by James Philip
Samuel Calleja stared a little longer at the elegant lines and radar adorned lattice masts of the British cruiser. From his vantage point several hundred yards away he could clearly see men moving on Tiger’s decks.
It was odd that a ship like HMS Tiger; so out-dated before her time in the age before the October War; should be so well-fitted for the kind of war that in all likelihood, she was going to have to fight in the coming weeks and months. Notwithstanding, he had few doubts that the initial explosion of Red Dawn would sweep the beautiful ship aside as its flaming banner swept all before it in the eastern Mediterranean.
History had its own momentum.
HMS Tiger, like the British Empire and eventually the destroyers of worlds - the Great Satan, America – would fall beneath the onslaught. Not since the epochs of the Mongol Hordes out of Asia had western civilization faced such an implacable threat to everything it held dear.
The time of the reckoning was upon them and the men crawling over the grey, floodlit carcass of the cruiser tied up alongside Parlatorio Wharf had no inkling of what was coming.
Ignorance was truly bliss...
Chapter 37
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Flight Briefing Room, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
“What just happened?” Jack Kennedy demanded flatly. When there was no immediate reply he repeated: “What the fuck just happened?”
Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bobby Kennedy both started talking at once but the President couldn’t see the British delegation walking out of the room so nothing they said made much sense for some seconds.
“They’ll be back,” the Vice-President declared but the wiliest negotiator on Capitol Hill wasn’t entirely convinced and the glimmer of uncertainty sent shock waves of new anxiety radiating out in all directions.
Standing in the back of the makeshift NBC control room in the Aircrew Ready Room next to the Flight Briefing Room, Walter Brenckmann felt like he was witnessing a slow motion car crash and couldn’t understand why none of the parties had seen it coming. He’d suspected the President and LBJ would play the good cop – bad cop game; it had worked before. Apart from the fact it was the wrong game and that time was running out; why wouldn’t it work now?
Since he’d reported to the Base Commander and placed himself at that officer’s disposal ‘in the current emergency’ Walter Brenckmann had been ignored, mildly ostracised and left to his own devices. Eventually, explaining to the NBC producer who’d been bussed in at short notice to supervise the communication link with the White House and to record the ‘peace summit’, that he’d come over from England ‘with the British’ and would like to observe the ‘technicalities of the communications process’, he’d been given a ring side seat without further debate.
He’d watched the opening moves with mounting alarm.
Given that Premier Heath and his associates had flown into an ongoing civil war – no other term began to describe what was going on in America’s capital city – they didn’t need to be told that the Kennedy Administration needed every friend it could get. Yet the Vice-President had switched into attack dog mode at the very moment the British had given him the two headline concessions over POWs and diplomats that the Administration had to be able to deliver to the American people; assuming the main players survived the insurrection that was presently burning down Washington DC.
Insanity!
How in God’s name did his leaders imagine the British were going to react to LBJ’s riposte to Edward Heath’s entirely factual – and in the circumstances, relatively restrained – statement of the US Government’s failures to make good its earlier promises? It was one thing for the President to suggest that the past was the past and that they should all focus on the future; another entirely to persuade the British to take whatever new promises and guarantees they received with anything more than a very large pinch of salt. For the Vice-President to suggest to the British Prime Minister he didn’t even plan to make any new promises was like waving a red flag in front of a charging bull. Especially when that suggestion didn’t remotely reflect the Administration’s actual negotiating position. Walter Brenckmann didn’t know what that position was; he just knew that playing hardball wasn’t it unless the Kennedy Brothers, LBJ, Robert McNamara, John McCone and the other surviving members of the Administration had had a collective brainstorm!
“Does your microphone broadcast to all the parties on the circuit?” Walter Brenckmann asked the NBC producer with every ounce of his professional litigator’s gravitas.
“Yes, sir,” the other man confirmed. “But anything I said over the link would go directly to air if we were broadcasting live.”
“But you’re not broadcasting live now?” Walter Brenckmann queried, trying to keep the visceral horror out of his voice. NBC hadn’t actually been broadcasting the summit live while Washington was under attack?
“Oh, no, sir. There is a speaker at the White House and another in the Conference Room...”
“Give me the microphone!” Walter Brenckmann said it in the voice he’d sometimes had to employ at sea when one of his officers had done something unbelievably stupid, or a bone-headed enlisted man had needed the crap scared out of him.
The NBC man almost jumped out of his skin.
He pulled off his clumsy headset and passed it over with both hands as fast as was humanly possible.
Holding one earpiece to his head Walter Brenckmann raised the microphone to his lips, hurriedly composing himself.
“This is Captain Walter Brenckmann,” he announced in a carefully calculated monotone. “I might not have an honours degree in international diplomacy but I can as sure as Hell tell when a divorce is turning messy, gentlemen.”
“Brenckmann?” The President queried irritably. At this point he probably put his hand over the microphone believing it would make what he said next inaudible. “Who the fuck is this guy Brenckmann?”
“Captain Walter Brenckmann, United States Navy, sir,” the Boston lawyer informed his Commander-in-Chief. “I’m the guy who warned Ambassador Westheimer, the State Department and the Navy Department that out policies were driving the British into a corner and they were likely to come out fighting. When the British identified the involvement of US personnel in the attack on Balmoral Castle in which the Queen’s husband was crippled and her youngest child killed,” he was a little surprised nobody had cut him off or told him to shut up, so he continued, “that finally crossed their red line. Premier Heath isn’t a guy you want to be pushing right now, sir.”
There was a silence.
A long, static hissing silence that dragged on for an age.
Walter Brenckmann waited for the tramp of booted feet in the corridor, the click of rifle bolts and the inrush of Marines. They were going to arrest him, right? The lunatics had taken over the asylum; therefore, shooting the messenger had got to be de rigor. Right?
“I don’t want war with the British, Captain Brenckmann,” Jack Kennedy drawled with a quiet confidence that everybody who heard it knew to be utterly false. “Right now I’d give them all the gold in Fort Knox if I thought that would buy them off.”
“Like I said, sir,” the Boston Lawyer reminded his President, “I’m no diplomat but if this was a divorce I’d be advising you against trying to buy off your estranged, er, partner. For one thing former wives, I mean, partners, don’t always like to have it known that they can be bought off. For another, I don’t think you’ve got enough treasure to pay the bill and the British already know that. The only thing you’ve got that they want, and that they really need, is friendship, sir. And grain and a few tankers full of crude oil, obviously. It isn’t like they’re asking for golden elephants. This isn’t going to cost you anything you can’t afford. Hell, we’re talking small change here. I honestly don’t see what the problem is.”
Walter Brenckmann imagined – or perhaps, he’d really heard – explosions on the line. At the White House or closer to Andrews Field? There was no way he cou
ld tell.
Still, nobody burst into the improvised studio in the Aircrew Ready Room.
“Put Bobby on the line,” the President commanded.
“I’m here, Jack.”
“Have you been listening in?”
“Yes,” the Attorney General acknowledged tersely. “I’m hearing a lot of explosions at your end...”
“General LeMay has called in Skyraiders to clear out the last terrorist enclaves in the vicinity of the White House.”
Walter Brenckmann had seen Douglas A-1 Skyraiders in action in Korea. Big single-engine aircraft capable of carrying huge mixed payloads of napalm, general purpose and cluster bombs, and air-to-ground rockets on under-wing pylons and hard-points. Some variants carried twenty-millimetre cannons and fifty calibre heavy machine guns. A single pass by on Skyraider could wipe out all life in a fifty yard wide swath of any battlefield on Earth. The idea of such aircraft being deployed in the streets of a modern city was so appalling as to be virtually beyond his comprehension.
The President was still speaking, offering reassurance to his younger brother.
“The Army and the Marines have the situation under control in Georgetown and the Embassy District, they’ve secured Capitol Hill and the White House perimeter was secured several hours ago as you know. The Marines and the National Guard are expanding that perimeter as we speak. The terrorists are trying to melt away. Only a few diehards are actually still fighting in the city, although the reports from downtown are garbled. There may still be disturbances in progress there. The fighting around the Pentagon is almost over. Arlington is a no go area because General LeMay is reluctant to order air strikes against the rebels,” Jack Kennedy corrected himself, “terrorists who’ve taken refuge in the National Cemetery. ”
Walter Brenckmann coughed. Realising that this hadn’t stopped the dominant siblings of the most disastrous United States Administration in history wasting precious time – that they didn’t have - bringing each other up to speed, the Boston lawyer ostentatiously and very loudly cleared his throat.
“Gentlemen,” he declared, paternally, “you don’t have time for this.”
The brothers would much rather have been talking to each other than the stranger who seemed intent on bringing them only bad news. Walter Brenckmann knew as much. Parties to messy divorce cases invariably opted for denial sooner or later.
“With respect,” he said, not really believing he was having to tell them this, “the Attorney General needs to go and talk to Premier Heath now.”
“Why?” Bobby Kennedy asked. There was impatience in his tone; but no malice and no suggestion that he was in any way talking down to an underling. He was curious, as if he really wanted to know what the older man knew that he didn’t. “Why, Captain Brenckmann?”
The former Naval Attaché to the Court of Balmoral thought it ought to have been obvious to the Attorney General. However, in his experience as a litigator very few people actually had any real understanding of what, to a real lawyer, often seemed patently obvious.
“Because somebody has to talk to Premier Heath face to face and give him everything, and I do mean everything he wants. Trust me; you’ll be surprised how little he wants. Grain and fuel will do for now, medical supplies and a hot line to the President will seal the deal.”
“And this will come better from Bobby?” The President queried.
“Yes.” Again, Walter Brenckmann really didn’t know why he was having to tell them this. “I mean no disrespect, Mister President,” he explained flatly, “but the Attorney General is the Kennedy brother the Brits don’t hold personally responsible for the death of millions of their countrymen, sir.”
Chapter 38
Tuesday 10th December 1963
Armada de Tagus Hotel, Lisbon
Giles Gerard was a florid, plump man of indeterminate middle-years with a twinkle in his eye and a winning smile. He was exactly the sort of man one would expect to bump into – probably tipsy – below the grandstand of a race course like Goodwood or Ascot checking out the form of the horses in the parade ring. He was wearing a tweed jacket and plus fours and brandishing a bottle of twelve year old Royal Lochnagar whiskey.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had followed his ‘personal steward’, Leading Electrical Artificer Jack Griffin down to the unpopulated lounge of the hotel privately questioning the wisdom of agreeing to meet the ‘War Correspondent of the London Times’. The Times, like the other historic Fleet Street staples, the Daily Mail, Express and the Evening Standard had, with the assistance of the UKIEA re-established themselves in Manchester and in the last few months begun again to publish daily national editions.
Now that he’d set yes on Giles Gerard the young naval officer’s doubts crystallised. Apart from the fact he was dog tired and likely to say something he ought not to say, his father’s notoriety – long before his recent exploits in command of Operation Manna – had bred in the son an instinctive mistrust of everything he read about the Royal Navy in the popular press. The problem was that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce – the man whose word was law in the Royal Navy - had ordered him to talk to the bloody man.
The journalist pumped his right hand enthusiastically.
“I expected you to look more weather-beaten, Commander,” the older man guffawed cheerfully. “The Ministry of Information flew me out here especially to do a piece on the ‘Electronic Warfare Whizz son of the Fighting Admiral’,” he explained apologetically. He held up the whiskey. “I brought this to soften the blow. You’re not one of these post-war born again bloody teetotallers are you?”
Peter Christopher shook his head.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jack Griffin sliding away.
“Stay, Jack,” he said softly. He’d only ever used the other man’s Christian name half-a-dozen times in the sixteen months of their acquaintance. Every previous occasion had been when he’d pulled the man aside and berated him for some – now forgotten – infraction of Queen’s Regulations or on account of the consequences of one of his famously misfiring pranks. “We’re off duty,” he looked to the smoke discoloured ceiling, “inside, and we seem to be the only representatives of the Senior Service in residence. After what we’ve been through in the last few days you deserve a stiff drink as much as I do.”
Giles Gerard raised an eyebrow.
“You said the Ministry of Information sent you out here?” Peter asked as the three men settled in threadbare armchairs. An old man in the faded red and gold livery of the Armada de Tagus Hotel materialised to clank glasses on the table around which the chairs had gathered and departed without a word.
The man from The Times nodded as he poured a couple of fingers of amber malt whiskey into each of the three glasses and placed the bottle in the middle of the table.
“The fate of HMS Talavera and HMS Devonshire was the first item on the radio news and front page fodder for all the papers for over two days,” Giles Gerard said. “Stirring stuff. And when the news from Malta started to emerge, well...”
Peter Christopher picked up his glass; as did Jack Griffin, the latter with an odd, uncomfortable hesitancy.
“Malta?”
“Oh, I assumed you’d have been briefed?”
“No, nobody’s told us anything.”
“Oh, I see.” The journalist redrew his previously prepared remarks, began anew. “At about the same time you came under attack in the Atlantic enemy forces were converging on Gibraltar and Malta. The former raid was discouraged by HMS Hermes’s Sea Vixens...”
“What happened at Malta?”
“The Regia Aeronautica attacked ships and dockyard installations and, apparently, they claim, inadvertently, civilian areas at low-level, while,” Giles Gerard flashed a disbelieving smile, “four B-52s dropped big, and I mean very big, bombs on practically all our major headquarters and bases in and around Valletta...”
Peter Christopher suspected that Jack Griffin was staring at the journalist with exactly the sam
e incredulity that he was; for a moment he was convinced the man from The Times was playing some ill-conceived ludicrously cruel practical joke on him. A moment later icy fingers clutched his heart.
Marija!
“But for the fact that the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm happened to be in the middle of a big war game and had nearly twenty kites in the air over Malta,” Giles Gerard went on, “the bastards would probably have got away with it without a scratch.”
Marija...
The two Navy men listened with mounting outrage to the tale.
They nodded grimly at the news that RAF Hawker Hunters had gunned down four B-52s; listened in horror at the bald numbers of the casualty lists. Between one and two thousand dead, as many people injured; most of the major headquarters buildings on Malta demolished, HMS Agincourt sunk at her moorings in Sliema Creek, HMS Torquay capsized in dry dock, HMS Sheffield – the same ship that had taken part in the hunt for the Bismarck in May 1941 – grounded in shallow water in Lazaretto Creek...
“Are we at war with America?” Peter asked, interrupting the journalist’s flow.
“Not yet.” The older man shrugged. “So far as I know, anyway.”
“My father is uninjured?”
A brusque nod. “Yes. He landed on the island about an hour before the raid started. He’s spent most of the time since touring the bombed areas and shaking hands.” Giles Gerard decided he’d overstated the glad-handing propensities of the ‘Fighting Admiral’. “Sorry, that’s not really true. He’s C-in-C of everything between Gibraltar and the Levant now. Between the Hermes Battle Group standing out to sea off Cape Trafalgar – a nice touch that – and periodic precision strikes by V-Bombers hopefully the Spanish seem to have abandoned bellicosity in favour of licking their wounds and hiding in bomb shelters. As for the situation on Malta, well, my colleagues on the spot say Sir Julian has been stoking up the old wartime spirit. There are reports that he’s clapped and cheered everywhere he goes. Perhaps, the man actually has the ‘Nelson touch’ after all?”