by James Philip
“Yes, Prime Minister...”
“Good.” Margaret Thatcher looked directly across the table to the impassive uniformed figure of Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff. “Sir, David. Would you please brief us on the latest military and intelligence developments?”
“There is currently no significant threat in home waters or in home air space, Prime Minister,” the suave, coolly professional Admiral reported. “No United States Navy surface unit is presently within one thousand nautical miles of our shores. However, American assets have been made available to C-in-C Mediterranean under the terms of the recently concluded Washington agreement. Ideally, satellite over flights of the Adriatic, the Aegean and Asia Minor might have gone a long way to addressing the intelligence deficit in the Eastern Mediterranean. Regrettably, I have been informed that no such reconnaissance facility is operational at this time. Notwithstanding, Central Intelligence Agency U-2 spy planes operating out of Aviano in Northern Italy and from RAF Akrotiri have flown missions over the Aegean, the approaches to the Bosphorus and over the Black Sea as far north as Sevastopol. Photographs from those sorties are presently being analysed by CIA analysts in theatre. First reports indicate more traffic in the Bosphorus and along the southern Black Sea coast than we anticipated. A number of vessels, possibly warships are anchored in the vicinity of Istanbul. There are also indications of large fires and troop movements around that city. Since we have no eyes on the ground in that part of the World we are somewhat disadvantaged. C-in-C Mediterranean has requested Special Forces troops – either or both Royal Marine Special Boat Squadron and Special Air Service Regiment parties - be inserted into the region to provide a better feel for what is going on. I have explained that this will not be possible owing to the ongoing internal home security commitments of the SAS and SBS. C-in-C Mediterranean is aware of the increased demands on the available deployable Special Forces units subsequent to the attack on Balmoral. Understandably, Admiral Christopher’s primary concern is for the security of our position on Cyprus. Currently, the forces deployed on Cyprus are at the end of a long supply chain, and are too weak to sustain action overlong against a determined and more numerous enemy. Which brings me to the ongoing redeployment of all available military assets to the Mediterranean.”
The mood around the table was subdued as the First Sea Lord began to detail the plans now in motion.
“The fleet carrier HMS Victorious and the commando carrier HMS Ocean departed Gibraltar last night in company with seventeen other vessels, including the Cunard liner Sylvania carrying troops, and a cadre of skilled tradesmen and their families to Malta. HMS Hermes will follow in three days time with four escorts and a convoy of seven fast merchantmen including the P and O liner Canberra. In total these vessels are transporting the equivalent of two brigades of mechanised infantry, over thirty centurion main battle tanks and over fifty other armoured fighting vehicles. The main bulk of these forces will be based, off-loaded, or cross-decked at Malta for redeployment as circumstances determine once Admiral Christopher’s initial entrenchment exercise is completed.”
This plan had raised eyebrows at the meeting, ten days ago on the morning the peace mission had set out for Washington DC.
The C-in-C Mediterranean planned to ‘tidy up the map’ by seizing the islands of Pantelleria, Lampedusa and Linosa which lay across the western approaches to his Mediterranean citadel, Malta. Presently, the islands were in the hands of local tribal juntas, and ‘pirates’ who had preyed on fishermen and passing small craft, and presumably, reported all shipping and aircraft movements in the area to their clients in Sicily and Italy. Once Cyprus had been secured by a, hopefully, self-sustaining garrison and the fleet was reinforced to such a strength as to allow it to keep that garrison supplied indefinitely; Julian Christopher had his eyes on, if not occupying Crete, then neutralising it as a threat to his lines of communication in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Crete operation was unlikely to feasible for some months as many of the troops who were being transported to Malta were fresh recruits. Moreover, if opposed, retaking – or even just occupying Crete – would be a major undertaking requiring a great deal of meticulous planning.
The ‘Christopher Plan’ was based on the premise that British and Commonwealth interests in the wider Middle East could only be secured from a position of military strength. At the moment the Egyptians, Israelis and the Lebanese were sitting watchfully on the sidelines. It was known that since the October War the Americans had maintained a tenuous air bridge with Tel Aviv, but this was now temporarily in abeyance.
Farther south only the presence of what were essentially isolated and beleaguered British garrisons – literally a thin red line of trapped troops and aircraft badly in need of spare parts and maintenance, supported by a handful of former Pacific Fleet destroyers and gunboats – held what was left of the peace East of Suez. The oil-rich Arabian peninsula lay virtually undefended, its constituent nations, emirates and feudal fiefdoms constantly looking across the waters of the Persian Gulf at an unstable Iraqi state and Iran, the sleeping regional superpower ruled by a man – forty-four year old Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi - who increasingly behaved as if he was a reincarnated Persian Emperor rather than the son of a usurper who had seized power in a military coup in the 1920s. Under the ‘Christopher Plan’ British and Commonwealth forces would eventually reinforce the one existing substantial Commonwealth garrison at Abadan, and other key points in the region to ‘deter any adventures’ by either the Iraqis or the Iranians. In the present circumstances it was a pipe dream and the C-in-C Mediterranean’s motives for ‘flagging the matter’ had more to do with broadening the strategic debate about what was, and what was not possible, than mandating urgent military priorities at the fringe of his area of responsibility.
“I gather there has been another sabotage incident on Malta?” Margaret Thatcher checked.
“There were two internal explosions on HMS Torquay while she was being moved out of dry dock. The wreck sank in the Grand Harbour. Fortunately, the two halves of the ship do not present an immediate hazard to navigation. The latest news I have is that an officer from the C-in-C’s personal staff was killed by a booby trap while investigating the disappearance of a dockyard employee who might, in some way, be linked to the Torquay incident.”
Margaret Thatcher nodded.
“Thank you.” She did not need to ask the First Sea Lord to keep her informed. She looked around the table. “Has everybody had a chance to read the digest of the survey reports on the bombed areas of greater London?”
Airey Neave raised a hand.
“We ought to follow up in strength ASAP, Prime Minister!”
“Forgive me, I completely disagree,” Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary objected politely.
“We need to strike while the iron is hot, man!” The former escapee from Colditz Castle protested.
Margaret Thatcher held up a hand to forestall a general free for all.
“Mr Jenkins,” she invited, “while the investigation and re-assimilation of the bombed areas may eventually become a military matter – or at least, a matter requiring military resources to be allocated to its accomplishment – at this time the issue falls within your remit. What is your view as to how to proceed?”
The Home Secretary blinked at her through his horn-rimmed glasses, possibly a little surprised by the genuineness of the deference in her clear soprano voice.
“It seems to me,” he prefaced, deprecatingly, “that if people have been living in the devastated areas beyond the writ of the national government for over a year I suspect they won’t take kindly to folk whom they might regard as, shall we say, freebooters suddenly marching in and cherry picking resources that they feel that they rightfully own. It is my view that we should send parties in to negotiate the return of the peoples of these regions to the, er, bosom of the nation, rather than to simply assume that they automatically ‘belong to us’. The last thing we need is another guerrilla-styl
e war on our hands like we have in Ulster. Our priorities are to re-open the docks, yes? Everything else can wait but the sooner we get the London docks back into operation and re-open the roads between them and the rest of the country the better, yes?”
Margaret Thatcher nodded curtly.
She glanced to her friend Airey Neave. He shrugged, grimaced his impatient acquiescence.
“If you would submit plan for immediate action along the lines you have suggested for next Cabinet please, Mr Jenkins?” She searched the room for dissent. “That’s settled then. What is next, Sir Henry?”
The Cabinet Secretary was a little pained when he spoke.
“The Dreadnought Incident, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 11
Monday 20th January 1964
HQ of the C-in-C Mediterranean, Mdina, Malta
If anybody else had tried to hold back Arkady Pavlovich Rykov in that moment he would have killed them. His rage was so pure, his disgust so unrepentant that he was, almost but not quite, utterly beyond reason.
“Arkady! No!” The woman’s terrified scream cut through the shimmering red haze of his lust for murder. The room had disintegrated into madness moments before, filled with cries of disbelief and alarm, and a cacophony of flying furniture and crashing sound. “No, Arkady!”
The former KGB Colonel blinked back to sanity.
He was standing over the bloodied form of the man on the ground. No, not the ground. The body on the floor of the darkened office beneath the crazily swinging single light bulb.
The man at his feet was groaning.
He had been afraid he had killed him for a moment; killing was much easier than hurting a man.
Arkady Rykov seemed to realise he was gripping something heavy in his right hand. He was gripping it so hard the muscles in his forearm were starting to twist with cramp. He opened his hand and the rounded stone, a paperweight of some kind that he had snatched up from the desk, dropped leadenly onto the wooden boards an inch from the man on the floor’s bloodied head.
That, he thought, was careless.
If he killed the man at his feet there would be inquests, and many questions he did not want to answer.
“What’s going on in here?” Demanded a calm, boyish voice with an authority far beyond the years of its owner.
Lieutenant Alan Hannay stepped cautiously over the detritus-strewn floor. Behind him two big men wearing the Red felt trimmed caps of the Royal Military Police stepped into the room.
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant looked around, and down at the man with the smashed face moaning softly at his feet. Finally, he studied Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and his badly shaken blond female companion. He frowned at the former KGB-man, and smiled a tight-lipped smile at Clara Pullman.
The young man removed his cap, scratched his cropped skull while he contemplated his next decision.
“Ah,” he sniffed, his youthful features a picture of bafflement. “Well, I think I can safely report to the C-in-C that you’ve introduced yourself to Major Williams, Colonel Rykov.” He looked again at Arkady Rykov, this time a hard, quizzical look that lingered on the man’s scarred head and rage-filled eyes. “We were warned that you two had previous history. Have we finished settling old scores for the moment, Colonel?”
Clara Pullman took hold of her lover’s elbow.
“Yes,” she hissed.
Alan Hannay was waiting to hear it from the lips of the professional killer standing in front of him.
“Yes,” the Russian grunted. He spat on the man on the floor; Major Denzil Williams, the man he had come to Malta to replace as MI6 Head of Station on the archipelago.
Alan Hannay frowned; spitting on a man when he was down was just as bad as kicking him in his book. Still, if we had understood the Russian character a little better it would probably have saved an awful lot of unpleasantness fourteen months ago. He glanced over his shoulder at the two Redcaps.
“One of you fellows cut along and find a doctor! Sharply now!”
Admiral Christopher’s flag lieutenant would have had a great deal more sympathy for Major Denzil Williams, the acting head of Station of the Secret Intelligence Service on the Maltese Archipelago if the man’s pig-headed complacency and incompetence had not recently got one of his friends blown to pieces; and if he had not had to be the one to break the news to Marija Calleja. The Admiral would have done that, but he was on a tour of inspection on Gozo and he had not wanted the poor woman to hear the news from a stranger or by accident. Marija had sobbed uncontrollably for several minutes before Doctor Margo Seiffert had arrived and enveloped her in her arms.
“I’m Alan Hannay, by the way,” he grinned sheepishly, extending his hand to the pretty blond woman he knew had to be Clara Pullman, the defector’s secretary.
Arkady Rykov turned to shake his hand also, kicking the prostrate man’s left arm out of the way as he stepped closer to the younger man.
“I didn’t know Lieutenant Siddall very well,” the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant said, not really very interested in whether the man on the ground between the two men was alive or dead, “but he was a decent sort and he will be sadly missed. Unlike some people I could think of.”
“I lost my temper,” the Russian apologised. “I haven’t lost my temper for many years. Not since my old friend Nikita Sergeyevich put down the rising in Hungary, in fact.” He sighed. “After that I learned that losing one’s temper was not enough.”
“Quite,” agreed the younger man.
“What has been done about the other names on the list?” Arkady Rykov asked brusquely.
“Two of the names were killed when HMS Torquay was bombed the first time. Two of the others are in custody. We’re still looking for other three.”
“Arkady!” Clara pleaded.
She and Alan Hannay both thought the Russian was going to start kicking the unconscious SIS man again. Although neither of them felt overly inclined to stop him if he did, they were both mightily relieved when he refrained.
“The World is full of fucking idiots!” Arkady Rykov growled. “I need a cigarette.”
The only man who had cigarettes was the second Redcap.
“Since when did you smoke?” Clara asked her lover.
“I always smoked. When we met I was busted up in hospital. They wouldn’t let me smoke. Then you said you hated men blowing smoke in your face so,” the man shrugged in an uncharacteristically Gallic way, “so I stopped smoking.”
Alan Hannay felt a little left out as the man and the woman gave each other long, searching looks.
“You gave up smoking for me?”
“It is no big deal,” the ex-KGB-man scoffed.
“Every time I think I know you I...”
Again, the Russian responded with a Gallic shrug.
“I was Iosif Vissarionovich’s translator, remember? After Yalta that slime ball Beria tried to have me sent to the Gulag for collaborating with the Yankees even though I was obeying Iosif Vissarionovich’s orders. I served Nikita Sergeyevich loyally for many years and then the old fart paid me back by making me break bread with Red Dawn. Giving up smoking is nothing, my love.”
Alan Hannay’s eyes kept opening wider and wider.
Clara saw this.
“Arkady was Joseph Stalin’s translator at the Yalta Conference in 1945,” she explained, wondering how she could sound so vexed. “The Man of Steel – that’s what the Russians called the old monster – had him mix with the American interpreters and that was how his spying career got started. Arkady was Nikita Sergeyevich’s, I mean Khrushchev’s inside man in the NKVD and later in the KGB. He fell out of love with Khrushchev when he was ordered to infiltrate the leadership of Red Dawn in 1959. When I met him he had just escaped from...”
“Clara, I love you dearly but if you say another word I will have to break your beautiful neck,” the Russian said glumly, in between taking long, lung-filling drags on his cigarette. He gave Alan Hannay a bleak stare. “I must talk to Rosa C
alleja.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. The poor woman is practically catatonic, Colonel.”
Arkady Rykov’s expression indicated that he did not understand why this needed to be an insurmountable problem.
The trio were standing in the narrow cobbled street behind the Cathedral and had to stand to one side to allow a harassed-looking civilian and two new Redcaps into the wrecked office. The civilian was one of Denzil William’s men who had run to fetch, presumably the two Redcaps he had in tow, when Rykov had turned up.
The Russian finished his cigarette and crushed out the glowing stub beneath his heel. He flexed his right hand, suddenly aware of the stinging ache across his knuckles.
“I think I’ve broken something,” he remarked.
“Somebody is hurt, they say?” A peeved, American accented woman’s voice demanded from the darkness behind the three people standing in the street. Margo Seiffert squinted irritably at the man testing his damaged right fist.
“Yes,” Alan Hannay called, stepping forward. “He’s inside that door,” he pointed. “Major Williams. He had a very nasty fall, I’m afraid.”
“A fall,” the former United States Navy Surgeon Commander asked, eyeing Arkady Rykov. “Um,” she breathed, “and would this fall have anything to do with what happened to that poor man yesterday in Kalkara?”
“Have a look at him for yourself, Dottoressa Seiffert,” the Russian suggested sardonically. “Judge for yourself.”
The woman shook her head and brushed past, moving in swift, bird-like steps. She darted inside.
“We can’t stand here all night,” Alan Hannay declared.