by James Philip
By then, either Operation Judgement Day would have already happened – and they would all be living with the consequences – or the conspirators would be dead, or have covered their tracks. Either way, he got to spend the rest of his life digging canals in the Arctic permafrost with a spoon!
“You see, I have already denounced you,” Zakharov added, unnecessarily. “So, anything you say about me will be, let us say, tainted by the suspicion that you are just trying to get back at me.”
Andrei knew that the calculus was more complicated than that; for one, he had no idea what else the older man had done to undermine him.
“Think of it this way,” Zakharov put to him, “while you and I carry on sniping at each other it will entertain our masters. Hopefully, long enough for us to complete our work at Seryshevo.”
The big man vented a sour laugh.
“What do you mean? Our work?”
“Don’t you want to get back at the Yankees for what they put you through in Iraq?”
“That wasn’t the Yanks, that was the fucking British!”
That whole campaign in Iraq had been a nightmare, and the withdrawal from Baghdad a disaster. Admiral Gorshkov and all the other big men, like Yuri Andropov – supposedly the Governor of Baghdad – had run away and left the shattered remnants of the USSR’s last two tank armies, to their fate.
“Same thing,” Zakharov grunted. He sighed: “Okay, I’ll make this easy for you. Either you start working for me or I’ll have somebody put a bullet in the back of your neck. Your choice, Comrade Commissar.”
Chapter 50
Saturday 14th September, 1968
Government House, Yarralumla, Capital State Territories
It was odd to be returning to the place which had been their family home for two years until only a week ago. That said, for Captain Sir Peter Christopher, RN, VC, it was a huge relief to be able to don his dress uniform and not have to buckle on his father’s sword!
He had lost count of the number of times he had very nearly fallen over the damned thing during his tenure as Governor General of Australia. His inability to ‘manage’ the ceremonial weapon had become a standing joke among family, friends and staff at Yarralumla. Whatever he did the bloody thing always seemed to get under his feet, or snag on something. Things had got so bad that at one stage Lucy had been giving him advice, her face scrunched with concern and his daughter, darling Elisabetta, would point and laugh whenever he put it on!
Thankfully, all that was over for a while.
Tomorrow at around noon, he, Marija and the children, Jack and Mary Griffin and their little one, Harry, would fly up to Amberley in Queensland to board the British Overseas Airways Corporation – as of 1st of June, BOAC, had reformed as the United Kingdom’s national carrier – long-range Super VC-10 which would carry them first to a three-day stopover in Hawaii, and thence, via Los Angeles to Washington DC.
It would be good to catch up with Nicko and Mary Henderson, and their daughter Alexandra, who was probably very much a young lady by now. In a little over ten days, they would all be in New York and this time next month – all being well, not a thing to be taken for granted in this brave new post-cataclysm world - he would take command of HMS Liverpool as her scheduled seven month period in the hands of the Brooklyn Navy Yards at Wallabout Bay, on Long Island, drew to a conclusion.
Judging by the nonsense that had been going on in the Western Pacific and the shenanigans playing out in US politics at the moment, the former Governor General was fairly confident that the world was not about to regain its sanity any time soon; so, whatever else he had heard about the state of the Royal Navy in the last eighteen months, it did not look like the Old Country was going to be able to dispense with Senior Service in his, or anybody else’s lifetime!
In Alan Hannay’s recent letters, he had spoken about the plans for the Navy in the 1970s, once, that was, the shipbuilding standstill was lifted, and the fleet was gradually renewed taking full advantage of recent developments and the opportunities offered by ongoing US-British technology exchanges.
Alan had been so desperate to start acquiring sea-going time that, having completed his year at Pasadena on what the US Navy called its ‘Command and Engineering Foundation Course’, four months of which he had spent at sea, passing out with although he would not admit it, flying colours; after treading water in a staff appointment, he had voluntarily accepted a temporary step down in rank to Lieutenant Commander, so that he could go to sea as the Executive Officer of the Leander class frigate Naiad.
Peter wished his friend well and looked forward to catching up with him properly sometime in the next few months.
The last week had been a continuous round of farewells, receptions, and meetings during which the former Governor General and his spouse had been at great pains to make themselves available to their successors. Although they had not known what to expect of Lord and Lady Casey, they had both been a little disappointed that neither had really shown the least enthusiasm for drawing on their experience, or in seeking their advice, or in fact, visibly valuing either.
However, the outgoing incumbents at Yarralumla had not jumped to criticise their successors. They could hardly claim to have been entirely conventional residents of Government House; and understood that the Caseys’ distance was in no way inexplicable. Peter and his wife were a lot less than half the new couple’s age, and in retrospect, had only ever been caretakers at Yarralumla, very much holding the fort in a time of huge changes.
Nevertheless, privately the couple had reservations about Lord and Lady Casey. Not that it was their place to double guess the Australian Government’s, or Her Majesty’s choice in the matter of the selection of the new incumbents at Yarralumla. But…they had both tacitly assumed, certainly until that summer, that the new Governor General would probably be sixty-three-year-old Sir Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck, one of outgoing Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies’s most trusted lieutenants.
Born in Freemantle and a graduate of the University of Western Australia, Hasluck had been his country’s first Permanent Representative to the United Nations. A man of many parts, he had returned to academic life in Perth after the Second War and subsequently been commissioned to write two volumes of Australia in the War of 1939–1945, the monumental 22-volume official history of Australia's involvement in World War II. He had published the first volume, The Government and the People 1939–1941 back in the early fifties but work on the second, The Government and the People 1941–1945, had been delayed somewhat by his distinguished unbroken career in government ever since 1951.
Hasluck, even in his sixties remained a trim man with a neat moustache. Married to the author and social historian Alexandra Darker, whose book ‘Unwilling Emigrants’ was, when it was published in 1959, the first general study of Western Australia’s ‘convict era’, as evinced by his commission to contribute to the Official History of Australia in the Second World War, he himself was a historian of no little note, who had once been on the Staff of ‘The West Australian’ before academe and Liberal politics had called.
Hasluck was no rabid anglophile, before the October War he had been a strong advocate of ever-stronger ties, economic and military with the United States even at the expense of traditional links with the Old Country. He was, however, a man embedded in the contemporary Australian political milieu whose attitudes and loyalties, and pragmatic character would have made it relatively easy for him to make many of the compromises the next occupant of Yarralumla was likely to have to make. Also, and it was no small issue, he and his wife might have been prepared to contemplate a full, five-year term in office, which, for the first native-born Australian to hold the job was, to Peter Christopher’s mind, a prerequisite for the man who by definition, was going to change the face and the role of the Governor Generalship, forever.
Understandably, the seventy-eight-year-old Right Honourable Lord Richard Casey, DSO, MC, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, and a Privy Counse
llor to her Majesty the Queen, had severe reservations about taking on a five-year term at Yarralumla. A former Governor of Bengal – as long ago as 1944 – few Australian soldier-statesmen could rival his immensely long career of unstinting public service.
Born in Brisbane he had studied engineering at the University of Melbourne before continuing his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, been commissioned into the Australian Imperial Force in 1914, fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in the First War, and in the 1920s worked in Whitehall as an liaison officer, reporting directly to the then Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce. His parliamentary career in Canberra had begun in 1931, serving as Treasurer (his country’s equivalent to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer), Minister for Supply under Sir Robert Menzies, and been Australian Ambassador in Washington from 1940 to 1942 before becoming a member of Winston Churchill’s Wartime Cabinet. After the Second War he had returned to Australian politics and the government, retiring in 1960. Problematically, Casey, who had been aide-de-camp to Sir William Bridges, the commanding officer of the Australian 1st Division at Gallipoli in 1915, and subsequently for most of his adult life been the ultimate political insider, was not only now an old man but he was, sadly, possibly not actually as in touch with the political realities of the modern world as perhaps, his sponsor, Sir Robert Menzies – himself planning to step down from office sometime in 1969 – imagined. In Lord Casey’s appointment there was an undeniable element of schadenfreude, and as worryingly, an attempt, by design or otherwise, to if not turn back the clock, then to try to slow it down.
Peter Christopher was troubled, and he knew Marija felt exactly the same way. This, despite their personal respect and liking for Lord Casey and his wife Maie, who, in her own way was every bit as remarkable a human being as her husband.
Lady Casey, the daughter of a Melbourne surgeon had been a daredevil aviator in her younger days, was a poet and artist and in following her husband around the globe she had become the friend and confidante of Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and had included the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the wife of the last Viceroy of India, Edwina Mountbatten as close personal friends, quite apart from rubbing shoulders with the likes of the late Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, and the thankfully, still alive and well, in California, Katherine Hepburn.
Lord and Lady Casey were extraordinary people; they were just not the right people to be, at their age, taking on the challenges of Yarralumla. Especially, when everything they did, and every word they said and gesture they made, was inevitably going to be compared to those of their somewhat younger, rather more media savvy and rightly or wrongly, flamboyant predecessors.
Almost every way one looked at it, Lord Casey’s appointment as Governor General felt very much like a backward step. And unfortunately, that was what was already being whispered throughout the Capital Territories, and farther abroad. Nobody really understood what Sir Robert Menzies had been thinking putting forward his old friend’s name; and it was an even bigger mystery why Lord Casey, had actually accepted the job.
All of which had added a piquancy to Peter and Marija’s long round of farewells.
‘My, my, I think I envy you, Sir Peter,’ Lord Casey had observed, the seventeenth Governor General of Australia taking the hand of the sixteenth in the moments after the metaphorical handing over of the keys to Government House last weekend. ‘Getting back to active service. All I have to look forward to is returning to my retirement!’
That was the thing; when all was said and done, they were both creatures of duty.
The irony was that Peter and Marija knew that Lord Casey was anything but the stuffy, old-world stick in the mud that his critics were going to see, and attack once the Queen was gone and the dust settled. Presently, the Queen and the royal princes and princess were the news - the only news in Australia - and nobody cared a fig about the arrangements at Government House.
Truth be told, the former Governor General and his spouse, relieved of the responsibilities of Yarralumla, had been in an odd, end of term mood for much of the last fortnight, preoccupied with family matters, including getting Lucy De L’Isle settled in at the US Embassy, a thing pleasantly complicated by the coincidental arrival of the McCain’s heroic aviator son, John four days ago.
John had detoured to Canberra for ten days in the middle of a twenty-eight day furlough, having left the Enterprise and Attack Squadron VA-76, ahead of converting to F-4 Phantom IIs, the prelude to his next – unexpected – tour of carrier flight operations.
The US Ambassador’s son had been bubbling with the joys of life: fully recovered from his latest escapade over the Taiwan Strait; his career as a fast jet naval aviator given a surprise new lease of life; and reunited with his family and friends in Australia – including one particular young lady – he had been a picture of health and optimistic vitality.
‘The thing with F-4s came out of the blue. I thought I was through flying fast jets but I guess the Navy’s short of old dogs like me, these days! Whatever, I may have a few less miles left in my bones than a lot of the guys coming through nowadays but there’s life in the old dog yet! One thing ends, another starts! I get to fly the best plane in the world! It’ll be a blast!’
Both Peter and Marija had been impressed, and relieved, by the marvellously correct way their friend had behaved towards Lucy.
Lucy had come rushing towards him as if she was going to throw herself into his arms – in public, which would never have done – and John McCain hand just given her a look and held out a hand. Lucy had skidded to a halt and looked down at her feet.
And then they had shaken hands.
‘You’re a heck of a kid but you’re still fifteen,’ he had smiled, ‘and I haven’t been that for a long, long time.’
There were still a few out-and-out officers and gentlemen in the world, and John McCain III, was one of them…
Peter realised he had been wool-gathering, a thing halted by his wife’s gentle nudge in his ribs.
The queue of official cars, having halted for a few seconds, was now moving again, with the vehicles up ahead turning into the grounds of Government House. Although everybody was very friendly at the High Commission, where the small ‘Christopher entourage’ had been camping out in recent days, leaving Government House had simply emphasised that they needed to make a new, more permanent home while Elisabetta and Miles were still too young to understand that the peripatetic life their parents had lived the last four years was not normal.
Marija was expecting their third child now, and that, somehow, had changed the calculus.
Am I being selfish putting my career ahead of my family?
Peter worried a lot about that.
And how would they address the other elephant in the room (presently, the High Commission Bentley); that there were people, a lot of people, who yearned for Marija to return to Malta?
She had been their princess, the girl who had risen from her sick bed and become, in some, indefinable way, their voice in the year after the October War and he, selfish man that he was, had taken her away from…her people. It did not help that he knew, he just knew, that she would uncomplainingly, stoically follow him wherever he went, and support him whatever he decided. Their lives had taken unlikely twists and turns, their marriage, still only four-and-a-half years old, had seen them catapulted into a global notoriety that they could never undo. And yet, bizarrely, now was the first time they had really had an opportunity to draw breath, a breathing space in which to ask themselves what they wanted to do with their lives and what, more importantly, would be the best thing for their children.
Peter was about to confront the greatest challenge of his naval career, the command of one of the Royal Navy’s biggest, most powerful ships and her crew of anywhere between eleven and fourteen hundred officers and men.
But what happened after that?
Much as he hated to admit it, there was the temptation to attempt to go one better than his
father: to skipper a winning challenge for the America’s Cup. Either that, or defer or forsake that chance, and to aim for the top in his chosen career. And yet if he had learned anything since the October War his life could never again be just about him; and the thought of never allowing Marija to be what she might be back on Malta, had preyed on his mind while they had been in Australia. He had been the Governor General but she had been the glue that held the wider Yarralumla family together, and all the while, with her letters to The Times of Malta, and her huge, broad correspondence with everybody from children attending a school in Sliema, where her mother and father still lived in the family’s modest Tower Street apartment, to politicians on the archipelago, and all around the world, to the wives – and sometimes their husbands - of Prime Ministers and Presidents, movie stars and girls trapped in dreary typing pools, she had been the one reaching out across the globe, the one touching the lives of countless people in ways he knew, he never would or could.
“You look very serious today, brother?” Joe Calleja grinned. Marija’s little brother was uncomfortable in his rarely worn lounge suit, seated back to back with the driver in the passenger compartment of the limousine.
Joe’s wife, Luiza, had sewed the ribbon of his George Cross onto his left breast pocket – he had given the actual medal to his Mama – never having believed he had done anything to earn it. Presently, Luiza was clinging to her husband’s hand like her life depended on it.
The couple had arrived in Australia five weeks ago, and Joe, Luiza and the children – Federico, who was eleven, Julio, about Elisabetta’s age, and four-month-old Margo (Margarita) – were still settling into the house in Manly that Marija, with the assistance of the New South Wales representatives of the Betancourt International Educational Foundation, had rented for her brother and sister-in-law.