by James Philip
“Let’s have lots and lots of running about all over the boat impersonating headless chickens if you please, Number One.”
The word was passed and soon men were trampling up and down the boat, hitting bulkheads with wrenches and scraping anything that made an appropriately unhappy screeching sound against available exposed metal surfaces. And then Dreadnought’s bow rose higher and the boat began to slowly slip back into the waiting depths.
“Five zero revs please,” Simon Collingwood ordered.
At three hundred and thirty-five feet the boat’s gentle descent slowed and stopped.
“Four zero revs.”
Still the depth gauge remained steady.
“Three-zero revs.”
Dreadnought began to slip backwards.
“Three-five zero feet!”
“Three-six-zero feet!”
Simon Collingwood knew what the men in the American boats would be thinking. Dreadnought was in distress; and no submariner would ever wish that on another.
“Flood torpedo tubes one and two,” he ordered very quietly.
On an older, smaller diesel-electric boat the water rushing into the forward tubes would have been audible in the control room. Not so on the Dreadnought.
“Tubes one and two flooded down, sir!”
“Flood tubes three and four.”
Simon Collingwood didn’t believe the American boats would fire on Dreadnought but if they did he didn’t intend to die wondering. Both Skipjack class boats were standing off, slowly circling.
“One hundred revs if you please.”
“One-zero-zero revs, aye, sir!”
“Ten degrees left rudder. Hold the boat at two-seven-zero feet.”
HMS Dreadnought turned wide circles beneath the North Atlantic with her jailors watching from afar for over twenty minutes before turning onto a course that intersected the Portuguese coast north of Oporto, and increasing speed to twelve knots.
Obediently, the two Skipjack class jailors fell in behind the British submarine. After an hour one of the pursuers came alongside Dreadnought’s port side at a range of about five hundred yards, probing the renewed silence of her quarry.
Simon Collingwood had predicted the manoeuvre. The US skippers weren’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security because that wasn’t the way either the US Navy or the Royal Navy trained its submarine commanders. However, Dreadnought’s antics and her dogged attempt to head for Portugal would have suggested to them that their prey was damaged and therefore, less dangerous. Because of this it might make what he had in mind much more likely to work.
Another hour passed. The USS Scorpion trailed in Dreadnought’s wake, her companion boat quartered the ocean about a mile ahead.
“Full right rudder!” Simon Collingwood rasped. “Helmsman, reverse your course. Come down to four-zero revs please.” The acknowledgements rattled back.
The USS Scorpion might be trailing at the same depth as Dreadnought, or not. If she was then she was going to have to take drastic evasive action. Either way, the game had begun in earnest.
The jarring pings of active sonar shattered the quiet.
“That was Bandit One getting nervous, sir!” Reported the sound room. “Scorpion is still running silent.”
Again, sonar raked Dreadnought.
“Bandit One is turning right... Coming around onto our stern...”
Simon Collingwood frowned.
Why was the second American boat trying to match Dreadnought’s potential collision course with its sister? He’d come across one or two gung ho sorts training in Connecticut prior to joining the boat a year before her projected completion at Barrow-in-Furness. However, what Bandit One was doing wasn’t gung ho; it was positively dangerous.
“Scorpion is maintaining revs and heading!”
Okay, I’ve got one Skipjack class hunter-killer on a possible collision course on my bow, and another steaming up my prop wash.
This is going to be interesting!
More shrill pings deflected off Dreadnought pressure casing.
And then as the other boat fell in directly astern the pings became mushy, confused in the boat’s wake or missing completely; or returning off a target beyond Dreadnought...
“Bandit One is painting Scorpion for us,” Max Forton chuckled, meeting his Captain’s eye as he looked up from the plot.
Simon Collinwood acknowledged this with a nod.
“All stop! Repeat, all stop!”
Max Forton raised an eyebrow.
“Scorpion and her chum know where we are. We’ll let them think they’ve won this round.” More active pinging scourged the boat.
Minutes passed slowly.
“Scorpion is on our port bow. Very close...”
In this game of underwater blind man’s bluff played with three to four thousand ton chess pieces nothing was more dangerous than one of the players not following standard operating procedures and ignoring the customary courtesies between former friends. If the three participants had been trying to kill each other things would have been so much simpler; as it was Dreadnought’s running silent and manoeuvring erratically was a nightmare for her jailors whose nerves would be rubbed red-raw by now.
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought could hear and feel the USS Scorpion’s churning multi-bladed single screw and the soft thrumming of her turbines. The other boat was less than a hundred yards away, perhaps; and a little deeper. He couldn’t help holding his breath as the sound faded astern. Both US submarines knew exactly where he was but they couldn’t manoeuvre freely because they’d just got in each other’s way.
“Maximum revs please,” he demanded, fighting not to smile too widely. “Come to two-seven-zero degrees. Make our depth three-zero-zero feet.”
Simon Collingwood felt better now he’d seized back the initiative. The United States Navy could either race Dreadnought out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, search for the Hermes Battle Group or fall back on the USS Enterprise and her consorts patrolling the Western Approaches south of Ireland. If they followed Dreadnought into the west; that was well and good, he’d play hide and seek again in a few hours at a time and under conditions of his choosing. If the two Skipjack boats went south he’d put himself between them and the Hermes’s northern screen. If they turned back to secure the undersea flank of the fleet around the USS Enterprise, the giant new super carrier that was the pride of the US Navy, he’d follow them.
HMS Dreadnought surged forward.
Chapter 29
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
If General Curtis LeMay had been smoking one of the fat cigars he’d been famous for pugnaciously jamming between his jaws in dozens of wartime photographs, he’d have involuntarily chewed it to bits. As the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King transporting him from Andrews Air Force Base on the short hop to the White House rose off the tarmac he got his first good look at the pillars of smoke rising from the city on both sides of the Potomac. The main targets had been government buildings, the embassies of friendly countries, and the British Embassy. Part of the Navy Department block on Constitution Avenue had been demolished – or collapsed spontaneously, nobody knew for sure – after two massive truck bombs detonated in front of it. The Main State Building, the huge State Department complex close to the river had been targeted with petrol tankers and a clutch of truck bombs, and as at the Pentagon there were stories of gangs of heavily armed men in military fatigues gunning down survivors and marauding through the wrecked building after the initial assault. There was a pitched battle in progress in and around the Pentagon, Marines and National Guardsmen having been thrown into the ongoing fire fight as they arrived through the night. LeMay’s own aircraft had been delayed nearly an hour in a holding pattern over Andrews Air Force Base as C-130 Hercules transports delivered two battalions of the elite 101st Airborne Division to bolster the defence of the capital.
“Tell me again what’s going on at the White House?” The Chief
of Staff of the United States Air Force demanded, yelling above the roar of the rotors.
“A bunch of crazies with Bazookas tried to slug it out with the Marines holding the perimeter, sir. There were a couple of hits on the West Wing, some bullet damage but the Marine Corps pretty much wiped out the insurgents.”
Curtis LeMay’s expression grew very sour.
Whereas the defenders of the White House had shrugged off every ragged assault to date, the two platoons of lightly armed Marines and the squad of Washington PD officers guarding the grounds of the Pentagon had been wiped out in minutes. The building’s internal security force had been driven deep into the complex before reinforcements from elsewhere started to arrive. By then well-organised ‘insurgents’ equipped with automatic weapons and wire-guided anti-tank munitions had already established defensive positions within the building commanding unrestricted fields of fire over the main approaches. It wasn’t until Virginia National Guard tanks and armoured personnel carriers arrived that a path up to and into the great construction had been secured – with the loss of seventy men and a five armoured vehicles - and the ‘insurgents’ outer gun line breached. FUBAR didn’t begin to describe the catastrophe. Scores of government buildings, embassies and office and suburban housing blocks were burning. Gangs of insurgents had roamed the streets all night stalking, murdering and terrorising innocent unarmed civilians. Scores of firemen and policemen had been gunned down going about their duty; and the atrocity was still going on.
Nobody was talking about casualty numbers; it was too early for that and vicious spasms of new fighting kept breaking out across the city. No sooner was one hot spot damped down than another flared up somewhere else. The latest outbreaks of violence seemed wholly unconnected with the sieges and stand-offs which had developed as the first troops and armour had been fed into the battle. Out in the suburbs there were disturbing reports of the homes being attacked and the families of government officials and diplomats being executed. One account told of a family of a senior Treasury Department official being forced to kneel down in the street outside their burning home before being riddled with automatic gunfire. Panic was spreading like a deadly contagion. In the middle of the fire fights shops and marts were being looted, vehicles stolen and with every passing hour the situation grew murkier. Not least because the telephone system was down across three-quarters of the city. A dystopian apocalyptic nightmare was playing out in the streets of the capital of the most powerful nation in the history of the World.
The Sea King’s loadmaster leaned over Curtis LeMay’s shoulder.
“The White House is still taking sporadic incoming small arms fire, sir,” he reported. “The pilot says we’ll be approaching low and the landing is going to be fast and dirty. He says the sooner everybody’s safely on the ground the better he’ll feel, sir!”
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was never prouder of his people than in moments of dire adversity. He half-turned and patted the younger man’s arm.
“That’s the way I feel about it too, son!” He bawled back, flashing a fearlessly bellicose smile.
In the grey light of the early morning the smoke lay like a dank autumn mist across large areas of the city as the Sea King raced north-east towards the White House, swooping down, flaring out at the last moment, hitting the soft, rain soaked ground hard and rolling several yards before coming to a jarring halt. The door was flung open and Curtis Lemay and his entourage jumped down onto the muddy, churned grass of the West Lawn.
Everybody crouched down and looked around; everybody except the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. Douglas MacArthur had rehearsed his famous return to the Philippines; made damned sure the cameramen were standing in the right place before he stepped off that landing craft and got his feet wet. There were no cameramen waiting for Curtis LeMay’s return to Washington DC but the Big Cigar had no doubt which return was going to have the greater impact on American history. History wasn’t about the last war or the one before, it was about the here and he knew that his country needed him a goddam sight more than the poor goddammed Filipinos had needed that arsehole MacArthur back in 1944.
Curtis LeMay stood tall; his back ramrod straight while everybody around him hunkered down as low as they could without falling over. Curtis LeMay didn’t need a film crew to make him do his duty! He had never hidden from anything in his whole life and he didn’t intend to start at the age of fifty-seven. If some no-good, cowardly, traitorous bastard ‘insurgent’ wanted to take a pot shot at him he didn’t give a goddam flying fuck about it. The whole goddam Luftwaffe had tried to kill him a dozen times over Germany in the forty-five war; what chance did some useless waste of space, unpatriotic, un-American disgrace to the human race have of shooting him now? He stood tall, shot his cuffs and flicked dust of his jacket. When an officer reported to his Commander-in-Chief – even when he knew that the aforementioned President loathed him – it was that officer’s sacred duty to honour him. The chain of command was there for a good reason; he might not like the orders he’d been given by this President, or by this Administration, but if the Chief of Staff of the Air Force didn’t obey orders what right did he have to expect his people to obey his orders? Moreover, whatever his disagreements with the Kennedy Administration, Curtis Emerson LeMay was nothing if not a diehard patriot who was perfectly willing to sacrifice his life in the defence of his country.
A bullet whined past and kicked up dust on the West Wing veranda.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force watched other rounds clipping splinters off the stonework around the already holed and cracked windows.
The cowardly bastards couldn’t even shoot straight!
He marched unhurriedly up to the White House, stiffly erect while practically every other member of his entourage; part staff, part bodyguard squatted low and eyed the chaos around the home of the President of the United States of America with suspicion and no little outrage.
Curtis LeMay’s own personal outrage had been fulminating ever since he’d received the first reports of the Malta ‘incident’ in Arizona, where he was racing his prized Allard J2, former Le Mans car. Racing fast cars had become his release from the pressure-cooker stresses of building up and maintaining Strategic Air Command at the highest levels of operational efficiency throughout the 1950s. The brutal denouement of the October War bore staggering testimony to the success of LeMay’s regime in those years, although few would have guessed that ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ didn’t take anywhere near as much satisfaction from the performance of his boys as most Americans imagined. Like many larger than life characters LeMay was a more complex man than he liked people to think; his joy at renting out and taking part in events held at former US Air Bases under the auspices of the Sports Car Club of America, ought to have suggested to his critics and detractors that the damnation of his nation’s foes was not the sole preoccupation of his long and distinguished military career. There was perhaps, no finer leader of men in the service of his Commander-in-Chief than Curtis LeMay and the situation called for a man cast from exactly his template.
“Who is in charge here?” Demanded the man who in real life made John Wayne look and sound like a nervy, ten-stone weakling.
A hulking Secret Service man advanced.
Before he could speak the Chief of Staff of the Air Force cracked a ruggedly grim smile. Bullets were pinging off the building in the background. The ‘pinging’ was punctuated by the barking detonations of grenades in the middle distance.
“Take me to the President, son. We’ve got a battle to fight and my President needs to know his Air Force is waiting to unleash Hell on our enemies!”
Nobody was going to stop Curtis LeMay presenting himself in the Situation Room but the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force wasn’t prepared for the crowd of panicky, ashen-faced men – and a handful of women – milling dispiritedly in the corridors outside the heart of the bunker complex. His scowl deepened as he was briefly baulked
at the doors to the Situation Room. Inside, he was immediately struck by the stillness and the oddly confident stoicism of his President. All around John Fitzgerald Kennedy flunkies and Cabinet members, worried staffers and political hangers-on danced attendance on their master, or sat shocked, despondent and exhausted around the long oval central table.
The President was deep in conversation with Robert McNamara; the latter looked around, startled by the commotion of LeMay’s entrance. The airman ignored his immediate political chief and strode up to his Commander-in-Chief, drew himself to his full height, stuck out his formidable chest and saluted crisply.
“General LeMay reporting, sir!” He announced, knowing that it was the drama of moments such as these that mattered most in times of crisis. “What are your orders, sir?”
Jack Kennedy didn’t get up from his chair.
There were men in his Cabinet who’d wanted the ‘maverick’ former commander of SAC arrested months ago; or if not arrested, removed from his post. That had not been a realistic option before, or since, the October War and the President had never seriously entertained it. The wisest of his predecessors in the White House had always contrived to find a way to accommodate prima donna Generals and Admirals like LeMay – Generals MacArthur and Patton, and Admiral King came to mind from recent history – because when the going got rough men like them were the rocks upon which victory or defeat turned. Curtis LeMay had won the October War; without him, it might have been the United States that was laid waste by the thermonuclear fires.
“It is good to see you, General LeMay,” Jack Kennedy drawled, his calm seeming too implausible to be real in the febrile atmosphere of the Situation Room. “Bob,” he said quietly, speaking to his Secretary of Defence, “call Bobby and get the Secret Service to clear the room please.”
Having given the order the President rose to his feet and beckoned Curtis LeMay to walk with him to the head of the room where there was a lectern and a pull down movie projector screen. The Chief of Staff of the US Air Force had waved away his own senior staffers. Suddenly, the older man found himself locked in his President’s gaze.