December Ultimatum

by Michael Nicholson

  Hotel and other public swimming pools would be emptied forthwith to discourage mixed bathing. Dolls would be banned from the toyshops—dolls were idolatrous— frozen meat banned from public sale because it was considered unclean. The sale of dog food was banned— dogs were also considered unclean. Television, radio and cinema were henceforth to be forbidden as means of entertainment. In future they would only be used for religious and educational purposes. Purdah was to be reintroduced. No part of a woman’s skin was hereafter to be shown in public. Public flogging, the cutting off of hands, arms and feet and public execution by beheading would continue by order of the magistrates or mullahs.

  And the father of Saudi Arabia, who under the guidance of God and the prophet Mohammed had wielded many desert peoples into one, would be revered anew. King Fahd announced in the final minutes of his press conference that Riyadh airport, where he would land later that day in triumphant return to his beloved country would be renamed after his father, the first desert King. In future it would be called Abdel Aziz bin Abdel Rahman al Saud.

  The President read the tapes as they were brought to his desk. Fahd, he thought, was giving the Saudis their own solemn good news day and they were getting the reforms they deserved. So frozen meat went back to Texas, the dolls to Taiwan and too bad about the dogs. And if a man lusted after a woman in the water, let him take her to his bathroom. The United States had its oil. That’s what mattered.

  Four days in December, ninety-six hours to the brink and back again. But it was quietening down and the President seemed to remember somewhere, someone saying that it is commonly wise in the aftermath and post mortems of global crises for the world to stand back and re-assess itself. Thank God it was still alive to do so.

  He did up his collar button and tightened the light blue silk tie. He pulled on his jacket and smoothed his hair, using his fingernails to comb back the tight grey crinkly curls around his ears. Shadows were spreading across the large room and the bright day’s winter light was slowly turning.

  Over three thousand Atlantic miles away, in the churchyard in the small grey village of Pooley Bridge in the Lake District in northern England, four men stood by an open grave and licked the snow from their lips as they silently mouthed the Lord’s Prayer, staring at the elm coffin in the dark trench. Three of them, strangers to the dead girl, showed only professional remorse. The other, a foreigner, seemed genuinely depressed.

  She had a name but the smallest man there, the vicar, wondered if it really belonged to her and he began to question, as he read the last rites, the professional ethics of burying someone whose given name you doubted. But on reflection he hardly thought it was worth the raising. Whoever was in there, he reasoned, would sooner or later have to own up.

  The vicar wiped snow from his spectacles and a dribble of melted snow quivered on the end of his nose in the breeze. The gravedigger pounded the frozen earth with his shovel so that the others might have something to throw down. The undertaker from Windermere looked at the broken clock on the squat church tower as he always did during funerals here and saw the same hands, green with moss on rust, that had stopped at half-past four during his wife’s burial exactly a generation ago.

  The vicar turned to the stranger, the American, in the sad apologetic way he used at normal burials, forgetting this one had no substance of grief at all. The vicar thought he looked tired and ill and he noticed, as vicars do, that he walked with a limp and kept his gloved left hand to his stomach, as if hand or stomach or both were injured. He noticed too the cuts and bruising over his right cheek.

  ‘Mr Franklin,’ the vicar said, ‘is there anything you’d like to add to my prayers before we cover the coffin?’

  ‘No, sir. No thank you,’ he replied. ‘She knows where she’s going.’

  And with that he turned abruptly and walked away along the crunching footpath, past the black slate tombstones of good Cumbrian people, whose ghosts would forever protest at the new company, on past the crosses and angels and a solitary gilt eagle to the waiting car. The gravedigger pickaxed his way into the frozen mound by the trench, and Franklin heard the first hard clods hit the long elm box as he closed the car door.

  The undertaker drove his black hearse south along Lake Ullswater to his warm friendly funeral parlour in Windermere. Franklin was driven away in the opposite direction towards Penrith and the motorway that would take him south to London and the American Embassy.

  And the vicar, relieved that the sordid business was over, went inside his dank and dark uncomfortable church which smelt of camphor and paraffin to register in his neat copperplate a fit and proper burial: Name: Anna Schneider. Age unknown. Born Bonn. No headstone required.

  Suddenly America rallied. As the Good News Day infected Mr Everyman he was proud of himself. He saw the worst was over. He saw that the pumps would not run dry, that the wheels would not stop turning, the gears stop changing, or the pistons stop firing. The God-given right of American mobility had been restored and he was brave again.

  So perhaps there had been a little panic. Perhaps some people got themselves hysterical, blood had been spilt and some political coats had changed colour, but these things happen.

  America, in its effort to look forward, quickly forgot the past. National Guardsmen stopped riding shotgun on truckers’ cabs, and truckers removed their forty-tonners from blocking the petrol stations, and petrol stations pulled the rolls of barbed wire away from their pumps, and the pumping relay stations from the refineries of the Southern States began pushing oil through the repaired pipelines to their friends in the North and car stickers in Texas no longer demanded that the bastards freeze, and the frozen carcasses from the abattoirs of the Mid-West were packed into the freezer wagons and railed to kitchens in Boston and San Francisco.

  Department stores were suddenly packed as people grabbed Christmas presents they had almost forgotten to buy. Their cars barged around the snow-slide streets of Washington, New York and Philadelphia, and in Los Angeles they stopped altogether in the last-minute rush of Yuletide generosity. There was suddenly so much to be pleased with, so much to be proud of in America, so many heroes to mourn, brave young American boys who had given their lives so that their nation should live on. Who in the USA did not lift their heads higher because of them? Who did not feel the sadness and the pride at the name Okinawa and who in America did not look to the one man who epitomized the spirit of the day, the essence of it all? The man, who by his own personal bravery, determination, constancy and true American grit, had sent the Russians packing! The man they were calling Mr America.

  The President stepped out of the shiny black armour- plated Lincoln to a blaze of colour and a storm of sound. He held his hand in front of his face, momentarily blinded by the television lights, then waved to the crowd. It was as if Mardi Gras, St Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and the Fourth of July had been launched at the same hour together. Brass bands of the Salvation Army and the American Legion were playing separate tunes at a separate beat at both ends of the Cathedral steps so that it all sounded like wildly-syncopated stereo. The clergy of the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul had pulled out a red carpet but as the President stepped on to it, it changed colour with confetti and streamers, rice and ticker-tape. He felt as if he was going to his second wedding then, remembering his wife behind him, turned and smiled the broad, public, unseeing, unblinking smile she knew was only for her.

  Three yards either side of the Pilgrims’ Steps had been roped off and security men, identically dressed in raincoats and brogues with welts the size of snowshoes, lined up either side, cordoning off the crowd that shouted its praise, screamed its adulation, chanted campaign slogans, held up his campaign posters and his portraits. It blew toy trumpets and banged toy drums, sang God Bless America and three-cheered Mr America as it flash-photographed and video-recorded his triumphal climb to the open Cathedral doors and the warm yellow glow inside.

  ‘
He has come to mourn his dead,’ said a daring television reporter to the eye of his camera, ‘in a style that would raise the roof of any campaign convention.’ And people nodded agreement and laughed and were proud to say that Mr America did nothing by halves.

  He reached the top of the Cathedral steps flushed with victory, a Caesar. He shook hands warmly and looked across the many Bishops’ shoulders to the altar and the lines of candles inside, and saw the thousand faces looking over their shoulders from the pews. And the smile left his face. His eyes were suddenly dark and sad, and his head was high and his shoulders stiff and proud, a President saddened and outraged and coming to mourn unnecessary death. Those watching him, those who knew him well, saw at that moment again the proof that there was no one in American politics with such a sense of occasion, no one who could match his sense of drama or his impeccable timing.

  Holding his wife’s hand in a simple touching way that the cameramen could not miss, he walked slowly to his seat in the front row and stood, head bowed in prayer. Security men sat at both sides of and behind him and eleven more were distributed by the altar, discreetly hidden in the flickering candlelight shadows. Two more stood thirty feet up on the ledge below the stained glass windows, behind the heavy embroidered brocade, a radio transmitter- receiver in one hand and a machine-pistol in the other. The Bishop was into his thirteenth minute when an envelope was passed down the seated line of bodyguards, hand to hand, until it reached the President, a blue envelope with the flap stapled down. With his ears on the Bishop, he thumbed open the staple and pulled out a single sheet of blue paper, handwritten by Tom Sorenson.

  Good News Day. Forty-eight votes for, eleven against, with five abstentions including France who have their own deal. The United Nations condemns the Soviets, setting match to the fire, etc., and praises US restraint. We can keep our boys on the ground until UN arrives. Say a fortnight. And we’ve majority Gulf Arab support for UN sea patrol, pushed by Sultan of Oman on pressure from Brits: OPEC is alive. Repeat alive and we did it. Fundamental differences, etc., mutual agreement, guaranteed levels of production and so on. What a day! You’re in the right place to say thank you, Mr President!

  Sorenson.

  Carefully he folded the slip of paper and slid it back into the envelope and pushed it into his inside breast pocket. Then he closed his eyes to shut out the sight and sound of the Bishop’s drone. OPEC alive! Three short telephone calls to three oil capitals, to three attentive Presidents; Caracas in Venezuela, Lagos in Nigeria and Tripoli in Libya. Simple words of warning and they agreed to toe the line. He opened his eyes and the Bishop was beckoning him to come to the brass-eagled pulpit, to the spotlights and the microphones that would amplify his words to the people at the furthest pews and to a thousand million people beyond them, beyond the loudspeakers on the Cathedral steps, beyond the television sets in Washington, beyond the East and West Coast shores and across the oceans to all those who might not understand his English but would not fail to grasp his message. Friends and foes.

  He placed his hands on each end of the lectern that sat astride the brass eagle so that to the television cameras he seemed to be holding its great wide wings in flight. He looked all-powerful and there was silence.

  ‘With your permission I shall not read the Scriptures. I shall instead tell you something of what I believe to be God’s work, these past four December days. This nation was founded by men who carried the Bible, and today with His help, we have survived with that book still in our hands.

  ‘I said to you at the onset of this crisis that it was not our power but our will that was being tested. I asked you whether we Americans, the strongest nation mankind will ever know, had the courage and the will to meet a direct challenge when the chips were down. I asked you whether you were prepared to pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe to assure the success of our liberty. And the officers and men of the USS Okinawa said yes. Those boys have paid the highest price for the defence of the country they loved!

  ‘Now there was a risk we would be branded as aggressors by sending our boys to protect the very means of our survival. But I said then, and I say it again tonight, the true peacekeepers of this world are those who stand up against tyranny and its brutality. We stood up. We continue that way.

  ‘I have just received from our Ambassador at the United Nations news that the World Assembly has tonight accepted by an overwhelming majority our resolution to declare the Persian Gulf an International Zone of Peace. He has agreed we should stay there until a world peacekeeping force can take over. So that’s the message. We’ve won. The world’s on our side. And I declare to you tonight, as God is my witness, that I will not by my timidity be the first President to see this country accept its first defeat in its proud two hundred years’ history. Now is the time to be great, with God’s continued help and guidance. God bless the memory of the Okinawa. God bless America!’

  If men cheered, they did it in front of their own television sets. Only the President’s footsteps broke the silence of the Cathedral. He reached his seat, his wife stood and turned and together they walked down the centre aisle, while the congregation stood up as the choir began ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed.’ The President saw that men and women, young and old, on either side of him were crying and he was pleased.

  The cheers began as he crossed out from the Cathedral into the bright lights and the snow of Washington. Suddenly Hartmann was by his side with the radio mike earpiece and he slipped it in. The Okinawa families were there, lined up at the top of the Pilgrims’ Steps, snow on their heads and shoulders, just as Hartmann had arranged them.

  The President went down the line one by one, shaking his head, holding a hand, pausing for acclaim, giving words of sympathy in exchange, lowering his eyes at others’ grief. And every time, on cue, the right name for the right person, a son’s name for every mother, a husband’s for every wife, a brother’s for every sister. And people watching in the warmth and comfort of their homes, eavesdropping with the television networks, marvelled at the man’s memory and his warmth and understanding.

  There was no going back. Mr America was tonight in the tall cotton and sitting on the bird seat.

  The carol singers lined his steps down towards the waiting Lincoln by the newly-brushed red carpet, and the statue of George Washington.

  ‘God rest you merry, Gentlemen,

  Let nothing you dismay,

  Remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.’

  ‘My name is Mary,’ said the little girl as she gave the President a posy of holly and ivy.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Santa told me,’ said the President, and the cameras found tears in the President’s eyes as he knelt down on one knee and kissed her cheek.

  ‘What will you do if there’s a leak, Mr President?’

  ‘There won’t be, Tom.’

  ‘What if one of the Okinawa survivors suspects? What if things are pieced together?’

  ‘They won’t be. Help yourself to malt. God, but you’ve earned it.’

  ‘But what will you do if—’

  The President filled his cut-glass tumbler, a gift from the merchants of Waterford. ‘Tom, five minutes drive from here is a dead old man in a bath tub of cold water, a man who couldn’t face, the facts and wouldn’t take the blame. But that’s for tomorrow, Tom . . . that’s for tomorrow.’ They drank without a toast, simply lifted their glasses and smiled. And the Christmas tree outside the windows of the Oval Office suddenly lit the snow-covered lawn with its red, white and blue lights.

  About the author

  Michael Nicholson is one of the world’s most travelled and most decorated television foreign correspondents. He has braved 18 war zones over the past 40 years, picking up a host of awards. Michael is a familiar face in Britain’s homes as a former anchor of ITV’s Evening News and a corresp
ondent for long-running current affairs series Tonight.

  He has won numerous British and international awards for his reports – from Biafra, Cyprus and Vietnam – and has twice been named the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year. For his coverage of the Falklands War he was given the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Award by BAFTA. In 1991, Michael was awarded the OBE for his reporting of the Gulf War.

  His books include The Partridge Kite, Red Joker, December Ultimatum, Pilgrims Rest, Across the Limpopo and his memoir A Measure of Danger. His book Natasha’s Story, the gripping account of how he bought an orphan from war-torn Bosnia home to the UK, was made into the Hollywood film Welcome to Sarajevo in 1997.

  PUBLISHING INFORMATION

  PUBLISHED BY APOSTROPHE BOOKS LTD

  www.apostrophebooks.com

  ISBN: 9781910167724

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 1983 BY ROBSON BOOKS LTD.

  Digital edition produced in 2014 by Apostrophe Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Michael Nicholson 1983.

  Michael Nicholson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.