by James Philip
Nightmare…
The Navy had lost another four aircraft yesterday, that made seventeen since the sinking of the Berkeley. At least six of those planes had gone down over the mainland. Five of the aircrew in the other downed aircraft had been rescued, mercifully, including Jack McCain’s boy, lifted off a beach on the Pescadores Archipelago.
The Navy was sending nearly hourly updates on the whereabouts, medical treatment and continuing recovery of his son to the Admiral at the Embassy in Canberra.
Commander John McCain junior’s survival was the one good news story that had come out of the Western Pacific in the last week!
That and the fleeting distraction of the revealing of the identity of the Admiral’s son’s ‘pen friend’.
The TV people had hungrily latched onto the fact that the one ‘special girl’ the heroic downed naval aviator had mentioned, when he was scooped from the sea the last time, in the wake of the Berkeley incident, had turned out to be the vivacious fifteen year-old, - although she looked a little older, certainly when flanked by Sir Peter and Lady Marija Christopher; they had to be the most naturally telegenic diplomats in the world? - remarkably self-possessed and confident in front of the cameras, daughter of the former Governor General of Australia, the current British Defence Secretary, and an intimate of Prime Minister Thatcher, Viscount De L’Isle!
The problem was that nothing, not even the ‘Lucy De L’Isle factor’ was going to distract attention overlong from the Administration’s ever-deepening problems at home, let alone those abroad.
Yesterday’s riot had had about it the feeling that a dam had broken, that some kind of invisible line had been over-stepped and that if anybody in the Administration had believed there was any way of turning back the clock, that hope was dead.
And now that bloody woman had just poured petrol onto the fucking fire!
Ironically, what she had said, presumably in exasperation, outside the White House had not been a patch on the lecture she had given Richard Nixon, his hard-pressed, these days much-maligned National Security Advisor, Gordon Gray, Secretary of State Bill Rogers, his long-suffering Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, and White House Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, who these days, looked ever-more like a man on the way to the gallows.
Gordon Gray had got hot under the collar, even Bill Rogers had bristled undiplomatically, not helped by the President’s tendency to revert to communicating in blank, tight-lipped monosyllables when Margaret Thatcher was at her most strident. Melvin Laird, these days beyond being surprised and grey with weariness, and Haldeman, had kept out of the angriest exchanges, attempting to retain cool heads.
Gordon Gray, who had served under Democrat Harry S. Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, had lost his temper at one stage.
Born into a wealthy Baltimore family – his father, uncle and his brother were all at one time or another Presidents or Chairmen of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – Gray had served as Secretary of the Army between 1949 and 1950, and later as Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. A former President of the University of North Carolina, Dwight Eisenhower had appointed him to the Atomic Energy Commission, and then to lead the Office of Defence Mobilisation before making him his US National Security Advisor in 1959. Richard Nixon had turned to Gray when he desperately needed a safe pair of hands to fill the huge void in his Administration, left by the resignation of Henry Kissinger on the eve of the United Nations rededication on board the USS America in San Francisco Bay last year.
Gray was the only man in the room who had made a serious, sustained attempt to gainsay the British Prime Minister.
‘Gordon, don’t be ridiculous!’ The Lady had admonished him, glancing angrily at Nicko Henderson, her man in Washington who was in attendance almost entirely in the capacity of a referee, a large, charming presence in the middle of the gladiatorial arena. ‘We told you why we thought investing everything in a pact with the Soviets, although laudable, was a bad idea. The Chinese Communists are completely one-eyed over Taiwan but nevertheless, we could have bought them off with a seat on the Permanent Security Council of the United Nations last year! As for all this pointless sabre-rattling: what did you think was going to happen in the Taiwan Strait for goodness sake? How would you feel if after the recent Civil War in the Midwest the Kingdom of the End of Days had set up anew on Rhode Island?’
‘Perhaps,’ Gray had retorted in pique, his voice laced with battery acid, ‘if British and Commonwealth policy was not continually undermining our initiatives in the Pacific, such an accord might still have been possible at that time…’
‘Stuff and nonsense, and you know it!’
‘What does Tom think about all this?’ Bill Rogers had inquired, hoping to spill a little of the wind from the Angry Widow’s sails, and failing, dismally.
‘My Foreign Secretary and I are as one on all major issues!’
In the Administration they had got used to calling Lord Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson ‘Chinese Tom’ on account of the number of times he and Zhou Enlai had met at global forums in the last year, invariably at moments crucial US-Soviet meetings were in progress.
‘Understandably,’ Gordon Gray had complained, ‘we have been disappointed with the level of solidarity of our NATO allies…’
‘NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Gordon. Under its terms we are each obliged to come to the assistance of co-signatories threatened or attacked by enemies as specified within its articles. If NATO covered the Pacific it would be called the North Pacific Treaty Organisation. It is not. And before I hear further complaints about the Hong Kong Treaty; that averted a war, not provoked one, gentlemen. Just because you have treaty obligations to Japan and the Philippines and other Pacific territories, that does not mean you are entitled to wage aggressive war against whomsoever you please. I live in a country which suffered catastrophic death and destruction because the North Atlantic Treaty appeared to give the US Government that option. Subsequent events ought to have been object lessons in why I, for one, will never allow that to happen again!’
Suddenly, everybody on the Administration side had been thinking about the disastrous battles in the Persian Gulf in July 1964, and the loss of another super-carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk.
Nicko Henderson had rolled his eyes in despair.
‘Face it, gentlemen,’ his Prime Minister had continued, remorselessly, ‘the Chinese Communists, knowing that it was your purpose to attack, damage and destabilise their hold on power on the mainland have reacted pragmatically: insofar, as they have lured your ships into an ambush, a trap. They know full well that you cannot bomb a country back into the Stone Age which, for the majority of its people, never left that Age! Our treaty over Hong Kong promised the hope of mutual development, co-existence with the most populous nation on earth and yet now your ships and aeroplanes are systematically destroying any prospect of future peace and co-operation in Asia!’
The final barb had been the one that stung, very nearly, intolerably, and was unapologetically directed at the President.
‘Goodness,’ she had gone on, hectoring now, ‘when we were spilling the blood of our troops and every last piece of our dwindling treasure liberating France from Communist oppression, your Administration, Mister President, sat on its hands and talked about no more foreign wars, about how you were never going to send GIs overseas again, and boasted in private about how proud you were that in future American wars would be fought by proxies, surrogates, and patsies like the Brits and their Commonwealth allies, like in the Gulf War where we found ourselves standing alone against the might of the Red Army!’
Dead silence, the sound of a pin dropping on a thick pile carpet would have sounded like a hand grenade going off.
Margaret Thatcher had signed off with one last, cruel observation.
‘Well, it is hardly surprising that your armed forces are out of practice fighting an enemy who must rely on pure courage and native guile, to combat foes equipped with the best weapons mon
ey can buy!’
A few minutes after the British Prime Minister’s departure – nobody was looking forward to round two of the bout at a state dinner at Blair House that evening – one of Bob Haldeman’s staff pollsters had walked into the room.
The poor man must have wondered if he had just trespassed into the meeting which had authorised an all-out nuclear strike against the Soviets and the Chinese, because it had been learned that enemy ICBMs were already incoming.
“Oh, shit,” Haldeman had muttered before passing the two sheets of numbers to his boss, and lingered, looking over the President’s shoulder.
‘Reagan is up ten points in California… McGovern has closed to fifteen points if the general election was between me and him tomorrow,’ Richard Nixon mused, then hesitated. ‘That can’t be right, Bob?’ He queried, brow furrowing. ‘No, surely not… Brenckmann beating McGovern among Democrats for the first time and only six percent down on me in the head to head?’
‘The statistical margin of error is plus or minus three percent, sir,’ the staffer said uncomfortably.
‘We’re still ahead in most of the key House races, sir,’ Haldeman remarked, looking for something to cling to.
All the trends were going the wrong way and none of these polls had been conducted before the Battle of Tsushima. What had happened to the Kitty Hawk off Kharg Island in 1964 had prompted JFK’s physical and mental collapse, doomed his successor, LBJ in that autumn’s general election and very nearly obliterated the Democrats’ influence in both Houses. The parallels with what had just happened to the Ranger and her escorts, defeated in battle not by a respected, high-tech opponent like the Brits but by a gang of sneaky commie’s who did not even look like most of the people on Main Street, might, and probably was going to, play many times worse – disastrously so - with the American people; and that was before the gutted wreck of the USS Ranger started appearing on TV screens in peoples’ living rooms!
A secretary had crept into the Oval Office and whispered something to Bob Haldeman. The President noted his Chief of Staff grimace and rise to his feet to follow the woman out of the room, thinking little of it. Haldeman had always sifted and filtered the supposedly ‘urgent’ calls and messages which bombarded the White House with terse, ruthlessly uncompromising efficiency.
The President groaned and contemplated his undrunk cup of cold coffee. He picked it up, took a suspicious sip, and tried very hard to ignore the raised voices around him.
“Mister President,” Bob Haldeman was saying, as if from the other end of a long tunnel.
“What?” Richard Nixon blinked, breaking out of his bubble of increasingly outraged self-pity.
The room had gone quiet.
“What?” The President asked again.
“CBS has a report,” his Chief of Staff said lowly, confidentially, “that Claude Betancourt was taken ill in Georgetown this morning. A stroke, they think. He was taken to Walter Reed in Bethesda…”
“Okay,” the man behind the big desk sighed as if to say: “So, what?”
“The report we have is that the old bastard was declared dead on arrival in the emergency room, sir.”
Chapter 44
Monday 25th June, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Major Andrei Kirov had been a busy man since his return to Seryshevo. A busy and a visibly angry man who had not restricted his ire to the lackadaisical KGB uniformed contingent at the air base under his direct command.
He had pestered and harangued Vladimir Zakharov’s Chief of Staff, a thickset Colonel in his mid-fifties with the flat, Mongolian features of the men of the tribes just across the border in China, about the numerous failings everybody knew about but never did anything about in the base’s woefully maintained perimeter defences, and the infrequency of the patrol regime. Then he had started interrogating members of the 182nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment’s non-flying rump, starting new files on the ‘political commitment and reliability of individuals and their surviving family and civilian associates.’
Andrei Kirov’s job was to spy on the seven hundred or so Red Air Force, seventy-two Red Army and six Red Navy personnel nominally serving under Major General Vladimir Zakharov’s command in, and around Ukrainka and the air base. The KGB man was on a personal mission to reinstate all the pettiness, nastiness and deliberate intrusiveness of the pre-Cuban War era and it went without saying, that he did not care who he upset.
His first demand had been that every single person on the base’s rolls be identified, and their current duty assignments and location established. This had caused an ongoing panic – albeit one that was currently bubbling beneath the surface of life at Seryshevo – because the biggest scam in the book was hiring out, or loaning service personnel to Party-sponsored external projects, like working on non-military work, effectively providing free labour for the local bigwigs who were profiting hand over fist working, often, for the Red Air Force, Army or Navy, or building roads, repairing rail tracks or directly for city administrations, at the expense of the parent service’s budget. Such activities were rife, especially the farther one travelled from the centre of things in Sverdlovsk. Out here in the Far East the Gorbachev regime had attempted to halt the worst excesses of the endemic ‘skimming off’ operations in the Vladivostok and Amur Valley Districts; but elsewhere, it was like trying to hold back the ocean tides with nothing but stern words. Corruption had been systematic, built-in to the Communist state which might as well have been founded on graft and extortion, as ideology.
So, when somebody threatened to look into where everybody who was supposed to be at a big military base in a remote province, it was guaranteed to cause a lot of trouble!
Which was precisely why, it hardly ever happened these days.
Andrei knew it was only a matter of time before the first squeals of pain, and threats, presumably with menaces, materialised.
No problem, the Base Political Officer carried his Makarov with him everywhere he went, a round in the chamber and eight more in the magazine. He needed leverage, evidence and it was odds on that Comrade Major General Zakharov had been turning a blind eye to more than one scam. Even if he had not, which was inherently implausible, if it turned out illicit things had been going on his watch and he had not noticed them, then that was prima facie proof of criminal negligence.
Comrade First Secretary Kryuchkov only thought he wanted dirt on the base commander; Andrei Kirov needed it like an addict needed his next fix.
And he did not care how he got it!
That morning he had rolled into the KGB building – an ugly, concrete and brick blot on the landscape several hundred metres from the main Administration Block a little after ten o’clock. Everybody had leapt to attention when he walked in, and then formed an orderly queue to be obsequious, and to deliver the daily reports he now demanded from every section leader.
It was amazing how a cushy billet in the back of beyond could be transformed into a nightmare hive of activity virtually overnight. The secret was shouting, bullying and the peremptory issuing of summary fines, cancelling leave and off base privileges, and generally frightening the shit out of one’s people. In retrospect, he had been a soft touch. That had been okay but being a complete bastard was more fun.
Even if it was not enough, of itself, to allow him to forget that he was a dead man walking.
Another weird thing was that on reflection; he really ought to have been more worried about discovering he was in the power of a man like Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov. Initially, he had been worried. Very worried, practically to the point of panic. But that had passed. Frankly, after he had had a couple of days to think things through, he had been relatively sanguine; the one aspect of the whole fuck-up was that, for whatever reason, he had been played for a fool probably from the outset of his time at Seryshevo.
It made him wonder why Zakharov had gone to all that trouble?
He had still been really pissed off, of course. It was only once
he had got out of Vladivostok, and put a little distance between himself and KGB Central that his primary preoccupation had become how best to get even with the bastards who had made a fool of him.
It always paid to have a plan…
There was a rat-a-tat, insistent knocking at his door.
“Fuck off! I’m busy!”
“That, I doubt!” Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna retorted as she stepped into his office and shut the door at her back.
Andrei Kirov stared at her.
He tried to remember the last time he had seen her in her day uniform; and a crisp, freshly starched one at that, with her shiny medal ribbons over her left breast. She pulled off her cap and stuffed it under her arm.
“Why have you been avoiding me?” She asked. “And while you’re thinking about your excuses, what the fuck is all this Stalinist bullshit about suddenly clamping down on corruption? Don’t you know you’ll get yourself shot?”
Andrei thought about this. Although, not for long. For a woman who had never given any indication that she cared overmuch what she looked like, the KGB man was struck by how well Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna scrubbed up…
“I’ve been busy since I got back from the east,” he said curtly. “And base security is a Political imperative. Did you want something? Or did you just come here to piss me off?”
This irritated but did not faze the woman.
“That would be a ‘yes’, and a ‘yes’,” she replied, scowling now.
They viewed each other a little breathlessly.
“You look a little thinner,” she observed.
“The food was crap on the journey, both ways. And they seem to eat mostly just fish in Vladivostok.”
“I heard that before,” she sniffed, still standing just inside the door some three to four paces from where Andrei sat behind his desk. “We need to talk.”
“Why?”
“We need to talk before you dig yourself into a hole you’ll never get out of. That’s why!”