by James Philip
He smoked one, then a second cigarette, watching what was happening on HMS Talavera.
Two tall men, officers, were standing on the stern a little apart from a gang of others, talking, perhaps laughing as they examined the ship’s many jagged wounds.
For the first time he wondered exactly what kind of a man Peter Christopher was; any man who had done what he had done off Lampedusa – assuming the stories were true – was a brave man. Marija had said he was a good man. A brave good man. Now there was a thing!
After an age the whaler which had transported the Commander-in-Chief across the glassy waters of Sliema Creek to welcome home his conquering hero son, filled with bodies and serenely chugged back towards the ferry jetty.
Joe began to work his way along the waterfront to get a better view.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher was his father’s height, possible an inch taller, a perfect, carbon copy of the great man as he must have been in his late twenties.
Joe saw the younger man looking around; knew he was questing for Marija.
He waved but then so was everybody else.
Flash guns popped and dazzled, the Pathe film crew stalked their prey. Big, round metal microphones were pushed into the younger Christopher’s face. He took it in good spirit, smiling a little shyly, self-consciously the way all movie stars wish they could but never, ever quite manage to pull off.
“On behalf of my crew,” he said sheepishly, his father standing back out of the limelight as his son’s voice carried, echoing along the seafront and up the narrow streets of Sliema. “I must thank everybody for such a marvellous welcome. I’m told the crowds on Tigne Point and the ramparts of Valletta were a thing to behold. I missed most of it, I’m afraid. I’ve never been to this part of the World before and I was rather keen not to inadvertently run Talavera aground on her first visit to this lovely island!”
There was laughing, a shuffling clamour for more.
What followed was a quick-fire barrage of shouted questions which the youthful destroyer commander parried with what appeared to be practiced grace but was in fact, simply well-manner charm.
“All I can say is that I’ve been looking forward to visiting Malta for a long time and now that I am finally here, I intend to enjoy every minute of it. Although obviously, not until my ship is patched up and ready to rejoin the fight!”
Chapter 26
Thursday 30th January 1964
HMS Dreadnought, Sea of Crete
In another fifteen minutes Captain Simon Collingwood, the commander of the Royal Navy’s most advanced warship, the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine HMS Dreadnought, would have dived deep and commenced a twenty-four hour high speed run to his new patrol box one hundred and fifty miles south of Crete. Then the sound room had picked up surface contacts coming his way.
For the previous forty-eight hours Dreadnought had slowly cruised off Souda, and Heraklion and back again. The presence of a few small fishing boats had been noted, but the pre-October War ferry traffic, and the criss-crossing of the Southern Aegean by merchantmen of every shape, size and antiquity was a sad memory. The seas north of Crete were eerily quiet and lonely. The waters under the boat’s keel were also astonishingly deep in this part of the Eastern Mediterranean. Here only a few miles off the north-western coast of Crete there was no bottom for nearly two miles down.
The hairs on the nape of Simon Collingwood’s neck had tingled, stood up on end when he had received the orders to proceed to Crete. Crete was one of those places that had a special resonance to Royal Navy men. It was in the waters around Crete in 1941 that the Mediterranean Fleet had fought some of the most gallant actions of the whole Second World War. Tasked to evacuated the defending troops routed by massed German paratrooper drops, cruisers and destroyers weighed down with rescued soldiers had shot themselves dry as they twisted and turned beneath a rain of bombs. When ships ran out of ammunition men had picked up pistols and rifles, anything to fend off the relentless Stukas and Junkers Ju 88 dive bombers. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk, another fifteen warships damaged in rescuing over sixteen thousand of the twenty-two thousand men of the original garrison on Crete. When questioned about the Royal Navy’s appalling losses in the evacuation the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham famously replied: ‘It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It takes three hundred years to build a tradition. The evacuation will continue.’
Right now the hairs on the back of Simon Collingwood’s neck were starting to stand up again.
In the distance the tall superstructure of the approaching cruiser had reminded him of old photographs of the Bismarck’s consort at the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the Prinz Eugen. This was hardly surprising because Soviet naval architects had stolen practically all the best ideas of their German enemies after the Second World War; not to mention one or two of their not so good ideas. Notwithstanding, the fifteen thousand ton Sverdlov class cruiser bearing down on HMS Dreadnought cut a singularly impressive dash. Nearly seven hundred feet long, armed with a dozen six-inch guns in four turrets, with her superstructure bristling with anti-aircraft guns, equipped with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes, and with her vitals protected by up to four inches of armour plate, the cruiser was approaching at thirteen or fourteen knots.
Even at a range of over a mile Simon Collingwood could clearly see the huge flag flying from her tripod main mast abaft her second stack as it streamed out to port on a stiffening southerly wind.
No battle flag he had ever seen flown by a Royal Navy ship, not even by one of the old King George V class leviathans he had served on as a snotty – a midshipman - at the end of Hitler’s war, was half the size of the great rippling blood red standard lashed to the Sverdlov class cruiser’s halyards.
He clicked the button to take photographs.
The mechanism of the camera module built into the periscope mounting whirred and advanced the film. He clicked again, and again.
“Down scope!”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought stood up straight.
“Down planes! Make our depth one-five-zero feet!”
The deck under his feet began to gently cant forward. Soon they would all hear the onrushing cruiser, her screws thrashing at the water, her passing like the distant thunder of a score of express trains in the night.
“She’s a later Sverdlov class ship,” Simon Collingwood announced conversationally. “More radio and radar clutter on her superstructure than I’ve seen before. I couldn’t see any escorts but the sky behind her was very hazy. The haze might have been funnel smoke, but,” he shrugged, grinned at his red-headed, rusty-bearded Executive office, Max Forton. “Nothing would surprise me, frankly!”
There was a brief low mutter of amusement before everybody got on with their jobs.
“Once she’s gone by we’ll come up to periscope depth again and see what’s coming up behind our Sverdlov, Number One.
Waiting until the big cruiser had crossed Dreadnought’s track some five hundred yards astern, Simon Collingwood brought the submarine about and slowly came up to periscope depth, around sixty feet, the depth being measured from the boat’s keel.
“Target One is turning!”
And so she was! For long seconds the big ship presented her elegant port silhouette to the clicking periscope camera.
“There’s a lot of traffic coming down from the north!” Max Forton reported as he watched the tactical plot updating. “At least one heavy! Maybe two!”
“Our Sverdlov has a big pennant number on her side,” Simon Collingwood reported. “One-zero-five!”
There was a short delay while files were hurriedly thumbed.
“That’s makes her the Admiral Kutuzov, sir!”
The next question was what on Earth was she doing this far south?
“What was her home port?”
“Sevastopol.”
Okay, but if one of the Soviet’s big ships was at sea when Sevastopol was blasted off the fac
e of the planet; how many of her brothers and sisters were sent out to sea to keep her company?
A destroyer or a frigate could limp out of harbour within, say, a couple of hours of flashing up a single boiler? But a big ship like that cruiser out there? If she had had her boilers lit, no time at all; but from a cold start? Hours, many hours. There was nothing modern about the machinery of these Stalin-era cruisers. The Soviets had been given a half-built German heavy cruiser as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, later they had captured other German uncompleted or badly bomb damaged hulls and buildings full of blueprints. It was tacitly assumed they had adopted the Germans’ pre-war overly complex and maintenance-intensive machinery layouts, as well as copied numerous other internal features of the Nazis’ Hipper class cruisers. Hence the striking resemblance of the Admiral Kutuzov with twenty year-old images of the Prinz Eugen.
Simon Collingwood watched as, some four thousand yards away, increasingly silhouetted against the setting sun, the handsome cruiser came to a virtual dead stop, with her bow pointed almost due north.
“What’s our range to the nearest land?” He asked.
“Two point two miles, sir.”
The Captain of HMS Dreadnought went on watching.
Nothing happened for about a minute and then, without warning, the cruiser’s side lit up like a long, violently iridescent, blinding firework. It was some moments before he realised the Admiral Kutuzov’s main battery had fired a broadside.
“The cruiser has just loosed off a broadside,” he intoned flatly. “Presumably, at the units coming down from the north.”
The Sverdlov class cruiser fired another broadside; this time the guns spat a little raggedly.
“Second broadside. Under local control this time.”
It was peculiar watching so much sound and fury and hearing nothing.
His hand closed on the camera button as the next broadside erupted from the side of the Admiral Kutuzov.
Moments later the sea between the periscope lens and the cruiser convulsed, huge columns of white water completely obscuring the fifteen thousand ton warship.
The darkness was settling now.
He waited for the cruiser’s next broadside.
A minute ticked by, and another.
Then far astern of the nearly stationary ship a huge tract of sea dissolved into a forest of shell splashes bigger than anything he had ever seen other than in the movies, or a..
“Give me a range and bearing to the nearest northern contact please!”
He was already swinging the periscope around.
“Zero-two-one degrees!”
“Nine thousand years!”
Nothing. At first there was just the seemingly impenetrable grey dusk and the haze making it impossible to distinguish where the sky ended and the ocean began. Simon Collingwood raised the periscope to its maximum extension. Ships carrying out a full bore shoot weren’t worrying about detecting the radar ghost of a raised scope.
He was counting the seconds.
Almost two minutes passed.
He trained the lens down the bearing of the approaching contact.
Cranked up the magnification to maximum; imagining he could make out a low, dirty, smoking hull almost directly bow on to the Dreadnought.
Without warning the whole northern horizon seemed to momentarily flare like a bursting supernova as the fifty-three year old battlecruiser Yavuz – built as the SMS Goeben in 1912 to serve in the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet – unleashed an eight-gun broadside from the eleven inch guns of her main battery.
“Gentlemen,” the Captain of HMS Dreadnought chuckled ruefully, “I think we are witnessing one of the most bizarre gunnery exercises in history. The Kutuzov and a World War One battlecruiser are trading offset broadsides.”
The light was gone.
“Down scope!”
“Make our depth two-zero-zero feet!”
Moving to the plot Simon Collingwood eyed the Cretan coast to the south waiting like a long, impenetrable barrier against which he had no intention of being trapped.
“We’ll work our way around to the east of these fellows up top,” he decided out aloud. “I’ll feel happier when we have a little sea room. I propose to delay our run south until we receive word from Malta. We’ll send off a flash report on the shenanigans topside and see what Fleet HQ wants us to do about it.”
Chapter 27
Thursday 30th January 1964
Cheltenham Town Hall, Gloucestershire, England
“This is a dreadful mistake, Margaret,” Iain Macleod hissed as he caught up with his Prime Minister on the steps to the Town Hall, having had to scurry madly around the car to continue their ‘debate’. Or rather, their politely ‘blazing row’. It was all very well for Airey Neave to assure him, and everybody else who would listen, that ‘the lady had made up her mind’ and that therefore, ‘there was nothing anybody could do about it’ but Airey was not the Chairman of the Party, and in any event the poor man had, in retrospect, been in the Angry Widow’s thrall for many months.
“It is nothing of the sort, Iain,” Margaret Thatcher retorted irritably. “In two or three months time I will be standing at the by-election in this constituency and I have no intention of taking anything for granted.”
“The bloody man wins both ways!” The Minister of Information protested. “By sharing a stage with the bounder you give him credit he doesn’t deserve!”
“I don’t like what he’s been saying around the country any more than you do,” the woman snapped. “But he’s got a perfect right to say what he wants. Just as I have a perfect right of reply!”
The Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland would have argued more but fresh snow had fallen that afternoon and the stone steps were slick with ice. He lost his footing and pitched forward, saving himself only by throwing out his arms.
“Iain! Iain?” Margaret Thatcher demanded plaintively. “Are you all right? Was it your old wound?”
The strong hands of the nearest Royal Marine Commandos of the Prime Minister’s personal bodyguard raised the shaken Minister to his feet and started dusting him down, their eyes searching for danger, other men fingering the trigger guards of their Sten Guns. Many of the Royal Marines had been with Margaret Thatcher in America and throughout her ceaseless perambulations around the country, they had begun to form such an esprit de corps that already comrades and detractors alike had started calling them the ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’. The Prime Minister had been informed that some of the Commandos wore vests beneath their combat fatigues emblazoned with the motto ‘God Bless the Angry Widow!’
It smacked of exactly the cult of personality which so energized her Right Honourable Friend, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West. That, and she strongly suspected, the fact that she was a mere woman.
The Royal Marines unceremoniously carried Iain Macleod inside the lobby of the Town Hall, clearing a path through the throng of aimless sightseers, local dignitaries and assorted anonymous MPs who had decided tonight would be a good time to make a belated appearance in the town which had been the United Kingdom’s seat of government for the last year.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Margaret Thatcher commanded. “She turned to view her Minister of Information. He looked a little bedraggled and he had mud on his hands. She handed him a handkerchief and placed a sisterly hand on his arm. “Are you sure you are all right, Iain?”
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, wiping his hands and trying to shrug some of the creases out of his jacket.
“Perhaps, you should sit down for a little while?”
“I shall be fine in a moment,” the man insisted. “Besides, if you think I’m going to let you go out there and face that, that,” he spluttered with the indignation of a man who feels himself to have been betrayed by an old friend, “that man alone,” he forced out eventually, “you have another thing coming, Margaret. And that’s final!”
Marga
ret Thatcher thought she was going to cry.
But the instant quickly came and went.
She smiled and Iain Norman Macleod, the man who had once been her fiercest critic in the former United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, briefly felt as if all the ills of the World were as nothing.
The youthful Captain in command of the AWP detachment went ahead into the body of the Hall where an audience of well over a thousand souls hung over the first floor balconies and shifted impatiently in the packed seats below the stage. The crowd stilled as the Marines surveyed the ground around them before waving for the Prime Minister to be ushered through the doors at the rear of the chamber.
Most of the audience jumped up and started clapping and cheering but a significant minority stayed seated, their silence like an accusation. A block of about a dozen teenagers dressed in black ostentatiously turned their back on the Prime Minister’s party as it passed. As she and Ian Macleod climbed up the steps onto the stage the cheering reached a spontaneous crescendo and six Commandos moved into position in the narrow gap between the first row of seats and the front of the stage, eyeing the nearest members of the audience with stony stares.
The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West was sitting patiently, emulating a marble statue in one of the two chairs placed on the right hand side of the stage. Next to him, perspiring in the television lights, sat his second, the MP for West Flintshire.
Eton educated fifty-seven year old Evelyn Nigel Chetwode Birch, had emerged from the Second War with an Order of the British Empire – an OBE – and the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He had been elected to Parliament in 1945 despite the Labour landslide, and progressed effortlessly up the greasy pole of political life until, in league with the man sitting beside him on the stage, he had joined Peter Thorneycroft, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer in resigning in protest from Harold MacMillan’s Cabinet in 1958. Before that he had held the posts of Minister of Works, Secretary of State for Air and finally, Economic Secretary to the Treasury but all that had ended once he had fallen out with the Prime Minister and a large part of the Tory Party hierarchy. Like most politicians who feel themselves undervalued and publicly spurned by his leaders, he had scores to settle.