by Gavin Lyall
She coughed again, this time just to explain the pause, and went on. "You should see yourselves as essentially anurban Resistance movement. It follows that we are assuming there will still be cities, that the fabric of British society will still remain. If we are a nuclear wasteland, then the Russians aren't likely to be interested in taking us over. It also follows that the occupying force will work through the existing structures of that society, not try to change everything overnight. They just couldn't do it. They'll do what the Germans did in Europe: exercise control through some form of national parliament, the existing civil service, local government, the police, postal and broadcasting systems, the distributive trades and so on. And it's there, in those same channels, that you willsabotage their efforts and try and exert your own control. It's no good setting up Resistance armies in Wales-or here." She made an elegant gesture at the glimpse of moorland in one corner of the window behind her. "You'll simply be ignored. You must go to them, not wait for them to come to you. And you'll find them in the cities, in the key positions that exist today.
"There also already exists the framework you'll need for recruitment and training. I want you to take out your pens and write down all the unofficial non-statutory organisations that you have some personal connection with, or even just knowledge of. In three minutes, please, starting now."
There was a bit of old-fashioned school-marm in Miss Dorothy Tuckey. She stood beaming with confidence as they glanced at each other, puzzled, then began to write slowly, but faster and faster.
… the Regimental Sailing Club, Maxim wrote; the Littlehampton and District Model Railway Society; the Royal United Services Institute (was that statutory, though?); my mother's Thursday lunchtime club; my old school association; Camden Ratepayers' Association; the Darts Club at the Hare and Hounds; the Church of England (well, why not?); Military Book Society…
Everybody was still writing, or pausing for furious thought, when Miss Tuckey called time. She made no move to collect the papers.
"All those," she said, "are potentially subversive organisations." She rode on over their instinctive amusement. "They are all groups of people with some shared interest or commitment, and therefore a basis of mutual trust. They all have a centralised structure and some sort of a base, even if it's only a temporary or part-time one, and existing lines of communication. And don't forget the amount of further education that goes on in the civilian. world. Think of all the local authority night schools, all the summer schools run by industry and the unions, all of those are ready-made training schemes. You can't abolish them without weakening the whole structure of an industrial society, and it would be an enormous job to take them over or infiltrate them all with informers. By the way, didanybody write down the readership of Sappho or Gay News'?"
She joined in their laughter; nobody put up his hand.
"I'm glad to hear it. But quite seriously, don't dismiss homosexuals as unreliable or distasteful. Most of them have just the experience of leading secret, double lives that you lack. Moscow knows all about that. When they were recruiting among the Apostles at Cambridge before the war, they weren't blackmailing those people. They were just picking up young men who had been self-taught secret agents ever since puberty. Who already had a grudge against the existing society because it wouldn't accept them for what they were."
"What about the Church?" someone asked. "I mean any church?" Maxim was glad somebody had pre-empted that question; he was trying, because that was part of the course's teaching, to be as anonymous as possible.
"Yees," Miss Tuckey began hesitantly. "The problem is that Moscow has always taken religion very seriously -1 mean as a rival. The clergy would certainly be on the lists. But you're right in one way: any religion-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu-has a background of subversion. They were all underground at one time. And religious belief can be a great solace in loneliness; I dare say some of you know that already."
Glancing covertly around, Maxim saw a few quickly restrained nods. A Resistance war might be lonely in the long run, but on a raw battlefield loneliness could strike in the brief snap of a bullet's flight-even if you were clutching the hand of the next man along. He had done that, too.
"Did anyone write down the Family?" Miss Tuckey asked. "Don't think Moscow doesn't know about that, either. It can be the most dangerous, subversive organisation of all."
Chris? Maxim wondered. Brenda?-yes, she'd join up within months, and Chris immediately… Dear God, don't let it happen. Let the tanks and guns be enough, even the nukes, letme be enough, just don't let it come to this. He was beginning to see that a secret war would be the most total of all.
After lunch they paced the clipped grass of the ramparts overlooking the grey waters of the firth. The barracks had been built for the garrison of the fortress surrounding them, set on a low spit of land where the channel narrowed and French ships would be exposed to cannon fire as they picked their way in to supply a second Jacobite rising. Over two hundred years later the sandstone walls stood untouched by anything but Scottish winds and the incised graffiti of recruits who had gone on to die at Corunna and Waterloo, Balaclava and Lucknow, the Sommeand Alamein. This of course gave exactly the sort of romantic continuity the Army loves, so it seemed likely to keep the Fort swept, mown and whitewashed for another two hundred years, although no longer for a full garrison. It had now become a useful back room for training courses that needed more secrecy than space.
None of the nineteen was supposed to know who each other were, which obviously couldn't always work but helped establish an atmosphere. The group itself was named-Garibaldi-rather than numbered, which would have suggested how many courses had gone through before them. They all wore plain barrack dress, the only badge being a self-chosen codename, and Maxim already felt uneasy about being 'Jabberwock'. It sounded frivolous, and gave away that he'd read Alice. Three of the others had chosen Shakespearean names and he wished he'd blended with them, however much he doubted that 'Coriolanus' had actually read himself. He also wished he wasn't already sure what rank most of the others were, and to what corps or regiment they belonged. What had they learnt about him, putting his life in their hands for the KGB thumbscrew to squeeze out?
Secrecy is the condition for action; trust is the means for it, an earnest Int Corps instructor had told them on their first-night briefing. Maxim had duly pondered that, and come to the conclusion that, in the Army, it meant nothing new.
Miss Tuckey had been cornered by half a dozen of the others in the angle of one of the bastions, and Maxim drifted over. They had got her on to the topic of assassination.
"But couldn't you use it to provoke reprisals, to getpeople worked up about the occupation?" That was 'Gremlin' (also a Major, but with the bounce of recent promotion and the smug Calvinism of a Gunner).
"Oh, don't you worry"-Miss Tuckey had to use her classroom voice against the wind-"an occupying power always behaves badly enough without any prompting. If you cause more reprisals the population will probably blame you for making things worse."
"Would you say that it was never a good idea, then?" 'Heracles' asked (not quite Guards, Green Jackets maybe).
"Not never, but the circumstances have to be very special. You have to be very aware of the profit and loss." She paused and pushed her napping silk scarf down into her golfing jacket. "Have you ever heard of Philippe Henriot? He was the Vichy French Minister of Information and a broadcaster. A very prominent collaborator. The Resistance got him in Paris in early 1944. That didn't cause much trouble because he was only French, and it probably did a lot to put off other collaborators. The one that people really argue about was Heydrich; you've heard of him?"
"SS, number two to Himmler."'Gremlin' again.
"That's right. And for counter-intelligence he was a lot better than Himmler; London ordered him killed because he was tracking down our networks. That was in Czechoslovakia in 1942. After that, the SSshot about three thousand people; it was why they destroyed the village of Lidice. Now
, you can argue that Heydrich would have done as much as that himself, if he'd lived. He really was a most vile man. But if only they could have made his death seem like an accident we'd have been spared all that and still had him out of the way."
"It wouldn't be easy."
"You're right, it wouldn't. These people are always heavily guarded and their movements are kept secret. But do you see the difference between the two? Henriot had to be seen to be assassinated, as an example-but it could have been any collaborator of equal prominence. With Heydrich we had to getthat man, that cog out of the machine, but it would have been better to make it seem by chance. You do really need great awareness with assassination."
Maximsensed the discontent, almost disappointment, in those around him. Miss Tuckey was also looking round the group and grinning mischievously and he- suddenly saw why. They had come up here to learn techniques and she was trying to teach them attitudes. They wanted to know about sabotage, booby-traps and silent killing. She wanted them to learn silent living.
"Never mind," she said cheerily, "you've got this afternoon on the range, haven't you? You'll enjoy yourselves there."
And indeed they did, enthusiastically returning to tangibles with the study of those foreign weapons most likely to be available to guerillas: Russian and American. They learned, stripped, reassembled and finally fired the AK-47, AKM and M16 rifles, plus one precious example of the new AK-74, then on to the PKM and M60 machine-guns and lastly to the short range for the M3A1 submachine-gun and a clutch of pistols including the Makarov. They ended with bruised shoulders and scratched hands, greasy, soaked in the smell of gunfire and yelling through their deafness, but feeling like real soldiers again and having given away a lot about their backgrounds. Maxim spotted only one other who already knew the weapons as well as he did, but assumed he was spotted in return; although he had made deliberately bad groups with the guns he knew best, it was impossible to be wilfully stupid with a loaded weapon.
In their private mess, the Intelligence Officer had just handed out a 'Secret' folder of news the press wasn't supposed to know, or Int Corps' interpretation of things the press had got wrong. He hovered watchfully as they passed it around. The stories in Continental papers about the Archbishop of Canterbury's relationships with choirboys had been backtracked to a small Italian magazine, a known starting-point for KGB disinformation. It was, Int Corps concluded with a sniff, a crude and hasty reaction to the Archbishop's speech supporting the status quo in West Berlin: Moscow over-reacting to religion yet again.
The commander of the Soviet air division in Afghanistanhad been replaced following the shooting down of the Iranian airliner; it was now believed the airliner could have been hijacked by left-wing Iranians who were trying to escape to Russia.
A Blowpipe anti-aircraft missile, part of a batch en route to Thailand, had gone missing. Int Corps thought it was more likely to be the IRA than Moscow.
"Bang goes one of our choppers in Armagh," observed 'Bluebeard' (a Captain, probably an Engineer).
"Ifthey hit it." That was 'Gremlin' again.
"I thought it was rather accurate?" Maxim provoked innocently.
"It's as good as the training. We put our chaps through seventeen hundred simulated firings before they get to the real thing." 'Gremlin' blithely confirmed that he was a Gunner. "You start getting worried when they pinch a simulator as well."
"That's a relief." The Int Corps officer caught Maxim's eye and smiled; Maxim tried to look friendly but puzzled.
4
Maxim's sister had been quite right in claiming that the Army has secret plans should there be a nuclear attack on Britain. That is hardly surprising: the military is expected to have plans for every possibility and, naturally, such plans are kept secret. But the slant of the orders might have surprised even Brenda-or perhaps confirmed her worstconvierions.
Like most people, she had assumed that the Army is ultimately controlled by Parliament, just like the Post Office and pub opening times. It is not, not quite. Look at the Army List and you will see that the Commander in Chief is the Monarch (the same is true of the Navy and Air Force). The reasons go back to Parliaments who wanted no responsibility for an Army after they had seen what Cromwell did with his, but the fact remains three centuries later the Army's allegiance is to the Crown and the-unwritten-British constitution, and if the Army ever thought that Parliament was behaving unconstitutionally…
Of course, it won't come to that. But the point is that the Army needs no Parliamentary approval to plan for a duty that antedates even politics by several million years: survival. Any idea of 'taking over' when Parliament is radioactive rubble is largely irrelevant. The Army does not want the job of running Britain; it simply wants to survive.
For a start, there is no question of blocking the main roads out of London and other cities. There might be some point in keeping such roads open, but that is accepted as impossible. If millions of car-owners decide they will be incinerated if they stay put, then no threat of machine-gunning them will make any difference. They will block the roads for themselves, so the Army looks elsewhere for its own survival.
The embryo of that survival is the Gold List: the key personnel-almost all military and almost all men-from the Chiefs of Staff and their Secretariat, the Joint Planning Staff, Joint Intelligence Staff, Joint Admin/Logistics Staff and equivalents from each armed service. Given enough warning, the Gold List will quietly melt away from London by road, in small groups. Hardly anybody will notice: they are not public figures.
But if there is not enough advance warning, then Operation Playpen will begin. Playpen is (or will be) an area of roughly one and a half square miles in central London. It is bounded on the east and south by the river, and completed by a line running along the King's Road, Grosvenor Place and The Mall, the main bastions of its perimeter being Chelsea Hospital, Buckingham Palace and the Old Admiralty and War Office buildings at the top of Whitehall. Londoners are accustomed to a military presence, usually ceremonial, but seldom stop to think just how concentrated that presence is. Playpen encompasses the Chelsea, Duke of York's and Wellington barracks, with the Hyde Park Household Cavalry barracks just a few hundred metres outside the perimeter; in all, purpose-built accommodation for nearly four thousand troops and much of their equipment, and that ignores the military hospitals and several smaller Army establishments inside the ring.
However, the Playpen planners do not count on four thousand troops or anything like that number. The whole point of the operation is that it can be run by the minimum: Playforce, comprising just one infantry battalion and a few special units, or less than a thousand men in total. More would be wasteful of time, and probably the men themselves. In fact, the boundaries of Playpen might well be the same even if it included no barracks at all; it's just nice that it works out that way. For what really matters is that Playpen holds three easily defended helicopter Pickup Zones: Everest, Peacock and Famish.
'Easily defended' is the key when deploying a small force. The open stretches of Hyde Park would be easier for the helicopters themselves, but in the Worst Possible Case-which is what Playpen is all about-it could be rushed not only by panic-stricken mobs but interdicted by firefrom sabotage groups. Those also have to be allowed for. So the three chosen PZs all have existing defences.
Everest is the garden of Buckingham Palace, surrounded by walls and Palace buildings. Peacock is Horse Guards Parade, protected on three sides by government offices and the fourth, St James's Park, easily swept by covering fire. The grounds of the old soldiers' home at Chelsea Hospital, Famish, also have only one open side: the road and the river immediately beyond, again easily covered by defensive fire. There is a fourth, back-up Zone codenamed Tallyman: the playing fields of Westminster School in Vincent Square. But although there are two Army establishments within a hundred yards or so, the grass rectangle is only protected by a wire mesh fence and surrounded by exclusively civilian buildings. (Unless you count the Rochester Row police station, whi
ch the Army doesn't. Brenda had also been right in saying that the police had secret orders as well, but the Army politely refuses to plan on the assumption that the police can adapt to a war footing in a matter of minutes. Playpen simply ignores the existence of the police.)
The Operation is a three-stage one. When the armed services go on Alert, Playforceis automatically brought to four hours' readiness (four hours is officially the Army's maximum readiness state; in practice, Playforceis expected to be ready to move at half an hour's warning). Simultaneously, all helicopters belonging to the RAF at Odiham, the Queen's Flight at Benson, the Army Air Corps at Middle Wallop and the experimental squadron at Boscombe Down-all within sixty miles of London-will be grounded. Their fuel will be topped up, all loads and extraneous equipment (one of those phrases the planners love because it sounds so precise) slung out, and no maintenance work done except to make unserviceable machines flyable. There might then be fifty helicopters available, or as few as twenty-five: it depends on whether the emergency has built slowly enough for the formed squadrons to leave for their war stations in Germany. The Lists allow for this: some people are on Standby for survival.
If the second stage is ordered-it never has been, yet -the helicopters will take off and stage into RAF Northolt, just eleven miles from Whitehall. It is acknowledged that this, mo vewill be a 'public' one, so there will no longer be any point in keeping Playforceoff the streets. However, most troops will not actually dismount from their trucks except for the PZ control and fire support units, who are supposed to behave 'unobtrusively' or as unobtrusively as men in combat dress setting up machine-guns in top windows can behave.