George Washington's Ghost

“With your leave, I’d like to assign two or three dive bombers to have a go at that cruiser before the big ships open up, sir,” Andrew Buchanan responded, simply registering his point of view.

Patrick Bentinck thought about it.

“Two aircraft only.”

The final decision would be adjudicated by the Task Force Commander, Rear Admiral Parkinson. That said, thus far Parkinson had not demonstrated the least propensity to countermand or in any way disregard the expert advice of men under his command who were self-evidently, well-qualified in their fields.

The Princess Royal and the Indefatigable would jump at the opportunity to rain Hell on one of the ships of the Vera Cruz squadron, the harbingers of this evil war, already covered in the blood of the men of the Achilles and the rape of Jamaica.

Presently, the ships of Task Force 5.1 were running without lights with the gun line still in company. The big ships would break away a little after midnight for their high-speed run to within as close as six or seven miles of the Santo Domingo coast. At one stage two escorting destroyers were to be detached to lay mines at the mouth of San Juan Bay; a scheme abandoned shortly before sailing because to be effective the mines would have to be laid inordinately close in shore – perhaps as near as two hundred yards from known shore battery locations – and whatever else Operation East Wind was about, it was not about presenting thin-skinned targets to Dominican gunners shooting over open sights at point blank range!

A month ago, nobody would have blinked an eyelid at taking a chance of the Dominican’s being caught napping; but a lot of things had changed in the last few weeks and no more unnecessary hostages to fortune were to be offered until further notice.

The command group meeting broke up a few minutes later.

Alex knew he ought to try to grab a couple of hours sleep; but also knew it was not going to happen. Every single aircraft under his command was going to be in the air tomorrow morning, and nobody was getting much shut-eye tonight!

The Dominicans and their foul Triple Alliance friends must be thinking that they had their God on their side. To date the war could hardly have gone much better for them, at sea, in the air and on land, not to mention beneath the waves if the Indomitable’s fate was anything to go by. Well, around dawn tomorrow morning the enemy was going to get a very, very rude shock!

One-thousand-pound semi-armour piercing bombs were being slung under the bellies of Sea Eagles, and an additional pair of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound high-explosive ‘eggs’ under each bomber’s wings. Eighteen-inch air-launched torpedoes, each with a warhead of over four hundred pounds of high-explosives, and capable of racing through the water at upwards of forty knots, were lined up on dollies to be maneuvered under the fuselages of the ‘fish carriers’ parked menacingly in the midships section of the hangar deck, while most of Alex’s Goshawks were already topside, their gun boxes stuffed tight with bullets, with lightweight fuel ‘drop’ tanks topped off and hanging beneath cockpits or in the case of Alex’s aircraft, also on two underwing hardpoints in lieu of the rocket pods mounted by twenty-three of his other scouts.

Those pods packed a fierce, short-range punch, fourteen 2-inch missiles armed with a three-pound high-explosive or anti-personnel fragmentation warhead, with a range of up to fifteen hundred yards. In practice, the unguided munitions were only accurate up to about two to three hundred yards and best unleashed only when one could literally see the whites of ones’ enemies’ eyes.

Before leaving Norfolk there had been some discussion about the notion of several of the carrier’s aircraft dropping ‘Greek Fire’ cannisters over the target. Nobody was entirely clear if employing such weapons – basically, when they hit the ground they dispersed a sticky, burning jelly-like form of Hades on earth across a broad swath of ground and anybody unfortunate enough to get in the way was likely to be burned to death of to suffer dreadful bone-deep wounds – was either legal, or in any sense moral. However, given the horror stories one was hearing about the way the junior parties to the Triple Alliance, the Cuban, Hispanics and particularly the way the Dominicans treated their prisoners of war, and at times, their own people, the debate was one of splitting hairs. Discarded drop tanks, virtually empty, apparently went off like mini ‘Greek Fire’ bombs, anyway.

Philosophically, Alex knew that he ought to retain at least a modicum of unction about the rights and wrongs of the subject; but actually, he was already well beyond that point.

Even had he not already known it, war was a nasty, brutish, kill or be killed business, and anybody who tried to pretend otherwise was an imbecile, or a charlatan, or both, in his book.