Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  A cable to the Secretary of State, Henry Cabot Lodge II – whatever his shortcomings a decent, courteous man who had always respected the dignity and the sensibilities of the invidious situation Dobrynin found himself in – had swiftly prompted a request for the US Air Force to make the necessary arrangements and twenty-four hours later everything had been in place.

  A dozen cabins on board the USS United States had been set aside for the Soviet delegation and the Secret Service had appointed a liaison officer to be ‘at Ambassador Dobrynin’s disposal on arrival in San Francisco’.

  Dobrynin had immediately asked for alternative accommodation to be provided ‘on land’. Secure lodging at the Presidio had been offered, and his people would inspect those facilities when they got to California.

  Apart from having to stand in front of a bloody US Air Force plane things had been relatively painless, until now…

  The Soviet Ambassador brandished his notes.

  Lately, his large-boned frame had filled out to become again the imposing, bear-like presence he had been in better times; although inwardly, he felt the chill as he had never done before October 1962.

  Every survivor of war plague said as much…

  The wind plucked at his papers as spots of rain began to fall.

  Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov stood shivering in the cold of the winter morning, longing to collapse into a seat on the jetliner and surrender to the blissful arms of a restorative slumber. He had been too exhausted, worn down by the exigencies of his original tortuous journey to Washington, the influenza which had touched him last week, and the inevitable march of time, to do more than run his eye over the momentous statement his much younger, heartier comrade was about to make to the American media.

  When the two men had read the Troika’s ‘United Nations Directive’ they had looked at each other for some moments before Dobrynin had voiced the thoughts they were both thinking: ‘I can honestly say that I did not see this coming, Comrade!’

  Now Dobrynin focused on the words already beginning to dissolve in the rain.

  “Gentlemen, it is my honour to announce today that Chairman Shelepin and the Deputy First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will, in the next few days, be flying to San Francisco to take the Soviet Union’s rightful place at the top table of international affairs.”

  Given the inherent leakiness of the State Department it would have been a minor miracle if most of the men and women gathered on the wet tarmac at Andrews Field, had not known that the diplomatic game was, well and truly, afoot several days ago.

  In recent weeks the American media had been obsessed with rising ‘gas prices’, the ongoing revelations about the Warwick Hotel Scandal, not to mention the latest indictments posted by the US War Crimes Tribunal, detailing in still more egregious fine print, the depravities committed by the rebels before and during the Civil War. The forthcoming United Nations ‘circus’ had not been front page news, and the paucity of hard information seeping out of Camp David about the allegedly frosty US-British pre-San Francisco planning summit, had forced broadcasters and newspaper editors to look elsewhere for their headlines.

  Anatoly Dobrynin suspected that yesterday would be the last ‘quiet’ news day for a while…

  “Ever since the disaster of the Cuban Missiles War the United States and its allies have attempted to conduct themselves on the international stage as if my country no longer existed. Consequently, the risk of a new and even more terrible global conflagration has been ever-present in the last fifty-one months. Historically, after all great wars there has been a coming together of the parties, old enemies have come together to make pacts to ensure that the mistakes of our fathers are not repeated by we, the sons and daughters of war. President Kennedy, President Johnson and now, President Nixon, have refused to confront the great questions of war and peace which confront the World today.”

  Nobody had hurled a rock at him…yet.

  That was probably a good sign.

  “Chairman Shelepin will fly to San Francisco in search of a new global settlement. We have no wish, or desire to revisit the failures of Versailles in 1919 or of Potsdam in 1945; the one led to the Second War in which twenty million of my Motherland’s sons and daughters perished, and the other to the Cold War and the cataclysm of the Cuban Missiles War, and all the miseries which have followed.”

  Dobrynin tried to speak slowly.

  “It is my country’s wish for there to be a peace between the great nations of the Earth. But not a peace between the victors and to the defeated; rather, a peace that respects the legitimate security and territorial imperatives of all the parties. A peace which outlaws great wars forever but which allows different economic and political systems to co-exist.”

  This was where it got…serious.

  “The Soviet Union is prepared to respect the rightful sphere of influence of the United States. In return, it demands that the Soviet Union’s rights in Europe be respected.”

  And even more serious…

  “We must move away from the flawed settlement of the post-Great Patriotic War era and international forums must be re-configured to reflect the realities on the ground. Specifically, the Security Council of the United Nations must be re-modelled or scrapped. It is simply not tenable in this new era for France, a country that does not exist in any meaningful form at this time, or for the island of Formosa, to be allowed to continue to speak for the Chinese people, over ninety-five percent of whom live on the mainland of China in a completely different country under their own government.”

  Dobrynin had no intention of spending the next thirty minutes reading out a list of demands, many of which were at best fanciful, and few of which were actually anything other than provocations, a classic smoke and mirrors tactic. He would leave that for the negotiators at San Francisco.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a great prize to be won on board the USS United States in San Francisco Bay.” This he asserted, his voice ringing with gruff gravitas. “If the United States and its allies will de-commission its nuclear arsenal, so will the Soviet Union. If the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will turn its tanks into ploughshares and send its warships to the breaker’s yards, so will the Soviet Union. If the West scraps its warplanes, so will the Soviet Union. If NATO disbands, so will the Warsaw Pact. As an earnest of its good faith, the Soviet Union is prepared to accept, as a starting point for all future peace talks the October 1962 demarcation lines. The Soviet Union will unilaterally undertake to withdraw its forces behind those boundaries if the United States will do likewise…”

  Which was, as they all knew, hogwash.

  US forces could not march back into South Korea, or reassert their pre-war influence in South East Asia, the geopolitical map of the Middle East had been redrawn by the Soviet invasion of Iraq and Iran, and the expulsion of US oil companies from the Arabian Peninsula. There were no ‘boundaries’ in Europe other than that of the Rhine, and the Alps guarding the passes into a fragmented and strife-torn Italian peninsular. The Balkans, Turkey and the Anatolian littoral seethed with civil war, partially under Soviet control. The old Warsaw Pact existed in name alone and nobody in Washington, or anywhere else in the West could put their hands on their heart and claim, one way or another, if Russia and China were friends, allies of any kind, or simply old enemies looking to take advantage of the other’s weakness. Elsewhere, Krasnaya Zarya hold outs, the legacy of older Soviet inspired insurgencies and the exigencies of a world trade system which had still barely recovered from the disruptions of 1962, 1963 and 1964, had caused political, economic and vast humanitarian disasters, and hugely ravaged parts of the old colonial empires. Even unaligned, potentially mighty India – on account of its stalled wars with Pakistan and its ally, China over Kashmir and the Himalayan Ladakh - struggled just to feed its people.

  “Or,” Dobrynin called, much in the fashion of an enraged Grizzly Bear, “let us, let the World hear the peace proposals of the Gov
ernment of the United States. Chairman Shelepin will come to San Francisco with no pre-conditions, with no red lines. The World is in crisis, let us together chart a way forward!”

  Chapter 17

  Wednesday 1st February 1967

  Commonwealth One, Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota

  Within minutes of Margaret Thatcher completing her deeply disturbing interview with Rachel French, Guy, her disconcerting, frightening interlocutor’s stepson – the pilot of Commonwealth One – had come over the intercom and with masterful understatement explained: ‘There’s nothing to worry about but several red lights have just blinked on up her in the cockpit…’

  As if this was nothing anybody should concern themselves with, he had gone on to explain that he was requesting the US Air Force to escort the VC-10 to ‘somewhere safe’ where ‘we can put down’ and ‘run a few routine checks’.

  Margaret Thatcher knew she would remember the apologetic, almost hurt insouciance in her pilot’s words; as if the fact that there was a problem with the aircraft was somehow Guy French’s personal fault, a thing that clearly mortified him to his very core.

  Commonwealth One had bled off height and speed, eventually flying on across the wasteland of post-war Wisconsin, across Minnesota to North Dakota, intercepted by a pair of F-4 Phantoms over the darkened, barren, ruined cityscape of Chicago some minutes after having declared an emergency.

  Guy French had sent his co-pilot back into the main passenger cabin to personally explain the situation soon afterwards.

  ‘The aircraft is flying happily,’ he had explained cheerfully. ‘It is just that some of the instruments are playing up and every now and then the starboard outer engine surges somewhat. So, we’ll be switching that off in a few minutes. The kite can fly on two engines, or even one at a stretch, so going down to three is an absolute breeze. The Americans have offered us facilities at Minot and Grand Forks, or several nearer fields in the unlikely event we run into more trouble.’

  Commonwealth One had made an unusually bumpy landing on the three-and-a-half-mile-long main runway at Grand Forks Air Force Base; a thing Guy French had subsequently fulsomely apologised for. It transpired that the reason the aircraft had rolled for so long after it touched down was that he had not wanted to risk touching the brakes on account of his instruments reporting an almost complete loss of hydraulic pressure in the undercarriage and braking systems. The bumpiness of the landing was attributable to his having had to turn off not one, but two of the VC-10’s four Rolls-Royce Conway Mk 301 turbofans on the approach to Grand Forks. In fact, as soon as the jetliner had come to a halt, he had ordered – firmly but very respectfully - an emergency disembarkation.

  ‘Dreadfully sorry about that,’ he confessed, afterwards, downcast, ‘I was afraid something might have broken when we bumped up and down like that on landing. I thought it was for the best that everybody vacated the kite pronto, just in case there was a fire…’

  In the following hours Commonwealth One had been towed to the hangar complexes which normally serviced the B-52s of the 4133rd Strategic Bomb Wing, and the McDonnell F-101 Voodoo supersonic interceptors of the 478th Fighter Group, and it seemed, every aircraft engineer and mechanic in the US Air Force had fallen upon the stricken VC-10 in response to the Base Commander’s gruffly unequivocal command to ‘fix it fast’.

  An hour after landing the President had been on the line to Grand Forks, personally inquiring after the safety and comfort of his British guests. An offer to send an aircraft to convey Margaret Thatcher and her entourage onward to the West Coast was forthcoming; and likewise, a suggestion that Air Force One, the modified long-range Boeing VC-137C flagship of the Presidential air fleet, might stopover at Grand Forks to collect the Prime Minister’s party…

  ‘No, no, I can’t have you being put out in such a fashion,’ the Prime Minister had objected.

  In the end it was agreed that if Commonwealth One could not be safely repaired within the next twenty-four hours, the US Air Force would assume responsibility for safely delivering the British delegation to San Francisco. In the meantime, Grand Forks was pulling out all the stops to accommodate and to entertain its unexpected visitors.

  The Base Commander, a large, phlegmatic man with a stern physiognomy and a growling laugh who had flown B-24 Liberators with the Eighth Air Force in England in 1943; seemingly both the grimmest and the happiest days of his life, treated the British Prime Minister as if she was the Queen.

  Everybody had been put up in marvellously functional, comfortable, spic and span quarters in a wing of the Officers’ Mess complex, royally attended by stewards and guarded by immaculately turned out military policemen (and women).

  ‘How practical would it be for Rachel French to do a disappearing act before we leave this place?’ Margaret Thatcher had put to Airey Neave and Steuart Pringle.

  The two men had considered this for some moments.

  ‘My chaps could smuggle her out on an expedition to the nearest town, Ma’am,” the Royal Marine had remarked.

  “I doubt of the locals would count our people out, and then in again, Margaret,” Airey Neave had offered.

  The nearest town – more a community straggling south of the nearby east-west state highway – was a place called Emerado. Grand Forks itself, was some fifteen or sixteen miles to the east, bisected by the north-south US Route 26.

  ‘Perhaps, an expedition to Grand Forks?’ Steuart Pringle prompted hopefully.

  The Prime Minister had recognised that her personal guardian angel was immensely, albeit genteelly, keen to see the back of Lady Rachel French!

  Nobody at Grand Forks AFB had batted an eyelid when several of the AWPs and a couple of the Prime Minister’s junior staffers, undertook a jaunt into Grand Forks the next morning. Similarly, nobody seemed to notice that the returning party, all with diplomatic papers and thus immune from any of the normal base security checks, it seemed, was one short of their full complement.

  Later, she had confessed to Tom Harding-Grayson that she felt she had betrayed Rachel.

  ‘No, Margaret,’ he had objected paternally. ‘Things are what they are…’

  ‘I should never have given permission for her to be approached in the first place!’

  ‘Don’t you think the Americans would have approached her, anyway?’

  Her Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary had reminded her that as a result of the breakneck expansion of the Anglo-American aerospace partnership, Wiltshire was turning into an ‘American camp these days’. He had speculated that as many as one in fifteen or twenty of the new arrivals from the United States either worked for, or were in some way secretly affiliated to the CIA.

  ‘Trust me. Somebody, would have made the initial approach to Rachel, with or without our leave.’

  This thought had done nothing whatsoever to alleviate Margaret Thatcher’s nascent guilt, which lingered like a miasma low in her consciousness.

  Now, finally, everybody was strapped in as Commonwealth One taxied smoothly onto the main runway and halted at the threshold. Guy French was being overly cautious; today he ran up the engines against the brakes, throttled back.

  There was a delay of several seconds.

  “Captain to crew, prepare for take-off.”

  And then, to his passengers.

  “Everything looks ticketyboo up here. We’ve been routed a long way west today, so the flight down to California will probably be in the order of about four to five hours. At some stage we should get a jolly good view of the Rockies; I’ll come back on the intercom when we’re a bit closer. Until then, I hope you enjoy the rest of our interrupted flight!”

  In moments the jetliner was surging forward and in no time at all, leaping into the air like a rocket-powered salmon, climbing steeply away from Grand Forks after barely using a third of its great runway.

  Not for the first time the Prime Minister found herself contemplating the wrecked landscapes over which they had flown, to reach the safety of Grand Forks.


  Remembrance was their one inviolable defence against stumbling again down the road to ever more terrible future wars. When the spring came the wastelands would ‘green’ anew, like London, large tracts of which had already been reclaimed by the Thames; verdant scrubland, new growth feasting on the nutrient-rich ashes of the last metropolis.

  That train of thinking brought to mind her most recent conversations with Miriam Prior-Bramall, the solitary Labour Party member of her Cabinet charged with oversight of the London Garden City Project (LGCP).

  Miriam had always been sensitive to the contradictions of her position within Margaret Thatcher’s Government. Her own Party had long since disowned her as a traitor, withdrawn ‘the Parliamentary whip’, effectively consigning her to internal exile and certain de-selection as a Labour candidate at the next election. She attended Cabinet, reported on her portfolio – London and other reconstruction projects and plans – but declined to vote and often excused herself when strictly Party-political topics were under discussion.

  Once, or sometimes twice a month she lunched with the Prime Minister, alone the two women would – as unlikely as it seemed – enjoy each other’s company, and almost although not quite manage to gossip, and review the progress of the LGCP. The last time Miriam’s soldier husband, Major General Edwin Bramall was home from France, the Thatchers had entertained the couple at their rooms in Hertford College. Frank had got on like a house on fire with Edwin, while the women talked of the planned network of villages to be planted, or allowed to generically ‘grow’ within the sea of greening ruins of the former capital.