George Washington's Ghost

Nonetheless, that the harbour master should still be sitting back, presumably in a fog of indecision, and carrying on watching as a vessel which had just sunk two of the Armada del Santo Domingo’s ships, not even challenging her defied credulity.

But then when the Emden had arrived at San Juan she had pretty much, sailed into the bay without a by your leave to anybody in particular. Claude Wallendorf had had to order a pair of small tugs to assist him to navigate the main channel; with the harbour authorities never at any stage really catching up with events as the cruiser edged towards its berth alongside the main quay of the Port of the Imperial Concession.

Hans von Schaffhausen had been as surprised as anyone!

Although, on reflection, the German Minister had confided that it was not at all uncommon for one hand of the Dominican government not to have the remotest idea what any

of the other agencies were up to. Add into the mix the machinations of the autonomous organs of the Inquisition and obviously, the potential for chaos was unlimited. Likewise, as implausible as it sounded, it might well have been that the only reason the badly damaged Weser had been allowed to enter the port unmolested was that nobody had forewarned the harbour authorities at San Juan that the Inquisition had ordered two Dominican Navy torpedo boat-destroyers to intercept the commerce raider.

Peter Cowdrey-Singh flinched as a heavier shell erupted in the water near the bow sending a jolt through the deck at his feet. Briefly, he spared a thought for the hundreds of German non-combatants below decks, huddling in claustrophobic, humid compartments dogged shut to guarantee the maximum possible watertight integrity in the event of a hit below the waterline.

Anecdotally, his understanding was that the Emden

’s design incorporated approximately three the times the weight of armour as Achilles – a ship a little less than two-thirds of her tonnage – had, and that below the level of the main deck, itself protected in places by up to two-and-a-half inches of modern Krupp cemented plate, there was up to five inches around her magazines and engineering spaces at the waterline, tapering to about two at the joint with the main deck.

As a rule, all German cruisers tended to be more heavily protected than their Royal Navy counterparts, a thing the Kaiserliche Marine could get away with because range was not the priority for it – historically a North Sea and Baltic Fleet – as it was for a Navy with global responsibilities. In essence, Emden’s weight of armour and general protections system was roughly comparable with that of the latest class of British heavy cruisers.

In other words, Emden was built to be tough for her size, and ought to be capable of taking a fair bit of punishment. Which was just as well because if the gunners manning the batteries guarding the main entrance to the port got their act together, things were going to get somewhat more than middlingly unpleasant if and when, assuming she did not go aground, the cruiser rounded Point La Puntilla, turning her bow to the west following the deep water channel before she made the long, slow, very predictable turn to the north and if she was still under control at that time, ran for the open sea.

The bridge chronometer reported it was 04:07; although dawn was around six o’clock that did not mean they had another two hours of darkness in which to fight their way out to sea. Twilight, the pre-dawn brightening would be with them in about an hour. After that, if there had ever been anywhere that a ten-thousand-ton cruiser with a fighting top seventy to eighty feet above its waterline could hide, it would not be inside this port no matter how much smoke she was making.

Presently, a long, choking pall of steamy, half-burned oil was drifting ahead of and a point east of north of the cruiser as she crawled, barely at walking pace away past the graveyards of the San Miguel and the Weser.

Whatever awaited the Emden around the headland of Pont La Puntilla, there would be no dodging it. If she deviated from the channel she would ground and thereafter the Dominicans would surely shoot her to pieces at their leisure.

Chapter 36

Monday 8th May

San Juan, Santo Domingo

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, and one simply had to be philosophical about these things. But when the enemy started the battle before one had even arrived, when the nearest of the Perseus’s and Hermes’s aircraft were still over thirty miles away, that was ridiculous!

Approaching the enemy coast at three-hundred-and-forty-knots, Alex Fielding flicked across UHF frequencies, picking up the excitable, panicky, oddly angry babble of Spanish on both of the frequencies the Armada del Santo Domingo was known to employ before re-selecting today’s designated command channel.