by James Philip
Marija said nothing.
“Sorry, you don’t want to hear about my...”
“Don’t be sorry, Captain,” she assured him. “We all have our stories and sometimes I am afraid that people have stopped listening to them.”
The man and the woman lapsed into silence.
The voices of the other men speaking lowly didn’t register.
“From what I overheard some of the Brits saying,” the American prompted, nervously breaking the spell, “you have quite a story yourself?”
Marija laughed.
“No, not really.” But instantly, she wanted to explain. “When I was nearly six years old I was trapped in a building that was hit by a bomb. Me and my little brother, Joe. He was unhurt; I was trapped by falling masonry. My pelvis and my legs were crushed. They’d never have found us but for Joe’s crying.”
“Oh, right...”
Marija wasn’t worried that the young American officer didn’t know what to say.
“They didn’t expect me to live,” she explained. “And when I did they didn’t expect me to ever walk again. If it wasn’t for Commander Seiffert and a British Naval Surgeon called Reginald Stanley Stephens, I’d have lived a different life.” She half-turned to study the airman. They were – give or take a year – the same age. He was a handsome boy with, she suspected, a placid disposition. In another time and place he’d smile mostly with his eyes and confuse more girls than he knew. “I lost nobody who was close to me in the October War. I don’t know about on Friday night, things are still too confused. People I know must have been hurt, or killed, because so many are dead and injured...”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to be said, Captain. The World is the way it is and we must carry on as we may.” Looking away she peered into the blue-grey haze out to sea. She couldn’t begin to imagine living a thousand miles from the ocean. That sounded so profoundly unnatural as to be...
“Marija!”
Margo Seiffert was trotting up the curving stone steps to the battlements with a flustered grin on her face.
“Marija!”
The younger woman’s heart missed a beat.
“Peter is safe!” Her friend called breathlessly immediately she spied Marija on the opposite side of the fort. “Peter is safe!”
Marija stared at her.
Why was Margo looking so worried?
And why was the World going around in circles?
Chapter 32
Tuesday 10th December 1963
HMS Dreadnought, 357 miles WNW of Vigo
“Full left rudder!” And so the dance begins again, thought Commander Simon Collingwood. He wasn’t as much surprised as intensely irritated that the USS Scorpion had clung onto Dreadnought’s wake with such tenacity the last sixteen hours. The Scorpion’s Skipjack class consort had broken off the chase nine hours ago and headed north, presumably into a blocking position between Dreadnought and the Enterprise Battle Group.
The submarine heeled into the high speed turn.
“Reverse course! Come to zero-nine-five degrees!”
“Zero-nine-five, aye!”
Collingwood waited until the boat had steadied on the reciprocal course: “All stop! Repeat, all stop!”
Now they’d really find out what their opponent was made of!
The last time Dreadnought had turned back she’d targeted the Scorpion with active sonar. For some seconds both boats had exchanged shrill, nerve jarring electronic pulses and fallen silent almost as one. Short of opening their bow tubes and trading salvoes of torpedoes; they’d gone to the brink.
Lieutenant-Commander Max Forton moved across the control room to stand by his Captain’s shoulder.
“I don’t understand why this chap is hanging on to us like grim death,” he confessed. “I mean, we must be close enough to the Enterprise or one of her escorts for them to have put a sub-hunter or a chopper into the air over us. They’ve probably got half-a-dozen sonar buoys in the waters hereabouts. So why in blazes is this beggar is still charging up our bloody prop wash?”
Simon Collingwood had been thinking about that for several hours.
He didn’t like any of the conclusions he’d reached.
The USS Scorpion had actually stopped ‘charging’ the moment Dreadnought’s wheel had gone over. The American boat was coasting to a halt about a mile away, more or less bow to bow with her British quarry.
Bandit One, the Scorpion’s sister had headed away at high speed, discounting any fanciful idea that she’d suffered some kind of mechanical problem and been forced to abandon the chase. Ever since then the Scorpion had easily kept pace with Dreadnought, never falling more than three miles astern, which told Collingwood that both the US Navy subs had a speed advantage over his boat with its older hull form. Although the Skipjack boats might not have the teardrop hulls he’d heard mooted for the subsequent class of US nuclear attack boats – the Thresher class – they shared the same power plants and propulsion machinery, and they were clearly more slippery through the water than Dreadnought. To have maintained contact so easily their speed advantage had to be at least two or three, perhaps as many as five knots. If that wasn’t bad enough, and it wasn’t in any way good; he was beginning to suspect that the Americans probably had superior passive sonar equipment. This and the knowledge that his every move was almost certainly now being tracked by air-dropped sonar buoys, somewhat limited his options.
Simon Collingwood wasn’t entirely disheartened; he’d drawn the two Skipjack class boats away from the Hermes Battle Group and, if and when the acoustic and sonar records of the last forty-eight hours were properly analysed, a huge amount of operational and tactical information about the relative performance of the Dreadnought and her American cousins would be gleaned for future reference. Moreover, this had been achieved without anybody actually getting killed, which was always good news.
It went without saying that the game had been fun.
“Right full rudder!” He called, coming to a decision. “Make five-zero revs! Make our course one-eight-zero degrees. Make our depth one-zero-zero feet if you please!”
Dreadnought’s Executive Officer raised an eyebrow.
“We’re not getting away from that chap,” he grimaced, jabbing a finger at the USS Scorpion’s symbol on the tactical plot. “And I don’t think he’s going to let us get anywhere near the Enterprise Battle Group. We’ll cut out losses and report in to Fleet HQ. I should imagine we’ll be redeployed south to cover the Hermes’s northern screen.”
The USS Scorpion held her course until she was directly astern of the Dreadnought and then formatted on her, heading south.
“Persistent bugger, isn’t he?” Max Forton complained.
His Captain frowned.
He’d anticipated his US Navy counterpart would have understood that the game was over, let the range open and commenced patrolling just to make sure Dreadnought didn’t put about and attempt to creep around her to the north. Carrying on the chase wasn’t playing the game; nor was it wise.
“What does he think is going to happen next?” Max Forton asked rhetorically. “Sooner or later we’re going to fall in with Hermes’s anti-submarine screen. After what those fellows have been through the last week they’re going to be a tad trigger happy, methinks!”
“Active sonar on standby please!” Simon Collingwood demanded. This thing needed to be stopped before it got even more dangerous. “Prepare to send by Morse code in the open.”
He didn’t quite know why but he was getting a very bad feeling about the situation. He wasn’t quite sensing an icy hand clutching at his vitals; but the hairs at the nape of his neck were beginning to stand on end.
“S ONE-ZERO-ONE TO SSN FIVE-EIGHT-NINE STOP WELL PLAYED STOP GAME OVER STOP RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST YOU BREAK CONTACT AT THIS TIME STOP ADVISE AGAINST CONTACT WITH ROYAL NAVY SURFACE UNITS PATROLLING SOUTH OF THIS POSITION STOP PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE MESSAGE ENDS”
Nothing happened.
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“Scorpion is holding at two miles, sir.”
Collingwood and his Executive Officer looked thoughtfully at each other.
“Send,” the Dreadnought’s commanding officer ordered, “S ONE-ZERO-ONE TO SSN FIVE-EIGHT-NINE STOP PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE MY PREVIOUS TRANSMISSION MESSAGE ENDS”
HMS Dreadnought was closed up at action stations but some hours ago all internal hatches had been dogged open.
“Quietly if you please, Number One,” Simon Collingwood murmured, “let’s close up the boat and warn the torpedo room to be ready to flood down the tubes again.”
The word was passed through the ship in hoarse whispers.
“Yeoman, prepare the following signal for broadcast in the clear to Fleet HQ: Dreadnought to C-in-C Fleet STOP COPY C-in-C First Submarine Squadron STOP Have attempted to break contact with USS Scorpion and communicated my intention to that vessel STOP I anticipate possible hostile action may be imminent STOP I have determined not to fire the first shot STOP.” Suddenly, he could have cut the atmosphere in the control room with a knife. “Append our current position, course, speed and depth to that report at time of dispatch please.”
“Scorpion is flooding her tubes!”
Simon Collingwood held up a hand before Max Forton could order Dreadnought to respond. Scorpion had the prime tactical position.
“Sir?” The other man asked.
Collingwood began to game the options: Scorpion could have fired on Dreadnought at any time in the last few hours; the best time would have been when her prey gave in to the inevitable and abandoned its flight a few minutes ago.
“Revolutions for twelve knots please!”
“Scorpion is conforming to our course and speed!” Then: “Belay that! Scorpion is coming right and increasing revs... Altering right to pass along our starboard side, sir!”
“Maintain current course and speed!” Simon Collingwood directed as he tried to unravel what was going through the mind of his counterpart in the Skipjack class submarine’s control room.
“SPLASH ONE!” Yelled a gruff voice from the sound room. “Bearing green-two zero! FAST PROPELLORS! Three thousand yards! TORPEDO IN THE WATER!”
The Captain of the Royal Navy’s first and only nuclear attack submarine understood everything in a fraction of a second with a perfect clarity; a perfect clarity that made absolutely no difference to the fact that within minutes he and all his men would be dead.
“SPLASH TWO!”
Commander Simon Collingwood would have panicked if he’d thought it would have done any good. He was astonished at how calm his voice sounded when he started giving orders.
“Ten degrees right rudder!”
“Make maximum emergency revolutions! Over-ride ALL safeties!”
“Down bubble!”
“Make our depth three zero-zero-feet!”
“Flood all torpedo tubes!”
Chapter 33
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
The Vice-President of the United States of America, Lyndon Baines Johnson stepped forward in the steady rain that had begun to fall twenty minutes before the Boeing 707 in the dark blue and white livery of the British Overseas Airways Corporation landed. The easterly wind which had blown wintery rain across Virginia and Maryland had carried away the pall of smoke that had hung across Andrews Field like a dirty fog, when dawn had finally broken after the most terrible night any of those in the reception committee could ever recollect.
Edward Heath, hatless in a nondescript gabardine raincoat had paused in the doorway. The low clouds and the rain obscured the agony of the city to the north-west and he was a little relieved. In the Second World War he’d been an artillery man; fought all the way from Normandy to the Rhine and beyond, witnessing in detail the pitilessness of war. He collected his wits and walked carefully down the steps to the tarmac followed by his Foreign Secretary, Tom Harding-Grayson and Iain Macleod, his Minister of Information. While the VIPs disgorged from the front of the airliner Sterling submachine gun-armed Royal Marines and less military-looking dark-suited Special Branch bodyguards decamped hurriedly from the rear door.
The British Prime Minister had never met the Vice-President. Both were tall men whose imposing physical presence and uncompromising characters cowed many lesser mortals. The two men eyed each other like heavyweight prize fighters stepping forward from their respective corners, each mindful of the other’s sledgehammer right fist.
They shook hands.
“Welcome to the USA, Mister Prime Minister.”
Edward Heath had visited America many times before the October War. Prior to America’s entry into the Second World War he’d toured the north-east on an Oxford Union sponsored debating tour, later he’d returned both to visit old friends and on various political missions, meeting many luminaries of the Eisenhower Administration and leading Congressional and Senate members. But he’d never met Lyndon Baines Johnson whom he knew to be one of the most formidable operators on Capitol Hill. He looked the man who was a heartbeat from the Presidency in the eye, oblivious to the tumbling rain.
“I am glad to be here in one piece, Mister Vice-President.” He turned and introduced the two ministers who’d followed him down the steps, and then their American hosts were anxiously ushering their VIP visitors into the limousines parked nearby, engines running in the rain. There were trucks and Jeeps waiting to transport the Royal Marines and Special Branch men. Dick White and Walter Brenckmann were guided into the last limousine by worried-looking Secret Service agents.
The three senior British VIPs found themselves alone in the back of the Vice-President’s personal vehicle; Edward Heath and Lyndon Baines Johnson facing forward and Tom Harding-Grayson and Iain Macleod sitting with their back to the driver’s compartment.
LBJ grinned and patted the side of the limousine.
“They tell me this car is bullet-proof,” he explained.
“Let’s hope nobody decides to test it!” Iain Macleod retorted.
“What is the current situation, Mister Vice-President?” Edward Heath asked, not wanting to be drawn into what he considered inconsequential diplomatic small talk.
The Texan gave him a ruminative glance, and briefly, he eyed the other two occupants of the rear compartment of the armoured limousine.
“I’ll leave the fancy talk to the President,” he prefaced, sighing. “The situation is pretty fucked up, that’s what it is. When this is over we’ll have to rebuild the capital again from the ground up.”
The convoy of limousines, trucks and Jeeps sped past lines of tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
“We pulled elements of the 3rd Armoured Division out of the city to secure the perimeter of Andrews Air Force Base,” the Vice-President said flatly. “Curtis LeMay’s got F-4 Phantoms overflying the area, and A-1 Skyraiders loitering over Harrisburg just in case we get any trouble anywhere near the perimeter. The President is still holed up at the White House but we’ve re-established secure communications. We don’t know when it will be safe to pull the President or his senior staffers out of the White House defended zone. What we have to discuss is too important to wait; do you have any objection to commencing the summit via a remote communications link to the White House, Mister Prime Minister?”
“No. I agree with you that the events of the last twenty-four hours here in Washington make our business even more pressing.”
A secure area within the base was still being fortified as the British party decamped. Deep in the Officer Quarters Block where VIPs were routinely accommodated Walter Brenckmann approached Edward Heath and saluted.
“Thank you for the ride back home, sir,” he said flatly. “Consistent with my agreement with the Foreign Secretary, now that I am back on US territory I can no longer confidentially advise you or members of your party.”
The Prime Minister shook the American’s hand.
“Good luck, Captain Brenckmann.”
Edward Heath watched the othe
r man go. The naval officer’s own people would most likely accuse him of treason. If there had ever been such a thing as justice in the World it was temporarily in abeyance.
“They’ve actually got real tea!” Iain Macleod exclaimed triumphantly. “And fresh milk!”
Tom Harding-Grayson was studying a sheet of paper.
“Somebody needs to get their head screwed on the right way round at the State Department,” he observed distractedly. “Did somebody say there was proper tea?”
Edward Heath viewed the proposed agenda for the ‘Anglo-US International Summit’ and shook his head.
Opening remarks by the President and by Prime Minister Heath.
Item 1: The Release of United States Personnel held as Prisoners of War and, or diplomatic hostages by the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration (UKIEA).
Item 2: The repatriation of the bodies of United States personnel.
Item 3: The recovery of US dual key and other nuclear weapons systems from territories under the control of the UKIEA including weapons held in CENTO stores in Cyprus.
Item 4: Steps to reduce bilateral military tensions between the UKIEA and the United States.
Item 5: Future spheres of national interest and the free navigation of US ships.
The Prime Minister looked up.
“We shall see,” he declared, wondering if the windowless room into which the party had been shoe-horned was bugged. They’d discussed that possibility during the latter stages of the flight. Dick White had assured them that it was unlikely since the rooms they were going to be using were regularly frequented by senior members of the Kennedy Administration awaiting, or post-embarkation from one of the two Presidential jetliners based at Andrews Air Force Base.