Lusitania Lost by Leonard Carpenter

Author:Leonard Carpenter [Carpenter, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633536562
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2017-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

The Plot

The Map Room at the Admiralty House in Whitehall was hushed in expectancy. Sea Lord Jackie Fisher, fresh from his daily church attendance at Westminster Abbey, sat waiting by the broad chart table. He sensed that his sullen presence caused the room’s usual bustle to be muted. But he didn’t care. The Sea Lord’s mood this morning was dark, and he made no effort to conceal it by polite chatter.

This war was going badly for England, both on land and sea. Now Fisher, as much as anyone, stood to be held accountable. The Admiralty, whose decisions loomed large in both areas, appeared to be in turmoil over it. It seemed crystal-clear to the old seafarer that the weather must change, and soon.

His Lordship Jackie, as they all knew, had fought his way up “through the hawsehole” to his high position, starting out at the rank of novice seaman in an old square-rigged sailing ship. Now at the peak of naval power, as his reward for talent and persistence, he found himself under the thumb of an over-ambitious Public School boy who’d never even been to sea. Shades of HMS Pinafore; the comic opera was less funny now. He’d never expected to be the butt of the joke.

True, the young Lord Winston had been pleasant enough to work with at the start. Churchill and Fisher were both reformers, both with visions of the future to impose on the crusty, centuries-old naval establishment. They had begun as a team, but now Churchill was clearly more intent on his own visions of glory than on the slow, patient task of shepherding a navy. He had pushed forward this grand wager of a Turkish invasion, drawing Fisher and others reluctantly along, and now that it was failing, someone would have to pay. With the trenches dug deep in Europe and an undersea blockade bleeding England dry, the young firebrand was casting about for some other schoolboy exploit to break the deadlock and win acclaim. Between the demands of war and overweening personal ambition, tensions had been growing that must soon lead to a fracture. All sensed it.

The staff worked on silently, avoiding the gold-braided curmudgeon brooding in his armchair and awaiting the young firebrand. They spoke in whispers as they shuffled their papers and updated the charts.

The focus of their labors was the Plot, a large map covering one twenty-foot-tall wall of the broad room. On it, ruled over with a grid of latitudes and longitudes, were the outlines of Europe, England, Ireland, the Atlantic and all of the adjacent seas, bordered by Africa and the Americas. The known positions of significant merchant vessels and warships, be they friend, enemy or neutral, were pinned onto the map as color-coded disks of various size, all marked with arrowheads to indicate the vessel’s last known direction. Each disk was large enough to cover the approximate area of open sea that a ship’s lookout could survey from the height of its crow’s nest. In that

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