The immediate priority was to ensure that in the United Kingdom as many people as possible survived this coming winter. Afterwards, he’d turn his mind to the Mediterranean hoping in the meantime that no new calamity befell British arms in those most problematic of waters.
He squinted at the new blips on the radar screen by his right hand.
“Passenger to Pilot. What am I seeing on my screen?”
“That will be the Enterprise Battle Group’s CAP, sir. Coming up to investigate us, sir. ETA within visual range in about three minutes.”
“Thank you. Out.”
The USN had pulled out of Holy Loch immediately after the cataclysm and probably regretted it ever since. The latest intelligence was that CINCLANT was looking for forward bases in Ireland or the French Biscay ports. Officially, the Irish government hadn’t made up its mind yet. The French, to their credit, had warned that any American vessel approaching their shores would be fired upon. No formal request for base facilities had been placed before the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration headed by Prime Minister Edward Heath. The presence of a powerful US Navy battle group in the Western Approaches almost but not quite barring the path of the first Operation Manna convoy was an incredibly clumsy, ill-considered provocation. A crass reminder to its old ‘special ally’ that it was Washington that was calling the shots.
Hubris was the downfall of every great empire.
Hubris was what blinded great men to reality.
The aircraft and the nuclear attack submarines of the Enterprise Battle Group were playing war games but the British Pacific Fleet was not playing games with anyone. It was odd that having committed the unthinkable — unleashing thermonuclear Hell across the northern hemisphere — the Americans seemed incapable of actually thinking the unthinkable. That his former allies complacently assumed that the survivors would meekly go back to ‘business as normal’ in the aftermath seemed, to Julian Christopher, so surreal that it defied belief. Likewise, he could hardly imagine how perturbed the US Navy would be to discover that the primary objective of the Atlantic War Plan developed by Christopher’s staff — and currently before the Prime Minister — assumed that the ‘forwardly deployed battle group’ of CINCLANT Command would be the first target of the United Kingdom Defence Forces in any future war. Although the Enterprise Battle Group was, on paper, more than a match for the leading squadrons of Christopher’s fragmented Pacific Fleet, he’d never been a man who placed much faith in ‘paper facts’.
Christopher had been a student of American tactical and strategic naval doctrine for two decades. The USN had ended the 1945 war with more ships than it had men to man them and successive US administrations had opted to save money by putting new technology into old hulls instead of building new ships from the keel up. The Americans had, quite reasonably, decided that its preponderance of naval air power and its overwhelming superiority in nuclear submarines spelled ‘victory’ in any conceivable future conflict. It was a policy designed for the world in which it had been made; not the new post October War world. In the old world the US Navy had enjoyed a massive technological and firepower advantage over any likely foe and the next most capable navy on Earth, the Royal Navy, was on its side. While the US Navy remained — on paper — invincible, other than in its undersea fleet its margin of superiority had been significantly eroded by the mothballing of so many of its surface units purely to save money, over the Royal Navy was hugely reduced. Moreover, the Atlantic War Plan didn’t envisage a confrontation with the USN anywhere other than in British waters beneath an umbrella of land-based RAF aircraft.
Put bluntly, any plan which proposed engaging the USN in deep water beyond the effective reach of one’s own air cover amounted to a suicide note. This was why if it came to it the Atlantic War Plan foresaw drawing a single battle group — like that based around the USS Enterprise — relatively close to shore and hitting it with everything including the kitchen sink short of nuclear weapons…
“Pilot to passenger. We have company on our starboard side, sir. Two F4s coming in to eyeball us.”
“I see them.” The McDonnell Douglas Phantoms were big elegant, businesslike beasts. Two great white sharks of the sky in close formation, rising to meet the two Sea Vixens.
“These chaps are just trying to be friendly, sir.” The Pilot said quickly. “They’ve switched off their radars and they’re broadcasting old-fashioned NATO IFF codes like they’re going out of fashion.”
“What’s our combat status?”
“Hot and ready, sir.”
“Very good.”
The leading Phantom drifted in until it was level with Christopher’s Sea Vixen, and little more than thirty yards away, wingtip to wingtip. The pilot raised his left hand, waved. Appeared to salute. Before he could stop himself Julian Christopher had returned the gestures. The Phantoms flew in company for about thirty seconds, waggled their wings and broke away in a long, slow, shallow turn to the south west. There had been talk of buying Phantoms for the Navy’s proposed new fleet carriers but somehow, Christopher didn’t think that was going to happen now.
“Passenger to Pilot. They don’t think we pose any danger to them, do they? Over.”
“No, sir,” the man in the left hand cockpit confessed cheerfully. “They can see us coming before we know they’re there and they can fly twice as fast as us. Oh, they’ve got two or three times our combat endurance, too. And much better missiles, probably, we think. Over.”
“So we can’t fight them?” Julian Christopher asked, brazenly ignoring intercom protocol in the way that only Fleet Commanders could ignore it.
“I wouldn’t say that, sir. Just not at long range. Now, if we can get into a dogfight, that’s a different game! Any time you give us the go ahead, sir! Over.”
“Thank you. I didn’t doubt it for a minute. Out.”
Chapter 9
Sir Henry Tomlinson stepped ahead of the Prime Minister to open the door. He let his political master precede him into the Situation Room and followed him inside, pausing to shut the door behind him.
Government House had been the country pile of a now dead newspaper mogul whose papers had consistently demanded a ‘harder line against the Soviet juggernaut’. He at least had had his last — dying as it turned out — wish come true.
The building was a sprawling, neo-classical abomination of a mock-Tudor mansion that had sat in several hundred acres of sculpted Gloucestershire landscape framed by the Chiltern Hills on the flood plain of the River Chelt, from which the nearest town, Cheltenham some four miles away had taken its name. The Ministry of Supply had requisitioned the estate and its attached farms in January. Urgent work had been necessary to secure the immediate perimeter but Grenville House — the previous owner had thought of himself as every inch a new Elizabethan — had become the de facto seat of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration on 1st March 1963. Excluding the areas of the country too devastated to have yet been surveyed, the UKIEA’s writ ran in all the surviving major centres of population and in perhaps eighty to ninety percent of the countryside. Some regions were effectively still under martial law, mostly parts of Ulster and the borderlands with the wasteland of the Greater London area, the South East, East Anglia and Merseyside. Elsewhere, some measure of civil order had been restored. In the territory controlled by the UKIEA strict rationing was in force and had thus far kept the general population as fed and as healthy as possible in the post-war circumstances. It was a sad truth that medical services, especially the efficacy of disease control measures and the re-establishment of basic public sanitation, had been greatly facilitated by the unavoidable ‘die off’ during last winter and the early spring of the most seriously injured, the old, the very youngest, and practically everybody who’d had serious pre-existing health problems before the cataclysm.