by James Philip
“In fact,” JFK declared, his voice finding a depth and strength which masked the turmoil behind it, “I must tell you now that I have already broadcast a message to the Soviet leadership disassociating myself from British actions. Via the good offices of former Ambassador Dobrynin, whom you may know elected to remain in the United States after the Cuban Missiles War, we have been in communication with the Troika, the collective leadership of the Soviet Union in recent weeks and days energetically endeavoring to defuse tensions arising from the sinking of the USS Providence in the Arabian Sea...”
Curtis LeMay wanted to put his head in his hands.
He looked again at Westmoreland whose eyes were as wide as saucers.
The Army man shook his head, opened his hands briefly in a gesture of abject helplessness.
The transatlantic phone line hissed.
Those with keener hearing imagined they heard muffled voices, a heated discussion going on.
“Margaret,” the President prompted. “Margaret, are you still there...”
Still, only the hissing of static.
“Margaret...”
Jack Kennedy looked around the table.
“Somebody check the line!” LeMay commanded and some twenty seconds later a Marine stepped into the room.
“The connection is still UP, sir!”
The men in the vault waited.
“President Kennedy,” Margaret Thatcher announced, her voice quivering with what could only be the rage of a woman shamefully scorned.
Curtis LeMay realized that something else had just gone catastrophically wrong; and that it could only be that the full scale of the abomination in the Persian Gulf was now becoming evident to the British.
“I took you for many things,” the woman continued, her manner ever more excoriatingly contemptuous of her interlocutor. “Some of those things were uncharitable, others it now seems, unjustly creditworthy. As we speak the United States Navy is murdering British and Commonwealth sailors, airmen and in all likelihood soldiers in the Persian Gulf. Once again you have attacked my people without warning, their blood and the blood of all those who will die in the next few days, weeks and perhaps, years will be on your hands for all time.”
The lady was suddenly glacially calm.
“Mr President,” her tone was so implacable that it made the hairs on the necks of all the men in the room stand up in sympathy. “Once again it seems as if the United States has stabbed Great Britain in the back...”
“Margaret, I...”
“As we speak American airmen and sailors are murdering British and Commonwealth personnel in the Persian Gulf.”
There was a hissing silence on the line for several seconds.
“Margaret, I’m receiving news as we speak...”
“Mr President, I will not let this stand!” Margaret Thatcher had spoken softly but to those who had heard her words it felt as if she had screamed them in their faces. “Do you hear me?”
To the men in the vault there could be no doubt that in that moment she was channeling the terrible righteous anger of her whole nation.
“Do you hear me, Mr President?”
Jack Kennedy’s ashen pallor had assumed a waxed, deathly hue.
“Yes, I hear you, Prime Minister...”
“This will not stand,” the woman said, her voice trembling with deadly intent. “Be assured that I will use every gun, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon that I have at my disposal...”
She broke off to snatch a ragged, spitting breath.
“Every weapon that I have. I swear I will avenge this betrayal one day. Do your worst. I will fight you with my own eye teeth if I have to!”
The man at the other end of the transatlantic line was literally lost for words.
“My own eye teeth,” the Angry Widow ground out venomously. “May you rot in Hell!”
“Margaret, I...
But the hissing static had died
And with it the impossible dream of peace.
Chapter 49
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Madison, Wisconsin
Norman Schwarzkopf had been unable to drag himself up more than a dozen of the two hundred steps up to the redoubt command post in the gallery of the State Capitol Building before he collapsed. The wound in his leg was on fire, now the medics were talking about an infection and pumping antibiotics into his feverish body.
In the distance the night pulsed with distant B-52 strikes. Periodically, the M2s up in the dome sawed and hammered. The rebels had already infiltrated the carpet bombed moonscape surrounding the city, and by swimming or floating across the lakes. They crept from bomb crater to crater, unseen, invisible from the first trench line until they were almost upon it. The bombing had killed a lot of rebels but inadvertently, it had also destroyed the continuity of the battlefield in all directions, obliterated lines of sight and all reference points and re-triangulating fire support grids had proved virtually impossible. In the crater fields snipers could creep within an arm’s length of the surviving defense works; and with nightfall the enemy had moved forward in strength, probing, pressing at both ends of the Madison Isthmus.
Now Schwarzkopf was relegated to a cot in a corridor of the State Capitol.
“Hey, buddy,” a familiar voice chortled ruefully. “Looks like you’ve got a ticket out of this town.”
Through the mists of fever the younger man realized his commanding officer was crouching by his cot.
“I’ll be okay in the morning...”
“Some morning, maybe,” Brigadier Harvey Grabowski conceded grudgingly. “Just not any morning soon, Little Bear. We’ve got Navy Sea Kings incoming later tonight. I’m getting the Governor and his people out and as many wounded as the choppers will hold. You’re going out on the Governor’s aircraft.”
“Sir, I...”
Schwarzkopf felt something on his chest.
“Don’t lose these. Dispatches from the front! Might not get anything out of here after tonight. Guard them with your life, Little Bear. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Schwarzkopf remembered being carried out into the night, the thrumming of rotor blades, the background crackle of light arms fire punctuated by regular heavier explosions, then being strapped down inside the darkened cabin of the helicopter.
A woman, or perhaps, a man was whimpering nearby.
There was a sharp needle prick above his thigh wound.
And after that he remembered nothing...
Chapter 50
Friday 3rd July 1964
Situation Room, Philadelphia White House
The Attorney General walked into the room and halted, very nearly in mid-stride. Bobby Kennedy was as exhausted as everyone else – except Curtis LeMay because Old Iron Pants never got tired – but it was not the grey, leaden expressions on the faces of Administration insiders which very nearly stopped him dead in his tracks. It was his brother’s face.
Bobby had gone down to Washington yesterday afternoon after the Lincoln Memorial riots. He had visited the injured in hospital, met with and consoled his friend Martin Luther King and many of those who had lost loved ones. Seventeen marchers were known to have died, another thirty-nine were seriously injured, there were scores of walking wounded; at least twenty Washington PD personnel and Maryland State Troopers had been killed or badly hurt defending the marchers. Marines were still hunting down the murderers. The FBI was telling him that the Klan was behind the sustained attack and the subsequent sniping; disturbingly, the Marines were now reporting that prisoners claimed they had been paid by the Government to attack ‘the enemy within’.
J. Edgar Hoover had vehemently assured him that Philadelphia was tied up ‘so tight that if a bad guy farts we’ll shoot him!’ Bobby Kennedy had retorted: ‘Why the heck didn’t your people see the Washington attack coming?’
The Director of the FBI had reacted as if this was some kind of unfair, low blow. Before heading back to Philadelphia the Attorney General
had spoken on the phone to Nick Katzenbach, his friend and deputy at Justice.
Nick was so wrapped up in the minutiae of the legality of the extraordinary security measures now choking the temporary capital city of the Union that he was effectively out of the loop, when it came to what was going on in the Midwest and in the Middle East. However, he had said that the reports from both these latter ‘problem areas’ seemed to be uniformly disastrous.
‘Perhaps, you’ll get the low down when you speak to Jack,’ the other man had suggested in weary exasperation.
Bobby had not been able to get the President on the line last night, or this morning before he set off for Philadelphia. In fact, getting anybody to come to the phone had become a huge problem in the last few days.
It was past noon by the time the Attorney General’s convoy had forced its way into the city, and nearly one o’clock when he got through the final White House security cordon and a Secret Service man escorted him down to the vault of the former Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank Building.
Curtis LeMay, a grey haired aide-de-camp, a one-armed veteran wearing 101st Airborne tabs, and Westy Westmoreland were the only military men in the Situation Room. Also present were the Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright, Robert McNamara from Defense, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. The emptiness of the room contrasted starkly with the lobby and reception area outside, which was a crush of flunkies and mid-level Administration staffers.
The President acknowledged his brother’s entrance with a raised hand.
“What’s happened?” Bobby Kennedy asked, not really wanting to know.
The mood in the room was...panicky.
It was Curtis LeMay answered his question.
“The British attacked the Kitty Hawk Battle Group south of Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced, pushing himself to his feet and beginning to pace like a Grizzly with grumbling ulcers. “Reports are coming in all the time but the Brits used nukes,” he vented a disgusted grunt, “and we think the Kitty Hawk is gone!”
Bobby Kennedy stared at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as if he suddenly found himself confronted by a madman with a felling axe foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
The President stirred.
“Bobby’s been out of town the last two days, General,” he said in a broken voice. “He won’t have heard what happened yesterday.”
The younger brother looked at his elder sibling.
Shock, fear tingled down his spine.
Jack looked like an old, dying man, hunched and diminished in his chair, lifeless and defeated.
“Jack, are you...”
Curtis LeMay stepped between the brothers.
“Carrier Division Seven – acting in accordance with Presidential directives - attacked and destroyed the British carrier group in the Gulf around this time yesterday.” This the veteran airman barked angrily, brutally cutting across the brother’s fast waning empathetic linkage.
“We did what?”
Bobby Kennedy was starting to feel like he had walked into somebody else’s bad dream.
“Why the heck did we do that?”
The President attempted to sit up, slumped back.
“Because that was what the Navy thought I wanted,” he murmured, slurring the words. “Twelve hours ago the Russians demanded B-52 strikes against the surviving British ships in the Shatt al-Arab, British armor south of Basra and on British defensive lines on Abadan Island...”
The Attorney General was struggling to get his head around what he was hearing.
“Did you say the Kitty Hawk was gone?” He asked LeMay, thinking he must have misunderstood what he had just been told. Everything he had just been told, or at least that was what he fervently hoped.
LeMay nodded sternly.
“Kitty Hawk, the cruiser Boston, other ships are damaged, several may be in a sinking condition.” He paused, gulped down a sharp intake of breath. “The Brits know how we fight. They know our weaknesses.”
This latter was voiced as an accusation to the room at large.
Bobby Kennedy realized belatedly that LeMay was scowling at Robert McNamara, who had removed his rimless spectacles and was cleaning the lenses with a small, dark cloth. Old Iron Pants had goaded his political master to step up to the plate.
The Secretary of Defense was impassive.
“We’re still waiting on developments in the Mediterranean, Bobby. Sixth Fleet has been ordered to adopt a ‘passive’ stance unless fired upon by British and Commonwealth forces.”
Bobby Kennedy had never really followed military matters. He had briefly been in the Navy in the Second War, but not seen any active service, and largely avoided contact with martial affairs ever since. Now his lawyerly mind began to zero in on the pressing dilemma facing the commander of the powerful Mediterranean Fleet.
“It’s Bernard Clarey in charge in Malta, isn’t it?” He checked, thinking aloud.
Clarey was the man who had ‘cleaned house’ after the attempt to suborn the chain of command of the US Navy’s Polaris Missile Submarine Fleet. He had done what he had to do quickly, efficiently and without once allowing the ‘problem’ to break out into the public domain. His reward had been his appointment to fly his flag on the USS Independence, after the Kitty Hawk the Navy’s biggest and most modern operational super carrier...
Curtis LeMay had stopped pacing.
“Yes.”
“What do we think the British will do in the Mediterranean, General LeMay?”
“Clarey thinks they will intern our ships. The whole goddam fleet!”
“Can they do that?”
“They just sank the Kitty Hawk!” LeMay thundered. “What do you think?”
Chapter 51
Friday 3rd July 1964
The British Embassy, Wister Park, Philadelphia
Rachel Piotrowska had been watching the protesters pressing against the relatively thin blue line of the Philadelphia PD’s riot squad. National Guardsmen and State Troopers stood in groups behind the policemen wielding pump action shotguns and long night sticks, waiting anxiously for their moment around the three M113 armored personnel carriers which had moved into the park overnight.
“Would you attend the Ambassador and the Chargé d'affaire please, Rachel?” Lady Franks asked, gently tapping on her office door and looking inside.
The younger woman broke from her thoughts.
“Of course,” she smiled.
Barbara, Lady Franks, had refused to go to Canada with the other wives after the bombing of the Embassy Compound in June. She and her husband had been married over thirty years and she was not about to be separated at the very moment when ‘Oliver needs me most’.
After the ‘Maltese Navy Wives’, Marija Christopher and Rosa Hannay had departed Philadelphia with their husbands bound for California via Huntsville, Alabama, Barbara Franks had gone out of her way to befriend Rachel, perhaps sensing that with the departure of Marija and Rosa, she had felt a little bereft, almost as if she had lost two little sisters.
The older woman joined the Embassy’s chief spy at the window.
“Why do they hate us so?” She asked sadly.
“I don’t think it is hate,” Rachel offered distractedly. “I think it is fear, and that is much more dangerous.”
The two women walked across the first floor of the building, Lady Franks bidding her companion farewell outside the Ambassador’s room as she returned to her private apartments.
Both the Ambassador and his deputy, Sir Patrick Dean rose from their chairs when Rachel entered the room.
“Thank you for coming over so promptly,” Lord Franks smiled grimly.
“Is there more news from the Persian Gulf?” She asked.
“We’ve just learned that the C-in-C Mediterranean, Air Marshall French has been ordered to ‘intern’ all Sixth Fleet ships at Malta and Gibraltar and has been authorized to ‘arrest’ American naval and commercial vessels at sea.”
“When?” Rachel inquired, feeling empty inside.
“Within the next hour or so.”
The RAF had dropped nuclear weapons on the US Navy in the Persian Gulf and – probably – sunk the USS Kitty Hawk and several other big American ships. Now British and Commonwealth forces throughout the Mediterranean were about to seize, by force if necessary, what remained of the US Navy’s once globe-dominating blue water fleet.
“Is there any other news from Iran and Iraq, Ambassador?”
Lord Franks shook his head.
“Other than that heavy fighting continues in the Abadan sector and around Umm Qasr, no, I’m afraid not. I think the fog of war is descending on the whole region. We may have already received the last reliable reports.”
Sir Patrick Dean nodded sagely.
“Perhaps, the time has come to begin destroying sensitive papers, Oliver.”
“Yes,” his friend agreed, looking to Rachel. “Perhaps, your people should start on that as soon as possible?”
“Yes, of course. With your permission I will arm my staff, sir.”
Lord Franks nodded.
Members of the Security Services and Armed Forces were permitted to carry hand guns within the compound whether on or off duty. Royal Marines assigned to the Embassy security detail were armed with Sten Guns and L1A1 SLRs. In normal times nobody carried weapons within the walls of the Embassy building and all guns were locked away.
The Ambassador met Rachel’s stare.
“Under no circumstances is there is to be gun play if the US authorities attempt to enter the Embassy compound. In that event I will surrender myself and expect every other member of the legation to do likewise without fuss, or bother.”
“I understand, sir,” she acknowledged, quirking an apologetic half-smile. “I will make your orders known to all my people.”