Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  She slipped her right arm through the crook of his left.

  “I want to hear all about the Russians,” she declared and he knew there was no arguing about it.

  However, he felt obliged to put up token resistance.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me all the Embassy gossip first?” He replied.

  “The Admiral has been asked to fly to Los Angeles to ‘confer’ with Ambassador Brenckmann,” Lucy confided. “But that’s top secret and I’m not supposed to know. So, if your father finds out I’ve blabbed I’ll be shot at dawn.”

  “We can’t have that happening,” John McCain promised.

  “Which was the right answer,” the teenager laughed.

  Wholly disarmed, the man was grateful that they were in a crowd, albeit probably only being watched by a score of eyes. He focused on that thought; it helped remind him that he was twice Lucy’s age and he was supposed to be an officer and a gentleman.

  “Now,” he said, trying to be stern and failing dismally, “about that hug back there…”

  “You keep trying to get yourself killed, or vaporised,” she objected. “And I decided I was going to hug you. So there! Besides,” Lucy glanced around, “there are so many beautiful women on this ship I didn’t want any of them getting the mistaken impression that you were unattached!”

  Okay, one of us knows what they are doing…

  “People will talk.”

  “Let them,” Lucy retorted, frowning.

  Spontaneously, he bowed his head towards her and pecked her cheek.

  Momentarily, Lucy was speechless.

  She blushed, smiled, giggled and looked at her feet; simultaneously seizing his hand possessively determined not to let go any time soon.

  “Show me your aeroplane,” she commanded.

  They walked through the crowd towards the bow to where Lucky Lucy was the third Phantom back from the Saratoga’s enclosed clipper stem.

  They stood by the aircraft, beneath the cockpit.

  “The TV cameras weren’t allowed close enough at Honolulu to get Lucky Lucy properly in focus,” the young woman said, thoughtful now. “But I’m sure that people could make it out.” She hesitated, momentarily very girlish and a little lost. “I cried,” she confessed.

  The man’s face clouded with concern.

  “With pride,” Lucy went on quickly, her smile bathing her knight errant. “Goodness, you are going to be so easy to tease!”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, when we are married.”

  Chapter 81

  Thursday 5th December, 1968

  Situation Room, Headington Quarry, Oxford

  Field Marshall Sir Michael Power Carver was some ten minutes late for the meeting with his fellow Chiefs of Staff and the select cadre of invitees drawn from the ranks of the South Atlantic Planning Group (SAPG), which he had been privately dreading for some days.

  “My apologies, gentlemen,” he said as he approached the conference table where the others had been conversing in low tones awaiting his arrival. “The Prime Minister wished to bend my ear, and that of my Secretary of State, after the meeting with the Treasury team concluded.”

  He had left his direct political master, Viscount De L’Isle doing battle with the Lady. All in all, it had not been a good day, and the Chief of the Defence Staff was in a less than sunny mood. Those fraught days back in the deserts of Iran and Iraq plotting the defeat of two Soviet Tank armies with two to three brigades – albeit one of them a divisional-sized force made up of Iranian Army units who had rebelled against their own government – outnumbered five or six to one by the invaders, had been, on reflection, halcyon times unfettered by the political and economic complexities of the home front which nowadays, blighted his existence.

  The soon to retire First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg was accompanied by his deputy, the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, newly promoted Admiral Sir Peter Hill Norton.

  The third Service ‘Chief’, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Daniel French had brought along the RAF’s Director of Operational Training, forty-eight-year-old Air Vice-Marshal Neil Cameron, a distinguished and much decorated Second War fighter pilot whom everybody agreed seemed to have fought everywhere the action was the hottest, from the Battle of Britain, the sands of Cyrenaica to the jungles of Burma, and was seen as an obvious candidate to be the RAF’s top man in years to come.

  However, in many ways it was the supporting cast representing the SAPG and the Intelligence Services, which would have really caught the eye of a knowledgeable watcher of the British military establishment.

  This was a strange, not to say extraordinary gathering in more than one respect, not least because the presence of the three Service Chiefs was guaranteed to distract the eye of the diplomatic community in Oxford, and as importantly, the focus of the resident press corps. It happened that the senior men were only in the capital of the United Kingdom because they had attended Cabinet that morning, and were to be guests of the Prime Minister at dinner, in nearby Churchill House, that evening.

  Michael Carver had asked them to ‘indulge me’ by adding this engagement to their busy agendas while they were in the city, so that they might ‘provide cover’ for the keynote briefing he planned to deliver to the junior officers present that afternoon.

  Insofar as it was plausible, the CDS wanted as many people as possible to think that this was just a routine Chiefs of Staff follow up meeting in the aftermath of that morning’s – mercifully uncontentious and thereby, uneventful – Cabinet meeting which had been mainly preoccupied with ongoing budgetary issues related to the ongoing Defence Review 67 process.

  Michael Carver was astonished that even thought ‘DR67’ had, in effect, been ‘paused’ some weeks ago, that the Oxford Press Corps was still, it seemed, blissfully ignorant of the fact. What he was less sanguine about was that if, and when, the news got out there was bound to be a furore.

  Notwithstanding, for the moment the fiction that defence spending was frozen, and any number of projects were likely to be axed in coming months, suited the Government’s purposes. Not least because the narrative was entirely consistent with the general awareness that the country was, after all, technically bankrupt.

  In fact, if one excluded the ever-growing military transfer and lend-lease arrangements with the United States - from which both sides benefited from across the board research and development co-operation, the exchange of existing technologies and all manner of non-military scientific collaborations, informal and project-based - and the resultant hard currency dollar investments which were artificially skewed significantly in the United Kingdom’s favour; the country was actually bankrupt.

  As it was, the deep financial cuts in the last year to all three armed services had done little to enhance a spirit of mutual trust and inter-operability at home, just as the drive to achieve exactly that desired environment had begun to thrive with the United States armed forces. The problem of course, was that there was always going to be tension over programs like the Joint Polaris Deterrent Force based in Scotland, for which the US Navy picked up ninety percent of the bill, thereby subsidising the one element of British defence spending ring-fenced from all the other cost-cutting, specifically, Admiral Simon Collingwood’s Undersea Fleet Project.

  This was particularly galling for the RAF and the Army, and no less so, for the Royal Navy’s surface fleet, each of which had had to abandon a raft of procurement and modernisation programs specifically designed to rebuild capabilities eroded by Britain’s involvement in wars in the Mediterranean, France and the Middle East.

  Since the end of the French campaign one-third of the Royal Navy’s surface fleet had been placed in reserve, another third taken out of service for essential repairs or placed in the queue for modernization, or scrapped, all this in addition to the moratorium – now nearly two years’ old on the laying down of new British-built keels.

  The Army felt itself to be particularly hard done by. It had lost two mechanized divisions
without appreciably losing any of its existing commitments to the Commonwealth, in France – although the drawn down of forces ‘in country’ was due to be completed in the next couple of months, leaving only a rag-tag of special forces, helicopter observation flights and several hundred advisors and liaison officers on the ground - or at home in supporting the police and the civilian authorities, and in holding the line in Northern Ireland.

  For the RAF some of the cutbacks had been horribly traumatic. The English Electric Lightning squadrons had been axed, as had the last of the V-bomber units, albeit with a few of the surviving bombers converted to, or earmarked for conversion to tanker duties. While the VTOL – vertical take-off and landing – subsonic Kestrel fighter and attack aircraft, now jointly developed with the US Air Force, had been retained and was in squadron service, the RAF’s supersonic interceptor role was now discharged by McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs.

  This latter was the result of horse-trading over the future implementation of the TSR 2 Strike Eagle Joint Development Program with Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, which would, in theory, eventually replace the capability lost with the retirement of the V-bomber fleet. Presently, the RAF’s only operational bomber was the English Electric Canberra, over half of which had been mothballed in the last eighteen months.

  Understandably, the ‘defence family’ felt itself to be more than a little hard done by after the sacrifices it had made and the thousands of casualties it had suffered – cumulatively, roughly analogous to those sustained by the British Army on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1917 – between January 1963 and the beginning of October 1968, to be treated so shoddily; a feeling exacerbated by the continuing dilution of the post-October 1962 Military Compact, the nett effect of which was to steadily reduce the rights and benefits accruing to servicemen and their families, the Government’s intention being to gradually bring those ‘rights’ back into line with those enjoyed by the general populace.

  All of which made Michael Carver’s attempts to obfuscate the real purpose of this briefing to key officers of the South Atlantic Planning Group, all the more, in his opinion, necessary.

  He was a man who was conscious of, and uneasy with, the fame he had garnered, and the near awe in which he was viewed by many in the military community in general, and his present political masters in particular.

  He was the man who had ‘Cannaed’ virtually the entire armoured strength of the last two Red Army tank armies on the planet in the Gulf War of 1964; he was the British Army’s, and the Commonwealth’s modern-day Hannibal, the master strategist-tactician of the age, and when he spoke it was with the authority of a man most of the people who knew anything about the profession of arms, believed was a positively Napoleonic figure unrivalled since the Duke of Wellington in the immediate aftermath of the victory at Waterloo in 1815.

  Now, confronted at one level by what might become the first schism of the post-cataclysm British democratic state; and at another, by a gathering storm of inter-service discord which might blight the defence community for a generation, Michael Carver had determined that it was imperative that he reset the rules and the terms of engagement, both with the politicians, and with his own military family.

  This was not a thing he was undertaking lightly.

  He had discussed his dilemma with his predecessor, Lord Hull, during a recent tour of inspection in the Mediterranean. Over walks around the walled garden of the Governor of Malta’s residence, the Verdala Palace, and over dinner with his old friend and his charming wife, Lady Antoinette, and later burning the midnight oil over coffees and brandy, he had meticulously outlined the issues and deconstructed the options.

  Richard Hull had refrained from offering specific advice; the ultimate professional soldier, he had understood that was not why his successor had sought him out at a moment of approaching crisis. However, by the time the Chief of the Defence Staff had returned to England, his thoughts had crystallised.

  He returned the barrage of salutes.

  “Please, take you seats again, gentlemen.” The doors to the room were closed. “I have asked you here today, by the kind permission of your respective service chiefs,” he nodded his appreciation to the senior men, “and Ministers.”

  There were glasses and two jugs of fresh water on the table.

  The CDS paused, reached for a glass, waving away the movement of the nearest man as he reached for and poured himself a glass of water.

  “Thank you, Colonel Pringle,” he murmured, taking a sip to wet his lips, nodding to the Royal Marines’ representative on the presently, tiny staff of OPERATION UPLAND GOOSE; the name some wag had given to what was envisaged as by far and away the largest exercise to be mounted by British combined arms since the 1950s.

  Within weeks that staff would be commanded by a vice-admiral and number hundreds, possibly over a thousand men and women drawn from every corner of the British military establishment.

  “First, let us disentangle the political from the war-fighting components of the debate which will surely ignite in the months to come,” Michael Carver prefaced, setting down his glass. He searched the faces around the table. “It is the worst kept secret in England that there will be a General Election in the spring, probably in March, at which time it is very likely that the present administration will seek a mandate from the people to resolve the South Atlantic ‘Problem’ by any, or all possible means within the lifetime of the next Government. Contingent upon this, the Prime Minister has directed that the ‘diplomatic push’ should re-commence in earnest in January, and that it should be supported by a large demonstration of force, capability and intention by the Armed Services.”

  The Chief of the Defence Staff scanned the faces around him anew. He was flanked to the left and the right respectively by the First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Air Staff and their supporting seconds.

  Forty-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Sir Steuart Robert Pringle, 10th Baronet of Stichill, sat with the group of ‘juniors’ a little apart from the top brass to his right, half-way down the table. Many suspected that the Prime Minister had released the Royal Marine from his duties as the head of her security detachment, specifically to be her man on the inside, on the shop floor, as it were, of the SAPG’s activities.

  Michael Carver did not think that for a moment; nobody who knew Steuart Pringle would give the notion that he was anybody’s stool pigeon, a split second’s credence.

  To Pringle’s right sat thirty-six-year-old Captain John Foster ‘Sandy’ Woodward, RN, the leading light of the select cadre of nuclear submarine commanders driving through Vice Admiral – soon to be full Admiral – Sir Simon Collingwood’s Undersea Fleet Project at Rosyth. Woodward had been one of the first Royal Navy submariners to take his boat under the Arctic ice; these days he was a veteran of four extended patrols in the South Atlantic, two commanding the conventional diesel-electric submarine Oberon, and the latter two in command of the Valiant, the nation’s second nuclear hunter killer.

  “Do we know who thought up the designator UPLAND GOOSE?” the CDS inquired, the thought popping into his head.

  “That would be me, sir,” confessed the tall, bearded, angular man sitting opposite Steuart Pringle.

  Michael Carver smiled thinly at forty-eight-year-old Captain Dermot Patrick O’Reilly, RN, DSO and Bar, the Canadian veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic in one war, and a string of desperate actions since 1964, the most recently of which had seen him lauded by the French as saviour of the ‘Villefranche Fleet’ and the ‘Liberator of Toulon!’

  “The bar of the Upland Goose Hotel at Stanley was the last one I was thrown out of before I left the South Atlantic for home at the end of the 1960-61 whaling season, sir,” the Canadian explained, poker-faced.

  Thirty-nine-year-old Colonel Julian Calder, late of the Green Jackets but now installed as commanding officer of his former alma mater, 22nd Special Air Services Regiment, allowed himself a small, very rueful smile.

  “It seemed appropriat
e, sir,” he observed. “To plan on the basis of starting off where one of our number had,” he hesitated, “unfinished business.”

  Michael Carver eyed the SAS man. For his heroics in Upper Michigan commanding B Troop of the SAS, the Americans had awarded Calder a Congressional Medal of Honour. He remained the only British soldier in living memory to enjoy that privilege.

  Not for the first time it struck the CDS that out of adversity, British arms had developed, or acquired, almost by accident a truly remarkable group of middle-ranking warriors, of which the men around the table were representative of, rather than one off examples of the breed.

  Today, this small gang of professional desperadoes and pirates were, to a degree, balanced by the fifth member of their very select club.

  Forty-two-year-old Brian John Maynard Tovey was an assistant secretary – a senior principal intelligence officer - at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who had learned Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, had joined GCHQ in 1950, and since early 1966 been Head of the South American desk at Cheltenham, and more recently, split his time between the West Country and the Scottish lair of the SAPG.

  Michael Carver sucked his teeth.

  “The politics of UPLAND GOOSE is none of our business. Regardless of the political motivation to mount such an exercise, frankly, there is a long-overdue need for such an exercise to remind everybody that all arms of the services must work together. And frankly, to wake up a lot of people who have been resting on their laurels of late!”

  He let that sink in.

  “The call up of reservists will kick off in the next few days. The reactivation of mothballed vessels is already in progress. Forty-two and forty-six Royal Marine Commandoes will be warned to prepare to participate in UPLAND GOOSE. I have seen draft proposals for an amphibious assault exercise involving over fifty ships and two thousand troops. That will not do. Either this looks like a serious practice run for a real expedition to retake the Falkland Islands Dependencies, or it does not. The object of the exercise is to make it look like we mean business. If the Argentine Junta believes we mean business, that may speed negotiations towards a mutually satisfactory conclusion. In any event, let there be no misunderstanding; I want to wave the biggest possible stick.”