The second phase was just about to begin.
0450 hours Zulu (0550 hours Zone)
H.M.S. Ark Royal
Scapa Flow
Four hundred miles southwest of Romsdalfjord, in the huge natural
anchorage within the Orkney Islands called Scapa Flow, another battle had just
ended, and ended victoriously. The sun was well up, casting a golden radiance
across the scattering of barren-looking hills and small villages that
surrounded the anchorage. Lieutenant Commander DuPont stood on a concrete
pier, staring up at the moored vessel that, for the past five days, had been
his first command.
Esek Hopkins was a wreck, her bridge shredded as though by a giant’s
hand, windows blindly gaping, her mast with the broad SPS-49 radar dish
smashed and twisted, her hangar aft sheared away and her gray hull streaked
and blackened by fire. Her pumps were still running. He could hear their
familiar, steady chugging muffled by Hopkins’s hull, and steady streams of
water continued to pour from her scuppers and outlets. Even now, moored to
the pier, she maintained the fifteen-degree list that she’d carried all the
way across the North Sea. She seemed to be straining against the lines that
tied her to the land.
To life, as though she wanted to give in at last to the sea.
For four days after the attack off Norway, the battle to save the
combat-savaged Perry-class frigate had seesawed between desperation and utter
disaster. More than once, DuPont had been certain that Hopkins, steadily
taking on water, was going to turn turtle and sink, especially on the second
day when the wind had picked up and a squall line had struck. It had been an
epic voyage, one of heroism and of survival. And of will.
Somehow, somehow they’d made it, with men manning the hand pumps by turns
when the automatics simply could not keep up with the flooding. They’d made
it under their own power too, though the turbines had threatened moment by
moment to quit. Progress had been painfully slow through heavy seas. He’d
had a choice between putting in at Bergen and heading across the North Sea to
Scapa Flow. Hearing reports of almost constant air attacks on Bergen, DuPont
had chosen the Orkneys. The crippled Hopkins would have made an ideal target
to Soviet attack planes and to the submarines known to be lurking off the
coast. If he’d known their speed was going to be as slow as it had been, he
would have opted for Norway and to hell with the Russian blockade.
But they’d come through. Kearny had stuck with them until the end, ready
to take off the skeleton crew of volunteers that had remained aboard if the
decision was made to abandon. Late the previous evening, the Hope-kins, as
her weary crew had renamed her, had limped into Scapa Flow. She’d been met in
the approaches by an escort of Royal Navy destroyers, Cardiff and Exeter, and
the tug Gwendoline. After rendering honors, Kearny had come about and
returned at once to the open sea. Commander Tennyson, her captain, had been
eager to return to the Jefferson battle group as quickly as possible.
And DuPont wished that he could go too.
Now, with the Hopkins secured, her wounded “in hospital” as their British
hosts had put it, and her crew in a naval barracks ashore, she seemed like a
ghost, empty … and dead. He’d promised to save her and he had, but she
would never go to sea again, of that DuPont was sure. He was seaman enough to
know that nothing short of a complete rebuild would make her seaworthy again.
He was going to miss her.
He also felt lost. The first of what would probably be countless full
reports on the battle and the damage to the ship had already been cabled to
Washington, but so far, neither he nor his crew had received new orders. It
was unlikely that they would, either, at least for several days. The Navy
Department was preoccupied now with the battle off Norway. Washington had not
yet made up its collective mind about which way to jump–with full-fledged
support of Norway, or with all-out retreat from the Norwegian Sea.
Time would tell. In the meantime, DuPont and his men were at loose ends.