by James Philip
Planting the couple in the Mess he hurried away, promising to return in a few minutes.
“We’ve only just got here, Arkady!” Clara whispered angrily.
They had been flown direct from Lisbon to interrogate the surviving members of the Red Dawn cell they had infiltrated on their last visit to Malta; the members of which ought to have been in custody for the last seven days. It was only when they arrived in Mdina that it transpired that the local ‘intelligence men’ had thought it was a better idea to keep the suspected Red Dawn terrorists ‘under surveillance’ than to round them up ‘prematurely’.
Major Denzil Williams had been somewhat put out to discover that the ‘senior officer’ the Head of MI6, Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White, had personally sent to Malta to take over his operation was none other than Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. He had indignantly informed the Russian in somewhat unprofessional, intemperate language that the only way he was going to allow him, a ‘fucking Soviet traitor’, to speak to any of his prisoners was over ‘my dead body’.
Coincidentally, Arkady Rykov had been looking for a pretext to do just that.
The former KGB Colonel had needed no further encouragement to oblige the man who had had him kicked half-way around the Rock of Gibraltar seven weeks ago.
Chapter 12
Tuesday 21st January 1964
HMS Dreadnought, Algeciras Bay, Gibraltar
The Royal Navy only had one nuclear-power hunter killer submarine and when she had limped into Algeciras Bay before Christmas all the stops had been pulled out. A two-dozen strong team from Vickers Shipbuilding Ltd at Barrow-in-Furness had flown into Gibraltar on an RAF Comet within hours.
The air-dropped Mark 44 thirteen-inch torpedo, one of four dropped by the USS Enterprise’s Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine hunter aircraft, ought to have sunk HMS Dreadnought. The warhead had exploded within feet of the stern of the submarine. Shock damage had shattered machinery footings, shorted out most the boat’s electrical systems, and comprehensively killed her sonar suite. It had taken Dreadnought six days to limp into Algeciras Bay. Once in harbour and dry-docked Commander Simon Collingwood’s initial damage assessment was that his command would not be fit to go to sea again for six months. That was a month ago, now the Royal Navy’s first, and for the foreseeable future, solitary nuclear–powered attack submarine was thrusting out into the Straits of Gibraltar on a dark, starless night, provisioned for a six week war patrol.
The Captain of the Royal Navy’s most complex and valuable asset was not under any illusions that his command was in tip top fighting trim; or that in an ideal World she did not still need several months in dockyard hands. However, that did not mean that HMS Dreadnought was not fit for combat.
“Depth of water under the keel please!” He called.
“Eight hundred feet, sir!”
Simon Collingwood glanced across the plot table to his Executive Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Max Forton.
“Diving Stations if you please, Number One!”
“Diving Stations, aye, sir!”
In an ‘ideal’, perfect World, Simon Collingwood would have preferred to have test dived the boat in dock, or within the inner dockyard basin but they did not live in a perfect World. God knew they did not! So they would have to get on with it in the open ocean instead. Dreadnought had put to sea with five civilian workers onboard; Flag Officer Submarines had thought this would support the fiction that Dreadnought was departing on a slow, safe run home to Plymouth. That was fine for Flag Officer Submarines, who bless his cotton socks, was not the man who was going to have to explain to five disgruntled civilians sometime in the next few hours that Dreadnought – notwithstanding the boat was a tad worse for wear – was heading not for Blighty, but for the Eastern Mediterranean.
The two men who had been on watch in the cockpit at the top of the sail thirty feet above the control room, slid down the ladder and dogged the hatch shut over their heads.
“The boat is ready to dive, sir!”
“Carry on,” Simon Collingwood said to his Executive Officer before casually settling in his command chair.
He heard the air rushing out of the ballast tanks, felt the planes grip the water and the bow of the submarine begin to dip. It was all very quiet and orderly, there were no raised voices, no anxiety other than the normal breathlessness everybody experienced the first time a boat dived after a spell in dockyard hands.
“Seventy feet!”
Dreadnought was submerged.
“Eighty feet!”
“Ninety feet”
“One hundred feet!”
Shortly the submarine’s wake would be subsumed by the ocean and her passage through the water would be invisible at the surface.
“NO LEAKS!”
“Level the boat at one-five-zero feet please!”
At one hundred and fifty feet they would check again for leaks. They would check every single inch of the boat, just to be sure.
“Helm. Make our course two-seven-five degrees!”
“Two-seven-five degrees, aye, sir!”
“Come up to six zero revs please!”
Two hours later after dropping down to two-hundred and thirty feet below the surface there were still no leaks, nothing had shorted out and the engineering department reported a clean bill of health.
“This is the Captain,” Simon Collingwood announced over the boat’s public address system. He would worry about running silent another time. “The boat is dry and nothing important has broken since we left port. This being the case in five minutes time when I turn the boat around HMS Dreadnought will commence her second War Patrol. This time we won’t be playing hide and seek,” he allowed a suggestion of wry levity to tinge his words, “we will be operating in support of allied naval units in the Eastern Mediterranean. We are carrying a full load of torpedoes and we are fully provisioned for a six week cruise. I offer my sincere apologies to the civilians in our midst but for security reasons it was deemed necessary to make it look as if we were either going out for a short proving trip or heading straight home. I suggest you enjoy the trip. That is all.”
Trying not to chuckle too loudly he looked to his Executive Officer.
“Revolutions for twenty knots, Number One!”
“Helm. Make your course zero-eight-five!”
Simon Collingwood went to his claustrophobic cabin – spacious and luxurious compared to any other on the boat he often joked, very much with his tongue in his cheek – shut the door behind him and opened the small safe by his bunk head with the small key he always carried with him.
Sealed orders which were only to be opened once a vessel had departed port and was out of sight of land rarely contained good news.
He opened the envelope unhurriedly with an odd lack of interest.
He was astonished to discover two hand-written sheets of note paper bearing the crest of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Sunday 19th January, 1964.
Dear Captain Collingwood,
I have written this note by leave of the First Sea Lord and the Flag Officer Submarines, as it would otherwise be highly irregular for a Prime Minister to communicate directly with a serving offer, thereby circumventing the chain of command.
I have pleasure in communicating to you that Her Majesty has seen fit to award you the Distinguished Service Order in recognition of your remarkable achievement in completing, trialling and making HMS Dreadnought so self-evidently combat ready. Moreover, your professionalism, restraint and tactical acumen under immense personal stress in resisting the temptation to engage hostile enemy vessels last December was instrumental in avoiding a new general war. It is therefore my pleasure to inform you that the Board of Admiralty has seen fit to promote you to the rank of Captain as per the date of this letter.
With regard to your current mission I wish you all success.
A list of awards for gallantry and good service, and promotions for several other members of your excellent crew will follow within forty-eight h
ours of your departure from Gibraltar.
I thank you and your people again with all my heart.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher.
PS. Please feel free to share the contents of this note with your crew.
Simon Collingwood stared dumbfounded at the flowing script for a long, long time. ‘PS. Please feel free to share the contents of this note with your crew...’
The commanding officer of the most lethal – conventional – weapon in his nation’s armoury had never really been very interested in politics. He had never voted; never really seen the point. One old man in a suit saying pretty much the same thing as another was not that much of a choice was it? Whichever party was in power the World kept on spinning round, the Navy struggled on from knock to knock and rediscovered the Nelson touch whenever there was a new war. Politics had not mattered.
The Prime Minister had written to him.
Personally.
As if she was just another human being like him.
And it was not a typed pro forma sort of letter. She had sat down and taken the time to write it to him.
Personally.
Back in Gibraltar all Dreadnought’s logs and sonar records had been confiscated; supposedly sent back to England for analysis. Nobody had actually mentioned a Board of Inquiry; but he had assumed that he and Max Forton, and perhaps several others would inevitably be hauled in front of one. The USS Scorpion and all her people were gone and somebody somewhere was going to have to pay the price for that. He had assumed it would be him; and that when the time came he would defend himself and the service and go down fighting if that was what it came to in the end.
It had never occurred to him that his Government would stand by Dreadnought, let alone reward him, his crew and his command for their fortitude under intolerable pressure.
Suddenly, he was on his feet heading for the control room brandishing Margaret Thatcher’s letter as if he was Moses coming down the mountain to proclaim the wisdom freshly written on immutable tablets of stone.
The Prime Minister had written to him, personally...
Chapter 13
Tuesday 21st January, 1964
City Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The city fathers of Philadelphia had always thought big and City Hall was the living embodiment of that hubris writ upon the land in granite. With a tower topped by a thirty-seven feet tall twenty-seven ton hollow bronze statue of the City’s founder, William Penn, at five hundred and forty-eight feet high Philadelphia City Hall had been the tallest inhabited and habitable building in the World when it was completed it 1901. Other brick and stone structures like the Pyramids, and a small number of medieval cathedrals topped it but nobody had worried overmuch about that at the time or since because nobody actually ‘lived’ in them.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Vice-President of the United States of America was sick to the back teeth with facts. Especially, facts about City Hall; the designated temporary home of Congress. Both Houses were due to sit again in less than a week’s time and he was beginning to feel like the man who discovered the rattlesnake in the lucky dip. Of course, a little of his unease was the natural discomfort of a lifelong Southern Democrat in a strange north-eastern city in the middle of winter, and living in the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was just the icing on the cake. He had started telling visitors the ‘facts’ that the locals had drilled into his head as if he too, was a native of the city.
“This is some place, Admiral,” he said gruffly to the tall handsome man in uniform as he led the new Chief of Naval Operations into his hastily configured conference room. Notwithstanding that there were over seven hundred rooms in City Hall finding official accommodation for his staff and that of senior Congressional leaders had been a nightmare. Once Philadelphians had realised that the circus was coming to town rents had doubled and trebled in the blocks around City Hall. In a month or two Philadelphia would be exploring boomtown territory like a second Atlantic City between the First and Second World Wars. The local real estate ‘boom’ was being further exacerbated by the Navy Department’s decision to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, on the opposite bank of the Delaware River. “City Hall took thirty years to build and cost the city twenty-four million dollars. That was in 1901 when money was money!”
“My people tell me it is still the tallest masonry building in the World,” Admiral David Lamar McDonald, the forty-seven year old Georgian who had inherited the ‘CINCLANT fiasco’ and was now charged with reversing the mothballing of most of the US Navy. In the absence of a functioning Congress there had been no time for, or any practical means of, conducting acceptance hearings for the CNO; instead McDonald had been invited to Blair House by the President, the Secretary of Defence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and grilled for several hours. The President suspected that the Navy had caused one global nuclear war, knew for a certainty that it had almost started a second one last month by clumsily manufacturing an incident in the North Atlantic with the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought, and he was determined that the Navy was not going to screw the pooch again on his watch!
“Yes, they say that too,” the Vice-President sighed.
“They say the observation room up in the tower is five hundred feet up in the air, Mr Vice-President,” the CNO rejoined with respectful affability. He was a naval aviator who had progressed steadily through the ranks with the assurance of one destined for high command; McDonald had been the executive officer of the USS Essex, and later commanding officer of the USS Coral Sea before graduating to command the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
“I hear tell you get the best view from the hatch at the top of old Bill Penn’s statue,” Lyndon Baines Johnson replied, determined to get the last word on the subject of City Hall.
The two men shut out their flunkies and took seats at the head of the long, gleaming rectangular mahogany table which dominated the Vice-President’s personal conference room.
“Do you have any problems with the command protocols notified to your office forty-eight hours ago, Admiral?” The Vice-President asked bluntly.
The confident, strong-featured naval officer grunted ruefully.
“The Commander-in-Chief has spoken and General LeMay in his capacity as the lawfully appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has endorsed the President’s actions. These are extraordinary times and I concur one hundred percent with General LeMay that my duty, and the duty of all the men under my command is to stand behind the President.” He half-smiled. “So, to answer your question directly, Mister Vice-President, in the matters we shall be discussing today, I serve at your pleasure.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson nodded. The trouble with most officers and gentlemen was that they never answered a straight question with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Nevertheless, McDonald came recommended by everybody who had ever had anything to do with him and he had been pencilled in for the CNO job before he got his fourth star. Perhaps, if McDonald had been CNO last year they would have saved themselves a lot of unnecessary grief. Still, there was no point crying over spilt milk.
The President and Jackie were off on the stump in the Midwest and Bobby Kennedy was trying to quieten down the situation in Atlanta, Georgia. The two most charismatic members of the Administration would be living on jetliners for the next few days attempting to hold what was left of the Union together; LBJ was minding the store in Philadelphia while Robert McNamara, the one-time whizz kid boss of the Ford Motor Company, was methodically unravelling the nightmare reorganisation and relocation of the Pentagon with one hand, and with the other acting as the provisional military governor of the nation’s sorely ravaged capital. To say that the situation was a mess was to understate the problem by a factor of scores and hundreds but at least Curtis LeMay had – in the last week - finally managed to lock down all of Strategic Air Command’s nuclear assets.
“Where are we with the SSBN inventory, Admiral McDonald?” The Vice-President
asked bluntly.
“All Polaris ballistic missile armed boats are in port, sir,” the CNO reported. “Inventory checks are ongoing but all fully generated warheads and launch systems are accounted for and locked down at this time. All nuclear-capable surface units have returned to port and are off-loading munitions to secure facilities on land with the exception of the carriers Enterprise, Kitty Hawk and Independence. Enterprise is currently in transit to Norfolk, Kitty Hawk is docked at Kobe, Japan, and the Independence is on a homeward transit via the Cape of Good Hope. I am prepared to personally vouch for the loyalty of the commanding officers of those ships, Mister Vice-President.”
Each of the big carriers routinely operated with up to forty nuclear warheads stashed in their magazines. In retrospect, scattering ‘nuclear assets’ around every theatre of war and every ocean of the World had been madness. That said nobody in Washington had foreseen a situation in which the political leadership could not trust its military with the custody of such dangerous toys; until it was too late.
What might have happened if the insurgents had got their hands on an atomic bomb during the Battle of Washington?
LBJ shuddered at the very thought of it.
“The British think the lid’s going to blow in the Mediterranean,” the Vice-President growled. “We have fragmentary intelligence about fighting in and around Istanbul and there’s a lot of new traffic in the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. The trouble is neither of us have any eyes on the ground any more. The CIA is screaming for the spy satellite program to be reactivated but realistically we’re not going to have cameras back in orbit for six to twelve months. We made a whole lot of bad decisions last year,” he admitted, keen to clear the air with the newly-appointed Chief of Naval Operations. “We know something is happened over there but we don’t know what.”
“Red Dawn?” Admiral McDonald asked. “My staff report there is a big increase in radio chatter from formerly ‘quiet’ areas around the Black Sea. Presumably the CIA is talking to the British about this stuff?”