Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “How long do we have?”

  “Before those idiots get themselves organised? A day or two, perhaps. Longer, if we’re lucky but we need to be gone before that happens.”

  In other circumstances Benois would be reporting to the ship’s Executive Officer but he, of course, was dead. The man had put a pistol to his temple last autumn. His replacement had been killed in the battle with the Revolutionary Guards, cut in half by a 20-millimetres cannon shell as he stood on the bridge wing. In the absence of anybody else; Serge was reporting to her because…well, actually, she had no real idea why anybody was reporting to her, or for that matter even taking her seriously!

  She was their Admiral’s secretary, his steward, no more or less. Rene had not taken her as his mistress nor, had he given anybody the impression that she was his mistress.

  And yet knowing that their Amiral was wounded the Jean Bart’s people were looking to her…

  The World had truly gone mad!

  The flagship’s unlikely new Executive Officer must have read her thoughts, some of them, anyway. He shook his head, touched her arm.

  “Aurélie,” he murmured reassuringly. “We all stopped being in the Marine Nationale after the war. We never had a leader until le Amiral came aboard the Jean Bart,” he went on, lowly, as if he was afraid the fitfully sleeping man in the nearby bunk was hearing every word. “The Worker’s Committees put their own people onto the fleet. Nobody knows what happened to the original captains of the bigger ships, they were just purged most likely. The fucking Navy sat back and let it happen. But when your man,” he went on, nodding at Rene Leguay’s unconscious form in the nearby gloom, “came to us, things started to change. He was one of us, a real Navy man who cared about us. He didn’t care about the state of the ships, or all the old rules we were breaking, or the ordinary citizens sheltering in the fleet. Right from the start he was our Amiral. He reminded us all how much we had missed the old La Royale!”

  The Royal…

  No real French Navy-man called his service the ‘National Marine’ when he was among his friends. To a son of the service it was always ‘La Royale’, a living, breathing tradition.

  Aurélie Faure was staring at the man with eyes that must have been as large as dinner-plates by then.

  “And you were his woman months ago, only we knew it, and you knew it before he did.” Serge Benois declared with the authority of a fond, slightly disreputable uncle. “Whatever, whether I like it or not, I’m the real executive officer of this tub now. So, if it comes to it, I’ll sail her, and I’ll fight her as well as I can if our Amiral,” another nod to the sleeping form in the nearby bunk, “needs me to. But I won’t make the mistake of thinking this is my fleet the way it is his,” he shook his head wryly, “or yours,” he concluded, half-bowing his head: “la dame de mon Amiral.”

  My Admiral’s lady…

  Now Aurélie suspected she was blushing like a virgin backstage at the Folies Bergère!

  She stared at the deck by her feet, nonplussed.

  “So,” the man sighed, “while the Amiral is sleeping; who else on board his flagship would I report to, Mademoiselle Faure?”

  Much as she would have preferred to cry, Aurélie sniffed, straightened to her full height, her forehead just about coming to the man’s unshaven chin.

  “I thank you for your report, Commander Benois. I am sure that the Amiral will resume his duties as soon as he has rested. I will pass on you report when he awakes.”

  It was not until she was alone again with Rene Leguay that Aurélie became aware that she was shaking from head to toe. She folded her arms tight about her chest, squeezed her eyes shut and hoped, against hope she was not about to completely break down.

  Rene had once remarked, in that self-effacing way of his that tended to take the sting out of even a stiff rebuke, that the difference between a real Navy man and a ‘fair-weather’ sailor was that a ‘real’ La Royale man always remembered that ‘things can always get worse!’

  There was just enough time for Serge Benois’s booted footsteps in the passageway to fade to quietness.

  Before the alarm bells started sounding throughout the ship.

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday 31st January 1967

  HMS Campbeltown, 22 nautical miles south of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

  The old Fletcher class destroyer was quartering a six-mile square patch of sea, zigzagging just in case one or more of the Front Internationale submarines based at Toulon had managed to slip past HMS Onslaught, the diesel electric Oberon class submarine presently guarding the approaches to that eerily derelict port. Overhead the sky was overcast, and farther out to sea Campbeltown’s air search and gun director radars picked out the two high-flying de Havilland Sea Vixen FAW2s of Task Force V1’s combat air patrol. The CAP was operating twenty or so miles inshore of the invisible flagship and the cruisers of the gun line. Campbeltown’s sisters, the Perth and the Berwick flanked their Leader at varying ranges of eight to ten miles respectively, to east and to west, with the other four Fletchers of the 21st Destroyer Squadron ‘riding herd’ on the Victorious.

  Captain Dermot O’Reilly paced his darkened bridge, pausing now and then to remark about this or that, or to peer in apparently idle curiosity at the glowing green screens of the radar repeaters. The ship rode easily on the strangely placid wintery Mediterranean swells.

  Campbeltown had been closed up to Action Stations – these days, really just a refined, nervier version of Air Defence Stations One – for the last hour as the destroyer’s erratic zigzagging had gradually brought her closer to the rocky shores of the Cote d’Azur.

  O’Reilly had been surprised by how little electronic ‘life’ there seemed to be on that still distant shore. No probing radar pulses reached out into the night, and apart from a few faraway echoes from small boats close inshore – fishing boats, perhaps – there was no coastal traffic, and there were no aircraft movements in the skies over France. Given that he had been sceptical of the reconnaissance reports about the lack of air activity, it was a little unnerving to discover how far France, less than five years ago, a modern, fast-growing industrial powerhouse, had descended back into the medieval darkness.

  Yet now his radars left no doubt.

  There was no distant glow of lights along the northern shore; and the invisible electromagnetic spectrum scanned by his radars was deserted.

  The ship’s C-I-C – Command Information Centre – reported occasional snatches of what could have been talk, or broadcasting; it was hard to pick anything out of the background mush, white noise which might have been jamming except, it was not.

  Steaming north from Gibraltar, the distant Spanish coast had been radio ‘quiet’, not dead like this.

  The minutes dragged past.

  The destroyer’s Captain fought back the urge to pester his Communications Officer.

  They ought to have heard something by now, instead, his mind was turning through ever-darker possibilities.

  He had proposed that the best way to avoid ‘unnecessary unpleasantness’ might simply be for him to take Campbeltown into the anchorage at Villefranche, and to attempt to establish navy-man to navy-man contact with whoever was in command…

  ‘No, we’re not doing that, Dermot,’ Rear Admiral Henry Leach had decided. ‘Not unless we know exactly what we’re dealing with. The blighters might simply turn the Jean Bart’s big guns on you!’

  Nonetheless, neither man actually wanted to blast the French Fleet out of the water unless they absolutely had to; hence, tonight’s attempt to communicate with the ships at Villefranche.

  Thus far, to no good effect…

  Suddenly: “The Comms Room have made contact with the Jean Bart, sir!” The bridge talker reported.

  O’Reilly hesitated, realising that there was more.

  “They say they are in communication with a lady calling herself la dame de mon Amiral, sir?”

  Dermot O’Reilly had grown up a fluent French-speaker, his best frien
d as a teenager – the poor fellow had been killed at Dieppe in 1942 - had been of Quebecuar descent and although his command of his second language had grown a little rusty with disuse, he grinned at the talker’s Anglicized accent.

  ‘My Admiral’s Lady,” he guffawed out aloud, not remotely knowing what to make of it.

  He had been handed a headset without having to request it.

  He donned it.

  “Patch me through. Headset only, please.”

  This, he decided, was going to be interesting!

  He waited patiently to be told he was on an open circuit.

  “This is in the plain, sir,” he was reminded. It was a comfort to know that all the evidence of the last few hours was that there were precious few people listening; but not that much of a comfort. “Understood. Carry on.”

  The connection crackled and hissed, swooped and attenuated distractingly.

  “This is Captain O’Reilly,” he said. He thought about it: “C'est Capitaine O’Reilly!”

  For several seconds there was silence.

  “My name is Aurélie Faure, I am Secretary to Contra Amiral Rene Leguay, the Commanding Officer of the Jean Bart and the Villefranche Fleet.”

  The woman had spoken in French.

  “Forgive me, my English is un-practiced,” she added apologetically.

  “That’s all right, Madame. I speak French,” Dermot O’Reilly replied sternly. He thought about trying to apply normal radio protocols. He decided using ‘OVER’, or ‘CLEAR’ or ‘COPY’ risked confusing matters possibly beyond all recovery. “Please explain why Amiral Leguay is not available?”

  There was a hissing of static for some seconds.

  “Amiral Leguay was wounded when the Front Internationale attempted to seize the fleet. That was two nights ago. He lives, he will be all right…I think, I hope. But at the moment he is incapacitated in his cabin and much of our radio,” she paused, ‘many of our intercom and public address system cables situated above the main armoured deck were shot through in the recent battle. I am speaking to you from the ship’s radio room and it will take some minutes for my comrades to carry Mon Amiral to this place…”

  Dermot O’Reilly was still digesting this when the woman asked him two obvious – in the circumstances – questions.

  “Where are you, Captain O’Reilly?”

  Axiomatically, he was not about to call out Campbeltown’s longitude and latitude. This, the woman belatedly worked out for herself a moment later.

  “Sorry, that is a stupid question…”

  A burst of clicking and roaring drowned out everything for about ten seconds.

  “Sorry, I heard none of that?” O’Reilly called.

  The woman’s question was stark: “Have you come to kill us all or to save us?”

  Now that really was a good question!

  “These are matters I must discuss with Amiral Leguay,” O’Reilly said. “In the meantime, we need to find a ‘cleaner’ and a more secure frequency over which to communicate. I will keep this channel open. Please pass your headset to one of your radio people, my Communications Officer will advise him of alternative frequencies by which you may contact this ship if this channel is jammed, or unusable for any reason.”

  O’Reilly scowled as he handed back the headset.

  “How far away is the Flagship?” He asked Lieutenant Keith Moss, Campbeltown’s Navigator and by chance presently the officer of the watch.

  “Victorious is over fifty miles to the south, sir. Beyond scrambled TBS range,” he apologised, as if it was his fault.

  O’Reilly glanced at the air search repeater.

  “Request the CAP to fall back on Campbeltown. I want to piggyback their secure comms to the Flagship. As soon as the link is up, put it through to my sea cabin please.”

  Calling his sea-cabin a ‘cabin’ was to grotesquely malign the word ‘cabin’. Cupboard or ‘dog-kennel, would have been pejorative yet oddly apt names for the tiny space crammed into the starboard side of the bridge. However, it was home when the ship was under way and frankly, he would not have swapped it for a suite in a five-star hotel.

  He switched on the overhead lamp, shut the hatch at his back and tried very hard, to think slowly, rationally. Contrary to their worst fears the ships at Villefranche might not be under the control of Krasnaya Zarya, the Front Internationale…

  A buzzer rang.

  He picked up the handset near the head of his narrow bunk.

  “Captain speaking!”

  “The flagship is on circuit two, sir.”

  O’Reilly flicked the toggle.

  Rear Admiral Henry Leach sounded as if he had been half-expecting his call.

  “What the Devil has gone wrong now, Dermot?” The other man inquired jovially.

  O’Reilly recounted his short exchange with the woman claiming to be on board the Jean Bart.

  “Fifty-fifty it is some kind of ruse, a trap, Dermot.”

  “I agree, sir. But…”

  “Well. You had better have a chat with this chap Leguay,” the Task Force Commander determined. “We shall take stock of the situation again. Carry on.”

  Chapter 11

  Tuesday 31st January, 1967

  Headquarters Free French 2nd Corps, Châlons-sur-Marne

  Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver stepped down from the train, his booted feet sinking deep into the falling snow. As was his custom when he came to France or visited troops in the field, on training exercises or operations in Northern Ireland, he was attired in standard British Army battle dress absent any insignia of rank. He wore a tanker’s black beret with the badge of the 7th Armoured Brigade; his one small concession to sentimentality in memory of his days in the desert in the bad old days of 1941-42.

  The Supreme Commander of All Allied Forces in France – SCAAFF – was similarly decked out in battle dress, except unashamedly he was proudly wearing his General’s tabs and medal ribbons on his left breast.

  Alain de Boissieu crisply saluted the Chief of the Defence Staff and stuck out his right hand in welcome, as, in his turn, did the lean, moustachioed, smiling officer at his shoulder bearing the pip and crossed sword and baton tab of a major general.

  For the cameras, Michael Carver, who had stuck rigidly to his self-denying ordinance that their ought to be only one field marshal in the British Army – otherwise the elevation the rank implied was meaningless, until the official retirement from the active list of his predecessor as CDS, Sir Richard Amyatt, now Lord Hull, gazetted a month ago, which was due to come into effect at midnight – exchanged fraternal kisses with his French host, followed by a manly handshake with de Boissieu’s Chief Liaison Officer, Francis St John Waters, VC.

  Yesterday afternoon, Carver had attended Woodstock Palace to receive his field marshal’s baton from Her Majesty, the Queen, in a ceremony carefully choreographed before the assembled British and ever-growing international press corps in Oxford. He had found the whole thing an enormous strain, a genuine trial whereas the arduous overnight journey to France by train, ferry and train, again, as the Arctic blizzard now engulfing Northern Europe swept in from the east, had been a blessed relief and an invaluable opportunity to receive and digest the implications of the latest reports, while locked in conference with his Staff.

  Carver had instructed his senior lieutenants that while they were in France, to conduct all discussions ‘in French’, and firmly reiterated his earlier mandate that there will be ‘no suggestion of us and them’ in allied deliberations.

  Frank Waters, the Prime Minister’s husband, was in a typically buoyant mood.

  “Do you think the bloody weather is part of Warsaw Concerto, sir?” He put to the Chief of the Defence Staff.

  This prompted hearty guffaws all around them.

  Michael Carver noted that Alain de Boissieu had laid on a large honour guard; long lines of Legionnaires, Chasseurs to one side, and light tanks and armoured personnel carriers to the other, awaiting his inspection in the increasingly wintery sc
ene.

  The Chief of the Defence Staff reviewed the troops with keen alacrity, pausing a couple of times to complement a man on his turnout, once remarking that ‘a White Christmas has come late again this year’.

  Then the troops were dismissed back to their billets and the senior officers hurriedly sought the warmth and privacy of the Hôtel de Ville, formerly the mayoral offices of Châlons-sur-Marne, for the last year the Headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Free French Army, and now the home of the Staff of the Free French 2nd Corps, now briefly hosting SCAFF and his entourage.

  Major General Guy Méry, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of the Second War Resistance, commanded in this sector of the front. A tall, distinguished-looking man he was noticeably stiffer in the presence of his English guests than his chief, Alain de Boissieu.

  Frank Waters had warned Michael Carver not to be concerned if Méry ‘seemed a little offish’. According to the ex-SAS man the ‘Free French High Command is a bit like my wife’s party, practically every senior officer, regardless of the abundant weight of evidence to the contrary, thinks he is top quality C-in-C material!’

  The Chief of the Defence Staff had not planned to come over to France for the start of what everybody – bizarrely, given the climatic conditions – called the ‘Spring Offensive’. But then he had been handed the latest meteorological reports.

  A giant storm system from the east – all the way from Siberia, it seemed - was rolling across Western Europe and temperatures were predicted to fall as low, as improbable as it seemed, to perhaps minus fifteen or more degrees Celsius over parts of northern Germany, the Low Countries and much of France, in the next few days.

  Roads would soon be impassable from the Channel coast to the Auvergne, the rebuilt railways of the Somme and Picardy were predicted to grind to a standstill within hours, and men in the open could easily freeze to death in hours…