by James Philip
The two IRA men were beginning to smile; they could not help themselves.
“What we need to do is get from here,” Seamus McCormick prodded the first cross he had made, “to here and here,” he went on indicating the crosses for Brize Norton and Cheltenham. “Or rather, I’m going to take two of the Redeyes to here,” he stabbed at Cheltenham, “and you two are going to take the other Redeye to Brize Norton.”
“You said you were the only man who knew how to fire these things?” Sean O’Flynn objected almost speaking in a whisper.
“Anybody can fire the bloody thing!” McCormick grunted. “You just won’t have a snow flake’s chance in Hell of hitting anything!”
“So what’s the...”
Frank Reynolds patted his comrade’s shoulder and gave McCormick a dark look.
“You said there was only one launcher, friend?”
The former British soldier shrugged.
“I lied.”
Chapter 52
09:44 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
USS Charles F. Adams (DDG-2), 4 miles East of St Paul’s Bay, Malta
“MAN IN THE WATER!”
The moment the call reached the bridge of the guided missile cruiser the alarm sounded, the engines were stopped and crewmen streamed up onto the decks of the USS Charles F. Adams. All night she had been standing close in off St Paul’s Bay with over fifty of her people ashore and onboard the wreck of HMS Yarmouth. The last of the seriously injured had been airlifted by the USS Independence’s Sea Kings to hospital on Gozo or directly back to the big carrier. The destroyer’s small marine detachment and twenty seamen under the command of the ship’s Executive Officer had remained on land when the Charles F. Adams had been forced to crawl into deeper water and head south.
Her main fuel bunkers were nearly dry and any time now her pumps would be sucking sludge out of the bottom of the starboard emergency tank. After that she would be adrift off a rocky and visibly unforgiving lee shore in water too deep to safely anchor until – hopefully - a tug arrived to haul her into port.
In St Paul’s Bay HMS Yarmouth smouldered, a partially gutted hulk. Overnight her Squid anti-submarine mortars had lit off, sympathetically igniting hundreds of rounds of forty-millimetre ammunition stored in her after main deck ready lockers. By then everybody who could be saved had been lifted off the wreck. Over half the frigate’s crew were dead or missing.
As the Charles F. Adams lost weigh heavy objects clunked against her port hull plates.
Commander Simon McGiven had been down in the engineering spaces discussing how soon his ship could take on a hundred tons of heavy bunker oil at Marsamxett Anchorage – where he was assured that the oiling wharf had survived the recent bombardment unscathed – and get back on station off St Paul’s Bay when the alarms sounded.
A lean compact man of only slightly more than average height he had trotted – not run, for that was a thing a commanding officer could not do with dignity – up the ladders to the main deck and gone immediately to the port rail. As a young man, a very young man in fact, he had been a midshipman on the USS Honolulu at Pearl Harbour that fateful day in December 1941 and had enjoyed a charmed career for the rest of that war right up until the morning of 10th June 1945 when his ship, the Fletcher class fleet destroyer USS William D. Porter (DD-579) was sunk by a Kamikaze off Okinawa. He had only been in the water thirty minutes before he was rescued but that was long enough for him to understand, completely, what the men in the cold, choppy Mediterranean had been through since their ship sank the best part of forty-eight hours ago.
Two days ago McGiven had not wasted a second thought looking for the survivors of the Yavuz and the Admiral Kutuzov, or of their escorts the Independence’s Air Group had mercilessly hunted down and destroyed farther out to sea. No sooner had the Charles F. Adams and the Berkeley raced to interpose themselves between the last enemy cruiser and the by then burning British vessels, the enemy had promptly disengaged and attempted to retire north east at flank speed. McGiven had manoeuvred to open his ship’s A arc – so that both his fore and aft quick firing automatic five-inch turrets could engage the enemy - and the Berkeley had raced back to stand by HMS Talavera. McGiven would have pursued the fleeing enemy until the ends of the Earth but at flank speed he would have run his bunkers dry in literally minutes, so reluctantly, after a few minutes he had called off the chase and left the surviving enemy vessels to the tender mercies of the Independence’s A-4 Skyhawks.
He had since learned that the Skyhawks had bombed the Chapayev class Soviet cruiser to a standstill fifty-six miles north-north-east of Valletta and finding her dead in the water but stubbornly still afloat the morning after the battle the SSN USS Permit had administered the coup de grace with two Mark 14 torpedoes, both of which exploded beneath the keel of the crippled enemy ship, breaking her back and sending her to the bottom in less than three minutes. Nobody had sent out search and rescue ships or choppers to the co-ordinates where the cruiser – thought to be the Komsomolets – and her eight hundred man crew had gone down.
Commander Simon McGiven and his comrades had been far too busy rendering assistance to real heroes.
HMS Yarmouth had taken a direct hit to her bridge early in the action. Likewise, another hit had opened up her single twin 4.5 inch gun turret like a sardine can ripped apart by a rifle bullet. Most of the later hits seemed to have passed through the ship before exploding but near misses and massive splinter damage had set her on fire amidships. By the time the Charles F. Adams hove alongside the frigate was being conned from her emergency steering position on the stern.
Simon McGiven had no idea how HMS Yarmouth’s people had contrived to successfully run their sinking ship practically up onto the beach in St Paul’s Bay. What he did know was that by so doing whoever was responsible had probably saved the lives of most the men who had survived the Battle of Malta.
Now the commanding officer of the Charles F. Adams gazed at the heads bobbing in the tangle of floating wreckage in a long thin, current-sculpted slick, for hundreds of yards out to sea. Here and there an arm waved. He guessed that many of the heads bobbing in the cold water had died many hours ago.
He looked to the sky, the clouds and back down to the sea.
The flotsam and detritus of battle was drifting down onto the destroyer. Boarding nets were going over the side, life jackets and flotation blocks were being hurriedly stacked along the rail.
He sighed and hastened to the bridge.
“How much water do we have under the keel?” He demanded.
“Six hundred feet, sir.”
McGiven strode to the bridge wing.
“SLOW ASTERN!” He ordered. The destroyer’s forward momentum was carrying her ahead of the slick of survivors and debris.
He waited for the screws to bite the iron grey seas and to feel the movement of the ship under his feet.
“ALL STOP!”
He turned to the Officer of the Deck.
“Manuever so as to keep the ship between the survivors and the coast.” Then, after giving orders for a report to be transmitted to the USS Iowa and copied to the flagship, he returned down to the main deck to supervise the recovery of men who had ceased to be his mortal enemies the moment they went into the water.
Ship-wrecked mariners all.
May God have mercy on our souls.
Chapter 53
08:45 Hours,
Sunday 5th April 1964
Fort Rinella Joint Interrogation Centre, Malta
Major Denzil Williams, the MI6 Head of Station on Malta and as of thirty-three hours ago, give or take a few minutes - the de facto ‘Security Chief’ of the archipelago reporting directly to the Acting C-in-C, Air Vice-Marshal French, had had to forego the ‘pleasure’ of interrogating Samuel Calleja overnight as a constant stream of new prisoners was processed into the hastily designated ‘Joint Interrogation Centre’ in the old fort opposite Valletta.
“What’s the latest head count?” He ask
ed the careworn blond woman who had assumed the role of his secretary and chief translator overnight.
“Eighteen Maltese men and five women,” Rachel Angelica Piotrowska reported, looking up from her notes and the neatly piled sheaf of Prisoner of War Reception and Identification Control Sheets she had collected in the last few hours. “And thirty-two officers and senior non-commissioned other ranks of the 38th and 39th Guards Airborne Regiments of the Red Army.”
“How the fuck are we supposed to interrogate all those bastards?” Williams complained, slumping down into a chair in front of the woman’s desk. He fixed her with a ruminative stare; she did not seem to be half the bitch he had thought she was when she was with Arkady Rykov but he was not about to make the mistake of underestimating her a second time. Not if the stories coming out of Mdina were half-true...
She gave him an unsympathetic look.
“One at a time, Major,” she suggested dryly. Already her voice was flecked with accentuations which hinted at her Polish childhood. After years affecting the tone and manners of an upper middle class Englishwoman there was no longer any need for pretence.
“Very funny!” He had never seen the woman without make up, roughed up, not entirely ‘on show’ as if she was about to step onto an international catwalk and he was asking himself where he had seen her before, years ago long before she was on Comrade Arkady Pavlovich’s case.
“What would you rather do? Shoot them all?”
“Yes, well, I seem to recall that you made a pretty good start on the job the other day in the Citadel, Miss Piotrowska.”
Rachel did not have the energy to glower at him.
“That was in combat, Major.”
“Um...” He grunted, rose to his feet. “What would you do if I started breaking the rest of Samuel Calleja’s fingers?”
The woman’s expression became bleak. The Acting C-in-C’s orders regarding prisoners had been explicit. Regardless of the status of ‘detainees’ – be they suspected agent provocateurs, saboteurs, spies, fifth columnists, or simply captured soldiers in uniform – ‘all prisoners will be treated with decency and their physical and medical needs given appropriate priority’. On the subject of interrogation methods ‘Gestapo tactics’ were without exception, forbidden.
Dan French had asked her to make that crystal clear to Major Williams.
She had been able to soften the pill be adding that: ‘those prisoners of war and Maltese traitors clearly guilty of committing war crimes against the civilian population, or self-evidently guilty of treachery will be summarily executed under the powers vested in me [as Acting C-in-C Malta] in due course.’
That had cheered up Denzil Williams more than somewhat.
“Samuel Calleja’s admission documentation indicates he was processed into this ‘Centre’ without obvious physical injuries other than a bang on the head and an injured left hand. If he subsequently sustained significant additional harm you would have to explain exactly how he sustained those injuries.” She put down her pen, sat back in her chair. The coarse fabric of the over-sized battledress tunic and trousers she had been issued with the previous evening itched and scratched, she felt shapeless and somehow diminished in the uniform and the heavy shoes that she had been given hurt her feet. “Don’t you think enough people have been,” she shrugged, “damaged on this island in the last forty-eight hours?”
The man scoffed derisively.
“We have most of the people responsible for ‘damaging’ our friends and comrades and murdering God alone knows how many helpless innocent civilians sitting in our cells!”
Rachel said nothing.
“What do you think your friend Arkady Pavlovich Rykov did to the poor sods he brought here so he could cover his tracks?”
“I don’t know what he did to them,” she lied. Arkady had tortured and murdered at least one woman in the dungeons of Fort Rinella. Other men he had killed. She understood now that he had done it to stop his victims betraying him and that Julian Christopher had compelled him to do it because he wanted the men responsible for the terrorist killings, atrocities and the sabotage of HMS Torquay liquidated before the poison spread via Samuel Calleja to envelope the rest of his family, and eventually, by tainting his own son, his and the Royal Navy’s good name. At the time she had accepted it as a necessity of war; Arkady’s victims had been members of his own Krasnaya Zarya cell; all except Lela Catana-Perez, whose only crime now seemed to have been that she had had the misfortune to have been unknowingly married to a Red Dawn conspirator. In retrospect she now knew that if she had ever been so unwise as to have left the monster alone with Rosa Calleja, it was likely a similar fate would have befallen her.
Julian Christopher had been an honourable, moral man confronted with an impossible choice but he had not hesitated. He had done what was necessary because he understood that the true evil of war is the terrible things one’s enemies force one to do.
“Don’t you?” The Denzil Williams taunted Rachel, backing away until he found the cold, unyielding end wall of the cell appropriated as the ‘Admin Room’ for the ‘Centre’. “Admiral Christopher would have given us carte blanch with all these bastards. Dammit, he wouldn’t have wasted time and resources we don’t have guarding POWs, he’d have had the whole lot of them put up against a wall and shot!”
Rachel did not think that this was remotely likely.
Over three and hundred and fifty Soviet soldiers, including scores of wounded men, had laid down their weapons and surrendered. A few were still on the run; they were being hunted down like dogs. Those fit to work had been organised into gangs to assist in rescue operations or placed at the disposal of the Royal Engineers attempting to put the main runway at Luqa back into commission. At least thirty Soviet paratroopers were under guard at Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, many suffering from dreadful life-threatening injuries.
“No, he wouldn’t have had anybody shot,” she declared. “We have to be better than our enemies otherwise what right do we have to survive?”
“That’s too deep for me.”
The woman wanted to slap him.
“You shouldn’t have had Arkady beaten to a pulp at Gibraltar,” she snapped at Denzil Williams.
“You mean I should have killed him?” The man inquired acidly. “Rather than just roughing him up?”
Rachel rose from behind her desk and crossed her arms tightly across her breasts as if she was suddenly cold.
“You forced Dick White’s hand, you imbecile!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because you almost killed Arkady Pavlovich, Dick White had to make it look like an accident. He had to travel to Portugal to make it look like he was bringing him in from the cold. Arkady told him nothing that I hadn’t already passed on to him via other channels. Have you any idea how hard it was to persuade Arkady to come back to Malta to dismantle his own networks. You and I would both be dead by now if he hadn’t been forced to do that to maintain his cover!”
Rachel turned away.
Why are men so obtuse sometimes?
“Yes, that’s all very well,” the man protested indignantly. “The way I see it all he did was take out a few expendable assets he knew were already blown. What about the people we’ve got locked up downstairs? He didn’t roll up their networks?”
“They weren’t working for Rykov, you...”
Why are some men so obtuse and so stupid all the bloody time?
“What are you talking about?”
“The people we’ve got here were nothing to do with Arkady Pavlovich Rykov,” Rachel explained slowly, wondering as she spoke if she ought to be pronouncing each syllable of each word slowly and separately because from the look on the Secret Intelligence Service’s Head of Station on Malta English was obviously not his first language. “After he was forced to roll up his only network on the island he was too busy trying not to give himself away to do anybody any harm. He was trapped on Malta. Sooner or later he would have betrayed himself. When thos
e big ships started shelling the island and the paratroopers started dropping out of the sky he must have thought all his birthdays and Christmases had come at once!”
Denzil Williams was staring at her as if she was mad.
“Don’t you understand?” She asked plaintively. “Arkady Pavlovich had failed and his handlers had cut him adrift. His only surviving friend on the archipelago was Samuel Calleja, a man who didn’t even know how to remove the safety on the Makarov pistol he was holding to Admiral Christopher’s head at the time I broke into the headquarters building in Mdina!”
Chapter 54
09:50 Hours (GMT)
Sunday 5th April 1964
Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire
“You must have put something in my hot chocolate before I went to bed last night,” Margaret Thatcher remarked to her friend, Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson as the car, a newly delivered armoured Bentley slowed briefly before being waved through the heavily guarded checkpoint on the Oxford Road east of the picturesque village of Woodstock. There were few people about, it was Sunday morning after all and the leaden overcast threatened spring showers sooner rather than later. Old thatched cottages and houses swept past as the two women studiously looked out of their respective windows, left and right.
At first glance the October War had left Woodstock untouched but the roads hereabouts were empty of all but official traffic because of the chronic petrol shortages, and coal smoke lingered in the air from hearths that were the only source of heating in dwellings which could rely on only two to four hours electricity per day. In Woodstock as in most places the United Kingdom was a drab, cold place much like both women recollected it had been in the darkest days of the Second World War.
A helicopter gunship usually shadowed the Prime Ministerial convoy when Margaret Thatcher travelled by road; today, no helicopters were available. In lieu of aerial firepower the Prime Minister’s Royal Marine bodyguards – whose members proudly called themselves the AWP, the ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’ had mounted recently acquired American 50-calibre heavy machine guns on the Land Rovers topping and tailing the convoy rushing through the Oxfordshire countryside.