge, then gazed around the group. ‘In the meantime, the bomber squadrons are ready to start torpedo operations as soon as we have a target.’ She looked at Chalky. ‘You’re authorised to fly tomorrow. I want the shipping lanes scoured every six hours.’