Medusa

When we reached Addaia she tucked herself into a little parking bay where we had a clear view of the quay across pantile roofs and the steep overgrown slope of the hillside, and it wasn’t just the truck from Codolar that was waiting there. I counted no less than five trucks, all parked in line along the concrete edge of the quay and facing towards us. There were more than a dozen cars, too, and a lot of men, most of them gathered round the back of the last truck, where crates were being dumped on the quay, prised open and the weapons they contained handed out.

‘Christ! See that, mate. They got rocket-launchers. The hand-held type. What do the bastards want with them?’ Lennie had followed me out of the car and across the road. From there we had a clear view of the anchorage where I had joined Carp for the voyage to Malta. And there, as though I were seeing it all again, like on video but from a different angle, was the Santa Maria motoring in through the narrows that separated the humpbacked outline of the second island from the muddy foreshore and the huddle of fishermen’s dwellings. The boat was headed straight for the quay, and as she slowed and swung her stern to lie alongside, I saw she had a stern light showing.

That was when we heard the rumble of engines coming from seaward, and a moment later we saw the dim shape of a flat box of a vessel. There were two of them, old LCTs dating from the days before they called them logistic landing craft. I recognised them immediately, one of them having dropped me off at Loch Boisdale on its way to St Kilda some years back. The Santa Maria had clearly been leading them in. Now she was alongside and a man had jumped ashore. I watched him through the glasses as the men on the quay gathered round him. Even in that dim light I was certain it was Evans. He was head and shoulders taller than most of them, standing there, hands on hips, issuing orders. He wore a kepi-like forage cap and camouflage jacket and trousers, and the way he stood, the arrogance and the air of command, I was suddenly reminded of early pictures of Castro.

A splash, and the first of the logistic vessels had dropped its stern anchor, the big drum winch on the afterdeck reeling out the hawser as the ship nosed into the quay. The bow doors opened, then with a clank and a crash, the ramp dropped on to the quay. By then the second vessel was coming in alongside it and a moment later the vehicles inside the two slab-sided hulls, their engines already running, began to trundle out. They were half-tracks, each of them mounting what looked like a heavy Bofors gun, and as they came off the ramps they were joined by small detachments of the men on shore.

Behind the half-tracks came men, dozens of them, dressed in some drab uniform and loaded down with equipment, each of them pausing for a moment as they stepped on to the terra firma of the quay’s concrete edge. It was as though they needed to find their feet. Some, as they stood there, arched their backs and stretched. A babble of human voices reached up to us. It was the natural reaction of men who had been cooped up in a confined space for some considerable time and for a moment the scene below us was one of disorder, almost chaos. Then somebody shouted. I think it was Evans, and the men standing around the parked trucks began splitting up and moving to join the new arrivals, the melee gradually sorting itself out as they formed up into units and marched off to embark in the waiting trucks or climb on to the backs of the half-tracks.

It was less than ten minutes from the time the LCTs had put their ramps down to the moment when the local vehicles were all loaded and the whole convoy beginning to move off, and by then I was convinced that what we were witnessing was the start of an armed usurpation of the political power in the island. Who the men were that had landed from the two LCTs, where they had come from — that was of no importance for the moment. What was important was to alert somebody in Mahon to the danger. I saw it all in a mental flash, dissident elements, gathered from the various towns, meeting here to be given arms and then to be distributed amongst the newly arrived mercenaries, or whatever they were, to guide them to objectives that had already been decided on.