by James Philip
“It is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” Simon Collingwood said, wholly rhetorically. It was a thought he would not have dreamed of voicing to any other man aboard Dreadnought.
“Presumably, one of the reasons the Blake is holed up in Limassol is that her main battery magazines are full of HE and proximity fused ant-aircraft rounds,” Max Forton mused. “Her escorts too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“None of our cruisers could lay a finger on the Yavuz,” Simon Collingwood observed. The old ex-German battlecruiser had eleven-inch thick cemented armour over her vitals, nine-inches protecting her turrets and up to three inches on her decks. Catching himself thinking negatively he instantly recanted. “Still, I’m sure if the old beast turns up the RAF will have her number!”
“You never know, she might sail across our bows sooner or later, sir!”
Late yesterday afternoon the Admiral Kutuzov and her escorting destroyers had rendezvoused with a tanker anchored off the Greek island of Rhodes. There were fires burning on the island, a pall of smoke drifting out to sea. Fire on the land and oil slicks marring the blue Aegean from sunken ships; everywhere that Red Dawn went scorched earth followed. Having topped up their bunkers the Sverdlov class cruiser and her escorts had steamed over Dreadnought, heading south. That was two hours ago.
Max Forton opened his mouth to speak.
The distant explosion had both men on their feet.
By the time the concussion waves of the second and third detonations reached the Dreadnought both men were marching into the control room.
“Contacts along the explosion bearings?” The Executive Officer demanded, studying the tactical plot.
“Negative, sir!”
There was a smaller explosion, and another. Low rumbling outbursts that eddied in the deep water.
“We have the Kutuzov group bearing zero-nine-five degrees. Range five miles. The explosions bear zero-one-five degrees. Range unconfirmed but I’d guess two to three miles, sir!”
Despite the inherent risks there was no substitute for the mark one human eye when it came to unravelling a thorny tactical situation.
“Bring the boat to periscope depth if you please, Number One!
The sporadic detonations continued as the Kutuzov group steadily drew away to the south. Dreadnought’s primary task was gathering intelligence, clinging onto the cruiser was secondary now that ‘Operation Reclaim’, the rather unimaginatively named exercise to empty the nuclear weapons stockpile on Cyprus had been put on hold for forty-eight hours, possibly longer.
Thirty minutes later Simon Collingwood was studying a scene from a bad dream. Over a dozen sailing boats, several small lateen-rigged and three or four larger, two-masted brigs were running west while the Admiral Kutuzov fired speculative long-range salvoes at them from her rear turrets, and one of her escorts, a Krupny class destroyer idled at around three thousand yards sporadically picking off fresh targets. The quality of the gunnery was abysmal but it did not have to be very good to every now and then cause carnage. Smoke rose from two unseen victims as Dreadnought’s periscope cruised very slowly through the flotsam and jetsam of wooden ships blown to pieces with high explosive shells. From what Simon Collingwood could make out the sailing boats were packed with bodies.
There were also a lot of bodies floating in the water.
The periscope camera clicked and whirred.
“Down periscope!”
The control room waited patiently.
“The bastards are using a refugee convoy for target practice. There’s a Krupny class destroyer on the other side of the convoy firing pretty damn near over open sights. She’s holding position letting the wind blow the sailing boats onto her guns.”
It was of course, pure cold-blooded murder.
Although Dreadnought’s rules of engagement gave him unusually broad discretion, they did not give him unfettered licence to risk advertising his presence in daylight by putting a Mark XX twenty-one inch homing torpedo with a one hundred and ninety-six pound warhead, under the keel of the Krupny class destroyer. Simon Collingwood re-considered this. No, he decided, I’d probably put a couple of old-fashioned Mark VIIIs into the bastards. Why waste modern kit on people who behave like eighteenth century pirates?
“We have to assume they don’t know we’re here,” he explained irritably. “Take us down to two-zero-zero feet. Plot a course to put us in front of the Kutuzov group.”
The captain of HMS Dreadnought stalked out of the control room.
Summoning a yeoman he dictated a terse report to be transmitted to Malta.
He checked his deck head chronometer.
Darkness came suddenly at this time of year, in less than an hour’s time.
Coming to a new decision he walked back to the control room.
“Belay my last orders. A change of plan,” he announced. “It will be getting dark up top soon. We’ll loiter at periscope depth westward of the convoy. Whatever’s left of it, that is, until dark and see what our friends on the Krupny do next.”
He hoped the destroyer would rejoin the rest of the Admiral Kutuzov force.
If so he would surface, take on board the first survivors he found. If one could not see with one own eyes what was going on ashore; the next best thing was talking to somebody who had seen and experienced what was going on!
Simon Collingwood went to his command chair to wait.
Waiting was a thing a man got used to in the submarine service; and a wise man used his ‘waiting time’ wisely. From what he had seen of Red Dawn at sea – if Red Dawn in action was what he had actually seen in the last few days because nothing really made much sense in comparison to the World he had lived in before the October War – his putative enemy was profligate, arrogant, and brutal. His briefing notes on the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean spoke in vague terms about pirates, the island of Crete ravished by invaders, people fleeing to British territories in small boats with garbled tales of unspeakable horrors in their homelands. At the heart of the darkness seemed to be a thing called Krasnaya Zarya, but what might seem to be going on and what was really happening might well – in fact they often did – turn out to be completely different things. He had never met a member of the Red Dawn movement, never heard a named individual labelled a member of that organisation, and unless he had seen that giant blood-red flag flying from the mast of the Admiral Kutuzov with his own eyes he would have been none the wiser. His assumption would have been that the cruiser had survived the war and was in the Aegean because frankly, once your home port had been nuked, practically anywhere else was a huge improvement.
If Dreadnought had been at sea during the October War and the United Kingdom had been totally devastated; he would probably have sailed to Canada or the United States, or if they were as devastated as Europe, then South Africa or Australia, anywhere that did not glow in the dark where he and his crew were welcome. Many Soviet citizens, military and civilian, must have had to make decisions like that. Red Dawn might simply be one of many ‘homes’ for people, ships, and families who had literally nowhere else to go. His initial acquaintance with the naval representatives – probably of Krasnaya Zarya - told him that murdering helpless refugees just for the sake of it was probably par for the course. Which was explicable, in a way because that was what monsters did sometimes. However, what was going on with that Krupny class destroyer and the convoy of sailing boats was so inexplicable as to be almost theatrical. If the name of the game was barbaric slaughter then why not just circle the convoy with the whole firepower of the Kutuzov group and get it over and done with fast. Presumably, the big cruiser had somewhere it needed to be, so why drag things out like this and waste so much main battery ammunition on ships that could be sunk by a couple of short close range bursts from a twenty millimetre anti-aircraft cannon?
A nasty, suspicious mind was an invaluable asset for a submarine commander. Without it a man would not have advanced far in the service; and in the way of things it was only the men with the most highly de
veloped nasty suspicious minds that got to the top of the tree. Suddenly, Captain Simon Collingwood’s very nasty, suspicious mind was working overtime.
“Flood down torpedo tubes one, two, three and four if you please, Number One!”
Max Forton acknowledged this and began to issue quietly voiced orders.
Tube One was loaded with a Mark XX homing torpedo, the other three tubes with infinitely more reliable World War II vintage heavyweight Mark VIIIs. Currently, Tubes five and six were empty.
“The boat will come to actions stations!” He added: “Very quietly please!”
Chapter 37
Monday 3rd February 1964
Prime Minister’s Rooms, Government Building, Cheltenham
“Willie! Margaret Thatcher scolded her Secretary of State for Defence. “If I’d had any idea you were laid so low I’d never have allowed you to make your ‘flying visit’ to Malta!”
The man with the hangdog, paternally reassuring looks of a man a decade or more his senior smiled wanly. There was greyness in his face and a bone deep weariness in his limbs that reminded him of the toll illness had taken on him in the last year. Others had greater burdens to bear than he, and the Secretary of Defence was not about to complain about his own minor aches and pains. He had hardly known the Angry Widow before the war and it had not occurred to him that in forming her new Cabinet she would rely so heavily on men friendly with, and held in esteem by her predecessor.
‘I know Ted Heath wanted you in Government as soon as you were recovered, Mr Whitelaw,’ she had assured him in the moments before she had offered him his current portfolio.
‘My closest colleagues and friends tend to call me Willie,’ he had responded and they had gotten on famously ever since. His calmness and grace under pressure was more of a comfort than he realised to a harassed single mother of two who still, occasionally, felt a little out of her depth.
“You were far too busy to absent yourself for the best part of two days,” the man replied emolliently. “Besides, for my sins I was once a soldier and sometimes military men find it easier to be frank with a fellow old soldier.” This said he changed the subject. “I missed President Kennedy’s fireside chat while I was in the air?”
“The President rowed in behind us. He was a real trooper! I listened to the ‘fireside chat’ with Jim Callaghan and Tom Harding-Grayson. They were mightily encouraged and somewhat relieved. Jack Kennedy is having a frightful time convincing Congress to support his line; Lord Franks was astonished he went so far as he did. He’s virtually declared war on his own Party in the House of Representatives. Lord Franks says he won’t carry out his threat to suspend Congress whatever happens but that he probably felt he had to make the threat to convince his enemies that he was in earnest.”
Willie Whitelaw had known, or rather known of, Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador to Philadelphia - for the foreseeable future the de facto post Battle of Washington capital of the United States – for many years and regarded him as the best possible man to be representing the United Kingdom’s interests in America.
It was two o’clock in the morning and the Prime Minister had been working through her official Red Boxes – the constant stream of reports, papers and submissions which flowed through her private office – when the Secretary of Defence had arrived back at Government House. She had smiled, ordered him to sit down while she arranged for tea to be brewed and served. Presently, they sat across a low coffee table, cradling their cups and saucers next to a guttering coal fire.
“The naval situation is potentially very worrying,” Willie Whitelaw explained. “Every available ship is being rushed to the Mediterranean but as you know, some thirty percent of the fleet is still in overseas waters and committed to maintaining our ‘presence’, in Australian, New Zealand, South African, Hong Kong, Singapore and other waters as part of the compact informally agreed with Commonwealth and other countries to facilitate Operation Manna. That part of the active fleet which is now in Home Waters is mostly in very urgent need of refitting or replenishment, and drafts of experienced men have been taken from many of those ships to bring the crews of ships in the Mediterranean up to war strength, or to form new training cadres in the United Kingdom. The case of the Ark Royal illustrates the situation perfectly. The ship and her men are exhausted after a year of continuous operations. The ship needs many months in dock and her men are frankly, somewhat jaded. HMS Eagle, our other large aircraft carrier is just out of dockyard hands, and by transplanting several hundred men from the Ark Royal into her complement and transferring Ark Royal’s somewhat depleted air group, I am informed that she may be fit for limited operations sometime in the next month or so.”
“But the Hermes is available?”
“Another tired ship with a depleted air group. Hermes is currently en route for Malta at her best speed, currently around sixteen knots. In certain sea condition she can fly off fast jets, but without all her machinery working in tip top form she will struggle to safely land any aircraft she launches. That leaves HMS Victorious as our only available fleet carrier in the theatre. And she is still relatively freshly out of dock and is carrying only half her designated air group. These problems are common, to one degree or another, across the whole Mediterranean Fleet, Margaret. The depth of our problem may be best expressed by the fact that Admiral Christopher is hoping to send HMS Sheffield to join the Victorious battle group. One of HMS Sheffield’s three main turrets is wrecked and she cannot steam faster than eighteen knots. He won’t even know if the ship is seaworthy until she runs trials off Malta in the coming days.”
“But that’s...”
“Madness?” Willie Whitelaw suppressed a yawn. “I think not. The First Sea Lord reminded me of something Sir Julian’s Second World War predecessor, Admiral Cunningham said during the Battle of Crete in 1941, something along the lines of while it takes two or three years to build a ship, it takes hundreds of years to build a tradition. I know you speak to Sir Julian every few days and you will believe me when I say that he is in no way downcast. The transfer of American aircraft to Gibraltar and Malta increases ‘Allied’ air power in the theatre and thus far, although Red Dawn – if it is not Red Dawn then it is something equally inimical to our vital strategic interests in the region – obviously has significant naval forces and possibly, armies on land, we have thus far seen little evidence of a modern air striking force. In fact, Red Dawn seems to completely lack an air component. Nevertheless, Operation Reclaim is on hold for forty-eight to seventy-two hours pending developments.”
“Developments? Such as?”
“Other than HMS Dreadnought we have virtually no intelligence gathering capability in the vicinity of Crete or in the Aegean. As for Asia Minor we are blind. The CIA mounted a U-2 mission to overfly Istanbul, the central Aegean and the length of Crete yesterday but photographic analysis had not commenced by the time my flight left Malta. All the US Air Force people who do that sort of work were in transit from Aviano yesterday. RAF Luqa is like an oriental bazaar at the moment. Honestly, Prime Minister, you wouldn’t credit how much equipment our American allies had stashed away at Aviano! Plane after plane is unloading all the time! Our chaps out there feel like comparative paupers!”
There was a quiet knock at the door.
“Come in!” Margaret Thatcher called.
James Callaghan, the Deputy Prime Minister looked like he had just been awakened from a deep sleep. Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson seemed only a little less discommoded.
Chairs were drawn up around the still glowing embers in the hearth, and there was a pause in proceedings while the Prime Minister made sure her new guests had cups of tea.
The Foreign Secretary yawned and rubbed his eyes. His tie was a little askew and his threadbare jacket needed pressing; he had probably come over without disturbing his wife, Lady Patricia.
At the Prime Minister’s prompting Willie Whitelaw briefed the newcomers, adroitly summarising what he had already reported to Margaret Thatcher.
Tom Harding-Grayson frowned wearily.
“If a number of major ex-Soviet surface warships survived the October War then it is likely that a number of ex-Soviet submarines survived also. As we learned to our cost fifteen months ago, some of their submarines carry nuclear-tipped torpedoes, Margaret.”
“Yes,” the Angry Widow acknowledged tersely.
“Sir Julian is not unaware of this possibility,” Willie Whitelaw remarked.
“I spoke to the American Ambassador before I came over,” Tom Harding-Grayson said to the room in general. “Walter Brenckmann says that when the Enterprise battle group arrives off Gibraltar, the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach, the two nuclear-powered ships will proceed directly into the Western Mediterranean and proceed at their best speed to Malta.”
The Defence Secretary coughed.
“Several of the Enterprise’s escorting vessels will need to oil and provision at the Rock before proceeding into the Med,” he explained. “In the event they don’t catch up with her in time Sir Julian plans to send vessels pencilled in to join HMS Hermes’s squadron to meet the Enterprise.”
“When can we expect the Enterprise to reach Gibraltar, Willie?” Jim Callaghan inquired.
“Thursday at the earliest. There’s a huge storm system in the North Atlantic presently. Even pulling out all the stops,” he shrugged, “she probably won’t be in a position to support our forces in the Eastern Mediterranean for a week to ten days.”
The Foreign Secretary shook his head, hoping to clear out some of the cobwebs.