The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

  Previously, whoever was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had remained the Chief of Staff of his own service; but Jack Kennedy did not want a ‘chairman’, he wanted a fully fledged ‘commander’ capable of, and authorised to, issue orders to the other chiefs of staff and had promulgated an Executive Order to this effect a week ago. Congress would do its best to shoot this arrangement down in flames but for the moment, the President was confident he had re-established a chain of command that actually worked. Today was John McConnell’s first full day in his new post as the professional head of the US Air Force.

  Jack Kennedy shook the airman’s hand.

  “Welcome to the majors, General McConnell.”

  John McConnell’s high brow furrowed for an instant.

  “I serve at my President’s pleasure, sir.”

  Chapter 3

  Monday 10th February 1964

  French Creek, Grand Harbour, Malta

  If Marija Elizabeth Calleja had still to make up her mind whether being the prospective daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in the Mediterranean was an entirely good thing; she was entirely confident that her blurted acceptance – five days ago - of the great man’s son’s proposal of marriage was a very, very good thing. The fact that by all accounts Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, the twenty-seven year old son of Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations – those that had survived the travails of the last few weeks, anyway – had done his level best to get himself killed in the handful of days since she had finally met him, face to face, for the first and only time in their fourteen year courtship, had not diminished her conviction that Peter was the best thing that had ever happened to her by one single iota. In retrospect the strangest thing was that she had not actually realised she was head over heels in love with him until the October War.

  Earlier that morning she and Surgeon Commander Margo Seiffert, United States Navy Reserve (Retired) had stood anonymously in the crowd in the Upper Baraka Gardens overlooking the old saluting battery as the USS Enterprise had nosed slowly into the Grand Harbour. Margo had squeezed Marija’s hand and tried to suppress a gasp of horror as the huge ship passed beneath their elevated vantage point. The drifting smoke of the saluting guns could not hide the giant aircraft carrier’s wounds; everything aft of her modernistic box like bridge superstructure was scorched and warped by the massive fires and explosions which had consumed the thirty aircraft and helicopters which had been parked on her deck at the moment the giant searing thermonuclear airburst had reached out to flail at the great ship.

  The two women had leaned close one to the other.

  Later they had watched the first of scores of terribly injured men loaded into lighters for the journey across the Grand Harbour to the hurriedly readied burns wards at the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi. Several hundred terribly burned wounded were expected, survivors from the USS Long Beach and the USS Enterprise. In the three days since the strike the big carrier’s forward hangar deck had been transformed into a huge hospital but still, they said, several men died every hour from their nightmarish burns. Margo Seiffert had volunteered the services of her nursing auxiliaries to the Medical Director of RNH Bighi but had been politely rebuffed. Specialist doctors and nurses trained in the treatment and care of burns victims had begun to fly into RAF Luqa yesterday morning; no cost was being spared by the US Navy to ensure that its men got the best possible specialist treatment. Margo would have pressed the issue but none of her ‘auxiliaries’ were trained to nurse men with fifty percent or worse burns. The small boats continued to carry the desperately wounded and the dying across to Bighi all that morning and into the afternoon.

  Everybody was saying that if HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera had not immediately come to the leviathan’s assistance to train their fire hoses directly into the infernos raging in the USS Enterprise’s stern, that the carrier would have had to have been abandoned, doubling or tripling the loss of life. The Scorpion and the Talavera, later assisted by HMS Broadsword had steamed so close under the overhanging flight deck that they had collided, time and again with the red hot steel flanks of the massive ship while, above them fully armed and fuelled jet interceptors and helicopters burned, exploded and showered the destroyers’ relatively fragile superstructures and hulls with a rain of flaming debris. The four surviving ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had been unable to do anything for the Enterprise’s consort, the nuclear-power anti-aircraft cruiser the USS Long Beach, other than to take off as many of her survivors as possible before the wintery chop of the iron grey Mediterranean seas had consumed her shattered, fire-ravaged hulk. The Long Beach and the missing HMS Aisne had been almost directly beneath the airburst; the yield of which Admiral Christopher’s experts now speculated must have been in the one to two megaton range. The Aisne was gone, lost without a trace with her two hundred and seven man crew. Between them HMS Broadsword, and Talavera’s sister ship, HMS Oudenarde had lifted nearly three hundred survivors off the Long Beach and out of the sea before she sank.

  Tragically, although over eight hundred men had perished on the American guided missile cruiser and nobody yet knew how many hundreds more on the Enterprise but oddly, today was a day of celebration. The salvo of nuclear weapons thrown at the Maltese Archipelago had detonated – or in the case of the ICBM which had plunged into the three mile channel between the main island and the islet of Filfla off the south coast, fortuitously not detonated at all - so far from the islands that not a single person had so much as been scratched on land; and somehow, against all the odds, the battered ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had helped to put out the Enterprise’s fires and successfully escorted the mighty ship into the safety of the Grand Harbour.

  All things considered Marija had decided to forgive Peter Christopher his recklessness. This time, anyway.

  The Commander-in-Chief – her courageous fiancé’s father - had briefly separated himself from his entourage of bodyguards and staff officers to seek out the two women.

  ‘I must detour to the new Communications Centre to take an urgent call from England,’ he had apologised. The Signals Corps had taken over an annexe to a bomb damaged former Grand Master’s Palace in the heart of Valletta and set up a small, state of the art, secure telecommunications facility with equipment flown out from England in the last forty-eight hours. Until yesterday all ‘secure’ traffic had had to pass through the antiquated emergency command centre in the Citadel at Mdina. ‘I have arranged for transport and the necessary clearances to enable you both to have a ringside seat in French Creek. HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera will tie up alongside Parlatorio Wharf. Broadsword and Oudenarde don’t seem to be so badly knocked about so they will anchor in Sliema Creek pending engineering reports on their condition. I hope to rejoin you by the time Scorpion and Talavera are tying up alongside.’

  Neither of the women had expected to be chauffeured, much in the custom of visiting movie stars or VIPs, directly onto the quayside just in time to watch the smoke billowing again from the saluting battery below the Upper Baraka Gardens – now on the opposite side of the Grand Harbour - as the first of the two fire blackened destroyers nosed under the ramparts of Valletta and swung their sharp prows into the broad entrance to French Creek. Both ships looked a little strange quite apart from their discoloured, grubby appearance. Both were listing; Scorpion to starboard by perhaps two or three degrees, Talavera to port by about the same angle. But it was more than that; their lattice foremasts were bent out of true and Talavera’s four-ton double bedstead Type 965 aerials were drunkenly leaning aft. Both ships were pumping frothing white water over their fo’c’sles from multiple hoses. Marija also noted that both ships were making more smoke than was customary; this latter spoke to sloppy engine room drills or more likely, major structural damage not visible to the naked eye. However, while all these things caught Marija’s practiced eye – she was after all a daughter of the Naval Do
ckyards, had grown up in a family that talked of nothing but the Royal Navy and its ships at meal times, and had watched a thousand grey warships come and go from the anchorages of the Maltese Archipelago in her young life – nothing took her breath away so much as the big, embroidered battle flags streaming from each destroyer’s main mast halyards. Her father was fond of reminding anybody with ears and the inclination and patience to listen that ‘when push comes to shove the Royal Navy doesn’t care about ships, all it cares about is its traditions’. Until she had laid eyes on those magnificent battle flags she had never really understood what he was talking about. Now, in a flash of revelation, she understood. And in that moment she understood also why she would never, ever ask the man she loved to ‘be careful’. In the last three months over half the Mediterranean Fleet had been sunk or put out of action; in the bigger picture it meant nothing. More ships would be sent to Malta, the war would go on. Nobody seeing those flags streaming proudly in the unseasonal gusting wind from the main masts of the two badly damaged British destroyers could doubt it.

  Marija shivered involuntarily and mistaking this for trepidation Margo Seiffert put her arm around her younger friend’s shoulders. The older woman was a little surprised when she found herself studying the broadening smile on her protégé’s face.

  “What?” She asked before she could stop herself. Margo had been married once but never wanted children at the time. Fate had decreed that she had eventually met the love of her life many years too late for all of that child-bearing nonsense and looking back she would have changed nothing. In her sixty-third year she was a hyper-active small, wiry woman with piercing dull blue eyes and short straw grey hair whose look could sometimes be amply sufficient to turn a strong man’s knees to jelly. She had always enjoyed a very special relationship with Marija. Marija had been her child patient, later she had mentored and overseen her blossoming into the woman she was now. Marija had become her best friend on Earth; the nearest thing to the daughter she had never had. “I know that look!”

  “Peter does not believe in God,” Marija said, smiling seraphically before sobering a little. She went on: “But that doesn’t matter. I have enough faith for both of us.”

  Margo Seiffert pursed her lips, held her peace.

  Peter Christopher could have been killed half-a-dozen times in the last three months. Over fifty percent of the men who’d sailed with HMS Talavera from Portsmouth in November were dead, missing or in hospital. Less than a fortnight ago his captain had had a foot blown off by a solid shot fired by an anti-tank gun off Lampedusa; Peter had assumed command and conned the unarmoured destroyer even closer inshore to assist HMS Puma – hit in the engine room and drifting onto the rocks – and since then he had once again fearlessly steered his command into harm’s way to save the most powerful warship in the World, and in so doing probably re-cemented the ‘special relationship’ between his country and the USA. The boy was a positive combat magnet!

  The women watched the two destroyers limp deep into the Grand Harbour, slowing to a halt while big Admiralty tugs churned into position to nudge and prod the warships into French Creek. Normally, any self-respecting destroyer captain would steam confidently towards the quayside; wait until the last possible moment when a disastrous collision with the dock seemed inevitable before reversing his screws so as to glide to an imperceptible, kissing contact with the landward fenders. However, anybody with eyes in their heads could see that neither captain believed his ship was capable of such smart manoeuvring in their presently somewhat down at heel state.

  The crowd parted nearby and the Commander-in-Chief strode onto the scene. It was not lost on Marija that her prospective father-in-law was wearing the sort of smile that, at this minute, implied he felt himself perfectly capable of walking on water.

  “The Malta Defence Force is to be constituted as a permanent unit of the Commonwealth garrison of the Maltese Archipelago,” he announced to the two women in a voice designed not to carry beyond their hearing.

  Previously, the MDF had been a hotchpotch of local volunteers, organised along the lines of the British Home Guard in the 1945 war. It had been something of a standing joke and regarded by regular British forces with affectionate contempt.

  “The reconstituted MDF will have a Maltese commanding officer with the rank of major-general, its own land, sea and air branches, and,” Julian Christopher grinned, “its own Medical Directorate which, as with the other arms of the new service will have to be built from the ground up. The post of Senior Medical Officer will be graded at Commander-level initially.” He looked meaningfully at Margo.

  “I’m not even Maltese,” she objected, flushing with unfamiliar embarrassment.

  “Actually, you are,” retorted the tall, handsome man resplendent in his freshly pressed uniform and transparent good humour. “You have lived continuously in these islands for over ten years. Coincidentally, that’s the official definition of who is, and who is not, a citizen of the archipelago for the purposes of membership of the MDF.”

  “Since when, Julian?”

  “About thirty minutes ago.”

  Margo Seiffert frowned. “I’ll think about it.”

  Julian Christopher shook his head and chuckled beneath his breath. Marija could have sworn he winked conspiratorially in her direction but on reflection, she might have imagined it. The Commander-in-Chief, the two women, and the hundreds of people who had gathered on or around Parlatorio Wharf, on the quayside and atop the ramparts of Senglea on the other side of French Creek waited patiently, expectantly as the two destroyers held station while the tugs manoeuvred.

  In the background the USS Enterprise had temporarily moored opposite the neck of the French Creek beneath the Floriana bastions, with a fleet of small boats latched onto her like limpets. Helicopters from RAF Hal Far and Luqa had begun to shuttle to and from her relatively undamaged forward flight deck offloading the unburned wounded and delivering supplies. That evening the carrier would be warped and nudged in shore to the old steamship anchorage currently occupied by the twenty-two thousand ton Cunard liner the RMS Sylvania. Beyond the Enterprise, already moored beyond the old passenger quay, the P and O liner Canberra, drab in her grey and khaki camouflage had docked overnight. The Sylvania had been in transit to Malta from Gibraltar at the time of the nuclear strikes and the C-in-C had thought long and hard before ordering her into the Grand Harbour to unload her desperately needed cargo of over two hundred skilled dockyard workers, defence industry communications specialists, radar men and electricians, their families and the four companies of fully equipped infantrymen of the Warwickshire Regiment that the liner had brought out from Southampton. The Canberra had been destined to join the Victorious Battle Group acting as a hospital ship and troopship for the evacuated garrison of Cyprus. When the Victorious had been crippled by a nuclear strike on one of her escorts and forced to withdraw to Alexandria for emergency repairs, the mission to Cyprus had been abandoned and the Canberra diverted back to Malta.

  “I think Peter would have had the easier time of it,” Marija observed, interrupting the great man’s chain of thought.

  “Oh, how so?”

  “Well, I know that removing the steam feed to the lower half of the reversing turbines of the Weapon class ships solved the problem of major machine room breakdowns,” Marija explained, her face a picture of concentration as she watched HMS Scorpion drifting towards contact with the quayside fenders, “but having to manuever so close to such a big ship, almost in the USS Enterprise’s prop wash, HMS Scorpion must have been very nearly uncontrollable with only half her designed reversing power?”

  Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s mouth momentarily hung open in astonishment. He looked at the slip of a girl his son was determined to marry and gulped once, twice like a fish out of water before he collected his wits.

  “HMS Talavera is a slightly bigger ship without partially disabled reversing turbines,” Marija continued, squinting at HMS Scorpion’s dented and slightly askew
bow, missing starboard anchor, and her torn up fo’c’sle rails. In comparison the Talavera’s damage – ignoring the unsightly charred gouge all down her starboard bridge plating to the level of the main deck through which keen observers could see the destroyer’s helmsman at the wheel - seemed relatively superficial. “Peter would have had a much easier time of it. Don’t you think, Admiral?”

  Julian Christopher found himself exchanging looks with Margo Seiffert who was struggling, and failing, to conceal her huge amusement at his discomfort.

  It was a funny old World.

  An hour ago he had been in discussion with the Prime Minister intent on clarifying the circumstances under which he was authorised to task Arc Light nuclear strike missions by the five V-Bombers based at RAF Luqa. Margaret Thatcher had sounded unusually worried and very tired at the other end of the secure voice link to her new office in Oxford, the location of the soon to be reconvened Houses of Parliament. The Cabinet Office was in the process of moving to premises at King’s College, while Christ Church would accommodate the House of Commons. It seemed extraordinary to him, as a military man, that Margaret Thatcher remained so implacably, unreasonably committed to the restoration of ‘politics as normal’ in the old country just three days after Red Dawn had launched what amounted to a thermonuclear first strike – involving the use of as many as a dozen warheads, including several city-killing yield weapons - across his theatre of operations, and specifically, against his forces in the Mediterranean. He had had to remind himself that practically everything about Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the thirty-eight year old blond bombshell, Boadicea-like leader who had emerged seemingly from nowhere to galvanise a broken and dispirited people, was utterly extraordinary.