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

by James Philip

  Nobody at the Calleja family gathering had mentioned the name of Marija’s older brother, Samuel. Samuel had not just disappeared, his corporeal remains and memory had been surgically excised, as if, irrespective of the story which had been so expertly sold to the public at large, his own family knew in its collective heart that Samuel Calleja had never been quite what he seemed to be and that now, every tiny doubt harboured down the years suddenly assumed an outrageous new significance.

  Outside the apartment Marija had taken Peter’s hand, they had crossed the road and slowly walked up a very slightly rising street, an avenue between wall to wall two and three storey buildings until presently, they arrived in front of the bomb-damaged Cambridge Barracks Headquarters building. Marija guided him along another narrow street, and then down the steep hill towards the waterfront.

  “Joe and I came down here on the night of the war,” she explained when they stopped at the sea wall. The ships in Sliema Creek; HMS Broadsword, HMS Dunkirk, newly arrived from Gibraltar, and HMS Oudenarde were showing faint, hooded bow and stern lights, but were otherwise darkened despite the bright street lights along The Strand from the Cambridge Barracks to the bridge between Sliema and Lazaretto Creeks that joined the main island to Manoel Island upon which so many men and women had died when the 100th Bomb Group’s bombs had obliterated the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief on Malta. “That night was the first time I met Jim Siddall.”

  Peter Christopher was silent. Alan Hannay had told him the story of how it had been the big Red Cap – Royal Military Policeman – who had rescued Joe Calleja from the hands of what his father now believed to be an illegal and in any event never officially sanctioned, CIA-sponsored interrogation camp at the Empire Stadium in nearby Gzira. Anybody suspected to be working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and most Americans, had been thrown off the archipelago soon afterwards; being replaced by British ‘Internal Security Department’ thugs who had subsequently been responsible for filling the numerous detention ‘depots’ with suspected ‘troublemakers, left-wing agitators, and apologists for terrorists’. Although his father had emptied the detention camps within days of his arrival on the Maltese Archipelago, habeas corpus had only been reinstated – albeit hedged around with ‘security’ caveats – in early January.

  “Jim was a good friend to me,” Marija said, staring dreamily across the darkness of Marsamxett at the curtain walls and ramparts of Valletta. “If anything had happened to you I might have married him even though I don’t think I could have loved him. Not the way I love you, anyway.”

  “If you had married him I would have understood,” Peter muttered, squeezing Marija’s hand. She leaned against him, her head resting on his right shoulder.

  Suddenly she giggled.

  “What?” The man asked, not knowing what to make of it, and gently curious.

  “Men,” she sighed fondly.

  “I mean it,” he went on. “If anything ever happens to me I’d hate to think you’d wrap yourself in mourning forever.”

  “How long should I ‘wrap myself in mourning’?”

  Peter chuckled, knowing she was teasing him.

  “I like your family,” he told her.

  “Good.” She gently tugged his hand and they began to walk, very slowly towards the ferry quay. “I never once tried to run for Jim,” she reassured the man, mischievously seraphic. “Not once.”

  They walked on.

  “All this is still a bit of dream for me,” he confessed.

  He and Marija were living in an armed camp.

  That morning he had watched the low black hull of Britain’s only nuclear-powered hunter killer submarine ease into a dry dock deep within French Creek over which secretive awnings had been draped ahead of the deadly vessel’s arrival. Taking a whaler back to the RMS Sylvania to dress for the evening he had counted four long grey US Navy anti-aircraft and anti-submarine destroyers moored in Kalkara Bay and another tied up fore and aft at the emergency buoys in the middle of the Grand Harbour. One of the Big Cats, HMS Lion was moored alongside Parlatorio Wharf with the new frigate, HMS Leander tied outboard of the big cruiser. Just inside the northern Grand Harbour breakwater HMS Sheffield, the crippled veteran of the chase for the Bismarck in May 1941, was anchored as floating gun battery, and nearby was HMS Hermes, resplendent in a new coat of battleship grey paint with a squadron of Sea Vixens parked on her flight deck. Another carrier, HMS Ocean was absent, apparently transporting reinforcements to the garrisons on Pantelleria and Lampedusa, in company with a mixed bag of half-a-dozen escorting destroyers and frigates. HMS Talavera and HMS Scorpion were side by side in dry dock; and the race was on to complete their underwater repairs as fast as possible to free up the dock for the next ‘cab on the rank’, possibly HMS Victorious if she managed to get back to Malta under her own steam. There was new talk of offloading HMS Sheffield’s wrecked ‘C’ turret, welding and riveting her stern back together and restoring her to active service. The Fleet was aching to finish unfinished business on Cyprus.

  “I joined the Royal Navy to play with electronic gizmos and to travel to exotic places. It never occurred to me that any of this would happen.”

  “Would you have come to Malta but for the war?”

  “The war? I don’t know. That night of the war when Talavera was out in the middle of the North Sea everything changed, it was like a switch clicking in my head. I just knew what I had to do. Everything changed.”

  “I loved the idea of you from when I was still a girl. I know you did not love me the way I loved you, not a first.”

  Peter halted, looked down into Marija’s darkly limpid eyes.

  “No, it isn’t that,” he explained. “It was just that I didn’t know how much I loved you until the World went barking mad.”

  She smiled, detached her hand from his and reached for him, stretching her arms around his neck. He did not need any further encouragement to bow his head and search for her lips with his own.

  Marija broke their intimate clinch, breathlessly resting her forehead on his chest for long seconds, before stepping away half-a-pace.

  “Something horrible could happen to us all at any time.”

  Peter Christopher considered her point and could not help but agree. Another salvo of ICBMs could be hurtling towards Malta right now. There had been that incident a few days ago in which HMS Amphion was lost, barely a hundred-and-fifty miles from where they stood. They said Bucharest was gone, although that was just a Wardroom rumour. Until a week ago the Royal Navy had been throwing ships into the fire as if it was refighting battles of earlier wars. The enemy – Red Dawn, whatever that was – had attacked Limassol and HMS Victorious’s escorts with tactical nuclear weapons; it was probably only a matter of time before the Americans, or perhaps, the V-Bombers based at RAF Luqa struck back. And then what? Round upon round to atomic tit for tat until nobody was left standing? The idea made him shiver with despair.

  “Yes, something awful could happen at any time,” he agreed. “But I can’t live like that. No,” he corrected himself, “I refuse to live like that.”

  Marija said nothing, nodding proudly.

  “If one day everything ends in a blinding flash,” he added, whispering, “so be it. But until that day I intend to live my life like the free man that I was born. I refuse to live in fear. I plan to live normally.”

  There were tears in Marija’s eyes now. Peter Christopher thought she was going to bury her face in his chest anew. She sniffed, collected her strength and gazed into his face, her lips working mutely while she attempted to organise her thoughts and her words.

  “Peter, there has been no time to talk about things. There are a lot of things that trouble me deeply, that I don’t even know if you want to hear me speak of, but the way things are...”

  His sudden concern creased her face with worry. She shook the long hair from her brow, placed a tentative hand on his torso, her fingers tracing tiny, frightened circles on his jacket breast pocket.

&nb
sp; “You know what happened when I forgot that I cannot run,” she continued, forcing a strained half-smile. “I am not as most other women of my age. Beneath my skirts I am...”

  Belatedly, Peter Christopher saw where she was going and instinctively, wanted to forestall her.

  “Skin and bone like me?” He queried softly.

  “Ugly,” Marija said hoarsely.

  “I have a few unsightly nicks and stitches under my finery,” he offered.

  “I am trying to be serious, Peter.”

  The man admitted defeat; knowing he was never going to be capable of refusing her anything once she had made up her mind. Every time he looked at her he felt her inner strength, her inner belief in the rightness of things. Yet even the Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu had her Achilles heel.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, putting on his most crestfallen look, complete with a dramatically trembling lower lip.

  Marija giggled, reminded herself she was trying to be serious.

  But that was so hard with this man!

  “Under my skirts,” she reiterated, backing away and passing her hands over her lower abdomen and her left thigh, “I am ugly. Everything was broken and it was put back together as best as possible but,” she shrugged helplessly, apologetically, “I am not as other women you,” he could tell she was blushing deeply with embarrassment in the gloom, “may have known. Margo says I am being stupid but I am frightened, Peter. She says I can bear children but, I don’t know and I...”

  Peter stepped towards her and wrapped her in his arms.

  He planted kisses in her hair.

  “Our wedding day will be the happiest day of my life,” he informed her, somewhat more formally and stiffly than he had meant. “When we are married there won’t be anything, anything that we can’t sort out between us. I love you exactly the way you are. Exactly the way you are.”

  “You do?”

  He held the love of his life at arm’s length so that he could lose himself in the soft, liquid pools of her eyes, he was shaking with a strange tension that began to evaporate only when he realised there was no fear in Marija’s return gaze.

  “Yes. Do we understand each other, Miss Calleja?”

  Marija nodded, pursing her lips to stop herself giggling.

  “Yes, Lieutenant-Commander Christopher.”

  In a moment he had swept her off her feet, she screeched a laugh of delight as he swung her in a slow circle and their lips melded together, careless of the watching eyes and in that moment utterly oblivious to the uncaring threat-filled World in which they lived.

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday 18th February 1964

  Camp David, Thurmont, Maryland

  In the weeks since James William Fulbright, the fifty-eight year old Missouri-born Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had been appointed as the late Dean Rusk’s replacement as Secretary of State on Christmas Eve 1963, he felt like he had been living his life in one or other of the Presidential fleet of jetliners. When the President had asked him to return to the United States and ‘weekend’ at Camp David he had initially bridled, protested that there was work to be done shuttling between ‘the parties in Europe and the Middle East’. However, Jack Kennedy had remained quietly insistent that he return and he had given in with good grace. He was dog tired and badly needed a break from the constant travelling. It was only when he had landed at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday morning that he first learned that the House of Representatives, sitting in joint session, after a litany of blustering threats had finally tabled a Bill of Impeachment against the President.

  Fresh snow had fallen overnight and the temperature was several degrees below zero as Fulbright and his Marine Corps minders, two men from the squad who had been with him throughout his recent travels, toting automatic rifles walked with him from his bungalow to the President’s ‘villa’ that morning. The Secretary of State who was still technically – ‘technically’ because he had not sat in the House since joining the Administration – the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was scheduled to leave for Philadelphia that afternoon. Arms needed twisting that only he could twist. The Vice-President had stayed in Pennsylvania freely dispensing the famous ‘LBJ treatment’ to wavering representatives and disaffected former supporters of the President. Other members of the Administration would descend on the city tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, the President would remain aloof, above the fray.

  Fulbright, who had been elected to Congress as long ago as 1942 was not without sympathy, albeit at on a purely philosophical, sentimental level with the grievances of many of his fellow House members and was old enough to be experiencing a vague feeling of déjà vu. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ridden roughshod over the rights and prerogatives of the House in the 1940s and memories were long. FDR had got away with it because America had won the Second World War and emerged as the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. Jack Kennedy could not promise the American people a repeat of FDR’s triumph. Besides, FDR had died in the days before the final victory, a great, gallant knight in defence of democracy and freedom who had perished in the fight. Of such things are legends made. FDR had had a ‘good war’ to fight; Jack Kennedy had not been as lucky and whereas FDR’s America had remained inviolate in his war; in the October War the sacred soil of the United States had been savagely defiled by her enemies and then beset with widespread internal political, criminal and sectarian strife, and ultimately, murderous insurrection.

  While it was likely that a majority in both Congress and the Senate might genuinely believe that the President had usurped their powers and prerogatives and therefore, behaved unconstitutionally, Fulbright regarded the actions of many of his former colleagues as unconscionable and in many ways, despicable. A lesser man than John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have been circling the wagons by now.

  Fulbright trudged up the path to the entrance to the President’s villa where more Marines crunched to attention.

  McGeorge Bundy, Jack Kennedy’s newly re-appointed United States National Security Advisor, was already in the room when the Secretary of State was ushered into the President’s presence.

  Bundy had been with Jack Kennedy in the Oval Office the night of the October War. Last spring he had been struck down by the influenza pandemic that had randomly carried away so many of the old, the frail and the very young across the northern states. Immunologists, virologists and the best medical minds were still puzzling over what had caused the short-lived epidemic; the mystery remained unsolved although all manner of conspiracy theories and wild conjectures about germ warfare had been the rage last summer. In any event, McGeorge Bundy had been struck down and disappeared from the scene until his unheralded re-admission to the Presidential circle in recent days.

  The Secretary of State and Bundy were different kinds of men but Fulbright recognised the inherent wisdom of re-introducing ‘Mac’ Bundy back into the fold. Astutely, the President had brought him back without fanfare and as far away as possible from the public gaze because there were a lot of people on the Hill who secretly suspected – wrongly in Fulbright’s opinion - that ‘Mac’ was as culpable as any man for the catastrophe of the October War. In the circumstances, Naval Support Facility Thurmond, more popularly known to the man in the street as ‘Camp David’, was the ideal place to quietly begin the rehabilitation the Administration’s prodigal son.

  Camp David had been the country retreat of Presidents of the United States of America since 1942. Sixty miles from Washington DC in the Catoctin Mountains, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had called it the USS Shangri-La – allegedly because the base was run by the Navy and it reminded him of the mythical Himalayan paradise described by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’ – but Dwight Eisenhower, the least sentimental of all recent American Presidents had, uncharacteristically mandated the name ‘Camp David’ in commemoration of his father and his grandson, both named ‘David’ in the 1950s. Protected with missionary zeal by the Marin
e Corps, Camp David was the one place in America where the Administration could conduct its business in absolute privacy.

  McGeorge Bundy looked twenty years older than his forty-four years; his hair was thinning and straw grey, his waxen pallor that of a man who had survived a life-threatening serious illness without ever really recovering from it. The Secretary of State had been shocked to see the decline in the much younger man. Bundy’s physical collapse was a cruel metaphor for the hopes and dreams of that Inauguration Day in 1961 when everything and anything had seemed possible. The notion of some kind of new Camelot had been so seductive that nobody had wanted to admit that real life was not like that. The last sixteen months had been the brutal vindication of that truth.

  “Mac,” Fulbright nodded, shaking the younger man’s bony hand.

  “Senator,” McGeorge Bundy smiled but it was a pained expression.

  Jack Kennedy watched the two men thoughtfully. He had agonised over bringing Bundy in from the cold, LBJ and Bobby had been ambivalent, not least because when eventually, the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War got into its stride ‘Mac’ was inevitably going to be in its sights from day one. Thankfully, Mac’s participation in the briefings and discussions of the last twenty-four hours had allayed the worst of his fears. Inside the wrecked physical shell Mac’s mind was needle sharp; and being outside the ‘big game’ not knowing what was really going on had been slowly killing him. Now at least he had a reason to carrying on fighting.