by James Philip
Dermot had been decidedly hugger-mugger about his work with the South Atlantic Planning Group up at Auchtermuchty in deepest Fife.
Fair enough.
Need to know and all that.
The name of the department gave it away, however discrete one tried to be. The only thing of interest to the Grey Funnel Line down in the South Atlantic was the Falkland Islands dependencies, or as the Argentines call them, Las Malvinas.
Alan suspected it would be, if one allowed it to be, a little dispiriting wasting all one’s time moping over those once sparsely inhabited – the Argentines had exiled the original population in 1964 – wind-swept islands at the end of the world. That said, Dermot looked fit and well, despite his endless traipsing around all over the place.
That must be the ‘Lottie effect!’
Alan thought the whole SAPG exercise was a waste of time, a marginalised project kept in being just to keep the retired colonels and group captains, supposedly the mainstay of the Conservative Party in the shires, happy.
There could hardly be any other reason for encouraging so much loose talk about re-taking those windswept islands in the middle of nowhere!
Goodness, it was not as if – forget the angry talk back in 1964 – the country was going to, or indeed, was remotely capable of putting together the huge task force that would be needed to go all the way down there, a third of the way around the globe, to eject the invaders.
And even if all those ships and men could be found from somewhere, without abandoning garrisons throughout the Commonwealth, or the Mediterranean, or Ulster – now there was a thought - what would be the point of all that, anyway?
It was not as if the United Kingdom, or the Navy had anything to prove after everything they had all been through in the last few years. He had fought in one famous battle, just one among a clutch of victories against the odds. The Navy had held the line in the Mediterranean, been critical to the success of Commonwealth arms in the Gulf War, mounted a valiant, Dunkirk-like evacuation of refugees from France – except on a scale that eventually dwarfed the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’ in 1940 – and later been instrumental in making possible the liberation of that great nation. Peter Christopher’s was one of eight Victoria Crosses awarded – five posthumously – to Royal Navy officers and men since the October War. Until the last year it had seemed as if there was a Royal Navy squadron, or ships in harm’s way daily; Alan Hannay knew he was not alone in hoping that in future the Navy’s role would be keeping the peace, not seeking battle with each and every one of Her Majesty’s potential enemies.
Moreover, there was a big difference between defending one’s home, one’s country from foreign aggression and going looking for a new war. Yes, there was a feeling abroad in the Navy, more strongly held by some than others admittedly, that there was unfinished business down in the South Atlantic; but surely, after all they had been through there must be other ways of sorting out ‘unfinished business’ than resorting to lethal force?
This was a view that fed into another debate that was abroad in the service, granted not one which was so widely discussed; Alan hardly thought he was alone among his fellows in feeling that when it came to sticking one’s head above the parapet and getting it shot at, he had done his bit and deserved the chance to get on with living, and bringing up his young family. Pragmatically, in desiring to pursue his profession he accepted that this inevitably meant times away from home. Conversely, Rosa had a reasonable expectation that every time he went away, she could count on him coming back to her at some stage, and not having his head blown off by some foreigner HMG had upset for no particular good reason.
If the British Isles was attacked, that was another thing, obviously; but when the subject was the Falkland Islands dependencies, well, was that really Britain? Alan had no problem regarding Malta, or Cyprus, or Gibraltar as British territory that simply had to be defended, and the alliances with other, sovereign countries, for example, those under the CMAFTA umbrella, relied on the United Kingdom to stand by them, and vice versa, if it came to that. Fair enough, but those were defensive commitments; the talk about the South Atlantic was about something else entirely; the waging of a war of aggrandisement, aggression pure and simple and he had honestly believed that his country was better than that.
Preferably, peace would be good.
Or failing that – all the evidence of recent years was that they all lived in a profoundly imperfect world - an absence of war.
What was wrong with armed neutrality?
Thankfully, as far as he could tell whatever the SAPG were up to in Scotland, it was not going to come to anything. Poor Dermot, after all his adventures – he was the chap who had rescued the French Mediterranean Fleet, after all – must have felt himself to be at a complete loose end up in Fife.
Still, the rest had clearly done him a lot of good.
Or perhaps, that was just Lottie’s home cooking and tender loving care…
The bride and her two maids of honour, women from her Division at Portsmouth, were both it seemed, feeling a little odd in their borrowed, long party dresses.
There had not been a lot to celebrate these last few years.
Alan’s fingertips had never moved from the rings in his jacket pocket. He turned to seek out Rosa’s eye; she smiled reassuringly, knowing how anxious he was about today. It was ridiculous really, he had a reputation which preceded him wherever he went: he had been the last man standing on the aft deckhouse of the Talavera, blazing away with a 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannon at a German First War battlecruiser at point blank range; and he was the peerless purser-fixer-supply officer, the one-time Naval Attaché in America, a confidante of ambassadors and prime ministers, and once the Fighting Admiral’s legendary flag lieutenant, and at one time, he and Rosa had been the second most photographed couple in the world…
And yet the idea of discharging the duties of a best man at his friend’s wedding scared the life out of him!
He thought of his and Rosa’s wedding day; and of that day in Mdina when the whole of Malta had – it seemed – turned out to witness Peter and Marija’s nuptials…
“Dearly beloved,” the Chaplain declared.
That concentrated Alan Hannay’s thoughts marvellously.
All the nerves evaporated.
That was the funny thing; right up until the moment the Talavera had poured on the power, dug her stern into the chop off Sliema and charged at those two huge Russian ships, he had been terrified, afraid he was going to wet himself, in fact.
And then, as if by magic, the fear had evaporated.
And never really come back until he was trying very hard not to drown in the oily water watching the wrecked destroyer, her back broken, sinking.
It was all Alan could do not to beam like an idiot.
Chapter 71
Sunday 27th October, 1968
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Gretchen and Dan had waved off Walter and Joanne Brenckmann that afternoon as their Secret Service cavalcade – everybody knew next week’s General Election was a done deal and nobody was taking any chances with the safety of the next President and his First Lady – had roared off into, not the sunset, but a misty, murky Boston autumn afternoon as a storm blew in from the Atlantic.
The Ambassador had made a speech at Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, in front of an estimated thirty thousand people, last night.
‘Next year, 27th October will be a national holiday, a day of national remembrance and redemption. October War Day, the day that, by God’s will, we all survived when so many others died. We forget our mistakes at our peril. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to remember the fallen, and to look to a better, safer future for Mankind.’
Later, back at the campaign house in Brookline, the next President of the United States had spoken to journalists and TV reporters about bringing Americans together. On one side of the coin was LBJ’s old idea for Medicaid, never embraced by the Nixon Administration, a scheme to ensur
e that all Americans could get medical care when they needed it, regardless of how much they could afford to pay; on the other, an orderly retrenching the military – actually asking the question what do we need our armed forces for; and do we have the right Army, Navy and Air Force for that job? - and putting right the damage caused by the ‘futile warmongering’ of the last year. ‘How many ICBMs and Polaris boats do we need?’ A pressing question given that the US’s nuclear arsenal was now capable of laying waste the entire planet twice or thrice over, which was patently insane. ‘Maybe, we really should put an American on the Moon, someday?’
This last he had mused, a rueful smile playing on his lips.
With the children in bed and Sherry watching TV, Gretchen and Dan went down to the utility room beneath the old house. The same room where his parents had come on the night of the October War, six years’ ago.
It was not as cold as it had been that night, and there were a couple of heaters taking the edge off the fall chill. If they lived here much longer, they had plans to turn it into a proper kids’ play room.
But they would probably have to move on soon.
Back to DC, once Gretchen was elected Congresswoman for the 4th District of Massachusetts, the logical thing to do was to hand the house back to the MIT Housing Administration, good student lodgings were still at a premium in Cambridge and the nearby city.
“Is this stuff really happening?” Gretchen asked, a note of perplexed angst in her voice as she settled on the old, threadbare sofa with her husband, taking hold of his right hand and cradling it on her lap.
Last night at the Red Sox’s stadium, somehow it had all stopped being a game and in the blink of an eye, become real life and she did not think she was going to get used to that any time soon.
“Yeah,” Dan cooed.
He knew, so did his Ma and his Pa, and Junior too, that her father’s passing had fractured something in Gretchen that was going to be a long-time healing. People got his wife all wrong. The reason she was the way she was, indefatigable, a force of nature was that she had always known her father had her back. The two of them had been as close as a father and a daughter can be, perversely united by the cold, calculating indifference of her mother, and the bitter sibling rivalries that were always just beneath the surface, waiting to erupt like volcanoes.
Those sibling rivalries were, of course, no longer beneath the surface and that too, had weighed on Gretchen’s shoulders these last few months, in ways that inheriting the burden of the whole Betancourt empire, never would.
Her brothers, and at least two of the three surviving wives were biding their time; after the election the knives would come out again with a vengeance and Dan knew, that whatever she said to the contrary, Gretchen was dreading that.
Just not enough to pay them off.
She might easily have decided to pay them off back in July, or August but the vitriol had hardened her resolve. And besides, like blackmailers, they would always keep coming back for more, and more…
Her younger siblings would always be under her wing, and also, her father’s fourth, youngest wife and her children, whom the old man had adopted as his own, would never want for anything – within reason – that was in her gift. But the elder siblings, along with her own bitch mother, and step-mother, they could go whistle in the wind if they carried this thing on beyond the election.
Dan had tried to draw her out; his wife had been resigned to a final, irrevocable rift with all of her elder siblings, her own mother, and Celeste, her step mother who for all her crocodile tears, had never been the mother she now claimed to have been to Gretchen as a girl.
‘They’d just come back for more,’ she had sighed, the last time husband and wife had talked through the options.
Junior was at sea, so far as they knew. He was now the commanding officer of the USS Guardfish (SSN-612), the tenth vessel of the fourteen-boat Thresher class, based at Groton. They planned to talk to him when he next came home on furlough; before Gretchen made the final decision as to whether she enacted the draconian ‘no litigation against the terms of the will’ clause in her Father’s Testament.
Ever since the reading of the will at Oak Hill, there had been muttering about Junior being the third person in their marriage. But that was not the way it worked. If Dan tended to trust people too easily, Gretchen did not. However, she had always trusted Junior, in much the same way she had always trusted Dan’s mother and father. Before that, her husband honestly did not think that, other than her father, she had ever trusted anybody, apart possibly, from ‘Uncle’ Bill Sallis. For a young woman who was suddenly one of the richest people in the world, that was a problem. Junior got it; even though – possibly because – like Gretchen, Dan did not think his brother had ever had that many close friends, not friends to whom he would, or could ever open his heart.
Dan was never going to forget that it was his brother, not his parents, to whom he had listened and who had persuaded him to finally get his life back on track that year before the October War. He knew also that the first time he and Junior met Gretchen, the starry-eyed, glazed look in his wife’s eyes had not been on account of Dan’s presence. He loved Gretchen, he loved his brother, that made everything easy; he could live with his wife loving him, and Junior and there was nothing creepy, or weird about it. Junior only did platonic; that was just him, the way he was, the way he was wired and the thing which meant he was always going to have an advantage over the other guys in the Navy who were as ambitious as him. They had wives, kids, distractions and Junior just had himself, and a very small circle of people he could trust, really trust, like Dan and…Gretchen.
“October War Day,” Dan said ruefully.
Gretchen leaned against him.
“Oh, God, I was horrible to you that night.”
Dan shrugged. “Yes, you were. But you were also strong for me when I was falling to pieces.”
“Heck… You thought your Ma and Pa, Junior too, were all gone. And Tabatha,” she added in a small voice. “I wish I’d met her.”
“She was a sweet kid,” Dan sighed, his eyes misting. He retrieved his hand from his wife’s lap and circled her shoulders, kissed her hair.
Gretchen squirmed around and raised her face to his.
“Am I a bad person?” She asked, breathlessly. “I mean, on tonight of all nights, and down here, where your Mom and Pa came on the night of the war, for feeling really horny?”
Dan did not have to think overlong about this.
He shook his head.
“No, but I’m glad you shared that with me, sweetheart.”
Gretchen laughed.
And then, shortly thereafter, nature took its course.
Chapter 72
Thursday 31st October, 1968
USS Saratoga (CV-60), Pearl Harbour, Oahu
The carrier was moored on the north side of Ford Island – the opposite side to where the battleships of the US Seventh Fleet had been tied up on 7th December 1941.
Well over a third of the Sara Maru’s crew, of around five-hundred-and-fifty officers and five thousand men, were enjoying twelve or twenty-four hour liberties ashore as midnight came and went on Halloween.
Commander John McCain, the commanding officer of VF-74, was in his cabin sipping cold coffee and catching up on the mountain of paperwork that came with the territory. He could have unloaded a lot of it onto his Exec but this way, he reckoned he was going to get on top of things faster. And besides, he hated dumping on another officer just to make his life easier. He was not the only squadron or divisional CO on the Saratoga who was racing to catch up with Navy red tape after his ship returned to port; and besides, he was not the only man to have been taken by surprise by the ship’s altered schedule. There would have been plenty of time to square away the routine, less time-sensitive pen-pushing once the carrier departed Pearl for Subic Bay or Sasebo but that element of the ship’s deployment had been cancelled soon after she docked.
Now, the carrier – with her long
list of defects - was going into dockyard hands sometime next week. The decision had been so sudden, literally out of the blue, and caught everybody on the hop. Which was why the carrier was going to have to sortie next Monday, or Tuesday, nobody had made that call yet – ahead of going into dock – to fly off her fixed-wing squadrons.
Tuesday was Election Day but John McCain felt completely disconnected from events at home. Wherever home was, these days. Home was the place a man settled down with his wife and kids, or the latest base he was posted to. His home the last ten years had been officers’ quarters, barracks, ships’ cabins or lately, too many hospitals.
Not that he was complaining; what right had he to complain?
The life had suited him. He had been a footloose fighter jock, played the field, and probably, broken hearts he had not even known he held in the palm of his hands; and forgotten the faces of most of the girls he had met on all those one-night stands. And then his luck had run out, he had got bust up. Thinking about it, it was a lie to claim everything had changed that night in Upper Michigan. He had not changed at all, not at the time, only later. But as to a normal life, knowing any better where home was; well, that was another question.
Those brief spells in Canberra with his parents, being befriended by Peter and Marija Christopher, being out of the Navy milieu, away from other naval aviators, surrounded by people who did not expect, or want him to prove anything to them had left him questioning a lot of things he had taken for granted all his adult life.
And, of course, there was Lucy…
She was just a kid.
It was ridiculous and yet, not…
She was still just fifteen.
Well, fifteen years and eight and some months old.
She was his Lucky Lucy.
He kept thinking he was through flying fast jets. Each time he got another life, another shot at it. He loved what he did, the chance to fly F-4s had never registered, seemed impossible, until he was actually at the controls of a Navy Phantom II. Once upon a time it would not have worried him that he had become ‘lucky’ John McCain. Before, he had always been ‘that crazy SOB’ son of an admiral.