by James Philip
‘They were generated by the CIA’s Office of Security? Doesn’t that come under the ADDOCI?’
That was probably when the Vice President had panicked, or possibly, realised that – horror of horrors – he might be president one day soon; a job nobody who knew him seriously thought he actually wanted for a single moment. Being Governor of New York had been bad enough…
Kay Graham had clearly been well-briefed.
ADDOCI…
Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence: James Jesus Angleton, the most mysterious, secretive man at Langley.
‘Surely, those papers must be classified?’ Rockefeller had shot back, trying not to seem overly defensive.
Even by Rockefeller’s own account, Kay Graham had been politely disappointed with this, obviously expecting much better of such a highly erudite, intelligent man of the arts and good causes, whom, even now that he was Vice President remained the nation’s most generous patron of the arts and philanthropist.
Now Bob Haldeman was about to reiterate the ticking time-bomb question that the owner of The Washington Post had put to a stunned Nelson Rockefeller.
“Kay Graham asked, and it seems likely The Post is going to ask, along with an exposé of the documents in its possession,” the White House Chief of Staff prefaced, “why exactly, the man who was in charge of the collapse of US spying operations in Western Europe between 1959 and 1962, and who has since been spying on millions of patriotic Americans, is still ADDOCI?”
James Angleton adjusted his glasses, viewing Haldeman very much with the curiosity of a cat watching a goldfish in a bowl; ruthlessly calculating the optimum moment to trail his claws through the water.
The insulting manner in which the interrogative had been delivered, presumably in full knowledge of the visceral pain it would almost surely re-awaken, did not provoke the reaction Haldeman was hoping for: in fact, Angleton’s expression and the dull contempt in his eyes remained opaque as if he had not actually heard the question wrapped inelegantly around the ill-considered insult.
Just because the President and the Brits had ‘made up’ lately, was irrelevant. Angleton would never trust them again. Once bitten, thrice shy was the principle that applied. That he now accepted that the Soviets’ success in shutting down CIA operations in Eastern Europe and Russia in the years before the October War, was the work of Kim Philby, the former acting MI6 Head of Station in Washington, his long-time friend, was a non sequitur. That the Brits had known – strongly suspected was too weak a description – that Philby was a Soviet agent for years and never admitted as much to their closest allies; well, that was a thing he was never going to forget, let alone forgive. Moreover, he had drawn a deeper lesson from his personal, and his nation’s betrayal from the episode. People like Philby and the other ‘Cambridge Spies’ could not have acted alone and if that sort of thing could happen in England, it could as assuredly happen in North America. Thus, when a defector – KGB Major Anatoly Mikhaylovich Golitsyn - had posited, less than a year before the Cuban Missiles disaster, that there was a mole at Langley, he had begun the hunt. That Operation Maelstrom had subsumed the original mole hunt was simply an accident of history but the notion of leaving the imperative national task of the unravelling of the American resistance to those thick-eared idiots at the FBI had never been an option.
Not in James Jesus Angleton’s book!
When later, it had been put to him that his ‘mole hunt’ had turned into a ‘witch hunt’, which threatened to cripple the Agency around the time of the Cuban Missiles debacle, and had almost certainly paralysed Langley in the months leading up to the Battle of Washington, he had retorted that if there was ‘paralysis’ then it was the work of ‘bad actors’, traitors in their midst. Nothing that had happened since, had in any way altered his perspective, or his guiding calculus; the country was full of dissidents and it was his job to stop them dragging the United States to perdition.
“What did you tell Kay Graham?” He asked, coldly.
Bob Haldeman brushed the question aside.
“I told her that John Mitchell would serve her, and The Post, a non-disclosure order and a subpoena for the return of all classified documents in their possession.”
“And?”
“She laughed.”
Chapter 2
Friday 27th January 1967
Battleship Jean Bart, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France
First Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev attempted and failed to focus his vision for what seemed like an indeterminately long period of time. He did not try to move; knowing intuitively that this would be both a painful and probably, a very, very bad idea. The atmosphere stank of disinfectant, acrid bleach, there was a constant whisper of voices, a sense of movement around him and in the middle distance the low rush of…engine room blowers. So, he was on a ship, presumably the Jean Bart and from the proximity of the blowers, somewhere above the main armoured deck level amidships…
“Welcome back to the world of the living, Dmitry,” Aurélie Faure said gently, not stinting on her obvious relief.
The man felt the soft touch of her hand at his right shoulder and a moment later a cool cloth dabbed at his brow.
“You had us worried for a while after we pulled you out of the water,” the woman explained, her cheerfulness of that particular weary beyond measure angel of mercy kind.
The Russian blinked at her.
Her face came into and out of focus, as nausea washed across him.
“Where am I…”
“We converted the crew space beneath the boat deck into a makeshift hospital,” Aurélie Faure told him. “The sick bay was filled up almost as soon as the shooting stopped. We ran out of anaesthetics; thankfully, they operated on you while you were still unconscious.”
“What is the damage?” He asked, unwisely seeking to form a rueful smile on his lips.
For the first time he recognised the grey exhaustion in the woman’s face, and the uncertainty in eyes which had seen too many terrible things in the last few hours.
“You were shot twice.” Aurélie put a finger to her right torso, and then to her abdomen. “Both rounds went straight through. There’s a drain in your right lung, we don’t think the belly wound hit anything important, they just sewed that up. You swallowed a lot of water when you went into the bay. And the water is very cold at this time of year… It may have been the cold that stopped you bleeding to death.” Too much information, she decided. “Anyway, like I said, you surprised us all still being here this morning.”
That said, she smiled and blinked away a tear.
“Fortunately, several crew members had small stashes of morphine. We threatened that we would leave anybody who didn’t turn the stuff over to us behind, when we left, if they didn’t do the right thing. We got a couple of ampoules into you before we ran out.”
The woman sighed, viewed him fondly.
“What you did was unbelievably brave, Dmitry. We’d never have caught so many of the bastards in the open like that but for you…”
Kolokoltsev must have betrayed his utter bewilderment.
Aurélie was unsurprised that his memories were foggy.
“Somebody on one of the destroyers opened fire with an anti-aircraft cannon when you were almost at the top of the gangway,” she said, trying to be helpful. “Things were a little crazy after that.”
She grimaced wryly as she flexed her left shoulder.
The Russian noticed her right cheek was puffy as if she had walked into something…
Aurélie Faure sighed, and forced a wan smile.
“Oh, that,” she said, raising a hand to her face. “When the shooting started Rene tackled me to the deck and lay on top of me until the others could drag us back behind the sandbags. Mon Amiral,” she said with quiet pride, “got hit by shrapnel from a grenade, maybe from two grenades and a bullet, a spent one, thank God, knocked him out long enough for the surgeon,” a frown, because the Jean Bart’s ‘surgeon’ was a former sec
ond-year medical student press-ganged into his present post before Rene Leguay’s time with the fleet, “to dig out the biggest pieces of metal from his back and his,” she hesitated, oddly shy, “buttocks.”
“Where is…” Kolokoltsev’s strength was failing.
“He is on the bridge. The Fleet cannot stay here. We have to leave. There is a lot to be done.”
That was the understatement of the age.
Seeing that the Russian had passed out, Aurélie patted his torso, softly called across the cots between her and the nearest nurse-orderly that she planned to return to the bridge, and quietly departed.
Rene would be relieved to hear that Dmitry had made it through the night and besides, she needed to be by his side. She discarded her bloody once-white smock and emerged onto the deck. The cold air hit her like an unexpected slap in the face. For a moment she tottered, reached out to steady herself against the nearest bulkhead.
The Front Internationale’s Revolutionary Guards had had several big guns: 75-millimetre calibre rifles, she was told, probably mounted on light tanks, Char 13t-75 Modèle 51s most likely.
In the confusion the Jean Bart had been hit by at least ten, possibly twice as many rounds before her return fire, and that from the other ships in the bay had obliterated the threat.
Most of the hits had hardly scratched the side of the battleship or bounced off the impregnable main battery turrets but a small number of others, thankfully just a few, had crashed into the less well-armoured superstructure and bridge of the leviathan, killing and wounding over fifty of their people. One of the hits on the bridge had killed two of the flagship’s officers, both had been standing on the compass platform rather than in the heavily-armoured conning tower; presumably to get the best possible view of what was going on around the ship.
Aurélie’s uncle, an officer in the Reserve, who had been captured by the Germans near Verdun in May 1940, and spent the rest of the Second War in a series of grim prison camps, before returning to teaching history had once told her brother, Edward – she was the youngest of three children - that war was ‘messy, random and unutterably brutal.’ Eddy had been killed in Algeria just before Charles de Gaulle, after winning an election promising he would never betray France’s dead, shamelessly reneged on his pledge. They said the British had revived the Gaullist so-called ‘Free French’ to fight the Front Internationale, the Gaullists always betrayed their friends in the end, for such was the nature of the beast…
My thoughts are a mess…
Aurélie allowed herself a moment to reconnect with the harsh realities of the present. Her memories would have to wait for another day.
I was alone in the World; my sister Jacqueline had been a stranger to me long before the war. My family is…gone. My old family, leastways. Now, I have only my new family. My brothers and sisters on the Jean Bart…
Aurélie looked about her, letting the cold air sting her awake.
Nobody had had time to wash the blood off the decks of the flagship yet, like so many things, that would have to wait for another day.
Dmitry Kolokoltsev would have been dead if the last thing Rene Leguay had done before he passed out had not been to stop their people shooting the men in the water.
‘Prisoners! Get me prisoners! We have to know what’s going on!’
Those tank guns on shore were still shooting at the time.
Nevertheless, their people had started hooking and hauling on board the bodies floating nearest to the gangway. Most of the men landed were already dead or too far gone, Dmitry would have been left for dead had she not found him bleeding on the deck.
It had seemed like an age before her shrieking had attracted attention…
Last night’s battle – it could not have lasted more than ten minutes – was still an insane, unresolved melange of deafening explosions, blinding flashes, earthquake-like detonations, screaming, and the constant yammering of automatic gunfire.
One of the other ships had suddenly opened fire.
Tracers had sliced through the gloom.
There was shooting on the gangway.
Rene had tackled her as if he was on a rugby field, much as she had seen, many times, her brother crash into an opponent in her girlhood, cheering from the side-lines, hurling her to the deck and throwing himself on top of her.
The three 152-millimetre guns of the port turret of the ship’s aft mounted secondary battery had roared, seemingly right above her head, although intellectually she had known the nearest gun was over thirty metres away.
In a moment the air above her head had been filled with more tracers, and the deafening racket of countless automatic heavy-calibre weapons. The red and blue and white tracers had raced towards the shore at impossible speeds; the whole bay was lit up by the continuous explosions.
And then the great guns of No 1 turret had spoken.
In that moment Aurélie had imagined the ship had blown up!
The deck had heaved beneath her by then prostrate body.
The sound of the four great 380-millimetres naval rifles discharging had been like standing right next to a clap of thunder, except fourfold.
The ship had recoiled, rolled perceptibly, steadied.
And for several seconds afterwards she had heard nothing but for the ringing in her ears.
The next thing she was aware of was being hauled, literally by the collar of her shirt, behind cover.
‘Where is Rene? Mon Amiral…’
‘We’ve got him! We’ve got him!’
Rough hands had instantly begun to roam her body. She had fought back, not realising that she was covered in blood and that the men and women who had rushed out onto the open deck to save her and Rene were, far from molesting her, simply trying to find out where all the blood was coming from!
Aurélie began to climb up through the ship.
By the time she limped, stiffly onto the bridge she was breathless, ready to collapse, lie down, curl up and sleep forever. Suddenly dizzy, breathless she tottered. Fortunately, strong hands grabbed her, picking her up and carefully putting her in a chair.
She felt foolish discovering that she was in the Captain’s seat to the right of the binnacle. Making to get up, a hand on her shoulder restrained her.
“Somebody, bring Mademoiselle Faure a hot drink please. Something with brandy in it!”
Aurélie breathed a new, heartfelt sigh of relief to hear the strength in Rene Leguay’s voice. Strength and a now unshakable authority.
“You look all in,” the man sympathised.
“There is so much to do…” Belatedly, she remembered the first thing she had planned to tell her Amiral. “Dmitry is conscious. Sort of. He’s in a bad way but,” she shrugged, “but we haven’t lost him yet.”
“Good. That’s good.” Rene Leguay’s hand still steadied Aurélie. “Okay. Now you’ve looked after everybody else you ought to try to get a little shut-eye. Have something to drink, then lie down in the sea cabin,” he nodded towards his claustrophobic cubby hole built into the starboard side of the bridge.
“But there is so much to do,” she protested.
“Things are under control,” the man assured her.
This would have been a lot more convincing had Rene Leguay not looked like death half-warmed himself. Blood oozed and coagulated on the back of his jacket and trousers and she guessed he must have swallowed a handful of amphetamines to still be standing on his own two feet, more or less unaided.
The man met her concerned look with another half-smile.
“Serge Benois,” he explained, “has got three of the four big guns in No 1 turret re-loaded. The secondary battery seems to be operational again. If anybody tries to come down the coast road, we’ll blow them to bits. I’ve sent some of our people over to the Clemenceau and the other ships to see if they can make enough steam to get under way and in a couple of hours La Seine will come alongside. Sometime tonight she ought to be able to start putting some oil back into the bunkers of our ships.”
/> Serge Benois was Capitaine de corvette – equivalent to a lieutenant-commander in the British Royal Navy – the battleship’s Gunnery Officer, and now Rene’s second-in-command. He was a man in his early fifties, grizzled, who had, like the ship’s few surviving regular officers, given up, long before Rene had come aboard.
Until last night, the Jean Bart’s big guns had not fired a shot since 1957.
Aurélie was almost falling asleep in the chair.
Rene Leguay’s presence made everything somehow…all right.
Back on the bridge with him she felt safe again.
“Not all the ships will be able to leave,” she murmured.
The man chuckled grimly.
“We aren’t leaving anybody behind. If it comes to it the Jean Bart will tow the whole bloody fleet out to sea!”
It was said part in jest. No matter, it perfectly expressed Rene Leguay’s intentions. The French Mediterranean Fleet was done with the Front Internationale.
“Where will we go?” Aurélie asked, faintly.
The man thought about it for a second, guffawed anew: “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song,” he whispered in halting English as if exchanging some private joke that only they understood.
“John Masefield,” she muttered, impressed. She beckoned him to lean closer. “The next time you jump on my bones can we do it on a mattress, not the deck, Mon Amiral?”
The man vented a snort of startled laughter which made everybody else on the bridge turn around. He shook his head and waved for the others to carry on doing whatever they had been doing.
For a moment he nuzzled the top of her head.
“That’s one promise I know I can keep, Mademoiselle Faure.”
Chapter 3
Saturday 28th January 1967
British Aircraft Corporation, Filton, Bristol, England
Air Marshal Sir Daniel French stepped out onto the balcony surrounding the Flight Operations Tower at RAF Filton the moment the rain eased, itching to get the best possible view of the new American-built Kestrel IIAs as they flew in from the USS Bonhomme Richard (CV-31), steaming some thirty-five miles away in the Bristol Channel.