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

by James Philip

  The younger man grinned in the darkness.

  “Forgive me if I venture to say,” Peter Christopher rejoined respectfully, “that I fear you protest overmuch, sir.”

  “Maybe,” the other man conceded. “Tomorrow hopefully, we shall discover what else has been going on in the World while we’ve been preoccupied with our own little local difficulties.”

  “I’m not entirely convinced that I actually want to know.”

  The Captain of HMS Talavera laughed ruefully, relieved to hear the self-deprecating irony in his EWO’s voice.

  Each time the wind veered the stench of burning, of leaking bunker oil and corruption wafted back onto the destroyer; in the background the pumps strained and roared, dirty water sloshed over the side in streams all along the amidships main deck. The bodies of the dead were in bags beneath tarpaulins on the decks, others lay below in shattered compartments, their mangled remains hopelessly enmeshed in the twisted steel.

  Two hours later after one last round of farewells – Guns, his friend Peter Weiss was staying with the ship, as were other warrant officers and leading rates he’d known since the October War - Peter Christopher stepped into the waiting arms of the men in the whaler taking the last of Talavera’s walking wounded to the shore. Jack Griffin jumped nimbly down after him. The two men had lumps in their throats as they stared back at their ship as the small boat pushed off.

  There was a large crowd, mainly comprised of local civilians, on the quayside. A cheer went up as the first man stepped ashore from each boat that came alongside. There were ancient ambulances and buses, motors running noisily, clattering along the dock. Doctors in white coats and nurses in prim, starched uniforms surrounded each injured man.

  Peter Christopher doffed his filthy, salt-fouled cap as he walked into the lights. A nurse began to shepherd him into the shadows.

  “I go where Commander Christopher goes, luv,” Jack Griffin declaimed loudly.

  The hospital was clearly swamped by the sudden – albeit expected – rush of seriously injured casualties, many suffering from horrific burns, from the two damaged British destroyers. Peter Christopher walked among the men waiting to be assessed and taken away to the wards of what seemed in the darkness, no more than what in England before the war he’d have described as a large cottage hospital. The knowledge reinforced his gratitude to the Portuguese for stepping in to help and risking the ire of its powerful Spanish neighbour.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Christopher!”

  Peter hadn’t meant to drop off to sleep in his chair; it had happened anyway.

  A concerned-looking, rumpled man of ample girth rolled this way and that through the crush in the reception hall, waving hopefully.

  “I’m Donald Wyndham, Assistant Honorary Console in this beautiful city. I’ve been sent to find you.”

  “I wasn’t lost,” the younger man replied, yawning so hard his whole body shook with the exertion of it.

  “No, of course not.” Wyndham looked around. “We’ve booked rooms at several hotels for those of your men who aren’t in need of urgent medical attention. As you see, the locals are doing their very best but they’re a little bit swamped, as it were. The first tranche of, er, survivors, was taken to the Naval Hospital but that was soon overwhelmed. There’s talk of flying in personnel from England but the medical services at home are no less stressed...”

  And so it was that Peter Christopher found himself in a room in the Nuvo Reunion Hotel overlooking the River Douro. Of course, he didn’t know about the stunning vista from his bedroom window when he arrived. He was too tired, too far gone and it was the middle of the night.

  His kit, all his possessions including his wallet were still on the Talavera. Everything except the clothes he stood up in and the portrait of Marija he’d retrieved from its shattered frame. Marija had sent him the studio head and shoulders monochrome picture, six inches by four, which he’d had mounted in a frame in Edinburgh. She wore a small gold crucifix on a slender chain hanging from her neck. Her skin was clean and clear, her eyes focused a little off camera to show her face in half profile and her hair was pulled back in a traditional, and to modern eyes, almost Edwardian way. He sometimes thought there was something Sephardic, eastern in her – for Malta was the mixing pot of the Mediterranean and its people proud of the fact - and in the portrait her eyes were smiling...

  He always slept better when his head touched his pillow with a picture of Marija floating across his mind’s eye. The bed groaned, he rolled onto his side and slept.

  ...In the sunshine that fell in shafts between great thunder clouds the carrier nosed cautiously into the Grand Harbour, the pilot boat chugging almost beneath her overhanging flight deck. On deck there was only a token parade, perhaps a hundred men lining the side fore and aft of the island bridge and the flight deck was empty, every serviceable Sea Vixen and Buccaneer having flown off to land at RAF Luqa at dawn.

  Inside the Grand Harbour breakwaters the motion of the big ship eased.

  He climbed the steps to the Flight Operations Bridge where the redundant Flight Officer nodded friendly acquaintance and went to stand on the open bridge wing.

  Malta at last...

  On the rampart walls on the Valletta side of the Grand Harbour there were only a few people to welcome the carrier’s arrival at her new home port; but many of those who paused to watch the carrier’s slow progress waved. Guns barked from the saluting platform opposite the broken shell of Fort St Angelo where so many Navy men had died on 5th December. More guns were saluting the Rear Admiral’s flag which slapped and crackled, streaming in the gusting wind from the carrier’s lattice mast beneath the constantly revolving radar bedsteads.

  He stared hard up at the bastions where he could see small groups of men and women waving, or just staring at the rusty, weather-beaten big ship slowly coming to a dead stop. Tugs were positioning themselves at her bow, ready to push the great vessel’s head around. She’d turn in the deep water opposite French Creek; moor up alongside Parlatorio Wharf, where she’d disembark most of the crew before being moved into dry dock sometime tomorrow.

  The carrier had been at sea for over three months and notwithstanding she was a relatively young ship – only four years in commission – she’d steamed hard and operated in several of the World’s oceans in those four years and was long overdue a major refit. Not that HMS Hermes couldn’t still fight her weight if it came to it; as she’d proved, time and again in recent weeks.

  He stared up to the ramparts, a little vexed that he couldn’t name the different curtain walls and redoubts...

  She was standing alone.

  Not atop the towering bastions.

  But on the Valletta quayside half the ship’s length away.

  He shouted for binoculars...

  She was exactly as she was in her portrait.

  Waving, gently amused, happy in her tears...

  Chapter 23

  Monday 9th December 1963

  UKIEA Building, The Cabinet Room, Cheltenham, England

  The President of the United States of America was in a solemn mood as befitted the crisis of the times.

  “In asking Chief Justice Warren to Chair this Commission into the Cuban Missiles War I do so in full confidence that he will unravel the conspiracy that plunged this great country into the darkest hours in its history...”

  The inner circle of the War Cabinet had listened in silence until this juncture.

  “Do we know who this Warren man is, Tom?” Margaret Thatcher asked the Foreign Secretary. Her political antennae told her that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was going to dissemble shamelessly about how the old World had been brought down by some kind of highly implausible, and equally unsubstantiated – and for that matter, impossible to meaningfully authenticate – coalescence of malignant forces inimical to American democracy. Before he finished he was probably going to invoke ‘apple pie’ like his mother had made him when he was a toddler at her knee. The notion that Rose Kennedy would make an
ybody, let alone her own spawn ‘apple pie’ or any other pastry was as absurd as the concept of attempting to explain away the most terrible war in human history as some kind of Machiavellian conspiracy. Even if there had been a conspiracy it had been JFK’s job to root it out before, not after he unleashed the dogs of thermonuclear war. And while she was thinking about it, it would have been nice if Joe Kennedy’s wastrel, playboy second son had consulted his allies in anticipation of, rather than during the all out first strike!

  The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Edward Heath, spread his hands, giving Tom Harding-Grayson - until last week the Permanent Secretary to the late Sir Alec Douglas-Home - who now found himself guiding what passed for the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration’s foreign policy in the post-war era, leave to answer the Angry Widow’s question.

  James Callaghan, the Secretary of State for Defence, and the de facto Deputy Prime Minister sighed: “If we could listen again when the blasted man starts talking about what he’s going to do about the mess his conspirators have allegedly made. But that probably won’t be for a while.”

  Nobody in the room was an avid fan of conspiracy theories. Most successful people in politics understood that conspiracies never worked and when one was caught in the act of conspiring, as one always was, one always looked very bad. Especially, with the voters.

  “Chief Justice Earl Warren is sixty-two years of age,” the Foreign Secretary declaimed. “A lifelong Republican he ran for the Great Old Party’s Vice-Presidential nomination in 1948. He’s the only man to have successfully run for Governor of California three times, before which he was the Attorney General of that State. He became the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States in 1953. Despite the fact that he is a Republican he is socially liberal; he’s against segregation by dint of race and colour in the public school system and is known to support the Civil Rights agenda that was espoused by various members of the Kennedy Administration, notably the President and his brother Bobby, prior to the October War. Despite the parlous state of the rule of law in some areas of the United States, especially those which suffered nuclear strikes during the war, he is a vehement opponent of the suspension of civil liberties in virtually all circumstances. He is known to have taken the White House to task for its casual attitude to declaring states of emergencies, and has publicly deplored occasions when the National Guard and Federal Armed Forces have been called in to contain what he considers to be legitimate and constitutionally-justified protests against the widespread suppression of individual and civil liberties, and inalienable human rights.”

  The three politicians in the room stared at Tom Harding-Grayson, a mixture of surprise and mild astonishment in their faces. The question had been asked; he’d instantly pulled a marvellously concise and eloquent profile of Chief Justice Earl Warren out of his hat like a magician conjuring a white dove into existence.

  The fifth member of the select gathering, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Henry Tomlinson smiled owlishly. The new Foreign Secretary was his oldest friend in Government and – this was a thing he could vouch for in confident verisimilitude – possibly the best informed and intelligent man in his extraordinarily wide acquaintance.

  “A sound man, then?” The Prime Minister observed, half-smiling.

  “If the President thinks we’re going to fall for this nonsense he’s got another thing coming!” Margaret Thatcher declared.

  “Forgive me, Margaret,” Tom Harding-Grayson countered mildly.

  The Home Secretary had honestly believed she’d learned a thing or two about crisis management in the last year; until that was, the last fortnight. The hardest thing wasn’t keeping so many balls in the air at once; it was focusing on the one that mattered at all times. She’d been completely taken off her guard by the Prime Minister’s reminder – to the members of the newly formed War Cabinet – that what they did in the present was critical to what they did in the future. It seemed so obvious but it was so easy to forget. Whatever they did now had to be with one eye on that future. It was an object lesson in strategic rather than tactical thinking, a window into the mind of a man with a vision. Idly, she wondered if this was what it was like being close to a man like Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt at the height of the Second World War. Yes, we limp from one crisis to the next but one day, if we stick to our work, a better World awaits us tomorrow...

  Margaret Thatcher forced herself to focus on the Foreign Secretary.

  “That may not be the important thing,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued, suspecting that the highly-intelligent, thirty-eight year old mother of two was going though one of those problematic phases that most politicians went through when they first attained real power and influence in government. He’d seen the same thing a score of times in his career; and in the case of the Angry Widow he was untypically confident that she’d soon come to terms with her changed realities. The Prime Minister had given her a glimpse of a vision without for a moment understanding what he’d done; without understanding he might conceivably have sparked something extraordinary. The Foreign Secretary met Margaret Thatcher’s gaze. “Whatever we think about it, the Americans appear to have stumbled upon a new narrative. A new legend. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this might yet, even at this eleventh hour, give them, and us, a way out of the impasse that we both find ourselves in.”

  “They gave Franco and his henchmen free reign to attack Gibraltar; they bombed Malta and killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent people, Tom!”

  “Yes,” the Foreign Secretary agreed, not yielding ground for he’d realised – even if other senior figures in the Government hadn’t in recent months – that the Angry Widow trampled over people who didn’t have the conviction or the guts to stand up to her. “And their agents in Ireland were almost certainly behind what happened at Balmoral. And let us not forget the aggressive posturing of the United States Navy in the Western Approaches. Or the apparent, albeit clownishly inept machinations of a certain Loudon Baines Westheimer II, to rabble rouse malcontents within the, er, previous, now dissolved Cabinet. But that’s not the point, Margaret. While the White House was entrenched behind the battle lines of ‘it was us or them’ and were determined to hold the line that it was the Soviets’ fault and that we ought to have in some way supported their stance more effectively than, apparently, by their lights, we did,” he manufactured an impish grin, “other than to confess their sins and ask for absolution, Kennedy’s people had nowhere to go without surrendering the high moral ground. Now they’ve got an escape route and if they have the wit to see it, a way to honourably step back from the brink with us that they never had with the Soviets.”

  In the background the voice of the President changed pitch, warning the highly attuned ears of the listeners in the Cabinet Room that he was about to move past purposeless conjecture, forget scoring cheap political points and hopefully, remember that he was actually supposed to be a leader and a statesman.

  “However,” Jack Kennedy said with a solemnity that might not have been wholly false, “in the context of the affairs of man there is truth in the recognition that words are only words, and that our fears and hopes can only be addressed by actions. I am content to leave the judgement on my part in the momentous events of the last thirteen months to Chief Justice Warren,” a self-deprecatory hesitation, presumably to allow him to flash a boyish grin at the American people, “and to the battalions of historians that will surely study our age with limitless intellectual energy and forensic analysis for as long as human beings continue to walk this Earth. To me, as your President in a time of renewed international crisis, the sacred duty falls upon me to ensure the survival of the American people and of our way of life. Even as I speak Secretary of State Dean Rusk is speeding a proposal to our British ‘friends’ that we hold a face to face, leader to leader summit at which our current problems can be discussed and resolved. In so doing we disregard the fact that the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Adminis
tration unilaterally broke off diplomatic relations three days ago; and that thus far our diplomats have not been granted safe passage to return to the United States. Moreover, as a token of our peaceful intentions towards the United Kingdom, our staunchest allies in the Cuban Missiles War of October last year, I have ordered the US Navy to immediately comply with all the provisions of the unlawful Total Exclusion Zone declared by the UKIEA which comes into effect in less than three days time.”

  “Unlawful!” Margaret Thatcher scoffed softly.

  “Further to this concession I wish to restate the United States unchanged view of the legitimacy of the governments of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Sicily, and of Corsica and Sardinia. It is the view of my Administration that the declarations of independence by the latter island nations, of Corsica and Sardinia, by separate self-appointed military juntas are illegal under international law. Sardinia is rightly an integral part of the polity of Italy; Corsica likewise, is a part of France, notwithstanding the somewhat chaotic governance of that troubled land at this time. The United States of America recognises but does not in any way support or endorse the right-wing, authoritarian regime of the Tuscan League whose writ runs the length of the Italian Peninsula, and to a lesser extent, throughout Sicily. I reiterate that the US Government regards the dictatorships of General Franco in Spain, and of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal as affronts to the democratic principles enshrined by our founding fathers in our constitution. I have issued an executive order to all arms of the United States Government that all existing bilateral and multi-lateral defence and economic agreements and undertakings with and to Spain, Portugal and Italy are, as of ten o’clock Eastern Standard Time, suspended for a period of twenty-eight days.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson was frowning.

  The President was explaining to the American people what a good egg he was and reassuring the New York Stock Exchange that nothing he’d just said was likely to impinge upon business as usual. And if it did then Uncle Sam would ensure nobody was out of pocket.