Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  The corpses of the hated Soviet advisers and political officers who had foolishly failed to avail themselves of the opportunity to jump overboard at the beginning of the mutiny; now lay in bloody heaps on the deck or swung lifelessly from nooses strung from the foremast and main mast cross beams and were clearly visible in the crosshairs of HMS Alliance’s attack periscope.

  The commanding officer of the submarine knew the name of his foe because he could clearly read the big D351 pennant number of his quarry painted on the hull beneath her bridge.

  Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington signalled for his second-in-command to come and take a look for himself. Mainly, because he did not actually believe the evidence of his eyes. Or rather, he did not believe what he thought he was seeing, which was even worse.

  Lieutenant Michael Philpott arched an eyebrow conspiratorially – albeit cautiously because his commanding officer had only joined the boat at Gibraltar three weeks ago and although he gave every appearance of being a decent and competent skipper with a dry sense of humour one never took these things for granted – as he crouched to peer through the eyepieces of the barely raised attack periscope.

  HMS Alliance had been submerged eight hours and the atmosphere was already thickening. Not for her crew the five-star luxuries of life on the Navy’s newest and most expensive toy, HMS Dreadnought, or the new Oberon and Porpoise class advanced diesel-electric boats; Alliance was a good old-fashioned boat built just after the German war allegedly incorporating lessons learned in that war. Consequently, life onboard could be and sometimes still was, a dirty, smelly business and most of the men in the control room sported full ‘sets’ – beards of various maturities – and the predominant odour was one of mingled perspiration and lubrication oil.

  The boat had been in transit from Malta to replace HMS Artful in the picket line currently a hundred miles east of the archipelago when it had intercepted the ‘MALTA IS UNDER ATTACK BY SEA AND AIRBORNE FORCES OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION’ alert transmitted in the clear from the Headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet.

  Philpott peered at the destroyer filling the lens of the attack periscope as it periodically bobbed above and below the waves.

  The destroyer was dead in the water less than five hundred yards away.

  The periscope brought the details into sharp near focus.

  The bodies swinging on long ropes from the yardarms.

  The three main battery turrets were trained fore and aft.

  And there were huge white sheets flying from every available halyard...

  HMS Alliance’s twenty-four year old second-in-command stepped away from the periscope.

  “Down scope,” Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington said quietly. He was the old man in every sense in the submarine’s wardroom. At forty-two he had been a reservist for fourteen years by the time of the October War and had only belatedly been called back to the colours last autumn. The last time he had been in these waters it had been as a terrified sub-lieutenant on an old U-class boat – the Unbroken – but at least he had known who was trying to kill him in those days. These days, who knew? Red Dawn? The old Soviet Union? The Turks? The Americans?

  He stepped across to the chart table where a rudimentary plot of what might be happening in the general vicinity – between the Alliance and Malta – and where his recently re-fitted but still old command probably fitted into the big picture. He doubted anybody knew where the Alliance was, or cared. Fleet headquarters in Malta probably had other more pressing things to worry about than the whereabouts of an old Amphion class boat like the Alliance; and in any event nobody in Malta would know that she had had to spend most of the night bobbing around on the surface with her starboard diesel in pieces on the engine room floor. Alliance had been crawling towards the sound of distant explosions when she had run across the Turkish destroyer lying dead in the water streaming – by the look of it - every piece of linen in the Wardroom cupboard.

  Barrington sighed.

  It had been impossible to recharge the boat’s depleted batteries last night. Sometime in the next hour or so he would have had to have surfaced anyway. Notwithstanding, necessity was hardly any kind of virtue in an ocean which had suddenly become horribly dangerous.

  He met the eye of the Engineering Officer, whom he had summoned to the control room ten minutes before.

  “Well, Chief,” he grimaced. “What do you think?”

  The other man shrugged.

  “The port diesel will fire up, sir,” he declared defensively. “After that,” another shrug, “I can’t promise she’ll stay running...”

  The dockyard at Gibraltar had botched the rebuild of the starboard diesel and now it seemed as if they had taken onboard a bad batch of diesel, or one of the bunkers had somehow got contaminated with sea water. It never rained but it poured. A fellow could take it to heart or he could make the best of a bad deal and get on with it!

  Barrington chuckled and shook his head.

  Sometimes that was all you could do!

  Around him the mood lightened.

  “The boat will clear for action, if you please, Number One.”

  HMS Alliance was already braced for battle and within a little over a minute Michael Philpott reported the boat as being “ready for action, sir.”

  “Thank you, Number One.”

  There was time for a last consideration; one more trawl through the evidence at Francis Barrington’s fingertips and the obvious pitfalls of the action he was about to take. It went against the grain to torpedo an enemy who was so completely at one’s mercy but nobody would offer so much as a breath of criticism, let alone censure, if he simply put two Mark VIII heavyweight fish into the side of the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak. However, that would hardly have been in either the best traditions of the Service, or in any way sporting. Moreover, given the number of bodies hanging from the destroyer’s yardarms Francis Barrington thought it was extremely unlikely that the men onboard the Turkish warship would relish falling again into Soviet hands. Which made the idea of surrender if not axiomatic, then at least pragmatic while not ruling out the possibility that the moment Alliance broke surface the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak might still open fire on her with everything she had.

  “Hands to surfacing stations,” he declared. A thing that must be done was best done swiftly.

  He took a final deep breath.

  “Surface! Surface! Surface!”

  Compressed air blasted into the huge saddle ballast tanks.

  Within seconds the one thousand five hundred ton two hundred and eighty feet long diesel-electric submarine broke the oily grey surface of the Mediterranean like a cork. Francis Barrington followed the first two ratings up the ladder to the conning tower. Alliance’s deck-mounted 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon had been removed in 1960, part of a ‘streamlining’ refit designed to improve the boat’s underwater handling characteristics. The boat had had a temporary mount for a deck gun while she was in the Far East, but this had been removed at Devonport long before Barrington had taken command. However, this was of little consequence because Alliance had surfaced only a quarter-of-a-mile off the Turkish destroyer’s port side with her open bow torpedo tube doors pointing directly at her bridge.

  The doors of all six of the Alliance’s 21-inch torpedo tubes were open; and each tube was loaded with a Mark VIII fish. If the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak so much as twitched in a threatening way Francis Barrington planned to blow her out of the water.

  White flags or not!

  A small signal lamp had been dragged up to the top of the conning tower – or as it was called in these modern times, the ‘fin’ – had been heightened and extended during the boat’s last refit. Now it soared over twenty-six feet above the waterline, giving the boat a slightly out of proportion look from some angles and suggesting that the Alliance was actually a very much larger vessel than she seemed at first sight.

  An Aldis lamp was winking urgently from the destroyer’s bridge.

  “S-U-R-R-E-N-D-E-R!
”

  Oh, well. That seems fairly straightforward.

  Hopefully, the destroyer’s captain spoke passable English.

  “Signal ALL CREW TO ASSEMBLE ON DECK!”

  The small lamp clicked and clattered by his side.

  Barrington waited, wondering how he could be so calm. He had spent most of the last fifteen years working as a solicitor’s clerk in a sleepy West Country law firm in Bath; trying very hard to forget the spills and thrills and the unmitigated unpleasantness of those desperate missions out of Malta in 1941 and 1942. Every night in harbour the boats would disembark all but a skeleton crew and submerge in Lazaretto or Sliema Creek. To this day he remained undecided whether skulking in a bomb shelter on Manoel Island or inside the fetid submerged pressure hull of a submarine had been worse; at least when the boat was at sea it would sometimes run on the surface at night and the blowers would keep the stench down.

  “She’s acknowledged, sir!”

  Barrington raised his binoculars to his eyes.

  Men were pouring onto the destroyer’s deck. In fact they were in such a hurry to comply with his order that men were literally falling over each other in the rush.

  Bloody Hell! The former solicitor’s clerk from Bath said to himself. I’ve just captured a destroyer!

  Chapter 15

  19:05 Oxford

  Friday 3rd April 1964

  Balliol College, Oxford

  Roy Jenkins brow was deeply furrowed when he welcomed his visitor and escorted him to his chair. The other man was tall, erect, hurtfully stiff and resembled nothing so much as a shadow of his former self. Yet notwithstanding his physical decline and the terrible scars of the injuries he had suffered on the night of the October War, defiance and battle glinted still in his one good eye.

  “Do you know what is going on in the Mediterranean, Home Secretary?” John Enoch Powell, the fifty-one year old Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West inquired in that instantly recognisable nasal, imperious way that had become his hallmark down the years.

  “No,” the anonymous, bespectacled, balding Home Secretary confessed as he settled in a chair opposite his guest. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary were dealing with whatever was going on in the Mediterranean. His brief was the administration of justice and civil society in the home country and until he was called to Cabinet to be briefed on developments overseas he was getting on with his job. Such were the demands and the prerequisites of and for ongoing good government. He met the piercing one-eyed stare of the man who was probably the fiercest constitutional opponent in Parliament, indeed, in the whole country of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. Today, that did not matter because he had no intention of discussing politics with his Prime Minister’s bête noire. Today he wanted – under ‘Privy Council’ terms of confidentiality – to pick the former Tory minister’s brains. “I need your advice, Mr Powell.”

  The other man’s half-paralysed face twitched with what might have been contempt or surprise; it was impossible to guess which.

  Roy Jenkins, a prominent and rising member of the Labour Party in opposition, had had very little time for Enoch Powell, Conservative Cabinet member and high flier in Tory governments in the 1950s. Powell was also that little bit older than the miner’s son from Wales, and the fact that Jenkins and Ted Heath had been on good terms had made impossible any great meeting of minds in those pre-war years. The Home Secretary had regarded Powell as a remarkable freak of nature, in a former age he would have been recognised for the near genius polymath he was but in the twentieth century, such men were too often mavericks who invariably fell out of favour with their natural friends in politics. And so it had been for Enoch Powell; the advent of Margaret Thatcher had simply accelerated his inevitable divorce from the Conservative Party.

  “It is a rare thing for a member of Mrs Thatcher’s coterie to ask my advice, Mr Jenkins.”

  The Home Secretary smiled sheepishly. Opposite him sat a poet who had studied at A.E. Houseman’s elbow, become a University Don in his mid-twenties, was only one of two men who had enlisted as a private soldier in the British Army at the beginning of World War Two and emerged at the end of it as Brigadier, a man who spoke countless languages, a man who had learned to speak Urdu specifically because he planned to be Viceroy of India one day. In the decade before the October War he had been a junior Housing Minister, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Minister of Health and but for the war he would have stood for the leadership of his Party when Harold MacMillan finally retired to his beloved grouse moors.

  “I am hardly a member of Margaret’s ‘coterie’, Mr Powell.”

  “As you wish. Privy Council terms?”

  Roy Jenkins nodded thoughtfully. Individuals appointed to Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council occupied, by accepting the ‘honour’ of the appointment, a unique and sometimes invidious position within ‘the establishment’ of the British state. At one level the Privy Council was what it had always been throughout history, a body sworn to loyally and faithfully advise the Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. However, to be in a position to wisely advise the Sovereign nominated Privy Councillors needed to be well-briefed about many, if not all the great secrets of the realm. Therefore, on a second level, because of their duty of confidentiality, a small number of Privy Councillors involuntarily became in effect, the guardians of the nation’s conscience.

  Enoch Powell almost smiled.

  It seemed that doors formerly barred and locked shut were to be selectively opened for the UAUK’s most trenchant Parliamentary critic to look within. It would have been funny had not he been a man to whom his word was not just his bond, but life itself. Wild horses would not drag anything he learned in this room from his lips even though they tore his mutilated body to shreds.

  “You were in intelligence during the war?” Roy Jenkins asked. “The forty-five war, I mean?”

  “Yes. Military intelligence. In the United Kingdom, the Middle East and later in India and Burma. The longer the war went on the more unpopular I made myself. In war lazy thinking is especially dangerous because it kills people. Lack of intellectual rigor killed far too many of our people in that war.”

  “I’m sure you are right. Can I ask you what you know of Bletchley Park, a fellow called Turing and another man called Welchman?”

  “Ah,” the MP for Wolverhampton South West sighed because now he understood everything. “I see. You’ve had a run in with those idiots at Cheltenham!”

  “Yes and no,” Roy Jenkins conceded, a little put aback. “It would be more correct to say that several senior members of GCHQ have had a run in with MI5.”

  “Have you talked to Tom Harding-Grayson or Sir Henry Tomlinson about this?”

  “Er, no.” With the apparent crisis in the Mediterranean demanding the Foreign Secretary’s full attention, and presumably, that of Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service too, he had had no opportunity to beard either man’s attention since the GCHQ Security File had crossed his desk that morning.

  “Why haven’t you rung up the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters? I’m sure your Permanent Secretary will have his direct line number, Home Secretary.”

  Roy Jenkins tried hard not to get flustered and lose his temper.

  “Nobody in my private office seems to have the necessary security clearances to look into any aspect of the management and administration of GCHQ,” he explained patiently.

  “Rubbish! You are a bloody Cabinet Minister!”

  “Yes, but...”

  The Home Secretary was grateful for the urgent rapping at his door. His Private Secretary stepped into the room.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you, gentlemen,” he apologised smoothly, because private secretaries to senior government ministers did not as a rule allow themselves to seem overly alarmed. “The Foreign Secretary is coming over...”

  Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson very nearly fell into the room
such was his hurry, brushing past the Home Secretary’s gate keeper as if he was so much Scotch mist. The newcomer blinked at Enoch Powell, who made as if to struggle to his feet to depart.

  “Ah, I see. Sorry if I’ve arrived in the middle of a tete-a-tete, Roy,” he grimaced. Then he turned to the MP for Wolverhampton South West. “Please stay, Mr Powell. Your, er, particular perspective on things may be helpful to us.”

  Without further ceremony he pressed two sheets of Foreign Office notepaper into the Home Secretary’s hands.

  Enoch Powell had re-settled in his chair after the agony of attempting to rise to his feet the moment before.

  “Oddly enough, I was about to advise the Home Secretary to seek your counsel on a matter related to GCHQ and our esteemed Security Service, Sir Thomas,” he observed like a cruelly badly mauled but infuriatingly smug Cheshire cat.

  “Oh, yes,” Roy Jenkins murmured, scanning the documents he had just been given without resuming his seat. Presently, he looked up. “Oh dear,” he concluded. “May I?” He inquired, glancing to Enoch Powell.

  “By all means,” Tom Harding-Grayson said tersely.

  Things could hardly get any worse; there had been some kind of disaster at Malta in the Central Mediterranean, British colonies and dependencies in the South Atlantic, specifically East Falkland and South Georgia had been seized by the Argentine, and now the IRA were planning a new campaign on the mainland of the United Kingdom and the blighters appeared to have acquired the wherewithal to shoot down V-Bombers and jetliners!