by James Philip
“The Captain sent me to find you,” he explained.
“Here I am,” she retorted patiently.
“Yes, the Captain said for me to find you and to give you this letter. He had to report to the new C-in-C, you see...”
In the darkness and the shadows, her face illuminated only by the loom of lamps blinking through shattered windows on the upper floors of the hospital Jack Griffin suddenly realised that the young Maltese woman before him might not know that the Fighting Admiral was dead.
“Nobody really knows much about anything,” she assured him.
“They say he was killed in the fight to defend the headquarters,” the man blurted. “Sorry, I thought you must have heard, it having happened just a couple of streets away from here....”
“No, things have been busy and very strange since I got here.”
“There’s some story about your friend Clara Pullman being with him when he died.” Jack Griffin decided he had probably said enough and shut up.
“Clara?”
“That’s what they say, sorry, I...”
Marija rose from the bench. She shook her head.
“No, you have nothing to be sorry about, Mr Griffin,” she comforted him, patting his arm. “Things are so,” she shrugged, “so mixed up.” Her husband’s father was dead and she was worrying about her own loss; she should be with Peter.
Jack Griffin pressed the envelope into her hands.
“The Captain said for me to give you this. He said if you decided to travel to Valletta after you’d read it I was to make sure you got there safely. He said for me to bring a couple of bruisers with me, just to be safe, like. It’s a bit well, lawless out there. Anyway, half the deck division, well, them that’s still breathing, leastways, volunteered to come with me,” he chuckled with grim pride.
Marija, ever practical, suggested they walk back inside the hospital where there was light for her to read her husband’s letter; which a little while later she opened with trembling, suddenly clumsy hands.
Peter’s writing was jerky and there were stray spits of ink here and there on the single sheet of bonded letter paper. The scrawled words filled both sides of the single sheet.
My Dearest Marija,
I am a little knocked about but otherwise in one piece and you must not worry about me.
My father is dead and more than half my brave Talaveras are gone or badly wounded. But that is the way of war, I suppose. Once I knew you were unhurt nothing else really mattered.
Forgive me if this note is a mess. They mean to make my Talaveras and I heroes and to send us back to England to meet the Queen and goodness knows who else. The C-in-C wishes you to accompany me. I told AVM French that I would ask you to accompany me but that if you felt you had obligations on Malta which prevented your coming to England then he would have to jolly well lump it!
On a purely selfish note – I want to see your smile and to hold you in my arms. PO Griffin will bring you to Valletta if you can leave Mdina. Otherwise, he will act as postman for your reply.
I love you, Marija Calleja. I am and shall always be your adoring husband, Peter.
Marija started crying again.
Jack Griffin, who had stepped into the corridor reappeared, his face a picture of dismay.
“I am okay. No, I’m not,” she decided contrarily. “But I will be okay in a minute. I will return to Valletta with you. I don’t think I can do much good here and...” Marija left the rest unsaid.
The man she had loved since she was a teenage girl confined in a metal cage in RNH Bighi while Michael Stephens’s famous ground-breaking orthopaedic surgeon uncle, and Margo Seiffert had slowly rebuilt her crushed lower body and left leg, needed her and her place was by his side. She had been stupid to allow herself to be transported so far away from Kalkara, to be separated from him when she had known that Peter was nearby.
It was a mistake that she would not lightly make ever again.
Chapter 44
22:00 Hours (GMT)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Foreign Secretary’s Residence, Balliol College, Oxford
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had greeted his visitor with a sanguine smile. He had known Sir Richard ‘Dick’ Goldsmith White for over twenty years and although the two men had often been professionally at odds, they had always operated on the basis of mutual respect, and oddly, trust. Oddly, because the Foreign Secretary had spent most of his career as a high-flying civil servant keen to protect his political masters from the machinations of MI5 and MI6, and Dick White had been Britain’s premier spymaster for a generation.
The Foreign Secretary’s wife had met the tall, elegantly attired and immaculately preened head of MI6 at the door and pecked his cheek in welcome as she had in happier times before she had departed; her presence at Balliol was a fleeting one, a hurried visit to change into a less creased frock and to ‘brush up’ before she went back to the Prime Minister’s rooms at Corpus Christi. Crisis or no crisis her younger friend needed her, and somebody had to make sure the Thatcher twins were sheltered from the storm of chaos and dissent that was threatening to swamp the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. There had been angry crowds in the street that afternoon and the Army had had to be called in to restore order in the city centre.
Alone in Tom Harding-Grayson’s study, a cluttered oak-panelled former don’s room deep within the ancient college, the Foreign Secretary’s intelligence chief waited as his old friend poured two generous measures of Whiskey into ugly, utilitarian tumblers.
“Pat looks well,” Dick White observed, accepting the glass he was offered.
“Yes, she and Margaret are very close. Most of the time she is acting in loco parentis with Carol and Mark. She’s very fond of the brats. She tells me she never suspected she was the ‘maternal sort’.” The Foreign Secretary’s voice was a little hoarse but betrayed little of the angst-ridden despair that had brought him low in the last forty-eight hours. “If you’ve come to offer your resignation,” he said abruptly, ‘forget it. That’s not up to you or me. The Prime Minister issued an edict this afternoon about ‘men who are more preoccupied with doing the honourable thing than in serving their country’. Nobody resigns. If anybody is for the chop,” he grimaced, “Margaret will deliver the blow herself.”
“Not even the Angry Widow can stop a man resigning, Tom,” Dick White retorted with an irony that verged on insouciance.
“No? She’s right, you know,” Tom Grayson-Harding countered, resuming his seat in front of the low fire guttering in the hearth. “In the old days a fellow could walk away from the consequence of his actions with impunity. But not now.”
“Nevertheless, I will be tendering my resignation. I have the letter in my pocket.”
“Rykov?” His friend asked. “Or the whole Red Dawn nonsense?”
“Krasnaya Zarya was, and is real, Tom.”
“If you say so, old man.”
The spymaster sipped his drink, pausing to reflect that one of the few sectors of the pre-war economy which had survived relatively unscathed and would in any other time have boomed was the Scottish Whiskey distilling industry. In an age when potable, clean drinking water and a reliable electrical supply were at a premium, or unavailable across large parts of the country, Scotch Whiskey was so ubiquitous that but for government regulation the country would be completely awash with the stuff.
“If I had come to you and told you that, despite the evidence to the contrary and the complacent view from across the Atlantic that the Soviet Union was not a ‘busted flush’, you wouldn’t have taken me seriously, Tom.”
“The Soviet Union is a ‘busted flush’,” the Foreign Secretary declared. “Or at least I hope it is or we are all in big trouble.”
The spymaster contemplated his Whiskey.
“In the old days you and I talked a lot about Abadan and what might happen if the Soviets attempted to force a corridor to the Indian Ocean, Tom,” he reminded the other man. “Before the war the Amer
icans, and to a lesser degree, ourselves, kept significant naval and air assets in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean. Iraq, Iran and Pakistan seemed militarily and politically vulnerable in those days but with our bases in the region and with the option of quickly deploying reinforcements by air and via the Suez Canal, well,” he spread his hands, “we were confident we could meet any likely threat. But now?”
Tom Harding-Grayson remained silent.
“Suez is blocked at Ismailia by vessels sunk by a Krasnaya Zarya nuclear strike,” Dick White re-stated what everybody knew. “Our forces in the Persian Gulf and in other ‘friendly’ countries in the region have been slashed to the bone. The Americans picked up all their toys in Arabia and sailed home after the October War. What if the stories of Soviet troop concentrations in Azerbaijan and the reports of some kind of uprising in Tehran turn out to be something altogether more worrying, Tom?”
The Foreign Secretary groaned.
“I outlined my former ‘concerns’ about a Soviet push south through Iran and Iraq to the Cabinet today,” he reported glumly. “The Prime Minister thought I was being hysterical. The trouble is nobody can see beyond what happened in Malta yesterday.” He supped his Whiskey, meditated and met the spymaster’s gaze. “The House of Commons will sit on Monday. Margaret will make a statement to the House.”
Dick White read between the lines.
“Might the government fall?”
“Yes.” Tom Harding-Grayson drained his glass. “Margaret wanted to get onto the first plane out to Malta. Willie Whitelaw and I had a heck of a job talking her out of it. As it is the Chief of the Defence Staff, Airey Neave and Iain Macleod are heading off to the Mediterranean as soon as they’ve filled in the holes in the runway at RAF Luqa. Well, a couple of aircraft carrying doctors, nurses and medical supplies will be going out first, but ‘the VIPs’ will be hot on their tails.”
It was the turn of the Director General of the MI6 to hold his peace.
Tom Harding-Grayson was still uneasy about the decisions that had come out of that evening’s War Cabinet. The general view around the table had been that the worst had happened and that the time had come to pick up the pieces. His own view remained that what had happened in the Mediterranean was a political rather than a military disaster which raised new and frightening questions about the former Soviet Union’s surviving war fighting capabilities. The spectre of further significant aggressive moves on the part of an enemy they had all believed to be a ‘busted flush’ was suddenly back on the table.
However, once it had been decided that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce would fly to Malta to assess the situation and if necessary – the decision would be his and his alone – act as interim Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations regardless of American sensibilities, and that Airey Neave and Iain Macleod would accompany him, the debate had shifted to one of how to limit the political damage at home and how best to patch up the potential new rupture in Anglo-American relations.
“Sir David might take command in the theatre of operations?” Sir Dick White asked rhetorically. “Why are two Ministers going out to Malta?”
“Well, Airey Neave is Minister of Supply. His department’s writ runs throughout the United Kingdom and the remaining dominions and dependent territories. Malta will need all the help it can get if it is going to be back on its feet as quickly as possible. Besides, the press love Airey.”
“Presumable, the Minister of Information is going to Malta to talk a good war?”
“Something like that. Apparently, the MOI had a film crew with a ringside seat overlooking the Grand Harbour when the Battle for Malta kicked off. According to Iain they got pictures of HMS Talavera roaring out of port to attack the enemy.”
Much of the evening’s War Cabinet had been spent discussing not war, or war fighting but the contentious subject of how best to fight the ‘battle for hearts and minds’. Throughout the heated discussions the Prime Minister had been unusually aloof, a little part of her spirit broken by the loss of the man she had secretly planned to marry. With a man like Sir Julian Christopher by her side there was no telling what she would have achieved. That she had already achieved great things, and might yet go on to achieve greater things was not to be denied. But without Julian Christopher by her side, at her shoulder, the one man in Christendom she trusted with her deepest doubts and secrets, she would forever be in some way diminished. Worse, the spark of optimism and never say die unreasoning courage which had been her hallmark in the short months of her meteoric premiership seemed briefly to have been extinguished. The Angry Widow’s anger, until now largely apocryphal had been transformed overnight into something bleaker, more real, deadlier and potentially self-destructive.
“The heroes of the Battle of Malta are to be flown home to be appropriately feted,” he concluded sourly.
Sir Dick White’s handsome face was wearing a troubled frown.
Sending Sir David Luce to Malta to stabilise the situation was an eminently pragmatic decision; but if the Government planned to hide behind the ‘heroes’ of yesterday’s disaster rather than to face up to what it implied for the continued prosecution of the war in the Mediterranean, that was, well, despicable. It smacked of an unwillingness to confront the changing priorities of both the tactical and strategic situation in the region. It seemed self-evident to the spymaster, as it must to most senior military men that Great Britain was no longer ‘great enough’ to continue to wage war in an essentially ad hoc fashion. Either the country geared itself to fight an ongoing ‘total’ war or it modified its global pretensions. Operation Grantham, the hastily thrown together amphibious operation to re-conquer Cyprus had required every available ship, warplane and soldier in the Mediterranean at the cost of leaving the most strategically important British base in the theatre naked, effectively stripped of its defences. But for the fortuitous belated intervention of the US Navy and the suicidal bravery of the men of two small Royal Navy ships, British arms in the Mediterranean might have been facing an unimaginably more devastating setback. The Soviets had come within an inch of seizing the Maltese Archipelago!
If Malta had fallen into hostile hands, even for a short period the consequences were unthinkable. Would the invaders have invited in the Italian Fascisti? Or treated with the criminals in charge in nearby Sicily? Or perhaps, sought an alliance with the forces of the despotic military junta on Sardinia? Or flown in more troops from Eastern Europe? Re-fortified the islands and used the three hundred thousand or so Maltese as an expendable slave labour force? And where would the ships committed to Operation Grantham have returned to refill their fuel bunkers, dry dock and refit? Where would those ships have re-armed had the armouries of Malta been in enemy hands? Those ships might have been trapped indefinitely in the Eastern Mediterranean, bottled up in ports like Alexandria, Haifa, Beirut and Limassol, trapped and picked off at will by hostile submarines and bombing raids. Yesterday the United Kingdom had come within minutes of complete disaster; had those two small warships not drawn the fire of the big Soviet ships when they did the island would almost certainly have capitulated. Even if the invaders had only seized parts of the archipelago, Malta would have ceased to be a viable fleet base for the Royal Navy. The magnitude of the disaster which had been so narrowly averted was positively nightmarish...
“But for those two ships,” the Director General of MI6 said, unable to completely hide his disgust at the bungling which had left Malta so vulnerable, “we would be sitting here talking about the abandonment of Operation Grantham, the abdication of British influence in the Mediterranean and the collapse of any hope of a long-term rapprochement with the Americans? Goodness only knows what effect that would have had on our Commonwealth friends and allies! The United Kingdom would have become a laughing stock!”
“Yes,” the Foreign Secretary sighed. He changed the subject: “Did you know Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was still working for the Soviets?”
“That was my working assumption all along.”
Tom Harding-Grayson nodded, sat back in his chair and smiled a smile that had he not been so weary would have been unambiguously saturnine.
“And the woman he was with?”
“She was my,” Dick White hesitated, “control. But in the way of these things...”
“Was she KGB too?”
The spymaster shook his head.
“No. Up until the time I debriefed Rykov – I don’t actually think that was any more his real name than Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov, by the way – in Portugal before Christmas, she was a rock. After that I think she lost focus. It happens. My fault, really. It is always a mistake to leave an agent in place so long that they begin to believe that they are the legend they have been living. I think she began to be Clara Pullman. In fact I think she began to rather like Clara Pullman. Even after Clara Pullman’s feelings for Rykov became, shall we say, complicated. I don’t know the full story, not yet. But I strongly suspect that at the end she attempted to be Clara Pullman and to live another life. Unfortunately, this crisis probably occurred at exactly the time it was most critical to be in control of Rykov and his activities on Malta.”
Tom Harding-Grayson tried to unravel the jargon, decode the assumptions underlying the spymaster’s matter of fact, conversational account of how one woman’s emotional turmoil might inadvertently have facilitated mayhem, and possibly, sometime in the next few days the fall of the government of which he had been proud to be a member.
“Was it worth it?” He asked curtly.
“My counterpart in the Security Service will be better able to speak to that in the United Kingdom,” the Director General of the Secret Intelligence Service replied. “I gather that despite Sir Roger’s misgivings about the information I was able to pass onto him that MI5 has spent the last forty-eight hours sweeping up and generally eradicating Red Dawn’s tendrils in the United Kingdom. My people have been using rather more direct and less judicial methods on Malta, in Gibraltar, Portugal, Spain and in Beirut.” He ran a hand through his thinning fair hair. “As to whether it was worth it? Time will tell.”