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  PRAISE FOR DAVID BLACK

  In his hero Harry Gilmour, David Black has created a Jack Aubrey for the modern age. And set him at the heart of a tale as epic as those of O’Brian and Forester; a tale that encompasses not only the same thrill of action, but also the same compassion and understanding for the true heroes of our nation’s seafaring traditions – the fighting sailors then, as now.

  – Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Boyce KG GCB OBE; former First Sea Lord and the Royal Navy’s senior submariner

  It’s a wonderful book and . . . the evocation of naval life, submarines, and even the feel of wartime itself are all beautifully done. The characters and the description of ‘the Trade’ and how it worked reminded me rather of what my old ‘Tankies’ told me about their lives crammed into those other metal boxes with death often over the next ridge.

  – Mark Urban, Diplomatic Editor of BBC2’s Newsnight and author of Rifles and The Tank War: The Men, the Machines and the Long Road to Victory

  ALSO BY DAVID BLACK

  The Harry Gilmour Series

  Gone to Sea in a Bucket

  The Skipper’s Dog’s Called Stalin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 David Black

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477819494

  ISBN-10: 1477819495

  Cover design by Lisa Horton

  To Alison, my first muse

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  We should have taken Alexandria and reached the Suez Canal had it not been for the work of your submarines.

  – Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, Chief of Staff, Deutsches Afrikakorps

  Preface

  This is a work of fiction, but because it takes place in a real place and time in history, it deals with real events and real people. Characters such as Shrimp Simpson, Hubert Marsham and Max Horton were real people, doing the very real jobs I describe throughout the siege of Malta. I have attributed words and deeds to them I could not ever know about, and so neither can be mistaken for fact. The picture I have portrayed of them, however: the cool, calculated valour, tirelessness, tactical skills, the dedication to duty and the care they showed to their men – in fact, all the necessary attributes a man must possess to command in wartime – I believe to be completely true. And I hope and trust that their surviving friends and relatives will forgive my presumption.

  Where I name a ship and place her in significant action, I have tried to use a fictional name out of respect for the families of those who actually served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

  As for the N-class submarine, such as HMS Nicobar, there never was such a class in service with the Royal Navy during the Second World War – I invented her because I needed a better U-Class boat.

  Finally, when it comes to the action, it is all as true as I could make it.

  British, Italian and German officers, mostly from their respective air forces, were indeed interned on Majorca, and they did indeed live hugger-mugger and carry on much as I have described. Although I did not encounter any incident in which any of them tried to escape, certainly not British or Italian officers.

  The siege of Malta, too, progressed much as described, as did the losses among the submariners of the Tenth Flotilla.

  Anyone interested in delving deeper into the full epic of the siege of Malta should look no further than James Holland’s excellent history of the campaign, Fortress Malta. And for a blow-by-blow account of Royal Navy’s Tenth Flotilla in the central Mediterranean between 1940 and 1944, there is The Fighting Tenth by John Wingate.

  Chapter One

  ‘You hit the main mast of HMS Renown – and you’re still alive?’ asked Harry, in English.

  They’d been speaking Italian up until this point, so Fabrizio frowned, not exactly sure of the precise meaning of what had just been said to him, but from Harry’s incredulous stare getting the drift. He gave his Italian shrug.

  ‘You were so low, your wing clipped the mast of a British battlecruiser?’ Harry repeated.

  But Harry couldn’t wait for the answer. He began rolling around on his lounger, helpless with laughter.

  Fabrizio’s frown deepened. He took another belt of his tumbler full of gin and vermouth, topped off with soda water. ‘They weren’t interested in me in my single-seat, single-engine, popgun-armed Folgore,’ he said, surly, in Italian. ‘They were shooting at the Savoia-Marchetti torpedo bombers.’

  If you were up on one of the hotel balconies and out of earshot, you’d have thought they were just two ordinary young men, admittedly rather handsome ones, with nothing better to do than sprawl on loungers and tell jokes. They were both wearing light-coloured Oxford bags and open-necked shirts; Harry in a dark-blue sweater, and Fabrizio with his fawn one draped over his shoulders. They were out sunning themselves on the pool terrace, on a still-warm Mediterranean autumn afternoon, not a care in the world. Nothing here to tell you it was 1941 and there was a war on, out there beyond the horizon, and not a hint from these two young men that they fought on opposing sides.

  Someone was watching: a tall man in a light-blue summer uniform. The two small golden starbursts below the chevron on his sleeve said he was a Teniente Coronel, a Lieutenant Colonel, of the Ejército del Aire, the Spanish air force, EdA for short. He was bare-headed, so you could see his silky, light-brown hair was already starting to recede, a fact emphasised by the way he wore it swept straight back. He was still young, almost impossibly young. And he was the absolute spitting image of the actor David Niven, right down to the pencil moustache and the crinkles when he smiled. He was smiling now. His name was Eurico de la Peña, and he was very pleased with the way the young Italian seemed to be cheering up these days. The fact that the young British naval officer could speak Italian, and the fact that the circumstances of his arrival here had been even more inglorious, seemed to be doing the trick. Because, for a while, Eurico had feared for Signor Fabrizio’s state of mind.

  Meanwhile, back in his serviceable Italian, Harry was saying, ‘. . . and the torpedo bombers. They shot them down? Renown shot them down?’

  Fabrizio’s answer was a sullen stare.

  ‘Renown shot them all down,’ said Harry, ‘and now you feel guilty because you’re still alive and they’re not.’

  Hi
s words met with the same stare.

  Eurico, eavesdropping from above, nodded. He considered himself a student of the human condition, and not just as a passing fancy. He was fascinated by it. And after all this silliness was over, he intended to take up the study of psychoanalysis as a profession, so this little Petri dish of a command over which he presided had, in the course of the preceding months, turned out to be a most excellent foundation course. He observed the two young men below more closely. Harry had stopped laughing, and had sat up and swung his legs round. He was looking down at Fabrizio, all serious now.

  ‘Well, that’s not your fault,’ he heard Harry say.

  Eurico couldn’t know, however, what Harry was thinking right then. That he was imagining the sheer size and imposing presence of HMS Renown; trying to see her as this young Italian airman must have seen her – all 750 battleship-grey feet of her; and her six fifteen-inch guns; and her four-inch and three-inch secondary batteries; and all the light anti-aircraft guns, the whole thirty-two thousand tons of her bristling with them – all blazing away as she pounded through the waves, her four giant props driving her at over thirty-two knots! And he was wondering at the courage that must have driven this fellow.

  ‘It’s called fire control,’ Harry pointed out patiently to Fabrizio, in Italian. ‘You didn’t fail to draw Renown’s fire. They just weren’t shooting at you, you daft lump. You were in a fighter plane. The most damage you could do to Renown was chip her paintwork. But the torpedo bombers could sink her. The bloke in the gunnery control tower directing her anti-aircraft fire would have been ordering all the AA gunners to ignore you. Good grief, he probably wouldn’t even have had to. These were Royal Navy gun crews you were flying against . . . battle-hardened Royal Navy gun crews. Those boys wouldn’t have needed telling who they should be shooting at.’

  And at that, Harry smiled to himself. He was remembering something said to him by an older, more senior officer a long time ago, after he had survived his first close-run thing with death: ‘You’re not going to be a girl about this, are you?’

  ‘So stop being a girl,’ said Harry, all gruff and dismissive, as he reached to top up Fabrizio’s glass from the pitcher. ‘And have another drink.’ Only then did he let his face break into a smile. ‘Bet you smashed up their masthead light good and proper, though. Your name will’ve been mud in the Bosun’s mess. And anyway, you haven’t heard yet how I ended up here.’

  Watching the two men, Eurico was smiling too. After all, his experiment appeared to be working. For Teniente Coronel Eurico de la Peña had a kind heart – he genuinely had not wanted to wake up one morning and find Fabrizio dangling from a home-made noose, especially after he had survived so much. It was not that Eurico had anything such as a formal duty towards him. Neither Fabrizio nor the other young man were under his command, far from it. But as senior air force officer on the Balearic Islands, he was responsible for them, and for the thirty or so others who had managed to fall out of the sky or wash up on the beaches of these Spanish islands – these neutral Spanish islands. Interned belligerents. That was their official designation under international law. Officers of the German Luftwaffe, and the Italian Regia Aeronautica, and from the other side too: the RAF boys and Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. All here because their war had been cut short somewhere over the western Mediterranean. Mechanical failure or enemy fire, it didn’t matter – they’d all faced a pretty simple choice: they could either end up in the drink, as the British called it, with precious little chance of ever being picked up; or bail out, crash-land or otherwise deposit themselves on neutral Spain. So here they were. Not quite prisoners of war, because Spain wasn’t at war, yet not quite free to roam around like tourists causing mischief, because no one had invited them in. It was more like being on parole while they waited for their respective consular officials to arrange their repatriation, and then they could get back to their squadrons, and get on with killing each other.

  And since they were nearly all aircrew, it fell to the Ejército del Aire, the EdA, to look after them. And that was why Eurico had them all holed up here, together, in the same place – the Hotel El Real, built into the huge fourteenth-century fortress that surrounded the Palacio Real de La Almudaina, overlooking the old port of Palma de Mallorca. No segregation. All bundled together. From the beginning, Eurico had accepted that it was a measure that could lead to complications, but so far it had generated more amusement than conflict, and at least it kept them out of the way of the Army.

  The young Italian lad, Fabrizio di Savelli, was Regia Aeronautica; a Sottotenente – or what the British called a Second Lieutenant. He had arrived in a single-engine Folgore fighter that had barely managed to claw its way over the airfield perimeter fence at the Son Bonet Aerodrome before pancaking in a heap on the runway. That had been almost two months ago. Even Eurico had to admit, it had taken some fancy flying on Fabrizio’s part to keep his Folgore in the air at all, let alone nurse it back over however many miles of Mediterranean. He had actually watched young Fabrizio bring it in, and had been slack-jawed. Depending on the angle you looked at the Italian fighter, it had at first appeared immaculately unscathed, with no apparent cause for the engine to be racing and screaming as if it were being tortured. It was only when the pilot’s efforts flickered and one wing came up and the other dipped, that you could see the aircraft was missing a substantial bit of wing tip – snapped right off, with two sheared spar ends left rattling in the slipstream. How the pilot still had the brute strength to continue holding her from flipping right over into a spin after God knows how many hours in the air defied all logic. So, when the pilot actually stood up from the wreckage – there had been no fire because there had been damn all fuel left to burn – Eurico was already striding across the airfield to meet him and shake his hand, one pilot to another.

  He remembered being especially pleased to see that the young Italian appeared to have suffered no injury; in fact, he had risen as you might from a good meal. But Eurico had been wrong about there being no injury.

  Despite his dramatic entrance, since he had arrived, Fabrizio had refused to admit to anyone how he had come to lose part of his wing and end up in Eurico’s internment camp – luxury internment camp. Not to Eurico, not to his fellow Regia pilots, not even to the Maggiore – the Regia Aeronautica Major – who commanded the extended bunch of Italian aircrew currently languishing under Eurico’s hospitality. Fabrizio had brooded. His fellow pilots had tried to josh him out of it – and then given up. The Maggiore had just shrugged and said things like, ‘Ah well, you see . . .’ and made calming, let-it-be gestures. Eurico, however, couldn’t help but suspect that the young pilot was ashamed about something, although after that exhibition of airmanship that had got him here, he couldn’t imagine what.

  Meanwhile, Fabrizio was quietly shutting himself off; or, as Eurico’s RAF guests would say, ‘getting himself into a right old tizzy’.

  Two months later and Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour had been deposited on the quay at Puerto de Sóller by fishermen, wet, salt-encrusted and exhausted, stepping gratefully off a smelly tuna boat. When he had been hosed down and relieved of the rancid blanket he was wearing, he’d been delivered to Eurico, as all officers from belligerent nations were supposed to be. Eurico had welcomed him, and inquired as to how he had come to be in need of Spanish hospitality.

  Harry, apparently, had been picked up from a lifeboat that had been bobbing around for some time on the northern edge of the British main convoy route down the Mediterranean. Except, when the fishermen found them, the British naval officer was looking positively spritely compared to the half-dozen or more half-starved and half-delirious middle-aged merchant seamen from some bombed British tramp steamer whose lifeboat it was. To the fishermen’s experienced eyes, the merchant seamen had obviously been in the lifeboat a lot longer than Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour.

  So Eurico was keen to hear Harry’s story and, when he had, he realised he had a young man whose arrival on Spanish territory must be even
more questionable than Fabrizio di Savelli’s. And not only that, but a young man who, like Fabrizio, was also a junior officer, and . . . and Eurico could hardly believe his good fortune when he discovered it . . . In fact, if he had been a religious man, which, surprisingly for a Spaniard, he wasn’t, he would have regarded it as a sign from God, a divine blessing on his plan: the young British officer could actually speak Italian. Well, Italian after a fashion.

  That was what gave Eurico his idea: he would put them together, get them to talk and maybe, just maybe, Fabrizio would see that if this shambling, amiable, laconic youth could live with himself after his escapade, then so could he. And there they were, both laughing now. It appeared to be working. Indeed, the pair looked as though they might even become friends. Not that surprising, really. Very few of the British and none of the Italian officers here had seemed to take the war or politics that seriously. Especially when there was carousing to be done. There’d been a lot of friendships. Of course, that would only last until their papers could be processed. Then, he supposed, it would be back to business as usual. That thought pushed the smile from Eurico’s face.

  It was now late afternoon and shortly they would no longer be alone at the hotel. The British and the Italians had already missed ‘afternoon tea’ and would be determined not to miss ‘sundowners’. It being Thursday, the day the English taught the Italians cricket, one or the other side would be arriving back in particularly high spirits, alas.

  And the Germans: they would be due back from their afternoon route march. Eurico found himself hoping the Anglo-Italian throng and the German column would not meet on the drive. For the Germans disapproved of their fellow internees mightily. It was a feeling that was mutual. The Germans disapproved of the British because they were the enemy, and of the Italians because they didn’t seem to care, and of both because neither seemed to be treating the war with the gravity it demanded, or to be in the slightest bit eager to return to it. As for the British and the Italians, they disapproved of the Germans for the exact opposite of all the reasons the Germans disapproved of them – and also because they thought the Germans were all arrogant arses who had their Nazi salutes up each other’s bums, an achievement that was commented on often and loudly. So, on the odd occasion when their paths did cross, en masse, it invariably ended in a full-throated rendering of obscene songs and a truly childish amount of buttock-baring and rude gestures. And, of course, there was then the ensuing avalanche of letters of complaint from every shocked local who’d managed to crane their neck sufficiently far to be disgusted by the spectacle. Eurico decided not to wait and see. He turned on his heels and marched purposefully back to his office in the hotel.