by James Philip
Simon Collingwood remained in the Wardroom as most of the others departed. Two men attempted to doze in one corner, and another swung himself into the hammock slung between two improvised hooks at the aft end of the compartment. Refugees were accommodated in the cabins of his officers, his people made the best of things. It was amazing how quickly men adjusted to new realities.
He began to work through a sheaf of defects lists, supply requisitions, status reports and personnel files. There were readiness updates, training recommendations, evaluations, medical summaries of the health and remedial treatments administered to the twenty-two refugees. He soon became absorbed in his work, so absorbed that he was unaware of the pair of wide dark eyes staring at him from an inch or so above the edge of the Wardroom table.
He blinked at the child.
“Sorry, sir,” blurted a steward, “I didn’t see the little beggar come in.”
“Leave her be, Adams,” Simon Collingwood half-smiled. Once upon a time he had thought knowing, and remembering, the names of every man aboard would be virtually impossible. Not counting the unwilling civilian dockyard workers who had been compelled to come along for the cruise, Dreadnought’s complement was one hundred and thirteen officers and men, several of whom had joined the boat at Gibraltar. “I very much doubt that she is a Red Dawn assassin.”
“No, sir,” the other man agreed with alacrity.
The girl’s name was Yelda, which Maya had explained meant ‘summer rose’ in her native tongue. The child had inquisitive, tawny eyes and a mop of black, tousled hair.
Simon Collingwood sighed.
There was something badly wrong with a World in which Yelda could find herself orphaned, homeless and a passenger on a nuclear hunter-killer submarine in the middle of a war.
Chapter 56
Friday 7th February 1964
Special Air Mission 26000, Over the Nile Delta
General Curtis LeMay was fit to burst a blood vessel. Well, several actually. All the communications equipment on the Presidential VC-137 – a specially adapted and modified long-range Boeing 707 – was supposed to be ‘hardened’ to survive close proximity to the EMP, the electro-magnetic pulse, emitted by a large nuclear explosion. Like so much of the hugely expensive garbage supplied to the United States Armed Forces to appease and grease the palms of grasping defence contractors and their gutless clients in the House of Representatives, it transpired that seventy-five percent of SAM 26000’s communications suite was junk. Although the aircraft had been thirty miles away from the first airburst, and at least fifty from the second; practically the only systems that had survived were the short-range air-to-air intercom, and the air control circuit to the Egyptian civil and military command centres. He stomped back down the jetliner, his brows knitted and his expression black as night.
“Our best guess is that the first ICBM was meant for Cairo, Mister President,” he growled like a bear with both feet snared in the jaws of the same trap. “It went off several miles approximately south west of the southernmost pyramid,” whose name he had forgotten in the walk back from the cockpit.
“The Pyramid of Menkaure,” an aide murmured helpfully.
“The other strike was in the Ismailia area. The wind is from the west so the fallout from the Cairo strike is going to be a problem. Ismailia?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shrugged. “There’s just desert east of Ismailia.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was the calmest man in the cabin.
“Bill Fulbright ought to be in Israel by now?” He asked rhetorically.
“His flight was scheduled to touch down in Tel Aviv about the time of the second strike, sir,” Curtis LeMay confirmed.
“Who can we talk to at the moment, General?”
“The Egyptians,” the big man grunted unhappily.
“Where the nearest phone?” Jack Kennedy asked, a sardonic half-smile playing on his lips. “I need to call home before this gets out of hand. And I need to do it soon.”
“We need to get out of the combat zone, Mr President,” an aide blurted.
Jack Kennedy and his senior military commander weren’t listening to anybody else in the compartment.
“Alexandria, Mr President. The Brits set up an emergency communications relay station as soon as Nasser opened the port to them.”
“That’s where we go then.”
Curtis LeMay had seen this coming.
“The pilot says that the runway at Alexandria is ‘marginal’ for this aircraft, sir.”
Jack Kennedy frowned and cut to the chase: “I don’t care if we crash so long as we get back in contact with the rest of the World, General!”
Chapter 57
Friday 7th February 1964
HMS Talavera, 47 miles SSW of Malta
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had been watching the USS Enterprise launching and recovering aircraft most of that morning. The day had dawned dull and hazy but as the hours went by the sun had burned off the mist and the wind had veered around from the west to blow fitfully out of the north east. On the open bridge of the destroyer, loping comfortably through the three or four foot high swells at twenty-seven knots it was the sort of day a destroyer man lived for. Slowly circling the big carrier and her consort, the anti-aircraft cruiser USS Long Beach at a range of between two and six miles, the air search radars of the five vessels of the 7th Destroyer Flotilla scanned the surrounding heavens for threats and tracked the Enterprise’s aircraft as they quartered the skies far beyond the visible horizon.
Periodically, Peter Christopher studied the Type 965 repeater screen on the bridge. His eyes were as attuned as those of any man on the ship to the flickering, ever-changing returns detected by the great, revolving double bedstead aerials high above his head. Even several miles away the roar of jet engines boomed across the sea as jets took off and landed on the USS Enterprise. HMS Talavera’s captain still could not get used to how big that ship was; over eighty thousand tons of steel and ultra-modern technology capable of steaming faster than any of the aging Battles and Weapons of her temporary screen. The first of the super carrier’s conventionally powered escorts was due to come on station later that afternoon, two of the very latest Coontz class guided missile destroyers, the USS Farragut (DDG-37) and the USS Mahan (DDG-42), each bristling with guns and rockets and equipped with the latest sensor suites.
How do I get myself invited onboard one of those destroyers?
“Kye, sir,” Petty Officer Jack Griffin said, respectfully pressing a mug of steaming hot chocolate into his captain’s hands. It was a balmy day but with a twenty-seven knot wind coming over the bow and a patchy overcast which often hid the sun it was not warm on the bridge.
“Thanks,” Peter Christopher grinned. The red-bearded petty officer had been an enigma to every captain he had ever served under until David Penberthy - Talavera’s previous commanding officer whom Peter still thought of as ‘the Captain’ - had assigned the ship’s black sheep to the Radar and Electronic Warfare Division. The young technical whizz and the trouble-making senior rating who had a knack for finding himself knocked back a peg every few months, had formed an oddly brotherly relationship in which each man knew intuitively that he could trust and absolutely depend on the other in a crisis.
“Signal from Scorpion!”
Both men turned but something made Peter Christopher glance at the Type 965 repeater before he strained to decipher the rapidly flashing signal lamp on the Leader’s bridge wing.
“What,” he gasped.
He had never seen the screen do that!
“SCATTER! SCATTER!” Jack Griffin yelled, not really believing the signal code he had seen HMS Scorpion flashing.
The bridge intercom buzzed angrily.
“SCATTER!” Called the talker.
Peter Christopher suddenly realised what was happening; and what the impossibly fast, ghostly traces on the Type 965 repeater signified.
“Hard port w
heel. Sound the collision alarm! Maximum revs on both screws!
He waited until the bells started clanging throughout the ship.
“CLEAR THE BRIDGE! EVERYBODY ON DECK GO BELOW! CLEAR THE DECKS!”
The orders were broadcast throughout the ship.
“Come port to course zero-seven-zero!”
The destroyer heeled into a racing turn, her stern sliding imperceptibly to the east as her screws churned and her rudders bit into the cold waters of the wintery Mediterranean.
Peter Christopher was operating on auto pilot.
There was no time for fear; no room for weakness, hesitation or for worrying about things over which he had no control.
He dropped his mug of hot chocolate on the deck and dived for the hatch.
Sliding, skidding, he fell into the crowded enclosed conning bridge moments before the whole world suddenly lit up.
Chapter 58
Friday 7th February 1964
The House of Representatives, City Hall, Philadelphia
The Vice-President of the United States of America took a deep breath and attempted to interrupt the British Prime Minister a second time.
“Madam Prime...”
“Mister Johnson,” Margaret Thatcher retorted before the grim-faced Texan could say another word. “Neither American nor British sovereign territory has actually been hit by a nuclear strike thus far. I will not order a strike by my V-Bombers until or unless the territory of one or both of our countries has been defiled. Nor will I entertain any talk of a ‘retaliatory strike’ until I know against whom, and where, that retaliation should be properly directed.”
“Madam Prime Minister,” Lyndon Baines Johnson drawled, having waited for the Angry Widow to pause to draw breath, as he had known even she would have to at some stage, “preliminary reports indicate that both Cyprus and Malta may have been targeted in this attack. What are those islands if they are not ‘sovereign territory’?”
“That is not the point, Mister Vice-President,” Margaret Thatcher rejoined, like a schoolmistress correcting an inattentive pupil’s blunder. “I am not going to sanction a renewed global nuclear war because somebody, we still don’t know who, appears to have randomly launched what remained of the Soviet strategic missile arsenal at targets in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. There are circumstances under which I will fight a war with nuclear weapons; but there are no circumstances under which I will use the filthy things simply to wreak ‘revenge’.”
“We need to keep all our options open.”
The Vice-President held the telephone handset away from his head as two men in Navy Blue uniforms knocked cursorily at his door and broke into the room.
“The President is alive!”
“Prime Minister. Wait one minute please!”
“The President’s aircraft is down at Alexandria and he’s in contact with the Command Room via the British relay station at Alexandria.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson sighed a shuddering sigh of relief.
“I heard that!” Margaret Thatcher said. “Alexandria?”
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
“You will need to speak to the President, Mr Vice-President,” the woman declared. “He and I also need to speak urgently.”
“We’ll keep this line open, Prime Minister. I’ll be back to you as soon as possible.”
Jack Kennedy sounded like the coolest man on the planet when two minutes later the connection was put through to the Vice-President’s Office.
“What is our status?” The President asked.
“DEFCOM TWO.”
“Very good. Tell me what you know, Lyndon.”
“LeMay’s people at SAC think the guys who launched the strike flew their birds with whatever targeting co-ordinates they had pre-configured around the time of the war fifteen months ago. Either that or they just fed the wrong numbers into their birds. So far we’ve got the two strikes in Egypt, one in the sea thirty miles south of Cyprus, a strike somewhere in northern Italy, another two or three in Yugoslavia,” he hesitated, “and at least two in the sea south west of the Maltese Archipelago...”
Chapter 59
Friday 7th February 1964
Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Mdina, Malta
The air raid sirens were wailing like demented banshees in the near and far distance across the whole Maltese Archipelago; little good would it do if the next strike was half-a-dozen miles closer to land.
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher stood on the ramparts of the old citadel looking north beyond Comino and Gozo. Indistinct in the haze the great nuclear mushroom was beginning to fray around the edges, and drift downwind. The pillar of fire had detonated fifteen miles north of Gozo before the alarm had sounded. The air defence radar net had spotted the second missile, and correctly predicted it would be over fifty miles ‘long’; but been unable to predict landfall – or sea fall – for the third missile. It had briefly been lost in the clutter of electromagnetic disturbance generated by the first strikes. The ‘long’ strike had detonated within the pre-arranged ‘operating area’ where the newly arrived USS Enterprise, USS Long Beach and the 7th Destroyer Squadron was patrolling in anticipation of being joined by the rest of the Enterprise’s Battle Group – designated Task Force Twenty-One - in the coming days.
Peter’s ship was down there somewhere...
The third ICBM, following about a minute behind the first two had come down in the sea between the uninhabited islet of Filfla and the southern coast of the main island. Thus far, the warhead had not detonated. If it had exploded – and had been of a comparable explosive yield as the weapon which had gone off north of Gozo – most of the people on Malta would be dead or dying by now.
That it had not gone off was not luck, good or bad, it was war. War was chaos; chaos was war. At the end of the day there was no rhyme or reason why the one missile that was more or less on target had had a faulty warhead. It did not matter. The only thing that mattered was that the bloody thing had not gone off and Malta had survived.
The Commander-in-Chief of all United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean surveyed the half of the island of Malta that he could see from his vantage point high in the gallery of what had been the RAF Central Officers’ Mess prior to his reactivation of the dusty, forgotten emergency World War II era command centre in its bowels two months ago.
God, had he only been back on Malta two months?
It seemed like a lifetime; a second lifetime in fact.
They had sent him to the Mediterranean to ‘hold the line’ but nobody had known what nightmares lurked just below the horizon. He had arrived in time – literally with minutes to spare – to witness the bombing of his island base by US-supplied Italian fascist A-4 Skyhawks, and by four Strategic Air Command B-52s. Irreplaceable men and ships had been destroyed, over a thousand civilians killed or seriously injured and his ability to fight a modern war hamstrung. The reconstruction of the command and control system the bombers had destroyed was still a work in progress, barely begun; too many good men had been killed and too many purpose-built facilities wiped off the face of the Earth. Everything he had done in the last two months had been damage control, he had known deep down that the emperor had no clothes and that British power in the Mediterranean hung by a thin thread which could be severed at any time. The disasters in the eastern seas around Cyprus had been as inevitable as they had been predictable, but the only alternative would have been to evacuate the island without a fight, and running away would have sent entirely the wrong message to current and future allies in the region and elsewhere in the World. He had factored in casualties, just not the numbers or the mindless, brutal ruthlessness of his enemy. What sane man could make rational plans to combat an enemy whose manner of making war was to fight like medieval berserkers driving women, children and old folk before them as they assaulted one’s lines? How could he hold back madmen who thought nothing of levelling a besieged city with a one megaton air burst, or who empl
oyed nuclear-tipped torpedoes and booby-trapped merchantmen to attack one’s ships?
But he should have anticipated as much.
What had happened in the eastern seas was his fault.
He had never had enough ships, aircraft or infantrymen, or any kind of reliable intelligence framework to underpin a strategy to counter what had actually befallen his over-stretched command. But ever since he had learned of Red Dawn’s existence he had had few illusions. From that moment onwards the game had always been about one thing; holding on long enough for the sleeping might of the American colossus to awaken.
Cyprus was gone.
For nothing it seemed.
The two QRA – Quick Reaction Alert – V-Bombers based at Luqa would be airborne by now. The other three V-Bombers would be scrambling to get off the ground. At least one of the stood down aircraft was always loaded with a nuclear weapon.
Arc Light, the power to reignite Armageddon lay with the Prime Minister. Sometime in the next sixty minutes the thirty-eight year old widowed mother of twins would have to make the most terrible decision of her astonishing life to date.
Julian Christopher heard a sound behind him.
He turned to find a steward waiting patiently.
“Can I get you anything, sir?”
The older man chuckled.
“A large Scotch would hit the spot,” he confessed with a wry guffaw. “There’s a bottle of Royal Lochnagar behind the bar.” A present from Margaret Thatcher, the second bottle she had sent him since he had come to Malta. The steward was a middle-aged man with the leathery hide of one who had been in Malta many years. Everybody other than the C-in-C and the lowly Mess Steward had gone down to the bomb shelters carved out the living rock of the Citadel rock. “Pour yourself a stiff one, too. A man shouldn’t drink alone on a day like this.”