The fleet had sailed west along the coast, all the way to Tobruk where the big guns cleared their throats lending fire support for the besieged garrison. They lingered there for a day until Admiral Tovey signaled that he would detach for an urgent meeting at sea, with no further details. Cunningham left in a hurry, boarding a destroyer and slipping off into the night, leaving Barry and the other fleet Captains in the dark as to what was causing the delay.
That night, on the 30th of January, they sailed north to a position well screened by British submarines. Since that time they had been sailing in a wide circle, attended by cruisers and destroyers just in case an Italian sub might get curious. They had been overflown by recon planes from Greece on the 31st, even while Fedorov was having his most unexpected first meeting with Brigadier Kinlan.
It was hard to keep up morale in these circumstances. Gibraltar had fallen, Malta was battling for its life, and the British army had just been chased halfway across Libya into Egypt again, wiping out all the gains O’Connor had delivered with his remarkable campaign. Captain Barry had a restless, worried feeling now, and the long slow circles he was sailing did little to calm his mind. Anything would be better than this, he thought. The men are as worried as I am, and it’s plain enough on their faces. We should be charging off to Malta now, guns at the ready, but instead here I am idling north of Derna, twiddling my thumbs and reading reports from the Chief of Engineers.
There had been an odd clicking sound in one of the turbines when they left Tobruk and started north. The engineers noted it, and were rousting about to see what it might be, but it did not seem serious. Probably just needs a little grease, he thought. The ship had been too long abed, and she was bound to have some creaks and squeaks now that she was up in her slippers and shuffling about again. That was all…
Cunningham had been welcomed aboard HMS Invincible, curious as to what this meeting was all about. It seemed very odd to be detaching like this, and politics were now uppermost in his mind as he sat down with Admiral Tovey for a briefing. He had assumed this meeting might have something to do with organizing fleet operations aimed at covering an evacuation of Greek forces, possibly to Crete, as they were sailing for Chania Bay. Andrew Browne Cunningham, old “A.B.C.” as he was called from his initials, had been disappointed when the planned attack on Taranto could not be teed up. He finally got hold of a pair of aircraft carriers, and now they were relegated to fleet air defense and anti-submarine patrols. His bid to even the odds and catch the Italians napping in port had been tabled with the news of the attack on Malta.
Now it was down to the real brass tacks, he thought. If we lose Malta the whole central Med goes with it. It was our unsinkable aircraft carrier, battered and beaten up daily by the Italian air strikes, but defiant. He knew the airfields at Ta’qali and Luqa would not hold for long. The Luftwaffe had come in droves, adding its considerable weight to Regio Aeronautica, and there was simply no way the threadbare squadrons on Malta could survive. They did their best, he thought, but we would have needed to get another thirty Hurricanes out there to make a fight of it. The carriers were here, and now I’ve a mind to see what we can do. Cunningham had a great deal on his mind that day, but he would soon learn things that would send him spinning like a top. The knowledge he was about to be handed, like an apple picked from the tree in paradise, was forbidden fruit. He would not be the same man when he returned to the fleet.
For his part, Admiral Tovey had anguished over what to do in this situation. He was the only man who really knew the whole terrible truth about the Russian ship and crew, or so he thought. At that moment, another man was learning that truth, as Fedorov struggled to convince Brigadier Kinlan of his impossible fate. Yet Tovey knew nothing of this when he stood to greet Admiral Tovey as he arrived for the meeting. He had been considering the situation for some time, and had determined that, given the circumstances calling for this meeting, there would be no way he could keep Admiral Cunningham in the dark. The man was simply too essential to the operation of the fleet here, a steady and reliable hand on the tiller that would be difficult to replace.
