To stop himself laughing Alistair had to bite his cheek.
He took a step forward. “Well, men, as you all know, our loved ones are taking a beating back home and they are holding up superbly, and now it is our turn. The Admiralty tells us that one of their tubs, Illustrious, has undergone some unplanned modifications at sea. She’s on her way in now, and we can be certain that the enemy will spare no effort to sink her in port.”
“Or brandy,” whispered Simonson.
“Perhaps we cannot do much against high-altitude bombing, but as you know we have a very effective anti-aircraft weapon in the 3.7-inch gun, and we intend by coordinated firing to establish a box within which the enemy’s dive-bombers cannot operate.”
“A lunch box,” whispered Simonson. “A cricket box.”
“Gunners, your sergeants will be issued with the angular sectors and elevations for each gun. There will be a coordinated firing sequence in order to achieve the maximum coverage of shell splinters for the minimum expenditure of ordnance. The details will be—”
As Alistair spoke, he had noticed a growing agitation among the men. Now they were looking past him, over the ramparts. Alistair stopped talking and turned to see what they were watching.
Looming huge over the breakwaters, Illustrious was limping into Grand Harbour under cover of dark. Alistair had never seen a carrier and he was awed at the size of her. She wore no lights and the harbor was blacked out, but they could see her silhouette against the moonlight. She darkened half the sky. Her huge turbines throbbed as she ghosted in. The sea breeze brought the awful smell of her: scorched metal and flesh, burned aviation spirit, leaking oil. No one spoke. A dozen officers and two hundred men watched for two full minutes in silence. When the smell got too much, Alistair turned back to the men.
“All right,” he told them, abandoning the speech he had planned. “As you can see she will be hard to miss, even for the Italians. We had better all get to our guns.”
Back with his own troop, Alistair felt all right. He busied himself with making each man as comfortable as he could. Since it would be a cold night he had blankets and bedding brought up from below, and thermoses filled with cocoa. He sent his subaltern to the medical officer to secure a stock of eyedrops and Benzedrine for the men, knowing from his experience in France that it would be two or three more days at full alert before the stuff was needed, but that by the time it was, it would be gone. He split each gun crew into two watches of two hours, and he spent the long night walking the quarter-mile beat of his guns.
No attacks came.
Finally, with the hum of fatigue in his ears as the day dawned in gray cloud, he took himself down to the rocks below the fort. He looked at the sea and thought about Tom. The waves broke themselves on the rocks, each retreating with its wounded hiss to succumb to the surge of the next. They came from the horizon to do it. Alistair watched the incoming queue of them. Not one wave jumped its order or renounced its destination. Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign.
The cloud clung to the island all morning, and at noon the lieutenant colonel had them stand the gun crews down. A long lull began. The cloud stayed so low that nothing could fly, and with so much of the Royal Navy still in the approaches, the enemy would risk nothing from the sea. All eyes peered upward. At any perceived darkening of the gray, the men would remark that it was turning out nice again. Any slight break in the cloud brought anxious silence. In short order the men became authorities on gray, able to distinguish between the nuances of ash, dusk and silver; granite, slate and mouse. Their upturned faces took on the lifesaving pallor.
Leave was canceled, officers and men confined to the fort. There were no more afternoons sailing or swimming. On the first day fresh barrels were fitted to the guns. Shells were brought out and inventoried and restocked into the underground magazines. When there was nothing more that could usefully be made ready, the men were given a hundred things to polish. The rubble-painted gun carriages, the brass oil lines, the optics of the predictor gear. When all the artillery pieces gleamed, the men moved on to cutlery, flagpoles, boots. By the end of the second day of the lull, the fort and all its contents were burnished to a furious sheen under the unflattering sky.