Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  ‘Or that was what I thought back in 1964,’ Collingwood had chuckled ruefully. ‘That second war patrol was so secret I was unable to draw charts for the Med before we sailed!’

  “Tom,” Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson scolded her husband. “What did I tell you about not pestering Margaret? Give the poor woman a chance to catch her breath!”

  The Prime Minister snapped out of her wool-gathering introspection and smiled at her friend. Her Foreign Secretary took his cue and eased himself to his feet so that his wife could join her younger friend.

  “This trip really isn’t anything like the disaster that everybody said it was going to be,” the older woman said brightly.

  Margaret Thatcher smiled tight-lipped.

  Her friend had been a successful novelist and a regular contributor to left-leaning papers and periodicals before the October War; yet, in this mixed up, topsy-turvy age she had become the National Conservative Prime Minister’s go-to speech writer, fashion guardian, confidante and in many ways, reassuring mother figure; the one person in Christendom that the nation’s first female leader – since Elizabeth I, quite an act to follow – could say, literally, anything to. Although, not in such a public place as the cabin of Commonwealth One.

  “That is as may be, Pat,” she agreed. “But right now, that is not really terribly comforting!”

  “That’s because you’ve spent the last few days surrounded by all the President’s men,” the older woman commiserated. “My, my, what a complete shower! Lawyers, used car salesmen and flimflam men, all of them. Well, apart from Henry, obviously. And that nice Mr Laird. And Nelson…”

  The Prime Minister suspected her friend had taken quite a shine to Henry Kissinger at Camp David. Of Richard Nixon’s other associates, only Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and Vice President Rockefeller, whose wife Happy, Pat Harding-Grayson got on with like a house on fire, remotely stood up to her high standards.

  Pat had positively flirted with Henry Kissinger, the charming Harvard academic – formerly a Rockefeller man - who had found himself the United States National Security Advisor in what was, as scandal began to fall upon the heels of earlier disasters, a less than stellar Administration.

  The Prime Minister looked away, staring out across the darkness over which the VC-10 was cruising, six miles high at over five hundred miles an hour.

  “I do hope Frank is taking care of himself in France, Pat.”

  “The poor man would have been bored stiff over here on this trip,” her friend said. “As for the headlines in some of the papers, well, he would have been bound to punch somebody on the nose sooner or later.”

  Margaret Thatcher smiled.

  The American media had rediscovered the Angry Widow of yore, a handbag swinging witch, smiting her foes and detractors right, left and centre. These days the cartoons and the editorials stung, the pain was momentary, and the realisation that she was being taken with deadly seriousness by all and sundry, a little humbling. Whatever they said about her, she knew that most Americans respected her.

  And that, was a thing beyond price…

  Ian Gow materialised in the aisle, and leaned confidentially towards Margaret Thatcher.

  “I thought you’d like to know the moment we heard from the Mediterranean. I am given to understand that the French Fleet at Villefranche has been surrendered to Admiral Leech’s squadron, thankfully, without bloodshed,” the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff said lowly.

  Chapter 18

  Thursday 2nd February 1967

  HMS Campbeltown, Villefranche-sur-Mer

  One of HMS Victorious’s Westland Whirlwind helicopters had made two round trips to the anchorage to transfer four seriously injured men, two women and a child – an eight-year-old girl with multiple shrapnel wounds – to the assault ship HMS Fearless, cruising some forty miles off shore.

  The Fearless had the best equipped and staffed surgical facilities on any ship in Task Force V1, and one of her roles in any major landing operation was to put ashore at the earliest opportunity, an emergency field hospital detachment. She also had a large helicopter landing deck.

  Because of the clutter of mothballed 57-millimetre Modèle 1951 in twin ACAD Model 1948 anti-aircraft mounts on the quarterdeck, the casualties had had to be offloaded from the fo’c’sle; an evolution greatly assisted by the fact the battleship’s Number One main battery turret was still traversed ninety degrees to port, thereby approximately doubling the amount of space the Whirlwind’s pilot had to work with.

  Lieutenant-Commander Brynmawr Williams had served on a battleship as a young man, as indeed, had his father, who had been a junior gunnery officer on the old Colossus at Jutland; a thing his mother always blamed for his deafness in later life. Now and then, as a boy, he had wondered what it would be like to command one of the leviathans.

  Now – for a few hours at least - he knew.

  It was surreal…

  ‘These people want to join the fight with us,’ Dermot O’Reilly had told him shortly after he returned from his first meeting with the French admiral. ‘I intend to send as many people as we can spare over to the Jean Bart, and the Clemenceau, too, all being well. We’re going to steam or tow as many of these ships out of here as possible. Ideally, sometime in the next forty-eight hours. But most of all I need you to go on board the battleship and act as my liaison with Admiral Leguay. And,’ his commanding officer had added, ‘take over if necessary. I should imagine things are a bit chaotic at the moment.’

  Williams was too old a hand not to seek absolute clarity on one particular matter.

  ‘Are these fellows our prisoners or our…’

  ‘They are our allies,” he had been informed, definitively, “unless or until somebody tells me differently; but in the meantime, we will proceed under that assumption.’

  Once Dermot O’Reilly had sought and received the Task Force Commander’s leave, the three detached Fletchers of the 21st Destroyer Squadron had set to with a will to care not just for the Jean Bart’s sick and wounded, but to alleviate the near starvation rations the French had grown accustomed to regarding as a balanced diet. Over a hundred of the Campbeltown’s men were presently aboard the battleship; the destroyer’s galley and sick bay stores having been three-quarters emptied the previous afternoon and overnight, in a cross-decking exercise which had co-opted every spare man, woman and child on the French battleship.

  HMS Perth and HMS Dundee had nosed into the anchorage around noon yesterday, the former tying up alongside the Clemenceau and the latter bow to stern with the La Bourbonnais, similarly freely transferring men and supplies to further cement Anglo-French relations and to hasten the readying of the Villefranche squadron for sea.

  Unlike his Captain, Brynmawr Williams’s command of French was non-existent; thus, he was heavily reliant on the services of his ever-present translator, Aurélie Faure, other than on those occasions, at roughly hourly intervals when she disappeared to check on her ‘Amiral’. Rene Leguay was confined to his cabin – nothing to do with the perfidious English crawling all over his mighty vessel but upon doctor’s and Mademoiselle Faure’s diktat – receiving a stream of visitors and in between, being debriefed by two French-speaking members of Rear Admiral Henry Leach’s staff who had cadged a lift to Villefranche on the Whirlwind mercy sorties. Each time Williams laid eyes on the intelligence men methodically sucking up every last bit of tactical, technical and political information about the Villefranche Squadron, the politics of the coastal region and the dangerous hinterland beyond, they were a little wide-eyed, and scribbling like men possessed.

  At a little after three in the afternoon the sound of gunfire rumbled like distant thunder, coincidentally as Aurélie Faure returned to the bridge map room – where Williams and a somewhat spruced up Serge Benois – had just finished the latest of an ongoing series of mini-conferences. The two men had hit it off from the outset, they were both practical men with very little time for the staid, formulaic protocols that would normally have gov
erned the working relationship of men from the two different Navies. Benois had touched his battered cap and smiled at Aurélie as he departed.

  “Mon Amiral is having his dressings changed,” she reported distractedly. “Now that he is feeling a little like his normal self, he didn’t want me to be around,” she admitted, not knowing whether to be relieved or a little miffed. All she knew for a fact was that her relationship with Rene Leguay would never, nor could it ever be, what it had been before the battle. “He is determined to come to the bridge when Lieutenant Braithwaite has finished with him.”

  “It only goes to show you can’t keep a good man down, Mademoiselle Faure!”

  Threading her way through the Anglo-French work parties and the stores and equipment heaped and piled in the passageways amidships, Aurélie had not noticed that the wind had freshened until she had taken a moment to compose herself on the upper platform deck, ahead of reporting to the map room buried deep in the armoured citadel of the bridge.

  The normally millpond-still waters of the anchorage were flecked with spray, the chop running at perhaps half-a-metre, with small waves actually breaking in flurries of apologetic spume on the shores of Cap Ferrat. Moreover, she could see that several of the destroyers and frigates moored in the most protected part of the bay, were gently moving, working against their rusting anchor chains.

  A couple of seamen on the nearby deck of the Campbeltown looked up and caught her eye, they waved and she mirrored their gesture, smiling before she could stop herself.

  The British were supposed to be such a warlike people; yet everybody she had met in the last day or so, was as pleased ‘as Punch’, as was she, that everybody was friends again.

  Rene said that the Campbeltown’s radar was relatively ineffective within the anchorage, masked by the surrounding hills, nevertheless the curved aerial bowl atop the destroyer’s forward superstructure turned constantly and above her stern deckhouses another smaller, greyly conical electronic eye moved from side to side, scanning relentlessly, tirelessly.

  A couple of miles out to sea another British warship, a visibly more modern frigate with tall box-like masts fore and aft of her single funnel, both presumably topped with the most modern all-seeing electronic eyes, kept watch. Now and then this ship disappeared into the haze, or behind a rain squall.

  “This is just the leading edge of the great storm that’s afflicting England and the northern two-thirds of France,” Brynmawr Williams explained cheerfully when she commented about the changing weather. “The worst of it will never reach this far south, the storm centre is drifting slowly across the northern foothills of the Massif Central at present having dumped several feet of snow up to a hundred or so kilometres south of the Loire Valley. By this time tomorrow we’ll be on the wrong end of forty or fifty knot,” he paused, converted the numbers to an approximation of the wind speeds in kilometres per hour, “that’s gusting up to seventy or eight kilometres per hour, with a likely sea state of six or seven, that equates to waves from five to seven metres high by the time the storm has blown through.”

  To Aurélie, this seemed to be awful news.

  How could the rusty, neglected ships at Villefranche survive in a storm like that?

  “Can your Task Force fly its aeroplanes and helicopters in such weather?” She asked, thinking she already knew the answer.

  “Probably,” the man retorted affably, as if he really did not see what the problem was. “The storm is beginning to wear itself out. We might be lucky down here. It might not be anywhere near as bad as we fear.”

  Aurélie heard the distant thunder again.

  “What is that?” Aurélie Faure asked anxiously.

  “The Belfast is demonstrating off Nice,” Williams reported. “She’ll be out of sight of land, most likely. I think the general idea is to drop several salvoes of 6-inch shells onto the coast road and in and around the main port area, then withdraw further out to sea. If the Front Internationale has any plans to interrupt operations here in Villefranche Bay, we thought it might be a good idea to make them think again.”

  “Those people can still approach Villefranche through the mountains?” She pointed out, her voice a whisper.

  She was still getting used, half-way through the second day after HMS Campbeltown had tied up alongside the Jean Bart, to the idea that the three lethally armed British destroyers in their midst were their saviours, not their executioners.

  Aurélie felt as if she was walking through a dream; it was all she could do to resist the urge to pinch herself. It was going to be a long time before she got used again to being in contact with people who, regardless of their rank or the badge of specialisation on their fatigues, knew exactly how and what they were supposed to be doing, to whom they needed to report to, and who had, without fanfare, miracle of all miracles, had immediately set about reviving and repairing long dormant, apparently moribund equipment working again, if not like new then at least serviceably, throughout the ship. Apart from the helicopter which had lifted off the Jean Bart’s most badly wounded casualties, two similar machines had since landed on the deck of the Clemenceau, offloading men from the British ships cruising somewhere below the southern horizon.

  Brynmawr Williams flicked a glance to the heavens.

  “If anybody in the hills makes trouble the Fleet Air Arm will settle their hash for them!” he promised grimly.

  “This Belfast, is she a battleship like the Jean Bart?” Aurélie asked sheepishly.

  This hugely amused the Royal Navy man.

  “Good Lord, no,” he chortled, “we sent the last of our dreadnoughts to the breakers yard a couple of years before the big war. The Belfast is a cruiser, an old ship built before the Second War. I suppose she’s about the third of the size of this ship. Her main armament is the same calibre as this ship’s secondaries but unlike the Jean Bart she’s got the latest fire control and air search radars; so, she shoots her arrows right on the nail whatever the time of day or the state of the seas!”

  The roar of the Rolls-Royce Avon turbojets of a pair of De Havilland Sea Vixen interceptors, and of the Rolls-Royce Spey turbofans of Blackburn Buccaneer strike bombers, loitering several miles high above the anchorage was always audible from the decks of the ships of the Villefranche Squadron.

  The man and the woman had walked out onto the bridge wing to watch as the Campbeltown’s crew recovered the last lines, water churning under her transom as she pulled, very slowly, clear of the behemoth, with the Aldis lamp on the port wing of the bridge blinking.

  The plan was for the Campbeltown to go alongside the old cruiser Jeanne d’Arc, pump a couple of hundred tons of bunker oil into the French ship, and to use her generators to power the equipment to test and restart the derelict’s antique electrical systems.

  Williams read the Morse code.

  He shook his head, chuckled softly.

  Moved to the rail and waved.

  “En attendant de nous revoir,” he explained, apologetically. “If I am not mistaken!”

  “Until we met again,” Aurélie grimaced.

  “I bet the skipper had to spell that out to the yeoman at the lamp,” Williams laughed.

  Aurélie Faure opened her mouth reply.

  Had she spoken her words would have been drowned out by the Campbeltown’s fog horn, blasting deafeningly, repeatedly.

  The woman started in alarm, and looked to the British naval officer whose easy bonhomie had suddenly been replaced with a grim, vaguely angry resolution.

  “Oops, that’s torn it!” Brynmawr Williams groaned, taking Aurélie’s arm and striding to the port armoured hatch, dogged open.

  Aurélie blinked into the spotting rain she had not noticed falling, glanced to the destroyer still less than fifty metres clear of the Jean Bart’s massive flank, watching her men running to their battle stations. The ship’s four 5-inch dual purpose guns began to elevate, their gun houses swinging around to bear towards the north east.

  Brynmawr Williams bawled: “SOUND TH
E ALARM! COLLISION STATIONS! SHUT ALL WATERTIGHT DOORS! ALL NON-ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL ARE TO GET BELOW THE ARMOURED DECK! PREPARE FOR AIR ATTACK!”

  Aurélie was rooted to the spot as the battleship’s klaxons began to blare.

  Air attack…

  How could the man know that?

  How could anybody know what was going on…

  Campbeltown’s main battery suddenly belched red-spotted fire.

  The whip-like percussion of the broadside made her ears ring.

  Aurélie could see that HMS Perth and HMS Dundee were casting off from their charges, their decks a riot of men clearing equipment and sprinting for the guns.

  “They aren’t going anywhere,” Williams promised her, conversationally calm and collected. “Our ships need a little sea room to clear their ‘A’ arcs.” A little too much naval jargon he decided: “So that we’ve got clear arcs of fire for all our big guns.”

  Campbeltown fired a second broadside, her guns pointing, it seemed to Aurélie, at an impossibly acute angle almost directly up into the looming clouds.

  It was then that Aurélie heard the unearthly whistling.

  She stared in startled, shocked, momentarily uncomprehending disbelief as the hillside above Pointe de la Rascasse, on the western side of the anchorage, began to sprout giant, dusty plumes of erupting earth. The sound of the huge explosions was delayed a split second and then they were reverberating around the anchorage. It was as if somebody was striking the surrounding hills with a godlike hammer. She felt herself being seized, unceremoniously manhandled away from the hatch but not before she saw the volcanic plumes of water, hundreds of feet high erupting across the neck of the bay.

  It was all like a dream.

  A nightmare.