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

by James Philip

  McCormick contemplated his options.

  “Think of this as a grouse shoot, boys,” he suggested. “I need you two to be my beaters. I need you to kick the bushes and flush me some nice fat helpless birds into the air so that I can ‘bag them’.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “Unless either of you boys has got a Centurion tank in your pocket there’s no way the three of us can shoot our way into the Cheltenham DEZ. As for Brize Norton,” he shrugged, “if we try to do it the other way round we all end up dead; three dead men lying on the ground with three unfired Redeyes with British squaddies smoking Woodbines and laughing amongst themselves. Do it my way and you boys might get home to Dublin to tell the tale of how you tweaked John Bull’s nose.”

  “What about you, friend,” Sean O’Flynn growled.

  “How do you mean?”

  “After this? What about you?”

  Seamus McCormick looked the IRA assassin in the eye.

  “Whatever happens, there is no after for me.”

  Chapter 58

  11:05 Hours

  Sunday 5th April 1964

  Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, Kalkara, Malta

  Joe Calleja had not really been awake when the ward orderlies had got him out of bed, cleaned him up and started to dress him in a somewhat over-sized civilian suit. He had never owned, nor foreseen the need to own, such a suit. True, he owned a comfortable old jacket – with patched elbows – and a tie that he sometimes wore to church to placate his Mama, but a suit? No, never. Nowhere in Das Kapital did it say that a good Marxist had to own, or in fact, had any right to own a suit. Admiralty Dockyard lackeys and British oppressors wore suits. Not good honest Communist dockyard electricians like Joseph Calleja!

  A wheel chair – a rickety, squealing contraption – had been rolled, clanking and jolting into the ward.

  “I can walk!” Joe had protested.

  Actually, he very nearly fainted in attempting to stand up.

  The men in the other beds had waved and cheered, not in any way derisively he had realised, as he was slowly, hurtfully pushed out into the corridor.

  “Where are you talking me?” He asked belatedly.

  “You’re going off to the Verdala Palace with the other Talaveras,” he was informed in a weary, matter of fact way.

  With the other Talaveras.

  “Oh.” Most of the times men had come to cart him off somewhere new in the last eighteen months it had been to arrest him so the prospect of visiting the seat of British Imperial power on the archipelago in the company of men with whom he had just fought a huge battle was, well, different and gave him considerable pause for thought. So much so that he said not another word until Petty Officer Jack Griffin, decked out in what looked like a brand new blue Dress No 4 uniform still stinking of mothballs swam into his field of vision.

  “Look what we’ve got here, lads!” The red-headed, piratically bearded and scarred Navy man guffawed loudly.

  Joe winced as men surrounded his wheelchair, each and every one of them intent on patting and slapping his back and shoulders and ruffling his hair.

  “Good on you, mate!”

  “You had us worried...”

  “You don’t look half as bad as they said?”

  “The drinks are on you the next time we end up in Sammy’s Bar!”

  Sammy’s Bar was a notorious Navy watering hole off Pieta Creek at the eastern end of Marsamxett Anchorage. It was a Navy bar – its real name was ‘The Old Bar’ but the Royal Navy had renamed it years ago - renowned for purveying various beverages of dubious provenances and sweet white that had very little in common with the output of any other vintage produced in pre-war Europe. Sammy’s Bar was the sort of place a Maltese civilian like Joe Calleja would normally give as wide a berth as possible...

  “Sammy’s Bar!” The men around him chorused. “Sammy’s Bar!”

  The circle of faces parted and the painful back slapping ceased.

  “Give the civilian room to breathe, lads!” Chief Petty Officer Spider McCann ordered. He bent low and squinted thoughtfully at the battered dockyard electrician. Presently, he was joined by Lieutenant Alan Hannay in his earnest scrutiny of the injured man.

  “Mrs Calleja will accompany us, Mr McCann,” the young officer declared. “But Joe will need somebody to keep an eye on him.”

  Joe Calleja was fascinated by the fleeting suggestion of an unspoken question in Spider McCann’s eyes and his momentary delay in acknowledging the suggestion.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Hello, Joe,” Rosa Calleja said uncomfortably.

  The man in the wheelchair blinked at his sister-in-law. She seemed somehow changed, as if a cloud had lifted off her shoulders. Her short hair was brushed back off her face and held in check with a blue band, she had applied some kind of subtle rouge to her cheeks and she seemed alive.

  “We are all to go to the Verdala Palace in a bus they are sending,” she explained. “It will be a bumpy ride,” she apologised. “I will try to get hold of some more aspirins and the boys are looking for pillows and cushions to make you comfortable.”

  She patted his undamaged left arm gently and departed.

  Jack Griffin leaned over Joe.

  “They were going to leave you behind!” He complained, clearly horrified by the idea. “But then Mr Hannay called up HQ and everything was sorted!”

  “Oh, I see.” Or rather he did not.

  “Fuck it!” Jack Griffin growled. “You were the one who actually sank those two big fuckers. Not those fucking come lately fucking Yanks!”

  Chapter 59

  10:15 Hours (GMT)

  Sunday 5th April 1964

  Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire

  Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith had been flanked by her two children, fifteen year old Prince Charles, and thirteen year old Princess Anne in the reception hall as Margaret Thatcher and her own small entourage had been graciously escorted into Blenheim Palace.

  It was some minutes later after much bowing and scraping and the mutual introductions of their respective offspring that Monarch and Prime Minister removed themselves to the library where, across a low ornate table bearing a tea service the two women had settled in Queen Anne chairs.

  “I shall be mother,” the Queen announced.

  It had become the custom in recent months for the Prime Minister to be accompanied at audiences with her sovereign by a representative of her Labour Party coalition partners in government. The arrangement was one which recognised that within the current constitutional and parliamentary accommodation put in place after the October War, that there was an inherent ‘democratic deficit’ and it was vital not to place the Queen, the one inviolable and inalienable surviving symbol of national unity in a position where she seemed to be in any way partisan. Today, this was not an issue because the Queen had specifically summoned as was Her right, Her Prime Minister for a private audience.

  Presently the two women, both younger than any of their senior ministers, both bereaved and torn with fears for their children and loved ones, viewed each other over the rims of their tea cups.

  “I know that you and Admiral Sir Julian Christopher were very close,” the Queen said sadly. “These must be awful times for you?”

  Margaret Thatcher did not trust herself to speak.

  She nodded mutely.

  The Queen’s three year old son Prince Andrew had been killed in the regicidal attack on Balmoral four months ago and her husband and consort Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh had suffered injuries so severe that he was still as yet insufficiently recovered to make the journey south to join his family at Blenheim.

  The two women had established a rapport in the aftermath of the attack on Balmoral, jointly setting up and managing an emergency casualty clearing station in the ruins of the castle. Since then they had unflinchingly faced one crisis after another in the
sure and certain knowledge that this was their lot, the burden that they must both carry, together.

  The Queen was the younger of the two by six months, not yet thirty-eight for another three weeks or so; and she never allowed herself to forget the crushing weight of responsibility that pressed down upon her Prime Minister’s eminently capable, but nonetheless fragile shoulders.

  “Sir Julian and I were to be married,” Margaret Thatcher said, relieved to be able to say it without fear of anybody overhearing or interpreting her grief for weakness. “I confess that I have not been myself since I heard of his death, Ma’am.”

  “That is entirely understandable.”

  There would be no crocodile tears in this room today. It was enough that the two women understood and empathised one with the other. Neither paused to contemplate the strangeness of how it had come to be that a grocer’s daughter from Grantham had become the primus inter pares – first among equals – in Queen Elizabeth II’s realm.

  “I am quite recovered now, Ma’am.”

  The Queen did not believe this and her silence communicated it.

  “Recovered,” Margaret Thatcher qualified, “but not reconciled. I had hoped, all of us in government had hoped, that we could see some kind of end in sight. With American help I saw a day when not only Cyprus would be back in our hands, perhaps Crete also, and that we might effectively have penned the evil of Red Dawn behind defensible barriers for the foreseeable future. But recent events, if they have shown us anything at all have shown how little we know about our enemies.”

  “How goes the campaign in Cyprus?”

  “We have taken casualties at sea, in the air and on land overnight, Ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher admitted. “However, the Chiefs of Staff are confident that the whole island will be in our hands within the next seventy-two hours. Inevitably, there will be a great deal of mopping up to do over the course of the coming weeks but Operation Grantham is broadly speaking, proceeding according to schedule.”

  The Queen nodded, sipped her tea.

  “What of the reports from Iran?”

  Her Prime Minister’s face hardened.

  “Our listening stations have intercepted a large volume of short wave radio traffic. In Farsi and English but also in Russian from the area of the Iranian-Azerbaijani border with the former Soviet Union, and from within and around Tehran, Ma’am.”

  The Queen raised a patient eyebrow.

  “The situation is very confused,” Margaret Thatcher continued. “However, it is clear that what we initially interpreted as a popular uprising, or a full scale coup d’état aimed at toppling the Shah’s government,” she hesitated, the words tasting dangerously bitter in her mouth, “is no such thing. Large numbers of men dressed in former Soviet uniforms and armed with former Soviet weaponry briefly took control of the city. Our own embassy and that of the United States and the embassies of several other countries were attacked, our diplomats murdered and our compounds ransacked. We believe that the Shah of Iran was residing at the Sa’dabad palace to the north of the capital at the outset of the attack. That Palace was over-run by the ‘invaders’ and there has been no word of the Shah’s personal fate. The latest news to hand is that Iranian Army units have entered the city and have driven the ‘invaders’ into the western suburbs around the Mehrabad Air Base, Ma’am.”

  The Monarch’s brow was somewhat furrowed.

  “Forgive me, you have employed the term ‘former’ in the context of troops behaving and dressed as ‘Soviet’ troops?”

  “Yes,” the other woman agreed. “The distinction is one that is still being made by our intelligence analysts. However, given what happened at Malta and various other indications, I personally think that we have reached the point at which such distinctions are somewhat academic.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Margaret Thatcher took a deep breath.

  “I believe we may have been making our plans under a completely false premise,” she said grimly. “Further, I believe that Red Dawn, an organisation which we have previously classified as a terroristic, stay behind organ of the largely destroyed pre-war Soviet state, may be no more or less than the outrider of the surviving elements of KGB and the military machine of the USSR. I further believe, or more correctly fear, that recent events lead to the conclusion that significant, coherent elements of the ‘former’ USSR survived the war and that potentially, this is the spectre that now confronts us in the Eastern Mediterranean and, conceivably will threaten our vital strategic interests elsewhere in the World.”

  “Where does the news from Iran fit into this revised ‘threat picture’?”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret Thatcher conceded. “Tom Harding-Grayson has a doomsday scenario in which unstoppable Soviet tank armies crash through the mountains of Northern Iran down into the floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, and subsequently drive south to the Persian Gulf seizing the Kirkuk oilfields, Basra and eventually Abadan Island. Frankly, that all still sounds a little far-fetched to me, Ma’am.” Margaret Thatcher shrugged. “I hope it is far-fetched. With the Suez Canal still being blocked at Ismailia there would not be an awful lot we could do about it,” she shrugged again, “if it came to it.”

  “Presumably, all reinforcements to the Persian Gulf would have to go around the Cape of Good Hope? Or all the way across the Pacific from the West Coast of America?” The Queen inquired. “That would take months, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Always assuming we actually had the ‘reinforcements’ and the necessary war-fighting materiel to hand in the first place. As you will know well over half the Army’s tanks and armoured vehicles were based in West Germany at the time of the October War and the factories which produced those vehicles were mothballed last year because of the chronic post-war shortages of high-grade steels and the hundred and one other things that are required to build sophisticated modern fighting vehicles. Priority was given to warship construction and maintenance and in keeping our surviving aircraft flying, Ma’am.”

  “Quite.” The Queen tried not to sound overly worried. “My word, the thought of having Russian tanks parking on the beaches of the northern Persian Gulf ready to drive into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is hardly an appealing prospect?”

  “No, ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher concurred, “it is most certainly not!”

  Chapter 60

  12:30 Hours

  Sunday 5th April 1964

  Joint Interrogation Centre, Fort Rinella, Malta

  “My name is Rachel Angelika Piotrowska,” she explained unhurriedly. “You and your case officer, Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, knew me as a fading English courtesan called Clara Pullman. As it happens I was born in Lodz, in Poland in 1928, and I was just old enough to be able to kill Fascists when the war came. In 1945 the Red Army liberated Ravensbrück, where the Nazis had left me to starve to death. Despite everything I had been through I was still an innocent in some ways at the time. But then I was raped by one Red Army pig, then another, and more than once by several of the pigs at once. That was when I started ‘putting down’ Soviet ‘animals’. Like you.”

  Samuel Calleja stood before her desk in the hastily set up office in one of the upper caverns of the old fortress. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was swaying, exhausted, on his feet. He was naked apart from his stinking, soiled skivvies. Two redcaps flanked him, both hefting long night sticks.

  Rachel met the man’s sullen stare with coldly unblinking eyes.

  “You will tell me about your disappearing act around the time HMS Torquay was blown up?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “No, you don’t,” she agreed.

  Samuel Calleja tried to stand up straight.

  “I don’t care what you do to me,” he spat.

  Rachel shrugged. She nodded to the Redcap standing menacingly behind the prisoner’s left shoulder. It was a pre-arranged sign; while Samuel Calleja squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the first impa
ct of a night stick across his naked back the Redcap stepped back and picked up a blanket from the floor which he shook out and draped around the shivering man’s shoulders.

  “I’m not going to do anything to you, Samuel.” Rachel declared, assessing the confusion in the prisoner’s eyes as she quirked an unfunny smile. “I am not a monster like Arkady Pavlovich.”

  “Then what are we doing here?”

  “We’re having a nice friendly chat and once you’ve told me what I want to know you’ll feel a lot better about things.”

  “You’re mad!”

  “Yes, a little bit. But I’m tired of hurting people. So perhaps I’m not quite as crazy as I was a few days ago.”

  The man was too weary to think clearly. He had never been trained to resist interrogation; even when he had led an assassination squad to murder the post-war Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet – and incidentally, his wife who was unfortunate enough to be in the car with him at the time – he had not actually fired a shot. The killers had been Moscow-trained thugs, Arkady’s people. His job was to make it possible for Arkady’s people to merge into the background of Maltese society, to provide places to hide their weapons and explosives, to be the guardian of their radio, a courier and postman. He had never fired a gun in anger or personally harmed a hair on anybody’s head. Moreover, he had no idea if the sabotaging of British communications and radar across the archipelago was Arkady’s doing; or even why the Russian had spared him after he had butchered all his friends...

  “Did you plant the bombs that sank HMS Torquay, Sam?”

  Samuel Calleja shook his head before he knew he had reacted.

  “Okay,” Rachel half-smiled. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

  Again, the man shook his head involuntarily, before his conscious mind had had a chance to catch up with his body’s instinctive response.

  “If it wasn’t you, who was it who planted the bombs?”

  “I don’t know. I was already hiding in the safe house at Qormi by then. I was to send daily reports about V-Bomber movements, and...”