The Falklands Intercept by Crispin Black

Most still had names that would have been familiar to Nelson’s captains. But they had got on this one in a hurry, in the middle of a windy and rough night, and he hadn’t quite caught the name. No one in his platoon had heard it either and he was too embarrassed to ask in case he got shouted at. Turning to go back to his men he saw a large diamond shaped shield in gold. It was beautiful and glistened in the sunlight. At its centre was a portrait, just the face, with a Latin motto underneath,nothing else. A tough looking man in his early forties maybe, not handsome but certainly not hideous. The motto read
Pax Quaeritur Bello
– Peace is sought through war. Rather appropriate thought Jacot. Beneath it the name of the ship in gold lettering – Royal Fleet Auxiliary
Oliver Cromwell
. It was an odd name for a fleet auxiliary, ships mainly involved in supply and transportation rather than fighting.
Oliver Cromwell
would be a better name for a warship but it was hardly one the admiralty would choose. It was odd, thought Jacot, that there was a ship at all in the service of the crown that commemorated this great man. It was odd too that here he was in the middle of a war when just a couple of years before he had been a schoolboy.
    He looked at the face again. There was something about the heraldic design that was unsettling. It wasn’t derived from the famous “warts and all” portrait so the face itself was pleasing enough, but the way the thing had been painted brought to mind the dead Cromwell more than the living – the head looked as though it had been recently severed from the body. As indeed it had been after the Restoration, when Cromwell’s body was disinterred and his head stuck on a spike above Westminster Hall. The head, if Jacot remembered rightly from his recent school history lessons, had fallen down in a storm a few years later eventually ending up, after many adventures, being buried at Cromwell’s old Cambridge college sometime in the 1960s. Jacot shuddered. Suddenly he felt vulnerable and far from home.
    He was sore in need of another cigarette already, and cheering up by Sergeant Jones whose pithy, apposite and obscene commentary on unfolding military events was invariably a refreshing tonic.
    It was Jones’ voice that somehow reached him in the midst of the smoke and the flames. ‘This way. This way lads. I am in the doorway. On me lads. Follow my voice.’ He must have been shouting with all his might but the tone was even – it was a command not an outburst of panic. It was this voice faintly heard through the smoke that brought Jacot back from the brink of hysteria. He had assumed that staying calm in a crisis would come naturally, that he was born to lead. But he had not reckoned with being trapped on a burning ship – indeed he was burning himself. But then the voice was lost in the noise.
    Jacot had to get up and get out. Thick black smoke meant he could see little. He could hear men screaming. Presumably they were cooking too. He tried to push himself up from the deck but something heavy and shaking was on top of him.
    It was leaking blood and shouting, ‘My legs. My f…..g legs. Help me. Help me. For God’s sake help me.’
    Jacot pushed hard and the body rolled off him – shrieking face down on the steel deck. Every instinct, every message from the brain was telling him to get out. Get out. Get out. Get some air. Get off the ship before it blows sky high. But he could not go – not just yet. He turned the body over and reached for a morphine syrette hanging round his neck. If he could get the casualty to be still there would be a chance of carrying himto safety. The body writhed and shuddered. Jacot tried to find a place to inject but as he pulled up the arm of the casualty’s combat jacket a mixture of burned material and cooked skin started to come away in his hands. There hardly seemed to be man there at all just a