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

by James Philip

  Belatedly, Marija saw her brother’s knapsack just inside the door of the family’s apartment.

  He glanced back down at his feet.

  “They’ve taken me back on at the dockyard,” he confided, smugly.

  “Does Margo know?”

  “Margo knows everything!” Joe Calleja reached into the house and hefted the rucksack. He sobered a little. “There were a lot of guys killed and injured in the docks. I think everything has changed. I wish I was sure it was for the better.”

  Marija’s shoulders sagged.

  “Peter’s ship was attacked,” she sniffed, on the verge of a flood of tears. With Joe she didn’t need to be brave, level-headed, or reasonable unless there were witnesses and notwithstanding they were standing in a busy street with people walking by all the time, they were as good as alone. “The same night we were bombed. Nobody knows if he is alive or dead...”

  Her brother embraced her very, very gently as she began to sob.

  Chapter 27

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  Government House, Cheltenham, England

  “My word,” Sir Richard White, Head of the Secret Intelligence Service remarked dryly, “you’ve been a busy little bee, Tom,” he added, shaking the shorter man’s hand.

  “It is a funny old World,” the Foreign Secretary agreed, waving his premier spymaster to a chair by the guttering fire which had taken the edge off the chill in the air. “I always thought ‘Red Dawn’ was one of those intelligence myths, you know, like the existence of a hypothetical Fellow of Trinity College who isn’t a KGB plant?”

  The spymaster blanched at this.

  “Red Dawn is a damnably better subtext for what’s been going on lately than anything anybody else has come up with, Tom.”

  The two men had been friends since they had worked together in MI5 in the Second World War. Like other wartime intelligence officers their Who’s Who entries explained away their war service as ‘attached to the War Office for the duration’ or some such similarly anodyne form of words. Tom Harding-Grayson had not been alone in thinking transferring Dick White from MI5 – where he’d been respected and successful – to Head MI6, where he’d been neither, in the years before the October War, had been a blunder.

  “Did you hear Kennedy’s speech last night?”

  “No,” the spymaster apologised.

  “He played the conspiracy card and virtually accused the US Air Force of going ‘rogue’ on him.”

  “Ah, that’s not good.”

  “The Yanks will parley with us but only if we hand back their POWs first.”

  “I didn’t realise we were at war?” Dick White queried urbanely. “Did I miss something?”

  Tom Harding-Grayson guffawed.

  “The reason we’ve not attempted to deal directly with the White House is that they’ve shown very little inclination to take our calls lately, and frankly, it is the considered judgement of the UKIEA that we haven’t a clue what they actually want. You can’t negotiate with somebody who doesn’t understand their own vital strategic interests. To do so would be a recipe for disaster.”

  Dick White absorbed this unhurriedly.

  “My source for Red Dawn is Arkady Pavlovich Rykov,” he said in little more than a whisper.

  His old friend blinked at him.

  “Wasn’t there a young fellow called Rykov who was Stalin’s interpreter at Yalta and Potsdam?”

  “Yes. The same man. Later he was Nikita Sergeyevich’s protégé.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson’s eyes narrowed.

  “He was Khrushchev’s man, too?”

  “Yes. A colonel in the KGB.”

  The new Foreign Secretary gave his principle spymaster a thoughtful look as if he half-suspected he was the potential victim of a particularly fiendish practical joke.

  “And how long has Arkady Pavlovich been in your pocket?”

  “Since the end of 1956. The way the Hungarian Rising was put down was the last straw. For the record; Rykov’s not the sort of man who is ever in anybody’s pocket, Tom,” Dick White avowed dryly. “Red Dawn was a thing of the Stalin era which, shall we say, got so out of hand that by the late fifties Khrushchev was afraid it would destabilise the entire Soviet system. I don’t know if Operation Anadyr, the attempt to base ICBMs on Cuba was a thing sponsored by members of the Red Dawn movement inside the Soviet hierarchy, of just a bad call by the Politburo, or even by Nikita Sergeyevich himself. I don’t know if Red Dawn poisoned the atmosphere in Moscow so badly that the Soviets backed themselves into a corner they couldn’t get out of over Cuba. What I do know, or more correctly, strongly believe, is that the Red Dawn movement is real and that the Soviet leadership was worried enough about it in the late fifties to attempt to systematically purge it, and when that failed to ask a man like Arkady Pavlovich Rykov to penetrate its higher echelons.”

  The Foreign Secretary looked at the calm, unflappable man dressed immaculately, impeccably despite having stepped off an RAF Comet twenty minutes before knocking on his door.

  “So you’re basing your Red Dawn theory on the word of a single Soviet spy who may, or may not be telling the truth?”

  The spymaster said nothing.

  Tom Harding-Grayson continued to analyse the problem. He and his old friend had not always seen things eye to eye, especially when it came to the Americans, and although they’d agreed to disagree more often than not, their minds didn’t operate along parallel lines. What made perfect sense to the Head of MI6 did not necessarily fit into the bigger picture Tom Harding-Grayson tried to keep in his head at all times. Spies were wont to see plots and conspiracies in the most innocent of errors, miscalculations or misplaced ambitions. That was what they were paid to do and their lives, occasionally, depended on that corrupted view of everybody else’s reality.

  “It is all a bit far-fetched, old man,” he said presently, clasping his hands together and casting his gaze into the dwindling glow of the embers in the hearth. Getting by on the same coal ration as the ordinary worker and his family was problematic at this time of year and the winter hadn’t really bitten yet. “I’ll grant that it offers an explanation for some of our troubles.”

  “Rykov’s most recent intelligence comes from the Levant, Tom. Red Dawn is a more coherent and tangible movement in that part of the World. If Red Dawn has significant tentacles and capabilities in Western Europe and North America, the animal may be a completely different beast. Perhaps, a more opportunistic, disjointed force simply exploiting the civil and military dislocation caused by the October War. Remember, Red Dawn was not created by Stalin as a political instrument; more as an ongoing blight upon humanity after he was dead. Hitler tried to do the same thing at the end of the forty-five war. Remember how obsessed we and the Americans were about the so-called Alpine Redoubt that hundreds of thousands of fanatical Nazis were supposedly going to hold onto for all time? The only difference is that Hitler died too soon to do more than inflict scorched earth on his own people; Stalin had the best part of a decade to get Red Dawn off the ground, a decade in which to exploit the simmering ethnic and religious tensions in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the World. Nearly a decade in which to lay the foundations of a movement whose central raison d’être is to promote a virulently nihilistic antidote to everything the Western World has stood for since the Renaissance.”

  The Foreign Secretary smiled bleakly.

  “Goodness, we’ll make a philosopher of you yet, Dick.”

  The spymaster leaned towards his friend.

  “Tom, if half of what Arkady Rykov has told me is true our current difficulties are as nothing to what is to come.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  A young woman in a shabby dress stole into the room and handed Tom Harding-Grayson a slim Manila folder with a much overwritten cover, and departed as swiftly as she had appeared. The Foreign Secretary opened the file.

  “Excuse me a moment, Dick,” he murmured distractedly as he perused the contents of the f
ile marked ‘Urgent and Immediate’. After a few moments he reached for the phone on his desk. “I’d like to speak to Captain Brenckmann in my office please. Yes, as soon as possible. Thank you...”

  Dick White waited patiently.

  “Something’s going on in Washington,” his friend told the spymaster, looking up from the file. “We’re intercepting radio broadcasts reporting a large number of explosions and sustained gunfire around government buildings including the Pentagon and fighter bombers over-flying the city.”

  “A coup, perhaps,” the Head of MI6 speculated.

  “Is that really likely?” Asked the other man, in no way discounting the idea.

  “Ninety percent of North America was untouched by the October War. However, the perceptions of most Americans I have met in the last year is that their country was ravaged as badly, if not worse, than any other ‘democracy’. This, and the fact that the war changed the rules of the political game by removing America’s one unifying ‘enemy’, the Soviet Union, has bred a somewhat febrile atmosphere in which many of the more extreme elements in American Society – to paraphrase a senior member of the US intelligence community, ‘back-woodsmen, miscellaneous crazies and religious nuts’ whose numbers have been swelled by disaffected ex-servicemen summarily dumped back into civilian life by the so-called ‘peace dividend defence cuts’ – have moved filled the vacuum left by what I suspect future historians will probably term ‘the great American democratic deficit’.”

  “Go on,” the Foreign Secretary prompted.

  “The situation is made for a movement like Red Dawn to exploit. Federal mismanagement of the immediate aftermath of the October War reignited the ‘states rights’ issue in Massachusetts and the Carolinas and even, to a degree in New York State, and of course in the Pacific north-east. Perhaps, the most de-stabilising of the handful of Soviet strikes was the one that destroyed large areas of Chicago. Notwithstanding that the American industrial base was, and remains, so vast and so riddled with redundancies, the balance of industrial and therefore, economic power has shifted, become more diverse and in time will create a far more resilient and probably, much wealthier America. But in the meantime the American people are suffering a period of rapid re-adjustment. Unemployment has soared despite the drive to return to pre-war levels of production because the inefficiencies in the system are suddenly being ruthlessly purged. With all the non-jobs and sinecures being squeezed out of the US economy it isn’t surprising that there should be widespread industrial discontent. Don’t forget that profound racial tensions were bubbling up in the Deep South before the October War. The burgeoning Civil Rights movement led by charismatic figures like Martin Luther King hasn’t gone away, in fact, the events of the last year have served to drive forward the struggle for equality. In such a climate it is hardly surprising that with an intensely partisan political system and large areas of territory under a variety of kinds of martial law, or no law at all, that the ‘crazies’ should start ‘coming out of the woodwork’. Personally, I thought the process of societal disintegration would take longer in the States. Several years, perhaps. However, that a major insurrection might be in progress at this time, relatively speaking so soon after the October War speaks to me of the influence of a guiding hand. Red Dawn might well be that guiding hand.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson’s eyes narrowed.

  “You don’t sound very surprised to hear about explosions and gunfire and fighter jets flying over Washington DC, Dick?”

  “I’m not. My analysis was that it was bound to happen sooner or later.” He shrugged apologetically. “If I’d come to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, your predecessor, or to you as Sir Alec’s principle advisor with this before now you’d have sent me away with a flea in my ear. You’d probably have accused me of being alarmist.”

  “Perhaps,” his friend conceded. Dick White was right; dear old Alec Douglas-Home would never have taken the spymaster seriously again if he’d come to him with a hypothesis linking Red Dawn to a future armed insurrection in America.

  “I’d never dream of sending a fellow like you away with any kind of flea in his ear, Dick,” Tom Harding-Grayson remonstrated dryly.

  “You know what I mean, Tom.”

  There was a new knock at the door.

  Captain Walter Brenckmann was tired and dishevelled in his crumpled US Navy uniform and he hadn’t shaved for thirty-six hours. He’d just been roused from a troubled sleep having despaired of the quixotic mission the British envisaged for him when they’d brought him back to Cheltenham. His one ‘conversation’ with ‘his people back home’ had been an unmitigated disaster in which he’d said one thing to Dean Rusk and Bobby Kennedy and the US Secretary of State and the Attorney General had heard another. He’d tried and failed to rationalise that misbegotten trans-Atlantic telephone exchange; politicians always only heard what they want to hear. He’d had a shot at trying to get the fools in Washington to understand what was going on and he hadn’t just blown it, he’d made things worse. Listening to the President’s State of the Union Address he’d asked himself how soon the missiles would be flying and when the first bombs would fall.

  The newcomer viewed the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service warily.

  “This is Sir Richard White, Head of MI6,” Tom Harding-Grayson announced unnecessarily.

  “Call me ‘Dick’,” the tall, handsome man in his fifties said to the unkempt former US Naval Attaché to the Court of Balmoral. “I hear you share our fervent desire to avoid further mutual unpleasantness between our two countries?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Reuters is reporting explosions and heavy fighting in the streets of Washington DC,” Tom Harding-Grayson said flatly, coming to a decision that he fully understood would be the making or the breaking of his career, and possibly of the British people.

  Chapter 28

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  HMS Dreadnought, 117 miles West of Vigo

  Commander Simon Collingwood stood over the Plot Table in the control room of the Royal Navy’s first – and only – nuclear-powered attack submarine while he methodically deconstructed, and then as painstakingly, reconstructed the operational plan he had been considering ever since the two United States Navy boats had latched onto HMS Dreadnought like a pair of four thousand ton steel limpets.

  Both of Dreadnought’s jailors had similar acoustic signatures and since one of them, USS Scorpion, SN589, had been identified from a previous encounter by her sound profile, it was likely that both vessels were Skipjack class hunter killers. It was this realisation that had placed a malicious seed in Simon Collingwood’s mind.

  Under the terms of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement Dreadnought had been constructed around exactly the same S5W reactor and propulsion system as the boats of the Skipjack class. Although the hull forms of the British and the American boats were different, they ‘sounded’ very alike, especially when they were in close company or making speed at a distance. This shared ‘acoustic profile’ was much less of a problem for the hunted than it was for the hunters who, in dire straits, had at all times to be absolutely sure they weren’t hunting the ‘wrong’ target.

  The Commanding Officer of the Dreadnought had been observing how his jailors were going about their business for the last twelve hours. While it was clear that the American captains were manoeuvring independently; he’d seen enough to know they were both using the same, somewhat unimaginative ‘playbook’. Understandably, their priorities were to: one, not collide with each other or their ‘prisoner’, and; two, not to give Dreadnought any excuse to start a shooting war in which, most likely, all three boats would probably be sunk with all hands. While Simon Collingwood wasn’t planning to get himself killed – well, not if he could help it but accidents happened – if the price of getting out of jail was to risk a collision...so be it.

  “Mr Forton,” he said quietly to his bearded Executive Officer, “the boat will come to Actions Stations. As loudly as possible, if you please.�
��

  The other man grinned wickedly as he raised the intercom microphone to his lips.

  “This is the Executive Officer. The boat will come to Action Stations! Repeat, the boat will come to Action Stations!” He nodded at the crewman opposite the plot. “Sound the collision alarm!”

  The crew of the Dreadnought, pre-briefed, compartment by compartment, division by division clattered noisily about their business.

  “Down planes,” Simon Collingwood called. “Ten degrees down angle. Helmsman, come left ten degrees...”

  Right now the control rooms of the two shadowing Skipjack class submarines would be coming to life with a rude shock. Reports would be ricocheting off the bulkheads, heads would be being scratched, and watch officers urgently summoning their captains.

  “Make you revs one hundred, Mr Forton.”

  “One-zero-zero revs, aye, sir!”

  “Reverse planes. Up angle ten degrees!”

  Dreadnought’s turning dive became a rolling ascent as she slowly porpoised down and then up some one hundred and fifty feet in the water column.

  “Scorpion has broken right and come up to ten knots. Away Doppler.”

  The USS Scorpion had been trailing a thousand yards astern.

  “Bandit one has come to a full stop, sir.”

  The other boat had heard Dreadnought’s sudden, unexpected emergence from silent running and plotted her turn. Now she was listening; trying to work out what was going on. So far, so good. One jailor had broken away to reduce the collision risk, the other had passively stood off.

  “All stop!” He called.

  The boat stopped softly vibrating and glided to a halt at a depth of two hundred and thirty feet, slowly, imperceptibly at first, assuming a bow up attitude.