by James Philip
Marija took pity on her compatriot.
“You may talk to me. If he wakes up my husband will talk to you. For him it would be rude not to talk to you. For me, well, I chose to talk to you because I want my husband’s story to be told first in Malta.”
This utterly perplexed the youthful editor of The Times of Malta.
“I was fortunate to get to know my husband’s father a little. The first time we met I was a little afraid he would think of me as less than his son deserved. A grasping little Maltese hussy. I even suspected that he might put obstacles between us. Instead, he ‘approved’ of me so much that I think I became his ‘daughter-in-law in waiting’ even before I met Peter.”
Paul Boffa was struggling with his shorthand pad.
“I didn’t sharpen my pencil,” he apologised.
Marija giggled, her husband blinked awake and she stroked his brow. He slept again.
“Today Peter and I belong to Malta but tomorrow,” she hunched her shoulders resignedly, “that will be over, for a while at least. So we will talk now while we can.”
“Is it really true that you and Commander Christopher never met until HMS Talavera came to Malta?”
“Yes. We were pen friends from when we were thirteen.”
“When you were thirteen you were still...”
“In hospital. At Bighi, mostly held together with metal,” she recollected ruefully. She stroked her husband’s sleeping cheek. “I think I loved him from the start, but it was different for him. I think he loved me for a long time but never knew it until the night of the war...”
“Love you...” The unconscious man murmured complacently.
Marija and the journalist were silent for some seconds.
Around them quiet voices echoed down the corridors, distantly a typewriter clattered, and the far away rumble of the diesel generators provided a continual, low-level background hum.
“The funny thing is,” Marija went on, “whenever I heard Peter had been involved in this or that battle I was never surprised. When his ship was bombed in the Atlantic off Cape Finisterre I thought I might have lost him. I fainted when I heard he was all right. Then there was that fight off Lampedusa when poor Captain Penberthy lost his foot and Peter had to take command of the whole squadron, and later the dreadful fight to save the USS Enterprise. I sort of expected him to be, I don’t know, heroic. Because he just is. Heroic, I mean. My sister, Rosa and I, we were high on the hill above Kalkara on Friday when HMS Talavera raced out of the Grand Harbour like a greyhound. The big shells were landing all around her and she was running up all the flags her people could find in her flag lockers; and she looked so brave and so small as she disappeared from sight behind Fort Ricasoli...”
Marija’s voice tailed away, she was a little embarrassed by how dreamy her words must have sounded.
“A little later I felt death. I think that was when my friend Margo Seiffert was murdered but at the time I was afraid it was my husband.” She wiped away a tear, sniffed. “God is sometimes merciful.”
“You felt death?”
“How could one not feel it at such a time?”
Paul Boffa was too shell shocked to pursue this further.
“I am intruding,” Paul Boffa mused aloud. “I will leave you in peace. But first, may I ask a last question, Marija?”
“Of course, Paul.”
“They are saying that Admiral Christopher ordered your husband to save his ship?” He shrugged in an agony of indecision. “That he told your husband to save himself and his ship? Is that true?”
“No,” Marija replied. She spoke now in English. “Peter told me that his father’s actual order was: ‘Cut your lines and go, Peter.’” She let this sink in. “And then Admiral Christopher added ‘get out to sea and await further orders’. But there were no further orders. So my husband interpreted Sir Julian’s orders in the way any destroyer captain in the Royal Navy would have interpreted them. He steamed at full speed towards the enemy.”
Paul Boffa looked at the woman in mute astonishment.
Marija seized the moment.
“Did you know my little brother Joe was onboard HMS Talavera in the battle?” This was self-evidently news to the journalist. “You see the Talavera left the Grand Harbour so suddenly he was not able to go ashore. And then the near misses as the ship was escaping the Grand Harbour killed or wounded many of the torpedo crew. So Joe had to work the torpedo tubes and fire the torpedoes that sank those two big ships that where shelling Malta.”
If Paul Boffa had been struck speechless by her previous revelations he was now briefly dumbfounded, stunned very much in the fashion of a man who has just been hit on the head with a lump of two by four.
She had just handed him the biggest scoop of his career.
Marija viewed him quizzically.
“Your mouth is hanging open, Paul,” she observed sympathetically.
“Can I print that?” He asked anxiously. “I mean all of it?”
Marija nodded, she understood perfectly why the C-in-C’s men had sent the youthful, unwary, idealistic editor of The Times of Malta to her.
“Even the private things,” she emphasised because she knew that her days as a comparatively anonymous dutiful Maltese daughter and wife were over forever.
In the morning a very different life awaited her and the man she loved.
Chapter 50
09:25 Hours (GMT)
Sunday 5th April 1964
RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England
Iain Norman Macleod was in a vile mood. His back was playing up, his old thigh wound from 1940 was making him walk like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and he was about to board an RAF plane – on which smoking was prohibited – and therefore faced the prospect of the best part of four to five hours without the solace of a single cigarette. The cherry on top of his personal cake of woe was the news which had come in overnight from Cyprus; the modern frigate HMS Leander had been torpedoed and sunk twenty miles west of Pathos, and the enemy on land, having previously retreated into an enclave in the north-east of the island had mounted a local counter attack which had inflicted over a hundred casualties on two companies of Scots Guards and destroyed several armoured vehicles. Moreover, ambushes by ‘stay behind’ guerrilla forces had begun to disrupt the activities of lines of communication troops and to threaten depots as far back as the beachheads. At least thirty people, mostly civilians had been killed in these ‘nuisance’ attacks, necessitating the withdrawal, or the holding back of hundreds of desperately needed troops from the front line.
“It is all very well for the Chief of the General Staff to complacently turn around and say he expected this sort of thing to happen all along,” the Minister of Information complained irritably, “but we simply can’t afford to allow ourselves to get bogged down in a war of attrition in Cyprus!”
The Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce had spoken to General Richard Amyatt Hull before setting out for Brize Norton. Since the October War he had learned to treat whatever a politician said about making war with a very large pinch of salt.
“General Hull is anything but ‘complacent’ about the situation on Cyprus. It would have been astonishing if we had not encountered any ‘stay behind’ forces, Minister,” he observed tersely. “Likewise, the enemy has every right to attempt to counter attack us at a time and place of his choosing and, unfortunately to do his level best to sink our ships. We are fighting a war, sir. Things go wrong in war. Unexpected things happen and people are killed and wounded. That is the nature of the thing.”
This morning there was impatience and barely veiled disappointment in his voice and his customary imperturbable urbanity was audibly strained.
“Yes,” Iain Macleod snapped angrily, “coming from the man who left Malta undefended that’s a bit rich!”
The Minister of Information had limped half-a-dozen paces farther towards the Comet 4 jetliner waiting at it hardstand in a pool of arc lights fifty yards away before he realised
that he and his companion, Airey Neave were alone. With a growl of displeasure he turned to confront the lean silhouette of the First Sea Lord.
“Sir David?” He asked peremptorily.
Airey Neave had taken his friend’s elbow.
“Iain, old man,” he said, a scion of reasonableness. “That’s not fair. Neither you or I was on the spot in Malta...”
The First Sea Lord had not moved.
“Sir,” he said with icy dignity. “Have you actually taken the trouble to read the reports – any of the reports – that I had delivered to your private office during the course of the early hours of this morning?”
“Not of all them. I’ve skimmed through most of them. I’m a busy man...”
This was no lie; in addition to being the Minister of Information and thus the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s chief official propagandist, he also held the post of leader of the House of Commons, and the onerous, somewhat poisoned chalice of the Chairmanship of what remained of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
“We are all busy men these days, sir,” the man who spoke for the Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services observed tartly. His tone stated rather than suggested that if a man under his command had attempted to use the ‘I’m a busy man’ excuse to justify not being on the ball then very severe consequences would certainly have ensued. “But for young Peter Christopher’s actions in first drawing the enemy fire, thus allowing our weakened garrison on Malta to achieve local concentration against the main enemy airborne forces around Mdina and Luqa; and secondly, in subsequently crippling two of the three enemy heavy units supporting those airborne forces,” he paused, not for effect but because he had been so angry he had forgotten to take a breath for some seconds, “we might well have lost Malta. Not because of a military decision taken on the ground or at sea in the Mediterranean; but because nobody in Government heeded my repeated entreaties to establish a robust chain of command in the theatre co-ordinating all Anglo-American operations. Frankly, in the present situation it ill-befits anybody in England to sit in judgement of fighting men overseas.”
Iain Macleod opened his mouth to speak in his own defence.
However, the First Sea Lord had not finished and he cut the politician off before he could say a single word.
“Furthermore, whichever official in your department put out that press release which failed to clarify the purpose of my visit to Malta ought, in my opinion, to be shot.”
“That was...”
Airey Neave cut across his Cabinet colleague.
“Shut up, Iain.” He took a step closer to the First Sea Lord. “We’re all a little bit;” he grimaced, “frazzled at the moment, Sir David. My colleague meant no offence. God only knows we are all in the debt of those brave young men in those two gallant small ships. You and Sir Julian were very close, and nobody knows better than you the magnitude of his loss to our cause.”
“Quite,” the professional head of the Royal Navy acknowledged brusquely. “I suggest we board the plane without delay so we can be about our business.”
Airey Neave drew a breath of relief.
The present crisis had not just strained the patience of the Chiefs of Staff it had pointed up the glaring weaknesses and deficiencies in British military capabilities, cruelly highlighting how over-stretched those forces were everywhere, and vividly illustrating the past insensitivity of the political elite to practically every warning the Chiefs of Staff had voiced. The point had been reached when if things got out of hand sooner or later one or other, perhaps all three of the Chiefs of Staff might turn around and say ‘enough, no more’.
The three men fell into ragged step, pausing at the foot of the ladder up to the open forward hatch of the RAF liveried Comet. Airey Neave and the First Sea Lord held back as Iain Macleod haltingly, painfully ascended the steps. The ever watchful Marines and Royal Military Policemen patrolling around the jetliner would have been happy to assist the Minister of Information but he hated it when people offered him a helping hand.
Airey Neave turned to the erect, dignified naval officer at his shoulder.
“Contrary to outward impressions, Admiral,” he said lowly, “we are all in this together.”
“Yes, Minister,” Admiral Sir David Luce retorted dryly, “but while we are all in it together it is my people who are the ones who are actually doing most of the dying.”
Chapter 51
09:42 Hours (GMT)
Sunday 5th April 1964
Redditch, Worcestershire, England
Seamus McCormick had been flying blind for several hours. At both pre-designated ‘contact points’ he had parked up and waited – twenty minutes each time – and there had been no ‘contact’. This meant only one thing; the rest of the active service unit embedded in England ahead of his arrival had been driven underground, or worse, ‘blown’.
The farm buildings had looked derelict and they had needed to get off the road and work out what to do next.
An hour ago they had broken into the coffin containing the small arms and plastic explosives. Each of the three men now had a loaded Browning 9-millimetre pistol stuffed in his waistband as they crouched around the fire.
Army trucks drove from base to base. Army trucks carried their cargo and that was it. They had been travelling light; no food, no rucksacks, blankets, none of the normal kit a British squaddie slung over his back on a march. If they had been stopped carrying anything like that questions would have been asked and it would have ended badly. So they were travelling light; and were hungry now with no maps, and no safe place to hide up.
The cigarette cupped in Frank Reynolds’s hands had burned down to a stub. He took a last drag and threw it into the fire they had lit to warm their hands. He was the younger of the two IRA killers assigned to ‘watch over’ the turncoat British soldier who was nominally the leader of their small ‘cell’.
Reynolds glanced to Sean O’Flynn, the stockier of the two gunmen.
“There’s no way we’d get those coffins back across the water,” he grunted, stating the obvious.
“We could bury them,” the other man suggested thoughtfully. “Leave them for somebody to collect later?”
Seamus McCormick listened impassively as he smoked his cigarette and continued to think through his next move. His mind was walking down much narrower, sharply focused roads than his companions. The IRA men still thought they had options, that they were still in control of their own fate but Seamus McCormick knew otherwise. He had been in the British Army over eight years before he defected, spent time in Germany and Aden, actually spent two tours in Ulster fighting people exactly like Frank Reynolds and Sean O’Flynn. He had no illusions as to how perilous their situation had become and how little time they had before the net closed around them.
Before the October War there would have been other traffic, civilian traffic, on the roads to make it harder for the searchers to zero in on their quarry. These days there were no private cars, only registered trucks and lorries, and there were roadblocks everywhere cracking down hard on the black market and rigorously enforcing the ‘transit and transfer’ protocols designed to stop the wasteful burning of fuel by military and other vehicles. They had been lucky so far. Very lucky.
Oddly, food was not a problem.
Three men in uniform with current ID cards could walk into any ‘Austerity Kitchen’ in the United Kingdom and get a free meal with no further questions asked. Usually, the meal on offer was only some kind of soup, a lump of bread and a mug of tea but a man could live on that almost indefinitely. However, that was the only thing going for them.
Theoretically, they could steal anything they needed; fuel, maps, clothes, uniforms at the point of a gun. Practically, if they tried it more than once they would probably be dead a few hours later. The mainland was just as much an armed camp as Ulster and most major roads were patrolled; post-war even the Police carried hand guns and rifles.
“We�
�re not burying the coffins,” he said quietly.
It had rained overnight and the ground around the three men was wet.
McCormick picked up a stick and scratched a cross in the earth.
“We’re here, outside Redditch,” he declared. And scratched another cross approximately south-east of the first. “This is Oxford, sixty to seventy miles away. And this,” he added another cross west of Oxford, “is RAF Brize Norton, a few miles west from it.” He looked at the faces of his associates. “Another fifty miles more or less west from there is Cheltenham, and another nice long runway. In between we have the Cotswold Hills. The main runways at Cheltenham and Brize Norton are angled so that aircraft can take off and land into the prevailing westerly wind. At both airfields the runways are angled approximately west-south-west in relation to magnetic north. This matters because it determines the landing approach and take off flight paths of approaching or departing aircraft. Are you guys still with me?”
Frank Reynolds scowled, Sean O’Flynn was poker-faced.
“An aircraft which is just about to land or has just taken off, most likely heavy with fuel, cannot take violent evasive action without stalling and crashing. That matters because a jet airliner like a Comet or a V-Bomber like a Vulcan is basically a big jet fighter, very nearly fully aerobatic like giant Hurricanes or Spitfires. It they have sufficient altitude they can twist and turn, dive and climb sharply and if they get lucky, evade a heat-seeking missile like a Redeye.”
Neither IRA man spoke.
All three men stared at the four crosses and the lines joining them on the ground at their feet.
“Aircraft take off and land into the wind so the way the wind is blowing tells us where to get the best shot at an aircraft’s tail pipes – the hottest part of the airframe – when it is at its most vulnerable. When it is making its final landing approach.”