by James Philip
“He did what?” Olga caught herself in an instant. “No, he’s not that sort of man.” Another rethink, blurred by Vodka but still rational, on what she was being told. “What the fuck is going on?”
“He is a threat to us all,” Akimov insisted doggedly. “He’s the one guy on the base the Commandant can’t control. He had to be discredited, or removed. He isn’t going to be replaced; that isn’t going to happen, the KGB would lose face. As it is, he’s coming back here under a cloud, nobody is going to take him seriously. Even if he suspects anything about why the Amerikanskaya Mechta has absolute priority for all spares and ground crew time, or finds out that we’ve started re-assembling one of the Kh-20s, nobody back in Vladivostok will listen to him now. If he sounds an alarm, back at HQ they’ll just assume he’s trying to rehabilitate himself…”
It was about then that Dmitry Akimov started to worry, just a niggling itch he could not scratch at first, that Olga ought to be a lot angrier than she actually was. In fact, the woman seemed far, far too calm now that she had moved on past her visceral first take on the news.
“You fucking idiots,” she hissed.
The older man made no attempt to hide his confusion.
“Sometimes, I honestly believe all men have bollocks for brains,” Olga snarled lowly, leaning towards Akimov. “If you were going to cut Andrei off at the knees you ought to have done it properly. You ought to have given his boss a conspiracy to investigate; something to scare the shit out of him, something so bad he had to cover it up, and send in a hit squad. Instead, all you’ve done is fucked up Andrei’s life and now he’s coming back to Seryshevo, where he knows somebody has stabbed him in the back. You idiots!”
Dmitry Akimov would have been happier if she had simply punched him on the nose. That was what she had done to the prick who launched that famous R-16 before she had time to properly shut the inner blast doors of the emergency launch pad fire bunker in October 1962.
He judged it wise not to interrupt her.
Olga vented a shuddering sigh.
“Seryshevo had a Chief Political Officer who was doing his best to keep his head down. The guy is a soldier, not a spook. He was killing time before his next posting. Getting to fuck me was the icing on the cake. He’d have swallowed any story we wanted to tell him about the Amerikanskaya Mechta, and what we were up to in Special Weapons Store Number Two.” Olga halted, shuddered again with what, momentarily was the closest she was ever going to get to despair. “Now he’ll be a man on a mission when he gets back. We will get nothing, absolutely fucking nothing past him!”
“He’s been discredited…”
Olga brushed this aside with withering scorn.
“Hey guys, you’ll never guess what those naughty boys and girls at Seryshevo are up to! Oh, and did you know about the flying bomb that they’re not supposed to have, fitted with a three-megaton warhead that they’re building, just for the Hell of it?”
Dmitry Akimov had to admit, privately that this was the sort of thing – regardless of the discreditation or otherwise of its source – the people at KGB Central in Vladivostok and the Intelligence Staff of the 37th Air Army in Komsomolsk, would most certainly take very, very seriously.
“The General was convinced that we needed a backup plan…”
“Then the General has shit for brains, too!” She had another, awful thought. “What the fuck am I supposed to say to Andrei when I see him?”
The man thought he was being helpful when he suggested: “You could always act like nothing has happened.”
“Seriously?”
Her angry, sarcastic interrogative silenced the captain of the Amerikanskaya Mechta.
“That’s the way you think he’ll play it? Seriously? If he fucks up out here, they’re not going to pension him off to a collective farm in the Altai, or a dacha in the country, he could end up in a fucking labour battalion digging canals out of the permafrost with fucking tea spoons somewhere in the fucking Arctic!”
Dmitry Akimov offered no defence.
“Fuck it!” Olga spat. “We might as well have painted ‘Amerika, vot i my!’ on the side of the fucking plane!”
America here we come!
Chapter 34
Monday 10th June, 1968
Headquarters, Royal Navy Portsmouth
Captain Dermot O’Reilly, DSO, until forty-eight hours ago, Captain (D) of HMS Campbeltown and the 7th Destroyer Squadron, paused for a moment at the half-open door on the first floor of the C-in-C Channel Fleet’s building, suddenly intensely conscious of the quiet, unfussy activity of the office around him. Through a nearby window he could see the masts of HMS Victory – still nominally the flagship of the Royal Navy two-hundred-and-three years after her oaken keel first touched the water – and grey superstructures of the ships in the inner basin. In one sense he felt oddly disconnected with things, as if he was at a little bit of a loose end which, of course, was nonsense. He might be going ashore for a spell but he knew it would only be a matter of time before he was back at sea.
However, all that lay in the future.
Today, he had – for the first time in years – purely personal business to attend to; business he ought, by rights to have given his full attention to long before now.
The small stencilled sign, more a neatly trimmed piece of thin plywood, perfectly squared off at eye-level, read: First Officer C. Richards [Fleet Logistics].
Dermot O’Reilly shrugged his shoulders, stood tall, wondering if he ought to have re-trimmed his beard that morning and if his crisply pressed best No. 3, day uniform, was as immaculate as he fervently hoped it was.
He knocked lightly at the door.
And again, a second time, unable to stop himself in his state of gathering indecision. He had had everything worked out in his head before he walked into Fleet HQ that morning.
And forgotten his carefully laid plans in a split second.
“Come in!”
The quietly authoritative, friendly voice of the woman whom most people at Portsmouth, or at least, those in the know, acknowledged was very nearly solely responsible for keeping the Channel Fleet victualled, fuelled and its magazines stocked, rang out clearly.
O’Reilly was suddenly uncomfortably aware that every eye in the outer office must, at that moment, be trained on his back.
Serendipitously, it was the imagined pressure of those watching eyes which probably perturbed his nervous inertia sufficiently to propel him through the doorway into the orderly, well-lit office of the Principal Assistant to Captain (L), Channel Fleet.
First Officer Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Richards’s uniform jacket hung on a hanger in the corner, it’s blue one-and-a-half cuff rings a little faded, rather like the blue of her patient eyes. Her white shirt and dark tie, and her short, straw-blond hair all contributed to the air of unruffled, confident competency with which she discharged her duties.
The newcomer jammed his cap under his arm and with a tight-lipped smile softly shut the door at his back.
The woman behind the desk rose to her feet, making no pretence that she was anything other than pleased to see the famous Canadian former Captain (D), of what was – without qualification - the most illustrious destroyer squadron in the modern Royal Navy.
In fact, the pair of them had got on well, and worked happily together ever since their first acquaintance, some months before the 7th Destroyer Squadron had embarked upon its Mediterranean adventures last year. At infrequent Mess receptions, or even at meetings over operational matters, they had invariably ended up chatting amiably, naturally relaxing in each other’s company.
As men and women of a certain age sometimes do…
She was two or three years Dermot’s junior, in her mid-forties. Widowed in the October War, her younger son, David, was scheduled to pass out of the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth later that month, and her daughter, Antonia, was training to be a nurse in Manchester.
Having joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (the WRNS, univer
sally referred to as the ‘Wrens’), in 1942, she had met and married her husband, a then sub-lieutenant serving in Western Approaches Command, coincidentally on a Flower class corvette like O’Reilly – left the Navy post-Second War to bring up her three children - and after the world had tried to blow itself up in 1962, volunteered to re-join the Senior Service. Hence, her presence for the last two-and-a-half years at the heart of things in Portsmouth.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” she said, smiling.
“Er, yes, well…”
Dermot O’Reilly was lost for words.
A part of him knew that he had been an absolute idiot not to have said something to Charlotte – ‘Lottie’ – before now but it had been awkward. Damnably awkward while he was captain of the Cavendish, and later, the Campbeltown. Although she had never been in his direct line-of-command, that is, a subordinate directly reporting to him; until yesterday, he had been posted to the Channel Fleet and therefore, technically her senior officer when he was in port at Portsmouth, and the Navy, and he personally, simply did not countenance even the hint of inappropriate or in any way improper relations, or advances, of any kind to or between senior and junior officers, or officers and other ranks, et al…
He would never have forgiven himself if he had risked putting her in a difficult situation. Or to have risked besmirching their friendship. which over the months he had come to recognise had become a thing he immensely valued and well, desperately needed.
“The,” he began again, aware that his face was colouring with embarrassment. “As you know, I’ve been posted to the Admiralty. I’ve handed over command of Campbeltown and the Squadron. So, I’m…”
The woman seemed to find this all a little comical.
“A free man?”
“Yes, that’s it,” he confessed with a sigh of relief. “So, if I was to ask you,” he went on, his courage faltering.
“Out, perhaps?”
“Yes, that would be it,” the dashing hero of a string of daring, devil-may-care fleet actions stuttered like a schoolboy. “Out. Yes, that would be it…”
Charlotte Richards moved around her desk to stand in front of him. She was five feet and a few inches even in her shoes; he well over six feet tall, angular, and towered over her.
She was just tending towards a suggestion of maternal plumpness; and today there was a girlish twinkle in her eyes.
“I thought you’d never ask, Captain O’Reilly,” she smiled.
“Well, things were…”
“No, you were always very correct. Although, I can’t imagine anybody would have batted an eyelid if we had been,” she pursed her lips, more mischief bubbling to the surface, “discreetly wicked but I know you were only thinking of me. Which was very sweet of you.”
This ought to have calmed Dermot O’Reilly’s angst, instead, it prompted another bout of nerves.
“Lottie,” he muttered helplessly.
“The ‘going out’ options in Portsmouth are a little limited,” the woman observed, “although there’s always one of the cinemas, I suppose.”
O’Reilly was speechless, literally speechless by then.
“When do you leave for Oxford?” She inquired, all business.
“The weekend, probably.”
“That settles it, report to my digs in Southsea tonight and I’ll cook us both a nice dinner!”
A few minutes later, still reeling, O’Reilly set about completing his farewell rounds of the base. He had heard that when Peter Christopher returned to Malta – on a month-long leave as he and Marija travelled from North America to Australia in 1966 – he had looked up literally everybody on the archipelago who had ever had anything to do with the Talavera, simply to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, a thing he and Marija had never had the opportunity to do in the wake of the Battle of Malta in April 1964. So, it seemed like the right thing to do, the only thing to do, to spend the rest of that day ‘doing the rounds’ of Royal Navy Portsmouth.
Bidding his farewell to the Campbeltown, and the 7th Destroyer Squadron’s captains had been a dreadful wrench. Leaving a ship on which one had so many happy memories, moving on from serving with men one had fought beside was never easy.
De-mobbing from the Royal Canadian Navy after the Second War, had very nearly broken his heart, in retrospect sent him into a downward spiral which would have killed him by now had it not been for the cataclysm of October 1962 which, bizarrely, had given him a second chance and by a fluke of fate, parachuted him into the midst of Peter Christopher’s band of brothers on board HMS Talavera.
After that, he had had a fair few old scrapes in HMS Cavendish: in the fighting to rescue refugees from the French Channel ports, not to mention that battle in Philadelphia to repel bombers and terrorist boarders. On reflection, set against Talavera’s last doomed fight, and those desperate actions in the Channel and on the waters of the Delaware River on board Cavendish, for the Campbeltown, at least, last year’s fight at Villefranche-sur-Mer had been relatively bloodless.
That was a mercy indeed…
They had given him a bar to his DSO – effectively, a second Distinguished Service Order – for, supposedly, ‘rescuing the French Fleet’ from the hands of the perfidious Front Internationale. Actually, most of the credit for that belonged to his friend Rene Leguay and his remarkable consort, and now wife, Aurélie. He had Rene to blame for the ribbon of the Légion d'honneur which now adorned his increasingly over-crowded dress uniform left breast. It was becoming harder and harder to remember that less than six years ago, he had been a bar bum in Montreal who had not been sober since he got home from that last spell in the Southern Ocean hunting whales in 1961. His father had drunk himself into an early grave; like father like son.
Then the Russians had sent those pesky missiles to Cuba, tens of millions of people had died and Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly, HMRCN (Reserve), had got lucky…
It was a funny old world!
Thus, it was with no little trepidation that he presented himself at the door of the terraced house in Southsea that evening at the stroke of seven o’clock. He listened to the doorbell ring – clang distantly – as he distractedly gazed through the evening haze that always seemed to form when big ships were navigating the main channel into the inner harbour of the great, historic naval base.
Charlotte was wearing a plain, grey-blue summery cotton dress that accentuated her curves. Her hair was unclipped, somehow blonder than it always seemed in the office, and she was smiling a vaguely Cheshire cat sort of smile.
As if she had finally made her catch…
That would be me, Dermot realised.
She took his hands and drew him inside. The door clunked shut at his back in the claustrophobic hallway. He could smell a meaty stew simmering on the stove in the air.
“Well, here we are at last,” his host laughed.
In the parlour there was hardly any clutter. Before the October War everybody had had the accumulated ephemera of their whole lives around them; but the war had blown all that away and most people, like Charlotte had had to start again from scratch. Notwithstanding that the country had been off ‘the ration’ for over two years, the opportunity to acquire new ‘things’, knickknacks or any kind of varied wardrobe of clothes, or memorabilia was limited.
Filling the shelves of grocery stores and butchers’ shops, chemists and the like had been the great domestic achievement of the Thatcher Government; that and ensuring – most of the time - there was reliable alternating current in the partially restored national electricity grid, and coal in the scuttles the last few winters to ward off the cold. Practically everything had been broken after the October War. That Saturday in the autumn of 1962 had been day zero of year zero; the point at which the past and the present violently diverged.
Taking in the homely sparseness of his surroundings Dermot O’Reilly was lost in a strange reverie, unaware that he had let down the defences of years.
“I think it would be perfectly in order for you to kiss me, D
ermot,” Charlotte Richards declared. “I’ve been wondering how ticklish your beard was going to be for months!”
Chapter 35
Thursday 13th June, 1968
USS Enterprise (CVN-65), South of Pescadores Archipelago, Taiwan
Commander John McCain spooled up the Wright J65-W20 turbojet and felt his McDonnell Douglas A-4 Skyhawk straining to launch.
He saw the Deck Flying Officer drop his flag, took his hands off the controls and a moment later was crushed back into his seat as the aircraft rocketed off the Big E’s port bow catapult. Over ten tons of hurtling airframe, AVGAS and munitions staggered momentarily as it left the deck, then its engine’s eight thousand – and some – pounds of raw thrust kicked in and the altimeter began to spin up.
In a little over a minute McCain was levelling out at five thousand feet, banking into the turn to form up with the ever growing, circling swarm of fast jets.
He had been allocated a ‘spare’ aircraft for the day’s second strike at coastal targets in Fujian Province directly opposite Taiwan. Two of the aircraft which had participated in the dawn missions had returned with minor damage, probably caused by small arms fire and after much lobbying, McCain had finally been rotated back onto the flight roster.
It was not before time; he could see that the pace of operations was beginning to tell in several of his fellow A-4 jockeys’ faces, and he had been starting to feel like a real heel, sitting out mission after mission.
He still felt bad about getting promoted for his bit part in the loss of the Berkeley; knowing also that it meant he was likely to be rotated off the carrier the next time she touched land. Although he was happy to fly as a subordinate – effectively, still as a Lieutenant Commander – with Strike Squadron VA-76, the extra half-ring made it uncomfortable for his old CO, and that situation was unsustainable for any length of time.