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

by James Philip

  Margaret Thatcher had much to think about on the journey back to Oxford.

  There was no single homogeneous ‘community’ in the capital. There were numerous ‘gangs’, mostly small and territorial, some more aggressive and xenophobic than others. ‘King Harold’s’ domain stretched from the old north-west suburbs deep into the heart of the city in the area around Westminster. The King had talked fancifully of creating an anarcho-syndicalist commune, a socialist collective; but what he had actually described was a loosely co-operative number of groups of survivors who traded across poorly defined boundaries and occasionally sent representatives to his ‘court’, which for the last couple of months had been at Eton. Life in the ruins of the city in the winter was harsh and his ‘tribe’ was not exclusively made up of the youngest and the fittest of the survivor ‘polity’.

  Harold Strettle had been a Trades Union organiser working for the London Underground. On the night of the war he had been in a deep tube recovering a broken down train with a gang of seven other men. Several days later they had emerged into a nightmare changed World.

  ‘Nobody ever got around to burying the dead,’ he had told the Prime Minister. Of the capital’s pre-war population of several millions he guessed that somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand might still live in the city. The population shifted from place to place, constantly drifting into and out of the undamaged lands beyond the wrecked inner suburbs,

  “I apologise if today’s exercise was less than productive,” the Home Secretary said, interrupting Margaret Thatcher’s rumination. “But I think it was important for the Government to be seen to be talking to what, intelligence sources inform me, is the largest, most coherent and least violent of the survivor groupings. In the longer term I think today’s encounter will bear fruit, Prime Minister. Mr Strettle’s group is the only one that talks to most of the other ‘gangs’, who in turn tolerate it because it freely trades food and other supplies with them across its borders. Hopefully, the word will now spread that Her Majesty’s Government is not insensitive to their situation and is not planning an imminent military takeover of their domains.”

  “It might yet come to that, Mr Jenkins.” Margaret Thatcher reminded him. The troubles in Northern Ireland, the bottomless pit of the campaign in the Mediterranean and the need to maintain troops on home soil to secure ports and power stations against the still very real terroristic, fifth column threat posed by Red Dawn and other dissident and criminal elements, meant there was no real scope for diverting scarce military assets to repossess the ruined capital; even had that been a thing that needed to be done now, which it was not. If the nation’s fate had hung on re-opening the docks and ‘mining’ the vaults and cellars of London she would have ordered the Army in without a qualm and it did no harm to remind her Home Secretary of the fact.

  “The use of force against one’s own people for political and economic ends, no matter how vital to the pursuance of the greater good of the general population,” Roy Jenkins counselled firmly, “is to start down a very slippery slope, Prime Minister.”

  “I know,” she conceded sadly. “I know.”

  Chapter 38

  Wednesday 1st April 1964

  USS Iowa, Straits of Gibraltar

  With six of her eight Babcock and Wilcox M-Type boilers lit the battleship’s four General Electric cross-compound steam turbines drove the leviathan through the night at over twenty-eight knots. Beneath an overcast sky the USS Iowa’s escorting destroyers were invisible to the naked eye, and ten miles ahead, only the all-seeing green eyes of the AN/SPS-10 surface and AN/SPS-6 air-search radars saw the USS Independence and her escorts. The big carrier had slipped her moorings in Algeciras Bay and sailed out into the North Atlantic the previous day to rendezvous with the battleship beyond sight from land. Reversing course around dusk and working up to the Iowa’s best speed, Task Force 21.1 was ‘shooting’ the eight mile wide channel between Spain and the Algerian coast.

  Nobody onboard any of the ships actually believed their entry into the Western Mediterranean would go unnoticed or unremarked; the exercise was primarily designed to sharpen up and concentrate minds on the job in hand. This was no peacetime exercise, sometime in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours British troops would be going ashore on Cyprus over two thousand miles to the east supported by US Navy SSNs – nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines – and half-a-dozen major USN surface units. The British were desperately short of carrier-born air cover; the fleet carrier Eagle and the smaller Hermes carried only sixty aircraft between them, against the eighty – including twenty-four McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms - of the Independence. Every man of Task Force 21.1 understood that they were coming late to the party.

  Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt felt that shared angst as much as anybody; however, his angst was balanced by a sense of immense achievement. To have succeeded in reactivating, shaking down and just getting to the Mediterranean in less than two months had been an achievement of truly Herculean proportions. The assignation of the Presidential ‘Absolute Priority’ seal to the project had done no harm, nor had the Chief of Naval Operation’s masterstroke of calling up every old battleship man on the reserve list; even so, getting the ‘The Big Stick’ – Iowa’s nickname from the days of the Korean War – operational in such a short time very nearly beggared belief. And yet here she was, steering towards the sound of the guns.

  From the darkened bridge wing Schmidt watched the lights of Gibraltar receding astern as he smoked his cigarette, a Lucky Stripe. He had given up the filthy habit when he retired from the Navy. A lesser man would have been driven to drink by the stresses and strains of recent weeks, and it was not as if he was getting any younger. In a few days he would be sixty-two.

  Eleven hundred miles to Malta, almost as far again to Cyprus and no telling if those sneaky Red Dawn bastards would attempt to nuke the Independence the way they had nuked the Enterprise, the Long Beach and that British carrier, HMS Victorious.

  The more things change the more they remain the same. Those World War II British flat tops were tough nuts to crack. He had seen the Victorious’s sister ship, HMS Formidable, burning off Formosa in May 1945. The Kamikazes had not known they were wasting their time crashing into the armoured decks of the British flat tops; once the Brits had put out the fires and hammered the dents out of the flight deck they carried straight on launching and recovering their birds as if nothing had happened.

  Two fleet oilers had sailed from Gibraltar three days ago. They would be positioned half-way between Lampedusa and Malta, waiting to top off the bunkers of every ship in the Task Force.

  As he smoked his cigarette, the Captain of the USS Iowa inwardly digested the latest situation reports from Malta. Operation Grantham, the huge combined operation to eject Red Dawn from Cyprus and to secure the island as a base for ongoing operations had thus far gone without a hitch. Other than a handful of attempts to penetrate the fringes of the Malta Air Defence Zone by former Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 bombers – probably operating in a dedicated reconnaissance role – there had been no contact with the enemy. The intelligence community was still pedalling the line that ‘Red Dawn discipline and control have broken down in areas nominally under its control’; throughout Eastern Turkey, Northern Greece and pockets of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. Supposedly, there was ‘minimal naval activity in the Aegean Basin’ at this time, although a footnote to the report conceded that ‘aerial surveillance of areas of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Dardanelles has been hampered by poor weather conditions in the last seven days’.

  Schmidt remembered a conversation with an old friend who had become a CIA contractor when he retired after two decades in naval aviation, that ‘one day soon we’ll be able to spy on the surface of the whole planet from space’. Before the October War all things had seemed possible. Schmidt still did not know what to make of that crazy speech the President had made about putting an American on the Moon back in November, but whatever it was about it was not
going to suddenly reverse the mothballing of the whole space program in the spring of last year. Whichever way one looked at it the ‘intelligence picture’ it was as spotty as Hell and the fact Operation Grantham was apparently proceeding with the smooth precision of an expensive Swiss watch, signified precisely diddly-squat in the humble opinion of Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt. Those Red Dawn fanatics had loosed off nukes, they had over run thousands of square miles of real estate and given the second best navy in the World one Helluva bloody nose in February. He did not need the rumbling pain of his ulcers to tell him that those guys had not just gone away overnight. If recent history taught a man anything, the cynic in him said, it might simply be that the bastards had been planning something nasty all along and that far from going away, Red Dawn was simply bidding its time.

  One last drag on his cigarette.

  If he had had another month he could have actually got ‘The Big Stick’ into some kind of state to really go to war. Two days ago he had allowed the turret crews to fire off most of the Iowa’s practice rounds. He had almost forgotten how good it felt in that moment the ship seemed to stop dead in the water for a split second when the big guns loosed off a broadside. The sound and fury of the main battery had briefly allowed him to forget that he still had over a hundred civilian contractors onboard, mostly working in the Fire Rooms, that there were seemingly intractable electrical problems in Number Two main battery turret, that the ship’s internal communications system was a mess and that the port side secondary dual-purpose five inch battery was only operable in local control. Moreover, having so many old battlewagon hands on board was not turning out to be an unmitigated blessing. The old timers were infuriatingly set in their ways, constantly reminding their divisional officers of ’the way things were done’ on the Missouri, or the New Jersey, or the Wisconsin, and a significant minority clearly viewed the Iowa as a pale shadow of their ‘own’ former ships.

  It was fortunate that Captain Schmidt was a man who was convinced that his cup was always half-full, not half-empty. The one thing a Navy man could rely on was that things could always be worse.

  “Surface contacts bearing zero-two-zero!”

  Anderson Schmidt waited for more.

  “Range forty plus miles. Contact keeps dropping out.”

  The hulls of the contacts were probably still below the horizon. They might be fifty, not forty miles out.

  “Radar signature?” Schmidt asked coolly.

  “Unknown, sir.”

  The Independence would have had the contacts on her plot ever since Task Force 21.1 had ‘shot’ the straits. At any one time she always had one of the four brand new twin turboprop Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye all-weather tactical early warning aircraft - flown out from the States a fortnight ago – in the air. The E-2s gave the carrier a bird’s eye view of the surrounding sea and land out to one to two hundred miles in every direction. If anything happened to the Independence the air defence controller sitting in the ‘duty’ E-2 would automatically ‘manage’ the battlefield. It all seemed like something out of a Buck Rogers movie to Anderson Schmidt, which was one of the reasons he had known when the time had come to retire from the Navy. Several of the escorts had ‘real time’ communications links to the Independence and to the orbiting E-2 Hawkeye, constantly updating their tactical plots. The Iowa had none of that new kit. An early version of the electronics suite carried by some of the smaller escorts had been installed in the battleship in the mid-fifties; only to be removed during the mothballing refit in 1958.

  “Have we got scrambled TBS with the Berkeley and the John King?” Anderson Schmidt asked in his sage, old-fashioned, no nonsense way. The two modern four thousand ton Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyers were pacing the Iowa, the Berkeley two miles to the north, the John King on station to the south.

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Keep the connection to both ships live please.” The Berkeley and the John King were armed with Tartar surface-to-air missiles, ASROC anti-submarine rockets and a five-inch main battery slaved to state of the art gunnery control radars. Schmidt did not know if they were also connected in real time to the Independence’s E-2 Hawkeyes. Establishing ‘secure up links’, whatever the Hell that was in plain English was apparently a ‘fiddly business’ and there might not have been time to complete it prior to shooting the Straits of Gibraltar. It did not matter, both escorts had modern sensor and electronic warfare suites and the Iowa, did not. The Berkeley, patrolling on the battlewagon’s port flank would have detected the unidentified surface contacts long before the Iowa.

  “Berkeley is on the horn, sir.”

  Captain Schmidt took the handset.

  “Iowa,” he acknowledged. The Captain of a United States Navy ship was that ship.

  “CV-62’s Hawkeye is painting two bogeys at four-nine miles from your position, sir,” the commanding officer of the escorting destroyer drawled in a New England accent. “CV-62 requests Berkeley and John King spool up our Tartar systems and await further orders.”

  Schmidt absorbed this.

  “Affirmative. If the John King needs to clear the range she may independently manuever ASTERN of Iowa at her own discretion.”

  The last thing he wanted was some damned fool destroyer jockey trying to cross his bows to clear the range for his Tartar twin missile-launcher. He handed back the handset to the middle-aged bridge talker.

  “Independence is launching birds, sir,” the bridge talker called, relaying the message from the radar room.

  The British had warned their allies that the Spanish had a habit of tracking foreign warships entering the Mediterranean. From the intelligence digests he had read Anderson Schmidt doubted these two contacts were Spanish ships. The Brits had sunk or disabled half the Spanish Navy in December’s battles and most of the surviving surface units had hunkered down in Cadiz and Barcelona ever since.

  The surface contacts were already starting to fall astern.

  Anderson Schmidt signalled the bridge talker to approach him.

  “Put me on the ship-wide circuit,” he ordered, picking up a handset from beside the tactical plot.

  He waited for the circuit to open.

  “This is the Captain,” he said, hearing and feeling his amplified voice booming around the great ship, “this ship has now entered a war zone. A few minutes ago unidentified surface contacts were detected at the extreme range of our radar systems. As a precaution our escorting destroyers have been authorised to manuever freely so as to clear the ranges for their missiles. We are presently drawing ahead of the surface contacts which remain under surveillance by the Independence’s aircraft. From this point on we can expect to be targeted and attacked by enemy submarines, surface units and aircraft. Because of the risk of attack with atomic, bacteriological and or chemical weapons no crew member may go on deck other than with the express permission of a senior officer.” He paused. “The ship will now close up to battle stations.”

  Turning to the Officer of the Deck, Anderson Schmidt smiled thinly.

  “Sound Action Stations!”

  The klaxons blared and the USS Iowa was consumed by rushing bodies, semi-organised chaos and outright, shambolic chaos.

  The minutes dragged by, reports came in.

  The lights on the readiness board began to change from amber to green.

  Everybody donned flak jackets and steel helmets; officers strapped on their 45-calibre Brownings, or if they were old-school like their commanding officer, pattern 1911 Navy Colts.

  Number Two turret’s lights gleamed bright red long after the rest of the battleship had closed up to battle stations.

  “Number Two main battery turret reports many electrical failures, sir!” Then: “Turret captain reports turret ready for action under local control, sir!”

  Schmidt’s expression was glacial.

  At least the Turret Captain had worked out his options eventually!

  Many of the smaller anti-aircraft weapons in the superstructure w
ere in exposed open mountings. In battle, Schmidt would be stationed in the conning tower, protected by up to seventeen inches of armour.

  Who said life had to be fair?

  Chapter 39

  Thursday 2nd April 1964

  Married Quarters, Kalkara, Malta

  It was almost midnight before Peter Christopher crept through the front door like a thief in the night. He carefully placed his bag on the floor, hung his cap on the hook on the wall at the foot of the stairs and, without even thinking of putting on the light, started to creep upstairs.

  The Grand Harbour had been empty, a dark and lonely place when he had finally conned HMS Talavera through the breakwaters. Even HMS Sheffield had gone, having presumably set off on her long slow cruise back to England and a likely appointment with the breakers yard. Anchoring fore and aft to the emergency destroyer buoys on the Corradino heights side of the anchorage he had sent two thirds of the crew to their billets on the Cunard liner Sylvania, left his ship in the capable hands of his Executive Officer, Miles Weiss and taken a taxi back to Kalkara. He had to return to his ship in a few hours but the way things were shaping up, he might not see Marija again for days or weeks once Talavera had taken on a full ammunition load and topped off her fuel bunkers. The prospect of not seeing Marija again before Talavera received her sailing orders was, unthinkable...

  The second step creaked loudly under his foot.

  He froze.

  A minor steam leak and miscellaneous easily fixed, but nonetheless vexing generator and electrical faults apart, Talavera’s sea trials had gone well. Actually, they had gone better than well. Under full power the destroyer had touched thirty-four knots, and her new torpedo division had drilled relentlessly. The ship still felt ‘light’ in any kind of sea and ‘stiffer’ than she had been in her prime as a Fast Air Detection Escort with a mass of sophisticated equipment installed high above her centre of gravity. Even at flank speed Talavera’s bow was reluctant to dig deep into big waves, her stern settling down, burying her screws deeper and deeper in the water as the increasing power was transmitted into her propeller shafts. He wondered how fast Talavera might steam if he had ordered engineering to open all the valves. He had been tempted, resisted the urge, not wanting to risk breaking his rebuilt ship on her very first excursion out of dockyard hands.