Medusa

‘Matey, isn’t he?’ The Pilot smiled at me. ‘The way they behave sometimes you’d think they were our comrades-in-arms. And that’s one of their Kresta class — very lethal!’ He was a short man with a round face, a puggy blob of a nose and a twinkle in his eyes. ‘My name’s Craig, by the way. Peter Craig. I’m supposed to see my lords and masters here don’t scrape their bottom along the seabed or hit a headland.’ He waved at the chart. ‘That’s where we’ll be anchoring.’ He indicated a little cross he had pencilled in. ‘Then we’ll start explaining ourselves to the harbour master.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Twenty-two minutes to go till the next news. Think they’ll have it on the World Service?’

A sub-lieutenant, standing beside the chart table with his back to the bulkhead, said quietly, ‘If the BBC includes it in the news, then the PM will be tearing the guts out of the C-in-C and we’ll be in the shit good and deep. Thank your lucky stars, Pilot, you’re just a common navigator. I wouldn’t be in Taffy’s shoes right now …’ He stopped then, glancing at me apologetically. ‘Sorry, sir, no disrespect, but all Welshmen are Taffy to the boys, just as anybody called Brown is Buster and anybody with a name like Randolph, our Chief, becomes Randy. No disrespect, you see.’ Like the Pilot, he was a Scot, a Glaswegian by the sound of his voice. His name was Robinson and he was a seaman officer-under-training, one step up from midshipman. I thought he was probably not more than nineteen or twenty years old.

The Pilot was concentrating now on the approach to the anchorage and it was an older officer standing by the radar who answered him. ‘You shoot your mouth off like that and it’s you who’ll be in the shit.’ And he added, ‘Right now nobody wants to be reminded what could happen following that little incident, so forget your old man’s on the ITN news desk and keep your trap shut. Okay?’

There was a juddering under my feet and I turned to see the ship was slowing: ‘Harbour launch close abeam, still signalling Stop.’ Mault ignored the report. He came back to the chart table, took a quick glance at the position the Navigating Officer had pencilled in, then asked him to report how far before letting go the anchor as he moved to the port bridge wing and took up one of the microphones. Everyone was silent now, waiting, the ship slowing, small alterations of helm, the shore lights barely changing position. ‘Let go!’ I felt, rather than heard, the rumble of the chain, then the voice of the officer on the fo’c’s’le was reporting how many shackles of cable had gone out.

‘Well, that’s that.’ Craig checked the time, entered it on the chart against the fix he had taken as the anchor was let go. Behind him, the bridge began to empty. ‘Care to join me for a drink in the wardroom, sir?’

I hesitated, then nodded. Lloyd Jones would be as anxious to get rid of me as I was to go, so no point in making a nuisance of myself. Besides, I was interested to know what his officers thought of it all.

The wardroom was two decks down on the starb’d side. Half a dozen officers were already there and all of them silent, listening for Big Ben on the loudspeaker set high in the corner. It came just as Peter Craig handed me the horse’s neck I had asked for, the solemn tones of the hour striking, then the announcer’s voice giving the headlines. It was the third item and followed bomb blasts in Belfast and Lyons — ‘A frigate of the Royal Navy on a courtesy visit to Malta was involved this evening in an incident in which a shore party had to be given protection. Shots were fired and one officer was injured.’ That was all.

‘Playing it down,’ Craig said, sucking eagerly at his drink and turning to look around him. ‘Where’s young Robbie? Hey, Robinson — tell yer dad he’ll have to do better than that. The people at home should know what really happened.’ His words about summed up the view of the others. A put-up job, that was their verdict, and then Mault came in. ‘Mr Steele. The Captain would like a word with you. He’s in his cabin.’

I nodded, finishing my drink, but waiting for the news broadcaster to come to the end of the Lyons outrage and move on to the Malta incident. It was padded out, of course, nothing new, and nothing to upset the Maltese, no indication that it was they who had fired the first shot, or that the ship had been deliberately moored alongside Hamilton Wharf so that an anti-British mob could move in from the nearby Malta Dry Docks and threaten the lives of British sailors returning from a wine party that had almost certainly been organised solely for the purpose of luring them ashore.