by James Philip
“You know that the new Admiral is the father of Peter Christopher, Marija’s...”
“Pen friend, yes.”
Peter Calleja gave his son a sharp look, stung by the bitterness of his retort.
“What’s got into you tonight?”
The younger man waved at the wreck of the frigate in the dry dock.
“I lost a lot of good men in that,” he ground out between virtually clenched teeth. “And for what?”
Peter Calleja didn’t know the answer so he said nothing for about a minute as the two men eyed the scene. There were surveyors climbing about, sometimes disappearing under the ship where she rested on grounding blocks, many of which had penetrated or warped her plates when she rolled over. A hundred feet away HMS Torquay’s lattice foremast lay across the quay, broken, bent. It was a surreal sight.
“The last time I saw something like this was back in the forty-five war,” the father said, eventually, to his son. “HMS Kingston was in dock. She’d got too close to a couple of fifteen inch shells from an Italian battleship. Anyway, there was a big raid and when we came up out of the shelters, there she was, lying on her side, just like this. She was a constructive total loss in the end although there was a lot of pressure to patch her up. Afterwards we stripped her down to a bare hull, plugged her holes and moored her out of the way while we got on with the war. Later she was towed north and scuttled in St Paul’s Bay.”
“I thought Joe was under some kind of curfew?” Samuel queried, ignoring what he’d just heard.
“Er, yes and no. I only know what your mother told me after she’d spoken to Dr Seiffert. You know how your mother tends to gabble when she talks about the La Dottoressa Seiffert but from what I can gather, Dr Seiffert ‘squared things away’ with Admiral Christopher.”
Sam Calleja grunted.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, “I’m tired.” He nodded at the frigate lying wrecked on its side in the dry dock. “A couple of the guys who are still missing joined the yard when I did.”
His father planted a hand on his arm.
Peter Calleja was of the ‘war generation’ who’d gone through the bombing and the siege of 1940 to 1943. He’d seen his idyllic island home scarred with rubble, stood and wept by more gravesides than he cared to recollect, and watched the sinking, wallowing remnants of the convoys struggling into the Grand Harbour. With every new convoy more of the destroyers and cruisers the Senglea Yards had patched up would be missing. The horror of fighting monthly battles just to keep the people of Malta from starving was written in the faces of the men of the warships who fought the convoys through. His son had been only ten when the Italians, and soon afterwards, the Germans began to bomb Malta. There had been no hunger in the beginning, that came later when convoy after convoy of vital supplies; food, fuel and ammunition, was decimated by dive bombers, U-boats, torpedo boats and mines lying in wait in the narrows between Sicily and Tunisia. There was nowhere for the convoys to hide on the wine-dark Mediterranean seas and the waters around the Maltese Archipelago had become a graveyard for the Royal Navy. His son had grown into adolescence knowing fear and hunger; their family home in Birgu – Vittoriosa to the English – had been destroyed, Marija nearly killed, crippled. Those were the worst of times. They said Malta had been the most heavily bombed place on Earth in 1941 and 1942. Every day he’d awakened wondering if this would be the day of the invasion, the day when German parachutists fell from the sky like a dark, malevolent swarm of vultures, and Italian soldiers poured out of ships onto the quays of the Grand Harbour. It had been bad for the adults; for the children those must have been years of unimaginable terror. He’d always understood – better somehow than his dear wife seemed capable – how hard that time had been for his eldest son. If he’d been a little older, or a little younger, perhaps he’d have shrugged off the memories of the things he seen, heard, and lived. But the war had caught Samuel at that cruel cusp between true childhood and the possibility of manhood; at that moment when his mind was at its most vulnerable and his personality – the man that he might become – was emerging from the innocence of his youth. Other boys of a less sensitive disposition, who were more confident in their own physicality, or just that little bit farther down the road to growing up had shrugged off the horrors of the siege; but Samuel had been the prisoner of those days ever since and probably always would be. Peter understood this as only a loving father could understand it; the tragedy was that Sam’s siblings never would. Such was the true evil of war.
“I’m going to put my head down for a couple of hours in my office,” he told his son. “There’s no point trying to get home at this time of night.”
“No,” the younger man agreed, grimacing. Even if the buses ran at this time of day – which they hadn’t for several months due to fuel shortages –a lot of the roads were still blocked. Besides, he didn’t want to have to answer his wife’s questions. Whatever hour of the day or night he got home to their company house in Kalkara, Rosa would bombard him with demands to know everything about the nightmare of the last few days. At first he’d found her attentiveness, and the melodic soprano of her voice comforting, reassuring but lately she got on his nerves and it was hard to conceal his true feelings. He’d needed a good marriage and Rosa, the daughter of an old and respected Maltese family embedded in the fabric of the island and its nationalist politics, had seemed too good to be true. In other circumstances they might easily have been happy. He felt a little guilty denying Rosa the bambinos she so longed to bear him; otherwise, he was beyond regret. “Maybe I’ll try to have a nap in my office later. There’s too much to do here.”
Peter Calleja, thinking he saw a suggestion of wry amusement in his son’s hooded gaze felt a renewed paternal connection. Ever since the October War he’d been aware of a distance between him and Sam, as if his son had retreated into his shell, shut out the world. Like fathers everywhere and in all times, he seized on any small sign that the Samuel he loved and for whose existence he had always thanked merciful God, still lived behind the mask of worry and exhaustion that sometimes afflicted all men.
“You do that. If I learned anything in the bad old days it is that a man must get his sleep because...”
His son grinned involuntarily.
“Because something worse is always likely to happen tomorrow,” he said grimly, repeating his father’s familiar mantra.
“You can rely on it!” Peter Calleja chuckled.
Shortly afterwards father and son parted; Sam Calleja to clamber down into the dock to check the progress of the surveyors, Peter Calleja to his office where he planned to spread a blanket on the floor and rest his aching head. Tomorrow was a new day and unlike his son, at his age he needed several hours sleep a night if he was to be able to function again in the morning.
The younger man briefly walked into the shadows beneath the bow of HMS Torquay. Down in the dock it was as if the whole World was upside down, inverted, topsy turvy like something out of a darkling fairy tale.
Sam Calleja paused in the blackness, reached up and ran his hand along the clammy cold steel of the broken frigate’s plates, remembering the dead still trapped in the ship’s hull. The pain of dislocation, of not belonging, of forever feeling alien stabbed his soul anew. His father knew nothing; he lived his life like a sleepwalker. Things might have been different but the war had come that October night when the Yanks and their British lackeys had set fire to half the World and after that, hope and reason had died. In this brave new poisoned World the very act of procreation had become a lottery, Russian roulette; the very air he breathed was blighted yet people like his sainted sister, the Heroine of Birgu, carried on as if everything was normal. The last time they’d spoken they’d quarrelled, she’d told him that ‘people are still people’, and that ‘we must do what we can’, and ludicrously, ‘to believe in a loving God is to believe in a future in which hope will surely be rewarded’. Of course, he’d provoked her into that nonsense. He and Marija were chalk and cheese; the
y’d always fought like alley cats.
The wreck looming over his head creaked ominously and something fell noisily onto a steel bulkhead deep in the hulk. Sam Calleja wondered idly if the ship was about to break in two and if the bow would fall on him. He made no attempt to run, he simply waited.
If he died tonight it didn’t really matter.
Nothing really mattered any more.
Chapter 16
Monday 9th December 1963
HMS Hermes, 127 miles ENE Cape Trafalgar, North Atlantic
It was just beginning to lighten, not yet quite dawn as the small party gathered to wait in the cold, clammy compartment at the base of the carrier’s island bridge superstructure looking through the open hatch onto the grey, pitching deck.
“It seems the Portuguese are our new best friends,” the young Fleet Air Arm lieutenant explained cheerfully as the delay lengthened. “As I understand it the Captain was asked to get you two to England as soon as possible and what with the Portuguese suddenly opening their air space to us,” he shrugged, “it gives us the opportunity to send you to Lisbon – along with dispatches and several of the other wounded – in a Wessex.”
Clara Pullman gazed at the angry white-horses chasing from the crests of the huge waves the carrier was smashing into every few seconds.
“We’ll bring the stretcher cases up on the centreline lift,” the youngster went on. “Cart the poor fellows straight onto the aircraft then we’ll wheel you two out into the rain and you’ll be on your way.”
“Lieutenant,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov asked, “what happened last night?”
“Oh, you mean all the high speed turns and the whizz bangs?”
“Yes,” the former KGB Colonel confirmed patiently. He was swathed in several layers of clothing against the cold and the wet and a crewman was strapping an inflatable lifejacket bib around his brutally beaten torso. His head was bare and the bruising on his face was subsiding a little. Now that the swelling was subsiding his features looked less lopsided and his lips no longer slurred his words.
“We intercepted a couple of merchantmen. A big tanker with a refrigerator ship in company. They were bound for Genoa so we impounded them. Or rather, we tried to impound them. The refrigerator ship was torpedoed.”
“Torpedoed!” Clara exclaimed.
“We think Hermes was the target but the SS Sevonia got in the way. The submarine must have fired a spread of five or six torpedoes, most likely at extreme range and it was just unlucky the Sevonia happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously, as soon as the ball went up the Hermes got her skates on and the escorts got stuck into her would be assailant!”
“So the groups of three explosions we heard later were depth charges?” The Russian checked, nodding.
“Yes, anti-submarine mortars. Limbos,” the younger man confirmed enthusiastically. “HMS Duncan thinks she got the blighter with the first salvo but the Venerable followed up afterwards, just to be sure. There was a fairly big oil slick so we’re pretty confident the sub was a Spanish diesel-electric boat.”
“What happened to the SS Sevonia?” Clara inquired. Out on the wet, windswept flight deck she saw two stretchers being carried towards the big helicopter which had moved into the periphery of her vision.
“You’d have thought she’d have gone down like a stone, wouldn’t you?” The younger man replied his expression perplexed. “Great big hole in her side like that! The torpedo hit her plumb on the waterline, she must have been digging her stem into a big swell I suppose for it to have clocked her that high. So, a great big hole but not a huge amount of underwater damage. The Rhyl is escorting her to Lisbon. You’ll fly over the two ships in a few minutes; they can’t have gone far yet.”
Clara heard the matter of fact, whatever will be will be fatalism in the young man’s voice. She guessed he was in his early twenties and already a veteran of this callous new age.
“What about the other merchant ship?” She asked.
“The tanker? We turned her around. No idea where she went.”
“Oh.”
“Right! If you’d come with me please!” The youthful lieutenant took Clara’s arm and led her out into the wind and the spray while two burly ratings half-carried her companion to the waiting Westland Wessex. The helicopter rocked and swayed as the passengers were hurriedly arranged in the cargo cabin. There were four stretcher cases and a sickbay attendant, with Clara and Rykov planted in the only free corner.
The big doors clanged shut and the machine seemed like it was about to shake itself to pieces as it clawed into the air; wobbling, fish-tailing it dragged itself away from the carrier. The rain beat angrily at the sweaty aluminium skin of the Wessex.
Clara was glad of the arm Arkady Rykov cautiously extended about her shoulders and she carefully, mindful at all times of his injuries, melded against him. The last few days had become a blur of fear, relief, horror and incomprehension. The past year had been exciting, exhilarating and well, terrifying but she’d probably never been so alive and now, she was a little afraid that was all over. Assuming the helicopter they were riding in didn’t crash into the sea in the storm; what awaited her and Arkady back in England? They’d half-beaten him to death in Gibraltar; were they going to finish the job as soon as they got home? And what was it really like in England? One heard so many awful things. She couldn’t begin to picture London where she’d lived half her life in ruins. They said there’d been famine, plagues last winter and that many of the old and the very young had not lived through the snow and ice of that ‘nuclear’ season.
“Ma’am?” The Wessex’s load master was crouching beside her. “They said you are a nurse?”
Clara didn’t try to explain that she hadn’t been for years; in the circumstances one didn’t split hairs.
“Yes,” she yelled above the roar of the rotors and the thunder of the rain-heavy slip steam.
“One of the stretcher cases is in a bad way, can you help?”
Clara was already getting up before she nodded, brusquely.
“Yes, of course.”
The flight was much longer than she had expected. It seemed to go on, and on, and on, the buffeting and the shaking, the racket of the engine over their heads was deafening. She couldn’t imagine how nightmarish it must have been for the four badly injured, sedated men on the stretchers. She stroked the face of the badly burned boy, waiting as long as possible before injecting another ampoule of morphine into the kid. He was a little more peaceful after that and his breathing, and pulse, which she checked from minute to minute steadied.
The Wessex outran the leading edge of the storm front as it crossed the coast; watery grey sunshine filtered, now and then, into the cargo bay as the helicopter banked and turned, searching for the nominated landing ground.
There were stretcher bearers waiting as the Wessex bumped down, rolled a few feet and halted, rattling loudly. The load master flung open the door and blustery, drizzle-laden air refreshed the oily, humid cabin. Clara jumped onto solid ground, swayed for a moment before she regained her balance and started to supervise the unloading of the four badly injured seamen.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, demonstrating stoic Russian phlegm attempted to disembark unaided.
The reception committee – a mixture of uniformed men and white-coated doctors and nurses under the concerned ‘command’ of a diffident middle-aged air force officer, pounced on their patient and in a moment he was laid on a stretcher.
“This man is Colonel Rykov?” The officer inquired solicitously as he and Clara fell into step beside the former KGB man’s litter.
“Yes,” the woman confirmed.
”I have arranged for you both to be transported directly to the British Embassy.” The Portuguese officer raised a hand forestalling the expected protest. “I am to assure you that your, er, friend, will be attended by the Ambassador’s personal physician.”
A tall, distinguished, still handsome man with thinning fair hair stood by the Bentley
parked at the edge of the runway that the Wessex had touched down on. Behind the small stretcher party the helicopter taxied in a whirl of rotors and spray a short distance to where a small fuel bowser awaited its arrival.
Clara hadn’t seen the tall man or the Bentley until the Wessex had moved out of her line of sight. Other than a second man wearing a Homburg sitting behind the wheel of the black car, which had a small diplomatic plate on its rear bumper, there seemed to be no welcoming committee.
When Rykov’s litter was placed on the ground a few yards from the Bentley the tall man approached, smiled pleasantly but wordlessly at Clara, and crouched down beside the injured man.
“Well, well, well,” he said in a voice that was pure Oxbridge and not in any way unfriendly or threatening. “The chaps on the Rock gave you a bit of a hard time, I hear. Dreadfully sorry about that. You know how I hate violence.” He extended his hand, gripped the Russian’s left hand and slowly, patiently helped the invalid to his feet while Clara rushed to support him.
Painfully, Rykov straightened and to Clara’s astonishment formed a crooked grin on his battered countenance.
“Presumably,” he said, stifling a groan, “your boys back in Gibraltar will have spread the word that they kicked me until they wore out their boots and then they threw me off the highest point of the Rock?”
The tall man - the Russian’s head only came up to his chin - smiled a glacial smile.
“My Head of Station on the Rock, Denzil Williams, was incandescent when I told him he couldn’t toss you off the Rock.”
“He and I have history,” conceded the shorter man.
“Yes, quite.” The tall man, dressed in the sort of expensive suit that one could no longer buy from a real Savile Row tailor, looked to Clara, raising an eyebrow. “Arkady Pavlovich. Perhaps it is time you introduced me to you charming companion?”
