by James Philip
“Er, now, actually.”
It was actually over an hour later as the Cathedral bell was chiming eight o’clock that Margo – with the light of battle glistening in her eyes – was ushered into the modestly appointed office of the Commander-in-Chief.
The Fighting Admiral looked up from his papers.
He grimaced and rose to his feet, coming around his desk to greet his visitor.
“Thank you for coming, Margo,” he half-smiled, extending his hand.
Hands were shaken. The woman said nothing.
“Would you bring that bottle I we brought back from England and a couple of glasses please, Alan?” The great man asked his flag lieutenant. In a moment a bottle of twelve year old Royal Lochnagar Scotch Whisky was being opened and generous measures poured into two crystal tumblers. Alan Hannay, his duty performed, made himself scarce, leaving his elders in private.
Julian Christopher held out a glass for the woman who had almost but not quite been his mistress a dozen years ago during his last stint in Malta. He had commanded a cruiser squadron in those days. The German Wars seemed over, and the Cold War was a long way away on sunny Malta and he had reverted to type, carefree and womanising. And Margo had – after keeping him on tenterhooks for several weeks - comprehensively rejected him. At the time it had come as a rude shock, a sign that the years were catching up with him. However, he soon got over his rejection, moved on from one cold-hearted affair to the next until his wife had died. Peter had never forgiven him for not being there when she died; for not having been there for her at all in fact, during her final illness. Atonement was an odd thing, he reflected.
“Peter’s ship will be anchoring in Sliema Creek sometime tomorrow afternoon,” he announced, raising his glass. “HMS Talavera distinguished herself again the other day. Her commanding officer was incapacitated by a direct hit and Peter took command of Talavera’s squadron.” Julian Christopher was on the verge of exploding with paternal and professional pride. “When HMS Puma was damaged by two direct hits which left her dead in the water,” he went on, “it seems that Peter conned Talavera into shoaling waters between Puma and the guns on land so that a tow line could be passed onboard!”
Margo tried not to think of the horrible conversation she had had with Marija earlier that evening.
“A chip off the old block, Julian!”
“I’ll say!”
“Will you toast the officers and men of Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera with me,” the man chuckled.
“Yes, of course I will.”
“Talavera!” They both drank deep; and stood looking at each other.
Presently, Margo looked into her glass.
“This is the real thing!”
“A present from an admirer in England.”
Margo’s eyes narrowed. He had not said it triumphantly, but fondly and with a self-deprecation that would have been alien to his character in those long ago days when he was attempting to seduce her.
“My lips are sealed,” the man confessed wryly.
“It must be serious then?”
“Oh, yes.” He waved to the chairs in front of his desk. They sat down, each stiffly and suddenly worn by the exertions of another very long day. “I was slated for retirement last autumn,” Julian Christopher guffawed.
Margo waited for him to get around to the real – or perhaps, in the circumstances the other reason - he had asked her to join him at such short notice.
“This is a hateful business with Marija’s brother,” he said presently, soberly sipping his whiskey.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“How is Marija?”
“She thinks this thing has ruined her life but because she is the person she is,” Margo shook her head, “bless her, she has resigned herself to it.”
“Oh, god,” the man groaned. “What does that mean? Is she off to a nunnery or something?”
“Her brother has disgraced his family and in this part of the World that really matters, Julian!”
“Sorry, I didn’t put that very well. I understand that she must be upset about what happened to Lieutenant Siddall, of course.”
“Aren’t you?”
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations pursed his lips.
“Yes. But I can’t allow things like this to become personal, Margo.”
“Why not?”
“According to the people we have in custody, Samuel Calleja’s workshop was booby-trapped to destroy the evidence of what had been going on in it and to kill the first person who came looking for him. Standard operating procedure, apparently. It now seems likely that he remained on board HMS Torquay when she was refloated so that he could personally set off two demolition charges positioned in the engine room bilges adjacent to the ship’s keel. Think about what manner of man can do a thing like that! Think about it, Margo! Is it any wonder his own family, his own wife, for goodness sake, didn’t understand that they were living hand in glove with a monster?”
“Marija blames herself.”
“The man’s wife didn’t know he was making bombs and storing stolen demolition charges in that bloody workshop,” the man grunted.
“Demolition charges?”
“The Naval Clearance team who have been examining the site of the explosion and searching every address or shed or hole in the ground that these people,” he clearly did not include these people as fellow members of the human race, “have lived at, worked in or hidden in, think that the detonation of at least two connected five pound charges was involved at Kalkara. Other charges were daisy-chained to the booby trap but failed to go off. Half the neighbourhood would have gone up in smoke if all the explosives in that hut had gone off!”
“Madness,” Margo breathed angrily, finishing her whiskey. Marija had given her a more or less verbatim account of her meeting with the man and the woman who had visited Rosa in hospital at Bighi. “The Russian and his,” she paused, not knowing how to describe the blond woman Marija had spoken of, “partner? They talked to Marija about something called Krasnaya Zarya?”
The Fighting Admiral bared his teeth in a predatory smile.
“Mr Rykov and Miss Pullman both work for me,” he confirmed. “The World is in more of a mess than we thought it was. If that’s possible? We destroyed one enemy,” he went on brusquely, “in the October War and spawned something that might, in the long term, be even more dangerous. At least we could talk to the Soviets. I don’t think it is even worth trying to talk to Red Dawn.”
Chapter 22
Wednesday 29th January 1964
United States House of Representatives, City Hall, Philadelphia
Lyndon Baines Johnson no calmer now than he had been nine hours ago. In some ways he was actually angrier now than he had been when he had seen the numbers the tellers had handed him late last night.
A few minutes before midnight the previous evening, the second full day that the House of Representatives had sat since the Battle of Washington, both Houses of Congress had narrowly voted to suspend the ‘Emergency War Mobilization Authority’ issued by the President on the 2nd January, instructing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reactivate reserves, commission ships and order Air Force units to forward bases.
The ‘Authority’ had green-lighted the orderly restoration, over the course of the next twelve to eighteen months of the military striking power of the armed forces to its pre-peace dividend cuts status; giving immediate priority to the mobilization of units which could be made ready for foreign deployment within ninety to one hundred-and-eighty days.
The much depleted House – eleven Congressmen and six Senators had been killed in Washington, a score hospitalised and several were absent in protest because they objected to the reconstitution of ‘the House’ in Philadelphia – had stabbed the Administration in the back.
The President was on his way back to Philadelphia.
General Curtis LeMay, the rambunctious Chairman of the Jo
int Chiefs of Staff was on his way back to Philadelphia.
The problem was that every drifter and grafter in the North-East was also on his or her way to Philadelphia to share in the Government largesse which was steadily, surely coming to dominate every aspect of life in the city. It was one thing for the President to signal the end of pork-barrel politics nationally; another entirely to lay so much as a finger on the rights and prerogatives of the good men and true who populated the House of Representatives.
The Vice-President of the United States of America waved down his visitors, he did not have the time for the normal civilities.
“Are you guys out of your tiny fucking minds?” He demanded of the assembled Majority and Minority leaders and their deputies of the Democratic and the Republican Parties of both the Senate and the Congress.
“Mister Vice-President,” the Democrat Majority leader of Congress began. He did not get another chance to speak for some minutes.
“Who the fuck do you think saved your miserable fucking arses last month?” Lyndon Baines Johnson roared. The tall Texan’s anger was in no way theatrical; his rage was white hot and if he had had a gun he would have shot somebody by now. He had expected belly-aching, he had expected to have to buy off some of the harder cases particularly in the Senate; what he had not expected was a gutless restatement of old vested interests as if the Battle of Washington had never happened. “Haven’t you arseholes listened to a single fucking word the President and me have been saying to you since the fucking war?”
No, they had not.
“Jesus Christ!” The Vice-President fumed, towering over the old has-beens and party place men who passed – in these sad times - for the political leadership of the two once great pillars upon which American democracy ought still to be able to rely. “Less than two months ago parts of our military, aided and abetted by people in practically every goddam organ of Government were plotting to get us into a war with the British. Six weeks ago there was a full scale insurrection, a coup d’état in Washington DC! Now you guys are fucking around like turkeys the week before Thanksgiving!”
At midnight tonight all work reactivating and restoring the United States of America’s military might to its pre-October 1962 condition and status was illegal. The Navy Yards across the Delaware in Camden, New Jersey were already shutting down; funding was frozen, everything was being infected by a new and deadly paralysis. Even if the madness could be undone nobody would trust the Administration again until only God alone knew how much scarce treasure had been wasted.
The Vice-President had no illusions about the honour or the motivations of the men before in him the grand, wood-panelled reception room on the first floor of City Hall. Sometimes he thought the House of Representatives was populated entirely with lawyers and small-time mobsters. Yes, there were some notable figures in both Houses but they were a minority and they did not invariably rise to the top, often they were held down and ignored by the plethora of resentful ‘little men’ around them. As he glared at the angry, flushed faces of the ‘legislators and lawmakers’ in the room he felt unmitigated contempt. Southern Democrats and Northern Republican money-lenders; bleeding heart East Coast liberals and West Coast attorneys, Mid-West isolationists and Deep South good old boys! All it wanted was for Wyatt Earp and Sitting Bull to chase each other around a fucking Wild West Circus and the whole charade of the American dream would be manifested in glorious Technicolor!
“This country is under attack,” Lyndon Baines Johnson growled. “But nothing, I repeat nothing, so endangers the American way of life and the freedoms we all cherish so dearly as the wilful neglect of its duty by the alleged the representatives of the People!”
He had briefed this same caucus of ‘leaders’ at regular intervals in the last three weeks. He had taken the risk of passing on confidential information supplied by the British, and his trust had been repeatedly betrayed; he had read about it the next morning in the Philadelphia Herald, listened to his words playing back over public radio and on fucking Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC a day later. And now the bastards had deflated the expanding bubble of the re-mobilization of the American military so effectively that even if they revoked last night’s vote in the next few hours – which they weren’t going to do because it was beneath their fucking dignity regardless of the consequences for the nation – it would take several weeks, perhaps a month to put everything back on track. Probably, it would take a lot longer. And every one of the bastards knew it!
It seemed that the leadership in both Houses had, with hitherto undemonstrated calculated mendacity, united around a consensus that until such time as the Warren Commission’s first formal evidence session was scheduled – ideally the date would be carved into the living rock – that the Administration’s ‘war plans’ should be subjected to ‘extraordinary scrutiny’. There was also the small unresolved matter of the loss of the USS Scorpion, which nine out of ten Americans still erroneously believed was the result of a sneak attack by the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought. The Senate had moved a motion demanding a Joint Committee of Investigation into the sinking of the USS Scorpion’ at which it intended to subpoena the British Ambassador and the commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought to testify ‘under oath’. Small considerations such as the sanctity of diplomatic immunity, and the fact that there was no law in the land under which a serving officer of an allied power could be obliged to swear any kind of oath before a Congressional Committee were judged by the ‘leaders of the House’ to be ephemeral, piffling details to be addressed at another time.
The Warren Commission into the Causes and Consequences of the Cuban Missiles War had been the Administration’s great initiative to set the record straight. The Battle of Washington had delayed its planned public set piece inauguration but preparatory work was well in hand. A secretariat had been recruited and Chief Justice Earl Warren, its universally respected Chairman, had already discussed with Administration members, and several of the men present that morning in City Hall, exactly how he planned to conduct his work.
The Vice-President had allowed himself to be gulled into a false sense of security on the ‘Warren Commission Front’; right up until the moment the ‘leaders of the House’ had stabbed him in the back.
Et tu Brute?
Until last night he had regarded several of the men in the room as personal and political friends. Up until last night he had been unwilling to fully sign up to the President’s plan to appeal over the heads of Congress directly to the American people even though his – and to a lesser extent, Bobby Kennedy’s separate tour of the Deep South – seemed to be playing much better with the man in the street than he had hoped it would in his wildest, most outrageously optimistic dreams. The pictures of the two Kennedy brothers praying with the Reverend Martin Luther King at that church – what was it called? The Ebenezer something or other, in Atlanta and afterwards leading that march – in which they had said there had been over a million people must have been like Sherman’s march to the sea all over again to the Southern Democrats in Congress. The little prick who had shot at the President in Dallas had done the Administration another huge favour, sparking a wave of spontaneous outrage that further swelled Jack Kennedy’s poll ratings. God in heaven, JFK was like some resurrected Pied Piper! When he had breezed into the intact southern suburbs of Chicago the networks had covered the visit as if he was the prodigal returning. If only he had got out and about on the stomp in the months after the October War; things might have been so different.
However, Lyndon Baines Johnson had not got where he had got by crying over spilt milk. They were where they were. There was no Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was for kids. Treating the ‘leaders of the House’ with respectful kid gloves had been a bad miscalculation. He should not have listened to the President; he should have done this thing his own way.
“Later today I have schedules meetings with Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, and with the Director of the Cent
ral Intelligence Agency, John McCone. Those gentlemen have made me aware that the judgement of several of the ‘representatives’ who voted in last night’s ‘debate’ may have been clouded by personal pecuniary considerations and been unduly influenced by, well, let’s just say, the company that some of them have been keeping in recent times. Without wishing to pre-determine the outcome of those meetings, once I have seen Director Hoover’s, and Director McCone’s evidence, it is likely I will have to decided whether or not to pass that evidence to prosecutors, or to other interested parties. Director Hoover has been accumulating evidence for some considerable time about corruption in the body politic. Until this time I was able to persuade the President that allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation a free hand in investigating fraud, insider trading, false accounting and the granting and accepting of inappropriate political favours by member of the House, would not assist in the Administration’s wider desire for stable government. Likewise, Direct McCone of the Central Intelligence Agency regards, particularly the most recent cases, where sensitive and confidential information about the defence status of both the United States and its ally, the United Kingdom, has found its way into the hands of unauthorised persons in the media within hours of its disclosure to Members of the House, constitutes not a breach of privilege, but repeated acts of treachery. When I next speak to the President I will advise him in the strongest possible terms, that,” he paused, wanting to grind his teeth with exasperation, “notwithstanding my previous objections, it is in the national interest that Directors Hoover and McCone, and the other relevant authorities, fully investigate and prosecute to the last full measure of the law, without fear or favour, each and every malefactor.”
The room exploded with protestations of innocence.
The sad thing was that the protestations were completely genuine in the minds of many of the loudest and most outraged ‘protestors’ because these men had been corrupt for so long, that they honestly believed the backhanders, favours and ‘considerations’ they received were legitimate elements of their monthly pay cheques. They took it for granted that their children would be awarded bursaries to the best schools and colleges, that they would have the choice of lucrative legal partnerships and boardroom sinecures, that they would collect honorific titles that enabled them to call themselves ‘Doctor’ of ‘Professor’ or ‘Judge’ or ‘Colonel’ when it suited them, that newspapermen would allow them their illicit extra-marital romantic peccadilloes and unsavoury friendships because that was what business as usual on Capitol Hill was all about.