by James Philip
“Our two great nations have fought three World Wars this century,” Jack Kennedy boasted proudly, his voice ringing melodically as it echoed down the serried loudspeakers positioned along Pennsylvania Avenue. “No two nations on Earth have such a noble history of standing up to and facing down tyranny. No two peoples have proven such an unrivalled devotion to the cause of freedom and peace in the World!”
Margaret Thatcher envied her counterpart the ease with which he connected with his people. Put the man in front of a microphone and within minutes he had his audience in the palm of his hand. The vast crowd clapped and cheered, bayed for more. A sea of raised arms waved like a great ocean in motion.
“And perhaps, no two peoples have gone through such travails and survived with their systems of government intact, their belief in the sanctity of the rule of law untrammelled and their faith in the future undimmed. We have fought together for the right to build a great new society and we owe it to our children and our grandchildren to do the right thing now!”
The Angry Widow had been lost so deeply in her thoughts that she remembered, with a shock, that she ought to have been applauding with the rest of the stage party. She put her hands together and, by her lights, quirked a self-deprecatory grimace in the direction of the President’s younger brother.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy returned the half-smile. He had been wounded in the left calf when Captain Walter Brenckmann, who had subsequently been appointed as the new United States Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral, had wrestled Edward Heath’s assassin to the ground. If the courageous naval officer had not reacted so quickly there was little doubt that other members of the British ‘peace mission’ would have been killed or seriously injured. Ted Heath’s murderess had emptied the magazine of her ex-husband’s point four-five calibre M1911 pistol randomly around the packed Oval Office after she had been forced to the ground. Secret servicemen had carried her out of the room screaming and writhing like somebody in the throes of an epileptic seizure. Within hours of the shooting the woman had been locked away in an asylum for her own protection.
The Attorney General had offered to give his ‘British friends’ daily updates on the condition of the woman, forty-nine year old Edna Maria Zabriski, a White House secretary. The Prime Minister had politely declined the offer.
‘Justice should take its course according to your laws and the judicial processes of the United States of America without any suggestion of intervention, or influence from outside,’ she had assured him.
It was Bobby Kennedy who had come to her privately and asked her to rethink her decision not to speak at this ceremony. The President, it seemed, was concerned that an audience outside the United States would not understand her silence at such a ‘signal event in the history of our two countries’.
‘The President is a charismatic and accomplished public speaker and I am not,’ she had explained. ‘The steps of the Capitol Building are his natural stage. Mine will be a room in Blair House later in the evening. We both have our own constituencies and I know how best to communicate with mine.’
After the ‘Battle of Washington’ the Administration had relocated many of its departments to Philadelphia and New York. The damage to departmental buildings, the loss of archives and the death toll among key personnel was so high that in many cases, organs of Government were going to have to be rebuilt again virtually from the ground up. For example, although the US military machine remained formidable, and its command and control infrastructure superficially more or less intact, its planning, personnel, technological development, policy, training and resupply organisations were in a state of unmitigated chaos. The ships at sea, the aircraft parked at their bases and the army units in their camps and forts were like the branches of some great Redwood tree that had been unexpectedly felled. While the individual branches had survived, the trunk that delivered life-giving sap to those branches and their countless leaves had been split and severed at its base. Just paying military salaries was going to present an almost insurmountable problem in the coming weeks, and every major procurement program was going to have to be reconstructed like giant, unbelievably complicated jigsaw puzzles. The same process was going to have to be repeated across every strata of governmental activity.
Margaret Thatcher knew from personal experience how difficult that was going to be. In Britain the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration – officially superseded by her own Unity Administration on 1st of January – had had to re-invent a totally new form of government utilising the Emergency District System automatically enacted in the aftermath of the October War. She had been the first ‘Supply Minister’ in the UKIEA, and basically, had made up the rules drawing on the lessons learned in the 1945, as she went along. Despite her anger the Angry Widow could not help herself feeling a little bit sorry for her hosts. Not least because it was not until their own people had risen in insurrection, that the Administration had truly comprehended some small part of what things had been like for their ‘allies’ ever since the cataclysm.
“America has looked inward upon itself for long enough,” the President declared. “We in this continent are not an island cast adrift or in some way separated from the World. No man or woman in these United States of America is apart from the rest of Mankind. It is not our destiny to withdraw into our heartlands, or to cower behind the ramparts of our military might. It is not our destiny to be isolated from our fellow men. I thank God that we live in a nation that speaks the language of William Shakespeare. I thank God that we live under a system of law and governance mandated by the sons of the European enlightenment. And I thank God that we have been, and will continue to be the grain store of the World and the arsenal of democracy. While I live I am proud, proud my fellow Americans, to dedicate myself to the great work of renewal and freedom that lies before us all!”
Chapter 2
Tuesday 14th January 1964
Lisbon, Portugal
HMS Hermes looked like a very old ship from where Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher viewed her from across the harbour. The aircraft carrier had about her that rusting, grubby, greasy sheen that the onset of dusk could not entirely hide from the most disinterested or distant observers, and he was neither. Hermes was hardly four years old and yet she had been worked hard – almost worked to death – in the last year. Not that her down at heel appearance did not mean she could not still, at a pinch, fight her weight. Her magazines had been partially restocked with newly flown in American air-to-air missiles, her ready lockers were stuffed with clips of forty-millimetre reloads for her Bofors guns, her tanks had been topped off with aviation and all the other oils and lubricants she needed to keep on steaming and flying her dwindling air group. Her peacetime air complement of a dozen De Havilland Sea Vixens interceptors, seven Blackburn Buccaneer low-level strike aircraft, five Fairey Gannet anti-submarine aircraft, and six Westland Wessex helicopters was reduced to seven Sea Vixens, three Buccaneers, two Gannets and four Wessex’s. Most of the surviving aircraft were over-stressed, flying literally on a wing and prayer.
“Commander Christopher,” the elegantly dressed blond said, smiling. She had poured herself into the chair opposite him at the table in the waterfront taverna. He had found this place a week ago and come here the last few evenings to collect his thoughts and make his peace with the changed reality of his life. He missed his old ship, HMS Talavera. He missed the gadgets and gizmos that as the old destroyer’s Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO) had been his to experiment with and to play with to his heart’s content. He badly missed his friends from Talavera’s wardroom; those both dead and alive. Worst of all he felt disconnected from things. Ever since Rear Admiral Grenville had brought his staff ashore from his flagship, the Hermes, he had been a spare part, a square peg in a world of round holes. Hermes sailed for Malta in the morning for a three month refit; and here he was ashore twiddling his thumbs. If God had a sense of humour it was a bloody perverse one! Peter Christopher gave the woman an impatien
t frown.
“Don’t look so worried,” the newcomer laughed. “I’m not about to proposition you, or anything.”
The woman’s voice was plumy, straight out of the Home Counties.
“We’ve not met,” she went on. “I’m Clara Pullman.” She waved to the bar. “Might I have a coffee, please?” She asked in Portuguese. “I came here a lot before the war,” she explained, smiling again.
Peter Christopher guessed his companion to be in her mid-thirties. She wore a lightweight fawn coat over a plain cotton dress that was obviously tailored to her contours. She had no rings on her fingers; and had placed a small, grey leather handbag on the table.
Several of the tables around them were occupied by men in Royal Navy or Royal Air Force blue. Lisbon had become an outpost of the British military machine shortly before the ceasefire was declared and now it was swiftly turning into a regular staging post and watering hole, much to the delight of the local hotel, taverna and restaurant owners.
“Forgive my manners,” the man muttered. “If it is all the same with you I am not feeling terribly sociable this afternoon.”
“No offence taken,” the woman assured him. She gave the waiter a tight-lipped smile when her coffee was placed before her, was silent until the man retreated, wiping his hands on a stained apron. “You’ve had a rough old time of it lately. Still, you’ll be on your way to Malta soon.”
The man gave her a baleful look.
“You just need to have a little faith, that’s all,” Clara Pullman said, glancing out of the window as she raised her cup to her lips. She wore very little makeup, much in the style of the local better off, respectable women of the city; that was how the man had known she was not a tart drawn to the waterfront by the influx of foreign sailors, airmen and soldiers. She nodded towards the darkening silhouette of HMS Hermes. “When were you last in England?” She asked suddenly.
Peter Christopher snorted softly.
“Late November.” It seemed like a lifetime ago; all those months that HMS Talavera was swinging around her anchors in Fareham Creek, the occasional runs ashore into Portsmouth or Gosport, the greyness of the skies and the radiation lockdown exercises. Yes, that was another lifetime.
“What’s it like at home?” The woman probed, trying not to seem overly anxious. “I left London just before the war, you see. I had a lovely little flat in Hampstead. Courtesy of a rich admirer who had fallen in love with this city during the war – Hitler’s War, that is – when he was something dangerous and exciting in the Special Operations Executive. Lisbon was the playground of the spies of all the warring parties in those days.” She laughed a sad little laugh. “The more things change the more they remain the same, I suppose.”
“Home is not like it once was,” the man said gently. “There is no London any more. Or much of Kent, or large tracts of the East Coast. There were some hits up in the north-east, I think. Nobody talked much about it and not a lot of people really know what really happened in some places. There was a big airburst over Morecombe Bay, for example. I’ve no idea if Blackpool is still there. We heard bad things about the rationing, shortages of everything, there were rumours of plague; I don’t know. That’s what it is like at home. Pretty grim for most people, I should imagine.”
The woman viewed him thoughtfully.
“They say radiation levels aren’t as bad as everybody said they would be if we ever blew up the World?”
Peter Christopher shrugged.
“Radiation levels dropped quickly after the first few weeks. The best policy is probably not to think about it. We won’t know how bad things are going to be for a while. Several years, perhaps, decades.” He found himself thinking about Marija celebrating each defect-free birth at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women at Mdina; wondered if that was the new future for all of Mankind. Counting its blessings for the tiny things; the things that only a truly merciful God could reliably bestow upon his children. “Humanity is fourteen months into a millennium long experiment when it comes to living with raised background radiation levels. You and I, we just won’t live so long as we would before the war. It is our children who will pay the real price.”
Clara Pullman grimaced.
“Children have never been on my agenda. I’m not really the maternal type.”
“No, what type are you Miss Pullman?”
“I was once a nurse. From time to time in the last year I have been again. In the meantime I was,” she smiled, fluttered her eyelids and tried very hard not to giggle, “a kept lady. But that career was slowly winding down. The sort of men who keep women of my ilk like their trophies young and lissom and as you see, I have been neither for some time now.”
Peter Christopher raised an eyebrow.
Clara Pullman raised a hand.
“No, don’t start trying to be gallant, Commander,” when she laughed her eyes came alight. “In the last year I have embarked on a new career. Although I didn’t know it until about a month ago I’ve been, shall we say, on Government Service ever since the day of the war. Which brings me to why I’m sitting at a table in a waterfront taverna with a handsome young naval officer trying very hard not to flirt.”
Peter Christopher’s ill humour at being jogged out of his brooding had morphed into curiosity by then. If a beautiful woman – and whatever Miss Pullman thought of her own looks, she was a beautiful woman – wanted to spend the time of day cheering him up who was he to affect misogyny?
“We’re not flirting, Miss Pullman,” he observed. “I am...” His voice trailed off because he had been about to say ‘engaged’, which strictly speaking, was not true. He and Marija Calleja were, well, affianced but not in a way that he could easily explain to himself, let alone a complete stranger. They had only ever spoken through their letters, one to the other, and they had never discussed, or mentioned what their ‘status’ actually was. He did not even know what her voice sounded like, or she his. He simply felt ‘committed’ to her and he tacitly assumed she felt the same way towards him. In either event he did not consider himself free to ‘flirt’ with an attractive older woman he met in a waterfront taverna.
“Spoken for?” The woman inquired, her eyes smiling. That was when Peter Christopher started getting the feeling that she knew some, if not all of his secrets. It was like having one’s pocked picked. “I know about Marija Calleja,” Clara said, putting down her coffee cup. “In November I was sitting behind her on a bus as close to her as I am to you now.”
The man said nothing.
“And before you ask,” his companion went on, “I and the people I represent mean neither of you any harm.”
Peter Christopher’s stare narrowed. The woman was either a criminal about to blackmail him, somebody put up to this by his father to let him know that the new Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean did not want any kind of scandal, or she was a spook.
Clara Pullman was not intimidated by the young man’s silence. Everything she knew about the tall, handsome son of the famous ‘Fighting Admiral’ confirmed that he was every inch the prototypical ‘new’ naval officer, highly intelligent, technically accomplished in his own field of radar and electronics and probably in several other specialisations, respected by his fellow officers and the men under him. Not yet half-formed he had already been singled out within the Navy for future high command. Of course, Peter Christopher did not know this, or even suspect it. He was not overly ambitious, did not crave to emulate his distinguished, somewhat estranged father, and rather like Marija Elizabeth Calleja in faraway Malta, had virtually no idea how he was seen in the eyes of others. Marija Calleja and Peter Christopher were well matched, remarkable innocents abroad in the World who needed people like her to guard their backs if they were to ever go in search of their destinies.
“When you get back to your hotel this evening,” she explained. “Sober, hopefully,” a sympathetic half-smile, “you will find new orders waiting for you.” Clara began to rise from the
table. “We shall meet again one day,” she promised, and walked out of the taverna.
What on Earth was all that about?
Peter Christopher thought briefly about running after the woman and demanding to know what was going on. He could not move even though his mind was racing. If the woman had been going to blackmail him she would have come straight out with it. If that was not it, then whatever was going on was far too subtle for his father’s handiwork. Clara Pullman, if that was her real name, had just made contact. It was classic. She had identified him, approached him, looked him in the eye, made her assessment and departed. And now he was a part of the Great Game.
Or am I?
Finishing his beer he paid up and walked, unhurriedly back the mile or so to his hotel, where he and his erstwhile ‘steward’, Petty Officer Jack Griffin and a score of officers and senior NCO’s from all three services were billeted. The Armada de Tagus was a genteel, old-world sort of rest house that usually catered for retired Portuguese civil servants and naval officers. It had about it the faded glory of the days when Portugal had been in the first rank of European superpowers, and like Portugal itself, the hotel had seen better times and was quietly falling down, its walls cracked and its paint flaking. He and Jack Griffin had found themselves back at the hotel after Hermes put into Lisbon a fortnight ago to offload several sick bay cases, and to take on new drafts. What had been planned as a forty-eight hour stopover had stretched, first to a week and now fourteen days and counting, when the Portuguese authorities granted permission for the carrier to undertake ‘essential maintenance’ in the sheltered waters of the Tagus Estuary. In fact the Portuguese had fallen over themselves to be of assistance and a stream of dignitaries, including António de Oliveira Salazar, the seventy-four year old Prime Minister – Dictator really - of Portugal and several of his ministers, had paid much lauded courtesy visits to the Happy H in recent days. Peter Christopher had been summoned onboard to escort the Portuguese dictator around the bridge and the flight deck since he had already met the old man, who was especially eager to be photographed again with the son of the ‘famous Fighting Admiral’. Salazar was not at all what one expected a 1930s-style fascist dictator to be like; he seemed mild-mannered, professorial, more like one’s favourite elderly uncle than a contemporary of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.