by James Philip
Max Forton sniffed, he would have pawed the deck in vexation but it would not have looked dignified.
“Good thing we didn’t waste our last Mark XX on that silly beggar,” he observed unkindly.
Simon Collingwood returned to his command chair.
He was handed the engineering department’s latest fault list. Dreadnought had been commissioned with such alacrity – some would say recklessness - last spring that there had been no opportunity to rectify the inevitable defects that a completely new design throws up. The boat was suffering the cumulative effects of dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of little patches, adjustments, and botched repairs which really ought to have been addressed by experts in the calm, controlled environment of a dockyard rather than in an ad hoc, needs must way at sea in between and sometimes under combat conditions. The boat was designed to run at twenty-eight knots submerged; she had never managed more than twenty-six knots, at the moment he only dared take her up to twenty-one. It had been impossible to pump out Number Three Torpedo Tube after the battle with the invasion force off Cyprus because the bow door would not shut. Below three hundred feet the boat leaked in the turbine room bilge and aft around the shaft packing. Worse, Dreadnought was getting progressively noisier. Even the air in the boat was getting thicker, the circulation and scrubbing equipment overloaded by the extra people on board and the extended periods running silent with every available piece of kit, including air pumps, turned down low or switched off.
Simon Collingwood passed the clipboard to his Executive Officer.
“Stand down from quiet running routine.
His orders gave him licence to roam the Eastern Mediterranean ‘interdicting enemy communications’ and that was what he intended to do until or unless his ship broke. There was no invasion to block; it had already happened. There was no carrier battle group to defend; it was limping south towards Alexandria while HMS Victorious’s crew fought her fires. Having twenty-two civilian refugees onboard was not ideal but the intelligence they had provided had more than paid for their bed and breakfasts. In the Royal Navy a man made the best of a bad deal. The tradition was the thing; one fought until one – or one’s vessel –could fight no longer and even then giving in was not an option. Defeat was simply one’s cue to think and work a little harder at the serious business of confounding the Queen’s enemies.
“We will run northwards towards Limassol. Assuming we don’t bump into anything on the way we will re-assess the situation when we get there.” Dreadnought had a Mark XX homing torpedo and four heavyweight old-fashioned Mark VIIIs loaded in her five working torpedo tubes. Captain Simon Collingwood had no intention of leaving them unemployed when it was so patently obvious that it was his duty to launch them into the sides of the ships of the abomination of Red Dawn!
“Helm! Make your course zero-nine-five degrees!”
He waited for his orders to be called back in acknowledgement.
“Make revolutions for fifteen knots if you please, Number One!”
Sensing a presence by his shoulder the commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s only surviving combat ready offensive weapon in the Eastern Mediterranean glanced over his shoulder.
Maya Hayek was patiently waiting while he made the necessary arrangements to recommence his marvellous, magical, spaceship like vessel’s private war against the plague of Krasnaya Zarya.
“Your... Cocoa... Capitan...” She murmured shyly, lowering her twinkling eyes in a slightly melodramatic show of redundant humility.
Simon Collingwood almost burst out laughing.
The weariness and the tension of constantly operating on the absolute, ragged edge of one’s capabilities, with one’s nerves stretched very nearly to breaking point for hours on end, suddenly evaporated and he felt for a moment twenty years younger and without a care in the World.
And all because a pretty girl whom he would never have known existed but for the nightmare of this new war had made eyes at him!
It was a funny old World.
Chapter 52
Friday 7th February 1964
Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Mdina, Malta
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher was impressed but not overly surprised by how quickly his former flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, had made his mark in his first sea-going posting. The boy had hardly been gone twenty-four and there were people already baying for his blood!
In the handful of hours the boy had been HMS Talavera’s new Supply Officer before the 7th Destroyer Squadron had sailed to rendezvous with the much depleted USS Enterprise Battle Group, he had succeeded in mortally upsetting the captain of the RFA Resurgent, and two middle-ranking Mediterranean Fleet logistics staffers. The Commander-in-Chief chuckled to himself as he strode up to the ramparts for his early morning coffee. As always he was immaculately presented and his manner was such that a stranger arriving at his Headquarters who had not been reading the newspapers, or listening to the radio – and had been on Mars the last few weeks – would not have guessed that the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was currently overseeing the temporary collapse of British military influence in the region.
It went without saying that he hardly viewed recent events with equanimity; but the end of the World was not yet nigh. Any subsequent inquiry, should he live long enough to suffer its forensic, possibly politically twisted verdict, would concur with his assumption that Cyprus was not a ‘tenable base for operations in the current emergency’. However, his assessment of the viability of a ‘controlled evacuation’ of the old CENTO warhead stockpile and the bulk of the British presence on the island had been self-evidently over-optimistic, flawed.
He had not believed that Red Dawn would be so rash as to use nuclear weapons, selectively or otherwise. Not least because they probably did not have very many fully generated, viable warheads to hand; and their enemies still had huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Soviet systems and designs were known to be more elementary than the majority of those developed by American and British scientists; but first principles remained, when all was said and done, first principles. The business of actually persuading a warhead to detonate was a less than straightforward procedure. Although numerous nuclear arsenals may have survived unscathed all over the Soviet Union; Red Dawn’s problem was that the command and control infrastructure had been comprehensively dismantled, rendering most surviving weapons, to all intents, inert. In the United Kingdom and the United States that crucial command and control infrastructure had been damaged, but otherwise survived. Every single warhead in British or American stockpiles was as useable and therefore as tactically deployable today, as it had been on 27th October 1962. If the trans-Atlantic allies wanted to re-run the October War all they had to do was hit the button. Julian Christopher had made the mistake of taking it for granted that the leadership of Red Dawn would know that.
Julian Christopher regarded his error of judgement in this respect to be, in retrospect, inexcusable. That everybody else had made the same erroneous assumption was no comfort. What had happened in the last few days had been such a catastrophe to British arms in the Eastern Mediterranean as to be on a par with what had happened when Empire’s forces first encountered the Japanese in Malaya in the winter of 1941-42. Two decades ago Imperial strategists had assumed that Singapore was impregnable; a Japanese Army that depended on bicycles for its mobility and was outnumbered two to one by the defenders had captured the most heavily defended bastion of the British Empire in the Far East in a matter of weeks.
For Singapore in 1942 read Malta in 1964.
No battle plan in history had survived first contact with the enemy.
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations liked to think he had recovered from his initial shock with unseemly haste. Plan A was broken so he had gone to Plan B. Since Cyprus could not be evacuated in a ‘managed fashion’ the garrison
would have to hold the island as long as possible and get on with the job of bleeding Red Dawn dry. Losing HMS Blake in such a terrible way and losing so many other ships and most of the fine men on them hurt a lot. However, bad things happened in war; that was why people who had been to war were not usually very keen to fight another one. The bloodier things got the more important it was to accentuate the positive.
HMS Victorious had anchored at Alexandria that morning. Her crew had put out her fires but the ship was half-gutted and listing with four hundred dead and missing. There was no count of her wounded yet; the figure was likely to run to hundreds including many who would surely die of their burns, or would be blinded for life after looking into the heart of the new sun which had briefly burned within a few hundred yards of the carrier’s port side. Even though the nuclear–tipped torpedo, with a warhead in the fifteen to eighteen kiloton range, had detonated beneath the keel of HMS Undine, a Second World War destroyer converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate in the 1950s, the fireball had reached out for the carrier. Its thermal shockwave had scorched her port side and ignited aircraft, fuel and munitions on her crowded flight deck. The over-pressure blast wave had smashed into her steel flanks in the moments before a great wall of water had virtually rolled her over – all thirty thousand tons – onto her beam ends. The great ship would have foundered if she had not, by some outrageous fluke of hydro-dynamics been partially sucked upright again by the huge volume of water hurled several thousand feet in the air by the explosion falling back into the pit in the sea created by the initial explosion. It was a fluke that had saved at least a thousand lives, and for that the Commander-in-Chief was happy to thank God!
The tape recorder was already set up in his office when he marched in and slapped his cap, heavy with fresh gold braid on his blotter. He looked to the hard, scarred man in the brand new, locally tailored suite.
“Well,” he grunted, “I’m here. What was so important it couldn’t wait until I’d finished my breakfast, Colonel Rykov.”
The former KGB man waved for the Signals Corps subaltern who had set up the equipment and doggedly guarded it like his life depended upon it, to leave. The man snapped to attention and saluted the C-in-C.
The door closed with a loud click.
“The man you are about to hear speaking is called Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Admiral Christopher.”
The name was unfamiliar to the Englishman. However, he had known Arkady Pavlovich Rykov long enough to know that, whatever else he was, he was not a man overly moved to waste his superiors’ time. He said nothing, waited to be told the bad news. Given that the man Sir Dick White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, had – for reasons best known to himself because the C-in-C thought he was mad - appointed Head of Station of MI6 in the Central Mediterranean had gone to the trouble of setting up a big, reel to reel, tape recorder in his office at such an ungodly hour of the morning, it was a little after five o’clock, he had every reason to believe that whatever news the defector had brought with him was probably unbelievably bad. In his experience good news in the middle of a losing war never arrived before a man had had a chance to eat a hearty breakfast.
“Yuri Vladimirovich was born in Nagutskaya, near Stavropol in the old Russian Empire in 1914. He was the son of a humble railway official. His father was of Cossack stock, his mother the adopted daughter of a Finnish-born Muscovite watchmaker. He was orphaned by the time he was thirteen but he was a resourceful boy. He worked as a telegraph clerk, and for a while as a deckhand on a Volga steamer. He graduated from the Water Transport Technical College at Rybinsk in 1936.”
Julian Christopher moved behind his desk and sat down. He did not invite his guest to take a chair. Arkady Rykov never accepted a seat in the presence of a superior unless he was ordered, directly and unequivocally, to ‘bloody well sit down!’
“Yuri Vladimirovich became Secretary of the Komsomol, or as you would know it in the West, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League when he was at college in Rybinsk. By 1940 he had risen to be First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol for the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic during which time he participated in partisan guerrilla warfare against the Finns and their German overlords. It was in those days that his ‘potential’ first emerged. He was a prominent man in the Komsomol, but not so prominent as to be ‘purged’. That was a particular talent a man had to have in the Motherland if he was to gain advancement before Nikita Sergeyevich’s regime inherited the abattoir that Iosif Vissarionovich and that animal Lavrentiy Pavlovich left him.”
It was not until the ex-KGB man had so efficiently and expeditiously resolved the problem presented by the surviving members of Samuel Calleja’s original Red Dawn terrorist cell, that Julian Christopher had understood why Dick White had recommended the man to him in such ambivalent terms. But of course, when one learned that the man had, supposedly, been Stalin’s interpreter, Lavrentiy Beria’s assassin, and Nikita Khrushchev’s protégé it went without saying that only a fool would ever be comfortable in his presence.
Julian Christopher had asked Dick White if he trusted Rykov. The Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had hesitated.
‘No. But then it is always a mistake to trust a man,’ he had hesitated again, ‘or a woman who has betrayed his, or her, own people. Arkady Pavlovich is one of those men one must watch at all times.’
The C-in-C had asked the spymaster if Clara Pullman was Rykov’s ‘partner in crime or his jailor’, and the veteran Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had replied: ‘I wouldn’t put it in those terms’.
Exasperated Christopher had demanded: ‘I want to know if somebody is watching the bloody man at all times, Dick!’
‘Yes and no.’
That was the trouble with spymasters; a man could never get a straight answer out of the blighters!
“At the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 Yuri Vladimirovich was Ambassador in Budapest,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov continued. “Afterwards, members of the Politburo joked that Andropov suffered from a ‘Hungarian complex’. And why not? He had witnessed officers of the Államvédelmi Hatóság, the Hungarian secret police being dragged from their offices across the street from the Soviet Embassy, beaten, tortured and lynched from lamp posts by the mob. Until that day I don’t think it had ever occured to Yuri Vladimirovich – or to any of the ’big men’ of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership – that the poletariat that they claimed to speak for could turn on their masters so fast, or with such uncompromising brutality, literally overnight. It was Andropov who persuaded Nikita Segeyevich to crush the Hungarian rising. That was the moment Andropov realised that even the most monolithic single-party state hegemony was vulnerable to the mob. Watching those Hungarian secret policemen swinging from those lamposts in Budapest was probably what convinced Yuri Vladimirovich to throw in his lot with Krasnaya Zarya.”
“And why exactly are you telling about this man, Colonel Rykov?” Julian Christopher asked testily.
The former KGB man viewed the Englishman with dead eyes.
“Because I think that Yuri Vladimirovich is the leader of Red Dawn.”
Chapter 53
Friday 7th February 1964
Cabinet Office Briefing Room, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
The Prime Minister jumped to her feet and fussed around a somewhat embarrassed, horribly uncomfortable Enoch Powell as the tall, gaunt man limped painfully into the room. He settled with stiff formality in the chair Margaret Thatcher insisted on holding for him. It was at once unbecoming and somehow, touching. Whatever his ideological, doctrinally political differences with the blasted woman she kept treating him like an ally! The newcomer acknowledged the other men present in the small former Don’s study off the main stairs.
Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White smiled grimly at the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West. They had not had much to do with each other when they were in MI5 during Hitler’s war, but they had known of each other and had since watched
each other’s careers with interest. Dick White’s counterpart and contemporary MI5, Roger Hollis, had never been flavour of the month in Edward Heath’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, and lately he seemed to have been permanently sidelined shuttling between Belfast, Cheltenham and Langley, Virginia, or completely ignored by the Angry Widow’s entourage. Dick White had forewarned the nation of the menace of Red Dawn; Roger Hollis had allowed that bastard Kim Philby and the other Cambridge traitors to slip through the net before the war and for all they knew, failed to uncover goodness knew how many other bad apples since.
Enoch Powell had pigeon-holed William Whitelaw, the Angry Widow’s man at Defence as a sound, amiable fellow destined for a middle-ranking career in Government. It had taken a nuclear war to advance him into the Cabinet. As for James Callaghan, he viewed him was a big man with a puny intellect barely capable of keeping his own rag tag Party in order! Conversely, Tom Harding-Grayson was a man the Member for Wolverhampton South West might have relished crossing swords with in other circumstances. The man had a mind like a razor’s edge. Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary was another man to be reckoned with. Not such a formidable intellect as his old friend, the Foreign Secretary, but a brilliant, infinitely patient, innovative strategic operator marvellously suited for his present, impossible task.
Enoch Powell eyed the reel-to-reel tape recorder, a grubby, metallic monstrosity balanced on a low table that looked as if it was about to collapse at any moment.
Margaret Thatcher addressed the newcomer.
“The listeners down at GCHQ in Cheltenham picked up this speech, or rather, diatribe, last night and again this morning. The man who is speaking is, or purports to be a spokesman for Krasnaya Zarya. GCHQ prepared a transcript but it occurred to me that as you are an accomplished linguist and a Russian speaker to boot, that it might be advantageous to listen to the recording with, if you are up to it, your translation and commentary. The transcript we have really doesn’t provide many insights, and the finer the nuances of these things can be very hard to encapsulate in black and white, don’t you agree?”