The Pillars of Hercules (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 3)

by James Philip

  “An RAF unarmed high-altitude Canberra reconnaissance aircraft attempted to climb to within visual identification range of our U2 sortie over the Maltese Archipelago and tracked it back to the general vicinity of its base in northern Italy, Mr President. Over Genoa Regia Aeronautica interceptors attempted to engage the Canberra but it was flying too high. Permission was sought to vector two F-104 Starfighters onto the bogey but the C-in-C US Forces in Italy ordered the ready fighters to land.” The General had brought copious notes, which he now referred to before continuing. “The Hermes Battle Group CAP successfully engaged the second U2 sortie over elements of the British force blockading the Straits of Gibraltar. Two of Hermes’s Sea Vixens, climbing several thousand feet above their known service ceiling launched four air-to-air missiles – Sidewinders we must have supplied before the war - at our aircraft which we believe to have been operating at an altitude of between fifty-four and fifty-seven thousand feet, rather than the sixty thousand plus feet specified in the mission brief...”

  “The British shot down one of our most technologically advanced spy planes because it wasn’t flying at the correct mission height?” The President asked coolly.

  “One theory is that the aircraft might have been experiencing technical difficulties, sir. Normally, if this was the case the mission would have been aborted. However, it was believed that the British had expended the last of their Sidewinders in the previous day’s action against the Spanish Air Force, sir,” General Wheeler continued stiffly. “This was an assumption consistent with the Hermes Battle Group standing over a hundred miles out to sea...”

  Jack Kennedy had seen enough the workings of the ‘military mind’ in the 1945 war in the Pacific to know that the guiding principle in all military hierarchies was that practically every senior officer he’d ever met had been promoted several ranks beyond his competence. General Curtis LeMay was a classic example; a brilliant, press on bomber commander with a drive for organisation who was an accident waiting to happen at any rank above full Colonel. Right now in the middle of the biggest international crisis since the October War ‘the General’ was conducting an unplanned tour of inspection of Strategic Air Command bases in the mid-west; and he wasn’t taking calls!

  Not even his Commander-in-Chief’s calls!

  “I thought the Central Intelligence Agency owned the U2 fleet?” The President asked John McCone.

  “Several aircraft are nominally on call for Department of Defence missions,” the wealthy Republican industrialist who’d been brought in to curb the excesses of the CIA replied, his tone carefully neutral.

  “How many?”

  “Four. Three of which are usually at twenty-four hours or less, notice to operate. My office wasn’t notified that two of the aircraft had been transferred to northern Italy for operations in the European Theatre.”

  The President didn’t believe – he didn’t want to believe – that the CIA had lost track of several of its most prized assets. He re-fixed his attention on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “So, what’s the story when the Brits hand over the gun camera movies to Pathe, RKO, NBC, ABC and the BBC, General?”

  To his credit the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t flinch.

  “I serve at the President’s pleasure, sir. After this meeting I will submit my resignation to you.”

  Bobby Kennedy, sitting between an iron-faced Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, and an ashen, visibly shaken Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, fidgeted and eventually blurted: “Why hasn’t that maniac LeMay been arrested yet?”

  Jack Kennedy looked to his younger brother. He sometimes envied Bobby his optimism; likewise, there were times he despaired of his lack of common sense. The only thing you never, ever did in the military was give an order you absolutely knew wasn’t going to be obeyed.

  The President flicked a glance at General Wheeler.

  “You tell the Attorney General, Mister Chairman,” he invited. In later years many biographers would cite JFK’s calmness in that crucial moment as a classic example of ‘grace under pressure’. Actually, his was the calm of a man who was without hope and who was patiently waiting for; either, something else to go wrong, or for something to ‘turn up’ and save him from the fine mess he was in. What others took as ‘grace under pressure’, was simply the outward manifestation of a man who’d discovered he was in a deep dark hole and had belatedly concluded that now would be as good a time as any to stop digging.

  “My intelligence is that General Lemay is travelling with a large entourage,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained.

  “So what?” Bobby Kennedy snapped irritably.

  “General LeMay is ‘inspecting’ bases commanded by former subordinates and trusted associates, sir,” General Wheeler went on. “Since all the bases on his itinerary are SAC bases each has a substantial garrison and up to a hundred nuclear warheads in its bomb dump.”

  “Oh, shit...”

  Jack Kennedy drank his coffee.

  Was LeMay crazy enough to go for a full scale military coup? The problem wasn’t so much mounting a coup as keeping the lid on the CIA malcontents and fifth columnists currently running amok in the Mediterranean, and of course, in the British Isles...

  He stared at the big photograph directly in front of him on the table.

  Somebody had scrawled a white notation Manoel Island FAB after action print 02/63/missionBZ2 across the bottom of the image. Thirty seconds after a three ton camera guided earthquake bomb had demolished the western side of the old fortifications, an experimental thermobaric fuel-air device had exploded on the left hand side of what looked like it might once have been a parade ground. Nobody above ground or inside HMS Phoenicia – the official Headquarters of the British Military Governor of the Maltese Archipelago – could possibly have survived that second bomb. It was murder pure and simple and the likely architect of this particular crime against humanity was presently conducting a victory tour around his mid-western fiefdoms.

  “Okay,” the President said again, his voice developing a sudden cutting edge that snapped every eye up from the surface of the table to find his face. “Okay. At my request the Vice-President is consulting Chief Justice Earl Warren with a view to granting him an unfettered hand to investigate the causes, the conduct and the aftermath of the October War. If he accepts this great national task he will have unrestricted access to all documents and will be able to subpoena under penalty of criminal law any member of this Administration or any other person he deems it necessary to interview. His report, whenever he deems it complete, will be released in full to the American people, and thus to the wider World.”

  “Mr, President,” Dean Rusk blurted, his customary urbanity shredded, “is that...”

  “Wise? No. But it is the right thing to do, Dean.”

  Robert McNamara was scratching his chin.

  “There will be serious national security ramifications, Mister President.”

  “I don’t care.” He turned to his brother. “Bobby, tell the networks I will be making a State of the Union Address from the Oval Office at eight o’clock tonight.” He half-smiled. “This day.”

  Silence.

  “That’s less than eleven hours from now, Jack. There’s no way they can set things up that fast...”

  “Tell them if they aren’t ready they’ll miss the scoop of the year and have to read all about it in the Washington Times.”

  The Attorney General hesitated for one, two, three seconds. Then he was on his feet running for the door already shouting to his aides waiting in the corridor outside the Situation Room to follow him.

  “Mr President,” Robert McNamara asked, blinking through the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses with the air of a man who was vexed by the suspicion that that he might have just missed something important. “Have you thought this thing through? I found at Ford that it didn’t pay to be, well, impulsive, in moments of high tension...”

  “Bob,” Jack Kenned
y drawled, his anxiety draining from his body like water swirling down a storm drain after a sudden summer downpour, “I’ve been thinking about this ever since that night thirteen months ago. Maybe, the American people will skin us alive but at least we’ll have taken the first small step towards atoning for what we did.”

  The Secretary of Defence was minded to pursue this unlikely thread of thought but he was interrupted by Dean Rusk, who’d recovered a little of his poise now that he knew their fates were sealed.

  “LeMay’s people will hear about this the moment Bobby puts through the first calls to the networks, Mister President?”

  General Earle Wheeler had just picked up the handset of the ready phone that was never far from his elbow. He met his President’s eye unwaveringly.

  “There will be soldiers guarding the perimeter of the White House within half-an-hour, sir,” he said grimly. From his tone what he meant to say was ‘there will be soldiers, tanks, field artillery and every fit man, or woman, from the Pentagon who could bear arms guarding the perimeter of the White House in a lot less than half-an-hour!

  The Head of the President’s Secret Service detachment had entered the Situation Room.

  “I am advised that we have a situation, sir?”

  Jack Kennedy chuckled.

  He hoped he was wrong but it seemed to him that since Curtis Lemay was – by his own design – dragging around the boondocks half a continent away, it was unlikely he was ready to move yet. Of course, if he was wrong then he’d most likely be dead sooner rather than later. Oddly, he didn’t think for a minute that the man who’d launched Armageddon planned to drive up Pennsylvania Avenue standing on the top of a tank. The man wasn’t capable of thinking through the logic of his actions, any of them. No, he’d engineered – cack-handedly, obviously with a collection of misfits and old buddies – a different kind of coup. He’d set out to sow confusion, to create a second World crisis and waited to see how the chips fell confident that the American people would surely acclaim him their new Emperor. Douglas MacArthur had had a mind like LeMay’s – explaining why the two men had detested each other so fiercely – and had it not been for Harry Trueman’s intervention he’d have started a nuclear war, too.

  When Curtis Lemay heard about the unplanned State of the Union Address he’d almost certainly think his plan was about to come to fruition.

  He might even think he’d already won.

  Chapter 15

  Monday 9th December 1963

  Naval Dockyard, Senglea, Malta

  Samuel Calleja blinked into the violent dazzle of the arc lights illuminating the wreckage in Dock No 1. He placed his hands on his hips, gagged on a yawn and shook his head. HMS Torquay lay on her side in the now drained dock. Pumping had only just started when the bomb, either a five hundred or a thousand-pounder had exploded between the wall and the frigate’s starboard side next to her engine room spaces inflicting catastrophic structural damage. Detonating so close alongside the dock wall the destructive power of the bomb had been multiplied several times by exactly the same kind of hydro-dynamic compressive forces that Barnes Wallis had exploited to design a bomb to knock down the great dams of the Ruhr Valley in 1943. Except, in this instance, those effects had been at play on the thin side plating of an unarmoured hull, not several hundred thousand tons of solid brick and concrete. The blast had blown in a twenty foot long section of hull from the level of the main deck to the vessel’s keel and probably broken HMS Torquay’s back. The ship had capsized within seconds and over fifty men – some thirty naval personnel and over twenty mostly native Maltese dockyard workers had been trapped in the wreck. Thus far only eleven bodies had been cut out of the hulk although now that the dock had been drained – a second bomb which had exploded in French Creek had killed two men in the pump house and severed most of the power cables to the electric motors working the pumps – they’d belatedly been able to start a compartment by compartment search. Realistically, it was a search for more bodies; over forty-eight hours after the disaster there was no realistic hope of finding anybody else alive.

  “I thought I’d find you here, son,” said the familiar voice as a hand patted his back.

  Sam Calleja half-turned and gave his father a wintery smile.

  “This would never have happened if the British had left us in peace after the war,” he said sourly.

  “Which war?” The older man inquired wryly. There was no member of his family who’d been more pro-British before the October War than Sam. He attributed the remark to tiredness. “The Crimean War, the Great War...”

  His eldest son shook his head as his lips became a thin white line across his grim-smeared face.

  “Joe and your sister have gone back to Mdina now,” his father told him. “The British have asked Dottoressa Seiffert to set up an emergency hospital at Fort Pembroke. Marija went back to Mdina to collect a few things.”

  The nightmare of the attack was slowly fading now.

  The bombs had exploded in and around HMS Agincourt moored in Sliema Creek less than three hundred yards away from where Peter Calleja, his wife and daughter had been drinking coffee and enjoying the mild dusk. Dozens of people had been walking on the sea front. He’d heard the approaching scream of jet engines, seen the flash of the first detonation and bundled his wife and daughter to the ground, desperately attempted to shelter them from the bullet and shrapnel-filled air. He’d been the most surprised and the most relieved man on Earth when afterwards he’d realised that none of them had received so much as a scratch. Nearby, men and women, and a child, a girl of perhaps four or five, lay or sat on the pavement, bleeding, too shocked or too badly injured to move. Marija had been a revelation. She’d gone first to the girl child, established she was splashed with blood and traumatised but otherwise unharmed. Peter’s wife had comforted the child while her daughter went among the dead and the wounded, calling for help, directing dazed passersby to staunch wounds and to help her move casualties under cover. And then the big bombs had landed within the ancient ramparts of Fort Manoel with ear-splitting concussions and smoke, dust and the screams of the dead and the dying had seemed to drift across the oil-fouled waters of Sliema Creek like a malignant miasma. It had been nearly two hours before an Army doctor with a small team of orderlies arrived on the waterfront. Peter Calleja had no idea how many lives his daughter had saved by then. Yesterday morning his wife had burned Marija’s blood-stained dress; partly because the garment was ruined forever, but mostly to try and expunge the horrible memories of the sights and sounds they’d witnessed the previous evening.

  Peter Calleja had good reason to be proud of his children. He was a lucky man and every morning he reminded himself of the fact. He remembered the day Samuel; his first born had followed him into the dockyards as if it was yesterday. Until Friday evening when Marija had woven her magical spell and created a pool of order out of a scene of utter chaos and stupefying suffering he’d honestly believed nothing could, or would equal his pride of that day. Now Sam was an under-manager; in ten years he’d be doing his job as Dockyard Supervisor. Like father like son, the one following the other into the family business. Not that the old Naval Dockyards straggling around the creeks of the Grand Harbour were anybody’s family business. In 1959 the Royal Navy had leased them to a firm registered in Monmouthshire, South Wales called Bailey (Malta) Limited, which in the period leading up the October War had managed the docks like feudal absentee landlords. In those days the British had been stepping aside, gently winding down towards granting Malta independence and the Royal Navy had seemed happy to allow the old Admiralty yards to slowly descend into a kind of benevolent anarchy ahead of Maltese independence, scheduled for sometime in 1964. Everything had changed in the last year and the docks had been re-nationalised under direct Admiralty control. There had been talk of prosecuting several of the former directors of Bailey (Malta) Limited for financial irregularities discovered by Royal Navy auditors but nothing had yet come of those rumours. Peter Calleja had had mix
ed feelings about little Malta trying to go it alone in the World; the chaos in the dockyards had seemed to him like an ill portent of what was likely to follow in the first years of independence and he hadn’t looked forward to the prospect. He yawned, ran a hand through his thinning dark hair.

  Peter Calleja looked at his thirty-one year old son, barely able to contain his paternal pride. Sam had been a troubled, solitary child with nightmares about the 1945 war but he’d grown into a fine man. Sam was the spitting image of him when he was the same age, sparsely built and tall, dedicated to his career and his family although his mother would only be happy when Sam and his wife, Rosa, a beautiful girl from an old Maltese family finally produced their first child. Peter and his wife were beginning to despair of ever holding their first grandchild in their arms. Especially, since Joe didn’t seem to be the marrying kind, or at least if he was he wasn’t in any hurry, and Marija, well, Marija might never bear at child... That thought deeply pained her parents; although not a day passed when they didn’t thank merciful God for the miracle of her life. They’d so nearly lost her all those years ago and later having to watch her imprisoned in a hospital cot, unable to walk had been the cruellest of tortures. To see Marija now, so young and beautiful, so full of vitality and living her life to the full was answer enough for their years of prayer. To witness Sam becoming a man to be reckoned with in the dockyards, well respected, made the trials of recent times bearable. He just wished Sam and Marija hadn’t fallen out. What did it matter if Sam’s new wife had airs and graces? Why did Marija have to flaunt her political activities in front of her brother when she knew, full well, that Sam had never shown the remotest interest in any of that stuff?

  “Is it true?” The younger man asked.

  “About Marija meeting the new Admiral?”

  “Yes,” there was a strange hoarseness in Sam Calleja’s throat which his father put down to the smoke and dust which still hung around the docks two days after the attack.