The Gun Garden by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788639910
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

One hour later, I watched Achilles and Arrow slide silently into the Grand Harbour. I suppose I should have been relieved they were safe and sound. But I wasn’t. Instead I wondered for the hundredth time where the hell they’d been and exactly what they’d been up to. As far as I could see, their only excuse would have been that they were at full fathom five, which at that moment I wished they bloody well were. By Christ, I swore to myself, if Routh didn’t turn up, they were going to have the hell of a lot to answer for.

Hour by hour, the day went by. I hung round G Shelter most of the time, waiting for news. At ten thirty they laid on an air-sea-rescue search. Some Spitfires from Takali took off to search along Routh’s return track. At twelve o’clock they came back with nothing to report, and another couple took off half an hour later, and they had no joy either.

At tea-time, Jonah surfaced, and we had a natter about what we could do, if anything. About five, we heard that the search had been called off altogether, and when I rang up Operations in the Barracca to ask if we could go out and look ourselves, that same squadron leader I’d met there on my arrival in this bloody island told me Routh had been on the plot sixty miles south-west, and they’d got a pinpoint of him going in. There was no sign of him now, and they were very sorry but that really did finalise it.

Routh’s R.I.P., I thought. I remember feeling a sudden overwhelming anger, not because I was close to Routh, for I’d never particularly liked him as a matter of fact, nor because our impotent little flight had now been chopped into its lesser half, but because Routh had always done his damnedest. And now although they were all going through the motions, no one was really doing their damnedest for him.

I got my crew together, and we went back to G Shelter. I still thought I might talk someone into letting us have a bash around the pinpoint area. And at first when we arrived, by the sort of restrained excitement in the place I thought they might have some news for me.

‘Oh, there you are,’ the Intelligence Officer said. ‘The A.O.C. wants you in his office at six. Post-mortem into your fiasco last night. Force Z say that but for the sticklebacks… they’d have sunk the whole convoy!’

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