George Washington's Ghost

Up at twenty thousand feet the pre-dawn twilight began to turn the blackness of the night into subtle greys, with the diamond twinkle of the stars above fast winking out while down below, on the deck, the darkness clung on another few minutes. Or rather, it ought to have lingered a while longer.

In the distance the flash of big guns sparkled, many, many fires were burning and a plume of grey-black smoke was drifting across the San Juan Bay and the city around it.

Racing south, giving a wide detour to the Princess Royal, Indefatigable and their escorts – they were bound to be trigger happy on a morning like this – Alex’s Goshawk was closing the range with the northern coast of Santo Domingo at nearly six miles a minute.

Down lower there was tracer fire reaching up into the sky.

Anti-aircraft fire?

How the Devil do they know we are out here?

The Princess Royal and the Indefatigable would have launched her Gimlet amphibians by now. They were supposed to stay well to the west of the line of the Rio Hondo, which marked the western border of the German Concession and report the big ships’ fall of fire as best they could from a safe distance away.

Oh, well, there was nothing for it but to go and have a closer look!

Alex put the nose of his Goshawk down, he was not going to see an awful lot of ground detail from four miles high!

He rocketed over the long isthmus protecting San Juan Bay where the original conquerors had established their city in that long-ago post-Columbian epoch, where, nowadays, the Armada del Santo Domingo had its only large, relatively modern base.

At least, for a few more minutes…

There was a near impenetrable smoky haze across much of the anchorage; so much for the meteorologists promise of a lovely clear morning!

And then he saw it.

The same Mainz class cruiser that was supposed to be tidily moored alongside the German wharf in the inner bay, meekly, unknowingly awaiting her fate.

Instead, she was in the main channel, heading for the open sea.

And…

She was shooting at the Dominicans!

Alex realised instantly that the haze was the cruiser making smoke.

He kicked the rudder pedals, and without consciously thinking about it began to climb into a wide circle over where, hidden in the murk, the German Concession lay.

The cruiser’s forward turret spat fire to the right; moments later her aft guns blazed away at targets to the left as the ship began to turn to the north for the final run for the open sea. There was a fire somewhere near the ship’s bow, another amidships, belching black smoke and even as he snapped his eyes away for a lightning check of his cockpit instrumentation, he saw at least two shells smash into the ship as countless near misses threw up a sudden forest of water spouts around her stern.

There was oil streaking the water in her wake and she was steaming very, very slowly… before the haze hid her from view.

All this he saw, parsed using a fraction of his mental capacities as he flew the Goshawk, weighing odds, intuitively joining-up the pieces of the jigsaw. In the heat of battle a thing was usually what it seemed to be. When the bullets were flying all around one, the time for artifice, clever stratagems and slights of hand were over.

He opened the command channel.

“BAD BOY ONE TO NAUGHTY CHILDREN!”

He paused.

“BAD BOY ONE TO NAUGHTY CHILDREN!”

Another pause.

This needed to be succinct; unambiguous.

“HERE THIS! HERE THIS! ONE MAINZ CLASS CRUISER ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE, REPEAT, ESCAPE FROM THE PORT. THIS SHIP IS CURRENTLY ENGAGING SHORE TARGETS. DO NOT ATTACK THIS SHIP. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ENGAGE THIS SHIP. ALL OTHER OPERATIONS WILL PROCEED AS PLANNED. TALLY HO! TALLY HO! BAD BOY ONE OUT!”

He waited for his Squadron Commanders to tersely confirm receipt of his orders, each snapping back an affirmative, their call sign and calling a terse ‘OUT’ in the designated sequence so they did not jam each other’s transmits.

Alex switched to the Princess Royal’s circuit.

He guessed that if the German cruiser did not sink in the main channel first, she would reach the sea within the next twenty minutes. In which event he would leave her to the ‘big boys’ out at sea.

“Roger to that, Bad Boy One,” a laconic voice confirmed, “we’ll deal with her when we’ve got a moment. Out.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind Alex recollected that the Task Force Commander had mentioned the need for a secondary ‘gunfire support plan’ just in case the gun line’s objectives had to be modified during Operation East Wind.

There were plenty of targets around San Juan Bay…