Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Several day’s personal correspondence had caught up with the British delegation at Andrews Field, and a fresh slew of telegrams had passed through the communications centre at Grand Forks Air Force Base. By design only the highest priority communications had been allowed to interrupt the summit at Camp David, thus, if was as if the flood gates had suddenly been opened!

  She and the President had had their senior advisors agree the text of an anodyne official communique which had shamelessly glossed over the most egregious of their differences, and enthusiastically highlighted those areas – which, whatever the naysayers claimed, were many and significant – where the parties stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’.

  All to no avail.

  Already, much to the Prime Minister’s chagrin, the DC press corps was damning the Camp David discussions as a ‘car wreck’. That, in her humble opinion, was a travesty: just because the United Kingdom was unprepared to unquestioningly fall into line with everything the United States wanted was, she had decided, probably a sign of hope rather than a cause for despair going forward.

  ‘The future is usually somebody else’s problem, Margaret,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had said, attempting to console her after one particularly ill-tempered exchange. He had warned her that China was the ‘only thing’ the Administration wanted to discuss and as always, in this, her Foreign Secretary had been reliably perspicacious.

  Tom was such an old cynic sometimes!

  He was convinced that the American’s angst over China – which one was the real one, etcetera, which in itself was a stupid question, anyway – had more to do with ensuring that the new United Nations was a toothless talking shop, than anything resembling a coherent Far East policy.

  ‘So far as the State department is concerned, the whole Hong-Kong-South Korea-Taiwan imbroglio was no more or less than proof positive that when it comes to global realpolitik, neither we, nor our Commonwealth friends can be trusted. Personally, I suspect the Administration is still far too traumatised by the Civil War, not to mention increasingly afraid of its own shadow over the Warwick Hotel fiasco, to think very far beyond November 1968 and the next Presidential race. It may be that our best strategy is to wait and see what happens next. Because of the CMAFTA and the blood and treasure we and our Commonwealth Allies spilled back in 1964, the White House understands – even if Congress does not – that the key to the US regaining its October 1962 pre-eminent global economic position, lies in Oxford.’

  Margaret Thatcher had been much cheered to receive a bright, breezy cable from her knight errant husband, which had served to remind her exactly how much she missed his bright, breezy cheerfully insouciant presence; and a longer, as always eminently sensible and of late, sisterly, sympathetic missive from Lady Marija Christopher.

  Marija was a marvel.

  The Prime Minister was well aware that things had not been all tea and cakes down in Canberra lately but as was to be expected, the Governor-General and his wife had risen to the challenge as if to the manor born. Not that Marija’s letter had troubled its intended recipient with any of that nonsense: no, Marija had focused on updates about the children – the Prime Minister’s godchildren – new friends, Jack Griffin’s forthcoming return to ‘sea duty’, and the ongoing social whirl of Government House in Yarralumla. Several photographs had been enclosed, a family group of the mother, father and the youngsters, with young Miles Julian in his baptismal shawl, and separate up-to-date portraits of each of Peter and Marija’s bambinos…

  Margaret Thatcher knew that among their other responsibilities, the Christopher’s had taken on the role of chaperoning and generally acting in the capacity of locus parentis of their predecessor, Viscount De L’Isle’s two youngest daughters. Nineteen-year-old Anne was at University, but Lucy, still only thirteen had, it seemed been taken under Marija’s wing much in the fashion of the little sister she had always longed to have! Apparently, Lucy was positively thriving in her first experience of attending a normal day school, a thing suggested by the ever-egalitarian Christophers, and apparently, much-lauded by the Australian press.

  Philip De L’Isle had mentioned to the Prime Minister that he had already received two ‘very comprehensive reports’ on ‘the girls’, which had done a great deal to reassure him that he had done the right thing ‘abandoning them in the Antipodes!’

  ‘Lucy sounds like she’s having the time of her life…’

  Under the tutelage of Lady Marija Christopher that did not surprise the Prime Minister one jot!

  Nothing quite gave Margaret Thatcher more hope for the future than the constant, small reminders of the kindness of strangers.

  To her way of thinking, the most malign underlying evil of the October War had been the way its aftermath had predated so mercilessly upon the old and the young, particularly upon babes in arms and toddlers. The war would leave a damaging demographic hole in the population for the generations alive today, it ought to be everybody’s duty to do what they could to repair the…hurt.

  Her Majesty the Queen had caught the national mood by producing another royal prince; in comparison, had she shirked her responsibilities by not providing Mark and Carol, her twins, a new sibling?

  Of course, not every woman felt this way, and many like herself could legitimately claim a higher calling. If she was still an obscure, anonymous Member of Parliament everything would be so different. Or not. She might never have met Frank Waters, for example. She had never expected, for a single moment, that he would be so ‘fatherly’ towards the twins, or get on so well with both of them, especially Mark, who as special as he was to her, yet had not always been an easy child to like…

  Margaret Thatcher became aware of a looming figure.

  “You asked to be informed when the operation against the French Mediterranean Fleet got under way, Prime Minister,” Ian Gow, her Chief of Staff murmured. “Our terms have been delivered to the French at Villefranche. We are awaiting further updates.”

  “Thank you, Ian.”

  There were times, many times, when Margaret Thatcher almost envied her predecessors from the ages before modern communications shrank the globe. Nowadays, the information flow was brutally continuous, literally blow-by-blow, relentless. Worse, the temptation to try to intervene, to double-guess the people on the spot could be dangerously seductive. Which was why she expected her most intimate confidantes to ensure she did not meddle once she had made up her mind. If she had learned anything in the last few years it was that one simply had to trust the man, or the woman, on the spot.

  One intelligence report described the French ships at Villefranche as a ‘ghost fleet’ which was unlikely to be capable of conducting offensive operations; but others warned it constituted a clear and present threat to British Forces in the whole Mediterranean Theatre. Politically, there could be little doubt that ‘neutralising’ what remained of the pre-war French Navy, would send an unambiguous message to the regime in the Massif Central at the moment Allied Forces went onto the offensive in France.

  Now that she had had a chance to think about it, the Camp David talks had been far more unpleasant than any of them had anticipated. It was doubtful any British Prime Minister and an American President had ever been so at odds over so many things. One way to look at it was that the air had been cleared; another was to accept that there was still a gulf, or as Tom Harding-Grayson remarked, ‘a bloody great big ocean between us!’ Had the memory of standing shoulder to shoulder last year, and the horrors of those terrible times when the two countries had almost gone to war with each other, not been so fresh in everybody’s mind, those days at Camp David would have been truly bloody. As it was, very little had been resolved and deep rifts had been widened, not papered over.

  Both sides had told each other a lot of things they really, really did not want to hear. Not even the introduction of Walter Brenckmann into the mix, effectively brought in to attempt to bridge new chasms threatening to open up between the allies, had achieved a great deal more than to ensure discus
sions were conducted in a civil fashion.

  There had been times when Margaret Thatcher had felt horribly guilty. Nobody knew better than she how much President Nixon had done to accelerate and sustain the ongoing British recovery; honestly, without his and his country’s selfless, remarkable generosity, things would still be unutterably grim back home and by now, the United Kingdom’s ability to carry on holding the line in Borneo, the Persian Gulf, Arabia, in several struggling, recently ‘independent’ sub-Saharan countries and of course, in maintaining ‘deterrent’ garrisons in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and going full speed ahead with a slew of major, very expensive economic mutual assistance and defence programs, would be in serious doubt.

  In the air, large parts of the British aerospace industry were now locked into partnerships with US companies; the Kestrel vertical take-off and landing subsonic fighter program was a joint British Aircraft Corporation, McDonnell Douglas, Grumman venture, the supersonic version of the Kestrel, the P-1154 Raptor, was now a joint Lockheed ‘Skunk Works’ venture, and the TSR-2 Strike Eagle, sponsored in the US by McDonnell Douglas and Pratt and Whitney was undergoing proving and advanced evaluation in Texas and New Mexico.

  At sea, the Polaris-armed Joint Nuclear Strike Force was about to commence deterrent patrols operating out of the Gare Loch on the Clyde, the Royal Navy’s nuclear hunter-killer building program at Barrow-in Furness and at Rosyth was gathering momentum, and the continuing US Navy surface ship transfers begun in 1965, were finally filling the yawning capability gaps left by combat losses and the intolerable strain of constant operations for much of the last three years.

  Basically, even while the US had been fighting the war in the Midwest transatlantic aid had been running first at tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars a month. Yes, there was the hackneyed argument – often pedalled by the left and by backwoodsmen in her own Party – by people who were always ready to point out that much of the American ‘aid’ was actually spent in the United States, employing American workers who would otherwise be unemployed; but that completely misrepresented the scale of the largesse of the American taxpayer.

  Without once stating it publicly, the Nixon Administration had in effect, secretly committed itself to a modern-day equivalent of the post-Second War Marshal Plan. And despite the failures of the Camp David Summit, nobody on the American side had whispered, let alone threatened, to even mention any possibility of turning off the aid tap.

  Margaret Thatcher wondered, if she and the President’s positions had been reversed, if she would have remained so staunch in her internationalist belief that whatever else happened – or realistically, whatever else went wrong – that the United Kingdom was, like Canada, an ally that the United States simply had, come what may, to sustain. It was almost as if, despite Richard Nixon’s re-emerging domestic problems, now the war in the Midwest was already slipping into memory, America’s best interests lay in rebuilding what could be rebuilt, of the former world order.

  Tom Harding-Grayson quipped that Nixon had been Eisenhower’s faithful lieutenant for so long that he saw no better global geopolitical model than that of the Cold War map of the 1950s: a web of alliances resting upon US wealth and military weight ringing and holding back the Red Menace…

  Perhaps, Richard Nixon still viewed the World like that, perhaps not. Either way, Margaret Thatcher still felt awful about the way Anglo-American differences were going to be ruthlessly highlighted at the coming United Nations ‘jamboree’, when in fact, the White House and her own administration were in rock-solid agreement about so many more things!

  Back home there were discontented voices on her own back benches; her own MPs complained that British soldiers, sailors and airmen were ‘holding the line’, and that the Americans were only paying us what ‘we are due’.

  How could people be so short-sighted?

  “The darkness is a curse,” Tom Harding-Grayson said softly, settling stiffly in the rearward-facing seat opposite his friend.

  The Prime Minister blinked out of her reverie and flashed a brief frown at the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary.

  “This thing with the French Fleet must be done, Margaret,” he said gently, sharing her misgivings.

  “We don’t even know if those ships are manned, or ready to fight, Tom!”

  “We can’t take the risk that they might one day steam out into the Eastern Mediterranean and cause God alone knows what havoc,” the man sighed. “If that was going to happen then now, or in the next few days when the Front Internationale feels itself under threat from both the north and the south for the first time, is when those ships could do us the most harm.”

  “Yes, yes,” Margaret Thatcher groaned. She dragged her eyes from the dark wasteland of the Midwest and affixed her friend in her sights.

  Poor Tom, he was looking older these days. He had wanted to retire, fade into obscurity at the time of the March 1965 election; she had press-ganged him into carrying on. Now great tranches of the globe were allied, organised, at odds with each other because of his – and her – handiwork. Tom was like a master magician, full of surprises, always with another rabbit or dove to hand.

  She sighed: “Like July 1940, Mers-el-Kebir and all that. I know that, I understand why we must be…”

  “Cruel?” Her friend prompted.

  “Ruthless,” she objected mildly.

  “It was ever thus,” the Foreign Secretary sympathised. “Plus, ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” he smiled thinly

  The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

  The Prime Minister shook her head.

  “Warsaw Concerto,” her friend reminded the Prime Minister. “It’s all very well for Dobrynin to claim that it is just a propaganda film but we know there are Soviet troops in West Germany and Austria, and that they would be in Denmark too if the Danes were any less trigger happy. We know for a fact because of radio traffic analysis coming out of France, our listening stations in northern Italy and intercepts by Royal Navy submarines operating in the Bay of Lions and off the Cote D’Azur, that the Soviets are operating an air bridge to the Front Internationale…”

  “I know,” Margaret Thatcher agreed reluctantly. “I know…”

  Her friend was not prepared to let the argument rest there: “Admiral Gorshkov has made no secret that he will use ‘any tool that comes to hand’. Goodness, we have no way of knowing if one, or more, of those blasted submarines they’ve been building in the Far East, has managed to reach the Mediterranean!”

  Privately, Tom Harding-Grayson was dubious that was even conceivable for one of the noisy, relatively primitive Project 627 or Project 659 nuclear powered submarines constructed at the Leninskiy Komsomol Shipyard, at Komsomolsk-na-Amur to get out into the North Pacific, evade the US Navy blockade and make passage, undetected all the way to the Mediterranean via the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. The experts at the Pentagon thought it was just about impossible; and they laughed in one’s face if one suggested a Soviet submarine might evade the US Navy blockade of the shallow Bering Strait, successfully circumnavigate the ‘northern route’ via the Arctic and the Norwegian Sea, break out into the Atlantic and somehow arrive off Gibraltar.

  Perhaps they were right.

  In any event, the Navy was confident that any enemy submarine attempting to ‘break into’ the Eastern Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, would be detected by a British or American submarine, or a sonar buoy, and thereafter, if it failed to surface and surrender, it would be depth-charged or torpedoed by a patrolling anti-submarine helicopter or frigate, or by ‘one of our subs.’

  Or that, at least, was what the Prime Minister had been told up until now, although not, in such categorical tones, by the one submariner whose opinion she valued over all others.

  Vice Admiral Sir Simon Collingwood, VC, promoted and knighted in the New Year’s Honours List, Flag Officer (Nuclear Submarines), who had earned immortal fame in command of HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s prototype
nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, on her first two war patrols, had not completely written off the possibility that one day, the Red Navy might successfully infiltrate one or more Project 627 or 659 boats ‘into the mix’ in the Mediterranean.

  ‘Dreadnought went one hundred and one days submerged during her first patrol to the South Atlantic. She could have stayed down longer but the crew would have starved!”

  Simon Collingwood had speculated that it might take a Soviet submarine between sixty and seventy days to make the ‘southern passage’ via the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, well south of the Cape, and well out into the South Atlantic before turning north for the run up to Gibraltar. He calculated as many as forty days for the alternative Arctic ‘northern run’. However, he was less than sanguine about the prospects of transiting the Straits of Gibraltar without being discovered: ‘We always have a sub, usually an ‘O’ or a ‘P’ class boat loitering in the vicinity most of the time. Those boats are devilishly quiet, we usually hear a US nuclear hunter-killer, coming miles away and we know Soviet nuclear subs are as noisy as express trains!’

  The Prime Minister had asked her favourite admiral if he could have sneaked into the Mediterranean when he was in command of the Dreadnought?

  ‘I might have got past the American boats. Always assuming that I had the nerve to dive deep enough, I might have been able to ride the eastbound current past the watchers.’

  Margaret Thatcher had had no idea that there was an upper, westward current pouring out of the Mediterranean, and a lower, colder, eastward counterpart sweeping into it. The problem was that a submarine using, hiding deep in the latter might – there were an awful lot of ‘mights’ involved in this business – have to risk diving below its crush depth to utilise it…

  ‘It would have been an ‘iffy’ affair in the Dreadnought,’ Simon Collingwood had confided to her. Subsequent classes of British nuclear submarines had been designed to dive deeper but Dreadnought had never been certified below about five hundred feet and the bottom south of Gibraltar was over nine hundred deep in places.