by James Philip
“I don’t understand, Margo?”
“Whatever you do don’t wait for Marija to come to you, Peter.”
A few minutes later the acting commanding officer of HMS Talavera escorted his guest to the gangway and sent her ashore in the destroyer’s whaler. He stood watching the small boat glide across the hundred yard gap to the ferry quay. His thoughts were tangled and troubled and he was sick at heart. The World had betrayed him and for the moment he was at a loss to know what to do about it.
Unseen on the waterfront Marija stood anonymously in the crowds milling around the ferry bus stops. She saw the tall naval officer shaking Margo’s hand, the side party coming to attention as her friend departed the ship. It almost broke her heart seeing Peter Christopher from afar as he stared after the boat taking Margo to the shore. The lies in the Times of Malta were worse than the truth; at least in the truth there were answers. In those lies there was only despair. If the British had tricked the paper in lying about Samuel’s crimes, what else had they lied about? What had really happened to the terrorists?
She was torn.
She could hardly look at the long deadly, scarred outline of the destroyer moored in the middle of the Creek without flushing with pride. Her Peter commanded that ship. Her Peter was a hero. Except he was not her Peter. If he ever had been he was not now. All her hopes were in ashes.
Hot wet tears ran down her face as she drew her shawl over her hair and turned her back on the destroyer anchored in Sliema Creek, and the man whom she had never met but had loved for as long as she could remember.
Chapter 32
Saturday 1st February 1964
RAF Luqa, Malta
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations and his deputy, Air Vice-Marshall Daniel French waited for the two VIPs to disembark from the RAF Comet 4, and stepped forward to greet the visitors.
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, exchanged salutes and crisp handshakes before turning to the hangdog-faced man in a baggy suit.
“May I introduce you to the Secretary of State for Defence, Mr William Whitelaw, MP.”
“Delighted to finally make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” the politician smiled, speaking in a slowly lugubrious voice that broadcast quiet confidence.
The quartet walked towards the slab-sided control room where cars awaited to carry them to Mdina.
“The Prime Minister most particularly asked to be remembered to you, Sir Julian,” William Whitelaw declared. “She’s dreadfully keen that everybody knows that blighter in Cheltenham Town Hall missed her from point blank range even though she never moved a muscle throughout the whole episode!”
When Julian Christopher had first heard of the assassination attempt he had almost burst a blood vessel. His high anxiety had not materially decreased in the following twenty-four hours. It was only now that his normal equilibrium was partially restored. He was relieved when the First Sea Lord suggested the Defence Secretary and Daniel French take the first car. He dropped beside his old friend in the back seat of the second vehicle.
“How are you, old man?” He inquired solicitously.
“Not so bad, David.” Julian Christopher could not stop himself following up with: “How is Margaret?”
This provoked a rueful chuckle.
“The man was fourteen feet away from her and he fired five rounds from a Webley Mark IV revolver,” the First Sea Lord explained, “and completely missed her. Mr Powell, the fellow who has been giving her so much stick back home attempted to place himself between the assassin and his bête noire. One round nicked that gentleman’s right hip. Otherwise, nobody was inconvenienced. It transpired that the assassin was a fellow with a long history of mental disturbance, somewhat exacerbated by the loss of his entire family in the recent war.”
“How the blazes did the blasted man get into the hall with a loaded gun?”
“The AWP are looking into that.”
“The what?”
“The Angry Widow’s Praetorians, that’s what some of the Commandos in her protection detail call themselves.”
Julian Christopher laughed, the tension drained away.
“Dreadnought is still in contact with the Admiral Kutuzov,” he reported to the professional head of the Royal Navy. “Well, she was the last time she reported in about two hours ago. The Kutuzov is in company with two Turkish destroyers; a couple of old M class ships we transferred to them in the late fifties. At Cyprus, the Blake and her escorts may be ready to depart Limassol as early as this evening but Operation Reclaim is on hold, at least until we establish a better picture of the tactical situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, or until all the supporting forces are in position.”
Sir David Luce ruminated.
“Do you think the Admiral Kutuzov is likely to move into a blocking position south of Crete, Julian?”
“I’ve got no idea,” his friend confessed. “There are obviously several other potentially hostile major surface units operating, or perhaps simply exercising in the Southern Aegean. For all we know it may be just one of several task forces patrolling the approaches to south-western Turkey.”
“Dreadnought running into the Admiral Kutuzov and the Yavuz trading practice broadsides was quite a stroke of luck. I’m not sure I’d have liked being in the Kutuzov’s place, trusting to fifty year old German optics for my salvation.”
Both men had been brought up in a big gun navy in which gunnery exercises involving shooting at another ship with a deliberate range or bearing error built into all the firing solutions, was routine. Among other things it demanded a very steady nerve. Inadvertently feeding the correct information into the gun control table – a complicated room-sized mechanical computer on a big ship – could result in disaster.
“Good lord, no! Still, it takes one back a bit, what!”
“Not all the reports of the Lampedusa action have come across my desk back home,” the First Sea Lord went on, “but your boy is evidently a chip off the old block, Julian. Taking command of the flotilla and going inshore like that to rescue the Puma! Finest traditions of the service and all that!”
In the Citadel of Mdina the two admirals, the airman and the politician went up to the old Officers’ Mess terrace on the south-eastern ramparts.
“Quite a view,” William Whitelaw exclaimed. “You can see half the island from here!”
“From the northern walls you can see the rest of the island, sir,” Air Vice-Marshall Daniel French explained. “In the olden days this place was the great bastion of Malta. Lookouts could see pirates and invaders coming from miles away. The locals would rush inside the fortress and wait until it was safe to go back outside again.”
“There’s a similar citadel on Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese Archipelago,” Julian Christopher remarked. “At Victoria.”
Supervised by the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, stewards served tea and biscuits as the senior officers made small talk with their political master. Then it was down to business, big maps of the Eastern Mediterranean were unrolled across the tables and the briefing commenced.
“Can you talk about the air situation first please, Dan,” Julian Christopher asked. He and his deputy met once or twice a week, otherwise their duties kept them apart. It had been Air-Vice Marshal Daniel French’s Hawker Hunter interceptors which had shot down the four 100th Bomb Group B-52s on that awful Friday in December before they had succeeded in totally wrecking the archipelago’s defences. The two men had got on well from the outset, more than that, they actually liked each other. The Royal Air Force had swiftly promoted their man once the C-in-C had unilaterally appointed the airman his deputy on Malta with ‘full powers’ to act in the event of his absence or unavailability. “The First Sea Lord and Mr Whitelaw probably won’t have heard the latest news.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Air Vice-Marshall Dan French grinned. The former Lancaster pilot and the commander of
one of the first V-Bomber squadrons deported himself with a calm, cheerful confidence that imprinted his authority on everybody he met. His wife and daughter had been killed in the October War; his son, a Vulcan bomber pilot, had survived and he had come to terms with his personal grief by throwing himself into his duties on Malta. Notwithstanding that he ran a tight ship and he did not tolerate fools gladly, he was popular and well respected by his men, and had a reputation for going out of his way to get on well with those Maltese citizens with whom he had regular dealings. “The US Air Force isn’t wasting any time extricating itself from Spanish and Italian territory. Three C-130 Hercules transports landed at Ta’Qali shortly before you arrived at Luqa. Another two are expected at Gibraltar around now. The C-130s are chock full of ground crews and all the spares they could cram in and still take off. There will be several more C-130s flights coming down from Aviano tomorrow ahead of the rest of the air group. The fast jet element of the US Air Group is six F-104 Starfighters and eight A-4 Skyhawks. There is also a U-2 based up there and two KC-135 tankers. From tomorrow the C-130s will be shuttling back and forth evacuating the two under strength battalions of Marines who have been defending the base from ‘brigands’ and ‘freeloaders’. If things go according to plan all moveable assets and personnel should have been transferred to Malta within the next seven to nine days. The Spanish situation is murkier. Franco’s people are making waves apparently. It may be that the US Air Force commander on the ground ignores the Spanish and ups and goes with everything that’s airworthy at very short notice. To cover for this eventuality the Prime Minister has made a personal approach to the Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, asking him to re-open his air space to US aircraft.” He looked to the Defence Secretary. “I imagine you know more about the political aspects of this, sir.”
William Whitelaw nodded.
“The Prime Minister has been eager for US-Portuguese relations to be ‘normalised’,” he confided. “Given the exigencies of the current situation this might well happen via the back door, as it were.” He hesitated. “What is the strength of the American air presence in the Iberian Peninsula?”
“In total about thirty serviceable aircraft of all types, sir.”
“Can they all be accommodated at Gibraltar at need?”
“Yes, but RAF Gibraltar is extremely vulnerable to Spanish interdiction, sir.”
“Quite. How would you describe your relations with our American cousins, Air Vice-Marshall?”
“Cordially robust, sir. However, there has been no discussion of command and control issues.”
Julian Christopher launched into a concise summation of the general naval situation.
“HMS Blake is still at Limassol. The transferral of warheads and the tactical uncertainties arising out of the movements of the surface forces Dreadnought has encountered have put Blake’s part in Operation Reclaim on hold. HMS Victorious and her escorts will be in a covering position mid-way between Crete and the North African coast by around dawn tomorrow morning. HMS Dreadnought continues in contact with the former Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov and her two screening destroyers. The Kutuzov group is presently patrolling in an area close to the north-west coast of Crete. My concern is that this ship is approximately a match for HMS Blake in a gunnery duel and at her maximum speed could easily intercept either the Victorious, or the Blake task forces in the open sea. While Dreadnought remains in contact with the Kutuzov we have the whip hand; however, the intelligence picture is dangerously incomplete. We have no idea where the old battlecruiser Yavuz is, or where the other major surface units spotted at Istanbul may have deployed in the last week.”
William Whitelaw stared at the charts on the table. He looked up.
“What action will you take if the Kutuzov attempts to intercept HMS Blake or HMS Victorious, Sir Julian?”
The Fighting Admiral did not hesitate.
“I have ordered Dreadnought to sink her if she approaches within thirty miles of elements of either the Blake’s or the Victorious’s screens. In the event that Dreadnought is out of contact with the Kutuzov at that time or unable to carry out an attack, I have issued similar orders to the Flag Officer, Victorious Battle Group, sir.”
There was really very little to discuss: HMS Victorious was steaming hard to be in position the following morning, the Blake was preparing to leave Limassol for a high speed run to Malta with her cargo of nuclear warheads, and the Dreadnought was stalking a former Soviet cruiser now flying the flag – they assumed – of Krasnaya Zarya.
“Before we left Brize Norton,” Sir David Luce said, speaking for the first time in some minutes, “I spoke to Admiral McDonald, the new US Chief of Naval Operations. He seems a good, solid fellow. Basically, practically all US Navy available major surface units are converging on Gibraltar. Logistically, it is a complete dog’s breakfast; the Americans are having to improvise practically everything. The long and the short of it is that two big carriers, the Enterprise and the Independence will be in theatre sometime in the next twenty days. The Enterprise sooner, it seems. One fly in the ointment is that the Independence has catapult troubles; we’ll have to see what we can do to help her at Gibraltar. If needs must McDonald is prepared to send Enterprise and her ‘goalkeeper’ the Long Beach, the two nuclear-powered ships directly into the Med. He’s also ordered four SSNs already on exercise or patrol in the Atlantic to proceed to a holding position off Lisbon. Unfortunately, these boats are not provisioned for an extended cruise so again, we’ll have to see what we can do about that at Gibraltar. So, it seems the cavalry is on the way. Personally, I hope we don’t need to be rescued, but I rather suspect that whatever is brewing in the Eastern Med things are going to start happening fairly soon.”
The Secretary of State for Defence mulled matters.
“Sir David mentioned to me on the flight here that HMS Hermes may be forced to return to Gibraltar?”
“Machinery troubles, sir,” Julian Christopher bemoaned philosophically. If Hermes could not steam fast enough for long enough to launch and recover fast jets, there was nothing he could do about it. One fought battles with what one had to hand, not with the forces one wished one had. Hermes’s woes had not been entirely unexpected and Rear Admiral Nigel Grenville had already shifted his flag to the Victorious before the operations against Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa. “Hermes will dock at Malta pending a decision as to whether to send her back to Gibraltar. A second carrier would be just the ticket right now but we haven’t got one so that’s that.”
“What of HMS Ocean?”
“She’s in relatively good fettle. Presently, she can only steam at twenty-three knots but that’s not such a huge problem since she’s configured solely as a helicopter carrier.”
“Um. Might it be advisable to indefinitely delay HMS Blake’s departure from Cyprus?”
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations did not read into, or imply any criticism from the Secretary of State for Defence’s question.
“Yes,” he admitted immediately. “It might be. However, given how exposed our garrison on Cyprus has become with the fall of Crete to – if not hostile then possibly inimical – unknown forces and certain other worrying intelligence indications, the weapons store at Akrotiri has become a hostage to fortune. Removing it from the strategic ‘mix’ will greatly clarify the situation in the event of a crisis in that area.”
William Whitelaw straightened and met Julian Christopher’s gaze.
“You mean that we won’t necessarily have to resort to Arc Light, Sir Julian?”
In the months since the October War nobody talked about using nuclear weapons; Arc Light, the name of a pre-war exercise simulating the effects of a limited atomic exchange had become the generic header under which a generation of British senior officers and their political masters now debated the unthinkable.
The hangdog, prematurely jowly face of the forty-five year old Defence Secretary was suddenly stony.
Air Vice-Marshall Dan French flicked a glance at the First Sea Lord, who replied with a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders
“What if Red Dawn possesses viable nuclear weapons?” Julian Christopher responded coolly.
“If they do,” William Whitelaw said resignedly, “I suspect that sooner or later Red Dawn will employ them regardless of what we do.”
Chapter 33
Saturday 1st February 1964
HMS Dreadnought, 7 miles SSW of Elasa Island, Crete
It was a dull, windy day with spits of rain in the air. The water in the three-and-a-half mile channel between the uninhabited, rocky outcrop of the island and the Cretan mainland was choppy, with white-capped waves tripping over each other. The island of Elasa itself was drably faded green and mostly brown, and the sea had turned that particular iron shade of grey that all seasoned mariners knew was a harbinger of stormy weather.
It was over an hour since the Admiral Kutuzov and her two escorting destroyers had changed course to pass through the channel. It was too risky to follow the surface ships into such narrow waters so Dreadnought had broken away to the east and run at high speed to intercept the big cruiser south of Elasa. The Sverdlov class cruiser ought to have been filling the lens of the attack periscope but the channel was empty.
“Down periscope!”
Captain Simon Collingwood cursed silently.
“Come right. Make our course zero-nine-five!”