by James Philip
“I still think we gave far too much credence to all that nonsense about a global Red Dawn conspiracy. Damn it, Tom. I don’t doubt Krasnaya Zarya exists and is malignant in every conceivable way towards our cause, but really, what’s the connection between the Falklands, the Battle for Malta, Operation Grantham – which so far as we know is going forward like a well-oiled machine with negligible casualties on our side – and a hotchpotch of unsubstantiated and probably unverifiable reports about a coup in Tehran and alleged troop concentrations in the Caucasus?”
Airey Neave was unusually reflective when he spoke, mildly objecting to his friend’s scepticism. Although he rarely made any play of it he had formed connections with the intelligence services in the latter part of the 1945 war and never really ceased to dip his toe into those murky ‘waters’ in the years since. Having acquired a reputation as being something of a loose cannon within the Party, of being not entirely ‘reliable’ had been an excellent cover for all those confidential contacts he had made over the years and since the October War, shamelessly employed to ward off what evil could be deflected from his protégé, Margaret Thatcher.
Airey Neave could not recollect the exact moment in those dreadful days just after the October War when he had fallen under the Angry Widow’s thrall; but he had never doubted that throwing in his lot with her had been the only thing to do. Having lost his wife in the war there were probably those who imagined there was more to his attachment to Margaret than friendship and political pragmatism. There was nothing of that sort, of course although he had been somewhat knocked back when he realised that his friend was so wrapped up in her ‘fighting admiral’. After she had returned from her brief tryst on Malta the previous month to attend the marriage of the old sea dog’s son and his little Maltese princess; Margaret had been walking on air and his every suspicion had been confirmed. He had been pleased and in an odd way, a little relieved. Every time he looked around the Cabinet table he wondered how many of the apparently tractable, loyal and obedient men surrounding his protégé really believed in her. How many of them would shrink away if the going got too tough? He would die for her; but what of the others? With Julian Christopher at her side Margaret might have been invincible. Now, who knew what the future held or even if the lady still had the heart to carry on?
“I’d like to hear what Tom has to say before I jump to any conclusions, Iain,” indicated the man who had escaped from Colditz over twenty years ago. On this occasion he made no attempt to hide the fact that he was more in tune with the thoughts of the majority of the men around the table than his brilliant, sometimes irascible friend.
“By all means,” Iain Macleod guffawed impatiently. Nobody could tell if his outbursts of pique and sharpness of tongue were on account of the thigh wound – never really healed – he had sustained in France in 1940 or straightforward bad temper. Like many intellectuals he had never troubled to learn the subtle art of treating fools gladly, nor seen the wisdom in avoiding systematically alienating practically every fool he encountered. His friends put this down to the pain from his old war wound and that he was known to suffer from ankylosing spondylitis, a spinal condition which exacerbated his limp and meant he was rarely free of pain. “Like the Prime Minister I think the first thing on the agenda ought to be communicating an ultimatum about resolving the issues with the chain of command...”
“There are no issues with the chain of command,” William Whitelaw, the Secretary of Defence, interjected amiably. “That at least is my American counterpart’s view. The Kennedy Administration has been adamant in its stance that American forces will remain under American command and control. They regard this as an article of faith. We can beat about the bush as long as we want but frankly, we just need to accept it and get on with things. The whole of Philadelphia is up in arms on account of a single piece of malicious disinformation about our alleged attitude to this question. We should simply invite President Kennedy to nominate an American Supreme Commander and get on with the business of fighting the war in the Mediterranean.”
Margaret Thatcher scowled half-heartedly at her Defence Secretary.
Tom Harding-Grayson coughed again.
This time he coughed loudly.
“While I was most interested to hear of Willie’s proposal,” he nodded to William Whitelaw, “to send a squadron of our most modern conventionally powered submarines down to the South Atlantic to persuade the Argentine to mend its ways, I don’t think we ought to allow ourselves to be distracted from the main thing. The Mediterranean.” He let this hang in the air for a few moments. “As in classical times the Mediterranean ties everything else together; the modern World lies to the west and the old to the east. The blocking of the Suez Canal at Ismailia already presents ‘the West’ with insuperable difficulties; everything that comes to us from the near east and Asia Minor must now travel thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope adding six to eight weeks to transit times. Overnight, the nuclear strike on Ismailia in February altered the strategic balance of the region because it made it impossible, for example, for us to speedily reinforce and re-equip our garrisons in Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the event of some unforeseen threat arising in that area...”
“That’s hardly likely, Tom,” James Callaghan observed lugubriously. But he had said it more as a question than an outright objection.
“Ah, now that’s the thing,” Tom Harding-Grayson retorted mildly. “Back in the good old days when I was locked away in a Foreign Office room so far from away from Foreign Secretary that he and I lived and worked in practically separate time zones,” he continued, very much in the manner of an exasperated schoolmaster addressing a bunch of cavorting teenagers in the middle of a lesson, “I was the bane of my then masters not just because I consistently advocated a relationship with the United States based on a rational understanding of our own national interest, but because I also had an irritating habit of positing worse case scenarios,” he sighed, “several of which have now actually come to pass.”
Margaret Thatcher gave her Foreign Secretary a very hard look.
“Yes, well this is hardly the time for reminding Cabinet that you ‘told us so’, Tom!”
The grey dapper, studious looking man seated to her right beyond the Deputy Prime Minister, James Callaghan, took this put down in his stride. He went on as if she had not opened her mouth.
“For the record I posited two relevant scenarios both of which would be disastrous not just to the long-term interests of this country, but to those of the United States also, Prime Minister. One of those scenarios was that of a nuclear war fought without meaningful operational planning and co-ordination between America and ourselves. Such a war happened and was fought in the way that it was fought because the United States looked – as it saw it - to its own national geopolitical strategic interests before those of its European Allies, of which we were only one among many and essentially, in the bigger picture, expendable. For what it is worth faced by an impossible situation in which he probably believed a massive Soviet first strike was imminent, in my opinion President Kennedy responded in the only rational way that he could have responded.”
Nobody said a word.
“That is ancient history,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued, blandly as if he was making polite conversation. “I don’t claim to have predicted every aspect and consequence of the October War. Frankly, I was surprised the British Isles escaped so lightly and that so many of us were left alive to worry about the future. Be that as it may, we are where we are. Presently, it is my second doomsday scenario which is exercising my mind, and I think, ought to be exercising the mind of everybody around this table.”
Margaret Thatcher was viewing her friend with quivering impatience. She and the Foreign Secretary had been together at Balmoral Castle at the time of the attempted assassination of the Queen and her family. They had formed a strong bond of mutual respect in the aftermath of surviving the nightmare and ever since then they had seemed to be on similar wavelen
gths. Until now; presently, she was finding Tom Harding-Grayson’s scholarly air of understated moral superiority very nearly intolerable and was asking herself if he really was as clever as he thought he was why had he not seen yesterday’s catastrophe coming?
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Tom!”
“Before I explain, Prime Minister,” her friend returned, spreading his hands in apologetic supplication. “I confess that I put the particular doomsday scenario I am about to describe to bed, as it were, after the October War because at the time it seemed that the Soviet Union was a spent military force.”
“The Soviet Union is a spent military force!” The Prime Minister snapped imperiously. Several of her colleagues flinched; the Foreign Secretary smiled self-deprecatingly and asked an inconvenient question.
“Do we actually know that, Prime Minister?”
“Of course we do, Tom!”
Airey Neave sensed the temperature of the room chill another degree. In common with many of his old friends in intelligence circles he had been more than a little dubious about American claims of ‘total victory’ after the October War. Just because the Soviets had stopped fighting back after a few hours was not evidence of an inability to continue to fight. In the seventeen months since he had waited, and waited and finally given up waiting for the completeness of the Soviet annihilation to be confirmed. The West had sleep-walked into Armageddon once; now it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that history was about to repeat itself.
All eyes focussed on the handsome face of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce the First Sea Lord.
“I don’t know,” he said dully. “A few months ago I would have, and in fact, frequently did give a conditional ‘yes’ in reply to the question of whether the Soviet Union was a militarily spent force. At that time I would have been confident of the veracity of that reply at a strategic, if not a local, tactical level. However, in the last few weeks we have seen significant ‘former’ Soviet assets engaging with and inflicting heavy losses on our forces in the Mediterranean. Given this evidence, it is not that great a stretch of the imagination to envisage a situation in which other, as yet unidentified or suspected, ‘significant’ former Soviet military assets survive elsewhere deep within the boundaries of the USSR. It may be also be the case that we have been mistaken in describing these assets as ‘former Soviet’ assets. It will be instructive to discover what may be learned from the large number of Russian parachutists and the small number of Turkish seamen thus far captured after the Battle of Malta. What we learn may materially alter our view of, for example, whether such a thing as the ‘Soviet Union’ actually still survives beyond the Ural Mountains or in the Trans-Caucasus.”
Margaret Thatcher’s angry eyes viewed her senior military advisor with atypical suspicion and mistrust.
“And you’ve just thought to tell me this now, Sir David?”
The First Sea Lord brushed past the accusative threat in her voice.
“It is my job to inform and advise you on the basis of what I know and what I think may be true. It is not my job to advise you of every piece of intelligence community gossip, careless tittle-tattle and most likely, misinformation, that comes into the hands of my staff, Prime Minister.”
“Um...”
Chapter 36
14:10 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina, Malta
The bodies of the two Soviet paratroopers who had died in the courtyard of the hospital still lay where they had fallen. One had been dead before he crashed onto the unyielding flagstones of the yard, shot through the head and torso while he hung helplessly on his straps hundreds of feet above the Citadel. The second man had been the first – of many – invaders killed by Clara Pullman, at the beginning of her murderous rampage through Mdina the previous afternoon.
There were spent cartridge cases all over the courtyard.
Very little of what the others had told Marija made much sense. They said Clara had shouted something in Russian at the man she had killed in the courtyard before locking the others in the safety of the basement; and departing to roam the streets of the Citadel like an avenging angel before eventually giving herself up, at of all places, the British headquarters.
The women had laid Margo Seiffert in the shade, covering her small, wiry bullet-riddled body with pure white blankets and lighting candles which now flickered all around her on the ground. Somebody had cleaned her face and brushed her hair. But for her deathly grey face she might have been sleeping.
Marija felt numb.
The women said that Admiral Christopher was dead, too.
Frighteningly, the women were convinced that if so many of the Russian invaders had not been drawn away from the hospital to hunt for Clara, they too would all be dead now.
As Marija knelt by her oldest and best friend in Christendom – her second mother in all but name – the tears rolled down her face and dripped onto the cold stones of the yard, splashing now and then on the shroud in which Margo’s grieving nurses had wrapped her overnight.
The God in whom Marija had trusted to be merciful had allowed Margo, Peter’s father and so many others to be consumed by the never-ending war. How had He let such evil walk upon the land? She had prayed to Him for the lives of her husband and their children as yet unborn; He had exacted a terrible price and the horrifying thing was that she had no idea how many others she loved had been sacrificed so that her selfish prayers might be answered.
The others had tried to comfort her as she sobbed.
Briefly, her grief was inconsolable. The hopeless, irreconcilable loss shut her off from all sanity; from all remembrance of joy. Her grief was like a river in flood, a madness that she could not fight until its first overwhelming surge slackened and she again began to recognise that her sorrow was but a tiny drop in a vast ocean of misery.
What right do I have to drown myself in my sorrow when so many others have suffered so greatly that I can hardly begin to imagine their loss?
Marija bowed her head.
That Margo had never believed did not matter. She stilled believed so she would pray for her, wherever Margo’s spirit now walked. Margo’s life force still lived in St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in Mdina where she had lived and worked for nearly two decades, in the hearts and memories of all those people whose lives she had touched and improved and in hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases, saved. Margo lived on in the children she had helped to bring into the World, the scores of nurses she had trained; few of whom would ever have had the chance to practice the scared art of nursing without Margo Seiffert’s indefatigable never say die attitude to the obstacles that hamstrung so many lives less ordinary than the one that she had made for herself on Malta. That Marija knew herself to have been blessed, infused with Margo’s lust for life and her intuitive refusal to be talked out of always trying to do the right thing, she had no doubt. That but for Margo Seiffert she would have been a very different person, possibly never found the love of a good and brave man, and never have amounted to anything but the faithful daughter of an anonymous Maltese family, likewise she had little doubt. But then Margo had been her second mother; and for better or worse mothers inevitably shape the women their daughters subsequently become in maturity.
Presently, because she was Margo Seiffert’s spirit daughter she wiped away her tears, dried her hands on her smock and with the help of two of the other women – both patiently waiting for her to overcome the first rush of her grief – she rose to her feet, and with a final sniff announced:
“I would like everybody who can be spared to come out in front of the hospital in St Paul’s Square. I will address everybody in five minutes time.”
This said she turned back to look down on Margo Seiffert’s face one more time, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Very stiffly, she bent down and drew the edge of the blanket over her spirit mother’s face.
Sleep well, my old fried.
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Sleep well...
There were about twenty women waiting for her when she limped painfully out into the sunlight. Not all were pale blue-smocked auxiliary nurses, at least half were local women who helped out at the hospital a day or two a week, two were nuns from a convent in Rabat who devoted time each week to the good cause of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, another woman was a cleaner. More women and several patients leaned out of glassless first floor windows, literally hanging on Marija’s every word.
“I shall miss Margo forever,” she began, her words nearly lost in the breeze swirling around the square. Her hair threatened to cover her face and she brushed it away.
Speak loudly!
“I shall miss Margo forever,” she repeated, this time in her native Maltese, hoping she was succeeding in projecting her small voice far enough for the women in the windows to hear. She slipped back into English. “Margo often talked to me about what might happen to the hospital when she was no longer with us. I never really took it seriously because Margo seemed so indestructible.” This last word she echoed in Maltese.
The first thing any local girl had to do to gain entrance to Margo’s training regime was to learn to speak and write good English. ‘Without command of English you cannot possibly have a good argument with a British doctor!’ That had been Margo all over; the love of her life had been the most English of Englishmen but the British medical establishment of the archipelago had always been her greatest bugbear.
“Margo did not ever, so far as I know, want me to follow in her footsteps or in any way take over from her when she was gone. I don’t think that was what she dreamed for me and we never talked of such things. Whoever replaces Margo as our Medical Director must be willing and able to commit her life to the hospital. I disqualified myself from that role when I married an English naval officer. Wherever my husband goes, so I go. Even if it means leaving the island of my birth and my family behind. That is the way of things.”