Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  She heard Brynmawr Williams speaking laconically over the TBS – Talk Between Ships – network that the first boarding party had set up even while Captain O’Reilly was formally receiving Rene Leguay’s capitulation…

  “Fourteen or fifteen heavies, yes…”

  “The CAP has already taken down two, roger that…”

  “Victorious is scrambling two more Sea Vixens…”

  The whole ship shuddered, rang like a cracked bell, rocked and stabilised.

  “A couple of near misses off the stern, yeah, we all felt them!”

  Aurélie realised that Williams, who could not see what was going on from within the armoured citadel, was receiving a running commentary from the Campbeltown.

  “Open the bloody hatch, I need to see what’s going on!” He demanded, his frustration peaking. In a moment he was outside again on the port wing of the compass platform, with Aurélie trailing along; attempting very hard, to be anonymous in his wake.

  She knew she had lost all sense of time by then.

  Already she had no idea if the attack had been under way for seconds or for minutes.

  All three British destroyers in the anchorage were blasting main battery salvoes into the northern skies every few seconds; their shooting radar-directed at invisible targets.

  Campbeltown was idling in the waters at the neck of the bay, her Bofors heavy cannons rattling continuously. A stick of bombs marched ominously, unstoppably towards her and she disappeared behind monstrous walls of water and spray.

  Aurélie could swear she saw rivers of foaming white water flooding off her upper works and over her sides as she slowly staggered back into the grey afternoon daylight.

  Brynmawr Williams was bawling at men standing on the deck alongside the barbette of Number Two main battery turret apparently ‘watching the fun’ to go below.

  “The CAP is engaging a formation of TU-95 Soviet bombers at Angels Two-Zero!” He reported, picking up his running commentary. “Our boys have splashed four of the beggars now!”

  There was a new, terrifying whistling.

  Nobody needed to be told what that signified.

  Everybody dived for the deck.

  Two sticks of one-thousand and two-thousand-kilogram semi-armour-piercing bombs, one of eight and the other of seven, dropped on a heading of approximately one hundred and ninety degrees – more or less down the length of the anchorage from north to south – began to plummet into the now churning, fouled grey waters of the bay.

  One big bomb exploded on the corniche; others began to stride like the footsteps of an avenging colossus towards the helpless ships of the ghost fleet.

  The bigger harbingers of doom, the two-thousand-kilogram death-bringers were already falling faster than the speed of sound, the smaller devices went silent as they fell to earth and water, wood, iron and flesh.

  A bomb struck the destroyer La Galissoniene amidships, another somewhere on her fo’c’sle, both carved through the ship like two red-hot knives through butter, their fuses initiating at depths of fifteen and twenty-five metres beneath and slightly to starboard of their points of impact.

  The first hit, immediately aft of the two thousand seven-hundred-ton T-53 class destroyer’s bridge, had passed through the forward fire room uptakes, killed everybody in the boiler room through which it crashed and exited the vessel carrying away a seven-metre square section of keel plating.

  The second hit penetrated the deck beside the forward twin 5-inch main battery turret, slicing down through the empty magazine, smashing frame six, compromising the stability of the bow section forward of it and tore out a ragged ten-spare-metre section of underwater hull plating.

  The destroyer would probably have sunk even had neither of the two huge bombs actually exploded; but when they went off, less than milliseconds apart, La Galissoniene ceased to be a ship. Her back broken, her waterlogged bow floating apart from the wrecked carcass of the once proud greyhound of the seas, she died in less than a minute.

  In the spray and fury of the drum roll of ear-splitting detonations nobody actually saw the bombs which bracketed and shattered the T-47 class destroyer Surcouf, like La Galissoniene, she was a sinking, smashed hulk by the time the smoke cleared.

  A one-thousand-kilogram bomb exploded on impact with the roof of the old cruiser Jeanne d'Arc’s Number Two double 6-inch main battery turret, instantly destroying the bridge and Number One turret and a large part of the fo’c’sle, killing everybody within fifty to sixty feet of the impact in every direction.

  Several other very big bombs landed in the waters around the six-and-a-half thousand-ton cruiser and the oiler, La Seine, lashed alongside. One, possibly two or three of these exploded directly beneath, or penetrated the sides of the two ships. The massive underwater explosions probably stove in the tanker’s starboard side, snapped the Jeanne d'Arc’s keel and opened her up like a tin can from end to end.

  Inside three minutes the cruiser had capsized, turning turtle before lingering on the surface for half-a-dozen dreadful minutes as survivors attempted to cling to her barnacle-encrusted bottom. Nearby, La Seine sank by the bow amidst a spreading morass of flotsam and evil-smelling bunker oil.

  And then, as swiftly as it had begun, it was over.

  Aurélie Faure and the others drifted out onto the bridge wing to stare, dazedly at the carnage, unaware that they were all drenched from head to toe and the decks all around them still ran, in places several inches deep in gushing water, from the towering near misses.

  The foul, acrid tang of burning oil and wood, and the stench of cordite hung in the air as the cold wind began to blow with new, bitter ferocity across the scene of devastation.

  Chapter 19

  Thursday 2nd February 1967

  Prince Street, Alexandria, Virginia

  The body of sixty-nine-year-old Jay Lovestone, since shortly after the Cuban Missiles War, the Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), whose offices had relocated to Alexandria in the spring of 1964 after its old premises – having survived the Battle of Washington unscathed – happened to be in a block requisitioned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, was discovered by his secretary when she reported for her fourth morning, working as a temporary agency typist, for the AIFLD.

  When the cops arrived on the scene she said her name was Adele Fleming – she also explained, chattily, that she had been born ‘Mueller’ but her father had changed the family name in 1942 when she was only four – and that she was covering for the absence of Mr Lovestone’s normal secretary, a Miss Clara Schouten, a lady in her fifties, while she cared for her aged father, who had been taken ill in Connecticut the previous week…

  No, she had no idea if Mr Lovestone had any enemies.

  No, so far as she knew he never kept more than a few dollars, ‘petty cash’ in the office safe.

  And no, she had not seen anybody acting suspiciously in the vicinity but then, she had only worked at the AIFLD office on Prince Street since Monday.

  So, she had hardly known the dead man.

  In fact, the Washington PD soon discovered that the AIFLD had had such a low profile that few of the workers employed in the building above and below its offices, or anywhere nearby in the neighbourhood, was aware of what it did, or even of who opened and shut up the premises every day of the working week. In fact, it soon became apparent that most of the AIFLD’s former employees, laid off when the Corps of Engineers took over the organisation’s former premises nearly three years before, had had no idea that Jay Lovestone – not a very well-liked man, it seemed – had even set up a new office.

  The dead man had been shot twice in the back of the head, probably when he was on his knees. There was not much left of his face and there was a lot of blood on the floor, and splashed across one wall and two grey metal filing cabinets.

  Later, a Washington PD homicide detective was to note, for the file, that Adele Fleming – the temporary typist – had been unaccountably calm and collected, unusually s
elf-possessed when she rang the local precinct to report finding the body, and later when the first uniformed officers arrived in Prince Street. However, that note was only appended some days later, after the lady in question had disappeared without trace, and three women called Adele Fleming had been tracked down by investigators in the surrounding counties and the District of Colombia, none of whom had turned out to be the woman encountered at Prince Street that morning.

  None of this came as any surprise to the handful of people who actually knew what went on at the anonymous office of the American Institute for Free Labor Development in Alexandria, nor to the man Jay Lovestone had worked for, since before the Cuban Missiles War.

  “Do we have any idea whatsoever has happened to Clara Schouten?” James Jesus Angleton – still for the moment at least, although probably not for much longer, the Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence of the CIA – as he sipped the tepid black coffee the slim, twentysomething brunette, who had ushered him into the ground floor parlour of the two-storey 1940s town house at Bellevue.

  “No,” the young woman retorted. She had held herself together until she got back to the house – one of two ‘safe houses’ nominated for the duration of her operational attachment to the Office of Security at Langley - but had poured herself several fingers of Bourbon since then. “All I know is what I was told when I was briefed to work for that slime-ball Lovestone!”

  “Lovestone said nothing to you earlier in the week?”

  James Angleton’s companion had briefly planted herself in an adjacent arm chair, now she jumped to her feet, clunking her glass on a low table prior to folding her arms tightly across her bust and beginning to pace.

  “The Police did not ask you for proof of your identity?” The man asked.

  “No! I told you.”

  “Yes,” Angleton agreed. “And there were no cartridge cases?”

  “No. I told you. I looked before I called the cops.”

  At some level James Angleton was aware that the young woman was becoming more agitated, irritatingly tearful. However, if he had ever been overly concerned with the fears or the problems of subordinates, among whom his rudeness and arrogance was a given, that was a train long gone.

  The woman was getting his nerves, now.

  “I’m not an agent, Mr Angleton,” she reminded him. “I’m just a junior case officer. Nobody told me I was likely to walk in just after a man had been murdered. For all I know I might have passed the killer on the stairs. If I hadn’t been held up this morning, I might be dead too!”

  The spymaster frowned at her.

  “Yes. You were ‘held up’. Why were you ‘held up’ this morning?”

  The cold suspicion behind the curt interrogative startled the young woman. She stopped pacing, stared at the monster suddenly studying her as if she was an enemy.

  “I got a call from a girlfriend just as I was leaving my house in Georgetown. She’s expecting her first baby, it is due any day now, she was getting panicky.” The Bourbon was beginning to work its spell. “Her husband is a klutz.”

  Angleton rose stiffly to his feet.

  “You should stay here tonight. Make yourself scarce over the weekend. Report back to work at Langley on Monday. If anybody asks, stick to your cover story about ‘running errands for my office’. Do not discuss this matter with anybody. Is that understood?”

  Angleton left the house a few minutes later.

  One of his people was dead; sooner or later the Washington PD, or some FBI-man was going to start joining up the dots, following the breadcrumbs back to Langley. Obviously, the Office of Security was firewalled but that would not stop the whispering, DC was gossip ground zero and once Operation Maelstrom became public property he was finished.

  When the call came through about the killing, his first thought had been to check that the Angel of Death had disembarked from that British plane at San Francisco. He had refrained from making that inquiry; knowing Richard Helms would have warned him if she was still in DC.

  Implausibly, that only really left Billy the Kid in the frame and so far as anybody could tell, he was still in California…

  James Angleton had not noticed the rain sleeting in his face until he dropped behind the wheel of his car, a nondescript 1962 Chrysler, parked two blocks away from the safe house, and he was surprised to discover that he was dripping wet, and suddenly shivering.

  He fired up the motor, cranked up the heater to maximum and waited as it blew frigid air for some minutes. He lived in a country which could drop an ICBM on a pinhead – well, within a few hundred yards of a pinhead half-way around the world – but could not build a car with a heater that actually worked!

  Angleton thought about lighting a cigarette, discovered the pack in his jacket pocket was wet. He did not notice the matronly woman with two young children who walked past the car giving him a very, very odd look as he sat behind the wheel, with the engine rumbling, staring fixedly, blindly down the road.

  Forget about Operation Maelstrom…

  When his association with Jay Lovestone became national news, his career would end; inevitably, the AIFLD would be blown, and with it the CIA’s covert money transfer and laundering operation in Latin America.

  Everything was going to Hell…

  It seemed that Angleton had no more understood Jay Lovestone than he had his old friend Kim Philby; the latter was a double agent, a traitor, Lovestone, was just a loser who had never wholly shaken off his past. Old Communists never die, they just plot their next coup…

  Jay Lovestone had been born Jacob Liebstein, the son of Jewish parents in the Lithuanian province of the old Russian Empire sometime around the end of 1897. His father had come to America when he was six or seven, and he, his mother and three siblings had followed in 1907. Growing up in the Lower East Side and later the Bronx, he had got embroiled in socialist politics studying at the City College of New York. Back in those days there was no enduring stigma in this – in both the 1912 and 1920 general elections Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs attracted nearly a million votes - nor in becoming a full member of the Communist Party, which the young Jacob Liebstein did in 1919, around the time he changed his name to Jay Lovestone.

  Like so many American Communists Jay Lovestone had had, at practically every turn, demonstrated an uncanny knack of being on the wrong side of history. In a movement riven with factional feuds and arcane ideological schisms he had ended up on the Bukharin side of the ‘Stalin question’, albeit, only after burning his boats with a host of would-be allies after featuring prominently in the expulsion of so-called Trotskyite back-sliders in the movement. After visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s he was expelled from the Party, mainly on account of his support for the theory of American Exceptionalism, a defeatist paradigm which held that capitalism was so well-entrenched in North America that, in effect, Marxism was never going to work ‘over here’.

  Lovestone had found a home, at first around the fringes, then as an organiser in the labour movement as long ago as the 1920s. In a career infrequently touched by success or meaningful, lasting achievements – possibly because he was forever serving the cause of International Communism at the same time he was supposedly representing workers – by the time the United States had entered the war against Germany (on the side of the Soviet Union), old loyalties had got warped and to a degree, Lovestone’s communist past was rapidly becoming ancient, somewhat blurred history.

  In 1944 he was the director of the International Affairs Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), then still one of the biggest unions in the country. It had been while holding this post that he had been positioned on the American Federation of Labor’s so-called Free Trade Union Committee. And it was out of this web of connections that the American Institute for Free Labor Development had emerged with a specific remit to promote and organise labour unions in Europe and Latin America which were deemed, free of all communistic involvement.

  Ja
y Lovestone was one of those old communists who had been on a long, circuitous journey without ever really knowingly acknowledging that he had changed sides.

  James Jesus Angleton could spot a conflicted man with deeply confused motivations a mile away; they were perfect fabric from which to weave his countless spider-webs of deceit.

  The American Institute for Free Labor Development – fronted by a relatively prominent old-time, supposedly reformed American Bolshevik – had been James Jesus Angleton’s pliant tool for over a decade; obediently working to sabotage Soviet influence within the international labour movement, and dripping leftist insider intelligence to the CIA. In the confusion of the immediate post-October 1962 era, Angleton had seized the opportunity to re-design the whole operations, turning the AIFLD into a full-blown cut-off through which misinformation and millions of dollars of aid had been fed to South American allies.

  In the scale of things, the AIFLD managed by Jay Lovestone – a man who had needed increasingly onerous ‘management’ as time when by, and he got older and grumpier – was relatively small beer in comparison with the Office for Security’s main responsibility, Operation Maelstrom. Such small beer, that even James Angleton could appreciate the irony in the AIFLD, not the vast spying machinery he had created to watch over the actions and the consciences of the American people, becoming the primary, initiating cause of his now inevitable downfall.

  Gradually, he regained his senses, his mind slowed, calmed and as the Chrysler’s heater suddenly began to pump out blisteringly hot air to warm his sparse, angular partially drenched frame, and the sleet began to turn to snow, accumulating on the windshield, obscuring the street ahead, he realised that only one question still possessed the power to torment.

  Who had used the AIFLD cut-off to re-awaken the Agency’s most dangerous assassin?

  Or perhaps, pertinently, a better question might be: who had the most to gain by unleashing Billy the Kid on the rump of the Resistance – which, for the while, it had been deemed safer to leave in place and keep under surveillance than to attempt to roll up, on the grounds that it was better the Devil one knew than to risk driving it underground where it could do all manner of harm, and nightmarishly, morph into a ‘real’ threat again – and in the process, allow the maniac a gold-plated chance to settle every last blood debt?