by James Philip
“I thought I’d find you down here.”
McCain’s thoughts had been wandering, his pen poised in thin air for some seconds. He blinked, half-turned to meet the broad grin of Commander Dick Sperry, Acting Combat Air Group Commander, his direct superior on board the Saratoga.
Sperry was a dozen years older than McCain, a former Skyhawk pilot who had flown over fifty missions in Grumman F9F Panthers off the USS Philippine Sea and the USS Valley Forge during the first Korean War.
The younger man waved at his paperwork-heaped desk – desks on board ships were never big enough – and mirrored the older man’s grin.
“I get to fly the best aircraft in the Navy but the trade-off is the size of the maintenance logs, sir!”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like the Sara Maru will be heading west any time soon, John.”
“Is that official?”
This drew a rueful shake of the head.
“Not until it is.” Dick Sperry dropped into the small cabin’s one spare chair, next to the open hatch. He grimaced: “From what I’m hearing the Battle of the Paracels hasn’t caught the public imagination back home the way the Battle of Midway did in forty-two.”
McCain had put down his pen.
He had got on well with Sperry from day one. He was a supportive, wise old head and he did not take crap from anybody. The Navy did not have enough men like him and those they did, like Sperry, had stopped making Captain has frequently as they ought. Probably, because the upper echelons of the service were over-filled with show-boaters like Elmo, call me ‘Bud’, Zumwalt, the hero of the Battle of the Paracels.
“That’s the way it is sometimes, I suppose,” the younger man smiled, somewhat lopsidedly, “Maybe, Ray Spruance and old Black Jack Fletcher just got lucky.”
“Two carriers against four or five? If somebody throws a bad pass and you get lucky, intercept it, heck you deserve all the luck you get!”
“We’d have won the war anyway,” McCain objected; but the other man knew he was playing Devil’s advocate.
“Maybe in 1947 or 1948 with two or three times the casualties,” Sperry objected.
John McCain shrugged: “We weren’t there, at the Paracels, I mean.”
“Zumwalt could have lost two or three ships,” Sperry sighed. “That’s not just me talking; that’s his captains. We could, and should have taken out those missile boats with an air strike the next morning. And how in the name of all that’s right, did Seventh Fleet let the goddam Chinese turn the fucking Paracels into a forward base in the first place?”
That was a very good question.
Perhaps, that had been part of the masterplan…
If Elmo Zumwalt had pulled off his would-be masterstroke a few days earlier while his biggest fan, Richard Nixon, had still been sitting behind a certain desk in the West Wing of the White House, he might be a national hero now. He would probably be planning his ticker-tape parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. It only went to show that timing was everything. Nelson Rockefeller was the man in the hot seat now; and people were asking what that clown Zumwalt had been thinking putting Task Force 136 in harms’ way, courting a repeat of the Tsushima catastrophe just to sink a few goddamned missile boats?
“It’s a pity your old man isn’t CNO,” Sperry declared.
John McCain was not about to be drawn on that one!
The Saratoga’s CAG concluded his point: “If he was, I’d bet a lot of money that Zumwalt would be on his way back to DC to get his butt kicked all the way back down to lieutenant jg!”
McCain was happy to give Sperry the benefit of the doubt on that one, if only because he knew that the CAG’s youngest boy, Carl, was a jg on the USS Agerholm. Like every officer, the destroyer’s Chiefs – her senior non-commissioned men - and all bar one of her petty officers, the kid had volunteered for Elmo Zumwalt’s fifty-fifty ‘suicide’ mission.
There had been a time when McCain would have volunteered for that sort of winner take all high stakes game, one throw of the dice, throw a six and win, throw anything else and you lose everything deal. That was why he had made that third, and then, just for the Hell of it, that fourth pass over that landing ground in Upper Michigan a couple of years ago.
But now…
Honest to God, he did not know.
How would I explain a thing like that to Lucy if it all went wrong?
He realised the older man had said something to him.
“Sorry, I was someplace else, sir,” he grinned apologetically.
Dick Sperry was gently amused.
“Have you figured out if you get to be a Lord or something if you marry a Governor General’s girl?”
If anybody else had asked him that, McCain would have cut up rough. That everybody knew he wrote regularly to a fifteen, sixteen next year, kid who was the granddaughter of a Field Marshall and the daughter of a Viscount, was, he supposed unavoidable, no matter how he felt about it. It was simply that he was taking things one step at a time; doing what he could not to think too far ahead.
“I have no idea. I doubt it. I read somewhere that she would still be the Honourable Lucy Corinna Agneta, McCain. I think you need to consult Debrett’s, they’re the authorities on etiquette and suchlike over in England, to get a definitive answer to that one. Their office and most of the real experts got wiped out on the night of the war, Lucy says. But apparently, there were enough experts left to set up shop again in Oxford, that was a year or two back…”
“Debrett’s?”
“Yeah, like I say, they’re the experts on etiquette and correct behaviour, the publishers of something called the New Peerage. Lucy says that the Queen was very ‘keen’ that somebody ought to figure out what was left of the aristocracy. About half the British aristocracy was wiped out in the war…”
“You sound like you’ve really gone into this thing?”
“It’s a lot less complicated than working out what all the dials in the cockpit of an F-4 are for, Dick!”
“I guess. I shouldn’t josh you about this stuff, sorry.”
John McCain quirked a wry grin; he had nothing to be ashamed of, quite the reverse.
“It’s a messed up world, things are what they are.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Sperry made to get up. “Don’t be surprised when you see the conversion packs come on board for your F-4s, John. It looks like we’re headed for the Gulf.”
The younger man blinked, said nothing.
“Somebody’s got to visit the grave of the Kitty Hawk from time to time.”
The CAG’s eldest son, Lieutenant Dick Sperry junior, a missile officer, had been killed on the USS Albany (CG-10) in the second Battle of Kharg Island in July 1964.
John McCain tried to move on past that.
The older man was telling him that the war in the Far East was over, and that the United States had lost.
“But you didn’t hear it from me,” Sperry grunted, rising to his feet, and shrugging off his melancholy. “Well, not until you do, if you know what I mean.”
Alone again, McCain stared sightlessly at the papers on his desk.
He knew guys who had gone down with the Kitty Hawk.
Men who had, likely, participated in the disgrace of the first Battle of Kharg Island in which British and Commonwealth ships had been attacked without warning on the eve of the final, tumultuous battles of the war on land.
Without US help, in spite of the US Navy, in fact, British and Commonwealth forces, fighting side by side with Iranian armoured units who had refused to follow their Government’s edict to surrender, had fought, to a standstill and subsequently defeated in detail, the Soviet Red Army forces which had outnumbered them three- or four-to-one in Southern Iraq and Iran. That this had been possible was in no small measure because HMS Tiger and HMAS Anzac had fought their way up the Shat-al-Arab most of the way to Basra and added their guns to the defence of Abadan, albeit at the cost of their own immolation, while the Kitty Hawk and her task group had steamed the Persian Gu
lf, backwards and forwards through the oil slicks leaking from the sunken wrecks of the small British carrier, HMS Centaur, the frigates Hardy and Palliser, and the New Zealand frigate, the Otago, it had attacked and sunk in in the previous days.
If that had not been a day of infamy, he had no idea what was.
And yet, the British and their allies – the real ones, the ones who actually fought and died beside them, rather than the allies who currently doled out ‘lend-lease’ and propped up the pound sterling to salve their consciences – had won one of the most spectacular victories against the odds, in modern history.
That this was the real history of the US Navy’s tragedy in the Persian Gulf, was a secret much less well kept than that of his innocent friendship with a sweet kid in Australia, whom his parents treated these days, like a daughter.
Sometimes, the truth hurt like Hell.
To lose a son was bad enough; to lose him with a stain on his memory which was never, ever going to be erased was, McCain thought, damned near intolerable.
Unable to focus, his thoughts banishing any notion of turning in for the night, he made his way up to the hangar deck, wandering through VF-74’s F-4s, wings-folded upward and inward, Phantoms bullying the smaller Skyhawks. There were crews working on several aircraft; a big carrier never slept.
At sea he might have walked back to the stern; that was where you goofed off if you wanted to gaze into the ship’s wake, or smoke a cigarette without a Chief bawling you out for lighting up someplace where there might be AVGAS vapour in the air. Smoking anywhere around an aircraft was forbidden these days, that was why so many guys chomped on a cheroot, or got wise and chewed gum.
That night he climbed up to the flight deck.
The deck landing crews often hung out up top, they owned the deck, flyboys like him just rented time on it.
Up here you could smoke anywhere, meet with your buddies, sit or wander around, enjoying the cool breezes wafting across the deck. Some areas were roped off, like the catapult tracks. Tonight, gangs were working on one of the traps a hundred and fifty feet forward of the stern. More aircraft were lined up forward, each at an angle, nose pointing thirty degrees aft. In the nearly twenty years since the Saratoga and the other carriers of the Forrestal class had begun to take shape on their designers’ drawing boards, aircraft had got bigger, more complex, faster and even with her peacetime air group on board, as many as one in three of her aircraft would always be on deck.
The ship was so big – one thousand-and-sixty-three feet long and over two-hundred-and-fifty feet across the widest section of her angled flight deck – that the sound of the engine room blowers was imperceptible fore and aft. Not that the ship was ever quiet, anywhere, at any time.
In port, rope rails were rigged all around the flight deck, nowhere closer than a stride from the edge. Far below on the quayside, groups of men were piling off the buses and out of taxis, returning from Manila or the brothels, dives and bars around the bay.
McCain watched men stumbling up the gangway.
No real Navy man could come to Pearl Harbour and not commune awhile with the ghosts of that original day of infamy back in 1941. In retrospect the Japanese attack had become explicable, and its long-term consequences well understood.
How would future generations look back on the 1960s?
How could a man explain the irredeemable insanity of human kind in the last decade?
Officially, the long-awaited Final Report of the Warren Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War was not due out for a few more days; but every paper in the free world had already seen leaked copies. Nobody had been to blame: the October War was the result of oversights and the shortcomings of every US Administration since 1945, and the ineluctable logic of the clash between the democratic West and the Marxist-Leninist East. If there was a smoking gun which explained why a crisis had turned into a hot war on Saturday 27th October 1962, it was not to be found in the probable decisions of a single Red Navy submarine commander, or the provocative tactical stance of the US Atlantic Fleet in international waters.
No, the real, underlying cause of the catastrophe was more likely to be found in the systemic failure of the Soviet command and control system. Pragmatically, nothing else explained why the Soviet Union would keep on pushing the United States way beyond the brink. Sure, Nikita Khrushchev had screwed up but broadly speaking, neither side had understood the hand the other was dealt, and in the end, the technological and numerical disadvantages of the Russian side had saved the globe from total disaster. That, and the fact that JFK had categorically refused to authorise a second all out strike on the morning of Sunday 28th October. It seemed, on the grounds that there was already enough of the hot stuff in the air as it was, and his conscience simply would not allow him to be the angel of death responsible for the deaths of still more tens of millions of his fellow human beings…
It was hard to remember now but Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1965, was seen at the time by many to signal a new start. Instead, his Presidency had been an unmitigated disaster during which it was now likely that more Americans had died, than on the night of the October War. So much for a man of the past, wedded to the values and the assumptions of the 1950s, not the 1960s.
It was anybody’s guess if Walter Brenckmann would be any better.
What could he do that JFK, LBJ and Nixon had failed to do?
Bind the country together again?
John McCain shook his head, knowing he needed to get his head down. Tomorrow was another day and he was wasting time thinking about things which were a zillion levels above his pay grade. None of that was going to ensure that VF-74 was ready to fly ashore off the Sara Maru next week.
In the cool of the tropical night he walked, slowly towards the island superstructure, his head bowed.
He was lost in his thoughts but oddly, not in his fears.
Chapter 73
Sunday 3rd November, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
The Colonel from the 37th Air Army’s Inspectorate General’s Department had travelled ahead of most of the rest of his team, flying in shortly after dawn that morning, arriving with an aide-de-camp and four Red Air Force Military Policemen.
‘His name is Yuri Alekseyevich Ignatov,” Andrei Kirov informed his KGB duty watch. “Do not take the piss with this man. He will eat you alive. That is all. Carry on normally. We’re not the ones being inspected!”
Ignatov was already in conference with Vladimir Zakharov when Kirov swung by the base administration block. Nobody attempted to stop him going upstairs but two of Ignatov’s bruisers blocked the door to the Commandant’s office.
“Nobody is allowed beyond this point, Comrade Major,” he was advised, respectfully.
The KGB man thought about pushing his luck.
No, this was a bad time to be attracting attention to myself.
Surreally, the fact that everything was about to implode around him was gradually lifting an unbearable weight off his shoulders. He would not have to take part in an operation likely to start a new global war; or be vaporised trying to frustrate Zakharov’s insane conspiracy.
Best of all, the waiting was over.
It only took him a few seconds to dial back on his relief.
They had run out of borrowed time.
His life would be shit from here on in, if he lived that long to actually have any kind of life…
He would miss Olga.
A lot, as it happened. He did not know if he was in love with her but given half-a-chance he suspected he could become a better, probably happier man, with her by his side. Always assuming they survived the coming days.
Sadly, that was unlikely.
By now, Zakharov’s lies would have wrecked his career with the KGB, to whom he was almost certainly a monumental embarrassment; in exactly the same way his reports about the base commander would have undermined him with the Red Air Force, and the Party apparatchiks in Vladivos
tok. Had it not been for the lunacy circling the Amerikanskaya Mechta, the two men might have reached an accommodation, covered each other’s backs.
Well, in theory; thinking about it he asked himself was it even possible to negotiate with a hungry wolf?
Returning to the KGB building, Andrei Kirov wondered how Zakharov was playing his cards. The big man’s assumption had always been that at the first sign of real trouble, Zakharov would trade away the lives of the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s crew. No doubt he would produce files proving he had been watching those ‘traitorous bastards’ for weeks and months, proving beyond doubt how determined he had been to establish how deep and far the poison of mutiny had spread so that, at the right moment, he might call in the dogs.
What would happen; would happen.
Andrei reckoned his calmness that morning probably had more to do with having got the worst of the terror, and a sizable chunk of the worrying out of the way weeks, and months ago. He was so light-headed that he seriously contemplated finding Olga; and dropping the – admittedly – flawed pretence at secrecy about their affair.
Just before mid-day, a call was put through to his second floor office.
He had been staring out of the window.
Lost track of time.
“Comrade Major, there is an urgent call for you.”
The Political Officer of Seryshevo Air Base blinked alert.
And stuck out his hand to sweep up the handset.
“Kirov speaking. What is it?”
It was Olga.
“I’m calling from the Operations Room,” she said tersely. “We’ve been ordered to begin pre-flight checks. Take-off is provisionally scheduled for one-eight-three-zero hours local…”
“On who’s orders?” The man demanded. He must have sounded incredulous because the woman snapped back at him angrily.