George Washington's Ghost

Several bombs – including three five-hundred pounders – had exploded on the flight deck and the fires, up top, had raged for well over an hour-and-a-half most of the damage had turned out to be relatively superficial. The design concept of making the flight deck an integral ‘strength deck’ had been wholly vindicated. Likewise, the associated concept of building the hangar deck as, in effect, a giant armoured box, had ensured structural integrity was never threatened and that once the wreckage of the four planes undergoing servicing near the seat of the fire had been cleared away, and the stern elevator repaired – probably the most challenging element of the repair program – the ship would swiftly be back in business.

As to the flight deck, the dockyard was already peeling and cutting away the distorted, splintered plating directly above the still intact armoured roof – up to three inches thick – of the hangar deck, preparatory to ‘resurfacing’ the rear four hundred and forty-seven feet of decking.

Obviously, nothing was as simple in practice as it was in theory; the landing systems had been destroyed, as had the hydraulic mechanisms tensioning the ‘traps’, the steel hawsers, wires that ‘caught’ a plane when it landed, and light anti-aircraft weaponry and other equipment had been wrecked but essentially, the ship was sound and it was confidently predicted, that in between six and eight weeks she would be ready to re-join the Fleet.

As yet, the dockyard had done nothing about the fifteen feet wide by seventeen feet high hole caused by the explosion of the submarine-launched single torpedo – one of at least four launched at the carrier, apparently – which had struck the ship’s port side approximately sixteen feet below the waterline between frame fifty-six and fifty-seven, some two hundred-and-thirty-five feet forward of the stern.

The ship’s plates were twisted inward as if Ulysses had been hit by a giant sledgehammer.

The fish had exploded on contact with the outer plating and its warhead, its effect multiplied by hydrostatic forces, had punched through the carrier’s double hull like a fist through paper. The Navy’s boffins had studied the hole and determined that it had been caused by the detonation of approximately seven hundred-and-fifty pounds of, probably, ‘enhanced high-explosive’.

‘Bloody hell,’ Alex Fielding thought to himself, ‘no wonder the powers that be decided they wanted to ban submarines back in the mid-1960s!’ And, ‘no wonder the top brass is absolutely livid that two of their biggest ships – the battlecruiser Indomitable

, and now the Ulysses – had, thus far, been so badly damaged by internationally outlawed weapons.’

Worse, the very existence of the Spanish submarines had forced the Fleet to fight at long-range and compelled a hurried, somewhat ad hoc re-writing of the rulebook of naval warfare.

It was hardly any surprise that people in New England, and presumably, back in the Old Country, were presently asking themselves what the Navy was doing?

The answer, of course, was that the Navy was licking its wounds prior to getting stuck in again with a vengeance. However, with the sinking of the Indomitable in Mobile Bay, the crippling of the Ulysses and the loss of so many of her aircraft – although most of her birds had landed on the Perseus there had been no room for all those kites on her flight deck so they had had to go over the side – and the threat of the submarine menace ever-present, there was an awful lot of head-scratching going on at Norfolk trying to work out how exactly, the Royal Navy was going to reassert its supremacy over the waters of the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean when clearly, not even Atlantic waters were safe!

Alex had been staring into the dark depths of the great gash in the carrier’s flank for some moments, unaware of anything going on around him.

“It’s Fielding, isn’t it?”

For once in his life Alex had been, quite literally, lost in his thoughts.

He had steered clear of the gaggle of senior officers down at the other end of the dry dock when he had descended into its depths. He was killing time before he boarded his flight to Bronxwood Aerodrome that afternoon; by tonight he hoped to be holding his nineteen-day-old son, Alex junior, in his arms for the first time.

Leonora’s parents said the baby had his nose. He could not see it himself, or at least, not in the photograph Leonora had sent him of his then, day-old first born. Every baby he had ever laid eyes on looked exactly the same to him but he knew it would be different once he got to hold the little sprog in his own arms.