by James Philip
Peter Christopher raised his glass to his lips and drank deep.
The malt whiskey burned his throat.
Marija, he decided, would have been in Mdina. Miles away from the bombing around Valletta. Unless she’d gone home to Sliema for the weekend to be with her parents...
“You won’t have heard about the fighting in Washington, of course?” Giles Gerard asked rhetorically.
No, they hadn’t heard.
“The situation is a tad confused,” the older man frowned. “But it sounds dreadful. Full-scale insurrection. Perhaps, an attempted coup. They always used to say that the World was going to Hell in a handbag, didn’t they. These days one wonders if they weren’t right all along.”
Chapter 39
Wednesday 11th December 1963
UKIEA Government Compound, Cheltenham, England
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce was stoically ashen-faced as he laid the latest flash report from HMS Dreadnought on the table in front of the Acting-Prime Minister. He almost jumped out of his skin when the door behind him opened and Margaret Thatcher and Airey Neave rushed into the room.
“Is it true, Jim?” The Angry Widow demanded without preamble.
The man behind the big desk in the Minister of Defence’s office sighed and pushed the note towards her. Before the Home Secretary could pick it up, Airey Neave, her de facto chief of staff and the newly appointed Minster of Supply grabbed it and read aloud.
“IMMEDIATE C-IN-C FLEET STOP USS SCORPION DESTROYED BY SURFACE OR AIRBORNE LAUNCHED TORPEDOES AT 03:07 HOURS ZULU STOP FORCED TO RUN DEEP TO OUTRUN HOMING TORPEDOES AND UNABLE TO RISE TO PERISCOPE DEPTH UNTIL 07:15 DUE TO PRESENCE OF HOSTILE SURFACE FORCES STOP NO TORPEDO WAS FIRED BY DREADNOUGHT IN THIS ACTION STOP FURTHER AAR TO FOLLOW MESSAGE ENDS...”
The former escapee from Colditz looked up.
“This was sent hours ago,” he remarked idly.
Sir David Luce had clasped his hands behind his back.
“Dreadnought hasn’t broadcast again since the initial after action report. My best guess is that is she hasn’t been destroyed that she’s running silent. Presumably, avoiding hostile vessels or aircraft.”
Margaret Thatcher had drawn up a chair opposite the Acting-Prime Minister’s desk. She gave James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party a thoughtful look.
“I’m told the fighting has flared up again in Washington, Jim?”
The big man nodded.
“There are reports that the CIA complex at Langley is under sporadic artillery fire. There have been truck and petrol tanker bombs in New York.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “It seems several National Guard units have been stood down. The reports list ‘stand downs’ in several States including Texas, the Carolinas, Virginia and New Jersey. I should caution that all of the reports are coming to us via third parties...”
“GCHQ intercepts?” Airey Neave checked.
“Yes. And from BBC listening stations.”
The Angry Widow looked to the First Sea Lord.
“What is your assessment of the situation in the Atlantic, Sir David?”
“Dreadnought’s last reported position was over three hundred nautical miles west of the Spanish mainland. The only reason she’d have been so far west was if she was either attempting to shake off pursuit, or deliberately drawing potentially hostile units away from the Hermes Battle Group.”
“Have the Americans said anything yet?”
There were shrugs around the room.
“The US Navy’s communications net seems to be partially disabled at the moment,” the First Sea Lord remarked. “CINCLANT may be operating without effective political oversight and guidance. One intercept inferred that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was ‘down’. It is chaos in Washington.”
“If Kennedy’s top soldier is ‘down’?” Airey Neave asked. “Who is next in line over there, Sir David?”
The Admiral grimaced.
“General LeMay, I should imagine.”
Margaret Thatcher groaned: “Marvellous,” she exclaimed, “absolutely marvellous!”
“Are there any indications of renewed civil disorder at home, Margaret?” James Callaghan inquired after a troubled quietness threatened to envelop the meeting.
“No. After the outrage at Balmoral the Army and the Police rounded up known troublemakers and anybody the Security Service had previously identified as a person of interest. I doubt if that would have scratched the surface of a conspiracy like the one we’re witnessing across the other side of the Atlantic; but it may at least have driven our own terroristic elements underground. Bear in mind martial law was applied somewhat heavy-handedly last winter. That may have had a dampening effect on any nascent Red Dawn cells that survived the October War.”
James Callaghan remembered the bombings and the assassinations in the weeks after the war; and the brutal tactics the Army, reinforced by Royal Navy and Royal Air Force units and the Police, had employed to hunt down those responsible. In the United States there had been no sudden outbreak of lawlessness other than in the bombed areas; in America the decline towards civil disobedience, and the gradual disintegration of the old social order had spread like a slow, inexorable plague across the continent. The authorities had managed to keep the lid on things in the big cities but in some parts of the country, and out in the back woods, anarchy was embedding itself in the fabric of the nation. Local militias had sprung up, vigilante groups roamed the streets and while regular units of the Armed Services remained loyal, thousands of disaffected career soldiers, sailors and airmen discarded by the Kennedy Administration in a desperate attempt to rebalance the hard-hit American economy with the huge ‘peace dividend’, had provided a raft of recruits to mostly rightist protest groups. The October War might not have devastated the American heartland; it might yet prove to have splintered it.
Sir David Luce glanced at his watch.
“HMS Victorious will be sailing from Portsmouth about now,” he reported. “She’ll be in a position to support the Ark Royal’s air operations in approximately thirty hours.”
James Callaghan tried not to broadcast his unease.
HMS Victorious had been in dockyard hands until eight weeks ago. The old, much rebuilt and modernized carrier was a paper tiger. She’d had no opportunity to work up to any kind of operational readiness and until more aircraft and pilots became available – a big imponderable in the present circumstances – her air group was going to consist of a single squadron of De Havilland Sea Vixens and a pair of Westland Wessex helicopters, the latter fabricated from spares cannibalised from unserviceable and crashed machines.
If the omens seemed uniformly oppressive to the Acting-Prime Minister, who’d received no word from Andrews Air Force Base since the receipt earlier in the day of confirmation that the Prime Minister’s aircraft had landed safely; the First Sea Lord’s preoccupations were similarly dark.
History weighed heavily on his shoulders.
Against the might of the Enterprise Battle Group the Royal Navy was pitting one exhausted ship, the Ark Royal, in urgent need of six months in dockyard hands with a depleted air group of less than twenty aircraft; and an old World War II vintage ship straight out of dock with a maximum of twelve serviceable interceptors. The USS Enterprise was in company with nuclear-powered cruisers, the US Navy’s latest destroyers and boasted an air group of at least eighty fighter, bomber, anti-submarine, tanker, and airborne early warning and electronic warfare aircraft and half-a-score of helicopters.
Sir David Luce remembered the disastrous outcome of the Battle of the Denmark Strait in May 1941 when the elderly, obsolescent battlecruiser HMS Hood and the brand new battleship HMS Prince of Wales – the latter with teams of civilian workers onboard struggling to iron out problems with her main battery – engaged the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. The German ships were newly built, state of the art modern warships which had been working up to peak combat efficiency for several months, in Bismarck’s
case for over a year; HMS Hood was old and tired, a relic from another age, HMS Prince of Wales ought by rights to have still been in dockyard hands. In hindsight the outcome of the battle ought to have been entirely predictable. The Hood had blown up after a handful of salvoes with the loss of over fourteen hundred lives. The Prince of Wales had been handled so badly she’d reeled out of the fight behind a smokescreen only minutes later.
For Bismarck read the USS Enterprise; for the Hood and the Prince of Wales read Ark Royal and Victorious.
HMS Dreadnought might already be gone.
The darkness was descending upon them all.
Chapter 40
Wednesday 11th December 1963
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
“Premier Heath,” Bobby Kennedy began, clasping Edward Heath’s hand, “I must ask for your understanding in these times.” He released his grip and met the Englishman’s stare with his own, somewhat boyish, intensity. The Attorney General had the natural charm and the winning smile of all of the Kennedy brothers. “The present situation is a thing beyond the experience of any one of us here today; I think we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt, perhaps?”
Standing at the Attorney General’s shoulder Walter Brenckmann thought the President’s brother had got his opening remarks about right. As he’d told countless divorcing clients the main thing was ‘to stop digging before the hole gets too deep to climb out of’. While he wasn’t entirely convinced the President and the Vice-President had got their heads around the intrinsic wisdom of this concept; at least Bobby Kennedy was running with the ball.
The former Boston lawyer said nothing.
He and the Attorney General were alone in an annexe to the Base Commander’s office with the British Prime Minister, his Foreign Secretary, the owlish Tom Harding-Grayson, and the restless, suspicious-eyed Minister of Information, Iain Macleod. Edward Heath was the tallest man in the room, although a little thinner in person than the pictures of the well-built man in his pre-war CIA dossier.
The five men weren’t standing on ceremony; there simply weren’t enough chairs in the room.
Tom Harding-Grayson touched Edward Heath’s arm.
“If I may, Prime Minister,” he suggested. In the years before the October War his brilliant career, and subsequently his marriage and some small part of his sanity, had foundered on the rocks of a British foreign policy which he was convinced was based on a fallacy. Specifically, the fallacy of the so-call special relationship with America. The specialness of that unwritten compact was always a mischievous thing liable to the capricious whims of the senior party. It had begun as a personal tryst between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, staggered on through the Second World War, and faltered when the United States went it alone with the development of nuclear weapons after 1945. With onset of the Cold War, the crisis over Berlin in 1948 and the start of the Korean War in 1950, the specialness of the bonds between the old country and its mighty former colonies was refurbished, only to be very nearly completely derailed by the Suez debacle of late 1956. The 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement marked a rapprochement based on the personal chemistry between Dwight Eisenhower and Harold MacMillan, rather than any recognition of the vital national interests of the old and waning global superpower, and the new Romans. The special relationship that emerged from the Eisenhower-MacMillan Axis was a fragile thing, not so much a grand alliance as a papering over of the cracks spreading across the geopolitical map of the changing World order. When all was said and done a special relationship that was totally reliant on the close personal relationships between the then President, Dwight Eisenhower and his old wartime friend, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, and several senior Royal Navy and US Navy admirals, was a profoundly insubstantial scaffold upon which to build an impregnable castle keep. Tom Harding-Grayson’s career had disintegrated when eventually, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan and his complacent – and in some cases inbred and doltish confederates – had wearied of being constantly told the truth. Emperors rarely take kindly to be reminded that they forgot to dress that morning. The special relationship was a chimera. Its specialness was entirely dependent on the perception of his nation’s vital strategic needs by the incumbent – at any given moment – of the White House. Inevitably, when the status quo of the Eisenhower years dissolved into the dazzling hopes of the Kennedy Administration the special relationship came to mean one thing in Washington, and another in London. Therein, lay the seeds of disaster. The Foreign Secretary sighed: “I think the time has come to speak frankly with our friends.”
Edward Heath nodded, and stepped aside.
Bobby Kennedy viewed the dapper, wiry man in his fifties with interest, struck by the grace with which the Prime Minister had deferred to his Foreign Minister.
“Unlike the majority of my colleagues in the Foreign Office I always recognised that in the heat of the moment that an American President wouldn’t hesitate to sell us down the river. However, please don’t think I say that in a censorious or a pejorative way. In your brother’s position, I might have done exactly what he did.”
“Jack did what...”
“I’m sure he did what he thought was the right thing for all the right reasons, Mr Kennedy,” Tom Harding-Grayson conceded. “However, if civilisation is to flourish in the World in the future, everybody needs to stop moralising and face up to the new realities. The United States must decide if it is to be the grain basket of the World and the arsenal of democracy as it was in the Second World War, or if it is to worship the idol of some kind of global Pax Americana.”
“We have more pressing concerns at the present,” Bobby Kennedy said tersely.
“Ah, yes. Red Dawn. I suspect that most of the ‘rebels’ in your country have never heard of Red Dawn and would decry it, and its objectives if they had. Oh, I don’t doubt members of the Red Dawn movement will have had a hand in recent events, but what’s going on out there on the streets of your capital, Mr Attorney General isn’t wholly, or mainly the work of Red Dawn. What’s going on out there is rather more to do with the forces you unleashed in October last year and your Administration’s wilful failure to address the aftermath. Red Dawn might have been the guiding hand behind the attacks on Balmoral, our ships off Spain and the sneak attack on Malta,” Tom Harding-Grayson’s voice had acquired a hard, cutting edge, “but those atrocities were carried out with and by the connivance of patriotic American citizens who honestly believed they were carrying out the orders of their President.”
“There is no evidence...”
“We brought copies of the gun camera film from Malta, Mr Attorney General. What else do you want? Pieces of the 100th Bomb Group B-52 that crashed on the island of Gozo?”
Bobby Kennedy held up his hands.
“Since we’re being frank with each other,” he retorted, “as friends may sometimes be, one with the other,” he added, slowing himself down before he was drawn into saying something rash. “The United States will make good on all those promises of assistance to the United Kingdom currently deferred by Congressional order. We can discuss what this means in detail in due course but suffice to say the President will issue executive orders to ensure that food, fuel, medical and other strategic industrial commodities will be made available to the United Kingdom commencing at the earliest possible date.” The Attorney General looked around the circle of faces trying to gauge the mood of the members of the British delegation. “I realise that the most important thing in any friendship is trust, and that trust between our two nations is a thing that will have to be re-established between us. Please believe me when I say that it is this country’s most fervent wish to live in peace with the perilously small family of democratic nations that remain on this planet.”
Edward Heath had extended his right hand.
Bobby Kennedy shook it, a broad smile beginning to form on his lips.
There was a knock on the closed door to the annexe.
Dick White
, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service entered.
“I must speak to you privately, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 41
Wednesday 11th December 1963
West Lawn, The White House, Washington DC
General Curtis LeMay flicked an irritated glance at the blood spatter on his right sleeve, and involuntarily raised his hand to touch the sutures recently inserted to staunch the flow of blood from his gashed head. In the distance sporadic small arms fire broke the unnatural quietness of the great city’s streets. His eyes lifted involuntarily to the sky as two F-4 Phantoms made a low pass over the White House. Half-a-dozen Skyraiders still loitered at three thousand feet, circling above the Pentagon. As if to mock the desecration of the nation’s capital bright late afternoon wintery sunshine broke through the high clouds and the drifting smoke of battle.
Striding purposefully across the muddy west lawn LeMay caught the vile stench of napalm in the air at the same moment he heard the thrumming of the approaching Sea Kings.
Three M-60 Patton main battle tanks were parked fifty yards away. The grey steel monsters were still buttoned down. Armoured personnel carriers mounting fifty calibre machine guns formed a picket line closer in to the West Wing of the White House. The fires in the East Wing had been put out now. All things considered, the old building was relatively intact even if nobody was going to be living or working in it any time soon. Now, if he could only stop the fucking Navy starting a shooting war in the North Atlantic, they might just earn enough time to figure out what went wrong before something else blew up in their faces!