by James Philip
Bobby Kennedy didn’t take offence.
He clunked down his glass.
“I came down to invite you to the ‘hand of peace’ ceremony in the Oval Office. It is a mess up there but Jack wanted the Press and the TV people in to witness the show.”
Chapter 48
Wednesday 11th December 1963
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington DC
It was chaos. The Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack hung side by side on a hastily rigged frame behind the President’s desk while photographers ducked and dived and flash guns exploded. The floor was a treacherous snake pit of cables for NBC’s live network broadcast. Everybody was exhausted, a lot of people in the room had been drinking all evening and Jack Kennedy and Edward Heath were ad-libbing to the increasingly fierce barrage of questions being hurled at them from the crowded body of the half-wrecked Oval Office. There were bullet holes in the wall, concussions from a rocket propelled grenade strikes had brought down plaster from the ceiling and NBC’s lights threw deep, sinister shadows across most of the people in the room.
Walter Brenckmann was feeling as light-headed as the others. His son was alive and there would be no war. The United States of America and her old ally, Great Britain, had been reunited by the travails of recent days; each publicly agreeing that they’d been afflicted and tormented by the same mutual conspiracy. Henceforward they would combat the cancer of Red Dawn together, hunt it down and exterminate it like the parasitic plague-carrier it was wherever it manifested itself, and at whatever the cost. It made for a good narrative, a readily available lick of paint to cover over the yawning cracks in the old alliance. But it was a beginning, a turning of the tide. Maybe, just maybe, the World’s remaining nuclear superpowers had signalled a willingness to dream of a better future. Only time would tell; in every trial reconciliation the devil was always in the detail. Walter Brenckmann the man and the officer, the servant of his President, wanted to see the positive, the career lawyer part of him recognised that the road ahead was going to be exceptionally rocky.
However, today he’d thank God – even though he didn’t believe in the existence of a merciful, all-loving God: where was the evidence? – for the life of his son and the preservation of what was left of the country he’d sworn to defend that long ago day in 1940 when he’d been inducted into the United States Navy.
“What happens now that HMS Dreadnought has reappeared?”
That was going to be a problem. Pragmatically, the survival of the British nuclear boat kissed goodbye to any lingering hope the Administration retained that the ‘Scorpion Incident’ might be quietly buried. Inevitably, there would be boards of inquiry, inquests, savage recriminations and a raft of questions nobody really wanted to hear answered.
Edward Heath looked the man who’d shouted the question in the eye.
“For the moment we rejoice that over a hundred brave men feared dead have survived...”
“What assurance can you give the American people that the murderers of the ‘brave’ Americans on the Scorpion will not be forgotten, Mister President?” Demanded another voice.
Jack Kennedy made a pacifying gesture with his hands.
“This is not the time to pre-empt the official boards of inquiry that both our navies will convene to discover the truth.”
The President’s calm gravitas briefly quietened the room.
Walter Brenckmann sensed it was the quiet before the storm. Washington was a seething cauldron of shocked, traumatised humanity and everybody in the Oval Office – every man from the Secret Service agents fingering their guns to the blank-eyed White House junior staffers and secretaries – was operating in an unreal daze. Allowing so many pressmen into the inner sanctum of the Presidency was a dumb idea. If the President’s closest advisers had been thinking clearly – which under the circumstances it wasn’t very easy to do – they wouldn’t have touched this three-ring circus with a long stick.
“What about the murderers of the 100th Bomb Group?” It was the voice of one of the Reuters correspondents, a young Englishman with a bloody bandage on his brow and disbelief in his eyes. “Hundreds of innocent Maltese civilians were murdered on Malta? Don’t they count because they’re not Americans?”
Walter Brenckmann froze.
The ink wasn’t dry on the ceasefire and already the fault lines in the patched up ‘special relationship’ were tearing apart at the seams. In the crush he was jostled. He flicked an irritated glance to his left at the middle aged, plump brunette in a creased twin set with a tired perm who was glaring at the English Premier. He thought he recognised the woman as one of the President’s secretaries. He couldn’t recollect her name; in fact he didn’t think he’d actually heard it.
The woman had jammed her handbag, an ugly scuffed blue leather thing, against his hip and was attempting to retrieve something from inside it.
Walter Brenckmann thought he saw metal glinting.
He thought nothing of it.
But then he thought again.
The glaring arcs illuminating the two leaders cast hard shadows and a backlight that reflected off every surface, dimly, He’d seen a reflection off a bright, shiny metallic edge where there ought to have been none.
He half-turned just as the barrel of the gun, a lumpy old-style Pattern 1911 Navy Colt was raised slowly, shakily.
The Navy man didn’t actually believe what he was seeing.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blond Secret Service man begin to move. The eyes of his President and those of the British Premier widened. The gun levelled.
Everything happened at once with incredible speed.
And yet in that blink of an eye everything seemed to be moving in ultra slow motion.
The blond Secret Service man bowled over Jack Kennedy like he was a linebacker sacking quarterback.
For a split second Edward Heath looked into the eyes of his assassin as another Secret Service agent moved towards him, probably knowing it was a million years too late.
The first shot barked deafeningly and there was instant pandemonium.
Bodies were diving for cover.
Everybody except Walter Brenckmann.
He wrestled with the woman with the gun, clawing for the Colt. There was a second shot as the Navy man and the woman fell hard on the ground. The third shot was so close to Walter Brenckmann’s head that the concussion of the discharge seemed to be inside his skull.
That was when his World went black.
Chapter 49
Friday 13th December 1963
Headquarters of the C-in-C Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, Mdina, Malta
Lieutenant Jim Siddall took Marija’s arm and helped her out of the Land Rover. The big former Redcap looked less fierce, less hard-bitten in his crisp new uniform and strangely, more relaxed. He’d collected her from the Pembroke Barracks and at her request, taken her home so she could change into a fresh dress. He’d explained that the ‘C-in-C would welcome the opportunity to speak with the leader of the Women of Malta movement’, so she’d decided she’d look her best for the interview. A little over a week ago she’d have half-suspected such an invitation would result in her arrest but everything had changed in the last week.
“The Women of Malta is not a ‘movement’,” she scolded her driver as the Land Rover negotiated the narrow, twisting roads out of the town. “I’m not even sure if it has any reason to exist now that our men have been released from detention.”
This seemed to amuse the big man.
“What?” She demanded, smiling.
“You have no idea the way other people see you,” he retorted quietly.
It was one of those mild winter days on Malta when the rain occasionally fell heavily but not for long and in between the showers the sun was strong enough to raise the dust. The prickly pear bushes beside the road were almost but not quite out of season, in the middle distance the ancient fortress city of Mdina overlooked a faded patchwork landscape of dry stone walls and small fields, villages a
nd lonely farmsteads that sprawled across the rugged landscape of the interior of the island. Beyond Hamrun there were signs to the RAF airfields of Luqa and Ta’Qali, as if the roaring of jet engines could hide the existence of the great concrete scars of their runways. Marija knew that from the ramparts of Mdina she’d be able to look down on Ta’Qali, and watch the big transports and fighters drifting down and taking off there and from more distant Luqa. She and Joe had often watched the comings and goings from the two fields and the other small strips for endless summer hours in those years after the war when the British presence had seemed so benign.
It was not a long drive.
Nowhere on Malta was a long drive from anywhere else. Marija had read somewhere that the whole Maltese Archipelago was smaller than the Isle of Wight. She had looked at maps, compared scales and discovered that although Malta was smaller than the faraway island in the English Channel, roughly three times as many people lived on the islands of the Archipelago. Contemplating these facts she’d concluded that the Isle of Wight must be a lonely and a very quiet place and she’d felt a little bit sorry for the people who lived there.
“I can’t do anything about how other people see me,” she complained. “That is their problem, not mine!”
Soon the Land Rover was climbing up the slope to the ramparts of Mdina, negotiating the last switchback and driving up to the old city gate. The guards waved them through into the citadel where the narrow cobbled roads wound between great canyons of limestone and granite buildings.
The large sign above the double doors said: C-IN-C MALTA. Next to it a smaller board said: ALL VISITORS REPORT TO THE DUTY DESK.
“My office is three doors down the road,” Jim Siddall explained, pointing.
Marija looked up at the spires and domes of the Cathedral on her right. St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, where Margo Seiffert had trained her and dozens of other local women to be auxiliary nurses and midwives was just the other side of the Cathedral. Hardly anywhere inside the citadel was more than five minutes from anywhere. Mdina was like Malta itself in microcosm.
The big man escorted his charge inside.
“Miss Calleja has an appointment with the C-in-C,” he explained to the Royal Navy sub-lieutenant behind the desk inside the double doors. The other man made a call.
Alan Hannay trotted down the stairs half-a-minute later.
“Thanks, Jim,” he nodded affably to Marija’s guardian angel. “I’ll take it from here.”
The big ex-Redcap hesitated.
“Never fear, I’ll make sure Miss Calleja gets home safely,” the Commander-in-Chief’s flag lieutenant promised.
Marija climbed stairs with a patient, unhurried gait, almost but not quite one step at a time. If Alan Hannay was impatient with her slow pace he was far too well brought up to show it.
“I hear you almost had a nasty fall the other day?” The boy inquired, belatedly wondering if his attempt at polite conversation was possibly a mistake.
“I fainted,” Marija explained, feeling foolish. “One of the American fliers, Captain Zabriski, caught me.” She shrugged. “He kept apologising for ‘manhandling me’ afterwards as if it was his fault I’d fainted. You know that most of those boys at Fort Pembroke feel sick about what they did, don’t you?”
“Yes. I imagine I’d feel the same if I was them.”
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant swiftly absented himself as soon as he’d delivered Marija to the great man’s room. His guest looked to the Commander-in-Chief and then around the mostly bare limestone walls; the room was more of a cell than an office with a single three feet square window with a view down towards Ta’Qali. Other than two hard-backed chairs the only furniture was a big, rather gnarled desk, and a single three drawer gun metal filing cabinet.
Her host had risen to his feet on her arrival but stayed behind his desk.
He said nothing when the young woman moved to the side of his desk and viewed the three small framed photographs on his uncluttered desk.
Marija remembered Peter’s mother, a slim, clever woman whose laugh was often forced. The second picture was of a woman in her twenties with her mother’s chin and her father’s eyes; Peter’s older sister, Elspeth, who’d emigrated to Australia before the October War. Finally, Peter looking very young and self-conscious, on parade in front of a big building with tall colonnades brandishing of all things, a ceremonial sword...
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operation chuckled lowly.
“I have more recent photographs of Peter. I make it known to his commanding officers, confidentially you understand, that I like to keep a record of his progress, you see. But that’s the picture I carry with me always.”
Marija remained silent but gave the man a quizzical, unafraid look.
“It was the day,” he explained wanly, “that I was most proud of him and yet couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I’ve never forgiven myself. He’s never forgiven me. It was the worst day of my life; I hope to live long enough to atone.”
“Oh.” The young woman was confused. She’d ponder what she’d just been told at her leisure. It was a thing that deserved long and careful consideration; possibly the most important thing the great man would ever say to her. “Lieutenant Siddall said you wanted to talk to me about the Women of Malta?”
“Another day, perhaps.”
Julian Christopher resumed his seat.
Marija continued to roam the room.
She picked up the picture of Peter wielding the sword.
“Dartmouth,” she was informed. “Peter’s passing out parade.”
“Oh.” Marija looked up and met the older man’s gaze. Subconsciously, her hand stroked the frame.
“I have made a point of not interfering in Peter’s career,” Julian Christopher said flatly. “Yes, I keep in touch with his commanding officers but always on the clearly stated basis that I am only interested in hearing realistic appraisals of his progress. Peter has achieved everything that he has achieved in the Service off his own bat. Everything. However...”
Marija frowned, unsure where this was going.
“However, in attaching Peter to the fleet staff on board HMS Hermes I have broken the rule of a lifetime. A rule that, with hindsight, I should have broken long ago. There’s no fool like an old fool, as they say.”
“I don’t understand, Admiral Christopher,” Marija confessed.
“Under the forthcoming reorganisation of my command area, from January HMS Hermes’s new home port will be Valletta.”
Chapter 50
Saturday 14th December 1963
Cheltenham Town Hall, Gloucestershire, England
With the collaboration of GCHQ technicians it was going to be the BBC’s first live outside broadcast since the October War. The Director General of the British Broadcasting Company had protested that his reconstructed, relocated and still ramshackle organisation - a pale imitation of its old majesty - was not ready for such a momentous step. He’d also objected to the ‘technical input by MI6’ in ‘ethical grounds’ but Margaret Thatcher had over-ruled him. Basically, if the BBC wasn’t up to the job then ‘what was it good for?’
This question had stumped the Director General who’d been sulking ever since about the iniquities of a ‘totalitarian states’ and ‘Soviet methods’. The Angry Widow had never had much time for wishy washy artistic types with fragile egos so she’d made a mental note to talk to Iain MacLeod, the Minister of Information about finding somebody capable of rebuilding the BBC ‘a little faster’ than its current chief.
The BBC had taken over Cheltenham Town Hall, a marvellous Gothic Victorian structure in the heart of the nearest town to the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration compound three days ago to prepare for another kind of broadcast. Edward Heath had planned to speak to the nation on his return from America. Nobody had known three days ago if he was to return with tidings of peace or war; and two scr
ipts had been drafted.
What had happened in Washington forty-eight hours ago had altered the shape of politics forever on both sides of the North Atlantic. In America and in England the Governments of the old allies had crossed their respective Rubicons. There could be no going back.
Margaret Thatcher had been working on departmental papers in her room two nights ago when the call had come through from Washington. Iain MacLeod’s tone had been a little odd, stoic in a way that was totally alien to him. It wasn’t until he’d begun to explain what had happened in the Oval Office less than an hour before that she had understood. The Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland was the Prime Minister’s oldest surviving friend in Government; possibly the one man in whom – despite their recent differences – he’d trusted most.
It had been a relatively brief, cruelly pragmatic conversation because Iain Macleod, the brilliantly shrewd political tactician and strategist at the heart of one nation conservatism, had understood that his country simply couldn’t survive further divisions within its leadership. His analysis had been brutally incisive.
‘Whilst Jim Callaghan is the nominated Deputy Prime Minister, he is not the heir apparent. He won’t like being passed over but he knows that he doesn’t have an unimpeachable right to govern and his personal integrity won’t allow him to seek external backing for a bid for the premiership.’
Margaret Thatcher knew her colleague was talking about the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party’s respect for and friendship with Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord. Iain Macleod might be the political kingmaker; the First Sea Lord and the other Chiefs of Staff were the men who held – if they wanted to wield it - the real power in the land.
‘Within the Party,” the Minister of Information went on, “both I and Peter Thorneycroft would normally have precedence in the succession. As would a score of others in their own estimation.” Peter Thorneycroft, Jim Callaghan’s deputy at the Ministry of Defence and Edward Heath’s trusted bellwether of the mood of the Party in the country, had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1950s. ‘But whoever takes over has to be able to command Jim Callaghan’s support and the whole-hearted support of the Chiefs of Staff. There is also the small matter of Royal Assent...’