by James Philip
Enoch Powell nodded mechanically.
He hated the way the woman got under his skin!
“If I can be of service,” he shrugged. “So be it.”
The tape began to play, the big spools whirring softly.
The voice was beset with static burps and hisses. It was a level, evenly-paced voice delivering a scripted, charmless monologue with a disconnected indifference. It was a voice almost totally without empathy, or humanity. This much every listener could divine without knowing a single word of conversational Russian.
“This man has spent a lot of his life in the Moscow milieu,” Enoch Powell decided. “Perhaps, he came from the Stavropol Region. There’s a trace of something else in there, too. A suggestion of a Karelo-Finnish accent?”
Margaret Thatcher blinked at this.
It was all she could do not to stare at him, in fact.
How could he tell that much from the man’s first three or four sentences?
The terribly scarred, half-blind man who regarded himself as her dedicated bête noire within the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, had immersed himself in his task. He began to translate, his version pointedly more colloquial than the bald transcripts on the laps of the other men in the room.
“For over a year we have been girding our loins for the great patriotic battle to avenge the firestorm inflicted upon us by the sworn enemies of International Socialism. They attacked us when we were in our beds. They murdered our women and our children without mercy. They struck like cowards and now they will pay for their genocide.”
There was no applause, nothing but the voice. A voice that was as remorseless and unforgiving as the mind of the man behind it.
“There can be no peace treaty with the murderers. There will be no peace with the murderers. The Motherland might be in ruins but from its ruins the survivors will have revenge. While the Great Satan America has wiped its bloody hands this last year we have been gathering...”
Enoch Powell scowled momentarily.
“Do we know who this apparatchik is?”
“Andropov,” Tom Harding-Grayson told him. “Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov. He was appointed to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union just before the October War. He was the Soviets’ Ambassador in Budapest in 1956.”
“Oh,” the politician breathed, thinking his thoughts. He carried on translating. “Our purpose is revenge. Our password is revenge. Our creed is revenge. The Americans waged war on our women and children so we shall wage war on their women and children. In Istanbul the forces of the old regime tried to stand before us. We went into battle driving their women, their children, their old and their sick before us into the muzzles of their guns. That will be our way of war. No mercy! Scorched earth!”
Enoch Powell looked around the room.
“This could be one of Stalin’s speeches rehashed?”
“Quite so,” the Foreign Secretary concurred.
“The American puppet regime in the Mediterranean tried to resist us on the island of Cyprus. Our great horde has driven them from their bolt holes into the mountains and forests where they think they are safe. The British have abandoned the people of Cyprus to our justice, our retribution, our vengeance. When we over run the British in their enclaves we will burn their children alive and ravage their women. Those who survive will become our slaves.”
The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West shook his head.
He continued to translate for several minutes and then the low key harangue changed a gear and for the first time Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’s voice shook with something like real emotion.
“The army, the navy and the air force of the New Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has fallen on the uncontaminated lands of the American lackeys in Turkey, Greece and the island of Cyprus. This is but a beginning, a first flexing of the sinews of Krasnaya Zarya. Our Motherland is desolated so we shall seize new lands as yet undefiled by the curse of radioactive death. We shall take such lands as we please and subdue them to our will. To the peoples of Yugoslavia, Italy, and to the peoples of the Middle East I say turn upon your infidel overlords and join our crusade. When Krasnaya Zarya has conquered the Mediterranean Basin we will turn south and devour the canker of the Jewish State forever. Turn upon the British interlopers in your midst now or become our enemies in the coming struggle.”
“Oh, God,” Tom Harding-Grayson groaned. “Now the blighters are trying to whip up a bloody jihad against us!”
“That is hardly likely to happen in the current situation,” Enoch Powell retorted, his ear tuned to the dreary tone of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’s discourse. The man had a text that ought to be burning off the page and electrifying the ether as it was broadcast but mostly, he droned like a sulky schoolboy forced to recite Sophocles. “Notwithstanding that most of the Arab countries of the region will be riddled with stay behind former Soviet apparatchiks, some of whom will no doubt be Red Dawn vipers in the nest.”
He concentrated hard for a moment.
“Too the oppressed people of Malta; I command you to rise up against your Imperialist jailors. Cut their throats while they sleep. Burn them in their houses. Attack them on the streets. Hang the pro-consul Christopher from a lamp post, drag his collaborators out onto the streets and stone them...”
Enoch Powell took a ragged breath.
“I think the man is barking mad,” he remarked dryly.
Chapter 54
Friday 7th February 1964
HMS Talavera, 27 miles SSW of Cape Spartivento, Sardinia
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher rested his elbows on the forward bridge rail and tried to zero-in his binoculars on the approaching American ships. Two days earlier than expected the USS Enterprise and her nuclear-powered consort, the fifteen thousand ton cruiser USS Long Beach were creaming east at twenty-eight knots. Even miles away the great bulk of the Enterprise stood out of the water like a fast moving steel island. The outlines of the approaching carrier and the unique, unmistakable, high, box-like superstructure of the cruiser were like shining beacons of new hope.
“Scorpion is signalling, sir!”
The twenty-seven year old captain of the Battle class destroyer acknowledged this and waited.
“The Squadron will form up in line astern and make revolutions for fifteen knots!”
The five destroyers of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had quartered the rendezvous point at twelve knots for the last five hours, now as dusk hurried towards them from the east the two US Navy superships rushed ever nearer. McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms had been overflying the British destroyers for the last three hours, orbiting, occasionally disappearing to the north or the south. Talavera’s double bedstead Type 965 air search radar had been painting other aircraft, each squawking old-fashioned NATO friendly IFF codes. It was not so much like the cavalry arriving to save the day, as one’s old friends belatedly turning up to help one defend one’s house with a very, very big stick.
HMS Talavera’s position in the welcoming gun line was at its stern, as befitted her commanding officer’s lack of seniority and the ship’s somewhat reduced combat effectiveness. Unlike the other destroyers in the Squadron, Talavera had no meaningful electronic warfare capability, no surface-to-air missiles or anti-submarine mortars.
Once Talavera was cruising four hundred yards astern of the fourth ship in the line, her sister HMS Oudenarde, Peter Christopher ordered the bridge talker to open a channel to the ship-wide public address system.
“This is the Captain,” he announced. Goodness, that still sounds odd! He thought he would get used to it faster; and he had been wrong. He was the commanding officer of one of Her Majesty’s ships and he was engaged to be married! It was too much to take in all at one. “Just to let you all know that the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach are approaching at speed from the west. We will be taking up screening positions shortly after nightfall. That is all.”
> The plan was to escort the two big American ships through the narrows between Sicily and North Africa at high speed during the hours of darkness to place the super-carrier close enough to Malta to – with the aircraft already based on the island – provide an ‘iron umbrella’ over and around the whole archipelago, thus securing it as a base for offensive operations in the east. Every defensive position needed an anchor, and Malta, as it had been in Hitler’s War, was to be that vital hinge upon which all ‘allied’ operations in the Mediterranean would revolve.
South of Malta the 7th Destroyer Squadron and the two American superships would be joined by the Big Cats, the cruisers Lion and Tiger and their escorts, which had been recalled from their abortive mission to strengthen the now decimated Victorious Battle Group. Meanwhile, HMS Hermes would dock at Malta and hopefully, rectify her ongoing boiler and turbine troubles.
The Enterprise and the Long Beach reduced speed to eighteen knots until the five British destroyers had surged into their pre-arranged screening posts; and then the race to Malta re-commenced. The big ship poured on the power and the Weapon and Battle class destroyers struggled to keep up. When HMS Broadsword was unable to sustain thirty knots she was abandoned in the night as the rest hammered into the darkness.
Watching the huge ultra-modern, somewhat terrifyingly American ships in the fading light before the helter-skelter sprint to Malta began in earnest, Peter Christopher’s spirits had risen, as had those of every man who laid eyes on the newcomers.
The USS Enterprise was like a sheer wall of grey steel rising out of the water, with her flight deck crowded with the most advanced and deadly aircraft in the World. Peter reminded himself that he had seen huge fleet carriers before and when all was said and done, impressive as she was, the Enterprise was just a very big aircraft carrier. Enterprise was twice the size of the Ark Royal or the Eagle, the Senior Service’s biggest, forty-thousand ton floating airfields, and nearly three times as big as the Victorious or the Hermes, but basically, she was still just a huge aircraft carrier.
But so huge...
The USS Long Beach was another kind of beast; a futuristic-looking seven hundred feet long ship that might have been built straight off the page of a science fiction magazine. Instead of an old-style superstructure and funnels the nuclear-powered anti-aircraft cruiser had a single raised box bridge and CIC – Combat Information Centre – located a fraction forward of amidships. This over-sized structure looked out of all proportion to the rest of the ship especially when the Long Beach of was bow or stern on to the observer. The ‘box’ towered well over a hundred feet above the waterline. The ship’s armament was every bit as futuristic as her silhouette: she had Talos surface-to-air missiles capable of hitting targets eighty miles away; Terrier missiles for defence out to a range of thirty miles, ASROC, an anti-submarine rocket system to depth charge submerged targets ten thousand yards distant, torpedo launchers, and two five-inch guns in turrets amidships for surface action or shore bombardment as required. Peter Christopher could hardly imagine what wonders a man might find if he was allowed to roam that amazing ship!
The Enterprise and the Long Beach had left their conventionally-powered oil-guzzling escorts in their wake, one to two days behind; and the big ships’ fleet train was strung out all the way across the North Atlantic. Elements of it might be in the central Mediterranean sometime in the next fortnight but nobody was holding their breath. No man on any of the British destroyers charging into the night in company with their newly reconciled, much bigger friends, doubted the leap of faith, or the sincerity of the unambiguous signal that the presence of the Enterprise and the Long Beach, unescorted in dangerous waters sent for the future. The United States of America was back in the fight with her re-discovered allies. Placing the US Navy’s two most modern and potent assets in harm’s way was the sort of demonstration that no words on any treaty in history could possibly have matched.
“There was an inconclusive surface action between the Mediterranean Fleet and most of the Italian Navy around here in November 1940,” Lieutenant Miles Weiss, Talavera’s boyish Executive Officer said to his captain in the darkness of the open flying bridge as the roaring wind of the ship’s passing buffeted them. “The Battle of Cape Spartivento.”
“Oh, really?” The name rang a very distant bell but Peter Christopher had never been a stickler for knowing the particulars of each and every battle the Navy had ever fought.
“It was the last time the Fleet took a backward step in the Med in Hitler’s War. It was escorting the old Ark Royal so that the carrier could fly off aircraft to defend Malta. Our capital ships, the Ramillies and the Renown, if memory serves, weren’t really a match for the Italians. The old Ramillies was too slow and couldn’t keep up with our cruisers, and Renown only got into the fight very briefly so our cruisers ended up trading broadsides with Italian battleships. After about an hour our chaps set off back to Gibraltar and the Italians let us go. Churchill wanted the admiral in charge, Admiral Somerville, I think it was, cashiered but the Navy wouldn’t hear of it. I think you father might have been on one of the cruisers in that fight, I can’t remember which one. Perhaps, I’ll look it up one day.”
Peter Christopher glanced at the radar repeater and looked out into the blackness of the night to where the great bulk of the USS Enterprise lurked in the darkness.
“Funny old thing history,” he chuckled. “Perhaps, this is the moment when we stop taking backward steps in this war?”
Chapter 55
Friday 7th February 1964
HMS Dreadnought, 117 miles WSW of Paphos, Cyprus
Captain Simon Collingwood slapped the message sheet down on the Wardroom table with undisguised disgust. Around him his department heads and senior non-commissioned officers waited for him to speak, every man sensing his weary disenchantment.
Only the Executive Officer was absent, on watch in the control room. He and his captain had already chewed over the contents of the offending sheet of paper that now lay malignantly on the Wardroom table.
Simon Collingwood opened his mouth to speak.
At that precise moment two very young children burst into the compartment, the one evidently chasing the other and both toddlers hugely and loudly enjoying their game. Moments later a flustered, very embarrassed young woman pursued the two innocent miscreants.
Maya Hayek grabbed the slightly larger of the infants, a boy by the scruff of the neck and unceremoniously wrapped him in her arms so he could not flee. This completely spoiled the second child’s fun. The little girl contemplated hiding under the table in the forest of legs. Thinking better of it she meekly surrendered to her adopted mother.
“I... Very sorry... Capitan...” The young woman with the limpid brown eyes stammered, horribly guilty and self-conscious.
To Simon Collingwood’s astonishment the little incident had miraculously detached the black dog mood from his back. He had been livid, disappointed, felt betrayed when he had received Admiral Christopher’s orders. Suddenly, those orders did not seem to defeatist or so ‘stupid’ as he had initially determined. In fact, they seemed entirely rational in the circumstances of the war in the Eastern Mediterranean, the evolving tactical situation elsewhere and the particular conditions now prevailing in his command.
“No damage done, Miss Hayek,” he assured the young woman in what he hoped was his most emolliently paternal tone.
The woman lowered her eyes and fled with the two infants.
The commander of the Royal Navy’s only – and increasingly tired and battered – nuclear-powered submarine tried to remember what he had been about to say.
Oh yes...
“We have been ordered to return to Malta at our best speed,” he declared. “Dreadnought is to avoid renewing contact with the enemy. Several US Navy SSNs are expected to begin operating in the Ionian and Libyan Seas sometime with the next five days and the C-in-C doesn’t want to risk us tangling with each other until such time as robust standard operating procedures ha
ve been established and tested in exercises simulating actual war conditions. The C-in-C is also cognisant of the fact that the boat is badly in need of dockyard time. These considerations allied to aerial reconnaissance indicating that the enemy has no major surface units deployed south of the line Crete-Cyprus provides an opportunity for Dreadnought to dock at Malta and to make good defects. The C-in-C ends his message,” he took a breath, “please extend my personal thanks and congratulations to every member of your excellent crew for the exceptional service you have rendered Queen and country in recent days.”
Simon Collingwood looked up.
“The C-in-C also looks forward to meeting with and shaking the hand of all on board when we get to Malta.”
There were smirks and guffaws around the table.
“I suppose we ought to break out a Jolly Roger for our entrance into the Grand Harbour, sir?” One wag proposed.
“The Executive Officer already has that well in hand!” Simon Collingwood allowed the levity to circulate the cramped compartment for a few seconds. “Right. We’re still a long way from base and the nearest friendly ship is in Alexandria right now. Everybody needs to be on their toes the next few days. There are people out there who would dearly like to do us harm. Keep your wits about you, gentlemen. That will be all.”
The commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought had never cared for overlong, discursive briefings, conferences, meetings of any kind. People confused the word ‘meeting’ with ‘party’ far too often in his book. The one was business, the other pleasure. The two did not mix, especially on a devilishly complicated and vulnerable thing like a nuclear submarine operating in a war zone. Moreover, while off the boat he might consider Max Forton a friend, he was no other man’s friend on his boat. He was the captain, end of story. At any moment he might have to order any or all of the men in the Wardroom to their death. He did not have the luxury of friendship onboard his command and he despised any captain who did not understand this basic tenet of command.