by James Philip
She barged the door open, shouldered inside and slammed it hard, at her back.
“AAAARGH!”
This cry from the heart, was vented in spontaneous surprise and alarm from her lungs, as she squeezed her eyes shut and leaned back against the door.
She had been wanting to scream out aloud for the last two hours!
“Aaaargh….”
She opened her eyes, mostly to look around for something to kick.
“Aaargh…”
Suddenly Caro’s eyes widened in alarm.
The other woman was sighting in an armchair, watching her with faintly amused, limpid eyes.
Caro froze, staring at the Navy Colt resting in the younger woman’s lap.
“Oh dear,” Rachel smiled wanly, “dear, dear me. I get the distinct impression that you’ve had a bad day, Professor.”
Caro went on staring.
“How…”
“I’m good with locks,” her unexpected guest apologised. As she spoke, she casually put the Colt into her handbag, an expensive-looking creation of the kind Caro had seen in the windows of the most exclusive shops in the rebuilt capital city. “Sorry about the gun. I didn’t know it was you who would be the first person to come through the door.”
Caro began to…unfreeze.
Rachel Piotrowska was dressed in a designer fawn two piece, still wearing a stylish – a-la Jackie Kennedy – and sensible, pair of new patent leather ankle boots.
The footwear was no doubt a trousseau compromise on account of the icy conditions outdoors; a girl in her business never knew when she was going to have to sprint for one’s life…
Rachel rose to her feet and beckoned for Caro to follow her into the bathroom. Obediently, the older woman trooped after her. Therein, the younger woman closed the door and turned on the bath faucet and the shower.
“That’s better,” Rachel decided, putting down the toilet lid and sitting down, folding her right leg over her left knee and placing her handbag on the floor. “Now we can have a nice, private, long-overdue chat, Professor Constantis.”
Chapter 37
Friday 10th February 1967
USS United States, San Francisco Bay
International diplomacy is about accentuating the positive; or when there is nothing optimistic to be said about what divides the parties, agreeing to talk about something else.
There was only one common thread running through all the pre-conference discussions: namely, the USS United States was appallingly unsuited to host the gathering of the nations. There were ninety-two national delegations ranging in size from two or three persons to the twenty or thirty plus of each of the Chinese parties, the twenty or so of the British and Soviet contingents and the dozen plus of many of the other participants. With the crew of the ship doubled in size by translators, clerks, Secret Service and other national security detachments, and with the need to supply facilities for upwards of one hundred and fifty US and international journalists, not to mention seven or eight TV broadcast crews and their equipment, the whole ship was a crowded, ill-tempered circus.
It took up to three hours for all the delegates who had not made the mistake of basing themselves aboard the liner, to get to Alameda, then aboard, having to form long lines to have their credentials checked and for escorts to be summoned to take them to those areas of the vessel they were actually permitted to enter. Given that the USS United States was moored well within a couple of hundred yards of several Polaris submarines, the US Navy was understandably paranoid about security and heavily armed Marines guarded every corridor and communal hatchway. Throughout the ship there were huge signs in English, Russian, Mandarin, French and Spanish proclaiming ‘NO ENTRY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’ and warning that ‘INTRUDERS MAY BE SHOT ON SIGHT’.
It did not make for a conducive environment to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Nor, with so many missions – about a quarter - led by national Heads of State or Premiers, was there a great deal of scope for good old-fashioned behind the scenes arm-twisting by professional diplomats. Or leastways, not without risking multiple international incidents.
Of the old, pre-October 1962 Security Council members, only the Soviet mission had elected to partially base itself on the USS United States. Claiming that the Soviet Union’s last-minute notification that it planned to attend the San Francisco Conference limited the options, the US State Department had come up with a list of inherently unsatisfactory possible locations, including military bases and buildings on the campuses of Berkeley and Stanford. Quite apart from the fact such locales made it far too easy for junior members of the Soviet mission to defect, virtually at will at a time of their choosing, the KGB judged each ‘insecure’.
Thus, Chairman and First Secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Shelepin had killed off further discussion with a curt: “The secretariat will stay on that bloody ship!”
Only the senior members of the Soviet delegation would be accommodated in the comfort of one of the lodges at the Presidio; and even then, the Russians were horrified to discover that they were being put up within a long stone’s throw of the British!
Alexander Shelepin took it for granted that the Americans would bug their quarters, and spy on them every minute of every day that he and his people were in California. There was nothing they could do about that and anyway, the KGB would have done exactly the same thing to the Americans had the tables been reversed. That was, in a funny way, something of a return to business as normal. The only thing that mattered was that the Soviet Union was visibly, demonstrably a major player at the forthcoming event. It was his country’s best chance since the war to make a real diplomatic impact on global affairs.
Shelepin and his deputy, First Deputy Secretary and Minister of Defence, Admiral of the Fleet Sergey Gorshkov had made their way to the uppermost public deck of the liner to watch the constant traffic of launches to and from the Alameda quayside.
Both men had eyed the long, low, black forms of the Polaris boats moored in the middle distance, and the continual helicopter take-offs and landings at the Naval Air Station less than a kilometre away. All around them San Francisco Bay thronged with activity and the cities ringing it were vibrant, breathing, ever-expanding, great engines of self-evident wealth and prosperity.
“We cannot fight this, Comrade Sergey Georgyevich,” Alexander Shelepin observed, very quietly, without anger, knowing that there was more treasure and industrial capacity in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other cities of the American South West than there was in what remained of the whole former Soviet empire. There were small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania which produced more steel than the entire Soviet Union; and aircraft factories within twenty miles of where the two men stood which produced more, and vastly technically superior war planes than the whole aircraft industry of the Motherland. Now, just looking at the great city across the bay, with the tall red girders of the Golden Gate Bridge just visible through the haze beyond it, the Soviet Leader hoped, above hope, that the men and women he had brought with him to America would see, like he had seen and already understood, that thoughts, talk of fighting the Yankee behemoth – stupid ideological pipe dreams even before the Cuban Missiles War – was futile. How could Nikita Khrushchev have believed, for a single moment, that he could directly confront such an all-powerful…colossus?
The Soviet party’s Tupolev Tu-114 had eventually landed at Beale Air Force Base some thirty-six hours ago after technical difficulties had forced an emergency landing at Calgary, and US Air Traffic Control had subsequently diverted the aircraft to Offutt in Nebraska, presumably to show the Russians the lines of B-52s standing ready and waiting to carry on bombing the Motherland back into the Stone Age.
Making Shelepin’s aircraft land at Beale, forty miles north of the state capital of Sacramento, and over a hundred from San Francisco, had probably been another calculated insult.
That said, Anatoly Dobrynin, who had greeted the party at Beale had explained that the Americans had prob
ably offered it as a landing site because of its very long runway. This might, actually, have been true given that Shelepin’s plane’s ‘hydraulics issues’ had only been patched up at Calgary and the endless runways at Offutt and Beale Air Force Bases had meant its pilots had not needed to rely on their brakes to bring the giant aircraft to a safe halt.
Shelepin had only met the Soviet Ambassador to America a couple of times; that had been in passing, back before the Cuban Missiles War, not to talk. Gorshkov and the others thought he ought to recall Dobrynin; he had an open mind. He would decide for himself if the jovial Russian bear of a man who had greeted him at the foot of the steps on Californian soil had gone native, or not.
It was not lost on Shelepin, that Dobrynin had left his wife and daughter in Washington.
Presumably, just in case he was suddenly manhandled onto the Chairman’s aircraft, out of reach of his alleged Yankee friends. The Tu-114 was diplomatic territory, as were, allegedly, the staterooms assigned to the mission on board the USS United States.
At Beale Air Force Base, Dobrynin had explained that the US State Department and the American Secret Service, had organised a convoy of armoured cars to transport Shelepin and the rest of the mission to San Francisco. Again, they had driven through sprawling urban landscapes broken by great factories along roads heavy, in places, with traffic and mighty, silvery lorries thundering in their countless profusion.
‘If California was a country,’ Dobrynin had commented, “it would be the fourth largest economy in the world.” He had reeled out the numbers to back up this assertion.
Listening to the statistics, Alexander Shelepin, unable to deny the evidence of his own eyes, accepted that the ‘sunshine state’ was vastly more productive, and many times wealthier than the whole of what was left of the Russian Motherland.
The US Navy had moored a battleship and a huge aircraft carrier in the channel north of the Bay Bridge opposite the Berkeley shore, just to hammer home the point about who was the bully on the block.
“They are so powerful,” Shelepin sighed, “yet still, they fear us. That is all we have on our side. We must work with that; we must find some way to co-exist with the monster we share this planet with.”
Sergey Gorshkov scoffed ruefully.
“What makes you think they even want to co-exist with us?”
“Dobrynin says Nixon has his back to the wall,” Shelepin retorted. “That may be good, or very bad for us.”
Both men found it cruelly ironic that their adversary, supposedly the land of the free, was wringing its hands having finally awakened to the fact that its government had been spying on it – somewhat in the fashion of a pre-war Warsaw Pact state – for years. To the Soviets, the naivety of their American hosts was breath-taking.
Gorshkov was eyeing the long, elegant lines of the seven thousand-ton Leahy class guided missile destroyer – he made out the number ‘16’ on her bow - moored a couple of kilometres south of the USS United States, her fore and aft twin-Terrier rails loaded and elevated forty-five degrees. He could not imagine what terrible threats the Americans imagined might materialise out of thin air in the middle of this great military camp!
Nevertheless, he admired the modern warship from afar with covetous eyes, wondering yet again: “How can these people not know how powerful they are?”
Anatoly Dobrynin had speculated that if the new General Assembly voted for the membership of the Security Council to be discussed the replacement of the Formosans with the People’s Republic of China – he thought this was by no means a given, in fact on the balance of probabilities it was unlikely – and if either or both of the Soviet Union, or the British stood by their treaty obligations to the Chongqing regime, then that abominable Thatcher woman was likely to counter-propose that India and possibly, Australia should join the United Nations’ top table, at least temporarily in lieu of France.
Alexander Shelepin thought that was all a bit tautological even for a professional diplomat; however, he was warming to Dobrynin. The man only rarely talked like a diplomat; in private he had about him the jovial ruthlessness of a gangster who only cared about realpolitik. He got the impression that Dobrynin was impatient, angry with the attitudes and policies coming out of Sverdlovsk.
‘Disengagement has been a mistake,’ he had said, bluntly.
Shelepin had uses for men who were not afraid of him.
Providing they knew their place…
Dobrynin had cut through the sophistry; explaining why he recommended Shelepin do ‘whatever it takes to make sure there is no serious discussion of the Security Council.’ There were ‘elements within the Nixon regime’ in favour of attempting to vote the USSR off that august forum.
It was not known what the British response to this would be.
That bloody woman was nothing if not…unpredictable!
Notwithstanding, Gorshkov was tickled pink about the rumours of discord within the enemy camp. Translators had gleefully read out whole screeds of the last couple of days editions of the San Francisco papers. Nobody knew for sure but it seemed that several of the President’s men had decided, like rats, to jump off the sinking ship. Presumably, so they had more time to hire and brief their attorneys before policemen began to knock down their doors!
It was all hilarious!
If the gossip was to be believed, and since their arrival in California the air had been positively buzzing with the wildest of stories, a psychologically inebriating experience for many in the Soviet party, nobody was going to know who actually spoke for the United States until the ‘last man standing’ opened his mouth at that afternoon’s opening plenary session of the General Assembly.
He mentioned this to Shelepin as the two men began to pace the open deck. The sun had broken through the overcast and from their vantage point they could now clearly make out the tops of the soaring red steel towers of the distant Golden Gate Bridge beyond the glinting windows of the San Francisco cityscape.
“Perhaps,’ Gorshkov suggested sarcastically, “we will be confronted by Mickey Mouse!”
Chapter 38
Friday 10th February 1967
Sequoyah Country Club, Oakland, California
When it was feared that busloads of students and ‘beatnik’ protesters planned to descend on the Claremont Hills, the Secret Service had demanded that the President’s party re-locate to the leafy foothills east of Oakland. At least here the narrow roads and the championship golf course south and east of the main clubhouse could be inundated with California State Troopers and Marines, and in extremis, the fairways and greens, provided multiple helicopter landing zones.
Margaret Thatcher was welcomed by Vice President Rockefeller as she stepped down from the cabin of Marine Two as the rotors of the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King came to a standstill. She was closely followed by her Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Tom Harding-Grayson, blinking in the bright light as the sun poked dazzlingly through the otherwise leaden overcast for a moment. Ian Gow, the Prime Minister’s ex-officio Chief of Staff followed, offering the older man a supporting hand as he threatened to stumble.
The invitation to fly to the unscheduled meeting with the President had come after the United Kingdom’s advance guard had already departed the Presidio for the onerous journey by car to Alameda.
Commander Alan Hannay was the last man out of Marine Two. Dressed in his best uniform, he and his wife, Rosa, had brought their two youngsters to the Presidio to pay their respects to the Prime Minister – a pre-arranged five-minute engagement, just for form’s sake – before they left San Francisco.
Unwittingly, the couple had walked into an, albeit bloodless, diplomatic minefield. Staffers had been running in all directions and US Marines were marking out a landing field on the lawn in front of the British party’s ‘lodge’.
“Why, Commander Hannay!” The Prime Minister had smiled maternally. And then beamed delightedly at Rosa who was cradling little Sophie Elisabetta in her arms, while eighteen-month-old Julian Alan, was tr
ying to clamber out of his father’s arms onto his shoulder, clearly determined to knock off his cap. “Marija would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t found time to see your bambinos while we were here in San Francisco!”
Alan Hannay smiled proudly.
The Hannays did not know the Prime Minister as well as their friends Peter and Marija, and had never presumed to be on familiar terms with the lady, even though they had both gained the impression that in some way she regarded them as being a part of the same extended family to which the present Governor General of Australia and his wife belonged.
Margaret Thatcher had almost immediately been brought back to reality by the crisis of the moment.
“Admiral Pollock has gone on ahead to the USS United States, Prime Minister,” Ian Gow, balding and dressed in city pin stripes rather than his normal immaculate Hussars rig, reminded his principal. “Protocol probably demands we turn up with a military escort.” He had looked meaningfully at Alan. “Commander Hannay perfectly fits the bill. And the Americans already know him.”
Thus, Alan had kissed Rosa and his bambinos and marched purposefully out to clamber on board Marine Two when, a few minutes later it landed fifty yards away.
He had turned and waved to Rosa; phlegmatically hoping he would be returned to the Presidio in time for them to set off, bright and early tomorrow morning for their new home in Pasadena, where he was due to commence a training course he confidently expected to kick-start anew, his career as a ‘proper’ naval officer.
Alan had met Nelson Rockefeller a dozen times in Philadelphia and in Washington, now the philanthropist billionaire, seemingly a little under the weather, brightened momentarily as he received the younger man’s salute.
“I’m standing in for Admiral Pollock, sir,” Alan explained. “He had left for the UN event prior to the Prime Minister’s change of plan.”