“They said nothing to us and ordered their nuclear forces to attack the United States of America and its European allies on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962. I prayed that night. For our souls, for all of our souls. I prayed for the souls of friends and foes alike for we are all alike in God’s sight. And then I knew what I must do. My fellow Americans, that was the darkest night of my life because I knew that for all our sakes, I could do no other than to uncover the sword of everything that was right and just in the world in your defence. In your defence and in the defence of the free world. In defence of the inalienable values passed down to us by our founding fathers…”
Lieutenant-Commander Hugo Montgommery cleared his throat.
“Steward, would you turn that noise off please,” he glanced around the wardroom. He paused briefly to check that he was speaking for all the officers present. He was.
The silence that ensued was blessed.
“My apologies, Captain Brenckmann,” HMS Talavera’s executive officer shrugged to the American visitor. “We’ve been through a lot in the last year,” he opened his hands, palms outward, “but one draws the line at some things.”
The American shrugged, smiled wanly.
“That’s okay. Next time I plan to vote Republican.”
Chapter 2
Tom Harding-Grayson nursed the last few drops of Brandy in his glass and decided not to meet the eye of his guest. Patricia, his wife, whom he’d remarried within days of discovering she’d survived the war, had excused herself and gone back to reading her book in the kitchen. Like so many people, when she read it was invariably something insubstantial, romantic or comedic, or from some distant past of which none of them retained any memory. The contemporary world was a grim enough place without reliving the grimness through somebody else’s eyes. The kitchen had another advantage. With the kitchen door firmly shut she couldn’t hear that hated voice bleating from the small transistor radio in the parlour.
“…they said nothing to us and ordered their nuclear forces to attack the United States of America and its European allies on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962. I prayed that night. For our souls, for all of our souls. I prayed for the souls of friends and foes alike for we are all alike in God’s sight. And then I knew what I must do. My fellow Americans, that was the darkest night of my life because I knew that for all our sakes, I could do no other than to uncover the sword of everything that was right and just in the world in your defence. In your defence and in the defence of the free world. In defence of the inalienable values passed down to us by our founding fathers…”…”
Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the newly reconstituted Home Civil Service and by the pleasure of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, groaned and shook his head.
Tom Harding-Grayson — nobody who knew him ever used the ‘Harding’ barrel of his name — glanced at his old friend and raised his glass to his lips. If he didn’t know how badly he needed to keep his wits about himself he’d have loved to have got drunk. Patricia had left him the first time because he drank too much. His colleagues, even Henry, had wearied of his intemperance. What was the use of having a first class mind if it was soaked in alcohol most of the time? In the old days he’d retort to the rhetorically posed question by countering; what was the point of having a Double First brain in an environment populated with inbred, incompetent nincompoops of the kind he’d had to work with in Government. Yes, he’d gone to the same school as most of Harold ‘Supermac’ MacMillan’s cronies — Eton — and to Cambridge with some of the dunces, too. He’d played cricket and rugby with several of the idiots in his younger days. They hadn’t seemed so bad during Second War and several of the ones who weren’t bright enough to park themselves behind a desk in MI5 or in some home ministry hundreds of miles from the front, had got themselves shot or blown up. Darwinism at its most piquant, dullards putting their heads above the parapet at exactly the wrong moment. Unfortunately, a lot of them had survived and because of their unimaginative politics, the immobility of their shared world view, their entrenched prejudices, and their devotion to maintaining the status quo and because most of them seemed to be related by birth or marriage to the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, they’d ended up running the country. In the late 1950s Tom Harding-Grayson’s brilliant career had stalled and finally crunched into the buffers well short of the lofty station which everybody had once believed was his inevitable destination. He’d told the useless beggars — Supermac’s inner circle — that if they kept on down the road they were on with the Americans it was likely to end badly. Unfortunately, he’d been proved right and being right gave him cold comfort. The Americans had turn up three years late for the First World War, they wouldn’t have turned up for the Second at all unless the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour, and Hitler had — presumably because he was insane — declared war on them. Even then they’d only prioritised the European war because they’d worked out that defeating Hitler was the most efficacious way to extract treasure from the, by then, bankrupt British Empire. Of course, his was a thesis which had never gone down well in Whitehall. Post war governments were too much in hoc to the Yanks, so seduced by the notion of the non-existent ‘special relationship’ that they didn’t notice that they’d become meek, well-schooled tame clients feeding off scraps from the tables of the new Romans. Unfortunately, having made his views abundantly clear throughout Whitehall Tom Harding-Grayson’s brilliant career had stalled and eventually nose-dived into the ground. His had not been a soft landing. Losing Patricia had been the low point and it was a crying shame it had taken a nuclear war to reunite them.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America had one of those strikingly mellifluous voices that seized a man’s attention. It was probably because one tended to listen to and actually hear what he said that one either loved or hated the man.
Tom Harding-Grayson wasn’t so much interested in what the duplicitous little demigod had to say, as to why he’d gone to Texas and to William Marsh Rice University — generally known as ‘Rice’ or ‘Rice University’ — in the relatively undamaged part of Houston, Texas, to say it. The airburst that obliterated Galveston had wreaked havoc in the southern suburbs of the city but this wasn’t one of those obsessively hand-wringing speeches Kennedy usually delivered when he visited ‘a desecrated city’, or rather, ‘ruins that are the monuments to the memory of our sacred fallen’. This was a speech in which the familiar hand-wringing and the tortuous self-justification seemed to be laying a platform, a foundation upon which to lay a different, possibly new message. Tom Harding-Grayson should know, he’d spent half his life putting words into his masters’ mouths; it was so much safer than letting the fools think for themselves, especially when the fools were Supermac’s friends and relations.
“Didn’t the blighter make that ‘Moon Speech’ at Rice University last year? A month or so before the cataclysm?” Tom Harding-Grayson asked, rhetorically.
Henry Tomlinson nodded. If Tom Grayson, his oldest surviving friend had been top man at the Foreign Office in the years before the October War things might have been different. But he hadn’t been and now the old friends were living with the consequences.